bronze studs set in wood that looked older than the house itself.
“We’re too late,” I said, grasping the gate and jiggling it in case the catch released. “He’s closed.”
“He knows what’s at stake,” Johnny said grimly.
“Yeah, must be why he locked the door and turned off all the lights.”
She got out her cell phone and pressed what seemed like two dozen numbers on the little orange-lit pad. “Ha, wow, look at that. Forty-five missed calls. None from Mom.”
“Yikes. Anything from… from my mom?”
“Rutger would never let them. I’m sorry, I know it’s scary, but… hello? Igor? It’s John... at your front door. Yes, Tunisia. Yes, on the street. You can go right back to bed after. I need to... Yes. It’s what we talked about. No, I know it’s crazy that I’m here, with my body, at your house. I know.”
A light went on in an upstairs room. Further down the street, silent, I saw a flash of blue and red—cop lights. No way a cop would let a bounty hunter get that money, I thought. She’d said so. The Society, maybe. Without speaking, we moved slowly into the shadows beneath the big tree by the gate. That, too, quite a coincidence. The society people again, Sofia the Suspiciously Good Samaritan? Secret detective work? Or was it just that millions of perfectly random people had seen us on CNN today?
Finally a dark shadow padded through the courtyard—a stocky man barely taller than Johnny, in a loose white robe and slippers, holding a lantern with violet glass in the panes. As he got closer I saw designs etched into the glass and wondered if it meant something or if it was just decorative; everything seemed like a system of signs now. He was mostly bald, dark hair cut short where it remained, scalp visible through it.
“Stand back,” he said, and I followed Johnny as she backed into the street. We turned just in time to see a blue-white flare, like the light of an arc welder, fade from the gate’s heavy lock. “Quick, quick. Who’s this?”
“He knows,” she said, as if that were an answer. As we passed under the gate I felt a bone-deep tingle, as if I’d been briefly electrocuted; the air shimmered in front of me. Johnny’s hair rose for a second, then settled back down. She said, “Protection?”
“No. Who is so strong? Not me. A glamour only, to hide the call of the books. I put it on days ago, when you first called. Shouldn’t have worked, should have needed too much power. Hmmph.” He unlocked the front door with an ordinary key, but tapped the brass studs quickly in a pattern almost too fast to see before he opened it. Inside, it smelled like fresh, unfired clay, books, and incense. Broken-up sticks of the stuff lay unburnt in flat bronze dishes hanging on chains from the ceiling. Bad place for open flames. The walls were bare, white clay, undecorated with the tiles I had seen everywhere else.
He looked at me. “You. She didn’t answer the question.”
“Nick Prasad.” I looked down into his face, creased and squashed with sleep, his eyes blue but surrounded by pink, bleary.
“Where you from? Here? Assyrian, Akkadian? Not a Hittite.”
“Um,” I said. “We’re from Guyana. I was born in Canada.”
“Guyana? You don’t look African.”
“Guy-ana,” I said. “Not Ghana.”
“Then you don’t look South American.” He turned to Johnny, face pleading. “Look at this thing you drag with you, full of lies.”
“Guyana is crammed with Indians that the British brought over to work on the sugarcane plantations,” I said, annoyed. “Read a book sometime.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Speaking of which, don’t touch the books. And as for you”—he held the lantern closer to her, so that the lavender light joined their faces, matching expressions of anger and impatience—“you say you’ll make this right.”
“I said I’d try.”
“On the phone. You said. You knew how to do it.”
“I said I knew how to find out how,” she said. “You’re splitting hairs. Are you going to let me down there or not?”
He chuckled, a thick, angry noise. “Some choice. Some choice you give me.”
The plain white hallway led to another big, studded door, this one locked top to bottom—seven locks, all different and some as big as a Frisbee—and barred with a wrist-thick iron rod. He continued, not looking at either of us as he fumbled in his robe for a keychain: “I watch the news too, I see what they say. I get emails from all over.