“If he can only possess blood relatives, why would he allow two of his host bodies to be in the same place?” the Rider countered. “Why would he risk it?”
“Who can know a mind as twisted as Adon’s? From the events you described he surely did not intend to sacrifice both bodies indeed, if he even intended to lose one. The Quechan tracker’s bullet was a stroke of luck for us. Adon is without a body until he can locate another host.”
“Anyone trained by the Sons of The Essenes has the power to possess any individual. Jacobi hopped from body to body at Camp Eckfeldt,” Kabede said.
“Yes but we’re talking about sustained total possession for a period of years—decades,” Faustus explained. “For the entire time Adon was enrolled in the Sons of The Essenes, he was Auspitz. The Rider said Auspitz couldn’t even remember the last twenty years clearly. Neither you or the Rider or this Jacobi fellow could maintain possession for as long as a day without the aide of my apparition booth. It’s because your spirits are naturally tied to your physical forms. Adon has been without a physical form for thousands of years. Imagine the willpower it takes to keep another soul buried and unable to use its own body for so long.”
“In the meantime, two innocent men are dead,” the Rider said grimly.
“How do we know they were innocent?” Kabede suggested. “Couldn’t they have been knowing collaborators?”
“Auspitz wasn’t,” the Rider said with certainty. “I don’t know about Laird. He was apparently a cruel man, but I’m not sure he knew about Adon any more than Auspitz did.”
“It may be that he has willing hosts,” Faustus said. “But it would probably be safer for him if his hosts were ignorant of their lineage. Some might take steps to rid themselves of him.”
“That’s true,” said the Rider.
“Well,” said Faustus. “This is all conjecture until we have definite proof, but it might be something to keep an eye out for.”
“What else did you want to discuss?” the Rider asked.
Faustus rose and knocked his pipe bowl into a brass ashtray shaped like a clamshell.
He went to the back door of the vardo and pushed it open.
The Rider’s pale onager was dozing on its feet, tethered to the back.
“This is no ordinary animal,” Faustus said, when the three of them were out in the hot sun and surrounding the beast.
“I’ve often thought that,” the Rider admitted. “I’ve conducted experiments on it. I’ve looked through the lenses, I’ve held talismans to its hide. They’ve never revealed anything. It’s just an animal.”
“Rider, it crossed the desert alone, located the two of us and led us to you,” Kabede said.
“Actually, it anticipated where you would be,” said Faustus.
“If you’ve got any ideas about it I haven’t, you’re welcome to try them out,” the Rider said.
“It’s in spry condition for its age, wouldn’t you say?” Faustus said, running his hand along the bristly neck.
“I don’t actually know how old it is,” the Rider said. “It’s about the same physically as when I bought it.”
“It is,” said Faustus, pulling back its lips and examining its teeth. “This breed tends to live about twenty or thirty years, and considering all it’s been through…it has a strange coloring too. Nearly white. I’ve never seen one this color.”
“I’m at a loss,” the Rider said. “He’s a good companion. I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Or a gift onager?” Faustus smiled. He patted the animal’s shoulder and it brushed its muzzle against him. “There there, Galjâ.”
“Galjâ?” the Rider asked.
“Fifteen years and you’ve never named the poor beast. I had to call him something,” said Faustus. “It means bright. I’ll get the feed,” he said, and went back into the wagon.
The Rider frowned and rubbed the animal’s shoulder. Funny how he had never named his most constant companion. He was a little disappointed the old man had jumped the gun on him.
“Galjâ …I would’ve got around to it,” he muttered.
“Now, Rider, there is something we must discuss,” said Kabede, stroking the animal’s back between them. “Will this old man go with us to Tombstone, or will we part ways?”
“You haven’t said much about all this,” said the Rider, meaning his encounter with Adon and their ruminations on his nature. “Are you thinking that you shouldn’t question fairy tales?”
“I believe all you have said,” Kabede said.
