“Nola, aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“That someone wants to kill you. You’re living in an apartment overlooking a busy street, with big windows where you insist on sitting, a perfect target. Now you’re planning on going back there alone.” He paused for effect. “At night.”
The wind seemed to have gotten into my blood and chilled my bones. I thought of the creature I’d caught spying in the lobby of the office building and shivered.
“Actually, it’s even worse than that,” I said. “I was planning on going out alone to talk to a couple of Agency stringers. One of them works in the Tenderloin. Know what that is?”
“Oh, yes. Your police made a point of telling me.” He crossed his arms over his chest like an angry schoolteacher.
Which may be why Sister Peter Mary appeared on the hood of the car, about half life-size. When I went to high school, most of the teachers were laypeople, thanks to the emptying of the convents in the ’70s and ’80s, but for religion class we had a nun, black habit, bobbing white wimple, and all. I’d heard that some years previously she’d gone to her reward in heaven. Now she dropped back down to point her ruler at me like the weapon it had always been in her hands.
“Lust,” she said, “can kill. Remember Bathsheba.”
As visitations went, this one lacked all justice. Wasn’t I trying to avoid emulating Bathsheba despite Nathan’s obvious qualifications to be one hell of a David? Sister Peter Mary slowly dematerialized, ascending back into heaven, I assumed.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Nathan said, “though I have the distinct feeling you weren’t talking to me.”
“I wasn’t, actually. Sorry.” I managed a smile. “Just one of my—uh—visions, I guess you’d have to call them.”
He sighed and uncrossed his arms, then turned in his seat to look straight ahead.
“What gets me,” I went on, “is this crop all seem to have religious content. That’s probably because of the Hounds.”
Nathan continued staring out the windshield. I remembered St. Joseph di Copertino and let the subject drop. Still, Nathan had spoken the truth about my putting myself in danger. If danger existed—I’d not received a single warning since the day Aunt Eileen first met me on the street, not about assassins, at any rate, only about Nathan himself.
Sometimes I’m slow. The tarot reading finally fell into place along with the latest vision. Lust kills. Sister Peter Mary had been right, though not quite in the way she’d meant. What most people would call sexual desire comes from the Qi flowing between two people. What summons the flow depends on the desiring person’s psychology, whatever they find sexually attractive for whatever reason. Nathan and I attracted each other enough to pour out Qi, surrounding both of us in what amounted to a thick psychic fog. While it was physically uncomfortable for him, it made my talents impossible to control.
“Tell you something,” I said. “I’d be safer if you weren’t around.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” He slewed around to face me.
“You told me that first day that you prefer to work alone.”
“Yes, well. That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I realized you have suicidal tendencies. Why do you think you’d be safer alone?”
“I’m good at avoiding being noticed. You’re not.”
“Don’t lie.”
“Bastard!”
We both began staring out the windshield. I could either tell him the truth or just put up with him acting like a bodyguard, even though my raw physical feeling for him was causing nothing but problems. I could see a third option, allowing us to balance out the Qi in the usual way, but that would bring problems of its own.
“You
were
lying,” he said eventually.
“Yeah, so what?”
“I’m not going to apologize.”
“What makes you think I wanted you to?” At that point, I realized that our conversation had sunk to the level of thirteen year olds, and for reasons appropriate to that age. I thought up a half-truth as a cover story. “Nathan, look, I’m sorry. I’m all to pieces, thinking about Pat.”
“Well, yes, you must be.” He turned toward me again. His Byzantine eyes radiated genuine sympathy. “I just don’t want you to join him.”
“I’m not real keen on leaving this wicked world the same way he did, no. All right, I won’t go down to the Tenderloin alone.”
“Fine. With me along you’ll be a lot safer.”
“You can’t stay with me twenty-four hours a day.”
“Why not? I’ve got my suitcases in the boot.”
“No. You’re not moving in.”
“I was planning on sleeping on the floor of your lounge.”
