I walked until I reached a familiar marker—Charing Cross Road. I’d never been there before, but for decades I’d worked at the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village. After some early run-ins with customers, I was delegated to the stockroom. I’d remained there until the previous November, using my five-finger discount until security got beefed up. But I had enough contact with buyers and sellers to know that Charing Cross was where famous bookstores lived.
Or used to. The bookshops here had taken a hit. I slowed my steps, searching in vain for Neuman’s or Blackwell’s among the bakeries and cheap restaurants and souvenir shops. Finally I ducked into Any Amount of Books, stashing my bag with the woman behind the counter. I was neither stupid nor fucked up enough to try lifting anything from these shelves. I perused the photography books, then asked to look at a first edition of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency kept safely behind glass. A day ago, the girl behind the counter might have kept a raptor’s eye on me as I handled it.
Now, makeup and my chic gamine hair gave me a new kind of invisibility. The girl unlocked the case and didn’t bat an eye as I glanced at The Grapes of Wrath—five thousand pounds, not a bad price—and a mint first of The Maltese Falcon in dust jacket. You could buy a house for what that one was worth.
I picked up the Goldin with care. I had my own copy back in New York, boosted from the Strand when it first came out. I was curious as to what it went for now. Five hundred pounds: not bad.
Mine was inscribed—me and Nan shared a drug dealer. I thanked the salesgirl and set the book back on its shelf. She closed and locked the case, giving me a cheerful goodbye as I walked back into the street.
Early dusk had fallen. The streets were packed with people hurrying to the Underground, pretheater dinners, and pubs. I continued along Charing Cross till I saw another name I recognized from my days at the Strand: Cecil Court, an alley that had been made into a pedestrian way, lined with small specialty bookshops whose brightly lettered placards swung in the wind.
I entered the alley, the sounds of traffic diminishing to a soft drone. In the sudden hush my footsteps echoed loudly on the pavement. A young man glanced up at me, nodded absently, and went back to browsing a table stacked with antique prints.
I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head and peered into the window of a shop that had just closed for the night. Children’s books were displayed like sweets, with dust jackets in marzipan colors. The shop next door sold theatrical ephemera, its window crammed with black-and-white publicity stills of forgotten stage stars arranged like headstones, alongside books on Shakespeare and the glory days of music hall. Music wafted from an upstairs window. Lotte Lenya, “September Song,” Tom Waits and “Hold On.” A playlist for the death of the publishing industry.
At the end of the alley, I turned and retraced my steps, halting in front of a shop with a green placard in front:
WATKINS: SPECIALISTS IN MYSTICISM, OCCULTISM, ORIENTAL RELIGION, THE PERENNIAL WISDOM, CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY
Back at the Strand, we used to special-order titles from this place for Sarah Lawrence students and aging musicians who played the theremin. Until recently, my own interest in the occult began and ended with a former lover who’d broken up with me after a bad night with the I Ching. I’m not a believer, and the last few months had made me increasingly gun-shy of those who are. The real world is weird enough.
Still, I found myself staring at a sign that advertised a talk and signing that night by Lawrence Caccio. Caccio had been a minor player in the Warhol crowd during the Factory’s Union Square days, a not-bad photographer who’d had the unenviable distinction of being the guy who opened the door to Valerie Solanas the afternoon she shot Andy. Caccio had just released a tarot deck based on vintage photos he’d taken at the Factory, with an introductory note by Julian Cope.
I peered into the shopwindow, spied a clock on the wall. Almost six. Caccio’s event started at seven.
I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t feel like fighting the crowds to get a drink at a pub. Wind gusted down the alley, colder than it had been. I hunched my shoulders and entered the shop.
It was warm inside, with the musty, once-familiar scent of a place that traded in both new and used books. New paper, old ink, and leather bindings, with underlying traces of the store’s clientele—weed smoke, a powerful base note of sandalwood incense shot with sesame oil. An old white hippie sat behind the counter, his gray hair pulled into a scraggy ponytail. He glanced up from his bowl of noodles and pointed his chopsticks at me.
“Can I help you with something?”
I shook my head and he went back to his udon. The room was surprisingly well lit for an occult bookshop. Maybe not so surprising, when I considered the number of shoplifters the Strand used to bust in the act of making off with paperback copies of Aleister Crowley’s autobiography. I glanced at the prominently displayed stacks of the Factory tarot—at forty quid a pop, more than I was willing to spend on a novelty item.
