And their footsteps on the pavement sound like they’re saying: We own the street! We own the sea! And again: We own the street! We own the sea!
Yeah, thinks Niner, if Cosmos could conquer the dogs he’ll be able to find a five-star hotel, too.
And Cosmos does find a condemned house, for he knows where to look: right where the city is at its ugliest. Perhaps behind the slaughterhouse, where it stinks of blood and piss. Or next to the garbage dump.
And sure enough, there really is a condemned house there. It doesn’t look anything like a five-star hotel, though. It looks rather creepy, actually. A horror house with dead window-eyes.
I never would have gone in there, thinks Niner. If I were alone, I never would have gone in there.
The front door is nailed shut with planks. But Cosmos knows what to do.
“Come with me!” he says, glancing quickly down the street. Not a soul in sight.
“This way,” says Cosmos, and disappears behind a big lilac bush left over from an earlier time, when there was still a garden here, and a warm light in the windows.
“We’ll take the service entrance,” says Cosmos, laughing.
The back door isn’t locked. Cosmos pulls Niner into a dark corridor. Three steps lead upward.
“Wait!” says Cosmos, and digs into one of his two plastic bags.
Niner hears the rustling. In the dark, everything is amplified. The rustling in the plastic bag, Cosmos’s voice, and also Niner’s fear.
“WHEN YOU’RE SCARED, YOU’VE just got to sing out loud, Little Hobbin!” Mama used to say.
And it really did help. At least until Mama’s new boyfriend moved in.
“Quit your yelping!” the new guy said. “That’ll make a man’s hair stand on end!”
“Oh, let the boy sing, Hubert!” Mama answered.
“You stay out of it! That howling’s giving me a headache!”
So Mama stayed out of it. And Niner resumed with his singing.
“You bastard!” the new guy hollered. “You rotten bastard!” And then he started hitting, too. First with his hands, then with his belt, and then with a clothes hanger. And with every blow he only seemed to get angrier.
And still, Mama stayed out of it.
That’s when Niner learned to make himself invisible, and to cry without making any sound.
And in the evenings, in the dark, when Niner lay in bed, the fear grew stronger and stronger. Until finally, he got to the point where no amount of singing could have helped.
THE PLASTIC BAG RUSTLES loudly. The house smells damp and musty. Then a match flares up, and Niner sees that Cosmos is lighting a candle.
Their shadows flicker on the walls as they climb the creaky stairs.
And there, at the top, is a room with two beds. There are even pillows and blankets, and a rug on the floor.
“Well, now. Five stars?” asks Cosmos.
“At least!” says Niner.
“Lucky night?” asks Cosmos.
“Lucky night,” says Niner.
“Oughtta take advantage. Might just be a lucky streak. D’you still want to go to the sea?”
“For sure!”
“Hungry?”
“Always!”
“Can you look hungry?”
Niner nods.
“Let’s see!”
The candle flickers and Niner puts on his saddest face. Trembling lower lip. Eyes big and wide. He only has to think of Mama, and it happens all by itself.
“Fantastic!” says Cosmos. “I’d give you my last bit of fried chicken, and the biscuit on top.”
“Tell me all about it,” says Niner. “What’s your plan?”
“I know this bar,” says Cosmos. “It’s called Caracas. Some pretty shady characters hang out there. But people with money, too, if you’re lucky. A lot of money, if you get my drift. The kind that are bored, ’cause they’re so rich. The kind that pay for everything, just to keep from bein’ alone.”
“Like those dumbasses with the mansions and fancy cars?”
“Like those dumbasses with the mansions and fancy cars. Fisher and Frost Jr. and such. They have money, we need money, and you know how to look hungry. Tonight’s our lucky night!”
“Well then, let’s go!” says Niner. “What’re we waiting for?”
IT’S A LONG WAY to the Caracas. First an overgrown dirt path, then a gravel path that runs past the neon signs. “Your jeweler” flickers in red from a wall. “Your jeweler.”
And right next to it are ads for an insurance company. Three guardian angels in a row. Wasp-waisted women in chic clothes with transparent wings, holding their hands over deeply tanned men and their expensive cars. “Always here, always near,” it says in green letters beneath the guardian angels.
Suddenly, it seems to Niner as if the entire city had been papered with these ads. Overnight. Always here, always near. A path lined by guardian angels.
“Cosmos? Do you believe in that?” asks Niner after the fifth ad.
“In what?”
“That,” says Niner, and points to a guardian angel with transparent wings.
“Do I believe in guardian angels?” Cosmos laughs, “You sure do ask some funny questions.”
“So tell me. Do you or don’t you?”
“Fairy tales,” says Cosmos. “Guardian angels are fairy tales. It’s a buncha crap, if you really wanna know!”
Cosmos shakes his head.
“But if you didn’t have a guardian angel, then . . .”
“Then what? Then you fall out the window? Break a leg getting up? Get run over by a car? Think about it, man. I ain’t got no guardian angel! And? Have I got a broken leg? Been run over by a car? Fallen out a window? Of course not. So there you have it!”
Niner hangs his head and thinks it over, but somehow he doesn’t believe Cosmos. Maybe Cosmos does have a guardian angel. Maybe there’s an invisible woman standing right behind him, but Cosmos doesn’t know it. After all, you can’t see guardian angels. And you definitely can’t touch them.
“I do,” says Niner, “I’ve got a guardian angel.”
After the seventh guardian angel ad, they come to the Caracas. Or at least that’s what it says on a big sign over the door:
CARACAS
Niner had expected the bar to be bigger and much more attractive.
But Caracas is actually one of those dark, smoke-filled dives where drunks line the bar next to women with bright red lipstick who are always laughing too loudly. Where the wheels of the slot machines spin around endlessly and no one ever looks up, except when the bell above the door rings.
This is the place where Cosmos wants to rustle up some cash?
“You go on ahead,” says Cosmos. “They already know me here. And you got your guardian angel anyway. But look good and hungry. And come get me if someone offers to help.”
NINER GOES. HE TAKES a deep breath, opens the door to the bar, and can’t look hungry at