We left in the coolest vintage black Jag I had ever seen. It was old but well-maintained and had way more character than Rottheim’s high-tech limo. The engine positively purred. The hostess was driving. Her name was Milan. Mr. Dench was next to her in the front. Étranger seemed anxious. Very anxious. Like he was a student with a big test—or perhaps a man facing a moral dilemma. Either way, we all could feel it, and it was bringing us down.
“Think about it,” I explained. “You’re a young woman on the run. You have serious people after you. You know they’re legit, well-funded, so first you have to stay off social media, which will give you away immediately. Where do you go?”
He scowled, like he had no idea.
“To someone without a social media account,” Milan said from the front.
“That could be anyone,” Dench replied flatly. His voice was so strange. It was like he had no emotion.
I pressed my case with the chef. “Where’s she gonna find someone to put her up, no questions asked, for a week or whatever while she figures out her next move? Craigslist? She’s being chased. She’s scared. She has to disappear fast. She can’t go to family. They’d find her. And she doesn’t want to put them in danger. She has to go to someone she trusts, someone she expects will trust her—at least enough to let her into their house. But it has to be someone outside her usual circle.”
“What are you saying?”
“Rottheim’s army of PIs checked every contact she had: coworkers, old school friends, anyone who chatted her up online. So it can’t be anyone with an obvious connection or they would’ve found her already. They worked methodically through every motel in the city. Think about it. This girl is gorgeous and wears $800 shoes. She gonna turn heads. If she’s not at a motel or a shelter or hospitals or the morgue, if she’s not with friends or family, if she didn’t get on a bus or a plane or a train, then where the hell is she? Who does she run to? Who isn’t on social media but is safe, trustworthy, and nice enough to take her in for a few days?”
Etude didn’t answer.
“A neighbor or church member would be great, but she lives in a block of cubicles and doesn’t go to church. But that got me thinking. The guy who gave her those books does. I mean, who gives a girl like Lily Chicken Soup for the Soul? In hardcover? Come on. And with a gift receipt?”
He was scowling like I had presented him with a puzzle deeper than Fermat’s last theorem.
“Not anyone trying to sleep with her,” Milan explained.
“I’m guessing an older man,” I added. “Clearly religious. Sees this girl messing her life up—in his mind, at least—but doesn’t want to be rude or scare her away, so he gives her the ultra-soft underhanded come-to-Jesus pitch. He didn’t just hand her five books in one day. Which means she ran into him from time to time, and he periodically upped the ante. Whoever gave her those books was already trying to save her.”
Milan glanced to Etude in the mirror. “It’s worth checking out.”
But the chef didn’t acknowledge. He was too busy brooding at the passing city.
“We shall see,” he said.
We stopped around the corner from While Away Books. Mr. Dench got out with us, but the chef asked him to wait.
“If Ms. Song is right, then we are very close to a confrontation with our adversary.”
Milan rolled down the window. “Is it time?” she asked gravely.
Étranger looked up—like, all the way up. So I did, too.
Clouds.
“It’s going to rain,” he said.
Didn’t seem like it to me. I looked to the others to see if that meant something, other than the obvious, but they simply waited.
“We must draw him to the watchtower,” he told Milan finally. “Make our stand there. With luck, there will be enough of it left that we may call for aid.” He turned to Dench, who was waiting by the car door. “Please make preparations.”
Dench nodded and got back in.
“Good luck,” Milan told us. Then the two of them pulled away.
“What’s that all about?” I asked.
“I fear in time you will come to see. But first we must find the dagger.”
He started toward the shop but I stepped in front of him.
“Maybe you should let me go in first.”
“This is very impor—”
“I know it’s important. But you”—I held up my open hands in front of his coat and moved them all around, including near his bald head—”have all this goin’ on.”
He didn’t understand.
“Okay, look. If we do it my way, then we get two tries. If you come with me, they’ll know we’re together. But if I go myself and screw it up, you can still go back later and try yourself.”
That seemed to satisfy him, and he nodded once.
The shop was small and densely packed with display shelves. Stacks of bestsellers on a table near the front begged to be read—by anyone. A young woman at the side wall organized and restocked the wide shelves while an older woman, who seemed to be her boss, watched from behind the counter and made suggestions.
“Can we help you?” she asked when she saw me.
