“Aaahhhhh…”
With a moan she backed away from the corpse. When she bumped into the door she shrieked softly, covered her mouth with her hand. She stood there for a long time, staring. Finally she gazed down at the lunula dangling from her fingers.
In the dim light it looked almost black. The spots where the blood had dried were like jagged bites in the soft metal. As she stared, the blood staining the silver began to glow. The metal grew hot, so hot she cried aloud, but just as she moved to fling it away, the crescent cooled, as rapidly as a hot poker stuck in the snow. She saw where lines began to stand out on the smooth silver, the full curves and swells of its moons so brilliant they looked molten. Magda thought it would begin to drip, spattering liquescent metal upon the floor.
But then the lines faded, red to black to grey. The lunula’s surface gleamed as before, pure and smooth as though it had been cast anew.
She waited more than an hour before leaving his room. When she did, she saw no one. Not then; not when she bolted into the filthy bathroom at the end of the hall to wash. Not when she left the next day, her duffel bag stuffed with books and clothes, a small newspaper-wrapped bundle beneath her arm. She had paid for her room in advance; there was no one who cared when she departed, as long as it was before Friday. She had spent the intervening hours curled in a ball on her mattress, feverish, nearly delirious, waiting for the sound of footsteps that never came. When she finally left the pensione she walked quickly. She crossed several streets until she came to an empty alley. Without stopping, without even hesitating, she dropped the bundle containing Peter’s bloodstained shirt into the gutter.
Her flight left Athens as scheduled. While the customs officials spent twenty minutes going through her bag, and confiscated a model of a water clock that she had purchased in a shop near the old Agora, they took no notice of the crescent moon that hung pale and lucent as a tear against her throat.
“Excuse me—oh!”
Someone bumped into her and Magda winced. She ducked her head and let the lunula slip behind the silken folds of her dress.
“Well, well! Professor Kurtz! We’re sorry to be losing you again, Magda.”
It was Harold Mosreich, he who had attained such success with his work in the Yucatán and was now a fully tenured professor of Central American Archaeology at the Divine. He smiled at her, genuinely forlorn: whether because he had bumped her or because she was leaving, she had no idea. Magda smiled and leaned over to kiss his cheek, catching a whiff of talc and Lilac Vegetal.
“Oh, Harold. You’re the only one.”
He shook his head. “Not at all. Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.”
“So soon?”
At mention of Balthazar’s name she grew cold. She thought of the naphaïm in her room; of the faces she had glimpsed in the silver basin, the boy and girl she had come in search of tonight. She stammered, “I was actually supposed to leave earlier, but I stayed on a few extra days. Bind up a couple of loose ends. You know…”
Her voice trailed off. She wished she’d gotten another drink, or a canapé, something to use as a prop and distract Harold, keep him from looking at her face. She felt the lunula like a brand burning at her throat. How could she have been so stupid as to wear it here?
“Oh. Well, maybe he was sorry you hadn’t left sooner, then.”
She glanced at him sharply, but Harold’s expression was without irony. He was gazing across the room at a drift of white-clad nuns blocking one of the service doors.
“You don’t suppose they’re all going to the bathroom together, do you?” he asked. When Magda raised her eyebrows he went on, “It’s just that Balthazar particularly asked that we don’t have a lot of traffic upstairs tonight—they were supposed to cordon off that end, but then the loo by the kitchen backed up, and—well, you don’t want to hear all this, do you?”
He took her hand and shook it affectionately. “Good luck, Magda. Have a safe flight back.”
“Thank you, Harold.”
She smiled as she watched him make his way through the crowd, his bald head gleaming beneath the gently swaying chandeliers. Before Harold reached the doors leading upstairs, she turned to snare more champagne from a passing waiter.
And so she didn’t see Balthazar Warnick step from behind the cluster of nuns to greet Harold Mosreich, with Francis Xavier Connelly looming behind him. By then Magda Kurtz was much too far away to hear Harold’s words to her former mentor, or to see how the tenured professor of Central American Archaeology sketched a half circle in the air, his melancholy eyes even sadder than they had been a few minutes earlier. She did not see how Balthazar Warnick nodded as she took her champagne flute, or how he marked the tenebrous halo about her like a cloud’s passing, the glint of silver at her breast.
CHAPTER 7
Night of the Electric Insects
I ALWAYS WONDER WHAT would have happened if I hadn’t gone with Baby Joe for those two vodka tonics. If instead, I’d gone over there to stand with Angelica and Professor Kurtz. In my head that’s always been the moment when everything changed, the stone tossed into the stream that changes its course. If I’d been there talking to them, maybe the others would have left them alone. Maybe my entire life would have been different.
Probably I couldn’t have done anything at all. But I would have saved them if I could.
Her conversation with Harold Mosreich left Magda uneasy.
Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.
But she hadn’t told Balthazar, or anyone else, that she was going. He could have easily figured it out, of course: the summer session was over, the fall term had already started; but it was still unsettling. She had interfered with Benandanti matters; she had stolen knowledge of their Sign, cast a pebble into the clear water where they went to scry their secrets.
Time to go, she thought. But as she started for the door a voice cried out to her.
Wait!
The command was so loud and clear that she stopped, glancing around furtively. She saw only the same crowd of well-dressed men and women, nothing else. But when she took another step it came again—
Wait!
—a man’s voice, low and insistent. She smoothed her damp palms against the front of her dress, closed her eyes as she tried to summon whom or whatever had called to her.
Nothing. She heard scattered bits of conversation—classes, football, something about incunabula at the Library of Congress—the sweet sad notes of the string quartet. Tod und der Mädchen. She opened her eyes.
All was as it should be. There was Harold Mosreich, chatting with a blue-haired matron. There was one of her students, a boy who had been her partner in a brief and intense liaison over the Fourth of July weekend. Near Harold was another boy, stocky and dressed in an ill-fitting suit, who leaned over to light the cigarette of a pale, dark-haired girl, with a freckled, waifish face and nervous hands. Nothing more.
Magda let her breath out. Nerves and fatigue, that was all. She had forgotten how the effort of summoning the naphaïm exhausted her. By this time tomorrow she’d be back in her apartment at Berkeley, readying herself for her own fall term. She’d done what she could to intervene on behalf of her Mistress. Now it was out of her hands. She finished her glass of champagne and was turning to leave when the girl approached her.