“That’s weird,” I said. “AOS14 must be connected to the Chaos magic symbol, the unbalanced version, I mean. The graffito you keep washing off our front wall.”
“Interpol agents are vetted,” Ari said. “We don’t hire magicians.”
“I said it was weird.”
“All of your psychic impressions are weird.”
“I can’t argue with that. The real question is, are they accurate?” I let my mind roam a little further. “Wait, I get it now. It’s just because of his initials, AOS. The guy who invented the Chaos magic system was a Brit named Austin Osman Spare.”
Ari started to reply, but the laptop beeped at him. He glanced at the screen. “An answer,” he said and hit a few keys. He read, he scowled, he swore in Hebrew.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“He just told me that his name’s Austin Osman Spare.”
I gaped. “Look, it could be some kind of pseudonym.”
“If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll tell you what he says.” Ari
cleared his throat. “I assure you that’s my real name,” he read from his screen. “I come by it legitimately, though of course I’m not the world-famous British artist.”
“World-famous?” I said. “I’d never call him that.”
“Do you mind not interrupting?” Ari glared at me, then continued reading. “The fourteen is an integral part of my name. I’ll explain at some point should you wish to meet.”
“His family must be crazy for genealogy,” I said, “if he goes around telling everyone he’s the fourteenth in his line.”
“Will you shut up?” Ari snarled, then continued reading. “I would like to discuss a matter that should interest you greatly. I have some information of interest to O’Grady as well and a request to put before her.” He looked up. “He goes on to say that he wants to know if he can contact you directly via e-mail.”
“What about?”
“He doesn’t say.”
“Um, would you mind asking him?” I considered. “And ask him what his position is in Interpol. He may be the guy at the NCB level who wanted you here in San Francisco.”
Over the next half hour or so, encrypted messages rode the airwaves between Ari and the mysterious Mr. Spare14. In the end they made an exchange. Spare14 learned one of my e-mail addresses, secure but separate from the Agency system. In return he handed us a piece of information that twisted my mind like a kaleidoscope.
“I do operate at the NCB level,” he admitted, “but in a custodial position for a world with severe problems. I believe that O’Grady’s brother has visited it.”
After Ari read this bit aloud, I found the implications so difficult to process that I couldn’t speak. Ari watched me for some seconds.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “I can tell that you’ve got the wind up about something.”
“I just put a few weird things together, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about them.”
“That seems to be normal for our situation. He must be referring to the deviant world you call the Interchange.”
“Yeah, for sure. But how does he know about it?”
Ari answered me. I saw his lips moving, but I heard nothing. I felt myself get up and go to the window. Instead of the usual view of our Sunset district neighborhood, I looked out over an unfamiliar city, a toothed skyline of brick-and-stone buildings in a flat landscape. A brown river wound through, bound with iron bridges. A train rumbled and whistled. Factories poured black pollution out of tall smokestacks.
As I watched, I saw an enormous spray of energy, colored like the rainbow, fall into view from high above. It blotted out the sun and filled the sky. Bright spots of colored light swarmed like wasps, hot and vibrant, tearing the sky apart. I could see the black of outer space and stars shining, cold pinpricks of light as the sky withdrew like the water in a tidal wave. It rolled back and back, leaving the city naked, exposed to the blazing tide of death that swooped down to light every building with the flare and flash of all the colors in the spectrum.
With a roar the blue sky rushed back in and washed the rainbow colors away. The buildings on the skyline glowed with an evil violet glare. As the sunlight faded into night, I smelled rotting meat, the overwhelming, gagging stench of corpses.
The living room reappeared around me. The white plaster ceiling looked oddly close at hand. I could smell witch hazel, Ari’s usual aftershave. It occurred to me that he might be carrying me in his arms. I checked, and yes, he was.
“Nola? Are you back?”
“Sort of.”
“Are you ill? You’ve gone pale.”
“Just terrified. That’s all.”
He carried me to the couch, set me down, then sat next to me and slipped his arm around my shoulders. “You went into another of those sodding walking trances.”
“Yeah, sure did. It was quite a vision.”
“Of what?”
“The death of Interchange.”
