HELL IS FOR GUMSHOES

by Helen A. Handbasket

Chapter One

     I leaned back in my squeaky chair, put my feet up on the desk, and looked out the window from my third story office at the intersection of Rosie and Oprah on the ninth level of hell. It wasn't exactly where I wanted to be, but it would do. Better than some places I've been, worse than others. The view was nice but the population was appalling. The ninth level of hell was full of people who were getting exactly what they deserved.
     What concerned me wasn't where I was but whom I was dealing with. My prey. The guy I'd been hired to find. The elusive bastard with a trail colder than Sharon Stone's aneurysm. What did he look like? Would I know him when I saw him? Who cared as long as I was getting paid. Satan's checks never bounced.
     "Someone here to see you," said Maurice Chevalier over the intercom. At least they gave me a secretary and Maurice was pretty charming.
     I put out my cigarette and pressed a button. "Do they have an appointment?"
     "I don't sink so, but zey are very persuasive" crooned Maurice.
     "Yeah? What do they look like?"
     He started humming a song and it wasn't "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." It was something by Alice Cooper. I knew I was in trouble.
     I checked my revolver for the third time that morning, making sure it was loaded with one in the barrel.
     "Show them in," I told Maurice.
     I'd never had an adversary who showed such callous disregard for the rules of play. How do you play a game? You find an opponent and you mutually agree to a set of rules before you start. The whole point of a game is to see who can win according to the rules. Without rules, there's no game. How do you figure out who the winner is? 
     Total strangers from around the world, and deep down under, can gather to play chess or checkers or dominoes or hundreds of other games because these games have immutable rules. Chess is chess, even if the opponents don't speak the same language. There's nothing to chance. There are no dice thrown. If you win, it's because you played better, period. There aren't variations of chess. If your opponent in chess moves his rook diagonally, saying "That's how we play where I'm from," you are being bullshitted, my friend, and you don't have to take it. The game is over. You stand up from the table and look for a new game with someone who knows how to play.
     That's what I was doing on the ninth level. The ninth level is the game level, where everybody plays games all the time - only anybody can make up any rule they want on the spot. Lots of weaponry. The rule of chess in the ninth level of hell is that the winner is the first player who declares checkmate and doesn't get stabbed. The rule of baseball in the ninth level of hell is that the winning team is the one with the most home runs at the end of the ninth inning who doesn't get mowed down in machine gun fire.
     If you were researching games, this was the place to be, in a brownstone without an elevator, a crappy two-room office with the bathroom down the hall, and no air conditioning. At least the windows opened, which brought in a sulfurous breeze that sickened as it cooled you off.
     Maurice opened the door to my office and let in a gruesome, drooling sight, like a Jack Davis caricature of an ogre, dressed in leather and creosote, a cross between a warthog and a sumo wrestler. "What the hell are you looking at?" it snorted. 
     "Your tusks," I said. "could use a flossing."
     "Your cunt could use a fucking," he said, "but I'm not rude enough to mention it."
     Crude and sarcastic. I like that in an ogre.
     He plopped himself down on my sofa, raising a cloud of God knows what. "You wanted to see me?" he snorted.
     "Depends on who you are," I said.
     He pulled the sofa up to the desk, reached into his fringed vest, and withdrew a deck of cards, which he shuffled with a hellish flourish. He then dealt us each five. I picked up my hand and looked at it.
     Standard deck, probably fifty-two but who knows. All I knew was that if we were playing poker, I had a royal flush made out of hearts.
     "I'll take two," he said, throwing two of his cards down on the table and dealing himself two more from the deck.
     He looked at me like he expected me to do something. "I'll stay with these," I said.
     He squinted his inscrutable piggy ogre eyes, smiled, and put his cards on the table. "I bet..." he said, then waited, looked around the office as if sizing up the place trying to figure if there was anything here worth winning. "I bet you think I don't know who you work for."
Some bet. Here I was sitting on the hand of a lifetime but he wasn't going for his wallet. Bad sign.
     "I work for whoever hires me," I said, putting down the cards, figuring the game was over. "I'm considering the likes of you so obviously I'm not so picky."
     "You got a mouth on you for a white girl," he grunted. "You better watch what you say to me. You don't know who you're dealing with."
     "Okay, who are you?"
     He handed me his card. There was no mistaking it. Covered in meticulous renderings of demons. This guy was Breughal. 
     Pretty famous case. Eternity's most famous whistle-blower. Doomed to spend a decade as every character he ever drew, just for giving away company secrets. I actually admired the guy and wondered what he really looked like.
     "I think we have something in common," he said.
     He was right. With my earthly column, "Who's Going to Hell This Week?" I was certainly guilty of betraying our lord and master as much as he did, which got me wondering. Why was he doomed to spend eternity in such an uncomfortable form while I was this luscious babe? 
     "I guess we do have something in common," I said, warming up to the putrescent monstrosity soiling my sofa. 
     "I've got a job for you," he said. "Are you interested?"
     "You want to know if I'm interested before telling me the job?"
     "That would spoil the surprise."
     Playing games. Ninth level bullshit. Well, I was here; I had to put up with it. That's why they pay me the bucks.
     "You gonna tell me what you're willing to pay," I said.
     "Nothing," he said, "think of it as a trade."
     "What do you have that I want?"
     "I know where to find the Gamemaster."
     That got my attention. I'd spent countless hours with Satan and his filleted mignons, but I'd never met the Gamemaster. If reality was a game of Monopoly, then the Gamemaster was the ultimate bank. He was the cosmic arbitrator, the repository of all rules. If I could get to him it could only help me in my quest. If the man I was hired to find played by any rulebook, the Gamemaster would have it. I needed to meet him, whatever the cost.
     "It's a deal," I said.
     Did I mention I get a bonus?
 

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