Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  I looked at The Book of Moons. Where had it come from —and

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  what was I going to do with it? It wasn't mine to dispose of. It wasn't Ned's either, it was safe to say, but whose was it?

  Whoever the book belonged to, I didn't have to worry about it tonight. I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open, and almost anything I did would be sure to be wrong.

  So I wrapped it up the way I had the other eight, typed "Book of Moons" on the label, and put it with the rest of my new collection of purloined Books of Shadows. At least this way I wouldn't lose it.

  Then I locked up the studio and walked home, a habit I'm going to pay for some night, I know.

  But not this one.

  ^'^^ WEDNESDAY, MAY 4 ^-^J^

  Having been so reasonable and prudent, I didn't get much sleep after all.

  I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about Ned and The Book of Moons. I thought about what intervention I could have made in Ned's life to have given it a different outcome. I wondered if he'd be alive if I'd taken a taxi, if I'd listened to him more, if I'd encouraged Belle to take him into Changing.

  And I knew I wouldn't have done those things. I hadn't had any telegram from the future telling me what Ned would turn rejection into —and if I had, what then? This was the dark side of the possession of power: knowing the pain it caused people like Ned, who somehow, by some standard, weren't good enough.

  Pain that could, in the end, kill.

  If the Craft is all smoke and mirrors —if it is merely the recreation of ignoble minds —then there is no justification for all of the pain that it causes.

  But if instead it is not a faith, but a practicum inspired by gnosis and observation of the noumenal world, then the pain is, if not justified, in some sense pardonable. Pardonable because mere comfort cannot be the human animal's highest good. If it is. Nature, daughter of the Goddess, is made unnatural, since She has overfitted Her creatures for this world.

  These were not comfortable thoughts to spend the night with. But comfort, as I have said, is not the goal.

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  And in that much we had made Ned a part of the Craft after all, because he had found no comfort with us.

  Seven a.m. I thought about calling in dead, but I needed the hours. Besides, the books were at the studio. 1 had to return them before something else happened to them. So I dragged myself out of bed and took a shower, drank three cups of coffee, dug out and emptied the Danish Bookbag, and went.

  It was still cool on the street, cooler—in fact—than it was indoors. 1 stopped at the deli and bought replacement cigarettes for Eloi and coffee for me and went up to the studio.

  "You left the coffeepot on last night," Ray said when 1 came in.

  1 groaned and looked around for Mikey.

  "He isn't here yet. I put it to soak," Ray said, relenting. "You look like hell. You got those dies done yet?"

  "Soon," I said. "Patience is a virtue," I added.

  Ray sneered. He's very good at it.

  I went and washed out the coffeepot in the sink by the stat camera. I went back and made fresh coffee. Royce and Seiko were here, but most of the carrels were empty: no work, so no Angela and Tyrell and Eloi and Chantal.

  I took four Excedrin for that run-down feeling and put extra sugar in my coffee from the deli. Then, feeling nauseated and slightly buzzed, I finished the jobs for Ray and meticulously cleaned my area. I made two brief phone cadis on the studio phone: Glitter was in. Belle was not. Around noon I put the binding die mechanicals on Ray's desk.

  "You got anything else for me?" 1 said.

  "Go home. Sleep. You look horrible," Ray said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

  Which meant he didn't.

  "Yeah," I said. I bundled seven wrapped parcels into the book-bag and left.

  It is an amazing truth of the universe that people always feel better the moment they leave work. For example, I almost felt as though I'd managed to get some sleep. 1 took the 6 downtown and got off at the City Hall station.

  Glitter works in the big building on Court Street. The lobby is black and white marble, and in addition to bearing a generic resemblance to postwar buildings of a certain age, has always struck me as being a facade of tidiness slapped over some of the bleaker

  functioning of our society. Magical thinking: if you don't see it, it isn't there.

  I gave my destination to a guard and took an elevator and gave my name to another guard who called into the back to see if I was expected. Glitter came out and conducted me into her office.

