He owed the Father more than he could ever repay, so if Father Harry needed new runes to keep the mission roof from leaking, Alex was happy to do it. Leslie didn’t understand, she couldn’t understand, and he didn’t blame her for that. She was right, helping the Father and his Mission was a drain on the business, but Alex simply didn’t care. Family was family, and Father Harry was family.
“Gonna have to take a rain check,” he said to Mary as he made his way back to the lunch counter.
“You sure?” she asked, her lips in an adorable pout. “It’ll only be another minute and a half.” As if to punctuate her words, the toast popped up from the toaster. The aroma of perfectly browned bread made his stomach growl.
He hesitated. Every minute he sat here was another minute water was pouring into the Mission’s great hall. On the other hand, it would take him at least thirty minutes to get there on the crawler and anything already wet wasn’t going to get any wetter if he took five minutes to eat.
“All right,” he said, sitting down. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Mary was such agreeable company.
Almost exactly a minute and a half later, she presented him with a plate of perfectly poached eggs on generously buttered toast.
“What did you call these?” he asked through a mouthful.
“That’s Adam and Eve on a raft with axle grease,” she said with a giggle.
Alex had heard this before, of course; waitresses and cooks in diners were always yelling such unintelligible nonsense around.
“You worked in a diner?”
“I love to cook, so I moved to the big city to try my hand here,” she said. Her voice had a lilting, far-away quality to it as she spoke. “Then, when I got here, I found out that being a cook anywhere is a serious boy’s club. The only jobs a woman can get cooking is places like this where you have to look good. No one ever wonders what the cook looks like in a diner, or a five-star restaurant for that matter.”
“Well, these eggs are perfect,” Alex said. He liked them soft, with the yokes hot but runny and the whites cooked hard, something an inexplicable number of cooks couldn’t seem to master.
“Thank you, Alex,” she said, beaming. When she smiled like that, Mary was really quite attractive.
Alex wolfed down his food and gave Mary a dime tip.
“Are you really a good cook?” he asked. She raised an eyebrow and leaned across the counter at him.
“Come back sometime,” she said. “Try me.”
Alex pulled out his pocket notepad and scribbled an address on it.
“There’s this place a few blocks from the park called The Lunch Box,” he said, tearing out the paper and handing it to her. “It’s a bit of a dog-wagon, but I know the owner. Ask for Max and tell him Alex Lockerby said you need to cook for him. He’ll give you a fair shot.”
“Hasn’t he got a cook?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But he stinks. The old cook retired and Max brought this new kid. He’s terrible. I hate to eat there anymore.”
“Why go?” Mary asked.
“It’s the only place near my apartment.”
“Thanks, Alex,” Mary said, tucking the paper into the pocket of her apron. “Will I see you again?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “I expect you to start cooking at my favorite place. You’ll see a lot of me then.”
“I think I’d like that,” Mary said with a very agreeable smile.
Alex doffed his hat, then took out one of Burt’s cigarettes and lit it. He tore a Minor Barrier Rune out of his book and cast it on himself.
“See you soon, Mary,” he said, then stepped out into the downpour.
The promise of paying work for the police let Alex justify the taxi ride over to Danny’s crime scene, but helping out Father Harry meant taking the crawler. Most big cities had a streetcar service, but New York’s was unlike anything in the world. The Crawler was one of J.D. Rockefeller’s inventions. Most sorcerers got rich marketing various enchanted materials, like Barton with his power capacitor in the Empire Tower, or Sorsha Kincaid, the Ice Queen who enchanted the metal disks used to keep iceboxes cold. Rockefeller was a whole different kind of sorcerer; when he put his power to work, he made tens of millions. When he first showed off the crawler, people said he’d finally gone insane.
Alex rounded the corner and made his way down the block to the crawler station. A half-dozen people were crowded under a metal awning that covered a single bench. As Alex approached, they all looked down the block expectantly, so he quickened his pace. The crawler swept into view, two blocks away, but it still made it to the station before Alex. It looked like a normal two-decker streetcar from the wheel carriages up, but it crawled along the ground on dozens of legs made of blue energy. It looked more like a giant, glowing centipede than a streetcar.
The crawler skittered to a stop and Alex jogged the last few feet to board. As he stepped up, he felt his weight cause the streetcar to shift a bit, then its legs adjusted and leveled it. The car was crammed with passengers, all huddling away from the doors to stay out of the wet and cold. Alex’s barrier would work for at least another half hour so he sat in one of the front stairwells and watched the city go by. The big advantage of crawlers was that they could go much faster than an electric or cable-driven streetcar, and they rode a lot smoother. They seemed to flow over even the roughest ground as if it were still water. For a dime, it was quite a ride.
Alex got off a few blocks from the Brotherhood of Hope Mission. Crawlers needed reliable power for their energy legs, so they never ventured too far into the outer ring. As he walked, Alex could feel his barrier rune beginning to fade and he quickened his pace. By the time he reached the mission, he was just beginning to get damp.
His knock at the door was answered by an old black nun who looked a hundred if she was a day. Despite her frail appearance, she let out a whoop of joy at the sight of Alex and hugged the stuffing out of him.
“How are you, boy?” she said when he’d finally disentangled himself from her. “Why haven’t you been around more lately?”
“I’m sorry, Sister Gwen,” he said. Alex blushed and didn’t hide it. “Things have been busy at work.”
Sister Gwen grunted, a sound that clearly indicated she thought this was a poor excuse.
“I hear the roof is leaking again,” he prompted, changing the subject. The old nun nodded and turned away, motioning for him to follow.
“Father Clementine’s been expecting you.”
She led him down familiar paths, past the dormitories and the kitchen and into the main hall. It was vast and open, like a warehouse, and Alex could see several unbroken streams of water falling down into strategically placed buckets. As he watched, two men in cassocks pulled a full bucket out from under one of the streams while an older man in a simple robe replaced it with an empty one.
“Be careful dumping that,” the man in the robe said. “I don’t want to have to mop the vestibule again.”
Alex gave Sister Gwen a parting hug and stepped up beside the older man. He was tall and worn with a craggy complexion and an enormous nose in the middle of his face. A thick crop of unkempt hair adorned his head, still jet black despite his being at least seventy. His hands were rough, calloused, and big, like boxers’ hands. As far as Alex knew, however, those hands had never been used in anger.
“I think two grown men can handle a bucket full of water,” Alex said.
“Alex,” the big man said, tuning to envelop Alex’s right hand in his. “How are you, son?” Before Alex could answer, he went on. “Sorry to bring you down here again, but…well, you see.” He waved at the leaks, as if somehow Alex might have missed them.
“No problem, Father,” Alex said. “Always happy to help out. In fact, I should have come down sooner to check on the runes.”