Petty Magic (6 page)

The Mission

8.

The wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there, too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.

—W. B. Yeats, “The Sorcerers”

W
E HAVE
our own language, too, which we use mostly for the recitation of spells. Latin, Greek, Aramaic: all are playpen chatter compared to the words we use in secret. Our tongue is so old it doesn’t have a name for itself, which is why they say it was the language spoken in the Garden.

It’s also the language we speak whenever there’s an international gathering of beldames. I know most European languages, of course, but back in the day we used it whenever we found ourselves in a place where the walls had ears. You must know there were
loads
of us in secret service.

They say certain personality types are naturally attracted to, and suited for, a life of espionage. Those who enter into it for material gain usually die without a farthing, though they do tend to outlast the conflicts they exploit—and that, sad to say, can’t be said for the majority of their nobler colleagues. After all, the most infamous were by definition the most inept; folks tend to forget that Mata Hari met her end before a French firing squad. Jonah was one of the best, and now hardly anyone remembers him but me.

We are deviant, naturally deceitful. Lies come as easily as breathing, though not by some innate pathological defect—it’s just that our nature necessitates it. No surprise, then, that so many beldames chose the life I did. We hid refugees and resistance members in our warrens and memorized military dispatches in a single glance, cracked safes with the tap of a finger and garbled enemy radio signals with a flick of the tongue. We spread black propaganda far more quickly than anyone from Morale Ops could have done, and made it all the more convincing. As I say, we couldn’t change what fate had already decided, but that distinction grew so nebulous that on plenty of occasions we wound up squandering our efforts. We accomplished so much and berated ourselves for not doing more. Isn’t it always the way?

Morven wasn’t going back into nursing either. She scored off the charts on a series of cryptography exams and was sent to Arlington Hall early on in the war. (It was around that time she found our apartment in Cat’s Hollow, though it would be years before we could actually live there.) The Signal Intelligence Service very magnanimously lent Morven to MI6, and they kept her there until V-day. She “broke”—translated, that is—plenty of codes from other beldames behind the lines, and at the end of the war they made her a member of the Order of the British Empire. She still keeps the medal in a box on her bedside table.

Yes, sir, the Harbingers pulled their weight. Uncle Heck and Uncle Hy were two of the most celebrated pilots in the U.S. Air Force; they volunteered for missions that seemed tantamount to suicide and came home again without so much as a ding in the chrome. Together they flew a B-26 Marauder all over Europe, yet the plane never made a blip on an enemy radar screen before it reached its target; the only evidence of its presence was a shadow gliding over wide green pastures in the moonlight. One could take over if the other ran low on oomph. They called them the “Immortal Duo.” They really did seem invincible back then.

In many ways espionage was even more frustrating than nursing. You had very little idea how your own bit would be of value, because you were never meant to know too much in case you were captured. No matter how trivial the errand, you trusted it mattered a great deal in the grander scheme, and so you put everything you had into fulfilling it safely. Get your hands dirty without leaving a smudge: that was the trick. Every detail was crucial, no matter how minute, for a man’s life was forfeit if an SS officer noticed his buttons were sewn parallel instead of crosswise. And if your luck ran out, you had to destroy the evidence and be prepared to die at your own hand. But I had all my oomph in those days—before there was a hide to slough—so there was little for me to fear in that regard at least.

As I say, foreign languages are a cinch for the likes of us. Still, I thought I might like to live in Berlin for a while, get fluent and such. I was there over twenty years but it passed like a blink: by day I studied this and that at the
Universität
, and for my living I read palms and tarot cards in a fusty parlor teeming with aspidistra; by night I drank pink champagne with kohl-eyed nancies in sequined chemises. The Romanisches Café was the best spot, the only spot. I’d drink lager by the quart before supper and tip a dainty bottle of Underberg at the finish—aids in the digestion, you know.

