Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll kiss you your way.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The ounce of heroin in my coat pocket would buy me the Rabbi’s secrets—that is, if he didn’t still hold a grudge over that whole Dybbuk thing.

  I got out of the cab on Madison Street near the Wabash L line subway station and started the four-block walk to the Chicago Loop Synagogue. Harel had grudgingly agreed to meet me there this morning. It had taken the promise of the smack and my guarantee that I wasn’t hanging around very long after that to coax him out.

  It was very bright day, the sky was clear. I had thought it was cold in Virginia, but Chicago slapped me around and disabused me of that notion. It was still at least a month away from anything resembling spring, regardless of what the calendar said.

  The trip from Covington had been uneventful. Jimmie had been good to his word, and his friend, a fellow trucker named Guthrie, had let me ride along while he drove a load of steel up to Illinois. Guthrie, a tall black man in his sixties, who seemed to have been born with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth, was also a damn good singer. He had played guitar and sung backup on a few tours with Buck Owens in ’71, and we ended up knowing a few of the same old folks in the business. We sang a lot of old country songs, and by the time we rolled into Chicago, we were discussing names for the band.

  I turned onto Clark Street, headed south. I loved this town. It was a wilderness of stone, glass, and light; there were dangerous predators on the street, in the halls of political power, in the markets. If you weren’t on your A game, this city would eat you alive, feetfirst, so it could watch your expression. Don’t get me wrong, New York will try to kill you if you don’t respect her, but Chicago does it with a pipe wrench and the unabashed exuberance of a Teamster working over a scab.

  The Loop Synagogue was next to a Wendy’s. It was a beautiful building—the architecture was modern, sandwiched between older styles. There was a glass-enclosed lobby, and most of the façade was taken up by windows. A sculpture of twisted metal hands open in welcome. Behind the hands was a wall of words of love and faith carved in bas relief. The sculpture greeted me above the entrance. I liked it. It reminded me a little of magic itself—hands and words tied to divinity. It seemed a fitting greeting in a place where the ineffable spirit of God roamed.

  I entered but didn’t bother with the traditional donning of the kippah, or taking one of the siddurim, or prayer books, from the shelf next to the entrance to the Prayer Hall proper. Given what I was here about and who I was meeting, it seemed kind of hypocritical to do all that.

  It was too hot inside the synagogue; someone had pumped up the heat to compensate for the cold outside. Harel was pacing near the huge stained-glass mural that took up most of the eastern wall of the synagogue, near the bimah, the platform where the service was conducted.

  Harel Ettinger was about ten years younger than me, in his midthirties, but you’d be hard-pressed to realize it. Even as ragged as I looked, the years of shooting up had not been kind to him at all. He had dark circles under his hollow, haunted brown eyes, and his complexion bore the pale, waxy look of smack-chic. Harel was thin when Boj and I met him in ’96 and skinny the last time I saw him six years ago; now he was cadaverous. His hair was black, sprinkled with white, cut short, and shaved tight on the sides; the top was a mop of dark curls. He sported a goatee and was wearing a dingy-looking trench coat, a gray collared shirt with a very fine purple pinstripe, black jeans, and leather shoes. It suddenly struck me by the way he was dressed how much he was the son of my and Boj’s influence. We had helped shape Harel into the man he became. That realization made me sadder. Harel was known as “the Rabbi” on the streets of Chicago and in the Life, though he had been kicked out of rabbinical school in 2005, near the end of his studies.

  “About damned time,” Harel said. “You’re late. You got the shit?”

  “Nice,” I said, looking around. “You want to shoot up in here too? You can cook it up right there on the bimah.”

  “Like you haven’t done worse, Ballard.”

  He had me there. I gave him a casual handshake, which he returned with a scowl. I palmed and passed him the smack, which was in a small, taped plastic baggie. Instead of pocketing it, he cradled it like you might hold the last shard of your soul. Reluctantly, he slipped it in his pocket. An old Hasidic man paused from tutoring a young bespectacled boy to glare at Harel and me.

