“Is that where the Holocaust Memorial is?”
“Yeah.”
“Get in the front seat. We’re leaving.”
I changed places as fast as I could while he grabbed the phone. I heard him say, “Nathan from Interpol,” and then, “I’ve had a tip on Johnson.” He hung up the phone again.
“Safety harness,” he said. “We’re going to make some speed.” He grinned at me. “Sanchez and some uniformed officers will meet us there.”
I would prefer to forget the next couple of minutes of my life, but they’ll always live on in my nightmares. Nathan hit the lights and the siren, and we went howling down JFK Drive, which was crowded with cars on this weekend afternoon. Some people might find it exciting, racing through traffic in a police car driven by a crazed Israeli secret agent. I found myself trying to remember childhood prayers. At least Nathan knew where we were going. I could never have given him coherent directions.
At the Twenty-fifth Avenue exit he wrenched the wheel around. We skidded into a right turn, burst through the red light on Fulton, and raced up the hill toward Geary as if all the devils in hell were after us. They may have been, come to think of it. Driving like that should be a sin, police or no police. A frenzied left onto California—against the light, of course—I slid down as far as the safety belt would let me in the muddled idea that when we crashed, the dashboard might protect my vital organs.
I could hear other sirens rushing our way as we wrenched around onto Lincoln Drive and started up the hill through the greens of the civic golf course. I began praying that the usual crowd of golfers had all stayed away because of the rain. At the top of the hill we burst out into the parking area across from the museum itself, which sat a good distance back from the street behind a lawn framed by colonnades on either side. Nathan slammed the car to a stop. He’d slid out and started running toward the museum before I could thank the saints for our safe arrival.
One black-and-white cop car sat by the sidewalk. Two others joined it just as I staggered out of Nathan’s car. Uniformed police piled out and ran, guns drawn, across the grass and past the enormous Rodin statue that sat in the middle of the long lawn. I leaned against the car and gasped for breath until it dawned on me that Johnson could be right at hand. I returned to the car, shut both doors, and slid down in my seat again, praying this time for invisibility.
Another unmarked car came howling up the drive and slid to a stop not far from ours. A dark-haired fellow in a navy blue suit that screamed “police officer” despite its civilian cut flung open a door and emerged. I caught a glimpse of his face, pale brown skin, dark mustache, eyes with the look of an eagle, before he too dashed for the museum. Lieutenant Sanchez, I figured.
The placid dowager of a building, very Beaux Arts, was having the excitement of its life. People began streaming out, frightened tourists from the look of them, huddling together under umbrellas or in their hooded parkas. As they trotted past to the cars parked in the lot behind me, I could hear them gabbling to each other. Locals, dressed warmly though properly, followed with stately dignity. When you live in fear of an 8.0 on the Richter scale, you can accept a mere police raid with a certain calm.
I was acting like a coward, I realized, not a San Franciscan born and bred. I got out of the car again and let my mind range toward the museum in Search Mode. I received only a dim impression of Nathan standing on a marble floor just inside the entrance. I could pick up not the slightest trace of Johnson. Damn! I thought. He gave them the slip. Since he’d felt my attempt to locate him, I could guess that he’d decided to take no chances and simply left the scene.
Although I had to wait close to an hour, Nathan and Sanchez eventually confirmed my insight. I saw them striding across the lawn by The Thinker and hurried over to meet them on the sidewalk.
“He was there, all right,” Nathan said. “The clerk at the entrance desk confirmed it from the photo. Unfortunately, he managed to get out and was gone by the time we arrived.”
With Sanchez standing beside him, I said nothing about knowing it already. Sanchez was looking me over with one eyebrow quirked, as if wondering what I was doing there. I match Nathan’s predilection for using cross-agency ID, which I carry for such occasions. I took it out of my inner coat pocket and handed it over. Sanchez looked at it, whistled under his breath, and handed it back.
“You didn’t tell me,” he said to Nathan, “that your girlfriend was—well, let’s just say, government.”
