Succubus in the City (12 page)

I called Sybil to check up that she was doing okay after her upset yesterday, and she was fine and had a date for tonight. Sybil dates less than we do, but then her service to Hell is not based on her love life. So the date was a real one, not an assignment. Lucky Sybil.

“I’m a little nervous,” she admitted over the phone. “I met him on one of those dating sites and I’ve never done that before. I mean, it seems so strange to know these things about a person I’ve never even met before. And what if he’s ugly? What if his picture is ten years out of date? What if he’s bald? What if he lied?”

“Well, where are you meeting?” I asked. First things first.

“Oh, just at the Cathedral for coffee. And he doesn’t have my last name, even. He should recognize me from my picture on the site, and I’m supposed to recognize him the same way. So if we want to disappear, we can.”

“Who suggested Cathedral?” I asked. It wasn’t Sybil’s usual haunt, being down in the East Village. The Cathedral was next door to what had once been a church. When it had gone on the market, the coffee house had bought up a load of stained-glass windows that were installed as their walls. So you sipped your coffee surrounded by stained-glass suffering saints. Très goth. But very pretty if you’re into that kind of thing.

“He suggested it, actually,” she said. “I was surprised but it seemed like at least no one I know would be there. And it’s convenient.”

“Well, call me tomorrow and let me know how it goes,” I told her, only a little bit jealous. “Have a great time.”

I refused to let my mood be dampened by the fact that I didn’t have any plans for the evening. I was going to sit at home and read MagicMirror and maybe rent the whole first season of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We’re all big Buffy fans. In lots of ways she’s so much like us.

On the way home from work I decided that a treat was in order and I took the long detour to Benny’s for one of their steak burritos. Mmmm.

“Hey, Lily, isn’t it?” a voice asked from behind me.

I spun around to find Nathan
R
-for-Rhys Coleman standing behind me in line. “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Are you stalking me? Are you following me because you can’t find your runaway pharmacist? I suggest you go off to Nevada or Iowa or wherever it is runaway husbands go.”

“Sorry,” he said, raising his hands. “I’m getting dinner. Okay, I happened to see you on the street. But I was in the area because I wanted to pick up their chicken enchiladas in tomatilla salsa. I can’t even admit it to my friends, but they’ve got the best tomatilla salsa in the city.”

“Why can’t you admit it to your friends?” All my friends knew I loved Benny’s, even if they thought I was nuts. And I thought all guys liked Mexican food and beer.

“They’d think I was crazy for going twenty minutes out of my way for these when there are plenty of very good Mexican places in my neighborhood. But none of them make salsa verde like Benny’s.”

“Do you want a table?” a waiter asked, gesturing to one of the spaces available. Okay, it was way early for dinner. And I had been planning to go home with my food, but—all of a sudden I thought,
Why not?

I never do things like this and I should have known better. A strange guy was such a risk. But, when I thought about it, I was the immortal one with Satan and the backup of Hell and it was only a burrito dinner at Benny’s, which is as unthreatening a place as I could imagine. And this guy did have my address and my work phone and my e-mail. So if he wanted to stalk me or do something dangerous, he wouldn’t have to meet me at Benny’s.

Of course, he could be doing this just to put me off guard.

But I was hungry and immortal and the place was just so normal and safe and—the truth was, I was jealous of Sybil’s date and even of Desi’s aborted date last week. I wanted to pretend, just for a few minutes, that I had an actual date of my own.

And Nathan was so cute in his Diesel jeans and leather jacket. He looked so perfect, as if he had been put together by one of our stylists, and he definitely was as hot as any of the models we used, though definitely a few years older. Which meant that he might have learned to order wine, do his laundry, and hire a cleaning service.

We gave each other a few quick quizzical looks.

“Do you think?” I asked.

“Whatever suits you,” he replied.

“Well, we’re both really busy,” I stated because I suddenly realized that I could not admit to being without plans for an evening, even a Wednesday, to a man I hardly knew. Eros and Desi and even Sybil would disapprove. I’d heard them lecturing each other on the subject often enough.

