Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  I shrugged. “I won’t go up in a puff of smoke or anything.”

  He looked at me, brow furrowed in doubt. “Have you touched one before?”

  “Sure I have.”

  He held his breath as I reached for it. “See?” I held up the heavy book with both hands and waved it about, and Jonah exhaled with an uneasy laugh.

  “It’s only a book,” I said as I lifted the gilded cover. “Same as any other.” I felt for an opening along the leather edging, then did the same for the back cover. I paused. “It isn’t here.”

  After another moment’s thought I closed the book and hurried back to one of the side chapels I’d only glanced in before. To my left, more kneelers before a gaudy shrine alight with flickering votives; behind a wrought-iron gate to my right, a semicircular alcove with simple stone memorials stacked like filing cabinets up to a round, rather crudely formed hole in the ceiling. The nooks were too small to hold anything but cinerary urns, unless the bones were reinterred here—not that I wished to find out for certain either way.

  I tapped the gate lock and it swung open noiselessly, and I stepped into the narrow opening and began to pore over the names on each memorial. The masonry had been scraped away around one stone near the floor, and when I crouched to read the name I sighed with relief. “Monsieur Boulanger,” I said. “We meet at last.”

  Carefully I eased the stone from its place, laid it on the floor, and reached a tentative hand into the darkness. “ ‘Dead drop,’ ” Jonah murmured to himself. “Hah.” My fingers met something cold, made of metal, rectangular—a box—and I put my other hand in and pulled it out. I didn’t need to open it to know that what we needed was inside. I tucked the box in my satchel and fitted the memorial slab back into the wall.

  As we stepped through the gate and Jonah closed it behind us, I wondered what had happened to the mortal remains of Monsieur Boulanger. Men like him were often more useful than their living, breathing counterparts. After all, they couldn’t betray you.

  We never saw or heard from Père Bernard again. I found out much later that they had arrested him that very afternoon and shipped him off to Natzweiler the following week.

  THAT MORNING, after we had passed the contents of Boulanger’s metal box along to Fisher, we lay together in the tiny attic room of our safe house.

  “Behold, the spear of destiny!” I said in a loud whisper.

  He threw his head back and laughed. Then I got quiet for a moment, thinking of the real “spear”—the Lance of Longinus. “It’s hidden underground someplace, a place he thinks is safe …”

  “You don’t really believe that old legend, do you?”

  “How funny. You men have such a way of saying ‘I believe this’ or ‘I don’t believe in that,’ as if the truth could alter itself to suit you.” He rolled his eyes as I went on. “Anyway, they’ll find it—we’ll find it—and on that day he’ll die, just as the legend says.”

  “How would you know that?”

  I gave him an impish little smile, and he said, “Touché.” Then another pause. “If you can see all that,” he ventured to ask, “can you see when it will end?”

  I shook my head. I only knew it might be years yet, but what was the point in telling him so? “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Now, where were we?”

  WE’D HAD three successful sabotage operations in March of 1944. The consequence of this was, of course, that Lyons was positively infested with Gestapo. It was only a matter of time before we came face to face with them.

  Jonah very rarely left his safe house in the daytime, but on this occasion it couldn’t be helped. He’d been betrayed before, remember, and this time he was determined to err on the side of caution in all dealings with his fellow agents. This particular afternoon he was going to confront one whom he suspected of careless talk. He wasn’t carrying his pistol, because in the daytime it was best to travel without anything that might incriminate you. That illusion of innocence would protect you far more than a firearm would. He was driving a wagon full of milk cans, ostensibly to market, and I had made myself a barn cat, sitting on the driver’s seat beside him twitching my tail as if I hadn’t a care in the world.

  On the outskirts of Lyons a checkpoint appeared out of thin air. A German officer strode out into the road and held up a hand. “Documents, s’il vous plaît.”

