Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

“You heard that?” I said.

  “I did, yes.”

  “This could be real trouble. I don’t want anything happening to the realty maintenance man when the guy tries to wash this off.”

  “What do you think might happen?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  I called Singh back and told him that we’d just deal with the graffito ourselves.

  “I’m going to do some cleaning in the upstairs flat anyway,” I said. “So I’ll have rags and soap and stuff.”

  “If you prefer, certainly,” Singh said. “I have not yet called the fellow, so it is not a problem.”

  I clicked off. Ari took off his jacket, handed it me, and began to roll up his sleeves.

  “Put that in the car,” he said. “I saw some rags and a hose in the back garage. There’s a spigot over there by the front garage door. Let’s just deal with this now.”

  “Okay, but be careful about it. Hey, you’re not wearing a gun.”

  He smiled and patted the waistband of his trousers. Silly old me!

  I stowed the jacket while he fetched the supplies. Before I let him wash the graffito off, I threw another Chaos ward. This one held steady. The graffito gave out a miserable hiss and fell silent. When Ari trickled water onto it from the hose, a few blue sparks flashed, but the design began to dribble paint a second or two later. He wiped off most of it with a rag.

  “It’ll take soap to get that last bit of gray smear off,” I said.

  “Yes.” Ari turned off the water and began to disconnect the hose. “What do you think would have happened if water had touched it when it was full strength?”

  “Nothing good. A lot of sparks at the very least.”

  After Ari returned the hose and rags to the garage, we went up the outside steps and tried our new keys in the locks. Both worked, a good sign. We went inside the lower flat first, where Ari prowled around, looking into every closet.

  “Uh,” I said, “is something wrong?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said. “After that thing on the front wall, I thought I’d best see what there is to see.”

  “You know what just occurred to me? You never came inside the day we rented the place.”

  He stopped prowling. “I assumed you knew what you wanted. I can’t say it matters much to me where I live, as long as the sodding windows aren’t covered over and the gas doesn’t leak and so on.”

  “Ah. Well, the upstairs flat’s a lot nicer than this one. I’ll show you around.”

  We found no more peculiar graffiti or other problems inside either flat. Whoever had stenciled the symbol outside had made no effort to break in. I wondered if they’d left the Chaos mark as a signal to other Chaotics or as a warning to me to back off. Maybe both.

  After I decided where I was putting the couch and other furniture, I called one of my operatives, Annie Wentworth. I had Agency money for her, and she invited us over so I could pay her. Although she’d been promised the police reward money from locating Johnson and Doyle, she’d yet to receive it.

  Annie was still living in the same shabby basement studio, if you could call it a studio, one long room of a converted garage out in the Sunset district, not far from the building we’d just leased. She had, however, added a few new pieces of furniture to the previous daybed and round kitchen table: a new bed for Duncan, her fox terrier; an armchair in front of her tiny TV; a glass display case hanging on the wall beside the framed posters of her grandmother’s vaudeville career.

  “What’s all this stuff, Annie?” I looked into the case.

  “Equipment from my grandmother’s spiritualist act.”

  Annie joined me in front of the glass case. She was a small woman, way too thin for her faded jeans and gray sweatshirt thanks to recent rounds of chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her hair had grown back gray and dead straight.

  “Grandma had a number of different acts, huh?” I said.

  “Yes, indeed.” Annie paused for a smile. “She honestly was psychic, so she hated to ‘prostitute that talent upon the stage,’ as she always put it. She did it when she had to, but she preferred her turns—that’s what they called their acts, turns—to be something fake. You can see by this stuff that she couldn’t really call up spirits.”

  “This stuff” consisted of a couple of small black metal boxes, a pair of black garters, each decorated with one small embroidered rose, and some lengths of twisted wire, also black. Behind them stood a worn and faded ouija board flanked by two silver candleholders in the shape of small dragons.

