The Black Angel

CHAPTER EIGHT

The town of Sedlec lies some forty miles from the city of Prague. An incurious traveler, perhaps deterred by the dull suburbs, might not even deign to stop here, instead opting to press on to the nearby, and better known, town of Kutná Hora, which has now virtually absorbed Sedlec into itself. Yet it was not always thus, for this part of the old kingdom of Bohemia was one of the medieval world’s largest sources of silver. By the late thirteenth century, one third of all Europe’s silver came from this district, but silver coins were being minted here as early as the tenth century. The silver lured many to this place, making it a serious rival to the economic and political supremacy of Prague. Intriguers came, and adventurers, merchants, and craftsmen. And where there was power, so too there were the representatives of the one power that stands above all. Where there was wealth, there was the Church.

The first Cistercian monastery was founded in Sedlec by Miroslav of Cimburk in 1142. Its monks came from Valdsassen Abbey in the Upper Palatinate, attracted by the promise of silver ore, for Valdsassen was one of the Morimon line of monasteries associated with mining. (The Cistercians, to their credit, might charitably be said to have employed a pragmatic attitude toward wealth and its accumulation.) Clearly, God Himself was smiling upon their endeavors, for deposits of silver ore were found on the monastery’s lands in the late thirteenth century, and the influence of the Cistercians grew as a result. Unfortunately, God’s attentions quickly turned elsewhere, and by the end of the century the monastery suffered the first of its numerous destructions at the hands of hostile men, a process that reached its peak in the attack of 1421, which left it in smoldering ruins, the attack that marked the first coming of the Believers…

Sedlec, Bohemia

April 21, 1421

The noise of battle had ceased. It no longer shook the monastery walls, and no more were the monks troubled by fine scatterings of gray dust that descended upon their white garb, accumulating in their tonsures so that the young looked old and the old looked older still. Distant flames still rose to the south, and the bodies of the slain were accumulating inside the nearby cemetery gates, with more being added to their number every day, but the great armies were now silent and watchful. The stench was foul, but the monks were almost used to it after all these years of dealing with the dead, for bones were forever stacked like kindling around the ossuary, piled high against the walls as graves were emptied of their occupants and new remains interred in their place in a great cycle of burial, decay, and display. When the wind blew from the east, poisonous smoke from the smelting of ore was added to the mix, and those forced to work in the open coughed until their robes were dotted with blood.

The abbot of Sedlec stood at the gate of his lodge, in the shadow of the monastery’s conventual church. He was the heir of the great Abbot Heidenreich, diplomat and adviser to kings, who had died a century earlier but who had transformed the monastery into a center of influence, power, and wealth-aided by the discovery of great deposits of silver beneath the order’s lands-while never forgetting the monks’ duty toward the less fortunate of God’s children. Thus, a cathedral grew alongside a hospital, makeshift chapels were constructed among the mining settlements sanctioned by Heidenreich, and the monks buried great numbers of the dead without stricture or complaint. How ironic it was, thought the abbot, that in Heidenrich’s successes lay the very seeds that had now grown to doom the community, for it had provided a magnet of sorts for the Catholic forces and their leader, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, pretender to the Bohemian crown. His armies were camped around Kutná Hora, and the abbot’s efforts to keep some distance between the monastery and the emperor’s forces had proved fruitless. Sedlec’s reputed wealth was a temptation to all, and he was already giving shelter to Carthusian monks from Prague whose monastery had been destroyed some years earlier during the ravages that followed the death of Wenceslas IV. Those who would loot Sedlec needed no further incentive to attack, yet Sigismund, by his presence, had now made its destruction inevitable.

It was the killing of the reformer Jan Hus that had brought these events to pass. The abbot had once met Hus, an ordained priest at the University of Prague, where he was dean of the faculty of arts and, later, rector, and had been impressed by his zeal. Nevertheless, Hus’s reformist instincts were dangerous. The church was in crisis. Three different popes were making conflicting claims on the papacy: John XXIII of the Italians, who had been forced to flee Rome and had taken refuge in Germany; Gregory XXII, of the French; and Benedict XIII, for the Spaniards. The latter pair had already been deposed once, but refused to accept their fate. In such times Hus’s demands for a Bible in Czech, and his continued insistence on conducting the Mass in Czech rather than Latin, inevitably led to his being branded a heretic, a charge that was exacerbated by his espousal of the beliefs of the earlier heretic, John Wycliffe, and his branding of the foul John XXIII as the Antichrist, a view with which the abbot, at least in his own soul, was reluctant to take issue. It was hardly a surprise, then, when Hus was excommunicated.

Summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 by Sigismund to air his grievances, Hus was imprisoned and tried for heresy. He refused to recant, and in 1415 was taken to “The Devil’s Place,” the site of execution in a nearby meadow. He was stripped naked, his hands and feet were tied to a stake with wet ropes, and his neck was chained to a wooden post. Oil was dumped on his head, and kindling and straw piled up to his chin. It took half an hour for the flames to catch, and Hus eventually suffocated from the thick black smoke. His body was ripped to pieces, his bones were broken, and his heart was roasted over an open fire. His remains were then cremated, the ashes shoveled into the carcass of a steer, and the whole lot cast into the Rhine.

Hus’s followers in Bohemia were outraged at his death and vowed to defend his teachings to the last drop of blood. A crusade was declared against them, and Sigismund sent an army of twenty thousand into Bohemia to quell the uprising, but the Hussites annihilated them, led by Jan Ziska, a one-eyed knight who turned carts into war chariots and called his men “warriors of God.” Now Sigismund was licking his wounds and planning his next move. A peace treaty had been agreed, sparing those who would accede to the Hussites’ Four Articles of Prague, including the clergy’s renunciation of all worldly goods and secular authority, an article to which the abbot of Sedlec was clearly unable to accede. Earlier that day the citizens of Kutná Hora had marched to the Sedlec monastery, around which were gathered the Hussite troops, to plead for mercy and forgiveness, for it was well-known that Hus’s followers in the town had been thrown alive into the mine shafts, and the citizens feared the consequences if they did not bend the knee to the attacking troops. The abbot listened while the two sides sang the Te Deum in acknowledgment of their truce, and he felt ill at the hypocrisy involved. The Hussites would not sack Kutná Hora, for its mining and minting industries were too valuable, but they wanted to secure it for themselves nonetheless. All of this was mere pretense, and the abbot knew that before long both sides would again be at each other’s throats over the great wealth of the town.

The Hussites had withdrawn some distance from the monastery, but he could still see their fires. Soon they would come, and they would spare no one found within its walls. He was consumed by anger and regret. He loved the monastery. He had been party to its most recent constructions, and the very raising of its places of worship had in itself been as much an act of contemplation and meditation as the services carried out within them, their every stone imbued with spirituality, the stern asceticism of the lines a precaution against any distraction from prayer and contemplation. Its church, the greatest of its kind in the land, was patterned on a Latin cross, achieving a harmony with the natural formation of the region’s river valley by featuring a central axis that oriented the choir down the river’s stream rather than toward the east. Yet the conventual church was also a complex variant on the original plans drawn up by the order’s chief propagator, Bernard of Clairvaux, and so it was imbued with his love of music, which manifested itself in his faith in the mysticism of numbers based on Augustine’s theory of music and its application to the proportions of buildings. Purity and balance were expressions of divine harmony, and thus the conventual Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist was a beautiful, silent hymn to God, every column a note, every perfect arch a Te Deum.

Now this wondrous structure was at risk of total destruction, even though, in its simplicity and absence of unnecessary adornment, it symbolized the very qualities that the reformists should have prized the most. Almost without realizing he was doing so, the abbot reached into the folds of his garment and removed a small stone. Embedded in it was a tiny creature, unlike anything the abbot had ever seen walk, crawl, or swim, now turned to stone itself, petrified as though caught in a basilisk’s stare. It resembled a snail, except its shell was larger, its spirals closer together. One of the laborers had found it while quarrying by the river, and had given it to the abbot as a gift. It was said that this place had once been covered by a great sea, now long since gone, and the abbot wondered if this little animal had lived by the ocean’s gift before it found itself marooned as the sea retreated, and was slowly absorbed by the land. Perhaps it was a relic of the Great Flood; if so, then its twin must yet exist elsewhere on the earth, but secretly the abbot hoped that such a thing was not true. He prized it because it was unique, and he thought it both sad and beautiful in the transience of its nature. Its time had passed, just as the abbot’s time was now drawing to a close.

He feared the Hussites, but he knew too that there were others who threatened the survival of the monastery, and it was simply a matter of which enemy breached its gates first. Rumors had reached the abbot’s ears, stories meant for him, and him alone: tales of mercenaries marked with a twin-pronged brand, their number led by a Captain with a blemished eye, his footsteps forever shadowed by a fat imp of a man, ugly and tumerous. It was unclear to which side the Captain’s soldiers offered their allegiance, according to his sources, but the abbot supposed that it did not matter. Such men assumed flags of convenience to hide their true aims, and their loyalty was a fire that burned cold and fast, leaving only ash in its wake. He knew what they were seeking. Despite the beliefs of ignorant men, there was little true wealth left at Sedlec. The monastery’s most famed treasure, a monstrance made from gold-plated silver, had been entrusted to the Augustinians at Klosterneuburg six years earlier. Those who sacked this place would find little in the way of ecclesiastical riches to divide among themselves.

But the Captain was not interested in such trifles.

And so the abbot had set about preparing for what was to come, even as the threat of destruction drew closer. Sometimes the monks heard distant orders shouted; at other times they listened to the screaming of the injured and the dying at the gates. Still, they did not pause in their work. Horses were saddled, and a huge covered cart, one of two specially constructed for the abbot’s purposes, lay waiting by the hidden entrance to the monastery garden. Its wheels were sunk deep into the mud, driven down by the weight of the cargo that it carried. The horses were wide-eyed and foam-flecked, as though aware of the nature of the burden that was being placed upon them. It was almost time.

“A great sentence is gone forth against thee. He shall bind thee…”

Heresy, thought the abbot, as the words came unbidden to him. Even possession of the Book of Enoch, condemned as false scripture, would be enough to draw the charge down upon his head, and thus he had taken great pains to ensure that the work remained hidden. Nevertheless, in its contents he had found answers to many of the questions that had troubled him, among them the nature of the terrible, beautiful creation entrusted to his care, and the duty of concealment that now lay upon him.

“Cast him into darkness… Throw upon him hurled and pointed stones, covering him with darkness; there shall he remain for ever; cover his face, that he may not see the light. And in the great day of judgment let him be cast into the fire.”

The abbot’s lodge lay at the heart of the monastery’s concentric fortifications. The first circle, in which he now stood, housed the conventual church, reserved for the use of the order’s initiated members, the convent building, and the cloister gallery. On the side of the church’s transept opposite the river lay the gate of the deceased, which led into the churchyard. It was the most important portal in the monastery, its intricate sculpture standing in sharp contrast to the starkness of the architecture surrounding it. This was the gateway between earthly life and the eternal, between this world and the next. The abbot had hoped to be carried through it one day and buried alongside his brothers. Those who had already fled upon his instructions had been requested to return when it was safe and to seek out his remains. If the gate still stood, he was to be brought through it. If it did not, a place was still to be found for him, so that he might rest beside the ruins of the chapel that he so loved.

The second circle belonged to the initiated members, and also contained the granary and a sacred plot of land at the entrance portal to the church, used to grow grain for the baking of the host. Within the third circle was the monastery gate; a church for lay members of the order, outside worshippers, and pilgrims; living quarters and gardens; and the main cemetery. The abbot stared out upon these walls that protected the monastery, their lines clear even in the darkness, thanks to the false dawn of the fires on the hillsides. It looked like a vision of hell, he thought. The abbot did not believe that Christian men should fight over God, but more than those who killed in the name of a forgiving God he hated those who used the name of God as an excuse to extend their own power. He sometimes thought that he could almost understand the anger of the Hussites, although he kept such opinions to himself. Those who did not might quickly find themselves broken upon a wheel, or burning on a pyre for their temerity.

He heard footsteps approach, and a young novice appeared by his side. He wore a sword, and his robes were filthy from his exertions.

“All is ready,” said the novice. “The servants ask if they may muffle the horses’ hooves and wrap cloth around the bridles. They are concerned that the noise will bring the soldiers down upon them.”

The abbot did not answer immediately. To the younger man, it seemed that the abbot had just been offered a final possibility of escape and was tempted to accept it. At last he sighed and, like the beasts bound to the cart, accepted his inevitable burden.

“No,” he said. “Let there be no silencing of hooves, no wrapping of bridles. They must make haste, and they must create noise as they do so.”

“But then they will be found, and they will be killed.”

The abbot turned to his novice and laid his hand gently upon the boy’s cheek.

“As God wills it, so it shall be done,” he said. “Now you must go, and take as many with you as it is safe to allow.”

“What about you?”

“I-”

But the abbot’s words were cut off by the barking of dogs in the outer circles. The monastery had been abandoned by many of those who might otherwise have come to its defense, and now only animals roamed behind the second and third walls. The sound the dogs made was panicked, almost hysterical. Their fear was palpable, as though a wolf were about to enter into their presence, and they knew that they would die fighting it. The young novice drew his sword.

“Come,” he urged. “There are soldiers approaching.”

The abbot found that he was unable to move. His feet would not respond to the urgings of his brain, and his hands were trembling. No soldiers could make the dogs respond in such a way. That was why he had ordered their release: the dogs would smell them and alert the monks to their approach.

Then the twin gates of the inner wall were blown apart, one flying free of its hinges and landing amid a copse of trees, the other left hanging like a sot at night’s end. The fleeing dogs leaped through the gap, those that were too slow killed by arrows that shot from the shadows beyond the gate.

“Go,” said the abbot. “Make sure the cart reaches the road.”

With one last frightened glance at the gates, and with sorrow in his eyes, the novice fled. In his place, a pair of servants joined the abbot. They bore halberds and were very old. They had remained at the monastery as much out of their inability to flee far as out of any loyalty to the abbot.

Slowly, a group of horsemen emerged from beyond the wall and entered the inner circle. Most wore plain, formfitting breastplates, with mail at the groin, armpits, and elbows. Three had cylindrical Italian sallet helmets on their heads, their features barely distinguishable through the T-shaped frontal gap. The rest had long hair that hung about their faces, concealing them almost as well as the helmets of their fellows. From their saddles dangled human remains: scalps and hands and garlands of ears. The flanks of their horses were white with spit and foam, and the animals looked close to madness. Only one man was on foot. He was huge and fat, and his neck was swollen with some dreadful purple goiter. On his upper body he wore a long brigandine for armor, constructed from small metal plates riveted to a textile covering, for his build was too deformed for the fitted protection worn by his allies. There were plates made in a similar manner on his thighs and shins, but his head was bare. He was very pale, with almost feminine features and large green eyes. In his hand he grasped a woman’s head, his long fingers entwined in her hair. The abbot recognized her face, even twisted in the torments of death: an idiot who sat outside the monastery gates, begging for alms, too foolish to flee her post even in wartime. As he and his fellows drew closer, the abbot could see a crudely drawn symbol upon their saddles: a red grapnel, newly created with the blood of their victims.

And then their leader emerged from the heart of his men. He rode a black horse, a spiked half shaffron protecting its head, and a peytral guarding its chest, all intricately carved in black and silver. He was clad almost entirely in black armor, apart from the hood upon his head: pauldrons extending over his chest and shoulder blades; gauntlets with long protective cuffs; and tassets to cover the vulnerable spot at the top of his cuisses, where his breastplate ended and his thigh armor began. His only weapon was a long sword, which remained in its scabbard.

The abbot began to pray silently.

“Who are they?” whispered one of the servants. “Jan’s men?”

The abbot found enough spittle to moisten his mouth and to free his tongue to speak.

“No,” he said. “Not Jan’s, and not men.”

From the rear of the monastery he thought he discerned the sound of the cart moving forward, urged on by its driver. Hooves beat a slow cadence upon grass, then upon earth as they moved onto the road. The speed of their timpani slowly increased as they tried to put some distance between themselves and the monastery.

The leader of the horsemen raised his hand, and six men split from the main party and galloped around the chapel to cut off those who were fleeing. Six more dismounted but remained with their leader, slowly moving in on the abbot and his men. All bore crossbows, already spanned with the bolt ready to be fired. They were smaller and lighter than any the abbot had seen before, with a crannequin for pulling back the bow steel that was portable enough to be worn on their belts. They fired the bolts, and the abbot’s servants fell.

The Captain dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The animal advanced, and the Captain’s shadow fell across the old monk. The horse stopped so close to the abbot that moisture from its nose sprayed his face. The Captain kept his head low and slightly turned away from the monk, so that his face could not be seen.

“Where is it?” he said.

His voice was cracked and hoarse from the screams of battle.

“We have nothing of value here,” said the abbot.

A sound came from beneath the folds of the Captain’s hood. It might almost have been a laugh, had a snake found a way to convey humor in its hiss. He commenced freeing his hands from the gauntlets.

“Your mines made you wealthy,” he said. “You could not have spent it all on trinkets. It may be that you yet have much of value to some, but not to me. I seek one thing only, and you know what it is.”

The abbot stepped forward. With his right hand, he gripped the cross around his neck.

“It is gone,” he said.

In the distance, he heard horses neighing wildly, and the impact of metal upon metal as his men fought to protect the cart and its cargo. They should have left sooner, he realized. His act of concealment might not have been revealed so quickly had they done so.

The Captain leaned over his horse’s neck. The gauntlets were now gone. His fingers, revealed to the moonlight, were scored by white scars. He raised his head and listened to the cries of the monks as they were slaughtered by his men.

“They died for nothing,” he said. “Their blood is on your hands.”

The abbot grasped his cross more tightly. Its edges tore his skin, and blood leaked through his fingers, as though giving substance to the Captain’s words.

“Go back to hell,” said the abbot.

The Captain lifted his hands to his hood and threw back the rough material from around his face. Dark hair surrounded his beautiful features, and his skin seemed almost to glow in the cool night air. He extended his right hand, and a crossbow was placed in his grasp by the grinning imp at his side. The abbot saw a white mote flicker in the blackness of the Captain’s right eye, and in his final moments it was given unto him to see the face of God.

“Never,” said the Captain, and the abbot heard the dull report of the crossbow at the instant the bolt penetrated his chest. He stumbled back against the doorway and slid slowly down the wall. At a signal from the Captain, his men began entering the buildings of the inner circle, their footsteps echoing on the slabs as they ran. A small group of armed servants emerged from behind the conventual church, rushing forward to engage the intruders in the confined space.

More time, the abbot thought. We need more time.

His monks and servants, what few remained, were putting up fierce resistance, preventing the Captain’s soldiers from entering the church and the inner buildings.

“Just a little longer, my Lord,” he prayed. “Just a little.”

The Captain looked down upon the abbot, listening to his words. The abbot felt his heart slow just as the Captain’s men flanked the monks on the steps and entered the chapel, ascending the walls and crawling like lizards across the stones. One moved upside down across the ceiling, then dropped behind the defenders and impaled the rearmost man upon the end of a sword.

The abbot wept for them, even as the cool tip of a bolt touched his forehead. The Captain’s lieutenant, bloated and poisonous, was now kneeling by his side, his mouth open and his head tilted, as though preparing to deliver a last kiss to a lover.

“I know what you are,” the abbot whispered. “And you will never find the one that you seek.”

A pale finger tightened on the trigger.

This time, the abbot did not hear the shot.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the Cistercians of Sedlec were able to commence their reconstruction in earnest, including the restoration of the Church of the Assumption, left roofless and vaultless after the Hussite wars. Seven chapels now form a ring around its presbytery, and its Baroque interiors are decorated with art, although these interiors are hidden from the sight of the public as its restoration continues.

And yet this stunning structure, perhaps the most impressive of its type in the Czech Republic, is not the most interesting aspect of Sedlec. A rotary stands near the church, and at this rotary there is a sign that reads KOSNICE, pointing to the right. Those who follow it will come to a small, relatively modest house of worship seated at the center of a muddy graveyard. This is All Saints Church, built in 1400, revaulted in the seventeenth century, and reconstructed in the eighteenth century by the architect Santini-Aichel, who was also responsible for much of the restoration work on the Chapel of the Assumption. It can be entered through an extension added by Santini-Aichel, after it was discovered that the front of the church had begun to tilt. A staircase to the right leads up to All Saints Chapel, where once candles were lit for the dead in the two towerlets behind the chapel itself. Even in the spring sunlight, there is little about All Saints that might attract more than a casual second glance from the windows of an air-conditioned bus. After all, there are the wonders of Kutná Hora to be seen, with its narrow little streets, its perfectly preserved buildings, and the great mass of Saint Barbara’s dominating all.

But All Saints is not as it might seem from the outside, for it is in fact two structures. The first, the chapel, is aboveground; the second, known as Jesus Christ on the Mount of Olives, lies below. While what is above is a monument to the prospect of a better life beyond this one, what lies beneath is a testament to the transience of all things mortal. It is a strange place, a buried place, and none who spend time among its wonders can ever forget it.

Legend tells that Jindrich, an abbot of Sedlec, brought back with him from the Holy Land a sack of soil that he scattered over the cemetery. It came to be regarded as an outpost of the Holy Land itself, and people from all across Europe were buried there, alongside plague victims and those who had fallen in the many conflicts waged in its surrounding fields. These bones at last became so plenteous that something had to be done with them, and in 1511 the task of disposing of them was reputedly entrusted to a half-blind monk. He arranged an accumulation of skulls into pyramids, and so began the great work that would become the ossuary at Sedlec. In the aftermath of Emperor Joseph II’s reforms, the monastery was purchased by the Orlik line of the Schwarzenberg family, but development of the ossuary continued. A woodcarver named František Rint was brought in, and his imagination was allowed free rein. From the remains of forty thousand people, Rint created a monument to death.

A great chandelier of skulls hangs from the ossuary ceiling. Skulls form the base for its candleholders, each resting on pelvic arches, with a humerus clasped beneath its upper jaw. Where delicate crystals should hang, bones dangle vertically, connecting the skulls to the central support via a system of vertebrae. There are more bones here, small and large, forming the support itself and adorning the chains that anchor the skulls to the ceiling. Great lines of skulls, each clasping a bone beneath its jaw, line the arches of the ossuary at each side of the chandelier. They hang in loops, and form four narrow pyramids in the center of the floor, creating a square beneath the chandelier, each skull capable of holding a single candle in the center of the cranium.

There are other wonders too: a monstrance made of bone, with a skull at its center where the host should be, six femurs radiating from behind, smaller bones and vertebrae interwoven with them. Bones mask the wooden support around which the monstrance has been constructed and its base is a U ending at either side in another skull. Even the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms is formed of bone, with a crown of skulls and pelvises at its peak. Those bones that have not found a practical use are stored in great piles beneath stone arches.

Here, the dead sleep.

Here are treasures, seen and unseen.

Here is temptation.

And here is evil.

CHAPTER NINE

The windows in the room were covered with sheets of metal riveted to the walls, preventing any natural light from entering. There were pieces of bone on a workbench: ribs, a radius and ulnae, sections of skull. A smell of urine added a sharp, unpleasant character to the stale air in the room. Beneath the bench were four or five wooden packing crates containing straw and paper. Against the far wall, to the right of the blacked-out windows, was a console table. At each end rested more skulls, all missing their lower jaw, with what appeared to be a bone from the upper arm clasped beneath the upper mandible. A hole had been made in the tops of the skulls, into which candles had been inserted. They flickered, illuminating the figure that hovered behind them.

It was black, about two feet in height, and appeared to be made from a combination of human and animal remains. The wing of a large bird had been carefully stripped of its skin and feathers, and the bones skillfully fixed in place so that the wing stood outstretched, as though the creature to which it belonged were about to take flight. The wing was fixed to a section of spine from which a small rib cage also curled. It might have belonged to a child or a monkey, but I couldn’t tell which. To the left of the spine there was, instead of a second wing, a skeletal arm, with all of the bones in place, down to the tiny fingers. The arm was raised, the fingers grasping. They ended in small sharp nails. The right leg looked like the back leg of a cat or dog, judging by the angle of the joint. The left was clearly closer to that of a human, but was unfinished, the wire frame visible from the ankle down.

The fusion of animal and man was clearest, though, in the head, which was slightly out of proportion to the rest of the figure. Whoever had crafted it possessed an artistry to match his disturbed vision. A multiplicity of different creatures had been used to create it, and I had to look closely to find the lines where one ended and another began: half of a primate’s jaw was carefully attached to that of a child, while the upper part of the facial area between jaws and forehead had been formed using sections of white bone and bird heads. Finally, horns emerged from the top of a human skull, one barely visible and resembling the node on the head of an immature deer, the other ramlike and curling around the back of the skull, almost touching the statue’s small clavicle.

“If this guy is subletting, he’s in a shitload of trouble,” said Angel.

Louis was examining one of the skulls upon the workbench, his face barely inches from its empty sockets.

“They look old,” I said, answering a question that had not been asked.

He nodded, then left the room. I heard him moving boxes around, searching for some clue as to the whereabouts of Alice.

I followed the smell of urine to the bathroom. The tub contained more bones, all soaking in yellow liquid. The stink of ammonia made my eyes water. I made a cursory search of the cabinets, a handkerchief pressed to my nose and mouth, then closed the door behind me. Angel was still examining the bone statue, apparently fascinated by it. I wasn’t surprised. The creation looked like it belonged in an art gallery or a museum. It was repugnant, but breathtaking in its artistry and in the fluidity with which one creature’s remains flowed into the next.

“I just can’t figure out what the hell this is supposed to be,” he asked. “It looks like a man changing into a bird, or a bird changing into a man.”

“You see a lot of birds with horns?” I said.

Angel reached out a finger to touch the protuberances on the skull, then thought better of it.

“I guess it’s not a bird, then.”

“I guess not.”

I took a piece of newspaper from the floor and used it to lift one of the skull candlesticks from the table, then shined my mini Maglite inside. There were serial numbers of some kind etched into the bone. I examined the others and all had similar markings, except for one that was adorned with the symbol of a two-pronged fork and rested on a pelvic bone. I took one of the numbered skulls and placed it in a tea chest, then carefully added the forked skull and the statue. I took the box into the next room, where Louis was kneeling on the floor. Before him stood an open suitcase. It contained tools, among them scalpels, files, and small bone saws, all carefully packed away in canvas pockets, and a pair of videocassettes. Each was labeled along the side with a long line of initials, and dates.

“He was getting ready to leave,” said Louis.

“Looks like it.”

He gestured at the chest in my hands.

“You found something?”

“Maybe. There are marks on these skulls. I’d like someone to take a look at them, perhaps at the statue too.”

Louis removed one of the cassettes from the case, placed it in the VCR, then turned on the TV. There was nothing to be seen for a time except static, then the picture cleared. It showed an area of yellow sand and stone, across which the camera panned jerkily before coming to rest upon the partially clothed body of a young woman. She lay facedown upon the ground, and there was blood upon her back, her legs, and the once-white shorts that she wore. Her dark hair was spread across the sand like tendrils of ink in dirty water.

The young woman stirred. A male voice spoke in what sounded like Spanish.

