Uptown Local and Other Interventions (9 page)

Then she shrugged.
Never mind, don’t waste time fiddling around in hopes of maximizing the effect—
Annabelle went over to the old maple breakfront, touched her thumb to the keyhole patch on the right-hand door, and pulled it open, rooting around for a moment among the ceramic pots and cups and other bric-a-brac there.
Now where’s that mirror?
Normally she kept a small one here in case of situations like this. But it was nowhere to be found.
Did I borrow it from myself to do my makeup the other night?... Oh, heck.

After a second she muttered, “Never mind, it’s about time I got some new powder,” and went out to the hallway to go rooting in her purse. The compact, at least, was where it was supposed to be. Annabelle went back into the living room, sat down on the couch in front of the coffee table, opened the compact, and put it down on the table, turning it carefully so that when she sat back it would reflect nothing but the white of the ceiling.

Annabelle tucked her legs up under herself and got comfortable, then allowed her gaze to drop gradually to the mirror, as if by accident. That seemed to be the main trick to catroptomancy, at least when Annabelle was doing it;
sneak up on the optic, sneak up on the hidden reality, don’t let it see you coming…

But apparently it had seen her already. The mirror went pale, not with any reflection of the ceiling’s white paint, but with the strange glossy texture of the rolls that Mrs. Not-Really-A-Kaftan had spread out for her.
More an ivory color,
Annabelle thought, as the long dark scrawls of the design ran down the mirror—almost as if someone was holding it in her hand, running it down one of the rolled-out scrolls.
Of course. It’s not paper: it’s parchment. The smooth side of a piece, not the skin side.
She had been fooled into thinking the material was something modern by how excellent its condition had been.
Very carefully kept. For how long, I wonder?

The view in the mirror didn’t change.
And not just designs. Writing—
This too was something you had to sneak up on, being careful not to press too hard. The mirror would show you the truth, if the truth was at all accessible: but you had to keep your own preconceptions well away from the scrying, for fear of skewing it. The black writing writhed as Annabelle watched it—paled, shimmered, then shifted. Suddenly it looked like English-language cursive done in a very regular hand: but it was hard to read, having been written with a broad-nibbed pen. Annabelle dared not look too hard at the mirror, but here and there a word became plain as the writing flowed by.
Water… irresistible, and… the basic human necessity… must take time to… in the fire, but…  chicken…

Chicken??
Annabelle thought, incredulous.

And the compact’s mirror cracked from side to side.

“Oh, damn,” she muttered, “I rushed it.” Annabelle sighed and swung her feet down off the couch, picking up the compact. There would be no more scrying today: one a day was her limit. She glanced around to make sure that no splinters of glass had jumped out when the mirror broke, then closed the compact, got up, and headed for the kitchen, pausing only to dump the poor broken compact back into her purse.
I’ll get a replacement tomorrow,
  she thought.
Meanwhile, just the thought of chicken is making me hungry. Oh well: make some dinner, think about this… 

*

But dinner didn’t help her get any closer to working out exactly what she should be thinking about. Annabelle spent the rest of the evening quietly, then slept on the problem. Sleep didn’t help either. She woke up no more enlightened about what she’d seen than she’d been when she went to bed, and went off to work as usual.

If possible, it was even quieter than it had been the day before. Annabelle occupied herself with casual stock-taking and dusting the cookware on the hanging racks until, about an hour before lunchtime, the phone finally rang. She hastened toward it, oddly pleased.
George, probably. Wait till he hears about that scrying
. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”

“By getting out of retail, it doesn’t suit you,” her mother said.

Annabelle rolled her eyes. She loved her mother dearly, but the two of them had a gift (as her father put it) for “winding each other up the wrong way”. The fact that her mother was telling her exactly what she’d been thinking herself just somehow made matters worse. “Mom,” she said. “I thought you said you’d be out getting your hair done this morning.”

“They canceled on me, Sheila came down with that bug that’s going around. You should be careful you don’t catch it too, working in a public place like that.”