Oh, yeah? I thought. For how long? Five minutes? Aloud, I said, “I can protect myself. I know you don’t believe in things like ensorcellment, but they work.”
“Against a military sniper’s rifle fired from a hundred meters away?”
“How is your body on my floor going to protect me from that?”
“It won’t, of course, but if someone tried to break in, they’d have a surprise waiting for them. Nola, why aren’t you taking this threat seriously?”
“I’ve wondered that myself.”
“Look.” He made a fist with his right hand and punched it into his left palm. “My superiors must have believed that the kind of talents your Agency offers are essential to this case. I scoffed at first, but I’m coming around to their way of thinking. I need your help, so damned if I’m going to lose you to the psychopath we’re hunting.”
I considered the offer on its merits. Beyond the problem of the superfluous Qi that Nathan and I were generating, I suspected that Johnson had talents of his own that allowed him to interfere with my extra senses. If I had a bodyguard, I could take the risk of scanning for him. If he physically followed the scan back to me, Nathan would be waiting to surprise him.
“All right, Nathan. That makes sense.”
“Brilliant.” He hesitated briefly. “Why won’t you call me by my first name?”
“Because,” I said and started the car.
I drove back to the apartment in a foul mood. I knew the route well enough to drive with half a mind and think with the other half, more than I’d been using recently. I needed to figure out a way to keep my animal instincts from blocking my mental talents.
Parking, as always, took far too long, but eventually I found a spot on a side street uphill from Judah. By then the fog had covered the entire sky and turned to a drizzle. In the midst of a canyon of art deco apartment buildings the passersby hurried along; some held newspapers over their heads; others had pulled up the hoods of their sweatshirts or parkas. Nathan took his suitcases from the trunk and shot the sky a baleful glance. I put on a jeans jacket over my cotton shirt.
“You must be cold,” Nathan said. “You should dress better.”
“I’m used to this weather.”
He snorted in a particularly unpleasant way. Under the cover of the rattle and rumble of a passing streetcar, I refused to answer. As we walked around the corner, I glanced at the row of newspaper racks cluttering up the curb. In one box a couple of morning editions of the
Chronicle
sagged, unbought and forlorn. A secondary headline caught my eye.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
I fished in my pocket, found a couple of quarters for the automatic mechanism, and bought a paper. Nathan glanced over my shoulder as I read, “Another Zodiac?”
“Astrology?” Nathan said.
“No, a serial killer that the San Francisco police never caught. That was back around 1968.” I glanced at the story under the header. “Our Johnson seems to have sent a letter to the paper, just like the Zodiac used to do.”
Nathan swore under his breath in some language that I took to be Hebrew. As we walked back to my building, I read the article aloud while he steered me around pedestrians and other obstacles. The killer of Mary Rose Romero had written a letter to the editor that spoke of ridding the city of an ancient Native American curse by blood sacrifice of those who engaged in unclean practices—whatever the writer meant by that. The reporter remarked that the letter’s garbled prose made very little sense.
Although the paper had followed the police request to refrain from printing a complete facsimile, the reporter did state that the writer had filled the margins with occult symbols that “harked back,” as he put it, to the Zodiac letters.
“The question remains,” the article finished up, “whether the letter is genuine or a hoax. The police are running a battery of forensic tests in an attempt to answer this question.”
I folded the paper and glanced at Nathan for comments.
“The Israeli papers received a similar letter about Greenbaum,” Nathan said, “though not about the consular official. The curse in our letter was attributed to ‘Arab occult magic,’ not Native Americans, of course.”
“Then this one’s likely to be genuine. Do our police know about the previous letter?”
“They have the full dossier, yes,” Nathan went on. “I’ll inquire if they’ve read it. You need to read the police report on the Romero murder. I included a translation of the original dossier on Johnson for you, too. A copy of the letter’s there as well.”
A translation. Of course, the original dossier had to be in Hebrew. Somehow with his classy accent and his perfect English, I kept forgetting just how foreign he was, a man who’d lived his entire life in a country surrounded by enemies. No wonder he carried a gun. O’Grady, I told myself, you’re melting. Stop it!
