James Baldwin - Blood Hound

Enfolded in the papery silence of the hall, I shucked my shoes, unbuttoned my cuffs, and rolled them up to the elbow. Binah leaped from my arms and wandered off into the house to explore. I lost track of her on my way to the kitchen. The lead caster with the sigil was burning a hole in my pocket, but when I extended my senses towards it, feeling for any imprinted magical residue, it came up blank.

Still, Alexi Sokolsky is not known for being an incautious man, so before anything else, I got a clean tin chalice and filled it with coarse rock salt and water, burying the caster in the center. Tin is the metal of Jupiter, the Greater Benefic who oversees abstracts such as justice, purification, and good fortune. Salt and water are to magical effects what containment pools are to spent nuclear fuel rods. They don’t fix the problem, but they keep it confined and—temporarily—safe.

I got together an old litter box and food bowls for Binah in the bathroom and then shed my gloves and threw them and my keys into the bathtub to wash up. Exposed, my hands rang like a tuning fork: I pressed my teeth together and forced myself to touch the tap and turn it. The chilly metal sent a shock of bright sensation through my bare fingers. The sound of the screeching faucet and rushing water obliterated my vision with white haze while I washed the keys, my gloves, and then myself under the shower—twice with soap, once with lanolin cream. Too much heavy magic and not enough sleep turned up the dial on my nerves, overstimulating my senses to the point of disability. The sound of the water had color and shape. I was very overstimulated, and besides that, possessed of some strange, nebulous discontent.

I couldn’t say if I was disturbed by the course of the night or not. Death has never particularly disturbed me. It is nicely certain, one of two events—the other being birth—which are guaranteed and irrevocable. The only variable is how you go about it, when the time comes. Do you die well, or do you die badly?

For different reasons, two men had died badly tonight, and bad deaths bothered me in a way I could not even articulate to myself.

Once I was clean, I felt around over the sink and opened the mirrored cupboard with the point of my wrist. Inside was a glass tumbler and a new pair of gloves. Even after all that, I still felt dirty, as if I were covered in a faint sheen of blood and filth. It had been a very long night, and it was going to be an equally long, hot, difficult day. I had to pick up Vassily, and then maybe—if I was lucky—I’d get six hours sleep before we drove in to report to Lev.

God, Vassily. The thought of having him back made my mouth turn dry. I still had surfaces to clean, books to sort. The place needed to breathe: it needed to be everything that prison wasn’t for those precious first minutes when Vassily stepped in and found everything the way it should be. He’d been gone for five years. I guess it wasn’t that long, not really. Not on the scale of, say, the time between the present—1991—and the day I’d run away from my parents’ house, but five years is a long time to be missing your right hand. We’d practically lived together from the day I’d been adopted into his family to the day he had been convicted, and for five years, I’d come home to this heavy silence after every job, hanging my coat and setting down my gun in the buzzing nothingness of an empty apartment.

Before I left, I spent some time in front of the mirror practicing. Nic told me soon after Vassily had gone in that sometimes, the prison wouldn’t admit you if you looked potentially violent. I’d never been refused a visit, but this was a release, and I wasn’t completely certain it was the same sort of occasion. I tried to appear more pleasant and less severe for several minutes, but no mirror in the world could bring a warm light to my eyes or soften my mouth. No matter what I do, I look like a street shark, the kind of guy who kills other men. It was Vassily who taught me how to socialize outside the confines of a hit. Thanks to his patience, certain kinds of interactions are manageable. Hellos, goodbyes. Business. Intimidation. Dealing with people like Moni is easy: I have those men down to a science. But being likeable, attractive, relaxed? They were Vassily’s skills.

I fiddled with my face and clothes until my cheeks ached. Frustrated, restless, I stood back, gut tight, and breathed deeply of the clean vacuum smell of the house. Overriding it was the faint perfume of frankincense and myrrh. My altar took up one wall of my bedroom, a plain table laid out with a well-organized, eclectic clutter of Judaica and Occult paraphernalia from no particular country or point in history: a knife and chalice, a statuette of Santa Muerte, the Mexican cartel saint who protected those who worked by night, and an effigy of Veles, ancient god of magic, in honor of my Slavic heritage. A tarot deck wrapped in a scarf sat in front, the card for the week propped up against the rest, and a hundred other items of curiosity, awe, and personal significance were arranged in concentric rings from the central point. The Colt Wardbreaker lived there, resting next to a gold ankh I’d given to Vassily on his twentieth birthday. He had pressed it into my hand just before he was led out of the courtroom during the first hearing, his fingers hot against my palm.

I took up the ankh, folded my fingers around it, and squeezed. It was time to go and see what remained of my best friend.

Fishkill was located just off Route 84, a former New York State Psychiatric Center that looked more like a castle than a prison. My gut was sour with tension by the time I cleared security. Dry-mouthed, I waited in reception with my hands twisted on my lap, staring down at them in stony silence while I tried to think of things other than the dangers and vices of cellblock life. Jaundice. Drugs. Alcohol. Especially alcohol.

A buzz preceded the opening of the inmate release doors, and each time, the sound jerked me from my reverie. Three ex-convicts went by, one after the other. One of them, a black man with the hollow eyes of a serial jailbird, was picked up by a stoic woman with big hair and big teeth. Next out was a bald, fit hardcase with an underbite and piercing blue eyes. He marched out the door alone without a backward glance. The third was a bewildered little rabbit who lingered around the reception desk. I watched him with slow eyes. He had the wire-strung build of a junkie and the quick, jerky manner of prey. Men like that were fun to quarry, and I almost let the pleasant mask I’d worked on so hard slip as I mentally stalked him across the floor.

The buzzer blared a fourth time, and my gaze shifted from Rabbit to the door. My eyes lit on a familiar pair of hands—long, fine-boned philosopher’s hands, lettered and tattooed over the knuckles: the tattoos of a Vor v Zakone . [10] ‘Thief in Law’. The formal term for an old-school, prison trained Russian gangster. The title conveys prestige, but as of 1991 it was reserved for older Mafioso. Vassily and I were both too young to actually be considered Vor v Zakone, the oath-taking sworn thieves of Nic and Lev’s generation. Vassily’s tattoos were well deserved in many other ways, but they were really a memorial to the father he’d never known.

I stood up in alarm as my sworn brother—thinner, harder, and more wolfish than I remembered—let his mouth stretch in a chagrined smile as he was led to the desk for processing. His black hair was shorter, and his old suit strained visibly across his shoulders and hung loose around his waist, but he was just as lean and tall and handsome as I remembered. I stared at his back in shock as he signed the release, pulse hammering under my tongue. Finally, I heard the final stab of the pen from across the room, and Vassily nearly threw it down as he broke apart from his escort in a rush. We collided as I stepped into his long-limbed embrace, wrapping my arms around his chest as he swore and laughed and squeezed his whole upper body around my head. Under the weird clinical smell of institutional air, without cologne or aftershave, he still smelled the way he always had. He smelled right, like fur and blue and spice on my palate. For a long moment, I found my mouth full and cottony, unable to speak from a place of perfect stillness.