Magic Time: Angelfire

by Marc Zicree

  It was, ironically, because of shadow that I saw it.

  Howard Russo could not abide even the weak sunlight that wedged its way into his rooms through gaps in the blinds and curtains. Goldie had undone his careful tucking of the parlor curtains the night before, and now Russo took his eyes from the objects of his attention just long enough to seal the gap with safety pins.

  In that initial darkness, Goldie gleamed as if his skin had been dusted in gold and burnished. He had a noticeable aura, like Magritte’s, if slightly fainter. More than that, the two of them were connected by a bright conduit of flare radiance.

  My first impulse was fear. “Goldie,” I said, perhaps too sharply, “Goldie, look at me.”

  He turned, his eyes going wide with surprise as I trapped his head between my hands to peer into them. They were comfortingly brown, with normal, round, human pupils. Had they always been that large, I asked myself, that luminous?

  His brow furrowed. “Doc, what… ? What is it?”

  I put a hand to his forehead, brushing aside the tumble of thick curls. No fever. “Close your eyes,” I told him.

  He did, grinning nervously. “C’mon, Doc, you’re scaring me.”

  Cal had come into the room and caught the exchange. He dropped the packs he carried and hurried to us. “Something wrong?”

  As certain as I could be that Goldie’s eyelids showed no sign of increased translucence, I stepped back and shook my head, meeting Cal’s worried eyes. “I had a moment of concern. The aura is so much stronger this morning.” I indicated the distance between Goldie and Magritte, which she had closed since I began my examination, her own face eloquent with distress. The closer she drew, the brighter became the trail of light that connected them.

  Cal followed the trail with his eyes. He turned back to me, his face going pale. “You thought he was changing.”

  Goldie took a startled step away from us, then caught sight of the radiant cord and blushed violently. “Oh, that. It, uh… I guess the longer we’re together, the stronger it gets.”

  He laughed. “I thought maybe I was breaking out in manic hives or something.”

  Ah, sarcasm. Dostoevsky called it the last refuge for the soul whose privacy has been invaded. At times it makes excellent camouflage. At others it simply advertises what one wishes to conceal.

  Russo had turned from his task at the window and sidled up beside us, his eyes darting, his impossibly wide mouth cracked in what can only be described as a leer. A sound that was more whine than giggle emerged from between his lips. “Told you.” He crooked a finger at Goldie. “Told you she was good.”

  Light exploded in my eyes, buffeting me like a scorching wind—hot, white, searing. It tore Howard Russo off his feet and slammed him backward into the curtains he had so painstakingly pinned shut. The window shattered with a sound like a rifle shot, but the thick fabric held. Russo hung against the forest green velvet for an instant, then pitched forward onto the floor.

  In the stunned hush that followed, there was only the sound of our breathing and the muted rain of glass on the street below. I turned fearful eyes to Magritte, certain the spectral attack must have come from her. But she was innocent, staring at Goldie, her hands to her mouth. It was Goldie whose body pulsed with residual energy, Goldie whose eyes poured venom onto the crumpled grunter. He turned his eyes to Cal then, and whatever Cal saw there caused him to take a startled step backward. Goldie brushed past him and left the room, leaving an almost palpable charge of static in his wake. After a moment of hesitation, Magritte darted after him.

  Cal and I both moved at once to kneel over Russo’s crumpled body. He was still breathing, thank God, and his neck had not been broken, though by all rights it should have been. We rolled him gently onto his back and I began to check for broken bones.

  He moaned and his eyes fluttered open. “Son’fabitch,” he muttered, and tried to sit up.

  Cal put a hand on his shoulder and held him down. “Not until Doc gives you a clean bill of health. How is he?” he asked me.

  “Lucky to be alive. That was no gentle slap.”

  Russo grunted and Cal shook his head, his expression grim. “No, it wasn’t. Damn Goldie. I don’t know what…”

  “Possessed him?” suggested Colleen wryly, from behind him. She reached past him to hand me my med-kit. “You know how he is about Maggie. Do you really have to ask?”

  They exchanged a long look.

