Nightwise (31 page)

Torri was quiet for a moment, then she sat up.

“How is Jareth? Mom? Dad? Jenna and Mike? Chelsea? They okay?”

“I talked to your mom today. She misses you. They all do. We all do.”

Torri looked off in the direction of her marker. She nodded.

“I'm going to go see Mom in a spell,” she said. “I managed to talk my way into some work down here for a while. There's a twelve-thousand-year-old man in Egypt, building a machine to devour gods. I have to deal with him.”

“I feel sorry for the venerable bastard,” I said, and ran my fingers through her hair. “I'm on the clock too. Got a black hat of my own to take care of. I guess we need to go, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “I've missed you. I've missed everyone. It's lonely sometimes—you'd think it wouldn't be with all of time and space to play in—the colors, colors there aren't human words for, and the music. Can you imagine suns singing? Skies that rain emotion? And with all of it, all of that, I miss my little boy's laughter, the feel of holding a warm hand, the smell of Mom's coffee, you stroking my hair, singing and dancing with Jenna, tasting good sushi.” Her voice quavered. Her eyes glistened as she blinked.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm so sorry, baby.”

“You were seeking,” she said, wiping her eyes, “the answer to a question. I felt the question calling.”

“Yeah,” I said, and wiped my eyes too. Scene change. “This man I am hunting, he calls himself Slorzack, and he apparently claims to be the avatar of the god Chernobog. At least one of Chernobog's servants thought so. He has protection from on high—a higher-order entity—someone you deal with, Torri. I need to know who is his patron, who has covered his tracks and why.”

Torri frowned. “Chernobog is diminished, darlin',” she said. “He was a minor deity of evil, destruction, and darkness. Kind of low rent. The height of his power was in the twelfth century. He was mostly forgotten, and gods when they pass from the hearts of men diminish, fade. Memory is power, Laytham.”

“So that god is just gone?” I said.

“Chernobog has become a shade,” she said. “Powerless. His demesne lies in ruin, his throne shattered. Without worship or sacrifices, or even memory, he is…”

“Sacrifices,” I said. “Sacrifices! Torri, is it possible for a mortal to take the demesne and power of a diminished god?”

“It's … I suppose,” she said, shaking her head. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “A man would have to try to embody the very essence of the deity he was trying to supplant. Chernobog was a bloodthirsty monster, a god of darkness and terror. A man would have to embrace atrocity to his core to even attempt it, and he'd need power—sacrifices, and so many, so much blood.”

“Slorzack has it on his hands,” I said.

“Are you sure he is not merely a servant of Chernobog and is trying to fortify the god by—”

“I know him,” I said. “I know him well enough to know he would never be anyone's servant, ever.”

“Sounds like someone we both know,” she said. “Well, I can tell you that Chernobog still slumbers in shadow and dust, and no member of the Court of the Uncountable Stairs, or any unaffiliated pantheons, have given this mortal aid or sanctuary. Trust me, I'd have heard word of it if they had.”

“Well, the tricks he's pulled require that kind of juice,” I said.

“That just leaves…” Torri let the thought drift off.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was already headed in that direction, but I had to make sure.”

“Are you going to … reach out to them?” she asked.

“Just ask a few polite questions,” I said. “Not looking for no trouble.”

She laughed. It was loud and it was boisterous and it was full of life. It was the universe telling you not to take it all so seriously. It was the most beautiful laugh I have ever heard. “Yeah, right,” she said, snorting a little, “since when?”

I held her again, tight. “Thank you, Torri Lyn.”

“I'm happy I could help you, Pickle,” she said. “I best be getting on to see Mom. I'm glad you were here.”

“Do you regret what I did?” I asked her.

“Yes,” Torri said. “I regret what they took from you in exchange for me. I regret what that cost you.”

“It was worth it,” I said.

“Laytham, they took your joy,” she said. “They cut it out of you like a surgeon. They amputated your emotions, sugar. No one is worth that.”

“You were,” I said. “'Sides, with you gone, I didn't need it anymore.”

