Powers (6 page)

A thought chilled him, and he ignored it by brewing another cup of coffee. The image waited and still lurked there in one corner of his brain when he came back to it with the mug warm in his hands. He made it wait some more, sipping hot bitter caffeine. It didn’t go away.

That woman, el Hajj. She claimed to be very good at finding things and following people. She also wanted to cut out his heart and eat it. You need a definition of “vendetta,” go to the Pamirs and the Karakoram country and the tribes. They held grudges and blood feuds that reached back to Tamerlane.

He’d once lived ten years in those unforgiving hills, learning the ways they talked to iron. They knew him as a member of the tribe of smiths, a different kin-tie but one they recognized. They’d accepted him for that. If he’d set a foot or hand wrong, though, they would have killed him without a second thought. They didn’t have laws. They had guns and knives and what they called honor instead, some of which he understood and some he didn’t.

As far as he was concerned,
she’d
attacked
him.
Shining a high-powered flashlight in dark-adapted eyes from four feet away, that’s assault. She hadn’t identified herself as police, hadn’t said a word or even made a noise before that. Her blood was on her own hands.

He didn’t think he could make
her
believe that. Besides the tribal honor thing, he’d noticed that cops never made mistakes. That was another tribal culture.

The second cup of coffee didn’t help. He’d never heard of anyone finding visions of the future in the brown liquid. A third would just crank up his twitching nerves another notch.

He gathered the demon’s gold into a paper bag and stowed it in a plumbing chase behind the bathtub where he’d chipped out three bricks years ago. No reason to leave temptation lying around—Mother still had keys, if she really was in town, and she’d see that pile of coins as hers. All wealth and property belonged to the Queen, you understand. Anything she left you was just a gracious gift.

He needed more information. To him, that meant “library.” As far as he was concerned, public libraries ranked up there with flush toilets and central heating as great advances of civilization. He remembered life before those good things, and had no wish to return.

So he grabbed his cane and headed down three long flights of creaking dark stairs through the dust and out, no mysterious brown envelopes sticking out of his mailbox this time, but enough advertising and financial offers and other junk that he suspected he’d lost more than one day to the demon and the forging and the crash that followed. He dumped everything unopened in a trash bin down the street, no keepers—if someone wanted to steal those credit-card offers to a name he hadn’t used in a generation, fat lot of good they’d find in the theft—and walked across town to the pile of yellow brick and stone and arched windows under a green copper roof that served as the local temple of knowledge. The place even
smelled
of learning: centuries-old paper and dark waxed wood and radiator dust in the long close-spaced shelves of books.

Also smelled of homeless people—stale cigarette smoke and layers of unwashed clothing and sour cheap-wine breath—but that was decreasing with the spring warmth and less need to get out of the arctic wind before you froze to death. He didn’t know why homeless people always smelled of cigarettes. There was
true
addiction for you, scraping up the bucks for a pack of smokes when you couldn’t keep a roof over your head.

Anyway, he got there just after the library opened, giving him first shot at the morning newspaper and a quiet chair in a corner. Early enough that he had to ask for the paper from the gray-haired librarian in the periodical room, and he gritted his teeth a bit before walking up to her with a smile he didn’t feel.

She recognized him, of course. “Good morning, Mr. Johansson.” She stared at his face for a moment like she always did, before pulling the newspaper out of a pile waiting for her to shelve. She shook her head, again like she always did.

The librarian thought he was his own son, or maybe grandson. He looked a lot like a man who used to come in thirty, forty years ago when she’d just started working. Charming little guy, they’d talked a lot, she’d had dreams, embarrassing dreams. Of course, that man had a beard . . .

Couldn’t be the same man, obviously.

She’d commented on this several times when he checked out books. He’d told her the truth—he never knew his father, and his mother didn’t talk about him. That hint of personal scandal meant the librarian wouldn’t ask again. Much.

This was one of the reasons he didn’t stay around any one place longer than twenty years and allowed long intervals before he returned. Good thing most people don’t or won’t believe their eyes.

