Chapter Four
San Francisco
Empyrean Group’s Tactical Models division sat in the SoMa district below San Francisco’s hills, in the offices of a failed dot-com. Empyrean had left the old firm’s décor, dated islands of cubicles in faded pop colors, quaint and grim like an empty playroom.
At his cubicle, an intimidating Empyrean security officer in black and blue uniform stood by Gabriel’s chair. The man drew himself up. He recognized Gabriel.
“Gabriel.” Jeff Prender, Gabriel’s boss, came up behind. Jeff wore a green sport coat, buttoned tight, his ruddy-white head half-extended like a turtle’s. “Follow me, son.”
Gabriel followed Jeff. The guard stayed behind. The only reason for this—couldn’t be.
Jeff’s office had a cluttered desk and a cleared table with a coffee service. At the table sat a dark black man with a long chin, in an olive-brown suit. The coffee smelled delicious, with spicy oils and almond.
“This is Bill Thorn,” Jeff said. “Executive Investigations.”
Bill Thorn stood to offer his hand. “Very nice to meet you, Gabe.” Thorn spoke in a northwestern singsong, with low rounded vowels. His use of a nickname sounded forced and false, a ploy to get a rise out of Gabriel.
“Hello, Bill. I go by Gabriel. Jeff, what’s going on?”
“This is my meeting,” Thorn said with cool authority. “Sit down. Coffee?”
Gabriel shook his head. After the nickname his guard was up. Jeff backed away to stand by his desk. It felt like a video game. Gabriel sat.
Thorn filled a mug and added sweetener. “Nathaniel Coleman. He goes by Nate.”
“If you know about it,” Gabriel said, “you know he swung at me first.”
“You swung back,” Thorn said. “Three broken bones in his face and a fractured wrist.”
“It just happened.”
“No, it didn’t. And if it did—it was exceptionally violent. Can you explain why?”
“No.” Gabriel’s thighs twitched, ready to run. “No, I can’t.”
“Gabriel Archer,” Jeff said from behind him. “Your employment at Empyrean Group is terminated, for unbecoming conduct. Human Resources will send a packet. I’m sorry.”
“Can you do that?” Gabriel asked. “I wasn’t arrested or anything.”
“You’ve admitted to it,” Jeff said. “Your employment contract has a morals clause. We can enforce it at—at the firm’s option.”
“And we so option,” Thorn said. “We can also share your name with Nevada police. But we won’t. You’re fired, that’s it.” He turned to Jeff. “If you would leave us alone?”
Jeff grew red as if insulted. Thorn straightened. Jeff walked out, slamming the door.
“That wasn’t about me,” Gabriel said.
“I think it was. But Jeff and I have a history.” Thorn settled back, crossed his legs. “You saw the guard at your desk. But he’ll wait. Have a coffee. It’s good. Real brew, not the pods.”
“What is this?”
“This is recruiting. Executive Investigations does background checks on senior staff. Meticulous work. Not exciting.” Thorn smiled. “I’ve a hunch you’d be a natural.”
“You just fired me,” Gabriel said.
“I did. You are welcome to leave.” Thorn closed his eyes, arms slack as if to meditate.
“What is this? An exit debriefing?”
“I told you. I’m recruiting.” Thorn opened his eyes. “To be clear, no one else at this firm will hire you. Tell me what happened.”
Gabriel winced. “He hit me first. He was bothering my date.” Gabriel remembered anger but also joy, the satisfaction of being necessary. “She was drunk, he was shouting. He hit me.”
“You broke his face.” Thorn leaned close. “You wanted to.”
“I was fighting. You fight to win.”
“That’s true. Did you feel justified?” Thorn spoke slowly, sympathetically. “Did it feel proper? Did he deserve punishment? Or did you just like hurting him?”
“I should leave now,” Gabriel said.
Thorn poured a mug of coffee and handed it to Gabriel. “Good luck then.”
Gabriel drank. It was strong coffee, bitter and nutty. He must have had it daily, but he had never noticed it being this good. The gray mug sported the Empyrean logo, a simple motif of nine floating gray steps. Ascension, progress. Now it looked rickety, unfinished.
