Water To Burn Part 30

Ari managed to drive us down to Market Street without causing an accident. He dropped me off at Fourth Street, then drove off to park the car in the public lot at Fifth and Mission. On Market, I hurried along the sidewalk, crowded with shoppers and workers on coffee breaks. As I pa.s.sed under the row of plane trees, I noticed that some of them had swollen buds on their branches, a promise of leaves.

In his old green parka and filthy slacks, Sarge stood in front of the slice of Roman bath otherwise known as the entrance to the Flood Building. A black-and-white patrol car sat at the curb. A uniformed officer was talking to Sarge, and from the way he'd shoved his pale pink face right into Sarge's dark brown one I suspected the worst. As I came up to them, I heard Sarge say, "I told you, I'm waiting for a girl I know, and here she is now."

The cop looked me over with a twisted scowl around his mouth. "Yeah?" he said. "Okay, then, you can both move along."

He sauntered back to the patrol car. We walked up to the crosswalk that led over Market to Bloomingdale's.

"Am I glad to see you!" Sarge said. "I got that letter for you."

"You do? Where's the rabbi?"

"In San Francisco General. He's been back a few days, sick as a dog."

"What's wrong with him?"

"The pneumonia, I'm betting. He told me that the flying saucer people dumped water on him, and he got a chill from it. Or something like that. He wasn't making much sense by then."

"I guess not. How bad is it?"

"Real bad. Me and some of the boys got him down to Emergency last night. Finally. He didn't want to go, but he was coughing and spitting too hard for too long."

The light changed. We worked our way through the crowd of pedestrians coming across. On the other side, I looked back. The squad car and its driver, that overexcited champion of Order, had left.

"Ain't no use standing around in front of this store," Sarge jerked a thumb at Bloomingdale's. "They got private heat to roust us."

"Let's go down to Fifth," I said.

"Good idea."

We walked past the fancy indoor mall and around the corner under the scornful eyes of enormous fas.h.i.+on models, photographs, that is, three-times-life-size posters that covered the windows of the Westfield Building. Down on Fifth Street, we found a spot to talk by a loading dock, closed at the moment with a metal pull-down door. We stood in front of three normal-sized posters advertising gold jewelry. Out on the street, traffic snarled and honked. Pedestrians hurried by, glanced our way, then looked somewhere else fast.

Sarge reached under his parka and pulled out a beaten-up brownish envelope that had started life white. He handed it to me. I tried to say thanks but sobbed instead-just once. On the front it read "for Nola O'Grady" in my father's handwriting.

"What's wrong?" Sarge said.

"I thought he was dead," I said. "My dad."

"Jeezus!"

"Yeah." I stuffed the letter into an inside pocket of the jacket. From another pocket, I brought out a twenty and a pack of cigarettes. "Thanks." I handed them over.

"Thank you." Sarge grinned with a display of missing teeth. "Aint you gonna open it?"

"Curious?"

"Real curious. Look, the rabbi wants to see you, too. If you want to see him, you better go down there right away. He's pretty bad off. He kept talking about wanting to see you and someone he called s.h.i.+ra's boy. Know who that is?"

"Not for sure, but maybe."

"The rabbi told me that he went to Israel to look for s.h.i.+ra's boy but couldn't find him. So he came back here to give you the letter. I told him, no way you could get to Israel and back again. He didn't say nothing to that, and then the doctor made me leave, because they was going to X-ray him."

I took the letter out of my pocket. I wanted to read it. I was afraid to read it. Finally, I got up my courage and tore off a corner so I could slit it open with a fingernail. When I took out the letter, Sarge caught his breath.

"That paper," he said, "looks like the c.r.a.p they give you inside."

"Sure does, yeah," I said.

Cheap wood pulp paper, lined, and the piece measured maybe four inches by six. At the top Dad had put a number-his number, I a.s.sumed, in whatever prison he was in. He'd covered every inch of the rest with tiny writing, except for one printed line at the bottom, which read "Moorwood H Block 814 Inspected 77."

"They sent him up, for sure," I said. "At least he's not dead."

"What did he do?"

"Long story." My hands began to shake.

"You read it." Sarge took a step to put himself between me and the sidewalk, then turned his back to me. "I'm too d.a.m.n nosy."

I leaned against the cold damp stone of the wall behind me and read. "Nola, I'll pray to every saint I can remember that you get this. They're letting Reb Ezekiel out without the StopCollar on, so maybe he can get back. I'm sending it to you because you're the one with the brains in our cursed family. Tell your mother I never meant to leave her and you kids. I didn't think they'd come that far-"

"Oh, s.h.i.+t!" Sarge said. "That lousy undercover cop!"