“Um. I hope so. I have a sort of unusual request. I was hoping you could help me find one of your customers.”
“Find?”
“Yes. He donates books to the Sunday school where I work. Religious books: The Prayer of Jabez, The Purpose-Driven Life, stuff like that. Always brings a gift receipt, too, just in case we already have it, which is sooo sweet. We wanted to do something nice for him, but we haven’t seen him recently and I’ll be darned if anyone can remember his name.”
“I’m sorry,” the old woman said in a way that made it clear she wasn’t sorry at all. “We can’t give out that information.”
“Well, does he come in a lot? Could you give him a messa—”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, “but this isn’t Facebook. We respect our customers’ privacy.”
“I get that. We’re not trying to invade this man’s life. We just want to thank—”
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly and walked to the back.
“Praise Jesus!” I called after her.
I sighed.
“You mean the funny old guy with the hat?” the younger woman whispered, glancing to the back to make sure it was safe.
“Hat?” I had no idea. But I ran with it. “Do you know him?”
“Not really. I’ve seen him here a few times. He’s a real talker. I think he’s lonely. I felt kind of bad for him, actually.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
She shook her head. “No, sorry. But I think maybe he lives around here. I’ve seen him reading at the cafe around the corner. Maybe you could try there?”
The chef appeared in the door then, hands in his fantastic coat. Apparently, he had no faith in me.
The woman gave us a puzzled look as I dragged him back out.
The first waitress we found at the cafe told us we needed to talk to a second, who related a similar story: an older guy in a hat would often stop by and try talking to her.
“He comes in a lot,” she said. “Coffee to go. Sometimes he reads. Bit of a creepo. Always talking about religious stuff. I mean—” She motioned to herself as a conclusion to the thought. She had oodles of dark mascara and a piercing through her nose.
“Do you know his name?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “He might’ve mentioned it, but to be honest, I never paid attention. Sorry.” She started walking away.
“I can pay you,” I said, reaching for my bag. “Like, a hundred?”
“I thought you said you worked at a church?”
The chef walked up behind me and snapped his fingers. Just like that, the look of suspicion dissipated from the girl’s face. She stared.
“What are you doing?” I demanded in a stout whisper.
“She is perfectly fine. It is merely a hypnotic state.”
“You’re hypnotizing her?”
I turned to see if anyone was looking. But no one was. The patrons were chatting and chewing their food. It’s like we were invisible.
“Picture this man,” Étranger said. “Think on his face, on his words. Did he mention a name?”
She seemed to struggle.
“Think on his clothes. Think on the hat.”
“It was a flat cap,” she said. “My dad used to wear one.”
“What about his name?”
I grabbed the chef’s coat. He looked down at my hand like he was surprised it hadn’t burned off.
“Let her go,” I whispered. “I totally know where he is.”
When the waitress shook her head a moment later, confused, she was standing in the same spot on the terrace, but we were gone.
“So fucking obvious!” I hit Etude in the shoulder as we walked down the road. The padding of his coat was thick. “We covet what we see!”
“What are you talking about?”
“What the hell was that back there?” I demanded. “You can’t just go around hypnotizing people.”
“Your method was not working. Where are we going?”
I ran a couple steps ahead and pointed around the corner. “There.”
He scowled at a nondescript block of flats.
“It’s her apartment building,” I explained.
“You said she was not there.”
“She’s not,” I said proudly, “but he is. Where else would a guy like that run into a girl like her all the time? Come on. That place is a fortress. We’re gonna have to cheat our way in.”
He opened the door and held it for me like a gentleman. There was a sign at the front desk that said BE RIGHT BACK.
I looked around. “Well . . . I guess we wait.”
I said it thinking he was behind me, but he wasn’t. He was standing before a wall-mounted bulletin board inside a glass case.
“What are you looking for?”
“A man in a cap,” he said.
In addition to various colored schedules and announcements, there were pictures from recent singles events. Everyone looked so happy. But everyone was young. And no guys in caps.
We sat in the waiting area, looking around and twiddling our thumbs. My odd companion sat quietly, legs crossed, admiring a large potted palm, taller than me, almost like the two of them were having a polite chat about life in the city and how warm it had gotten lately.
“What’s with the coat?” I asked, not wanting to be outdone by the foliage.