There was little I
didn’t
do and few I didn’t meet. I even ran with the socialist crowd from time to time, though I could only take their company in limited doses; they were angry men who deprived themselves of meat and drink and sex, rather like monks who’d lost their religion. The circus clowns weren’t much better—they were so sarcastic they could exhaust anyone who made an effort to engage them. They would stare at you over their empty beer steins, yellow stains under the arms of their undershirts, traces of greasepaint still ringing their nose and eyes, and tell you stories of their cheerless childhoods.

But oh, the acrobats! I tell you, making love to an acrobat is a singular experience. Sarrasani was Europe’s finest circus and Dmitri Nesterov—one of the aforementioned acrobats—its finest performer. I used to turn myself into a pigeon and roost on a tent pole so I could watch him perform every night high above the sword eaters and flame throwers.

And yet there was another member of the circus who was even dearer to me: the magician who called himself Neverino, a Bavarian shoemaker who’d fought in the first war and later reinvented himself as an Italian monk-turned-prestidigitator. He had gotten his stage name, Fra Carnevale, from an obscure Renaissance painter whose depiction of the Annunciation had brought him to tears as a young man in a museum in Munich. The vivid blue of the Virgin’s robe had recalled the only memory he had of his mother, who had died in childbirth when he was four years old, and when he gave his first magic show that night they introduced him as Fra Carnevale. He never did tell me what his real name was—the name his parents had given him, I mean—but I suppose you could say Neverino
was
his real name.

He pulled roses out of my ears and pfennigs fell from his lips every time he laughed, and he even sawed me in half a few times when his assistant was too sauced to come on. Neverino was the closest thing to a father I ever had, and he was the only person in Berlin who knew me for what I was. He was also the one who introduced me to the members of the Centaur network, with whom I collaborated for a good few years.

Neverino and I spent many happy midnight hours in the backyard of his little half-timbered house in Werder admiring each other’s tricks, me turning toad to raven to Doberman in the span of seconds, and though he wasn’t able to best me there, he did show me how to play dead even more convincingly than a two-day-old corpse. He had spectacles, though he didn’t need them, wore a tonsure and a rough brown robe both on and off the circus stage, and affected an Italian accent whenever it might give him an advantage.

As I say, the art of glamoury is best used to make oneself as inconspicuous as the light fixtures. I could, on purpose, drain the luster from my hair, my eyes, my complexion, and once I’d put on a drab serge suit and sensible shoes no one would ever suspect a thing of me.

In many respects it was better than being invisible, and I made terrific use of it on tours of various German munitions factories in ’33 and ’34. Neverino posed as a Canadian industrialist all too eager to praise the Germans’ superior technologies. (Just imagine it: a native German speaking his own language with a pitch-perfect North American accent! My, but he was brilliant.)

It is a universal truth that flattery will get you anywhere, even into the belly of a Panzer. Back then the Germans had no intention of starting a war with the British—a powerful race, Aryan as theirs—and they were anxious to show off their new feats of engineering. The Germans hardly noticed the bland young woman holding a small typist’s notebook, nor could they have known that the notes wrote themselves under the red cardboard cover.

For a time I was afraid our partnership would be short-lived. Hitler had seized control of the Reichstag in early 1933, and the following year Sarrasani took his circus on a tour of South America to evade the Nazi arsonists. They’d been lucky enough to stay in business after the first time the tent was torched. Neverino went too, but he promised he’d be back.

To my delight, he returned to Berlin within the month. Over a spaghetti dinner he told me that he hadn’t been to South America at all, but to London. He had managed introductions with some of the people who would later head the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and had passed along the notes we’d made on the factory tours. They’d given him instructions to set up one of the early Nazi surveillance and resistance networks, the Centaur circuit, and he wanted me to keep working for him. He paused only to laugh at the red wine rising in his glass.