  The place where Glitter does her probation officering for the City of New York is a glass-walled cubicle with a glass door, WPA vintage. It's about eight by ten, and where it isn't glass it is painted gas-chamber green. It contains two file cabinets, two chairs, a coatrack, and a desk, also green. The cubicle walls do not go all the way up to the ceiling. The back wall, above the height of the cubicle, is a dark brown-black and covered with exposed ductwork. The blackness does go all the way up.

  "So, you want to go to lunch?" Glitter said. She was wearing tiers and layers of hand-painted lavender-rose chiffon, spangled with fugitive rhinestones. Her pumps were a violent purple.

  I took a deep breath. "I got something back for you, but I don't want to talk about it yet, okay?"

  I handed her the package. She knew what it was the moment she touched it, but tore at it until she'd opened a comer of the wrapping just to be sure. Purple laime showed.

  "It's my book," Glitter said in an airless voice. She stared at me, open-mouthed, and then at the neat burden of similar parcels in my bag. She sat down behind her desk, clutching her book. After a moment she collected herself and put it into her bottom drawer.

  "Ned Skelton got whacked last night," she said. "Maura told me, 'cause I knew him. He'd come to my place a couple times. With Ilona, you know? He wanted to join a group. I was the one who told Belle about him."

  I waited. I couldn't see where this conversation was going. Whacked?

  "It was a very professional job," Glitter went on. "Close up and a little gun. .22 or .25, they think. Right at the back of the head."

  I didn't think I wanted to hear this.

  "And we all heard Ned at the picnic," Glitter said, talking to the top of her desk. She threw up her hands. "Oh my god, I can't do this!"

  I finally saw where the conversation was going. I sat down, feeling as if she'd punched me.

  "You think Ned stole your book." Which, as a matter of fact, he

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  had, but never mind. "You tJiink I killed him to get it back?" This was far stupider and more unfair. My voice rose indignantly.

  "No, no, no." Glitter waved her hands very fast. "Just took something from the crime scene where you maybe were. That's all. For Goddess's sake. Bast, I don't think you'd kill somebody!"

  Probably hung heavy in the air. Sometimes I wonder what my enemies think of me, considering the opinions my friends have.

  "Glitter, you are a wonderful human being, but—go. Write novels," I said. "Have a rich, full, emotional life."

  I could have explained it all—the package Ned asked me to hold (for the receipt of which 1, comfortingly, had witnesses), the phone call, the ruined city and fair Helen dead, but I didn't want to tell her about any part of last night. Glitter is an officer of the court, and while she is flexible about most things, she isn't about some things. If 1 actually had to talk to the police, I wanted to do it on my own initiative.

  She sat back. "Sony," she muttered. "It's this job. You look for reasons. And there aren't any. But where — "

  "I can't tell you that," I said. I wasn't sure why. Damage control. Or maybe I was trjmig to gear myself up for a career of outlawry.

  "So, lunch?" Glitter said finally, after I hadn't said anything for a while.

  I shrugged, a woman of few words and many gestures. "Some things to do," I said. "I'll see you later."
>
  She walked me out. There were the tenderings of explanations in my future —1 could see that—but just now, the way I had last night, I was buying time.

  I wasn't quite sure why. But I knew there were things I had to do before the reckoning came.

  There's one place where all the lines of communication in the Community cross: the Snake—or rather, the Snake's manager. Julian.

  Julian is a ritual magician, a scholar of magic and its history, and one of the more closemouthed people alive. This does not mean that he does not hear things. As if to Rick's Cafe Americain, everybody eventually comes to the Snake.

  And Julian would know whose books these were and how to return them. If I was lucky, he'd even leave my name out of it.

  I got up to the Snake around one o'clock and was glad to see

  the store was open—the Snake's hours tend to be rather whimsical. I passed under the neon sign, slid around the blessedly silent Elvis jukebox (it was blocking the doorway even more than usual), and walked in. As far as the naked eye could see, the place was deserted.

