With sorcery.
My train got there and I got in. The New York Transit Authority had kindly arranged for it to be air-conditioned to a level capable of dealing with the thermal output of its peak ridership.
96 Bell, Book, and Murder
thereby guaranteeing that the after-midnight travelers had a good chance of catching pneumonia. It did nothing to improve my headache.
I shared my car with a couple of members of what is tactfully called these days the underclass — fat, dark, weary ladies wearing white and talking together in Spanish. Too close to poverty and reality to live in a world where people did things like Ruslan's guest-bedroom cathedral. The money he'd spent on the incense was a week's groceries in their world.
It's called innocence, and the distinction between it and ignorance is fast dying out.
Three stops later—at the first Manhattan stop—one of the joys of MTA ridership boarded. He was tall, white, and barefoot and wearing corrugated cardboard placards front and back. His head was wrapped in purple cellophane and he wore one of those bouncy antenna headbands that'd been hot a few years back. I couldn't read his sandwich boards. He carried a saxophone. As soon as the train was in motion and he had a captive audience, he started to play it.
Pontius Pilate wanted to know what truth was. If he'd just waited twenty centuries he could have given up on that one and started asking about sanity.
And how was the Sax Man different from Ruslan? Or for that matter, from me?
I got off the train near Rocky Center and walked over to an all-night coffee shop I knew. It had stopped raining by then and the streets were all black glass, shining and as deserted as Manhattan ever gets.
It was only when I saw the lights and people at the Cosmic Coffee Shop that I realized how badly I wanted both. I was shook all the way down to the prerational level that good ritual is designed to touch. And whatever else was true, the Baba Yagas knew how to make a ritual.
Of course, so had the Nazis.
I slid into a booth with the same sense of relief a player of Tag-You're-lt feels reaching home.
I had coffee. I had white wine. I had scrambled eggs and home fries and I wanted a cigarette desperately, even though I'd only ever been an occasional smoker and that not for years. I bought a little metal box of Excedrin from behind the counter and took them
all with a second glass of wine, and finally I was able to put down the feeling that a Stephen King Nightmare From The Id was waiting to drag me off into the fifth dimension.
Fact: Ruslan had said that Baba Yoga had killed Miriam for oathbreaking. But black magic wasn't illegal, even if it worked. Was it? I didn't think there was a jury in the world that would convict Ruslan of Miriam's death, even if he'd been serious. Plain and fancy bragging is a long-standing tradition in the Community, after all. "Look what I healed, invoked, divined." This was just bragging of a darker sort.
But in my heart I knew it wasn't. If intention counted, Ruslan had killed Miriam Seabrook.
The next question I had to ask myself was, Had he killed Miriam? Effective maliflcaniw. is rare in the world today—it's so much harder than calling your lawyer, and about as healthy for you as smoking crack.
It comes down in the end to what you believe. If you think, down in the dark night of your soul, that a person can die on command, and that another person can give them that command, then Ruslan could be guilty.
If the human mind can raise stigmata or cause hot coals not to bum, surely it can stop the human heart?
Can, not had. Ruslan could be guilty. He thought he was. But what if he was firing blanks?
And what if he wasn't?
The Roman Catholic Church used to distinguish between intending to do something wicked and actually getting around to it. They were both sins, of course, but there was a difference in degree. I sat in the diner and drank lots of coffee and thought deep philosophical thoughts about the exact moment at which a crime has been committed.
If there was an ecclesiastical court for the Craft, Ruslan was definitely guilty on a number of counts.
He was (I was pretty sure) using drugs in ritual without the prior informed consent of all participants.
He was engaged in invasive, coercive magic—what we used to call, in less enlightened days. Black Magic. Whether he had any success at it or not, he had "attempted to compass the death of the said Miriam Seabrook by nigromantic operations."
