“All right, Nathan. That makes sense.”
“Brilliant.” He hesitated briefly. “Why won’t you call me by my first name?”
“Because,” I said and started the car.
I drove back to the apartment in a foul mood. I knew the route well enough to drive with half a mind and think with the other half, more than I’d been using recently. I needed to figure out a way to keep my animal instincts from blocking my mental talents.
Parking, as always, took far too long, but eventually I found a spot on a side street uphill from Judah. By then the fog had covered the entire sky and turned to a drizzle. In the midst of a canyon of art deco apartment buildings the passersby hurried along; some held newspapers over their heads; others had pulled up the hoods of their sweatshirts or parkas. Nathan took his suitcases from the trunk and shot the sky a baleful glance. I put on a jeans jacket over my cotton shirt.
“You must be cold,” Nathan said. “You should dress better.”
“I’m used to this weather.”
He snorted in a particularly unpleasant way. Under the cover of the rattle and rumble of a passing streetcar, I refused to answer. As we walked around the corner, I glanced at the row of newspaper racks cluttering up the curb. In one box a couple of morning editions of the Chronicle sagged, unbought and forlorn. A secondary headline caught my eye.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
I fished in my pocket, found a couple of quarters for the automatic mechanism, and bought a paper. Nathan glanced over my shoulder as I read, “Another Zodiac?”
“Astrology?” Nathan said.
“No, a serial killer that the San Francisco police never caught. That was back around 1968.” I glanced at the story under the header. “Our Johnson seems to have sent a letter to the paper, just like the Zodiac used to do.”
Nathan swore under his breath in some language that I took to be Hebrew. As we walked back to my building, I read the article aloud while he steered me around pedestrians and other obstacles. The killer of Mary Rose Romero had written a letter to the editor that spoke of ridding the city of an ancient Native American curse by blood sacrifice of those who engaged in unclean practices—whatever the writer meant by that. The reporter remarked that the letter’s garbled prose made very little sense.
Although the paper had followed the police request to refrain from printing a complete facsimile, the reporter did state that the writer had filled the margins with occult symbols that “harked back,” as he put it, to the Zodiac letters.
“The question remains,” the article finished up, “whether the letter is genuine or a hoax. The police are running a battery of forensic tests in an attempt to answer this question.”
I folded the paper and glanced at Nathan for comments.
“The Israeli papers received a similar letter about Greenbaum,” Nathan said, “though not about the consular official. The curse in our letter was attributed to ‘Arab occult magic,’ not Native Americans, of course.”
“Then this one’s likely to be genuine. Do our police know about the previous letter?”
“They have the full dossier, yes,” Nathan went on. “I’ll inquire if they’ve read it. You need to read the police report on the Romero murder. I included a translation of the original dossier on Johnson for you, too. A copy of the letter’s there as well.”
A translation. Of course, the original dossier had to be in Hebrew. Somehow with his classy accent and his perfect English, I kept forgetting just how foreign he was, a man who’d lived his entire life in a country surrounded by enemies. No wonder he carried a gun. O’Grady, I told myself, you’re melting. Stop it!
“I will,” I said. “Maybe the gruesome details will wake up my SAWM.”
“Your what?”
“Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism. Sorry. Agency slang.”
The door to the stairway leading to my apartment stood between a used clothing shop and a laundromat. I opened the door, but Nathan insisted on going in first, just in case a sniper lurked on the landing.
“This door should be kept locked,” he said.
“It is at night.”
“Murders have been known to happen during the day, too.”
Since nobody shot at us, we climbed the first flight of stairs. At the landing I could hear Mrs. Zukovski’s TV blaring Oprah, her favorite show, or so she’d told me often enough. At my landing Nathan stopped, motioned me back a step, set the suitcases down, and drew his gun.
I could sense no one inside. I let my mind range around, visualized every room—I even pictured the dust bunnies under the bed—not one trace of danger could I pick up. As quietly as I could, I mouthed the words “should be okay.” Nathan nodded, but he stood to one side when he put the keys in the lock and turned. The lock clicked loudly, nothing else.