“I’m fine, Mom,” Annabelle said.
It would be really nice if someone came in now, even if they weren’t going to buy anything from me. Come on, somebody get in here and make me seem busier than I really am…

“Besides, it’s sales, you’re not the kind of person for sales,” her mother said, making the word sound as if she was discussing indentured servitude. “If it’s spices and food and whatever you want to be working with, you should open a restaurant!  Everybody raves about your cooking! Every time we have a dinner party, everybody’s always saying, why doesn’t Annabelle open a restaurant? But you know best, you had to get yourself into this retail thing, you work terrible hours, evenings and weekends, how are you ever going to meet a nice—”

Gracious Queen of the Night defend me from this! …As if even You could.
“Boy, yes, Mom, I
know
, enough about the nice boys!  I would love to open a restaurant. It would be delightful. But would you please tell me where I’m supposed to get the money? Especially in this town. And anyway, if you don’t want me working in a public place, which by itself would be a pretty good trick, why are you bugging me to open a restaurant? You can’t get much more public than that. People crammed into a little tight space, eating at each other and spreading all their germs around—”

This, of course, was just going to make more trouble: Annabelle’s mom hated having her own logic used on her as much as Annabelle did. “Now what kind of way is that to talk to your mother!” her mom said. “You know I only want the best for you, but if you just keep on going your own way and never listening to anybody who cares about what you’re doing to yourself…” Annabelle found herself nodding as if her mother could see her—which itself wouldn’t have been a good thing, since she would also have been able to see the look on Annabelle’s face. Just the sight of a shadow falling across the glass of the front display window made her look up in hope.
A customer,
yes! She thought as the woman came in the door. “Mom, I gotta go, I’ll call you back,” Annabelle said, and hung up faster than she strictly needed to…

…and then realized that she was looking at Mrs. Kaftan again.

Today the veil was thrown back, and she was in blue.
It actually looks more like a sari,
Annabelle thought as she came out from behind the counter and headed for the woman.
And how the heck did she get back in here? I thought Mike said he was going to put up a banspell outside—
But Mike was not a licensed magical professional, having just done one of the standard paramagial  programs that security work these days required, and it was all too likely that his spellcast had slipped up somehow. “Ma’am,” Annabelle said, “you know I’ve got to ask you to leave, after that stunt you pulled yesterday—“

“But I was sure you really might want these,” the veiled lady said, rummaging around in the bag again. “Even though there are only six of them now…”

If you’ve gotten a little more sensible about the price, I’ll buy them just to get you out of here,
Annabelle thought.
I can’t cope with another of those piles of paperwork!

“Oh, no, the price is firm,” said Mrs. Kaftan. “Three hundred eighty-nine thousand, five hundred and twelve dollars and seventy six cents.”

Annabelle blinked as the woman dropped the Macy’s bag on the floor and stood up with the whole sheaf of rolls in her arms. “For a
limited
time
only!”
Mrs. Kaftan said, giving Annabelle a very sharp look indeed.

“Ma’am, please,” Annabelle said, “if I had that kind of money, do you think I’d be working in a shopping mall? And I want to keep on doing that for the moment, anyway, so if you’d please just go before security—”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Kaftan said, shaking her head—a touch sadly, Annabelle thought. “I couldn’t do
that
.”

Annabelle was opening her mouth to ask why when several of the rolls fell out of her arms onto the floor. This time they burst into flame without a lighter being involved at all.

This time, at least Annabelle had the fire extinguisher unlocked and ready behind the counter. But she couldn’t get her hands on it quickly enough to keep the overenthusiastic sprinkler system from going off again: and there was no way to attempt to keep Mrs. Kaftan where she was while the fire wasn’t yet under control. The veiled woman slipped out the door and wandered casually out of Annabelle’s sight. A few minutes later, the burning rolls were nothing but an ugly mess of soot and foam on the floor, and Mike and the fire officer and Mr. Farnsworth and about twenty other people were standing around all talking at once while the sprinklers, finally having being turned off, dripped disconsolately on the cookbook display. And then the phone rang.

“You hung up on me!”
Annabelle’s mother said.

Annabelle opened her mouth, then closed it before she said something needlessly injurious, and hung up again.

*

An hour and a half later, as Annabelle was finishing off the last of the paperwork in a now mercifully empty store, George called. “It was your turn to call me today,” he said. “What happened?”

“Mrs. Kaftan.”

“She came back?”

“For a comprehensive repeat performance,” Annabelle said, weary.

“Same deal as yesterday?”

