"All right," I said. I felt tired and angry and the thought of a drink was appealing. We left Lily’s flat and walked the short distance to the Princess Louise. I followed Chang into the dim interior; Big Vi and Brixton Peggy were sitting in a corner. Dealing. When they saw Chang they began to rise, but with a look from him returned to their seats.
"Business good?" I said.
Chang shrugged. "You know how it is," he said. “Everyone wants the dust my girls sell.”
I said, "Let’s go upstairs."
The upstairs bar was even dimmer than below, and mostly empty. I scanned the room, but there was only the usual crowd in there, the lowlifes and the permanent drunks.
Chang ordered two glasses of cognac, and we took a seat in the corner by the windows. Chang pulled out two packets of twisted paper from his pocket, offered one to me.
"Ta."
The cocaine perked me up; the cognac soothed the edge of my anger. "Start talking," I said.
"It’s to do with Manning," he said, and looked to see my reaction. He nodded. "I don’t know what he’s been up to in that prison: some fucked-up shit, by the sound of it. Way I hear it, he met some crazy houngan there. Someone not entirely human. Some awfully powerful horse being ridden by Samedi." He took a deep breath. "You know how he’s been about Billie," he said, and it was my turn to nod. Manning had never gotten over her death, but I suspected Chang hadn’t, either.
Chang looked reassured, but his face changed when he began to talk, his eyes narrowing. His fingers drummed a nervous staccato on the tabletop. "A man arrived at my establishment two nights ago," he said. "He was tall, almost gaunt, with a way of moving that reminded me of a cat. I can’t recall his face clearly: all I could see were his eyes, emerald green and hypnotic. It was like a strange elongated skull mask with two pools of burning light where its eyes should have been." He shuddered and swallowed the rest of the cognac. "He knew everything! Every detail of every transaction; he reeled out the network to me as if it were a family tree. Every connection, every shipment, everything."
“What did he want?" I said. There was a strange feeling at the back of my head, a warning, like we were being watched. I scanned the bar crowd slowly, but it had not changed and I felt exposed, my nerves tingling in anticipation of attack.
"What did he want?" Chang gave a low, bitter laugh. "He wanted me. My organisation. To start with. I have seen things in my time, Tzaddik," he said, "but I have seen nothing like that man, if it was a man. He had power, and he held me helpless." He paused, and snorted more cocaine. His eyes were moving frantically in their sockets. "He told me you would come. He arranged to be there when you did. What did he want? Maybe he wanted you. I don’t know. But I know this, Tzaddik: something Manning did brought this man here."
"How do you know?" I said. The sensation in the back of my head intensified.
Chang’s fist hit the table. "Because I saw them! I followed him, you see, and I saw them! In Highgate cemetery, digging up the coffin of Billie Carleton!"
Something didn’t ring true in Chang’s narrative. "All right," I said. "Two questions. One, how do you know about Manning’s houngan?" I didn’t believe the story about the cemetery, but I wasn’t going to interrogate him on that. There were more effective means at my disposal to ascertain the truth. They were never pleasant, but they were there and I knew I would have to use them.
"Two, if this man has the power you say he has, why did you follow him? And why are you talking to me now?"
Bill Chang smiled a slow, cold smile. "That’s three questions, Tzaddik," he said. "Technically." He signalled to the bartender, waited for two new glasses to arrive.
"Cigarette?" he opened a slim silver case and proffered it to me.
"No thanks."
He helped himself to a cigarette, lit it. Inhaled. The cold smile remained. "No-one fucks with me, Tzaddik," he said. "No-one. I don’t care where that son of a bitch moshushi came from, he’s not muscling in on my territory. I fulfilled my part of the bargain. He wanted to meet you. Knew you would come. If you ask me, it’s you who needs to start looking out."
He took a sip from his cognac and sighed. I knew then that Chang was lying to me, that somewhere in the last few days I had unwittingly walked into a maze of danger and deceit, and had to step cautiously if I wanted to survive it.
