Resurrection Man (21 page)

"Oh yes," Dante whispered.

Ghosts swayed and sighed everywhere around him. Each broken toy, each cracked cup leaked its secrets into the dense air. "Can't you feel the memories?" Dante shuddered as the angel in him woke, and began to stir.

"It's . . . it's sort of a joke," he finally said. "To you it just looks like junk. But if you're an angel . . ."

With every breath he took in a dizzying perfume of memories, mixed from lust and ancient spite, tenderness and green rage. He wanted to close his eyes, stop his ears, press his arms to his head and hide. "These are magic things," he said, unable to look at the bric-a-brac lining the walls. "Each one is like a dream. Like a dream you can't help having when you walk by."

Surely the whole house couldn't be like this, he told himself. What angel could bear it?

And what could Jewel be like, the angel who founded it? The one he was stupidly trying to find. Jewel hungered for these ghosts, swallowed them whole. Jewel had set up Hell to smolder with memories and old emotions.

He felt Jet next to him, cold and empty as a mirror, camera bumping on his chest like a demon's amulet full of stolen souls. Jet lifted it to take a picture of the hallway. "A joke?" he murmured. "But I don't hear you laughing, D. Where's your sense of humor?"

"On the boathouse floor," Dante said, grimacing. "With a lot of my better parts."

(And he saw Laura's Chrysler Tower earrings spinning, spinning; her long hand, with her mother's talon buried inside, her long hand reaching, reaching for the bottom of a tarnished bird cage on her right, where a pair of black-handled scissors lay, with a twist of long blond hair curling around the blades. The blades were bright, shiny and attractive. Laura reached for them through the open bird cage door.)

"For God's sake, don't touch that!" Dante hissed, grabbing her hand.

Laura jumped back, spooked and angry, her hand cocked and bunched into a fist. For an instant he thought she was going to crack him on his bruised arm again, but she held back. "Come on," he pleaded, and after a moment's stiff resistance she allowed him to pull her down the hallway.

A door opened, revealing a sharp-featured woman dressed in severe silks. "Welcome to Hell," she said, tense and unsmiling. "I'm the virgil tonight."

Jet snickered. "And this is Dante!" he cried, presenting his brother. "He's been looking for you for some—"

"Dante!" The virgil's eyes widened. "Urn—wait just a second. Don't go away!"

They heard her footsteps pounding up an unseen flight of stairs.

Jet watched her go. "He's been in need of a Virgil for quite some time," he finished. "Well, D., I'd say they've been expecting you."

"Oh shit," Dante said weakly.

"That was the angel the cops brought in to check out your place," Laura said. "I'm sure of it." She looked at Dante thoughtfully. "She was definitely hiding something that night. Angels do that a lot when they think other angels are involved in a crime; at least, that's what the cop said."

Jet frowned. "You know, if any of the angels in here can regularly predict the future, they may well be expecting us." He shook his head. "Isn't that a curious feeling: that someone else may know what we're going to do, before we know ourselves."

The hallway door opened and the virgil returned, accompanied by a middle-aged Chinese-American man with a narrow, hatched-shaped head. His fingers were dry and light. To Dante everything about him seemed light, as if instead of watery organs and muscles, something altogether more fleeting and electric filled his skin. He reached to shake Dante's hand. At his touch, a humming shock flew up Dante's arm and crackled over his body like sheet lightning.

"Good evening," the stranger said in unaccented English. "My name is Tristan Chu."

In the room behind him, five or six angels sat watching. Dante wondered if any of them knew how this visit would turn out. Not for sure, if Aunt Sophie's coins were any indication of how future-telling usually worked. Not with all the details.

Dante still felt shaky from Chu's touch. In a white sac inside himself he felt something stretch, and blindly move.

He willed it to stillness.

Jet nodded, studying Chu. "You were one of Jewel's pupils. I recognize you from the pictures."

Chu turned to Jet. The pleasant smile he had prepared died in a quick hiss of breath. He reached out, running his fingers lightly over Jet's butterfly birthmark, like a blind man reading Braille. "This is about you," Chu said flatly.

"Don't
touch
me," Jet said, slapping Chu's hand away from his face. There was a quick hiss of indrawn breath from the angels watching in the sitting room.

Chu shuddered, looking at his fingertips. They were red, as if tracing Jet's butterfly had burned them. "My apologies," he murmured. "Terribly rude of me."

Laura had recovered from her initial astonishment. "Tristan Chu! I've always wanted to tell you how much I love your work! The stadium, of course, but particularly the hospital."

Chu smiled thinly. "It is a quirk of history that the hospital has been overshadowed by that stupid World Series fiasco. But after all, home field advantage existed long before Harmony Stadium." He shrugged. "I just . . . gave it its head, that's all."

Dante must have looked as confused as he felt; Jet leaned in and murmured, "Remember the '75 Series? The Indians took game seven at home on back-to-back inside-the-park home runs."

"But a hospital where people actually
get well
!" Laura said. "That's Permitted City calibre work."

Dante wasn't sure he'd ever seen Laura in awe before. It made him uneasy. "Laura Chen. Chen Dai Fei's great- niece," he added pointedly.