Thorn wanted something specific from Gabriel. Maybe still a game. If Gabriel could figure it out.
“What would I have to do?” Gabriel said.
“I take you for a drive,” Thorn said. “To Oakland. A public street, outdoors.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you. Come for a drive with me or go home.”
“What’s in it for me?” Gabriel asked.
“Maybe a job, which is good these days. Also, it might be what you’re looking for.”
“Looking for how?”
“In your life. Do you like your life? Does it make sense? Or do you lie to everyone about it so you don’t have to try to explain? This might be part of that.” Thorn stood. “I’m going now. Come with me. C’mon.”
Gabriel felt like when Walt had steered him down a cliff. Look what had happened after that.
* * *
Bill Thorn drove a long gold American convertible, with cream leather and burled wood trim. Even with the top down it stank of detailing, a sharp chemical citrus.
“Where are you from?” Thorn asked at the garage exit.
“That’s not in my file?” Gabriel asked.
“Wasn’t the part that interested me.”
“Ha. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin.”
“Good town. What did your father do?”
“After the Navy he was a power-plant engineer. My mom teaches Russian. We all learned it from her. As a toddler I had Cyrillic blocks.” He felt a snap of fear, as if Thorn’s gold boat would steal his childhood. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“It’s a half-mile to the freeway. If you’re going to leap to freedom, do it soon.” Thorn turned on upbeat swing jazz. Gabriel wondered if this was part of the interview, would he stay or run, why it felt stupider to run than to go someplace he didn’t know.
On the Bay Bridge, Gabriel smelled salt, rust, and exhaust, curdled like cheese. He closed his eyes to focus on the smell. Even the sun moved but the Bay didn’t move. An odd thought.
When he opened his eyes, Thorn’s sedan aimed at the Oakland port’s great cranes. “Where are we going?” Gabriel asked.
“Not far now. It’s an old industrial park. Just a couple more miles.”
They exited onto narrow streets of old warehouses, parking lots fenced and topped with razor wire. He saw vans and trucks but no people. With the top down Gabriel felt more aware but also exposed. The Bay air hard to smell through wire rust.
“If I said to take me back, would you?”
Thorn glanced at him. “You need to be more decisive.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“That’s right,” Thorn said. “Besides, we’re here.”
Thorn turned down an alley of old uneven brick. The car rattled past crumbling buildings, boarded windows, rust-eaten dumpsters. No salt smell. Gabriel should have paid more attention. He could run. Was Thorn armed?
Thorn pulled up to a chain-link gate and turned off the engine. “Let’s go.”
Gabriel followed him, past a door stoop littered with cigarette butts. Acrid stenches, sewage and chemical. “This is nasty,” Gabriel said. He backed away, coughing. “I’m not going there.” He coughed in spasms. “My God, what is this?”
Thorn pointed at the barred windows on the building’s top floor. “There.”
A lava of odors poured down on Gabriel. Blood, shit, acid, copper, flame. He felt a horrid layered buzz in his nose, like a hive of pain and shame. Gabriel threw up but it was just a drop in the filth. In his head, a siren’s shrieking: bad habanero bad habanero bad habanero.
* * *
Gabriel woke in Bill Thorn’s sedan, his arms under the seat belt, his jacket draped over him like a blanket. He freed himself. They sat in the parking lot of a gray-white strip mall. Coffee house, drugstore, framing, salon. The car’s top was up. His phone had service. Gabriel leaned back into his body’s smells, sour-sweet vomit, vinegar sweat. “Where are we?”
“San Bruno,” Thorn said, looking at the sky. “It’s foggy. We’ll wait out rush hour.” Thorn’s suit was rumpled and dirty. “Let’s get coffee. You can freshen up.”
The coffee house looked unfinished, with empty green-white walls and few tables. The restroom had no mirror. Gabriel rinsed his mouth, washed his face, brushed off what dirt he could.
