Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Jesus have mercy!” Moni’s voice echoed up and down the stairs.

  The magical net snapped one last time, flickering with pearly light, then burnt itself out and fell dormant. The ripples slowed. The lights returned to normal. The ward was inert, while the big Bulgarian, a veteran of hundreds of smuggling runs and God-knew-how-many murders, was white and bunched with fear. He watched me warily in the swelling silence.

  “That was what we colloquially refer to as a ‘snatcher.’” Scanning the wall for anything I might have missed, I tugged my gloves up and adjusted the cuffs of my jacket. “A spell designed to extract intention and memory. If we’d passed the door, we’d have forgotten what we were here for. If Nicolai asked about the job, we’d have said it was finished, and as far as we’d know, it would be.”

  Moni’s eyes bugged. Slowly, he clambered up towards me from the bottom of the stairs. “So you’re saying that maybe some of the things I remember, I don’t really remember? Like, maybe I didn’t even do ’em?”

  “Perhaps, but spells this powerful are not especially common these days. They’re very expensive to hire for. Now, we move on. Come.”

  I led the way into the hallway, and for a time, we heard nothing but the rhythm of our shoes tapping against marble. I counted the doors out of habit, but I knew which one we needed. The penthouse floor was like a wind tunnel, the pressure of arcana drawing me towards its core.

  The ward scribed into Vochin’s door was a delight, thrumming the Yesodic substrate with a deep bass hum. The hairs on my neck thrilled as we approached, and I paused for a moment of appreciation for such a beautifully wrought piece of work. The one in the landing had been quick and dirty, a first-stop defense. This ward throbbed with power and malevolent, bated heat. It was written to connect with the energy of Mars, which meant it would respond—and act—with some kind of physical force. Explosion, implosion, kinetic burst. No wonder Semyon had run home.

  Moni couldn’t see the lines, but I could see him sense the force in them as the ward rippled warily in my presence. Gooseflesh crept up the big man’s neck and arms, and his fingers tightened on the trigger. “Fuck this place. Feels like them air pockets, huh? You know, like when you’re on a plane.”

  “I’ve never flown.” I held a hand up towards the door, and the ward thrummed sensuously in response. Who on earth had this kind of ability? I could only dream of creating something like this. It was impossible to suppress a twinge of envy, but given what had happened to Surzi and Boris, I’d expected Semyon’s inner layers of defense to be greater than what I myself could cast or dispel. “This is the same kind of ward that killed the men earlier today. Masterful, and the product of a great talent. Very dangerous.”

  “What did it do to them?”

  “It turned them into two buckets of red paint and ground beef,” I replied. It was hard to keep the right tone of voice at this point in the game. “This is a very powerful piece of magic—and I need your help.”

  “Me?” Moni turned to face me, a gleam of avarice finally lighting the spark in his wolfish eyes. No doubt he enjoyed my loss of blat', respect, and the boost to his own authority. His mind was already stoked on whatever he planned to do to Vochin’s wife, and the money he expected to get after the job: twenty thousand, minus Nic’s cut. Even after he greased the Kommandant’s palm for his excellent driving, Moni would have more money than he’d held in his entire life. “What the hell do you think I can do about this shit, shortass?”

  “You believe in God, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes narrowed warily.

  “I need you to stand right in front of the door and pray while I speak the incantation. Belief in the divine is more powerful than normal magic. I need your help and your faith.” I pitched my voice low, gentle and authoritative. “Make sure you don’t touch it, but get as close as you can.”

  Moni nodded, licked his chapped lips, and moved slowly towards the door. The ward geared itself expectantly, poised like a weaving cobra, but Moni did what he was told. He lifted his hands and prayed earnestly. He was scum, but he could definitely follow orders. None of us joined the Organizatsiya because we were nice, pleasant people, but I made sure Nic gave me the worst of the worst for these jobs. Rapists, bullies, pedophiles... My last partner had a thing for teenage girls, fourteen or fifteen years old. My stomach curled at the memory of his banter in the car.

  While Moni mumbled earnestly at the sigil, I drew my most powerful tool from my coat, a tool I have worked on enchanting for most of my professional life: The Wardbreaker, a silver Colt Commander engraved with symbols down the length of its barrel. I checked the silencer was properly aligned, then leveled it at the back of Moni’s head.

