In Plain Sight

17 The Connection

“Alex?” Iggy’s voice came over the phone before Alex could speak.

“Yeah,” he said, wheezing like a bellows. “It’s me.”

“Thank God. I’ve been worried.” The relief in the old man’s voice was palpable. Alex imagined he could hear Iggy’s muscles relaxing through the phone. “Everything go as planned?”

Alex started to laugh but the wound in his side flared into agony and he groaned.

“Not exactly,” he said, his voice a whisper. “One of the Broker’s men shot me.”

“Where?” Iggy said, a tone of the military doctor snapping instantly into his voice.

“Left side,” Alex said. “It’s painful to breathe.”

“Are you coughing up blood?”

“Don’t know; the guy knocked out one of my teeth too.”

“Can you get home on your own?” Iggy asked. “I’ll need to make sure my alchemical draughts are ready and prepare a restoration rune for your tooth.”

“I’ll manage,” Alex said. “See you soon.”

Iggy told him to be careful and hung up. Alex stumbled out of the phone booth, then straightened up and did his best to walk back out of the drug store without attracting attention. He hailed a cab, gave the driver the address of the brownstone, then fumbled with his wallet, pulling out one of the fake twenties.

“Fast as you can,” he said, shoving the bill in the driver’s hand.

He felt bad, giving the cabbie the funny money, but he didn’t have enough real money to cover the fare. He noted the driver’s name and promised himself he would make it up to him later. The rest of the cab ride was spent trying not to swear like a sailor every time the cab went over a bump.

“Thanks,” he gasped when the cab finally pulled up in front of the brownstone. He got out and staggered up the stairs, hoping he hadn’t left too much blood in the poor man’s cab.

Iggy opened the door as Alex fumbled for his pocket watch to deactivate the rune barriers. The old man’s face was the gray of old newspaper as he ushered Alex inside.

“Kitchen table,” he said, lifting Alex under the arm on his good side. As Iggy lifted, Alex’s vision seemed to dwindle down to a single point. “Stay with me,” Iggy said. “I’m not decrepit yet, but I don’t think I can carry you by myself.”

In the kitchen, Iggy had pulled all the chairs from their massive table, stacking them against the wall and pulled the table to the middle of the floor. A heavy canvas tarp covered the top along with a stack of clean, white towels. A large pot of water boiled on the stove, its steam rising in a thick mist over the unpleasant-looking handles of metal implements. On the counter next to the stove, a dozen vials with rubber stoppers had been laid out in a neat row, each containing a brightly colored liquid. At the end of the line of vials were three rune papers and a box of wooden matches.

“Looks like you’re all ready,” Alex said as they crossed the floor.

“Shut up,” Iggy said, helping him up onto the heavy wooden table. He carefully peeled Alex out of his ruined suit coat that still looked like a tux jacket. “Get out of your shirt, but don’t lie down yet,” Iggy said. “I’ve got to get that tooth growing back first. The rune’s only effective if administered within half an hour after losing it.”

Alex reached up to unbutton his shirt but stopped as a whole new world of pain washed over him. He could only move his right arm slowly and when he tried to move his left, he nearly blacked out. After a few deep breaths, he tried again, being more careful.

Iggy grabbed the rune paper on the end of the line and rolled it into a small tube. He pinched one end together and twisted it so the paper would not unroll. “Open up,” he said as Alex struggled to unbutton his shirt.

“Here I thought the bullet in my side would be first priority,” Alex said, grinning through the pain.

“If you were bleeding more, or weren’t able to make inane remarks, it would be,” Iggy said, retrieving a multi-lamp very similar to Alex’s. He lit it, producing a glow of ruddy light, then closed the focusing lens and directed the beam into Alex’s mouth. “That hooligan did quite a number on you,” Iggy said. “Hold still.”

Alex felt the paper jammed painfully into the empty socket where his tooth had been. A second later he heard Iggy strike a match and felt the instantaneous flash of heat given off by the rune paper as it burned. Normal people couldn’t feel the magic of an expended rune, but Alex felt it, probing into his upper jaw, burning its way into the roots of the socket where his tooth had been. A moment later he cursed as best he could with his mouth open. A sharp, throbbing pain gripped his jaw like a pair of pliers and wouldn’t let go.

“Don’t be a child,” Iggy said, shining the light into Alex’s mouth. “Growing a tooth in a few days’ time isn’t pleasant, but it’s vastly superior to the alternative. Now lie down and let’s see to the rest of you.”

Alex plucked ineffectually at his shirt, but Iggy produced an angled pair of scissors and simply cut it off him. “Now lie down,” he said.

