Hunt at The Well Of Eternity

Chapter 2

It was such a soul-rending cry that Gabriel had to turn and look at her. She had clapped her hands to her face and her eyes were wide with horror. Before he could ask her for an explanation, Gabriel heard the scuff of shoe leather behind him.

The punch Gabriel landed as he spun would have knocked most men out cold, but not this red-jacketed plug-ugly. The man was still upright, swinging a long, brawny arm in a backhanded swipe that smashed into Gabriel’s jaw. Gabriel staggered but managed to stay on his feet.

He yelled, “Michael, no!” as his younger brother came running up and jumped onto the big man’s back.

The phony waiter grunted and turned in place with Michael clinging to him, then brushed Michael off like a horse swatting away a fly. As Michael fell backward with his arms windmilling, he crashed into Gabriel. Their legs tangled and both of them went down.

That gave the waiter enough time to grab Mariella, throw her over his shoulder, and start galloping toward one of the rear exits. The other waiters covered hisretreat with blazing automatics. Gabriel scrambled up but couldn’t give chase. Flying lead forced him to grab Michael and duck behind one of the thick pillars as slugs pitted it.

He risked a glance around the pillar when he heard Mariella scream. She was pounding her fists against her captor’s back as he ran, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows.

Gabriel grimaced and wished again that he’d brought a gun with him tonight. He would have risked a shot at the son of a bitch’s legs to bring him down.

As it was, all he could do was pull his head back while bullets chipped splinters of plaster from the pillar next to his ear. His last sight of Mariella came as she was carried, still struggling, through the rear exit.

“The back!” a cop yelled from the front of the Great Hall. “Somebody cover the back!” Other cops were pouring into the room finally, and Gabriel saw two of them salute, turn on their heels and run out again, no doubt headed for the back.

But they would get there too late, Gabriel knew. Despite all the chaos, the waiters had sliced through the scene with brisk efficiency, like sharks through a school of minnows. Whoever and what ever else they were, they were professionals. Chances were their getaway was already arranged and they would be gone before any of the police could reach the back of the huge museum building.

Gabriel turned to Michael and said, “What the hell were you thinking, jumping on that guy?”

“I had to do something.”

“You do plenty,” Gabriel said. “Leave the jumping on people to me.”

“What was that he was after, anyway? It was rolling and spinning around so much I never got a good look at it.”

“I did,” Gabriel said. “It was a whiskey bottle.”

“A bottle of whiskey!”

Gabriel shook his head. “That’s not what I said. Come on.”

The shooting had stopped. Police officers and fire department paramedics were spreading out through the hall to check on the people who were injured.

Gabriel frowned as he scanned the room. He didn’t see any of the red-jacketed figures they’d taken down during the fray. The phony waiters had taken their wounded with them.

Michael still wasn’t too steady on his feet, so Gabriel kept one hand under his brother’s arm as he led him toward the spot where the bottle had shattered. He knelt, touched a couple of fingers to the wet spot on the floor, and then smelled them.

“That’s not whiskey,” he said. Not that he’d thought it had been—whatever had been in the bottle hadn’t been dark enough to be whiskey. “Doesn’t smell like any other kind of booze, either.”

He wet his fingers with the residue again and licked them, causing Michael to exclaim, “For God’s sake, Gabriel, don’t do that!”

Gabriel looked up. “Why not?”

“It could be some sort of toxin!”

Gabriel waited a moment, then shook his head. “Not a fast-acting one anyway.” He tasted it again. “It has no flavor at all.” He bent forward, sniffed at the spot directly. “No smell. No color. It’s not oily, not viscous. As far as I can tell, it’s water. Plain water.”

“Some poisons are flavorless and odorless.”

Gabriel nodded. “And not oily, sure. But so’s water, and I think that’s what this was a bottle of.”

Michael raised a hand to the cut on his head, winced as he touched it. “Why all that fuss over a whiskey bottle filled with…?”

“Water?”

“They went to a lot of trouble to get it away from Miss Montez.”

“Damned if I know.”

“You guys freeze!”

The brothers looked up at a beefy NYPD cop with a thick mustache dangling down over his upper lip. He had a service revolver leveled at them.

“Perfect timing, officer,” Gabriel said. “If you’ve got a key to the barn door, feel free to lock it.”

“Huh?”

“The horse.” Gabriel made a shooing gesture with one hand. “Gone.”

The cop turned to Michael. “What’s he talkin’ about?”

Michael gave Gabriel a look, then said, “Officer, we’re not armed, and we didn’t have anything to do with what happened here. We were guests at the reception. In fact, our Foundation was co host of the reception.”

The cop nodded toward the pieces of broken glass scattered across the floor. “What’s that you were monkeyin’ with?”

“That bottle appears to be what the gunmen were trying to obtain,” Michael said. “Along with a woman named Mariella Montez, who has been abducted.”

“Who’s this Montez?”

Gabriel said, “A young woman. About so tall—” Gabriel gestured with one hand. “Black hair. Busty. One of those phony waiters carried her off just before you got here.”

The cop sighed wearily. “Oh, Lord. That’s kidnappin’. Means we’ll have the damn FBI to deal with, too. Hey, stop that!”

Gabriel had taken a pen from his pocket and was using it to turn one of the larger pieces of broken glass over. “Look,” he said to Michael. “Most of the label is still intact.”

