Something More Than Night (16 page)

“He’s hoping you’ll change my diaper, too.” Silence fell over our conversation like a broken kite. Kivinen chuckled. “Relax. I can’t walk but I can still crap like a man.”

I liked him. But I like my own skin even more. And this darb had more going on behind the eyes than most monkeys in their prime. He was no use to me. That hotcha nurse and her cohort were likely to notice if wise old Kivinen suddenly started talking about himself as though he were a six-year-old girl. Which wouldn’t do my client any favors.

“You didn’t rat me out,” I said.

“You’re too interesting to toss aside just yet.”

“Maybe so, but I still have to make my rounds.”

“What’s your game? Talking rich, lonely, addle-brained retirees into signing over their power of attorney?”

“Nah. I’m not on the market for a butter-and-egg man. I’m here to share some memories.”

“I’ve had a long life. You can have some of mine.”

“You wouldn’t like what I’m selling.” I stood. “Thanks, Kivinen. It’s been swell.”

He said, “Wheel me inside. Spare me the indignity of eating my words before that lumbering brute, and I’ll help you find what you need.” I knew a square deal when I heard one. Kivinen was the real cream.

“I’m looking for somebody on the way out. A real screwball.”

A sea breeze redolent of dead plankton and flowering oleander tickled my nape while I pushed his chair toward the nearest pair of French doors. But he nixed the solarium. We passed two more doors along that long verandah, his wheels beating a monotonous tattoo against the planks, until he brought me to a narrower door. Took a bit of elbow grease to nudge his wheelchair over the threshold without sending him for a tumble. The room on the other side greeted us with tall oak bookcases, deep leather armchairs flanked by Tiffany lamps, and funereal silence. A man with mottled gray skin and a bad toupee dozed over an antique reader displaying the
Financial Times.
His turkey wattle quivered in time to his snores. Give this room a butler and hang a few plaques on the walls, and it might have been a London society club two centuries past.

Kivinen twisted a lip at the snoozer. “Christ,” he said. “How I despise that ignoramus.”

“He trouble for you?”

“Styles himself a Nikkei raider. But he made his fortune the old-fashioned way. He won the lottery.”

“It’s better to be lucky than good,” I said.

“His luck left him long ago. They keep him inside because he gets worked up every time he sees a flash of space junk. He’s lucid from time to time, but mostly he seems to think we’re living thirty years in the past.”

Sounded perfect. Already on the way out, but some good would come of his decline. He’d be doing flametop a solid, even if he never realized it.

“That’s swell. He’ll do.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Thought you hated him.”

“I do,” Kivinen said. “But I’d always hoped it would be me to end him.”

What can I say. I liked the old guy.

“I’m a student of human nature,” I said, truthfully, “and want to share a few experiences. That’s all. I won’t lay a finger and I won’t disturb one hair.”

Kivinen indicated his assent with another flick of those papery hands. “That’s a shame,” he said. He wheeled himself away without another word. Guess he wasn’t the sentimental type. That suited me. I’m not a fan of the long good-bye.

I pulled a chair next to the snoozer, settled in, and pulled out my wallet again. “Hiya, Pop.”

The geezer jerked awake. He blinked a few times, as though the world were something uncomfortable caught in the corner of his eye. Drool glistened at the corner of his mouth; he smeared it along the back of his hand. Then he saw me. The eye contact lasted less than a moment, but I got what I needed.

“You were telling me about the fireworks,” I said, “before you drifted off.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a voice stronger than wet tissue paper. A musky smell, and a tightness around his flat eyes, told me he was a little worried. He had no idea who I was, but didn’t want to admit it to himself for fear it meant he was losing his marbles. He forged ahead with the world’s most unconvincing lie. “I was waiting for you to stop interrupting.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

What is it with old guys like him and Kivinen? Do they spend half the day sitting before the mirror in search of the perfect
harrumph
?

“We were at a concert, Jennifer and me, on the night the sky changed. The night the war started. She didn’t want to go; we’d had a contractor to the house—this was in the days before you could unroll a couple strips of solar panels on your roof and call it done—but I insisted, and we hadn’t been to Red Rock since before the ice sheets had slid into the sea. You’re too young to remember. It was all bad news back then, first when the seas rose and all those people had to flee, nothing on the news but vacant cities and drug-resistant malaria. And then it really went to hell…”

I have to admit, there was a lot of history locked away in that screwball head of his. It was jumbled but good, though, and picking out the valuable parts made as much sense as trying to pull the egg yolk from an omelet. But he’d built up a good head of steam and didn’t need cues from me to forge ahead. I nodded while slipping out Molly’s memory fragment.