“But not all that he says.”
“Not all.”
“Some?”
“I trust Galjâ implicitly,” Kabede said, his dark face breaking into a blazing white grin.
“And Galjâ trusts him,” the Rider smiled back.
Kabede shook his head and laughed.
“It seems like madness. But what now? Will we tell him of the scroll?”
“If he goes with us, I guess we have to.”
“Alright, but let us talk to your man first.”
“Agreed,” the Rider said.
“Rider, while I was in Tombstone…” he paused, frowning. “I searched. There are Jews here, but no Temple. There was no Torah to be found.”
“Man plans, HaShem laughs,” said the Rider. “There’s something I have to tell you. When I was in the dream world, as I told you, Adon was able to pluck things from my mind. I couldn’t resist. He knows about the Balankab Enclave now. And the name of it.”
Kabede could only stare.
“The Lord protect them,” he murmured, turning away.
The first thing they saw on the way down into Tombstone was placard after placard of advertisements on the fence along the road. ‘Go To Bangley and Schlagenstein’s. They Are The Bosses, You Bet!’ ‘The Oriental Saloon: Cool Drinks, Faro, Poker, Roulette.’ ‘The Lap of Luxury: The Grand Hotel.’ This was a mining town, silver being the preferred ore. A giant water tower with a faded, chipped, and unreadable advertisement rose above the numerous miners’ humble abodes.
A city ordinance sign demanding they check their firearms induced the Rider to unlimber his Volcanic and stow it away inside. Kabede and Faustus had already left their rifles in the hutch.
The place had grown in the years since he’d passed through. Like Las Vegas, the impermanent structures were giving way to two story buildings of wood and brick, both adobe and red. A big stamp mill like the one in Tip Top was going now, a constant dull roar. Some shafts were sunk even in the empty lots among the buildings, and filthy miners crawled in and out like busy ants.
The miner’s hovels gave way to the Mexican quarter, and moving east down Fremont Street they passed Hoptown, the Chinese quarter.
The camels began to cause a commotion. Horses reared at the site of them, and filthy men stopped in the street to point and remark at the whole garish procession of the blue and gold gypsy wagon and its camel team.
“I think we’re making too grand an entrance,” Kabede observed.
“There’s a livery just ahead,” said Faustus.
Passing the Ah Lung Grocery, they saw a plump and powdered, elegant Chinese woman in red patterned silks and jewels, emerge, as out of place and overbearing as visiting royalty amid the dingy squalor that pervaded the rest of the quarter. She was flanked by a pair of grim looking highbinders in long black changshan, hatchets dangling just below the hems of their shirts in circumvention of Tombstone’s strict no firearms ordinance.
She regarded them with open distaste as they passed, and her painted eyes took in each of them in turn, then went to the garish wagon and the animals. The Rider watched her carefully cultivated eyebrows arch.
Faustus turned away and hunched his shoulders, pulling down the narrow brim of his tall hat as best he could.
The Rider was amused. Who did he intend to hide from in the driver’s seat of this ostentatious, blue painted rig?
“Do you know her?” the Rider asked.
“I had some dealin
gs with her the last time I was here,” Faustus said, “and I wouldn’t care to again.”
“Who is she?” Kabede asked.
“China Mary. She ostensibly runs everything in this quarter for the Six Companies,” Faustus explained. “The Chinese Benevolence Association. But she handles a lot of things they don’t approve of officially. Opium, prostitutes…no Chinaman works in Tombstone without going through her or her husband.”
Traffic was grinding to a halt around the vardo, and as they inched towards the corner, two important looking armed men in dark suits with badges shining on their lapels came stomping down the boardwalk, and China Mary turned her attention to the newcomers. She pursed her bowed lips, looking annoyed.
The Rider recognized the taller of the two men, and something within his chest shrank a little at the sight of him.
