II

Slipping the bills under the blotter, I contemplated the neatly lettered address where I was supposed to deliver the toboda. After a moment, I mentally placed the location. I’d passed by it once or twice, strictly on business, as I had neither the money nor the pedigree to enter its pristine marbled environs. It was a high-class hotel located on the far side of the city. The overall impression I’d had in passing was that white tie and tails were required for entry. If my hunch was right, delivering the statue might prove to be a bigger challenge than acquiring it.

Jovanovic’s shop was another matter, and I scratched my head for maybe five minutes as I tried to place it. I’d thought I knew New Orleans pretty well, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall an antique shop by that name in that quarter. There were one or two notable ones in New Orleans, but that section of the city was pretty much off the maps for wealthy sightseers and the better local families. Most of the shops in that neighborhood were limping along on even flimsier finances than I was at the moment.

The thing to do, I reluctantly decided as I cracked the door and noticed that the cloud cover overhead was, if anything, thicker and darker than before, was to check out the shop from the outside. I wanted a strong first impression before I ventured into the figurative lion’s den. Then I amended that thought. The first thing to do was try for a little more information on, and hopefully a picture of, a toboda. In my experience, that meant only one logical starting point. I was going to pay a visit to Lucius Cowell, aka The Professor.

Lucius’s past is a little muddled. No, make that a lot. It seems likely that he worked in academia for some time, though I haven’t yet been able to find out at what university. Not that I pry, Lucius being an informational gift horse. At any rate, he deserves the title, as he possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure and esoteric information, fueled daily by the contents of his slightly disreputable bookstore.

Unlike his brethren in the trade, Lucius actually reads the books in his charge and, as a consequence, is frequently my first stop when I need information on some little-known topic.

I found him parked, as usual, behind the swaybacked front counter, his thin beak of a nose deep in a heavy tome written in some obscure language. The pages were heavily discolored and the typeface was badly faded. It might have been Latin, but it might just as likely have been ancient Sanskrit. Whatever the language, it was clearly giving him no trouble, as he was flipping pages like a dervish.

I pulled up a rickety stool crowned with a cracked leather cushion, and sat down. Then I waited. And waited. It can take the Professor several minutes to return to the land of the living, once he’s in his deep study mode. After a while, his head came up and his eyes focused on me.

“What brings you to my emporium of knowledge this bright and gloomy morning?” he inquired.

I produced the folded menu bearing my scant notes. It took a moment to dredge up the name of the statue, as the greasy paper had defied the pencil in spots.

“Professor,” I finally managed, “have you ever heard of a…toboda?”

I expected a performance. Nine times out of ten, he’d lean back, half-close his eyes, and maybe massage his pointed jaw with one hand while he drummed the fingers of the other hand on the counter. If I’d asked a real poser, he might also start humming atonally while he ran my request through his venerable frontal lobes. Not today. Lucius got right to the point.

“That’s odd,” he countered. “You are the second person today to inquire about tobodas. Why the sudden interest? Is the city declaring a special holiday to honor the esoteric?”

I let that slide past. You ask a crazy question, you can pretty well expect a crazy answer. At least with Lucius. And, at the moment, I was more interested in there being another seeker of knowledge asking for info on the thing.

“Someone else came looking for information?”

The Professor’s head bobbed enthusiastically. His wire-rimmed glasses slid down his bet of nose at the gesture. Unfazed, he fielded them with the practiced skill of a veteran third baseman and returned them to their usual position.

“Looking for a book on the subject, to be precise. However, so far as I know, no book was ever written concerning the wretched little hoodoo. It’s only mentioned in a few paragraphs, in half a dozen books. To my knowledge, of course, but you may take my word for it.”

I raised placatory hands.

“I’ll take your word for it, Lucius Tell me, was it a woman in red?”

The Professor smiled faintly and his eyes briefly closed. I let it ride too. He was presumably reliving some cozy moment in his younger days when there’d been ‘someone special’ in his life. She’d probably worn red as well. I briefly wondered what had happened to that relationship. As far as I know, Crowell was a bachelor.

The Professor returned to the present with a sigh.

“No. It was a short fella’. Burly but knee-high to a flea. That being a facetious comparison, of course.”

“Of course,” I acceded.

Then got things rolling again.

“So, maybe there’s a picture of this thing in one of these books of yours? I’ve got a vague description, but it’s basically useless.”

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Sudden interest glowed in the Professor’s watery eyes.

“May I take it this is in relation to some new case?” he inquired eagerly. “Has Masaka brought something interesting to your attention?”

God forbid, I thought in instinctive alarm at the very thought.

I managed a sheepish, lopsided grin. The Professor was the only other person who knew of the mysterious girl’s occasional visits, and I strongly suspected that he’d devoted considerable effort to determining what species she might belong to. I had a hunch that he’d had no better luck in that department than I had.

“No,” I admitted, “not this time. I had a lady in the office about ten minutes ago. She spun me a story about having a statue of this thing that someone lifted. Evidently, it’s in an antique shop, and she wants me to get it back for her.”

Now the familiar finger tapping started, though he limited it to just an index finger beating cadence on the faded pages of the open book before him. faint cloud of dust rose from said pages.

“A statue? That is most interesting, and rare if true. Any descriptions of this creature are largely apocryphal. It was allegedly so evil that virtually no images were created, for fear of increasing its’ hold on the cult. Possibly on the world itself.”

