Pockets of Darkness (13 page)

Nineteen

“He went to school?” Bridget talked on her cell phone to Jimmy. “You and Michael let him go to school? You’re thick, the both of you. Why did—”

“Said he had a history test, boss. Said he wanted to stay busy, not think about things. Said he had to get out and—”

“Put Michael on—”

“Michael went with him, boss. Thought he should see if there was any paperwork at the school to deal with, change of address and such, you know. They took a cab, not even an hour ago. Michael said he tried to call you. Said he—”

Bridget remembered her phone buzzing earlier; no doubt Michael had been calling. She thrummed her fingers against the detective’s desk. The detective had stepped away to get them more of the precinct house’s lousy coffee. Across the room, she saw Sergeant McGinty, who waved and headed over.

“Boss?”

“Yeah, Jimmy?” Bridget pressed the phone to her face and thought she ought to get one of those ear-bud things.

“It was a good idea, Otter going to school. He needs to be busy. And he needs to stay with school. I should’ve kept with school, boss, and—”

“I know, Jimmy.” Bridget hung up and forced a smile for McGinty.

“What brings you back to the precinct, Miss O’Shea?”

O O O

An officer dropped Bridget back at her shop. Bridget had somehow managed to talk the police into leaving her name out of the arrest report the press would have access to—citing not wanting to deal with reporters and all the over-the-top coverage that Good Samaritans often had to endure. She looked at her watch: 8:05 a.m. She had fifty-five minutes before the shop opened for business, so a half hour before her manager and two employees would show up. Maybe she could find the Sumerian pieces on her own.

She had to key in the security code three times; she was that out of it, her fingers not cooperating with her brain. The demon patiently waited, then was the first to enter when the door opened.

It was a two-level shop, each floor a reasonably spacious twenty-two hundred square feet. The larger pieces were on the first floor, such as period furniture—currently including showpieces like a Spanish colonial bench, and two hundred-year-old Marquetry cylinder desk, Bregeres upholstered armchairs. In the aisle ahead of her sat a lavish 18th century Biblioteque marriage armoire and a fine Ottoman inlaid table with mixed woods and mother of pearl. To the left were shelves with porcelain, china, and silver. Paintings, including one “Old Master,” hung on the walls. Smaller pieces, sports memorabilia, dolls, books, and all of Bridget’s “under the counter” goods, changed hands on the second floor, which is where she headed after making sure the surveillance cameras still worked. The camera at the door had caught the footage of the New York Yankee fan knifing Bridget, and her subsequently wiping the blood off the blade. She erased the footage, not wanting evidence of her walking away basically unscathed from what could have been a fatal stabbing. She’d told the police her security camera hadn’t been working.

Bridget’s employees—members of her smuggling operation—kept the shop spotless, the furniture gleaming, silver polished, floor dusted, and cobwebs off the restored tin ceiling. She liked the way it looked and smelled … though the scent was impossible to detect between her own sour pong and the assortment of stinks the demon produced.

Her store was a real asset to the area, customers a mix of upscale clients with lengthy “want lists,” common folk, occasional tourists, and those who knew they could acquire special treasures. Her goods ranged from little odds and ends that could be had for about $40 to large pieces that would bring in thousands. She took the staircase, listening to the familiar creak of the steps and appreciating the slick feel of the mahogany banister against her fingers. There was an elevator, but sometimes it jammed, and it would be her luck for it to do so this morning—leaving her in close quarters with the demon until help came. She was surprised the cops hadn’t made some crack about her foul odor, but maybe they figured she’d picked it up from her tussle on the filthy sidewalk with the Yankee’s fan, not from her foray into the bowels of the city last night.

Bridget flicked on the lights upstairs, glanced at the shelves that spread away from the landing, and turned and went into her office that was between the elevator and the restroom. There were two more levels, both with lofty ceilings. The third floor was crammed with stuff that hadn’t yet been cleaned and cataloged, and items that had been cataloged, but not put in the official books. The fourth was vacant, the floor dicey and likely to give way if a fat man walked across it. At one time it had featured one of those spring-floors for ballroom dancing, but the sections were rotting, and so she’d had it busted up and removed.