I wandered toward the back of the store. There was less Anton LaVey than I’d expected, and more Asatru. Reprints of Éliphas Lévi and Elias Ashmole; a monograph on Guido Bonatti, a thirteenth-century Italian sorcerer who conjured a sailing ship from wax.
Crouching, I pulled out a cheap paperback dictionary of the occult. I leafed through it, stopping at random upon the entry for “onychomancy”—divination by means of reflection of the sun’s rays, a fair description of old-school print photography. I replaced the book and straightened, bumping into someone behind me.
A tall, stoop-shouldered guy stood there. Gangly, his longish dark hair threaded with gray, wide mouth parted to speak, and a hand raised in apology, so that I could clearly see the familiar scrawl of scar tissue that ran from the middle finger down his palm to his wrist. He was maybe fifteen years younger than I was, with a beaky nose, wire-rimmed Lennon glasses, an amused expression that swiftly darkened as he stared down at me.
“Cass?” His voice rose in disbelief. “Cass Neary?”
Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were topaz. A miniature nova bloomed above the pupil of the left eye, emerald striated with black.
Gryffin Haselton. I wanted to run, yet my lifelong curse held me. I couldn’t look away.
“You look different.” He touched my hair warily, as though it might emit sparks. “Jesus, it is you.”
I started to turn, but he already had hold of my arm. Anger crowded out his astonishment as he pushed me against the bookshelf. “What the hell are you doing here, Cass? The police still need to talk to you—you know that, right? Where the hell did you go?”
Back in November, I’d met him on the remote Maine island where I’d gone to interview his mother, the legendary photographer Aphrodite Kamestos. Things did not go well. Not for Aphrodite, at any rate. I was complicit in—some might say guilty of—her death.
But I did get some beautiful shots of her, postmortem.
Now I looked toward the door, tensing to make a run for it. Before I could move, Gryffin’s pissed-off tone grew thoughtful.
“You look good,” he said. “What happened? You knock off a liquor store?” At my stony glare, he added, “Right, I get it. Too close to home. Seriously, you clean up very nicely. Want to grab a bite?”
“What, so you can call the fucking cops? Just let me go, okay?”
I pushed past him, but he followed me out into Cecil Court.
“Cass, wait!”
He caught up with me at Charing Cross, took my arm again, and pulled me close. “Listen—the autopsy said she died of natural causes,” he said in a low voice. “She fell, she hit her head, she’s dead. She was my mother, but she was also a drunk who lied to me her entire life. It was stupid not to talk to the cops, Cass. Now they are interested in you. Before that it was strictly pro forma.”
I took a deep breath, fighting to keep my voice even. “What the hell were you doing in that bookstore? Are you stalking me?”
“Stalking you? Are you out of your mind? I was ready to pay cash never to hear your name again! As for what I’m doing here—”
He held up a battered leather messenger bag. “I’m a bookdealer, remember? I’m selling what’s left of my mother’s library, and later I have a meeting about another sale. Larry Caccio’s one of my customers; I saw he was doing an event and decided to drop by and surprise him. What’s your excuse?”
“I used to work at the Strand, remember?” I wrenched away from him, and he laughed. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“It’s just so bizarre, that’s all—what are the odds of running into you here in London?” He hesitated. “You want to get something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’ll eat, you can drink. Everybody wins.”
“You just said you’d pay never to hear my name mentioned again.”
He shrugged. “I changed my mind. Maybe we were supposed to meet up. Like, destiny.”
“That would be just the kind of destiny I’d get stuck with.”
“Come on, it’s my treat.” He gazed at me appraisingly. “Your hair—you look a lot better. Younger.”
I resisted the desire to punch him. Barely. Still, while I didn’t trust Gryffin, I knew, rationally, that he would have no reason to track me down in London, or anywhere else.
But stranger things had happened to me recently, including the fact that I’d lost Quinn so soon after finding him again. The last time I’d seen him, he was heading out to make arrangements for us to leave the UK incognito, on a barge owned by a guy he knew. Given Quinn’s past work as an occasional hit man with the Russian mob, I wondered if he’d ended up on a slow boat to the bottom of the Thames.
The thought made me feel slightly nauseated. Now that I’d had it, I knew it would be difficult to push it away. Gryffin would be a distraction, at least. Let him indulge his bad-girl fantasies by buying me a drink or five.
“Yeah, all right,” I said at last. “But enough about my goddamn hair.”