a gentleman doesn't share the details of his amorous encounters."
Lily crossed her arms and assumed a pose of disgusted incredulity, an eloquent pose, because before she said it, Charlie knew what was coming: "Bullshit. That cop shot pieces off her, but you're worried about protecting her honor?"
Charlie smiled wistfully. "You know, we shared a moment - "
"Oh my God, you complete man-whore!"
"Lily, you can't possibly be hurt by my - by my response to your generous - and let me say right here - extraordinarily tempting offer. Gee whiz."
"It's because I'm too perky, isn't it? Not dark enough for you? You being Mr. Death and all."
"Lily, the shadow in Sedona was coming for me. When I left town, it went away. The sewer harpy came for me. The other Death Merchant said that I was different. They never had deaths happen as a result of their presence like I have."
"Did you just say 'gee whiz' to me? What am I, nine? I am a woman - "
"I think I might be the Luminatus, Lily."
Lily shut up.
She raised her eyebrows. As if "no."
Charlie nodded. As if "yes."
"The Big Death?"
"With a capital D," Charlie said.
"Well, you're totally not qualified for that," Lily said.
"Thanks, I feel better now."
MINTY FRESH
Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he'd been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.
He'd spent his evening at Sato's on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.
For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and Bop City on Post Street the premier jazz club. When the war ended and the Japanese returned, many a late night might find Japanese kids standing under the windows of Bop City, listening to the likes of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, or Charles Mingus, listening to art happen and dissipate into the San Francisco nights. Sato was one of those kids.
It wasn't just historical happenstance - Sato had explained to Minty, late one night after the music had ended and the sake was making him wax eloquent - it was philosophical alignment: jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing - jazz wasn't something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment. "And in jazz, every moment is a crisis," Sato quoted Wynton Marsalis, "and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis." Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter - it's all right there - no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.
And Minty, taken by the need to escape his life as Death, had taken the train to Oakland to find a moment he could hide in, without the regret of the past or the anxiety of the future, just a pure right now resting in the bell of a tenor sax. But the sake, too much future looming ahead, and too much water overhead had brought on the blues, the moment melted, and Minty was uneasy. Things were going badly. He'd been unable to retrieve his last two soul vessels - a first in his career - and he was starting to see, or hear, the effects. Voices out of the storm sewers - louder and more numerous than ever - taunting him. Things moving in the shadows, on the periphery of his vision, shuffling, scuffling dark things that disappeared when you looked right at them.
He'd even sold three discs off the soul-vessels rack to the same person, another first. He hadn't noticed it was the same woman right away, but when things started