She goes to get the water.
“So,” Karl says, looking back at the door to make sure Anneke isn’t coming yet. He’s winding up to ask something awkward, and Andrew’s skin crawls.
How does he make me feel twelve and tongue-tied?
“Yes, sir?”
Again with the sir.
This kid doesn’t sir anybody else, I’d bet on it.
Knows I served and wants me to like him.
Kid hell, he’s like forty, just wears his hair long so he looks like Pocahontas. Probably puts shoe polish in it.
Probably uses moisturizer and plucks his eyebrows, too.
Goes down to the day spa in Syracuse.
I can see this guy getting a pedicure.
I want to like him, I do.
Anneke sure spends enough time with him.
Guy and a girl don’t spend that kind a time together without.
Is he?
I kinda hope he is.
“Are you and Anneke . . . ?”
“Sir?”
There’s no way in hell.
A guy like this.
Unless she likes him ’cause he looks a little like a girl.
I don’t even know if it works that way.
Shit, here she comes.
“Are you staying for dinner?”
Anneke hands Andrew a water glass with faded sunflowers painted on it, the last one of the eight-piece set from her childhood.
“You know we are, Dad.”
But only Anneke spends the night.
20
Night.
Andrew opens his eyes in the near-darkness of his own house, two wicks of his three-wick bedside pillar candle still alight, nearly but not quite drowned in red wax.
His paperback copy of The Baron in the Trees lies open facedown on the pillow.
Something is watching him.
He knows what.
He also knows it’s three in the morning.
That’s when it most often comes.
“Ichabod.”
The entity doesn’t respond.
“Ichabod, say something.”
“Something.”
It has chosen a little girl’s voice.
“Manifest in a form I won’t find disagreeable.”
“Ja, mein Captain,” it says.
A gently glowing Katzenjammer Kid, the blond one, appears, sitting on Andrew’s leather chair, its legs primly crossed at the knee. While Andrew appreciates the novelty of seeing the little German cartoon boy in 3-D, it is mildly disturbing. Perhaps a cat’s whisker shy of being disagreeable.
Ichabod has a sniper’s precision when it comes to causing unease.
Ichabod isn’t its name, of course, but then neither was the long Sumerian name whose first three syllables sounded vaguely like Ichabod.
“Did you touch my foot?”
“Just playing little piggies.”
“I don’t like that.”
“It seemed the gentlest way to wake you.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“Is that a command?”
“Yes. Are you going to insist on protocol?”
“Not this time. It seems a modest enough request. Note to myself: no touching Master Andrew’s sleeping piggies. Check. Anything else?”
Andrew sits up, gathering the sheet around him.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“What, here?” it says, and now the Katzenjammer Kid is sitting in bed next to Andrew, hands on lap, looking like a child who wants to be read a story. It gives off cold like a ham just out of the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.
Andrew forces himself not to recoil.
“Go back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”
It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.
Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.
“Well?”
“Well what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“Can’t I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There’s not a great deal to do there.”
“Then go back where you came from.”
“And miss the rest of your life? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Andrew sighs anxiously.
It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.
“I’m worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”
“Tell me why.”
“You know why.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Only because you don’t want to know. But you need to know.”
“Just say what you have to say and go.”
“You might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”
“I don’t want her destroyed.”
“But now it’s too late.”
“For what?”
“That Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”
“Fucking tell me.”
At Andrew’s flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.
Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.
“Some people see God’s hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”
Andrew seethes.
“Just . . .”
It cuts him off.
“Ask your rusalka for the dog’s collar.”
“Why?”
“You will want to research its owner.”
21
“There are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”
Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.
She favors the penny.
They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won’t allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.
All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke’s little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.
Her remote controls, one for TV, one for DVD player, have been wrapped in plastic, likewise clay-smudged and fingerprinted.
More inverted mugs, and a smattering of coffee cups and saucers, congregate on a card table, along with a tall vase topped by a precarious-looking round wooden board. A quarantaine of rosettes dries atop this board, the same rosettes that, when fitted with brass pins and painted Tudor red, will adorn the vests and doublets of the acting cast of the Renaissance festival to distinguish them from unpaid costumed enthusiasts. That is to say, when a drunken Landsknecht in rather convincing armor barfs on your lady fair, the lack of said rosette upon his breast will mark this as an unsanctioned event and indemnify both the festival and the troupe of professional improvisers that animate its lanes.