“I think he said that she’s still alive,” said Louis.

A figure appeared in front of the camera. The cameraman moved slightly to get a better shot. A pair of expensive black boots came into view.

“No,” said another voice, in English.

The camera was pushed away, preventing it from getting a clear view of the man or the girl. It picked up a sound like a coconut cracking. Someone laughed. The cameraman recovered himself and focused once again on the girl. There was blood flowing across the sand around her head.

“Puta.” It was the first voice again.

Whore.

The tape went blank for a moment, then resumed. This time, the girl had yellow highlights in her dark hair, but the surroundings were similar: sand and rocks. A bug stalked across a smear of blood close by her mouth, the only part of her face that was visible beneath her hair. A hand reached out, sweeping the hair back so that the cameraman could get a better view of her, then that section ended, and a new one began, with another dead girl, this one naked on a rock.

Louis fast-forwarded the tape. I lost track of the number of women. When he was done, he inserted the second cassette and did the same. Once or twice, a girl with darker skin appeared, and he stopped the image, examining it closely before moving on. All of the women were Hispanic.

“I’m going to call the cops,” I told him.

“Not yet. This guy ain’t gonna leave this shit here for just anyone to find. He’ll come back for it, and soon. If you’re right about being watched in the alley, then whoever lives here could be outside right now. I say we wait.”

I thought about what I was going to say to him before I opened my mouth. Rachel, had she been present to witness it, might have considered this progress on my part.

“Louis, we don’t have time to wait around. The cops can do surveillance better than we can. This guy is a link, but maybe we can pick up the chain farther on. The longer we stay still, the more the chances diminish of finding Alice before something bad happens to her.”

I’ve seen people, even experienced cops, fall into the trap of using the past tense when talking about a missing person. That’s why, sometimes, it pays to work out in your head what you’re planning to say before the words start spilling out of your mouth.

I gently lifted the box I was holding. “Stay here for a while longer, see what else you can find. If I can’t get back here first, I’ll call you and give you time to get out before I talk to the cops.”

Garcia sat in his car, a yellow Toyota, and watched the men enter his apartment. He guessed that the pimp was smarter than he had appeared to be, because there was no other way that they could have found his base so quickly. The pimp had followed someone to Garcia, probably in an effort to gain some room for maneuver in case his betrayal of the girl rebounded on him. Garcia was furious. A day or two later and the apartment would have been empty, its occupant gone. There was much in those rooms that was valuable to Garcia. He wanted it back. Yet Brightwell’s instructions had been clear: follow them and find out where they go, but don’t hurt them or attempt to engage them. If they separated, he was to stay with the man in the leather jacket, the one who had lingered in the alleyway as though aware of their presence. The fat man had appeared distracted as he left Garcia, but also strangely excited. Garcia knew better than to ask him why.

Don’t hurt them.

But that was before Brightwell knew where they were going. Now they were in Garcia’s place, and close to what they were seeking, although they might not recognize it if they saw it. Nevertheless, if they called the police, then Garcia would become a marked man in this country just as he was back home, and he might also be at risk from the very people who were sheltering him if his exposure threatened to bring down trouble on their heads. Garcia tried to recall if there was any way of connecting Brightwell to him through whatever remained in the apartment. He didn’t believe so, but he had watched some of the cop shows on TV, and sometimes it seemed like they could perform miracles using only dust and dirt. Then he considered all of his hard work in recent months, the great effort of construction for which he had been brought to the city. This too was threatened by the presence of the visitors. If they discovered it, or decided to report whatever they found in Garcia’s apartment, then all would be undone. Garcia was proud of what had been built; it was worthy to stand alongside the Capuchin church in Rome, the church behind the Farnese Palace, even Sedlec itself.

Garcia took out his cell. Brightwell’s number was to be called only in an emergency, but Garcia figured that this qualified. He entered the digits and waited.

“They’re at my place,” he said, once the fat man answered.

“What remains?”

“Tools,” said Garcia. “Materials.”

“Anything that I should be concerned about?”

Garcia considered his options, then made his decision.

“No,” he lied.

“Then walk away.”

“I will,” Garcia lied again.

When I’m done.

He touched his fingers to the small relic that hung from a silver chain amid the hairs of his chest. It was a shard of bone, taken from the body of the woman for whom these men were searching, these trespassers on Garcia’s sacred place. Garcia had dedicated the relic to his guardian, to Santa Muerte, and now it was imbued with her spirit, her essence.

“Muertecita,” he whispered, as his anger grew. “Reza por mi.”

Sarah Yeates was one of those people you needed in your life. Apart from being smart and funny, she was also a treasure trove of esoteric information, a status that was due at least in part to her work in the library of the Museum of Natural History. She was dark-haired, looked about ten years younger than her age, and had the kind of personality that scared off dumb men and forced the smart ones to think fast on their feet. I wasn’t sure what category I fell into where Sarah was concerned. I hoped I was in the second group, but I sometimes suspected that I might be included by default, and Sarah was just waiting for a vacancy to open up in the first group so she could file me there instead.

I called her at home. It took her a few rings to answer, and when she did her voice was foggy with sleep.

“Huh?” she said.

“Hello to you too.”

“Who is this?”

“Charlie Parker. Am I calling at a bad time?”

“You are if you’re trying to be funny. You do know what time it is, right?”

“Late.”

“Yeah, which is what you’ll be if you don’t have a good reason for calling me.”

“It’s important. I need to pick your brain about something.”

I heard her sigh and sink back into her pillow.

“Go on.”

“I have some items that I’ve found in an apartment. They’re human bones. Some have been made into candlesticks. There’s also a statue of some kind, constructed from human and animal remains mixed together. I found a bath of urine with bones in it, so I think someone was treating them for some reason. Pretty soon I’m going to have to call the cops and tell them what I’ve found, so I don’t have long. You’re the first person I’ve woken over this, but I expect to wake others before the night is through. Is there anyone in the museum, or even outside it, who might be able to tell me something I can use?”

Sarah was quiet for so long that I thought she’d fallen asleep again.

“Sarah?” I said.

“Jeez, you’re impatient,” she said. “Give a girl time to think.”

There were noises from the other end of the line as she got out of bed, told me to hold on, then put the phone down. I waited, hearing drawers opening and closing in the background. Eventually she came back.

“I’m not going to give you the names of anyone at the museum, because I’d kind of like to keep my job. It pays my rent, you know, and enables me to keep a telephone so dipshits who don’t even remember to send a Christmas card can call me in the dead of night asking for my help.”

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“That’s not the point. I like presents.”

“I’ll make it up to you this year.”

“You’d better. Okay, if this runs dry, I’ll arrange for you to talk to some people in the morning, but this is the guy you need to meet anyway. You got a pen? Right, well you also have a namesake. His name is Neddo, Charles Neddo. He’s got a place down in Cortlandt Alley. The plate beside his door says he’s an antique dealer, but the front of the store is full of junk. He wouldn’t make enough out of it to feed flies if it weren’t for his sidelines.”

“Which are?”

“He deals in what collectors term ‘esoterica.’ Occult stuff, mainly, but he’s been known to sell artifacts that you don’t generally find outside of museum basements. He keeps that merchandise in a locked room behind a curtain at the back of the store. I’ve been in there, once or twice, so I know what I’m talking about. I seem to recall seeing items similar to the ones you’re talking about, although Neddo’s equivalents would be pretty old. He’s the place to start, though. He lives above the store. Go wake him up and let me get back to sleep.”

“Will he cooperate with a stranger?”

“He will if the stranger offers him something in return. Just be sure to bring along your finds. If they’re interesting to him, then you’ll learn something.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

“Yeah, whatever. I hear you found a girlfriend. How’d that happen?”

“Good luck.”

“Yours, I think, not hers. Don’t forget my present.”

Then she hung up.

Louis moved through the unfinished floor, framed by doorways and lit by moonlight, until he came at last to the window. The window did not look onto the street. Instead, it showed Louis the dimly lit interior of a white-tiled room. In the center of the room, over a drain in the sloped floor, a chair had been fixed. There were leather restraints on the arms and the legs.

Louis opened the door and entered the white room. A shape moved to his left, and he almost fired at it before he saw his own reflection in the two-way glass. He knelt down by the drain. The floor, the drain, all were clean. Even the chair had been scrubbed, the grain cleansed of any trace of those who had occupied it. He smelled disinfectant and bleach. His gloved fingers touched the wood of the armrest, then gripped it tightly.

Not here, he thought. Don’t let her life have ended here.

Cortlandt Alley was a monkey puzzle of fire escapes and hanging wires. Neddo’s storefront was black, and the only clue to his business was a small brass plate on the brickwork with the words NEDDO ANTIQUES. A black cast-iron screen protected the glass, but the interior was concealed by gray drapes that had not been moved in a very long time, and the whole storefront looked like it had recently been sprayed with dust. To the left of the glass was a black steel door with an intercom beside it, inset with a camera lens. The windows above were all dark.

I had seen no trace of anyone watching the apartment building when I left. Angel covered me from the door as I went to my car, and I took the most circuitous route that I could to Manhattan. Once or twice, I thought I saw a beat-up yellow Toyota a couple of cars behind me, but it was gone by the time I got to Cortlandt Alley.

I pressed the button on the intercom. It was answered within seconds by a man, and he didn’t sound like he’d just been woken up.

“I’m looking for Charles Neddo,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

“It’s a little late to be calling, isn’t it?”

“It’s important.”

“How important?”

The alley was empty, and I could see no one on the street. I took the statue from the bag and, carefully holding it by its plinth, displayed it before the lens.

“This important,” I said.

“Show me some ID.”

I juggled the statue, found my wallet, and flipped it open.

Nothing happened for a time, then the voice said: “Wait there.”

He took his time. Any longer and I could have put down roots. Eventually, I heard the sound of a key in the lock and bolts being drawn back. The door opened and a man stood before me, segmented by a series of strong security chains. He was late middle-aged, with pointed tufts of gray hair sticking up from his skull that gave him the appearance of an ageing punk. His eyes were very small and round, and his mouth was set in a plump scowl. He wore a bright green robe that seemed to have trouble stretching all the way around his body. Beneath it I could see black trousers and a white shirt, wrinkled but clean.

“Your identification again, please,” he said. “I want to be sure.”

I handed him my license.

“Maine,” he said. “There are some good stores in Maine.”

“You mean L.L. Bean?”

The scowl deepened.

“I was talking about antiques. Well, I suppose you’d better come in. We can’t have you standing around in the dead of night.”

He partially closed the door, undid the chains, then stepped aside to let me enter. Inside, a flight of worn steps led up to what I assumed were Neddo’s living quarters, while to the right a door gave access to the store itself. It was through this door that Neddo led me, past glass display cases filled with antique silver, between rows of battered chairs and scuffed tables, until we came to a small back room furnished with a telephone, a huge gray filing cabinet that looked like it belonged in a Soviet bureaucrat’s office, and a desk lit by a lamp with an adjustable arm and a magnifying glass fitted halfway down its length. A curtain at the rear of the office had been pulled across almost far enough to conceal the door behind it.

Neddo sat down at the desk and removed a pair of glasses from the pocket of his dressing gown.

“Give it to me,” he said.

I placed the statue on a plinth, then removed the skulls and laid them at either side of it. Neddo barely glanced at the skulls. Instead, his attention was focused on the bone sculpture. He didn’t touch it directly, instead using the plinth to turn it while employing a large magnifying glass to peruse it in great detail. He did not speak throughout his examination. At last he pushed it away and removed his glasses.

“What made you think I’d be interested in this?” he said. He was trying very hard to remain poker-faced, but his hands were trembling.

“Shouldn’t you have asked me that before you invited me in? The fact that I’m here in your office kind of answers your question for you.”

Neddo grunted. “Let me rephrase it, then: who led you to believe that I might be interested in such an item?”

“Sarah Yeates. She works at the Museum of Natural History.”

“The librarian? A bright girl. I greatly enjoyed her occasional visits.”

The scowl on Neddo’s face relaxed slightly, and his little eyes grew animated. Judging by his words, it was clear that Sarah didn’t come around so much anymore, and from the expression on his face-one of mingled lust and regret-I was pretty sure why Sarah now kept her distance from him.

“Do you always work so late?” he said.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I don’t sleep very much. I am troubled by insomnia.”

He slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and turned his attention to the skulls. I noticed that he handled them delicately, almost respectfully, as though fearing to commit some desecration on the remains. It was hard to think of anything worse than what had already been done, but then I was no expert. The pelvic bone upon which the skull rested jutted out slightly from beneath the jaw, like an ossified tongue. Neddo laid it on a piece of black velvet and adjusted the lamp so that the skull shone.

“Where did you get these?”

“In an apartment.”

“There were others like this?”

I didn’t know how much to tell him. My hesitation gave me away.

“I’m guessing that there were, since you seem reluctant to answer. Never mind. Tell me, how exactly were these skulls placed when you found them?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Were they arranged in a particular way? Were they resting on anything else?”

I thought about the question.

“There were four bones to one side of the statue and between the skulls, piled one on top of the other. They were curved. They looked like sections of hip. Behind it was a length of vertebrae, probably from the base of a spine.”

Neddo nodded.

“It was incomplete.”

“You’ve seen something like this before?”

Neddo lifted the skull and gazed into the empty sockets of its eyes.

“Oh yes,” he said softly.

He turned to me.

“Don’t you think that there’s something beautiful about it, Mr. Parker? Don’t you find edifying the idea that someone would take bones and use them to create a piece of art?”

“No,” I said, with more force than I should have used.

Neddo looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

“And why is that?”

“I’ve met people before who tried to make art out of bone and blood. I didn’t much care for them.”

Neddo waved a hand in dismissal. “Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know what manner of men you’re speaking of but-”

“Faulkner,” I said.

Neddo stopped talking. It was a guess, nothing more, but anyone who was interested in such matters could not help but know of the Reverend Faulkner, and perhaps also of others whom I had encountered. I needed Neddo’s help, and if that meant dangling the promise of revelations before him, then I was content to do that.

“Yes,” he said, after a time, and now he seemed to be looking at me with renewed interest. “Yes, the Reverend Faulkner was such an individual. You met him? Wait, wait, you’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the detective who found him? Yes, I remember now. Faulkner vanished.”

“So they say.”

Neddo was now rigid with excitement.

“Then you saw it? You saw the book?”

“I saw it. There was no beauty to it. He made it from skin and bone. People died for its creation.”

Neddo shook his head. “Still, I would give a great deal to look upon it. Whatever you may say or feel about him, he was a part of a tradition. The book did not exist in isolation. There were others like it: not so ornate, perhaps, or so ambitious in their construction, but the raw materials remain the same, and such anthropodermic bindings are sought after items among collectors of a certain mien.”

“Anthropodermic?”

“Bindings made of human skin,” said Neddo, matter-of-factly. “The Library of Congress holds a copy of the Scrutinium Scripturarum, printed in Strasbourg some time before 1470. It was presented to the library by one Dr. Vollbehr, who noted that its wooden boards had been covered in human skin during the nineteenth century. It is claimed also that the Harvard Law Library’s second volume of Juan Gutierrez’s Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae Liber Secundus from the seventeenth century is similarly bound with the skin of one Jonas Wright, although the identity of the gentleman remains in question. Then there is the Boston Athenaeum’s copy of The Highwayman by James Allen, or George Walton, as the scoundrel was also known. A most unusual item. Upon Allen’s death, a section of his epidermis was removed and tanned to look like deer-skin, then used to bind a copy of his own book, which was then presented to one John Fenno Jr., who had narrowly escaped death at Allen’s hands during a robbery. That I have seen, although I can’t vouch for any of the others. I seem to recall that it had a most unusual smell…

“So you see that, regardless of any feelings of disgust or animosity you may have for the Reverend Faulkner, he was by no means unique in his efforts. Unpleasant, perhaps, and probably homicidal, but an artist of sorts nevertheless. Which brings us to this item.”

He placed it back upon the velvet once again.

“The person who made this was also working in a tradition: that of using human remains as ornamentation, or memento mori, if you prefer. You know what ‘mem-’”

He stopped. He looked almost embarrassed.

“Of course you do. I’m sorry. Now that you’ve mentioned Faulkner, I recall the rest, and the other one. Terrible, just terrible.”

And yet, beneath the veneer of sympathy, I could see his fascination bubble, and I knew that, if he could, he would have asked me about it all: Faulkner, the book, the Traveling Man. The chance would never come his way again, and his frustration was almost palpable.

“Where was I?” he said. “Yes, bones as ornamentation…”

And so Neddo began to speak, and I listened and learned from him.

In medieval times, the word “church” referred not merely to the building itself, but to the area around it, including the “chimiter” or cemetery. Processions and services were sometimes held within the courtyard, or atrium, of the church, and similarly, when it came to the disposal of the bodies of the dead, people were buried within the main building, against its walls, even under the rain spouts, or sub stillicidio as it was termed, as the rainwater was adjudged to have received the sanctity of the church while running down its roof and walls. “Cemetery” usually meant the outer church area, the atrium in Latin, or aitre in French. But the French also had another word for aitre: the charnier, or charnel house. It came to mean a particular part of the cemetery, namely the galleries along the churchyard, above which were placed ossuaries.

Thus, as Neddo explained it, a churchyard in the Middle Ages typically had four sides, of which the church itself generally formed one, with the three remaining walls decorated with arcades or porticoes in which the bodies of the dead were placed, rather like the cloisters of a monastery (which themselves served as cemeteries for the monks). Above the porticoes, the skulls and limbs of the dead would be stored once they had dried out sufficiently, frequently arranged in artistic compositions. Most of the bones came from the fosses aux pauvres, the great common graves of the poor in the center of the atrium. These were little more than ditches, thirty feet deep and fifteen or twenty feet across, into which the dead were cast sewn up in their shrouds, sometimes as many as fifteen hundred in a single pit covered by a thin layer of dirt, their remains easy prey for wolves and the grave robbers who supplied the anatomists. The soil was so putrefying that bodies quickly rotted, and it was said of some common graves, such as Les Innocents in Paris and Alyscamps in the Alps, that they could consume a body in as few as nine days, a quality regarded as miraculous. As one ditch filled, another, older one was opened up and emptied of its bones, which were then put to use in the ossuaries. Even the remains of the wealthy were pressed into service, although they were first buried in the church building, typically interred in the dirt beneath its flagstones. Up to the seventeenth century, it mattered little to most people where their bones ended up just as long as they remained in the vicinity of the church, so it was common to see human remains in the galleries of the charnels, or the church porch, even in small chapels specially designed for the purpose.

“Churches and crypts decorated in such a manner were thus not uncommon,” concluded Neddo, “but the model for this construction is most particular, I think: Sedlec, in the Czech Republic.”

His fingers traced the contours of the skull, then inserted themselves into the gap at the base of the head so that he could touch the cavity within. As I watched, his body grew tense. He stole a glance at me, but I pretended not to notice. I picked up a silver scalpel with a bone handle and proceeded to examine it, watching in the blade as Neddo turned the skull upside down and allowed the lamplight to illuminate what was inside. While his attention was distracted, I drew aside the curtain at the back of the office.

“You have to go now,” I heard him say, and his tone had changed. Interest and curiosity had been replaced by alarm.

The door behind the curtain was closed, but not locked. I opened it. From behind me I heard Neddo give a shout, but he was too late. I was already inside.

The room was tiny, barely the size of a closet, and lit by a pair of red bulbs inset into the wall. Four skulls sat in a neat line beside a sink that smelled strongly of cleaning products. There were more bones on shelves lining the room, sorted according to size and the area of the skeleton from which they had come. I saw pieces of flesh suspended in glass jars: hands, feet, lungs, a heart. Seven containers of yellowing liquid stood in a small glass cabinet, apparently specially constructed to hold them. Each held a fetus in varying stages of development, the last jar exhibiting a child that appeared fully formed to my eye.

Elsewhere there were picture frames made from femurs; an array of flutes of different sizes constructed from hollowed-out bones; even a chair built from human remains, with a red velvet cushion at its heart like a slab of raw meat. I saw crude candlesticks and crosses, and a deformed skull made monstrous by some terrible disorder of the body that had caused cauliflowerlike growths to explode from the forehead.

“You must leave,” said Neddo. He was panicked, although I didn’t know whether that was due to the fact that I had entered his storeroom or because of what he had felt and seen in the interior of the skull. “You shouldn’t be here. There’s nothing more that I can tell you.”

“You haven’t told me anything at all,” I said.

“Take everything to the museum in the morning. Take all of it to the police, if you wish, but I can’t help you any further.”

I picked up one of the skulls from beside the sink.

“Put that down,” said Neddo.

I turned the skull in my hand. It had a neat hole low down, close to where the vertebrae would once have connected to it. I could see similar holes in the other skulls. They were execution shots.

“You must do well when there are revivals of Hamlet,” I said.

I let the skull rest on my palm.

“Alas, Poor Yorick. A fellow of infinite jest, as long as you understood a little Chinese.”

I showed him the hole in the skull.

“China is where these skulls came from, right? There aren’t too many other places where people get executed so neatly. Who do you think paid for the bullet, Mr. Neddo? Isn’t that how it works in China? You get driven in a truck to a football stadium, then someone shoots you in the head and sends the bill to your relatives? Except these poor souls probably didn’t have any relatives to claim them, so some enterprising individuals took it upon themselves to sell their remains. Maybe they first harvested the liver, the kidneys, even the heart, then stripped the flesh from the bones and offered the rest to you, or someone like you. There must be a law against trading in the remains of executed prisoners, don’t you think?”

Neddo took the skull from my hand and returned it to its place beside the others.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. It sounded hollow.

“Tell me about what I brought, or I’ll inform some people of what you have here,” I said. “Your life will become very difficult as a result, I guarantee it.”

Neddo stepped out of the closet doorway and returned to his desk.

“You knew it was there, didn’t you, the mark inside the skull?” he said.

“I felt it with my fingertips, just like you did. What is it?”

Neddo appeared to be growing smaller as I watched, deflating in his chair. Even his robe suddenly seemed to fit him less snugly.

“The numbers inside the first skull indicate that its origins were recorded,” he said. “It may have come from a body donated to medical science, or from an old museum display. In any event, it was originally legitimately acquired. The second skull bears no such number, only the mark. There are others who can tell you more than I can about it. I do know that it is very inadvisable to become involved with the individuals responsible for making it. They call themselves ‘Believers.’”

“Why was it marked?”

He answered my question with another.

“How old do you think that skull is, Mr. Parker?”

I drew closer to the desk. The skull looked battered and slightly yellowed.

“I don’t know. Decades, maybe?”

Neddo shook his head.

“Months, perhaps even weeks. It has been artificially aged, run through dirt and sand, then soaked in a preparation of urine. You can probably smell it on your fingers.”

I decided not to check.

“Where did it come from?”

He shrugged. “It looks Caucasian, probably male. There are no obvious signs of injury, but that means little. It could have come from a mortuary, I suppose, or a hospital, except that, as you seem to have surmised from the additions to my storeroom, human remains are hard to acquire in this country. Most of them, apart from the ones donated to medical science, have to be purchased from elsewhere. Eastern Europe was a good source, for a time, but it is now more difficult to obtain unregistered cadavers in such countries. China, as you’ve gathered, is less particular, but there are problems with the provenance of such remains, and they are expensive to obtain. There are few other options, apart from the obvious.”

“Such as supplying your own.”

“Yes.”

“Killing.”

“Yes.”

“Is that what that mark means?”

“I believe so.”

I asked if he had a camera, and he produced a dusty Kodak instant from a drawer in his desk. I took about five photographs of the outside of the skull, and three or four of its interior, adjusting the distance each time in the hope that the mark would come out clearly in at least one of them. In the end, I got two good images, once the photographs had developed on the desk before us.

“Have you ever met any of these ‘Believers’?” I said.

Neddo squirmed in his seat. “I meet a great many distinctive people in the course of my business. One might go so far as to say that some of them are sinister, even actively unpleasant. So, yes, I have met Believers.”

“How do you know?”

Neddo pointed at the sleeve of his gown, about an inch above his wrist.

“They bear the grapnel mark here.”

“A tattoo?”

“No,” said Neddo. “They burn it into their flesh.”

“Did you get any names?”

“No.”

“Don’t they have names?”

Neddo looked positively ill.

“Oh, they all have names, the worst of them anyway.”

His words seemed familiar to me. I tried to remember where I had heard them before.

They all have names.

But Neddo had already moved on.

“Others have asked about them, though, in the relatively recent past. I was visited by an agent of the FBI, perhaps a year ago. He wanted to know if I’d received any suspicious or unusual orders relating to arcana, particularly bones or bone sculpture, or ornate vellum. I told him that all such orders were unusual, and he threatened me in much the same way that you have just done. A raid upon my premises by government agents would have been both inconvenient and embarrassing to me, and potentially ruinous if it led to criminal charges. I told him what I told you. He was unsatisfied, but I remain in business.”

“Do you remember the agent’s name?”

“Bosworth. Philip Bosworth. To be honest, had he not shown me his identification, I would have taken him for an accountant, or a clerk in a law office. He looked a little fragile for an FBI man. Nevertheless, the range of his knowledge was most impressive. He returned to clarify some details on another occasion, and I confess I enjoyed the process of mutual discovery that ensued.”

Once again, I was aware of an undertone to Neddo’s words, an almost sexual pleasure in the exploration of such subjects and material. The “process of mutual discovery”? I just hoped that Bosworth had bought him dinner first, and that the encounters with Neddo had brought him more satisfaction than my own. Neddo was as slippery as an eel in a bucket of Vaseline, and every useful word that he spoke came wrapped in layers of obfuscation. It was clear that he knew more than he was telling, but he would only answer a direct question, and the replies came unadorned with any additional information.

“Tell me about the statue,” I said.

Neddo’s hands began to tremble again.

“An interesting construction. I should like more time to study it.”

“You want me to leave it here? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Neddo shrugged and sighed. “No matter. It is worthless, a copy of something far more ancient.”

“Go on.”

“It is a version of a larger bone sculpture, reputedly eight or nine feet in height. The original has been lost for a very long time, although it was created in Sedlec in the fifteenth century, crafted from bones contained in its ossuary.”

“You said that the bone candleholders were also replicas of originals from Sedlec. It sounds like someone has a fixation.”

“Sedlec is an unusual place, and the original bone statue is an unusual piece, assuming it exists at all and is not simply a myth. Since no one has ever seen it, its precise nature is open to speculation, but most interested parties are in agreement on its appearance. The statue you have brought with you is probably as accurate a representation as I have ever seen. I have examined only sketches and illustrations before, and a great deal of effort has gone into this piece. I should like to meet whoever is responsible for its construction.”

“So would I,” I said. “What was the purpose of the original? Why was it made?”

“Versions upon versions,” said Neddo. “Your sculpture is a miniature of another, also made in bone. That larger bone statue, though, is itself a representation, although the model for its construction is made of silver, and thus extremely valuable. Like this one, it is a depiction of a metamorphosis. It is known as the Black Angel.”

“A metamorphosis of what kind?”

