“Nothing at the moment,” Jessie said. “But rest assured that we are going to be digging into this affair quite deeply in the next couple of hours. We are going to dig to the bottom of it.”
“Good luck, then,” the maseni said.
“I’ll be getting back to you,” Jessie said, hanging up.
“You have an absolutely fantastic knack for handling clients,” Helena said. “It’s a whole different side of you: sugar and syrup.”
“Never mind clients now,” Brutus said. “How are we going to dig to the bottom of the Tesserax affair in only a couple of hours?”
Jessie smiled. “We can start by tearing up his grave and finding what is at the bottom of it.”
Chapter Ten
Jessie decided they would go over the cemetery wall on a narrow alley beside the burial grounds, where there were no street lamps, and he sent Brutus through first, to check for sentries on the other side. The hell hound phased through the eight-foot-high stone wall, was gone a long moment, then melted back again.
“It’s all clear,” he told them.
“I wish we could walk through walls like you,” Helena said.
Brutus chuckled. “It isn’t easy, and I can’t do it very often, but it is a handy talent to have, now and again. But if you’re wicked enough, and if you die and go to Hell, maybe you’ll be transformed into a hell hound, like me.”
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just go over the top.”
Jessie faced the wall, jumped, hooked his fingers over the top edge, muscled himself up, got a knee over, twisted around and looked down at the hound and the woman. He put a hand down as far as he could reach, and he said, “Come on, Helena.”
Hesitantly, she approached, took his hand, planted her feet against the rain-wet stones and climbed laboriously up to join him.
In five minutes, the three of them were inside the alien graveyard, where most of the city’s prominent people—both maseni and human—were either buried or to be buried when their time came.
Rain had fallen while they were in the office talking to Zeke Kanastorous and to Galiotor Fils, and now the earth smelled damp, and the newly fallen palm leaves were ripe, daubing a strange perfume on the cool, night air that barely circulated around them.
In the shallow light of the big moon—almost a gibbous moon, Jessie thought—which shone through a break in the cloud cover, they could see the twin hillocks of the graveyard, though not the small ravine that lay between them much like the fold of Helena’s formidable cleavage. The mausoleum stood on the far hill, a square of white stone that seemed to grab the feeble moonlight, magnify and hold it. Human and maseni tombstones, set between well cultivated shrubs and fancy palm trees, dotted the hills and disappeared into the ravine now shrouded in impenetrable shadows spilled there like puddles of ink.
“We should have asked Galiotor Fils where his brood brother’s grave was, exactly,” Helena said. “I hadn’t realized that, in ten short years, you could fill one of these places to this extent.”
“People die regularly,” Jessie said.
“And a number of vampires have rented plots,” Brutus observed.
The graveyard was a ceremonial luxury that the city had been forced to do without for many years prior to the maseni landing. Since every foot of space, in those overpopulated days, was precious, none of it could be given over to the storage of corpses. Now, however, since the dead and dying Shockies, and all the potential children they never produced, were not cluttering up the place, maintenance of graveyards was again feasible. And popular. Despite the fact that there was no longer any religious bunkum that made burial a necessity, people wanted it done and paid well to have it done. It seemed, to some people, that burial carried with it a certain dignity, an undeniable status. Jessie didn’t much care for it himself; he intended to be cremated and to have his ashes thrown into any convenient disposal chute or garbage can. A sentimentalist, he wasn’t.
“Where do we begin?” Helena asked.
Jessie took a pair of flashlights from the satchel of tools he had brought along, handed one of them to the woman and kept the other for himself.