Chapter Sixteen
When the madam of a brothel says she needs you right away, it’s usually a sales pitch, maybe a special advertising promotion or an extension of the Very Happy Hour pricing. But I could tell from Neffi’s tone that she was dead serious. Normally the old mummy’s voice sounded like crackling dried papyrus, but on the phone I detected an undertone of fear.
And she was really pissed.
“If you don’t find me security soon, Mr. Chambeaux, I’m going to call in the army, or maybe the army of the night, to surround this place with tanks and bazookas. It wouldn’t be good for business, but at least it would keep my girls safe.”
It was the middle of the night, and I had gone back to the office to get some work done. Sheyenne was there, also working (and, I think, still unsettled by her time with Travis in the storage unit that day). She had forwarded me the phone call. “I’ll have a full protection crew for you tomorrow, Neffi,” I promised. I already planned to attend the Adopt-a-Golem job fair. “What happened?”
“Better come down here and see for yourself.”
I headed out the door, telling Sheyenne I was off to the Full Moon brothel. Not the sort of thing you usually say to your girlfriend, but I was distracted.
The withered old mummy was waiting for me on the front porch with the door wide open. Nightshade and Hemlock, the vampire princesses, stood together, talking intently. They still wore their sexy negligees, but they had removed their makeup in the hour before sunrise; one glance at them au naturel and I shuddered to think of waking up next to them. Cinnamon the werewolf was brushing her face, running a long tongue over her teeth as if she just couldn’t turn off the animal-magnetism sell job. The succubus, wide-eyed and waifish with her tight baby-doll perm, remained inside the shadows of the parlor, trying to keep out of the public eye. Her emerald gaze met mine; I could see she was frightened, and she looked so vulnerable.
Indignant and fuming, Neffi strutted back and forth. Her attitude would have made even a harpy cringe. She snapped at me with the sound of a neck bone breaking, “Mr. Chambeaux, we’ve had another threat.” She wrapped her gnarled arm possessively around mine, then lashed out at the vampire women and the two zombie girls who had shuffled out to see what was going on. “Don’t just stand there, ladies—tear down those posters! Make a bonfire and invite all the unnaturals. We’ll have a marshmallow roast and show everyone how we react to intimidation.”
“But Neffi,” said Hemlock, the strawberry-blonde vampire, “I thought you wanted to keep this for evidence.”
“I want those despicable posters gone. Mr. Chambeaux has already seen them.”
“Actually, I haven’t seen anything yet,” I pointed out.
“Then take a look … but that’s just the window-dressing on the disaster.”
The two vacant houses on either side of the Full Moon had been plastered with Senator Balfour’s posters decrying brothels in general, unnaturals in general, and unnatural brothels in particular. With my sharp detective’s eye, I noted that the headlines on two of the broadsheets contained typos, but Senator Balfour’s activists more than made up for their lack of literacy with large capital letters in an extra-bold font. Several posters demanded “Pass the Unatural Acts Act Now!” (complete with misspellings).
“This wouldn’t the first choice I’d look to rally support for the Senator’s bill,” I said. “You’re telling me that his people posted all these when no one was watching? Shows a lot of balls.”
“If they show their balls again, I’ll cut them off,” Neffi said. “Most people are more interested in what goes on inside the Full Moon than in the rest of the neighborhood.”
Savannah and Aubrey, the zombie girls, began pulling down the posters, while the vampire princesses wadded them up and made a pile in the front yard, taking Neffi’s bonfire suggestion seriously.
The mummy madam looked concerned. “Come in and have a look at the rest. It gets worse.”
Inside the brothel, she led me up the curved grand staircase to the lavishly appointed rooms where the ladies did their business. Someone had thrown bricks through the black painted glass, shattering the darkened windows. Shards lay strewn over the comforters on the brass beds.
“Intimidation, pure and simple. The ladies can’t use these rooms now. What if this had happened during broad daylight? All that would be left is pile of ash and a scorched comforter—and I’d have to hire new ladies.”
“I see your point.” I felt truly concerned now. Would Balfour’s activists go this far? “There’s a big difference between vandalism and attempted murder.”
I recalled the clueless and inept heckler at the Shakespeare in the Dark performance. If the Senator’s people had burned down the theatre set, they had already gone further than protesting, but this was another giant leap from arson.
“To tell you the truth, the Senator’s minions may not have had anything to do with this. I think the mob is trying to twist my arm—and with these old joints, it is not an easy arm to twist.” Neffi held up her brown petrified hand, bent her elbow. “Come, let me show you the worst.”
Inside her office, Neffi paused to steel herself. Someone had broken into her private quarters, found the three carved sarcophagi that held the mummified remains of her pet cats. Two of the three had been smashed on her desk, the gauze-wrapped kitties crumbled to dust and fluff, the third one left intact, either as a taunt or a threat.
“Gone,” Neffi whispered. “Even the best taxidermist in the Quarter can’t put them together again. Who would do that to poor innocent pets?”
“They didn’t do it to the pets, Neffi. They did it to you.” If organized crime was involved, this was the unnatural equivalent of leaving a horse head tucked in her sarcophagus.
“They want to scare me out of business. It’s not going to work!”
It was time, I decided, to take this case a lot more seriously. I called McGoo and asked if he could increase the visible police presence around the Full Moon until I could arrange for private security. He said, “That’s ironic, Shamble, since unnatural prostitution is still technically illegal.”