“Were you expecting a bomb to go off?” I said.
“That’s not funny, considering where I come from.”
“Sorry.” I winced.
No assassins lurked in the apartment. Nathan put his suitcases down by the door, then double-locked and chained it. I headed straight for the thermostat to turn on the wall heater.
“Coffee?” he said. “I’ll make it if you’ve got some.”
“Always. There’s the kitchen, and I’ve got one of those drip systems.”
“Milk? Sugar?”
“No, just black, thanks.”
I picked up the police report and sat down on the computer chair to read. The description of wounds and a tentative reconstruction of the fight Mary Rose put up would have awakened survival sense in a zombie. Apparently she’d seen or smelled him stalking her, then lain in wait and jumped him from behind. He’d rolled and managed to squirm and face her, then shoved his gun under her chin and—well, let’s just say it was going to be a closed casket funeral. I felt my talents beginning to stir, only to lie down again when Nathan returned carrying two mugs of coffee. He’d taken off his jacket and the gun, making it obvious how well that blue shirt fit him.
“There’s nothing to eat in your refrigerator,” he said, “except black lettuce.”
“That’s arugula. It’s perfectly fresh.”
“It’s still not enough for a meal.”
“I don’t eat much, usually.” I took the proffered coffee from him.
“Ah. That’s why you’re too thin.” He paused for a sip from his mug, then sat down at one end of the couch.
I felt a brief urge to swat him with the police report. All the suffering I endured to stay fashionable, only to be told I was too thin! He was grinning at me as if he knew damn well how annoyed I was. I spun the chair around to set my mug down next to the computer. I kept my back to him while I finished reading.
Even in a photocopy, Johnson’s letter to the Tel Aviv media brought me the smell of insanity. He rambled about dangers of the night, ancient curses, the rise of avengers to purify the human race—a particularly unfortunate turn of phrase, I thought, to use in a Jewish nation. In the margins he’d drawn an assortment of occult signs, the astrological symbol for Saturn, the alchemical shorthand for sulfur and phosphorus, and others that I couldn’t identify. It seemed that he was using them to creep people out rather than convey a message, but I decided to keep an open mind about that.
“Can I send a scan of this letter to my agency?” I said. “We’ve got a code expert who should take a look at these symbols.”
“Please do, but ours couldn’t find any meaning in them.”
“Your expert is probably used to dealing with rational human beings. Ours has a wider range.”
Nathan smiled at that. I returned to reading.
The various dossiers themselves told me little more than I could figure out for myself, except for a few details about Miriam Greenbaum. Her parents had chosen to emigrate to Israel under the right of return when she turned fourteen. After she’d been killed, they told the Israeli police that they’d emigrated because she was having difficulties in school in the “oppressive and conformist” United
States.
“Nathan?” I said. “Suppose the Greenbaum girl started making the full moon changes just before her parents decided to leave the States. Would it have been easier to hide her condition in Israel?”
“I don’t know for certain, but it’s easy to get a license to home school a child if the parents plead orthodoxy, particularly for a girl. The black hats, again. The Greenbaums lived on the edge of the desert, too, not all that far from Qumran, if you know where that is.”
“I do. The ruins there loomed large in the legends we got told in school.”
I swiveled the chair around to ask him another question, only to have it go right out of my mind. He was holding his coffee mug in both hands and watching me over the rim with a real longing. I had the sudden urge to take the mug away and rub my face on his sweaty shirt. I thought of Sister Peter Mary, the real one, not just the visitation, and remembered the question.
“These silver bullets,” I said. “Do you agree that he must be making them himself?”
“Yes. The Tel Aviv police tried to track Johnson’s movements. They were looking for a jeweler who might have done some custom casting, but they didn’t find one. The conclusion was that he’d brought them with him. Something that small—he could have hidden the slugs in a box with cufflinks or something of that sort. They would have scanned as jewelry.”
