Page 50 of Graceless

"People will, and people are wrong, and the truth is creepier." She waved it off. "Nicaea wasn't about the canon. Nobody cut Enoch in a smoky room in one afternoon — there's no villain and no decree, there's just… centuries of quiet. It stops being copied. It stops being cited. Whole languages' worth of it evaporate. If one man banned it, you could blame one man." She looked back down at my angel's ruined face. "Nobody banned it, and it vanished anyway, everywhere, except one mountain church that wouldn't let go. You're the conservator. You tell me: what does it usually mean, when damage that thorough has no documented cause?"

The tea had gone cold in my hands. I was hearing my voice, five days old, alone in a basement, talking to the saints: You weren't damaged. You were censored.

And the word for what was happening in my chest wasn't fear. This was the other thing, the drug thing, the thing from the loupe — being the first witness, except the panel had gotten bigger than the panel, and it was still growing, and somewhere at the bottom of it a man was sitting in my basement not looking at it.

He had until Monday.

It was Monday.

"Cat." Tara had her chin on her fist, watching me with those X-ray eyes they should never have let out of the archive. "You went somewhere."

"I'm here. I'm thinking."

"Want to hear my last piece? It's small." She slid the raking-light print into the middle of the desk. "Whatever your angel is — somebody spent four hundred years making sure nobody saw him. Ask yourself who has that kind of patience."

The radiator clanked. Eleven teenagers were waiting somewhere to hear about Botticelli.

She walked me out through the barricade, and at the door she pressed a warm sheaf of photocopies into my hands — pages from her own Enoch, a translation older than my house, her marginalia climbing the gutters like ivy. "The roster's in there. Chapter six. The cast list." The Christmas was back in her face, and under it, way under, one flake of something that wasn't. "Call me the minute you can tell me more. Or the minute you can't. Broke scholars are cheap dates, we accept crumbs."

"Tara." I stopped in the doorway. "Off the record. All of it — the book, the window they left open. Do you believe it?"

"I believe the seams," she said. "That's the whole discipline. You don't have to see the thing to see where it was cut out."

The D goes elevated after the bridge, and I rode home over Brooklyn with the folder on my knees, and somewhere past 36th Street I stopped pretending I wasn't going to open it and opened it.

Chapter six. The cast list. And these are the names of their leaders — and there they were, twenty of them, transliterated out of dead alphabets by a man in 1912, footnoted, ordinary as a union roll: Semyaza, who was their chief. Arakiba. Rameel. Kokabiel. Names like weather I'd never been out in. I read down the column with the train swaying and the sun going down the way it does over the yards, and the names kept being names — somebody's officers, somebody's crew, name by name by name — and every hair on both my arms stood straight up, and I folded the list closed before I got to the bottom of the column.

Not because it was nonsense.

Because it wasn't.

I looked out the window instead. Brooklyn scrolled by in its long gray inventory, the auto-body places, the cemetery, the cemetery. A book buried so quietly nobody had to ban it. A painting censored so well nobody could bill for it. A window left open in the canon for two thousand years that almost nobody looks through.

Speaking of names.

He had until Monday. It was Monday. My stop was next.

I put the folder in my bag and went home to go get what I was owed.

CHAPTER 14

CATE

He was on the stoop when I came up the block, which he never is — he is inside things or across from things, the man does not loiter — and the sight of him standing there in the last of the light, waiting, told me he'd been counting the day down the same way I had.

I let us in. I put Tara's folder on the kitchen table, on top of the mail, like it was mail. I hung the good coat. I did not work; there was no work left in my hands. When it got dark we were both still standing in my studio with the muslin-draped panel between us like a witness under a sheet, and I said:

"It's Monday."

"Yes."

"So here's how I'd like to do this." My voice came out steady, which cost me, and I spent it anyway. "I've had two weeks of boring answers. They were good boring answers — they held, every checkable one of them held, and I checked. And underneath every single one of them there's been the other thing, the thing that doesn't check, and we've both been living with it in this room like a leak nobody wants to call about. Fifth Avenue. The knife on 25th. A phone that rang half a ring. So." I crossed my arms so he couldn't see my hands. "You said not yet. It's yet."

Something in his face let go. I want to be able to describe it and I can't — it wasn't relief and it wasn't dread; it was the look of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying so long that the setting-down hurt worse than the weight.

"Where would you like me to start," he said.

And because I am who I am — because the armor doesn't come off just because you ordered it to, it comes off last, it's always the final thing out the door — I heard myself say, in my best insurance-adjuster deadpan: