The Necromancer's House (7 page)

“There are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”

Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.

She favors the penny.

They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won't allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.

All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke's little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.

Her remote controls, one for TV, one for DVD player, have been wrapped in plastic, likewise clay-smudged and fingerprinted.

More inverted mugs, and a smattering of coffee cups and saucers, congregate on a card table, along with a tall vase topped by a precarious-looking round wooden board. A
quarantaine
of rosettes dries atop this board, the same rosettes that, when fitted with brass pins and painted Tudor red, will adorn the vests and doublets of the acting cast of the Renaissance festival to distinguish them from unpaid costumed enthusiasts. That is to say, when a drunken
Landsknecht
in rather convincing armor barfs on your lady fair, the lack of said rosette upon his breast will mark this as an unsanctioned event and indemnify both the festival and the troupe of professional improvisers that animate its lanes.

“Which kind am I?” she says.

Meaning plodder or intuitive.

“A bit of both, like me,” he says. “But more intuitive, I think.”

Her brow wrinkles, and although she doesn't look away from the exercise in her palm, it's clear she wants more explanation.

“An intuitive just
does
it, doesn't need as many implements, can do small things almost immediately. Like what you're doing. An intuitive is more luminous, must in fact be luminous from the start.”

“And a planner?”

“Plodder.”

“Plodder.”

“They hate that word. And some of them are a bit contemptful and jealous toward intuitives.”

“Sounds like you're a bit contemptful of them.
Plodder
is an ugly word. What do they call themselves?”

“
Disciples
is the preferred term when they differentiate, but they don't differentiate the same way. They see themselves as disciplined and those who don't spend their lives bent over books as lazy. Thing is, they're all geniuses. The plodders. To come at magic without luminosity, you have to be smart enough to work for Apple or IBM or crack codes for the CIA, and a few of them do. Their books are much more complex, more like rocket science; more glyphs and formulas, though one of them would say
formulae
. They
think
their way into belief, crack the code of magic and understanding with brainpower. They aren't all luminous at the start, but they get there; they make a fire with sticks where naturals already have a fire. But the payoff is that they can do really big, astounding things. Think of it as learning a language with books and tapes versus being born in that country. Nonluminous plodders are like non-native speakers. But English was Nabokov's second language, and he wrote
Lolita
. Or was it his third language? He spoke French, too.”

“Nabokov, huh? Was that a jab?”

“At who?”

She raises an eyebrow, keeps moving the shard.

“Oh, right.”

I forgot you're a sex offender.

“Not consciously.”

Anneke is officially a witch, albeit a novice. The first time she jiggled that penny, Andrew felt the small tingle of magic waking up. She collapsed and sobbed afterward, but that was not unusual. He had a similarly emotive reaction the first time he spun a pop top. The first spell is usually some light levitation. Small magic, admittedly, a mustard seed from which some build mountains.

He leans forward just a little so the black iron conical stove behind her appears to top her head like a witch's hat. Sandalwood incense leaks smoke behind her. He leans the other way so it appears to come from her nose.

“What are you doing?” she says, her concentration split, Abraham Lincoln dead again on dull copper in her hand.

“Sorry. Nothing.”

She tosses the penny into a broken mug full of coins, lights a cigarette, gives him one. He totters the lighter out of her hand, levitates it into his.

“Show-off. Can you light it?”

“It's a more precise motion, takes more strength.”

“Yes, but can you?”

“Burns more gas.”

She squints her eyes at him.

“Magic burns fuel. Continuous spells burn fuel continuously. Spikes in magic use can disrupt those spells. Think of an outlet, energy surges.”

“Continuous spells? Like what?”

“Health. Youth. Luck. One well-cast luck spell in Vegas and a user can clean up. Only not in the MGM Mirage casinos—Mandalay Bay, Bellaggio, I forget the rest but I have a list—they have users working for them, kicking others out. Or worse.”

“Youth, huh? You running one of those right now, Mr. Looks Thirty-Five?”

“You should know. Try to detect it.”

She closes her eyes.

“Open them and think about what you want to know.”

Now she looks at him, really looks at him. Then she feels it, subtle as cat's breath. The hairs on her forearms stand up just a little.

“You vain motherfucker. So you can't flick the lighter or you'll get liver spots?”

“I'm a bit stronger than that,” he says, and the lighter sparks, lights up, Andrew smiling with his hands behind his head. “It's just that I have to focus more. It's easier just to light it by hand. It's like Skype.”

“Excuse me?”

“Skype. It's . . .”

“I know what it is, what's the relevance?”

“I used to have a crystal ball.”

“Sounds like a song title.”

He sings.

“I used to have a crystal ball,

It really was a fishbowl.”

He pauses.

“Can't think of a rhyme?”

“No.”

“Just say it.”

“It was a bit of a pain in the ass. The other person had to have a glass something-or-other with exactly the same spell cast into it, and you both had to concentrate; if you got distracted, the image faded or distorted or went away. You're about to ask if my fishbowl rang, and it did. Really, it quivered when the other person wanted to talk, but I taped a little bell to it.”

“I was going to ask if there was a fish in it.”

“There used to be, before I enchanted it. I'm not good with fish.”

“No, you're good with cars and dead people. And you're intuitive, like me. Who's a plodder?”

“I know one.”

“Powerful?”

“Scary powerful. Young, too. Lives in Lincoln Park. Chicago. And she's working on a project for me right now.”

Chicagohoney85:
The Mikhail Dragomirov you're looking for is Mikhail “Misha” Yevgenievich Dragomirov. Born December 1943. He was one of the few non-Jewish members of a crime organization that came over during the détente of the early eighties. He lived in Brighton Beach, which some called Little Odessa, but he wasn't from Odessa. He knew these guys from the army. His family has long ties to the Russian military, most notably with the great-uncle Mikhail Dragomirov he was probably named for, a Sean Connery–looking geezer who wrote extensively on 19th-century tactics. Died of heartbreak in 1905 when the Japanese kicked Russia's ass with 20th-century tactics. The dad, Yevgeny, was no slouch, either. Fuckton of medals in WW2. Tank commander, T-34. Only an efreitor, like a corporal, but survived three bullet wounds, crawled out of two burning tanks and killed more Germans than bad Bratwurst. Serious badass.

Ranulf:
Where was he from?

—The great-uncle, the badass dad, or your guy?

—All three.

—Big bear, the Ukraine. Daddy bear, a village near the Volga. Baby bear, Gorky, now called Nizhny Novgorod.

A chill runs down Andrew's spine and he actually leans away from his computer, as if away from the memories the word
Volga
stirs in him.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.

He feels sweat moisten his palms. He rubs these on his pants.

—Where is little Dragomirov now?

—I should be asking you that. He disappeared from his summer cabin in Sterling. New York State. Like a few miles from you, right?

—Does it look mobbish? Old business coming back for him?

—Not likely. Everybody liked him. He was so good with numbers that three separate bosses used him to help cover their gasoline schemes, and so charming and funny the Luccheses didn't whack him when they got Resnikoff. But he hung on until the early nineties when they opened that big, flashy nightclub,
Rasputin's
. Meanwhile, new Russian mob was coming over in droves, lots of it with ex-Spetsnaz muscle. FBI got interested because these guys were as big as the Italians now, at least locally. Mikhail Dragomirov felt it getting hot, took off to St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), married a stewardess who also modeled at boat shows and bought a couple of condos. She died, he sold the condos, and now he just tools around with his dog gambling and frequenting on-line escorts. He looooves the shit out of Vegas. And Cirque du Soleil. I think he saw Ka seven times. And Avenue Q. If someone was going to make him sleep with the fishes, they would have done it back in the day.

Andrew blinks at the screen, rubs his chin.
“Sleep with the fishes”? Was that intentional? Does she know about Nadia?

—Jesus, old man, you hang out with a rusalka? I didn't know there were any of those in the west. WTF, he comes all the way to America to get drowned by a Russian mermaid?

—Are you actually reading my thoughts over the Internet? And is this conversation veiled?

—Facebook knows more about you than I do. And computers are my specialty. You'd be amazed ;)

So saying, Radha appears in a box on the screen (half Iranian on her father's side but she says Persian—pale skin, dark hair, she
is
a honey), showing her hands. Text nonetheless continues to scroll.

—And I don't have unveiled conversations, except on BS social media as a front. If I weren't veiling this, I'd Skype you, because you type like a trained seal using his nose. I'm the go-to girl for like 40 of our sort . . . you think I'm going to let homeland security read this stuff? Try to print this conversation, I dare you.

Andrew likes dares. He prints. The printer slowly whines out not text, but a photograph. Him on the toilet, pants around ankles, long hair down, reading a copy of
Timber Home Living
, his favorite magazine. The picture is from this morning, from the angle of the polished brass mirror over the sink. A corner of his cell phone winks on the toilet's tank, just behind him, indicating the electronic fingerhold she used to get in. Normally brass mirrors are safe, can't be used as gates like glass ones, but Radha is so good with electricity and currents that she was able to press the conductive metal into her service.

—You scare me.

—Thanks. So, look, you should know I picked up some magic around him. Strong. Not coming from him, but someone near him, maybe family. Maybe the niece. Some Internet chatter about a niece coming over to help look for him, but nothing specific. I think someone's veiling on that end.

—Someone stronger than you?

Radha crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

—I didn't say that.

When she uncrosses her arms, she has six arms, Shiva-style, the hands of which she stacks on her hips defiantly, her six elbows fanned behind her, making a sort of Persian seraph of her.