“Which kind am I?” she says.
Meaning plodder or intuitive.
“A bit of both, like me,” he says. “But more intuitive, I think.”
“An intuitive just does it, doesn’t need as many implements, can do small things almost immediately. Like what you’re doing. An intuitive is more luminous, must in fact be luminous from the start.”
“And a planner?”
“Plodder.”
“Plodder.”
“They hate that word. And some of them are a bit contemptful and jealous toward intuitives.”
“Sounds like you’re a bit contemptful of them. Plodder is an ugly word. What do they call themselves?”
“Disciples is the preferred term when they differentiate, but they don’t differentiate the same way. They see themselves as disciplined and those who don’t spend their lives bent over books as lazy. Thing is, they’re all geniuses. The plodders. To come at magic without luminosity, you have to be smart enough to work for Apple or IBM or crack codes for the CIA, and a few of them do. Their books are much more complex, more like rocket science; more glyphs and formulas, though one of them would say formulae. They think their way into belief, crack the code of magic and understanding with brainpower. They aren’t all luminous at the start, but they get there; they make a fire with sticks where naturals already have a fire. But the payoff is that they can do really big, astounding things. Think of it as learning a language with books and tapes versus being born in that country. Nonluminous plodders are like non-native speakers. But English was Nabokov’s second language, and he wrote Lolita. Or was it his third language? He spoke French, too.”
“Nabokov, huh? Was that a jab?”
“At who?”
She raises an eyebrow, keeps moving the shard.
“Oh, right.”
I forgot you’re a sex offender.
“Not consciously.”
Anneke is officially a witch, albeit a novice. The first time she jiggled that penny, Andrew felt the small tingle of magic waking up. She collapsed and sobbed afterward, but that was not unusual. He had a similarly emotive reaction the first time he spun a pop top. The first spell is usually some light levitation. Small magic, admittedly, a mustard seed from which some build mountains.
He leans forward just a little so the black iron conical stove behind her appears to top her head like a witch’s hat. Sandalwood incense leaks smoke behind her. He leans the other way so it appears to come from her nose.
“What are you doing?” she says, her concentration split, Abraham Lincoln dead again on dull copper in her hand.
“Sorry. Nothing.”
She tosses the penny into a broken mug full of coins, lights a cigarette, gives him one. He totters the lighter out of her hand, levitates it into his.
“Show-off. Can you light it?”
“It’s a more precise motion, takes more strength.”
“Yes, but can you?”
“Burns more gas.”
She squints her eyes at him.
“Magic burns fuel. Continuous spells burn fuel continuously. Spikes in magic use can disrupt those spells. Think of an outlet, energy surges.”
“Continuous spells? Like what?”
“Health. Youth. Luck. One well-cast luck spell in Vegas and a user can clean up. Only not in the MGM Mirage casinos—Mandalay Bay, Bellaggio, I forget the rest but I have a list—they have users working for them, kicking others out. Or worse.”
“Youth, huh? You running one of those right now, Mr. Looks Thirty-Five?”
“You should know. Try to detect it.”
She closes her eyes.
“Open them and think about what you want to know.”
Now she looks at him, really looks at him. Then she feels it, subtle as cat’s breath. The hairs on her forearms stand up just a little.
“You vain motherfucker. So you can’t flick the lighter or you’ll get liver spots?”
“I’m a bit stronger than that,” he says, and the lighter sparks, lights up, Andrew smiling with his hands behind his head. “It’s just that I have to focus more. It’s easier just to light it by hand. It’s like Skype.”
“Excuse me?”
“Skype. It’s . . .”
“I know what it is, what’s the relevance?”
“I used to have a crystal ball.”
“Sounds like a song title.”
He sings.
“I used to have a crystal ball,
It really was a fishbowl.”
He pauses.
“Can’t think of a rhyme?”
“No.”
“Just say it.”
“It was a bit of a pain in the ass. The other person had to have a glass something-or-other with exactly the same spell cast into it, and you both had to concentrate; if you got distracted, the image faded or distorted or went away. You’re about to ask if my fishbowl rang, and it did. Really, it quivered when the other person wanted to talk, but I taped a little bell to it.”
“I was going to ask if there was a fish in it.”
“There used to be, before I enchanted it. I’m not good with fish.”
“No, you’re good with cars and dead people. And you’re intuitive, like me. Who’s a plodder?”
“I know one.”
“Powerful?”