It was Johnny Behan, Josephine Marcus’ no good paramour, whom he’d last seen running a saloon in Tip Top. She had said he’d planned to run for sheriff. Now he had a lawman’s badge to bluster behind. How was it possible that such a lowlife character could rise to such a position?
He didn’t expect much less from a place like Tombstone, but he did expect more from Josephine Marcus. He wondered if they were still together.
A heated exchange began between Behan and China Mary as the highbinders and the deputies postured behind their respective chiefs, but the traffic got to moving again and they swung into the Tombstone Livery and Feed Yard.
After a brief discussion between Faustus and the yardmaster, who was reluctant to accept the camels, they found themselves back on Fremont.
Behan and China Mary had moved their argument indoors.
“Will your wagon be safe here?” Kabede wondered, looking over his shoulder, with a little anxiety.
The Rider was impressed. In a show of trust, he had left the Rod of Aaron behind in the wagon, but the scroll was still in its case on his shoulder.
“No force on earth can break into her if I don’t want them to,” Faustus assured them.
“If that’s so, why’d you make Dick stay behind in Nacozari to watch it?” the Rider asked.
“Because he would’ve got in the way,” Faustus said, dusting the trail from his coat with a brush from his pocket. “Speaking of Mister Belden, where is he?”
“Just up the street here,” Kabede said.
He led them across Third Street to a lodging house which doubled as Fly’s Photography Gallery (C.S. Fly Prop) in the back.
Someone was apparently moving out, and they had to step aside for a pair of Chinese laborers bearing a trunk, before ducking in out of the heat themselves.
Kabede stopped outside.
“He’s in the last room on the left.”
The Rider paused to tell him to come, then thought better of it, remembering where they were, and went inside with Faustus.
He bumped directly into Josephine Marcus. Her hair was done up much neater than the first time they’d met, as if in the two year interim she had learned a great deal more about maintaining her appearance. Her dress was finer too, though made for traveling. She had a carpetbag in her fist.
He was struck by the sight of her, just as the first time. She was still a lovely young woman. Where Nehema’s charms had been obvious and maybe a bit overt, Josephine’s were reserved and all the more winsome. She had been a whore, yes. But she was a whore no longer.
“Excuse me,” she said, not looking at him, when he didn’t immediately move aside.
“Sadie,” he said. “It’s me.”
She looked up, but her dark eyes were angry and narrow, her cheeks flushed.
“I’m sure you have me mistaken for somebody else, sir,” she said firmly between her teeth.
Of course. She didn’t go by Sadie anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking off his hat like a proper Gentile gentleman. “I never thought Sadie was much of a name for a girl from South of The Slot anyway.”
Her neat, trimmed eyebrows met for a moment and her eyes looked on him anew. Her pinched lips drew into an unbelieving smile, bright and heartbreaking.
“Rider?”
“No,” he grinned back, shaking his head. “Manasseh, remember?”
She laughed and drew him in for a familiar embrace that made his ears color as he stooped down to receive it. By law he was tainted now, and would need immersion in a mikvah, but somehow he didn’t care.
It barely lasted at all before she parted from him, still smiling, oblivious to his conflicted reaction, to the tingling in him in every place where they had met.
“You look so different,” she exclaimed.
“Don’t remind me,” he said, rubbing his chin.
“No, you look…quite handsome,” she said, touching his arm. “I mean it. But I didn’t recognize you at all without your payot and beard. What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Which I’ll leave you to,” Faustus said, clearing his throat. “Please excuse me, ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his topper and shrugging down the back hall towards Belden’s room.
There was a moment of silent awkwardness at the old man’s departure where the two of them simply stared at each other.
“I…received a letter for you from a gentleman staying at the Grand,” she said. “And some friends of yours called on me. I gave it to them. I hope that was alright.”
“It was,” said the Rider. “Please say I didn’t impose.”
“No trouble at all.” She paused again, unsure of what to say.