—I dare you to get me info on the niece.

—Not fair.

—I double dog dare you.

—What do I get?

—What do you want?

—Madeline Kahn.

—Ok. I'll open a trapdoor for five minutes. You know how it works, right?

—Yeah, you send me a DVD of a movie she's in, and I get five minutes to get her to talk to me. Only she doesn't have to. She could tell me to go fuck myself and leave her alone.

—Or she could freak out. No telling with the dead. Most likely she'll use your time asking you about friends and family. You should probably Google the shit out of everybody she knew. And it's going to be VHS. I haven't figured out how to do it on DVD yet.

—Better catch up, old man. Even DVDs are old-school now. What are you going to do when it's all computer streaming? Which it is.

—I guess you'll take over.

—I can't open trapdoors. I tried. Plenty.

—Then I guess you'll have to go to a pawnshop and get a VCR.

—For Madeline? Ok. And send History of the World. I want to talk to her in that Roman get-up. “YES! No,no,no,no,no,no, YES!”

—Are you sure you don't have a family member or friend you'd rather talk to?

—I'm young. All of my friends are alive. Only dead family were crabby old grayhairs. One nice Grandma on Brick Lane in London just died, but I'd rather talk to Madeline Kahn. “Ohhh, it's twue, it's twue!”

—As you wish.

—All right. I'll keep poking. We'll see if comrade witchiepoo Dragomirov has hackers or slackers in her kennel.

An apartment in Kiev.

Small and dirty, littered with decades-old Western kitsch.

An Eiffel tower perfume bottle, yellowed and empty, cat hair stuck to its sides, dominates a plastic white end table hash-marked at every edge with cigarette scars.

Next to the table, and taller, stands a Babel tower of books, at the top of which a dog-eared paperback presents a redhead with arched eyebrows, her conical, late-sixties breasts like small missiles all but poking through her bikini as she guns a motorcycle beneath the Czech title,
Angels of Road and Beach
.

Fake German steins made in Japan stand on the floor against a peeling once-avocado wall, like very small counterrevolutionaries awaiting their firing squad.

A curling old poster, its corners peppered with tack holes, features a leering and clearly unauthorized Mickey Mouse pointing a gloved finger back at the legend
ORLANDO
; oranges spill from the first
O
, a dolphin jumps through the second. Behind the huge mouse, men and women in early-eighties hairdos, all of them soft around the edges like someone Captain Kirk is about to inseminate, laugh in a sort of twinkling, painted-in, promlike heaven. Mickey's waist is cut off by a neobiblical invitation,
Come and See, Come and See!
in Russian and Ukrainian. Under this is the Sunny Skye travel agency logo atop a long-dead phone number. The top and bottom of the poster are torn and taped in the middle where the apartment dweller's father ripped it from its thumbtacks, ripped it off of the wall of his illegal Donetsk business in 1986, just ahead of the arrival of the police.

An orange cat with white paws licks itself, ignoring the man hunched over the computer in a sun-bleached pinkish-yellow Izod polo shirt. If it could stand up and look over his shoulder, it would see him typing in English:

On ffriday, I was at the aunts farm and accidentally saw Huh, just call me, if you really want to join inserting hand up the horses butt, til elbow.

Hey, have you ever seen something like that?

Just take a close look at that pic:

http:// . . . (etc.)

Tell me please, if you, pervert, want to join me next time I travel to the country side.

The man's spine is curled like a question mark, not from an accident of birth, but from years of hunching before monitors. He leans away from the screen now, his back as close to straight as it will go, and regards his work. He is proud of the commas before and after
pervert
, something only an expert in English would know to do.

He smokes, still poring over his oeuvre, checking it for errors. He catches the double-effed
friday
, balances his cigarette on the table ledge, types jerkily, puffs and exhales. Soon he will sell “passage” on this spam to various clients, some in Ukraine, some in China, a few in Africa, who will pay him to insert their toxic URLs and launch them at Americans and Canadians by name. Like spells, but in the millions upon millions. Sperm, his sperm, racing for the ova of personal information. Credit cards will be stolen, e-mail addresses hijacked, spyware implanted, oh the lovely chaos! More importantly, oh the lovely dollars! Hard currency will appear in his several dozen false-front PayPal accounts; he will shunt this money to accounts he holds in Trinidad, St. Martin, and the Bahamas; and his retirement will grow.

He is thirty-four, means to retire at fifty.

He has been earning his own money since he was fifteen.

He will live until eighty-five, with the help of Western medicine and his retirement, thus spending thirty-five years working and thirty-five years doing
whatever the fuck he wants
. When he visualizes his savings, he sees a cartoon snowball of dollars growing as it rolls downhill, hitting a valley, then shrinking as it rolls uphill until it is gone, and a tiny pop is heard.