“Easier than washing dishes,” he countered.

“Sold,” I agreed. Even Eros and Desi and Sybil couldn’t fault the logic of that.

And so we were seated at a lime green table with pink and orange napkins on our laps waiting for margaritas that had not been in the game plan half an hour before.

“So tell me about this detective gig,” I said after my first few sips of a drink that could have filled half my bathtub.

He shrugged. “It’s not really a regular thing. I graduated from Yale and went to grad school there for a few years, but dropped out after I passed my comps when I realized that there really weren’t jobs in Akkadian.”

I nearly choked on my drink. Akkadian? My mother tongue. Fortunately, my mouth was full of tequila and lime so I didn’t say anything that would have been a mistake.

He misinterpreted my reaction. Which was no surprise, given that he was hardly going to figure that he’d been the first person in over a century to mention my native language to me. “I know, I know,” he said, waving his hand in a self-deprecating manner. He had the good grace to look abashed. “It was totally nuts. My mother called once a week to tell me that it wasn’t too late for me to go to law school. So I’ve got a masters in Near Eastern Languages, which is useless except to make me overeducated for almost any job that interests me. I keep thinking of going back to school, getting an MBA or going into law like my mother wants me to. I like languages and I’ve been playing with taking the test for the State Department, but right now I’m just weighing the options and trying to figure out what I want to do, when I can’t seem to do the thing I wanted to do most.”

“Which was?” I prompted. Guys love to talk about themselves and it’s usually a good tactic to let them do it. They feel happy and they don’t ever ask much about you, at least not in my experience. Which sometimes I resented, but mostly it was just safer. The less they asked, the fewer lies I’d have to tell.

He sniffled and blew his nose again.

“You still have that cold?” I asked.

He nodded. “It’s not getting better. If it keeps up for another week I’m going to a doctor.”

I shrugged. “It could be allergies.”

He laughed. “Oh, no, it’s too early yet for allergies. I have horrible allergies. Grass, ragweed, flowering trees, the whole shebang. What I really wanted to do was finish my Ph.D. and teach. Get to go to Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey to dig in the summers, translate texts, do the things my professors did. But there are very few students who are interested in studying ancient languages and now all the sites where I wanted to dig are war zones. For a while I thought that by the time I finished a Ph.D. the wars would be over and I’d be able to go. I know people who are working in Syria but I don’t think they’ll have permits for long.

“It’s really too bad because there’s a lot we don’t know about the ancient world, and we should know. We need to understand not only what happened then and how we’ve changed, but also how we haven’t changed. As people, I mean. It’s important for us to remember that Babylon was the New York of its day. The Ceremonial Way was as wide as Fifth Avenue and the walls were decorated with gold- and cobalt-glazed bricks, with lions and griffins and a magnificent gate called the Ishtar Gate.”

He went on talking, but I remembered it. He was right, it had been as grand as anything built today, and more beautiful. I remembered victorious generals at the heads of their armies, all washed and polished, carrying heaps of riches from their conquests and leading the newly enslaved and soon to be executed. We threw flowers from the roofs, so that a great snow of petals pelted our heroes.

We weren’t ashamed of conquest in those days. Land, riches, slaves, wealth, all came through the great gates and down the Ceremonial Way and Babylon cheered.

Today, Babylon is seen as degenerate and cruel, though not so developed in either degeneracy or cruelty as the Empire of Rome. But in our day some of the choices were simpler. We vanquished our enemies because otherwise they surely would have destroyed us. They would have marched our wealth through their streets, would have put our women and children in chains and brought our men to their temples to sacrifice to their gods.

“I’m boring you,” Nathan said flatly, cutting into my reveries. “I do that to people. I’m used to it. No one is interested in the ancient world.”

“No,” I said. “I’m more interested in Babylon than you can possibly imagine. Just that what you were saying brought back some…thoughts to me.”

“Really?” he asked, suspicious.

I shrugged. “About how war and conquest were viewed very differently then than now.”

He went still and regarded me for a moment that stretched into the next. Then he spoke very softly. “Tell me what you were thinking about conquest in the ancient world.”

