Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  This was a hands-down case of the second category.

  The book he unearthed was a facsimile copy of John Dee's Tal-ismantic Intelligencer, which is not, as you may think from the title, a small-town occult newspaper. I'd drooled over it when it came up in the Weiser's catalog a few years back but couldn't afford it. Limited edition, gold-stamped slipcase, bound-in ribbon bookmark, hand-sewn signatures, and guaranteed not to fit any bookcase I owned.

  "They reprinted," Julian said. I pulled out my Visa.

  "I'd kind of like your opinion on something." I stepped up onto the raised platform of the checkout cubbyhole while Julian rummaged around under his desk for the charge slips. "Ever seen anything like this?"

  I dug the Khazar book out of my purse and waved it at him.

  Julian came up—without the slips —and grabbed the book. I'd come to him not for slavish hormonal reasons but because Julian is that unpredictable —and rare—commodity, a scholar. The history of magic is his specialty.

  "Nice work. Yours?" Julian flipped through it and came back to the icon.

  "No. I got it from a friend. I was wondering about the Trad."

  "Looks Slavic," Julian said. "Very ceremonial." He paged through it again and stopped to read. He could probably read the Russian too, damn him. "Sort of an ecological version of Rasputin," he said and handed it back to me.

  "Rasputin —the guy who murdered the little princes in the tower?" I asked, just to be provoking.

  Julian adjusted his little glasses and regarded me disapprovingly. "Grigoiy Efimovitch, popularly known as Rasputin, or 'The Dissolute," magical healer and spiritual advisor to the court of the

  68 Bell, Book, and Murder

  last Tsar of Russia—that's Nicholas the Second, if you're counting. He was thought to be able to cure the TsarevitMs hemophiliac attacks by prayer and the laying on of hands. His major contribution to religious thought is the doctrine of 'sinning in order for God to have something to forgive.'"

  "God: That's Adonai Elohim, right?"

  Julian actually smiled; the two years I'd spent studying Kabbalah weren't wasted. "But what is this?" 1 asked. "What's it for?"

  "It's a prayer book," Julian repeated patiently. "A devotional — for raising magical power by prayer. You Witches don't go in much for that sort of thing."

  "I've raised some power in my time, Julian," 1 pointed out. Wic-can and pseudo-Wiccan groups just don't go in for prayer as an end in itself.

  "But then you used it yourself. This is obviously a . . . Think of it as a funnel. A link. The power is poured into the godform shown in the book—probably an artificial elemental of some sort— and then siphoned off later. At least it could be, if that was what they were doing," said Julian the ever-cautious.

  Craft slang for people who siphon aind store energy is "vampire."

  "So it's not a Wiccan thing," I said, very casual. "My friend said it was a new Trad. Too bad; someone should do something with Russian Paganism." Why, I don't know—it's just one of those things a person says to fill up a gap in the conversation.

  "You can't tell from this whether they're Witches or not. Poly-theists, certainly, but most of this is rewarmed Golden Dawn, the usual mishmash; the only thing really original is the ecological nihilism. There's this guy in Queens doing a Russian Wicca coven. Very into secrecy. Very high church. Calls his group Baba Yoga, You could ask him about this—if you're interested, I could let him know."

  Baba Yoga. Or, as Lace might hear it, Baklava.

  Bingo.

  "Do you know anything about them?"

  Julian frowned. "No. Like I said, they're very secretive. I don't think they'll even talk to you unless you're vouched for. If this is theirs, that friend of yours might be able to get you in."

  "And they're CM.?" I prodded.

  "If they are, nobody knows them." Which meant that Julian didn't know them, and Julian knew every serious practitioner of ritual magic on the Eastern seaboard.

  The name Baba Yoga was tickling something in the back of my mind, and I wasn't sure what.

  "Cindy might know," Julian added, trying to be helpful.

  "Yeah," I said. 'Thanks."

  He bagged my book and 1 decided to take his advice. I went off to see if Cindy was home.

  1 should have remembered that Julian is never helpful.