  “IAL!” The word of power burst from my lips like the bullet from the gun.

  There was almost no sound: just a small ‘click’, like a Hollywood silenced pistol. The Wardbreaker sounded like a toy, but it didn’t affect the power of the round. Moni’s face exploded in a wet spray against the ward, body jerking in surprise, and the air buckled and warped with a sub-audible screech. The sacrifice flooded the ward with energy, so fiercely and so suddenly that the magic spent itself before the man’s soul snapped its link and closed the Gate. I helped it along with another bullet, shoving as much of my own return force into the spell’s weave as I could. Moni didn’t even hit the floor: the ward sucked the remaining life out of him and compressed his flesh into something the size of a baseball, which landed with the full weight of a two-hundred–pound man and shattered into chunks of super-dense charcoal. A frightened cry came from inside. The job could begin.

  I kicked the door in and stepped in over the mess, into a white-walled hallway decorated with gilt mirrors, marble tables, and bad art. A cat ran from me, silent as it scuttled under the furniture of the sitting room.

  A door slammed from back in the house. I followed the banging and swearing, hugging a wall and circling in. Semyon's clatter turned deadly quiet, and the air of the apartment trembled with his silent terror as I drew closer. I heard suppressed, panicked cursing from inside the master bedroom. Carefully, I reached for the door and tried to focus, to sense for wards. Before I pushed down on the handle and threw the door open, a cloud of bullets sprayed through the flimsy wood and blew white paint chips across my coat and into the hallway with the 'spat-spat-spat' rattle of a machine pistol.

  I returned a single shot through the gaping splintered hole, whirled around from my cover, and put a booted foot through the remains of the door. It took most of the next hit. I rolled across and had a brief vision of Semyon cowering by his bedside table, a gun wobbling in his damp, shaking hand.

  “Stop! Stop! I’ll k-kill you, you crazy white-eyed fuck!” he called out. He sounded high.

  “You know why I’m here, Semyon,” I called back and measured the familiar weight of the Wardbreaker in my hand. Five bullets gone, four left. “Your protection is useless. You can’t stop me.”

  I dove around the corner of the open door. His reply was an auto burst that tore the bedsheets off his bed and sprayed me with shreds of fabric and foam, but Semyon couldn’t aim the barrel straight. The strength was draining out of him. He’d never been a strongman. He wasn’t a street soldier. He was a gemcutter and appraiser, a fussy white-collar who relied on men like Moni and me to do his dirty work and protect him, and I only had to wait until the final bullet and the guilty click of an empty cartridge to roll out from around the bed and aim my gun at his beaky, milk-white face.

  “A-Alexi. God, Molotchik, look look look... you know me, you know me,” he stuttered, still holding the useless gun. “There’s coke, lots of coke. And money. Money under t-the bed. Take it and I’ll g-go. Away. Moscow, Israel. I’ll go and you can t-tell Lev—”

  “That I let a snitch escape to Tel Aviv?” And coke? I frowned. I knew him, but he apparently didn’t know me very well at all. “You betrayed the Organization to the Manelli Family, and they went straight to the FBI. Or did they? What do you know abou
t this, Semyon Milosivich Vochin?”

  “B-business. It was just b-business,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Look, you have to talk to Nic about this, he—”

  “No, Semyon. No, this isn’t about business. Men like us have no business selling out.” I got to my feet, keeping him centered down the sight. “Lev paid for you to come to America and help our people. Not rat us out to the Manellis, and certainly not the police.”

  Semyon said nothing, staring at me with cringing, red-rimmed eyes.

  “He shared his home with you. He found you a job. You prospered, and you owed him your life here. You turned on him for drugs. Not for justice. Not because you thought you were doing the right thing. You turned for drugs and money.”