“A transformation from man to angel, or man to demon to be more accurate, which brings us to the point upon which opinions differ. Clearly, the Black Angel would be a considerable boon to any private collection simply for its intrinsic value, but that is not why it has been so avidly sought. There are those who believe that the silver original is, in effect, a kind of prison, that it is not a depiction of a being transforming, but the thing itself; that a monk named Erdric confronted Immael, a fallen angel in human form, at Sedlec, and that in the course of the conflict between them Immael fell into a vat of molten silver just as his true form was in the process of being revealed. Silver is supposedly the bane of such beings, and Immael was unable to free himself from it once he had become immersed. Erdric ordered that the silver be slowly cooled, and the residue poured from the vat. What remained was the Black Angel: Immael’s form, shrouded in silver. The monks hid it, unable to destroy what lay within but fearful of allowing the statue to fall into the hands of those who might wish to free the thing inside, or use it to draw evil men to themselves. Since then, it has remained hidden, having been moved from Sedlec shortly before the monastery’s destruction in the fifteenth century. Its whereabouts were concealed in a series of coded references contained in a map. The map was then torn into fragments, and dispersed to Cistercian monasteries throughout Europe.

“Since then, myth, speculation, superstition, and perhaps even a grain of truth have all combined to create an object that has become increasingly fascinating over the space of half a millennium. The bone version of the statue was created almost contemporaneously, although why I cannot say. It was, perhaps, merely a way of reminding the community of Sedlec of what had occurred, and of the reality of evil in this world. It went missing at the same time as the silver statue, presumably to save it from the depredations of war, for Sedlec was attacked and destroyed early in the fifteenth century.”

“The Believers, are they among those searching for it?”

“Yes, more than any others.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“And I don’t even consider myself to be an expert.”

“Then who is?”

“There is an auction house in Boston, the House of Stern, run by a woman named Claudia Stern. She specializes in the sale of arcana and has a particular knowledge of the Black Angel and the myths associated with it.”

“And why is that?”

“Because she claims to be in possession of one of the map fragments, and is due to auction it next week. The object is controversial. It is believed to have been uncovered by a treasure seeker named Mordant, who found it beneath a flagstone in Sedlec some weeks ago. Mordant died in the church, apparently while trying to flee with the fragment.

“Or, more precisely, I suspect, while trying to flee from someone.”

What if?

The words had haunted Mordant for so long. He was cleverer than many of his breed, and warier too. He was constantly seeking the greater glory, the finer prize, disdaining even to trouble himself with the search for meaner rewards. Laws meant little to him: laws were for the living, and Mordant dealt exclusively with the dead. To this end, he had spent many years contemplating the mystery of Sedlec, poring again and again over myths of dark places, and of what might once have been concealed within them. As was, so yet might be.

What if?

Now he was within the ossuary itself, its alarm system overridden using a pair of clips and a length of wire, the air impossibly cold as he descended the stairs into the heart of the construct. He was surrounded by bones, by the partial remains of thousands of human beings, but this did not trouble him as much as it might have disturbed a more sensitive soul. Mordant was not a superstitious man, yet even he had to admit to a nagging sense of transgression in this place. Curiously, it was the sight of his exhalations made visible that made him uneasy, as though a presence were drawing his very life force from him, draining him slowly, breath by breath.

What if?

He walked between pyramids of skulls, beneath great traceries of vertebrae and garlands of fibulae, until he came to the small altar. He dropped a black canvas bag onto the floor. It jangled weightily when it landed. He withdrew a heavy, pointed hammer from within, and set to work on the edges of a stone built into the floor, the shadow of the crucifix above falling upon him as moonlight filtered through the window behind.

What if?

He broke through the mortar, and saw that a few more taps would expose a gap large enough to accommodate the crowbar. So lost was he is in his work that he did not hear the approach from behind, and it was not until a faint musty smell came to his nostrils that he paused and turned, still on his knees. He looked up, and he was no longer alone.

What if?

Mordant raised himself slightly, almost apologetically, as though to indicate that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for his presence in this place, and for the desecration he was committing, but as soon as he felt certain of his leverage he pushed himself forward and struck out with the flat of the hammer. He missed his target, but managed to clear himself a space through which he could see the steps. Hands grasped for him, but he was slick and fast and determined to escape. His blows were connecting now. He was almost clear. He reached the steps and ascended, his sight fixed on the door.

Mordant registered the presence to his right just a second too late. It emerged from the shadows, striking a blow that caught Mordant on the Adam’s apple and pushed him back to the very edge of the stairway. For a moment, he teetered on the edge of the top step, his arms swaying in an effort to steady himself, before he fell backward, tumbling head over heels.

What if…?

And Mordant’s neck broke on the last step.

It was always cold in the ossuary at Sedlec, which was why the old woman had wrapped herself up warm. A ring of keys dangled from her right hand as she followed the path to Santini-Aichel’s door. The care of this place had been in her family for generations, and its upkeep was supported by the books and cards sold from a small table by the door, and by the admission charge levied on those visitors who made the effort to come there. Now, as she approached, she saw that the door was ajar. There was a smear of blood upon the first of the stones within. Her hand rose to her mouth, and she halted at the periphery. Such a thing as this had never been known before: the ossuary was a sacred place, and had been left untouched for centuries.

She entered slowly, fearful of what she was about to see. A man’s body lay splayed before the altar, his head tilted at an unnatural angle. One of the stones beneath the crucifix had been entirely removed, and something gleamed dully in the early-morning light. The shards of one of the beautiful skull candleholders congregated at the dead man’s feet. Curiously, her first concern was not for him, but for the damage that had been caused to the ossuary. How could someone do this? Did they not realize that these were once people like them, or that there was a beauty to what had been created from their remains? She lifted a piece of the skull from the floor, rubbing it gently between her fingers, before her attention was distracted by another new addition to the ossuary.

She reached for the small silver box by the dead man’s hand. The box was unlocked. Carefully, she raised the lid. There was vellum contained within, the rolled document apparently uncorrupted. She touched it with her fingers. It felt smooth, almost slick. She lifted it out and began to unroll it. In the corner was a coat of arms: it depicted a battle-ax against the backdrop of an open book. She did not recognize it. She saw symbols, and architectural drawings, then horns, and part of an inhuman face contorted in agony. The drawing was immensely detailed, although it ended at the neck, but the old woman wanted to see no more than she had been given to witness. It was already too horrific for her eyes. She replaced the vellum in the box and rushed to get help, barely noticing that the ossuary was slightly warmer than it should have been, and that the heat was coming from the stones beneath her feet.

And in the darkness far to the west, two eyes opened suddenly in an opulent room, twin fires ignited in the night. And at the heart of one pupil, a white mote flickered with the memory of the Divine.

Neddo was almost finished.

“Sometime between the discovery of the body and its removal following the arrival of the police, the fragment, which was contained in a silver box, disappeared,” he said. “Now, a similar fragment has been offered for sale through Claudia Stern. There’s no way of telling if it is the Sedlec fragment, but the Cistercian order has made clear its objections to the sale. Nevertheless, it appears to be going ahead. There will be a great deal of interest, although the auction itself will be a very private affair. Collectors of such material tend to be, um, reclusive and somewhat secretive. Their fascinations can be open to misunderstanding.”

I looked at the ephemera gathered in Neddo’s dingy store: human remains reduced to the status of ornaments. I felt an overpowering urge to be gone from this place.

“I may have more questions for you,” I said.

I took a business card from my wallet and laid it on the desk. Neddo glanced at it, but didn’t pick it up.

“I’m always here,” he replied. “Naturally, I’m curious to see where your inquiries lead you. Feel free to contact me, day or night.”

He smiled thinly.

“In fact, night is probably best.”

Garcia watched the building, growing increasingly uneasy as one hour rolled by, then another. He had tried to follow the man who was of such concern to Brightwell, but he was not yet familiar with the streets of this huge city and had lost him within minutes. He believed that the man would return to his friends, and they were now Garcia’s most pressing concern, as they were still in his apartment. He had expected the police to come, but they had not. At first, it gave him hope, but now he was not so sure. They must have seen what was there. Perhaps they had even watched some of the tapes in his collection. What kind of men did not call the police in such a situation?

Garcia wanted his possessions back, and one in particular. It was important to him, but it was also one of the few items that could connect him, and the others, to the girl. Without it, the trail would be almost impossible to find.

A car pulled up, and the man got out and rang the bell to Garcia’s building. Garcia was relieved to see that he had the large wooden box in his hands. He only hoped that whatever he had removed from the apartment was still contained within it.

Minutes later, the door opened, and the Negro and his smaller companion left. Now there was only one man in the apartment, alone.

Garcia uncloaked himself from the shadows and moved toward the doorway.

I made one last search of the rooms. Louis and Angel had been through the apartment again, but I wanted to be sure that nothing had been missed. When I was done with the occupied areas, I went to the white-tiled room that Louis had discovered. Its purpose was clear. While it had been thoroughly cleaned, I wondered how much work had gone into removing evidence from the pipes. They were probably new, since the room was a recent addition. If someone had bled into the drain, traces might remain.

Tins of paint, and old paintbrushes, their bristles now entirely hardened, stood on a trestle table by the far wall, alongside a pile of old paint-spattered sheets. I pulled at the pile, raising a little cloud of red dust. I examined the residue, then swept the sheets from the table. There was more brick dust on the wood, and on the floor below. I tested the wall with my hand and felt brick scrape against brick. I looked more closely and saw the brickwork was not quite even around the edges of a section perhaps eighteen inches in height. Using my fingers, I gripped the exposed edge and began moving it from left to right, shifting it until I was able to pull it forward entirely. It fell to the table, still in one piece, leaving a hole exposed. I could make out a shape inside. I knelt down and shined the flashlight upon it.

It was a human skull, mounted upon a pillar of bones around which a red velvet cloth had been partially tied. A gold-sequinned scarf covered the head, leaving only the eye sockets, the nasal cavity, and the mouth exposed. At the base of the pillar, finger bones had been placed in an approximation of the pattern of two hands, the bones adorned with cheap rings. Beside them, offerings had been placed: chocolate, and cigarettes, and a shot glass containing an amber liquid that smelled like whiskey.

A locket gleamed in the flashlight’s beam, silver against the white of the bone pillar. I used a rag to take it in my hand, then flipped open the catch. Inside there were pictures of two women. The first I did not recognize. The second was the woman named Martha, who had come to my house in search of hope for her child.

Suddenly, there was an explosion of light and sound. Wood and stone splintered close to my right arm, shards of it striking my face and blinding me in my right eye. I dropped the flashlight and fell to the floor as a small, bulky figure was briefly silhouetted in the doorless entrance before ducking back out of sight. I heard the terrible twin clicks as another round was jacked into the shotgun’s chamber and the man’s voice uttering the same words over and over again. It sounded like a prayer.

“Santa Muerte, reza por mi. Santa Muerte, reza por mi…”

Faintly, just above his words, I caught the sound of footsteps on the stairs below as Angel and Louis ascended, closing the trap. The gunman heard them too, because the volume of his prayers increased. I heard Louis’s voice shout, “Don’t kill him!” And then the gunman appeared again, and the shotgun roared. I was already moving when the trestle table disintegrated, one of its legs collapsing as the shooter entered the room, screaming his prayer over and over again as he came, jacking, firing, jacking, firing, the noise and the dust filling the room, clouding my nose and my eyes, creating a filthy mist that obscured details, leaving only indistinct shapes. Through my blurred vision, I saw a squat, dark form. A cloud of light and metal ignited before it, and I fired.

CHAPTER TEN

The Mexican lay amid the ruins of the trestle table, the discarded sheets tangled around his feet like the remains of a shroud. One of the paint cans had opened, showering his lower body with white. Blood pumped rhythmically from the hole in his chest and into the paint, propelled by the beating of his slowly failing heart. His right hand clutched at the wall, crawling spiderlike across the brickwork as he tried to touch the skull on the altar.

“Muertecita,” he said once more, but now the words were whispered. “Reza por mi.”

Louis and Angel appeared in the doorway.

“Shit,” said Louis. “I told you not to kill him.”

Dust still clouded the room, and the contents of the hole in the wall were not yet visible to him. He knelt beside the dying man. His right hand clasped the Mexican’s face, turning it toward him.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me where she is.”

The Mexican’s eyes remained fixed upon a distant spot. His lips continued to move, repeating his mantra. He smiled, as though he had glimpsed something that was invisible to the rest of us, a rip in the fabric of existence that permitted him to see at last the reward, or the punishment, that was his and his alone. I thought I saw wonder in his gaze, and fear, even as his eyes began to lose their brightness, his eyelids drooping.

Louis slapped him hard on the cheek. He held a small photograph of Alice in his right hand. I had not seen it before. I wondered if his aunt had given it to him, or if it were his own possession, a relic of a life left behind but not forgotten.

“Where is she?” said Louis.

The dying man coughed up blood. His teeth were red as his lips tried to form the imprecation one final time, then he shuddered, and his hand fell and splashed in the paint as he died.

Louis lowered his head and covered his face with his hand, the picture of Alice now pressed to his skin.

“Louis,” I said.

He looked up, and for a second I didn’t know how to continue.

“I think I’ve found her.”

The Emergency Service Unit was the first on the scene, responding to the “shots fired” alert from the dispatcher. Soon, I was looking down the barrels of Ruger Mini-14s and H amp;K nine-millimeter submachine guns, trying to identify surnames and serial numbers in the confusion of lights and shouts that accompanied their arrival. The ESU cops took in the killing room, the dead Mexican, the bones arrayed in the apartment, then, once they realized that the action was over for the evening, retreated and let their colleagues from the Nine-Six take control. I tried to answer their questions as best I could at the start, but soon lapsed into silence. It was, in part, to protect both me and my friends-I did not want to give away too much until I had a chance to compose my thoughts and get my story straight-but it was also a consequence of the image that I could not shake. I saw, over and over, Louis standing before the gap in the bricks, staring into the skeletal face of a girl that he had once known, his hands poised before her, wanting to touch all that remained but unable to do so. I watched him as he drifted back to another time and another place: a houseful of women, his days among them drawing to a close, even as another was added to their number.

I remember her. I remember her as a little baby, watching her when the women were cooking or cleaning. I was the only man who held her, because her daddy, Deeber, was dead. I killed him. He was the first. He took my momma from me, and so I erased him from the world in retaliation. I didn’t know then that my momma’s sister was pregnant by him. I just knew, although there was no proof, that he had hurt my momma so badly that she had died and that he would hurt me in the same way when his chance came. So I killed him, and his daughter grew up without a father. He was a base man with base appetites, hungers that he might have sated on her as the years went on, but she never got to see him or to understand the kind of man that he was. There were always questions for her, lingering doubts, and once she began to guess the truth of what had happened, I was far from her. I disappeared into the forest one day when she was still a child, and chose my own path. I drifted away from her, and from the others, and I did not know of what had befallen her until it was too late.

That is what I tell myself: I did not know.

Then our paths crossed in this city, and I tried to make up for my failings, but I could not. They were too grievous, and they could not be undone. And now she is dead, and I find myself wondering: Did I do this? Did I set this in motion by quietly, calmly deciding to take the life of her father before she was born? In a sense, were we not both father to the woman she became? Do I not bear responsibility for her life, and for her death? She was blood to me, and she is gone, and I am lessened by her passing from this world.

I am sorry. I am so sorry.

And I turned away from him as he lowered his head, because I did not want to see him this way.

I spent the rest of the night, and a good part of the morning, being interviewed by the NYPD in the Nine-Six over on Meserole Avenue. As an ex-cop, even one with some unanswered questions surrounding him, my stock had some value. I told them that I was given a lead on the Mexican’s apartment by a source, and had found the door to the warehouse open. I entered, saw what the apartment contained, and was about to call the police when I was attacked. In defending myself, I had killed my attacker.

Two detectives interviewed me, a blond woman named Bayard and her partner, a big red-haired cop named Entwistle. They were scrupulously polite to start with, due in no small part to the fact that seated to my right was Frances Neagley. Before I arrived in New York, Louis had arranged for a nominal fee to be paid into my account by the firm of Early, Chaplin amp; Cohen, with whom Frances was a senior partner. Officially, I was in her employ, and therefore could claim privilege if any awkward questions were asked. Frances was tall, impeccably groomed even after my early call, and superficially charming, but she hung out in the kinds of bars where blood dried on the floor at weekends and had a reputation for stonewalling so hard that she made titanium seem pliable by comparison. She had already done a good job of simultaneously distracting and frightening most of the cops with whom she was coming into contact.

“Who tipped you off on Garcia?” asked Entwistle.

“Was that his name?”

“Seems so. He’s not in a position to confirm it right now.”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

Bayard glanced at her notes.

“It wouldn’t be a pimp named Tyrone Baylee, would it, aka G-Mack?”

I didn’t reply.

“The woman you were hired to find was part of his stable, right? I assume you spoke to him. I mean, it would make no sense not to speak to him if you were looking for her, right?”

“I spoke to a lot of people,” I said.

Frances intervened. “Where are you going with this, Detective?”

“I’d just like to know when Mr. Parker here last spoke to Tyrone Baylee.”

“Mr. Parker has neither confirmed nor denied that he ever spoke to this man, so the question is irrelevant.”

“Not to Mr. Baylee,” said Entwistle. He had yellowed fingers, and his voice rumbled with catarrh. “He was admitted to Woodhull early this morning with gunshot wounds to his right hand and right foot. He had to crawl to get there. Any hopes he ever had of pitching for the Yankees are pretty much gone.”

I closed my eyes. Louis hadn’t seen fit to mention the fact that he had visited a little retribution on G-Mack.

“I spoke to Baylee around midnight, 1 A.M.,” I said. “He gave me the address in Williamsburg.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“Did he tell you that I shot him?”

“He’s all doped up. We’re waiting to hear what he has to say.”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“You wouldn’t know who did?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

Again, Frances interjected.

“Detective? Can we move on?”

“Sorry, but your client, or your employee, or whatever you choose to call him, seems to be bad for the health of the people he meets.”

“So,” said Frances, her tone one of perfect reasonableness, “either slap a health warning on him and let him go, or charge him.”

I had to admire Frances’s fighting talk, but goading these cops didn’t seem like a great idea with Garcia’s body still cooling, G-Mack recovering from bullet wounds, and the shadow of the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center looming over my future sleeping arrangements.

“Mr. Parker killed a man,” said Entwistle.

“A man who was trying to kill him.”

“So he says.”

“Come on, Detective, we’re going around in circles here. Let’s be adult about this. You have a room torn up by shotgun blasts; a crumbling warehouse filled with bones, some of which may prove to be the remains of the woman Mr. Parker was hired to find; and two VCR tapes that appear to contain images of at least one woman being killed, and probably others. My client has indicated that he will cooperate with the investigation in any way that he can, and you’re spending your time trying to trip him up with questions about an individual who suffered injuries subsequent to his meeting with my client. Mr. Parker is available for further questions at any time, or to answer any charges that may be pressed at a future date. So what’s it going to be?”

Entwistle and Bayard exchanged a look, then excused themselves. They were gone for a long time. Frances and I sat in silence until they returned.

“You can go,” said Entwistle. “For now. If it’s not too much trouble, we’d appreciate it if you let us know if you plan on leaving the state.”

Frances began gathering her notes.

“Oh,” added Entwistle. “And try not to shoot anyone for a while, huh? See how you like it. It might even take.”

Frances dropped me back at my car. She didn’t ask me anything further about the events of the night before, and I didn’t offer. We both seemed happier that way.

“I think you’re okay,” she said, as we pulled up close by the warehouse. There were still cops outside, and curious onlookers kept vigil with the TV crews and assorted other reporters. “The man you killed got off three or four rounds for your one, and if the bones in the warehouse are tied in to him, then nobody is going to come chasing you in connection with his death, especially if the remains you found in the wall turn out to be those of Alice. They may decide to go after you for discharging a weapon, but when it comes to PIs, that’s a judgment call. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

I had retained a license to carry concealed in New York ever since I left the force, and it was probably the best $170 I spent every two years. The license was issued at the discretion of the commissioner, and in theory he could have denied my application for renewal, but nobody had ever raised an objection. I suppose that it was a lot to ask for them to let me go around shooting the gun as well.

I thanked Frances and got out of the car.

“Tell Louis I’m sorry,” she said.

I called Rachel once I was back at my hotel. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine,” she said.

Her voice was flat.

“Is Sam all right?”

“She’s good. She slept through till seven. I’ve just fed her. I’ll put her down again for an hour or two now.”

The line went quiet for about five seconds.

“How are you doing?” she said.

“There was some trouble earlier,” I said. “A man died.”

Again, there was only silence.

“And I think we found Alice,” I said, “or something of her.”

“Tell me.”

She sounded suddenly weary.

“There were human remains in a tub. Bones, mostly. I found more behind a wall. Her locket was with them.”

“And the man who died? Was he responsible?”

“I don’t know for sure. It looks like it.”

I waited for the next question, knowing that it had to come.

“Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. I could hear Sam starting to cry. Rachel hushed her.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“It’s over, right?” she said. “You know what happened to Alice, and the man who killed her is dead. What more can you do? Come home. Just-come home, okay?”

“I will. I love you, Rachel.”

“I know.” I thought I could hear something catch in her voice as she prepared to hang up the phone. “I know you do.”

I slept until past midday, when I was awoken by the ringing of the telephone. It was Walter Cole.

“Seems like you had a busy night,” he said.

“How much do you know?”

“A little. You can fill me in on the rest. There’s a Starbucks over by Daffy’s. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes.”

I made it in forty-five, and even then I was pushing it. On my way across town, I thought about what I had done, and about what Rachel had said when we spoke. In one sense, it was over. I felt certain that dental records and DNA tests, if necessary using Martha’s DNA for comparison, would confirm that the remains found in Garcia’s apartment were those of Alice. So Garcia was involved, and may even have been directly responsible for her death. But that didn’t explain why Alice had gone missing to begin with, or why Eddie Tager had paid her bond. Then there was the antique dealer Neddo and his talk of “Believers,” and the FBI agent Philip Bosworth, who appeared to be engaged in an investigation that mirrored, at least in some way, my own. Finally, I was aware of a deep unease, the sense that there was something else moving beneath the surface details of the case, weaving through the hidden, hollow caverns of the past.

My hair was still wet from a hasty shower when I sat down across from Walter at a corner table. He wasn’t alone. Dunne, the detective from the coffee shop, was with him.

“Your partner know you’re seeing other people?” I asked him.

“We have an open relationship. As long as he doesn’t have to hear about it, he’s cool. He thinks you shot G-Mack, though.”

“So do the cops over at the Nine-Six. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pull the trigger on him.”

“Hey, it’s not like we really care so much. Mackey just doesn’t want it coming back to haunt him, someone hears we sicced you on him.”

“A couple of people pointed us in his direction. You can tell your partner he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

“ ‘Us?’”, said Dunne.

Damn. I was tired.

“Walter and me.”

“Right. Sure.”

I didn’t want to get into this with Dunne. I didn’t even know why he was here.

“So,” I said, “what are we doing here: testing muffins?”

Dunne looked to Walter for an ally.

“He’s a hard guy to help,” he said.

“He’s very self-sufficient,” said Walter. “It’s a strongman pose. I think it hides a conflicted sexuality.”

“Walter, with all due respect, I’m not in the mood for this.”

Walter raised a placating hand. “Easy. Like Dunne said, we’re trying to help.”

“Sereta, the other girl-it looks like they’ve found her too,” said Dunne.

“Where?”

“Motel just outside of Yuma.”

“The Spyhole killings?” I had watched some of the news reports on TV.

“Yeah. They’ve identified her for certain as the girl found in the trunk of the car. They kind of figured that anyway, since the car was registered to her and a section of her license survived the fire, but they were waiting for confirmation. It looks like she was still alive, and conscious, when the flames got to her. She managed to kick in the backseat before she died.”

I tried to remember the details.

“Wasn’t there a second body in the car?”

“Male. He’s a John Doe. No ID, no wallet. They’re still trying to chase him down with what they have, but it’s not like they can put a picture on milk cartons. Maybe on barbecue charcoal come the summer, but not until then. He’d been shot in the shoulder and chest. Fatal bullet was still in him. It came from a thirty-eight, same gun as they found on the Mexican who died in one of the motel rooms. They were operating on the assumption that he might have been the target of a botched hit. Guy was tied up with some pretty bad people, and the Federales down in Mexico were real anxious to speak to him. Now, with this Alice thing up here, maybe there’s another angle.”

According to G-Mack, Alice and Sereta had been present when Winston and his assistant were killed, but they hadn’t seen anything. They had taken something, though, and apparently this item was sufficiently valuable that the individuals involved were prepared to kill to get it back. They found Alice, and perhaps from her they gained some knowledge of where Sereta was hiding. I didn’t like to think of how they had acquired that information.

“Your friend G-Mack should be released from the hospital in a couple of days,” said Dunne. “From what I hear, he says he still doesn’t know anything about what happened to his hookers, and he didn’t get a look at the guy who shot him. Whoever put the bullet in his leg knew what he was doing. The ankle joint and the heel were shattered to pieces. Guy is gonna be a gimp for the rest of his life.”

I thought of Alice’s skull resting in the alcove in Garcia’s apartment. I imagined Sereta’s final minutes of life, as the heat grew in intensity, slowly roasting her before the flames took hold. By selling Alice out, G-Mack had condemned them both to death.

“That’s tough,” I said.

Dunne shrugged. “It’s a tough world. Speaking of that, Walter says he tried to talk to Ellen, the young hooker.”

I remembered the young girl in the dark clothing.

“You get anywhere with her?”

Walter shook his head.

“Hard outside, and getting harder inside. I’m going to talk to Safe Horizon about her, and I have a buddy in the Juvenile Crime Special Projects Squad. I’ll keep trying.”

Dunne stood and picked up his jacket.

“Look,” he said to me, “if I can help you out, I will. I owe Walter, and if he wants to call in that debt for you, then I’m okay with that. But I like my job, and I plan on keeping it. I don’t know who put those fucking bullets in that piece of shit, but if you happen to meet him, you tell him to take it to Jersey next time. We clear?”

“Clear,” I said.

“Oh, and one last thing. They did find something else unusual in the Spyhole. The desk clerk’s blood was smeared on his face, and they pulled foreign DNA from the samples. Weird thing was, it was all degraded.”

“Degraded?”

“Old and debased. They think the samples might have been corrupted somehow. They contained toxins, and they’re still trying to identify most of them. It’s like somebody rubbed a piece of dead meat across the kid’s face.”

We gave him a five-minute start, then left.

“So what now?” asked Walter, as we tried to avoid getting run over by a bus.

“I need to talk to some people. You think you can find out who owns that warehouse in Williamsburg?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. The Nine-Six is probably on top of it already, but I’ll see what I can get from the city assessor’s office.”

“The cops at the Nine-Six have a name on the man I killed. I don’t imagine they’re going to share much information with me, so keep your ear to the ground, see what filters through.”

“No problem. You planning on staying at the Meridien for another night?”

I thought of Rachel.

“Maybe one more. After that, I need to go home.”

“You talk to her?”

“This morning.”

“Did you tell her what happened?”

“Most of it.”

