“ Relax,” she whispered, her expression fierce, and pushed through the door into the dining room. The door swung back with a light breeze.
Jack found the dog food, spooned some into a dish, and delivered it with a flourish to the cage. “Fill your bellies, my sweet little rodents. No more flying. And maybe no more food for a long, long time.”
The rats considered the likelihood of game hen and the food actually at paw, then, resigned, fell to nibbling.
He sat at the counter and opened the newspaper he’d filched from the waiting room. He paged through the classifieds, seeking something—he could not remember what. But there it was in the middle of the last page: the message his eyes had read and remembered while the rest of Jack’s mind was elsewhere. Frowning, he touched the short ad—very short.
Then he stopped eating and shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Glanced at the screen door leading to the back porch. Something outside, waiting? No…
When he resumed eating—the food was too good to ignore—he kept glancing at the ad, until he tore it out and stuffed it in his pocket.
The rest of the paper he stuffed into Ellen’s recycle bin, under the sink. The talk through the kitchen door sounded cheerful, raucous in a feminine way, and after several glasses of wine, more directly truthful. The postprandial effects of good warm food had loosened Ellen’s guests. Ellen thought they were ready. She served dessert. Then she pushed Jack through the door and stood beside him, one hand high and bent at the wrist, the other at waist-level, like a couturier showing off her new line.
Across the long oak dining table, the two older women fell silent.
“I’ve told you about Jack,” Ellen said. “He works the streets. He’s a busker.”
Her guests stared, then exchanged veiled glances, as if there was so much to say but no way they would ever be caught saying it—not in front of their hostess. In their forties or early fifties, both looked as if more exercise and sun might do them good. Granny glasses, silk pantsuits—the redhead wore rhinestone-studded denim—fine manicures, and fashionable hairdos. Jack quickly sized them up: wealthy street marks, incomes over a hundred K per annum. One perhaps a lesbian—did she know? Under normal circumstances, he would happily separate them from as much money as he could get away with. For their part, Ellen’s guests regarded Jack with stiff civility—a too-young male of suspicious dark good looks in their female fastness, invited, to be sure, but why?
Jack groaned deep in his throat, then bowed. “Ladies,” he said, “thanks for the wonderful food. I don’t want to interrupt.” He tried to retreat through the kitchen door but Ellen jerked him back by his elbow. The women looked to her for guidance. She lowered her hands and folded them, demure. “Jack’s a friend,” she said.
“What sort of friend?” asked the eldest, older than Ellen by at least ten years.
“What does Ellen mean, ‘work the streets’?” asked the other, the redhead, pleasing enough in her plumpness. “What’s a ‘busker’?”
“It’s from the French, busquer, to seek, like a ship trying to find its course,” said the eldest. To her, Jack was a sand grain, a small sharp point of irritation.
Ellen gestured like a teacher, Tell the girls.For a hot instant he did not like her at all.
“I’m a showman,” Jack said. “I do magic and juggle.”
“Does it pay?” the redhead asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I get to keep bankers’ hours.”
They did not return his smile—though the redhead’s lips twitched. And what was heto Ellen, really?
she seemed to ask. Such a skinny young man!
The eldest glanced around the table with wide eyes behind thick glasses. “Can you show us a trick?”
Jack instantly assumed a dancer’s restful pose. Bowed his head as if in prayer. Lifted his hands, fingers to thumbs, as if to snap castanets. The ladies watched for some seconds. Tension built. The (probable) lesbian scraped her chair and coughed.
Jack raised his chin and met Ellen’s eyes.
“I don’t do tricks,” he said. “I invite the world to dance.”
“Tell us how you do that, Jack,” Ellen murmured.
All three women looked around the room with nostrils flared, like lionesses smelling blood. He did not like this kind of attention. His patience reached an end.
“That’s it,” he said. “Thanks again, but I’m done. Here’s my trick.”
For a tenth of a second—no time at all—the dining room fell under a muffled blankness, like stuffing your ears with waxed cotton. The crystals on the chandelier quivered. All six of the flame lights behind the crystals sizzled out.
“I’d like to ask—” the redhead began, but Jack pointed and lifted his eyebrow, and she looked out the window. Simultaneously, on the narrow street in front of Ellen’s house, two cars mated with a grating slam.
The walls shuddered.
All three ladies jumped and exclaimed.
“Was that thunder?” the redhead asked.
Ellen hurried to the front door. For the moment, they had forgotten about Jack. He shoved through the kitchen door, lifted his rats with a swoop—they flattened on their haunches—and fled down the porch. As he pedaled along the back alley, he could feel a familiar stiffness creep up his shoulder blades. Ellen shouldn’t have done that. That went beyond pixie—it was cruel, like introducing Peter Pan to Wendy when she could no longer hope to fly. Worse, he had moved so far off his line of good consequence just to arrange an exit that it might take days to jump back.
And who knew what could happen during that time?
As he coasted down a hill, Jack felt totally exposed.
CHAPTER 15
First Avenue South
That night, Ginny and Bidewell dined on take-out Thai food—what Bidewell insisted on calling
“takeaway.” He rarely cooked. There was no kitchen, only a hot plate and the iron stove where he kept a teakettle. The refrigerator held only white wine, cat food, and milk for tea. Bidewell expertly wielded chopsticks. They had already discussed his years in China, searching for certain Buddhist texts and trying to escape from Japanese soldiers in some war or another; Ginny had not listened closely.
From the main storage room in the warehouse, they heard a bump and cascading thumps—a stack of books falling over. Ginny pointed with her chopsticks. “Your cats?”
“Minimus is the only one who pays attention to my books.”
“Other than me,” Ginny said, then added, “They seem to go wherever they want.”
“All my fine Sminthians stay here,” Bidewell insisted. “Like me. The warehouse is all they need.”
“ Sminthians?”
Bidewell pushed a classical dictionary her way. “Homer. Look it up.”
Bidewell was cleaning away the paper plates and boxes when Ginny asked, “Why do you let the cat—why do you let Minimus—knock things over? He might hurt the books.”
“He doesn’t hurtthem,” Bidewell said. “Some cats are sensitive to the spiders between the lines.” He slid shut the flue on the stove to stifle the fire inside.
“What the hell does that mean?” she asked to Bidewell’s retreating back. He smiled over his shoulder, then vanished into his sleeping quarters, beyond the library and the warm stove. That evening, Ginny found a small, thin brown book on her table. It told a peculiar story. THE SCRIBES’ TALE
Near the end of the eighth century, on the island of Iona in the Western Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, a monastery protected many of the great manuscripts of antiquity from waves of intemperate history breaking over Europe and Britain.
In the abbey, monks copied and illuminated manuscripts and prepared for the day when the classics would again be spread to other abbeys, castles, and towns—and to the universities which were even then being dreamed of, centers of text and learning that would shine light from the past on a world buried in darkness.