Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Nothing happened.

  Oh, I could feel Belle's hurt feelings from one hundred and ninety blocks away, and I spent a serious amount of ritual time making sure my "personal space" was magicadly clean. Ruslan and I believed in magic, even if the rest of the world didn't.

  Some people bootlegged the flyer. I saw some copies I hadn't made in places I hadn't put them. I'd used up the rest of mine strewing them around the city in places you wouldn't normally expect to see things like that, like Rockefeller Center.

  But the consensus (or the general consensus of opinion, as our semiliterate friends on the telly would have it) was "judge not, lest ye be judged" —a homily that had never slowed the Christians down any.

  And I was perfectly willing to let the gods judge me. It was my peers that bothered me.

  Friday night. Coincidentally the twenty-somethingeth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, which had had no effect on life as we know it. Lace had called to invite me special to the Revel's TGIF circle. I was doing the politic thing and staying home. I did not

  132 Bell, Book, and Murder

  want to be patron saint of the first annual anti-masculinist Dianic Wiccajihad. Down at the Revel they'd taken the anti-Khazar manifesto to heart; Ruslan was a perfect bete noir for them, being a male Ceremonial Magician who had caused the death of a (sort of) lesbian while practicing god-centered Neopaganism.

  I'd seen this before, with the scapegoat of the moment. They'd blow him up to mythic proportions, then get tired of their game and wander off, leaving behind a certified Craft legend.

  Nor did I want to replace Miriam in Lace's affections. We'd developed the pressure-cooked emotional bond that comes from being victims of the same trauma, and it was probably better for both of us if natural attrition took its course. In addition to any number of other good reasons for becoming polite strangers again, I wouldn't make Lace any happier thain Miriam had.

  1 was actually considering calling Rachel Seabrook to see if she'd ever gotten any autopsy reports when the phone rang.

  "Jello?" I chirped.

  "This is Ruslan."

  There are times when your power of improvisation deserts you. For some reason I'd never expected to hear from him agaiin. I didn't have a script ready.

  "I suppose you think you're very clever," he said, in the tone that daddies everywhere use to begin the scold of the erring n5miphet. That saved me; I've never been any daddy's girl and I'm way too old for nymphethood.

  "Hello, Michael, it's nice to hear from you." Hearing his first name stopped him for a minute; I'd hoped it would.

  "I don't think you'll think so when you hear what I have to say, Karen. I'm calling on the advice of my lawyer about those flyers of yours. You didn't think I knew about them, did you?"

  Why not? Aside from their being the hot topic of the last two weeks, I'd even posted some on the Double-R line. He'd probably ridden to work in the same car with them.

  "My lawyer thinks he can make a pretty good case for libel, here, but I'm not a vindictive man. If you'll just make some good-faith reparations — "

  "What exactly is it that you want?" The song and dance about the lawyer was bullshit; if he had one he wouldn't be talking to me now.

  "Look, I know you're kind of overwrought. You know what I mean. But I think I can cut you a little slack. Just give me back

  the stuff you stole from Miriam's apartment and we can both just walk away."

  Oh, he was cool. Nothing I said was going to jair him loose from his preplanned script.

  "You know, Jadis, a lot worse things than lawyers could happen if you don't. I warned you. The gods of the Khazar are real, and they are not mocked."

  "I think that the Khazar gods are getting a little too much help these days," I said. It was pure inspiration, in the literal sense; I had the same feeling of right and proper action I'd had when I posted all those flyers.

  "Did you know they're autopsying Miriam Seabrook? Suspicious accidental death. You should have used Mogen David in your fucking Dixie cup, Mikey. There's somebody down in the Manhattan County Coroner's office slicing her liver up with a microtome right now—and when they're done they're going to find your signature all over it. Murder. Plain real-world murder that even the mundanes can believe in."

  "Bullshit," said Ruslan.

  I laughed. "I've got Miriam's Khazar book and a nice long letter full of names and addresses. Do I have to prove anything—or do they just have to look?"

