Steal the Lightning
Dedication
For my wife, Charity
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: A Nice Day Out
Chapter 2: Getting to Know You
Chapter 3: We Ought to Be at Macy’s
Chapter 4: The Seller
Chapter 5: Wish You Were Here
Chapter 6: Perils of the Restaurant Trade
Chapter 7: The Apartment
Chapter 8: Negotiating with the Damned
Chapter 9: Profanity
Chapter 10: The Cable Guy
Chapter 11: Indiana Jones
Chapter 12: Death and Breakfast
Chapter 13: Mr. Appleseed
Chapter 14: Reunion
Chapter 15: Man to Man
Chapter 16: Dealing with Death
Chapter 17: The Road
Chapter 18: Not the Village Fête
Chapter 19: Trying to Find the Reverend
Chapter 20: An Unexpected Rendezvous
Chapter 21: The Show Begins
Chapter 22: Faces in the Water
Chapter 23: Idiot or Genius?
Chapter 24: The Limo
Chapter 25: The Archivist
Chapter 26: A History Lesson
Chapter 27: The Look of a Tall Man
Chapter 28: An Audience with Eddie-boy
Chapter 29: Full Battery
Chapter 30: The Empty Square
Chapter 31: Options
Chapter 32: Confession
Chapter 33: All in the Prep
Chapter 34: A Gathering of the Faithful
Chapter 35: The Threat of Violence
Chapter 36: Heading South
Chapter 37: Stella
Chapter 38: The Interview
Chapter 39: A God Talking Through You
Chapter 40: Gate Keepers
Chapter 41: The Great House
Chapter 42: The Elder Ballington
Chapter 43: Transference of Forces
Chapter 44: A Bright, Bright Light Upon Our Future
Chapter 45: The Prodromal God
Chapter 46: A Man’s Name
Chapter 47: Night Music
Chapter 48: Ghosts at Evening
Chapter 49: Running Boy
Chapter 50: Side Effects
Chapter 51: Tell Him It’s Copeland
Chapter 52: God of Air
Chapter 53: Message from a Dead Man
Chapter 54: Echoes from Nowhere
Chapter 55: Intruders
Chapter 56: Assault on a Casino
Chapter 57: The Bug
Chapter 58: Prisoners
Chapter 59: Your Father’s Crazy
Chapter 60: The Most Terrifying Thing
Chapter 61: Holes in Reality
Chapter 62: Words in the Walls
Chapter 63: Thirteen
Chapter 64: Not Mecca or the Vatican
Chapter 65: The Elevator
Chapter 66: Ballington
Chapter 67: The God Is Free
Chapter 68: Registry Personnel
Chapter 69: Welcome to Field Ops
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from Devil in the Wires
Chapter 1: Interested?
Chapter 2: Night Moves
Chapter 3: The Car Wreck
Chapter 4: Everywhere Is Somewhere
Chapter 5: Thirty-four Potential Sites
About the Author
Also by Tim Lees
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
A Nice Day Out
If you can judge a city by its pavements, New York was in a bad way. People say the streets are mean, but they are also rutted, cracked, buckled, and cut about by grooves and furrows that, with just a little extra work, could serve as tank traps, should Manhattan ever be invaded. Some of these, I saw ahead of time, and steered around. Others seemed to lurk, invisible, then spring themselves upon me in one final, jarring moment, and the wheelchair I was pushing would abruptly jerk, buck, then crash back down, leaving its occupant to yell and fume at me. “Dumbass!” she’d cry, and ask if I was trying to kill her. Which by that time was a prospect I was starting to consider.
This should not have been my job.
I worked Field Ops.
Field Ops kept me far away from people.
I was Field Ops, not a fucking geriatric’s nursemaid.
The lady I was now escorting was named Melody Duchess Vanderlisle de Vere, a label so improbable it just had to be real. Yet she was not a duchess, save in name, and there was precious little melody about her, either. She had the voice of a crow and the manners of a Third World dictator. She would browbeat, badger and intimidate; at the same time, she could be suddenly, capriciously generous. She gave twenty bucks to the man who held the door at Tiffany’s, and was never less than courteous to the passersby—and there were many—who offered us assistance with the wheelchair, with doors, elevators, and whatever else we needed. She would gaze at them with helpless gratitude, these kindly souls, and her whole demeanor seemed to radiate: “Thank God you’re here to save me from this idiot.”
I was the idiot.
It was a verdict I found hard to disagree with.
By my third day on the job, though, I had a plan. I arrived at her apartment building, bright and early, determined that today, at least, I’d have an easy time. This was New York, when all was said and done, and Melody Duchess was cultured. Very, very cultured.
I squinted at the sky.
“Looks like rain,” I said. “You want to try the Guggenheim? The Metropolitan?”
She said nothing.
I said, “There’s a Degas exhibition.” I made this sound the greatest news on Earth. “Ballerinas, horse racing, you know? Be really good.”
But she sniffed, tipped back her head.
“Dagos,” she said, slowly, chewing the word around her mouth. “Why’d I want to go see dagos?”
