“I’m impressed,” I said. “Science isn’t my strong point.”
“I’ve noticed. But then again, it’s not mine, either. I suppose it would be unethical to nick a bit off a pillar and send it to a lab back home.”
“Not a good idea, no. The citizenry just raised a lot of money to repair the thing.”
“Oh, very well.” He paused, glancing around. “Let’s go. There’s too much cover around here. I don’t want anyone taking another shot at you.”
“I’d just as soon avoid it myself.”
“That’s why you need me for a minder.”
“A what?”
“Sorry. A keeper, I believe the American word is.”
“Very funny. Ha-ha. Let’s get out of here.”
He grinned at me and caught my hand as we walked together back to the car.
CHAPTER 10
ALTHOUGH ARI REFRAINED FROM telling me where we were going, he’d driven only two blocks before I realized that we were heading for my apartment. I concentrated on images of the hotel in Daly City where we’d spent Monday night, just in case Johnson came snooping around the aura field, but I never felt his greasy touch upon my mind.
We found a place to park up from Judah. I took one piece of luggage, the suitcase containing Pat’s journals, with me, and Ari brought along the sample case. When we came around the corner, I saw that plywood still filled in the bay window. Ari opened the street door leading to the stairs, then stepped sharply to one side. Since no hail of bullets greeted him, we went in. We’d just gotten to the landing when Mrs. Z opened her door with a blare of TV noise. She was wearing the orange muumuu that clashed with her purple hair.
“You back?” she said.
“Yeah, but I don’t know if I’ll stay,” I said. “I see that George hasn’t finished the repair.”
“Well, he was supposed to show up today, but you know how he is. What was all that noise last night?”
“Noise? I wasn’t here.”
“You weren’t?” She let her mouth hang open. “Oh, oh, well, I suppose, oh ...”
I could feel Ari go tense in sudden alarm. He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Let me just take a look.” He set his sample case down on a step. “Give me that suitcase.”
I did, then waited on the landing with Mrs. Z while he went upstairs. He put his key in the lock, turned it, then swung up the suitcase like a shield before his face and kicked the door open. Nothing blew up except his temper. He swore so violently that Mrs. Z began to dither even though neither of us understood a word he was saying. I ignored her, snagged the sample case, and trotted halfway up the stairs.
“You can come up,” he said. “They’re gone.”
They? I hurried up the rest of the way and looked into the apartment. All my worldly goods lay strewn across the floor, the couch cushions, the books, the china cat figurines, some of my clothes from the bedroom, even. When we went inside, I put the heavy sample case down and stood there staring at the mess. I could see that every kitchen drawer had been emptied out, and the fridge, too. I was expecting that they would have taken my computer and the TV, but the electronics all sat where I’d left them. I pointed them out to Ari.
“They were in a hurry,” he said. “Too much of one to even stage a proper burglary.”
The searchers had hit the bedroom as well, stripped down the bed, tipped up the mattress, emptied the drawers of my dresser, thrown the clothes out of my closet. I had two pieces of good jewelry—some diamond earrings and a gold and opal brooch that had belonged to my grandmother. They sat in their little velvet boxes in a corner with the dust bunnies. I picked them up and put them back onto the dresser.
“What a mess!” I said. “Doyle must have been looking for Pat’s journals.”
“Which you took with us. Good.”
From behind us I heard an “Oh, my gawd!” We returned to the living room to find Mrs. Z staring horrified at the disarray.
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Ari said. “When you heard the noises.”
“Well, I didn’t think it was, oh, I suppose I should have, oh, er, it wasn’t that loud. I just thought it was you two doing, oh, well, I don’t know, something.”
Ari smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand and snarled as if he were thinking murderous thoughts. She stepped back fast and pulled herself up to her full height, such as it was.
“And here I thought you’d be a nice quiet tenant.” Mrs. Z shot me a dirty look, then turned and shuffled away. At the door she paused. “First the window and now this.”
