Tindra shook her head. “No police,” she said. Gryffin started to protest, and she turned on him furiously. “I said no police! Maybe they want something—a ransom. They might call or come here. I’m going to wait. I don’t care about the money.”
I saw Lyla and her brother exchange a glance. Gryffin ran a hand across his face. “Cass,” he said. “This is crazy—tell her it’s crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s crazy. What are the police going to do? They’re caught up with all this terrorist Nazi shit. They’re not going to send a bunch of cops out after a book no one even knows exists.”
“That’s not the point! Someone murdered Harold—that’s what they should be investigating.”
“They’ll get to it,” Tommy broke in. “Someone’ll find the body and notify them. Happens nine times out of ten.”
“This is bullshit.” Gryffin started for the door, reaching for his mobile. “I’m calling 999, then the U.S. consulate. Cass, you do whatever the hell you want.” He yanked fruitlessly at the doorknob, held the mobile to his ear, and swore. “She’s blocking it.”
Tindra turned to me. “You can go.”
Gryffin gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”
Tindra gave me a once-over, her gaze lingering on my battered leather jacket and steel-tipped cowboy boots. “She’s not going to the police.”
She gestured at Lyla, who escorted Gryffin back to the couch. Tommy sat beside him, hands folded on his lap. His nails were bitten to the quick. “You’re safer here than outside,” he said to Gryffin. “Trust me.”
Tindra whistled. The dog raced to her side, and the two left the room, the door closing after them with a click.
Lyla set her backpack on the coffee table and removed the drone. “Sorry. She went off her meds,” she explained, peeling off her anorak. “Sometimes she gets paranoid.”
Tommy shook his big head. “I had a mate did that in Lashkar Gah. Started listening to ZOG podcasts and talking to UFOs.”
I frowned. “What’s ZOG?”
“Zionist Occupied Government.” Tommy opened a drawer in the coffee table and withdrew a Parcheesi set. “White supremacists, they think there’s a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.”
“They’re the ones marching in Victoria Park tomorrow,” his sister added as Tommy unfolded the Parcheesi board. “Among others.”
Tommy nodded. “Anyway, Tindra always says she can’t code on her meds. So she stops taking them, and it’s all Scientologists and MI6 tapping her mobile.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting her help?” said Gryffin.
“I’ve tried a dozen times,” said Lyla. “She’s gone through some bad stuff. But she’s crazy obsessive. She’s got her app ready to launch, but she says she needs that book before she can do it. I wish I could help her, but…”
“You do what you can,” said her brother.
“Maybe.” Lyla sighed. “It doesn’t ever seem like enough. And now this.”
Her voice trailed off again, and Gryffin turned to her imploringly. “You both realize how crazy this is, right? Your drone video, it’ll show who the real killer is.”
“That’s not our problem,” said Tommy. “Our problem’s Tindra, and her problem’s the book.”
“You’re obstructing justice!”
Tommy gave him a hard look. “If I was you, I’d shut up about all that. First thing the cops are gonna want to do is talk to you. And her.” He pointed at me. “Your alibi’s for shit, both of you. In the kitchen, getting champagne. Meanwhile someone shoots your friend in the head. Who doesn’t hear that?”
“It wasn’t a bullet,” said Gryffin.
“We were having sex in the pantry,” I said. “On the floor, with the door closed. Harold’s room was down the hall, and that door was shut, too. He didn’t hear us, we didn’t hear him. End of story.”
Lyla and Tommy absorbed this. After a moment, he said, “That’s pretty good.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Lyla started to arrange gaming pieces on the Parcheesi board. “She truly doesn’t care who killed him. All she wants is that book. She’s obsessed with her books. Alchemy, early science. That’s how we met, she was doing a year at UCL; we were in the same neurochemistry class. I couldn’t afford to stay, but she just got bored. Went back to uni in Uppsala, then to study computers and neuroscience at Stanford. She dropped out to play World of Warcraft full-time. She hit level sixty in about a week and decided to start designing her own games. FlightRisk, that was the first. She was just twenty-one.”
