We both declined, and Ilona vanished behind the curtain again. I looked around. 'Tapes?" Beaner hadn't told me what his special order was.
"Maria Stuarda," Beaner explained. "The Edinburgh Opera Received Version. One must do something."
Beaner leaned on the counter. I wandered around, looking at the new books. There were chairs for browsers, and most of the new stock was displayed on two vast oaken library tables in the center of the shop. I picked up a half dozen music tapes and a slip-cased reproduction of The Book ofKells that I couldn't really afford.
"Here we are," Ilona said, coming out carrying a cup decorated with elaborate Celtic designs in stained-glass colors. She sat down behind the counter. I approached. On a shelf about eye level, an enormous brindled cat the color of the wood blinked green eyes at me.
"You look cheerful," Beaner said. "How's the moving going?"
"I've decided not to move," Ilona said firmly. "I shall buy the building and stay. What a pity I didn't think of it when Mr. Moskowitz was alive, but one doesn't, you know."
I glanced at Beaner. He looked bland, which meant he was stunned, and reasonably enough. To buy the building Lothlorien was in would cost a quarter million, minimum. How could a business like Lx)thlorien come up with that kind of financing?
"Come into money?" asked Beaner.
Ilona sighed. "Not precisely. I've decided to sell. . . Well, I suppose you'd call it ain old family heirloom." She laughed a little sadly. "I admit it was hard to make up my mind, but I found I couldn't really bear to leave." She sipped her tea. "But you'll be wanting your order. Ned!" she called.
The cat blinked, slowly. The tape deck wailed about blood-red roses in someone's black silk hair. A person — probably Ned —appeared, descending the ladder that reached to the ceiling.
"Bring the special order for Mr. Challoner, will you, dear?" Ilona said, and Ned vanished in the direction of the back room. I formed a brief impression of dark hair and bulkiness.
"I don't know what I'd do without Ned," Ilona said. "I can't
afford to pay him much—and if I'd sold up, where would he be?"
A silence fell. The next cut on the tape started; drums first, then an eerie tangle of unaccompanied voices.
"From the hag and hungry goblin / That into rags would rend ye," the singers wailed. "All the spirits that stand by the Naked Man / In the Book of Moons defend ye— "
That woman again," Beaner said aggrievedly. "I'm being haunted."
Fiddle and pennywhistle and drums that would make a dead man dance joined the singers.
"Mary, Queen of Scots?" I said. I couldn't see what she had to do with Mad Maudlin and Tom Rynosseros and the rest of Bed-laim's bonnie boys.
"Oh, you know her?" Ilona said, as eagerly as if we'd just discovered a mutual friend.
"We've just met," I said.
" Tom O'Bedlam's a political ballad," Beaner said. "Sixteenth century."
Reasonable. Say something vicious, and, after enough time has passed, it becomes harmless art, suitable for children. Most of Mother Goose started out as political character assassination. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
"And not a very nice one, either," Ilona said, just as if Beaner were making perfect sense. "Calling her a Bedlamite. Poor dear Mary—all she ever wanted was what was hers by right."
Ned came out of the back room with a glossy box that was probably Beaner's opera.
"Unfortunately," Beaner said waspishly, "what she thought was hers adready belonged to other people."
I was looking at Ilona; Beaner wasn't. So I saw her face go very still, the way a polite person's will when she has been mortally offended.
Beaner drew breath for another volley. I bumped into him, stepping on his foot, and set my purchases down on the counter. "Can you ring this up for me?" I said brightly.
"I can't take you anywhere," I said to Beaner. He sighed.
"My god, my god, I am heartily sorry for having offended Holy Mary Stuart, martyr of the True Religion, and never mind that since her son James the Sixth became James the First of England her cause was hardly lost. How was I to know that dear Ilona was
154 Bell, Book, and Murder
one of Them? She's always seemed so sensible." Despite all the fluttering, I could tell that Beaner was flustered. He hates being unintentionally rude.