  The shop smelled resinously of burned incense; a haze of frankincense hung in the air like a set-dressing special effect. I looked around and spotted the source in front of the Snake's ecumeni-altar, the one that started life as a birdbath that'd had a heavy date with Primavera. The shell part is usually full of pennies (this being a retail establishment) or flowers. Today it was full of hot charcoal and about half a pound of expensive resin busily transforming itself into blue smoke. I went on, past the case full of crystal balls and ancient Egyptian meteorites and genuine Lady of the Lake chalices. The Siege Perilous was deserted, and something about that nagged at me, even in my current preoccupied state.

  I had the growing conviction that I was being led down the garden path, round Robin Hood's bam, and up to a conclusion I was supposed to jump to without understanding. In short, 1 had the feeling that my subconscious mind knew what was going on and 1 didn't.

  I hate that.

  I was halfway down the right aisle when I saw the secret bookcase swing out. I nipped around the end of the rack and surprised Julian coming out of the back room. He had an open book in one hand and looked like a pensive divine. He glanced up and saw me. The comers of his mouth quirked upward ever so slightly.

  "1 suppose you know why I'm here," I said, which was not what I'd meant to say.

  "You've come to see our new look?" Julian said blaindly.

  I looked appropriately puzzled. The bag on my shoulder was getting heavier. Julian watched me not get it, and finally explained.

  "Somebody tried to break into the Snake last night," he said.

  Religious tolerance and the gentle art of minding one's own business being what they are, the Snake receives an average of one editorial declaration per week from people who just can't bear its existence one moment longer. More, if you count the phone threats.

  These declarations range from pamphlets advocating the religion of your choice stuffed in the door, to bricks and bullets aimed

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  at the window. The window has been replaced twice —to the best of my knowledge —in the time I've been going to the Snake.

  I followed Julian up to the front of the shop.

  We got to the front door. Julian pushed the jukebox back, and I saw what it had been hiding.

  He'd lied.

  Tried to break in was not truth in advertising.

  Whoever it was that had paid the Serpent's Truth a visit last night had gotten the padlock off the outside gate and then gone after the door with a wood chisel. There were long flat gouges all down the red-over-green-over-blue-over-white paint, but those were only hesitation marks, really. Eventually whoever it was had found his angle, and there were deep, competent cuts into the door around the lock-plate exposing new white wood. It looked like performance art by Beavers With Attitude.

  'The alarm went off and the service called me and then Tris, but—" Julian shrugged. "At least they didn't do too much damage."

  "What did they get?" I asked, before I could stop myself. The urge to meddle is strong, even though I've never done myself any good by it yet.

  'They went straight for the grimoires," Julian said.

  I looked up at the locked glass case behind the cash register and Julian's Siege Perilous, where the really, really expensive part of the Snake's inventory is kept. Most of it is first or rare editions of occult books —like an 1801 edition of Francis Barrett's The Magus with marginalia, or a signed copy of White Stains—but sometimes a limited-run tarot deck or a piece of jewelry will be added to the collection.

  It wasn't there.

  I realized why the front of the shop had looked so odd to me when I came in. No cabinet.

  It was on the floor, propped against the wall. The doors of the cabinet had been sheared cleanly off, leaving small whorls of pale splinters where the hinges had used to be. The shelves, usually jammed, were bare.

  I would say that the contents of that one cabinet represent about fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars of the Snake's total inventory.

  "Damn," I said. "I'm sorry."

  'That's life in the big city," Julian said. "Someone went on a spree. Weiser's and Mirror Mirror were hit up, too."

  Weiser's, Mirror Mirror, and the Snake are all occult book-

  stores. They are also the only three occult bookstores in New York that have a rare books section.

  "Last night," I said. Julian nodded once.