“That sound you hear in the back of your mind? That’s thin ice cracking. You need to be with her now. Hormones, everything gets screwed up. You know that. Even little things can seem like the end of the world, and big things, well, they just really might be the end.”

I shook his hand.

“Thanks.”

“For the advice?”

“No, the advice sucked. ‘Thanks’ is for stepping up to the plate on this one.”

“Hey, once a cop,” he said. “I miss it sometimes, but this helps. It reminds me of why I’m better off out of it.”

My next call was to Louis. I met him at a coffee shop on Broadway, up in the Gay Nineties. He didn’t look like he’d slept much, and although he was clean-shaven, and his shirt was neatly pressed, he appeared uncomfortable in his clothes.

“Martha’s cousin is flying up today,” he said. “She’s bringing dental records, medical stuff, anything she can find. Martha was staying in some shit hole in Harlem. I made her move, so they’re both booked into the Pierre now.”

“How is she?”

“She hasn’t given up hope. Says it may not be Alice. The locket doesn’t mean nothing, except that the guy took it from her.”

“And you? What do you think?”

“It’s her. Like you, I just knew. I felt it as soon as I saw the locket.”

“The cops should have a positive ID by tomorrow, then. They’ll probably release her in a day or two, once the ME has made his report. Will you go back with the remains?”

Louis shook his head.

“I don’t think so. I won’t be welcome. Anyway, there’s history down there. Better to let it rest. I got other things to be doing.”

“Like?”

“Like finding the ones who killed her.”

I sipped my coffee. It was already going cold. I raised the cup to the waitress, then watched quietly as she warmed it up.

“You should have told me what you did to G-Mack,” I said, as soon as she was out of earshot.

“I had other things on my mind.”

“Well, in future, if we’re going to do this, you’ll have to share your thoughts some. Two detectives down over in the Nine-Six liked me for the shooting. The fact that I’d left another man dead on their patch didn’t help my case.”

“They say how that pimp asshole is doing?”

“He was still woozy when I was at the Nine-Six, but since then he’s come around. He told the cops that he didn’t see a thing.”

“He won’t talk. He knows better than to say anything.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Look,” said Louis. “I ain’t asking you to get involved in this. I didn’t ask you to begin with.”

I waited for him to say something more. He didn’t.

“You finished?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m done.” He raised his right hand in apology. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. If you shoot someone, just let me know, that’s all. I want to be sure I can say I was somewhere else. Especially if, for once, I was somewhere else.”

“The men who killed Alice are gonna find out that the pimp talked,” said Louis. “The man’s dead.”

“Well, when they come he won’t be able to run away, that’s for sure.”

“So what now?”

I told him about the death of Alice’s friend Sereta near Yuma, and the body found in the car with her.

“He wasn’t shot in the car,” I said. “Mackey told me that the cops followed a blood trail from outside the room to the door of the Buick. This guy walked to the car, then he sat in the driver’s seat with the door wide-open while he burned alive.”

“Could be someone was holding a gun on him.”

“It would have to be a pretty big gun. Even then, getting shot would be a whole lot more attractive than burning. Plus he wasn’t one of the guests registered. They’re all accounted for.”

“One of Sereta’s johns?”

“If he was, he left no trace in her room. Even if that were true, what was he doing outside the Mexican’s hotel room getting shot through the door?”

“So he was one of the killers?”

“It looks that way. He screws up, gets shot, then instead of taking him with them, his buddies leave him in the car and set him on fire.”

“And he doesn’t object.”

“He doesn’t even get up from his seat.”

“So someone found out where Sereta was and came looking for her.”

“And killed her when she was found.”

He made the connections, just as I had earlier. “Alice told them.”

“Maybe. If she did, they forced it from her.”

He thought about it some more. “It’s hard for me to say this, but if I was Sereta, I wouldn’t have told Alice more than she needed to know. Maybe general things, a safe number to contact her at, but no more. That way, if they came for Alice, there wouldn’t be too much she could give away.”

“So somebody down there ratted her out, probably based on whatever Alice’s killers got out of her.”

“Which means somebody down there knows somebody up here.”

“Garcia might have been the contact. Given how close the Spyhole was to the border, the Mexican connection would make sense. It could be worth finding out some more.”

“This wouldn’t just be a way of getting me out of the city so you can pursue a, uh, more diplomatic line of inquiry?”

“That would assume that I’m cleverer than I am.”

“Not cleverer, just slicker.”

“Like I said, someone down there may have information that could help us. Whoever it is, he or she is unlikely to give it up easily. If I were you, I’d be looking to strike out at someone right about now. I’m just giving you a focus for your anger.”

Louis raised his spoon and pointed it at me. He managed to rustle up what might almost have been a smile.

“You been spending too long sleeping with psychologists.”

“Not lately, but thanks for the thought.”

Louis was right, though: I wanted him gone for a couple of days. It would save me having to keep my movements from him. I was afraid that if I gave him too much information, he would take it upon himself to try to force answers from the people involved. I wanted the first shot at the bail bondsman. I wanted to speak to whoever had rented the warehouse space to Garcia. And I wanted to track down the FBI agent, Bosworth. After all, I thought, I could always set Louis on them later.

I went back to my hotel, but with one extra item in my trunk. I had entrusted the bone sculpture to Angel before he left the warehouse, and now Louis had returned it to me. If the cops found out that I had withheld it, I would be in serious trouble, but the sight of it had allowed me to gain access to Neddo, and I had a feeling that it would open other doors if necessary. Waving a photograph or a Crayola drawing wouldn’t have quite the same impact.

Angel and Louis were due to fly down to Tucson that evening, via Houston. In the meantime, Walter got back to me with a name: the warehouse was part of an estate that had become tied up in some endless legal squabble, and the only contact the cops could find was a lawyer named David Sekula with an office on Riverside Drive. The telephone number on the banner at the warehouse went straight to an automatic answering service for a leasing company called Ambassade Realty, except Ambassade Realty appeared to be a dead end. Its CEO was deceased, and all callers were directed to contact the lawyer’s office. I took down Sekula’s address and telephone number. I would call him in the morning, when I was fresh and alert.

I left three messages for Tager, the bail bondsman, but he didn’t return my calls. His office was up in the Bronx, close by Yankee Stadium. Tager, too, would be tomorrow’s work. Someone had asked him to post bail for Alice. If I found out who that person was, I would be one step closer to discovering those responsible for her death.

As Angel and Louis made their way to the Delta terminal at JFK, a man who might have been able to answer some of their most pressing questions passed through immigration, collected his baggage, and entered the arrivals hall.

The cleric had arrived in New York on a BA flight from London. He was tall and in his late forties, with the build of a man who enjoyed his food. His unruly beard was lighter and redder than his head hair and gave him a vaguely piratical aspect, as though he had only recently ceased tying firecrackers to its ends in order to frighten his enemies. He carried a small black suitcase in one hand and a copy of that day’s Guardian in the other.

A second man, slightly younger than the visitor, was waiting for him as the doors hissed closed behind him. He shook the cleric’s hand and offered to carry his case, but the offer was declined. Instead, the visitor handed the newspaper to the younger man.

“I brought you a Guardian and Le Monde,” he said. “I know you like European newspapers, and they’re expensive over here.”

“You couldn’t have brought a Telegraph instead?”

The younger man spoke with a faint Eastern European accent.

“It’s a little conservative for my liking. I’d only be encouraging them.”

His companion took the Guardian and examined the front page as he walked. What he saw there seemed to disappoint him.

“We’re not all as liberal as you are, you know.”

“I don’t know what happened to you, Paul. You used to be on the side of the good guys. They’ll have you buying shares in Halliburton next.”

“This is no longer a country for heedless liberals, Martin. It’s changed since last we were here.”

“I can tell that. There was a chap back there in immigration who just stopped short of bending me over a table and poking me in the arse with his finger.”

“He would be a braver man than I. Still, it’s good to have you here.”

They walked to the parking lot and didn’t speak of the matters that concerned them until they were out of the airport.

“Any progress?” said Martin.

“Rumors, nothing more, but the auction is in a matter of days.”

“It will be like putting blood in the water to see what it attracts, but fragments are no good to them. They need it all. If they’re as close as we think, they’ll bite.”

“It’s a risky business you’ve involved us in.”

“We were involved anyway, whether we wanted it or not. Mordant’s death ensured that. If he could find his way to Sedlec, then others could too. Better to retain a little control over what transpires than none at all.”

“It was a guess. Mordant was lucky.”

“Not that lucky,” said Martin. “He broke his neck. At least it looked like it was an accident. Now, you said there were rumors.”

“Two women disappeared from the Point. It seems that they were present when the collector Winston was killed. Our friends tell us that both have since been found dead: one in Brooklyn, the other in Arizona. It’s reasonable to suppose that whatever they took from Winston’s collection has now been secured.”

The bearded man closed his eyes briefly, and his lips moved in a silent prayer.

“More killings,” he said, when he was finished. “That’s too bad.”

“That’s not the worst of it.”

“Tell me.”

“There have been sightings: an obese man. He’s calling himself Brightwell.”

“If he has come out of hiding, it means that they believe they’re close. Jesus, Paul, don’t you have any good news for me?”

Paul Bartek smiled. It was a grim smile, but he was still worried that the next piece of news was affording him a degree of pleasure. He would have to confess it at some point. Nevertheless, it was worth a few Hail Marys to pass it on to his colleague.

“One of their people has been killed. A Mexican. The police believe he was responsible for the death of one of the prostitutes. They think her remains are among those found in his apartment.”

“Killed?”

“Shot to death.”

“Somebody did the world a favor, but he’ll pay for it. They won’t like that. Who is he?”

“His name is Parker. He’s a private detective, and it seems that he makes quite a habit of things like this.”

Brightwell sat at the computer screen and waited for the printer to finish spewing out the final pages of the job. When it was done, he took the sheaf of papers and sorted through them, ordering them according to date, starting with the oldest of the cuttings. He read through the details of those first killings once again. There were pictures of the woman and child as they had been in life, but Brightwell barely glanced at them. Neither did he linger on the description of the crime, although he was aware that there was a great deal that remained unsaid in the articles. He guessed that the injuries inflicted on the man’s wife and daughter were too horrific to print, or that the police had hoped at the time to hold back such details in case they encouraged copycats. No, what interested Brightwell was the information on the husband, and he marked with a yellow highlighter those parts that were particularly noteworthy. He performed a similar exercise on each of the subsequent pages, following the man’s trail, re-creating the history of the preceding five years, noting with interest the way past and present intersected in his life, how some old ghosts were raised while others were laid to rest.

Parker. Such sadness, such pain, and all as penance for an offense against Him that you cannot even recall committing. Your faith was misplaced. There is no redemption, not for you. You were damned, and there is no salvation.

You were lost to us for so long, but now you are found.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

David Sekula occupied a suite of modest offices in a nice old brownstone on Riverside. A brass plate on the wall announced his status as an attorney-at-law. I pressed the button on the intercom by the door. It gave out a reassuring two-note chime, as if to convince those who might be tempted to run away in the interim that everything would be all right in the end. Seconds later the speaker spluttered into life, and a female voice asked if she could help me. I gave her my name. She asked if I had an appointment. I confessed that I didn’t. She told me Mr. Sekula wasn’t available. I told her that I could sit on the steps and wait for him, maybe open a Mickey’s Big Mouth to pass the time, but if I had to take a leak, then things might get messy.

I was buzzed in. A little charm goes a long way.

Sekula’s secretary was spectacularly good-looking, albeit in a vaguely threatening way. Her hair was long and black, and tied loosely at the back with a red ribbon. Her eyes were blue, and her skin was pale enough to make the hints of red at her cheeks look like twin sunsets, while her lips would have kept a whole Freudian symposium going for a month. She wore a dark blouse that wasn’t quite transparent yet still managed to hint at what appeared to be very expensive black lace lingerie. For a moment, I wondered if she was scarred in some way, because it seemed like there were irregular patterns visible on her skin where the blouse pressed against it. Her gray skirt ended just above the knee, and her stockings were sheer and black. She looked like the kind of woman who would promise a man a night of ecstasy unlike anything he had ever previously imagined, but only as long as she could kill him slowly immediately afterward. The right man might even consider that a good deal. Judging by the expression on her face, I didn’t think she was about to make me that kind of offer, not unless she could bypass the ecstasy part and get straight to the slow torture. I wondered if Sekula was married. If I had suggested to Rachel that I needed a secretary who looked like this woman, she would only have agreed if I signed up for temporary chemical castration beforehand, with the threat of a more permanent solution always on the horizon if I ever felt tempted to stray.

The reception area, carpeted in gray, took up the entire front room, with a black leather couch beneath the bay window and a very modern coffee table made from a single slab of black glass in front of it. There were matching easy chairs at either side of the table, and the walls were decorated, if that was the right word, with the kind of art that suggested someone suffering from severe depression had stood in front of a blank canvas for a very long time, then made a random stroke with a black paintbrush before slapping a hefty price tag on the result and entering lifelong therapy. All things considered, minimalism seemed to be the order of the day. Even the secretary’s desk was untroubled by anything resembling a file or a piece of stray paper. Maybe Sekula wasn’t very busy, or perhaps he just spent his days staring dreamily at his secretary.

I showed her my license. She didn’t look impressed.

“I’d like a few minutes of Mr. Sekula’s time.”

“Mr. Sekula is busy.”

I thought I could hear the low drone of one side of a telephone conversation coming from behind a pair of black doors to my right.

“Hard to imagine,” I said, taking in the spotless reception area once again. “I hope he’s firing his decorator in there.”

“What is this about?” said the secretary. She didn’t deign to use my name.

“Mr. Sekula appears to be responsible for a property in Williamsburg. I wanted to ask him about it.”

“Mr. Sekula is involved with a lot of properties.”

“This one is pretty distinctive. It seems to have a lot of dead people in it.”

Sekula’s secretary didn’t even blink at the mention of what had occurred in Williamsburg.

“Mr. Sekula has been over that with the police,” she said.

“Then it should all be fresh in his mind. I’ll just take a seat and wait until he’s done in there.”

I sat down in one of the chairs. It was uncomfortable in the way that only very expensive furniture can be. After two minutes, the base of my spine was aching. After five minutes, the rest of my spine was aching too, and other parts of my body were crying out in sympathy. I was considering lying on the floor instead when the black doors opened and a man in a charcoal gray pinstripe suit stepped into the reception area. His hair was light brown and trimmed as carefully as potentially prizewinning topiary, so that not a single strand was out of place. He had the bland good looks of a part-time model, his features without a single flaw or hint of individuality that might have lent them character or distinction.

“Mr. Parker,” he said. “I’m David Sekula. I’m sorry you had to wait. We’re busier than we might appear.”

Clearly, Sekula had heard everything that was said in the reception room. Perhaps the secretary had simply left the room-to-room intercom open. Either way, it made me curious as to whom Sekula had been talking with on the phone. It might have been nothing to do with me, in which case I would have to face the possibility that the world didn’t revolve around me. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to take that step yet.

I shook Sekula’s hand. It was soft and dry, like an unused sponge.

“I hope you’ve recovered from your ordeal,” he said, ushering me toward his office. “What happened in that place was terrible.”

The cops had probably explained my involvement to Sekula when they interviewed him. Clearly, they’d forgotten to include his secretary in the loop, or maybe they’d tried to tell her, but she couldn’t understand them through their drool.

Sekula paused by his secretary’s desk.

“No calls, please, Hope,” he told her.

Hope? It was hard to believe.

“I understand, Mr. Sekula,” she replied.

“Nice name,” I told her. “It suits you.”

I smiled at her. We were all friends now. Maybe they’d invite me to go away with them on a trip. We could drink, laugh, reminisce about how awkward that first encounter between us had been before we all got to know one another and realized how swell each of us truly was.

Hope didn’t smile back. It looked like the trip was off.

Sekula closed the doors behind us and waved me to an upright chair in front of his desk. The chair faced the window, but the drapes were drawn, so I couldn’t see what lay beyond them. Compared to the reception area, his office looked like a bomb had hit it, but it was still neater than any lawyer’s office I had ever been in before. There were files on the desk, but they were neatly stacked and housed in nice clean folders, each marked with a printed label. The trash can was empty, and it looked like the filing cabinets were hidden behind the false oak fronts that lined two walls, or simply didn’t exist at all. The art on Sekula’s walls was also a lot less disturbing than the paintings in the reception area: there was a large Picasso print of a faun playing a lute, signed no less, and a big canvas that resembled a cave drawing of horses rendered in layered oils, the horses literally carved into the paint: the past re-created in the present. It too was signed by the artist, Alison Rieder. Sekula saw me looking at it.

“Do you collect?” he said.

I wondered if he was being funny, but he seemed serious. Sekula must have paid his investigators way above the going rate.

“I don’t know enough about it to collect,” I said.

“But you have art on your walls?”

I frowned. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Some, I guess.”

“Good,” he said. “A man should appreciate beauty, in all its forms.”

He inclined his chin toward the office door, behind which lay the increasingly less enticing form of his secretary, and grinned. I was pretty certain that if he did that in front of the lady in question, she’d cut off his head and stick it on a railing in Central Park.

Sekula offered me a drink from a cabinet against the wall, or coffee if I preferred. I told him I was fine as I was. He took his seat at his desk, steepled his fingers, and looked grave.

“You’re unhurt after the incident?” he said. “Apart from-”

He touched his fingers to his left cheek. I had some cuts on my face from the splinters, and there was blood in my left eye.

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

Sekula tried to figure out if I was joking. I didn’t tell him that the image of Garcia slumped against the wall was still fresh in my mind, his blood soaking the dusty, paint-spattered sheets, his lips moving in prayer to whatever deity permitted him to collude in the killing of women yet still offered hope and succor to those who prayed to it. I didn’t tell him of the metallic smell of the dying man’s blood, which had infected what little food I had consumed throughout the day. I didn’t tell him of the stench that rose from him as he died, or the way his eyes glazed over with his last breath.

And I did not mention the sound of that final breath, or the manner in which it was released from him: a long, slow exhalation, both reluctant and relieved. It had always seemed somehow apt that words connected with freedom and escape should be used to describe the moment when dullness replaced brightness, and life became death. To be close to another human being at that instant was enough to convince one, however briefly, that something beyond understanding passed from the body with that final sigh, that some essence began its journey from this world to another.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like to kill a man,” said Sekula, as though all that I had just considered had been revealed to him through my eyes.

“Why would you even want to imagine it?” I said.

He seemed to give the question some thought.

“I suppose there have been times when I’ve wanted to kill someone,” he said. “It was a fleeting thing, but it was there. I thought, though, that I could never live with the consequences; not just the legal consequences, but the moral and psychological ones. Then again, I have never been placed in the situation where I was seriously forced to consider taking the life of another. Perhaps, under such circumstances, it would be within my capabilities to kill.”

“Have you ever defended someone accused of a killing?”

“No. I deal mainly in business affairs, which brings us to the matter in hand. I can only tell you what I told the police. The warehouse was once a storehouse for the Rheingold brewing company. It closed in 1974, and the warehouse was sold. It was acquired by a gentleman named August Welsh, who subsequently became one of my clients. When he died, some legal difficulties arose over the disposal of his estate. Take my advice, Mr. Parker: make a will. Even if you have to write it on the back of a napkin, do it. Mr. Welsh was not so farsighted. Despite repeated entreaties on my part, he refused to commit his intentions to paper. I think he felt that making a will would in some way be an acknowledgment of the imminence of his mortality. Wills, in his view, were for people who were dying. I tried to tell him that everyone was dying: him, me, even his children and his grandchildren. It was to no avail. He died intestate, and his children began to bicker among themselves, as is often the case in such situations. I tried to manage his estate as best I could in the interim. I ensured that his portfolio remained watertight, that any funds accruing were immediately reinvested or lodged to an independent account, and I endeavored to produce the best results from his various properties. Unfortunately, the Rheingold warehouse was not one of his better investments. Property values in the area are improving, but I could find no one who was willing to commit sufficient funds to the redevelopment of the building. I left the matter in the hands of Ambassade Realty, and largely forgot about it until this week.”

“You are aware that Ambassade is no longer in business?”

“I’m sure that I must have been informed, but passing on responsibility for the leasing of the building was probably not a priority at the time.”

“So this man, Garcia, had signed no lease with either Ambassade or your firm.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Yet some work had been done on the top floor of the warehouse. There was power, and water. Someone was paying the utilities.”

“Ambassade, I assume. There may be an arrangement in place.”

“And now there’s nobody at Ambassade left to ask.”

“No, I’m afraid not. I wish I could be of more help.”

“That makes two of us.”

Sekula composed his features into an expression of regret. It didn’t quite take, though. Like most professionals, he wasn’t fond of those outside his field casting doubts upon any aspect of his business. He stood, making it clear to me that our meeting was over.

“If I think of anything that might be of help to you, I’ll try to let you know,” he said. “I’ll have to tell the police first, of course, but under the circumstances I would have no objection to keeping you informed as well, as long as the police confirmed that to do so would not interfere with the progress of their investigation.”

I tried to interpret what Sekula had just said, and came to the conclusion that I had learned all that I was going to from him. I thanked him, and left him with my card. He walked me to the office door, shook my hand once again, then closed the door behind me. I tried one last time to chip away at his secretary’s permafrost exterior by expressing my gratitude for all that she’d done, but she was impervious to insincerity. If Sekula was keeping her company at night, then I didn’t envy him. Anyone sleeping with her would need to wrap up against the cold first, and maybe wear a warm hat.

My next call was to Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx, where Eddie Tager had his office. There was a lot of competition for business, and the streets east of Yankee Stadium, and near the courthouse, were lined with bondsmen. Most were at least bilingual in their advertising, and the ones that could afford neon usually made sure that the word “fianzas” was at least as conspicuous as “bail” in their windows.

There was a time when the bail industry was the preserve of pretty nasty characters. They still existed, but they were strictly minor players. Most of the bigger bail bondsmen were backed by the major insurance firms, including Hal Buncombe. According to Louis, he was the bondsman that Alice was supposed to call if she ever found herself in trouble. The fact that she hadn’t called him indicated the animosity she felt for Louis, even when she was in the most desperate of situations. I met Buncombe in a little pizzeria on 161st, where he was eating the first of two slices from a paper plate. He was about to wipe his fingers on a napkin in order to shake hands, but I told him not to worry about it. I ordered a soda and a slice, and joined him at his table. Buncombe was a small wiry man in his fifties. He radiated the mixture of inner calm and absolute self-belief that is the preserve of those who have seen it all and who have learned enough from their past mistakes to ensure that they no longer repeated them too often.

“How’s business?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Could be better. We’ve taken some skips already this month, which isn’t good. We figure we gave up $250,000 to the state last year, which means we’re playing catch-up from the start of this one. I’ll have to stop being nice to people. In fact, I’ve already stopped.”

He raised his right hand. I noticed that his knuckles were bruised, the skin broken in places.

“I pulled a guy off the streets earlier today. Just had a bad feeling about him. If he skipped, he’d cost us fifty thou, and I wasn’t prepared to take that chance.”

“I take it he objected.”

“He took a couple of swings,” Buncombe conceded. “We hauled him out to Rikers, but they aren’t taking bodies, and the judge who set bail is on the West Coast until tomorrow, so I have him in a room in back of the office. He claims he has an out-of-state asset that he can offer as collateral-a house in some crack alley in Chicago-but we can’t take out-of-state or out-of-country property, so we’ll just have to hold him overnight, try to get him locked up safe in the morning.”

He finished his first slice and started in on his second.

“Tough way to make money,” I said.

“Not really.” He shrugged. “We’re good at our job, my partners and me. Like Joe Namath said, it’s only bragging if you can’t do it.”

“What can you tell me about Eddie Tager?” I asked. “Is he good at his job too?”

“Tager’s bad news, a scavenger. He’s so desperate he works mostly Queens, Manhattan, and they’re hard, real hard. The Bronx and Brooklyn are picnic boroughs by comparison, but beggars can’t be choosers. Tager deals with small-time beefs: not just bonds, but fines too. I hear most of the hookers don’t like turning to him if they’re in trouble-he likes them to give up a little extra as a show of thanks, if you catch my drift-which is why I was surprised when I heard that he supplied the cut slip for Alice. She would have been warned about him.”

He stopped eating, as though he had suddenly lost his appetite, and dropped the remains of the slice onto the plate before dumping it in the trash.

“I feel bad about what happened. I was trying to deal with paperwork over here and doing what I could over the phone. Someone told me in passing that the cops had pulled Alice in on a drug trawl, but I figured I had a couple of hours and that she could just sit tight until I picked up a few more bonds to make it worth my while heading over there to check up on her. It’s a pain in the ass waiting for Corrections to release one inmate. Makes more sense to build up four or five, then wait for them all to be cut loose. By the time I got over there, she was already gone. I saw the slip and figured that she decided to go with Tager. I knew she had a problem with our ‘mutual friend,’ so I didn’t take it personally. You know, she was a mess by the end. Last time I saw her, she wasn’t looking good, but she didn’t deserve what happened to her. Nobody deserves that.”

“Have you seen Tager lately?”

“Our paths don’t cross so much anymore, but I asked around. Looks like he’s gone to ground. It could be that he’s running scared. Maybe it got back to him that the girl had connections, and that certain people were going to take a dim view of his involvement once she didn’t reappear.”

Buncombe gave me directions to Tager’s office. He even offered to come along with me, but I declined. I didn’t believe that I’d need help making Eddie Tager talk. Right then, words were the only currency he had with which to buy his life.

Eddie Tager was so low-rent that he lived and worked out of the back of a fire-damaged bodega that had closed for renovations sometime during Watergate and never reopened. I found the place without too much trouble, but there was no answer when I tried the bell. I went around back and tried hammering on the rear door. It came ajar slightly under the impact of my fist.

“Hello?” I said.

I opened the door wider and stepped inside. I was in the kitchen area of a small apartment. A counter separated it from a living room furnished with brown carpet, a brown couch, and a brown TV. Even the wallpaper was light brown. There were newspapers and magazines scattered around. The most recent was dated two days earlier. Straight ahead was a hallway with an open door leading into the main office. To the right was a bedroom, and beside that a small bathroom with mold growing on the shower curtain. I checked each room before ending up in the office. It wasn’t exactly spotless, but there was at least an attempt at order. I went through the recent files but could find nothing relating to Alice. I sat down in Tager’s chair and searched the drawers of his desk, but nothing struck me as important. I found a box containing business cards in the top drawer, but none of the names was familiar to me.

There was a small pile of mail behind the door. It was all junk and bills, including one from Tager’s cell phone company. I opened it and flipped through the pages until I came to the date of Alice’s arrest. Like most bondsmen, Tager used his cell phone a lot in the course of his business. On that day alone he had made thirty or forty calls, the frequency of them increasing as the night drew on. I placed the bill back in its envelope and was about to put it in my jacket pocket so that I could take a closer look at it later when I saw a dark smear on the paper. I looked at my fingers and saw blood. I wiped them on the envelope, then tried to find the source, retracing my steps until I was back at Tager’s chair.