  Cal nodded. “Yeah, I do. I’d better go talk to him.” Colleen let out a throaty chuckle. “Be careful.”

  She watched him leave the room, then stepped over to the window and reached up to pull the curtains back inside the casement. Outside, more glass shook free to shatter on the asphalt. “We’re gonna have to board that up. I guess I’d better go see if I can score some plywood.”

  “Will you help me move Mr. Russo to the couch?”

  She hesitated. “Do I have to?”

  “Can make it myself,” croaked Russo.

  “Colleen,” I said. “Do you not care that Goldie might have killed this man?”

  She peered down at him, capturing his gaze. He looked away. “That is not a man, Doc. That is a weasel. And I’m not saying that because he’s a grunter; I’m saying it because he’s a weasel. That was a truly crappy thing he said to Goldie. And I’m damn sure it wasn’t real pleasant for Maggie, either.”

  I looked up at her. “Perhaps he doesn’t know any better. He is, after all, not quite himself—something of which he is painfully aware. His humanity is slipping away from him, Colleen. Can you not at least credit him for trying to preserve it?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? What makes you think he’s trying to preserve anything?”

  “The little sanctuary in the cellar where he spends his days. This carefully barricaded place where he spends his nights. The clothing he chooses to wear.” I straightened a tweed lapel, then nodded at the book that lay atop the Queen Anne table beside the chair. “That.”

  Colleen turned to look. “Dostoevsky. One of your guys.”

  I did not smile. “Yes, one of my guys. Crime and Punishment—a book that turns upon what it is to be human. Did you perhaps wonder why he didn’t try to go out during the night?”

  “Uh, well, at a guess—because we wouldn’t have let him?”

  I shook my head. “He never does go out at night. He doesn’t want to become like them.” My gesture took in the streets and whatever slept below them.

  She and Howard Russo shared another look, a longer look, then she turned her eyes to me. They were extraordinarily green and uncharacteristically soft. She squatted next to me on the floor, meeting me eye-to-eye across Russo’s body.

  “You’re a piece of work, you know that? I think Goldman would probably call you a mensch. And Viktor, yesterday, when I said that about you not being my father…” She hesitated, her lips pressed together as if to keep words from escaping. Then she leaned across Russo, kissed my cheek, rose and went off to “score some plywood.”

  Russo stirred, drawing my attention to him. His eyes were trained on my face. He grunted. “ ’M’not sayin’ a word.”

  TWENTY

  CAL

  What can I say? When I walked out into the courtyard, when I stood face-to-face with Goldie, I realized I was afraid of him. What I’d seen in his eyes just moments before had hit me like a sucker punch to the stomach. It was a dark, red rage that, until that moment, I would have said he was incapable of.

  I wanted to chalk Goldie’s outburst up to battle fatigue. But that would have been naive. Of all of us, Goldie had dealt with the unknown longer and more intimately. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was on the verge of a full-blown manic episode. I almost hoped he was. As vile as that sounds, the alternative was more disturbing.

  The morning sun had turned the entire sky burnt orange, as if fires burned somewhere out of sight. The recesses of the courtyard were still in deep shadow, and Goldie, though he was standing in the one spot that caught
the weak sunlight, had brought shadow with him.

  Magritte hung timidly behind him, as if she, too, were afraid of him—or perhaps for him. Enid, looking puzzled and worried, stood beside her, a supply pack in his hands.

  “I need to talk to Goldie,” I said.

  Enid glanced from me to Magritte, nodded, and went back inside.

  I felt Magritte’s gaze on me as I faced Goldie. His eyes were closed and he shivered as if the Great Lakes chill had sunk into his bones.

  A smile pulled across his lips. “What’s gotten into Goldman? That the $64,000 question?”

  His eyes opened. They were unreadable. For someone who wears most of his emotions right out on the surface, Goldie can be surprisingly opaque when he wants to be. But I thought the dark fire had died.

  Relief loosed the knot of tension in my throat. “I was worried,” I said simply.