Honest to God, he looked down like he didn’t even realize he was wearing it. He admired it for a moment.
“It belonged to one of your countrymen, a man named Zhang Jiao.”
“Oh? How’d you get him to part with it?”
“He’s been dead for the better part of two millennia.”
“No shit? That’s serious vintage. I’m surprised Beijing let you have it.”
“I doubt they are aware of its existence. It was a gift. From a man named Wu.”
A quiet moment passed and he turned back to the tree, as if it were a better conversationalist.
“Have you spent much time in China?” I asked.
“I have been once or twice.”
“Oh yeah? Which is it? Once or twice?”
“It depends,” he said with a hint of impatience, “on whether or not you consider Tibet to be part of China. Tell me,” he added quickly, “is there a dragon?” He nodded to my side.
“How did you know about that?”
“Deduction. The dragon and the phoenix are the symbols of the emperor and empress, whose union begets the state, just as the union of yin and yang begets the universe.”
“No no no no. How did you know I had a tattoo?”
“Ah. When you fell sideways on the sofa, your shirt lifted some.”
I eyed him.
“I replaced it,” he said.
“Uh huh.”
He motioned to my bag between us. “And that?”
I took out the tarot deck I’d gotten at Sour Candy. It was wrapped in plastic, all glossy and ridiculous. I ripped off the covering and read the 2D bar code on the back with my phone. While the app downloaded, he unfolded the little instruction manual stashed with the cards. It took him all of four seconds to scowl, crumple it, and add it to the coffee table full of magazines.
“Excuse you,” I objected. “That wasn’t yours.”
He turned his lips down like he’d just drunk heavy bitters.
“Any idiot could invent a better system than any of those, and off the top of his head.”
“Any idiot, huh? Alright, Einstein.” I pulled the deck from the box and handed it to him. “Prove it.”
He gave a little annoyed sigh. Then he actually cracked his knuckles.
It wasn’t until he started shuffling the deck that I noticed there weren’t any pictures on the cards.
“Wait.”
I pulled one just as he set the deck down for a third shuffle. There was a classic interlocking design on the back. On the front was a QR code on a white background with a simple border flourish around the edge. According to a note on the back of the box, it was a mechanism to prevent cheating. You had to draw a random card. You had no choice. They all looked the same, so there was no way to stack the deck to get the reading you wanted from the app or from the work-at-home tarot readers whose time it kept asking you to buy.
“That is your first card,” he said. “Set it down.”
The cards were crisp and they snapped loudly as he shuffled. He cut the deck once, shuffled twice more, then cut a second time, at which point he moved some of the magazines and spread the cards on the table.
“Choose six more,” he said. “But do not think—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I objected. “I know.”
After I chose, he placed all seven cards in a kind of pyramid shape: three on the bottom, two in the middle, and one on top, with the final card floating above and to one side.
“The first position,” he explained, pointing to the bottom left, “is the cardinal, the cornerstone of the castle, also called the House of the World. It tells us something about ourselves, our overall personality.”
He directed me to turn it and I did.
I scanned the QR code and the app gave me the option of using the classic Rider Waite deck or two alternate designs. There were also additional, fancier designs available for in-app purchase. I stuck with the default. A picture of a card filled the screen.
The Moon.
The orb itself shone in full between two flanking towers. A dog and a wolf howled, while a lobster crawled from the water at the bottom.
“Ah,” he said. “You are a very creative person. Intuitive, as well.”
“That’s the nice way of telling someone they’re artsy and flaky, but thank you.”
He pointed at the cards. “In the first position, The Moon represents mystery, and all that follows will be its unraveling.”
He motioned to the middle card on the bottom row, and I turned it.
“The second position,” he said, “is the House of Water, which flows over the world. It is movement, activity, transition—our life goals and the unexpected changes we encounter.”
I scanned it with a beep.
The Knight of Wands.
A man in shabby chain armor rode an unsteady horse rising on its back legs. His right hand raised a rod sprouting green leaves.
“Impetuosity,” he said, “and the pursuit of a foolhardy adventure.”
“Okay,” I acknowledged grudgingly. “Fine. Two for two.”
“The third position,” he went on, “is the House of Life, which grows from the wet earth. This is the house of family, love, and relationships.”
With some hesitation, I took the third card and scanned it.
The Three of Swords.