The blood was congealing on the underside and right-hand corner of the desk. There wasn’t a lot of it, but when I shined my flash-light on it I thought I could see some hairs mixed in, and there were stains on the carpet. The desk was big and heavy, but when I checked the area around the legs I saw marks on the fabric where the desk had shifted slightly. If the blood was Tager’s, then someone had hit the bondsman’s head pretty hard against the corner of the desk, probably when he was already sprawled on the floor.

I went back to the kitchen and soaked my handkerchief under the faucet, then cleaned down every surface that I had touched. When I was done, my handkerchief was covered in pink stains. I left the same way that I had entered, once I was certain that there was nobody around. I didn’t make any calls about the blood. If I did, I’d have to explain what I was doing there, and I’d need my own bail bondsman. I didn’t think Tager was coming back, though. Someone had asked him to post bail for Alice, which meant that he was complicit in the sequence of events that had led to her death. Garcia had not been acting alone, and now it looked like his confederates were taking care of the weak links in the chain. I patted the cell phone bill in my pocket. Somewhere in that list of numbers was, I hoped, another link that they might have overlooked.

It was now late, and dark. I decided that there was nothing more that I could do until the morning, when I would run the numbers from Tager’s cell phone bill. I went back to my hotel room and called Rachel. Her mother answered the phone and told me that Rachel was already in bed. Sam had slept badly the night before and spent most of the day crying until, exhausted at last, she had succumbed to rest. Rachel had fallen asleep immediately after. I told Joan not to disturb her but to let her know that I’d called.

“She’s worried about you,” said Joan.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Be sure to tell her that.”

I promised that I’d try to return to Maine by late the next day, then hung up the phone and ate at the Thai place beside the hotel, just because it was something to do other than sitting alone in my room with the fear that my relationship was disintegrating in my hands. I stuck to the vegetarian dishes. After my visit to Tager’s office, the coppery taste of spilled blood had returned to my mouth with a vengeance.

Charles Neddo sat in his office chair, his desk scattered with illustrations, all of them taken from books written after 1870, and most depicting variations on the Black Angel. He had never quite understood why there were no depictions prior to that date. No, that wasn’t true. Rather, the drawings and paintings became more uniform in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, less speculative and with a certain commonality to their lines, especially those originating with Bohemian artists. Depictions from earlier centuries were far more diverse, so that without a written indication of the source, imagined or otherwise, it would be impossible to tell that all were renderings of the same subject.

There was music playing in the background, a collection of Satie piano pieces. Neddo liked their air of melancholy. He removed his glasses, leaned away from his desk, and stretched. The wrinkled cuffs of his shirt rolled back on his thin arms, exposing a small mass of scar tissue above his left wrist, as though a mark of some kind had been inexpertly obscured in the relatively recent past. It was stinging slightly, and Neddo touched his left hand gently to the scarring, the tips of his fingers following the lines of the grapnel once branded upon his skin. One could turn away, he thought, and hide oneself among worthless antiques, but the old obsessions lingered. Otherwise, why would he have surrounded himself with bones?

He returned to the drawings, aware of a rising sense of excitement and anticipation. The private detective’s visit had revealed a great deal to him, and earlier that evening he had received another unexpected call. The two monks had been nervous and impatient, and Neddo understood that their presence in the city was a sign that events were moving quickly, and that a resolution of sorts would soon be achieved. Neddo told them all that he knew, then received absolution from the older one for his sins.

Satie came to an end, and the room fell into silence as Neddo put his papers away. He believed that he knew what Garcia had been creating and why it was being built. They were close, and now, as never before, Neddo was aware of the conflict raging within himself. It had taken him many years to break free of their influence, but like an alcoholic he feared that he would never really be free of the urge to fall. He touched his left hand to the cross around his neck, and felt the scar on his wrist begin to burn.

Rachel was deep in sleep when her mother woke her. She was startled and tried to say something, but her mother’s fingers pressed themselves to her lips.

“Shhh,” whispered Joan. “Listen.”

Rachel remained quiet and still. There was no sound for a moment, then she heard the scuffling noises coming from the roof of the house.

“There’s someone up there,” said Joan.

Rachel nodded, still listening. There was something odd about the sounds. They were not quite footsteps. Instead, it seemed to her that whoever was up there was crawling across the slates, and crawling quickly. She was reminded, unpleasantly, of the movements of a lizard. The noise came again, but this time it was echoed by a vibration against the wall behind her head. The bedroom occupied the entire width of the first floor, so that the bed rested against the wall of the house. A second heavy presence was now ascending the sheer wall toward the roof, and once again it sounded like it was moving on four legs.

Rachel got up and walked quickly to the closet. She opened it quietly, moved two shoe boxes aside, and looked at the small gun safe behind them. She resented the fact that it was even there, and had insisted that it have a five-number combination lock to prevent Sam from gaining access to it, even though it was six feet off the ground on the topmost shelf. She entered the code and heard the bolts slide. Inside were two guns. She removed the smaller of the two, the.38. She hated firearms, but in the aftermath of recent events she had reluctantly agreed to learn how to use this one. She loaded it, using the speed loader, then went back to her bed and knelt. There was a small white box on the wall, with a red button on top. She pressed it just as she heard the window shaking in the next room, as though someone were trying to open it.

“Sam!” she shouted.

The alarm began to sound, tearing apart the silence of the marshes as Rachel ran to Sam’s room, Joan close behind her. She could hear the child crying, terrified by the sudden burst of noise. The door was open, and faced the window. Sam was writhing in her cot, her little hands beating against the air and her face almost purple with the force of her tears. For a fleeting instant, Rachel thought she could see something pale move against the window-then it was gone.

“Take her,” said Rachel. “Get her into the bathroom and lock the door.”

Joan grabbed the child and ran from the room.

Slowly, Rachel approached the window. The gun was a little unsteady in her grip, but her finger no longer rested outside the guard and instead was gently touching the trigger. Nearer now: ten feet, five, four, three…

The sound of crawling again came from above her head, this time moving away from Sam’s room and toward the far side of the house. The noise distracted Rachel, and she lifted her head to follow its progress, as though the intensity of her gaze could penetrate the ceiling and slates and permit her to see what was above.

When she looked back to the window there was a face there, hanging upside down in the night from the top of the glass, dark hair dangling vertically from pale features.

It was a woman.

Rachel fired, shattering the window. She kept firing, even as the sound of the presences on the roof and wall came again, growing fainter now as they fled. She could see blue light scything through the darkness, and heard Sam crying even above the noise of the alarm. And then she was crying with her daughter, howling with fear and anger, her finger still pulling the trigger over and over even as the hammer struck only the empty casings and the night air flooded the room, bringing with it the smell of salt water and marsh grass and dead winter things.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Few people would have described Sandy and Larry Crane as happy individuals. Even Larry’s fellow VFW members, upon whom time was inexorably taking its toll and who now boasted a rapidly dwindling platoon of World War II survivors among their number, tended at best to tolerate Larry and his wife when they occasionally attended a veterans’ social event. Mark Hall, the only other member of their little band who was still alive, often told his wife that in the aftermath of D-day it was really just a question of who was going to kill Larry first: the Germans or his own side. Larry Crane could peel an orange in his pocket and open a candy bar with so little noise as to suggest that his time might have been better served in a special operations unit, except that Larry was a born coward and therefore of little use to his own unit, never mind to an elite group of hardened soldiers forced to operate behind enemy lines in desperate conditions. Hell, Mark Hall could have sworn that he’d seen Larry crouching behind better men during combat in the hope that they would take a bullet before he did.

And sure enough, that was what happened. Larry Crane might have been a cheap sonofabitch, and yellow as a buttercup’s ass to boot, but he was also lucky. In the midst of carnage, the only blood he ever got on him was other men’s. Hall might not have admitted it to anyone later, might even have been reluctant to admit it to himself, but as the war wore on he found himself sticking close to Larry Crane in the hope that some of that luck might rub off on him. He guessed that it had, because he’d lived when others had died.

It wasn’t all good luck, though. He’d paid a price by becoming Larry Crane’s creature, bound to him by the shared knowledge of what they had done in the Cistercian monastery at Fontfroide. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with his wife, no sir. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with anyone except his God, and then only in the ultimate secret confessional of his own mind. He hadn’t set foot in church since that day, had even managed to convince their only daughter to have her wedding outdoors by offering her the most expensive hotel in Savannah as a venue. His wife assumed that he’d suffered some crisis of faith over what he’d endured during the war, and he let her believe that, supporting her assumptions by making occasional dark references to “the things I saw over in Europe.” He supposed that there was even a little kernel of truth hidden beneath the shell of the lie, because he had seen some terrible things, and done some terrible things too.

God, they were only children when they went off to fight, virgins, and virgin children had no call to be holding guns and firing them at other children. When he looked at his grandchildren, and saw how cosseted and naive they were despite the pretence of knowingness that they maintained, he found it impossible to visualize them as he had once been. He recalled sitting on the bus to Camp Wolters, his momma’s tears still drying on his cheek, listening while the driver told the Negroes to sit at the back because the front seats were for the white folks, didn’t matter that they were all headed for the same conflict and that bullets were blind to race. The blacks didn’t object, although he could see the resentment simmering in a couple of them, and their fists tightened as some of the other recruits joined in, wisecracking at them as they walked to their seats. They knew better than to respond. One word from them, and the whole situation would have exploded, and Texas was tough back then. Any one of those Negroes raised a hand to a white man, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans or the Japanese, because their own side would take care of them before they had time to break in their boots, and nobody would ever be called to answer for what befell them.

Later, he heard that some of those black men, the ones who could read and write, were told to sign up for Officer Candidates School, on account of the fact that the army was organizing a division of black soldiers, the Ninety-second, to be known as the Buffalo Division after the black soldiers who fought in the Indian wars. He was with Larry Crane by then, the two of them sitting in some god-awful rain-drenched field in England when someone told them about it, and Crane started off bitching about how the niggers were getting the breaks while he was still a grunt. The invasion was imminent, and soon some of those black soldiers found their way to England too, which made Crane bitch even more. It didn’t matter to him that their officers weren’t allowed to enter headquarters by the front door like the white officers, or that the black troops had crossed the Atlantic without any escort because they weren’t considered as valuable to the war effort. No, all Larry Crane saw was uppity Negroes, even after the beach at Omaha was secured, their unit smoking cigarettes on the walls of a captured German emplacement, and they looked down to see the black soldiers walking with sacks along the sand, filling them with the body parts of the men who had died, reduced to the level of collectors of human garbage. No, even then Larry Crane saw fit to complain, calling them cowards who weren’t fit to touch the remains of better men, although it was the army that dictated that they weren’t fit to fight, not then, not until men like General Davis pushed for the integration of black GIs into infantry combat units in the winter of 1944, and the Buffalo Division began fighting its way through Italy. Hall had few problems with Negro soldiers. He didn’t want to bunk with them, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to drink from the same bottle, but it seemed to him that they could take a bullet as well as the next man, and as long as they kept their guns pointed in the right direction he was happy to wear the same uniform as they. By comparison with Larry Crane, this made Mark Hall a bastion of liberalism, but Hall had sufficient self-knowledge to recognize that by making only a cursory effort to contradict Crane or tell him to keep his damn mouth shut he was culpable too. Time and time again, Hall tried to put distance between himself and Larry Crane, but he grew to realize that Larry was a survivor, and an uneasy bond developed between the two men until the events at Fontfroide occurred, and that bond became something deeper, something unspeakable.

And so Mark Hall maintained a pretence of friendship with Larry Crane, sharing a drink with him when there was no way to avoid doing otherwise, even inviting him to that goddamned ruinous wedding, though his wife had made it clear that she didn’t want either Larry or his slovenly wife sullying her daughter’s special day with their presence, and sulked for a week when he informed her that he was paying for the whole fucking day and if she had a problem with his friends, then maybe she should have put more money into her bank account so that she could have paid for the entire wedding herself. Yeah, he’d told her all right. He was a big guy, a great guy, swearing at his wife to cover his own shame and guilt.

Hall figured that he had something on Larry Crane too: after all, they had both been there together, and both were complicit in what had occurred. He’d allowed Larry to dispose of some of what they had found, then had accepted his share of the money gratefully. The cash had enabled Hall to buy a piece of a used car dealership, and he built upon that initial investment to make himself the auto king of northeast Georgia. That was how he was depicted in his newspaper ads and in the TV commercials: he was the Auto King, the Number One Ruler on Prices. Nobody Beats the Auto King. Nobody Can Steal His Crown When It Comes to Value.

It was an empire built on good management, low overheads, and a little blood. Just a little. In the context of all the blood spilled during the war, it was hardly more than a spot. He and Larry never spoke about what happened after that day, and Hall hoped that he would never have to speak of it again until the day he died.

Which, curiously, was kind of what happened, in the end.

Sandy Crane sat on a stool by the kitchen window, watching her husband wrestle a garden hose like he was Tarzan trying to subdue a snake. Bored, she puffed on her menthol cigarette and tipped some of the ash into the sink. Her husband always hated it when she did that. He said it made the sink reek of old mints. Sandy thought the sink stank pretty bad already, and a dab of ash wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. If he didn’t have the smell of her cigarettes to whine about, she had no doubt that he would find something else. At least she got a little pleasure out of smoking, which went some way toward helping her to put up with her husband’s shit, and it wasn’t like those fucking cheap cartons that Larry bought for himself smelled any better.

Larry was squatting now, trying to untangle the hose, and failing. It was his own fault. She had told him often enough that if he rolled it up properly instead of throwing it half-assed into the garage, then he wouldn’t have these problems, but then Larry wasn’t one to take advice from anyone, least of all his wife. In a way, he spent his life trying to get out of messes that he created for himself, and she spent her life telling him that she’d told him so.

Speaking of half-assed, the cleft of Larry’s buttocks was clearly visible above the waistband of his pants. She could hardly bear to see him naked now. It pained her, the way everything about him sagged: his buttocks, his belly, his little shriveled organ, now practically hairless like his little shriveled head. Not that she was any bargain herself, but she was younger than her husband and knew how to make the best of what she had and how to hide her deficiencies. A number of men had learned, just a little too late, how deficient Sandy Crane was once her clothes hit the floor, but they’d screwed her anyway. A lesser woman wouldn’t have known whom to despise more: the men or herself. Sandy Crane didn’t worry too much about it and, as in most other areas of her life, settled for despising everyone but herself equally.

She had met Larry when he was already in his fifties, and she was twenty years his junior. He hadn’t been much to look at, even then, but he was in a pretty good position financially. He owned a bar and restaurant in Atlanta, but he sold out when the “faggots” started making the area their own. That was her Larry: dumber than a busload of tongueless morons, so prejudiced that he was incapable of seeing that the gays who were moving into the neigborhood were infinitely classier and wealthier than his existing clientele. He sold the business for maybe a quarter of what it was now worth, and he had seethed over it ever since. If anything, it had made him even more of a sexist, racist bigot than he ever was before, which was saying something, because Larry Crane was already only a couple of holes in a pillowcase away from putting burning crosses in people’s backyards.

Sometimes she wondered why she bothered staying with Larry at all, but the thought was quickly followed by the realization that snatched moments in motel rooms or in other women’s bedrooms were unlikely to be translated into long-term relationships with a sound financial underpinning. At least with Larry she had a house, and a car, and a moderately comfortable lifestyle. His demands were few, and growing fewer now that his sex drive had deserted him entirely. Anyway, he was so coiled up with piss and fury at the world that it was only a matter of time before he had a stroke or a heart attack. That garden hose might yet do her a favor, if she could learn to keep her mouth shut for long enough.

She finished her cigarette, lit another from its dying embers, then tossed the butt in the waste disposal. The newspaper lay on the table, waiting for Larry to return from his labors so that he could have something else to complain about for the rest of the day. She picked it up and flipped through it, conscious that this simple act would be enough to get her husband pissed. He liked to be the first to read the newspaper. He hated the smell of perfume and menthol upon its pages, and raged at the way she wrinkled and tore it as she read, but if she didn’t look at it now, then it would be old news by the time she got to it; old news, what’s more, with Larry’s toilet stink upon it, since her husband seemed to concentrate best when he was sitting on the can, forcing his aged body to perform another racked, dry evacuation.

There was nothing in the newspaper. There never was. Sandy didn’t know quite what she expected to find in there every time she opened it. She just knew that she was always disappointed when she was done. She turned her attention to the mail. She opened all of it, even the letters addressed to her husband. He always bitched and moaned when she did that, but most of the time he ended up passing them on to her to deal with anyway. He just liked to pretend that he still had some say in the matter. This morning, though, Sandy wasn’t in the humor for his bullshit, so she just ripped into what was there in the hope that it might provide her with a little amusement. Most of it was trash, although she laid aside the coupon offers, just in case. There were bills, and offers of bum credit cards, and invitations to subscribe to magazines that would never be read. There was also one official-looking manila envelope. She opened it and read the letter within, then reread it to be sure she’d picked up all of the details. Attached to the letter were two color photocopies of pages from the catalog of an auction house in Boston.

“Holy shit,” said Sandy. “Sweet holy shit.”

Some ash fell onto the page from her cigarette. She brushed it off quickly. Larry’s reading glasses lay on the shelf beside his vitamins and his angina medication. Sandy picked them up and gave them a quick clean with a kitchen towel. Her husband couldn’t read for shit without his glasses.

Larry was still struggling with the hose when her shadow fell across him. He looked up at her.

“Get out of the light, dammit,” he said, then saw what she had done to his newspaper, which, in her distracted state, she had tucked untidily under her arm.

“The hell have you done with the paper?” he said. “It ain’t fit for nothin but the bottom of a birdcage now you been at it.”

“Forget the damn newspaper,” she said. “Read this.”

She handed the letter to him.

He stood, puffing a little and tugging his pants up over his meager paunch.

“I can’t read without my glasses.”

She produced his glasses and watched impatiently while he examined the lenses and wiped them on the filthy edge of his shirt before putting them on.

“What is this?” he asked. “What’s so important you had to turn my newspaper into an asswipe to bring it to me?”

Her finger pointed to the piece in question.

“Holy shit,” said Larry.

And for the first time in over a decade, Larry and Sandy Crane enjoyed a moment of shared pleasure.

Larry Crane had been keeping things from his wife. It had always been his way. Early in their relationship, for example, Larry hadn’t bothered to mention the times that he’d cheated on her, for obvious reasons, and thereafter tended to apply to most of his dealings with Sandy the maxim that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. But one of Larry’s few remaining vices, the horses, had gotten a little out of hand, and he currently owed money to the kind of people who didn’t take a long view on such matters. They had informed him of their position just two days before, when Larry made a big payment significant enough to allow him to hold on to all ten of his digits for another couple of weeks. It was now at the point where his house was the only asset he could readily turn to cash because even disposing of the car wouldn’t cover what he owed, and he didn’t see how Sandy would approve of his selling their home and moving them into a doghouse in order to pay his gambling debts.

He could try turning to Mark Hall, of course, but that was a reservoir that had well and truly tapped out a couple of years back, and only absolute desperation would take him back to it again. In any case, Larry would be playing a dangerous game if he used the blackmail card on Old King Hall, because Hall might just call his bluff, and Larry Crane had no desire to see out the remainder of his life in a jail cell. He figured Hall knew this. Old Hallie might be a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them.

And so Larry Crane had been wrestling with the garden hose, wondering if there might not be a way to turn Sandy to some use by strangling her with it, dumping the body, and claiming the insurance, when the lady in question cast her shadow upon him. Larry knew then that he had about as much chance of successfully killing his wife as he had of looking after the Playboy Mansion on the days when Hugh Hefner was feeling a little under the weather. She was big and strong, and mean with it. If he even tried to lay a hand on her, she’d break him like he was a swizzle stick in one of her cheap cocktails.

But as he read and reread the letter, it quickly became apparent to him that he might not have to resort to such desperate measures after all. Larry had seen something like the item described in the photocopies, but he had never suspected that it might be worth money, and now here was a story informing him that it could bring in tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more. That “could” was an important caveat, though. What was being sought was not actually in the possession of Larry Crane. Instead, it rested in the ownership of one Marcus E. Hall, the Auto King.

While the face of the Auto King remained that of Mark Hall, the old man had become little more than a figurehead. His sons, Craig and Mark Jr., had taken over the day-to-day running of the family business almost a decade ago. Jeanie, his daughter, had a 20 percent share in the company, based on the fact that it was Craig and Mark who did all the donkey work while Jeanie just had to sit back and wait for the check to clear. Jeanie didn’t see it that way, though, and had been raising quiet hell over it for the past five years. The King saw the hand of her husband, Richard, at work. Dick, as his sons liked to call him both to his face and behind his back, and always with a little added venom, was a lawyer, and if there was one species of rodent that would use the excuse of money to gnaw its way into a family’s heart and consume all the goodness inside, it was a lawyer. The King suspected that as soon as he was dead, Dick would start producing pieces of paper in court and demanding a bigger share of the business backdated to the time when the Virgin Mary herself was in mourning. The King’s own legal people had declared everything to be watertight and above reproach, but that was just more lawyers telling their client what they thought he wanted to hear. There would be days in court after he died, of that the King had no doubt, and his beloved dealership, and equally beloved family, would be torn apart as a result.

The King was standing outside the office of the main lot on Route 17, sipping coffee from a big cup emblazoned with a gold crown. He still liked to put in a couple of days each month, and the other salesmen didn’t object because any money he earned in commission was put back into a communal pot. At the end of every month, one salesman’s name was drawn from a hat over beers in Artie’s Shack, and all of the money went to him, or to her, for two women now worked on the King’s lots, and they sold a bunch of cars to the kind of men who had wires running straight from their dicks to their wallets. The winner paid for beers and food, and so everyone was happy.

It was four in the afternoon, dead time, and since it was a week-day in the middle of the month, the King didn’t expect it to pick up much before closing. While they might get a few walk-ins once the office workers finished up, the only thing most of them would have in their pockets would be their hands.

Then, right at the end of the lot, he saw a man leaning into the windshield of a 2001 Volvo V70 Turbo Wagon, 2.4 auto, leather interior, AM/FM/cassette/CD player, sunroof, forty-five thousand miles. Thing had been driven like it was made of eggshells, so there wasn’t a scratch on the paintwork. The King’s boys had it tagged at twenty thousand, with plenty of room for maneuver. The guy was wearing a sun visor and dark glasses, but the King couldn’t tell much else about him other than that he looked a little old and beat-up. The King’s eyesight wasn’t so good these days, but once he got his marks in focus he could tell more about them in thirty seconds than most psychologists could learn in a year of sessions.

The King put his cup down on the windowsill, straightened his tie, slipped the keys to the Volvo from the lockup box, and headed out into the lot. Someone asked him if he needed any help. There was a burst of laughter. The King knew what they were doing: looking out for him while pretending that they weren’t.

“Guy is older than I am,” he said. “I’m only worried that he don’t die before I get him to sign the papers.”

There was more laughter. The King could see that the old man at the Volvo had opened the driver’s door and slipped into the seat. That was a good sign. Getting them into the damn car was the hardest part, and once they were test-driving, then guilt started to kick in. The salesman, a nice guy, was taking time out of his busy schedule to go for a ride with them. He knew a little about sport, maybe liked the same music once he’d taken a flip through the dial and found something that made the mark smile. After he’d gone to all that trouble, well, what could a decent human being do but listen to what the man had to say about this beautiful automobile? And hey, it was hot out there, right, so better to do it in the cool of the office with a cold can of soda in one hand, huh? What do you mean, talk to your wife first? She’s gonna love this car: it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s got solid resale value. You walk out of this lot without signing, and it won’t be here once you’re done having a conversation with the little lady that you didn’t need to have to begin with, because she’s going to tell you what I’m telling you: it’s a steal. You get her hopes up and bring her down here only to find out that this baby is gone, and you’re going to be in a worse position than you were before you started. Talk to the bank? We got a finance package right here that’s better than any bank. Nah, they’re just numbers: you’re never gonna end up paying back that much…

The King reached the Volvo, leaned down, and looked in through the driver’s window.

“Well, how you doin to-”

The pitch died on his lips. Larry Crane grinned up at him, all yellow teeth, unwashed hair, and dirt-encrusted wrinkles.

“Why, I’m doin fine, King, just fine.”

“You lookin at buyin a car there, Larry?”

“I’m lookin, King, that’s for sure, but I ain’t buyin yet. Bet you could do me a favor, though, we bein old war buddies and all.”

“I can cut you a deal, sure,” said the King.

“Yeah,” said Larry. “Bet you could cut me one, and I could cut you one right back.”

He lifted one mangy buttock from the seat and broke wind loudly. The King nodded, even the false warmth he had managed to generate now fading rapidly.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Uh-huh. You ain’t here to buy no car, Larry. What do you want?”

Larry Crane leaned over and opened the passenger door.

“Sit in with me, King,” he said. “You can roll the windows down, the smell gets too much for you. I got a proposition to make.”

The King didn’t take the seat.

“You ain’t gettin no money from me, Larry. I told you that before. We’re all done on that score.”

“I ain’t askin for money. Sit in, boy. Ain’t gonna cost you nothin to listen.”

The King exhaled a wheezy breath. He looked over at the office, wishing he’d never left his coffee, then lowered himself into the Volvo.

“You got the keys for this piece of shit?” asked Larry.

“I got ’em.”

“Then let’s you and me go for a ride. We got some talkin to do.”

The French Cistercians were used to hiding secrets. From 1164 to 1166, the monastery at Pontigny, in Burgundy, gave shelter to Thomas Becket, the English prelate exiled for opposing Henry II, until he decided to return to his diocese and was murdered for his troubles. Loc-Dieu, at Martiel in the Midi-Pyrenees, provided a refuge for the Mona Lisa during World War II, its combination of a fortress’s high walls and the grandeur of a country manor rendering it most appropriate for such a lady’s enforced retreat. It is true that other monasteries farther afield held treasures of their own: the Cistercians of Dulce Cor, or “Sweetheart,” at Loch Kindar in Scotland, were entrusted with the embalmed heart of John, Lord Balliol, in 1269, and of his wife, the Lady Devorgilla, who followed him to the grave two decades later; and Zlata Koruna in the Czech Republic held a spine reputed to have come from the crown of thorns placed upon the head of Christ, purchased from King Louis himself by Premysl Otakar II. Yet these were relics known to be retained, and while they were guarded by the monks there were few concerns by the twentieth century that an awareness of their presence might lead to the monasteries themselves being targeted.

No, it was those artifacts retained in silence, hidden behind cellar walls or within great altars, that placed at risk the monasteries and their inhabitants. The knowledge of their presence was passed on from abbot to abbot, so that few knew what lay beneath the library at Salem in Germany, or under the ornate church paving at Byland in Yorkshire’s North Riding.

Or in Fontfroide.

There had been monks at Fontfroide since 1093, although the first formal community, probably made up of former hermits from the Benedictine order, was established in 1118. The abbey of Fontfroide itself appeared in 1148 or 1149 and quickly became a frontline fortress in the fight against heresy. When Pope Innocent III moved against the Manicheans, his legates were two monks from Fontfroide, one of whom, Pierre de Castelnau, was subsequently assassinated. A former abbot of Fontfroide led the bloody crusade against the Albigensians, and the monastery aligned itself staunchly against the Catharist forces of Montsegur and Queribus otherwise tolerated by the liberals of Aragon. It was perhaps no surprise that Fontfroide should eventually seize the greatest of prizes, and so the abbey was finally rewarded for its steadfastness when its former abbot, Jacques Fournier, became Pope Benedict XII.