  Jonah nodded and pulled from his breast pocket the sheaf of papers drawn up for him by the C&D office in London. They identified him as Michel Durand, a farmhand from the village of Pérouges, excused from military service on account of a fractured knee. Of course, it was the Gestapo who had given him the bum knee in the first place. The Nazi could find no fault with the documents, but he signaled to two other officers, who forcibly removed Jonah from the wagon. I jumped off the seat and disappeared round the nearest corner, but only to turn from cat to bird. I remembered what Simone had said and stuck to pigeon.

  He was handcuffed and put in the back of a truck, and I alighted on the roof and rode with him to the police station. There he was led into a whitewashed room, where they turned out his pockets. They checked for blades in the heels of his shoes, and I prayed they wouldn’t demand he undress. Those scars on his feet were practically a calling card from their comrades in Berlin; they would know at once what he was about. They didn’t strip him in that room, but it was inevitable. I had to get him out of there before that could happen.

  Once he’d passed from that prison anteroom I lost sight of him. They were basement cells, with narrow barred windows at street level, though the street was more a dingy alleyway. That would be to our advantage. Thank goodness we hadn’t been rounded up in Paris. Liberating him from this podunk police station would be relatively easy.

  I spent the next few minutes flitting from window to window and found him easily enough. He was on the floor in a cell by himself, lost in thought. I flapped my wings agitatedly to get his attention. He got up and came to the window.

  Nothing stirred in the alleyway, and there was no one to see me as I resumed my womanly form. I crouched on the cobblestones and could just barely make out the contours of his face. “Here,” I said. “Come closer.”

  “Did you get the key?”

  “Don’t need it—I’ll make you small enough to fit in my jacket pocket. Come closer.”

  I reached between the bars and placed my hand on the crown of his head.

  “This is going to feel a bit strange,” I whispered. “Try not to make any sound.”

  Half a minute later a field mouse looked up at me in utter bewilderment. I petted him briefly. The mouse skittered up my coat sleeve, and I put my hand out of sight as I came out of the alley onto the street so he could venture out again into the safety of my pocket.

  I SHOULD HAVE known he would make himself distant over the days that followed. He could no longer go out of the house at any time of day or night, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. Once we were ensconced in one of the safe houses in town and I was able to turn him back into a man, he gave me a long look—grave, tender, and a little resentful. He understood that if it hadn’t been for me, he’d have been halfway back to Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch by now, déjà vu all over again. Jonah had managed to free himself once before without anyone else’s help, but fortune might not keep a second appointment. Furthermore, not every man in his situation had a girlfriend who could get him out of it, and it was for their sakes, too, that he resented my help.

  “What does it feel like?” he asked once, a few nights before the balloon went up.

  “What does what feel like?”

  He paused. “Being you.”

  How could I possibly answer that?

  “Knowing you’ll survive this,” he went on. “Knowing you’ll outlive the rest of us by a hundred years.”

  I felt a lump in my throat and a sting in my eyes. “Please, Jonah—please let’s not talk about it.”

  “I’ve bested them twice,” he said. “The first time by sheer providence”—I made a noise o
f gentle derision; “providence” had much less to do with it than his own bravery and good sense—“and I owe you for the second time. From here on I’ll be tempting fate, Eve. No, I mean it.”

  He was silent for a few moments and hardly responded to my hand on his arm. “In your file it says you were quite the fortune-teller in Berlin.”

  “I have a file?”

  He laughed, then went silent for a moment. “Why haven’t you ever offered to read my palm?”

  I looked at him sidewise. “Because I don’t want to know. And what’s more, I don’t think you do either.”

  There was another pensive pause. “You believe the future is fixed?”

  “I wish I could say I don’t,” I replied. “But it’s hard to deny when there’s a portent everywhere you look.”

  “Don’t you ever see one of these … portents … and seeing it causes you to change your plans, thereby eliminating what you were warned of?”

  “It happens.”

  “But not often?”

  I regarded him sadly. “Not often enough.”

  Maxwell Faust

  20.

  I DON’T EVEN have a photograph of us. What I would give for a single dog-eared snapshot, sunburned arms round each other’s shoulders and heads thrown back midlaugh! I wouldn’t care if it was only the size of a business card, water stained and criss-crossed in Scotch tape. What I would give for some small proof of all those happy memories we never got the chance to make.