“I will,” I said. “Maybe the gruesome details will wake up my SAWM.”
“Your what?”
“Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism. Sorry. Agency slang.”
The door to the stairway leading to my apartment stood between a used clothing shop and a laundromat. I opened the door, but Nathan insisted on going in first, just in case a sniper lurked on the landing.
“This door should be kept locked,” he said.
“It is at night.”
“Murders have been known to happen during the day, too.”
Since nobody shot at us, we climbed the first flight of stairs. At the landing I could hear Mrs. Zukovski’s TV blaring
Oprah,
her favorite show, or so she’d told me often enough. At my landing Nathan stopped, motioned me back a step, set the suitcases down, and drew his gun.
I could sense no one inside. I let my mind range around, visualized every room—I even pictured the dust bunnies under the bed—not one trace of danger could I pick up. As quietly as I could, I mouthed the words “should be okay.” Nathan nodded, but he stood to one side when he put the keys in the lock and turned. The lock clicked loudly, nothing else.
“Were you expecting a bomb to go off?” I said.
“That’s not funny, considering where I come from.”
“Sorry.” I winced.
No assassins lurked in the apartment. Nathan put his suitcases down by the door, then double-locked and chained it. I headed straight for the thermostat to turn on the wall heater.
“Coffee?” he said. “I’ll make it if you’ve got some.”
“Always. There’s the kitchen, and I’ve got one of those drip systems.”
“Milk? Sugar?”
“No, just black, thanks.”
I picked up the police report and sat down on the computer chair to read. The description of wounds and a tentative reconstruction of the fight Mary Rose put up would have awakened survival sense in a zombie. Apparently she’d seen or smelled him stalking her, then lain in wait and jumped him from behind. He’d rolled and managed to squirm and face her, then shoved his gun under her chin and—well, let’s just say it was going to be a closed casket funeral. I felt my talents beginning to stir, only to lie down again when Nathan returned carrying two mugs of coffee. He’d taken off his jacket and the gun, making it obvious how well that blue shirt fit him.
“There’s nothing to eat in your refrigerator,” he said, “except black lettuce.”
“That’s arugula. It’s perfectly fresh.”
“It’s still not enough for a meal.”
“I don’t eat much, usually.” I took the proffered coffee from him.
“Ah. That’s why you’re too thin.” He paused for a sip from his mug, then sat down at one end of the couch.
I felt a brief urge to swat him with the police report. All the suffering I endured to stay fashionable, only to be told I was too thin! He was grinning at me as if he knew damn well how annoyed I was. I spun the chair around to set my mug down next to the computer. I kept my back to him while I finished reading.
Even in a photocopy, Johnson’s letter to the Tel Aviv media brought me the smell of insanity. He rambled about dangers of the night, ancient curses, the rise of avengers to purify the human race—a particularly unfortunate turn of phrase, I thought, to use in a Jewish nation. In the margins he’d drawn an assortment of occult signs, the astrological symbol for Saturn, the alchemical shorthand for sulfur and phosphorus, and others that I couldn’t identify. It seemed that he was using them to creep people out rather than convey a message, but I decided to keep an open mind about that.
“Can I send a scan of this letter to my agency?” I said. “We’ve got a code expert who should take a look at these symbols.”
“Please do, but ours couldn’t find any meaning in them.”
“Your expert is probably used to dealing with rational human beings. Ours has a wider range.”
Nathan smiled at that. I returned to reading.
The various dossiers themselves told me little more than I could figure out for myself, except for a few details about Miriam Greenbaum. Her parents had chosen to emigrate to Israel under the right of return when she turned fourteen. After she’d been killed, they told the Israeli police that they’d emigrated because she was having difficulties in school in the “oppressive and conformist” United States.
“Nathan?” I said. “Suppose the Greenbaum girl started making the full moon changes just before her parents decided to leave the States. Would it have been easier to hide her condition in Israel?”