Fontfroide was wealthy to boot, its prosperity based upon the twenty-five farmsteads that it owned and its grazing herds of over twenty thousand cattle, but gradually the monks grew fewer and fewer, and during the French Revolution Fontfroide was turned into a hospice by the city of Narbonne. In a way, this was Fontfroide’s salvation, for it led to the preservation of the abbey when so many others fell into ruin, and a Cistercian community flourished once again at the abbey from 1858 until 1901, when the state put Fontfroide up for sale, and it was bought and preserved by a pair of French art lovers from the Languedoc.

But in all that time, even during periods when no monks graced its cloisters, Fontfroide remained under the close scrutiny of the Cistercians. They were there when it was a hospice, taking care of the sick and injured in the guise of laymen, and they returned to its environs when the wealthy benefactors, Gustave Fayet and his wife, Madeleine d’Andoque, purchased it to prevent it from being shipped, brick by brick, to the United States. There is a little church that lies less than a mile from Fontfroide, a far humbler offering to God than its great neighbor. It is called, in English, the Vigil Church, and from there the Cistercians kept watch over Fontfroide and its secrets. For almost five hundred years, its treasures remained undisturbed, until World War II entered its final phase, the Germans began to retreat, and the American soldiers came to Fontfroide.

“No,” said the King. “Uh-uh. I got one of those letters too, and I threw it in the trash.”

Mark Hall knew that times had changed, even if Larry Crane didn’t. In those months after the war the world was still in chaos, and a man could get away with a great deal once he took even a little care about it. It wasn’t like that now. He had kept a watchful eye on the newspapers, and had followed the case of the Meadors with particular interest and concern. Joe Tom Meador, while serving with the U.S. Army during World War II, had stolen manuscripts and reliquaries from a cave outside Quedlinburg in central Germany, where the city’s cathedral had placed them for safekeeping during the conflict. Joe Tom mailed the treasures to his mother in May 1945, and once he returned home he took to showing them to women in return for sexual favors. Joe Tom died in 1980, and his brother Jack and sister Jane decided to sell the treasures, making a futile effort to disguise their origins along the way. The haul was valued at about $200 million, but the Meadors got only $3 million, minus legal fees, from the German government. Furthermore, by selling the items they attracted the interest of the U.S. Attorney for eastern Texas, Carol Johnson, who initiated an international investigation in 1990. Six years later, a grand jury indicted Jack, Jane, and their lawyer, John Torigan, on charges of illegally conspiring to sell stolen treasures, charges that carried with them a penalty of ten years in prison and fines of up to $250,000. That they got away with paying $135,000 to the IRS was beside the point for Mark Hall. It was clear to him that the smart thing would be to take to the grave the knowledge of what he and Larry had done in France during the war, but now here was dumb and greedy Larry Crane about to draw them into a whole world of potential hurt. Hall was already troubled by the appearance of the letter. It meant that someone was making connections, and drawing conclusions from them. If they stayed quiet and refused to take the bait, then maybe Hall would be able to go to his grave without spending his children’s inheritance on legal fees.

They were parked in the driveway outside the King’s house. His wife was away visiting Jeanie, so theirs was the only car present. Larry laid a shaky hand on the King’s arm. The King tried to shake it off, but Larry responded by turning the resting hand into a claw and gripping the King tightly.

“Just let’s take a look at it, is all I’m sayin. We just need to compare it with the picture, make sure it’s the same thing we’re talking about. These people are offering a whole lot of money.”

“I got money.”

For the first time, Larry Crane’s temper frayed.

“Well I sure as fuck don’t,” he shouted. “I got shit, King, and I’m in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble can an old goat like you get into?”

“You know I always liked to gamble.”

“Ah, Jesus. I knew you was the kind of fool thought he was smarter than other fools, but the only folks who should bet on horses are those who can afford to lose. Last I heard, you weren’t exactly high on that list.”

Crane took the insult, absorbing the blow. He wanted to lash out at the King, to beat his head against the pine-fresh dashboard of this Scandinavian piece of shit, but doing that wouldn’t get him any closer to the money.

“Maybe,” he said, and for a few moments Crane allowed his selfhatred, so long buried beneath his hatred of others, to shine through. “I never had your smarts, that’s for sure. I married bad, and I made bad decisions in business. I ain’t got no kids, and could be that’s for the best. I’d’ve screwed them up too. I figure, all told, I got a lot of what I deserved, and then some.”

He released his grip on the King’s arm.

“But these men, they’re gonna hurt me, King. They’ll take my house, if they can get it. Hell, it’s the only thing I have left that’s worth anything, but they’ll cause me pain along with it, and I can’t handle no pain like that. All I’m askin is that you take a look at that thing you got to see if it’s a match. Could be we can cut a deal with the folks that are lookin for it. It just takes a phone call. We can do this quiet, and no one will ever know. Please, King. Do this for me, and you’ll never have to see me again. I know you don’t like me bein around, and your wife, she’d see me burnin in the fires of hell and she wouldn’t waste her sweat to cool me down, but that don’t bother me none. I just want to hear what this guy has got to say, but I can’t do that unless I know that we have what he’s lookin for. I got my part here.”

He removed a greasy brown envelope from a plastic grocery bag that lay on the backseat. Inside was a small silver box, very old and very battered.

“I never paid it much mind, until now,” he explained.

Even seeing it there, in the driveway of his own house, gave the King the creeps. He didn’t know why they had taken it to begin with, except that some voice in his head had told him it was strange, maybe even valuable, the first time he’d laid eyes on it. He liked to think he’d have known that, even if those men had not died trying to keep it for themselves.

But that was in the aftermath, when his blood was still hot; his blood, and the blood of others.

“I don’t know,” said the King.

“Get it,” whispered Larry. “Let’s put them together, just so we can see.”

The King sat in silence, unmoving. He stared at his nice house, his neatly kept lawn, the window of the bedroom he shared with his wife. If I could undo just one element of my life, he thought, if I could take back just one action, it would be that one. All that has followed, all the happiness and joy, has been blighted by it. For all the pleasure I have enjoyed in life, for all of the wealth that I have amassed and all the kudos I have gained, I have never known one day of peace.

The King opened the car door and walked slowly to his house.

Private Larry Crane and Corporal Mark E. Hall were in real trouble.

Their platoon had been on patrol in the Languedoc, part of a joint effort with the British and Canadians to secure the southwest and flush out isolated Germans while the main U.S. force continued its eastward advance, and had wandered into a trap on the outskirts of Narbonne: Germans in brown-and-green camouflage uniforms, backed up by a half-track with a heavy machine gun. The uniforms had thrown the Americans. Because of equipment shortages, some units were still using an experimental two-piece camouflage uniform, the M1942, which resembled the clothing routinely worn by the Waffen SS in Normandy. Hall and Crane had already been involved in an incident earlier in the campaign, when their unit opened fire on a quartet of riflemen from the Second Armored Division of the Forty-first who had become cut off during bitter fighting with the Second SS Panzer Division near Saint Denis-le-Gast. Two of the riflemen were shot before they had a chance to identify themselves, and one of them had died of his wounds. Lieutenant Henry had fired the fatal shot himself, and Mark Hall sometimes wondered if that was why he allowed the troops advancing out of the darkness crucial moments of grace before ordering his own men to open fire. By then, it was too late. Hall had never before seen troops move with the speed and precision of those Germans. One minute they were in front of the Americans, the next they were dispersed among the trees on both sides of the road, quickly and calmly surrounding their enemies prior to annihilating them. The two soldiers buried themselves in a ditch as gunfire exploded around them and the trees and bushes were turned to splinters that shot through the air like arrows and embedded themselves in skin and clothing.

“Germans,” said Crane, a little unnecessarily, his face buried in the dirt. “There ain’t supposed to be no Germans left here. What the hell are they doing in Narbonne?”

Killing us, thought Hall, that’s what they’re doing, but Crane was right: the Germans were in retreat from the region, but these soldiers were clearly advancing. Hall was bleeding from the face and scalp as the fusillade continued around them. Their comrades were being torn apart. Already only a handful were left alive, and Hall could see the German soldiers closing in on the survivors to finish them off, twin lightning flashes now gradually being revealed as the need for duplicity was eliminated. Hall could see that the half-track was American, a captured M15 mounted with a single thirty-seven-millimeter gun. This was no ordinary bunch of Germans. These men had a purpose.

He heard Crane whimpering. The other man was so close to him that Hall could smell his breath as Crane cowered against him in the hope that Hall’s body would provide some cover. Hall knew what he was doing, and pushed the younger man hard.

“Get the fuck away from me,” he said.

“We got to stick together,” pleaded Crane. The sounds of gunfire were becoming less frequent now, and those that they heard were single bursts from German machine guns. Hall knew they were finishing off the wounded.

He started to crawl through the undergrowth. Seconds later, Crane followed.

Many miles and many years away from the events of that day, Larry Crane sat in an air-conditioned Volvo rubbing his fingers on the cross carved into the box. He tried to remember what the paper that it once contained had looked like. He recalled taking a look at the writing on the fragment, but it was unreadable to him, and he had rejected the fragment as worthless. Although he did not know it, the words were Latin, and largely inconsequential. The real substance lay elsewhere, in a set of tiny letters and digits carefully drawn into the top right-hand corner of the vellum, but both the King and Larry Crane had been distracted by the illustration upon the page. It looked like a design for something, a statue of some kind, but neither man had ever understood why anyone would want to make a statue like this, using what looked like pieces of bone and dried skin scavenged from both humans and animals.

But somebody wanted it, and if Larry Crane was right, they were prepared to pay handsomely for the pleasure.

The two soldiers were wandering aimlessly, desperately trying to find shelter from the strange, unseasonable cold that was settling in, and from the Germans who were now presumably combing the area for any survivors to ensure that their presence was not communicated to superior forces. This was no last-ditch assault, no futile German attempt to force back the Allied tide like the actions of some Teutonic King Canute. The SS men must have parachuted in, maybe capturing the half-track along the way, and Hall’s belief that they had some seriously dark purpose for doing so was reinforced by what he had witnessed as he and Crane retreated: men in civilian clothing emerging from cover, shadowing the half-track and apparently directing the efforts of the soldiers. It made no sense to Hall, no sense at all. He could only hope that the path he and Crane were taking would lead them as far away as possible from the Germans’ prize.

They made for higher ground, and at last found themselves in what appeared to be an uninhabited region of the Corbière Hills. There were no houses, and no livestock. Hall figured that any animals that had once grazed had been killed for food by the Nazis.

It started to rain. Hall’s feet were damp. The top brass had taken the view that the new buckled combat boots recently issued to soldiers would suffice for winter once treated with dubbin, but Hall now had conclusive evidence, if further evidence were needed, that even in the wet grass this was not the case. The boots neither repelled water nor retained warmth, and as the two men trudged through the damp undergrowth Hall’s toes began to hurt so badly that his eyes watered. In addition, problems with the supply chain meant that he and Crane were clad only in wool trousers and Ike jackets. Between them, they had four frag grenades, Crane’s M1 (with a spare “immediate use” clip carried on his bandolier sling, for reasons Hall couldn’t quite figure out since Crane had barely managed to fire off a couple of rounds during the ambush), and Hall’s Browning Automatic Rifle. He had nine of his 13x20-round mags left, including the one in the gun, and Crane, as his designated assistant, had two more belts, giving them twenty-five mags in total. They also had four K-rations, two each of Spam and sausage. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either, not if those Germans found their trail.

“You got any idea where we are?” asked Crane.

“Nope,” said Hall. Of all the men he had to end up with after a goddamned massacre, it would have to be Larry Crane. The guy was unkillable. Hall felt like a pincushion, what with all the splinters that had entered him, and Crane didn’t have a scratch on his body. Still, it was like they said: somebody was looking out for Crane, and by staying close by, a little of that protection had rubbed off on Hall as well. It was a reason to be thankful, he supposed. At least he was alive.

“It’s cold,” said Crane. “And wet.”

“You think I haven’t noticed?”

“You gonna just keep walking until you fall down?”

“I’m gonna keep walking until-”

He stopped. They were on the top of a small rise. To their right, white rocks shone in the moonlight. Farther on, a complex of buildings was silhouetted against the night sky. Hall could make out what looked like a pair of steeples, and great dark windows set into the walls.

“What is it?”

“It’s a church, maybe a monastery.”

“You think there are monks there?”

“Not if they have any sense.”

Crane squatted on the ground, supporting himself with his rifle.

“What do you reckon?”

“We go down, take a look around. Get up.”

He yanked at Crane, smearing blood on the other man’s uniform. He felt stabs of pain run through his hand as some of the splinters were driven farther into his flesh.

“Hey, you got blood on me,” said Crane.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” said Hall. “Real sorry.”

Sandy Crane was talking to her sister on the phone. She liked her sister’s husband. He was a good-looking man. He wore nice clothes and smelled good. He also had money, and wasn’t afraid to spread it around so that his wife could look her best at the golf club, or at the charity dinners that they seemed to attend every second week and about which her sister never tired of telling her. Well, Sandy would show her a thing or two once Larry got his hands on that money. Barely eight hours had elapsed since she opened the letter, but already Sandy had their windfall spent ten times over.

“Yeah,” she said. “Larry looks like he might be coming into a little money. One of his investments paid off, and now we’re just waiting for the check to be cut.”

She paused to listen to her sister’s false congratulations.

“Uh-huh,” said Sandy. “Well maybe we might just come along with you to the club sometime, see about getting us one of those memberships too.”

Sandy couldn’t see her sister proposing the Cranes for membership in her swanky club for fear of being run out of the gates with the dogs at her heels, but it was fun to yank her chain some. She just hoped that, for once, Larry wouldn’t find a way to screw things up.

Hall and Crane were a stone’s throw away from the outer wall when they saw shadows cast by moving lights.

“Down!” whispered Hall.

The two soldiers hugged the wall and listened. They heard voices.

“French,” said Crane. “They’re speaking French.”

He risked a glance over the wall, then rejoined Hall.

“Three men,” he said. “No weapons that I can see.”

The men were moving to the soldiers’ left. Hall and Crane followed them from behind the wall, eventually making their way to the front of the main chapel, where a single door stood open. Above it was a tympanum carved with three bas-reliefs, including a brilliantly rendered crucifixion at the center, but the wall was dominated by a stained-glass oculus and two windows, the traditional reference to the Trinity. Although they were not to know it, the door they were watching was rarely opened for any reason. In the past, it had been unlocked only to receive the remains of the viscounts of Navarre or other benefactors of the abbey to be buried at Fontfroide.

There were noises coming from inside the chapel. Hall and Crane could hear stones being moved and grunts of effort from the men within. A figure passed through the darkness to their right, keeping watch on the road that led to the monastery. His back was to the soldiers. Silently, Hall closed in on him, sliding his bayonet from his belt. When he was close enough, he slapped his hand over the man’s mouth and placed the tip of the knife to his neck.

“Not a move, not a sound,” he said. “Comprenez?”

The man nodded. Hall could see a white robe beneath the man’s tattered greatcoat.

“You’re a monk?” he whispered.

Again, the man nodded.

“How many inside? Use your fingers.”

The monk lifted three fingers.

“They monks too?”

Nod.

“Okay, we’re going inside, you and me.”

Crane joined him.

“Monks,” said Hall. He saw Crane breathe out deeply with relief and felt a little of the same relief himself.

“We don’t take any chances, though,” said Hall. “You cover me.”

He forced the monk down the flight of four stone steps that led to the church door. As they drew closer they could see the lights flickering within. Hall stopped at the entrance and glanced inside.

There was gold on the stone floor: chalices, coins, even swords and daggers that gleamed with gemstones set into their hilts and scabbards. As the monk had said, three men were laboring in the cold surroundings, their breath rising in great clouds, their bodies steaming with sweat. Two were naked from the waist up, forcing a pair of crowbars into the gap between floor and stone. The third, older than the others, stood beside them, urging them on. He had sandals on his feet, almost obscured by his white robes. He called a name, and when no response came he moved toward the door.

Hall stepped into the chapel. He released his grip on the monk and pushed him gently ahead of him. Crane appeared beside him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re Americans.”

The expression on the old monk’s face didn’t indicate that he thought this was okay at all, and Hall realized that the cleric was just as concerned about the Allies as he was about any other potential threat.

“No,” he said, “you should not be here. You must go. Go!”

He spoke English with only the barest hint of an accent. Behind him, the monks, who had briefly paused in their efforts to shift the stone, now redoubled them.

“I don’t think so,” said Hall. “We’re in trouble. Germans. We lost a lot of guys.”

“Germans?” said the monk. “Where?”

“Near Narbonne,” said Hall. “SS.”

“Then they will soon be here,” said the monk.

He turned to the watcher and told him to return to his post. Crane appeared on the verge of stopping him, but Hall held him back, and the monk was allowed to pass.

“You want to tell us what you’re doing?” Hall asked.

“Better that you do not know. Please, leave us.”

There was a howl of rage and disappointment from the laborers, and the great stone fell back into place. One of the men sank to his knees in frustration.

“You trying to hide that stuff?”

There was a pause before the answer came.

“Yes,” said the monk, and Hall knew that he was not telling the entire truth. He briefly wondered what kind of monk told lies in a church, and figured that the answer was a desperate one.

“You won’t move that with just two men,” said Hall. “We can help. Right?”

He looked to Crane, but the private’s eyes were fixed on the treasure that lay upon the floor. Hall slapped Crane’s arm hard.

“I said we can help them. You okay with that?”

Crane nodded. “Sure, sure.”

He shrugged off his uniform jacket, placed his gun on the floor, and he and Hall joined the men at the stone. Now that he was up close, Hall could see that they were tonsured. They looked to their leader, waiting for him to respond to the Americans’ offer.

“Bien,” he said, at last. “Vite.”

With four men now working instead of two, the stone began to lift more easily, but it was still immensely heavy. Twice it slipped back down into its resting place, until a last, great effort forced it up sufficiently far for it to be pushed back onto the floor. Hall rested his hands on his knees and stared into the hole they had created.

A silver hexagonal box, perhaps six inches in circumference and sealed with wax, lay in the dirt. It was plain and unadorned, apart from a simple cross carved into the top. The old monk knelt and carefully reached in to retrieve it. He had just lifted it out when the alarm was raised by the sentinel at the door.

“Shit!” said Hall. “Trouble.”

Already, the old monk was pushing the cache of gold into the hole and urging his fellows to replace the stone as best they could, but they were exhausted and making slow progress.

“Please,” said the monk. “Help them.”

But Hall and Crane were making for the door. Carefully, they joined the lookout at the top of the steps.

Men, perhaps a dozen or more in total, were advancing along the road in the moonlight, their helmets shining. Behind them came the half-track, with more men following it. The two Americans took one look at each other and melted into the darkness.

The King stood on the top rung of the ladder and pulled the cord. The attic swam into light, illumination not quite reaching the farthest corners. His wife had told him again and again that they needed to install a window in the roof, or at least put in a stronger lightbulb, but Hall had never really made either a priority. They didn’t come up here much anyway, and he was no longer entirely sure what most of these boxes and old suitcases contained. Cleaning it up was a chore that he was too old for so he had resigned himself, not with any great difficulty, to the fact that it would be up to his children to sort through this junk when he and Jan were dead and gone.

There was one box that he did know where to find. It was on a shelf with a collection of wartime memorabilia that was now merely accumulating dust but which, at one point, he had considered displaying. No, that wasn’t quite true. Like most soldiers, he had taken souvenirs from the enemy-nothing macabre, nothing like the ears that some of those poor demented bastards in Vietnam had collected-but uniform hats, a Luger pistol, even a ceremonial sword that he had found in the scorched remains of a bunker on Omaha. He had picked them up without a second thought. After all, if he didn’t take them, then someone else would, and they were no use to their previous owners. In fact, when he entered that bunker he could smell the officer who was once probably the proud owner of the sword, as his charred body was still smoking in one corner. Not a good way to go, trapped in a cement bunker with liquid fire pouring through the gun slit. Not a good way to go at all. But once he returned home, his desire to be reminded of his wartime service diminished greatly, and any thoughts of display were banished, like the trophies themselves, to a dark, unused place.

Hall climbed farther into the attic, keeping his head slightly bowed to prevent any painful knocks against the ceiling, and threaded his way through boxes and rolled up rugs until he reached the shelf. The sword was still there, wrapped in brown paper and clear plastic, but he left it as it was. Behind it was a locked box. He had always kept it secured, in part because it contained the Luger, and he didn’t want his kids, when they were younger, to discover it and start playing with it like it was a toy. The key was kept in a nearby jar of rusty nails, just to further discourage idle hands. He poured the nails onto the floor until the key became visible, then used it to open the box. There was a trunk filled with old hardcover books nearby, and he sat down upon it, resting the box upon his knee. It felt heavier than he remembered, but then it had been a long time since he had opened it, and he was older now. He wondered idly if bad memories and old sins accumulated weight, the burden of them steadily growing greater as the years went by. This box was foul memories given shape, sins endowed with bulk and form. It seemed almost to drag his head down to it, as though it were suspended from a chain around his neck.

He opened it and slowly began placing the contents on the floor beside his feet: the Luger first, then the dagger. It was silver and black, and emblazoned with a death’s-head emblem. The blade, when withdrawn, showed spots of rust below the hilt and along the blade, but otherwise the steel was largely intact. He had greased it and wrapped it before storing it away, and his precautions had paid off. The plastic peeled away easily, and in the dim light the grease gave to the blade a glistening, organic quality, as though he had just removed a layer of skin and exposed the interior of a living thing.

He laid the knife beside the Luger and removed the third item. A lot of soldiers returned from the war with Iron Crosses taken from the enemy, mostly standard types but some, like the one Hall now held in his hand, adorned with an oak-leaf cluster. The officer from whom it was taken must have done something pretty special, Hall thought. He must have been trusted greatly to be sent to Narbonne, in the face of the advancing enemy, in order to seek out the monastery of Fontfroide and retrieve whatever was secured there.

Only two things remained in the box. The first was a gold cross, four inches in height and decorated with rubies and sapphires. Hall had retained it, against his better judgment, because it was so beautiful, and perhaps also because it symbolized his own faith, stored away in shame after what he had done. Now, as the time of his death inevitably approached, he realized that he had not misplaced that faith entirely. The cross had always been there, locked away in the attic with the discarded fragments of his own life and those of his wife and children. True, some were useless, and some were better forgotten, but there were items of value here too, things that should not have been set aside so readily.

He brushed his fingertips across the centerpiece of the ornament: a ruby as big as the ball of his thumb. I kept it because it was precious, he told himself. I kept it because it was beautiful, and because, somewhere in my heart and my soul, I still believed. I believed in its strength, and its purity, and its goodness. I believed in what it represented. It was always the second-to-last item in the box, always, for that way it rested upon the vellum fragment at the bottom, anchoring it in place, rendering its contents somehow less awful. Larry Crane never understood. Larry Crane never believed in anything. But I did. I was raised in the faith, and I will die in the faith. What I did at Fontfroide was a terrible thing, and I will be punished for it when I die, yet the moment that I touched the fragment I knew it was a link to something far viler. Those Germans did not risk their lives for gold and jewels. To them, they were just trinkets and ornaments. No, they came for that piece of vellum, and if one good thing came out of that night, it was the fact that they did not get it. It will not be enough to save me from damnation, though. No, Larry Crane and I will burn together for what we did that night.

The SS men poured down the steps like channels of filthy, muddy water and pooled together in the little courtyard that lay before the church door, creating a kind of honor guard for the four civilians who stepped from the half-track to join them. From the shadows where he lay, Hall saw the old monk try to bar their way. He was pushed into the arms of the waiting soldiers and thrown against the wall. Hall heard him speak to the senior officer, the one with the dagger on his belt and the medal at his neck, who had accompanied the men in civilian clothes. The monk held out a bejeweled gold cross, offering it to the soldier. Hall couldn’t understand German, but it was clear the monk was trying to convince the officer that there was more where that came from, if he wanted it. The officer said something curt in reply, then he and the civilians entered the church. Hall heard some shouting, and a short burst of gunfire. A voice was raised and Hall discerned some words that he did understand: an order to cease fire. He wasn’t sure how long that would last. Once the Germans got whatever they had come for, they would leave nobody alive to talk about it.

Hall began working his way backward, moving through the darkness and into the woods, until he was facing the half-track. Its passenger door was open, and there was a soldier sitting at the wheel, watching what was taking place in the courtyard. Hall unsheathed his bayonet and crawled to the very edge of the road. When he was certain that he was out of sight of the other soldiers, he padded across the dirt and pulled himself into the half-track’s cab, staying low all the time. The German sensed him at the last minute, because he turned and seemed about to shout a warning, but Hall’s left hand shot up and caught him under the chin, forcing his mouth closed with a snap while the blade entered below the soldier’s sternum and pierced his heart. The German trembled against the bayonet, then grew still. Hall used the blade to anchor him to his seat before slipping out of the cab and into the back of the half-track. He had a clear view of the soldiers on the right of the steps, and of most of the courtyard, but there were at least three hidden by the wall to the left. He looked to his right and saw Crane peering at him from a copse of bushes. For once, thought Hall, just once, do the right thing, Larry. He signaled with his fingers, indicating to Crane that he should go around the back of the vehicle and through the trees so that he could take out the Germans hidden from Hall.

There was a pause before Crane nodded and started to move.

Larry Crane was trying to light a cigarette, but the damn cigarette lighter had been removed from the Volvo so that smokers would not be encouraged to spoil its imitation new car scent with tobacco smoke. He searched his pockets once again, but his own lighter wasn’t there. He had probably left it at home in his hurry to confront his old buddy the Auto King with the prospect of easy wealth. Now that he thought of it, the unlit cigarette in his mouth tasted a little musty, which led him to suspect that he’d left both cigarettes and lighter in the house and what was now in his mouth was a relic of an old pack that had somehow escaped his notice. He had taken the first jacket he could lay a hand on, and it wasn’t one that he usually wore. It had leather patches on the elbows, for a start, which made him look like some kind of New York Jew professor, and the sleeves were too long. It caused him to feel older and smaller than he was, and he didn’t need that. What he did need was a nicotine boost, and he’d bet a dime that the King hadn’t locked the door to his house after he went inside. Larry figured there would be matches in the kitchen. At worst, he could light up from the stove. Wouldn’t be the first time, although he’d tried it once when he had a couple under his belt and had just about singed his eyebrows off. The right one still grew sort of rangy as a result.

Fuckin Auto King in his nice house with his fat wife, his slick sons, and that whiny daughter of his, looked like she could do with some feeding up and some holding down under a real man. The King didn’t need any more money than he had already, and now he was making his old army buddy squirm on the hook while he thought about whether or not to take the bait. Well, he’d take the bait, whether it sat comfortably with him or not. Larry Crane wasn’t about to let his fingers get broken just because the Auto King was having scruples after the fact. Hell, the old bastard wouldn’t even have a business if it hadn’t been for Larry. They’d have left that monastery poor as when they found it, and Hall’s old age would have been spent scrounging nickels and clipping coupons, not as a respected pillar of the Georgia business community, living in a goddamned mansion in a nice neighborhood. You think they’d still respect you if they found out how you came by the money to buy into that first lot, huh? You bet your ass they wouldn’t. They’d hang you out to dry, you and your bitch wife and all your miserable brood.

