“Let me make this as clear as possible, shithead. Uncle Jo hears some punk off the street has been chuckin’ his family name around like fuckin’ confetti, so he calls in me. Mr. Fixit. Now I’ve got my means and ways of finding out who’s who, where they are, and then dealing with them.” As he spoke, he gestured with his fingers, and the choke intensified. My face was turning numb. “And a little bird called me up, told me that the Russkies are working with Vincent Manelli, who doesn’t fucking exist, and that they axed Frankie. Frank Nacari. So I go to Vincent’s house, thinking I’ll go ask him some questions, and find you. And now you’re sayin’ you don’t know who he is?”
Someone was playing us. Someone had summoned the demon of feuds, Aamon, and they were playing us off against each other. “No… no, you don’t—”
He let me loose as suddenly as he’d seized me. I fell heavily, coughing. The relentless pain, the fading adrenaline were dulling my thoughts.
“You’re sayin’ that you don’t know who he is?”
The quaver in Carmine’s voice spoke of underlying desperation. I was bubbling at the corners of my mouth, but I could hear it. He was mining for something. It was a weakness and exploitable. All I had to do was make it up.
“Frankie… was a part of a deal.” The strain in my voice was genuine and cracked with every other word. “With Vincent. He’s… faking. Not really a Manelli.”
“Yeah, that’s more like it. Go on.”
“Frankie… he came over… to deal with us. Sell John out to us.”
Carmine’s wolfish eyes were gleaming. “Keep going.”
“We knew… we knew Vincent wasn’t real Manelli.” The words boiled together, rising blithely of their own accord. I was lying, and for once, I didn’t care. “But we never told anyone.”
“What was Frankie trying to sell you guys?” Carmine crouched down now, leaning in excitedly. “What deal did he set up?”
I wanted to spit on him. Five inches closer, and I’d tear his stupid larynx from his stupid chicken neck. Instead, I swayed, feigning a lapse of consciousness. Sure enough, the splash of cold water followed, and under the searing, sense-clearing spray, I put two and two together. This was where I had to guess. It felt insane. Sounded insane.
“Some kind of… relic.” I managed to keep the simultaneous question and disbelief out of my voice. “A book or something. That’s… what I heard. He was dealing with Molotchik. I don’t know his real name, I swear.”
“Is that so?” Carmine was very intent. “What’s he look like?”
I was reaching out on a limb. “Dark. Big. Kind of fat. Weird eyes. Bulgarian, maybe.”
Carmine’s eyebrow arched. He held up the Wardbreaker. “So you don’t know his name, but you let him juice you up with this? Cause I swear, you have the taint on you. The mark.”
“Y-yes.” I fought the urge to lick at my split lip, staring at the gun. “Pakhun[19] ordered it.”
“Huh.” He looked down on me. “So you got something else you want to tell me? Because that’s not enough to save your ass.”
I shivered, rattling from the base of my spine to the back of my neck. The next words came to me unbidden, almost as if I hadn’t even spoken them. They were from the images and the snatches of English in the dream diary, still lying on Vincent’s bedroom floor. “What is… The Fruit?”
Carmine rubbed the ring on his finger with his other thumb, staring down in silence for several long, thick seconds. His hand dropped away, slowly. Watching him watching me, I hung from the rail and waited.
“That ain’t any of your business.” Carmine stepped back and turned, his shoes tacking gummily against the tiles. “Too bad you don’t know anything useful. Go kiss God’s eternal ass for me in heaven.”
I watched Carmine’s back as he walked to the door. It opened into a fathomless black rectangle; he disappeared, and I heard him quip something in Italian to someone outside. I couldn’t understand him, but made out the tone well enough. Words to the effect of “All yours.”
This was not how I’d planned to die, but I was slipping and couldn’t stop it. This was not going to be a quick death, or an easy death, or a good death. I’d beaten enough men in basement interrogation rooms to know what happened from this point on. If I was lucky, they’d just shoot me. And if I wasn’t? Nothing is more depraved than a man hopped up on a cocktail of testosterone and righteousness. I felt for something, anything I could do, but I didn’t have my gun. There was blood, but no energy. The only sacrifice available was me. This wasn’t a ward I could break or a threat I could contain.
My nose was full of the smell of water. It smelled like glass. I licked my lips and settled into place, grounding in the pain, in the cold, in the wet. I’m not religious, but I’ve seen and done enough to know that magic comes from somewhere. The best hymn to the Higher Self was written by old Aleister Crowley, and it was that long-memorized verse I started to mumble. “You who art I… beyond… all I am. Who has no nature… and no… name…”
Staccato bursts of tense laughter from outside the bathroom punctuated the words. That didn’t bode well. Professional executioners didn’t chitchat and laugh just before the dirty work started. Bullies did. Old jailbirds, the type of guys who liked to rough up and torture.
“Who art, when all but thou are gone… the s-secret and center of… the Sun.”
The invocation continued to pull itself from my lips. It seemed to catch fire and fuel itself. “You hidden spring, of all things known and… unknown, thou aloof alone…”
Thou the true fire within the reed, brooding and breeding, source and seed… Of life, love, liberty and light? You are no Thelemite, my Ruach.
I heard a flutter and the tic-tac of claws as a raven with white eyes landed on the edge of the bathtub. His irises steamed into the humid air, spitting like burning magnesium. “Why quote Crowley’s daemon when you can talk to your own?”
Over the bird’s head, I saw the executioners enter, moving like shadows behind plate glass: two men, a combined four hundred pounds of hurt. Left was bald and Right was bearded and wore a baseball cap, but they both had the same shark-eyed, dog-jawed look I saw every morning in the mirror. These were hardened men, killers.
“Keeps me calm.” I don’t think I managed to speak aloud.
“These men are about to bleed you like a calf in this bathtub,” the raven said. The feathers of its plumage boiled in the air like a black liquid. “You will undergo Shevirah here, or you will die.”
Shevirah. Now there was a magical term I hadn’t heard in a long time. That was straight-up Kabbalah: Shevirah, the breaking of the vessels. Supposedly, YHWH created through a series of emanations. Shevirah referred to the point when the divine light of self-awareness within God grew so intense that it burst outwards into nothingness like a harpoon. As it grew farther away from God, it became more solid, more tangible, cooling and creating the myriad layers of reality.
I felt a rough hand haul my face up by the hair and refocused on the arm stretching down towards me. It was the bearded guy. He laughed, lewd and derisive, but the sound seemed to come from far away. The raven was still there, and I fixated on it. It looked back at me, through me, with eyes the color of blazed winter skies. My gaze was drawn into a swirling vortex of pure white that took my breath away, a spiral galaxy contained within a single point.
The tub vibrated under and around me as one of the men climbed in, standing over me. He hauled me up until my jaw was level with his fly. I could smell diesel oil, male musk, the faint odor of unwashed skin through his jeans. For a moment, I was reminded of Moni, the way he’d talked about Semyon Vochin’s wife. With distant disgust, I realized the man was hard, but he didn’t unzip; instead, he pulled a gun and pressed it between my lips as he jeered back at his friend.
19
The ultimate authority of an Organizatsiya. The Pakhun (literally ‘prince’) is generally a thief-in-law with great seniority. They are often involved in government and high-level corporate work, especially in gas and energy ventures. They may manage multiple Avtoritets and multiple criminal ventures and are rarely ever involved in street-level work.