A quick look at the date and yes, he’d lost two days. Lucky it wasn’t three, or he’d have wasted his walk and found the library closed for Sunday. Legion said the world would change, was changing, doom rushing toward the world like an express train on a single track, and Simon Lahti had two weeks at the most . . .

And Simon Lahti didn’t exist. Never had.

He found his story, page one but below the fold, a follow-up on the synagogue fire. The sixth in a year, the article said, complete with map on page five showing how the sites clustered in an area of a few blocks. All were of “suspicious origin,” quoting a police detective named Melissa el Hajj. There appeared to be a “human element” in most of the fires, besides the obvious pattern of the crime locations.

She hadn’t mentioned the inhuman element. Her business, not Albert’s. But
Melissa?
He’d expected something exotic like Fatima or Mumtaz. He revised his estimate of how long ago her family had left those Afghan hills.

Know your enemy—sage advice from a hundred sages. He couldn’t find a listing for her in the telephone directory, not even another el Hajj. Several el-Haj names, Hajji, al-Hajj, but the paper and his memory agreed on her chosen spelling. Nothing in the city directory, either. Well, he couldn’t blame her for an unlisted phone, not in her position.

He thought about calling up the central police station and asking to speak to her or leave a message, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe it had something to do with how she wanted to kill him.

That done, he made a quick check of an old city map, one with an “aerial” view faked with sketched-in buildings as they’d been in the 1880s, points of interest named. The synagogue was there, of course, it had been there since Methuselah was a puppy. He tried to match up the other fires with buildings in the picture, and no connections jumped out at him. At the time of the map, they’d been stores, hotels, a livery stable, a warehouse. The neighborhood had been upscale then, a couple of private clubs made the roster and a couple of banks long gone. He couldn’t see any pattern except proximity, and that they’d all been abandoned for years, “current owner unknown.”

He shrugged and headed back out, passing the gray-haired librarian now at the circulation desk, who nodded to him with a repeat of that quizzical smile.

The research had gained him little. At least he had a fine spring morning, blue sky, trees bright green in first leaf, birds singing, and a warm breeze from the south to bring a touch of brine-smell upriver from the bay. He walked, as always.

The synagogue’s neighborhood didn’t look any prettier by daylight: empty weed-grown lots where buildings once stood, now turning into dumps. The survivors looked like smallpox cases, pocked with boarded up or broken windows and a couple of places where he could see daylight through openings where no daylight should shine—evidence of collapsing roofs or walls. He walked past several of the previous crime scenes on the way, all empty lots, whatever burned-out shells the fires left had been leveled and the cellar holes filled in. No clues, no lingering smell of elementals beyond the slight residue of charred building on adjacent walls. He couldn’t see why anyone would
care
if the whole neighborhood vanished in smoke. Save the cost of demolition.

People lived there, though. People who didn’t look him in the eye but who studied his back or glanced sideways as he passed or who watched from windows until they made sure he wasn’t stopping at their doors. He didn’t know if they filed him under “Predator” or “Prey” or “Cop”—some label that made them keep their distance, anyway. Which, given the general atmosphere, suited him just fine.

The synagogue sat where he’d left it, a lot more detail visible in sunlight. It had been a smallish low plain building—there had never been a lot of Jews in town and most synagogues he’d seen tended to plain architecture. Traces of yellow paint still clung to the clapboards. He didn’t know if that was whim or a good price on bulk paint or a reference to the pale yellow stone of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Except for a small dome over the entry, now a blackened skeleton, the roof had gone—walls reached up to end in blackened ragged stubs, empty fire-gnawed windows down both sides with less wall at each until the last ones in the rear barely had sills. Even
he
could see that the fire had started at the rear, around the pulpit or whatever Jews called that space. That screamed “suspicious origin”—not that many fire sources for a pulpit, outside of God’s lightning striking down the preacher.

