License to Ensorcell (15 page)

“I’m beginning to,” he said.

“You’re new to the Agency?”

“No, he’s with Interpol,” I broke in. “We’re just assisting.”

“Interpol? Oh, like that TV show, the one on the BBC channel.” Annie gave him a bright smile. “That’s nice. Well, probably Jerry can tell you a lot more than I can about this sort of thing. Drugs, I mean. It really is too bad that he’s so addicted to cocaine.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but he can’t see it that way. Yet.” I took another twenty out of my jeans and slid it across the table. “I’ll invoice the Agency later, but you might as well have this now.”

“Well, thank you! ” Annie beamed at the twenty, then tucked it away with the others. “Such a help!”

Nathan had tactfully looked away during this exchange of cold cash. Annie noticed him studying the framed posters on the wall down at the other end of the room. The lithographs portrayed a woman in a flowing black dress and red turban; she stared out at the viewer with a crazed expression on her face.

“My grandmother was a vaudeville performer,” Annie said. “She had a very successful mind-reader act. Most of the so-called psychics on the circuit were nothing but tricksters and cheats, of course, but she really could read minds and see into the future and the like. I suppose that’s where I get it from.”

“Seems reasonable,” Nathan said. “As reasonable as any of this is.”

“We must be quite a trial for you.” Annie patted his hand in a grandmotherly gesture. “Policemen are usually so rational.” She lifted her hand, smiled, and held up his Interpol ID. “My grandmother knew so many little tricks. Vaudeville must have been so very interesting.”

Nathan stared at her, started to speak, then merely laughed. He slipped the ID back into his pants pocket. “Must have been,” he said. “I’m just glad you’re on our side.”

I decided that I might as well try calling Jerry, but he never answered his phone. He was either asleep, with a client, or too loaded to answer. After a good many rings, I did get a tasteful message via an answering service, announcing that Mr. Jerome had left his salon for the day but would return calls during business hours. Annie and I got a good laugh out of this cover story.

“After all,” she said, “the things he does would curl my hair, certainly!”

Nathan smiled politely, and we left.

As we walked back out to the street, I was considering Annie’s flash of insight. I knew only the basics of the drug trade, but even the network news talked about heroin from Afghanistan and how it reached American markets. I waited till we were clear of the house before I said anything to Nathan.

“Persian white, huh? You think?”

“I do. It comes through Kurdistan, where Johnson was spotted.”

Spotted. The word caught my attention and refused to let go. I was standing in an enormous library, miles of pale gray shelves in all directions. In a flurry of white wings the angel came to me and showed me an open book. “Sister Peter Mary,” the angel said. “Heresies.”

I was sitting in the backseat of the unmarked squad car. Nathan sat next to me with his arm around my shoulders. Rain pounded on the metal roof with the sound of machine guns. When Nathan leaned close to study my face, I caught the faint scent of witch hazel.

“Why don’t you use a real aftershave?” I said.

“I suppose that means you’re back,” he said. “Do you remember me putting you into the car?”

“No, now that you mention it. Why do you look so frightened?”

“You might have warned me that you go into walking trance states.”

“I didn’t know I did.”

Since Nathan’s arm felt heavy and warm, I could assume that he was real, and the angel had been the illusion. The scent of his painful idea of aftershave lotion underscored my conviction. Otherwise, I might have doubted it. I wanted to rest my head on his shoulder and sleep, but he slid over to the open door and got out of the car.

“Come sit in the front.” He held out his hand.

I needed his help to change seats. During the ride I fought off the clouds gathering inside my head. If the angels wanted to tell me something, I figured, they could damn well wait till I got home. They must have been assisting, however, because Nathan actually drove in a halfway sane manner, and we got a parking spot right near my apartment—a sure sign of divine intervention.

Nathan helped me out of the car and held the open umbrella over us both. Once I got my feet on the solid sidewalk, I took a deep breath of wet air and felt my head beginning to clear.

“How do you know what a walking trance is?” I asked him.

“It’s something I learned in my miserable childhood. Here’s the door to your apartment building. Mind the step up.”

“I’m okay now, thanks.”

I shook myself free of his arm, an ungrateful action in a way, but I was determined to stay unmelted. Getting inside my own space made me feel almost normal again. I hung up my wet coat on the shower rail and dumped the umbrella into the bathtub. The effort of returning to the living room made me flop ungracefully onto the couch. I realized too late that I’d left myself open to his sitting next to me. He took off his raincoat and tossed it over the back of the computer chair.

“You need something to eat,” he said.

“I don’t think I could keep it down.”

“If you don’t eat, you’re going to keep slipping into trance.”

“How do you know—oh, right, the spiritual retro kibbutz.”

He looked at me and smiled. “I should have known your agency would do a workup on me.”

“Of course. Yours probably did one on me.”

“It didn’t find much.”

“Neither did mine. What happened to that kibbutz, by the way? Is it still there?”

“No. A year after my father and I left, Reb Ezekiel had a heart attack in a whorehouse and died in the embrace of impurity. The remaining faithful lost their faith and fled.”

“I can see why.”

“There’s no doubt, though, that odd things happened under his regime.” He let his voice trail away for a moment, then shook himself. “So, yes, I know what fasting can do to someone.”

“Okay, I’ll eat. Just for you.”

