“I try to avoid that, yes. Which reminds me. I really should be teaching Michael how to handle a gun.”
I winced.
“I knew you wouldn’t like the idea,” Ari went on. “But he’s going to need to know how to defend himself, especially if he can’t learn to do what you do.”
“Ensorcellment? It’s a real rare talent, so yeah, you’re right. I appreciate your asking me first.” I managed to smile. “That’s a yes, by the way. Better he learns from you than from José and the BGs.”
“That’s precisely what I thought. There’s a gun club over by Lake Merced. I’ll see about getting a membership tomorrow.” Ari glanced at his watch. “They’re doubtless closed by now.” He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to go down to the deli and get takeaway for dinner. Do you want to go with me?”
“No, I’m going to run an LDRS on Reb Zeke while his memory’s fresh.”
“Shouldn’t I stay for that?”
“Why? It’s just a routine procedure. When you’re at the deli, could you get some actual vegetables? They have salads there.”
“I promise. I’ll be right back.”
“Okay. And I’m going to call Caleb and see about that lunch date.”
But when I called the cell phone number on Caleb’s business card, I only got his answering service. I left my name and number and a message about arranging our lunch. To emphasize the business aspect, I asked if I should bring a resumé with me—a silly question, since he claimed to want my psychic skills, but I figured it would set the tone. To underscore it, I added that Ari and I were moving to a new flat, and so I might have to postpone the lunch till the next week.
With that out of the way, I brought out my large-size pad of paper and a box of crayons for the Long Distance Remote Sensing operation, or as the old sources call it, farseeing. I sat at the kitchen table and picked up a black crayon to start with. I slowed my breathing, thought of Reb Zeke, and let my mind range out. My hand jerked once and began to draw. I kept the memory image in my mind and let my hand take over.
It picked up crayons, drew, laid them down again, then finally put itself back into my lap. When I looked at the drawing, I saw rough sketches of tall buildings looming like monsters over a small figure dressed in black. Here and there a scribble in a bright color indicated a sign or label on one of the buildings. Absolutely nothing indicated where in the downtown area Reb Zeke was. Still, San Francisco’s a small city, some eleven square miles, is all, and the downtown’s a small portion of the whole. Sooner or later, Sanchez’s men were bound to find him.
As soon as I mentally spoke that thought, I received a subtle warning, not quite a full SAWM, certainly not as strong as an ASTA, but a warning nonetheless. I concentrated on Reb Ekekiel—no, he wasn’t the source. Someone else was hunting me, even as I searched for Zeke. I put up an SH—a shield persona, as the Agency calls them, a barrier to mental detection. The warning vanished. I took the SH down so I could think.
Who? Belial? Or maybe the shadowy guy who spoke to the Peacock Angel? The more I thought about that question, the more puzzling it became. The Chaos forces must have already known both me and my location, judging from the projections and Chaos critters I’d seen: Fish Guy, the green possum thing, the fake office worker, the invisible presence in the elevator, and finally the off-balance magical symbol painted on the new flats. Since they knew, they could come after me if they wanted to, yet so far I’d only been aware of surveillance, not attempts on my life or even serious malice. My license to ensorcell might have been making them think twice, and Ari and his gun collection possibly was deterring them, as well.
Perhaps—the thought struck me—perhaps they didn’t know about the Agency. I’d assumed they knew that I was committed to serving Harmony, the balance point between Chaos and Order, but I had no way of knowing if that assumption was accurate. They might have considered me a lone Chaos operative, out for what I could get in the way of power and money, just like them. In that case, they might see me as a competitor or maybe even a useful ally, at least for the short run.
Those ideas gave me such a solid satisfaction that I knew the Collective Data Stream underlay them. I expanded them: if they didn’t know about the Agency, then they likely came from some other deviant world level, where it didn’t exist. Instead of a “they,” I probably faced an “it” or a “him,” a single actor, the most likely candidate for Chaos master being Brother Belial rather than Caleb, who’d impressed me as a candidate not for master but for “in over his head.”
