The Tattooed Heart (7 page)

The world of the little rural coffee shop sped up to three or four times normal speed. The three of them, Graciella, Nicolet, and the manager, all began to move
swiftly, hands and feet jerking, heads shifting as rapidly as a nervous bird. The guitar was lifted and set down, lifted and set down, and we heard helium chipmunk versions of songs sung at hyperspeed.

“Stop,” I said.

Graciella was initialing six sheets of paper, and signing the final sheet.

I stood over her shoulder to see, but having power over time and space does not make me capable of understanding a contract.

“We need a lawyer,” I said to Messenger.

“Yes.” He left it like that. Just a
yes
.

But it was not a fatalistic, dead-end
yes
. It was a
yes
followed by an unspoken but implied, “So . . .”

I frowned, very unsure whether what I was thinking would work. If it didn't, I'd have made a fool of myself. Maybe humiliation was part of my duty.

“I want a lawyer,” I said, trying not to grin at the way I was mimicking every police show I'd ever seen.

“Is the coffee here any good?”

This came from a woman who was standing beside me. Just standing there as if she'd been there all along. She was tall, middle-aged, attractive in a middle-aged
sort of way, with large, liquid eyes, dark skin, hair up in dreads, and wearing a beige designer suit.

“I don't know,” I said, staring.

“I suppose I can't drink it anyway,” she said. There was a distinct islands lilt in her English. “It's a drag being disembodied.”

“It's good to see you again, Ms. Johnson,” Messenger said formally.

Ms. Johnson did not answer him except with a disapproving look. She took in the room and said, “I see we are in freeze frame. And who are you?”

“Me? I'm Mara. I'm . . . um . . . the apprentice.”

“Really? Messenger must be nearing the end of his sentence. So, why am I summoned?”

I didn't want to answer that question at that particular moment because I wanted to ask her just who she was, what she was, how she had come here, and from where. But she did not strike me as chatty. “We have a contract we need interpreted.”

“Mmm.” She leaned over Graciella's shoulder and began turning the pages of the contract. As she read she would exclaim. “Ah!” or, “Ho ho!” or, “You shameless bastard.” This went on for several minutes while
Messenger and I just stood there like a couple of waiters with no customers.

Finally Ms. Johnson stood back and said, “Well, that is a very fine bit of legal work, that contract.”

I frowned. “So it's good?”

“It's great—if you're not that foolish girl. It gives an entity named Nicolet Productions Inc. complete ownership of any and all works produced by Graciella Jayne in perpetuity, throughout the universe, etcetera etcetera. For which she will be paid two thousand dollars and no royalty.”

“And that's bad?” I asked cautiously.

“Songwriters make their money off royalties. Every time Nicolet performs a song,
cha ching
, royalty paid to songwriter. Every time Nicolet sells a download,
cha ching
, royalty to songwriter. Like that. This is an ironclad contract that means this girl will lose all rights over all her work and never make a penny beyond the two thousand.”

She said thousand as “tou-sand,” which I liked.

“In short,” Ms. Johnson said, “she's being screwed. Ripped off. Assuming her majority, she'll never be able to write a song again without giving it to Nicolet.”

“She shouldn't sign that,” I said.

“Apprentice girl, you must be new. She's already signed it. She signed it a year ago.”

“Of course.” I blushed. “I knew that.”

“Is that all?” Ms. Johnson asked.

“Thank you,” Messenger said, and the lawyer was as gone as if she'd never been there.

“This job is going to drive me crazy,” I said, trying for “lighthearted.”

“Don't let it,” Messenger said.

7

AS IF TO PROVE I WAS RIGHT, MESSENGER TRANSPORTED us back to Trent and Pete.

“Psychic whiplash,” I muttered.

It was night. Very late, I thought, because we were in an older neighborhood of small, one-story clapboard or brick homes, but few lights shone from the windows.

Occupying a corner was a low brick building that looked very much as if it might once have been a small elementary school. Blue letters on a small white sign read,
Islamic Center of Des Moines.

From the way the two boys staggered and kept having
to suppress giggles, I guessed that this was either later in the life of that bottle of peppermint schnapps, or another night altogether with a different bottle. But they were drunk, intent on mayhem.

Each had a can of spray paint. Pete carried a brick. Trent had armed himself with a metal baseball bat.

First they spray-painted the wall facing the street, and then the front door, with their usual unimaginative slurs and death threats.

Then came the windows.

Crash!

Crash!

The baseball bat smashed. The brick flew. The two of them turned to race back to the car, giddy, excited, yipping and howling.

And there was a man.

He was middle-aged, dark-skinned, a large man, but with a body that seemed twisted by some earlier injury. He moved as though half his body was slow to respond. I wondered if he'd had a stroke, or perhaps been injured.

He was neither armed nor dangerous. But he was outraged.

“What are you doing? What are you doing?”

“Uh . . . smashing the hell out of this place, why do you ask?” This from Trent, exercising his wit. He tapped the baseball bat against the palm of his free hand. He made no effort to run although Pete looked much less confident.

“Come on, man, let's get out of here,” Pete said. He grabbed Trent's arm, but Trent shook him off.

