A Taste of You Page 3

  “Eighty-five, and we do it my way,” says Agent Jones, but we know it would be his way anyway. Damn him.

  “Unless I decide I want to quit,” I say.

  “Of course,” he says, knowing I’m pissing into the wind.

  He hangs up, and I draw a deep breath, looking across the desk at the Accounts Receivable woman.

  o0o

  About three hours later I’m sitting across a rickety little Starbucks table from Agent Jones, and he is handing me a thumb drive. “Use this on your home computer. We want to know when the data has been destroyed.”

  “Not tactful,” I say. I resolve to buy a new laptop on my way home.

  “Not part of my job description,” he says, smiling that charming smile.

  I wait. In the past twenty-four hours, Agent Jones has gotten cocky. Before this he was merely threatening, persuasive, and charming. I’m a little alarmed at how well I’ve come to know his face already. I suppose it’s Stockholm syndrome. When somebody’s holding a gun to your head, you are motivated to study nuance.

  “We suggest a fan approach,” he says now.

  “Do you mind not using the royal we?”

  “It’s the Federal we,” he says.

  “Offensive.”

  “Noted.”

  “What’s the fan approach?” I say, realizing that badinage is only prolonging this interview.

  “You look, uh, innocent,” he says, and I feel a rush of heat from him. “Underage. So you could approach him as a fan of his cable show. Tell him you’re doing a school project on him. Express interest in learning his philosophy of magic. He fancies himself a philosopher.”

  “I know.” Agent Jones is blushing. Calling me young-looking has made him blush. This is interesting. He can’t know how old I really am. So he’s embarrassed at commenting on my appearance?

  Or my innocence. A-hah!

  Wow. Is it possible Agent Jones is interested in me?

  For some reason, this makes my day. I tell myself to cool it. It’s not a good idea, the sleeping with the enemy thing.

  “I don’t think I’ll be wearing a plaid skirt,” I say, just to mess with his head. Agent Jones is no baby himself. He’s got to be pushing forty. Why haven’t I noticed this before? He looks like a kid to me, but to the girl I look like, he would be practically granddaddy. Well, daddy anyway.

  Now he’s brick red. He pretends he isn’t blushing. “The subject likes to surround himself with older women,” he says, and I feel slapped in the face, but then I realize he’s of course talking about women who are older than I look. “They’re uh, unusual. One of your tasks is to find out what you can about them.”

  “They’re unusual? As in bughouse crazy?”

  “Little bit,” he says. “So far as we know, he hasn’t hurt anyone, although a couple of husbands tried to sue him for alienation of affection. That didn’t get far.”

  Something about Agent Nick is really distracting me. He’s fun to talk to, and he is definitely more complicated than his thick-necked Federal agent act would imply, but what drives me up the wall, slowly but with increasing intensity, is his energy. Nick has an energy field about four feet in diameter. I’ve met cops like him. Huge people. Most of them are natural bullies, not mean spirited, just huge, and their jobs require them to push other people around by force of will, since law enforcement cannot be accomplished by physical force, not really.

  Nick? I don’t know. I’d like to know more about him.

  This is not good at all.

  I try to move the conversation along. “’Kay. What are the hot buttons?”

  “Hot buttons?” he says, but I know and he knows that I know what I’m talking about. This is Fed lingo my mom taught me years ago.

  I see the words “smart-ass kid” written across his eyeballs in letters of fire, but he doesn’t say them. “If he talks about accumulating magical power for any reason. Especially action at a distance. Or if he talks about running for mayor.”

  “For mayor?” I sputter, and laugh out loud. “Have you seen his cable show? He looks like Grover on Sesame Street.”

  “He almost ran last year,” Jones says.

  “So what if he wants magical power?” I say. “Every dork with a wand and a pointy hat wants power. Even dorky Federal agencies want power,” I add. “I’ve never met a magician who wasn’t power crazy and, frankly, also grossly incompetent. Why do you care about this one?”

  He measures me with a look. “How many magicians do you meet?”

  “Not as many as you do, I bet. Mostly idiots.”