I heard her going down the stairs; her TV blared and cats meowed as she entered her apartment. The door slammed, the lock clicked, the noise dimmed.
“What do you bet she raises the rent?” I said. “But Jeezus H, as Uncle Jim would say. We could have had the bastards if she’d only called the cops.”
“Maybe.” Ari took a deep, calming breath. “We might have had a dead police officer, too, if a patrolman had come up those stairs alone.”
“That’s true. We should call them now, I guess.”
“Yes. I’ll just get Sanchez on the phone.”
More police, more forensics techs, this time to strew fingerprint powder around and make the mess worse. The police interviewed Mrs. Z, who gave them no useful information. She did whine about tenants who disrespected her property. Once the police left, Ari and I stood in the living room and looked at the disaster zone.
“It’s going to take a while to clean all this up,” I said.
“We’ve got to be out of here before dark,” Ari said. “Here, I’ll put the spoiled food into the garbage. Why don’t you find the things you want from the bedroom, and then we’ll leave.”
I did pick up the broken pieces of the various cat figurines that Kathleen had given me over the years. I hummed “Taps” while I dropped them, one at a time, into the wastepaper basket. In the bedroom I tipped the mattress back onto the box spring, then began throwing clothes back into drawers. Mostly I needed clean underwear. As I was searching through the heaps, I found the black album about Pat’s murder. I put that aside to take with me just as Ari walked in.
“I’m surprised they left it.” Ari nodded at the album.
“I put a Chaos ward on it a long time ago,” I said. “They probably never even saw it.”
“What?”
“If you put a Chaos ward on something, a dedicated follower of Chaos will have trouble seeing it. It’s not that the thing’s invisible. It’s just hard to notice. The problem is that the wards only work on small items. Small non-living items, that is. A dedicated Harmony person has a kind of built-in ward.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.” Ari scowled at the album as if it had just betrayed him.
“This particular ward tells us a lot, though. Johnson and Doyle are dedicated Chaos people, all right, but at a pretty low level. The wards wouldn’t deflect an ordinary rip-off artist or a Chaos master.”
I returned to scrounging for underwear. I heard Ari whistle under his breath and turned to see him holding a pair of black thigh-high stockings, the kind with built-in garters at the top, so you can leave them on.
“Would you like to see those modeled?” I said.
Ari looked at me and blushed scarlet.
I took that as a yes and tucked them into the suitcase.
We ended up at another franchise motor inn that night, this one out on Van Ness Avenue, all beiges and browns and comfortable enough. Once we had a room, Ari went back down to the lobby to flash his Interpol ID around and show the staff the pictures of Johnson. I used the Agency laptop to log into TranceWeb. First I filed a brief report on the contents of the windmill. I had a pair of long e-mails from NumbersGrrl that began to make the entire concept of the multiverse a lot clearer, even without the math. Once I answered those, I returned to searching the net for hauntings of the correct type. In about twenty minutes Ari came back.
“No luck,” he remarked. “But so
oner or later, if the police keep showing these pictures around, we’ll find someone who’s seen Johnson.”
“I hope it’s sooner, before our scumbag kills someone else.”
My cell phone chimed. Aunt Eileen again, I figured, and I answered. No one spoke in return.
“Hello?” I said again.
Nothing but silence at first, and then a whisper-faint trace of a word that I couldn’t quite make out—yet it seemed that I should know it.
“Hello?” I snapped. “Who is this?”
The whisper again, slightly louder—was it “help” that the person was saying? The call went dead. I clicked off my phone and looked up to find Ari staring at me.
“Do you think that was Johnson?” he said.
“No. I don’t feel slimed. I don’t know who it was. It was a terrible connection, and then the call got dropped.” Michael, I thought. Oh, my God, could that have been Michael?
The phone chimed again. I grabbed it and opened the line.
“Hello?”
“Nola? It’s Kathleen.”