“Degas,” I corrected, though of course, she’d heard me perfectly. Her thin lips pressed together in what might have been a smirk.
“Must be your accent, hon,” she said. “I swear, there’s times when I can’t understand a word you say.”
I was a servant here, and it is not the servant’s place to show emotion. So I smiled, and felt the venom seep between my teeth.
She laughed then.
“I’m just getting a rise out of you, honey,” she announced, like that made everything OK.
And I said, “Fine,” just like it did.
Melody Duchess did not want to see a gallery. Melody Duchess, it turned out, wanted to trek up half the length of Broadway, recapturing the memories of her youth (“Though it was different then,” she’d always say). She wanted to go anywhere she’d been with “Frugs,” the late lamented Ferguson de Vere, Esq., her husband. In real terms, this meant everywhere. Frugs had worked as an attorney, with an office just off Wall Street and the cream of all Manhattan for his clientele. She’d been married to him more than forty years. He’d never strayed. “I would have known,” she said. “I would have known immediately.” Frugs had been gone twenty years now, and I couldn’t help but think that it was probably a great relief to him.
So from the WTC station, we pressed north. I offered her a taxi; she shook her head.
“Young man. If I want a taxi, I will ask for one. You know how long it is, since I had a chance to get around like this? I want to feel the wind in my hair—”
“The rain on your skin,” I said.
“It’s only a few drops. Now come on! Come on!”
You’re 86, I thought. So what’s the rush?
But I’d more than likely answered my own question.
Maybe a half mi
le further on, we struck a cross street. I was busy watching out for cars, not looking at the ground. The front wheel hit a rut, the chair jumped in my hands, then slammed down on my shin so hard I felt the bone vibrate. The nausea slid over me.
She was outraged. She was furious.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I twisted up. I hopped about there in the middle of the road, trying to block the throbbing in my leg. I have been beaten up and injured fairly badly in my life, but this one, stupid pain just really got to me. Melody might well have been a frail old bird, but that chair weighed a ton. And I had just collided with it. I slumped down on a doorstep, wondering if my leg was broken.
“You make too much fuss,” she said. “Let’s go get coffee. Then you can moan in comfort.”
It took twenty minutes to locate a coffee shop acceptable to her. It was really a patisserie, and I think we went there for the cakes, as much as anything. I’d say the place most likely saved my life, only the way that I was feeling, it’s probably more accurate to say that it saved hers.
Chapter 2
Getting to Know You
I could boast about my job. My proper job, I mean; talk it up and make it sound like one gigantic, ongoing adventure, terrifying and miraculous. Through the working week I have seen time transformed and shuffled like a deck of cards. I have come close to creatures once worshipped as gods, and seen them crystallize into a brute, destructive physicality, or else a beauty of such force that it could eat your soul; while somewhere in the world, there is an entity who wears my face, speaks with my voice, and yet is not, by even the most twisted definition of the term, remotely human.
All this, I could have told her. If I’d wanted to. And if, you know, I’d been a bit of a prat.
As it was, I’d given her a few moments of candor, right back at the start, when I’d been hoping that we’d get along. Then I’d clammed up. I hadn’t been particularly subtle with it, either. So now, over cakes and coffee, Melody Duchess had her reckoning.
“You’ve not been open with me, Christopher.” She tipped her head back, sighting at me down her nose. “You’re kind of secretive, you know?”
“I’m English. It’s called ‘reserve’.”
She wagged her pastry fork at me.
“What you’ve been doing, young man, is giving me the runaround. The company line. And I am sick of it, you hear?”
Her face was narrow, cheekbones sharp, her skin pleated with lines. Her eyes were very pale, as if the color had been draining from them, bit by bit over the years.
“So now,” she said, “you’re going to tell me all about yourself. Are we agreed?”
We weren’t. “Not much to tell. I’m Chris Copeland, I work for the Registry. That’s about it, really.”
“Flim-flam.” She chopped the air with her fork. “I know all that. Not interesting at all.” She sliced a corner off her apple-almond turnover.
“You’re from London,” she said.
“I’ve got a place there. When I get chance to visit. I’m from up north, originally.”
“Married?”
“Once.”
She put the pastry in her mouth, chewing with a sideways motion, like a sheep.
She raised her brows to me, demanding more.
I said, “We’re friendly still. We talk, see each other sometimes. I think she’s found someone. There’s been this guy around, the last year or so . . .”
“And how do you feel about that?”
It was like dealing with a really irritating psychoanalyst.
I said, “I’m glad she’s not alone.”
“You get along with him?”
“I only met him once. Seems OK. A bit, um . . .” I wanted to say, “dull,” but I said, “steady. You know?”
“Jealous?”
“Not a bit.”
“Now, see.” She wiped a crumb from her lip. “Now, I’d never be second best. Not in anybody’s life. I would never stand for that.”
“I’m not in her life. We’re divorced.”
“Doesn’t matter. You don’t sell yourself short. That’s what Frugs would have said. Don’t sell yourself short, Duch. Not for anyone.”
She gouged another chunk out of her pastry, raised it to her lips, and stopped.
“Still,” she said, “you’ve got your colored girl now, haven’t you?”