And once the war started, Neverino proved himself one of the most ingenious hoax-masters for the Allies. It was his idea to plant phony intelligence memos on corpses in uniform and his idea to build ersatz military complexes out of wood and rubber to fool the German bombers. Yes indeed, Neverino was a mastermind, an inspiration. His friendship meant a lot to me, and it meant even more in hindsight. I would never have known Jonah without him.

Nibble, Nibble, Little Mouse

9.

By one of those contradictions so frequent in the Satanic realm it was the oldest and most hideous and repulsive witches who knew the recipes for the most efficacious love-liquors.

—Grillot de Givry,
Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy

M
ORVEN’S PETTY
magic is as selfless as mine is not. My sister spends most of her afternoons with her friend Elsie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they wander from room to room looking out for pairs of lonely people whom they might bring together by “happy accident.”

For instance, one rainy Saturday afternoon two students were sketching the same gilded statue of Saint-Gaudens’s
Diana
in the courtyard of the American Wing. Each was seated on a bench in good view of the statue, but perhaps ten or twelve feet from one another; they were clearly unacquainted. The girl was checking her mobile at frequent intervals (in hopes that a particular someone might have called her, so much seemed plain), and she grew more and more dejected each time she tucked the phone away. In aspect the young man was as kind—and as sad—as she. They looked to be roughly the same age but too absorbed in their own private woes even to notice one another, let alone make any overture of friendship.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” said Elsie to the girl as my sister was speaking the same words to the young man. Both gave each jolly old dame a distracted “Not at all,” and went on with their work.

Several minutes went by, during which time both ladies gazed up at the statue of Diana the huntress in idle appreciation. Then, with a few silently mouthed words, Elsie proceeded to break the charcoal stick in the girl’s hand, and each stick following it. The girl huffed in frustration as she rummaged through her knapsack.

“Pardon me,” Morven murmured to the man beside her, “but I believe that young lady over there has just broken her last stick of charcoal.” She nodded to the full box of charcoal vine at his side. “Do you think perhaps you might …?”

“Oh?” he said, momentarily confused, and then: “Oh! Of course.” And as he ventured across the way to offer the girl a spare stick of charcoal Elsie slipped away under some silly pretense, a coughing fit perhaps. Both ladies watched from behind a nearby statue as the boy complimented the girl on her sketch, she thanked him graciously, and they inquired as to their respective places of study, and how she smiled when he asked if he might sit beside her.

They have hundreds of stories like that one. I’ve been up to the Cloisters with them on sunny summer afternoons and watched as my sister stimulated three pairs of pheromones with a few carefully chosen words in the gallery of the Unicorn Tapestries, then instigated a cordial debate on the best method for the restoration of egg tempera between two pasty-faced academics—and that was only in the first five minutes.

Helena disapproves of these excursions, says it’s meddling and that most lonely people have nobody but themselves to blame for it anyhow. Morven has invited me to come along again today, but I’d rather make my own mischief back in Blackabbey.

I’m not used to prowling in the daytime. The sun feels so nice on my smooth bare arms and I feel positively giddy. I shift the cake box from hand to hand as I amble down the mews, sundress flouncing round my calves. I pass Dymphna coming out of her shop and she gives me a vague smile, thinking me one of Helena’s progeny, though she knows what I get up to well enough.

Picture Fawkes and Ibis in the gloom of early evening: the steamer trunks and
Wunderkammers
, the bronze busts of forgotten statesmen and voodoo poppets fresh off the bayou, the
danse macabre
carousel that plays “In the Hall of the Mountain King” when wound. The walls are cluttered with English portraits and Renaissance engravings, lords and ladies in stiff white ruffs and naked men contemplating their own innards.

I peer through the front window and see Harry’s nephew bent over a game of solitaire at the counter. I can make out a long pale nose, thick dark hair in need of a cut, and a pianist’s fingers as he turns a card. I get a strange squirmy feeling then. And in the next moment, as I open the door and he looks up from his card game, I believe I have just locked eyes with a ghost.