  Tears leaked down Semyon’s face. “Alexi, I swear they made me take the deal, I didn’t have a choice! Nic—”

  “We always have a choice.” Five years ago, New York had no 'Russian Mafia.' No one knew about us, our Organizatsiya. We were a nebulous, seemingly unconnected collection of businessmen, racketeers, gambling bosses, spooks, bookies, bouncers, and attorneys. We kept an easy peace among ourselves and our community, and the police never connected the dots—until Semyon Vochin. The Manelli family had passed on his information because, like all the old Italian crime families, they had a strict code of honor they broke when it suited them and a policy of never working with the law unless it achieved their ends. “You chose to steal. You chose to stick product straight up your nose. The Manellis can’t order you to turn in your friends, Semyon.”

  “You don’t understand! They—”

  “I understand that five men are dead because of your choices.” A tic rippled across my face. I advanced a little more, carefully. Whatever magic he’d had, it must have been on the car, not on his person, but it paid to be cautious. “So now I am here, the logical conclusion of the bad decisions you have made. You only have one last choice to make. Die well, or die poorly.”

  “Fuck you,” he hissed.

  “Come now. It's a yes or no question, Semyon.” My aim did not waver.

  Semyon’s fingers twitched on the trigger, and before he could throw the pistol at me, I fired. Fully charged with blood, the gun was truly silenced.

  Blip blip. One took him in the chest, the other in the thigh, and with a hoarse shout, he pitched to the carpet.

  Blip. His wordless scream cut into nothingness.

  I found the cases of money under the bed: fifty thousand in cash, mixed hundred- and fifty-dollar bills. It smelled like new Government money. I left the case arranged neatly on the end of the ruined mattress, the rows of bills facing Semyon’s open bedroom door. Let the Feds find it, and wonder.

  As I nosed back through the house, I heard a sound from the den. Neck prickling, I slid along the wall and around the corner, gun leveled.

  The cat who’d run from me was nosing around the lines of coke laid out on the table, sniffing at them with her tail held high. She was a Siamese with pale gray points, lithe and bold. When the cat lost interest, she trotted across to me with a friendly chirp. Before I could think to move away, she pressed herself against my pants leg, purring and meowing.

  “Huh.” I looked down at her, chagrined, and holstered the Wardbreaker. I shouldn’t have let her touch me. The fibers of my trousers would be on her fur now.

  I tried to step back, but she rushed under my feet, making for one of the doorways, where she turned and yowled. Against my better judgment, I stepped around the blood and followed. She led me into a large, clean kitchen and paced around an empty dish of kibble crumbs. I felt a pang of something that might have been guilt.

  “I see.” I found the box and poured until the bowl was full. “I suppose you’ll be going to the pound when the Feds come by, won’t you?”

  The cat looked up at me, and for a moment, I was transfixed. Her eyes were a gray so pale they were white. Just like mine.

  “Mrrrr-raow. Mrrr,” she replied.

  Some hitmen were in the practice of killing animals to ‘warm up’ before moving on to taking contracts. The notion had always disgusted me. Animals can only be victims; marks are targets because of the choices they made. Moni’s choices had led him to die here; Semyon acted similarly, making decision after decision that led him to the moment of his death. His decisions shaped the fate of this cat, a creature with the misfortune to have been under the guardianship of a snitch. She was as stuck with him as I was with the Organizatsiya. This wasn’t her fault.

  I turned to leave but then paused, looking back. The cat had an expression of fatuous contentment, crunching on her kibble. It would take the police days to find the corpse. Would she have enough food and water? What if she ate Semyon’s coke-addled body and got sick?

  No, no, don’t start on this. Damn it, brain. Her welfare was not my responsibility—but I am the son of an alcoholic and a Jew besides that, and the impulse to take responsibility runs deep and true.

  I jerked my shoulders and forced myself to walk away. This time, I made it as far as the doorway before turning. The cat had stopped eating. She was watching me, her white eyes wise and wide, imbued with subtle intelligence. If she was afraid or regretful at the loss of her human companion, she showed no sign.

  “Don’t try and pull a fast one on me.” I folded my arms, wavering in place. “I’m wise to you, cat.”

  The Siamese responded by flopping onto the floor and rolling to her back. When I hesitated, she squinted and began purring, kneading her paws in the air, a sound that intensified when I crossed to her, crouched down, and petted her belly.