  “You fastened the soap box to your thigh with a garter,” Annie continued, “so you could press your legs together and make cracking noises. The wires went up the sleeves of your mysteriously embroidered black robes. You could hook the edge of the table with them and make it shake. And so on. On a dimly lit stage it was probably all very effective.”

  “If you believed in spirits in the first place,” Ari said.

  “You had to, yes.” Annie grinned at him. “She also gave private séances in her hotel rooms after the show. Most patrons probably had had a few drinks by then, so a different kind of spirits came into play.”

  “Is that where she used that ouija board?”

  “Yes. Everyone sat around the table and joined hands, except for her of course. That little pointer thing that goes in the middle of the board? You put just one finger on it, with the excuse that the spirits get carried away and might knock it off the table. You’re guiding it to various letters, of course, but if you practice, no one can tell.”

  “If everyone joined hands,” I said, “then there probably was a good flow of Qi around the table.”

  “Oh, yes,” Annie said. “It would have been the only legitimate phenomenon of the entire night—and the only one her patrons couldn’t see.”

  Ari snorted, and she laughed. “This must all be very hard to accept, Inspector.”

  “I’m trying,” Ari said. “By Qi, I take it you mean the same energy that karate people believe in.”

  “It’s similar, yeah,” I said. “But you don’t believe in it like something religious. You either accept the evidence for it or not.”

  Ari made a noncommital noise, kind of like “umph.”

  “How about some tea?” Annie said. “I even have some cookies. Oh, it’s so nice knowing I’ll have a little extra money in the bank. And the Agency payment certainly helps, too.”

  “I take it you’re willing to keep working for us,” I said.

  “Of course. That reward money won’t last forever.” She took off her glasses and busied herself in polishing them. “I know just how fast money you count on can disappear.”

  When it came to the tea, Ari slopped milk into his mug, British style. When I tasted mine, I followed his example. Annie did not mess around when she made tea; it was as dark as coffee. We sat around the kitchen table and discussed the current case, particularly Evers’ murder, while Duncan begged for bits of cookie. I also filled Annie in about Caleb.

  “I keep thinking that he’s somehow related to the coven,” I told her, “but I really doubt that he’s the hooded man. I’m still not sure if we have one case on our hands or two separate ones.”

  Annie had a thoughtful sip of her tea. “Maybe it’s not so clear-cut,” she said eventually. “Maybe the cases aren’t joined, but parallel. The hooded man could be the link, not Caleb.”

  “Yes!” I sat up straight in my chair. “Thank you! I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

  “More tea?” Annie held up the teapot, then continued talking as she refilled our mugs. “Do you think Belial is a human being?”

  “I’m beginning to have my doubts. Doyle told several individuals that Brother Belial was afraid of germs, but I’m betting he wrapped up to hide who he really was—or what.”

  “Why not both?” Annie said. “What was that H.G. Wells story? The War Of The Worlds.”

  “Right, the Martian invaders who were killed off by the common cold. If this guy comes
from some other world, who’s to say he has any kind of resistance to our diseases?”

  “Or us to his,” Annie said.

  “That’s an unpleasant thought, but yeah, it should work both ways, unless his people are overly sanitary and real good at killing germs.”

  “Do you really think,” Ari broke in, “that this person might actually not be human? Or are you just having a—”

  “No joke,” I said. “He could come from some other world level entirely, and who knows who lives on it?”

  “You’re serious, then?”

  “Very. I know this must be kind of hard to accept.”

  Ari made a strangulated noise, started to speak, then scowled at me instead.

  “Well, look,” I went on, “we’ve had a glimpse of one deviant level so far. There was something so strange about it that I’m ready to believe just about anything. Ari, you heard Mike’s description. Annie, you’ve read my report?”

  “Oh, yes. The nuclear war planet.”

  Intuitions nagged at me. “Well, that’s what everyone who lives there believes, yeah.”

  “You don’t?” Annie said.

  “I don’t know what I believe. When I got that one look at it, what with the giant mutant morning glories and all, I believed the nuclear explanation. But there was something so odd about it. It’s hard to put it into words.” I let memory images rise. “It all looked solid. But it didn’t seem real.”