  It’s marvelous, the resemblance. Sometimes I just sit there staring at him until he starts to look at me funny. Of course, they aren’t alike in every respect—Jonah didn’t have any freckles but Justin has loads of them, and we spend so much time together that I’ve begun to pick out the constellations on his arms. He’s got the Pleiades on a right-hand knuckle and Cassiopeia just above his elbow.

  But the similarities are so striking that I believe if I can find some quirk of Jonah’s in Justin—something even more uncanny than a confluence of hair, build, and features—that perhaps I can prove it to myself beyond all doubt. There was that weird little knob of flesh Jonah had behind his right ear, and one night when I ventured to touch a soundly sleeping Justin in that same spot, I found precisely what I was hoping for.

  The next day I told Morven all about the ear knob. “He is Jonah,” I said. “I’m sure of it.” Morven rolled her eyes as she picked up my hand and guided it to her face. She pressed my fingertips to a spot behind her ear, and she’s got a knob there as well.

  “You’d think I’d have noticed that long before now,” I’d sniffed. “You didn’t grow it just to spite me, did you?”

  “Unlike some we know, I do not squander my energies on such petty things as growing squishy bumps behind my ears for the sole purpose of spiting my sister.”

  So I would need something else to prove it, and one Saturday night in February I decide on a new test.

  Some nights we go into Manhattan and other times we just spend the evening at the Blind Pig, but either way I’ve got to make my exit before the oomph runs out. On this particular evening we’ve eaten at a darling little trattoria in the Village and come home early. In his room above the toy shop I watch his eyelids grow heavy. He gives me a sleepy smile. “Will you stay the night?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “You never do. I wish you would. I’d like to wake up beside you.”

  I smooth his hair away from his face and he smiles with his eyes still closed. “Oh, you dear, sweet boy.” I watch his face, the face of a grown-up cherub, as his breathing gets slow and even.

  Death is somewhat easier to meet when you believe, as we do, that to end is to begin. You will learn to walk and speak again, lose your teeth (but hopefully only once), bite into apples, count stars lying on your back in the dewy grass—and you will know, again, what it is to lust and to love. It will be a different face you turn toward the sun, and that someone dear will call you by another name, but there are many other things you go on remembering even when you can no longer recall their meaning.

  I look at Justin and think, But sometimes your face stays the same. I murmur his name, loud enough to rouse him.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  I wait for a minute or two for a more complete answer and, receiving none, I venture, “Are you mulling it over?”

  “Mmm rmm shleep,” he says.

  “Justin,” I murmur in his ear. “Mein Schatz …”

  “Hrmmph,” he says. “Shleep.”

  “Weisst du noch?” I whisper. “Bist Du zu mir zurück gekommen, mein Liebling?”

  No answer.

  “Sometimes,” I whisper, “sometimes I swear it’s you, but then you have to go and do something foolish. And then I think, How can he be Jonah? Jonah was never a skirt chaser and only hung around in bars waiting for loose talk. But you—you watch football games and stuff your face with beer nuts.” I pause. “But to be fair, you’re a lot younger than you were then.”

  Then I hear a low growl from deep in his throat, and I begin to fear I’ve said too much. “Lass mich schlafen!” he barks, and rolls over with an emphatic squeak of the bedsprings. I lie there for a while longer just staring at his back, jaw hanging. I was right! I’m positively tingling with excitement.

  Alas, not excitement. Toes a-tingle, I put on my coat and let myself out.

  FULLY RESTORED after a good night’s sleep, I go down to Mira’s early the next afternoon and find Justin reading the paper over coffee and a pastry. He looks up at me petulantly as I take the chair opposite. “You didn’t stay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I had horrible dreams. People were beating me up. And then I was rotting away in jail for something I didn’t do.” He shivers to himself, then looks at me accusingly, like it’s my fault he slept poorly. All right, so maybe it is.

  “Justin, do you remember what you said to me just before you fell asleep last night?”