“Impressive,” I said.
Tommy nodded. “She’s brilliant. But.” He tapped his head.
“She’s been working on this app for years. But every time she goes off her meds, she starts prepping and buys all this retro shite.” Lyla gestured at the video games. “You’re stuck in the panic room, do you really want to be playing Missile Command?”
“World of Warcraft, the Rabbit Hole, Majora’s Mask. And Space Invaders.” Tommy recited what was obviously a familiar litany. “It all bores the fuck out of me. But I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t keep me on.”
“Eh, there’ll always be work for you, Tommy.” Lyla handed him the dice. “You go first.”
Chapter 11
Tommy moved one of his gaming pieces and glanced up at Gryffin. “Want to play? Might help pass the time.”
Gryffin shook his head, and the siblings bent over the playing board.
I stood and watched them, brooding. Tindra said I was free to go, but I was reluctant to leave Gryffin. I knew he’d rat me out to the cops in a heartbeat once he had the chance.
And who was Tindra Bergstrand? All I knew was that she had enough money to purchase a rare book that was worth more than I cared to contemplate; a book that, so far, had left more bodies in its wake than the Maltese Falcon. I didn’t want to be another one.
I stared at my feet. I wished I’d never seen Gryffin again. I wished I was back in Reykjavík with Quinn. I wished I never bought that posh leather bag or the cashmere hoodie. Now I only had five hundred euros left.
But if I could find the book before Tindra did—or Gryffin, or the cops—and if I could find Quinn, and if Quinn could find a buyer, the two of us would finally have enough money to get away someplace safe. I wouldn’t have to return to a landlord waiting to boot me out of my rent-stabilized crib so he could sell the building to a developer who’d raze it and put up a high-rise that would block the sun for whatever poor schmoes were still holding out on Houston Street.
And Quinn wouldn’t have to return to living in a sheet-metal Quonset hut in Reykjavík, selling off his dwindling collection of rare vinyl. We could go to Greece. We could go anywhere.
If we found the book. If I found Quinn. Except I had no more idea where Quinn was than Tindra’s stolen book: only the words rotherhithe darwin, a persistent taunting whisper in my head.
I took a deep breath and walked over to the Space Invaders console, motioning for Gryffin to follow. After a glance at the twins, he joined me.
“Give me your mobile,” I said.
“What?”
“Your mobile—give it to me.”
“Forget it.”
Lyla glanced at us, frowning. I gave her a little wave and leaned into Gryffin.
“Gryffin, do not be an asshole. They’re not letting you out of here, not anytime soon. This way I can use your contacts, people you know who know Harold. Maybe someone has heard something.”
“You don’t even know how to use a smartphone.”
This was true. Before he could move, I snatched the mobile from his pocket. “What’s your password?”
I thought he might finally lose it. Instead, after a moment he muttered it under his breath.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I rolled my eyes and tapped in “B00KS.” “Okay, show me your contacts in London. Bookdealers, runners, anyone who might help me.”
“No one’s going to help you, Cass. You don’t know anything about books.”
“I worked at the Strand for thirty-three years.”
“In the stockroom!”
“Listen to me. Who else knows about The Book of Lamps and Banners?”
“No one.”
“Bullshit. The guy who bought it in Baghdad, he knows. Your guy at Berkeley suspected something.”
“They’re both dead.”
“Right, and I’m trying not to see a pattern there. Harold’s accountant must know something, if he just wired money. Tindra knows. And them.”
I cocked a thumb at the twins. “That’s three dead people and six live ones, counting us. Which is a lot of people to know about something that’s supposed to be a secret. Did Harold have any enemies? A rival?”
“The book business doesn’t work like that.”
“Well, something fucking works like that. Come on, Gryffin! Anyone who knows Harold, anyone who might know about this book? Dealers or, I dunno, alchemists.”
