Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  I looked at her. "You're getting at something, aren't you?"

  Belle dipped a banana in yogurt. "You told me that they were pretty secretive, didn't you?"

  "Yeah." I'd told her just about what Julian had told me, and left out the invitational phone call from Ruslan.

  "And so it's not like they were running something open. Probably they let you come to their meeting because you were a friend of Miriam's."

  "Yeah. Right. And then they told me they put a deathspell on Miriam for trying to leave the coven."

  That finally got Belle's attention. "Are you serious?"

  "I swear it by the Goddess, Belle. They had her athame, the one I gave her, and they said they killed her because she broke her oath to them."

  Belle regarded me critically, although not as though she was about to leap up and go for the police.

  "Well, no wonder she called you, if that was the kind of head trip they were putting on her. People like that make me so mad— and that kind of power-tripping, you Just know it's built on secrecy and disinformation. And it's so stupid—the Craft isn't about coercion and fear, it's about knowledge and empowerment."

  "Somebody's empowerment, anyway," I said. I'd pushed one of Belle's buttons and got one of the standard fifteen-second screeds; she does a lot of public-awareness outreach. "It doesn't matter what the Craft's 'about' when somebody's using it for something else."

  Belle sighed. "I thought we'd got over this Witch-war stuff. These are the nineties—this mystification and blind-faith Ancient Atlantean Magus stuff doesn't do cinybody any good."

  "It sure didn't do Miriam any good," I snapped.

  Belle got the expression on her face that she gets when she's trying to be open-minded and not say anything to contradict somebody else's value system.

  "Look, Bast. We all know about negative magic. There is no excuse for it. It's wrong. But it's out there, and everybody deals with it in their own way. It can't hurt you unless you open yourself to it. You just have to stay grounded in the earth-plane."

  106 Bell, Book, and Murder

  The day I discovered that all Witches don't believe in magic was a great shock to me. It was also long enough ago that I was no longer surprised that Belle, who is my friend and 1 love her, could say in one breath that the Magic Power of Witchcraft could reverse everything from caincer to tooth decay and in the next that black magic can't kill. Personally, I have always believed that the tail goes with the dog.

  "Belle, these people are into power-tripping and weirdness and black magic. When somebody tells you they've killed somebody, what do you do?"

  The bell for the downstairs door rang and Belle pushed the buzzer to unlock it. When she looked back at me her mind was made up.

  "I really don't know what to tell you. Bast. If you're looking for a villain you'll find one, and you could let this take over your life. But Miriam's dead and you're not—and what could you do, anyway? There isn't some central validating agency that decides who's a real Witch and who isn't. Different traditions have different value systems. You can't just stand here and say this is right because I like it and this is wrong because I don't like it, because those are not judgments based on objective criteria."

  "Murder?" I suggested.

  Belle smiled sadly at me. "Everybody has their own way of dealing with the truth," she said. "How are you going to prove that something Ruslan did magically was the real cause of Miriam's death?"

  I couldn't. Because 1 didn't know that Miriam had died of liver failure, and even if the autopsy proved it, / couldn't prove to the satisfaction of the police or anyone else that Ruslan had given her the chloroform that (maybe) caused it.

  And Belle was right. Even though he'd confessed to doing something that was wrong by Gardnerian tenets, it was undoubtedly right by Khazar rules — and there was no Neopagan ecclesiastical court to bring him up on charges in front of, anyway.

  No temporal authority. No spiritual authority. Nobody with any clout to call Michael Ruslan a bad boy.

  Part of me hoped, cravenly, that Ruslan had been well and truly frightened by Miriam's death. That it had been the tonic dose of reality he needed to stop dicking around in his syncretic dream-time and either grow up or get out of the Community.

  Because down at the back of my mind was the knowledge that

  ginyone who isn't a white Protestant Christian from a mainstream denomination is getting his or her religious freedom eroded every time the Supreme Court meets, and a nice big case of witchcraft murder could give all of us—Witches, Neopagans, Goddess-worshipers, and even the Iron Johnnies—more attention from bureaucrats and name-takers than most of us could possibly stand.