The boy has Jonah’s long, earnest face—Jonah’s hair, albeit on the shaggy side—Jonah’s slender fingers—and precisely Jonah’s look of eager expectation. It’s as if these sixty-odd years have melted away in a twinkling.

A few seconds pass in this amazed silence. He is opening his mouth to speak to me when his mobile goes off—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is the ditty—and when he gives me an apologetic look and opens the phone I finally remember myself. This is Justin, Harry’s nephew, and he was only staring at a pretty girl who’d walked into his shop.

I can hear a female voice through the receiver, and he is adopting a certain tone,
that
tone, you know what I mean: “Hey, it’s great to hear from you … How’ve you been? That’s good … It’s just that things’ve been so busy around here … Yeah, at my uncle’s shop …”

Jonah had grown up in London, and he had that glorious upper-crust accent that made you feel, as soon as he spoke, that you were in capable hands; and so my first thought is that this boy’s ordinary Jersey speech is just an act put on for the girl on the other end of the line.

My heart is thudding in my ears. Desperate for a distraction, I look around the room and pick out the changes since my last visit. To my relief, the horned mermaid chandelier still hangs above my head, but pretty much every item behind the counter has been rearranged and all the furniture dusted and polished. What else … oh! All the books are gone! There’d been no order to the book collection, just a few dusty volumes piled here and there, but now there isn’t a tome in sight. Then I notice an Apple laptop open on the counter in front of him beside a stack of old ledger books. Seems the nephew—Justin—is industrious enough to attempt to bring the Fawkes and Ibis record-keeping system into the twenty-first century. Good luck to him, and he’ll need it.

“Listen, do you mind if I call you back? I’m still at work … Yeah, see, the thing is, I’m down in Jersey right now, so I don’t think I can make it out tonight … Yeah, okay, I sure will …”

Slowly I circle the casket table by the window, examining every once-sacred object on its black varnished surface as if for the first time: the reliquary carved and painted in the likeness of a girlish saint, the repoussé incense burners, the monstrance with its tarnished sunburst.

“Thanks for the call … Enjoy your evening … Uh-huh, you too. Later.”

Is the girl aware she’s just been jilted? Probably not, if she was stupid enough to ring him in the first place. So we have a rake, have we! Not so much like Jonah, then.

I meet his gaze again as he flips his phone shut and I feel that frisson, that very particular zing, shooting out of my quim and rearranging all my guts on its way up. Now his face is strangely blank. I look away. A length of scarlet ribbon trails over the side of the casket table, and I hook my finger through the ribbon and hold the pendant up to what daylight remains. It’s a pomander, with a sprig of dried rosemary inside, but I will allow him to tell me so himself. I place the cake box on a shelf, flick the pomander’s tiny clasp, and the rosemary falls into my open palm.

I can feel his eyes on me. I make a little show of putting the sprig back in the hollow pendant and fumbling with the clasp, and I hear him round the counter and approach the table.

“Here,” he says gently. “Let me.” Gingerly I hand him the pendant and he smiles at me as he refastens the clasp. “It’s meant to ward off illness, bad spirits, and whatnot.”

“Though I guess that depends on what you put inside it,” I murmur.

He squints at the tiny price tag dangling from the ribbon. “Looks like it’s over three hundred years old.”

“The pomander itself, you mean. Not the ribbon as well, surely.”

“Seems I’ve been telling you things you already know. You an art history major?”

I shake my head. “I’m just interested.”

He looks at me as if to say
So am I
—and when he asks, “Is there something in particular I can help you with?” I am confident he isn’t talking about his inventory, though his manners are technically beyond reproach.

I remember myself and pick up the cake box. “I haven’t come to browse, actually.” With slightly trembling hands I give him the box. “It’s for you. It’s a cake. A toffee cake. For you.”

He stares at me, agape, and I’m not taking literary license here. After a long moment he says, “For
me?”

“My aunt baked it. She’s a friend of your uncle’s, comes in here all the time. She just asked me to drop it off.”