“Same deal. But, Georgie, this is taking on a decidedly supernormal turn. She shows on the security videos, all right. But not coming in, and not going out.”

“And the same thing with the scrolls?”

“That’s right. And the same fire,” Annabelle said, ruefully looking at the spot which she had once again had to scrub: this time the floor covering had blistered. “This time I couldn’t keep the water from hitting the cookbooks in the front: half of them are ruined. And she was even loonier than the last time, George. You’d think she’d have dropped her asking price a little for those scrolls, but no, she wanted the same amount, I think she’s fixated on the number for some reason—”

George didn’t say anything. “Hello?” Annabelle said, wondering if she’d lost the connection.

“No, I’m still here. Belle,” George said, “are you saying that she had only—
how
many of those did she have today?”

“Five or six—No, six, she said six….”

“And she wanted the same price? You’re sure about that?”

“To the penny,” Annabelle said. “She was really definite about it. I almost laughed. Her and her seventy-six cents—”

George didn’t say anything. “George?” Annabelle said.

“Belle,” George said, “I have to make a few phone calls. Then you need to close up early. Can you make an excuse?”

“I don’t think that would be much of a problem,” Annabelle said, for Mr. Farnsworth had just walked by outside again, and was giving her one of those odd looks that she suspected was going to mean trouble sooner or later. And right now, later looked good. “But where am I going?”

“We. Out to lunch.”

“Isn’t it kind of late for that?”

“I’m hoping not,” George said.

*

He actually came to pick her up in his car, which was unusual—George detested driving in the city—and drove her north of Madison. He made inconsequential law-office talk for most of the short drive, discussing the ghost’s cease-and-desist letter with the air of someone who was actually thinking hard about something else. “Where we’re going,” George said  finally, as he waited at an intersection for the light to change, “it may get loud. Don’t get scared, that’s all I can say.”

“Scared? Of lunch? Why would I get scared?” Annabelle said.

He pulled over to the curb and sat looking at a storefront with a frosted plateglass window and a frosted plateglass door. “You’ll find out,” he said.

They got out of the car, George locked up, and they walked over to that glass door. Only when she saw the tiny clear glass letters set at eye level above the door handle did Annabelle start to understand what was happening. The letters said S P Q R.

Annabelle’s mouth dropped open. “Good Lady above,” she said, “do you eat
here
?”

“Every Saturday,” George said.

“No
wonder
you need to be a lawyer,” Annabelle said under her breath. If you could get into the place, which normally meant reserving two months ahead, the prices on SPQR’s menu were such that it was rare for mere mortals to be able to afford a meal there without going into escrow.

“It’s all right,” George said, opening that severely plain door for Annabelle. “I also play poker here every Saturday. And the chef believes in luck… which is unfortunate when one of the people at the table is a card-counter.” George grinned. “In you go.”

In Annabelle went. She had seen pictures of that stark interior in the Tribune, but the pictures in the Trib could not convey the contrast that the glass-and-white starkness made with the lush Italianate aromas that, even after lunchtime was properly over, were still wafting out of that kitchen. Some of those scents Annabelle knew very well: she was one of SPQR’s many suppliers.
White marjoram,
she thought, instantly catching the aroma, along with someone else’s homegrown oregano.
I can’t believe they’re putting that in spaghetti sauce. Well, yes, considering the prices, I guess I can—

She had no more time for critique of a dish she could only smell and not see. The room was empty now, the thick glass tables naked. Back near the stainless-steel front wall of the open kitchen was a large circular table, with a very unfashionable linen cloth on it, and at it sat two people: a slender, dark little woman in a trim business suit, and a large, broad, tall, man with a mustache that reminded her of Harl’s. That man Annabelle knew, if only from Sunday supplements in the Tribune, and repeats on the local PBS station: Adelio Famagiusta, sorcerer and TV chef, famous all over the Midwest for the chain of restaurants of which SPQR was flagship, as well as for his never-ending succession of cookbooks, his relentless self-promotion, his flamboyant lifestyle, and his temper. As they headed for the table, Famagiusta got up to greet them, scowling. “Ah now,” he said, “you bring me a pretty lady, is that all this meeting is about, this big hurry hurry phone call, don’t you know I’m flying out to Napoli this evening?”