One thing I knew for certain. I needed to stay on my guard. Friendly relations between Chaotics never lasted long.
Ari returned shortly after with a large brown paper bag. He put it down on a kitchen chair, then picked up the drawing from my LDRS.
“All it tells us is that he’s downtown somewhere,” I said. “Not real useful at the moment.”
“No, but at least you can locate him.” He laid the drawing down again. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we could do some more hunting. Though if it rains, he’ll be driven indoors somewhere.”
I glanced out the window at a sky dark with clouds, scudding in fast from the ocean. “Well, if they leave the homeless shelters open,” I said. “Sometimes they don’t, even in weather like this.”
“Pretty rotten of them, then. Let’s hope they do.”
The paper bag turned out to be filled with small white cartons, one of which held coleslaw, the only vegetable dish he’d bothered to buy. It was better than nothing, I supposed, despite the mayonnaise dressing. He set the cartons out on the coffee table in front of the couch while I brought plates and silverware from the kitchen.
“There’s nothing worth watching on television,” Ari said.
“I’m not surprised. I’ve got some DVDs. They’re over on the bookshelf.”
Ari rummaged through the collection while I inspected the deli food to see if there was anything I could eat besides coleslaw. I heard him snort and looked up to see him holding a boxed set of Looney Tunes, a present from my brother Sean a couple of years back.
“Cartoons?” Ari glared at the boxes as if he suspected them of holding explosives.
“Bring them over,” I said. “I love Bugs Bunny. You must have seen some of these, right?”
“No.”
“You really did have a deprived childhood, didn’t you? Well, it’s never too late.”
Actually, it was too late. I had never seen anyone sit through the best of Bugs—“Wabbit Season,” Marvin the Martian, and “What’s Opera, Doc?” my absolute favorite and a great cultural monument—with such a stony face. Occasionally Ari did smile. Very occasionally. Mostly he ate pastrami and dolmades and olives, steadily and neatly, and pita bread stuffed with all sorts of fattening things. After twenty minutes of this, I’d had enough.
“Never mind.” I pressed the remote and ejected the current disk. “Maybe you’d prefer the video of my uncle Harry’s funeral.”
“Well, sorry!” Ari gave me a nasty look. “I just don’t see the point, is all, of watching things like this. Yes, some of the spoken lines are clever, but they’re only drawings, not real people or situations.”
“The point is having a good laugh and forgetting the troubles of the world.”
“I can think of better ways to do that.” He slipped an arm around my shoulders and smiled. “When you’re done eating and all that.”
I leaned away from him in self-defense. “And when you don’t smell like garlic and vinegar.” I risked a sniff. “And onions.”
“I’ll have a shower.” He let go of me and sat back on the couch. “I got you some baklava. I never did get to lick honey off your face.”
“I’ll smear some on just for you.” I wiped my hands on a paper napkin. “For now I’ll put these disks away.”
Yet as I was returning the boxed sets to their place on the bookcase, I had an inspiration.
“Just one more,” I said. “See what you think of this.”
I put
the disk devoted to the Roadrunner into the DVR and went back to the couch. Ari watched politely for a minute, then smiled. All of a sudden, when Wile E. Coyote’s Acme brand catapult flipped a boulder onto him rather than onto the Roadrunner, Ari laughed, not his usual polite attempt to share a joke, but a real deep honest-to-God laugh. He continued to laugh at assorted explosions, runaway jet skates, accidents with firecrackers, unexpected railway trains, and malfunctioning rifles. I wondered if I had a doppelgänger on my couch until I remembered the one other time he’d laughed in the same hearty way, at the thought that Johnson might have been bitten by a werewolf. Consistency—one of Ari’s salient characteristics, all right.
“Oh, very well,” Ari said at last. “You’ve made your point. Now these are really rather amusing.”
I smiled and turned off the video equipment.
