Water to Burn (19 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“That’s what Caleb’s counting on, isn’t it?”
I nodded and felt a knot of rage replace the pain in my stomach. “Well,” I said, “if Caleb’s involved with Chaos forces, the Agency will take up jurisdiction if Jack won’t go to the police.”
“It already has, hasn’t it?” Ari paused for a yawn. “Thanks to your promotion, here in San Francisco the Agency means you.”
With another twist of my put-upon stomach, I realized that he was right.
CHAPTER 7
N
OW THAT I’D MET THE LITTLE SLIMEBALL, I could keep track of Caleb with LDRS and Search Mode: Personnel scans. I used both on Monday morning, but with extreme caution to avoid letting him know he was being watched. He never noticed my prying psychic eyes, most likely because of the nausea and headache pain he was transmitting. At one point I got a clear image of him drinking a glass of water, clouded by some kind of hangover medicine. He turned to a toilet and began to throw it up again, at which point I shut down the SM:P as fast as I possibly could.
OW THAT I’D MET THE LITTLE SLIMEBALL, I could keep track of Caleb with LDRS and Search Mode: Personnel scans. I used both on Monday morning, but with extreme caution to avoid letting him know he was being watched. He never noticed my prying psychic eyes, most likely because of the nausea and headache pain he was transmitting. At one point I got a clear image of him drinking a glass of water, clouded by some kind of hangover medicine. He turned to a toilet and began to throw it up again, at which point I shut down the SM:P as fast as I possibly could.
“I get the impression,” I told Ari, “that he sucked up too much of Jack’s scotch last night.”
“I’m not surprised,” Ari said. “He seemed the type.”
“He’s got a big mouth, too. By the way, Caleb knows something about those rogue waves, all right. He nearly choked when I mentioned them.”
“Did he say anything incriminating?”
“No. He could barely talk at all. But you know, it doesn’t seem likely that he could have murdered Evers, to say nothing of that girl who drowned down at Ocean Beach.”
“True. Blackmailers and the like rarely use violence. They tend to be cowards, is why. The murders—Brother Belial’s work?”
“Possibly. I’m just not sure of where he fits into the case. Let’s face it; we don’t even really know if he’s connected to Caleb. I overheard that one contact between Caleb—I’m sure now it was him—and somebody or something that might have been Belial, but I can’t be certain.”
Monday morning also brought business hours in DC, when Y would be in his office. When I passed the problem of Ari’s mother’s role in the Armageddon kibbutz on to Y, he told me he’d get someone right on it.
“E-mail me a list of questions,” Y said. “I just happen to have a contact in MI5. It would probably be politic to tell him what we want. She’s one of their nationals, after all.”
“I’ll send them today, for sure. The problem is, I don’t have an address or phone number for her. And I get the impression that Nathan doesn’t want to give them to me.”
“The original workup we did on Nathan gave us her current last name, Flowertree.” His image—we were talking in trance state—frowned briefly. “It’s quite unusual, so between that and my contact, I think we can trace her. I’ll let you know as soon as we do.”
After I left the trance state, I made up the list of questions, encrypted them, and e-mailed them to Y’s private account. I started my usual work routine for a Monday, surfing the Internet, looking for the odd bits of data that might indicate Chaos activity. I’d gotten a third of the way through my bookmarked sites when Mr. Singh the realtor called with good news. The owners of the building we wanted had run their credit check on the Internet.
“So this morning they had their results,” he said. “You may sign the lease at my office if you still wish.”
“We sure do,” I said. “I’ll bring a cashier’s check with me for the rent and deposit and all that.”
“Excellent. I will give you the keys then.”
In honor of the occasion, Ari put on the blue pinstriped suit. I wore my tan corduroy skirt with brown suede boots and a white blouse with a red rose print, and a burgundy raincoat, because the sky that morning hung low and dark over the city. Once we’d signed the lease and had the keys, we drove out to the building because I wanted to decide where to put the furniture, and Ari wanted to look the place over for a mysterious project he had in mind. Rather than negotiate the driveway, I parked on the street. As we got out of the car, I saw spray-painted graffiti on the pale blue wall holding up the front steps.
The black paint of the artwork, if you can call it that, was so precisely applied that I knew it had been stenciled, not done freehand. A ring of stylized black arrows, each about ten inches long, emerged from a solid circle about two feet across, “Crud!” I said. “Don’t tell me that they found me already!”
“Who?” Ari was staring at the tag. “It looks like a traffic sign of some sort. A roundabout with many exits?”
“No, it’s a symbol of Chaos magic.”
“They have their own sort of magic?”
“Yes and no, if you mean the Chaos masters we’re looking for. They probably do, but I don’t know if they’re responsible for this or not. There are all kinds of schools of magic. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s modern, it comes from the U.K., and it’s not a threat.”
Ari stopped staring at the symbol and began staring at me.
“What I’m wondering,” I went on, “is if the Chaos masters are using this symbol now, or if some jerk kids found it on the Internet and have started tagging with it.” I looked closer and found a surprise. Four arrows emerged from the top half, but only three on the bottom. The discrepancy made the symbol appear ready to roll over.
“It must represent some kind of unbalanced force.” I told Ari. “Normally this symbol has eight arrows.” I paused for a grin. “Of course, it might represent stupidity if the tagger just copied it wrong.”
“Schools of magic? Um, if you could back up a bit—”
“Sorry. And no, I’m not having a joke on you. A lot of people in the Bay Area take magical studies seriously, usually ritual magic or Wicca, though, not the true Chaos magic, which is a mix of all sorts of different systems. Uh, do you know who Aleister Crowley was?”