  “They all look like idiots from my side of the binoculars.” Agent Jones shrugs. “I go by the raygun-and-X-ray-eyes standard.”

  “X-ray eyes?”

  “Everybody wants a raygun and X-ray eyes. Oh, and everybody wants to fly. That’s what magic means to these idiots.”

  He’s got me there. I was born wanting to fly. One of the things that got me into this mess.

  “X-Ray eyes?” I say again, and he blushes again, dammit. This is getting fun.

  “For seeing through women’s clothes,” he says brusquely with another dark red flush, and I’m enchanted.

  For the first time, I notice that Agent Jones is a prana dynamo. The longer he sits here, the hotter he seems, literally. His body temperature has risen a degree and half in the past five minutes. And, if my extremely acute sense of smell does not fail me, he has a woody.

  He’s hunched over the little rickety table.

  I won’t tell him I know about the woody.

  I’ve completely lost the thread of our discussion. Prana is beginning to boil on his skin. It smells ... delicious. Sweaty and horny and a bit like hotel soap.

  “So,” I say, to bring us back on track. “Short plaid skirt, dizzy schoolgirl act. Keep an eye on the old broads in his entourage. Watch for megalomania signs. That it?”

  “We think he’s got a project, something new. He’s always cooking stuff up in his lab, but he knows he can’t sell or disseminate it. He had a run-in with the law about that last summer.”

  “Project.”

  “He’s been corresponding with magicians in Brussels and Marrakesh. Particularly the Marrakesh guy.”

  “About what?”

  “We can’t break his privacy code yet. It seems to be the usual alchemical stuff, red dragon, white dragon. Blah blah blah. Elixir of life slash philosopher’s stone.”

  I prick up my ears. Eternal life is of course one of my own areas of interest. As in, how the hell did I get it, and how to do I get rid of it.

  “What, no magical Viagra formula?”

  Nick shrugs. “He’s a big history-of-theory man, and the Brussels guy was too, before Brussels took the big hit.”

  “Do you know any magical theory?” I say, curious. Agent Jones has the classic thick neck of all Federal agents. Thick neck, thick-soled shoes, thick head, but of course that could be part of his act. My so-witty libido is responding to the boner I can’t see but can smell. I wonder how thick that is.

  I don’t need X-ray eyes. I’ve got all the other fixings.

  Nick shrugs again. “I bone up on the new stuff. It’s all pretty dumb.”

  Bone up, says my witty libido.

  Down, girl, I think.

  I say, “Red and white dragon is not new.”

  Again with the measuring look. “No, it’s old. Very old. Alchemists have been using that formula for five hundred years and more.”

  “Just out of curiosity, is any of this illegal? What he’s doing? What he’s studying?”

  “No.”

  In the silence, Agent Nick doesn’t say that the government has been behind the curve of the magic invasion for five years, always behind Europe, always more paranoid than Asia, encouraging the public to freak out at the least little thing, while at the same time responding with “security theatre.” Pigeons start smoking. Road rage creates a pink smog that alters reality on the expressways at rush hour. Weird little things that seem to mean nothing,
and yet they disrupt all our lives. Our government responds with visually dramatic, completely ineffective, draconian solutions to events that look, to my old fashioned eyes, less like security threats and more like miracles.

  “So is the government trying to up its game, response-wise? Or are you in fact-finding mode?” I say.

  “More fact-finding,” he says.

  “By reading up on medieval alchemy.”

  He shrugs. “Guys like Katterfelto do. This Brussels expert.”

  I find that it’s lovely to talk to somebody with an education in magic, but who has the same hardheaded skepticism I have.

  But Nick’s skepticism is a form of anger. I can tell he hates magic. Me, I’m in this because I have to be, because the more I can learn about my situation, the more likely I can figure out how to live with it or get rid of it. Nick’s motives seem odder than that. He’s so angry underneath it all.

  He shakes off the theory discussion like a dog shaking a fly off its ear. “So here’s how it works. You go in, you present yourself as a college student, or yeah, even a high school student, that’s better, doing a school project.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. My faked personal records continually need updating and fiddling. Right now they say I’m twenty-four, but nobody buys that. I can barely pull off twenty-two.

