ALEX PIZZA AND THE PEIKING DUMPLINGS

“Just so we’re clear,” said the Illegal Artist as she unscrewed the cap on the Thermos, “I’m only here under protest.”

“Uh-huh.” Alex Pizza, Secret Agent to the Stars, took the Thermos from her, poured himself a cup of coffee, and took a sip all in one smooth motion, as if it was the beginning of an elaborate dance routine. It wasn’t really coffee, but it was a genuine Thermos-brand dewar flask. Without even a glance in the Illegal Artist’s direction, he handed her back the Thermos, raised his binoculars back to his eyes, and resumed the Vigil of Seven Unavenged Murders.

“You’re not impressing me with your lame cool,” the Illegal Artist told him. She knew he’d find the phrase lame cool grating.

They were standing (in fact Alex Pizza was leaning against a windowframe, and the Illegal Artist was shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other) in the front bedroom of a two-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup somewhere in the North End. The apartment had been vacant for several years, because of the fire damage, but its windows still offered a decent view of the street below.

The Illegal Artist wasn’t about to spend more time staring at Alex Pizza than she had to, so she set the dewar flask down on the floor and surveyed the bedroom, as if she hadn’t already seen everything worth seeing. No visible fire damage in this room, at least.

Item one, ratty Venetian blinds in the two windows. One window Alex Pizza occupied, binoculars, staring down, jackass. The other window was in the other exterior wall, and faced an extremely rickety-looking fire escape and a narrow alley, on the other side of which was another brick building. The Illegal Artist had considered spying out that window, just to spite Alex Pizza, but there wasn’t anything to see as the third and fourth floors of the neighboring building were dark and empty-looking.

Item two, bare off-white walls and ceiling. In one corner the ceiling had sustained some nasty water damage, and looked like it might give birth at any moment. All the walls had at least one major crack, which someone at some point sometime tried to repair or disguise by, apparently, painting over it, as if they had misunderstood that spackle and paint serve different purposes.

Item three, big complicated chalk drawing in the center of the room, on the floor. No, wait. That was item four, the Illegal Artist decided. Item three was the floor itself, which was linoleum on one half and, for some reason, maroon-painted hardwood on the other half.

Item four, the big chalk drawing blah blah secret magic woo woo. She assumed Alex Pizza had drawn it, probably to summon Baal or turn spider’s silk and ginseng into mandrake root and deadly nightshade or serpent’s scales or something else ridiculous and pointless. The main point of interest here was that the chalk he had used – Crayola brand fat outdoor chalk – was still there, tucked back into its flimsy cardboard container.

She picked up the chalk and started drawing on the walls pictures of all her favorite cartoon characters beating up all of her least favorite cartoon characters. By the start of the third hour of the stakeout, a mob led by Pogo and Lisa Simpson was burning Mickey both in effigy and, in the corner by the water damage, at the stake.

“Ah ah ah ah!” cried Alex Pizza unexpectedly sometime during hour five. “He’s moving?”

“What?” asked the Illegal Artist before she remembered that she didn’t care.

“Come over here,” he said, waving her in without taking his eyes away from the binoculars.

“You’ll miss the good part…” he said, in a sing-song voice, after he realized she wasn’t coming.

With a theatrical sigh suited to an eight-year-old, the Illegal Artist set down her chalk and stomped to the window. “I see nothing unusual,” she said, looking down at the tiny people below. “Except that it’s really goddamn crowded down there.”

“Okay, that guy,” Alex Pizza pointed, probably at someone in particular, though the Illegal Artist had no way of knowing who, “is either the High Dragon of the Seven Unavenged Murderers or the Fire-Brother of Wind and Sky of the Rightly-Guided Caliphate Masonic Order of the, oh, I forget, something Greek and fake. That guy with him is Vincent Schiavelli.”

The Illegal Artist gathered she was expected to recognize the name. “Who?”

“Vincent Schiavelli, character actor, totem warrior – he faked his death in 2005 but it’s definitely him. They’re probably doing the second stage of the Third Unavenged Murder.”

The Illegal Artist nearly said “What?” but caught herself just in time.

“In a second, one of them is going to give the other one money. How much money, and we’ll know whether he’s High Dragon or the Fire-Brother… shit. Shit! They must have seen I was looking, they ducked into a Chinese place.”

“I could go for Chinese,” said the Illegal Artist. “Look, I’m going to go get some Chinese, you want anything?”

Alex Pizza requested some hot and sour soup, which the Illegal Artist decided to misremember as dumplings. She went down the three flights of stairs to ground level, but when she opened the building’s front door Vincent Shiavelli was staring her in the face.

“Oh,” the Illegal Artist said. “You were the gypsy dude from the second season of Buffy.”

He nodded, and showed her his handgun.

“Lame!” she said, and shut the door.