Larry was getting nicely stoked up now. It had been a while since he’d let the old blood run free, and it felt good. He wasn’t going to take no shit from the Auto King, not this time, not ever again.

The cigarette moist with poisonous spit, Larry Crane strode into the King’s house to light up.

The officer emerged from the church, flanked by the men in civilian clothing. One of them was carrying the silver box in his hands, while the others had packed the gold into a pair of sacks. Behind them came one of the monks whom Hall and Crane had helped with the shifting of the stone, his arms held behind his back by two SS soldiers. He was forced against the wall to join the abbot and the sentinel. Three monks: that meant one was already dead, and it looked like the rest were about to follow him. The abbot started to make one final plea, but the officer turned his back on him and directed three soldiers to take up position as a makeshift firing squad.

Hall got behind the thirty-seven-millimeter and saw that Crane was at last in place. He counted twelve Germans in his sights. That would leave just a handful more for Crane to deal with, assuming everything went without a hitch. Hall drew a deep breath, placed his hands on the big machine gun, and pulled the trigger.

The burst of noise was deafening in the silence of the night, and the power of the gun shook him as he fired. Centuries-old masonry fragmented as the bullets tore into the monastery, pockmarking the façade of the church and shattering part of the lintel above the door, although by the time they hit the wall they’d passed through half a dozen German soldiers, ripping them apart like they were made of paper. He glimpsed the muzzle flare from Crane’s gun, but he couldn’t hear its report. His ears were ringing, and his eyes were full of dark marionettes in uniform, dancing to the beat of the music he was creating. He watched the side of the officer’s head disappear and saw one of the civilians bucking against the wall, dead but still jerking with each shot that hit him. He raked the courtyard and steps until he was certain that everyone in his sights was dead, then stopped firing. He was drenched in sweat and rain, and his legs felt weak.

He climbed down as Crane advanced from the bushes, and the two soldiers looked upon their work. The courtyard and steps ran red, and fragments of tissue and bone seemed to sprout from the cracks like night blooms. One of the monks at the wall was dead, killed perhaps by a ricochet, guessed Hall, or a burst of gunfire from a dying German. The sacks of church ornaments lay upon the ground, some of their contents lying scattered beside them. Nearby rested the silver box. While Hall watched, the senior cleric reached for it. Hall could now see that he was bleeding from the face, injured by fragments of flying stone. The other monk, the sentinel, was already trying to replace the gold in the sacks. Neither said a word to the Americans.

“Hey,” said Crane.

Hall looked at him.

“That’s our gold,” said Crane.

“What do you mean, ‘our gold’?”

Crane gestured at the sacks with the muzzle of his gun.

“We saved their lives, right? We deserve some reward.”

He pointed his gun at the monk.

“Leave it,” said Crane.

The monk didn’t even pause.

“Arret!” said Crane, then added, just in case: “Arret! Français, oui? Arret!

By then the monk had refilled the sacks and was lifting one with each hand, preparing to take them away. Crane sent a burst of gunfire across his path. The monk stopped suddenly, waited for a second or two, then continued on his way.

The next shots took him in the back. He stumbled, the sacks falling to the ground once again, then found purchase against the wall of the church. He remained like that, propping himself up, until his knees buckled, and he crumpled in a heap by the door.

“The hell are you doing?” said Hall. “You killed him! You killed a monk.”

“It’s ours,” said Crane. “It’s our future. I didn’t survive this long to go back home poor, and I don’t believe you want to go back to working on no farm.”

The old monk was staring blankly at the body in the doorway.

“You know what you got to do,” said Crane.

“We can walk away,” said Hall.

“No. You don’t think he’ll tell someone what we done? He’ll remember us. We’ll be shot as looters, as murderers.”

No, you’ll be shot, thought Hall. I’m a hero. I killed SS men and saved treasure. I’ll get-what? A commendation? A medal? Maybe not even that. There was nothing heroic about what I did. I turned a big gun on a bunch of Nazis. They didn’t even get a shot off in response. He stared into Larry Crane’s eyes and knew that no German had killed the monk with the chest wound. Even then, Larry had his plan in place.

“You kill him,” said Crane.

“Or?”

The muzzle of Crane’s gun hung in the air, midway between Hall and the monk. The message was clear.

“We’re in this together,” said Crane, “or we’re not in this at all.”

Later, Hall would argue to himself that he would have died had he not colluded with Crane, but deep inside he knew that it wasn’t true. He could have fought back, even then. He could have tried reasoning and waited for his chance to make a move, but he didn’t. In part, it was because he knew from past efforts that Larry Crane wasn’t a man to be reasoned with, but there was more to his decision than that. Hall wanted more than a commendation or a medal. He wanted comfort, a start in life. Crane was right: he didn’t want to return home as dirt poor as he was when he left. There was no turning back, not since Crane had killed one, and probably two, unarmed men. It was time to choose, and in that instant Hall realized that maybe he and Larry Crane had been meant to find each other, and that they weren’t so different after all. From the corner of his eye he registered the last of the monks make a move toward the church door, and he turned his BAR upon him. Hall stopped counting after five shots. When the muzzle flare had died, and the spots had disappeared from in front of his eyes, he saw the cross lying inches from the old man’s outstretched fingers, droplets of blood scattered like jewels around it.

They carried the sacks and the box almost to Narbonne, and buried them in the woods behind the ruins of a farmhouse. Two hours later a convoy of green trucks entered the village, and they rejoined their comrades and fought their way across Europe, with varying degrees of valor, until the time came to be shipped home. Both elected to stay in Europe for a time, and returned to Narbonne in a jeep that was surplus to requirements, or became surplus as soon as they paid a suitable bribe. Hall made contact with people in the antique business, who were acting in turn as middlemen for some of the less scrupulous collectors of art and relics, already picking their way through the bones of Europe’s postwar culture. None of them seemed very much interested in the silver box or its contents. The vellum document was unpleasant at best, and even if worth anything, would be difficult to dispose of to anyone but a very specialized collector. And so Crane and Hall had divided that item into two halves, with Crane taking the primitive silver box and Hall retaining the document fragment. Crane had tried to sell the box once, but had been offered next to nothing for it, so he decided to hold on to it as a souvenir. After all, he kind of liked the memories that went with it.

Larry Crane found some long matches in a drawer, and lit his cigarette. He was watching the empty birdbath in the backyard when he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.

“In here,” he called.

Hall came into the kitchen.

“I don’t remember inviting you inside,” he said.

“Needed a light for my smoke,” said Crane. “You got that paper?”

“No,” said Hall.

“You listen here,” said Crane, then stopped as Hall stepped toward him. Now the two old men were face-to-face, Crane with his back against the sink, Hall before him.

“No,” said Hall. “You listen. I’m sick of you. You’ve been like a bad debt my whole life, a bad debt that I can never pay off. It ends here, today.”

Crane blew a stream of smoke into Hall’s face.

“You’re forgettin somethin, boy. I know what you did back there outside that church. I saw you do it. I go down, and I’ll take you with me, you mark me.”

He leaned in close to Hall. His breath smelled foul as he spoke: “It’s over when I say it’s over.”

Crane’s eyes suddenly bulged in their sockets. His mouth opened in a great oval of shock, the last of the cigarette smoke shooting forth through the gap, accompanied by a spray of spittle that struck Hall on the side of the face. Hall’s left hand extended in a familiar movement, closing Crane’s mouth, while his right forced the blade of the SS dagger up under Crane’s breastbone.

Hall knew what he was doing. After all, he’d done it before. Larry Crane’s body sagged against him, and he smelled the old man’s innards as he lost control of himself.

“Say it, Larry,” whispered Hall. “Say it’s over now.”

There was blood, but less than Hall had expected. It didn’t take him long to clean it up. He drove the Volvo around the back of his house, then wrapped Crane’s body in plastic sheeting from the garage, left over from the last round of renovations on the house. When he was certain that Crane was wrapped up tight, he placed him, with a little trouble, in the trunk of the car, then went for a ride into the swamps.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tucson airport was undergoing renovation, and a temporary tunnel led from the baggage claim to the car rental counters. The two men were given a Camry, which caused the smaller of the pair to complain bitterly as they made their way into the garage.

“Maybe if you lost some of that weight off your ass, then you wouldn’t find it so damn pokey,” said Louis. “I got a foot on you, and I can fit into a Camry.”

Angel stopped.

“You think I’m fat?”

“Gettin there.”

“You never said nothing about it before.”

“The hell you mean, I never said nothing? I been telling you ever since I met you that your problem is you got a sweet tooth. You need to go on that Atkins shit.”

“I’d starve.”

“I think you are missing the point. Folks in Africa starve. You go on a diet, you be like a squirrel. You just need to nap, let your body burn off what’s already there.”

Angel tried to give the flesh on his waist a discreet squeeze.

“How much can I squeeze and still be healthy?”

“They say an inch, like on the TV.”

Angel looked at what he had clenched in his hand.

“Is that across, or up?”

“Man, you even have to ask and you in trouble.”

For the first time in many days, Angel allowed himself a smile, albeit a small one, and very short-lived. Since Martha’s appearance at the house, Louis had barely eaten or slept. Angel would awake in the darkness to find their shared bed empty, the pillows and sheets long cold on his partner’s side. On the first night, when they had brought Martha back to the city and transferred her to her new lodgings, he had padded softly to the bedroom door and watched in silence as Louis sat at a window, staring out over the city, scrutinizing every passing face in the hope that he might find Alice’s among them. Guilt emanated from his pores, so that the room seemed almost to smell of something bitter and old. Angel knew all about Alice. He had accompanied his partner on his searches for her, initially along Eighth Avenue, when they first learned that she had arrived in the city, and later at the Point, when Giuliani’s reforms really started to bite and Vice Enforcement began hitting the streets of Manhattan on a regular basis, NYPD “ghosts” mingling with the crowds below Forty-fourth, and monitoring teams waiting to pounce from unmarked vans. The Point was a little easier in the beginning: out of sight, out of mind, that was the Giuliani mantra. Once the tourists and conventioneers in Manhattan weren’t tripping over too many teenage hookers if they accidentally-or purposely-strayed from Times Square, then everything was better than it was before. Over at Hunts Point, the Ninetieth Precinct only had the manpower to operate a ten-person special operation maybe once a month, usually targeted at the men who patronized and involving just one undercover female officer. True, there were occasional sweeps, but those were relatively infrequent in the beginning until “zero tolerance” began to hit hard, the cops creating a virtual ticker-tape parade of summonses, which almost inevitably led to arrests, since the homeless and drug-addicted who formed the bulk of the city’s street prostitutes could not afford to pay their fines, and that was a ninety-day stint in Rikers right there. The almost continual harassment of the prostitutes by the cops forced the women to “stagger” their beats in order to avoid being seen in the same spot two nights running. It also forced them to frequent increasingly isolated places with the johns, which left them open to rape, abduction, and murder.

It was into this sucking hole that Alice was descending, and their interventions counted for nothing. In fact, Angel could see that the woman sometimes seemed almost to take a strange pleasure in taunting Louis with her immersion in the life, even as it inexorably led to her degradation and, ultimately, to her death. In the end, all Louis could do was make sure that whatever pimp was feeding off her knew the consequences if anything happened to her, and paid her fines to ensure that she didn’t do jail time. Finally, he could no longer bring himself to witness her decay, and it was perhaps unsurprising that she slipped through the net when Free Billy died, and came instead under the control of G-Mack.

And so Angel watched him that first night, not speaking for some time, until at last he said: “You tried.”

“Not hard enough.”

“She may still be out there, somewhere.”

Louis gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

“No. She’s gone. I can feel it.”

“Listen to-”

“Go back to bed.”

And he did, because there was nothing more that could be said. There was no point in trying to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that people made their own choices, that you couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, didn’t matter how hard you tried. Louis would not, or could not, believe those things. This was his guilt, and Alice’s path was not entirely of her own choosing. The actions of others had set her upon it, and his were among them.

But there was more that Angel could not have guessed at, small, private moments between Louis and Alice that perhaps only Martha might have understood, for they found an echo in the phone calls and the occasional cards that she herself received. Louis could remember Alice as a child, how she would play at his feet or fall asleep curled up beside him, bathed in the glow of their first TV. She cried when he left home, although she was barely old enough to comprehend what was happening, and in the years that followed, as his visits grew fewer and fewer, she was always the first to greet him. Slowly, she recognized the changes that were coming over him, as the boy who had killed her father, believing him guilty of the murder of his own mother, matured into a man capable of taking the lives of others without exploring questions of innocence or guilt. Alice could not have put a name to these changes, or have precisely explained the nature of Louis’s ongoing metamorphosis, but the coldness that was spreading through him touched something inside of her, and half-formed suspicions and fears about her father’s death were given body and substance. Louis saw what was happening, and determined to put some distance between himself and his family, a decision made easier by the nature of his business and his reluctance to put those whom he loved at risk of reprisal. All of these tensions came to a head on the day that Louis left his childhood home for the last time, when Alice came to him as he sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, the sun slowly setting behind him, his shadow spreading like dark blood across the short grass. By then, she was approaching her teenage years, although she looked older than she was, and her body was maturing more quickly than the bodies of her peers.

“Momma says you’re leaving today,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“The way she said it, it’s like you ain’t ever coming back.”

“Things change. People change. This ain’t no place for me now.”

She pursed her lips, then raised her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes as she stared into the redness of the sun.

“I seen the way people look at you.”

“What way is that?”

“Like they’s scared of you. Even Momma, she looks like that, sometimes.”

“She’s got no call to be scared of me. You neither.”

“Why are they scared?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard stories.”

Louis stood and tried to pass her by, but she blocked his way, her hands splayed against his midriff.

“No,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me that the stories ain’t true.”

“I got no time for stories.”

He gripped her wrists and turned her, slipping by her and heading toward the house.

“They say my daddy was a bad man. They say he got what he deserved.”

She was shouting now. He heard her running after him, but he did not look back.

“They say you know what happened to him. Tell me! Tell me!”

And she struck him from behind with such force that he stumbled and fell to his knees. He tried to rise, and she slapped him. He saw that she was weeping.

“Tell me,” she said again, but this time her voice was soft, barely a whisper. “Tell me that it isn’t true.”

But he could not answer her, and he walked away and left them all. Only once, in the years of her descent, did Alice again bring up the subject of her father. It was fourteen months before her disappearance, when Louis still believed that she might yet be saved. She called him from the private clinic in Phoenicia, in the midst of the Catskills, and he drove up to see her that afternoon. He had placed her there after Jackie O called him and told him that Alice was with him, that a john had hurt her badly, and she had nearly overdosed in an effort to dull the pain. She was bruised and bleeding, her eyes slivers of white beneath heavy lids, her mouth agape. Louis took her to Phoenicia the following morning, once she was straight enough to understand what was happening. The beating had shocked her, and she appeared more willing than ever before to consider intervention. She spent six weeks isolated in Phoenicia, then the call came.

Louis found her in the main garden, sitting on a stone bench. She had lost a little weight, and looked tired and drawn, but there was a new light in her eyes, a tiny, flickering thing that he had not seen in a long time. The slightest wind could blow it out, but it was there, for the moment. They walked together, the chill mountain air making her shiver slightly even though she was wearing a thick padded jacket. He offered her his coat, and she took it, wrapping it around her like a blanket.

“I drew a picture for you,” she said, after they had made a circuit of the grounds, talking of the clinic and the other patients she had encountered.

“I didn’t know you liked to draw,” said Louis.

“I never had the chance before. They told me it might help me. A lady comes in every day for an hour, more if she thinks you’re making progress, and she can spare the time. She says I have talent, but I don’t believe so.”

She reached into the pocket of her jacket and withdrew a sheet of white paper, folded to a quarter of its size. He opened it.

“It’s our house,” she said, as though fearful that her work was too poor to enable him to guess its subject matter.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, and it was. She had depicted the house as though seen through a mist, using chalks to dull the lines. A faint, warm light shone through the windows, and the door was slightly ajar. The foxgloves and dayflowers in the garden were smudges of pink and blue, the trilliums tiny stars of green and red. The forest beyond was a wash of tall brown trunks, like the masts of ships descending into a sea of green ferns.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I called Momma,” she said. “They said it was okay to call people, now that I’d been here for a time. I told her I was doing fine, but that ain’t true. It’s hard, you know?”

She examined his face, her lips slightly pursed, and he was suddenly reminded of the girl who had confronted him beneath the cottonwood.

“I’m sorry,” she said. I think maybe whatever you did, before I was born, you did out of love.”

“I’m sorry too,” he replied.

She smiled, and for the first time since she was a young girl, she kissed him on the cheek.

“Good-bye,” she said. She began to shrug off his coat, but he stopped her.

“You keep it,” he said. “It’s cold up here.”

She drew the coat around her, then headed back into the clinic. He saw an orderly search the coat for contraband, then return it to her. She looked back at him, waved, then was gone.

He did not know what happened subsequently. There were rumors of an argument with a fellow patient, and a painful, troubled session with one of the resident therapists. Whatever occurred, the next call he received from Phoenicia was to tell him that Alice was gone. He searched for her on the streets, but when she emerged after three weeks from whatever dark corner she had been inhabiting, that tiny light had been extinguished forever, and all he had left was a picture of a house that appeared to be fading even as he looked at it, and the memory of a last kiss from one who was, in her way, bonded more closely to him than any other in this world.

Now, for the first time since Martha’s appearance and the discovery of the remains in Williamsburg, Louis seemed energized. Angel knew what it meant. Someone was about to suffer for what had been done to Alice, and Angel didn’t care once it brought his partner some release.

They arrived at their rental.

“I hate these cars,” said Angel.

“Yeah, so you said already.”

“I’m just offended that she’d even think we looked like the kind of guys who’d drive a Camry.”

They placed their bags on the ground and watched as a man in rental livery approached them. He had a small titanium case in his hand.

“You forgot one of your bags,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Louis.

“No problem. Car okay?”

“My friend here doesn’t like it.”

The guy knelt, removed a penknife from his pocket, and carefully inserted the blade into the right front tire. He twisted the knife, removed it, and watched with satisfaction as the tire started to deflate.

“So go get something else,” he said, then walked out of the garage and into a waiting white SUV, which immediately drove away.

“I guess he doesn’t really work for a rental company,” said Angel.

“You should be a detective.”

“Doesn’t pay enough. I’ll go get us a decent car.”

Angel returned minutes later with the key to a red Mercury. Louis took the baggage and walked to the car, then popped the trunk. He glanced around before opening the titanium case. Two Glock nines were revealed, alongside eight spare clips bound with rubber bands into four sets of two. They wouldn’t need any more than that, unless they decided to declare war on Mexico. He slipped the guns into the outer pockets of his coat and added the clips, then closed the trunk. He got in the car and found “Shiver” playing on an indie station. Louis liked Howe Gelb. It was good to support the local boys. He passed one of the Glocks and two of the spare clips to Angel. Both men checked the guns, then, once they were satisfied, put them away.

“You know where we’re going?” said Angel.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Great. I hate reading maps.”

He reached for the radio dial.

“Don’t touch that dial, man, I’m warning you.”

“Boring.”

“Leave it.”

Angel sighed. They emerged from the gloom of the garage into the greater darkness outside. The sky was dusted with stars, and a little cool desert air flowed through the vents, refreshing the men.

“It’s beautiful,” said Angel.

“I guess.”

The smaller man took in the vista for a few seconds more, then said: “You think we could stop for doughnuts?”

It was late, and I was back at Cortlandt Alley, the taste of the Thai food still lingering in my mouth. I could hear laughter over on Lafayette as people smoked and flirted outside one of the local bars. The window of Ancient amp; Classic Inc. was illuminated, the men inside carefully positioning a new delivery of furniture and ornaments.

A sign warned of a hollow sidewalk, and I thought that I could almost hear my footsteps echoing through the layers beneath my feet.

I made my way to Neddo’s doorway. This time, he didn’t bother with the chain once I’d told him who I was. He led me into the same back office and offered me some tea.

“I get it from the people run the store at the corner. It’s good.”

I watched as he poured it into a pair of china cups so small they looked like they belonged in a doll’s house. As I held one in my hand I could see that it was very old, the interior a mass of tiny brown hairline cracks. The tea was fragrant and strong.

“I’ve been reading all about the killing in the newspapers,” said Neddo. “Kept your name out of it, I see.”

“Maybe they’re concerned for my safety.”

“More concerned than you are, clearly. Someone might suspect that you had a death wish, Mr. Parker.”

“I’m happy to say that it’s unfulfilled.”

“So far. I trust that you weren’t followed here. I have no desire to link my life expectancy with yours.”

I had been careful, and told him so.

“Tell me about Santa Muerte, Mr. Neddo.”

Neddo looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cleared.

“The Mexican who died. This is about him, isn’t it?

“Tell me first, then I’ll see what I can give you in return.”

Neddo nodded his assent.

“She’s a Mexican icon,” he said. “Saint Death: the angel of the outcasts, of the lawless. Even criminals and evil men need their saints. She is adored on the first day of every month, sometimes in public, more often in secret. Old women pray to her to save their sons and nephews from crime, while the same sons and nephews pray to her for good pickings, or for help in killing their enemies. Death is the last great power, Mr. Parker. Depending upon how its scythe falls, it can offer protection or destruction. It can be an accomplice or an assassin. Through Santa Muerte, Death is given form. She is a creation of men, not of God.”

Neddo rose and disappeared into the confusion of his store. He returned with a skull on a crude wooden block, wrapped in blue gauze decorated with images of the sun. It had been painted black, apart from its teeth, which were gold. Cheap earrings had been screwed into the bone, and a crude crown of painted wire sat upon its head.

“This,” said Neddo, “is Santa Muerte. She is typically presented as a skeleton or a decorated skull, often surrounded by offerings or candles. She enjoys sex, but since she has no flesh, she approves of the desires of others and lives vicariously through them. She wears gaudy clothes, and rings upon her fingers. She likes neat whiskey, cigarettes, and chocolate. Instead of singing hymns to her during services, they play mariachi music. She is the “Secret Saint.” The Virgin of Guadalupe may be the country’s patron saint, but Mexico is a place where people are poor and struggling, and turn to crime either through necessity or inclination. They remain profoundly religious, yet to survive they have to break the laws of church and state, albeit a state that they regard as profoundly corrupt. Santa Muerte allows them to reconcile their needs with their beliefs. There are shrines to her in Tepito, in Tijuana, in Sonora, in Juarez, wherever poor people gather.”

“It sounds like a cult.”

“It is a cult. The Catholic Church has condemned her adoration as devil worship, and while I have a great many difficulties with that institution, it’s not hard to see that in this case there is some justification for its position. Most of those who pray to her merely seek protection from harm in their own lives. There are others who require that she approve the visitation of harm upon others. The cult has grown powerful among the foulest of men: drug traffickers, people smugglers, purveyors of child prostitutes. There was a spate of killings in Sinaloa earlier this year in which more than fifty people died. Most of the bodies bore her image in tattoos, or on amulets and rings.”

He reached across and brushed a little dust from beneath the empty sockets of the icon.

“And they are far from the worst,” he concluded. “More tea?”

He refilled my cup.

“The man who died in the apartment had a statue like this one hidden in the wall of one room, and he called on Santa Muerte throughout the attack,” I said. “I think he, and maybe others, used the room to hurt and to kill. I believe the skull came from the woman I was looking for.”

Neddo glanced at the skull upon his own desk.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Had I known that, I would have been more sensitive about showing you this icon. I can remove it, if you prefer.”

“You can leave it. At least I know now what it was meant to represent.”

“The man you killed,” said Neddo, “have they identified him?”

“His name was Homero Garcia. He had a criminal record from his youth in Mexico.”

I didn’t tell Neddo that the Federales were very interested in Garcia. The news of his death had drawn a great many telephone calls to the Nine-Six from the Mexicans, including a formal request from the Mexican ambassador that the NYPD cooperate in every way possible with Mexican law enforcement by providing them with copies of any and all material relating to the investigation into Garcia’s death. Former juvenile offenders did not usually excite such interest in diplomatic and legal circles.

“Where did he come from?”

I was reluctant to say more. I still knew little about Neddo, and his fascination with the display of human remains made me uneasy. He recognized my distrust.

“Mr. Parker, you may approve or disapprove of my interests, and of how I make my living, but mark me: I know more about these matters than almost anyone else in this city. I have a scholar’s fascination. I can help you, but only if you tell me what you’ve learned.”

It seemed that I didn’t have too much choice.

“The Mexicans are more interested in him than they should be, given his record,” I said. “They’ve provided some information about him to the police, but it’s clear that they’re holding back on more. Garcia was born in Tapito, but his family left there when he was an infant. He began training as a silversmith. Apparently, it was a tradition in his family. It seems he was melting down stolen items in return for a cut of the resale value, which led to his arrest. He was jailed for three years, then was released and returned to his trade. Officially, he was never in trouble again after that.”

Neddo leaned forward in his chair.

“Where did he practice his craft, Mr. Parker?” he said, and there was a new urgency to his voice. “Where was he based?”

“In Juarez,” I said. “He was based in Juarez.”

Neddo released a long sigh of understanding.

“Women,” he said. “The girl for whom you were searching was not the first. I think Homero Garcia was a professional killer of women.”

Harry’s Best Rest was less than busy when the Mercury, considerably dustier than before, pulled up in the parking lot. There were still rigs scattered through the darkness, but there was nobody eating in the diner, and any lonely trucker looking for comfort from the cantina women could have enjoyed a range of choice had he arrived earlier in the evening, although the attentions of the police in the aftermath of the Spyhole killings had somewhat depleted even their numbers. The cantina was locked up for the night, and only two of the women remained, slouched sleepily at the bar in the hope of picking up a ride from the man who remained with them, smoking a joint and sipping a last Tecate in the murk, the carnival lights that illuminated the bar barely touching his features.

Harry was out back, stacking beer crates, when Louis emerged from the darkness.

“You own this place?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Harry. “You looking for something?”

“Someone,” Louis corrected. “Who takes care of the women around here?”

“The women around here take care of themselves,” said Harry. He smiled at his own little joke, then turned to go back inside. His partners would deal with this man, once he had informed them of his presence.

Harry found his way blocked by a small man with three days’ worth of stubble and a haircut that was a month past good. The guy looked like he was putting on a little weight, too. Harry didn’t mention that. Harry didn’t say anything, because the man at the door had a gun in his hand. It wasn’t quite pointed at Harry, but the situation was a developing one, and there was no telling right now how it might end.

“A name,” said Louis. “I want the name of the man who ran Sereta.”

“I don’t know any Sereta.”

“Past tense,” said Louis. “She’s dead. She died at the Spyhole.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Harry.

“You can tell her yourself, you don’t give me a name.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Those your cabanas over there?” asked Louis, indicating three little huts that stood right at the edge of the parking lot.

