Karl started to say something, but he was interrupted by a commotion from the reception area. I stood up, went to the door of the squad room, and looked out.
Four people, three men and a woman, were standing at the P.A.'s desk, all of them screaming at Louise the Tease. From what I could gather, one of their tribe had been busted earlier in the evening, and they'd all come down to demand his release, on the grounds that he was king of the gypsies. It's the same crap they usually pull when one of their own gets picked up. Everybody's the king of the gypsies, unless it's a woman who's been arrested. She gets to be queen.
Louise the Tease is known not to take no shit from nobody, but she was outnumbered, and nobody can kick up a fuss like a Gypsy. I was about to head over there and give her a hand when I realized that Vollman was standing just over my right shoulder. "Permit me," he said quietly.
I moved aside, and he stood in the doorway, where I'd been. I expected him to go into Reception and approach the P.A.'s desk, but he stood where he was.
" Chavaia!"
The gypsies must have understood the word, because they all turned toward Vollman, looking both startled and annoyed. Then they saw who it was, and the annoyance vanished like a coin in a conjuring trick. Both their voices and expressions became very still.
" Dinili, te maren, denash! Te khalion tai te shingerdjon che gada par brajo ents chai plamendi!"
Vollman didn't yell, but it didn't look like they had any trouble hearing him. " Te lolirav phuv mure ratesa. Arctu viriumca ba treno al qua pashasha. Mucav!"
Without another word, the four gypsies turned and left the room. They didn't quite run.
Vollman nodded once, then turned and returned to his seat. I followed.
Karl stared at the old man. "What the hell did you say to them?"
Vollman produced the thin smile again. "I merely suggested they stop bothering the young lady and take their concerns elsewhere. Without delay."br›
"I notice they didn't give you an argument," I said.
Vollman shrugged. "For some of these people, I am, as you say, The Man."
"So, what kind of person would want this book, the Opus Mago, bad enough to torture and kill for it?" I asked Vollman. "We're talking about a wizard or witch for starters, right?"
"Almost certainly," he said. "No one else would have any hope of being able to make use of it."
"You said something about 'arrogant' before," I added.
"Indeed, yes," Vollman said. "As I told you, the Opus Mago contains spells and rituals for invoking the darkest of dark powers. It is considered a book of forbidden knowledge, and closely guarded, for that reason."
"So where's the arrogance come in?" Karl asked.
"In the belief that anyone, regardless of training or experience, can hope to control such powers once they have been summoned," Vollman said.
"You're saying nobody could do it," Karl said.
Vollman shook his head slowly. "I will not say that, not with certainty. But I think it highly unlikely that such control, even if it were achieved, could be maintained for long."
"Maybe we ought to stop pussyfooting around this with terms like 'dark powers' and all that," I said. "You're not talking about just conjuring up some demon, are you?"
"No," Vollman said. "As your partner reminded us earlier, that has become almost a mundane practice in these times."
"What then?" I was afraid that I already knew the answer.
And I was right, I did. "Something very, very bad," Vollman said. "There are a variety of spells, invocations, and rituals contained within the Opus Mago. Each, it is believed, permits access to a spiritual entity of immense power and great malevolence. One, supposedly, contains the means for calling up Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec snake god, which has grown immensely powerful from the all blood sacrifices made to it over centuries."
"But all that human sacrifice stuff ended hundreds of years ago, once the Spaniards took over," I said.
Vollman looked at me and shrugged. "If you choose to believe so."
"What else?" Karl asked. "There's got to be more than that."
"Indeed there is, Detective," Vollman told him. "For example, there are those who say the book describes a ritual for awakening one or more of the Great Old Ones, those creatures that supposedly existed before man, and which still await the day when they may supplant him."
"Now I know you're yanking our chains," I said. "That stuff's right out of Lovecraft, and you already said he made it all up."
Vollman shook his head. "No, Sergeant, I only said that Lovecraft made up the Necronomicon. The veracity of his other material is… open to dispute, shall we say. Some maintain that he discovered things that man was not meant to know, and it was that knowledge which eventually drove him mad."
"You keep saying things like 'there are those who say,' and 'it is believed,'" I said. "So, you haven't looked at the book yourself."
"No, I have not, nor did I ever wish to," Vollman said. "But I have, over the years, talked to several people who did." He gave me the thin smile again. "They were the ones who survived the experience, with their sanity intact, of course."
"So, all right," Karl said. "This Opus Mago is a recipe book for cooking up different kinds of Truly Bad Shit. And it's been stolen by somebody who plans to whip up a big, smelly batch of ian thiv›
"Inelegantly put, Detective," Vollman said with a nod, "but an admirably succinct summary, nonetheless."
"Big question is," I said, "how are we going to know when he makes the attempt?"
Vollman's thin face, which would never be used to illustrate "cheerful" in the dictionary, became even more solemn. "You will know, Sergeant," he said. "Have no concerns on that account. You will know."
The first of the murders occurred four nights later, and we almost missed it.
The case could easily have been written off as a routine homicide. It would have been, too, if Hugh Scanlon hadn't given me a call.
Turned out, it was the right thing to do. This homicide was anything but routine.
A lot of "regular" detectives don't like the Supe Squad very much – I think they take that "when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you" stuff too seriously. But Scanlon's all right. I knew him from when we were both in Homicide. I eventually moved on to Supernatural Crimes for reasons of my own, but Scanlon kept working murders, and he's a Detective First now.
The crime scene was the alley behind Tim Riley's Bar and Grill, and by the time Karl and I showed up, the routine was well under way. Nudging some rubbernecking civilians aside, I lifted the yellow crime scene tape so Karl could duck under it. Then I followed him down the alley, the smell of rotting garbage strong enough to gag a sewer rat.
We made our way through the usual collection of the M.E.'s people, forensics techs, uniformed cops, and Homicide dicks, all of them busy or trying to look that way. Mostly they ignored us, apart from one or two hostile glances. But eventually Scanlon spotted us and came over.
"Vic's a white male, around thirty, throat cut, bled out where we found him," he said. Scanlon's never been known to use two words when he can get by with one.
"So why call us?" I asked him. "Sounds like a bar fight that moved out here, then went bad."
"I thought so, too," Scanlon said. "Then I saw something. Come on."
He led us over to where some forensics guy was taking photos of the body, his strobe flashing in the semi-darkness.
"You about done?" Scanlon asked him.
The guy looked up and realized he wasn't being asked a question. "Yeah, sure, all finished," he said, and backed off.
Scanlon produced a pencil flashlight and clicked it on. The beam lingered for a moment on the throat wound that looked like a sardonic grin, then moved up to the victim's face. The dead guy had a thick head of brown hair, and some of it was combed down over his forehead. With his free hand, encased in a latex glove, Scanlon lifted the hair away so that we could see the victim's forehead clearly, and then I understood why we'd been called.