“What are you going to do, old man?” Trent demanded.

“I am calling the police!”

The man pulled out a phone. Trent swung the bat and knocked the phone from his hand. As the man bent to retrieve it, Trent smashed the end of the bat down on the phone, shattering it.

“What are you doing, you crazy boy?” The man had an accent, not one I could identify, but it grew more apparent as he grew more agitated and afraid. “Go away! Go away from here!”

Trent grinned, a dangerous look for him. “Who do you think you're talking to, rag-head? Huh? I'm an American. I live here. I'm from here. I was born here, where the hell are you even from? Iraq?
Gabbagabbafreakistan?”

“I am from Afghanistan, I live here five years since—”

“So shut up! You're probably a terrorist. You going to blow yourself up? You got a bomb in your pocket, old man?”

When the man refused to answer Trent shoved the end of the bat in his chest. The man stumbled back. Trent hit him again and this time the man turned to run.

“Get him!” Trent yelled to Pete. But Pete was backing away, holding up his hands and saying, “No man, no man, we need to get out of here, dude.”

So Trent went racing after the fleeing man. They disappeared from view in the dark, then, a yell, and a solid, sickening
thunk!

The man screamed. “Stop! Stop! You're hurting me!”

Trent was yelling obscenities, grunting as he swung the bat again and again. The sounds of blunt force on flesh and bone were mixed with the hollow metal sound of misses where Trent hit pavement.

The man cried out for help but no lights snapped on in the windows of the neighborhood.

Finally the man fell silent.

Pete, obviously shaken, advanced into the darkness and we followed. Trent stood panting and cursing over the prostrate body. He noticed Pete and gave him a sickly, teeth-baring grin.

“Showed him,” Trent said. “That's one camel-jockey who won't be talking back to a white man again. Yeah.” He kicked the downed man.

“Oh, man, you have messed up bad,” Pete said. “Oh, man, oh, man.” He was hugging himself with anxiety, glancing all around, jumpy as a squirrel.

Far off a siren wailed.

Finally Pete took Trent by the arm and drew him away, leaving Messenger and me to stare down at the form of the battered man. He was still breathing, a fact for which I was grateful. Breathing but bleeding. His face was covered with blood. His hair was matted with blood. His breathing was choked by blood.

“His name is Abdullah Sohal,” Messenger said. Then, in an aside to me, “Have you seen enough of this?”

“I guess we cannot help him,” I said.

“He will survive. As you will see.”

And just like that we were gone from that place and that time and were suddenly in a hospital room, looking
at the same man we'd just seen being beaten. The sun was shining through the hospital window. Abdullah Sohal was having his bandages replaced by a male nurse who was attempting to make stilted, awkward conversation.

“If you have any pain, you have to tell me or one of the other nurses, you understand that, right?”

Abdullah Sohal was swaddled in bandages. There was an IV line in his arm and a thing on his finger to measure oxygen passing through his blood. His left arm was in a webbing cast. The fingers extending from that cast were clean but bruised. As the nurse peeled old gauze away from his face I saw a single mass of bruising. His face was swollen, his lip split open, teeth missing.

“Yes, I will tell you if the pain is greater.”

“Okay. Same if you have any trouble passing urine. Your kidneys took a beating.”

“I noticed.”

The nurse winced. Then, mouth set in a grim line, he said, “This is not us. This is not Iowa. I want you to know that we all want the s.o.b. who did this caught and thrown into jail.”

Sohal sighed. “It was a child. Maybe fifteen or
sixteen. The age of my own son.”

“Your son? Is he on the visitors' list?”

“No, sadly. He is still in Afghanistan, with his mother. My brother looks after them.”

“Ah.”

And that's when Sohal asked the nurse to fetch his wallet. From his wallet he took a photograph.

Of course I knew before I saw. I knew the connection that I would see revealed.

The picture was of the woman who had wept and cried out at the funeral of the boy in the picture. The boy who had died standing up to killers.

“Oh, so
that's
what this is about,” Oriax said, appearing behind me and looking over my shoulder. “Now, I see. But come on, Messenger, you can't really blame young Trent for what happened thousands of miles away.”

“I blame him. He is responsible for what will happen,” Messenger said. “What is
about
to happen in this time line. Abdullah was about to bring his wife and son over to America. He knows his son. He knows his son is outspoken and brave and he fears what may happen to him.”

Now we watched as Sohal composed an email to his
wife and son. It was written in a text I could not begin to decipher, but because of those gifts that come with being made an apprentice to the Messenger of Fear, I could understand it.

“He's not telling them he was beaten up. Just about the vandalism and grave desecration,” I said. “He's saying they'll have to delay plans to come to America. Plans that were to take effect in two weeks.”

“See, he's already over the little tussle he had with Trent,” Oriax said.

I had seen Oriax in action, but had never seen her attempt to halt a reckoning. The last time around she had intervened to help
doom
the evildoer. She had
wanted
him to be punished. She had enjoyed watching a boy burn.

This was different. She was trying to save Trent. She seemed indifferent to Pete, but she badly wanted to save Trent.

