Return to the Faculty Club — Thursday, March 7, 1991, 5:47 PM

University of Chicago faculty club / Devon Avenue / South Pilsen (Kaspar & Sons haven)

Chicago, Illinois

The faculty club at the University of Chicago keeps a fire going on Thursday nights for the same reason it keeps the limestone scrubbed. Nobody needs it. The building would look unattended without it. Sable came in out of a wind that had run unbroken off the lake for six miles, and the change of temperature registered on her skin as information rather than comfort. Thirty-five outside and falling, maybe sixty-eight in here, the difference living mostly in the cuffs of her coat.

Three men in the far corner argued Aristotle with the persistence of people who had nowhere to be at eleven at night. Sherry had been poured for them. Sherry had been poured, also, for the corner table by the stone wall, where it sat untouched at the elbow of a man with no intention of raising it and no intention of explaining why.

Critias had changed his face since January. Greyer at the temples, a cardigan with real wear at the elbows, reading glasses pushed up into hair that wasn’t his and hadn’t been for a long time. One book in front of him, the spine broken from use rather than display. He looked up before the door finished closing.

“Sable.” He shut the book without marking his place. “Sit. Milwaukee agreed with you — or disagreed with you, and you won.”

She sat. The leather had gone the color of weak tea, and the seat held no warmth, which meant he’d been standing when she came in and had arranged himself in the interval.

“A girl has to go on an out-of-town shopping trip at least once a year,” she said. “Chicago can get so stuffy.”

He didn’t laugh. Something happened at the corner of his mouth that stopped short of permission.

“Carthage was stuffy too, before it burned. Every city that mistakes stability for permanence eventually finds out which one it had.” He set the book aside, face down, still unmarked. “I find myself curious what a woman brings home from a trip like that, when the thing she went to buy isn’t sold anywhere on a shelf.”

His eyes had not left her face since she sat down. Men looked at her with a hunger she could work with, had worked with for sixty years, could set her watch by. This was a conservator’s look. Checking the canvas for overpaint.

“I found that, much like the Brujah, the Tremere have their own rebellion brewing. But not for a new Carthage.”

Nothing about him moved, and the stillness acquired an edge.

“Not for a new Carthage,” he said. “The Brujah dream of building. What do the Tremere dream of, when they dream against their own Pyramid?” He leaned forward a fraction, elbows finding the table. “Freedom, at a guess. Every clan’s rebellion is freedom from something, dressed up as freedom for something else. Whose freedom, Sable? Yours, or the source’s?”

“Please, old man. I’m a vampire. I don’t do charity cases.”

The almost-smile came back and stayed a half-second longer.

“No. You don’t.” He picked the book up again without opening it, because his hands wanted occupation. “Whatever you did in Milwaukee, you didn’t do out of charity. I’d have smelled that on you and lost interest. Charity is for creatures who believe the universe keeps score in their favor if they’re generous enough, and you’re not that naive. Strategy, or appetite, or both wearing the same coat. I don’t need to know which tonight. You brought me the Tremere, and that was the price of admission, and I’ll use it.”

His voice didn’t change register, only subject.

“But you didn’t come here for Thucydides and a pat on the head, and I have a debt to collect regardless of what you bought in Wisconsin. Bach’s pack. Lodin wants a location before he wants an apology. What have you found?”

She had decided in the car to give him the ugly answer whole. The only thing more expensive than a bad report is a bad report delivered in installments.

“Everything I have is nothing,” she said. “Bach’s pack hasn’t shown since the Opera fight. No location, no chatter, nothing on the street that isn’t three weeks stale.” She held his eyes. “And before you decide that’s a disappointing report. The Sabbat isn’t a chip either of us gets to play politics with. Not yours, not Lodin’s. If Bach finds his pack before we do, it won’t ask whose Primogen we answer to.”

The fire dropped a coal. In the corner, one of the Aristotelians said something about the Nicomachean that made the other two groan.