  “The blue-eyed dumb look will fool him, no problem,” Nick assures me, and I don’t slap him.

  “I’m sick of being typecast,” I say, baring my teeth.

  “Just do it. You’re a natural. Now, here’s the main things we need to know as soon as possible,” he continues, apparently not realizing he is sitting in front of a stink bomb about to go off. “One, is he working on action at a distance. Two, is he getting anywhere with it. Three, what are his feelings about the US Government.”

  I can hear the capital letters in his voice. Pompous jerk. Why am I giving him this much of my time?

  Oh yeah. Four hundred thousand dollars in hospital bills.

  “Four, is he breaking any laws where we can nail him. Don’t worry about that part. You just tell me everything you see and hear, everything, and I’ll figure out if it’s legal or not.”

  “I am vaguely conversant with the law,” I say coldly.

  “You don’t know what kind of magic practices are illegal.”

  “I didn’t know any magical practices were illegal. When did that happen?”

  “New bill in Congress. It hasn’t passed yet, but we’re poised to enforce, believe me.”

  “Uh, shouldn’t you wait until it is a law?”

  “Heck, we wrote it. Basically it’s an extension of antiterrorism laws of the Oughts. It’ll pass,” he says confidently.

  I get another shiver. There are rumors of a place where detainees in the war-on-magic go, a place they never come back from. Most people who live with magic don’t think about it. Or do they? I have no idea. I don’t discuss it with my coworkers, and nobody discusses magic at all in Chicago. The Hinky Policy makes that easy.

  He must see something in my face, some non-seventeen-year-old expression of rigid distaste and disapproval. “You’re on board now. You do what you’re told. You cooperate,” he amends, when I glare. “If you get something good, you get paid.”

  “That’s not how I understand the deal.” I need the money.

  “That’s the deal,” he says, not bothering to cajole or finesse me. He must know about the hospital bills.

  “I told you I’m not good with irrational autocracy.”

  “Big words for such a little girl,” he says, grinning, and I refrain from reaching across the table and plucking the eyeballs out of his head with my bare fingers.

  I get up, joggling the table and sloshing my hot chocolate all over.

  He’s still smiling, damn him. Thinks he’s got me by the short hairs. And he may. But I don’t want to look at him and feel all these mixed-up things about him and want to kill him and know that I can.

  Our eyes meet as I think this, and there is no baloney between us.

  He holds my privacy and security in his hands, and I hold his life in mine.

  He knows about his power. But he doesn’t know about mine.

  All he knows is that I’m not afraid of him, and maybe he is realizing that my self-restraint and self-confidence far outstrip what he thought they were.

  His eyes widen. The bunny has seen the headlights.

  In my schoolteacher voice I say, “We’ll talk again when you can find a way to describe your plan in a way that doesn’t make it sound like organized crime.”

  And I blunder away from the table, slinging my eighty-pound backpack over my shoulder too quickly, too easily, but I’m so angry I’m trembling. And so hungry.

  And oh, lordy, so horny.

  Chapter Seven

  Fate takes a hand next day.

  One of the parents, a weak-minded single mom named Virginia with a very strong-minded little seven-year-old named Breck, comes to see me as the boys are putting on their jackets and packing up their lunch pails.

  “Ms. Nagazy, I need a huge favor,” she says. She’s very young to be a mother, and completely incapable of dealing with the genetic sport she’s been given for a son. Breck is one of my peppiest boys. He’s beginning to take to my energy management training program. But he still finds himself bowling over smaller kids and making too much noise and doing outrageous things with his body before he realizes, Oops, time to get quieted down, and then he comes to me to be drained of the excess.

  Breck is tearing around the classroom, playing soccer with an apple from someone’s kicked-over lunchbox.