"Ah," Chu murmured, and he made a little bow. "Please remember me to your revered uncle. It has been"—he frowned—"three years since we last spoke."

Chen Dai Fei had died in 1977. Somehow Laura was sure Tristan Chu knew that very well.

"I'm here to see Jewel," Dante said.

"Ah." Delicately, Chu spread his hands. "Unfortunately, no one has seen her for days. . . . And there is a kind of madness leaking underneath her door." Chu hesitated. "She taught me a great deal, many years ago. Last week I dreamed her very dark; so dark I caught the first plane from Cleveland." He paused to look at Dante once again.. "I dreamed that she had gone to Hell. . . and I dreamed that you were there with her."

"Me?" Dante yelped.

Chu shrugged. "A gatekeeper with the devil's eyes, then, whose shadow wore a butterfly." He turned to Jet. "Tell me, are you an angel or a Sending?"

Dante knew Jet well enough to see the anger behind his twin's upraised eyebrows. He watched Jet raise his camera and shoot Tristan Chu—
Snap!
"Are those my only choices?"

Chu blinked, dazzled by the flash. "Don't do that again," he said quietly.

"You know what I (
Snap!
) think," Jet went on, ignoring him. The flash jumped like lightning, freezing Chu against the backdrop of broken toys and ancient furniture. "I think our (
Snap!
) friend here was the one that broke into Dante's apartment."

Laura's eyes narrowed, suddenly thoughtful. She looked back at Chu, waiting for him to deny it.

Still blinking, he removed a pair of gold-wire glasses and polished them on his raw silk shirt. "I was concerned," he said.

"Now isn't that nice," Jet observed. "Such concern from a former pupil."

"Jewel demanded certain. . . sacrifices from her students," Chu said. He was ignoring Jet now, speaking directly to Dante. "She had something of mine. Something of me, you might almost say." He frowned. "Of course it had no more right to feel betrayed than, say, a vice that one has outgrown; and yet, I always detected a certain bitterness between this . . . gift and myself. It is very important to me that I understand its current disposition."

"You're afraid to go into her room," Dante said slowly. "You think something has happened to her."

Hooray!
one part of Dante cried. . . . Well, no use following this lead any further. No point in staying around this spooky old house, either. While we're at it, let's call the cops and bust Chu's ass for break and enter, the supercilious bastard.

Dante had done his best. You couldn't say he hadn't given it the old college try. And after all, if Jet got this far without knowing what happened at his birth, a few more years wouldn't hurt him. . . .

The pain in Dante's abdomen came back, a sharp stitch that bought his breath up short.

"Let's make a deal," he said, wincing around the pain.

"A deal!" Laura cried. "Let him make a deal with the district attorney. He was rooting through your stuff, Dante!"

Summoning up the ghost of his old charm, Dante waved the whole unsightly affair away. "Nothing there worth stealing: you've told me so yourself a hundred times." He shrugged. "He can tell us about Jewel's friend. The Sending who broke Pendleton."

As he said it, Dante realized how much he didn't know about the Sending. Would the thing Jewel had jokingly called Albert still be in his early thirties, or would he be pushing sixty now, with graying hair? Would time have stolen the cold sparkle from his eyes? Would his fingers slip and slide unfeeling, plucking at the cards, losing their edges when he shuffled the pack?

Chu shrugged. "You mean Confidence, the hustler. Her first true Sending. I've heard of him. I don't know where he is now." He paused, his gaze traveling from Dante, to Jet and back. "I could find him—if you were to go down to the study in the basement and look behind Jewel's door."

"Maybe you could find him if I were to go over to a telephone and call the police about a break and enter," Jet said pleasantly.

Chu shrugged. "I wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know, at least not until I was sure my very expensive lawyers weren't more expensive than yours." He gave Dante a quick measuring glance. "But I have a hunch you don't have a lot of time to waste."

Dante looked back at his friends. Crisply Laura shook her head.

Jet remained impassive. Waiting, as he had always waited, for Dante to keep his promises.

This time I won't betray him, Dante thought. As God is my witness. "Okay," he said.

Chu nodded. "Good. Of course, you should be warned that Jewel's study is a dangerous place." He waved his hand at the broken dreams disguised as antique rubbish that cluttered the entryway of Hell. "Far subtler and more dangerous than this. But if you don't mind me saying so, I think you have made the right . . . no, the only choice. You have a destiny here."

Jet's eyebrows rose. "You mean a destiny has him."

N
OT ONE OF THEM WHO TOOK UP IN HIS YOUTH WITH THIS OPINION THAT THERE ARE NO GODS EVER CONTINUED UNTIL OLD AGE FAITHFUL TO HIS CONVICTION.
   —P
LATO

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

They crept down a winding stair with a single yellow light at the top; it dwindled away above them as Heaven must have fled the falling Lucifer. The way was cramped and narrow and the smell of death waited for Dante at the bottom of it—black dirt, talcum powder, urine, leaf mold. Candles.

Once Dante stopped and Jet bumped into him. In the darkness, where no one could see, he grabbed his twin's hand and squeezed until he felt the blood come back into his own fingers. When be started forward again, only Jet and Laura followed him. Tristan Chu and several other angels stood waiting in the darkness behind them.