Powers

by James A. Burton

  Antiques? In this neighborhood? New lamps for old, pottery jars big enough to hide forty thieves? She had thrown him into metaphors of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Always had thought Scheherazade would be a pretty little girl, soft hands and voice, not that harsh hill-tribe face as sharp as her blade or tongue, gnarled strong fingers scarred by the decades and callused to knife and pistol . . .

  No keypad to disable the alarm system. Probably inside, have to punch in the code within a minute of opening or it would start screaming for the cops. He tried the knob. Locked.

  “Back off.” She waved him across the alley, as if she planned to blow the door open with a limpet mine. Military idioms again, probably her fault again. Bent over the locks as if she was talking to the pins and tumblers and bolts, her body blocking his view of the door.

  “There’s an alarm system . . . ”

  “Dummy sticker. No such company.”

  She was the cops. She’d know.

  He couldn’t remember what day it was, weekday or weekend, with Legion’s habit of screwing up the flow of time, whether they were breaking into a store that was open or closed. Or even, from the outside evidence, whether it was still in business. Again he wondered, antiques, in this part of town? But she didn’t look like she planned on walking around to the street side of the block and using the front door like a law-abiding citizen.

  She turned the knob and the door swung in, unlocked by whatever words and incantations she’d muttered. Or lock-picks, more likely, with incantations like, “Come on, you mangy slit-eared misbegotten son of a yellow pariah dog mated to a pig . . . ”

  Darkness inside. She pulled her flashlight out, splashing blue-white probes into the shadows, side and floor and ceiling, not trusting. He didn’t hear any alarms. No shouts or threats from inside, either. She stepped over the threshold and studied the door’s frame behind her, probably checking for wires or switches or a keypad. Then moved on into darkness.

  He crossed the alley and followed. A quick sniff told him that they weren’t burglarizing a working business—stale air, dust, damp, winter’s chill lingering in the unheated darkness. Her stabbing flashlight beam and thin light filtering past boarded-up shop windows told him what kind of business it had been. Junk. The “antiques” label covered old battered tables and dressers, cookware better suited for scrap metal, some console radios that dated back halfway to Marconi without being old enough to start gaining in value once again. Electric heaters with exposed coil elements that could burn down whole city blocks given any chance.

  Veneer peeled off dusty sideboards and china cabinets. Stacks of crockery, he could see chips and cracks even in the gloom. This stuff would drag his apartment down a notch or five in the Gracious Homes décor scale.

  Then the stabbing light settled on feathers. A cobwebbed hen pheasant—not even good taxidermy when it was new—sitting in a forest of table lamps with frayed cords and decayed shades.

  Minus all its tail.

  The flashlight beam poked here and there on the floor. No recent footprints in the dust. Mother, if it had been Mother, had collected those feathers a year or more ago.

  He saw the harpy’s silhouette against the light, cocking her head to one side, as if listening and . . . sniffing. She pulled the feather out of her coveralls and left it lying on the dusty table next to the stuffed bird. No further value, except as a message if Mother came back?

  She turned back and waved him out. “Okay, now we track the paper. Probably same result, but what the hell, won’t know if we don’t try . . . ”

  So the two traces didn’t lead to the same place. Nice to finally get that answer.

  Out in the alley again, blinking against the light. She locked up behind him, click and clunk and click again. Generous of her, not leaving Ali Baba’s Cave open to the neighborhood looters. He hadn’t seen it, but probably they could find something in there worth stealing. If you looked hard enough. If you were desperate enough. Or maybe, just break up the furniture for firewood to heat a can of beans and hold frostbite at bay.

  She marched him two blocks down the alley, back past that door he recognized—she didn’t give it a second glance. Then through another narrow alley, out on a different street with a few stores hanging on, teeth and toenails, and she picked a security-grilled door with a dingy sign that offered news, magazines, and smokes. Once they stepped inside the narrow tiny store he saw it was mostly cigarettes and cheap cigars, some loose tobacco and a variety of wrapping papers for dope, but the place also offered a few racks of newspapers and lurid gossip tabloids. There were a few girly and muscle-boy magazines in plastic sleeves so you couldn’t peek at the goodies without paying. He wondered what they sold out of the back room.