  "Miriam Seabrook died of heart failure!" Ruslan said. "Baba Yoga-"

  "Ever hear of chemical footprints, jerkball? The traces a drug leaves in the user's bod)^? What's in the wine, Mike)^ Something good?"

  There was a pause, and the next time he spoke I had difficulty recognizing it as the same voice.

  "You cowan bitch. I am going to bury you. " " The bottom dropped out of reality and I clutched the phone. My heart was hammering as if I'd stared into the open throat of a Hell I professed not to believe in.

  I'd gotten his attention, all right. I'd finally made him mad.

  I stood there wondering if I dared to hang up, knowing he knew where I lived. Then he laughed. It was a friendly, confident sound that wasn't quite sane anymore.

  "You know, you really do have some things that belong to me, Karen. Why don't you give them back?"

  You always read in these spatterpunk effusions about terror on top of terror, and despite the bouncing heads and flying entrails,

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  tJie fear never seems plausible. Maybe you can't get down on paper or film about how real terror is what you do to yourself with the knowledge of what the other person can do, and probably will do, when there is nothing at all that you can do to affect his actions.

  Why don't you give them back? Because if you don't, some night you'll wake up and I'll be standing there, and I will do things to you that you don't even want to begin to imagine.

  If I didn't give Miriam's things to him he'd be mad. Bottom line.

  "I'll trade you. Then we're quits." I am not brave, and I wasn't then. It was an atavistic certainty that running from the nightmare would only make it attack that made me say it—that, and the hunch that somewhere on this path lay the only way out.

  ^You want something from ixs? WeU, this is unusual." Oh yes, he was willing to string this out now. His daimon was riding him, just as mine was me.

  "Miriam's athame. For the Khazar prayer book."

  "I'll be right over."

  "It isn't here," I said with quick desperation. Ruslan laughed. "Be reasonable—it's packed up and hidden to mail to the cops — why would I keep it here?—if I died, nobody'd find it."

  "You'd be surprised. You know, I don't think you know as much about magic as you claim to, Karen."

  "I know I have your book." I wanted to boast about the coun-terspells I could cast on it, the banishings I could do to make it only a decorated piece of board. But I didn't.

  "And you're going to give it to me. And your letter." Perversely, the fact that he believed in that made me feel better. Ruslan of Baba Yoga was not omnipotent.

  'Tomorrow night. Nine-thirty. St. Mark's Place. Bring Miriam's athame. I'll trade you."

  "Aren't you going to ask me to come alone?" Ruslan sounded amused. In control.

  I hung up on him.

  Now I had one more definite fact: Even while he was deluding and drugging his coveners, Ruslan believed what he was telling them. He believed there was magic in the Khazar icons he painted, and the more he failed to get Miriam's back, the more important it became to him, until it became an obsession.

  An obsession that I'd played right up to by telling him that the Khazar book could tie him into a murder investigation.

  Arguably the stupidest thing I'd ever done.

  About an hour later, when I stopped shaking, I realized what had been in the back of my mind when I'd done it. There was no Seabrook murder case. There might not even be an autopsy; New York's a busy town.

  But
even at nine p.m. there would be people all over St. Mark's Place when I met Ruslan. If I wanted to see some justice done, I had to make a civil pothook on which the temporal courts could hang him.

  Frame him? Not quite. I'd just given Ruslan a real good motive to shut me up. It shouldn't be all that hard to get him to assault me. And then I could swear a charge out against him.

  If the Goddess was on my side, if magic was afoot in the world, if this was a good idea . . .

  If it wasn't, I could just spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.

  I needed witnesses.

  "Hello, Glitter? This is Bast. I need you to do something for me."

  Gutter had been one of my partisans during the late unpleasantness with Changing. She was sorry I'd missed coven, glad to hear from me, eager to think everything was going to be fine now. I felt a little guilty drafting her for the role of Sancho Panza. I could have gotten Lace much more easily, but I could never have gotten her to testify afterward.