Iggy took half the pile of clean towels and tucked them under Alex’s head, then he retrieved the first vial from the end of the line on the counter and pulled out the stopper, breaking the lead seal.

“Drink up,” he said, passing it to Alex.

Alex painfully raised the vial to his lips. He had to turn a little on his side so as not to spill the mustard-colored liquid. It tasted vile, as all alchemical potions did, but he choked it down, then lay back down with a groan.

“Now,” Iggy said, moving around the table to examine Alex’s left side. “Let’s have a look at your wound.” He touched the jagged hole and Alex flinched. “Easy now,” he said. He probed the wound with his fingers and Alex sucked air in a long hiss.

“I’ll give you something for the pain,” Iggy said.

“No,” Alex gasped. “I’ve got an appointment with the Broker. I can’t afford to sleep.”

“And I know that,” Iggy said, handing him a vial with a liquid somewhere between red and pink. “Bottoms up, lad.”

Alex drank that one and immediately felt his hands go numb. The sensation seemed to crawl up his extremities, starting at his fingers and toes and moving inward. In a moment he couldn’t feel or move. His brain seemed to go fuzzy as well. He knew that should bother him, that he needed to be alert, but he just didn’t seem to care.

Iggy moved in and out of his vision, as he lay looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling. It was old and fancy, like most of the house, made of iron with a complex pattern of vines and ivy clinging to a lattice. The magelights inside were made of some kind of quartz with a yellow tint that always made the kitchen seem sunny, even in the middle of the night.

He saw a flash of light as Iggy used a rune, and then another flash sometime later. Then he felt nothing.

“Rink iss,” a voice that sounded remarkably like Iggy’s came from somewhere very far away. Suddenly his perspective changed as he was pulled up into a sitting position.

“Drink this,” he heard more clearly as the end of a glass vial was shoved into his mouth. Reflexively, Alex gulped down the liquid and the world suddenly came crashing down on him. He doubled over, swearing, as the left side of his body felt like someone was twisting it in a vice.

“Getting shot hurt less than this,” he croaked.

Iggy put his hand on Alex’s right shoulder and helped to ease him back up.

“Just breathe,” he said. “The reason it hurts so much is because the bullet bounced off a rib and hit another. You’re very lucky.”

“Funny,” Alex said, his breathing so shallow that it sounded like a panting dog. “I don’t feel lucky.”

Iggy laughed. “Give it a few minutes,” he said. “And you’re lucky because that bullet nicked your spleen. Once I moved it, you started bleeding for real. It was touch and go there for a few minutes.”

The pain started to dull and Alex found he could take regular breaths again.

“I guess I am lucky then,” he said. “Lucky I know you. Thanks, old man.”

Iggy chuckled. “You won’t be good as new for a week or two,” he said. “But as long as you weren’t planning to beat the truth out of the Broker, you should be able to question him just fine.” He pressed a rune paper into Alex’s hands. “It’s the last disguise rune I gave you,” he said. “I modified it so you’ll look like you did before. Should help with your interrogation. I assume you’ve got something interesting planned?”

Alex chuckled and instantly regretted it. “You know that pulp book of yours that’s just a rip off of The Pit and the Pendulum?” he asked Iggy.

“I rather like that book,” Iggy said with an indignant look.

“Well it gave me an idea for getting the truth out of the Broker without laying a finger on him.”

Iggy’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know you read my books,” he said with a thinly veiled look of amusement.

“You said I’d be good as new in a week or two?” Alex said, changing the subject. “Why can’t American doctors heal people that fast?”

“Oh, they can,” Iggy said with a smile. “If you have the money. I used two major restoration runes on you along with tincture of purity, oil of regrowth, and a tonic of binding. You’d pay two thousand dollars for a doctor to give you that kind of treatment in an American hospital.”

“Two…” Alex couldn’t even finish naming the amount. “How am I going to pay you back for that?”

“There’s no need, lad,” he said. Iggy patted him on his good shoulder. “I’ve had most of that stuff since my navy days. I’m just glad it was still good all these years later.” Iggy walked away chuckling.

“You’re kidding about that stuff being expired, right?” Alex called after him, but Iggy just kept on going, right up the stairs to his room. Alex thought about going after him and getting a better answer, but one look around the room stopped him. Bloody medical instruments littered the counter by the stove where the still-steaming pot of water sat, cooling. Equally bloody towels littered the tile floor and the canvas on the table was wet with alchemical serums and blood. It had been close to nine when he’d arrived at the brownstone and the clock on the wall now showed just before eleven.

Alex had been on the table for almost two hours. As bad as that was for him, Iggy was in his seventies. The physical and mental strain of saving Alex’s life couldn’t have been easy to bear.