The pop of a .22 against his temple; he means to be so poor at the top of that second hill he has no choice but to shoot himself.

It must be a .22.

Small-caliber so the bullet goes in, but cannot exit, ricocheting around inside, making cabbage of his brains, destroying all feeling, all memory. Leaving just a small, bleeding hole. People who shoot themselves with powerful guns are selfish, vulgar.

Bourgeois.

Someone must clean their brains from the wall.

Cursing them and scrubbing.

The gun will be his first purchase upon retiring.

Until then, he cannot bring himself to spend any more than necessary. He is a miser of the first house, wearing everything out until it simply cannot be used, only buying things that cost so close to nothing they might as well be free.

But when he turns fifty . . .

. . . the next time I travel the countryside.

“Perfect, pervert,” he says in thickly accented English.

The cat yawns, showing fangs that are perhaps the only truly white things in the apartment, and stretches, walking the crooked back of the sofa before sitting imperiously on the arm.

Now the night breeze, cool for June even here, fingers its way beneath the window, blowing the fly-specked curtains up. The view
en face
consists of yet more ugly block apartments, the lights on in only a few windows, but now these rectangles of light shiver slightly, as though from heat fumes.

No heat here, though.

The room gets colder.

The cat almost hisses, remembers what happened to it the last time it did, and curls itself around its master's feet, its tail flicking between those heels-up feet and the sooty footprints on the pink flip-flops beneath them.

Now the man turns in his chair and looks at the window.

She's here.

He looks away quickly.

His palms grow moist.

He anticipates the sound just before he hears it.

The sound of an iron pot scraping against the cheap stucco below the sill, scraping like a rowboat against a pier.

Baba Yaga riding through the night skies of Kiev, sitting in an iron pot, pushing it with a broom.

Just like in bedtime fables.

But she really is outside.

Some part of her, anyway.

I'm nine stories up.

Yuri . . .

“Yes, little mother,” he manages, smoking again.

He is careful not to show his teeth when he speaks.

Put on your kerchief.

The cat shivers violently.

He pulls the sticking drawer out, pulls out a blue terry cloth hand towel. Is repulsed thinking about putting this over his eyes but does so anyway, tilting his head back, holding it in place because God help him if it falls off and he sees her.

The crunching sound as the iron pot crumbles stucco.

Is there really a pot, or do I hear one because I expect to?

A bare foot on his gritty linoleum floor.

She is in the apartment now, he knows.

Yuri, you bought the ticket?

“Yes. One ticket for Marina Yaganishna, first class. Nizhny to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Syracuse.”

She will not want to sit next to anyone fat.

“I already looked. The seat next to her on the long flight remained unsold, so I moved a skinny man there.”

Good.

A long moment passes.

There's something you're not telling me.

I don't like that.

An acrid smell as the cat pisses on the floor.

“Sorry, little mother. I . . . There was someone poking around my curtain. In America. Chicago, I think. Magic.”

Find out who.

Find out why.

She comes closer.

The cat jerks from below the table, sprints for the bedroom, something else moves faster than the cat, which shrieks.

Yuri dares not look.

“I . . . I was working on this. I wanted to have the answer before I told you.”

And this is why you spend your time on filth?

A bony finger ticks on the screen of his computer.

Hands in horses? You think this is what happens in the country? I can show you what happens in the country, but I think you will not like it.

He doesn't know if she is reading the English on the screen or just peering into his head. He isn't sure she can do this, but neither is he sure she cannot.

He doesn't know what she is.

Nobody does.

He smells her scent of iron and cookfat and pepper, undercut with dried blood, mold, fear.

She smells like fear.

He presses hard on the towel over his eyes, frightened his shaking hand might betray him, that it might fall away. His urine fingers at its gateway, wants to leak out. He controls it.

He breathes through his mouth, awkwardly shielding his teeth with his lips.

She lets him stew for a moment.

Yuri . . .

“Yes, little mother?”

You have needle and thread in this shithole?

“Yes, little mother.”

Use it to sew the cat's tail back on.

“Thank you, Baba.”

Somewhere in his head, she grunts.

Now the sound of a twig broom, sweeping away her footprints.

She mounts the pot, which scrapes noisily against the bricks.

The woman in the apartment next door calls through the wall.

“What have you got over there, Yuri Denisovitch, an African rhinoceros?”

Then, more quietly, he hears her exclaim, “Shit! Spiders! So many!”

Now the sound of a broom (cheap, modern) whacking at the floor, a hurried prayer.

The cat yowls miserably from his bedroom.

The breeze stops.

The room warms, if it can be called that, from cold to merely cool.

Half an hour passes before he dares remove his terry cloth blindfold.

It is soaked with sweat.

But he did not piss himself this time.