  “Well, I don’t blame you.” He tilted his head back to gaze up over the rooftops. “I’d be worried, too, if I were you.” “About Russo…”

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” He began rocking slightly from side to side. “I should learn to control my temper. Mom always said so. Ph.D. can’t be wrong, right?” He shoved both hands into his jacket pockets. “Didn’t mean to scare everybody.”

  “Look, Goldie, you’re going to have to handle having Russo around. We don’t have a choice. We don’t know what’s under that dome. He does.”

  He wrapped his arms around himself, still not looking at me. Magritte glided a little nearer, protective.

  I pressed. “Can you be around Russo without trying to break his neck? I need to know, Goldie. This is too important—to all of us.”

  I tried to read his face for remorse or something like it, but he stolidly refused to let me in. His body language— arms straightjacketed across his chest, the rocking, the sarcasm—all told me that I was not the only one in this courtyard afraid of Herman Goldman.

  “You were out of control, Goldie. We need you to stay in control.”

  He laughed. “I wasn’t out of control. I didn’t want to be in control. I was pissed at the little rodent.” He shrugged. “Look, I’ve cooled off, okay? I’ve calmed down. I’m fine.”

  I moved closer—less than an arm’s length away. Close enough to see the glitter of tears in his eyes. “You’re not fine. You’re scared.”

  He answered the challenge with a non sequitur. “Cal, what did you dream last night?”

  “What did I … dream?”

  He smiled wryly and sang a line of lyric. “ ‘It’s all right; we told you what to dream.’ ”

  I recognized it: Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.” A chill cut a broad swath down my spine. “I … I don’t remember what I dreamed.” A lie.

  “I always remember my dreams. Always. Every dark, disturbing moment. That’s one of the reasons I don’t sleep much. It’s not terribly restful. But last night, I didn’t dream at all. Or, if I did, Maggie was the dream.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know … Yes, I do know. I’m saying she… jams the Source. She blots it out. Silences it. Hides me from it.” “As you hide her.”

  He nodded. “Symbiosis.”

  “More than symbiosis.” It was not a question.

  He glanced at her, then away. “Yes.”

  That was possibly the straightest answer I’d ever gotten from Goldie in all the time I’d known him. I wanted to shake him, tell him to stop tearing his soul apart over something that couldn’t change, that could only be gotten past. Instead I said, “Goldie, I think Magritte would be the first to tell you Russo didn’t do that to her. Wouldn’t you, Maggie?”

  She glided over between us, her eyes on Goldie’s face. He turned it away. She moved right up against him, laying fingertips to his cheek. He flinched, but she refused to let him break contact. “Listen to him, Goldie, if you won’t listen to me. He’s right. Russo didn’t put me in that room; my uncle Nathan did that. And he didn’t give me that damn name; my pimp did. A little bit ago, you told me he didn’t own me. Not then, not now. That’s God’s own truth. No one owns me… . except maybe the Storm.”

  He looked at her then, his eyes blazing. “No.”

  “Then save your hate for that.”

  They stood like that for a moment, locked eye-to-eye, their shared aura battling the sun for brightness. I had ceased to exist. Goldie closed his eyes and leaned into Maggie’s touch.

  A moment later he met my gaze directly, his eyes showing emotions that once more seemed to flow within the banks of the River Goldman. “Isn’t it about time we blew this Popsicle stand?”

  We decided to make the trek into the Loop on foot. Russo was adamant that to take the horses in would result in them becoming food, so we were faced with the problem of how to safeguard them. Russo solved it. He hired a couple of neighborhood teens to guard them for us.

  “They do stuff for me,” he told us. “Y’know, get things so I don’t have to go out much. I pay food, clothes, stuff from the other rooms up here. What I don’t need. They’ll watch.”

  The human talent for adaptation never ceased to amaze me. The brother and sister thought the horses were “très cool” (pronounced “tray que-well”) and agreed to baby-sit them for a plaid flannel shirt, a ream of paper, and a mechanical pencil with a tube of replacement leads and seven erasers.

  That settled, we spread a map of Chicago out on Russo’s kitchen table and held a huddle over it, deferring to him on our travel route.