“Scary powerful. Young, too. Lives in Lincoln Park. Chicago. And she’s working on a project for me right now.”
22
Chicagohoney85: The Mikhail Dragomirov you’re looking for is Mikhail “Misha” Yevgenievich Dragomirov. Born December 1943. He was one of the few non-Jewish members of a crime organization that came over during the détente of the early eighties. He lived in Brighton Beach, which some called Little Odessa, but he wasn’t from Odessa. He knew these guys from the army. His family has long ties to the Russian military, most notably with the great-uncle Mikhail Dragomirov he was probably named for, a Sean Connery–looking geezer who wrote extensively on 19th-century tactics. Died of heartbreak in 1905 when the Japanese kicked Russia’s ass with 20th-century tactics. The dad, Yevgeny, was no slouch, either. Fuckton of medals in WW2. Tank commander, T-34. Only an efreitor, like a corporal, but survived three bullet wounds, crawled out of two burning tanks and killed more Germans than bad Bratwurst. Serious badass.
Ranulf: Where was he from?
—The great-uncle, the badass dad, or your guy?
—All three.
—Big bear, the Ukraine. Daddy bear, a village near the Volga. Baby bear, Gorky, now called Nizhny Novgorod.
A chill runs down Andrew’s spine and he actually leans away from his computer, as if away from the memories the word Volga stirs in him.
Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.
He feels sweat moisten his palms. He rubs these on his pants.
—Where is little Dragomirov now?
—I should be asking you that. He disappeared from his summer cabin in Sterling. New York State. Like a few miles from you, right?
—Does it look mobbish? Old business coming back for him?
—Not likely. Everybody liked him. He was so good with numbers that three separate bosses used him to help cover their gasoline schemes, and so charming and funny the Luccheses didn’t whack him when they got Resnikoff. But he hung on until the early nineties when they opened that big, flashy nightclub, Rasputin’s. Meanwhile, new Russian mob was coming over in droves, lots of it with ex-Spetsnaz muscle. FBI got interested because these guys were as big as the Italians now, at least locally. Mikhail Dragomirov felt it getting hot, took off to St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), married a stewardess who also modeled at boat shows and bought a couple of condos. She died, he sold the condos, and now he just tools around with his dog gambling and frequenting on-line escorts. He looooves the shit out of Vegas. And Cirque du Soleil. I think he saw Ka seven times. And Avenue Q. If someone was going to m
ake him sleep with the fishes, they would have done it back in the day.
Andrew blinks at the screen, rubs his chin. “Sleep with the fishes”? Was that intentional? Does she know about Nadia?
—Jesus, old man, you hang out with a rusalka? I didn’t know there were any of those in the west. WTF, he comes all the way to America to get drowned by a Russian mermaid?
—Are you actually reading my thoughts over the Internet? And is this conversation veiled?
—Facebook knows more about you than I do. And computers are my specialty. You’d be amazed ;)
So saying, Radha appears in a box on the screen (half Iranian on her father’s side but she says Persian—pale skin, dark hair, she is a honey), showing her hands. Text nonetheless continues to scroll.
—And I don’t have unveiled conversations, except on BS social media as a front. If I weren’t veiling this, I’d Skype you, because you type like a trained seal using his nose. I’m the go-to girl for like 40 of our sort . . . you think I’m going to let homeland security read this stuff? Try to print this conversation, I dare you.
Andrew likes dares. He prints. The printer slowly whines out not text, but a photograph. Him on the toilet, pants around ankles, long hair down, reading a copy of Timber Home Living, his favorite magazine. The picture is from this morning, from the angle of the polished brass mirror over the sink. A corner of his cell phone winks on the toilet’s tank, just behind him, indicating the electronic fingerhold she used to get in. Normally brass mirrors are safe, can’t be used as gates like glass ones, but Radha is so good with electricity and currents that she was able to press the conductive metal into her service.
—You scare me.
—Thanks. So, look, you should know I picked up some magic around him. Strong. Not coming from him, but someone near him, maybe family. Maybe the niece. Some Internet chatter about a niece coming over to help look for him, but nothing specific. I think someone’s veiling on that end.
—Someone stronger than you?
Radha crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.
—I didn’t say that.
When she uncrosses her arms, she has six arms, Shiva-style, the hands of which she stacks on her hips defiantly, her six elbows fanned behind her, making a sort of Persian seraph of her.
The Necromancer's House Page 6