Ari’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement, and his lips parted as if he were about to speak. He closed them again and merely stared at me.
“I don’t know how I know,” I said. “But I know.”
A memory image from a Tom and Jerry cartoon rose in my mind, of a Swiss cheese with holes big enough for the mouse to crawl through. Oddly enough, the image meshed with the vision. The rainbow horror had turned a world into Swiss cheese, maybe by accident, maybe by design. Sometimes my visions can be in really bad taste. A lot of people died, maybe millions, and what did I see? A cartoon mouse.
“I feel okay now,” I told Ari. “I’d better record this vision and check in with my handler.”
“You’d best not go into another full trance until you’ve eaten something.”
“I wasn’t planning on another trance. Don’t worry. I’ll just log on and send him e-mail like a normal person.”
Not, of course, that I sent him normal e-mail. The Agency has its own heavily encrypted system, TranceWeb, that exists “in the cloud,” as it were, but a cloud of its own, Cloud 9 as we call it for laughs. Besides describing our earlier visitor and then the vision, I had a crucial question to ask Y, my handler. Should I turn the Belial entity over to this Spare guy if he really did work for Interpol?
I’d captured Belial (him or it, I wasn’t certain about the gender) on my Agency authority, but since the Agency had no official liaison with any police force, I had no idea of what to do next. Suppose I’d gone to the local police and told them that I had a criminal in custody who happened to be a sapient extraterrestrial squid. Would they have believed me? Yeah, exactly—especially when I went on to say that I had custody of only his consciousness, stored on an old-fashioned flash drive, not of his physical body.
When I finished sending the message, I logged off and shut down the system to derail possible Chaos hackers. I swiveled around in my computer chair to see Ari standing nearby. He held out a plate topped with a slice of cold pizza.
“You never ate lunch,” he said.
The pizza stared at me with olive slices for eyes.
“I didn’t want lunch, that’s why,” I said. “There’s an awful lot of calories on that plate.”
“The doctor said you need to eat more.” Ari fixed me
with a grim stare. “You need to join the gym and come with me when I work out. Then you won’t worry about a few sodding calories.”
“I was raised to believe that ladies never sweat.”
“Ladies, perhaps, but how does that apply to you?” He stepped back out of range before I could kick him. “Nola, you’ve got to eat more.”
We locked stares. He won.
While I ate the pizza, Ari paced back and forth by the window and talked on his cell phone in two different languages. The Hebrew I could recognize. I thought the other might be Turkish. I knew better than to ask questions, but when he finished, he volunteered some information.
“According to a couple of highly placed people I have access to,” Ari told me, “Spare’s a legitimate member of my organization. I never mentioned deviant world levels, of course. Neither did they.”
“But then, they wouldn’t even if they knew.”
Although I checked a couple of times that afternoon, I never received an e-mail from the mysterious Mr. Spare14. I did a little more research online about Chaos magic but found nothing I didn’t already know. At one time I’d done some serious research into the subject. I’d organized the results in a notebook, and fortunately I remembered where the notebook was.
Some years previously I’d cached some loose papers over at the house belonging to my Aunt Eileen and her husband, Jim Houlihan, when I’d moved out of town on Agency business. When I called her, she had no objections to my coming over to hunt.
“Stay for dinner, dear,” Aunt Eileen said. “Tell Ari I’m making lamb stew with poppy-seed noodles to go under it.”
“That will seal the deal, for sure. Thanks. We’ll be glad to.”
Ari put on a proper shirt and his gray sport coat. I changed into a pair of trouser jeans and a red-and-white-print cotton blouse. Before we left, I placed a couple of Chaos wards on every door and the downstairs windows. When I finished, Ari activated the elaborate electronic security system that he and his buddy Itzak Stein had installed in the building and the garage out in back. Ari and I
had leased the entire building in which we lived, two flats out in San Francisco’s fog belt, to ensure that any danger our jobs might bring would target only us, not an innocent neighbor. At the moment the bottom flat stood empty except for my father’s old desk, but I didn’t want anyone prowling around in it, empty or not.