“It is not for this crime, but for some use I cannot see,” Messenger mused aloud.

Oriax knew there was no point in denying it. “You do not have the right to punish some future misdeed, Messenger,” she warned.

“True, Oriax. And neither your future-sight nor your wishes will play a part in how I perform my duty.”

“No, of course not,” Oriax sneered. “The ever-so-pure Messenger, idiot tool of a forgotten goddess, dupe of an absurd ancient faith.” Then she turned to me. Some of her overpowering physical magnetism lessened a bit when she was angry. “Perhaps when it's your turn, mini-Messenger, you won't be quite the fool this one is.”

She was gone then. I wondered where she went when she left us. Did she pass the time in some sort of hell? Was it anything like the hell conjured up by some religions? Did she spend her days cavorting with demons and torturing the damned?

Or at the end of her appearances did she retire to some impossible-to-imagine n-dimensional backstage dressing room to await her next curtain call?

But Oriax had left behind a lingering doubt in my mind. “
Is
it fair and just to take Trent and Pete to task for what happens thousands of miles away?”

I was relieved that Messenger did not accuse me of being swayed by Oriax. Instead, as he sometimes did when my question was directly related to my training,
he chose to explain. “Two men decide to steal money from a store. Both vow there will be no violence. But the storekeeper resists and one of them pulls a gun and kills the storekeeper. Under the law of most nations both men are equally guilty of murder.”

“Yes, but—”

“Why are they both guilty if neither intended to kill the storekeeper and only one man fired the gun?”

“Because . . . because . . . well,” I admitted, “when I started this sentence I thought I knew the answer. But I obviously don't.”

“Admitting ignorance is a good thing,” Messenger said, sounding disconcertingly like an algebra teacher I used to have. “The intention was not to kill, but it was to break the law, to do a wicked thing. When you choose to do evil you break faith with gods and men. You declare yourself an enemy to law and morality. You choose to serve the purposes of foul creatures and forces. Trent and Pete assaulted the girl. Their school evicted them. They made matters infinitely worse, then, with violent attacks. Did they anticipate that they were setting off a chain of events that would result in Aimal's death? No. No more than the man who drives a car while drunk
intends to kill a pedestrian. And yet he is held responsible.”

“Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden,” I said, quoting from memory. “For, I tell you that to hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love.”

Messenger's mouth opened and closed like a beached trout. “You astonish me.”

“Well,” I said breezily, “I'm a very astonishing girl.”

“Yes. At times you are.” Then, he looked at me. As if he had never really seen me before. And my heart jumped.

“But a tired girl as well, I think. This day has included an encounter with a demon. That is enough. You need rest and food.”

“Don't you?” I asked. I don't know why I asked that. It was impertinent, and Messenger never seemed to want me to acknowledge that he was, after all, as human as I was. Or at least I believed he was.

“Yes,” he said, surprising me.

He looked weary. There were times when he seemed almost to be made of something stronger than flesh, when he would look invulnerable. But this was not one
of those times. His pale skin looked like fine, bone china, translucent and fragile. He always stood strong and erect, never slumped, and I had come to unconsciously mimic that pose. But within that rigidity were gradations, subtle hints of shoulders not quite square, of breaths only half breathed, of a head carried like a balanced weight that might topple to the side.

The silence had lengthened and I knew he was seeing things not there in the room with us. He carried a burden, and though he never complained, it was painful for him. The fact that this burden was in large degree to do with the mysterious Ariadne, and that the sadness that was so much a part of him was all about lost love, did bother me, I won't deny it. Was I jealous of the invisible and thus eternally perfect Ariadne?

Hopeless, I told myself. Don't go down that path. Don't have those thoughts.

I am not to be touched.

That had been his warning to me, and when I had inadvertently touched him I had been flooded with a terrible highlights reel of his life as a messenger. I had seen things that . . .

I froze.

Those memories . . . I had pushed them away in self-defense. But they were still buried in my brain, weren't they? If I chose I could summon them and go through them. Couldn't I?

But why would I? Just to better understand the enigmatic boy in black? Would I endure that psychic pain just to know Messenger?

He was, at the moment, the only other person in my life. Somewhere in time or space my mother and my friends were there, living their lives, as I drifted through time, forward and backward. Someday I hoped, believed, told myself, I would be back to that life. This would all end someday, and with the power to move through time I should be able to reinsert myself right where I left off. Like picking up a book you've put down.

That was my hope, what I told myself, but I did not know. Nor did I ask. I rationalized that questions to Messenger are seldom answered and therefore futile, but the truth was that I wasn't sure I wanted to know. I did not want to believe that I was “missing” from the real world, that the people who loved me were suffering, worrying about me. My burden was already too great, my control over myself too tenuous. I am insatiably
curious, and cannot help but wonder, yet I must, at the same time, do what I can to preserve my sanity.

Of course, in any event, I wouldn't be the same person, would I? My God, what would I even have to say to my old friends? How would I be my mother's daughter when I had known such terrors and used such power?

Part of me wanted to stay and finish with Trent now. But Messenger's instincts were right: I was starving and sad and in need of a break. Trent would be there when we returned.