We walked uptown in the gathering dusk. The buUdings were a mix of antique sweatshops, weird marginal industrial supply outlets, and newly remodeled buildings waiting for an influx of Pretty People. Probably they were owned by the same development corporation that currently owned Lothlorien's building and hoped to turn Lothlorien's space into a combination open-plan boutique and coffee bar, perhaps laying in a little neon around the plate-glass window to give the place just the right soupQon of cognitive dissonance.
Well, llona had scotched—pardon the reference—that notion. 'Things Celtic, remember?" I said. Beaner shrugged, his opera under his arm.
'That reminds me," I said, to change the subject. "Have you seen Glitter's book?"
"Yes," Beaner camped, "isn't it dreadful?"
"It's missing," I said. He raised an eyebrow. "She says," I added.
"HoLU could you miss it?" he demanded plaintively. He had a point. Glitter's Book of Shadows measures twelve by eighteen and is covered in purple metallic fabric decorated with sequins, rhine-stones, and chrome studs.
"Anyway, I'm going to go up and help her look for it. You want to come?"
Beaner shuddered delicately. "Mary has any number of faults — but she is not fuchsia. Pass."
"Coward."
"Granted."
We parted at West Fourth, Beaner to a hot date with a dead queen and me to Glitter's.
Glitter lives on Dyckman near Broadway, almost as far uptown as Belle. The neighborhood was okay when she moved in to it a few years ago, but there have been so many "incidents" on her block since that everyone's nagging her to move. Even I 8im nagging her, which, when you consider where I live, will tell you how bad Glitter's neighborhood is.
She shrugs it off. I suppose you have a different view of things if you're a probation officer for the City of New York, which Glitter happens to be.
I picked up two quarts of shrimp fried rice at the Cuban-
Chinese place on the comer and a six-pack of cervezafria at the deli next door. Cold beer in hand, I headed for Glitter's building.
You can tell it used to be what New Yorkers call "a good building": marble steps, terrazzo floor. But it was a good building sometime around 1920—now it's just tatty. I buzzed Glitter's door first for courtesy, but her bell's been broken since she moved in, so 1 punched buttons at random and announced myself until someone let me in. Who knows?—maybe I knew them.
The building is six stories. Glitter is the top right front. There is a purple glitter star painted on her door that her feUow denizens have not yet been able to efface. I shifted my burden to get a hand free and knocked.
When Glitter answered the door I saw she'd been crying. I rearranged my mental picture of events: if not objectively serious (jury still out on that one), then serious to Glitter.
"Come in," she said forlornly.
"1 brought beer."
"Yuch."
We sidled around each other in the narrow haU. Glitter locked the door. Rather than change places again, I preceded her into the apartment.
Kitchen downstage left. Bathroom on the right. Closet. At the end of the hall two tiny connecting rooms, about eight by ten each. Glitter uses the one overlooking the street for her bedroom, holding the opinion that when the world ends she wants to know it at the time.
I set the Chinese down on her kidney-shaped Lucite coffee table. Most of Glitter's furniture is transparent. She says she doesn't want anything interfering with the "full effect."
Glitter herself is part of the "full effect," so maybe she's got a point.
When I first met Glitter she wore large purple-tinted glasses, which have since been replace
d with contacts that turn her eyes the color of drowned violets pickled in Welch's grape juice. She has her hair Cellophaned with Wfld Orchid on an average of once a month, and there are very few items in her wardrobe that are not purple, or glittery, or both. Sometimes I wonder what her clients make of her.
"Glass?" she asked. I shook my head, extracted a Tsingtao from my six-pack, removed the cap, and drank.
"I'll get them," Glitter said, and bore the rest of the bottles off to her refrigerator. I looked around.
156 Bell, Book, and Murder
The walls —up to the strip of molding about eight feet up—were sponge-finished in fuchsia, purple, aqua, and just a hint of gold, all applied with the reckless disregard of the Manhattanite who knows she isn't going to get her security deposit back no matter what. The living room window shades were some paisley fabric, and the windows themselves were liberally swagged with cheap fringed gold shawls.