“She doesn’t like it advertised,” Nathan said. “Don’t forget, that agency doesn’t really exist.”
“Right.” Sanchez sent a grin my way. “I’ve forgotten already.”
I figured I could always kick Nathan later and merely smiled. “The question I have,” I said, “is what was Johnson doing here? Art lovers don’t generally go in for serial killing.”
“Good question,” Sanchez said. “Meeting someone—”
“That would be my supposition, too,” Nathan broke in. “It’s a public place. No one would think twice about two people walking through the galleries talking to each other.”
“Yep,” Sanchez said. “We—”
“You’d best follow that up,” Nathan said.
“We intend to.” Sanchez glanced at me. “The museum’s shutting up early. My partner and I are going to be asking the staff some questions. I’ll fill you in, Nathan, if we get any relevant answers.”
“Thanks,” Nathan said. “I’d appreciate it.”
Sanchez continued to look my way. “I don’t suppose,” he said at last, “that you can tell me why your people are interested in this case.”
“I can’t, no. Sorry.”
“You’re as closemouthed as he is.” Sanchez nodded at Nathan.
“We make a good pair,” Nathan said.
I kept smiling out of sheer willpower and let Nathan say the good-byes. As soon as we’d gotten into the car, I kicked him in the nearer shin as hard as I could. He winced and reached down to rub the rising bruise.
“What’s that for?” he said.
“Don’t even try to tell me you don’t know.”
He laughed and started the car.
As we left the museum grounds, I was thinking about my real mission, investigating the cause of the Chaos breach that Annie and Jerry had reported to the Agency. Although I’d seen the hunt for Johnson as a distraction, I realized that the two lines of inquiry were beginning to converge. What if Johnson or DD or both and their mysterious cult lay behind the uprush of Chaos forces? It seemed plausible, perhaps even likely.
“Nathan,” I said, “where are we going?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me.”
He took his eyes off the road to look at me, then swore in Hebrew. With a squeal of tires he swerved around an improvident golf cart. My heart pounded briefly.
“Back to my apartment,” I said. “Can you find it?”
“Yes, and would you calm down? You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m making you—” I gave it up. Words could not express.
I did, however, live to see my apartment again. Who could ask for more? Nathan escorted me up the stairs and inside, then left to stash the car. He’d found somewhere to garage it, he told me. Leaving a cop car out on the street at night did strike me as a bad idea. He returned with a huge vegetarian pizza, which smelled too good for me to resist, though I limited myself to one slice and a sliver. While we ate, we watched the TV news. Although the broadcast featured the excitement out at the Legion, it focused on Sanchez and never mentioned us, for which I thanked the powers that be.
“What now?” Nathan turned the set off.
“It’s time to test our assumptions about this Peacock Angel cult. If it’s really satanic, then it qualifies as a Chaos force, and I should be able to pick it up. If it’s just a cover story for smack dealers, then I won’t.”
“I’d call selling heroin chaotic.”
“To a lot of dealers it’s just a business. They approach it t
he same way as our Mr. Morrison imports prayer shawls.”
“The end result, however—”
“Well, yeah. It derails a lot of lives. Which reminds me, I wonder if Jerry’s come down enough to talk to me.”
Jerry answered his phone, but he sounded coked-out wired and made very little sense. When I mentioned Persian white, he did admit that you could find a lot of it on the street, but he declined to supply details over a wireless connection. I told him I’d check with him later and punched off.
“Well, it’s out there,” I told Nathan. “Once he has a mind again, Jerry may or may not have some idea of who’s dealing it.”
“I see. I told Sanchez to follow up on the narcotics angle, by the way, while we were waiting around in the museum. He’s got the resources.”
“Good. That’s not in my usual line of work at all. The cult, however, might be.”
“Do you have any idea of how to find out?”
“Of course. By working a little sympathetic magic.”
“Killing a black cock and peering at the entrails?”