“We got there at dusk,” he droned, “and the first stars had come out. Venus, too, real bright, low in the sky where it was still purple and pink. Couldn’t see much during the concert, though, and they had lights in the parking lot that washed out everything, so it wasn’t until we were on the road, must have been well after midnight when Jennifer first saw it. You never hear it anymore but that was a common name back then, Jennifer. I went to school with three or four Jennifers. She said she’d just seen a shooting star, but I didn’t because I had my eyes on the road. And then she saw another, and another, and then she begged me to pull over, so I did. This was back in the days when you had to drive your own car, no alternative to it like today. And so we stopped on the verge and got out and sure enough the sky was crisscrossed with little streaks of silver and red and tiny flashes of light like sunset at Disneyworld but from a thousand miles away, that’s what she said it looked like, and she never found out she was more or less right, but it was real fireworks and real rockets, not just for show. Never did find out who shot first—”

How could they? METATRON speaks to mortal men not as a thunder to make them quiver and quail, but as a whisper that turns their hearts.

“—but I got in the car to turn on the radio and that’s how the airbags saved my life when that goddamned drunk came screaming around the corner; maybe he was watching the sky, too, I don’t know, all I know is he didn’t have his lights on and couldn’t see Jennifer standing all agog…”

I would have sighed, but his voice cracked into plenty of pieces for the both of us. I thought about Gabby again.

As a distraction, for the both of us, I asked, “How’d you meet her?” while smoothing the creases from the secret memory I’d pinched from Gabriel’s Magisterium. And soon he was droning on about high school and a broken smartphone. That was a surprise; he seemed old enough to launch into a story about inkwells and pigtails.

They say it’s all in the wrist. Sometimes it’s even true. A little flick—I channeled Kivinen in that—and the gossamer shimmer of a memory fragment settled over the old man’s shoulders like a cowl. He twitched, brushed away a phantom cobweb, and then the middle of his soliloquy was all about how his beloved Jennifer expanded her vocabulary when she was a little girl by crouching beside her parents’ bedroom door. He’d appropriated Molly’s memory into the recollections of his dead wife.

I stood. “I’m sorry for your loss. She sounds like quite a gal, your Jennifer.”

His face folded into a scowl. “Who’s Jennifer?”

I pretended to cough, covering my mouth before the smile gave the game away. Philo Vance signed out less than an hour after he’d arrived.

Not a bad afternoon’s work. Entropy was running its course, destroying the connection between Gabriel and flametop, and I had a few C-notes lifting my fallen arches. I paused on a bench in the foyer to fish out more small bills; seemed a good idea to apply a parting coat of polish to the orderlies, and to keep the hackie pliant. No, not a bad afternoon’s work at all. I made certain to congratulate myself on that front.

But pride goeth before the fall.

The addle-brained sad sack and his sob story about celestial light shows got me thinking about Gabby again. I’d been doing my best
not
to think about him because it was a slippery slope. To be fair, though, and somewhat to flametop’s credit, she was a double handful of distractions. If not exactly the kind of distraction I’d prefer from a dish like her.

But now Gabby was at the forefront of my mind as I headed for the cab. I had to leave the same way I came, else somebody paying attention might notice old Philo arrived but never departed.

Poor Gabriel. He’d become mixed up with something terrible. But what? Or whom? He’d run afoul of some serious torpedoes, if they could rub one of the Seraphim. And just how did they manage that? This, more than anything else, was the frightening part.

Such were my thoughts as I emerged from the home with its jacaranda blossoms and ocean-view verandah, this place where the pony set went when the tug of entropy became too strong to ignore. Out I stepped, into the scents of oleander and sea salt, into the crash of surf and the whisper of my shoes over mosaic tiles, while the question of a murdered angel made a Möbius pretzel of my thoughts.

Nothing struck me as amiss when I climbed into the hack. The overlay was so smooth, so seamless, that I didn’t even notice when I slipped into the Pleroma. Only after the driver turned around did I realize I’d been played for a sap. His human pan had become the countenance of an ox with starlight in its eyes; his human arms, a pair of snapping vipers; his doughy human body, a wheel of ice covered inside and out with eyes of quicksilver.