She hugged me fiercely. I felt her tears on my neck. “Oh, you stupid, stupid man,” she said. “You know there are things I want to say, that I used to say, but I'm not allowed to say them here anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “The rules. It's okay, darlin', you said them all before. I remember them. Every day, I remember them. Your kisses too.”

She pulled me close again. She was my world—her eyes, her scent, her hair, the warm softness of her skin, her smile, her lips. Her.

She held my head, her hands on either side. “Memory,” Torri said, “is how I kiss you now.”

I closed my eyes, swept my hands into her hair, and pulled her to me. Our lips were a breath apart.

“To hell with the rules,” I said.

There were no lips, no Torri. I stood alone in the graveyard under the bright eye of the moon.

“Fine,” I said. “I'll kiss you your way.”

 

TWENTY-THREE

The ounce of heroin in my coat pocket would buy me the Rabbi's secrets—that is, if he didn't still hold a grudge over that whole Dybbuk thing.

I got out of the cab on Madison Street near the Wabash L line subway station and started the four-block walk to the Chicago Loop Synagogue. Harel had grudgingly agreed to meet me there this morning. It had taken the promise of the smack and my guarantee that I wasn't hanging around very long after that to coax him out.

It was very bright day, the sky was clear. I had thought it was cold in Virginia, but Chicago slapped me around and disabused me of that notion. It was still at least a month away from anything resembling spring, regardless of what the calendar said.

The trip from Covington had been uneventful. Jimmie had been good to his word, and his friend, a fellow trucker named Guthrie, had let me ride along while he drove a load of steel up to Illinois. Guthrie, a tall black man in his sixties, who seemed to have been born with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth, was also a damn good singer. He had played guitar and sung backup on a few tours with Buck Owens in '71, and we ended up knowing a few of the same old folks in the business. We sang a lot of old country songs, and by the time we rolled into Chicago, we were discussing names for the band.

I turned onto Clark Street, headed south. I loved this town. It was a wilderness of stone, glass, and light; there were dangerous predators on the street, in the halls of political power, in the markets. If you weren't on your A game, this city would eat you alive, feetfirst, so it could watch your expression. Don't get me wrong, New York will try to kill you if you don't respect her, but Chicago does it with a pipe wrench and the unabashed exuberance of a Teamster working over a scab.

The Loop Synagogue was next to a Wendy's. It was a beautiful building—the architecture was modern, sandwiched between older styles. There was a glass-enclosed lobby, and most of the façade was taken up by windows. A sculpture of twisted metal hands open in welcome. Behind the hands was a wall of words of love and faith carved in bas relief. The sculpture greeted me above the entrance. I liked it. It reminded me a little of magic itself—hands and words tied to divinity. It seemed a fitting greeting in a place where the ineffable spirit of God roamed.

I entered but didn't bother with the traditional donning of the kippah, or taking one of the siddurim, or prayer books, from the shelf next to the entrance to the Prayer Hall proper. Given what I was here about and who I was meeting, it seemed kind of hypocritical to do all that.

It was too hot inside the synagogue; someone had pumped up the heat to compensate for the cold outside. Harel was pacing near the huge stained-glass mural that took up most of the eastern wall of the synagogue, near the bimah, the platform where the service was conducted.

Harel Ettinger was about ten years younger than me, in his midthirties, but you'd be hard-pressed to realize it. Even as ragged as I looked, the years of shooting up had not been kind to him at all. He had dark circles under his hollow, haunted brown eyes, and his complexion bore the pale, waxy look of smack-chic. Harel was thin when Boj and I met him in '96 and skinny the last time I saw him six years ago; now he was cadaverous. His hair was black, sprinkled with white, cut short, and shaved tight on the sides; the top was a mop of dark curls. He sported a goatee and was wearing a dingy-looking trench coat, a gray collared shirt with a very fine purple pinstripe, black jeans, and leather shoes. It suddenly struck me by the way he was dressed how much he was the son of my and Boj's influence. We had helped shape Harel into the man he became. That realization made me sadder. Harel was known as “the Rabbi” on the streets of Chicago and in the Life, though he had been kicked out of rabbinical school in 2005, near the end of his studies.