While Ari took the promised shower, I did one last bit of research. A hunt through the apartment turned up the copy of the New American Bible I’d gotten for my first communion. I’d kept it mostly because my father had given it to me, but it came in handy that night, as did all those irritating hours I’d spent in religion class during my school years. When your uncle is a priest, like my uncle Keith, you don’t dare cut religion class. You’re sure that God will know and tell him. I had a dim memory of the original prophet Ezekiel’s visions, which somehow seemed relevant to the case of his self-described successor, Reb Zeke.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, under my reading lamp, and turned to the Book of Ezekiel. It took me about two minutes of reading the first chapter to realize that “relevant” didn’t even begin to describe it. I read through the entire vision twice. A damp Ari, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and the smell of his witch hazel aftershave, came in just as I finished. Normally the sight of him in that condition would have made it impossible for me to concentrate, but that night I managed to keep going.
“What are you reading?” he said.
“The Book of Ezekiel, Chapter One, verses one through twenty-six.” I looked up to see him scowling. “What’s wrong?”
“We had to memorize that in the kibbutz school. Lot of sodding nonsense.”
“It sounds like it could be a description of aliens and some kind of space vehicle.”
“That’s why we had to memorize it, so we’d recognize the aliens when we saw them invading.” He sat down next to me on the bed. “Let me see that translation.”
“This is the standard Catholic version.” I handed him the Bible. “Or at least it was when I was in school.”
He frowned over the passage, then read aloud, “As I looked, a stormwind came from the north, a huge cloud with flashing fire enveloped in brightness, from the midst of which, the midst of the fire, something gleamed like electrum.” He shook his head. “That’s not right. It isn’t electrum. The word’s hashmal.”
“What does that mean?”
“No one really knows what it meant back then. Reb Ezekiel thought it was the name of the landing vehicle’s pilot.” He rolled his eyes. “Quite doubtful, really. It’s become the modern word for electricity.” He turned back to the beginning, then frowned again. “The way they used ‘river’ here is another mistake. The word means a canal, the Chebar canal in this case, that ran from Babylon to Warka.”
“Is that the famous waters of Babylon?”
“Where we sat down and wept, remembering Zion? Yes.”
From the way he said “we,” you would have thought he was personally remembering the experience. He reminded me at that moment of my grandfather, who could rattle off a list of every massacre the English had perpetrated upon the Irish, starting in the twelfth century.
“They’ve left out a bit.” Ari pointed to a line in the middle of the vision. “Here where it’s describing the four-sided creatures. Aliens, of course, according to the ridiculous doctrine under which I was raised. Let me think, how would the missing line go in English?” He paused for a long moment. “In and among the creatures, bits of fire were dashing about—something like that. Reb Zeke, as you call him, said those were flashing signal lights from the landing vehicle, reflecting on the armor of the aliens.” He looked at me. “Do you want me to go on, or is this enough?”
“More than enough, yeah. You know, I was almost convinced myself that the prophet was talking about a spaceship and an away team. That vision is something else again. Wheels that can roll in any direction without veering, huh? And all those eyes! The creatures could be androids powered by force fields, and then their bases would be rimmed with sensing devices.”
Ari got up and laid the Bible down on the dresser. “First Bugs Bunny, now this!” he said, all mock seriousness. “I think you need a distraction from your own mind.”
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans and smiled at me. I began to feel warm all over. Sexual desire raises the level of Qi, whether those feeling the heat know what to call it or not.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “If you’ll turn on that dim light on the dresser, I’ll turn this bright one off.”
He did, and I did. When he sat down next to me, the warmth turned into a fever, and his mouth burned on mine.
CHAPTER 8
I SLEPT SOUNDLY THAT NIGHT UNTIL DAWN, when I woke to use the bathroom, probably because the rain was pelting down outside. Ari stayed asleep, though he reached for me when I lay back down. I cuddled against his chest and dreamed about Reb Ezekiel, that he had something to give me. When I woke again, the rain had stopped. Ari was already up and studying his Latin lesson for the day. I joined him at the table for coffee and told him about the dream.
