Nope. So I left.
It was still cold out, but the rain had stopped. Between the looming construction cranes and half-built skyscrapers, fast-moving clouds streaked a mother-of-pearl sky. I headed for the Regent’s Canal and walked along the towpath, dodging bicyclists and dog walkers, until I found myself momentarily alone in the dark passage beneath a stone arch.
I dug in my bag for the mobile phone I’d taken from a dead woman. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now the mobile was a liability. I glanced around, tossed it into the middle of the canal, and hurried on.
I left the towpath for the street. Within minutes I was lost. After wandering around for nearly an hour, I found myself at Russell Square, an area filled with cops and tourists headed to the British Museum. Lines of schoolchildren in matching uniforms, a cluster of well-dressed matrons who followed an Asian woman bearing a red umbrella like a standard. I made a wide detour around a couple of cops, stopping to buy a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans from a street vendor. I put them on, found an alcove where I sneaked a mouthful of Jack Daniel’s, and cut over to a main drag where the street sign read SHAFTESBURY AVENUE.
Booze and cheap shades and pharmaceutical speed made the late-afternoon glow like burnished steel. Without the weight of my camera, my new bag felt preternaturally light, almost empty. I comforted myself by thinking that on the Wall of Death it’s best to travel light.
Chapter 2
I walked until I reached a familiar marker—Charing Cross Road. I’d never been there before, but for decades I’d worked at the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village. After some early run-ins with customers, I was delegated to the stockroom. I’d remained there until the previous November, using my five-finger discount until security got beefed up. But I had enough contact with buyers and sellers to know that Charing Cross was where famous bookstores lived.
Or used to. The bookshops here had taken a hit. I slowed my steps, searching in vain for Neuman’s or Blackwell’s among the bakeries and cheap restaurants and souvenir shops. Finally I ducked into Any Amount of Books, stashing my bag with the woman behind the counter. I was neither stupid nor fucked up enough to try lifting anything from these shelves. I perused the photography books, then asked to look at a first edition of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency kept safely behind glass. A day ago, the girl behind the counter might have kept a raptor’s eye on me as I handled it.
Now, makeup and my chic gamine hair gave me a new kind of invisibility. The girl unlocked the case and didn’t bat an eye as I glanced at The Grapes of Wrath—five thousand pounds, not a bad price—and a mint first of The Maltese Falcon in dust jacket. You could buy a house for what that one was worth.
I picked up the Goldin with care. I had my own copy back in New York, boosted from the Strand when it first came out. I was curious as to what it went for now. Five hundred pounds: not bad.
Mine was inscribed—me and Nan shared a drug dealer. I thanked the salesgirl and set the book back on its shelf. She closed and locked the case, giving me a cheerful goodbye as I walked back into the street.
Early dusk had fallen. The streets were packed with people hurrying to the Underground, pretheater dinners, and pubs. I continued along Charing Cross till I saw another name I recognized from my days at the Strand: Cecil Court, an alley that had been made into a pedestrian way, lined with small specialty bookshops whose brightly lettered placards swung in the wind.
I entered the alley, the sounds of traffic diminishing to a soft drone. In the sudden hush my footsteps echoed loudly on the pavement. A young man glanced up at me, nodded absently, and went back to browsing a table stacked with antique prints.
I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head and peered into the window of a shop that had just closed for the night. Children’s books were displayed like sweets, with dust jackets in marzipan colors. The shop next door sold theatrical ephemera, its window crammed with black-and-white publicity stills of forgotten stage stars arranged like headstones, alongside books on Shakespeare and the glory days of music hall. Music wafted from an upstairs window. Lotte Lenya, “September Song,” Tom Waits and “Hold On.” A playlist for the death of the publishing industry.
