~4.23~

Most members of tribe were unnoticeable to some degree, but there were matters of context. A person who could be passed unnoticed on the street was not necessarily a person who could hang out in the lobby of a hotel or an office without being asked to move along.

Marley, though, had moved through multiple worlds during the years since his death. Initially, he’d lived a pretty mundane existence, apart from avoiding official attention. He’d been homeless. He’d been a member of tribe. He’d walked in the straight world and in the margins, and everywhere he went, he’d practiced being unnoticed… at first because he’d had to, and then to keep up the habit, and then finally because it had passed beyond the realm of habit and become truly his second nature.

At some point… a point which, appropriately enough, had gone unnoted and unremarked upon even by himself… Marley had become one of the unnoticeable. He was truly a ghost now… dead to the officialdom of the vanished twentieth century and unknown to the more officious officials of the twenty-first, and he could go nearly anywhere and find himself ignored by almost anyone.

There were witches who could engineer such an effect, under the right circumstances, but Ivan mistrusted them, and when he had to contract a job out, it suited his tastes to use as few people as was possible. Far better to hire someone like Marley than to involve someone like Ginger who worked to keep the children of the street mall from becoming too conspicuous along with an operative.

The problem was finding him. Ivan’s usual methods wouldn’t work. He’d made a study of Marley’s habits, to the extent that he had been able to, and they’d worked out a few drop spots where Ivan could leave messages… but he couldn’t use those for urgent or time sensitive matters, as Marley didn’t check them on anything like a regular basis.

It was almost as though he didn’t trust Ivan.