The place had been
old.
He saw timber posts and charred beams lying in the sodden ash on the floor, axe-hewn timbers and boards with the irregular faces of pit-sawing, clapboards split rather than sawn, the materials and methods he remembered from centuries ago and lands across the ocean.

He’d seen the peeling paint even in the night. Now, in daylight, he could see warped clapboards hanging askew with rust streaks telling him the damage came long before the fire. He saw rot in one unburned windowsill, then another, gray weathered breaks on the sash, piles of gray droppings and white streaks on the remaining eave trim where pigeons had gotten into under-roof spaces and nested.

Yellow tape still guarded the ruin, warning people away from a crime scene. Somehow that added to the mournful sense of a building abandoned, a building that had outlived its people and use. He could still smell the salamander and sandalwood again but much fainter, fading, he might not have caught it if he hadn’t been searching. No wonder Legion had wanted him to get there while the smells hung fresh.

He picked up a nail lying close to the wall and inside the tape, pulled from interior trim the firemen had ripped loose and thrown out through a smashed window in their haste. Wrought iron, not steel, it hadn’t caught enough heat to destroy its memory. He rolled it across his palm. Square shank, hand-wrought, rose-headed by five hammer blows on a nail plate, pointed by four taps on the anvil, he remembered making them by the hundreds, by the days, the weeks as an apprentice. He’d learned to
hate
nails. He touched it to his tongue.

“What can you taste from rusty iron?”

He jerked and looked up, finding his nemesis. She’d done it again, materialized like a ghost out of the shadows, moving without sound, now standing inside a burned-out window of the hulk. That woman was trying to give him a heart attack. At least this time she didn’t have a gun in her hand. She
did
have a shaved patch and bandage on the side of her head where he’d hit her, didn’t make her look any prettier, and some kind of cast on her left wrist and hand that left her fingers free.

Both cast and bandage were stained with soot. So were her blue coveralls, especially the knees and elbows—she’d been poking around her crime scene. He got the impression that she’d be pure hell as a patient. Doctor had probably told her to stay in bed.

“Age,” he answered.

She cocked her head to one side. “Age? Talked to a guy at Historic Preservation this morning. Near as he can tell, this was the oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere. No record of construction, but it turns up in town records from 1700. What does your magic tongue say?”

He tasted the iron again—cold, rusty, bitter, tired. “About three hundred winters, I guess. It’s a simple working, not enough soul for a good memory.”

She blinked at that, and looked skeptical. Hey, he didn’t know
how
he knew that sort of thing. He’d just spent so much time and sweat and blood and skin on working iron, they recognized each other. He could tell the man who forged the nail hadn’t been a Jew, hadn’t liked or trusted Jews, hadn’t thought they should be allowed to build in town. They denied the Son of God. Unhappy smith, unhappy nail, endless years sunk into the wood of a building it despised. He tasted that in the iron.

He remembered a scene from long ago and another city, a burning building with dark-coated men dashing through the flames and smoke and falling embers, coming out with their clothes and hair smoldering and red shining burns on hands and faces but joy glowing through those burns, bodies protecting long rolls cased in rich cloth with knobs of silver on the ends . . .

“Did they save the scrolls?”

Lifted eyebrows—she didn’t understand what he was asking.

“The, what do they call them, the Torah? The Word of God? I’ve heard that a Jew should protect it with his life.”

The cop shook her head. “Nobody’s used this building in something over forty years. Anything that important, they’d have taken away long ago.”

He could still feel
something
under that ash and char, just as strong as it had been a night ago, two nights, whatever. A piece of iron called to him.
Old
iron, old beyond anything he’d felt before, and that included Roman iron.

And it was hurt.

Iron didn’t usually cry out like that, even to him. He could walk past steel-framed buildings every day and barely feel all those tons. Even touching the metal or tasting it, like the nail, he needed to really pay attention to get something out of it. He had to heat iron, hammer it, forge it, want to make it into something, to get a good conversation going.

“Are you going to shoot me if I come inside?”