At the end of the alley, I turned and retraced my steps, halting in front of a shop with a green placard in front:
WATKINS: SPECIALISTS IN MYSTICISM, OCCULTISM, ORIENTAL RELIGION, THE PERENNIAL WISDOM, CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY
Back at the Strand, we used to special-order titles from this place for Sarah Lawrence students and aging musicians who played the theremin. Until recently, my own interest in the occult began and ended with a former lover who’d broken up with me after a bad night with the I Ching. I’m not a believer, and the last few months had made me increasingly gun-shy of those who are. The real world is weird enough.
Still, I found myself staring at a sign that advertised a talk and signing that night by Lawrence Caccio. Caccio had been a minor player in the Warhol crowd during the Factory’s Union Square days, a not-bad photographer who’d had the unenviable distinction of being the guy who opened the door to Valerie Solanas the afternoon she shot Andy. Caccio had just released a tarot deck based on vintage photos he’d taken at the Factory, with an introductory note by Julian Cope.
I peered into the shopwindow, spied a clock on the wall. Almost six. Caccio’s event started at seven.
I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t feel like fighting the crowds to get a drink at a pub. Wind gusted down the alley, colder than it had been. I hunched my shoulders and entered the shop.
It was warm inside, with the musty, once-familiar scent of a place that traded in both new and used books. New paper, old ink, and leather bindings, with underlying traces of the store’s clientele—weed smoke, a powerful base note of sandalwood incense shot with sesame oil. An old white hippie sat behind the counter, his gray hair pulled into a scraggy ponytail. He glanced up from his bowl of noodles and pointed his chopsticks at me.
“Can I help you with something?”
I shook my head and he went back to his udon. The room was surprisingly well lit for an occult bookshop. Maybe not so surprising, when I considered the number of shoplifters the Strand used to bust in the act of making off with paperback copies of Aleister Crowley’s autobiography. I glanced at the prominently displayed stacks of the Factory tarot—at forty quid a pop, more than I was willing to spend on a novelty item.
I wandered toward the back of the store. There was less Anton LaVey than I’d expected, and more Asatru. Reprints of Éliphas Lévi and Elias Ashmole; a monograph on Guido Bonatti, a thirteenth-century Italian sorcerer who conjured a sailing ship from wax.
Crouching, I pulled out a cheap paperback dictionary of the occult. I leafed through it, stopping at random upon the entry for “onychomancy”—divination by means of reflection of the sun’s rays, a fair description of old-school print photography. I replaced the book and straightened, bumping into someone behind me.
A tall, stoop-shouldered guy stood there. Gangly, his longish dark hair threaded with gray, wide mouth parted to speak, and a hand raised in apology, so that I could clearly see the familiar scrawl of scar tissue that ran from the middle finger down his palm to his wrist. He was maybe fifteen years younger than I was, with a beaky nose, wire-rimmed Lennon glasses, an amused expression that swiftly darkened as he stared down at me.
“Cass?” His voice rose in disbelief. “Cass Neary?”
Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were topaz. A miniature nova bloomed above the pupil of the left eye, emerald striated with black.
Gryffin Haselton. I wanted to run, yet my lifelong curse held me. I couldn’t look away.
“You look different.” He touched my hair warily, as though it might emit sparks. “Jesus, it is you.”
I started to turn, but he already had hold of my arm. Anger crowded out his astonishment as he pushed me against the bookshelf. “What the hell are you doing here, Cass? The police still need to talk to you—you know that, right?
Where the hell did you go?”
Back in November, I’d met him on the remote Maine island where I’d gone to interview his mother, the legendary photographer Aphrodite Kamestos. Things did not go well. Not for Aphrodite, at any rate. I was complicit in—some might say guilty of—her death.
But I did get some beautiful shots of her, postmortem.
Now I looked toward the door, tensing to make a run for it. Before I could move, Gryffin’s pissed-off tone grew thoughtful.
“You look good,” he said. “What happened? You knock off a liquor store?” At my stony glare, he added, “Right, I get it. Too close to home. Seriously, you clean up very nicely. Want to grab a bite?”
“What, so you can call the fucking cops? Just let me go, okay?”
I pushed past him, but he followed me out into Cecil Court.
“Cass, wait!”