The three bookcases and the coffee table were all Lucite, as in transparent.
There used to be a Gothic Cabinet Craft-t3^e place downtown on Broadway back in the early Eighties where you could get anything you wanted custom-built out of Lucite (including chests of drawers, but whose underwear is that decorative?). Glitter had patronized the establishment heavily.
I sat down on a throw pillow. Glitter came back with plates and chopsticks. I told her about Lothlorien's not-closing.
I was glad to see how much it cheered her up, but then I'd known it would. The rituals she designs for Changing have frequently been labeled the Celtic Twilight Zone. Like most people whose milk-tongue was Yiddish, the glottal stops of Gaelic are as nothing to her.
"Heirloom? What kind of heirloom?" Glitter wanted to know.
"An expensive one, I guess, if she's going to buy the building. She didn't say, and I could hardly ask, what with Beaner putting his foot in it big-time over Mary, Queen of Scots."
I watched Glitter closely for any signs of rabid partisanship, but she just snorted and helped herself to more rice.
After we finished eating, and I had another beer, we searched the entire apartment together. I did it because Glitter expected me to, and because to not do it would have been to call Glitter a deliberate liar. I was sure we'd turn it up in one of those out-of-the-way places that Glitter stashes things because they're so convenient.
But we didn't. It wasn't there. Not in the bedroom. Not on her altar, not under the bed, not stuffed behind the fabric swags concealing a horrible home-grown stucco job by the last tenant. Not in the bathroom. I even looked under the clawfoot tub. Not in the kitchen, although for a moment I entertained the theory that the roaches had decided to take up Wicca and stolen it. Not in the closet, although we did find a gorgeous pair of red silk stiletto-heeled pumps that Glitter couldn't remember bu3ang and that were too narrow for me.
Not here. Not there. Not £Ln57where.
I sat back down in the living room on my pillow. Glitter swept her caftan around her and sat down opposite me.
Looking anxious. Lx)oking as if she expected me to do something.
"When was the last time you saw it?" I asked, giving up.
'This is—what? Saturday? Then Wednesday, because Dorje came over to copy the Hymn to the Shopping Goddess I wrote for when he goes to look for a new kitchen table," Glitter said.
One trouble our mainstream apologists have with Wicca is that parody is alive and well and living in the Craft. It's hard for the ethnography set to take us seriously when they're being told about New York Metropagan "Insta-traditions" like Etaoin Shrdlu rituals (useful if you're doing desktop publishing) and hymns to the Shopping Goddess (great for the urban scavenger). They forget that every liturgy was once written down for the first time, and that even Christianity used to have parody rituals and sacred clowns.
"Okay," I said carefully. "Is there any chance he took it with him?"
"Been there, done that," Glitter said. "I called him. Bast. He doesn't have it. It was here when he left."
Wednesday night. "Did anyone—"
"Break in? With my locks? And only steal my BoS?" Glitter jeered. I had to admit that she had a point. Despite the neighborhood she lives in. Glitter is careful about who knows she lives there £ind how easy it is to get into her apartment. If any of her current or former multiple-felony-committing Probation Department clients ever managed to follow her home things could get messy.
"I thought maybe you could do a reading," Glitter said diffidently. "I got a new deck. I haven't used it yet."
"Sure," I said, since all magic aside, if a tarot reading would make Glitter feel better there was no reason for me not to do one. And besides, it wasn't as if I was going to charge her for it.
She came back with the reissue of the Coleman-Waite deck from the original plates that U.S. Games (the world's largest printer of tarot cards) came out with last spring. She set it down on the table and sat down across from me.
I shifted my pillow closer to the table and picked up the box. There is a great deal of ritual associated with reading the tarot cards, such as each reader having her own deck, wrapping the cards in red silk, and never letting someone else read with your cards. Even if you don't believe in magic, these rules focus
158 Bell, Book, and Murder
your attention on the cards. You can't get serious help from something you take lightly.
Isn't paradox wonderful?