A red heart was suspended in the air, pierced clean through by three crossing blades. Blood dripped from the bottom as rain fell from storm clouds in the distance.
“Heartbreak,” he said, “either yours or one caused by you.”
“Moving on.” I flipped and scanned the next card quickly.
“The fourth position is the House of Animals,” he explained, “which feed on the plants which sprout from the wet earth. This is our roving passion, our weakness, our foibles and limitations—which can also be our strengths.”
The Tower. I set my phone down where he could see the screen.
Lightning fell from a black cloud and struck a stone tower, like a battlement, which shattered, sending the pair at the top, a man and a woman, tumbling to the ground.
“Ah,” he said. “Your foolhardy quest will end in tragedy, a ruin of the highest order.”
I frowned, and after a short pause, he pointed to the second card on the second row.
“The fifth position is the House of Man, both saint and sinner, who was given governance of the animals that eat the plants that sprout from the wet earth. This is our rational mind, our hobbies and activities. Work and career also fall here.”
I turned the fifth card.
The Eight of Cups.
A lone figure dressed in a red hood and cape and carrying a walking stick followed the course of a river. The traveler moved away from the viewer, toward the dark and distant mountains, so it was impossible to say if it was a man or woman. An eclipsed sun hung in the sky, shining only as a thin halo around an otherwise black disc. A scatter of eight gold cups, all broken, lay in the foreground, as if they’d been smashed and discarded by the departing traveler.
“This symbolizes abandonment of old plans and aims,” he explained. Then he thought for a moment. “But given the prior house, I think it more likely means that magic has been used against you, driving you forth against your wishes and sending you on a journey that you would not have otherwise undertaken.”
I turned the sixth card, at the top of the pyramid.
“The sixth position, at the apex of the tower, is the House of the Devil,” he said “who yearns to replace the divine and who plagues all below. This represents our enemies—the friends that act against us—as well as the impediments and barriers to our own ascension.”
I scanned it. I paused when I saw it on the screen.
Death.
I looked at the image for a long moment. A skeletal figure in black armor rode a pale horse. Over the ground he dipped a long scythe, which mowed a garden of men, women, and children. A priest in a high hat knelt before him, hands pressed together in silent entreaty.
The chef could see the look on my face. “It may not be as you think. The Death card merely signifies an end, not necessarily the end of life.”
“How did you know what card it was?” I asked. I hadn’t turned the screen.
He didn’t answer.
“Why is the last card apart like that?” I asked.
The seventh and final card, the one I had chosen first, stood above and to the side of the others, like a sun rising over a castle. Or a moon.
“That is the House of the Divine, of life and fortune—long or short, good or bad. It is not the future but rather what waits for us outside time, what may or may not come to be, depending on our actions. It is a caution and an encouragement. You are female, symbolized by the moon, so we draw in the converse position, the Sun, on the right.”
“Can I help you?” a woman called from behind the front desk.
I shoved the cards in my hand into my purse and stood, swiping the last off the table and sticking it in my back pocket.
“Yes.” Étranger stood. “We’re looking for a—”
“Someone who works here,” I interrupted loudly as I stepped out in front of him. “We work at a Sunday school. He’s been donating books to our church for some time and we wanted to do something nice for him. A surprise.”
“Do you have a name?” she asked, eyeing the chef skeptically. Her name tag said MARY.
“No. But he’s a janitor or maintenance man, I think. Older. Wears a flat cap.”
“Sunday school, you said?”
“Yes. He’s a big reader, if that helps.”
“That would be Darren.”
“Darren?”
“Darren Tully. Our maintenance man.”
“Is he working now?”
“I think so. He switched to nights recently, but he usually comes in early.”
She lifted the phone, but I reached over the counter and pressed the lever on the receiver.
“We’d really love to surprise him,” I said softly. “If you could just show us where he is, that would be so great.”
The woman glanced again to the chef, who hovered behind me with his hands in his coat.
A coat. In June.
“Who are you again?” she asked.
Étranger raised his hand like he was going to snap his fingers again and I swatted it down.
She looked confused. And skeptical. “What is this about exactly?” She lifted the phone again like she might call security. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling. “We don’t want to cause trouble. We’ll surprise him at church. Thank you so much.”
I turned and practically pushed the chef out the front. I glanced back once and saw the receptionist calling the police.