  “You two will have plenty of quality time together soon enough,” I said. “How you been, kid?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Harel said. “Like you fucking care, Ballard. What do you want?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “And true. I gave up giving a shit about you when you tried to shake down Ellie Jackson’s family after we got rid of that fucking Dybbuk.”

  I had told myself that if I wanted this to work, I needed to not bring up the last time Harel and I worked together. We had managed to cast out a powerful evil spirit of an old, dead Jewish mobster, which had possessed a little nine-year-old girl whose family lived in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project here in Chicago.

  I had wanted to play this cool, but every time I saw Harel, the little bastard pissed me off. It was one of the reasons the so-called Occult Rat Pack of me, Harel, and Boj had split up.

  “You threatened to put the damn thing back in their little girl if they didn’t pay you ten thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Pay us. They had it,” Harel said, raising his voice. “Bunch of schwarze drug dealers, they could afford it. I’ve seen you shake people down plenty of times, Laytham, poorer than them. Remember that time with the nun when you—”

  “Enough,” I said. “You remember how this went down last time? You remember how it ended for you? Well, I’ve gotten stronger, and unless you really want to see how strong, I suggest you drop this shit right now before that fucking mouth of yours talks you right out of some work.”

  Harel shut up. The old man was obviously irritated. He was whispering to the little boy and trying as hard as he could to ignore us.

  “You have a job for me,” Harel said. “I can put aside whatever for coin of the realm, Ballard, even your bullshit.”

  “Regardless of what I think of you personally, Harel,” I said, “you are the best damn kabbalist and summoner in the Life. I know that, and you damn sure know it. I’ve been on a caper for a few months now, and at every turn I am getting stonewalled and jacked by summoned entities.”

  Harel narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

  “I need countermeasures and intel,” I said. “Someone on your side of the street has been screwing with me. You know a summoner goes by the handle Memitim?”

  “No,” Harel said.

  “I hoped you did,” I said. “The name roughly translates to ‘death angel’ in Hebrew.”

  “Actually, it’s mĕmītǐm,” Harel said. “It means an angel that rains destruction on those the guardian angels no longer protect.”

  “Sure he couldn’t be an old pupil of yours, or a fellow kabbalist?” I asked.

  Harel shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, the guy is a contract killer,” I said. “Specializes in hard targets, and targets in the Life. He’s apparently done a little work for the Russians and the Sicilians.”

  “So what you want from me?” Harel said.

  “I want you to help me find him, get all the info I can on him and his clients, and keep him off my back while I finish this job.”

  “And what’s in it for me?” he said.

  “This job I’m doing,” I said, “it’s for Boj. He’s dying. He sent me after the man who killed his wife, who killed Mita.”

  Harel shrugged. “And I give a shit why?”

  Back in the day, Boj was the cannon. When shit was too fucking powerful or too stubborn or evil to fall down when Harel and I threw words at it, Boj waded in with whatever weapon he could find and balls the size of Jupiter. He saved both of us more times than I could count and nearly died
doing it as many times. Boj also took Harel under his wing—Harel was his stupid, naïve little brother. They had a lot of laughs together. Boj loved Harel as much as he was capable of loving anything after Slorzack carved out his heart by killing Mita.

  This had been the test. I thought if there was anything that might bring Harel back to himself, it would be invoking Boj. I was wrong. The Harel I knew was dead and gone. I was talking to a hungry ghost.

  The anger welled up in me. Anger at Harel for being too weak and too cowardly to keep the poison from eating his soul, anger at my part in all of it, and anger for the loss, the betrayal of someone who had been a treasure in this world and now was just debris.

  I grabbed the little bastard by the lapels of his overcoat and forced him back until he crashed into the Ark. The old Hasid was up, bellowing at me in angry Hebrew. I spun and glared at him with crazy goyish eyes and jabbed a finger in his direction like a gun. The old man blanched and clutched his chest. The boy took the old man’s hand and pulled him toward the front doors of the temple.

  I turned my attentions back to Harel, still crushed against the cabinet that held the Torah scrolls.

  “Now, that’s more like the old Ballard I know.” Harel sneered.