Fine. But it wasn't a civil crime —at least I didn't think there were any laws agaiinst malificarum. on the books in the State of New
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York. The closest there were (and a real pain in the ass to people like ToUah and Tris) were the Gypsy Laws, which are designed to protect the moron in the street agaiinst fraud enacted by the palm-and-tea-leaf reading brethren.
Guilty or not, Ruslan had committed no temporal crime.
The question was, just how good was he at committing spiritual ones?
The jury was out on that one, but I took the proper precautions around the apartment anyway when 1 finally got there: from salt and iron to a blue candles ritual. By eight a.m. I had my apartment swept and garnished and psychically sealed, in as valid and practical a defense as Ruslan's could be an assault.
My wards were designed, as all good ethical magical systems are, to be purely passive; they would draw their energy from being attacked. If Ruslan wanted to take the trouble to hoodoo me, I wanted to make sure he got back what he sent, doubled and redoubled in spades.
Needless to say, it was not a night for sleeping.
But it was a day for earning a living, so later Thursday morning I washed the vervain and lemongrass and golden seal off in my dinky claustrophobic shower and got dressed and went down to the studio. My subconscious still had that overfed and undigested feel to it that meant it was just itching to bring things to my attention if left alone. I felt that I'd be happy to leave it alone for an equinoctial precession or two, along with Ruslan's nasty-minded godplayers and all the rest.
Because there was nothing I could do. And that was the un-kindest truth of all.
Having missed a night's sleep didn't bother me—yet. But it would if I didn't make it up, and I had coven tomorrow night. So when 1 got into work that Thursday I told Raymond I'd be in late on Friday, plainning to leave early and catch up on lost sleep, and then like a right jerk stayed overtime instead.
It was late. Everyone else was gone. It was nice and quiet and still light out, actually my favorite time of day to be here.
The phone rang.
You would think that the first thing on my mind would be all the nasty phone calls I'd gotten lately, but my subconscious was too busy with other stuff to bother making my life miserable. I answered the phone without a qualm in my heart.
"Bookie-Joint-can-I-help-you?"
"It's Lace. I tried your apartment and there wasn't anybody there, so I thought..."
I resisted the flip and cowardly urge to ask her if somebody else was dead. "How are you?" I said instead.
"Oh, not too good. Tollah says you're coming down to read at the Revel on Saturday. Maybe you'd like to go out to dinner afterward. Shop'll pay."
This is not quite as magnanimous of Tollah as it might appear. I don't read Tarot for her very often, because while she splits the take fifty-fifty with her usual fortune-teller, I have an ethics problem with taking money for magic —so when I read, Tollah scoops the lot. Her conscience bothers her enough to feed me.
"Yeah, sure," I said, wondering why she called, and knowing why. There was a Miricim-sized hole in Lace's life, and I'd known Miriam, too. Lifelong relationships have been formed on less.
"Have you heard anything? About the autopsy, or . . . anything?" Lace said.
Autopsy.
Brain-fever struck, so hard I almost hung up on her. CAMPHOR I wrote in large letters on the top of my board and underlined it three times. Camphor in the candles. Ether (or something) in the cup. Drugs.
Poisons.
"I'm here." The patter of little feet that was my subconscious doing a tap dance of joy at finally getting my attention was deafening. "No, I haven't heard anything more about the autopsy."
"What about the Baklava people?" Lace asked with unerring precision.
"I just talked to them," I admitted, wondering how I was going to edit my experience to keep Lace from going after Ruslan with a baseball bat.
And I was going to keep her from doing that, because as much as I wanted justice, I wanted even more not to be responsible even slightly for some kind of "Commie Satanist from Mars" stoiy in the New York Post, with Lace stuck in the middle of it. We're edging up on the millennium, and newspapers have always had a bit of trouble distinguishing between "Neopagan" and "Nut."
"Look. I really can't talk right now. But I'll tell you all about it on Saturday, okay? Really, they're mostly harmless."
So's a rattlesnake.