He caught up with me at Charing Cross, took my arm again, and pulled me close. “Listen—the autopsy said she died of natural causes,” he said in a low voice. “She fell, she hit her head, she’s dead. She was my mother, but she was also a drunk who lied to me her entire life. It was stupid not to talk to the cops, Cass. Now they are interested in you. Before that it was strictly pro forma.”
I took a deep breath, fighting to keep my voice even. “What the hell were you doing in that bookstore? Are you stalking me?”
“Stalking you? Are you out of your mind? I was ready to pay cash never to hear your name again! As for what I’m doing here—”
He held up a battered leather messenger bag. “I’m a bookdealer, remember? I’m selling what’s left of my mother’s library, and later I have a meeting about another sale. Larry Caccio’s one of my customers; I saw he was doing an event and decided to drop by and surprise him. What’s your excuse?”
“I used to work at the Strand, remember?” I wrenched away from him, and he laughed. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“It’s just so bizarre, that’s all—what are the odds of running into you here in London?” He hesitated. “You want to get something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’ll eat, you can drink. Everybody wins.”
“You just said you’d pay never to hear my name mentioned again.”
He shrugged. “I changed my mind. Maybe we were supposed to meet up. Like, destiny.”
“That would be just the kind of destiny I’d get stuck with.”
“Come on, it’s my treat.” He gazed at me appraisingly. “Your hair—you look a lot better. Younger.”
I resisted the desire to punch him. Barely. Still, while I didn’t trust Gryffin, I knew, rationally, that he would have no reason to track me down in London, or anywhere else.
But stranger things had happened to me recently, including the fact that I’d lost Quinn so soon after finding him again. The last time I’d seen him, he was heading out to make arrangements for us to leave the UK incognito, on a barge owned by a guy he knew. Given Quinn’s past work as an occasional hit man with the Russian mob, I wondered if he’d ended up on a slow boat to the bottom of the Thames.
The thought made me feel slightly nauseated. Now that I’d had it, I knew it would be difficult to push it away. Gryffin would be a distraction, at least. Let him indulge his bad-girl fantasies by buying me a drink or five.
“Yeah, all right,” I said at last. “But enough about my goddamn hair.”
Chapter 3
We went to a place that Gryffin knew, a mid-nineteenth-century pub called the Three Balls, now a gastropub. Inside, the old drinking establishment looked as though it had spent six weeks at the Hazelden clinic. Everything was sunlit and stripped down, the woodwork bleached and the original bar counter enlivened with vases of cut flowers and polite reminders not to smoke and to drink responsibly. I’d have preferred a dive, but once we were seated, Gryffin handled the menu as though it were a copy of the Magna Carta.
“I hope they still have that pig’s cheek with watermelon pickle—oh, yeah, here it is. What do you want?”
“Single malt. Something I can’t get at home. A double.”
“I mean to eat.”
I glanced at the menu. “Mr. McGregor’s Rabbit Pie sounds nice.”
Gryffin removed his overcoat and draped it on the back of his chair. He wore a gray herringbone jacket over a blue oxford-cloth shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, jeans, and knocked-up sneakers. When I kept on my leather jacket, he looked me up and down and made a face.
“The Ramones are dead, you know.”
“Not Marky. Or CJ.”
“Who’s CJ?”
“The emergency backup Ramone. You getting me that drink?”
Gryffin ordered my whiskey, along with an expensive bottle of pinot noir. I raised an eyebrow. “Your mother’s library must have found a happy home in the Hamptons.”
“Nope. The really valuable stuff, she left all that to the Portland Museum of Art. She left almost everything else to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Ansel Adams must be spinning in his grave. She didn’t leave me much besides the Maine house, which is a wreck, and a couple of books I sold to another dealer this afternoon.”
“She screwed you.”
He shrugged. “She didn’t owe me anything. And she’d be the first to tell you that.”
I savored my whiskey. Gryffin waited until the waiter filled his wineglass, then raised it to me. “Cheers.”
“Bottoms up.” I finished the single malt and helped myself to the pinot. “I still think it’s weird, running into you like this.”
