Water to Burn

  “Looks like you’re real cops,” she said. “Come in.”

  She ushered us into a room crammed with brightly colored stuff. It took me several minutes to sort out the sight—piles of books on the floor, knickknacks and more books on shelves and the mantel over the gas heater. Blue-andyellow paper lanterns, some with sun-and-moon faces, hung from the ceiling. Patchwork pillows lay piled on the two wicker chairs, on the floor in corners, and on the long cedar chest that sat in the big bay window, which was partly covered by green-and-purple brocade swags of curtain. Karo waved vaguely at the chairs.

  “You can sit there, I guess,” she said. “Just throw the pillows on to the floor if there’s too many.”

  There were, and we did. Karo pulled over a huge red-and-blue paisley floor pillow and sat on that.

  “So,” she said, “what do you want to ask me about? Bill?”

  “Evers, you mean?” I said. “How deeply addicted to heroin was he?”

  Karo grimaced and looked at the floor. “Real bad,” she said. “He kept fooling himself, saying he could handle it, because you snort Persian instead of shooting it, but he got to be a world-class junkie by the end.”

  “Do you think that’s what prompted his suicide?”

  She looked up and considered me. “I don’t think he committed suicide.” Her voice rang with defiance. “I think he was murdered. I just can’t see how they did it.”

  “They?”

  “Whoever it was.” She shrugged. “I don’t mean ‘they’ like in ‘I know who it was and there were a couple of them.’ Just they.”

  “Okay. What about this Brother Belial?”

  “Bill told me he’d spilled the beans about that.”

  “He did, yeah. Celia LaRosa wonders if Brother B was really human.”

  “I heard her say that maybe a hundred times, but I didn’t buy it. I think he was loaded, is all, and talked funny. And he always hid his face and wore gloves, so it was easy to make up stuff about him and what he must have looked like under all of it. Doyle always said Belial had a phobia about germs, but then, you couldn’t trust a damn thing Doyle said, so who knows.”

  “I can see why everyone speculated about Belial.”

  “Elaine agreed with Celia, sort of. They used to like to scare themselves, giggling about demons.” Her voice abruptly cracked. “God, poor Elaine! Last night I couldn’t sleep, you know? I kept thinking, they got Elaine and now Bill, and what do you bet I’m next?”

  I looked at Ari, who nodded a yes when I raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “You’ve been given police protection,” I said. “If you look out the window you’ll see a plain black sedan—”

  “The unmarked car, you mean?” Karo managed to smile. “They’re always so obvious.”

  Ari winced.

  “I thought they suspected me of something, like the drugs,” Karo went on. “But I guess not.”

  “You know,” I went on, “you can ask to be put in the witness protection program if you receive any sort of threat or see any signs of threats. If you feel you’re being followed when you go out, for example.”

  “You think Bill was murdered, too, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I saw no reason to lie. “But it’s only a secondary theory at the moment in official circles. I’m not a member of the San Francisco police force.”

  “I noticed that from your ID, yeah.” She turned slightly to look up at Ari. “Interpol, huh? There must be something real big behind all this, then.”

  “Heroin trafficking is always big,” Ari said. “Especially high-grade heroin sold to middle-class customers.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess it would be. I wish Bill had never touched the shitty stuff.” Karo paused to rub her face with both hands. “We used to fight about it, but Doyle—God, that creep Doyle, and what he did to Elaine! They said on the news that Johnson shot him. The one decent thing that super creep ever did in his life.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she swallowed a couple of times and looked at me dry-eyed. “I bet you’re wondering how I met Bill. It was through Elaine. I’m a tarot reader, and I did the cards for her a lot when she was getting her divorce, and so she invited me to the meetings.” She paused for a twisted little smile. “Elaine kind of collected unusual people. But she was nice about it. It wasn’t condescending. I think she was mostly real bored. Too much money, and everything was too easy for her.”

  “Do you know how she met Doyle?”