“No,” Critias said. “It won’t. You’re right that it isn’t a game. You’re wrong that I ever treated it as one. Lodin wants a location because a location is something he can act on. I want the same for a better reason. Four childer scattered in this city is a wound, and wounds that go unlocated fester.” He studied her with the same conservator’s eye. “You came here ready to be lectured for failing to find them. I find that more useful than the failure. It means you understand the stakes.”

He produced an index card from inside the cardigan and slid it across. It had been folded and unfolded more than once, and the crease had gone soft.

“A name. Ilsa Reinhardt. A mortal, occult bookshop on Devon, cash-only back room. Bach’s people have used cutouts like her before, in Boston, in ‘74. It may be nothing. It’s more than either of us had an hour ago.”

Blue ink, fountain pen, a hand that had learned to write before ballpoints and never saw the need to adjust.

“It will be done.” She turned the card over. Blank. “Anything else I should take with me? Do I go alone or bring my coterie?”

“Bring them. This isn’t a solo hunt, and Ilsa Reinhardt will smell a lone predator faster than a group with a reason to be shopping for old books.” He put the glasses on and opened the book to a page he found without searching. “Darius reads a room for leverage. Use that. Tomás will want to catalogue everything in that shop whether it’s relevant or not. Let him. Sometimes the irrelevant thing is the one that matters in retrospect.”

He closed the book again, and that time it stayed closed.

“One more thing, since you asked instead of assuming. Bach’s pack put a trophy in Pilsen. The Malkavian’s skull. That wasn’t a message for the Sabbat. That was a message for us, and nobody’s answered it yet. Whatever you find on Devon, I want to know if it tells you why they haven’t moved since.” He held her eyes a beat past necessary. “And Sable. Report to me before you report to Lodin. Not because I don’t trust him with the truth. Because I trust you to tell it better.”

She was halfway to the door when he added, without raising his voice, “Go carefully. You’ve already spent one recklessness this week that isn’t in your report.”

Devon Avenue at eleven-forty on a March Thursday winds itself down in three languages. The sari shops had their gates half-lowered, showing a foot of lit floor and a fringe of gold thread. The halal butchers were dark, windows still wet from the hose. One grocery stayed lit for the milk-and-cigarettes trade, and a man in a parka stood in its doorway eating a samosa in the cold with his hood up, and Sable, parking the Buick a block down with the engine ticking behind her, envied him so specifically and so briefly that it surprised her.

The shop sat between a shuttered travel agency and a check-cashing place. No name on the glass, a hand-lettered sign with the letters ruled straight: CANDLES • CARDS • CURIOS.

She gave herself a minute in the dark to let her senses come up. One light behind the front curtain, warm and low, a lamp and not overheads. No car parked running. Nobody smoking in a doorway who shouldn’t be. But the alley behind the row had a service door standing three inches ajar, and under the wax and the old paper, threading out of that gap, blood that had been spilled and not entirely cleaned up. Not fresh. Not old enough to be nothing.

She crossed. The pavement was gritty with salt thrown down in January and never swept, and in the middle of the street a scrape of it under her heel told her the crossing wasn’t as clean as she wanted. Not a sound so much as a small failure she felt in her own body. The rhythm behind the door didn’t change.

Because there was a rhythm. Back against brick that held no heat at all, she could hear a woman’s voice through the gap, not English, not praying in any register she’d heard in a church. It repeated. That was the whole of its character. It repeated, and the repetitions were getting shorter. Through the three inches: candlelight, not electric, long shapes thrown up shelves of jarred things she declined to resolve. Then the woman’s heartbeat came up, not the scatter of fear but the steady climb of effort, someone nearing the top of a staircase she’d climbed a hundred times.

Headlights swung wide at the alley’s far end and cut. Darius’s sedan, parked short. Two doors. Tomás got out stiffer than he’d moved a month ago, blood bags doing their thin work and no more, a slowness in his shoulders that had nothing to do with the cold.

Darius reached her first and read the alley, the propped door, and her posture in a second and a half.

“What do we have.”

“Someone’s home,” she said, low. “One heartbeat. She’s not talking to a customer. It’s a chant, not English, and it’s building toward something. No one else back there. But there’s old blood under the wax. Not fresh enough to be from tonight.”