I had told her about Angel on our first day, when I was trying to be nice. It was supposed to be a trade-off: here’s a bit about me, let’s hear a bit about you.
Building trust, familiarity.
I’d soon stopped doing that.
“Dr. Farthing is my colleague at the Registry. I’m not sure she’d appreciate the way that you referred to her.”
“Oh! Is that what you call her? Doctor Farthing?”
She gave a great caw of a laugh.
“‘Oh! Doctor Faaarthing!’”
It was a wail, mocking, lewd, and she drew the syllables out in a way that was unsettlingly lubricious. Her shoulders shook. Crumbs spilled from her lips.
Across the room, faces looked up, startled.
And then suddenly, she froze.
Her pale eyes she fixed on me. The laughter just drained out of her, and in a small, resentful voice, she said, “You’re here to take the god, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Yes, I am.”
Chapter 3
We Ought to Be at Macy’s
She did not like Union Square.
“Always such a filthy place,” she said. “Full of drug addicts and queers.”
“They cleaned it up,” I said.
But she scowled, skeptically eyeing up the park, with its throngs of shoppers, tourists, dog-walkers, commuters, and the single homeless man, dozing amid piles of plastic bags.
“We ought to be at Macy’s now,” she said.
But I’d insisted that we stop. I sprawled across a bench. I put my head back, flexed my neck, and tried to ease the aching in my body. You’d think my legs would hurt the most, but they didn’t. The pain was in my hands, my wrists, my arms, and worst of all, my shoulders.
I needed rest. And more than that, I wanted, if I could, to push our business just a little nearer a conclusion.
“You’d find the offer more than generous,” I said.
I watched a small Chihuahua-mix, there in the dog park, furiously barking at a Rottweiler some twenty times its size, and I thought of Angel’s dog, Riff, and how we used to walk him in Chicago, last year, in that weird, unearthly summer that we’d shared.
“I’m serious,” I said. “We’d pay you well. And keep it somewhere safe. That’s important, too, you know.”
She clucked, a mirthless little laugh.
“Frugs,” she said at last, “he always told me that I’d find religion one day. Duch, he said—he always called me Duch—you are due for such a conversion. I always went to church with him, of course, we had to for the business, but I’d no real use for it myself. All those thees and thous. It just holds people back, I used to think.
“Now here I am.” She placed her hands across her chest. “I have my own god.”
“Well,” I said, “we call them gods, but in the sense most people mean, they’re not like that . . .”
“Young man.” She straightened up, casting her grand, imperial gaze upon me. “If I say it’s a god, then it’s a god. All right?”
“The money we can offer—it could set you up for life. You’d have someone to take you out, any time you wanted—galleries, restaurants, or just a walk, like this. Anywhere you want to go.” Some other sucker, I thought. Anyone but me. “Hire a car, go for a drive. It’ll be good.”
“Paid company,” she said. “There’s a name for that.”
“I don’t think it would be . . . quite that way. We can put you in touch with a very good agency. Or perhaps you’d like a change of scene. A house in Florida, a trip to Europe—”
She raised a hand. “Wanna know where the money’s going? Truly?�
� I wondered if she was about to admit to a secret heroin habit, or a history of online gambling, but she said, “Mt. Sinai Hospital. Soon as the insurance runs out. Mark my words.”
“Not yet, though, surely? You’ve got—” I had been going to say, “Years,” but looking at her, I wasn’t so sure. “A long time yet,” I said.
She folded her hands across her knees. A schoolma’am’s pose.
“Let me tell you something, sweetheart. When you’re young, you think you just go on forever. You think your life’s a thousand years long, there’s time for everything. Everything you’ve dreamed of, you’ll get around to it. Not this year maybe. But next year, or the next, or . . . one day. Well, listen up. ’Cause ‘one day’ never comes, and that’s a fact. And ‘one day,’ it don’t matter anymore, ’cause one day, you’ll be dead.”
“You’ve got a point,” I said.
“More than a point, young man. I got the truth.”
“The god—” I said.
“Don’t ask again.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Not today. But look. I’m concerned, OK? These things are dangerous. To you, your neighbors—everyone around. Just ’cause it’s not in city bylaws doesn’t mean it’s OK.”
“Bylaws.”
“Ordinance. Whatever you call it. It’s like—it’s like having your own nuclear weapon. It’s safe if it’s contained, but otherwise—”
“I’m not against ’em, you know. Nuclear weapons. Not like some people.”
“You wouldn’t want one in your front room, though, would you?”
“They kept the Russians off our backs. And the Japs.”
“Just you tell me one last thing. Then we can drop it. Promise.”
She sniffed.
I said, “Where did you get it? I mean, how does someone . . . come by something like that? You know?”
“Someone like me, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Same way I come by everything, Christopher. I bought it. What d’you expect?”
Chapter 4
The Seller
Three young men wheeled racks of coats across the street. They didn’t even look before they crossed, just slid out straight into the road, regardless of the honking cars, the scurrying pedestrians, the woman in the wheelchair, and the poor sap pushing her, and trying, even now, to carry on a conversation.