  5

  SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2:00 p.m.

  Life in the Community often resembles the peripateisis of the Edwardian novel. You go here, you visit, you go there, you visit. It isn't so much caused by the Community as by the City.

  This is New York in June, which means intermittently hot, verging on beastly. Most of the people I know live in a tiny apartment or fraction thereof that either doesn't have am air conditioner or has one that the landlord won't let them run. Add to this the fact that anybody who is home isn't answering the phone for one of the following reasons:

  A) It's hooked up to the fax/modem

  B) He's too paranoid to answer it

  C) There isn't one because his roommate stole it

  and you have the reason why members of the Community spend their weekends wandering from deli to bookstore to apartment to coffee shop, hoping against hope that one of them will be air-conditioned.

  Cindy is the first person who realized all of this, and, in a dazzling bid for popularity, bought a commercial air conditioner and stayed home.

  Actually, that's only half the truth. Cindy has a typesetting and design service called Incendiary (her last name is Airey—at least it is now) that she runs out of the same loft she lives in. She spe-

  ciailizes in catalogs—like Tree of Wisdom, The Snake's mail-order service, or Witchwife, the occult jewelers.

  Cindy's street-level front door is one of those industrial-strength gray riveted things. Saturdays she keeps it propped open with a brick. Once you drag the door open you're confronted with a long narrow flight of stairs that goes up to Cindy's third-floor loft and no place else. There is no light bulb because the ceiling of the staircase — and the stairs are narrow—is about thirty feet away. I have always wondered how she got two thousand pounds of Computronic typesetter up them.

  1 trudged to the top of the stairs. On Saturdays the door at the top of the stairs is unlocked, too.

  Cindy is about five foot two and looks like what God could have made out of me if She'd (1) had money and (2) meant me to go through life as a French maid in a bedroom farce. We both have black hair and blue eyes, but where Cindy looks mysterious and elfin, damn her, people always ask me if I have a headache. She's neither Neopagan nor Craft, and she runs the closest thing to a salon New York has seen since Edith Wharton stopped writing. I pushed open her living room door.

  Cindy has a table made from one of those twelve-foot doors scavenged from some old East Side mansion. On Saturdays it's covered with food, with a tea urn at one end and coffee at the other. Nobody has ever been able to figure out why she does this.

  You would think, with a free and semipublic spread, the place would be jammed, but it isn't. People who don't fit in hardly ever come back twice. I think Cindy changes them into toads.

  (This is a joke. The only documented case of mantic theri-omorphism on record is Aleister Crowley's turning a friend of his into a camel on one of their Near East walking trips, and Crowley lied.)

  1 came in amd got tea. Cindy was sitting on a pile of pillows surrounded by her intimates. She looked like a punk Germaine de Stael.

  I've never really been able to figure out whether I'm "in" Cindy's crowd. I think I'm the only Witch who hangs out at Cindy's, but I'm not sure about that either.

  Another thing you learn to live with in New York is uncertainty.

  I found a seat and sat. The conversation turned on the usual topics: bands I didn't know, books I hadn't read, scandals where 1

  72 Bell, Book, and Murder

  couldn't name any of the players. I fared slightly better when talk entered the World of Publishing: There the talk was all about who was (a) prin
ting or (b) designing what magical book and what (c) lawsuits or (d) supernatural manifestations were attendant on that. Eventually I worked my way into an eddy in the conversation.

  "I've really started getting interested in Russia, lately. You know, the pre-Christian magical system there?"

  Neglect to substitute the codephrase "Pre-Christian religion" for "Paganism" in circles like these and you may be forced to listen for up to half an hour to someone telling you that Pagans do not exist. I've also heard that said about gremlins.

  "Do you know anybody into that?" I kept saying, and eventually I struck paydirt.

  "His name's Ruslan."

  The speaker looked vaguely familiar and I finally placed him— he'd come to the Crossing circle last night. Fortunately for my peace of mind he'd left almost immediately afterward—hours before I had. He couldn't be my midnight tailer.