Bridget sat at her desk, pulled out a ledger from the hollow spot in the tub drawer, and started scanning the coded entries to find Sumerian pieces. Dear God, please let me have something from Sumer here, she thought, and not sold to some antiquities fancier.

The demon hopped around the room, appearing to take in the details, and for a change chattering in a thankfully low voice. Bridget picked out the occasional word: Euphrates, Tigris, Enlil. Bridget. Life. Slaves.

“You’re a broken record,” she told it.

Rob arrived early. He still wore the bruises from Otter’s birthday dinner, but it looked like he’d used some sort of pancake makeup to cover the worst of them. Still, some of the yellow-green showed through.

“Do we have anything Sumerian?”

“Sumerian? Geeze, that’s really old. Ever see that movie, boss? Conan the Sumerian. Just kidding.” Rob scratched a spot on the back of his hand. “I think so. I think we do. Hard to keep track of everything, but I think so.” He brightened. “Yeah, we do, two pieces. Had three, but Alvin sold one last week to a history professor who said we were asking too much. Alvin’s a helluva salesman, boss. He’s do in, oh about twenty from now. I’ll have him dig up the two we got left. Maybe we should set the pieces out somewhere, eh? One of the counters. They’re pretty small, if I remember right. I’ll have Alvin get them for you as soon as he comes in.”

“Please.”

It took Alvin, one of Bridget’s oldest employees and an expert forger, only a handful of minutes to find the Sumerian pieces. Each was boxed and tied with a string, coded with tags. He left the boxes on Bridget’s desk, wriggling his red-veined nose when he got too close to her.

“We do have a third piece, Miss O’Shea,” Alvin said. “It’s sold, though. A history professor paid a good deposit for us to hold it. He’s coming by Tuesday to pick it up. It’s a Sumerian astrology tablet, a rock about the size of a skull.”

“These two should be good enough. Thanks, Alvin.” Bridget thought Alvin and Rob might be due a little raise for putting up with her odd requests and behavior.

Alvin was pushing seventy, though he dressed like a teenager, jeans and rock band T-shirts—no matter how cold it was. His hair was long and silvery, pulled back with a suede cord. He had startling Paul Newman blue eyes that twinkled, and that, coupled with his rich voice, was an asset in dealing with customers.

“These two small pieces, they’re rather plain, Miss O’Shea,” Alvin continued. “And despite being five thousand years old, are not especially valuable. We’re getting four grand from the history professor for the tablet. But these little pieces … he wasn’t interested. Doubt you’ll get more than six hundred or so. We have them overpriced. They came in on a shipment early last year, and I recall that you touched them and went all silent, said they were ‘interesting but not outstanding.’ We’ve been keeping them under the counter so to speak, but—”

“I do remember,” she said.

According to the tags, she was only asking eight hundred for each, and realized they should go in a display case downstairs, as these were likely to never be noticed as ill-appropriated. Yeah, they could reduce them to six hundred, and take five if someone offered. The first was slightly more remarkable, a ram carving, weighing about two pounds, with curled horns and the body simple, front and back legs together, tail short, workmanship average for the time. The other was a round stone seal about three inches in diameter, rare because of its size; most seals were smaller. The stone was light with dark red bands shooting through it, alabaster with a smooth patina. It featured drill holes to illustrate a horse that would appear when pressed against wet clay. Bridget revised her estimate; she’d actually ask a grand for the seal … when she was done with it, and take an offer of nine hundred. Simple, but rather pretty for something so very old.

“Will there be anything else, Miss O’Shea? There’s a few Greek pieces I want to—”

“No. No. This is all. Good work on selling the tablet, Alvin.” Always Alvin, never Al, she knew. Not even his brother, another of her questionable employees called him Al.

He left, and she heard the rattle-hum of the elevator. Alvin never took the stairs.

“So tired.” She was talking to herself, but the demon cocked its head, listening. “I have never been this tired.” Her watch read: 10:35. Bridget’s probing of the buckle had put the icing on her fatigue. She’d not used her psychometry on anything so heavily laced with magic before.