  “I remember you were babbling a lot. Do me a favor and don’t do that again, all right?”

  I dismiss his irritation with an excited flick of the hand. “You don’t remember you spoke to me in German? You said, ‘Lass mich schlafen!’ Isn’t that marvelous?”

  “Not possible,” he says. “I don’t know any German.”

  “Aha! You don’t think you know any German. I’ll have to tape-record you next time. It’s all in your subconscious, see. You do remember it.”

  “Remember it? I’d have to have learned it first.”

  I try to gaze at him meaningfully but he just rolls his eyes, smiling, and then he sighs and checks his watch. “I’ve got to go up to Emmet’s now. His nurse took the day off and Uncle Harry wants me to check in on him.”

  “Can’t they send a replacement?”

  “Not on a Sunday,” Justin sighs. “Not for a crank like him, anyway. Will you come along?”

  JUSTIN RINGS Fawkes and takes down a short food list—milk, bread, eggs, coffee—and I go along with him to the grocery store. Against my better judgment, I also accompany him to Fawkes’s place. Justin knocks on the bedroom door and opens it just wide enough to stick his head in. “Have you had breakfast, Emmet?”

  The old man perks up at the rustling sound of a brown paper grocery bag. “Who’s there?”

  “I brought Miss Harbinger along with me.”

  “Can she fry an egg?”

  Justin pulls his head out and looks at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Sure,” I say, and Justin ducks in again to tell him so.

  “Good,” says Fawkes. “I’ll take four. Should be some bacon left in the fridge. And I’ll have a cup of coffee too.” Justin leaves the bedroom door ajar as we make our way down the dingy corridor to the kitchen. “If it’s not too much trouble,” Fawkes calls after us, but with a definite insinuation that if it is too much trouble then we are nothing but a couple of lazy hoodlums.

  “Eighty-odd years on Earth and he still hasn’t learned to s
ay ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ ” I grumble.

  The kitchen is far tidier than I remember it, and I make a remark to this effect. “The nurse gets overtime for doing the cleaning,” Justin says as I pull a frying pan off the drain board. The whole place still has that sickroom stink, but no help for that I suppose. Justin spoons the grounds into the coffeemaker while I crack the eggs. They turn out better when they fry themselves, but I haven’t the oomph to spare.

  I pause in the doorway while Justin brings in the breakfast on a plastic cafeteria tray he found under the sink. Fawkes looks up at me for a moment but does not greet me. I lean against the jamb with arms folded and gaze idly about the room. Besides the bed, its principal furnishing is a massive rolltop desk piled high with books and newspaper clippings. The crossbar on a front-wheeled aluminum walker by the window is draped with discarded undershirts. The nightstand is covered with soiled Kleenex and empty juice boxes.

  The old man takes a sip of his coffee, grimaces, and spits it onto his fried eggs. “Bog water! What is this?”

  “It’s regular coffee. You asked for regular,” Justin says.

  “It’s Crapwell House,” Fawkes snarls.

  “Maison de Merdewell,” I say cheerfully. “Maxwell Mousedroppings. Maxwell Faust, as you’d sell your soul for something better …”

  “You didn’t tell me which brand to get,” Justin says patiently.

  Fawkes picks up his plate and tilts it so the spit-up coffee runs down the mounds of fried eggs and drips back into the mug. Justin eyes the old man in abject disgust. Fawkes reaches for his wallet among the dross on the nightstand. “Why don’t you make yourself useful, girl, and pop down to the shop to get me a decent cup of coffee?”

  I throw Justin a look—as if frying his stinking eggs and bacon wasn’t enough!—before I say with exaggerated cheeriness, “For the price of your immortal soul?”

  “Here’s a dollar,” he says. “Now get going.”

  WHEN I get back from Mira’s Justin is watching television in the sitting room. I knock on the bedroom door and enter without pause, hand Fawkes his coffee, and take the tray off his lap and make room for it on the nightstand. He mumbles a thank-you and I fight the urge to smirk at him.