100 Bell, Book, and Murder
I Spent another ten minutes soothing Lace down before I could hang up, and then I flew on wings of song to one of the bookshelves where the fruits of Houston Graphics' labors are stored.
A studio like Houston, which handles (let's face it) the leftovers and bits-and-pieces that fall through the cracks of the big studios and the publishers' in-house art departments, does a little of everything. We've mechanicaled pornography, haute fantasy, how-to books, technical manuals, medical textbooks, and everything else under the sun—including the monster World Encyclopedia of Wine (all nine hundred pages) that comes in for a complete patch-and-fit job every time somebody comes up with a new way to spell Chablis.
And usually the publisher sends us a couple copies of the book when it comes off press, which explains why the walls at Houston Graphics resemble a library gone wrong.
When you stare at something day after day you can hardly help reading it, which is why I know as much about diagnostic approaches to cardiopulmonary resuscitation as I do. And I'd read something, sometime, about camphor. And ether.
The book was called A Poison Dictionary. It was one of those helpful reference books wherein a technical subject is demythol-ogized for the layman, and the consensus at Houston was that it was written so Middle America would be able to off troublesome spouses and children with ease. It was a trade paperback with a (you should pardon the expression) poison-green cover and an alphabetical list of "over 1,000 common household substances" that could be fatal.
Some of them were very weird. I mean, aspirin? Coffee?
And Vicks VapoRub (used incorrectly, of course, as the entry was very careful to point out). Or to put it another way, camphor.
If it doesn't kill you, said the book, camphor induces, along with your headache, excitement, dizziness, and irrational behavior— though the book didn't mention what it considered irrational behavior. I made a note of the page number and kept on looking, because the candles hadn't killed Miriam.
The wine had.
Consider what you want out of life if you're some kind of charlatan working the occult circuit. You probably don't believe in magic, but you want your followers to believe in you, and you want to be sure they are docile, biddable, and experience Real Occult Manifestations they can brag to their friends about.
In the Middle Ages, it was easy. The so-called Witches' Flying Ointment used a combination of belladonna (nightshade, water parsley), bufotenin (toad sweat), digitalis (foxglove), and aconite (wolfsbane) to achieve these useful effects. As compounded from medieval recipes and tested by modem researchers (some people will do anything for a government grant), W.F.O. produces the sensation of flying, a feeling of exhilaration—and a set of three-ring hallucinations that may have accounted for most of the more lurid depositions people like Spengler and Kramer collected during the witch trials. Oh, people believed they'd been to the Sabbat, all right—with that particular chemical cocktsiil coursing through their blood, how could they not?
But this is now. And if you wanted to get the same effects in the modem coven, those particular ingredients were pretty hard to come by.
But ether wasn't. Or chloroform.
Especially if your day job involved a Clean-O-Rama—or any other place that might handle dry cleaning. The boxes in the bedroom suddenly made a horrible kind of sense. Both ether and chloroform are used in dry cleaning. Anybody with a plausible excuse and a credit card can get his hands on them quite easily.
Chloroform. A mildly caustic gaseous anesthetic, I read in A Poison Dictionary, liquid when chilled, gaseous at slightly above room temperature. It would bum your mouth if you drank it, but mixed with the sacramental wine you probably wouldn't notice much. A whiff would give you a dizzy, floaty, out-of-body feeling—add that to the camphor in the candles and the hypnostasis of the ritual and you would be sure that in Russian Orthodox Wicca you had found something with more bang for your buck than spending Sunday morning down at the First Methodist Bar & Grill.
Ingest enough chloroform over a period of time and it would kill you. Cirrhosis. Necrosis. Your liver stops working and you die. Without warning. Real fast. Alone, in a locked room, miles away from your killer.
My hands were shaking so hard I dropped the book. I crawled under my table to get it and rang my head on the underside of my board. Getting out seemed like too much trouble so I just sat there, reading over the entry again.