I looked up and saw Ari striding down the sidewalk toward us. He had his hands shoved into the pockets of his leather jacket, but when I ran an SPP, I picked up annoyance, not rage.

"It's okay," I said. "Yeah, he's a cop, but he's one of my regular johns, too. I was supposed to meet him over on Market."

"I hope the b.a.s.t.a.r.d pays you."

"Yeah, he does. He's not one of those f.u.c.k me or get busted cops." I stepped away from the wall. "Hey, good-looking! Think you could give me a ride somewhere? Or are you on duty?"

"Off for the day," Ari said. "Where do you need to go?"

"San Francisco General. The rabbi sent me this letter, and he's in there with-" I glanced at Sarge.

"Pneumonia," Sarge said. "I hope you ain't gonna bust him for something."

"No," Ari said. "There's no warrant out on him. That's what I was trying to tell you that day in the park."

"Guess I should have listened. The way the rabbi freaked like that, I thought you was after him for sure."

"A reasonable supposition," Ari said. "But wrong."

"Look, Sarge," I said. "Thanks. I mean, jeez, really, thanks. I might have another twenty to give you later-" I glanced at Ari and raised an eyebrow. "Like, an advance on what you're going to owe me, huh?"

Ari pulled out his wallet. "Very well, but you'd better not run out on me now."

"Nah. You're the only guy I, like, look forward to."

Ari handed Sarge a twenty. "I must admit," he said, "it gripes me to see a veteran like you out on the streets. What's wrong with this sodding country?"

"I kind of wonder myself," Sarge said. "Thanks."

I started to read the rest of Dad's letter in the car, in between bursts of giving Ari directions. "I didn't think they'd come that far to fetch me, or I never would have let myself have the luxury of a family. I love you all, and I miss you. I can't tell you how much I miss you." At that point I began to cry. I put the letter back in the inner pocket and found some old tissues in another.

"I'll finish it later," I said.

"Good idea," Ari said. "We're nearly there."

While I was wiping my face, I blotted off the worst of that red lipstick, too.

San Francisco General Hospital sits over on Potrero Avenue on the fringe of the Outer Mission district. The red brick buildings with their 1930s Deco trim stand behind a green lawn and a wrought iron fence, topped with spikes to keep the druggies out of the dispensary. Reb Joseph Witzer, they told us at the public entrance, had been admitted to one of the wards in the new building, a huge gray concrete monster looming behind a parking lot. As we walked over to the front doors, I began to tremble, because despite the late afternoon sun, I felt cold, a deep numbing chill.

"What's wrong?" Ari said.

"I don't know. Some kind of warning, I guess."

As abruptly as it had started, the s.h.i.+vering stopped.

At first, the woman at the admissions desk refused to tell us the rabbi's location. Ari brought out his Interpol ID, which made her phone the head nurse of the s.h.i.+ft to ask if Witzer could see visitors.

"Ari," I said, "is your mother's first name s.h.i.+ra?"

"Yes." He gave me a sharp look. "How do you know that?"

Rather than answer, I spoke to the guardian dragon. "This is the man the rabbi keeps talking about. Could you tell the head nurse that seeing him will help calm her patient down?"

She nodded and did. The ploy worked. We got permission.

We went up in the elevator, got lost, found the room eventually, a long narrow s.p.a.ce, painted a cheerful yellow, with four beds in it. Two were empty. In the third lay an elderly African-American man who muttered and tossed his head back and forth. I noticed that he'd been strapped down. In the last bed, by the window, lay Reb Ezekiel. A small lamp clipped to one of the monitors above showered a pool of light onto the floor beside the bed. We could see, but he lay in comfortable shadow.

Dressed in a hospital robe, he looked more like a stick of driftwood than a man. His gray hair, peyes and beard were long, combed back but matted with sweat. His scrawny hands clutched the blue blankets. Tubes in his nostrils connected him to an oxygen tank. He lay so still that I had a bad moment of wondering if he'd died, but his eyes snapped open, dark eyes glittering in a ma.s.s of fine wrinkles.

"Hah!" he whispered. "Not the other one. s.h.i.+ra's boy."

"Yes," Ari said. "And this is Nola O'Grady."

Ezekiel turned his head a couple of inches in my direction. He rested, breathing heavily, then whispered, "The letter?"