Gryffin removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Let me think.” He took the mobile from me and began to scroll through his contacts. “Nathan Ballingstead, he lives in Wapping. A runner.”
“Who else?”
“Lucy Ryman-Briggs used to have a shop in Farringdon. But she only sells online now, I haven’t talked to her in a while. Malloy Townson—another runner, he’s pretty sketchy. I don’t have an address for him, and I don’t know if that phone number’s still good.”
“Who else do you know who’s sketchy? Because those are the people who might actually be useful.”
He tapped the mobile’s screen. “This guy. And maybe him, he’s in Clerkenwell.” He sighed. “That’s it. Not many people still doing business.”
“Do any of these people know you’re here?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
Gryffin’s scowl suggested he thought otherwise. I let my lips brush his ear.
“Gryffin,” I murmured. “If they don’t know you’re here, they won’t know you’re missing, and they won’t call the cops. We do not want to call the cops. Got that?”
I slid the mobile into my pocket, and he grabbed my hand. “What the hell are you doing? Give me that!”
“No way. Hey,” I called over to Lyla and Tommy. “Can one of you let me out of here?”
As Lyla stood, Gryffin turned to me. “Goddamn it, Cass. Go to the consulate. Or call them anonymously. Something. You have to do something.”
“I am doing something. Look at the bright side—maybe Tommy will teach you how to play Missile Command.”
Lyla escorted me to the underground garage. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she warned. “My brother served in Afghanistan. He came back different. Episodes. He couldn’t find work. Tindra’s my best friend, she hired him. Both of us. Now go.”
She gave me a push and closed the door.
Chapter 12
After the filtered air in Tindra’s bunker, the corridor smelled musty and neglected. The LED floor lights and CCTV cameras made me feel as though I was fleeing a downed plane. I slowed when I saw the rickety metal bookcase, shoved against the wall like a discarded dorm relic, and glanced at the books it held.
Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems. Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Transient Global Amnesia. Anglo-Saxon Runes and Magic. Trauma and Memory: A Neurological Approach.
I pulled out a cheaply produced hardback. The boards had pulled away from the spine, and the pages were loose. The cover had no title or author listed, just a color photograph of a naked man. Tattoos covered his arms and torso: swastikas and runes, stylized dragons and hammers and crosses. In his hands he held a horned animal’s skull that obscured his face.
A clichéd image of masculine defiance, except for the rust-colored ribbons of dried skin and strands of what looked like human hair that clung to the skull. The tips of the man’s fingers were bloodied. I turned to the frontispiece and title page, careful to keep the pages from falling out:
Skalltrolleri: Fotografier producerad av Big Delusory Whim
The photographer had a sense of humor, anyway. The book consisted of photos depicting skulls in various stages of decay: mostly color, a few black-and-white. The latter were more interesting, the interplay of light and shadow canceling out the lurid subject matter. Another time, I would have kept it, but I didn’t want Tindra’s CCTV to capture me stealing a book, especially one with a white supremacist on its cover. I stuck it back on the shelf and continued on.
The garage was empty save for the SUV and that lonely bicycle. A slant of security light illuminated a figure sitting cross-legged on the floor. Tindra, her face glowing green from the laptop on her knees. Her blue dreadlock coiled around her fingers, its stray hairs like bits of frayed rope. The dog Bunny lay beside her. He growled as I approached, falling silent when she covered his muzzle with her hand.
I glanced at the computer, its screen filled with lines of code as incomprehensible as the symbols in The Book of Lamps and Banners. Tindra quickly closed it and set it on the floor beside her mobile.
“Your app?” I asked. She said nothing. “Lyla said that’s why you want the book.”
Her expression grew blank as a sleepwalker’s. I set down my bag, squatting so we were closer to eye level, and got a whiff of the dreadlock. It smelled like a long-dead animal. I gazed at her warily, trying to determine if that decay went deeper.