  I catch the apple as it whizzes past my ankles and reach out a hand to touch Javon, the other soccer player, on the shoulder. Instantly Javon quiets, as well he might, since I’ve just sapped his energy level about sixteen percent. I see the “Oops” look on his face, and he slows and goes back into the cloakroom. I suppress, instinctively, the rush of pleasure and happiness and satisfaction I feel at this jolt of the only food that really nourishes me.

  Breck sees this happen and he gets a mischievous look and slaloms off in a new direction so that he won’t come past me. He goes into the cloakroom. I hear shouts from the cloakroom.

  “I really have to go in there,” I say.

  Virginia leans close to me and talks quickly. “I found this doctor, he might be able to help, I don’t know how, but I have to try it, I have to try something!” she says, her voice rising as the shouts from the cloakroom become screams. “Will you help me take him in to the doctor’s office? I’ll pay you,” she adds desperately, and I consider it, because I figure she can afford it. Her ex-husband will give her anything except his time and help with the boy. “Tomorrow?”

  I groan inwardly. The noise in the cloakroom sounds worse. “I have practice in the evening,” I say.

  She says quickly, “We can go after school. I need your help. He won’t go to doctors’ offices anymore.”

  Oh great. Now I’m standing between a kid and medical treatment. Virginia may be a wimp, but she’s got the guilt-trip thing down.

  She must see me weakening. “His appointment is for five, but if that doesn’t work for you, I can call Dr. Katterfelto and ask to reschedule,” she says desperately.

  I freeze in mid-escape.

  This is too weird.

  Or too easy.

  A metal lunch bucket comes flying out of the cloakroom, clearly punted. More screams.

  “All right, all right,” I say, and give her my super-secret cell number. “Call me.” I sprint for the cloakroom.

  o0o

  Friday afternoon, I meet Breck’s mother after school and we spend a good five minutes negotiating with Breck about whether he will ride with me, or ride with his mother, or if I must ride in the car with him and his mother. On and on and on. I’d like to think that her ex-husband is better with the boy than she is, but I doubt it.

  Why do these women reproduce? I may be a soul-sucking fiend from hell, but I do not cr
eate little sports of my ecologically unsound genotype and then fail to manage them.

  Finally I settle it that if Breck wants me there to support him through the torment of another doctor’s appointment, he will ride with his mother and like it.

  Also, I take a hit off him while he is throwing himself on me and screaming and begging for mercy. This quiets him down. I tell myself that he needs it, that now he will behave better in his mother’s car while I am following in my elk-slayer-size hybrid Tahoe SUV.

  Dr. Katterfelto proves to be much shorter in person than I imagined him, reading his website. He’s roly-poly and bustling. Often, he slips disturbingly into a fakey Germanic accent.

  But he is, above all, upbeat. And I know from upbeat. He and Ma between them could run a Dale Carnegie course in a suicide ward.

  He charms Breck immediately. “So, little man, you have energy to burn, ja? Everyone is so slow, and they do not understand you when you speak. You are not selfish. You are a practical person and you have no time to waste, am I right?”

  He chatters Breck down the hall and into a room with a mongo complicated machine and a big white wall that glows. Breck starts to lose it when he sees the machine.

  “No! I don’t like it! I’m scared!” Breck pulls back and goes behind his mother, who looks at me imploringly.

  Like I can do anything.

  Dr. Katterfelto flips a bunch of switches, making everything hum. “That’s too bad, you are frightened, because, if you are brave, then you could make rainbows with me. Have you never made rainbows at a childrens’ museum before?”

  The white wall lights up much brighter, sending a blast of blinding light toward us. Breck screams.

  Dr. Katterfelto steps briskly away and walks across the white wall, and all of a sudden he is a rainbow silhouette against the brightness. A swirl of rainbow colors shoots off in all directions around his shape on the wall.

  Breck stops screaming.

  “Now the mother will show us how her colors look,” the doctor says, beckoning to her. But Virginia shrinks back, the dip.

  I walk forward. “No, it’s my turn now!” I make as if I’m shoving my way in front of Virginia to get to the wall first. The light is blinding. I can barely sense the shifting, swirling rainbow around my shape on the wall. I prance back and forth, making monkey gestures. Breck giggles.