The thing to blame, Sato reflected while breaking into Will Graham’s apartment, was time. You live long enough (and she had) you start running out of things to measure time by. Clocks and calendars couldn’t cut it, not after the initial couple of centuries. And after that first millennium? Forget it. So you started looking for something new, something fresh, to track your life by. Art, science, romance, war—they were all good bookmarks.
Ah, but people…
People were the best.
The lock popped open. Sato smiled and walked in.
What did she know about Will Graham? He was in his mid-twenties. No family. A blurry history hinted drug use, but no rap sheet. He painted miniatures. Beautiful, compact pieces of startling precision and luminosity. One of Sato’s agents had spied some of his work buried among a barrage of mediocrity at a communal gallery show and fed-exed the piece to Shanghai. Sato’s response was blunt and immediate: yes.
A Baku wasn’t an oracle. But it was within a Baku’s power to swallow an ominous dream and change it into good luck. It wasn’t a cheap ability, nor an easy digestive task, but it did lend her kind a certain sensitivity to omens. Sato had held Graham’s art, the product of his dreams, and sensed no ill fortune at the time.
Will Graham hadn’t been fated to die.
But...
What can change the fate of a man? Love. Hope. Grief, maybe, if one allowed it. There was another strong answer, but Sato didn’t want to entertain that possibility just yet. Instead, she focused on her surroundings.
The apartment was practically empty. A cardboard box sat, in place of a table, at the center of the room. Perhaps in an attempt at camouflage, or merely to avoid comments, a sheet had been draped over it. Will’s bedroom was a futon flanked by a fruit crate; some spare clothing was neatly folded into a peeling dresser of indistinct design. A like weary-looking drafting table was the most noticeable furniture in the place. Overall, it was not an impressive residence.
Yet…there was a scent. An elusive, melting ghost of a sweetness beguiled the Baku. Small but unmistakable it was the scent of dreams.
Whatever his faults and limits, Will Graham had been a true dreamer.
Well, enough of that. Sato tugged at her gloves, adjusting the fit. Time to work, work, work.
She started, predictably enough, with the kitchen—or at least with the tatty scrap of space that housed the mini-fridge and motley crew of dishware. She didn’t find much: half a dozen packs of (cheap) ramen, heap of sweetener and salt packets swiped, no doubt, from any diner and fast-food joint in the available area, aged Oreos. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a single matching set of dishes and only one fork.
Boring, boring, and more boring. Come on, Willy, make an effort.
The rest of the tiny apartment wasn’t much better. Sato unashamedly rifled through a surprisingly neat drawer of T-shirts, unscrewed and inspected each bottle of Tylenol/Aspirin/Sudafed in the bathroom (and rolled her eyes at the mismatched towels), shook out each paperback, turned out every pocket—and found nothing.
Damn it. Where were the paintings?
She finally found a shoebox of Polaroids behind a bookshelf. They were random shots, probably serving as examples of perspective and scale for the miniature painter. Sato fanned them like a hand of cards to study the parade of unknown faces and angles and walls. A few caught her eye, but explained nothing.
Disgruntled, Sato pushed open the window and lit a cigarette. A glance at her watch showed she’d spent nearly two hours in the apartment with nothing to show for it. Fabulous.
Just plain, fuckin’ fabulous.
Propping her hip against the windowsill, Sato smoked and thought. She could just quit and leave. Truth be told, there’d never really been a reason for her to come here in the first place. Yes, the boy’s early demise was surprising but that was no reason to get jumpy and start suspecting paranormal factors. And, yes, loosing the promised paintings—along with the promised sale—was unpleasant but it’d hardly cripple the gallery. The lawyers would figure out a loophole or the missing mystery beneficiary would be found or the customer would be convinced to change his mind. Point was there was no real reason for Sato to get personally involved.
No reason, except…
What can change the fate of a man?
With a sign Sato stabbed out her cigarette against a (dead) potted plant and dug for her phone. If she left now it’d be possible to still get some actual work done. Recheck the wine inventory, maybe, or review the latest from the Tokyo office. She hesitated momentarily over the Polaroids, attracted and unsure why.
And heard footsteps outside the door.
Immediately, body moving ahead of mind, Sato slid out the window onto the skinny fire escape. She crouched down, back to wall, breathing steady and alert.