The Sumerian pieces
should
be easy reads, but in her exhausted state, that might not be the case. She held the alabaster seal against her palm, closed her eyes, and listened to the harsh breath of the demon and the creaking of the stairs. Rob was leading a customer up, their voices flowing under a gap in the closed door. They were talking about the sets of early Bowman baseball cards and a near-mint Mickey Mantle rookie. A woman was looking for a special gift for her baseball card-collecting husband.

The seal had come from Umma, an ancient city on a river in what was now Iraq. Bridget’s arcane senses took in the image of a reed-thin man using the seal. She’d remembered seeing this image before, when she’d first acquired the seal many months ago. The man was a scholar, and there were baked clay tablets with writing on them around him. Sumerian written language predated Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Bridget knew that much of the early writing that had been discovered was not translatable. No one living knew what the language sounded like—except Bridget and the demon. The thin man with the seal addressed a boy, maybe his son. There was a similarity in tone to what Bridget had heard spoken by the Tamils in southern India. She listened closely, trying to find words that matched what the demon spewed.

From the previous foray into this piece, and into a handful of other Sumerian relics Bridget had through the years acquired and sold, she’d learned that Sumer was the name Babylonians had applied to the country. The earlier Sumerians had referred to it only as The Civilized Land, and they called themselves the Black Headed Ones. The few Sumerians Bridget had glimpsed in her visions before appeared fastidious and shaved their heads, probably to avoid lice. The land was fertile, agriculture and hunting fed a population that traveled by boat on the river and that had a bartering system of commerce. The land was wet, not like the desert that covered it today. The ancient people practiced irrigation, conducted complex business transactions, raised livestock, and their various dealings were recorded on clay tablets. There were slaves, and even they had limited rights. The man who’d once owned this alabaster seal had a slave—the boy, Bridget realized. Not a son, a slave, and the man ordered him to bring water and dates. The boy vanished, and the man stopped talking, his fingers moving over the clay tablets, reading to himself.

“Talk, damn you,” Bridget said. She nudged the vision forward, and she sat uncomfortably in the chair in an attempt to keep from dozing. Some time passed before the boy came back, and then left again, with no more words exchanged. Forward again, and the man rose and slept on a pallet of woven reeds, woke, and resumed reading the tablets. This was why Bridget had not returned to the piece after she’d first acquired it. The man was boring, probably a hermit, and Bridget was ready to give up on the seal and try the ram. The man paced in the confines of his baked brick home, then strung the seal on a cord around his neck, exited, and strolled down a path between buildings.

“Finally.” Bridget chewed on her lip and fought the urge to look at her watch; she didn’t want to drop the connection to the piece. “Now you’re being interesting. Now you’re moving. Now all you’ve got to do is talk to someone. Talk to—”

There were people on the path, all clean with shaved heads, some toting bowls filled with fruit, a woman carrying a child. Everyone chattered, but it was a cloud of sound she didn’t have time to pick through because the man with the seal picked up his pace. He went to a larger home, this one two levels high and also made of baked bricks. Two men came to the doorway and started a conversation with the seal bearer. Bridget directed all her concentration at it. Words started to match the demon’s prattle. Her mind started to translate.

Liberate.

Unshackle.

Forever.

Clay.

Stone.

Enlil.

Bridget tried to memorize the words, repeating them softly in the ancient tongue while the men in her vision continued to talk. She discovered that the man with the seal was a priest, and the women in the home—distant relations of the king—sought the blessing of the gods. The priest was invited inside, all five people present chattering now and providing Bridget with information about the society’s religion. It was at its heart nature worship, the wind, animals, water, all deified as humanlike entities. Enlil was at the top, and Bridget heard the priest assure the women that the wind would be kind this season and not uproot the recent planting; that Aldî-nîfaeti would be kept at bay, harnessed if possible and stopped from causing havoc.

Liberate.

Aldî-nîfaeti—demons.

Unshackle.

For an interminable time Bridget managed to stay connected to the seal, as the priest made his way through the city, boy-slave following and meeting every request. Bridget soaked in the words as she became soaked in sweat from expending so much mental energy. She set as much as she could to memory, but she feared it wouldn’t be enough.