Tomás’s head came around at chant.

She pushed her sight through the gap and it went down wrong from the first second. The room came back in colors it had no business having, the walls stained faintly with something that wasn’t the woman’s own hue, the same stain laid over the same places again and again until it had gone into the plaster like grease into an apron. Her vision swam for ten seconds afterward, punishment for reaching.

Tomás didn’t need to look. The rhythm was enough.

“That’s not English because it isn’t meant to be understood. It’s meant to be repeated exactly.” His voice went down half a step, which with Tomás meant something had arranged itself. “Ward renewal. She’s maintaining a boundary, not casting outward. Whatever she’s protecting, she’s protecting it in there. She isn’t calling anything to come to her.”

Darius worked the block behind them. No watchers. But a delivery van three doors down hadn’t moved since they arrived, and an upstairs window across the street had gone dark exactly as they turned the corner.

“Now,” Sable said. “Before she finishes it.”

She was through the door before the voice reached the end of its next repetition.

Ilsa Reinhardt was older than the front window had promised. Gray hair pulled back hard enough to lift the corners of her eyes, a cardigan buttoned wrong at the bottom, fingertips stained dark to the second knuckle. She knelt over a circle cut into the floorboards. Not chalked, not painted. Scored into the wood and worn smooth in the groove, dished in the middle like a church step under three hundred years of the same feet.

The candle flames didn’t move when the door opened. Sable noticed that before she noticed the woman’s face.

Ilsa didn’t scream. She went still, and the stillness had arithmetic in it.

“You’re early,” she said, to nobody. “Or he sent the wrong ones.”

Darius crossed the room before she could finish whatever she was adding up, got her eyes and held them.

“Who is ‘he.’”

Her jaw worked once, a swallow that didn’t take.

“Bach.” Flat, level, a woman reciting a grocery list she happens to have memorized. “He doesn’t come here. Never has. I keep the door open for his people. Three times since January.”

“Where is he now. Tell us everything you know about him, his associates, and the Sabbat.”

“He’s not in the city. Left two nights ago, no word on when back. Not unusual. He doesn’t keep a fixed haven, he moves with the pack.” Her eyes stayed glassy, but underneath something was still counting, still deciding how to survive the next ten minutes. “There are five of them, six before the theater. A woman named Mireille does the actual talking when Bach isn’t around. She’s smarter than him and meaner. Three others I only know as Chorus. It’s a title, not names. And Barb, young, American, turned somewhere in Ohio, still soft. He used to come alone, before the pack decided I wasn’t worth the risk.”

“Go on.”

“They’re not staying. I heard Bach say Chicago’s Camarilla is louder than expected. Meant Lodin, meant all of you. He wants Neally delivered or he wants to leave, whichever comes first, and he doesn’t care which.” Her stained fingers found the groove in the floor and rested there. “There’s a place. Not a haven, a drop point. Warehouse district near the river. I don’t have an address, I only ever met them here. But the last delivery I made, the boy who picked it up smelled like creosote. That’s rail yards, not warehouses proper. I’d start there, if I were hunting instead of asking.”

The word had a home somewhere in Sable’s memory. A flyer stapled to a pole on Milwaukee Avenue.

“Baby Chorus?” she said. “There’s a band with that name. Anarch kids.”

“Not baby anything. Just the Chorus.” Ilsa’s mouth did something brief that on a different face would have been amusement. “Three of them, one thing. Don’t look too close if you ever see them. The not-blinking-together part gets to people faster than the fighting does.”

Sable let out a breath she had no physical use for.

“We take her with us. Compelled, quiet, in the back seat, and we go look at rail yards.”

Darius didn’t answer right away, which was how he disagreed. Tomás answered for both of them, and he was looking at the floor when he did. At the circle with its half-said words still sitting in the grooves, unfinished, and nobody in the room able to say what an interrupted boundary does on its own recognizance at midnight.

“If we leave this,” he said, “we leave it doing something. And we don’t know what.”