Michael leaned over and put his hands on his knees, squinting to study the label. The cop bent over beside him. “Old Pinebark,” Michael read. “Brewed in…Dobie’s Mill, Florida.” He looked at Gabriel and shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That doesn’t exactly surprise me, Michael,” Gabriel said as he straightened. “But I haven’t either. And here I thought I’d sampled just about every brand of rotgut, hooch, and Who-hit-John under the sun.”

“That’s hardly something to boast about,” Michael muttered.

“How about you, officer? You ever hear of Old—” But looking up, Gabriel saw the policeman wasn’t listening. He was staring at the cloth that had been wrapped around the bottle. It was lying on the floor of the Great Hall, wadded up and soiled from being trampled underfoot.

Gabriel walked over to it, squatted down on his haunches. There was some sort of design on the cloth. He used the tip of his pen to straighten it out.

“There you go, messing with evidence again,” the cop complained.

The cloth was perhaps thirty inches square. The faded colors and some tattering around the edges indicated that it was quite old; there were long-dried bloodstains spattered along one edge and even a dark-rimmed bullet hole in one spot. Crossed sabers were emblazoned in each corner. Set in a large, gilt-edged circle that took up most of the center of the flag was a picture of a gray-uniformed man on a magnificent, rearing stallion. In the background was a large white house with white columns, set among rolling green hills and fields covered with lush crops. Letters that arched above the circle read Fifth GA. CAV-ALRY, and below the picture, set slightly apart, were the letters C S A.

Gabriel said, “You’re the one with the history degree. Want to tell me what we’re looking at?”

“It appears,” Michael said, “to be the battle flag of a Confederate cavalry regiment.”

“The Fifth Georgia Cavalry was commanded by Brigadier General Granville Fordham Fargo,” Michael said several hours later as he pointed at a yellowed page in the over-sized volume spread open on the room’s cherrywood reading table, itself an antique. He and Gabriel were in the Sutton Place brownstone that served as the headquarters of the Hunt Foundation, as well as Michael’s home.

The brothers had spent a portion of the intervening hours being questioned by the police at the scene, but they hadn’t been able to tell the cops anything beyond what was obvious: Someone had substituted gunmen for the real waiters who were supposed to serve at the reception, apparently for the purpose of kidnapping Mariella Montez and stealing the bottle she had brought with her to the museum. When the bottle shattered, they satisfied themselves with just grabbing her.

The grisly discovery of the bodies of the real waiters in the catering van parked behind the museum provided grim confirmation. Each of them had been killed by a single shot to the back of the head. Professional executions.

Instead of returning to his own rooms on the top floor of the Discoverers League building, Gabriel had come here to the brownstone with Michael. Michael had been sorting through one musty volume after another in the library adjoining his office for over an hour while Gabriel paced impatiently. The books Michael had pulled from the shelves were stacked in neat piles on the floor and the table. Only two were open.

Gabriel reversed a chair and straddled it as Michael went on, “The Fifth Georgia was raised from a county in the southern part of the state, near the border with Florida. Just across the border is where this place Dobie’s Mill was located. That also happens to be the location of the only major battle the regiment took part in, the Battle of Olustee. That was in 1864. There’s a list here of all the officers who served.”

“I don’t guess any of them were named Montez?”

Michael shook his head. “No.”

“What about that Old Pinebark distillery? You find anything about that?”

Michael hesitated. He loosened his bow tie and pulled it from around his neck, then opened his collar, which he hadn’t done until now. Gabriel had long since thrown his tuxedo jacket over the back of a chair, with the tie and cummerbund stuffed in the pockets.

“That’s actually rather odd,” Michael said. He moved over to the second open book, turned it around so it was facing Gabriel. “According to Hogan’s History of Distilling in America, the Old Pinebark distillery was destroyed during the war and never rebuilt.”

“I don’t suppose you mean World War II,” Gabriel said.

“No,” Michael said. “The Civil War.”

Gabriel frowned. “That would mean that bottle was at least—”

“A hundred forty-four years old,” Michael said with a nod.

“So we’ve got an antique whiskey bottle wrapped in a battle flag from the Civil War,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, and if the police find out that we have them, we’re going to be in trouble,” Michael warned.

The cop who had questioned them at the museum had been called away by one of his superiors, and Gabriel had taken the opportunity to carry the flag over behind one of the pillars, where he quickly folded it up and stashed it at the small of his back, under his shirt. The piece of broken glass with the label attached had gone into his pocket.

The flag was now spread out on the table next to the books. The piece of the bottle rested atop the elaborately decorated cloth.

“What did you find out about Mariella Montez?”

“Nothing,” Michael said. He waved in the direction of the computer sitting in one corner of the room, as out of place among the ceiling-high shelves of old books as a cell phone in a monastery. “Not even online. It’s as if…she doesn’t exist.”

“She exists, all right,” Gabriel said, thinking about the way Mariella had felt to him when he bumped into her. Though he’d been too distracted to appreciate it at the time, he wouldn’t soon forget that steel-under-velvet body.

Gabriel went on, “Why’d she want to give the flag and the bottle to you?”

Michael spread his hands. “Lots of people bring antiques to the Hunt Foundation—to evaluate, to identify. To buy. Usually items of older vintage than the Civil War, true, but…”

“You think she wanted you to buy them from her?” Gabriel asked. “An old whiskey bottle full of water?”

“It may have had some sort of value other than the purely economic,” Michael said, and Gabriel remembered how she’d screamed when the bottle broke.

“There’s one way to find out,” Gabriel said.

“How?”

“You said the distillery was in northern Florida, near where this regiment fought its only battle…?”

“That’s right,” Michael said. “Olustee.”

“Then it looks like I’m going to Florida,” Gabriel said.