Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking for a lost child, and he slept no more that night.
San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.
They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.
Wednesday’s jaw was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln town car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.
Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn’t feel like anywhere else.
“It’s almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside,” he said.
Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, “It’s not. San Francisco isn’t in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.”
“Is that so?” said Shadow, mildly.
“Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers—money, a federal government, entertainment; it’s the same land, obviously—but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.” They were approaching a park at the end of the road. “Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice.”
“I’ll be cool,” said Shadow.
They stepped onto the grass.
A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.
Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. “Buy dog food with it,” Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled.
“Let me put it bluntly,” said Wednesday. “You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad.”
“Is she your girlfriend or something?”
“Not for all the little plastic toys in China,” said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run.
There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth.
She was—not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.
As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, and put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. “Hello, you old fraud,” she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand and raised it to his lips.
He said, “You look divine.”
“How the hell else should I look?” she demanded, sweetly. “Anyway, you’re a liar. New Orleans was such a mistake—I put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle. The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that?” This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. “He’s blushing! Wednesday my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. What’s he called?”
“This is Shadow,” said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadow’s discomfort. “Shadow, say hello to Easter.”
Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlights—the blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin.
“So, how’s tricks?” asked Wednesday.
The woman—Easter—laughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? “Everything’s fine,” she said. “How about you, you old wolf?”
“I was hoping to enlist your assistance.”
“Wasting your time.”
“At least hear me out before dismissing me.”
“No point. Don’t even bother.”
She looked at Shadow. “Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. It’s all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapin—rabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged hare, well, why don’t I just fill a plate for you?” And she did, taking a plastic plate and piling it high with foods and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. “Are you eating?” she asked.
“I am at your disposal, my dear,” said Wednesday.
“You,” she told him, “are so full of shit it’s a wonder your eyes don’t turn brown.” She passed him an empty plate. “Help yourself,” she said.
The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. “Shadow,” she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. “That’s a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow?”
Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. “When I was a kid,” he said. “We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U.S. embassies, we went from city to city all over Northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I’d just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don’t know. I was a small kid.”
“You grew,” she said.
“Yes,” said Shadow. “I grew.”
She turned back to Wednesday, who was spooning down a bowl of what looked like cold gumbo. “Is this the boy who’s got everybody so upset?”
“You heard?”
“I keep my ears pricked up,” she said. Then to Shadow, “You keep out of their way. There are too many secret societies out there, and they have no loyalties and no love. Commercial, independent, government, they’re all in the same boat. They range from the barely competent to the deeply dangerous. Hey, old wolf, I heard a joke you’d like the other day. How do you know the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”