The Rider cringed inwardly. Whatever feeling had been there when they had last parted was gone, at least in her. He hoped it wasn’t Behan again. He knew he should go, but he suddenly needed to hear her for awhile, to see her a bit before she was gone for good.
The movers returned and went past them, darting into an open doorway.
“How’s Hetta and her son?”
“Oh fine,” she said. “Fine. She set herself up as a cleaning lady for a family in Tucson, and she writes that her son is enrolled in school there. They’re both doing fine.”
The movers emerged from the room, two with crates and one with a desk lamp.
“Please be careful with that,” she exhorted as they passed. “It’s for Doctor Goodfellow’s wife.”
The mover nodded and went on.
“You’re moving out,” the Rider observed lamely.
“Yes. I’m leaving Tombstone.”
“You are?” he was happy and sad at the same time. If Behan was sheriff, he wasn’t going anywhere, at least.
“Back to California.”
“Alone?”
She took his meaning.
“No,” she said.
“You believe in angels again,” he said, smiling thinly.
“Thanks to you, yes.”
“Not just me.”
“No.”
“He’s a good man?”
“I believe he is, yes,” she said. “A just man. A step up for me, after just men.” She smirked a little at her small joke.
“Then you’ll be happy.”
“And you?”
He kept smiling, but he moved to the side of the hall, to let her walk by.
“It was good to see you again.”
“Goodbye, Manasseh.” She reached out and touched his hand. It was not an unkind gesture, but its formality cut him nonetheless. “Thank you.”
“Goodbye, Josie,” he said, replacing his hat.
She walked off down the hall.
This time he did not watch her go.
There was a pain in his chest he hadn’t expected. A foolish pain. He felt like a fool just for feeling it. Had he thought the gold he had given her to start anew had been some kind of investment? Had he thought somehow when all of this was over she would be at the end of it, waiting for him? She didn’t owe him a thing. She was off to lead a normal life. But he couldn’t help feeling she embodied for him what he might never have himself.
He wasn’t here
to see her. He was here to learn secrets written down by enemies in a dead language.
Alright, so time to be about it.
Faustus came up the hall with Belden, who clapped his hands on the Rider’s shoulders when they saw each other.
“Good to see you, Joe,” Belden said, grinning. Much of his beard and hair was back now, and he had gotten rid of the remains of his uniform, traded it in for a clean white shirt and vest, a new hat, and some jeans. He had been drinking, though it was not yet noon.
“You look like shit,” he said, slapping the Rider’s cheek affectionately. “Should’ve kept your beard.” They stared at each other for a second. “Hell, the curls too.”
“Good to see you too, Dick.”
They passed city hall where a couple representatives of the temperance union were vying for attention with some members of the Anti-Chinese League for the attention of the shaded windows of the brick edifice.
“Just where are we going?” Faustus asked.
Kabede and the Rider looked at each other.
“We have an appointment to keep while we’re in town,” was all the Rider said.
A stout man in a paper collar shoved a pamphlet at Belden as he passed. He scanned it for a few steps, chuckled, balled it up, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Jesus pities a drunkard,” the man called after him.
“If the Lord hated drinkin’ he wouldn’t have turned water to wine,” Belden retorted over his shoulder.
“Dick,” said the Rider, “where’ve you been getting the money for board?” He wanted to say drink, but the room in front of the photography studio came to mind and spared him the more delicate interrogative.
“I’ve been doing odd jobs for a fella named Lepsy, runs a freight company doing a job down on Toughnut. Back breaking work, I’ll tell you, but once the little cash me and Kabede had between us ran out, I figured any port in a storm.”
“I intended to work with him,” said Kabede, “but then the dream came. I asked him to keep an eye on the men in the hotel and I left to find you.”
“What do you do?” the Rider asked.
“Nothing a mule couldn’t. Just loading barrels they take out of a shaft they just sank behind Russ House. Think it’s silver. I get three fifty every eight hours, and there’s a big turnaround. Shifts day and night.”
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 38