“It probably just means he can give me information,” I said to Ari, “which we kind of knew already. But I still want to go out and look for him.”
“Driving again?”
“Yeah, since I can’t pick him up on a scan. A quick survey of the kind of places he might hang out in could turn him up. If we spot Reb Zeke, you can come at him from one direction, while I come up from behind. I’d hate to ensorcell someone who looks as frail as he does, but I may have to, if we can’t physically pin him.”
“That would work, yes. If I spot one of the men who were protecting him, I can call Sanchez. The police can pick him up, and they’ll get the information out of him—”
“Yeah, sure!” I broke in. “The last piece of information we’ll ever get, if the cops work the guy over or scare the bejeezus out of him. Look, I’ve got some ideas about this.”
Eventually he agreed with them. I dressed for the job in my tightest jeans, a low-cut black blouse, a pair of beaten-up black boots with medium heels, and my older brother’s cast-off khaki trail jacket as a nod to the damp weather. As I was leaving the bedroom, I had a sudden inspiration. I took the plastic bag that held the remains of Michael’s stash and slipped it into an inside pocket. Ari wore his usual jeans, a gray sweater, and his leather bomber jacket.
“You look like one of the homeless yourself,” Ari told me.
“That’s the idea,” I said. “I need to stop at a liquor store to buy a couple of packs of cigarettes. They’re almost as good as cash on the street.”
I did, however, also withdraw some of the Agency’s money from the nearest automatic teller machine. If I’d been down and out and desperate, I’d have wanted payback for information, so I couldn’t blame the people who actually were in that condition. When I got back into the car, Ari gave me a grim look.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t think you should go through with it, not without me there.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that. Can you think of anything better?”
“No, since you don’t want the police involved.”
“It may not come to anything, you know, or we could get lucky and spot Reb Zeke himself, in which case I won’t have to playact at all.”
“Let’s hope, then. But if things look too dangerous, I’m not letting you out of the car.”
“You’ll let me out when I tell you to, or it could
ruin everything.”
He glared at me, then shrugged and started the car.
Because of the plan I had in mind, I had to let Ari drive. He did try to avoid killing us or wrecking the rental car, driving at about half his usual speed, stopping at stop lights, and refraining from swerving in front of buses and trucks. I only shrieked twice. Back and forth we went, first to the Panhandle, then downtown along Mission Street.
We cruised past the filthy sidewalks around Sixth and Mission, turned up Sixth and surveyed the human misery standing or sitting among the alleys and cheap hotels. We returned to Mission via Market and Seventh, where the traffic had Ari cursing in several languages at once. At Fifth, we turned up past the Old Mint, a dirty stone takeoff on a classical temple. A couple of men were sleeping on the little lawn in front, but no one we recognized.
We finally hit paydirt on Market itself. The office workers had all gone inside to their jobs by then, and the store clerks had yet to arrive to open the fancy boutiques and department stores, so the broad street, gleaming with silver streetcar tracks, stretched out oddly empty. A few people wandered along the sidewalks; a few cars drove down the asphalt side lanes. We were traveling past the shining clean windows of Bloomingdale’s department store when I looked across the many lanes to the opposite side of Market. The unusually tall African-American guy was sitting on the sidewalk near the cavernous entrance to the Flood Building, a multi-story pile of gray stone. Ari drove on a little ways and let me off at Fourth Street.
“Go back to Fifth and Mission and park in the municipal lot,” I said. “I don’t think things will get nasty, but you never know, and I want to know you’ve got my back.”
“I’ll be there if I have to leave the sodding car in the middle of the street.”
In cold gray fog light I crossed Market and walked along the sidewalk under a row of plane trees that lifted bare branches to the damp sky. The tall guy was still sitting where I’d spotted him. He was wearing a pair of filthy slacks and a green parka that I recognized as old Army issue, dirty and faded. Darker spots marked the places where he’d once worn insignia, probably his unit number and service branch, that kind of thing. A dark patch on the sleeve formed the silhouette of a chevron of sergeant’s stripes.
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