Chloroform causes liver failure. And there had been chloroform or its next-door neighbor in the wine. Ruslan had put it there.
Motive, opportunity, and access to tools. There was a real-
102 Bell, Book, and Murder
world cause of Miriam's death—and if I could prove it, I could nail Ruslan with manslaughter, voluntary or in-.
But if he used that stuff on a regular basis, why wasn't everyone in Ruslan's coven dead?
The dictionary—admittedly not the most reliable source in the universe —cited repeated doses —or overdoses —as cause of death-by-chloroform. Maybe other people had died. Maybe the police were closing in even now, their dragnet drawing ever tighter around Baba Yoga and its High Priest.
Or maybe Miriam had just come up unlucky.
But would she have been quite so unlucky, I wondered, if Baba Yoga hadn't been working magic to cause her death?
I took the book with me when I left the studio. Ray wouldn't miss it, and I wanted to think—about it and everything else in the world.
Miriam Seabrook was dead. And Ruslan was at one and the same time a vicious and merciless committer of premeditated murder and ain irresponsible goof who thought it was cute to slip people drugs without their knowing.
Just about everybody my age either knows someone it happened to or had it happen to them: the LSD in the orange juice, the hashish in the brownies, the magic mushrooms in the scrambled eggs. Back in the sixties, when drugs were supposed to be powerful and liberating and upscale things, these were harmless pranks —at least people said so.
But heroin moved out of the ghetto and cocaine moved into the marketplace and about the time your local pusher's daily special was something that would kill you before it addicted you, drugs stopped being cute.
But some of us were still hanging on to all of the sixties we could. And maybe Ruslan was one of them and still thought of drugs in the same breath as "recreational." I'd saiid I didn't mind working shamanic when I spoke to him on the phone — that might be taken for informed consent of a sort. And Miriam had gone back freely for months — surely she'd known what he was using?
I tried to sell myself on that all the way home and failed. Okay, Ruslan used chemicals in his rituals out of a countercultural sense of giddy irresponsibility—but he'd been very responsible when he set his coven to kill Miriam by magic. He'd said right out that he wanted her dead and had done his best to make her that way.
And she was dead. How he'd killed her didn't matter—or, I admitted, if he'd killed her. He'd wanted to. He'd tried to. He would have been just as guUty
of malificarum if Miriam were still alive.
Morality is even more indigestible than ethics. By the time I made it up five flights of stairs 1 was sick of the whole thing. I solved the problem that evening by getting drunk on Slivovitz boil-ermakers.
Never do that.
^•-^^ FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 6:30 p.m
Friday was the kind of day that gives reincarnation a bad name. I mean, who'd want to do something like this twice?
I woke up hungover and with a bad case of attitude that it wasn't hard to pinpoint the cause of. Anger. Frustration. I'd turned over a rock and a whole nest of moral culpability was lying there wriggling, and the only thing I could think to do was put the rock back down.
I gave Bellflower an excerpt from my troubles that night.
"I went up and saw the people Miriam was working with on Wednesday."
Belle and I were drinking tea in her kitchen. Belle's kitchen is four feet wide and was painted gas-chamber green sometime in the 1950s. It's furnished in early Gift Of The Garbage Goddess-curbside salvage—and contains a large number of nonworking appliances that the landlord refuses to remove, as well as Washington Heights' only four-quart teapot.
Nobody else was here yet—I'd left work early in addition to arriving late; the weekly paycheck was going to be on the slim side. Belle was eating fried bananas and raita from the Indian place that delivers and I was poking at my chicken curry and feeling morose.
"And?" Belle said.
"And," I said, "they are coercive, nonconsensual, and doing drugs—well, chemicals. There's this stuff in the candles that I'm pretty sure is camphor, and stuff in the wine —"
"So why did you go there?" Belle asked in her best voice of sanity. I stared at her.
"To find out what they were doing."
"And now you know. And you won't go back there, right?"
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