“Would it help if I asked you to do it for me, McGoo?” You can’t keep spending favors unless you earn them back, but my account wasn’t empty yet.
“Marginally. But you have to promise to laugh at my jokes from now on.”
I hesitated. “All of them?”
“Most of them.”
“Some of them,” I agreed. McGoo realized it was the best he was going to get, so he left it at that.
“What’s the difference between a werewolf and a poodle?” Yes, he was going to make me pay for the favor.
“I don’t know. What?”
“If a werewolf starts humping your leg, you’d better let it finish instead of kicking it away.”
So I laughed, because I had promised, although I had an odd image of Cinnamon in my head.
At daybreak, when part of the Quarter awakened and the other part crawled back into their darkest holes, I decided to get all my mummies in a row and find out as much as I could about Neffi, just to make sure I had the full story.
The Metropolitan Museum wasn’t technically open to the public at dawn, but I had an inside contact. Once upon a time, before the Big Uneasy, patrons would go to the museum to look at the butterfly collection, the gem and geode displays, the dioramas of human civilization, the stuffed wild animals in supposedly natural poses, the hall of dinosaur bones. Lately, the big draw was the original tome of the Necronomicon, the ancient spellbook which—through a combination of a rare planetary alignment, the phase of the moon, and a homely old witch’s paper cut that had provided the requisite drop of virgin’s blood—had sparked the reality upheaval that gave birth to all manner of creatures formerly relegated to ghost stories and paranoid imaginations. The museum dioramas, the insect display cases, even the dinosaur bones, now took a back seat to the creepy stuff.
When I gave my name to the security guard at the door and told him I was a friend of Ramen Ho-Tep’s, the man looked skeptical. “Like I haven’t heard that one before.”
I was puzzled. “What do you mean? He was a client of mine. I know him well.”
Again, the guard was unimpressed. “Do you know how many groupies hang around the delivery doors just trying to get his autograph?”
“Uh … no, I don’t. How many?”
“A lot,” the guard said. “He was the pharaoh of all Egypt, you know.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that before. Tell him Dan Chambeaux is here—I’d just like a word.”
“You’d better not be wasting my time.” The guard left me standing outside the museum’s side entrance. I continued to smile pleasantly at him, holding back my own comment that this guy was wasting my time. A few minutes later he opened the door again, looking both surprised and humbled. “What do you know? He says come on in. It’s your lucky day.”
“Right.”
Robin and I had helped Ramen Ho-Tep in his suit to be emancipated from the museum, on the basis that he was a person, not property. Since Mr. Ho-Tep, the pharaoh of all Egypt, was a significant draw in their Ancient Egypt wing, the museum resisted letting him go his own way. Eventually, we reached a resolution, and now, with his regular dramatic readings, Ramen Ho-Tep had become something of a star, and his weekly performances of “Egypt through the Eye Sockets of Someone Who Was Really There” had even been featured on a national news program.
When I came in to his dressing-room, the mummy rose to his feet, glad to see me. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Jellied lark’s tongues? I shall summon my slaves.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Ho-Tep. Just a quick question—I’m hoping you can shed some light on one of my cases.”
Ramen Ho-Tep was looking well. His laundered and bleached bandages had a stiff clean-linen appearance, and his dust-dry sinews and skin had plumped up again (just like any other ramen when soaked in water).
“The wealth of my knowledge is yours for the asking, Mr. Chambeaux. I was the pharaoh of all Egypt, and I am generous to my friends.”
“I’ve been hired by another Egyptian, with whom you may be acquainted. She’s experiencing some trouble.”
“I am concerned for all of my subjects,” Ho-Tep said. “Who is this person and how may I help?”
“She’s another mummy, maybe from a different dynasty. Her name is Neffi. She runs the Full Moon.”
Even behind all those bandages, I could see Ho-Tep’s expression pull into a pinched grimace of distaste. “She’s most definitely a slut, Mr. Chambeaux. No two ways about it. There was nothing between us whatsoever. Just gossip.”
Playing it cool, I said, “You know her, then?”
“Knew her—a long time ago. She used to think she was the scarab’s knees. Had quite a reputation, that one. But she wasn’t as lovely as she wanted to think. She painted herself up more than my sarcophagus, and she always used too much myrrh.”
“So …” I ventured, sensing a lot more there than mere hostility, “you two had a little thing going?”
“Not much of a thing,” Ramen Ho-Tep said. “Not at the rates she charged! She wanted me to build a pyramid for her, just to show my appreciation, but I wasn’t her honey daddy. Plenty of other fish in the Nile.”
“Somebody’s been harassing her,” I told him, “apparently trying to drive the Full Moon out of business.”
“Neffi?” He sounded alarmed, and he didn’t even try to hide his concern. “Is she all right?”
“Unharmed, but worried. Someone smashed two of the jars where she kept her mummified pet cats.”
“Oh, no! Not poor Socks, Whiskers, and Blackie!”
Ramen Ho-Tep had been a cat lover himself. His own pet, Fluffy, was preserved and on display in the museum.
“I shall have to send her my condolences, uh, as a professional matter,” he said. “If there is anything that I, as pharaoh, can do to help you solve this case, Mr. Chambeaux, I’ll do it. A fiend who would commit such a heinous crime must be punished.”
“If I think of anything, I’ll let you know, Mr. Ho-Tep. Thanks for the background.”
The mummy seemed rattled, but not so much that he forgot to give me two free passes to Saturday’s show. I thanked him and left.