  El Hajj pulled a tablet of lined paper off one shelf, carried it over to the cashier behind his scarred Plexiglas shield, paid for it, and waved at the door. Albert took the hint.

  Outside again, on the cracked sidewalk under the tattered canvas awning, she pulled Mother’s note from one of her pockets. She unfolded it and fitted the torn top edge against the matching ragged edge of the tablet. Mother hadn’t even bothered to steal or buy the whole thing, just had taken the one sheet.

  Ms. Detective Melissa el Hajj held the tablet up to the light and squinted along the surface of the paper, detecting. Shook her head. “She wrote out the note on this, in there, used one of the pens from the rack. Nobody saw her. Went in, wrote and tore it off, and walked out. In a shop where the cashier keeps a nine-millimeter automatic in the register and they have security mirrors covering every sightline in the store.”

  He shrugged. “We’re good at not being noticed.”

  “Now that’s two people I can’t trace. You and the woman you call Mother.”

  She tossed the tablet in a nearby trash bin, bonanza for some dumpster-diver, making him wince. Apparently she had more money to waste than he did.

  Which doesn’t take much. And why does she keep harping on whether or not Mother is my mother? Maybe it’s a cop thing. “Just the facts, Ma’am, nothing but the facts.”

  Then she cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes. “Okay, what had you so interested in that wooden door, back there in the alley?”

  So she had noticed.

  “Wooden door. You saw all the scratches on that metal door, the junk shop. Why hasn’t anybody tried to break into the wooden one? Hell, even the rats could gnaw through it, the length of time since anyone used it.”

  “And?”

  Damn her. “I remember seeing that door, years ago, decades ago. Going inside, with Mother. Can’t remember why.”

  “Worth a look. Let’s get a view of the front side first. Maybe I’d rather go in that way. Not that I think you’d lead me into a trap . . . ”

  A relationship based on mutual trust.

  She pointed down the street. “That way.”

  Left and right and left again and then straight for a couple of blocks, filthy stinking alleys and streets with no traffic and furtive shadows here and there in darkened windows, she seemed to carry a map of the city in her head. This wasn’t the way they came. As if he had an army of minions looking for a place to set up an ambush. They turned and stepped out on the street that should have had the front of the back they’d seen. He remembered the street names.

  This one offered him straight storefronts, no sign of the old brickwork or any gothic arches. Not even boarded-up storefronts, so they could see into the spaces—empty, most of them, but still dreaming of tenants. Hadn’t given up yet.

  Three buildings in from the alley, he counted, a tattoo parlor. Windows painted over for privacy. Peering through the door, he saw a waiting room with tattoo flash designs on the walls: voluptuous girls, grinning biker skulls, Chinese dragons, intricate Celtic knot work—some of it considerably better than average art. Cracked vinyl sofa and a small counter and doors leading back into the working space. No customers. Two-sided sign on the door turned to say: Closed. Please Come Back Again. But no hours
given.

  He stepped back and looked up. Counted floors. Three. Same height as the buildings to either side, continuous parapet at the roofline, even the same brickwork trim—vague memory called them corbelled dentils. Damned stupid memory, why couldn’t it offer him useful facts, dates, and names, instead of architectural trivia? Windows aligned straight down the block—all the same size, type, trim—age-browned shades or tattered curtains inside. The whole block looked like it had been built at the same time, maybe a century later than what he remembered from the mystery in the alley.

  Sometimes buildings split a parcel of land. Across the street and down a bit, he looked again and couldn’t see any higher floor in the back. He could see a chimney back there. It wasn’t tall enough to clear any hypothetical fourth floor.

  He looked at her. She looked at him and shrugged. They walked back down the alley, about eighty feet he guessed, and turned and counted buildings. Third one in, the arched doorway sneered at them, set into a type of brick and style that didn’t match the street side. He couldn’t see how far forward that fourth floor reached, couldn’t get far enough away in the alley, but what he could see had blank walls just like the rear.