  “Up Clinton to Jackson,” he said, “ ’cause Van Buren bridge is out. Then head in. There’s a sort of checkpoint there.” “Checkpoint?” Colleen asked. “Armed sentries?”

  “Not sentries… exactly.”

  “Jeez, Russo. Could you possibly be any more vague?” “Sure. You want me to?”

  Doc chuckled and Colleen opened her mouth for a tart comeback.

  I cut her off. “What kind of checkpoints, Howard?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t have words.” He pointed out the trail on a city map. Three blocks up, two over, cross the river. Easy.

  I checked the map over carefully, using my “extended” senses. But the simplicity of the route wasn’t what caught my eye. To my tweaked vision, the Loop district was a splash of red light so intense it obscured any other feature. It was very much like one of those Doppler radar weather maps, only the wrong color. A spot the dark red of a blood clot sat slightly off center in the larger area.

  “I don’t like the look of that. What is it?” Goldie pressed a fingertip to the crimson smudge.

  I’d half forgotten he could see this stuff. “Howard,” I asked, “what’s at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn?”

  Russo gave me a startled glance, then tugged at his lower lip. “Chicago Media Building.”

  I shrugged. “Is that significant?”

  “Primal Records,” said Enid. “Primal Records is in that building.”

  Colleen leaned over the map next to me, watching my face. She poked me in the ribs. “Care to let the rest of us in on this? What do you two see that we don’t?”

  “A dense concentration of some kind of power.”

  “Which means?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. But we’re going to find out. Howard, why would Primal Records give a damn about Enid’s contract? Or yours, for that matter? What could they possibly get out of holding either of you to them?”

  The milky eyes dodged toward me, then away. “Not sure. Have to ask them. Gotta be ready t’go.” He got up and trundled away into his office.

  I traded glances with the others, then went after him. He was rummaging around in a pack, putting in odds and ends that possibly made sense only to a grunter: scraps of paper, a book, a fistful of stubby pencils.

  I stopped in the doorway. “Not sure—but you have an idea.” “No idea.” He didn’t look at me and he didn’t stop his compulsive packing.

  “Howard,” I said, patience leaching away, “this is your chance to get free of thi
s contract. Enid said you were his friend. If that’s true, then I’d think you’d welcome the chance to free him, as well. If not for him, for the people he might harm with his music, or the ones he might help.”

  He hesitated, pack dangling in one hand, a book in the other. “Like your sister, Tina.”

  “Yeah. Like Tina.”

  “Doc says she was a ballerina.”

  Past tense. I winced. “Yes, she is. A very good one.” “Love ballet,” he said heavily. “Saw Bolshoi once. Magic Flute.”

  “That’s one of Tina’s favorites.”

  He slid the book carefully into the pack and clutched it to his narrow chest. “Music box,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “Choir Girl had one in her room. I remember. Had a ballerina on it. Played, uh, ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Huh. Funny.”

  I saw the jewelry box in my mind. Saw the ballerina: a delicate, blue-eyed blonde, graceful, precious.

  Russo turned to look up at me, his eyes glistening. “She turned into something beautiful,” he said. “And I turned into this. Why?”

  He might have meant Magritte or Tina. “I don’t know.”

  He was silent for a moment, then grunted. “Huh. ’N’ you call yourself a lawyer.” He lifted the pack to one shoulder and pushed past me into the living room.

  To my surprise, he waddled straight over to Goldie and Magritte and said, “Sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Goldie echoed.

  “Didn’t mean anything by it. Didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  Goldie’s face went blank, his eyes concealing his thoughts, but Magritte floated down to the grunter’s eye level and said simply, “Thanks, Howard.”

  Goldie gave her a sideways glance, then raked long fingers through his hair. “Shit,” he murmured. “Great, you’re sorry. Fine. You say anything like that again, I’ll—”

  “Break my fuckin’ neck?” asked Russo ingenuously.

  Goldie looked over his head at me, deadpan. “Roundly ignore you.”

  The grunter was still peering up into Goldie’s face. He said, “Don’t let it own you.”