  Paranoia. Right up Lace's alley. Don't even think of going after Ruslan because it would rock the boat into broad daylight.

  My public position had always been that John Q. Mundane did not give a damn about what the rest of us worshiped as long as we didn't do it on Wall Street and scare the insider traders. And I still thought that. Mostly.

  So I wanted Ruslan quietly brought to justice—but I'd settle for him just drying up and blowing away.

  As of Friday night, 1 still believed he might do that.

  On Saturdays the Revel opens at noon. I put on my New York blacks and lots of my funkiest jewelry and half a dozen rings aind the beaded belt pouch that holds my cards and another one for my keys and subway tokens so I wouldn't have a purse to watch and went.

  Everything looked different, and it didn't make me feel any better to know it was just me. Everybody else was the same; just as admirable or as contemptible as they'd ever been. They'd never been saints. They weren't quislings now, no matter what Ruslan had done or thought he'd done.

  Maybe I was burnt out. Maybe I should gafiate —Get Away From It All. Take up a quiet life of secularity and stop worrying about questions to which the twentieth century has thrown away the answers in a body; questions like morals and ethics and fault and responsibility. Justice. Restitution.

  Revenge.

  I actually stopped at a liquor store on the way to the Revel and bought a half-pint of braindy. It was a cheap, obvious, and useless escape, and the eagerness with which 1 went after it scared me enough to keep me from opening the bottle.

  But I'd still bought it.

  I got to the Revel about ten-thirty. Tollah saw me and opened up for me.

  "Oh, Bast, blessed be! You're a real lifesaver-Mischia had to

  108 Bell, Book, and Murder

  go out to Crown Point for a wedding—her brother—and she thought it was Sunday or next week or something and if it was next week I couldVe told everybody this week that we weren't doing it next week but you see—"

  "Just remember me in your will."

  ToUah looked nervous, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. I recollected the paper bag I was holding and handed it to her. "Here. Contributions to the community chest."

  She saw what was in it and gave me a funny look. I went over and sat down at the table set up in the comer for the Tarot reader.

  It was one of those collapsible card tables, and it was draped in a purple pall embroidered with Ur and Geb and Nut and all those Egyptian guys. I'd seen it a dozen times, but this was the first time I'd ever looked at the comer with the signature painstakingly embroidered in genuine J. R. R. Tolkien Elvish. It wasn't too hard to make out the transliteration. Sunshnke.

  Miriam.

  Damn her anyway. If I'd been her worst enemy she couldn't have done worse by me than opening up this Khazar can of worms in my face.

  There were little blue card-outlines embroidered into the cloth in the Celtic Cross pattern, not that I needed the aide de memoire. I got out my deck and began to shuffle.

  People always ask me if I "believe" in Tarot cards. It's pretty easy to do: I own five decks of them. What they mean, of course, is "Do you believe that Tarot cards can tell the future?" and the answer to that is yes —and no.

  You can tell the future. If you wear a white cashmere sweat
er-dress to an important lunch, there is an eighty percent chance that you will spill shrimp cocktail or something else with tomato sauce on it—if only because you're so worried about spilling something that you go all awkward. You know this, but you're unlikely to act on the information, even if your mother, your roommate, and your best friend all tell you so.

  But if the cards tell you so —and mind, tell you what you already know—you're more likely to accept and act upon the advice, wear bottle-green wool gabardine, and avoid serious grief and dry-cleaning bills. Tarot is a way of sorting out what's bothering you and getting advice from the best-informed source—you —in a way that you're likely to listen to.

  So I lay out your cards and tell you all the things your mind is busy sweeping under the rug so it can get on with its business of complicating your life. As for where / get the information—well, go figure. But I'm right more often than I'm wrong.