  Blank door. No hardware, not even hinges on this side because it opened inwards, just as he remembered. Did you get into the building from one side or the other, through one of its neighbors? Which one? He was pretty sure he remembered Mother using this door. As much as he could trust his memory . . .

  The door opens in . . .

  He knelt, careful of the dirt, the evidence, and examined the line where door met dust and weeds. A thin dark line separated them, dust not tight and molded against the wood. The door had been used sometime since the winter, since the last rain.

  She waved him back across the alley, just like she had with the junk-shop door.

  “How can you pick a lock that isn’t there? You got a battering-ram tucked away in one of those pockets? Dynamite?”

  She glared at him, it began to seem that was her permanent expression. “Probably can’t hide this any longer. If you tell anyone about it, I’ll kill you. But I have a bargain with locks and doors. If they don’t try to keep me out, I won’t break them. I don’t use lock picks.”

  As if she wasn’t planning to kill him anyway.

  That explained how she’d followed him down into his forge. Without explaining, really. And how she materialized at his bedside at midnight, in spite of all the layers of locks and traps and straight heavy bolts with no lock cylinder to pick.

  Well, Mother had a few little tricks that physics denied were possible. For that matter, so did he. Chemists and metallurgists wouldn’t like the things he did to iron and steel.

  She laid her hands on the door as if feeling for vibrations. “I can open this.”

  A chorus of barks answered her. Sounded like a whole pack of dogs in there, six or eight large dogs, German shepherd class, growling barks from deep chests. With large teeth and attitudes. She backed off.

  “I carry six spare magazines for the .45 auto. Only two for the .380—never figured on getting into a war using the backup. You can go in there alone if you want. I’m hiking back to my apartment and getting another gun.”

  “So you’re not one of those fairy-tale princesses that insists on opening the forbidden door?”

  “Not without superior firepower and air cover, that’s damn sure. With you guarding my back, even the .45 starts to look iffy. Maybe I want a 12-gauge street-sweeper in my hands.”

  Such trust and confidence. But the “princess” part apparently suited her just fine.

  IX

  She unlocked the outer door and waved him in. “After you . . . ”

  “You’re inviting me up to your apartment?”

  “I told you, I’m not letting you out of my sight. Besides, some people in this neighborhood aren’t smart enough to leave you alone. I don’t want their blood on my hands.”

  He blinked at what that last bit implied and went through the door. It handed him an industry standard cheap-apartment-foyer—dirty scuffed brown tile floor with a threadbare mat to wipe your feet, damp-stained nondescript sheetrock walls with mailboxes set into the wall to his right, steel door marked STAIRWAY on his left. Her neighborhood didn’t look much better than his. Some better, but not much. About the same age, since damn near half the town had burned down from a stable fire spread by wind back in the late eighteen-hundreds. A lot of people had rebuilt in brick, with heavy walls between buildings, in a move to prevent another firestorm.

  Three mailboxes, four floors, that added up to one narrow deep apartment for each floor. This place had a Chinese take-out on the ground floor rather than a pizza joint, but the main difference that made was the soaked-in smell of stir-fry pork and scorched garlic rather than tomato paste and burned mozzarella.

  No elevator, either. If you wanted handicap access in this town, you paid a lot more, lived in a newer century’s floor plan. She unlocked the stairwell door, different key and second layer of defense, and waved him through. She still didn’t want him behind her. Trusting woman.

  “I thought you enjoyed a good blood feud. ‘Then his brothers came for his blood, and we killed them.’ Old tradition, back in the hills.”

  Stars exploded in his head. His cane rattled away across the floor as she spun him around and slammed his back against the wall, the cast on her wrist against his throat. He couldn’t reach behind him for the knife, the way she had him pinned. Her breath growled warm on his cheek.