  “In a singles bar on Union Street. She was real flattered that he was interested, because he was so much younger than her.”

  Nothing occult or unusual there. I realized I’d been hoping for some weird detail that would give us a new line of inquiry.

  “Was there ever someone named Caleb associated with the coven?” I said.

  “I never heard about any Caleb.” Karo caught her upper lip between her teeth, thought, and let the lip go again. “No, sorry. It’s a name I’d have remembered. You don’t hear it much.”

  “All right. Anyone else?”

  Karo looked away and thought some more. Finally, she shrugged and looked back at me. “Doyle did mention one other guy, but only in a real vague way. Something about the man who spoke to the Peacock Angel. You know about Tawsi Melek, right? It was on the TV news about the Silver Bullet Killer.”

  “Yes, we do know about the cult. Do you think it’s satanic?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have had anything to do with that. It’s stupid, Satanism.”

  “I was wondering if you’d ever heard anything about sacrificing children to this Tawsi Melek.”

  Karo’s expression changed to authentic revulsion, wide-eyed and lip-curling. “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t have stuck around if they’d talked about that.” She shuddered, then went on. “No, this angel was supposed to be God’s right-hand man. Someone on the side of the Good and the Lovely, anyway. Doyle said there was someone who spoke to him and looked for converts. A missionary, kind of like those Mormons who show up at your door and won’t go away.”

  I wondered if this missionary lived in our world or on Interchange, where Doyle came from. I suspected the latter. “Did he ever mention a name?”

  “No. Sorry. But if you’re looking for a suspect, I’d put my money on Brother Belial. He was the guy in charge.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  I considered asking her about Evers and blackmail, then decided to leave that to Sanchez. I stood up, and Ari followed my lead.

  “Thanks for your cooperation,” I said to Karo. “If you think you’ve spotted trouble, call the police. Lieutenant Sanchez of Homicide is the name you want to invoke.”

  Karo laughed and scrambled to her feet. “Invoke,” she said. “I like that. I’ll keep it in mind. Don’t worry.”

  As we were going down the stairs, I realized that of the three coven members we’d interviewed, only Evers had recognized me from the ceremony I’d spied upon. He must have possessed a certain amount of psychic talent. Most likely, that very talent had made him vulnerable to whatever ensorcellment had driven him to his death.

  A fourth coven member had survived, of course: Brother Belial. I could only hope that he, whatever he might have been, would fail to recognize me, too.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT, Ari called Sanchez to tell him what we’d learned from the coven members. LaRosa had impressed both of us as an investigative dead end, but Karo interested me. Since people tell their tarot readers the damnedest things, she had plenty of chances to supplement her income by blackmailing her clients, some of whom she shared with Evers. On the other hand, I’d received a strong sense of honesty from her. Beyond the SPP, even, I couldn’t see a criminal type living in a toy box like her apartment.

  Sanchez would either hand this information over to the correct department or suppress it, depending on how much pressure the local powers that be put on him. Not my problem, either way, though Ari reported on the situation t
o Interpol, just in case there were “ramifications,” as he called them.

  “A great many people have been pressured into spying for one government or another,” he said, “by blackmail.”

  “So you’ll report it to your deep cover agency, too?”

  He glared at me for a moment, then took his laptop into the kitchen to work in private.

  I looked over the printout of Evers’ appointments that Miss Kowalski had made for us. The first thing I noticed was that Evers’ schedule began to clear out toward the end of February. New clients became scarce on the ground at that point. Perhaps, I speculated, his drug addiction had begun to affect his work. The column for the day of his murder contained only one entry, “unnamed man, 4 PM, Ferry Building.”

  I went into the kitchen and gave the printout to Ari.

  “See if you know any of these names,” I said, “though I don’t suppose you will. I’ve put a red check by the names of two municipal big shots.”

  “Thank you.” Ari glanced at the printout and pointed to the checked names. “Are these the men who are putting pressure on Sanchez?”