  There is something exciting about working with the cards. The more you work to match your knowledge and skill to the seemingly random spill, to understand this one of the seventy-eight-to-the-thirteenth-power possible combinations of symbols and positions and what it means for the woman sitting opposite you, the more you become conscious of reporting only the high points of a river, and the more you become aware of the unchanging subtext of that river; the eternal dialogue with sundered self. I saw the cards and listened to the river, and that took adl my concentration. My own problems lost their importance.

  It's a lot like jogging.

  My first client of the day came over aind sat down. I handed her the cards and watched her shuffle and cut. She had no trouble shuffling seventy-eight outsized cards. Probably she read Tarot herself, but there's the "who shaves the barber" paradox: Tarot readers can't generally read for themselves. You lie to yourself. You might as well watch television.

  I didn't ask her what she'd come to find out. That comes later, after you see what the cards say.

  She handed me the deck back. As I took them they sprayed out of our hands, cards going everywhere. One of them flipped over. The Chariot.

  Or as some people call it, the Fool's Paradise. I scooped the cards all back together and began laying them out.

  I try to keep omens in their proper perspective.

  Carrie brought me a tofu pita and a soda at about two. Traffic had been brisk; there were still about half a dozen women waiting for readings. Lace was behind the counter, with her hair all hennaed, oiled, and spiked out, looking like dangerous sculpture.

  Sometimes, despite all your best shuffling, the same cards will turn up over and over again from, reading to reading. This can be interpreted in many ways—from poor manual dexterity skills to the possibility that the people being read for are somehow linked. One of the common interpretations of the phenomenon is that the recurring cards are messages meant for the reader.

  I'd been seeing a lot of The Chariot today. A young man crowned in glory, his chariot canopied in stars, rides forth from the walled

  no Bell, Book, and Murder

  city he has conquered. You have to look at the card for a few seconds before you see that the animals that pull the chariot have neither reins nor bridles. It's the Captain James T. Kirk card, the card of leaping before looking, of burned bridges and uncovered asses. The card of thinking you know what's going on when you don't.

  As a message to the reader, it was ambiguous.

  Lace saw me see her and waved: black leather fingerless gloves with spikes across the knuckles. I looked down at my rings and necklaces. We were all in our best identity war paint today, dripping with symbols of being who we wished to seem.

  And who was Bast—Lady Bast, High Priestess of the Wicca?

  ''When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it"

  But I wasn't Sam Spade. I wasn't even the Queen of the Witches. Miriam wasn't my partner. And Ruslan hadn't broken any laws.

  I took a bite of the pita and opened the soda and went back to telling other people how the cards said they should run their lives.

  The Chariot. Willful stupidity. Fool's Paradise, as in "Living InA-"

  What was I missing? If anything?

  And what should I do about it?

  About five o'clock I looked up and there wasn't anybody standing around waiting. I wrapped up my cards and stuffed them back in my belt pouch. I stretched, and wiggled my fingers, and stood up, and generally indicated that the cartomaincer was done for the day.

  Lace camie over and folded up the cloth, and the card table, and the chairs, and I leaned against the jewelry case and hung out. The Revel was open until nine, but sometime sooner than that some assortment of us would be going out to dinner, and eventually I was going to have to talk to Lace.

  I still felt as if I'd lost my last pair of rose-colored glasses. I didn't like it. It meant thinking about too many things —and if the goal of modem life is satisfaction, ratiocination was taking me further from it every minute. So life is unfair, people are amoral Jerks, we're all going to die, and as a race humanity is too stupid to put out the fire in a burning house. Life is the business of forgetting all that, and the sooner I could get on with life, the better.

  * * * I made a good stab at forgetting any number of things at dinner. It was about seven by the time that got underway, what with closing the shop up and everything, and by the time everything had jelled it was Lace, Tollah, me, and three other women who had accrued during the wait. Tollah and Lace knew them and 1 didn't. We went to a new cheap Thai place a few blocks away and stuffed ourselves on things cooked with coriander and coconut milk. I had several beers, since it was courtesy of the Revel.

  Lace kept giving me meainingful looks and 1 kept willfully ignoring them. If 1 didn't have to talk about Baba Yoga, I didn't have to think about Baba Yoga. I knew I was being hard on Lace, but on the other hand, if she knew what I knew, she too would have to sit here deciding between life in prison and impotence. Maybe I was acting out of charity.