I can sense damage. It’s a toxic chemical that radiates from some people, their sweat and skin and saliva and sex. Whatever neurochemical alchemy creates it, I have the receptors to pick up on it, the way a dog can sense fear, or attacking bees home in on the person who kills their queen. I can read it in photographs, embedded in the emulsion or superimposed on an image, a blurred outline like the fake ectoplasm in nineteenth-century spirit photography. I wonder sometimes if that’s what I am: an analog ghost haunting the digital world, invisible to anyone born after the millennium.
Tindra saw me. She returned my gaze—not challengingly, but with the resigned patience of a sober person being subjected to a Breathalyzer, as though she knew what I was looking for and knew I wouldn’t find it.
I didn’t. No acrid taint rose from her. I felt no dark energy like a pent-up electrical charge waiting to be released if I were to brush against her bare skin.
Instead I felt something stranger and more disturbing: a kind of emptiness, the psychic rift caused by the profound disassociation I connected to my own rape on my twenty-third birthday. For me, it had been a sense of myself splitting into three distinct selves: one being assaulted on the rubble-strewn ground; one floating above the scene and watching with calm detachment; the third embodying a silent scream sucked into the void.
It was the last of these that still gave me night terrors. It was what I sensed in Tindra: a profound absence, the human equivalent of the hole on a piece of emulsion that has been exposed to direct sunlight.
Yet she sat less than two feet away from me, quiet and alert. Her pale brown eyes regarded me with detached curiosity that gradually became recognition. Her eyes widened and she nodded, as though I’d answered a question.
She said, “That’s why I need the book.”
“How’d you hear about it?” My voice came out in a parched whisper.
“It’s the kind of thing I know.”
I waited for her to go on, but she just stared at me with that preternatural calm. I tried a different tack. “Did you know Harold Vertigan before this?”
“I’ve bought a few things from him.”
“Was there anyone else who knew about this book? Another dealer, someone who might want to rip him off?” I pointed at the laptop. “Your app—it has something to do with magic, too? You can’t seriously believe in that shit.”
Anger flared in her tawny eyes. “It’s not ‘magic.’ It’s an ancient language, using symbols and images. A kind of code. We’re return
ing to that mode of communication. Everything is code. No more words.”
“Yeah? Then how come I can hear you now?”
“That’s changing.” She held up her mobile as though displaying a piece of evidence to a jury. “‘They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either.’ Sartre.”
I laughed. “Props for that. But Sartre was talking about photographs, not words.”
“Who cares?” A smile flickered at the edges of her mouth. “Who cares what it even means. See this?”
Without warning, she thrust the mobile toward my face. Its screen was a molten whirlpool of insignia: horned circles and crescents, wheels and crosses and swastikas, teeth and birds that seemed to spell out a message I couldn’t decipher. I recoiled, hands in front of my face, and shut my eyes.
Yet I still saw those symbols, a pinwheel galaxy of blue and green and crimson, the poisonous yellow of a liqueur you know you’ll regret tasting but can’t resist. Pain exploded inside my skull as the symbols spun, fragmented into brilliant pixels that rearranged themselves into a series of freeze-frames, and began to move.
Horrified, I stared at the image of my younger self on a dark downtown alley, the black silhouette of a car pulling alongside me.
“No,” I whispered.
A knife glittered, a voice hissed my name.
Cass, Cass…
The car door opened. Something moved, someone moved, a man, two men. A running girl. Someone else screamed: not someone else. Me.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop it…”
I had seen this before; I had been here before. I had never left this place.
On the ground in front of me, light bounced from a spar of jagged glass as long as my hand. My fingers dug into the cracked cement as I dragged myself forward, summoning all my strength to grab it.
“No! Don’t touch it—”
Knife, car, glass, all vanished. Tindra knelt in front of me. As my hand closed around her mobile, the dog leaped at my face.
“Bunny, drop!”
The dog fell back. Phantom images reeled across my vision, green and violet, that terrifying molten yellow. A curve of glass like a displaced grin. I fought to catch my breath, stammered, “What the fuck was that?”
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 7