He slid gingerly down from the table and straightened up. Already the pain in his side was dwindling to a persistent, throbbing ache. Limping to the little table Iggy used to write his correspondence, Alex pulled out a pad of paper and left a note promising to clean up the kitchen as soon as he was done with the Broker. He hoped Iggy wouldn’t ignore it and do it himself. Alex owed him big.

With one last look at the kitchen-turned-operating-theater, Alex made his way slowly upstairs and stripped out of the rest of his ruined clothes. On top of everything, he would need a new suit. He only had two and this one was beyond saving.

Iggy had cut Alex’s shirt away to work on his side, but his left arm was now bound in a sling. He tried moving his left arm but that caused so much pain he almost blacked out. Working carefully with his right hand, he finally got it off so he could shower, holding his left arm rigid against his chest. Alex knew that the hole where the bullet had entered would be closed by now, so he suspected that showering would be okay. The alchemical potions that closed wounds were relatively cheap.

After a frustrating shower where he had to learn to scrub himself in whole new ways, Alex dressed in his remaining suit and fished his vault key out of his ruined slacks.

“All right, Mr. Brewer,” he said, putting on his hat. “It’s time you and I had a chat.”

Since it was after midnight, he had to walk the painful three blocks to Central Park to get a cab. The cabby wasn’t surprised that someone was out at this time of night — it was New York after all — but he did pause for a moment when Alex told him their destination.

“The Brooklyn Bridge?” he said. “You ain’t thinking about jumping or anything like that, are ya?”

Alex assured him that he had no such intentions, and then just sat back and enjoyed the ride. The driver let him off right as they reached the bridge and Alex waited for him to be on his way before pulling out his rune book. Alex had crossed the bridge many times and recently he’d seen work scaffolding on one of the pillars in the middle of the span. He walked out over the bridge, along the side of the road until he reached the area, then stepped past the construction barricade and onto the scaffolding.

His heart tried to crawl up into his throat when he looked down. The platform where he stood was only about two feet wide. The moon was up and Alex could see its light reflecting on the rolling water far below.

The scaffolding ran around the tower of brick, out over the water and around the back side. Wooden ladders connected each layer of scaffolding with one above as it went up to whatever the men were working on. Fortunately, Alex didn’t care about any of those upper levels — which was good, since he could never have climbed the ladders with his left arm in a sling.

Moving slowly and deliberately, Alex made his way along the scaffold and turned the corner to the outside edge of the pylon, onto the part that faced the river. He inched his way to the center of the big tower of brick, then turned to face the wall. Pulling a piece of chalk from his pocket, Alex chalked the outline of his vault door on the weathered brick. He only drew the door down to a space about a foot up from the scaffolding, but he still had to kneel down to reach it. The shock of his knee hitting the scaffold platform shot up into his shoulder and he gasped in pain, dropping his chalk. It fell, a white streak reflecting the light of a nearly full moon, like a shooting star, before disappearing among the winking reflections of the moon on the water far below.

Saying a silent prayer just in case God did watch over idiots and children, Alex fished a second piece of chalk from his coat and finished the door. He had to hold the rune paper in place to keep the wind from blowing it away, but he got it lit. Finally, with a twist of his key, he swung his vault door open and stepped up and inside. He’d never been so glad to be indoors.

“Who’s there?” the belligerent voice of Jeremy Brewer boomed out of the darkness. This far from the core, the magelights in Alex’s vault barely glowed enough to be seen in the dark space, but Alex had prepared for that. After all, his vault could be opened anywhere there was a wall.

“Relax, Mr. Brewer,” Alex said, affecting the British accent again. “I’ll be with you in a trice.”

Alex took out his matchbook and lit the oil lamps that hung from fixtures in the walls. As they began to throw their light into the space, they illuminated the Broker. Alex had left him handcuffed to a metal chair with a bag over his head and his legs tied to the legs of the chair.

Once the lamps were lit, Alex was almost ready. Trying not to grunt with the pain of physical exertion, he shoved Brewer’s chair over to the door and faced it outward, while Brewer spewed a string of colorful profanities. The chair was attached to the back wall by a rope that ran through the two pulleys he’d installed earlier. Now he tied his second rope to the first, between the pulleys, and pulled it tight through the anchor he’d put in the wall by the door. This created about six inches of play in the rope holding Brewer and the chair. Below the anchor sat a small table with a candle on it and a box of matches.

The stage was set.

“I don’t know who you are,” the Broker said with a snarl, all pretense of his high society manners gone. “But you’ll pay for this. I’ll make sure you die spitting blood with my name on your lips.”