  “That would be my guess, yeah.”

  I returned to my computer. When I logged onto TranceWeb, I found the file on Reb Ezekiel waiting for me. The secret State Department office had finally connected with the Agency and passed the information across, almost a hundred and thirty pages of it. In a few places the text jumped, as if something had been snipped out for security’s sake. The translator had also removed almost all the personal names and replaced them with a line of hyphens. At first it referred to Reb Ezekiel, for instance, as J—W—.

  Young JW’s early career looked ordinary enough. He’d been born into a Modern Orthodox family in Bradford in the north of England, done brilliantly in the local primary schools, then gone to a prestigious yeshiva for the rest of his education, where he’d received his semikhah, his authority to teach and advise about the laws, from the line of righteous rabbis in his institution. He then spent two years in the U.K. searching for a congregation to hire him. None had, for reasons of “mental instability,” or so the report put it.

  After this disappointment, JW emigrated to Israel, where he hooked up with a group extreme even for the local extremists. He began to “seek wisdom in the desert,” as he called it, fasting for long periods and wandering around like a wild man in the wastelands, some of which belonged to Jordan. The authorities first took notice of him then.

  He saw visions. He heard voices. He believed them all uncritically, as rank amateurs always do. He also claimed to have learned “spiritual practices” from these visions and voices that enabled him to work “wonders.” The climax came when the ancient prophet Ezekiel came to him in vision and claimed him as his legitimate successor. From then on, the official report referred to him as Reb Ezekiel.

  He wrote these experiences up into a couple of lurid books, which sold very well on the occult market. They brought him money and a small group of followers. On this basis, he returned to the U.K. and began to teach and recruit. When he had enough money, he led his by-then much larger group of followers back to Israel, Ari’s parents among them, where they founded their kibbutz.

  My poor Ari had spent his childhood in the midst of everything that followed. I felt I understood him a lot better after reading about the place where he’d lived his formative years.

  Page after page of the report detailed the years that followed. Disenchanted followers had told the investigators plenty, not that the report gave their names. Many of the quotes reeked of bitterness, even in translation. I skimmed most of it that evening just to get a first impression. Later, I’d go over it in detail. The final pages, however, struck me as more important than the compilers of the report could know.

  The defection of a woman called S—N——, and the details pointed to Ari’s mother, had sparked something of a rebellion in the kibbutz. Reb Ezekiel had settled things down, then gone back out to the desert to fast and pray for new visions. He’d returned to the Negev Desert, which is when the government began to follow his movements in earnest. I hadn’t realized just how many military bases, all of them restricted areas, lay in or near that stretch of terrain. A great many higher-ups wanted to know why this ex-Brit had taken to prowling around them.

  Reb Zeke was gone about a month before he returned to his kibbutz. He staggered into the dining hall one night, half-starved, dehydrated, and incoherent. Sunstroke, perhaps concussion—for weeks afterward he’d acted confused, as if he’d forgotten the names of the people in the kibbutz as well as the details of its financial operation.

  In time, everything came back to him, but his behavior changed in subtle, less than holy ways during the next couple of years. The report detailed each bout of secret drinking, each trip into Tel Aviv where he consorted with unclean women, i.e. the whores in the brothel where he’d eventually died. At first, the faithful put the disappearances down to the sunstroke or concussion incident; his place of death, however, made the hookers difficult to explain away.

  I put the report through a second encryption, saved it, and cleared the screen, then stood up to stretch my back. When I glanced into the kitchen, I saw that Ari had attached a different keyboard to his laptop and was busily typing away. I started to sit back down, but I realized, thanks to a sudden line of cold running down my spine, that I was being watched. I spun around and saw a Chaos critter standing on the coffee table, a green-gray thing somewhat like a possum, except it had spiky scales instead of fur. As soon as I raised a hand to sketch out a ward, it disappeared.