My Aunt Eileen and her family, which at that time included my younger brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Sophie, live in the sunbelt, that is, the southeast side of the city. The house stands in the Excelsior district, partway up the hill that’s topped with the blue water tower. It’s an odd misshapen house on a double lot, three stories at one end, two at the other, but only one in the middle section: a long living room that the front door divides in half.
In one half of the living room, a pale orange brocade sectional sofa stands under a portrait of Father Keith O’Brien, my uncle on Aunt Eileen’s side of the family, in his Franciscan robes. I’ve never seen anyone sit there. The family clusters at the other end of the room, where there are shabby armchairs and recliners arranged near the TV, when, that is, we’re not in the kitchen.
It was in the kitchen that we found Aunt Eileen that afternoon, sitting at the round maple table and reading the newspaper. She wore one of her usual retro outfits, a pair of leopard print capris and a pale blue cotton shirt with rolled sleeves. She had new pink fuzzy slippers with bunny faces, complete with long ears.
A large pot of stew simmered on the stove. Wisps of herbed steam rose from the surface. Ari inhaled deeply and smiled. I sat down at the table a couple of chairs over from hers. Aunt Eileen folded the newspaper and laid it down.
“Ari, dear,” she said, “you can take off that jacket. It’s awfully warm in here.”
“That’s quite all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
“You really don’t have to hide your gun. I mean, honestly, we all know you’re a police officer.”
I snickered. Ari winced, but he did take off his sport coat to reveal the Beretta in its shoulder holster.
“He never leaves home without it,” I said.
Ari shot me a scowl, then draped the jacket over a chair and sat down next to me.
“Where’s everyone else?” I said.
“Well, Jim’s at work,” Aunt Eileen said with a sigh. “There was more trouble with the L Taraval line, and so of course they called him in.”
“That happens too much,” I said, “his boss taking his weekend, I mean.” My uncle worked for Muni, the San Francisco public transport system, which exists in a state of perpetual decay.
“It’s the budget problems. Since he’s on salary, they don’t have to pay him for overtime.”
“Makes sense, but very irritating.”
She nodded her agreement. “Brian’s team is playing today. High school basketball’s over for the year, so now he’s on the baseball team. I don’t know about Michael and Sophie—upstairs probably, and I don’t really want to know what they’re doing. Let’s hope it’s schoolwork.”
A lesson in human biology, maybe, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. Apparently Ari was thinking along the same lines.
“You’ve been quite generous to both of them,” Ari said. “I can have a talk with him about proper manners when you’re living in someone else’s house.”
“You’re a darling,” Aunt Eileen said. “It’s wonderful how he listens to you. Just make sure you knock before you open the door.”
Ari left the kitchen by the back stairs that led to the bedrooms on the floor above. Aunt Eileen waited until he was well gone.
“I hate to admit this,” she said, “but I’m beginning to think your mother was right about Michael.”
“That he’s an out-of-control juvenile?”
Eileen held out a hand parallel to the table and waggled it to indicate she could go either way. “At times he’s fine. At others, he’s really hard to handle,” she said. “Jim makes things worse, bellowing at him, usually after he’s downed a couple of glasses of whiskey. Jim has the whiskey, that is, not Michael. I’ve never seen Mike touch any kind of alcohol, which is just as well.”
“Yeah, it sure is! What’s the problem? Too much lewd conduct with Sophie?”
“No, it’s his schoolwork. He doesn’t do any, and here he’s got the chance at that scholarship for college. If he doesn’t get into college, the scholarship won’t do him a bit of good.”
“I’ll have Ari press home a few salient points. There’s something about being lectured by a man packing a Beretta that should make Mike sit up and listen.”
We shared a laugh, but I worried. When Michael was born, I was ten, and I thought he was the best doll in the world. Since my mother had seven children total to take care of, she was glad to let me play mommy with the new baby. Once my father disappeared a few years later, and she needed to work outside the home, I became Michael’s second mother. Since I was just a teenager, my parenting skills were minimal.
“I think the real problem,” Aunt Eileen said, “is that Michael’s talents are blossoming. They always come in like teeth and make a person just as irritable as teething makes a baby. That’s why I’m trying to ignore his behavior with Sophie. It calms him down.”