I broke the seal on the box and spilled the cards out. New decks are usually in order: first the Major Arcana, zero to twenty-one, then the fourteen cards of each of the four suits in numerical order, ending up with Page, Knight, Queen, King. I cut and shuffled and cut again until I was pretty sure that all the cards were completely mixed, then I set the deck down in front of Glitter and she cut it into three piles.
I prepared to do the reading that Glitter had asked for, based on the rules of divination as I knew them. What did both of us already know about Glitter's book that the cards would enable us to see?
Tarot, as I have said before, is a symbol system that allows the unconscious and the conscious mind to communicate with each other—a language of symbol, invented to communicate something that has no language. Since many Witches believe that the unconscious mind is bound neither by time nor distance, it follows that it already "knows" the answers to most of the questions you may ask.
But—just like using your home computer—the art lies in getting it to cooperate.
I turned up the first card. A cloaked figure in a gray laindscape, mourning over three spilled cups, oblivious to the two full cups behind him. Or her. The Five of Cups. Traditionally the card of not knowing what you've got, of swearing that your life is over when you stfQ have beaucoup resources.
"Well, this much seems clear," I said to Glitter, holding up the card to her. She grimaced.
Like I said, on some level you already know everything you're going to find out in the average tarot reading. But the fact that Glitter could reconstruct her book from Belle's — as I interpreted the Five of Cups—was not a large amount of comfort when she didn't know how hers had vanished.
I laid out the rest of the cards. Wands: intuition, travel, the element of fire. Cups: emotion and the unconscious; water. Swords: logic, intellect, and the daylight mind; angels and aerials. Penta-cles: money, possessions, time, the Left-Hand Path, ruler of the things of Earth.
Overall, gibberish; a message I might be too close to Glitter to understand. I read tarot best when I have no stake in the outcome
of the reading, and I didn't seem to be able to fall into that disinterested mode tonight.
1 added cards and added cards until the entire tabletop was covered and I had the subtle but distinct impression that the cards were laughing at me (in fact there's one deck—Morgan's tarot—that has a card titled precisely that: The Universe Is Laughing at You).
I pulled the cards together and put the deck away. I looked at Glitter and shrugged.
"Call Belle," Glitter and I said in chorus.
Gl
itter unearthed her phone from a pile of cushions and dialed. In a few moments I was listening to a one-sided conversation— Glitter telling BeUe she'd somehow sort of managed to slightly but permanently misplace her Book of Shadows, and could she make an appointment to copy a replacement out of Belle's?
Meanwhile, I considered my options vis-a-vis Glitter's information.
The book was not here. Fact. Dorje didn't have it. Fact. Glitter was telling the truth, as far as she knew it. Fact.
What did that leave? Nothing that made sense. Either someone had broken in without trace and stolen it and nothing else . . .
Or Glitter had lost it without knowing she had.
1 considered that, looking around the room. It was not inside the apartment, but if she'd balanced it on an open window ledge and then bumped it, it could have fallen out, in which case it was gone forever.
But that was the only mundane, real-world possibility I could come up with, and it seemed a little far-fetched even for a charter member of the Conspiracy to Prevent Conspiracies, which I am.
"She wants to talk to you," Glitter said, waving a Louis XVI-style telephone receiver at me and derailing my train of thought.
"It's Belle," Bellflower told me, unnecessarily. "Look, are you busy tomorrow night? I've got a candidate for Changing I want you to meet."
"Who referred her?" I asked. This was business as usual here on the New Aquarian Frontier. Belle usually called either Glitter or me to sit in when she was thinking of admitting someone new to Changing and wanted a second opinion, and usually me because I'm more or less out of the broom closet—unlike, say, Glitter, who might actually get into trouble if her religious affiliations
160 Bell, Book, and Murder
(as Opposed to her clothes sense) came to the attention of the City of New York.
At least as long as the New York Post spells "Wiccan" S-A-T-A-N-I-S-T.
"Him, not her," Belle said. "His name is Edward Skelton. He's been going to the Snake's Open Circles for a while. I talked to him on the phone Tuesday. He seems — " Belle shrugged eloquently down the phone line.
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