  "He's into stuff like that."

  "The guy up in Queens?" I saiid. "Baba Yoga?"

  "Yeah." My informant relaxed, having fallen for the oldest trick in the book—the one about pretending you know more than you do. Convinced I already knew everything he was telling me, my new friend Damien told how Ruslan had moved into the area (New York Metropagan Community) and started working Russian. "Very shamanic," he said—which probably meant drugs used in Circle. Damien had only gone as far as the one visit, since what they wanted—"that secrecy shit and all"—was "too heavy" for him.

  Cindy'd heard of Baba Yoga, too, and nailed down the reference for me.

  "It's named after that evil sorceress who has a hut that walks around on chicken feet: Baba Yaga. The one who eats children. Like in Fantasia."

  The things people think are in a harmless little movie never cease to amaze me. The same people who take their kids to see Batman Returns think the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence from a fifty-year-old Disney film is corrupting our young.

  Besides, 1 saw Fantasia again on its last release. There's no chicken feet in it anj^where.

  I stayed another couple of hours at Cindy's but I didn't get any-

  thing else at all useful, if you don't count a couple of leads on who might need some freelance layout work done for them by someone who doesn't freak out at the sight of a pentacle.

  But I had enough to annoy me. There was a coven in Queens that had been running for about a year. It was named after a black Witch in a Russian fairy tale, who was intimately connected with chicken feet a little bigger than the one Miricim had been wearing around her neck. Its leader's name was Ruslan, and it was a good bet he was the leader of the group that Miriam had been working with when she died.

  6

  MONDAY, JUNE 25

  So here it was Monday again, and just about ten days since Miriam died. As an avenging angel I was a bust.

  Belle'd called me Sunday night. The usual thing—how was I, how were things, was I still going unreasonably apeshit over Miriaim's death.

  I told her death was a part of the Great Cycle of Rebirth. I did not tell her about any death threats I may have received, or that there might be a black coven in Queens murdering people. It sounded stupid even to me, and Belle is so laissez-faire she makes Ayn Rand look like a Commie. If I told her everything I knew about the Baba Yogas Belle'd want to invite them to Circle.

  So she talked and I didn't, and she reminded me that Changing was meeting agciin this Friday and would I be sure to be there?

  Belle only makes these special quality-time phone calls to people she suspects may be in need of them. I did not like the feeling of being considered needy. I was supposed to be "over" Miriam by now—that much was plain.

  But now it was Monday and I had a cup of truly awful coffee at my elbow and a razor blade between my fingers and a spread in front of me where the repro was in so many pieces that it resembled a ticker-tape collage. And Miriam wouldn't go away.

  The ancient Greeks (who, as the Discordian saying goes, were in the sorry position of not being able to borrow any of their philosophy from the ancient Greeks) made dramatic hay from the idea

  that the blood of the murdered cries out for action on the part of the survivors —a literal, decibel-measurable crying that litercdly had to be done something about or nobody would get any sleep.

  I envied the ancient Greeks. They at least had a murder or two in hand. I didn't have anything, except a line on some probably unpleasant people that my backbrain was trying to work out a way to meet.

  I put in a long day at Houston Graphics/The Bookie Joint, first trying to jack up the old paycheck, then on a freelance piece of my own. It was after eight but still light when I left the studio.

  It was the end of June, but the worst of the summer heat was still to come. It was pleasant enough that I decided to walk instead of taking the subway.

  I often wonder, when I'm trying not to think about other things, if the citizens of Atlantis ever had any more idea that they were living at the pinnacle of civilization than the average New Yorker has. New York has been called "the only city" and "the new Atlantis" in about equal measure. Maybe it is: so big, complex, and information-packed that when people have really evolved to fit it they won't really be like other people anymore.

  And then again, maybe sometime all the city services will go on strike at once and we won't have to worry about evolving any more.

  My answering machine was flashing when I got home around nine: brilliant self-referential paragraphs of vermilion Morse that told me lots of people wanted to talk to me. I cranked up the volume and hit "Play."