I drank some of my margarita and our food arrived, leaving me a little time to formulate an answer. “I was thinking about how there was little guilt about the notion of empire then, about how people were simply glad to loot what they could from their neighbors and enslave them because they knew that anyone who could would do the same to them. That’s all. That’s just the way it was. The Babylonians and the Egyptians weren’t the worst of the lot, or the Greeks or Romans either. At least they had laws, some concept of social order that they spread with their hegemony. The people they conquered were usually not much worse off than they’d been before, and much better off than if a less ordered enemy had gotten there first.”

He nodded slowly, his eyes gleaming. “People today don’t understand the conditions or the mind-set. The world has changed so much. And that’s one of the reasons I love reading the ancient texts, being able to read from the original writings without interpretation, without anyone between me and them. There’s something almost magical about that.”

He sneezed again and I waved the waiter over for more chips and salsa.

“But why the PI thing? That’s because my mother’s friend’s son is doing Mom a favor by hiring me as a consultant to do some research. I almost never do the thing that I did with you, going to question people about a case. Mostly I do research, computer searches, translations. I’m good at it and it gives me something to do. Sometimes it’s even interesting.”

“So why did you come to my apartment, if mostly you’re just doing computer research?”

“The boss is trying to train me and give me more opportunities to do more of the actual job a PI does. I think he thinks that sending me to interview beautiful women will make me more interested in the job.”

I smiled at the compliment, and nibbled on my enchilada. Nathan was right, the tomatilla salsa was amazing, and I was glad that I had decided to try something new. Besides, I could get a steak burrito to go and put it in the fridge for tomorrow.

“So what’s the deal with the pharmacist, and how did I get into it?” I asked after I’d finished a hearty bite.

“That whole case is entirely weird,” he said after he had thought for a moment. “I don’t know what else to call it. Okay, so the guy disappeared. We did the usual missing persons/runaway search, studying his habits and hobbies. My boss once found someone because she had a thing for organic vegan food and wouldn’t shop in normal stores. I admire that; that’s good research. So I was interested and started to trace the same way. But I found nothing. It’s like he really disappeared into the ether, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe this is all just a smokescreen for something else. I just have this sense that I’m just seeing a little piece of a bigger pattern.”

“Hmmm,” I said as I pretended to concentrate on my food.

I understood what he meant, but more, I had a feeling that his piece of a pattern somehow intersected some other pattern of mine. He’d arrived just at the same time as Desi’s bad date and the Burning Men and I don’t believe in that much coincidence. I was certain there was some connection, and if I couldn’t see it there might be information in the Akashic.

I wondered if our librarian had turned up anything yet.

I thought about how Nathan would love the Akashic. If Nathan became a demon he’d want to be a librarian.

That thought made me very sad, for no reason I could identify.

“Hey, something got you down?” he asked softly.

“Yeah. Just…stuff.” There was nothing I could explain. “I just have a morbid imagination.” Suddenly, I had a very weird thought. Insane, actually, but hey—he was being nice and was interested in Babylon and that’s a sure way to my heart. “Do you have a copy of that picture you showed me? Because if he had my address maybe he knew someone I know. I could ask around a bit, just to see. If you’d like.”

His hand froze in midair, cheese dripping off his fork as he held it poised a foot above his plate. “You’d do that? You don’t have to. I mean, that would be great, but you don’t have to.”

“I know,” I said. “But if you have an extra one that you can spare, if it works out and comes up, I might be able to ask. It’s probably terribly unprofessional and I shouldn’t say anything like that and you probably want to interview people yourself—” And I shouldn’t be chattering on in that idiot fashion.

“I would very much appreciate it,” he said. His voice was quiet and serious. “And you are a wonderful person, Lily. I would like to spend some time with you and talk about ancient civilizations. You don’t know—it’s been ages since I met anyone who thought my interest was anything but a waste of time when I should be trying to work on Wall Street or get into law school. Which I haven’t totally discounted, you understand, but you’re the first person I’ve met just about since I moved back here who doesn’t think I’m crazy.”