  Which gave Ned Skelton the best alibi anyone ever had, not that he needed it. The BoS thefts had been done by someone who knew the Community pretty well, who laughed at locks and went through them as if they weren't there. He did not chop his way in with an ax.

  It wasn't—I dredged up terminology from my leisure reading— it wasn't the same M.O., even if it had the same sort of Wonderland illogic to it as Ned's had.

  For example, who would break into the Snake and not even smash anything? When Chanter's Revel, a feminist Wicca store in the East Village, got tossed last year the burglars didn't take anything, but they totaled all the merchandise they could get their hands on.

  Here, they'd only stolen the rare books. Why?

  It wasn't for their arcane secrets; almost everything in that case was available as cheap reprints.

  It wasn't for the money; you couldn't resell those books for anything like what they'd cost retail. If it was a straightforward robbery for gain, why had they taken the books and left the gold and silver jewelry? If they had—but Julian'd said they went "straight for the grimoires," and the jewelry cases looked typically cluttered.

  I wondered if the pattern was the same at Weiser's and Mirror Mirror.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked Julian.

  "Call the insurance company. Prove what we paid for them. Get half of it back." Julian shrugged and shoved the jukebox back into place. He looked strange in the afternoon sunlight; Julian is a creature of night and shadows.

  I recalled finally that I had another purpose for being here.

  "Would you do something for me?" I asked Julian. Like help me get some stolen property back to its rightful owners.

  I knew he did this sort of thing because I'd had it done for me once. Or maybe to me would be more accurate.

  Julian stopped looking at the door and looked at me.

  'There are some packages," I said carefully, "that I would like to see get to their proper destinations. I think most of the recipients come in here."

  I Wciited. Julian waited. Or maybe he was thinking. He turned

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  away and stepped up to the Siege Perilous. He quirked a finger and I followed him.

  The reason that the Siege Perilous is raised up is so that the person sitting at it can clearly see both aisles and most of the rest of the retail floor of the store. I regarded the empty aisles and swung my carryall up onto the table. I pulled out the books.

  Julian sorted through them. He piled
Xharina's and Amyntor's and Lx)relli's brown-paper-wrappedbooks in one comer. He hesitated over Crystal, then piled her and Otterleaf and Diana-27 in a second pile.

  "I don't know them," Julian said, which meant you'd have to go a long way to find anyone who did.

  "Any clues?" I said. "Crystal works Faeiy in Fort Lee. Otterleaf s a Gardnerian."

  His brow cleared. He retrieved Crystal's package and wrote "Doreen" on it with a large soft pencil, then added it to the first pile. 1 was touched at the special effort he was making for me, or possibly he felt that all those good customers and true would show their gratitude at these returns by overspending.

  "You can find Otterleaf yourself," Julian said reprovingly, which was true, although it'd probably mean going to Freya.

  Freya is Belle's Queen —the woman who brought her into the Craft—a very public woman from a very public family who manages to avoid most of the woo-woo associated with the public profession of Wicca and Goddess-worship by simply being far too cool for anyone to ask her stupid questions. She's also almost never home.

  "Yeah, right," I said.

  I put the two he hadn't ID'd—Otterleaf s and Diana-27's—back into my bag. Belle might be able to place both of them and get the books back to them, but then again she'd probably tell their recipients where she'd gotten them. Belle being incurably forthright and a rebuke to us all.

  While Julian loved nothing more than mystery, and would probably delight in keeping my name out of things.

  I shouldn't like that, but I do.

  "Anything else?" Julian asked. He sounded like the chief devil in a Restoration farce.

  Why did someone break in here after grimoires? Is it tied to Ilona's death? Here, and Weiser's, and Mirror Mirror are the only three places in the city that stock antique occult books, and who-

  ever it was hit all three. How did he know? What is he after? Do you know who he is? Would you tell me if you did? "No. Nothing," I said.

  Wednesday. Two-forty-five. I made it up the stairs and behind my own locks alive, which is a triumph of a sort here in Fun City. And every year it gets harder.