  Sometimes my capacity for self-abuse frightens me.

  Lace, who left her name but no message. Somebody for High Tor Graphics (me), who left a message but no name. A couple of hang-ups, faithfully recorded. Someone trying to sell me the Sunday New York Times (an automated random-dialer). Tollah, calling from the Revel, and could I please read Tarot down at the shop on Saturday because their regular reader was having a crisis? More hang-ups. It's a good thing answering machines don't get bored.

  Pay dirt.

  The tone, then: "My name is Ruslan. I believe we have a number of friends and interests in common. I do hope you'll call me.

  76 Bell, Book, and Murder

  My number is — " he rattled off a string of digits in 718, which is, among other things. Queens.

  Nothing is ever gained by hasty action. I went and found the cassette I'd recorded Miriam's last message onto and added Rus-lan's. I wrote down the phone number and tucked the cassette away again. I took the little Khazar misscd out of my purse and looked at it.

  There's a kind of phone book called the CrissCross Directory. Most libraries carry the one for their area. Instead of the usual alphabetic listings of Ma-Bell-as-was, all the phone numbers of your area are listed in numerical order, followed by who has them and where.

  So if you have a phone number, you can get a name and address. If I took this phone number down to the New York Public on Forty-second Street, I'd bet more than a nickel it would go to the address in Queens I'd visited Saturday.

  Bast, Girl Detective.

  I hesitated between coffee and a beer and settled for tea. While I was waiting for the teabag to commit hygroscopia, I got out Miriam's last occult diary and turned to where I'd been using it to make notes on things Khazar. Under my notes on what Julian had said and what I'd heard at Cindy's, I added my first impressions of Brother Ruslan.

  "/ believe we have a number of friends and interests in commorL "

  Ruslan had what is inaccurately referred to as a "white" voice — i.e., one that has been educated out of ethnic and regional identifiers. Not as common in New York as you might think; it'll soon be a thing of the past, but you can still frequently tell the borough, and sometimes the religion, of New Yorkers through vowels alone.

  "/ do hope you'll call me. "

  Yes, an educated voice. Maybe overeducated—just a little bit trying-too-hard to be upper-crust. Look how very important and refined I am.

  It was familiar. Not the voice itself, but th
e kind of voice. I sat and drank my tea and stared out my only window while the light slid down toward Vheure bleu.

  It was a professional voice. Doctor, lawyer, tax accountant, one of those fields that attracts bullies and sadists and emotional basket cases who have about as much compassion as a paper cup. An "I can do whatever I want, and not only are you helpless to stop me, if you don't pretend to trust me I am going to stick it to you even worse" voice.

  Paranoid ravings aside, during the course of your schooling most professions slap a thin veneer of whitespeak over the vowels you were bom with, aind most professionals pretend to an infallibility that God Herself couldn't cop to once they get out into the world.

  Guesses.

  Was it the same voice as whoever called me the night before the Crossing circle? I thought about it hard and honestly and decided I'd never be sure. It wasn't impossible, though.

  And if the mystery caller wasn't Ruslan, it was a safe bet the caller knew Ruslan and had handed over my unlisted phone number. Which Ruslan had chosen to call now.

  I felt like the heroine around Chapter Seven of a horror novel, at the point where she dimly suspects she's the victim of several interlocking conspiracies, but doesn't know who's in them or how they fit together. Why should Ruslan call at all? Why now? What did he know—and what did he think I knew?

  A professional voice. Doctor, lawyer, accountant. . . priest.

  There was no help for it. I picked up the phone.

  Ring, ring, ring . . .

  "Hello?" The same voice, but a little more rough-edged.

  Tm returning Ruslan's call," I said and waited.

  "Oh hey, Karen," Ruslan blossomed into polished talk-show sincerity. "HI How ya doing?"

  I thought over which of my msiny personae to plug in to keep him talking. I decided on Pathetically Grateful, which someone with a voice like that would want everyone to be.

  "Hi," I emoted. "I'm so glad you called."