A Throne. The bulls had found me.

10

MINUET FOR TWO ANGELS

The Plenary Indulgence recipients lived in and around Chicago. That made sense, after all, because so did the priest. Molly had never been to Chicago, and had only heard second- and third-hand of the city nestled alongside Lake Michigan, its mixture of grandeur and decay. But she wondered, after a bit of reflection, if she needed to know a place to find it. Even Bayliss had managed to overlay his Magisterium on an earthly laneway back in Melbourne, and
he
was so weak that he actually paid for Martin’s taxi rather than whisking him back to his hotel. And damned if she’d be outdone by him. So what was there to stop her from deciding reality included a passage to Chicago at the back of her coat closet?

Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except the fear of getting her ass kicked by METATRON again. That shit hurt.

It was one thing to flex her angelic juju in the privacy of her own apartment. Quite another to do it on Earth. Last time she tried it, she destroyed Ria, incurred the wrath of the Voice of God, and, apparently, made enemies of all the other angels in Bayliss’s Choir. It made a woman skittish about trying again. On the other hand, how much worse could it get?

So she pushed aside the woolen peacoat with epaulets (it still had one of Ria’s hairs on the shoulder), dodged a falling mop, and emerged from the shadow of an elevated train. A relentless wind dusted her skin with ash lofted from distant dead towers; the skyline leered at her like a mouthful of broken teeth. The air carried the scent of poisoned lake bed, and the ground rippled in time to the moods of the lake. It was faint, the trembling, but persistent beneath the electric thrum of traffic and wistful creaking of deconstructed skyscrapers.

The gusts teased her hair into disarray. Curls fluttered across her mouth, her eyes. Molly imagined her pocket contained a velvet ribbon, and it did. While tying her hair back she realized she hadn’t consciously chosen her apparel, but it had changed again when she emerged on Earth. Now she wore a satin vest over a high-collared shirt and jeans with thin pinstripes. For some reason she was barefoot. It took a moment’s focused concentration to change that.

A river of pedestrians flowed past her sheltered spot on the leeward side of a rusted steel pillar for the El. People listening to music, laughing in one-sided conversations, frowning, lying to each other, running, eating vat-grown hot dogs and dripping relish on the sidewalk. Molly hadn’t stood amongst so many people since before she’d died. (How long ago was that? How much time had passed on Earth? Did her phone still work? It couldn’t have been too terribly long; she still recognized some of the fashions on the passersby. She even had the same pair of boots as the woman carrying out a very loud breakup with her boyfriend.) She was out of practice when it came to reading the flow of body language in a large herd. Walking in a crowd meant feeling the subtle signs and weathering constant negotiations of space and speed and impetus. But these people couldn’t see her. What if she jostled somebody? Was she apt to leave a trail of brain-dead vegetables if she lost her concentration? How many lives would she destroy if she got this wrong?

But if she didn’t try, if she didn’t get to the bottom of this, the Cherubim would come for her again. Or something worse. Plus, if she wanted any hope of helping Ria and comforting Martin—witnessing her death must have pushed him over the edge; he was using again, she knew it—she needed practice. She needed to learn how to be a human being in a human space. She’d done it all her life, but now she didn’t know where to begin.

Molly took a long, steadying breath while watching for an opening. It came in the form of a fat businesswoman tottering on uneven heels. The current of pedestrians swirled around the slow-moving obstacle like water around a river stone to leave eddies of stillness in her wake. Molly stepped forward to slip into the crowd …

… And it parted before her.

Nobody flinched away from her; nobody lurched or dodged or backpedaled. There were no ripples, no distortions in the flow of pedestrian traffic. Yet somehow there just happened to be a little bubble of empty space right where she wanted to be and right when she wanted to be there. Again and again and again, one footstep after another, the bubble paced her. If she weren’t dead, she might have thought she had a wicked case of body odor. But no matter how she moved, or where, the natural currents of the crowd gave her exactly the space she needed. A tourist lost her map to a gust of wind and just happened to jump aside to catch it as Molly passed. A man heading into a boutique to shop during his lunch break happened to hear somebody calling his name, a friend across the street, and turned around just before he would have stepped in front of Molly. A man pushed his stroller behind an El pillar, overcome with a violent sneezing fit. A woman walking a pair of Weimaraners came up short because her dogs cowered when Molly’s shadow passed over them.