Suddenly Bibi saw what the diviner did not, and reached out to spell TO SAVE A LIFE.
“That’s it,” Calida loudly declared, with no slightest note of uncertainty. “Kid, you’re a natural for this, intuitive. The client never sees the message. They sit like toads, waiting for me to feed them flies.”
Bibi said, “Let me get this straight. So I was spared from cancer to save my life. I sort of already knew that.”
“No, girl, that’s not what it says. You can read the words, but I can read the words and their intended meaning. You were spared from cancer so that you could save the life of someone else.”
Bibi didn’t at once buy into that interpretation. Save from what, when, where, why? She wasn’t an adventurer, not a superhero—she hated tights and capes—not a woman of action unless the action was on the written page.
“Who?” she asked. “Save who?”
“That’s what we ask next.”
Not quite ready to pose the question, the diviner picked up her glass and quickly swallowed the remaining wine.
Bibi realized now that the chardonnay was either to help Calida cope with the pain of the needle piercing her thumb or to boost her courage, or perhaps both.
Stirring her right hand in the silver bowl full of tiles, the diviner said, “I bleed for answers. I can’t be—”
Before the woman could finish, Bibi’s smartphone, lying on the table, issued a call tone that imitated the antique ring of a rotary-dial telephone. She glanced at the screen and said, “There’s no caller ID. Ignore it.”
Failure to take the call clearly alarmed Calida. “No! If you don’t answer it, we won’t know if it’s them.”
“Them who?”
“The wrong people!” Her candle-glitter stare no longer seemed to be that of a diviner confident that she had her foot on the throat of whatever supernatural entity she had been consulting. “Answer it, for God’s sake.”
Further disquieted, Bibi took the call. “Hello?”
A man said, “Top agent?”
“Huh? Who is this?”
“What does that mean—top agent?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why play dumb? It’s the license plate on your car.”
“Oh. Not my car. My mother’s. Who is this?”
The caller hung up.
“Some guy,” Bibi told Calida. “I drove Mom’s car home. He wants to know what the vanity plate means.”
Calida’s worried frown folded some of the youth out of her face. “Doesn’t sound like one of them.”
“Whether it’s one of them or not, he must have seen me when I drove home. Or he’s in the parking lot right now. Everything’s sort of sliding, isn’t it?”
“Sliding? What do you mean?”
“Downhill, over the edge, into chaos,” Bibi said, and wondered why her usual self-possession seemed to be failing her.
Well, she hadn’t prepared herself for a world with these sudden new and strange dimensions. She had prepared herself to write stories for The Antioch Review, for Granta, for Prairie Schooner, to publish a first novel with Random House. She didn’t possess the emotional and psychological flexibility to deal easily with sudden inexplicable cancer cures and the supernatural consequences that followed them.
Calida looked at her oddly. “Everything is always sliding. Life is an avalanche, kid, and you know that as well as I do. Sometimes a slow and more enjoyable kind of sliding, sometimes wild. I read your novel. It’s in there—the avalanche. Get your skis on, girl, and ride the snow wave. Don’t let it wipe you out.”
“Yeah, well, right now I feel like a spleet.”
“A what?”
“A goob, a wanker, a wilma.” She picked up her half-full glass. She pulled a Calida and finished the chardonnay in one long swallow.
“To save a life,” the diviner said, reading the tiles on the table. “Now let’s find out whose.”
The shriek of the caracal in the night had worried Pax because he thought it might be the work of a mimic. When two shrieks followed and seemed to originate in a far different place from the first, his concern increased. If he and his guys were known to be in town, maybe they were being stalked by agents of some local warlord, signaling readiness to one another in the language of caracals.
There were caracals in the Middle East, though their numbers were much lower than in Africa and Asia. Iranians had once trained those cats to hunt birds. Although caracals weighed as much as forty pounds, they could leap straight up as high as seven or eight feet, biting and battering down eight or ten birds at once from a low-flying flock.
Pax and Danny had stood ready, awaiting another cat cry to judge its authenticity, MK12s in hand, wishing the guns pumped out a more damaging caliber. Yet time had passed, and the dawn had come without incident. Sometimes a caracal was nothing more than a caracal.