“How could he get a gun into the country?”
“He couldn’t have. Someone there had to have supplied him with one. He carried plenty of currency. With the proper connections he could have bought one from a Palestinian group that deals in smuggled small arms.”
“And since he turned up in Syria, it’s likely he had those connections.”
“Exactly. The San Francisco police are looking for a jeweler now, but I’m fairly sure that you’re right, and he must be doing his own casting.”
“He’s got to have some kind of base of operations, then. You can’t go smelting metal in a hotel room or the backseat of a car.”
“Of course not.”
I let the image from my first remote sensing rise into my memory, the black hat, the gray trench coat. The hat gave me a frisson as I thought of implications beyond Sam Spade. “Is it possible that this Johnson is one of the orthodox?”
“He couldn’t be, if he’s our killer. He shot Greenbaum on a Saturday.”
“Okay. I can’t imagine one of the people you describe professing faith in Jesus even as a cover story, anyway. It was just a thought.” And not a very good one, I told myself. “Do you think he’s working alone?”
Nathan gulped coffee while he considered the question. “I don’t,” he said at last. “He disappears too easily. Someone’s got to be sheltering him or at the least providing him with a safe house. He must have had such a connection in Israel and one in Syria and Iran, too.”
“Which leaves out the psychotic serial killer.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t disagree with that. Neither, really, can the local police. They can see the possible political implications as easily as you and I can. They’re afraid that the CIA will come barging in.”
“It’s a good bet.” I Frisbeed the manila folder back onto the coffee table. “To be honest, I’d be glad to turn the whole mess over to the CIA or FBI or any agency that wants it. I signed on to keep Chaos within necessary bounds, not to deal with spies and serial killers.”
“Which reminds me. If you’ve finished reading, I’ve a few questions for you. What do you mean, Chaos lights?”
“Basically what I told you on the bridge. The Agency calls them Manifested Indicators.”
“Indicators of what?”
“Chaos forces, of course. No one really knows what they’re composed of. The Agency has a research project going forward to find out. Some sort of radiation would be my guess.”
“That sounds logical. Is there any evidence for it?”
“No. Only the process of elimination. What else could they be?”
Nathan scowled at me.
“Sorry, but I can’t tell you what no one knows,” I continued. “We do know that they only appear when the forces of Chaos are threatening the balance point to a dangerous degree. They showed up in America and Russia for the first time in the 1950s, when the U.S. and the Soviets were building atom bombs like crazy.”
“The balance point?”
“Between Chaos and Order. We live in Chaotic times, and so most people would think of me as an agent of anti-Chaos or Order. But really, I serve the balance, not either side, which makes me an agent for Harmony.”
“Harmony is different from Order?”
“It’s the product of Order and Chaos in balance.”
I could tell that Nathan was actually thinking about what I was saying instead of searching for counterarguments, a trend I wanted to encourage.
“Well, look,” I continued, “Too much Chaos, and things fall apart, like the poet said.”
“‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer.’ That one?”
“Yeah.” I was impressed despite myself. “But too much Order, and things stagnate like a silted river between narrow banks.”
“I don’t know that poem.”
“That’s because I just made that up.”
“Not bad.” Nathan paused to consider something. “When I was put in contact with your agency, I was given a briefing about it, a very strange, very short briefing. I gather, though, that your Congress founded it back in the Fifties. Was that because of the flying saucer hysteria?”
“That was part of the reason, yeah.” I wondered how much he’d been told. I didn’t want to give anything away. “The Air Force set up the first project, down in Palo Alto. That’s just south of here.”
“And it grew from there?”
“You could say that.”
I smiled, he waited. Finally he looked into his mug, frowned, and set it down empty on the coffee table. “I’m really quite hungry. Do you think you might actually eat something if I pay for it?”
“That has to be the worst dinner invitation I’ve ever gotten, but yeah, I’m hungry, too. One thing, though. Those pictures of Johnson. Are they here or in the office?”