“Yuck! No, going into a full trance, on purpose this time. It’s a good thing you’re here, though. Sometimes I flop around, and I don’t want to set the place on fire.”
“On fire—Nola, what exactly do you have in mind?”
“You’ll see. Hold on while I get the black candles.”
“You’re joking!”
I merely smiled and trotted into the bedroom. I kept the tools for the Chaos Diagnostic Emergency Procedure, as the Agency calls it, under my bed in a suitcase. I pulled it out and returned to the living room to find Nathan standing by the window and peering out at the street. I put the suitcase down on the floor and knelt to open it.
“Er,” I said, “something wrong?”
“No, just making sure nothing is.” He let the curtain fall and turned back into the room. “What’s all that paraphernalia?”
“More tools of the trade.” I took out the black velvet cloth and shook it out to display the white pentagram painted on it. “I lie on this with the votive lights set around it.”
“They are black.” He knelt and picked up one of the small candle glasses. “Where does one find black votive candles?” He titled the glass to get a good view of the wax filler.
“In the Mission district, in candle shops. You can get all sorts of herbs and stuff there.”
Nathan set the glass down fast, as if he thought it might contain bugs.
“The point, you see,” I continued, “is to perform a fake black magic ritual. ‘Without intent’ is the technical term for fake. We’re back to the principle of like calling unto like. I’ll pretend to align myself with Chaos and then see what comes up to sniff the bait. Let’s hope it doesn’t bite, is all.”
“You’ve been thinking too much about wolves lately.”
“That could be, yeah.”
After I moved the coffee table out of the way, I spread out the cloth between couch and computer chair. I arranged the candles, then got a box of kitchen matches and lit the array. I turned off the lamps and lay down—carefully, avoiding the candle flames—on the pentagram with my head between two points. Theoretically I should have been naked, but for obvious reasons I kept my clothes on.
Nathan stayed kneeling by the couch. In the flickering candle-thrown shadows, I had trouble seeing his face, which at moments looked angry, at others utterly incredulous. I decided that he was probably feeling both ways at once. I actually felt some sympathy for him, a technological weapons expert, a special agent used to seeing the world in terms of life-and-death politics, faced at the moment with some of the oldest superstitions in the world.
And to make things worse, they worked.
“Now look,” I said. “Sometimes I roll around, so if I get too close to the flames, grab the candle in question, will you?”
“Very well.” He sounded deeply weary, as if perhaps he’d just heard that he was going to face a firing squad on the morrow. “Whatever you say.”
I stretched out my arms to either side and closed my eyes. Knowing that someone waited close at hand to make sure I didn’t catch my hair on fire made sinking into the trance easier than usual. I muttered the names of a few demons, just for local color, and let myself drift off.
At first I saw the usual hypnopompic images, flashes of the day, odd visual flickers of people I knew, a shot of Kathleen’s old gray Persian cat. They vanished, and I floated, conscious in a black void. I thought of Johnson and the mysterious DD. As soon as I pictured the face I’d seen in the photographs, I heard chanting, a dissonant wailing in the dark. Color exploded, electric blues and greens—yes, peacock colors, but these danced on the backs of reptilian creatures, flying and wheeling like a flock of birds, all claws and beaks.
A voice cried out, “Vide! Adest daemona!”
Bad Latin, I thought, an attempt at “See, the demo-ness is present!” Then I realized that whoever had called out meant me. I had the dim perception of a room filled with candlelight. Shadowy figures, seven in all, sat in a circle. They peered out of the hoods of their black robes and stared up in my direction, but thanks to the hoods, to say nothing of the dim light and the whirling reptiles, I could see none of their faces clearly.
One of the figures strewed a handful of resin incense onto the charcoal in an overly large brass brazier. Gray smoke swirled up and dimmed the scene still further. Still, I could grasp an image of their circle and file it away in my memory. I picked up their mind-sets, too, mostly a sweaty excitement, in some cases tinged with sexual tension. I found Johnson’s mind oddly at peace and oozing confidence, but he’d shielded the deeper layers beyond my ability to reach them.
