She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched the edges of her lips and she said, “Come in, then. If you don’t there’ll be no heat in here, either.”
He stepped inside her apartment. Plastic, multicolored toys were strewn all over the floor. There were small heaps of torn Christmas wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set.
“Okay,” she said. “This is what you do. First you seal the windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, it’s just like Saran Wrap but for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The building’s furnace is old, and it can’t cope with the real cold. We’ve had some easy winters recently, I suppose we should be grateful.” Then she put out her hand. “Marguerite Olsen.”
“Good to meet you,” said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and they shook hands. “You know, ma’am, I’d always thought of Olsens as being blonder than you.”
“My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond. Couldn’t tan at gunpoint.”
“Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper.”
“Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don’t see why we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around.” She nodded. “Yes. Some news reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the ‘News from the Community’ column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom?”
“Whom,” said Shadow, before he could stop himself. “It’s the objective case.”
She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced a moment of pure deja vu. I’ve been here before, he thought.
No, she reminds me of someone.
“Anyway, that’s how you heat up your apartment,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Shadow. “When it’s warm you and your little one must come over.”
“His name’s Leon,” she said. “Good meethjg you, Mister ... I’m sorry ...”
“Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.”
“And what sort of a name is Ainsel?” she asked.
Shadow had no idea. “My name,” he sail. “I’m,afraid I was never very interested in family history.
“Norwegian, maybe?” she said.
“We were never close,” he said. Then he remembered Uncle Emerson Borson, and added, “On that side, anyway.”
By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy.
“What the hell is that purple piece of shit you’re driving?” asked Wednesday, by way of greeting.
“Well,” said Shadow, “you drove off with my white piece of shit. Where is it, by the way?”
“I traded it in in Duluth,” said Wednesday. “You can’t be too careful. Don’t worry—you’ll get your share when all this is done.”
“What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.”
Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to hit him. “You’re living here because it’s the last place they’ll look for you. I can keep you out of sight here.”
“By ‘they’ you mean the black hats?”
“Exactly. I’m afraid the House on the Rock is now out of bounds. It’s a little difficult, but we’ll cope. Now it’s just stamping our feet and flag-waving, caracole and saunter until the action starts—a little later than any of us expected. I think they’ll hold off until spring. Nothing big can happen until then.”
“How come?”
“Because they may babble on about micromilliseconds and virtual worlds and paradigm shifts and what-have-you, but they still inhabit this planet and are still bound by the cycle of the year. These are the dead months. A victory in these months is a dead victory.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Shadow. That was not entirely true. He had a vague idea, and he hoped it was wrong.
“It’s going to be a bad winter, and you and I are going to use our time as wisely as we can. We shall rally our troops and pick our battleground.”
“Okay,” said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war had already begun. The battle was coming. “Mad Sweeney said that he was working for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died.”
“And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, you’ve repaid my faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”
“Las Vegas, Nevada?”
“That’s the one.”