“Here, of course. I don’t leave things like that lying around.”
“Bring them along. I want to show them to the stringer.”
We ate at a local Chinese place decorated by someone who believed in a daily hosing down with Lysol—bare pale green walls, white tiled floor with an obvious drain in the middle, vinyl-covered chairs, Formica tables. They had at least covered the bare light bulbs with silk lanterns that dangled red tassels for a spot of color. The food, however, I’d always found to be first-rate. Whenever I took anyone there, I’d order a number of different dishes and then just sample them while the guests did the serious eating.
When we walked in, Nathan stood looking narrow-eyed around the room. When a waiter tried to show us to a table in the middle of the room, he shook his head no.
“Sorry,” Nathan said. “I’d like that table over there in the corner.” He gave me an apologetic smile. “I’m never comfortable unless I can keep my back toward the wall.”
With a shrug the waiter led us to the chosen perch. He took my order, then trotted off to fetch the usual pot of tea.
Nathan had never used chopsticks before, and he set himself to be charming when I tried to teach him over an order of tiger prawns. We laughed a lot, but when the waiter brought the lo mein, he also brought Nathan a fork. Nobody in the room wanted to see him covered in noodles and sauce, not while they were trying to eat. He’d kept his jacket on during the meal, too. It didn’t look washable.
By the time we left the restaurant, the sun was setting off to the west, an orange glare behind the encroaching fog. Streetlights glimmered, waiting for full darkness. Shop windows and neon signs lit up in splashes of red and purple, glittering on the sidewalks damp from the fog. I love night in the city, cool, mysterious, jeweled with lights—I always feel that some magical thing waits for me, maybe arou
nd the next corner, maybe in some strange little shop still open when its neighbors have all gone dark.
Nathan, however, shivered and buttoned up his jacket with a small growl.
“I suppose you keep that coat on to hide the gun,” I said.
“Yes, but it’s the damp weather, too. I’ve been cold ever since I got here.”
“I hope you brought a raincoat. It is winter.”
We were walking side by side down the sidewalk. Without looking my way he reached for my hand. I almost let him take it, but just in time I pulled it away. I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets for safe keeping.
“We’d better not take the car,” I said. “The parking downtown is really lousy.”
“As far as I can tell, the parking all over San Francisco is lousy.” Nathan paused to look up and down the street. “This doesn’t look like a good district to find a cab.”
“There’s this thing called streetcars. We can’t pull up at Jerry’s corner in a cab, anyway.”
“Jerry is the stringer?”
“Yeah, and a hustler.”
“A what?”
“A male prostitute.”
“Um.” Nathan seemed unfazed by the revelation. “Is he reliable?”
“Very. He’s always had a good eye for Chaos.”
By the time we got downtown, night had fallen, close and silver in the fog. As we climbed out of the underground Muni Metro station, Nathan took a good look around at the scrappy shops, the drunks sitting on the sidewalk, the general disorder of Market Street once you get past Sixth and leave the big touristy department stores behind. Our route ahead on the side street lay between high stone buildings, dimly lit by streetlights alone, a shadowed canyon into the night.
“I don’t like this situation,” he said. “Let’s get in and out as fast as we can.”
“All right. I’ll give Jerry a call.”
Since Jerry’s fairly successful at his chosen line of work, he has a cell phone. He was standing, he told me, on a “good” corner on Ellis Street, a couple of blocks behind but not too near the big hotels around Union Square. With the economy so bad, the doormen were getting too greedy about kickbacks, or so he said, for him to sit inside. As we walked up, I saw him hovering by the lighted windows of a bar in his work clothes: a tight short skirt, sleeveless red blouse, black stockings, and very high heels. Thanks to the cold he’d added a ratty black fur coat to this mess. He wore his bleached hair—all his own, though—in that odd poufy style favored by drag queens, very Fifties with tons of hair spray.