He shrugged, then added, “But of course, in those days, you have to understand that their concept of the world was…ah…somewhat limited.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on ancient history. Other than on a very specific aspect.

“Yeah,” I persisted, “I’m sure. Now, what can you tell me about this thing?”

If his lips hadn’t been paper-thin, he’d probably have pursed them as he considered the question.

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted,” he finally remarked in a subdued tone, “as this is largely speculation. I’m connecting a very few recorded bits of lore with a lot of guesswork.”

I scowled. This reticence on his part was unusual. I decided to nudge him a little. Hoping he’d get to the point. After all, I was on a deadline.

“I just want to know anything that might be useful.” I explained. “You’ve already basically told me the figure is rare. I guessed as much when I started out a hundred bucks to the good. I’m more interested in finding out if there’s competition I might run up against. Like maybe some dedicated cult that might also be out to recover it. I don’t need or want that kind of trouble.”

The Professor shrugged. That was no concern of his. He had his book shop and wouldn’t be the one out there on the front line, so he could afford to take a broad view on the situation.

“Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. I’ve said the toboda is a very obscure thing, so I doubt any sort of organized worship would be unlikely. I can tell you that the wretched little thing was reportedly a bit of a mixed blessing for anyone having any dealings with it.”

“’A’ toboda? You mean there were more than one of them?”

He shifted uneasily, then shrugged.

“Oh, dozens, and they were very nasty little beasts. Worship tended to be a dicey prospect. If you encountered one and didn’t pay what it considered due homage, you would meet a quick and unpleasant end. Even if you did pay it proper homage, things were just as likely to turn nasty. There were reportedly very convoluted and strict rules of conduct were imposed upon interacting with them. Imposed by the tobodas themselves, and they were evidently highly mercurial beings.”

I managed to laugh that off. After all, aside from a disconcerting client, this looked to be a pretty standard job. There was no reason for things to get weird, the way my last couple of cases had. I was just to recover stolen property and return it for the rest of my fee, and I planned on that being outrageously high.

I’d visit the indicated shop, get a feel for the lay of the land and the dealer, feel out his reactions to a casual inquiry, and maybe do a little light breaking and entering if it came to that. As a rule, I steered a straight and narrow course, but for the kind of money-in-hand and the implication that I’d be recovering stolen goods, I could bend the rules just a little.

First, though, I wanted to hear the other side of the story from the shopkeeper. Maybe, just maybe, I was being played for a patsy. I still had that rinky feeling about my evasive client.

I had no reason to doubt Lucius’ reasonable accuracy in his speculation. I’d once gotten a look at the back room of the book shop. It amounted to a walk-in vault that would have done a bank proud. Foot-thick, case-hardened steel walls and a door so hefty I was surprised that, given his wiry build, he could open and close it. The vault was where he kept his rarest books and, so far as I know, though the book shop had several break-ins, he’d never lost a single volume.

Whatever he was basing his offerings on the toboda upon, it was doubtlessly tucked away in the safe. That meant it was of singular importance and value in Lucius’ eyes. That knowledge lent his speculation a degree of validity.

“Is there anything specific I should know about this toboda?” I asked, as I turned to leave. “Anything that might concern me?”

The resulting silence caused me to halt in my tracks. I turned, to find the Professor was again lost in one of his states of deep cogitation. After a moment, he was back with an additional bit of information.

“Well, I don’t know much more due to some obscurity in the historical records,” he offered apologetically, “but I do know they were particularly strong attractors.”

I blinked, completely lost.

“They were what?”

The Professor shook his head, evidently trying to find the right words to explain himself I layman’s terms.

“Let me try to put it in contemporary terms. Oh, what would be an apt comparison?”

Ten seconds of frantic finger drumming ensued before he brightened.

“Think of Al Capone. Yes, Capone is an excellent example! By which, I mean a toboda was rather like a gangster. Yes, that’s precisely it. Tobodas reportedly possessed a marked penchant for controlling lesser supernatural creatures. That was part of what made them so formidable. If you went against just one of the creatures, you were apt to find yourself confronted with half a dozen or more enemies of all levels of wickedness that they called up in response.”

Capone? Really? That was the best he could do? I considered telling him that his idea of ‘contemporary’ was a couple of decades off, but thought better of it. After all, he’d only been trying to help.

Lucius managed an apologetic half-smile.

“Not, I suppose,” he remarked in a crestfallen tone, “very reassuring.”

“No, Professor, you did fine. Thanks.”

I hit the street, hands stuffed in my jacket pockets and my head whirling with vague but disturbing toboda trivia. Okay, I was basically back at square one. I still had no clear idea what to look for beyond basically a flattened stack of evil purple pancakes with writing on its middle and a sinister smirk on what passed for a face. If I worked really hard, I could consider that a positive. The negatives of the case? Fanatic cultists coming into the mix were unlikely but not an impossibility. I’d have to keep an eye out for any wide-eyed passersby.

Ruthless collectors were a more realistic issue, but how bad could that make things? Then I recalled my last couple of cases and, decided maybe I’d better turn my thoughts to more pleasant topics while I sought out Javanovik’s shop.

I headed for the bus stop. What I’d find there was pretty much up in the air, but I had a nasty suspicion that trouble would be a sizable part of it. There was, I reflected, at least one good thing about the last half hour. The rain had stopped.