  Lace nailed me during a lull in the conversation. "You are holding out on me, you damn vanilla bitch."

  I glanced around. Tollah had her back to us, talking to the three women. I gathered that they were Dianic Gaians, and 1 hoped nobody would tell me what that was.

  "Will you for gods' sake lighten up? You want me to do my John Barrymore imitation or something?" I sotto voced at her.

  John Barrymore was one of the most talented drunks ever produced by the great Barrymore line, and when he died his friends stole his body from the funeral home and used it to scare the shit out of Errol Flynn. I wondered if 1 would ever have friends like that. If I did, I hoped I would outlive them.

  "You said you'd tell me tonight what happened Wednesday. So it's tonight," Lace insisted.

  "I can't do it here," I insisted right back.

  Lace grabbed my wrist with a hand that resembled one of those devices you use to shape sheet metal. If I hadn't had my Third Degree bracelet on she would have crippled me.

  "You can damn well tell me here if she had a lover!"

  There were tears in Lace's eyes, and I realized that all the Khazar Trad meant to her was the people who had taken Miriam away from her. She'd like to think they were rotten, but I didn't think that even Lace's wildest imaginings were wild enough to match the truth I'd uncovered.

  I thought I knew what she'd do if she knew what I knew. And what the Real World would do to her. I didn't want that to happen.

  112 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "It wasn't like that." Out of the comer of my eye I saw ToUah take an Interest in our conversation. "She was leaving them, okay? No lover."

  Eventually the party broke up. Lace and I walked Tollah back to the Revel.

  "So you want to invite me over to your place for a beer?" 1 asked, when Tollah was inside.

  "Cheap bitch," said Lace, and threw an arm around my shoulders.

 
1 knew that Lace shared a two-bedroom apartment with three other like-minded women way up north near Columbia, but I'd never been there until tonight. Sliced four ways the rent was bearable—just. Lace and one of the others had the bedrooms, and the other two shared the converted dining room.

  I would bet good money there isn't a single dining room in all of New York City being used actually for dining, outside of a few Park Avenue atavisms. In Manhattan you spell dining room "extra bedroom."

  'They're out," said Lace comprehensively as we got inside.

  The living room was furnished in that bizarre accretion of furniture gathered by women who have always been roommates—i.e., have lived their lives in a succession of bedrooms in houses or apairtments that they don't themselves rent. A lifestyle like that doesn't run to couches or coffee tables, and even when where you're living now has room for one you don't buy it, because where you're living next might not, and then you'd have to leave it behind with people you (may) have grown to hate.

  The living room of Lace's modem urban commune contained six chairs of wildly differing ethnology—from overstuffed Conran's upholstered in black polished cotton to a rather nice Biedermeier rocker—two mismatched bookcases and a salvage-it-yourself table that had been painted in gaudy Peewee Herman colors. There was a fake Tiffany lamp and one in Star Trek modeme. The walls were the same way—it was like living with a multiple personality affective disorder case where all the personalities got equal say in the decoration.

  Lace got both of us "lite" American beers from the kitchen. She opened hers, and sat down, and waited at me.

  "Okay," I said. I'd had all dinner to make up my mind and Lace herself to tell me what tack to take. "Her coven leader called me up last week and invited me to a Circle."

  And then I lied. Oh, I got all the facts right—at least the ones I told. But I'd never told Lace about Miriam's magical diaries or my midnight phone calls, and 1 didn't tell her now.

  Nor did I tell her about the poison Ruslan was feeding to his coveners or the fact that he'd boasted of working toward Miriam's death. 1 didn't tell her how he made my skin crawl, or how on sober reflection I was willing to bet that Starfawn was his next victim; a new wannabe Witch to Trilby-ize. Lace didn't need to know all that. Lace didn't want to know all that. Lace wanted to know that Miriam had loved her till she died, and that I could tell her without lying.