She thought about the salt grit under her heel in the middle of the street, and about one recklessness already spent this week, already in a Brujah’s mouth before she’d walked through his door.

“Then call your people,” she said.

Tomás stepped four feet away, all the privacy the room offered, and his voice changed before the line connected. Not louder. Flatter, stripped of every courtesy that wasn’t procedural.

“Report. Devon Avenue. A mortal contact of Bach’s pack, Sabbat, confirmed under compulsion. She’s been maintaining a warding circle, renewed on a schedule, cut into the floor. Professional work, old and repeated, not improvised. I’d want a proper assessment before anyone disturbs it further. There’s more. A drop point, warehouse district near the river, rail yard adjacent, creosote on a courier, no address. Bach left the city two nights ago, no return date. Pack roster confirmed: Bach, a lieutenant named Mireille who does the negotiating, and the Chorus.” He did not editorialize on what the Chorus was. “Orders.”

He listened. Then: “Understood. Twenty minutes. You’re right that Critias will hear about this. What are your orders on how I handle that?”

The answer ran long. Sable watched his face the whole time and got nothing off it but a tightening at the jaw that meant he was memorizing rather than agreeing.

“Yes. Competence, not circumvention. Understood.”

He hung up and came back, and to his credit he didn’t dress it.

“My chantry takes her and the circle. Squad’s twenty minutes out. We hold, we keep her breathing and quiet, and nobody touches the floor.” He looked at Sable. “I reported all of it. That’s how this works with me, and I’d rather say it now than have either of you find it out sideways.”

“I know how it works with you,” Darius said. “Go make sure your people don’t bring a truck down the alley with the lights on.”

While they waited, Tomás worked the shop as though he might be tested on it later, which is how he worked everything. Behind a false panel in the third shelf unit, a ledger. Handwritten, private shorthand, dates and quantities and initials and no names at all. Three deliveries since January. The last entry, four days old, carried a notation in a different hand: Return east.

Behind the ledger, wrapped in a rag stiff enough to stand on its own, a straight razor. Ordinary steel, recently stropped.

“What’s this for?”

“For when the ward needs paying.” Same flat register she’d used for the roster, the schedule, the boy who smelled of creosote. “It isn’t free.”

Sable crouched to the woman’s eye level, which put her knee on a patch of candle-warmed floorboard, the only warm thing in the room.

“Who wrote ‘return east.’ What does east mean? Detroit?”

Ilsa’s eyes went to the ledger before her mouth moved.

“Mireille wrote it. She does the ledger when Bach can’t be bothered. East doesn’t mean a city. It’s how they talk about where they came from. The pack doesn’t call anywhere home, they say ’east of here,’ like the direction matters more than the place. I took it to mean Sabbat ground generally. Detroit’s on the way if they’re driving. Could be further, Ohio, New York. I don’t know their road. I only know they don’t like saying names out loud, even to me, even after eight years of taking their money.”

“If they’re leaving, what’s the timeline.”

“I don’t know a date. The last two deliveries were smaller than usual. Like they’re not planning to need much more from me. That’s the only pattern I’ve got.” Her eyes went to the razor in Tomás’s gloved hand. “And the payment went up. It used to be once a month. Last time was two weeks after the one before. Something’s using more of whatever this keeps out.”

Nobody had an answer for that. Sable was aware of the woman’s heartbeat underneath the sentence, steady and unhurried, fifty-eight or sixty, a metronome ticking under a piece nobody was playing.

The van came in with its headlights off for the last forty yards. Three figures got out. The one who came in last used a cane with a silver top, wore a suit cut fifteen years before anyone in Chicago was wearing them that way, and didn’t bother introducing himself, having met Tomás once and found it sufficient.

Abraham DuSable crouched at the edge of the circle without touching it, and spoke at a volume that made Sable, four feet away, take a moment to be sure he’d spoken at all.

“Well. Someone competent, for once, in Sabbat employ.” His gaze went around the groove twice. “Ward of Persistent Occlusion, if I’m not mistaken. Old work. Older than the woman maintaining it. She didn’t design this.”

