“Turned? No. Vidocq has her in the Winter Garden.”
“That’s the best thing for her, I’m sure.”
I look at the table for a minute. My brain is churning with questions and answers that don’t hook up and don’t make any sense.
“Mr. Muninn, do you know what’s happening in the Backbone or up in the city?”
“I’m afraid not. A few of the dead wander out every now and then, but never before in this number. How did you and your Sapere friend find each other?”
“Cabal Ash sent me to his minders.”
“Ah, Cabal,” Muninn says. He chuckles.
“What a charmer. He must be feeling generous these days. He paid off a sizable debt recently. It was very unlike him. My impression was that he’d fallen on some hard times.”
“Did he say where he got the money?”
“It never occurred to me to ask. Do you think he has something to do with our migrating wildebeests?”
“Definitely. I was thinking that he’d released the Drifters to settle some old scores, but if he’s suddenly rolling in cash, maybe he did it for someone else.”
“Who would want that?”
“If I could figure out what they wanted, maybe I’d know who’s doing it. Releasing all these dead fuckers in the tunnels will make it even harder to tell who had a hit out on them and who just didn’t run fast enough. At first I thought this was a Sub Rosa feud that had gotten out of hand, but today I got mugged by a couple of Lacunas and I’m pretty sure the Golden Vigil sent them.”
“That is a strange collaboration.”
“What’s this?” asks Johnny.
He holds up a sculpture that looks like a tarantula with wings.
“That’s a spider deity worshipped by natives on a small island lying between Japan and Russia. They used to capture larger spiders, sew wings onto their backs, and toss them off cliffs so they could fly up to the great Spider Mother in the sky. The spiders, of course, didn’t fly so much as plummet into the sea. They weren’t a particularly bright people and disappeared along with their island in a volcanic mishap.”
“Has anyone else who had a debt with you paid it off recently?”
“There was a strange one just the other day. Do you know Koralin and Jan Geistwald?”
“Sure.”
“Their son, Rainier, purchased some potions from me a while back. Later, there was some talk that had me concerned about payment, but then he appeared out of nowhere and settled the entire debt with some very lovely Etruscan gold.”
“What’s so strange about that?”
Muninn finishes his wine and pours himself another glass.
“It’s strange because what I’d heard was that the boy was dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Fairly. I’m certain I’d seen young Rainier in the Backbone with my own eyes.”
Johnny is moving around behind us. Pawing through Muninn’s shelves. Knocking things over and laughing at what he finds. Can you give Ritalin to a corpse?
“What was he buying?”
Muninn shrugs.
“An assortment of potions. A few rare plants and extracts. None of it particularly sinister. I got the impression that he wasn’t buying them for himself since he didn’t seem to know what any of the substances were for.”