Chang tapped ash from his cigarette. A cloud of pale blue smoke covered his face like a cloud heralding storm. "As for Manning’s witch doctor? Uncle Lee is in prison, as you probably know. He told me the rumours. That’s all they are. All I know is what I saw. That Manning is now free, and a grave-robber to boot, and that a Feng-Huang is set loose in London. Make of it what you will."
While he was talking I was watching his hands. Chang’s hands were a lover’s hands: Billie used to say that. Long, sensitive fingers that trembled now, sending smoke up in a crazy spiral. I watched his eyes, the quick twitch in one corner; watched the sweat form on that smooth pale skin. The feeling at the back of my head refused to abate.
I knocked back the cognac and stood up. "Thanks for the drinks," I said. "I’ll be seeing you." He nodded at me slowly.
I left him there and walked out, feeling like a rabbit caught in the sight of an unseen gun.
I was caught in a web of lies, and somewhere -- unseen but for a brief glimpse in Chang’s opium den – somewhere was a spider, spinning the threads that threatened to bind me. I sat down in my armchair back at Smithfields and thought about the situation. On the one hand Manning, haunted by Billie’s ghost, carrying with him the gold box that I had thought secure in my possession. On the other, Chang, with a strange story about a man with fiery green eyes and the power of suggestion.
I had seen for myself the power of the stranger, and found in it something that I recognised. Manning’s people may have called it a loa; Chang’s word for it was Feng-Huang. And in my own long history I had known ones who were like this mysterious entity, glimpsed from beneath darkened skies and on the edge of worlds beyond time...
My people called such beings mal’achim: angels.
I felt forced into doing something that was perhaps best left undone. There was danger here, and no clear motives, no understanding of the deeper powers at work. To have an angel materialise on the human sphere, on Assiah... I thought of my time serving with the Thirty-Six, and of a day and a night long ago in the deserts of Kush. Specifics evaded me like water flowing through grasping fingers. I had seen this before, but the memory was weak and unreliable, as is always the case with beings from the higher Sephirot.
It was time to make a decision, and so I did. My living room was already prepared: I redrew the symbols on the floor and lit the candles and placed protection about me, the symbols and icons of long-forgotten religions.
The candles flickered as I began the summons, and the wind howled outside, sending leaves fluttering against the windows like moths drawn to a flame.
A darkness formed in the heart of my chalked star, a cold and empty darkness as of space itself. Pinpricks of light appeared and disappeared inside it, and I could feel my power being tapped, drawn to feeding the portal between the spheres, between the Sephirot.
The lights in the darkness slowly grew, resolved themselves into a being of light. As if from a great distance the sound of beating wings was heard, rattling the glass of the windows.
"Tzaddik..." a voice whispered from the star. Eyes the size and brightness of suns regarded me. "You are still alive... How disappointing."
Not taking my eyes off it, this thing summoned from the sphere called Binah, Wisdom, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a small packet of snow. The bright eyes regarded me with hunger. I took a small pinch between thumb and forefinger and snorted it. Then I blew the rest, gently, into the circle of light, and the being inside it made it disappear.
"I want to know what it is that had made its appearance on Assiah," I said, when it had quieted.
A slow chuckle like the death of stars. "The Emanations are distur
bed," it said. "The path from Ketter has been opened, and the Tree of Life itself is in turmoil. What have you done... human?"
The apparition’s words disturbed me. "I have done nothing," I said.
The chuckle again, grating like a nail against glass. "Then perhaps that is the source of the disturbance," it said. "When the guardians do not guard, who will guard the guardians?"
"Wait!" I said. The burning figure was diminishing, the darkness of space returning to the place of summoning.
"Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes..." whispered the voice, and the burning eyes closed, and were gone. The echoes of its mocking laughter resonated in the room, leaving me standing, alone and exhausted, in the thin light of candles.
"Manning’s been looking for you, boss," Motty said. He stood behind the counter of the sandwich shop, chopping onions.