  “Little man, do you think I enjoyed that? I had to speak the words of the Prophet in language they understood. Some things that Allah forbids, the knife and the bullet follow. The customs of their graybeards are not Islam. Their tribe is not Islam. I taught them this, and then I left, growing tired of blood.”

  She thumped his back against the wall again for emphasis and then released her grip on his jacket. Backed away. Tucked her .380 back into her coveralls. He felt an ache where she must have jammed its muzzle up under his ribs with her right hand. Hadn’t noticed it at the time.

  “You left, so they can return to their customs.” There was his idiot tongue again, careless.

  “We go back now and then, little man, me and some of my people. We walk their hill paths. Stand on their ridges against the sky, looking down on them. They remember us. To this day, you ask about a certain village and men will deny that it exists. That it ever has existed. Ask them to guide you through a pass that goes by a certain name and they will guide you through another. They remember, and obey the will of Allah. Their women go unveiled and speak with whoever they wish, still showing proper modesty but fearing none but Allah. Say the name of our village to their women and see the answer in their eyes.”

  She backed further, to where his cane had fallen, keeping her eyes on him. Squatted and picked up his cane. Tossed it to him. “Upstairs. Fourth floor. I don’t like people above me.”

  He glanced over at the mailboxes. There it was, Apt. 4 and el Hajj written out for the world to see. She hadn’t bothered to check it for any credit card offers or sale fliers. The other boxes said Abdullah for Apt. 2 and Meshud for the third floor. Probably some of her “people” and if he made the mistake of kicking up a fuss, he would have hostile company in a hurry.

  For that matter, he didn’t know if he would face a suspicious husband upstairs, and seven little el Hajj children, lined up in order of height. Each with a face like a hatchet and a knife tucked into the belt.

  But somehow she didn’t seem like the husband sort. The mother sort. But then, neither did Mother.

  He led the way up wooden stairs that popped and creaked and sang like a Japanese nightingale floor. Nobody was going to sneak up unnoticed, but none of the treads seemed to be traps. Second floor, single door off the landing, double locks, third floor the same. Fourth floor, he didn’t see any locks, just a knob like an interior door. He tried the knob and the door didn’t budge. Big surprise.

  This time, she didn’t bother t
o hide what she did behind her body. She just laid her left hand on the door and turned the knob with her right. The door opened. She waved him in, to a dark room of shadows with light bleeding in from either end, doors into front and rear rooms, rooms that had windows.

  His nose told him he could quit worrying about any Mr. el Hajj, any little el Hajj children. She had a distinct, a unique, smell—she’d just given him a fresh in-your-face sample—and that was the only human odor lingering in the air. There hadn’t been another body in this space in months. Perhaps years. He couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Then she flipped a light switch and he froze. Light flooded an austere room nearly bare and obsessively clean, no furniture, off-white walls and ceiling, dark gleaming hardwood floor, a brick fireplace on the wall toward the street side. But that wasn’t what caught him. A small Kazakh rug covered part of the floor, with a meditation pad in the center, clearly aimed at the far wall from the door. Which held . . .

  The Great Wheel, the Wheel of Life, he couldn’t tell if it was Tibetan or Nepalese, but the ones he had seen were small ink drawings or paintings, a couple of feet on a side at most. She had a tapestry or rug, must be eight feet square, with vibrant colors that told him the threads had to be silk and never exposed to sunlight, incredibly detailed. He’d never seen such a thing, never even heard of one.

  Afghanistan had been a Buddhist land once. He remembered the statues, the caves. A lot of the old art, Buddhist or Animist, had been destroyed by religious fanatics who said that all images were abominations to Allah. Somehow, she’d kept this and smuggled it out. But that weaving belonged in a museum under glass, or some billionaire’s mansion . . .

  It drew him. Each step closer revealed more detail—knife-edged fang-red mountains, evergreens that glowed against a clear lapis sky and brilliant snow, the scarlet Yama gleaming with ivory skulls in his golden fiery hair, the pig and snake and cock in the center so lifelike he expected them to start moving in their eternal dance and battle of sin. Ignorance, anger, and lust incarnate.