“Hey, we were in one of the last indie bookstores on the planet. You used to work in the Strand—soon that’ll be the only one left. We’ll all be fighting over the only surviving copy of Infinite Jest. It’ll be Left Behind for bibliophiles.”
“Very funny.” I took a sip of my pinot. “You have another meeting tonight?”
“I’m brokering a sale for a dealer I know in Hampstead.” He finished his wine and refilled his glass. “I’m celebrating. When this sale goes through, I’m done. Early retirement, new house in Monterey…”
“Aren’t you kinda young for that?”
“Not that young, trust me.”
“You look young.”
He grinned. “It’s the haircut.”
Our food arrived. Gryffin ordered a second bottle of wine, and we tucked in. The rabbit pie was good, though I was disappointed it didn’t arrive on a Beatrix Potter plate.
“So, is Caccio really into all that occult stuff? Tarot cards and crystals?”
“Dunno. Maybe. But a lot of people are, especially now—that’s how Watkins stays in business. And my customer is. Not Harold—he’s the bookdealer—but his client. She collects incunabula and volumes dealing with ancient magic. Alchemy, astrology. The real deal. Vellum manuscripts, fifteenth-century texts.”
He sipped his wine. The emerald starburst in his iris caught the light and glowed, like that phantom sunset flare known as le rayon vert. He leaned across the table, lowering his voice.
“Have you ever heard of a book called Picatrix?”
I shook my head. “What is it?”
“The most influential text on magic ever written. The most influential one known to exist, anyway. It dates to the tenth or eleventh century, but it was probably written much earlier, somewhere in the Middle East. The English translation of the title is The Goal of the Wise, but no one knew of an extant copy of an edition in the original Arabic until 1920. Sometime around 1256 it was translated into Spanish, and a century or two after that into Latin.”
“What does it mean, Picatrix?”
“No one really knows. Could be a transcription error, or a translation error. Some scholars speculate the author was a man named al-Majriti. His first name can be roughly translated as ‘to sting,’ which is similar to the medieval Latin word picare, which means ‘to prick.’ There’s a famous passage in Picatrix about treating a man for a scorpion sting, with a tincture made of frankincense and the use of various talismani
c seals.
“The book is filled with stuff like that—whoever wrote it compiled his information from hundreds of other texts on magic, everything that was known in the ancient world. It’s a cross between an encyclopedia and a user’s manual for astrology, talismanic charms, spells, poisons, obscure methods of torture and healing, you name it. Some of its ideas were later incorporated into Gnosticism, and the scientific method, and alchemy, and it was one of the earliest and most notorious banned books—the Inquisition arrested Casanova for owning a copy.”
Gryffin took a gulp of wine. His face had grown flushed, his strange topaz eyes glowing with excitement.
“And I mean,” he went on, stabbing a piece of watermelon pickle with his fork, “there are really good reasons for this being a banned book. In one section, you get this detailed description of how you lure a man into a temple, then strip him and imprison him in a gigantic pot full of sesame oil up to his neck. You feed him nothing but dried figs—no water—and wave incense around him for forty days. By then he ‘becomes as flexible as a candle.’”
I grimaced. “Nice.”
“It gets better. After forty days, you remove the head, hang it up, and wave around some more incense, and it talks to you. Gives you information on the stock market, political uprisings, the arrival of merchant ships. It also reminds you of when you need to offer a sacrifice in the temple and answers any questions you might have.”
“It’s the prototype for Siri.”
Gryffin laughed. “Picatrix is full of stuff like that.”
“So, what? You have a copy of this book?”
“No. Better.”
The waiter came to clear our plates. Without asking me, Gryffin ordered two Armagnacs. After the drinks arrived, he moved his chair around the table to sit beside me. I warmed my glass in my hands, eyeing him warily. Gryffin’s father had been a brilliant, deeply damaged photographer turned serial killer, named Denny Ahearn. I was starting to wonder if Gryffin was following him into the deep end.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 2