I slid onto a stool and opened the paper. Life was getting much too complicated, and I wanted a rest. I also needed the kind of information Motty and his boys could usually be relied on to supply.
"Thanks." I accepted the steaming mug of coffee and sipped the hot liquid.
"You want a pastrami and gherkin on rye with it?"
I smiled and lit a cigarette. "You know I do," I said.
"Sure thing, boss."
For the next ten minutes we didn’t talk; I drank the coffee and settled down to enjoy Motty’s creation. When I was done, I lit another cigarette and sat there, enjoying the momentary peace.
"Did Manning say what he wanted?"
Motty shook his head. "Said he needed to see you. Urgent like. Said you know where to find him."
I did. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to.
As I sat in the rare sunshine, a half-smoked cigarette in my hand and a new mug of coffee on the counter beside me, I found myself going back to the night on the twenty-seventh of November and the Victory Ball, when lights were once again allowed to dispel London’s after-hours darkness.
Billie wore a frock designed by one of her cohorts, Reggie De Vaulle: she looked stunning in it, like a butterfly awakened from a cocoon all ready to fly and dazzle. In the early evening she appeared in Freedom of the Seas. I was in the audience that night, and when the curtain fell I had felt a premonition, a fear. The curtain was about to permanently close on Billie Carleton.
The Victory Ball glittered with the ladies’ jewels; the Brigade of Guards played Rule Britannia. Then came the dancing.
It was a night that lasted forever. The dancing didn’t stop and neither did the trips to the lavatories, where men and women separately took cocaine to fuel their dancing. Billie had her gold box with her, and by the end of the night it was nearly empty. I danced with her once, and then she disappeared into the crowd.
It was a night that women ruled supreme. A night to welcome in a new era and lay to rest the old. Too many men had been lost on the battlefields of the Great War, and the change this had wrought was profound and, for many, unsettling. Billie danced all night, and the women of London danced all around her.
"Boss?"Motty’s voice shook the memories away like drops of falling water. "I don’t know what Manning was after, but there is something you should know."
I picked up the cigarette but it had run too low to smoke. I let it drop and helped myself to another. "What is it?"
Motty scratched his dark beard. He looked at me carefully. "Last night the boys were down by the Isle of Dogs. Helping remove a late night shipment, if you know what I mean." He smiled to himself. "They were nearly finished when they heard a dog barking at the river, loud enough to raise the dead." His smile vanished. "Or so they thought. You and I both know it takes more than a bark to..."
"Yes."
"They went over to check what the noise was about. When they came close enough, they saw it. It was a corpse."
I sipped the coffee. Corpses were not an unknown cargo on the Thames. They came floating up, bloated with gas, and lodged themselves in the reeds on the bank amidst the rest of the rubbish thrown into the river. For a corpse to remain unseen, it would need to be weighed down; letting it rise from the depths meant one of two things. Either the killer or killers were amateur, or they wanted the corpse to be found, as a message or a warning or both.
"Go on."
"It was a black man," Motty said. "His body was covered in faint blue tattoos from head to foot. Serpents and dragons and lizards; the boys said they seemed to move of their own accord, the lines glowing faintly in the moonlight." He sighed and rubbed his chin. "Boys."
I tapped the ash from my cigarette and waited. I had long ago found that Motty was not one to be hurried along. "Go on."
He lowered his voice. "It was a sangoma, Tzaddik. A houngan. Alfy Benjamin recognised him, even though the face of the corpse was frozen like a mask carved with fear. Alfy said he looked like he screamed for a long time; he said he looked as if, even in death, he was still screaming."
"You say Alfy recognised him?" I said. Possibilities were resolving themselves in my head, worrying me. "Where did he come across a houngan?"
Motty’s answer was the one I was expecting. "In prison," he said. "Two, three years back. This guy was doing life with hard labour for some muti that went very wrong. Three people died, and a baby."
"I remember." There were rumours of a cover-up, that it was someone at Cabinet level who ordered the botched ritual. The houngan, as far as I could remember, remained quiet on that front. "What did the boys do?"