“About damned time,” Harel said. “You're late. You got the shit?”

“Nice,” I said, looking around. “You want to shoot up in here too? You can cook it up right there on the bimah.”

“Like you haven't done worse, Ballard.”

He had me there. I gave him a casual handshake, which he returned with a scowl. I palmed and passed him the smack, which was in a small, taped plastic baggie. Instead of pocketing it, he cradled it like you might hold the last shard of your soul. Reluctantly, he slipped it in his pocket. An old Hasidic man paused from tutoring a young bespectacled boy to glare at Harel and me.

“You two will have plenty of quality time together soon enough,” I said. “How you been, kid?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Harel said. “Like you fucking care, Ballard. What do you want?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “And true. I gave up giving a shit about you when you tried to shake down Ellie Jackson's family after we got rid of that fucking Dybbuk.”

I had told myself that if I wanted this to work, I needed to not bring up the last time Harel and I worked together. We had managed to cast out a powerful evil spirit of an old, dead Jewish mobster, which had possessed a little nine-year-old girl whose family lived in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project here in Chicago.

I had wanted to play this cool, but every time I saw Harel, the little bastard pissed me off. It was one of the reasons the so-called Occult Rat Pack of me, Harel, and Boj had split up.

“You threatened to put the damn thing back in their little girl if they didn't pay you ten thousand dollars,” I said.

“Pay
us
. They had it,” Harel said, raising his voice. “Bunch of schwarze drug dealers, they could afford it. I've seen you shake people down plenty of times, Laytham, poorer than them. Remember that time with the nun when you—”

“Enough,” I said. “You remember how this went down last time? You remember how it ended for you? Well, I've gotten stronger, and unless you really want to see how strong, I suggest you drop this shit right now before that fucking mouth of yours talks you right out of some work.”

Harel shut up. The old man was obviously irritated. He was whispering to the little boy and trying as hard as he could to ignore us.

“You have a job for me,” Harel said. “I can put aside whatever for coin of the realm, Ballard, even your bullshit.”

“Regardless of what I think of you personally, Harel,” I said, “you are the best damn kabbalist and summoner in the Life. I know that, and you damn sure know it. I've been on a caper for a few months now, and at every turn I am getting stonewalled and jacked by summoned entities.”

Harel narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

“I need countermeasures and intel,” I said. “Someone on your side of the street has been screwing with me. You know a summoner goes by the handle Memitim?”

“No,” Harel said.

“I hoped you did,” I said. “The name roughly translates to ‘death angel' in Hebrew.”

“Actually, it's
mĕmītǐm,
” Harel said. “It means an angel that rains destruction on those the guardian angels no longer protect.”

“Sure he couldn't be an old pupil of yours, or a fellow kabbalist?” I asked.

Harel shook his head. “No.”

“Well, the guy is a contract killer,” I said. “Specializes in hard targets, and targets in the Life. He's apparently done a little work for the Russians and the Sicilians.”

“So what you want from me?” Harel said.

“I want you to help me find him, get all the info I can on him and his clients, and keep him off my back while I finish this job.”

“And what's in it for me?” he said.

“This job I'm doing,” I said, “it's for Boj. He's dying. He sent me after the man who killed his wife, who killed Mita.”

Harel shrugged. “And I give a shit why?”

Back in the day, Boj was the cannon. When shit was too fucking powerful or too stubborn or evil to fall down when Harel and I threw words at it, Boj waded in with whatever weapon he could find and balls the size of Jupiter. He saved both of us more times than I could count and nearly died doing it as many times. Boj also took Harel under his wing—Harel was his stupid, naïve little brother. They had a lot of laughs together. Boj loved Harel as much as he was capable of loving anything after Slorzack carved out his heart by killing Mita.

This had been the test. I thought if there was anything that might bring Harel back to himself, it would be invoking Boj. I was wrong. The Harel I knew was dead and gone. I was talking to a hungry ghost.