Alex shoved the chair forward until the ropes stopped it. The front feet of the chair slipped off the edge where the vault door was, and it slammed down hard with the front legs resting on the brick wall outside the door.

“Jesus!” the Broker swore as the chair suddenly pitched forward, “what are you doing?”

Alex stuck the disguise rune to his forehead and lit it with his cigarette. Next, he pulled the bag off the head of Jeremy Brewer and the Broker got his first look at the empty nothing in front of him. He screamed. To his credit, however, he did not lose control of his bodily functions.

“What do you want, you crazy son-of-a-bitch?” he yelled.

“Now, that’s what I like to hear,” Alex said in his cultured British accent, loosely patterned on Iggy’s, of course. He leaned against the wall by the door so that Brewer could see him. “You see, if you’d just taken that attitude back at the club, we could have avoided all this unpleasantness.”

He looked up at Alex with a snarl.

“Who told you my name?” he demanded. Alex laughed.

“My employer, who, as I mentioned, wishes to remain anonymous. Privileged information, you understand.”

“And what does your employer want?”

“A name.”

“Whose?”

“Someone stole a shipment of uncut diamonds out of a customs warehouse at the New York Aerodrome,” Alex said. “Now, they’ve not been offered to the local fences, even the high-class ones, so that means the theft was pre-arranged. By you.”

“Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.” The Broker chuckled. Alex leaned down, close to Brewer’s face.

“You’d better hope it was, for your sake.” He nodded toward the open door. Brewer leaned out and looked down at the water far below.

“So if I don’t give up a name, you send me to sleep with the fishes, is that it?”

“Exactly that, Mr. Brewer,” Alex said.

“So what happens if I tell you?” he asked. “You just going to let me go?”

“You have my word.”

“I hope you’ll pardon me for being skeptical,” Brewer said, his manners returning. “But I’ve seen your face. If I decided to look for you, there’s nowhere in the city you could hide.”

“As you may have surmised, I’m from out of town,” Alex chuckled. “My employer brought me here to do a job and once it’s done, I’ll move on. I have no fear of your righteous vengeance, Mr. Brewer, because I will be far beyond your grasp.” He paused to take a puff on his cigarette. “Now, the name. If you don’t mind.”

Naked calculation ran across Brewer’s face like tape feeding out of a stock ticker. Alex knew he was weighing everything that was said, judging whether he thought Alex was bluffing. Ultimately, he decided that Alex was.

“Sorry, old man,” he said, mimicking Alex’s accent. “I’m afraid what you want is a trade secret. Privileged information, you understand.”

Alex laughed at the sound of his own words being thrown back at him.

“Yes,” he said, walking around behind Brewer, stepping over the ropes that held his chair in place. “I’m a very understanding person. Unfortunately,” he added, taking out a match and lighting it, “the laws of thermodynamics are much less understanding. They’re downright rigid.” He lit the candle on the little table and pushed it under the taut rope, tied to the anchor bolt. Immediately, the rope began to smoke as its trailing fibers were incinerated. “I’m afraid you don’t have very long to tell me what I want to know.”

“You’re bluffing,” Brewer said, craning his neck in an effort to see where the rope went.

Alex just smiled and puffed his cigarette while the rope began to burn. Brewer stared at him hard, looking to see if Alex had the eyes of a killer. He didn’t believe it.

His tune and his color changed, however, when the first large strand of the twisted rope snapped and he felt his chair tip forward a bit.

“All right,” he yelled. “The guys who set up the job had German accents, real heavy.”

“Who were they?” Alex pressed as the rope burned.

“I don’t know,” Brewer said. “They paid in cash, so I didn’t ask questions. They didn’t even tell me what was in the box they wanted.”

Alex ground his teeth. He hadn’t foreseen this problem. Still, whoever stole them would have had to deliver them, right?

“Who did the job?” he asked.

“A burglar I work with sometimes, a real pro.”

“What’s his name? Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know his real name,” Brewer said as a second strand snapped and the chair dipped some more. “I only know where he lives.”

Alex pulled the candle away and blew out the fire on the remaining strand.

“Where?” he said.

“The corner of twenty-eighth and Mercer,” Brewer said, his voice still trembling. “That’s all I know, I swear.”

“What name do you know him by?”

Brewer hesitated. Alex pushed the candle back under the rope and it caught fire instantly.

“What name does he go by?!” Alex yelled.

“Beaumont!” Brewer screamed. “Charles Beaumont!”

The rope snapped and the chair fell forward six inches until the slack was taken up, then it jerked to a stop. By that time, however, Jeremy Brewer had fainted.