85- Damm you look good

?” They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Gerard as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Gerard to sit down at the kitchen table. Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Gerard, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark. “Good beer,” said Gerard. “We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus . . .” he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head. “I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to a pickup.” He sipped his beer. “I’ll work for my keep,” said Gerard. “While I’m here. You tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.” “We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel. The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Gerard’s boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Gerard felt comforted. The beer left a pleasant buzz in Gerard’s head. “Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,” said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll want to wash up and shave first, I guess.” Gerard did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Gerard suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully fromthe mirror at him. And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat. It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Patricia. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take. He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be gone before I know it. Then the door to the bathroom swung open then, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and “Mrr?” up at him curiously. “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.” He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door. His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed. He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically. Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie. “Hey,” he said to it. “You know something that I don’t?” and immediately felt foolish. The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I did shut that door. I know I shut that door.” She looked at him, interested. Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped down from the sill onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane. Gerard left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted to be left in peace. “Damn, you look good,” said Jacquel.