Since I’d left the heat on, the apartment was hot. He pulled his sweater over his head and tossed it onto the coffee table before he trotted into the kitchen and began bustling around. I rested my head on the back of the couch and considered my vision. The gray library, I realized, probably stood for my brain, and the angel symbol had been pointing out something that I knew or had known at one time and forgotten. Heresies: Asia Minor, and the entire Mediterranean world, for that matter, had spawned a hell of a lot of them. Sister Peter Mary had confined her lessons to a few of the important “enemies of the true faith,” as she’d called them. Arians, Nestorians, the iota controversy, Gnostics—empty words, jumbled together, rose in answer to the call of memory. One term, however—Gnostics—did ring in my mind as a subject that I’d once found interesting.

Nathan reappeared with a cheese sandwich, made with green lettuce and a lot of mayonnaise, and a mug of cold coffee, heavily spiked with milk. I’d never been waited on by a guy wearing a gun before. It had a certain charm.

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate this.”

“You’re welcome.”

He handed me the plate and mug, then disappeared into the kitchen again. He reemerged a moment later with a plate of his own, then sat down next to me.

“Good sandwich,” I mumbled, then swallowed before I went on. “I’m surprised you know how to make one.”

“Why? I live alone. The bachelor’s best friend, sandwiches. Usually I stuff things into pita bread, but English style will do.”

“Yeah. I’m a lousy cook myself.”

For some minutes we ate in silence. I tried to figure out why the word “spotted” had seemed so important, what it might signify in conjunction with heresies. I dimly remembered a college history lecture about a cult where leopards loomed large, drawing a chariot of some kind. Dionysus, yes, but something even older. They had some kind of peculiar ritual—

“Castration,” I said. “That’s it!”

“I beg your pardon!” Nathan snapped.

“Nothing personal! I’m trying to remember what cult had leopards and the priests castrated themselves.”

“Oh. Cybele, the Great Mother.”

“That’s it, yeah, thanks.”

Nathan took another bite of his sandwich, ate it, then wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “Would it be intruding,” he said, “to ask why you were trying to remember that?”

“Just an everyday thought around here.” I drank some of my coffee. “Seriously, though, it was the word ‘spotted’ that sent me off into that trance. I saw an angel who talked about heresies. Cybele goes back too far to be considered a Christian heresy or any other kind of heresy. The ancient world didn’t think like that.”

“Quite so, every god welcome in the pantheon and all that. Are there any Christian cults that leopards figure in?”

“No, not that I ever heard. It’s time to hit the Internet, I think. I’ll see what I can Google up.”

Nothing, as it turned out. I found thousands of pages about Gnostic heresy and heresies in general, and even more about Satanism, but no cults that featured leopards or anything spotted. I had reached the point of giving up when Nathan had a brilliant thought.

“Wait,” he said. “We were discussing Kurdistan. Any heretical beliefs would have to fall away from Islam, not Christianity.”

“Of course! How dumb can I get?”

After a few muddled minutes of trying various search terms, and quite a few more of link surfing, I finally hit the target, or to be precise, my web browser did.

“Peacocks, not leopards,” I said. “Ever hear of the cult of Tawsi Melek?”

“Melek? A king, is it?” Nathan said.

“That’s what this article calls him, yeah. The Peacock Angel or the Peacock King.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Neither have I, and apparently we’re not alone in our ignorance. It’s pretty obscure. There are some remote tribes in Kurdistan who worship this guy as the ruler of this world and the universe.” I skimmed down the screen. “The believers say he’s a holy emanation of the supreme god, the first emanation in fact. He went on to create the physical world following the supreme god’s instructions, with a lot of lesser emanations to help.”

“Ah. Sort of a divine foreman.”

“Yeah, but the Islamic clerics brand him as Satan. I’ll bet the Christian ones would agree.”

The angel appeared beside my computer desk. He smiled at me and raised both hands in blessing. “Coat of many colors,” he said.

“Why couldn’t you just say peacock?” I said. “It would have saved me a lot of time.”

“There are no peacocks in our holy book.”

And with that lovely bit of chop logic, he disappeared.

CHAPTER 6

“I SUPPOSE,” Nathan said in a profoundly weary tone of voice, “I’m going to have to get used to you speaking to things that aren’t there.”

“It would help you maintain peace of mind, yeah,” I said. “An angel just confirmed my guess about the peacock king cult.”

“Brilliant. How I am going to tell that to Sanchez?”

“No need for sarcasm.” I considered the legitimate question behind the tone of voice. “For one thing, we can’t be sure that Johnson and DD belong to it. These angels I see aren’t real, you know. They’re just visualized symbols from my own mind, so they’re not particularly reliable.”

“You can’t know how glad I am to hear you say that.”

“What?” I said. “You didn’t think they were real, did you?”

“No, I thought you thought they were.”

I swiveled around in the computer chair. He was looking at me without the slightest hint of a smile.

“I’ve never met anyone like you in my life,” Nathan continued, “not even when I was a child among the nutters. How am I supposed to know what you believe?”

“That’s a reasonable question, actually. You can always just ask.”

“There are times when I don’t even know how to frame the question.” He crossed his arms over his chest and glared.

I glanced around fast, but no Sister Peter Mary materialized. She must have missed her cue.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, “except I’m sorry. If it weren’t for the State Department, you wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. They’re the ones who put your agency in touch with mine.”

“Fine!” His voice climbed a couple of notes up the register. “Blame the sodding government!”

“Who else am I supposed to blame?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Blame is a stupid word to use, anyway.”

“You’re the one who introduced the concept into this discussion.”

Nathan growled at me, very tigerlike, then caught himself. I could see his face change as he made himself relax. He stopped hugging himself to keep the rage in, sighed, looked away, swallowed heavily, all of the little techniques they teach people in anger management classes. I could practically check them off a list, which made me realize that he must have taken a course of those classes. What would he be like in a real rage? Though it might have been an interesting scientific experiment to provoke him and see, I decided to play it safe.