“Say, did you try to call me just now?”
“Yeah, but the call got dropped.”
So much for the Michael theory. Obviously I had ghostly glimpses on the brain.
Since Jack always watched the TV news, Kathleen had learned the hard way that Michael had disappeared. I was surprised that Aunt Eileen or Mother hadn’t called her; she was angry about the same thing.
“It’s not fair,” Kathleen snapped. “Just because I don’t live in the city anymore, I’m out of the loop.”
“Come on,” I said. “Did you really want Mother to call you? She’s in full cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war mode.”
Silence, then: “No, oh, okay, but Aunt Eileen—”
“—is worried sick.” I broke in. “Look, why don’t you take over? E-mail everyone else and make sure they know.”
“Good idea. I want to feel like I’m doing something.”
I could understand that.
When we finished talking, I found myself thinking of Sneezy. Had she seen the nightly news, too? I visualized her face, peering out of that ridiculous black hood, and tried an SM: Personnel. I picked her up immediately, because she was terrified. Although I couldn’t be sure, I got the impression that she was pacing back and forth in her elegant living room while she trembled on the verge of tears. I started to withdraw the search; then on an impulse I sent her words: Don’t confront him. Just don’t confront him. Pretend it’s okay.
I had never had the slightest success with the various telepathy experiments the Agency researchers have tried, and I still haven’t to this day, but that night I could have sworn she heard me, because I felt her surprise.
I returned to being aware of the hotel room and realized that Ari was staring at me.
“Uh,” I said, “was I talking aloud?”
“Yes. I should be used to it by now, I suppose.” He returned to stuffing a hotel laundry bag full of dirty clothes while he talked. “When I finish this, you need to eat something. Think about what you’d like.”
Although I started to argue, I realized that he was right, because I felt as if I might float out of my body at any minute. He put the bag outside the door just as the maid came by to pick it up. When I heard him ensure that the laundry would be done by morning by tipping her extravagantly, I wished I had his kind of expense account instead of mine, which involved monthly haggling with the Agency’s accounting department. When he came back in, he locked the door and put on the chain.
“They do have room service here,” Ari said. “Shall I order some dinner?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How hungry are you?”
Ari smiled and ran a hand over his chin. “I need to shave,” he said.
“Okay. You do that while I change.”
“Change?”
“I brought those stockings.”
By the time we finished dinner, somewhere around ten o’clock, the late evening news shows had begun on the local TV stations. We sybaritically lay in bed while Ari flipped channels to see how much coverage the morning’s press conference was getting. Plenty, as it turned out, and several anchormen used phrases like “as we told you earlier” to indicate coverage on the all-important dinner hour broadcasts. Pictures of Johnson and speculations about Doyle showed up on every channel.
“I figured they’d take this seriously,” I remarked during a commercial. “But I’m glad to see it.”
“So am I.” Ari started to turn the set off, then hesitated as video of the marble portal appeared on the screen.
“Put on the sound, okay?” I said.
Vic Yee, a local investigative reporter and one of the best, stood in front of the gate to nowhere. “A secret meeting with the mayor today,” he was saying. “A reliable witness who asked to remain anonymous told me that the group of military officers met with the mayor for several hours. The fate of this San Francisco landmark hangs in the balance. No one could come up with a reasonable theory of why the Army would want to impound the Portals of the Past, but there was general agreement that the talks were heading in that direction.”
The anchorman chimed in with a question or two about financial compensation, which, Yee guessed, would be forthcoming. The news show cut to commercial. Ari doused the sound again.
“Impound it?” I said. “They must mean dig it up and carry it away.”
“I’d say so, yes. I take it that your military has heard about this gate theory.”
I hesitated, wondering how honest I could be, but after all, Israel was a military ally of the United States. If Ari passed along what little I knew, I’d hardly be betraying my country.