  “You listen to me, you little piece of garbage,” I snarled in his face. I could feel the flush of genuine anger on my skin. “I don’t care how badass a kabbalist you are, were, ’cause I’m the mojo-murder-man, motherfucker. I can turn your skin inside out; I can burn your soul to ash before you were ever born. I can make it feel like you are jonesing for-fucking-ever, asshole. Do you get me, you little worm? I can and I will. You really want to test your powers against mine again? Do you?”

  “No,” Harel said, full of sullen fear.

  “Good answer,” I said, as I dragged him toward the lobby. “Now, I need that information in the next few days. Everything about this summoner hit man and what he was doing and who he was doing it with, plus anything about a Dusan Slorzack. You ever hear of him?

  “No,” Harel said. “Who … who is he?”

  “The man who fucking murdered Mita,” I said. “How about James Berman? You ever hear of him? I want whatever you can dig up on him too. They’re all up to their fucking eyeballs in this shit.”

  “James who?” Harel said. He was sweating hard and cold now.

  “Berman, Wall Street suit. Got murdered a few months ago. He was Illuminati—the Inner Cabal of the Five Boroughs.”

  Even in his present state, Harel snorted. “Fucking occult Kiwanis club. Posers.”

  “Flyweight, I know,” I said, “but he was tied up in some much deeper shit, and I need to know what they were all up into and how it connects to this Memitim contract killer. I’m gonna pull it all out by the roots, and you are going to help me.” I gave him the number he could reach me at. “Forty-eight hours,” I said. “If I don’t get it, then I swear to fucking God I will rain down on your ass. Now go cook up your shit, Harel; you’re no fucking good to anyone straight anymore.”

  I let him go, and he slid away from me. His eyes were red coals of hatred.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll get you something in forty-eight,” Harel said. “No problem, pal. Just like the good old days, huh?”

  He glared at me and staggered up the aisle toward the lobby doors and the bright outside.

  “Whatever happened to you, Ballard?” he shouted as he pushed open the doors. “Lost your fucking sense of humor. It was your only redeeming quality. You used to be a riot at funerals.”

  The doors let in a gust of cold wind, like the breath of God, and then slammed shut in Harel’s wake.

  “Too many caskets these days, asshole. Too many. And now I have one more.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I made my way to the hotel. I was staying at a dive off East Garfield in Washington Park. I bought another cloned cell phone off a guy on the street and used it to call Grinner’s swept contact line.

  “We’re go as of thirteen hundred hours today,” I said. “Let me know what comes back.”

  I waited. I drank. I smoked.

  I kept remembering us the way we had been then and how the meat grinder had made us who we were now. Harel had been a bright-eyed young rabbinical student with a taste for the ugly side of the occult street, full of the fire and passion. He wanted so bad to have it all. He wanted to traffic in the forbidden but still help people. He was our light, but he yearned so for the darkness. Boj was the man, sharp as a razor, handsome, tactically brilliant, deadly, and so dead inside. He was beginning his slow courtship of oblivion through hypodermic communion. Not so lost in his pain yet that he had forgotten where the road was. His orbit had only started to decay. And me … I was a little stupider, a lot more arrogant. I was going to be the greatest wizard in the history of this world or any other—an occult rock star. I was willing to pay the price for knowledge, for power, and most of all for respect and awe—any price. I burned the taper of my soul at both ends and laughed while I did it. Okay, I guess I was a lot stupider.

  When I called the hospice in New York, I was told Boj was going. He had slipped into and out of consciousness for the last several days.

  “Can you give me any idea of how long he’s got?” I asked the nurse. Her name was Rae, and she had talked to me a few times before when I had called.

  “Three days, maybe a week. Anything you’d like me to pass along if he comes to again?” She paused and covered the receiver as she barked orders at a wandering patient to get back in his room.

  “Yeah, you tell him the redneck said he’s close and he needs to hang on, unless he doesn’t have the guts to do that. Be sure you tell him just like that, okay, darlin’?”

  Rae chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve gotten to know the tough little SOB. That should do the trick.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I’ll be there by the end of the week. Thanks, Rae.”

  We hung up.