“I’ve heard the name. A writer and a heroin addict, wasn’t he? He called himself a magician, I believe.”
“The heroin was incidental, but he was definitely a magician. One of his disciples, a guy named Austin Spare, laid down the theory for Chaos magic. The basic theory is that there is no theory. The goal is raising your consciousness to higher levels, and whatever works is okay, even drugs.”
Ari growled, more in disgust than anger.
“Never mind,” I said. “What counts now is getting this stuff off the building.”
I got out the cell phone and called Mr. Singh with the news, though I didn’t give the magical meaning. I described the graffito as “looking like a dead spider or something.”
“Another one?” he said. “Very well, I will have the maintenance man come out and wash over it. This has been a problem for a very long time, not that we have seen spiders before. Mostly letters and obscene words. The owners recently have been clever. They have painted the lower reaches of the outside walls with the special paint to which graffiti will not adhere. It can be removed with soap and water.”
“Wonderful! If you could do that soon—”
“I will call and send him.”
Singh signed off. Before we went inside, I tried to snap a picture of the tag with my phone so I could add it to my files on this case. The phone beeped and refused to save. I tried taking a picture of the garage door instead. The phone worked perfectly. I put the phone away, then sketched a Chaos ward in the air with my right hand. When I threw it at the symbol, the ward shattered in a spray of electric blue lines and triangles. The graffito sizzled like fat in a frying pan. Ari yelped.
“You heard that?” I said.
“I did, yes.”
“This could be real trouble. I don’t want anything happening to the realty maintenance man when the guy tries to wash this off.”
“What do you think might happen?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
I called Singh back and told him that we’d just deal with the graffito ourselves.
“I’m going to do some cleaning in the upstairs flat anyway,” I said. “So I’ll have rags and soap and stuff.”
“If you prefer, certainly,” Singh said. “I have not yet called the fellow, so it is not a problem.”
I clicked off. Ari took off his jacket, handed it me, and began to roll up his sleeves.
“Put that in the car,” he said. “I saw some rags and a hose in the back garage. There’s a spigot over there by the front garage door. Let’s just deal with this now.”
“Okay, but be careful about it. Hey, you’re not wearing a gun.”
He smiled and patted the waistband of his trousers. Silly old me!
I stowed the jacket while he fetched the supplies. Before I let him wash the graffito off, I threw another Chaos ward. This one held steady. The graffito gave out a miserable hiss and fell silent. When Ari trickled water onto it from the hose, a few blue sparks flashed, but the design began to dribble paint a second or two later. He wiped off most of it with a rag.
“It’ll take soap to get that last bit of gray smear off,” I said.
“Yes.” Ari turned off the water and began to disconnect the hose. “What do you think would have happened if water had touched it when it was full strength?”
“Nothing good. A lot of sparks at the very least.”
After Ari returned the hose and rags to the garage, we went up the outside steps and tried our new keys in the locks. Both worked, a good sign. We went inside the lower flat first, where Ari prowled around, looking into every closet.
“Uh,” I said, “is something wrong?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “After that thing on the front wall, I thought I’d best see what there is to see.”
“You know what just occurred to me? You never came inside the day we rented the place.”
He stopped prowling. “I assumed you knew what you wanted. I can’t say it matters much to me where I live, as long as the sodding windows aren’t covered over and the gas doesn’t leak and so on.”
“Ah. Well, the upstairs flat’s a lot nicer than this one. I’ll show you around.”
We found no more peculiar graffiti or other problems inside either flat. Whoever had stenciled the symbol outside had made no effort to break in. I wondered if they’d left the Chaos mark as a signal to other Chaotics or as a warning to me to back off. Maybe both.
After I decided where I was putting the couch and other furniture, I called one of my operatives, Annie Wentworth. I had Agency money for her, and she invited us over so I could pay her. Although she’d been promised the police reward money from locating Johnson and Doyle, she’d yet to receive it.
Annie was still living in the same shabby basement studio, if you could call it a studio, one long room of a converted garage out in the Sunset district, not far from the building we’d just leased. She had, however, added a few new pieces of furniture to the previous daybed and round kitchen table: a new bed for Duncan, her fox terrier; an armchair in front of her tiny TV; a glass display case hanging on the wall beside the framed posters of her grandmother’s vaudeville career.
“What’s all this stuff, Annie?” I looked into the case.
“Equipment from my grandmother’s spiritualist act.”
Annie joined me in front of the glass case. She was a small woman, way too thin for her faded jeans and gray sweatshirt thanks to recent rounds of chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her hair had grown back gray and dead straight.
“Grandma had a number of different acts, huh?” I said.
“Yes, indeed.” Annie paused for a smile. “She honestly was psychic, so she hated to ‘prostitute that talent upon the stage,’ as she always put it. She did it when she had to, but she preferred her turns—that’s what they called their acts, turns—to be something fake. You can see by this stuff that she couldn’t really call up spirits.”
“This stuff” consisted of a couple of small black metal boxes, a pair of black garters, each decorated with one small embroidered rose, and some lengths of twisted wire, also black. Behind them stood a worn and faded ouija board flanked by two silver candleholders in the shape of small dragons.
“You fastened the soap box to your thigh with a garter,” Annie continued, “so you could press your legs together and make cracking noises. The wires went up the sleeves of your mysteriously embroidered black robes. You could hook the edge of the table with them and make it shake. And so on. On a dimly lit stage it was probably all very effective.”
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