“I’d say that’s likely.” I compromised on half-truths. “Why else would they want the portal? It’s really obscure. I’ll bet that half the people in San Francisco don’t even know it exists.”
“It’s not a brilliant public monument, no. Ugly, really.”
Ari switched off the television, set the remote on the nightstand beside the bed, and reached for me. Tempted though I was, I rolled away and sat up.
“I’ve got to check one more thing,” I said. “Be right back.”
He shrugged and lay down again.
I wandered into the middle of the room away from the distractions he offered. I took a deep breath and tried another SM: P for Sneezy. I picked her up on the inner radar right away. Her signal came in so strongly that I tried overlaying it with an SM: Location. She lived straight west of my current location at a distance of a couple miles, nearly to the ocean. Sea Cliff, I thought. A fancy house in the Sea Cliff neighborhood would fit the glimpses that the LDRS had given me.
Although I continued to pick up Sneezy herself, the impression of place dimmed and faded out. A man came into her view, a man who frightened her. He’d shielded himself from me so successfully that I knew it had to be Doyle.
I broke off the SM: P and turned around to see that Ari had fallen asleep. His travel clock on the nightstand read midnight. I retrieved my cell phone from the pile of clothing on the floor beside the bed and took it into the bathroom where I could talk without waking him. The police had set up an automated anonymous tip line, which I used to leave the information that “the dark-haired dope dealer” had been seen driving around Sea Cliff with a blonde woman. I threw in the blue late-model sedan while I was at it. If they picked up Johnson by “mistake,” so much the better.
Although I considered filing a quick report to the Agency, I was yawning too hard to think. I turned off the lights and went back to bed.
In the morning, I tried scanning again for both our perps only to be blocked in all directions. From Sneezy I did pick up a trace of fear but nothing more.
“They’re really on to me,” I told Ari. “They’ve thrown up some kind of shield that I just can’t get through. That’s one of the hazards of my job, I’m afraid. We’re generally dealing with people or things that have the same talents we do. Otherwise we could just leave them to the
cops.”
“Things?” Ari said. “What do you mean, things?”
“You don’t want to know. Let’s just say werewolves are the least of them, okay?”
Ari opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. “Very well,” he said. “What about breakfast?”
“I’m not—well, yeah, I am hungry. I have to admit it.”
I was expecting him to make some smart crack, but he contented himself with a smug smile.
After we ate, I decided to increase my chances of getting a successful LDRS on Johnson and Doyle by returning to the Portals of the Past. Even though the pillars no longer functioned as a gate, they seemed to lend their trace energy to my talents. We entered the park at Tenth Avenue on the north side and drove down Kennedy toward the lake where the pillars stood. For a Thursday morning the traffic seemed oddly heavy, and the closer we got to the lake, the worse it became. Ari finally pulled over some distance from the monument and parked just east of Transverse Drive.
“We’ll make better time if we walk,” he said.
As soon as I got out of the car, I heard a distant voice speaking over some sort of amplification equipment—a cheap one, whatever it was. The echo and reverb distorted the words beyond decipherment.
“Don’t tell me someone’s giving a free concert!” I said. “I won’t be able to concentrate with rock music blaring.”
“It’s a peculiar time of day for a concert,” Ari said.
As we headed west toward the lake, the voice from the loudspeaker gradually came into focus. “Say no to imperialism on a local level” was the first full sentence I heard. My heart sank. “The arrogance of the military needs to be reined in,” the speaker continued. “Are we going to let them rip off part of our history?”
“No!” A crowd answered, a pretty good-sized crowd from the sound of it. “Army out!”
“Crud,” I said. “A demonstration.”
At that point the sidewalk rounded a curve and led us to the lakeshore. Across the rippling water I could see the crowd clustering around the pillars and spilling onto the paths beside the lake. Ari raised his hands in front of his face and peered between them to isolate portions of the view, then began counting the demonstrators in groups of ten. He’d been trained in crowd control somewhere along the way, I supposed.