  I was running out of time. If this plan didn’t work, I was done, and so was Boj. It all came down to Harel. Part of me hoped he didn’t let me down again, but another part of me secretly hoped he would.

  I missed the Harel I met before his soul had been scorched away, leaving something blackened and coarse in its place.

  In ’96, a thing was killing young men in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods. Without a shy, brilliant young rabbinical student named Harel Ettinger, Boj and I would never have found it, never stopped it. All Harel had wanted was the chance to keep helping us, to help more people, fight more monsters, and maybe take a little walk on the wild side of the Life.

  That good man never came back. “Those who battle monsters” and all that …

  I should have been preparing a defense for what I suspected would come next. I should not have been getting shit-faced drunk and listening to the gunfire down the street, while the idiot TV looped static, and the tiny blown-out speaker on the clock radio played “This Night” by Black Lab and I knew every word.

  I took another drag on the bottle of tequila, lit another cigarette, and waited. It felt like a wake. Eventually, it didn’t feel like anything anymore.

  * * *

  The bloodred numerals of the clock burned 3:15 A.M. into the stale, dark air of the hotel room when the cell phone rang. It had taken thirty hours, a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of tequila, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark for the call to come.

  I rolled over in the bed and answered the phone. “Yeah?”

  There was a wet sound on the line, coughing, then Harel’s rasping whisper.

  “You bastard,” Harel gurgled. “You set me up. I should have known better than to trust you, you son of a bitch. Always looking out for yourself.”

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Fuck you!” Harel screamed into the phone. There was a pause, more hacking, wet gurgling, and the sounds of great physical exertion by very damaged meat. The sound was sticky.

  “I’m … ah … ah, old house in West Garfield Park. Oh, God, it hurts!” Harel said. “Turned on me, son
of bitch turned on me. North … north of … Eisenhower Expressway.”

  “Where, Harel?” I asked.

  More uncontrollable phlegmy coughing from the phone. I was up, the lamp was on, and I was fumbling for my boots.

  “Four thousand block West Washington,” he rasped. “Boarded-up house … look for the Mask of Melchom drawn on the door…”

  “Okay, I’m on my way.”

  There was a barely intelligible barrage of profanity, and then the line went dead.

  * * *

  It took twenty minutes to reach him by cab. I threw a wad of crumpled bills at the cabbie and sprinted down the dark corridor of rotting houses and decaying concrete as he shouted after me to wait. My breath was pale smoke in the cold, wet night. My heart was thudding dully in my chest. I was still drunk, and I felt thick and stuffed with dirty rags. The cabbie shouted, called me a stupid peckerwood, and peeled off. Only a fool attracted attention in this neighborhood in the dead of the night.

  Across town there were monuments of shimmering steel, venerable marble, and mirrored glass. Lakeview, Edgewater, Hyde Park, lit up like Heaven, guarded by blue-vested garbed knights ready to turn back the unwelcome with traffic stops and steel batons. In the land of many mansions, the homes of those who do, who have, in the Chicago you saw in the movies, on TV, decent folk were asleep in their beds, behind solid walls and protected by electronic sentinels. Their bank accounts were positive and their kitchens were full of food. Their bills were paid up, barely, so they had lights and heat and water and all the things those in God’s country should have. They were anointed by the gods of credit and commerce: car payments, cell phone payments, mortgage, tuition bills, taxes. They were hardwired into the fabric of society. All it cost them was a small sliver of their souls, their freedom, paid in easy monthly installments.

  But here, in places like West Garfield, it was the longest hour of the night. Here it was shadowed lots choked with weeds and crack vials, oil stains on asphalt, and distant gunfire, distant sirens. Here you worked as much, as many places, as you could; here you fought a constant war between a thin check and a thick stack of bills. A struggle between hunger and self-respect, bus routes, sick children with no magic card to grant them access to the kingdom to be healed. Here it was a war to convince your kids it was better to work yourself into an early coffin that they ended up buying for your ass on credit, as opposed to the fool’s gold of cash in one hand, a gun in the other. Do the math of how little you actually make after you factor in the jail time and short life expectancy.