  “I should think it wouldn’t,” Ari said. “Not at first glance. It would take anyone’s mind time to come to terms with what you were seeing.”

  “That’s true.” I knew that a concept lay just beyond my mental grasp, but the words for it refused to come. “You could be right. Maybe that’s it, then. But as for Belial, who knows what he is? A human neurotic scam artist is the most likely explanation.”

  “Well, after all, if he was an alien,” Annie said, “Evers couldn’t have met him for a drink in a public bar. I mean, San Francisco has some rather odd inhabitants, but I do think people would have noticed an alien from another planet.”

  “You never know around here.” I grinned at her. “But yeah, I’m sure you’re right about that.”

  “When I do my usual searches, I’ll keep my extra eyes open for anything really outré, though.”

  “And listen with your third ear, too.”

  Ari tensed with a cookie in hand and stared at Annie.

  “A joke,” I said.

  He relaxed and gave the cookie to the dog.

  When we left Annie’s, I found myself thinking about Reb Zeke, as I’d started calling him. If I could get a look at the man, I could track him with Long Distance Remote Sensing.

  “You know,” I said to Ari, “there are particular areas where panhandlers and the homeless hang out. We could drive through them, and you could see if you spot Reb Zeke.”

  We took a long slow tour of the sleaziest parts of San Francisco, around Sixth Street and Mission, up through the Tenderloin, down again to cruise along Howard and from there, back to the portion of Mission Street that runs parallel to Market. We never saw a sign of Reb Ezekiel until we were heading home.

  We were driving out on Fell Street beside the park area called the Panhandle, a narrow slab of trees and lawns—the “pan” of the handle is Golden Gate Park—dotted here and there with benches and the occasional piece of children’s play equipment. We’d stopped for the light at Ashbury when I spotted a group of men standing near the concrete hut that housed the public restrooms.

  Since we had an hour before the police cleared the parking lane to ease the rush hour traffic, I found a spot on the right-hand curbside just beyond Ashbury and parked the car. Ari got out and stood with his hands in his pockets while he looked across the street. I saw him smile the tigerish grin, then dart right out into Fell Street and start dodging cars. I shrieked. How he made it across alive I cannot say—good reflexes, I guess, and blind luck.

  I got out of our car and stood behind it on the sidewalk to watch Ari making his way toward an elderly man, dressed all in black, who sat slumped on a bench, asleep. Standing nearby, sharing a joint or maybe a cigarette—I couldn’t really tell from my distance—were three other guys who had the rumpled clothes, messy hair, and defeated posture of men down on their luck. On the other side of four lanes of busy street as I was, I couldn’t hear what Ari said, but the elderly man sat up, looked at him, and let out a shriek that carried all the way across. He jumped to his feet. I could see him clearly enough to figure that, yes, we’d found Reb Ezekiel.

  Reb Zeke began to back away. When Ari took a step toward him, he yelped again, then ran, surprisingly fast for someone who looked so old. He darted between a pair of eucalyptus trees, where I lost track of him. Ari started after him, but one of the smokers, an African-American man who must have been nearly seven feet tall, stepped in front of him and blocked his way. For a couple of minutes they argued. Every time Ari tried to step around him, the guy moved with him. The other two finished what they were smoking, so openly that I assumed it was just a cigarette after all, then ambled over to help keep Ari penned.

  Eventually, Ari gave up. The three watched him go as he stalked away. He went back to the traffic light and crossed on the green, which I took as meaning that the survival instinct had reasserted itself. Scowling, muttering under his breath, he rejoined me at the car.

  “What went down?” I said.

  “The man on the bench was Reb Ezekiel. I would have had him if it weren’t for the misplaced loyalty of his street friends.” Ari paused for a deep breath. “When I called his name, he screamed.”

  “I heard that. Did he say anything else?”

  “You can’t take me back.” He shrugged. “Whatever the old sod meant by it.”

