She was even less certain now that Rosemary really intended to use the books solely as a means to influence the Family. There was too much of her father in her still. Bagabond remembered Rosemary's remark about wishing she had been a son, able to inherit control. Was she about to provide the means for Rosemary to get that control?
"I told you, my name isn't Adrian.'"
"Then I guess I'm not Rosa-Maria Gambione."
The man pulled off his mirrorshades. "Maria!" He smiled for the first time. "I remember once, I sent you the right hand from a kidnapped doll. You still wouldn't pay."
The other man spoke for the first time. "Be quiet" Adrian. Rosa Maria Gambione disappeared many years ago." He said to her, "You look more like a district attorney to me" Ms. Muldoon."
"Very good. I don't know you, do I?"
"No."
"My father fought for the Family in the old ways. I chose new ones."
"Like hounding us?" said the second man. "Prosecuting us?"
"To be a useful district attorney. I have to be a good district attorney."
The thin, inexpressive mouth below the sunglasses twitched at one corner. "Adrian, get your father. I think he'll be interested in this." He leaned back in his chair and said, "Please sit down, you and your friends, Ms. Muldoon."
Rosemary pulled out a chair and sat, crossing her legs and smiling at the man on the other side of the table. She barely turned her head. "Suzanne, I think now would be an appropriate time."
Bagabond turned Jack toward her and extended a hand toward his head. The man pulled back sharply. "Not here!"
"You're right." She caught Rosemary's eye and pointed her chin toward the door of the men's rest room.
"Good idea" said Rosemary. To the man across the table, she said "My friends will be rejoining me in just a moment. I can assure you they are not… armed." She looked directly into the opaque lenses. "Do you have a name?"
"Okay, make it quick." He waved idly at the rest room. "You always hang out with junkies?"
Rosemary reached across the table and poured herself a cup of tea. "No."
"Morelli," said the man. "Very pleased to meet you." Bagabond led Jack to the men's room door.
"Perhaps I'd best go first." Jack reached out to steady himself against the doorframe.
"You won't make it," Bagabond said matter-of-factly. "Your faith is touching." Then he gasped in pain. "On the other hand…"
Bagabond pulled open the door and walked in. No one stood at the urinal" but a Vietnamese man dressed in a soiled kitchen apron was just coming out of the stall. He squawked in surprise" managed hurriedly to wash his hands" then left, muttering in a language Bagabond was glad she didn't understand. "Get in here" she said to Jack. The door swung shut after him.
"I don't know if I can do this," said Jack. "Sometimes I can't call him up. I hurt too much right now to concentrate. I-"
"Just take off your clothes."
"What?" He tried to smile. "Bagabond, this isn't the time." He shut up as she stared at him in exasperation.
"I don't have any spare clothing for you this time. If you don't take it off, you're going to destroy what you've got on. Okay?"
"Oh. Right." His back to her, Jack unbuttoned his shirt. Careless of her suit, Bagabond sat down on the dirty tile floor. After he had stripped, Jack looked dubiously at her. He held the bundle of clothes in front of him.
"Lie down."
Jack swallowed and prostrated himself in front of Bagabond. In the limited space, his feet extended under the green wooden partition dividing off the stall. She reached out and set his clothing safely aside. Holding his head in her hands, she began to send her consciousness inside his mind, searching for the key to his transformation.
"Let go of the pain. Stop trying to control it." Bagabond stopped using the rough voice she had adopted years before. Now she spoke in the rhythm she used when she calmed her animals. She synchronized her breathing with that rhythm and stroked Jack's head.
She knew the way. It was not the first time she had worked with Jack, although it was the first time she had sought to release the beast rather than contain it.
Jack relaxed under her hands. In his mind, he led her down through the levels of his consciousness. She dodged the barriers there and respected the private self which stood behind them. The cats had always urged her to pry. Out of friendship and because of her own near-pathological desire for privacy, Bagabond resisted that severe temptation.
Journeying through Jack's mind was a trip defined by smell. The city, its people, Bagabond herself, were all denoted by their individual scents, not by sight or words. Those came much later in the chain of consciousness.
Coming to a smell of swamp, rotting death and decay, and darkness, Jack stopped. Bagabond met his fear of never returning from the swamp with her reassuring consciousness. She was there. She would not abandon him. But it was the strength of her will that forced him back through the dark space and smell that lay at the core of his reptile self. As Jack's conscious mind was subsumed into the other, Bagabond fled back through his brain as it imploded into the reptile consciousness. The miasma of the swamp and the bellowing challenge of a bull alligator followed her like a riptide.
As she returned to her own body, the reaction flung Bagabond's head back against the side of the porcelain sink and jerked her hands away from the alligator whose head lay heavily in her lap. The reptile flipped over onto his feet again and roared the challenge Bagabond had just heard. Gasping quick, deep lungfuls of air, she entered the creature's mind and calmed him. Tail-tip twitching, he backed slightly away from her, cramped for space in the small rest room.
Bagabond looked up when she heard Rosemary's voice raised outside. The rest room door opened sufficiently to reveal the worried face of the Vietnamese maitre d'. His eyes widened and his hand rose to his mouth before slamming the door on the impossible scene.
She looked back down at the alligator and began to search through his mind for the trigger to force him to vomit up the books. Bagabond directed the alligator toward the stall as she uncovered the memory of poisoned meat.
The psychic feedback almost did the trick for her too. The alligator vomited the contents of his gullet onto the floor and into the stool. The stench of half-digested food shook even Bagabond, inured to most aspects of life and death. Calming the agitated reptile, she got up and gingerly fished for the plastic-wrapped books. Thankfully, it didn't take long. She rinsed off the package in the sink. The alligator whipped his tail, smashing the stall partition into kindling. He growled deep in his throat, a discontented, hungry rumbling. Reaching out to the alligator brain, Bagabond began the process of separating Jack's humanity from the reptile mind. In little more than a minute, Jack lay shivering on the cold tile floor where the gator had been. She handed him his clothes as he curled up fetally against the smell and the memory.
"It had to be done." She moistened a paper towel and gently wiped his forehead.
"Each time, I think I will never be human again." Jack stared at the wall. "When that finally happens, perhaps it will be for the best."
"Not for Cordelia." Nor for herself, but that thought remained unspoken.
"Cordelia. Yeah. Okay." His voice was flat. "Let's get this thing done." Dressed now, he pushed open the door. Bagabond followed him. Across the room, Rosemary stood with two older men who had joined the group.
"Rosa Maria, we have only the greatest respect for your late father, but we cannot allow you to interfere with the business of the Family." The taller man spread his hands and regarded her paternally.
"The Family business is my business." Rosemary glanced over at the approaching Bagabond and Jack. "I am a Gambione." She took the slightly damp packet that Bagabond handed her. The two older Mafiosi exchanged exasperated looks. It was obvious to Bagabond that this conversation had been going on for some time while she'd been in the rest room.