Thorn was waiting for him at a rear table, with a large mug of coffee, two bottled waters, and a bottled iced tea. “Take your pick,” Thorn said. “I like them all.”
Gabriel drank a water in one go. “Please just tell me what’s going on.”
“You’re psychic,” Thorn said.
Gabriel felt he had walked into a window. “Again?”
“Psychic. Though, ‘sensitive’ is more in vogue. You have a supernatural awareness of people’s emotional and volitional states.” Thorn took the coffee and sipped it.
Gabriel pushed his chair back. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t think so. My sensitivity emerged in my late teens. With the hormones. Bad dreams, hallucinations, total certainty about bizarre courses of action. Some make it on their own. Some meet up with others. The Internet’s helped. Others become addicts, or diagnosed as schizophrenic. You repressed it.”
Gabriel waited for an outrage that never came. Instead, he felt a curious unfurling, like a dry sponge soaking water. “Convince me,” he said.
“You work hard to be good,” Thorn said. “People do that when they used to be jerks.”
Gabriel nodded. “My dad was a hard-ass. I never measured up. It rolls downhill. I liked getting in people’s faces. My mom pulled strings to get me into college but I cared less than she did. I left with two friends to be a ski-bum in Tahoe, working for lift passes and beer. But some nights, I looked for trouble. I’d go alone to different towns around the lake, strange bars. My specialty was macho assholes with self-hating girlfriends. I could smell them. Literally. Like burned coffee. Once I found one, it didn’t take much. In a minute we’d be outside.”
“You win?”
“Usually. I was more prepared. By springtime, I was working a second job, and—I don’t know. Like it was out of my system. One night there was this big house party, out by the airport. Didn’t really know anyone, friend-of-a-friend thing. I walked into the woods to take a piss. Found this couple. She was drunk, he was kissing her. She didn’t like it. I hauled off on him. Face, gut, gut again, knee to his face.” Even now, he felt the satisfaction. “She tried to stop me. When I pushed her off I felt her nose break. That woke me. I ran until I collapsed. I don’t know how I got home. Next morning, I left my share of the rent and drove to San Francisco. I quit drinking, got my head straight, got a scholarship. I haven’t been in a fight since, until Saturday.”
“In the woods,” Thorn asked, “why did you look for the couple?”
“I didn’t—” The question stung him sharply behind his ear. He had been chatting up a pretty brunette in black, with a New York look to her. He had left to give her space. Outside, the stars had shimmered like sparks above South Shore’s blue-white glow. He had ducked behind a tree. Above the smell of his own piss, a stench of sweat and come.
“I smelled them,” Gabriel said. “I smelled the sex.”
“They weren’t having sex.”
“That’s right. I—” Another sting. It made him shiver. “I smelled his plan.”
“Drink the tea,” Thorn said. “Then tell me about Saturday.”
He drank the tea like water until its strange scents stopped him. Plum, prune really, a jammy viscous sweetness. He put down the bottle. All day, he’d been distracted, his hassles sidelined by the world. By smell. “Nate smelled horrible,” Gabriel said. “Like sewage. I smelled him from far away. He caused the scene. He hit me—it wasn’t even a good punch. But something took over. I liked when it did.”
“The vigilante is justice’s proud bitch,” Thorn said. “Maybe Nate had evil in mind. But Nate hit you. If you stood down, they’d have thrown him out.”
“So I should have just—”
“Not hospitalized a person,” Thorn said. “What about today?”
“Slave labor. Kidnapped immigrants.” Now Gabriel could parse it: bitter sadness, coals of anger smoldering under damp shame. Fooled, fleeced, harnessed like donkeys, chained and crapping in buckets. “You pretended you didn’t smell it.”
“I don’t smell,” Thorn said. “What I saw was as ugly. Sensitivity uses dominant senses. I have perfect vision, so I see—colors, auras, distortions. You have a great sense of smell.”
“No, I don’t,” Gabriel said. “Not for years. Lately I smell a lot.”
“You repressed it. Now it’s back. That will be tough. Smell is immediate and evocative. Smell is why moths die in candle flames.”