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “Of course not! It’s like I told Tzaki, he hasn’t seen me since I was eight years old. I tried to tell him my name, but I doubt if he took it in. He was in a complete and utter panic.”

  “And those other guys—”

  “Saw immediately that I was a police officer of some sort. I suppose you develop an instinct for it if you live on the street. They were very polite.” Ari growled under his breath. “But they wouldn’t move. Leave the rabbi alone, sir, the tall fellow told me, he dunt do nothing wrong.”

  “He called you sir?”

  “Yes. As I said, very polite. I tried to explain that I wasn’t going to arrest him, but they didn’t believe me.”

  “Well, let’s get back in the car. We can drive around and see if we can spot him.”

  While I drove, Ari called Lieutenant Sanchez about the “person of interest,” as he described Reb Zeke. Sanchez promised he’d get a couple of squad cars over to the area. As we hunted for our runaway, we saw a lot of police on the streets, but neither we nor they found our fugitive rabbi.

  I did, however, talk with Lieutenant Sanchez later, once we were back in the apartment. He called to discuss a leftover question from the Silver Bullet Killer case, the sudden and inexplicable decay of the criminals’ bodies after their deaths. I’d asked for information about the fate of the blood soaking Doyle’s shirt. The report had arrived, and as I’d suspected, the blood had disappeared as if by magic or dry cleaning. The silk shirt stayed behind. He must have bought it in our world.

  “Look, O’Grady,” Sanchez said, “I realize that there are things you can’t tell me. But do you know if the rapid decay was the result of something the military’s working on?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth.” I lied only because the truth would have been impossible to explain. “They don’t tell me or my agency anything unless they’re forced to, and it usually takes a Congressional committee to do the forcing.”

  “Crap,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”

  “I don’t think we’d be out of line to suspect them, however.”

  “I have to agree with that. Okay, and thank Nathan for me, will you, for the tip on that homeless man. We’ll ro
und him up yet. A couple of uniformed officers found and interviewed the men who interfered with Nathan’s attempt at capture. That tall Black guy’s easy to spot.”

  “For sure. You know, if the street people are protecting your witness, it’s no wonder you haven’t been able to find him.”

  “Exactly. But those three, they were willing to talk about ‘the rabbi’ as they called him. Insisted he was harmless, a real loony, though, talking about flying saucers and some kind of alien invasion.”

  “Uh-oh. Do you think he’ll have any useful information about Evers, then?”

  “No, but I’ll follow up anyway. Nothing new on the Evers case, by the way. I’m about ready to agree it was suicide and leave at that.”

  I could decipher the wording: the pressure from above to drop the case was becoming intolerable.

  “Too bad,” I said. “But that’s how things go, sometimes.”

  “They sure do.” Sanchez hesitated, then spoke in a voice dripping with false humor. “Just never mention the word blackmailer in this connection, okay?”

  I pretended to laugh. “I won’t, for sure,” I said. “To go back to our homeless person of interest. Did his buddies mention why he ran when Nathan tried to talk with him?”

  “He’s convinced that some of the aliens are out to get him. So I guess he thought Nathan was one of the flying saucer people. Now there he just might be right.”

  With that he hung up. My alleged flying saucer person was at the moment sitting on the couch, flipping through the TV channels with the remote. I assumed he was looking for soccer games. When I caught his attention, he turned the sound off and listened to my rerun of what Sanchez said.

  “Interesting, all of it,” Ari said. “So Sanchez thinks Evers was a blackmailer?”

  “I got that impression, yeah. If so, the theory runs, one of his very important victims might have taken steps to end the blackmail once and for all. The only trouble with that theory is that it’s completely wrong.”

  “A trivial problem.” Ari paused to smile at me. “This doppelgänger business—I wonder if I look like someone Reb Ezekiel knew in that other whatever it is.”

  “Deviant world level,” I said. “If so, you’re not a nice guy over there. Not that you’re a nice guy over here, either.”