  But Glitter was not only a Probation Officer for the City of New York, she was perfectly willing to come down to St. Mark's Place and meet me. I had a plausible excuse. St. Mark's Cinema is one of the last revival houses in the city, but it's no place to go alone unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  "I've got to give some stuff to somebody, but he should be there about nine-fifteen. Then we can go and get some Chinese and probably hit the ten o'clock show, okay?"

  She said the playbill was The Women and Idiot's Delight Gable tap dances. With any luck, I'd be on my way to the hospital instead, with an assault charge against Michael Ruslan in my pocket.

  The more I thought about it, the worse I felt about lying-by-omission to Glitter. I could tell myself that the end justified the means, but it never does. Neither does the means justify the end.

  Ethics. Promises. The seduction of vendetta.

  Goddess, let me get through Saturday night alive and I'll reform. Promise.

  136 Bell, Book, and Murder

  * * * Saturday. The sun was still high when I started my preparations for meeting Ruslan —not that you could see it. The sky was an overcast pewter and the air was hazy. I pulled down my shade, lit my candles, and made every other preparation to get ready for tonight.

  I had settled the temporal side of the matter; if Ruslan was obliging enough to break the law in a provable fashion, I would have him prosecuted for it.

  That left the spiritual. And what I owed Miriam. Justice.

  To call upon the gods for justice in a proper framework of magical ethics, justice alone must be the goal. Not "1 win"/"You lose." How can you be sure who will win, if anybody? Maybe both of you are wrong. To ask for justice with magic you must care that there is an outcome without caring what it is — the sublime disinterest of the jurist.

  That was what I wanted. I would bring Ruslan face-to-face with moral superiority—not mine, because I might not be —and there would be judgment, in which I would take no part.

  Magical judgment for magical crimes. Everything else had been leading up to this. And tonight, when what I had set in motion stopped, it would be over for all time.

  I watched the candles bum before the Goddess of the Gsmies, and tried to empty myself of hopes for the outcome.

  ♦^ SATURDAY, JULY 21, 8:30 p.m. ^«-i^

  1st night of the dark moon

  There are some odd anomalous nights when the weather goes completely mad. I can never remember whether it's cold air/warm ground or warm air/cold ground that makes fog, but sometimes—even in polluted, overindustrial cities—the conditions are stiU right.

  It wasn't a very heavy fog, but it turned the street lamps into soft balls of golden light and made the geography of the next street over just a little uncertain. There was the lightest of warm misty rains falling; enough to make the air glitter. If the need eirose, I could wrap the air airound me like a cape. Or walk on it.

  And if I fell, that was because there was need for that too, in the glittering pattemless design that stretched farther and farther the longer I looked. I was part of that design; I could see the steps that had been laid out for me before I was bom, and dance their pattern wiUfuUy and foreknowing.

  And that I never suspected Ruslan was smart enough to anticipate me, that was foreordained, too.

  Below Eighth Street the aseptic grid of Upper Manhattan gives way to a tangle of streets that intersect in any way they please. The place in St. Mark's Place where I was meeting Glitter—and Ruslan—was a mostly triangular traffic island built nearly flush with the surrounding asphadt and put there in the hope of un-

  138 Bell, Book, and Murder

  knotting the chaos of five intersecting streets. It contained a lamppost and a god-awful piece of cubist modem sculpture, but was in plain sight of stores, pedestrians, and suicidal motorists driving enpointe in the lemming ballet. The fog made things especially chancy.

  I achieved the little plaza. Barely. I checked my watch.

  I'd told Glitter nine-fifteen. I'd told Ruslan nine-thirty. But it was nine o'clock when I got to St. Mark's Square, and Ruslan was waiting for me.

  He stepped out from behind the sculpture, and at first 1 didn't recognize him. He was wearing a trench coat; he looked like a rumpled, pudgy Bogart, but he wasn't funny.

  "Give it to me," he said. No, not funny at all.

  I stared at him. I had brought the presence of the Goddess with me; I felt Her as an infinite peace. Even so, I'd been expecting something more confrontational, with rhetoric.

  "The book," Ruslan said. He didn't look like someone carrying an athame, either. I knew he didn't have it, but I said my lines like I was supposed to.