  “Good thing we’re moving,” I muttered. I was getting real tired of spies popping up everywhere.

  I logged off TranceWeb, then walked into the kitchen. The screen on Ari’s laptop displayed what looked like Arabic letters to me, though I couldn’t be sure. Ari leaned back in his chair and smiled at me.

  “Tell me about Armageddon,” I said, “from an Orthodox Jewish point of view, I mean. The report mentions that Ezekiel believed it was coming, but it doesn’t go into detail. I got the Christian version in school, but I don’t know the Jewish one.”

  Ari’s smile vanished. “Reb Ezekiel’s version had very little to do with anything any other Jew believes. Alien invaders, mostly. In spaceships.”

  “You’re the one having the joke now.”

  “I am not. I wish I were. I was only eight years old at the time, of course, when we were first told about this in the kibbutz school, so I probably heard only a simplified version. But alien invaders were going to appear in Megiddo, and we were going to repel them.”

  “Is Megiddo where the kibbutz was?”

  “No. There’s a proper kibbutz there already, and they wanted no part of Reb Ezekiel’s revelations. It’s an important archaeological site as well. The various academics involved weren’t keen on having target practice going on near the antiquities. So he had to find land elsewhere.”

  I sat down in the chair opposite him.

  “Oh, boy,” I said. “And here I thought my hometown had a monopoly on that kind of thing.”

  “Belief in aliens, you mean?”

  “Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of people who believe that the flying saucers are coming, not just in San Francisco, but the whole Bay Area, and down south in Santa Cruz, and then there’s the Mount Shasta group, and—”

  “That’s enough, thank you.” Ari paused for a look of profound gloom. “I take your point.”

  “Okay. According to the file your agency sent me, Ezekiel wandered off into the desert for about a month. You would have been about nine, I think. It was after your mother left. Do you remember him going off?”

  “The incident when he had his stroke?”

  “That’s the one. The report calls it sunstroke or concussion.”

  “It was worse than that. Ezekiel was so muddled that at times he could barely remember where he was. He refused to get proper medical treatment.” Ari thought for a few moments. “I remember the uproar, but not why he woul
dn’t let the doctors examine him. I probably wasn’t told, actually. The adults did their best to keep things from the children.”

  “Too bad. Do you know if Zeke had any new visions during that missing month? The report doesn’t detail any, but then, whoever’s writing it tends toward scorn when it comes to psychic details. He thinks all the phenomena are just lies and scams.”

  “Do you think Ezekiel had genuine abilities?”

  “Yeah, I do. A lot of the details ring true.”

  “That’s a shock.” Ari hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, you’re the one who’d know. He was always having visions. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’d had a sodding flock of them during the time he was gone.” Ari paused to glare out at nothing in particular. “I wonder if his doppelgänger is as mad as he was?”

  “Uh, I have a new theory about that. Brace yourself.”

  Ari’s eyes narrowed. I decided that he was sufficiently braced.

  “If Reb Ezekiel’s in the city,” I said, “it’s not his doppelgänger. It’s him.”

  “What?” Ari slammed one hand down on the table so hard that his laptop screen flipped down onto the keyboard. The machine beeped. He winced and began rubbing the slammed hand with the other. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have done that. Nothing broken, I should think.”

  “Oh, good!” One of these days, I decided, I’d have to talk with him about that temper. “Look, he disappears for a month, and when he comes back, he doesn’t remember half of his loyal followers. He doesn’t know what bank the money’s in, or when the crops were planted—none of the really important stuff. And then we have the personality change. The report makes it clear that while Zeke was a nutcase, he was a sincere nutcase. All he thought about was religion, his spiritual powers, and Armageddon. So he suddenly takes to drinking and screwing whores?”

  Ari’s eyes had gone very wide, and his mouth, a little slack. I figured he was following my line of reasoning.

  “And then there’s the clincher,” I continued. “You told me that one of the things he claimed to be able to do was ‘shorten the journey.’ Right?”