Motty shrugged. "What could they do? They cleared out as fast as they could. But I don’t like it, Tzaddik. He was a powerful sangoma, that one was. Alfy, he said he saw him draw a window once on the wall of his cell. Said the window came alive, that there were things on the other side of that window he never wanted to see as long as he lived. Someone like that... Someone like that doesn’t turn up floating in the river, Tzaddik. Not unless..." He left the thought unspoken.
Motty had given me a lot to think about. It seemed the story Chang fed me was at least partially true, and that meant I had to find Manning and get the truth out of him in turn. What worried me, though, was that the houngan was sent down the river as a warning: as a message, addressed to me. The Feng-Huang was after me. I just hoped he would stop skulking in the fog long enough for me to kill him.
"Thanks Motty," I said. "You and the boys try and keep out of this, all right? Keep out of trouble for a few days."
Motty winked at me across the counter. "We’ll keep our noses clean," he said, mimicking putting snow to his nose and snorting it. "Don’t you worry, Tzaddik."
I shook my head and walked out, into the dregs of the sunshine. Shadows were gathering over the old stone buildings and the alleyways, and I wondered if it would ever be possible to be rid of them. London was such a city, in which light and shade were inexorably bound. I feared the darkness that was circling around me, stalking me in the shape of the Feng-Huang. And I feared the thought of Billie, a ghost forced to return to the scene of her death. The dead should be left alone, should be left to death. To force them into a semblance, a mockery, of life, that was a crime, and for that violation I knew I would have to act.
The Montmarte Café was dark and smelled of vinegar and smoke. I came up to the counter and greeted Zenovia Iassonides, patron of the
Soho Church Street
establishment and Manning’s unofficial business partner.
In the corner, two chorus girls were going over a script while blowing enough snow into their nostrils to kill an elephant. Cocainomaniacs, the papers called them, and they came to the café for Zenovia’s true trade, not for her cooking.
She greeted me with a closed face. Zenovia was a hard woman to read.
"I’m looking for Manning," I said.
She snorted, and brushed a strand of greying hair from her temple. "Who isn’t?"
I ignored that. "Is he here?"
Her hand took in the small, dank room and its shabby occupants. "Do you see him anywhere?"
I wasn’t in the mood for games. "He wanted me to ge
t in touch with him, and this is where he said he’d be." I paused, then added, "Please don’t answer that with a question."
She unexpectedly laughed. "It’s good to see you, Tzaddik. Where have you been hiding?"
"In broad daylight," I said, and she smiled and nodded. "Best place to hide, Tzaddik. Best place to hide."
I thought of Manning’s story, of Billie Carleton’s ghost, and of the Feng-Huang walking the streets of London. It was not I who was hiding but Manning, and in his place, I thought, wouldn’t I be hiding too?
"Come with me." She opened the latch on the counter and I came through. She took me to a small door underneath a wooden staircase that looked riddled with worms. She pushed the door open and pointed me in.
"Watch your step on the stairs," she said. "There isn’t much light down there."
I thanked her and stepped through, and she closed the door behind me and left me in darkness.
The steps were stone, and old. I could feel a chill coming off them and taste moisture on my tongue. It was damp and humid and yet increasingly cold as I descended.
At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and let my eyes adjust to the scant lighting. There was a table there, covered in a grimy red cloth, with a single candle on it. There was a small cabinet, with nothing but a handgun on it, and a narrow bed.
"Edgar..." I said.
The body on the bed jerked up, a hand grabbing the gun from the cabinet and pointing it at me.
"It’s me."
He looked at me with wild, unseeing eyes before some sort of sanity returned and he lowered the gun. "Won’t do much good against you anyway," he said in an almost inaudible voice.
"No," I agreed. "And it won’t do you much good against a loa, either."
His head snapped up. "What are you talking about?"
"Put the gun away," I said. He hesitated, then put it back on the cabinet.
"Good." I scanned the small subterranean room. "Do you have any opium down here? Or some alcohol?"
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