“I thought—wait, the sweatshop? How did you know? Are we going to do something?”
“I knew, how you know. Authorities have been notified. But I figured I’d use it.”
“That’s cold.” Gabriel panted. “We have to do something.”
“Ha. You can’t even stand up near that place. Be glad it can be fixed, Gabriel. We’re not the ones to fix it. You understand?” Thorn shook his finger, opened his hand. “You can’t just react. You have to handle it. I’ll try to help you. It would be easier if you worked for me.”
“Why can’t I just keep my job?” Gabriel asked.
“Did you like it all that much?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Do you know Empyrean Group is a devout workplace?” Thorn asked. “We have the same diversity of belief as most white-collar businesses. But from executive to custodial staff, we are more devout. High rates of church attendance, involvement, tithing. Even our atheists volunteer more and attend spiritual discussion groups. Such people have a sense of order, of community, of rules. You and I are witchy. We violate the rules. Remember how Jeff Prender behaved this morning? He’s not alone. The Russian office hated you. Even in a machine translation, it seemed all out of line. They had you put under surveillance when you came back, for corporate espionage.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, we’re paranoid. Obviously you weren’t spying. They just wanted to get you fired. Luckily for you, Jeff Prender doesn’t like Russians. But that’s over. There are few places people like us can work at Empyrean. We’re gargoyles. Protect the church but no communion.”
“You don’t really do background checks,” Gabriel said.
“Oh, I do, but as a cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“I can’t tell you until you accept,” Thorn said.
“What if I don’t like it? What if I want out?”
“I don’t know, Gabriel. I do know you need help. The world is going to drown you. I can help you swim.”
“And I don’t have a choice.”
“You can quit,” Thorn said. “It might be the best option. I’m a very tense fellow. I go to church twice a week, and the shooting range more.”
“You’re not much of a salesman,” Gabriel said.
“Thank you. If you say no, I’ll get you a good package. What I said, about our community, I’ll help with that too.”
A sudden panic gripped Gabriel. He imagined wires in his brain, screams and pain, guns and laughter. Against his fears, this one dour man, strangely calming. He was real. The tea was real. The place was real. His breathing slowed.
“I’m in,” Gabriel said.
“May I ask why?”
“Because your crazy is better than my crazy. My crazy, I’m alone and hallucinating this. Your crazy makes sense. Not just now, but before. My childhood.”
“That’s a start, Gabriel. We should probably head back.”
Fog glowed around the parking lot lights. Thorn looked around as if satisfied. He took off his jacket. They drove a mile not talking, listening to a jazzy guitar.
“Some call us witchy,” Thorn said. “Others call us blessed. They call your crazy smells a gift from God, with righteous ends.”
“That’s stupid,” Gabriel said.
“Who did you fight? Date-rapists. Jerks. You could have targeted weak women. I won’t insist on our holiness. But some believe we are here for good reasons.” His face shone brightly in the freeway light. “Our CEO, Luther Koenig, has dreams. Specific dreams, in advance, about real people. People who can do good they’re not doing, or people who need to stop doing harm.”
“Koenig is psychic?”
“Not like us. We know what is. He knows what will be. He is a prophet. The people he dreams of are real. We try to change their fates. I don’t know why, and if Mr. Koenig does, he’s not telling. But it’s real, and it’s our firm’s biggest secret.
“Three weeks ago, Gabriel, Koenig had a dream about you. I was in Tahoe this weekend, Gabriel, in that same bar. I stole the security recording. I kept the police from finding you.”
Dry pressure in his throat, as if Thorn had fed him balloons. “Why didn’t you stop me?” Gabriel asked.
“We didn’t know what you would do,” Thorn said. “We only know time and place.”
“Did you see me fight?”
“I did. You were fast.”
A great fatigue came on Gabriel. “Is it in my file?”
“The recording? If it were, would you want to see it?”
“I see it fine in my head.” Gabriel closed his eyes. “But it’s slow.”
“Look on the bright side,” Thorn said. “Now that you know you’re psychic, you can start drinking again.”