  “You’re a manipulative bitch, you know that?” I said. But we both knew I’d lost. Her reply was to grab my hand and groom it, purring all the while. Her slender neck could produce a surprisingly deep sound, and it felt nice: a pleasant rumbling mouthfeel, a sound my brain translated to a delicate sky blue.

  Five minutes later, I was back outside. Nic grunted with satisfaction when I threw open the car door and climbed into the backseat, then again in surprise when he noticed the bundle in my arms.

  “The fuck is that?” he said, turning the engine.

  “Mraaaow,” the cat replied.

  “Her name is Binah.” I rested a gloved hand on her head, flattening her ears. She relaxed under my palm. “Don’t ask.”

  “Uhn.” Nic pulled away with his headlights dark, only turning them on at the end of the street. “You did the job?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Moni?”

  “A non-issue.”

  “Good,” Nic replied. “Piece of shit.”

  We settled into a comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of Binah’s purr and the rustle of fabric as I shucked my outerwear. Nicolai was not known for being chatty. He was an old soldier, an Afghan veteran and a hardened killer. I couldn't say I liked or trusted him, but I respected him. He was my teacher, my superior... and less fortunately, my creditor.

  “So, about my fee,” I said after a time. “I’m waiving it towards Vassily’s prison bribe.”

  “Okay. But it’s not gonna cover it,” Nic replied. “Ten grand to go.”

  The pleasant afterglow faded, and fast. “Ridiculous. I already paid five. How much did it really take to get him out early?”

  “Thirty, plus interest. Five years of interest. That was the deal, kid.”

  The Vochin job was worth twenty. I’d already paid off five. The rest of my money had gone to my father’s old debts, Chernobog take him. My jaw worked, muscles tightening and bunching. “You get one more round of work from me. That’s it.”

  “I got one lined up already. You two can come talk to me about it when he’s back,” Nic said. He didn’t look over at me, steering laconically with one hand. It was the closest he got to sympathy. “Vassily’s out of the can tomorrow, isn’t he?”

  “Today.” My voice sounded tight in my own ears. I petted Binah, who restlessly explored the seat beside me. “Nine thirty.”

  Nic grunted. “Come to Sirens tomorrow. I�
��ll tell you more there and—fuck.”

  I perked up as the tinny sound of Nic’s pager cut through the cabin and tensed as the car listed to one side of the road when he pulled it off his belt and read it.

  “Fuck,” he said again. “Motherfucking piece of shit.”

  “Pardon?”

  Nic threw the pager back to me and stomped the accelerator, pitching me and the cat against the door as he strove to make the exit. I somehow caught it as the car righted and held it to the light. The code was a string of symbols: T1RH#4C.

  T was for trup, the Russian word for corpse, and the number showed how many bodies. The location, RH#4, stood for Site #4 in Red Hook: the AEROMOR shipping yard. The last letter in the paging code showed the nature of the problem. ‘C’ stood for cherny, 'black'—but to me, raised bilingual in Brooklyn, the C was for Crisis

  Chapter 2

  The greasy violet taint of decay carried on the wind and coated the back of my throat before we’d stopped the car. AEROMOR was our biggest cover business, and Dockyard Number 4 was normally like every other unremarkable shipping yard in Red Hook. Tonight, the old docks were absolutely lifeless. It smelled like a charnel ground.

  I left Binah to nap in the car. Lev and his posse were already waiting for us next to the guardhouse. The Avtoritet of Brighton Beach was nearly the spitting image of Bill Gates: a deceptively soft-looking man with an earnest pudding face and a receding hairline. He had weird, calm eyes, level and lightless, the gray-tinted green of the sea at dawn, and waited to receive us like a dignified heron in long sleeves and light slacks, unbothered by the heat. He was flanked by Vanya, a corpulent pufferfish of a man, and his favorite bodyguard, Mikhail. Most of the Yaroshenko men were Ukrainian and proud of the fact. Mikhail was a katsap, Russian, a sleek and dangerous Doberman in human skin. He glared at me as we approached, but like most men in the Organizatsiya, he did not ever meet my eyes.

  “Alexi, Nic. Good of you to join us.” Lev was terser than usual, his reedy voice stiff and halting. “Vanya’s man is bringing a truck to clear up the mess, but I wanted both of you to have a look before he arrives.”