  "We trade."

  He pulled something out of his pocket, but it wasn't Miriam's athame. It was a gun.

  I stared at it stupidly. Cold iron breaks all magic, I thought. Just as if this were a fairy tale and the gun wasn't real. Traffic whipped by scant feet away. It might have been on the dark side of the moon for all the useful help it was.

  "Give it to me," Ruslam said. He smiled, and for an instant we were both in on the joke. Both of us knew what was to come. Neither of us was fooled. We had consented to this mystery play a long, long time ago.

  I pulled a red silk bag out of my jacket. I was wearing the same one I'd worn the night 1 posted the flyers, but I was only carrying one thing now. I turned the bag upside down and shook the contents out on the ground.

  It was the front cover of the missal; I'd burned the rest of it that afternoon. The wood was soft; when push came to crunch I'd been able to split it into nine pieces with my boline and tie each piece up with hand-dyed red wool yam and twigs of American mountain ash.

  "KoLoan tree and red thread. " Proof against all sorcery. I'd knotted feathers into the cords, and blue glass beads, and a little sil-

  ver pentacle—binding, purifying, breaking the power of the Khazar coven over Miriam forever. There was nothing they could do to her—or her spirit—now.

  Ruslan giggled, and even in my self-induced trance state I thought it was a bizarre reaction. He waved the gun as if he didn't care who saw it. The fog made hadoes around everything.

  He looked at me with a weird crinkled little smile on his face. He was sweating; the light reflected off each moving drop as it slid down his cheeks.

  Then he looked into my eyes for the first time. I felt a chill shock of kinship even as 1 realized how far gone he was.

  Gone. "A journey to that far country from which no man returns." Meaningless tag-ends of poetry beat through me, and the passage of the cars on the street seemed to take on an intentionad rhythm.

  Ruslan's smile died like a burnt-out lightbulb. He brought the gun down and settled himself into the brace faimiliar from a hundred TV shows. I realized that he was going to shoot me now, and that the act wouldn't touch him at all.

  The Goddess folded Her wings around me aind 1 stood waiting for some cue to move. There was a letter addressed to the police— it was on my desk at work along with the
rest of the Khazar material. Maybe this was the way justice would be served.

  Then Ruslan broke stance and stepped backward off the curb— getting ready to run; getting a better angle. I don't know.

  There was an impact, soft and heavy at once, like dropping a stone onto a lawn. The gun in his hand vanished like a magician's trick, leaving me blinking after it.

  That was when I saw the car. It swerved wildly out, and then speeded up. I never saw what color it was. I don't know if the driver was even quite sure he'd hit somebody.

  Ruslan tottered on his feet for a minute, face thrown back into the mist. Long enough for me to believe he was fine and we'd go on to Act Two. Then he fell and rolled into the gutter at my feet, just like in the movies.

  The presence of the Goddess—or just ritually induced euphoria—was gone. Shock made me cold. I knew—good Samaritan, good citizen—that having witnessed a hit-and-run accident, my duty was to summon the authorities.

  Ruslan was moving, trying to get up. I knelt down beside him, but I couldn't have said a word if there was money in it for me.

  140 Bell, Book, and Murder

  His eyelids fluttered. His face was sickly pale, and he didn't seem to be able to move his right arm. There was no blood; only a smear of dirt on the trench coat to indicate impact.

  He opened and closed his mouth, but I didn't hear anything. I leaned closer, too stunned to be afraid. There was a rank fruity smell on his breath, and I remembered all those little bottles in the refrigerator in Queens. Michael Ruslan was a diabetic, and by the time the ambulance came cind took him to Bellevue Emergency and figured that out, it might be too late for insulin to do any good.

  I looked around. No one was paying attention. Nobody in New York pays any attention to anybody else. A lot of people sleep in gutters in New York. Ruslan could be just one more.

  My mind raced with the chill hj^erlexia of shock. I thought about a gray cat, fur brown with blood. Nails through its eyes and its mouth and stomach filled with broken razor blades.