"I have it," I said. "Thank you."

"Good man, your father. He protected me." Ezekiel closed his eyes again. "From the gangs."

"What was he in for? Can you tell me?"

"Transport across the world line." Ezekiel coughed, a horrible rasp. I grabbed some tissues from a box on the side table and held them in front of his mouth so he could spit. "Not the accessory." He fell back against the pillows and gasped. "They never could prove the shootings."

A nurse came hurrying down the line of beds. She looked at me and tapped her wrist.w.a.tch in a significant manner. I nodded to show I'd understood and dropped the tissues into the wastebasket.

"Ariel." Ezekiel opened his eyes again and looked at Ari. "They're coming. One of them is already here. And there are agents, human agents."

Once again, he coughed with that horrible rasp. I held the tissues and wiped his mouth for him. He smiled in thanks, then began to speak in Hebrew. Ari leaned close and murmured something in the same. Ezekiel went on speaking for a few minutes until he began to wheeze, choking, it sounded like, on his words.

"It's the fluid in his lungs," the nurse said. "You need to go."

"Right," I said. "Is it viral?"

"I'm afraid so."

I realized then, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, that Reb Ezekiel would die before the night was out. I didn't need to be psychic to see it. Ari spoke another sentence or two to the old man, who smiled. We let the nurse usher us out.

Neither of us spoke as we left the building. As we were walking across the parking lot, I glanced back at the ma.s.sive concrete slab. The west-facing windows gleamed with gold fire. I began to s.h.i.+ver again, so badly that I summoned Qi from the sunset air just to keep from fainting.

"Let's get you home," Ari said.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess this is some kind of premonition. Something not nice may be going to happen."

As soon as we were seated in the car, the cold s.h.i.+vers disappeared. Maybe they were just repeating the message about Reb Ezekiel's coming death, or so I told myself. The rea.s.surance lacked conviction.

I read the rest of Dad's letter on the way back to the flat. "I can't tell you how much I miss you. When I get parole they'll put the StopCollar on me, so I'll never see you all again. I'm paying for something that's a crime here but not where you are, a serious crime, though it never harmed anyone. Forgive me. If I could explain I would, but I don't know if you'd understand or not. They took me away too soon. I don't know what talents you or the other children developed, though I'd bet even money that Dan's the most normal of all of us. Maybe Maureen turned out normal, too. Sean and Kathleen-they're the kind of people who always find someone to take care of them. You, I trust to take care of yourself. I worry about Pat in particular because of those lines on his palms. And Michael, my poor little Mike! The seventh gets the worst of it. I know. I'm one. I hope and pray to G.o.d that you're all well and safe. With all my love. Remember me. Tell your mother I'm sorry we fought so much. Dad."

I sobbed, I'll admit it. I read the letter again and sobbed all the way through it. Ari said nothing, just drove grimly on, the best thing he could have done.

By the time we reached our flat, I'd gotten control of myself. I washed my face and changed into a pair of jeans that fit so I could breathe and an indigo-and-white print blouse. I put the letter and my cell phone on my desk next to the computer, then flopped onto the couch.

"You look exhausted," Ari said.

"I am," I said. "But I should take the letter over to Aunt Eileen, so she can give it to Mother."

"Tomorrow will do." Ari sat down next to me. "It's been thirteen years. One day more won't matter."

"You've got a point there."

He was watching me in wide-eyed expectation.

"Okay," I said. "It looks like my father was a coyote, all right. He transported people across deviant levels. Apparently, that's a crime wherever he is. They have something called a StopCollar that he'll be stuck wearing when he's paroled. I'm guessing that it interferes with the world-walker talent. Maybe with others, too, I don't know. But he doesn't think he can make it back here. I got the impression that he's a couple of levels away, not just one."

"He seems to have befriended Ezekiel in prison."

"Yeah. I don't know what Zeke's doppelganger did over there, but whatever crime it was, Zeke didn't have to wear the collar, so he could world-walk home once he got out. He took the letter as a favor, I guess, for Dad."

"What was the name of the prison? Did your father say?"

"Moorwood. It's printed on the paper."

Ari thought for a long minute or two. "I don't know of any prison with that name. I can look it up, but it sounds British to me. Except it can't be, because it's not."

"It's got an H Block."

"That's significant, yes. I suppose." Ari made his growling noise. "I don't know what we can believe anymore. A perfectly logical a.s.sumption here might have nothing to do with the reality over there."