He looked up at Tomás over his own hand, resting on the cane.

“Nicolai tells me you found this and had the sense not to touch it. Consistent with the report authority you insisted upon in February. Tell me what you have, in full, and I will tell you what it means. That was the arrangement, I understand.”

Tomás laid it out clean. The ledger, the razor, the compressing schedule, return east, the roster with the Chorus in it. DuSable listened without once interrupting. His stillness had none of Ilsa’s arithmetic in it. It was the attention of a man who had spent a mortal lifetime in courtrooms learning that an interruption always costs more than it buys.

“The ward first,” he said, “since it’s the part that will still be true after the woman stops being useful to anyone.” He crouched lower. “Persistent Occlusion does not hide a place. It hides a presence. Something that would otherwise be sensed by precisely the means your Toreador used at that door an hour ago.” He glanced at the bagged razor. “Blood payment scaling this way is not uncommon in older work adjacent to my own clan’s craft, which tells you the antitribu who built it understood the discipline properly, whatever else they have become since.”

“And what’s under it?” Sable asked.

“Old. Professional. Shielding something, and the shielding is costing more every month.” He rose, and the cane took his weight for a fraction of a second before his knees did. “That is the whole of what I will say tonight, Miss Price, and I would encourage you to resist the temptation to improve on it. Speculation acquires the texture of fact very fast in this city, and I have spent a great deal of my afterlife untangling what someone once said confidently in a hallway.”

She went outside to make her call, because the back room had gotten crowded with Tremere and the cold was a relief. The wind had come around and the temperature had dropped into the low twenties. The samosa man was gone. The grocery’s light was off.

Critias picked up on the second ring.

“Devon Avenue produced more than expected. Bach’s pack may be pulling out of Chicago. The mortal confirmed it, and Tomás’s chantry has her and a working she was maintaining in custody now.” She watched her own breath fail to appear in front of her. “You should know Tomás called it in before you did. Full disclosure to his Regent is how he operates. I imagine you’ll hear about the Tremere presence on this from more than one direction tonight.”

“I assumed as much the moment I mentioned bringing the Tremere along.” Dry as the pavement. “I am not offended. I am informed, which is what I asked for. What did the working show?”

“A ward. Old, professional, escalating cost. DuSable’s read, not mine. He says it’s shielding something and won’t say what, and he was deliberate about not saying it.” She shifted the receiver. “There’s too much here for a street corner. This belongs at Elysium. You, us, whoever else needs to hear it before it turns into three different stories told by people who all think they were there.”

“Elysium.” He’d been walking that route himself, by the sound of it, and was pleased to be met on it. “Formal venue means formal record. The harpies will have this before dawn regardless of what any of us do tonight. The only question is whether it’s ours or someone else’s when they get it. Yes. Bring it to Elysium. I’ll see it’s on the agenda, and I’ll speak before anyone can frame Tremere involvement as Tremere overreach. That much I can still manage.”

“That’s generous.”

“It isn’t generosity, it’s positioning, and you knew that when you suggested it, which is why I’m agreeing.” A rustle on his end. The book, she thought, or a chair. “You did well tonight. Both the lead and the instinct to make this public rather than let three parties disagree about it in private. Go rest. Elysium isn’t for a few weeks yet by the usual calendar. I’ll send word if that changes.”

The drive south was twenty-five minutes on empty streets, the Buick’s heater running for no reason except that Sable liked the sound of it, and nobody said anything worth remembering. Tomás sat in back with his hands flat on his knees. Darius drove the last stretch because she let him.

Kaspar & Sons came up on the left. Brick, boarded windows, the loading dock where the steel door used to close. It still didn’t close. It hadn’t since January, when something came through it and took the frame along, and the door stood propped in its opening at a permanent angle now, held by its own weight and a length of pipe.

Sable stood in the alley with the lake wind coming down it and looked at that for a while. The good steel. The bent hinges. The black gap at the edge where the cold got in.

Then she went inside, because the alternative was standing in an alley at one in the morning admiring a door, and there were four hours left until dawn.