One of the hooded figures began to cough as the smoke swirled her way. She pulled a tissue out of the sleeve of her robe and sneezed into it a couple of times. The other coven members turned to glare at her. I caught a glimpse of her face inside the hood—pale eyes and blonde eyebrows—before she sneezed into the tissue again. I heard a man’s voice snarl and her answering whine, but my trance vision began to break up as the smoke grew thicker and another coven member began to cough. I suddenly wondered if I’d managed to set my apartment on fire. The thought broke the vision and the trance state both.
I woke up on the floor just as Nathan turned on the lamp. He’d snuffed out the candles. The last wisps of smoke from their wicks floated around me.
“I’m sorry.” Nathan’s voice shook. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. You were writhing around and gabbling.”
“Ah.” I sat up. “Demonic possession.”
He stared at me openmouthed.
“That’s a joke,” I said as fast as I could. “That kind of noise is just the response of the autonomic nervous system to the trance state. So is the body motion. It’s like you’re trying to wake yourself up. Honest.”
Nathan sat down on the edge of the couch and took a deep breath. “I’ve never thought of myself as a religious Jew,” he said at last. “A member of the tribe, certainly. It’s my identity. But religion?” He shrugged the idea away. “But I’m surprised by just how abhorrent I found that—that—whatever it was. Display, I suppose I mean.”
“Just a technique, honestly.” I stood up, stepped off the cloth, then picked it up to shake it out. “I’m sorry if it offended you.”
He leaned back against the cushions and looked up at me without a trace of emotion on his face. “Offended?” he said at last. “That’s not the word.”
“Repelled?” I said. “Disgusted?”
He shook his head no and looked away. I concentrated on folding up the cloth, then put it back in the suitcase. The votive glasses would have to wait until they cooled down.
“Frightened, to be honest about it,” Nathan said abruptly. “I was seeing something unclean on the Sabbath—that’s the thought that came to me—and I was frightened. I was shocked at my own reaction.”
“I’m genuinely sorry. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it would take you that wa
y.”
“How could you have known?” He paused to run both hands through his hair and push it back from his face. The soft curls twined around his fingers. “It surprised me, didn’t it?”
“Okay.” I stood between the computer chair and the couch and dithered. He’d taken a risk, shown me something of himself that baffled him, and I found the openness much sexier than mere muscle, though he had plenty of that, too. Watch it, O’Grady! I told myself. Think of the complications! Think of the danger! Think of what Aunt Eileen would say! I sat down on the computer chair.
“Uh,” I said. “Do you want to know the results?”
“Yes, of course.” He gave me an oddly grateful smile, maybe at the change of subject. “I gather there were some.”
“Oh yeah. We have a full-blown Chaos cult on our hands. Johnson’s part of it, all right, but I’m ninety-five percent certain that the others have no idea how dangerous he is.”
“Those are good odds. What made you think that?”
“They struck me as rank amateurs. They didn’t even know how to use incense properly. One of them sneezed at the smoke and broke the mood for everyone.”
Nathan grinned.
“You actually do believe me,” I said, “that I saw all this, I mean.”
“You told me that Johnson was in the museum, and yes, he’d been there. From now on, I believe you.”
A welcome change, that.
“I say a cult,” I continued, “because there were seven people at the scene. They’d suited up for some kind of ritual. I saw a flock of Chaos critters, too.”
“Brilliant. What do these people want, anyway? The ones that join cults like this?”
I shrugged. I’d often wondered the same thing. “I can only guess,” I said. “Excitement, you know, the old antinomian thrill. Money, sometimes. The Peacock Angel’s supposed to supply the goods of this world. I’ve run across that attitude before, people who want to be filthy rich and don’t mind the filthy part. They don’t realize that they’re setting themselves up to be tools of the Chaos forces.”