Babayaga

alone.
    As she finished her tale, the old woman nodded. “Yes, this is bad. In my time, we would put you to work, slap you into shape, make you wake up from your miseries through the penance of toil. But this place makes you lie down on your cot, or wander the grounds like a stupid park pigeon, waiting for them to fill you with more treats from their pharmacies. They are not here to cure you, you know, they are only here to make the pharmacist’s pockets fat.”
    Noelle nodded. She was only waiting for the doctors’ signatures of approval, she said, so that her parents could take her home. There, she confided with a deep breath, she would surely try to kill herself again.
    “Bah,” said the old woman. “If you wanted death, you would have death. It’s too easy. Bang your head into that stone wall there until you crush it. Right there.” She pointed at the cold masonry. “Do it now.” Noelle looked at her, wide-eyed and confused. The old woman shrugged. “See? You do not want death. I tell you what, we can give you instead a whole new better life, one more beautiful than any idiot ballerina’s. What are dancers, really, but silly whores without the fucking? You give them money and they twirl around in frilly colored costumes before your eyes. They twirl until they drop. You don’t want that. You want what we can give you.”
    “Who do you mean by ‘we’?”
    “We? Oh, from now on we is you and me.” Elga patted her hand. “If you want it, we do this. I’ll help you. But it is a great secret. And if you do it, you’ll have to help me too. I will need your help with a very tough job.”
    “What job?”
    The old woman rubbed Noelle’s shoulder in a soft and reassuring way. “We have to kill a witch.”
    VIII

    Tuesday morning, Will had risen early and tried calling Oliver; then he had tracked down the address of The Gargoyle Press , and now, having been pointed to an unsteady, uncomfortable chair, he sat waiting among the piles of books and galley proofs in the journal’s “lobby.” The office was merely a large apartment with a few desks and telephones. Papers sat stacked and bundled along its tables, empty chairs, and windowsills. There were five people there, none of them the ones Will had met with Oliver at the bar. One sat at her desk reading, one sat typing in a concentrated hunt-and-peck fashion, and two more were at the far end of the room, apparently having a meeting. The assistant who had greeted him, an attractive, narrow-waisted French girl in a red sweater, had briefly disappeared after letting him in and then returned to her seat, where she slowly, studiously paged through the thick copy of Vogue that sat beside the big black telephone on her desk. He assumed she had told someone to find Oliver, but no one appeared. After a few moments, the phone rang and the girl answered it. For the next quarter hour she stayed on the phone, ignoring Will while she gaily chatted with the caller. Will suspected she was talking with a close friend. He thought of interrupting her but found it almost relaxing watching a pretty girl laugh and gossip as if he were not even there. Finally, one of the other young women who had been busy reading came over. “ Je peux vous aider ?”
    Will stood up. “ Oui, je cherche Oliver .”
    The woman smiled politely and switched to English, which came with a stern British accent. “You’ve come to entirely the wrong place to find him. He is almost never here, I’m afraid. You’re a writer?”
    “No.”
    She grinned. “So sorry, we always assume our visitors are writers; that is why we have Nicole leave them out here unattended. Sooner or later they wander away.” She stopped to correct herself. “That sounds bad. It’s not that we don’t fancy writers, we adore them, honestly, only just not the ones who tend to stop by. What do you do?”
    “I’m in advertising, but—”
    Her eyes lit up. “Advertising! Oh, right, then”—she firmly took him by the arm and guided him toward the door—“we should get you to Oliver right away. At this hour he’s probably at home still curled up with his coffee and a paper, it’s only a short walk from here.”
    “I tried calling him at his home number earlier.”
    “He rarely answers it. Oliver says the phone makes him a slave of technology, though he does love dialing me up at two a.m. with his tipsy editorial tips. Most Luddites are so charmingly inconsistent.”
    Like many of the British girls Will had come