“Wow,” he says. “Wow. Thank you so much.” I’m touched at how touched he is.

“I’ll tell my auntie you were thrilled.”

He offers his free hand. “I’m Justin.”

“Eve.” His hand is warm, his grip hearty. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Well, Eve. I’m closing the shop soon. What do you say we wash this down with a cup of coffee? Two cups, I mean. One for me and one for you.”

“Can’t stay, I’m afraid. I’ve got to get home for dinner.”

“Do you live here, then?”

I shake my head. “Just visiting. I live in New York.”

His eyes light up. “The city?”

I nod. “I live with my sister. We come down some weekends.”

“And what do you do for fun while you’re in Blackabbey?”

“We might go out for a drink. You know the Blind Pig Gin Mill?”

“Will you be there tonight?”

I shrug. “Should be.”

“Great,” he says with an enthusiasm that reminds me even more of Jonah. I feel a pricking round the eyes. “I’ll see you there.” He walks me to the door and hesitates. “Are you sure you can’t come for a drink now?”

“Quite sure. My aunts will be waiting for me. Tonight then?”

“Tonight,” he says, and I can tell he’s biting back the urge to ask exactly what time I’ll be there. “All right. Bye, then.” He parts the blackout curtain and opens the door for me, and when I glance back he’s still standing in the doorway looking after me.

A
FTER DINNER
I am playing a game of Neverending Hobscobble with Vega at the kitchen table when the doorbell rings. Vega leaves her hand on the table, ventures into the hall, and puts her eye to the peephole. “It’s a
boy,”
she whispers. “I don’t know him. Are you expecting anyone, Auntie?”

“Not particularly,” I reply, but I come up swiftly behind her and yank the door open.

“Hello, Eve.” Justin pauses. “I hope you don’t mind, but I asked Uncle Harry where your family lived and he gave me your address. Your aunt’s address, I mean.”

I usher him in and Vega looks at me as if to say,
So
this
is why you haven’t put your old skin back on
.

I pay her no mind. “I thought we were meeting at the bar.”

“We are. I mean, I was down there for a while, and then I started to wonder if you’d made other plans, so I just thought I’d come by and …” Justin casts a curious glance about the foyer, then remembers himself and lets out a nervous laugh.

I smile up at him. “I’ll just get my purse.”

O
UR CONVERSATION
is pleasant on the walk into town. We chat for a bit about Emmet Fawkes’s European itinerary and how Justin is settling into the upstairs apartment (not exactly home, but he’s getting used to the weird smells and antediluvian appliances); he tells me I have a classy name and that if it weren’t on my house he’d have thought it was a stage name. I laugh as though I haven’t heard this before. Like the names of all the classic film stars, ours generally sound as if we’ve made them up.

We arrive at the Blind Pig Gin Mill, a cozy, dimly lit pub where the blue-collar barflies and their lively sports chatter are a welcome alternative to the stodgy pretensions of the Harveysville Inn. The bartenders tease you if you order anything besides the swill they’ve got on tap, though the Harbinger girls are more or less exempt; I order a dry martini and the boy behind the counter nods without so much as a twitch of the mouth. Justin orders a pint of Miller Lite.

He tells me he’s excited to be working for his uncle and that he’d like to travel the world “going picking.” He admits he doesn’t have much of a head for business, but he hopes it’s something that can be taught. “Have you ever seen my uncle deal with somebody trying to make a return?” he asks, and I laugh. “He’s a total hardass. I’d never be able to do that.”

“You’ll learn, I suppose.”

Over and over he impresses me with his swiftly acquired knowledge of the Fawkes and Ibis inventory, his stories of crisscrossing Europe on a series of night trains and of the oddball customers in the secondhand record shop, and his impeccable manners. He’d held the door open for me, of course, he listens raptly to my own little anecdotes, and when my shawl falls off the back of my chair he bends automatically to retrieve it.