“Yeah, sometimes a man gets tired of sleeping in his truck. He wants to, he can have clean sheets for a night.”

“Or an hour.”

“Whatever.”

“If you don’t start cooperating, I’m going to take you into one of those cabanas, and I’m going to hurt you until you tell me what I need to know. If you give me his name, and you’re lying to me, I’ll come back, take you into one of those cabanas and kill you. You have a third option.”

“Octavio,” said Harry quickly. “His name’s Octavio, but he’s gone. He left when the whore got killed.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“She’d been working for a couple of days when men came. One was a fat guy, real fat, the other was a quiet guy in blue. They knew to ask for Octavio. They spoke to him some, then left. He told me to forget them. That night, all those folks got killed up at the motel.”

“Where did Octavio go?”

“I don’t know. Honest, he didn’t say. He was running scared.”

“Who’s looking after his women while he’s gone?”

“His nephew.”

“Describe him to me.”

“Tall, for a Mexican. Thin mustache. He’s wearing a green shirt, blue jeans, a white hat. He’s in there now.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ernesto.”

“Does he carry a gun?”

“Jesus, they all carry guns.”

“Call him.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Call him.’ Tell him there’s a girl out here wants to see him about work.”

“Then he’ll know I sold him out.”

“I’ll make sure he sees our guns. I’m sure he’ll understand your reasons. Now call him.”

Harry walked to the door.

“Ernesto,” he shouted. “Girl out here says she’d like to talk to you about some work.”

“Send her in,” said a man’s voice.

“She won’t come in. Says she’s frightened.”

The man swore. They heard his footsteps approach. The door was opened and a young Mexican stepped into the light. He looked sleepy, and the faint smell of pot hung about him.

“Stuff will ruin your health,” said Angel as he slipped behind the Mexican’s back and removed a silver Colt from the young man’s belt, his own gun touching the nape of Ernesto’s neck. “Although not as fast as a bullet will. Let’s take a walk.”

Louis turned to Harry.

“He won’t be coming back. You tell anyone what happened here, and we’ll be talking again. You’re a busy man. You have a lot of things to forget now.”

With that, they took Ernesto away. They drove for five miles until they found a dirt road, then headed into the darkness until they could no longer see the traffic on the highway. After a time, Ernesto told them what they wanted to know.

They drove on, coming at last to a shabby trailer that sat behind an unfinished house on unfenced land. The man named Octavio heard them coming and tried to run, but Louis shot him in the leg, Octavio tumbling down a sandy slope and coming to rest in a dried-out water hole. He was told to get rid of the gun in his hand, or die where he lay.

Octavio threw away the gun and watched as the twin shadows descended on him.

“The very worst,” said Neddo, “are in Juarez.”

The tea had grown cold. The image of Santa Muerte still stood between us, listening without hearing, watching blindly.

Juarez: now I understood.

One and a half million people lived in Juarez, most of them in indescribable poverty made all the more difficult for being endured in the shadow of El Paso’s wealth. Here were smugglers of drugs and people. Here were prostitutes barely into puberty, and others who would never live long enough to see puberty. Here were the maquiladoras, the huge electrical assembly plants that provided microwaves and hair dryers to the First World, the prices kept down by paying the workers ten dollars a day and denying them legal protection or union representation. Outside the perimeter fences stretched row upon row of crate houses, the colonias populares without sanitation, running water, electricity, or paved roads, home to the men and women who labored in the maquiladoras, the more fortunate of whom were picked up each morning by the red-and-green buses once used to ferry American children to and from school, while the rest were forced to endure the perilous early-morning walk through Sitio Colosio Valle or some similarly malodorous area. Beyond their homes lay the municipal dumps, where the scavengers made more than the factory workers. Here were the brothels of Mariscal, and the shooting galleries of Ugarte Street, where young men and women injected themselves with Mexican tar, a cheap heroin derivative from Sinaloa, leaving a trail of bloodied needles in their wake. Here were eight hundred gangs, each roaming the streets of the city with relative impunity, their members beyond a law that was powerless to act against them, or more properly too corrupt to care, for the Federales and the FBI no longer informed the local police in Juarez of operations on their turf, in the certain knowledge that to do so would be to forewarn their targets.

But that was not the worst of Juarez: in the last decade, over three hundred young women had been raped and murdered in the city, some putas, some faciles, but most simply hardworking, poor, and vulnerable girls. Usually, it was the scavengers that found them, lying mutilated among the garbage, but the authorities in Chihuahua continued to turn a blind eye to the killings, even as the bodies continued to turn up with numbing regularity. Recently, the Federales had been brought in to investigate, using accusations of organ-trafficking, a federal crime, as their excuse to intervene, but the organ-trafficking angle was largely a smoke screen. By far the most prevalent theories, bolstered by fear and paranoia, were the predations of wealthy men and the actions of religious cults, among them Santa Muerte.

Only one man had ever been convicted for any of the killings: the Egyptian Abdel Latif Sharif, allegedly linked to the slayings of up to twenty women. Even in jail, investigators claimed that Sharif continued his killings, paying members of Los Rebeldes, one of the city’s gangs, to murder women on his behalf. Each gang member who participated was reputedly paid a thousand pesos. When the members of Los Rebeldes were jailed, Sharif was said to have recruited instead a quartet of bus drivers who killed a further twenty women. Their reward: twelve hundred dollars per month, to be divided between them and a fifth man, as long as they killed at least four girls each month. Most of the charges against Sharif were dropped in 1999. Sharif was just one man, and even with his alleged associates could not have accounted for all of the victims. There were others operating, and they continued to kill even while Sharif was in jail.

“There is a place called Anapra,” said Neddo. “It is a slum, a shanty. Twenty-five thousand people live there in the shadow of Mount Christo Rey. Do you know what lies at the top of the mountain? A statue of Jesus.” He laughed hollowly. “Is it any wonder that people turn away from God and look instead to a skeletal deity? It was from Anapra that Sharif was said to have stolen many of his victims, and now others have taken it upon themselves to prey upon Anapra’s women, or on those of Mariscal. More and more, the bodies are being found with images of Santa Muerte upon them. Some have been mutilated after death, deprived of limbs, heads. If one is to believe the rumors, those responsible have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They are careful. They have protection. It’s said that they are wealthy, and that they enjoy their sport. It may be true. It may not.”

“There were tapes in Garcia’s apartment,” I said. “They showed women, dead and dying.”

Neddo had the decency to look troubled.

“Yet he was here, in New York,” said Neddo. “Perhaps he had outlived his usefulness and fled. Maybe he planned to use the tapes to blackmail the wrong people, or to secure his safety. It may even be that such a man would take pleasure from revisiting his crimes by viewing them over and over. Whatever the reason for his coming north, he does appear to provide a human link between Santa Muerte and the killings in Juarez. It’s not surprising that the Mexican authorities are interested in him, just as I am.”

“Aside from the connection to Santa Muerte, why would this be of concern to you?” I asked.

“Juarez has a small ossuary,” said Neddo, “a chapel decorated with the remains of the dead. It is not particularly notable, and no great skill was applied to its initial creation. For a long time it was allowed to fall into decay, but in recent years someone has devoted a great deal of time and effort to its restoration. I have visited it. Objects have been expertly repaired. There have even been new additions to its furnishings: sconces, candlesticks, a monstrance, all of far superior quality to the originals. The man responsible apparently claimed only to have used remains left to the ossuary for such a purpose, but I have my doubts. It was not possible to make a close examination of the work that had been done-the priest responsible for its upkeep was both secretive and fearful-but I believe that some of the bones were artificially aged, much like the skull that you brought to me that first evening. I asked to meet the man responsible, but he had already left Juarez. I heard later that the Federales were seeking him. It was said that they were under instructions to capture him alive, and not to kill him. That was a year ago.

“Across from the ossuary, the same individual had created a shrine to Santa Muerte: a very beautiful, very ornate shrine. If Homero Garcia came from Juarez, and was a devotee of Santa Muerte, then it’s possible that he and the restorer of the ossuary were one and the same. After all, a man capable of intricate work with silver might well be capable of similar work with other materials, including bone.”

He sat back in his chair. Once again, his fascination with the details was clear, just as it had been when he spoke about the preacher Faulkner and his book of skin and bones.

Perhaps Garcia had come to New York of his own volition, and without the assistance of others, but I doubted it. Someone had discovered his talents, found him the warehouse in Williamsburg, and given him a space in which to work. He had been brought north for his skill, out of reach of the Federales, and perhaps also away from those for whom he sourced, and disposed of, women. I thought again of the winged figure constructed from pieces of birds and animals and men. I remembered the empty crates, the discarded shards of bone that lay upon the worktable like the remnants of a craftsman’s labors. Whatever Garcia had been commissioned to create, his work was nearing completion when I killed him.

I looked at Neddo, but he was lost in the contemplation of Santa Muerte.

And even after all that he had told me, I wondered what it was that he was keeping from me.

My cell phone rang as I was nearing the hotel. It was Louis. He gave me the number of a pay phone and told me to call him back in turn from a land line. I called from the street, using my AT amp;T calling card to reach the number. I could hear traffic in the background, and people singing on the street.

“What have you got?” I said.

“The pimp running Sereta was called Octavio. He went to ground after she was killed, but we found his nephew, and through him we found Octavio. We hurt him. A lot. He told us he was going back to Mexico, to Juarez, where he came from. Hey, you still there?”

I had almost dropped the phone. This was the second mention of Juarez in less than an hour. I began joining the dots. Garcia may have known of Octavio from Juarez. Sereta fled New York and entered Octavio’s ambit. When Alice was found, she probably told them what she knew of her friend’s whereabouts. Garcia put out some feelers, and Octavio got back to him. Then two men were dispatched to find Sereta and retrieve what was in her possession.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll explain when you get back. Where’s Octavio now?”

“He’s dead.”

I took a deep breath but said nothing.

“Octavio had a contact in New York,” Louis continued. “He was to call him if anyone came asking about Sereta. It’s a lawyer. His name is Sekula.”

In Scarborough, Rachel sat on the edge of our bed, cradling Sam, who had at last fallen asleep. There was a patrol car outside the house, and the Scarborough cops had boarded up the shattered window. Rachel’s mother was beside her daughter, her hands clasped between her thighs.

“Call him, Rachel,” said Joan.

Rachel shook her head, but she was not responding to her mother.

“It can’t go on,” said Joan. “It just can’t go on like this.”

But Rachel just held her daughter close and did not reply.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Walter Cole got back to me the next morning. I was still asleep when he called. I had faxed him the list of the numbers called from Eddie Tager’s cell phone and asked him to see what he could do with them. If he had no luck, there were others I could turn to, this time outside the law. I just thought Walter could get the information more quickly than I could.

“You know that tampering with mail is a federal crime?” he said.

“I didn’t tamper. I mistakenly assumed that it was addressed to me.”

“Well, that’s good enough for me. Anyone can make a mistake. I have to tell you, though: I’m running out of favors I can call in. I think this is it.”

“You’ve done enough, and more. Don’t sweat it.”

“You want me to fax this to you?”

“Later. For now, just read me the names. Take them from around 1 A.M. on the date I marked. That’s about the time Alice was picked up on the streets.” Someone must have contacted Tager to tell him to bail Alice, and I was hoping that he had called that person back once he was done.

He read me the list of names, but I didn’t recognize any of them. Most of them were men. Two were women.

“Give me the women’s names again.”

“Gale Friedman and Hope Zahn.”

“The second one, was that a business or personal number?”

“It’s a cell. The bills go to a box number on the Upper West Side, registered with a private company named Robson Realty. Robson was part of the Ambassade group, the same one that was looking after the apartment development in Williamsburg. Seems like Tager called her twice: once at 4:04 A.M., and once at 4:35 A.M. There were no more calls from his cell until the next afternoon, and her number doesn’t show up again.”

Hope Zahn. I pictured Sekula in his pristine anteroom, asking his coldly beautiful secretary not to disturb him-No calls, please, Hope-while he sized me up. Sekula’s days were numbered.

“Is that any help?” asked Walter.

“You just confirmed something for me. Can you fax that info to my room?”

I had a personal fax machine on the desk in the corner. I gave him the number again.

“I also checked the cell phone number that G-Mack gave us,” said Walter. “The phone belonged to a Point junkie named Lucius Cope. Cope vanished three weeks ago.”

“If they had his phone, then he’s dead.”

“So, what now?”

“I have to go home. After that, it all depends.”

“On what?”

“The kindness of strangers, I guess. Or maybe kindness isn’t the right word…”

I headed out for coffee and called Sekula’s office along the way. A woman answered the phone, but I could tell that it wasn’t Sekula’s usual secretary. This girl was so chirpy she belonged in an aviary.

“Hello, could I speak to Hope Zahn, please?”

“Uh, I’m afraid she’s out of the office for a few days. Could I take a message?”

“How about Mr. Sekula?”

“He’s also unavailable.”

“When do you expect them back?”

“I’m sorry,” said the secretary, “but may I ask who’s calling?”

“Tell Hope that Eddie Tager called. It’s in connection with Alice Temple.”

At the very least, if Zahn or Sekula checked back with the office, it would give them something to think about.

“Does she have your number?”

“She’d like to think so,” I said, then thanked her for her time and hung up.

Sandy Crane was a little concerned about her husband, which meant that the week was turning into a real collection of firsts for her: the first promise of money in a while; the first mutual joy she and her husband had experienced since Larry had finally succumbed to senescence; and now concern for her husband’s well-being, albeit tinged by a considerable degree of self-interest. He hadn’t yet returned from his visit to his old war buddy, but he occasionally spent nights away from home, so it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. Usually, though, his absences coincided with horse races in Florida, and rarely now did he embark upon a journey with the sense of purpose he had shown the day before. Sandy knew that her husband liked to gamble. It worried her some, but so long as he kept it within reason, she wasn’t going to raise a fuss. If she started complaining about his spending, then he might in turn decide to curb her excesses, and Sandy had few enough luxuries in her life as things stood.

Sandy wouldn’t have put it past the old fart to try to cut her out of the deal entirely, though her fears were allayed slightly by the knowledge that Larry needed her. He was aged and weak, and he had no friends. Even if that stuck-up sonofabitch Hall agreed to play ball, Larry would need her by his side to make sure that he wasn’t taken for a ride. She was still a little surprised that Larry hadn’t called the night before, but he was like that. Perhaps he’d found a bar where he could bitch and moan for the night or, if Hall was willing to cooperate, where he could get himself a mild drunk on to celebrate. Even now, he was probably sleeping it off in a motel room between trips to the john to empty his bladder. Larry would be back, one way or another.

Sandy sipped a double vodka-another first, this time of day-and thought some more about what she might do with the money: new clothes, for a start, and a car that didn’t smell of old man stink. She also liked the idea of a younger guy, one with a firm body and a motor that purred instead of sputtering like the failing engines of the men who currently serviced her occasional needs. She wouldn’t object to paying by the hour for him, either. That way, there was nothing he could refuse to do for her.

The doorbell rang, and she spilled a little of her vodka in her rush to rise from her chair. Larry had a key, so it couldn’t be Larry. But suppose something had happened to him? Maybe that bastard Hall had allowed his conscience to get the better of him and confessed all to the cops. If that was the case, then Sandy Crane would plead dumber than the special kids in the little bus that passed by her house every morning, the spooky-faced people inside waving at her like they thought she gave a rat’s ass about them when they really just creeped her out worse than snakes and spiders.

A man and a woman stood at the door. They were well dressed: the man in a gray suit, the woman in a blue jacket and skirt. Even Sandy had to admit that the woman was a looker: long dark hair, pale features, tight body. The man carried a briefcase in his hand, and the woman a brown leather satchel over her right shoulder.

“Mrs. Crane?” said the man. “My name is Sekula. I’m an attorney from New York. This is my assistant, Miss Zahn. Your husband contacted our firm yesterday. He said he had an item in which we might be interested.”

Sandy didn’t know whether to curse her husband’s name or applaud his foresight. It depended on how things worked out for them, she supposed. The old fool was so anxious to ensure a sale that he’d contacted the people who’d sent the letter before he even had his hands on both the box and the paper it had once contained. She could almost picture him, a sly grin on his face as he convinced himself that he was playing these big-city folk like they were violins, except he wasn’t that smart. He’d given too much away, or raised their expectations so high that they were now at her door. Sandy wondered if he’d told them about Mark Hall, but immediately decided that he hadn’t. If they knew about Hall, then they would be standing on his doorstep, not her own.

“My husband isn’t here right now,” she said. “I’m expecting him back any moment.”

The smile on Sekula’s face didn’t falter.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if we waited for him. We really are anxious to secure the item as soon as possible, and with the minimum of fuss and attention.”

Sandy shifted uneasily on her feet.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure you people are okay and all, but I don’t really like letting strangers into my house.”

The smile seemingly etched on Sekula’s face was starting to creep her out like the smiles of the kids on the bus. There was something blank about it. Even shit-for-brains Hall managed to inject a little humanity into his hammy grins when he was trying to sell some deadbeat an automobile.

“I understand,” said Sekula. “I wonder if this might convince you of our good intentions?”

He leaned his briefcase against the wall, snapped the locks, and opened it so that Sandy could see the contents: a small stack of dead presidents lined up like little Mount Rushmores in green.

“Just a token of our goodwill,” said Sekula.

Sandy felt herself grow moist.

“I think I can make an exception,” she said. “Just this once.”

The funny thing about it was that Sekula didn’t want to harm the woman. That was how they had remained hidden for so long, when others had been hunted down. They did not hurt people unless it was absolutely necessary, or they had not until Sekula’s investigations had added a degree of urgency to their quest. The subsequent recruitment by Brightwell of the odious Garcia had marked the beginning of the next phase, and an escalation in violence.

Sekula was a longtime Believer. He was recruited to the cause shortly after his graduation from law school. The recruitment had been subtle, and gradual, drawing on his already prodigious legal skills to track suspicious sales and to ascertain ownership and origins wherever necessary, gradually progressing to more detailed explorations of the shadowy, secret lives that so many people concealed from those around them. He viewed this as a fascinating endeavor, even as he came to understand that he was being used to target the individuals for their exploitation rather than to assist in any prosecution, public or private. The information gathered by Sekula was utilized against them, and his employers amassed influence, knowledge, and wealth as a consequence, but Sekula quickly discovered that he was untroubled by this realization. He was a lawyer, after all, and had he entered the arena of criminal law, he would surely have found himself defending what most ordinary people would regard as the indefensible. By comparison, the work in which he was engaged was initially morally compromised in only the faintest of ways. He had grown wealthy as a result, wealthier than most of his peers who worked twice as hard as he, and he had gained other rewards too, Hope Zahn among them. He had been directed to employ her, and he had done so willingly. Since then, she had proved invaluable to him, both personally, professionally, and, it had to be admitted, sexually. If Sekula had a weakness, it was women, but Ms. Zahn fed his every sexual appetite, and some others that he didn’t even know were there until she discovered them for him.

And when, after a number of years, Sekula was informed of the true nature of their quest, he could barely work up the energy to be even slightly surprised. He wondered, sometimes, if this was an indication of the extent to which he had been corrupted, or whether it was always in his nature, and his employers had recognized it long before he himself had. In fact, it had been Sekula’s idea to target the veterans, inspired by his discovery of the details of a sale conducted through an intermediary in Switzerland shortly after the end of the Second World War. The sale had passed unnoticed amid the flurry of deals in the aftermath of the war, when looted items changed hands at a frightening rate, their previous owners, in many cases, reduced to a coating of ash on the trees of Eastern Europe. It was only when Sekula gained copies of the records of the auction house from a disgruntled employee aware of the lawyer’s willingness to pay moderately well for such information that the entry was revealed to him. Sekula was grateful to the Swiss for their scrupulous attention to detail, which meant that even deals of dubious origin were all recorded and accounted for. In many ways, he reflected, the Swiss had more in common with the Nazis in their desire to document their wrongdoings than they might like to admit.

The entry was straightforward, detailing the sale of a fourteenth-century jeweled monstrance to a private collector based in Helsinki. Included was a careful description of the item, sufficient to indicate to Sekula that it was part of the trove stolen from Fontfroide; the final sale price agreed; the house’s commission; and the balance to be forwarded to the seller. The nominal seller was a private dealer named Jacques Gaud, based in Paris. Sekula carefully followed the paper trail back to Gaud, then pounced. Gaud’s family had since built up their grandfather’s business and now enjoyed a considerable reputation in the trade. Sekula, by examining the records of the Swiss auction house, had found at least a dozen further transactions instigated by Gaud that could charitably be described as suspicious. He cross-checked the items in question against his own list of treasures looted or “disappeared” during the war, and came up with enough evidence to brand Gaud as a profiteer from the misery of others, and to effectively destroy the reputation of his descendants’ business as well as placing them at risk of ruinous criminal and civil actions. Following discreet approaches, and assurances from Sekula that the information he had obtained would go no further, the house of Gaud et Frères discreetly released to him copies of all the paperwork relating to the sale of the Fontfroide treasures.

It was there that the trail ran out, for the payment made through Gaud to the actual seller (following a deduction by Gaud for his assistance that was excessive to the point of extortion) was in the form of cash. The only clue that the current owners of the business were able to offer as to the identity of the men in question was that Gaud had indicated they were American soldiers. This was hardly surprising to Sekula, as the Allies were just as capable of looting as the Nazis, but he was aware of the twin massacres at Narbonne and Fontfroide. It was possible that survivors of the former might in turn have been involved in the latter, although the Americans were not present in the area in significant numbers by that phase of the war. Nevertheless, Sekula had identified a possible connection between the killing of a platoon of American GIs by SS raiders, and the SS raiders’ deaths, in turn, at Fontfroide. Through contacts in the Veterans Administration and the VFW, he discovered the identities of the surviving soldiers based in the region at the time, as well as the addresses of those others who had lost relatives in the encounter. He then sent out over a thousand letters seeking general information on wartime souvenirs that might be of interest to collectors, and a handful containing more specific information relating to the missing Fontfroide trove. If he was wrong, then there was always the chance that the letters might still elicit some useful information. If he was right, they would serve to cover his tracks. The target-specific letters detailed the rewards to be gained for the sale of unusual items deriving from the Second World War, including material not itself directly related to the conflict, with particular emphasis on manuscripts. It contained repeated assurances that all responses would be handled in the strictest confidence. The real bait was the entry from the auction catalog issued by the House of Stern, with its photograph of a battered silver box. Sekula could only hope that whoever had taken it had held on to both the box and its contents.

Then, late the previous morning, a man had called and described to Sekula what could only be a fragment of the map and the box in which it was contained. The caller was old, and tried to retain his anonymity, but he had given himself away from the moment that he used his home phone to dial New York. Now here they were, one day later, seated with an ugly drunk in polyester pants spotted with spilled vodka, watching as she got progressively more intoxicated.

“He’ll be home soon,” she repeatedly reassured the visitors, slurring her words. “I can’t imagine where he’s gotten to.”

Sandy asked them to show her the money again, and Sekula obliged. She ran a pudgy finger over the faces on the notes and giggled to herself.

“Wait until he sees all this,” she said. “The old fart will shit himself.”

“Perhaps, while we’re waiting, we might take a look at the item,” Sekula suggested.

Sandy tapped her nose with the side of her finger.

“All in good time,” she said. “Larry will get it for you, even if he has to beat it out of the old fuck.”

Sekula felt Miss Zahn tense beside him. For the first time, his unthreatening façade began to fragment.

“Do you mean that the item is not actually your husband’s to sell?” he asked, carefully.

Sandy Crane tried to retrieve her mistake, but it was too late.

“No, it’s his to sell, but you see there’s this other fella and, well, he has a say in it too. But he’ll agree. Larry will make him agree.”

“Who is he, Mrs. Crane?” said Sekula.

Sandy shook her head. If she told him, he’d go away and talk to Hall himself, and he’d take all that lovely money with him. She’d said too much already. It was time to clam up.

“He’ll be back soon,” she said firmly. “Believe me, it’s all taken care of.”

Sekula stood. It should have been easy. The money would have been handed over, the manuscript would have come into their possession, and they would simply have left. If Brightwell subsequently decided to kill the seller, then that was his call to make. He should have guessed that it would never be so simple.

Sekula wasn’t good at this part. That was why Miss Zahn was with him. Miss Zahn was very good at it, very good indeed. She was already on her feet, removing her jacket and unbuttoning her blouse while Sandy Crane watched, her mouth hanging open as she made vague sounds of incomprehension. It was only when Miss Zahn undid the last button and slipped the blouse from her body that the Crane woman at last began to understand.

Sekula thought the tattoos upon his lover’s body were fascinating, even if he found it almost impossible to imagine the pain that their creation must have caused her. Apart from her face and hands, her skin was entirely obscured by illustrations, the monstrous, distorted faces blending into one another so it was almost impossible to identify individual beings among them. Yet it was the eyes that were the most disturbing aspect, even for Sekula. There were so many of them, large and small, encompassing every imaginable color, like oval wounds upon her body. Now, as she advanced toward Sandy Crane, they seemed to alter, the pupils expanding and contracting, the eyes rotating in their sockets, exploring this new unfamiliar place, with the drunken woman now cowering before them.

But it was probably no more than a trick of the light.

Sekula stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He went into the dining room across the hall and sat down in an armchair. It gave him a clear view of the driveway and the street beyond. He tried to find a magazine to read, but all he could see were copies of Reader’s Digest and some supermarket tabloids. He heard Mrs. Crane say something in the room beyond, then her voice became muffled. Seconds later, Sekula grimaced as she started screaming against the gag.

The FBI’s New York field division had moved location so often in its history that it should have been staffed by Gypsies. In 1910, when it first opened, it was located in the old post office building, a site now occupied by City Hall Park. Since then, it had opened up shop at various points on Park Row; in the SubTreasury Building at Wall and Nassau; at Grand Central Terminal; in the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; on Broadway; and in the former Lincoln Warehouse at East Sixty-ninth, before finally making a home at the Jacob Javits Federal Building, down near Foley Square again.

I called the FBI shortly before eleven and asked to be put through to Special Agent Philip Bosworth, the man who had visited Neddo to inquire about his knowledge of Sedlec and the Believers. I got bounced around before ending up with the OSM’s department, or what used to be the chief clerk’s office before everybody got a shiny new title. The office service manager and his staff were responsible for noninvestigative matters. A man who identified himself as Grantley asked me my name and business. I gave him my license number and told him I was trying to get in touch with Special Agent Bosworth regarding a missing person investigation.

“Special Agent Bosworth is no longer with this office,” said Grantley.

“Well, can you tell me where I can find him?”

“No.”

“Can I give you my number and maybe you could pass it on to him?”

“No.”

“Can you help me in any way at all?”

“I don’t think so.”

I thanked him. I wasn’t sure for what, but it seemed the polite thing to do.

Edgar Ross was still one of the special agents in charge at the New York division. Unlike SACs in most of the other field offices, the SAC wasn’t the final authority in New York. Ross answered to the assistant director in charge, a pretty good guy named Wilmots, but Ross still had a whole family of hungry assistant SACs under his command and was therefore the most influential law enforcement official I knew. Our paths had crossed during the pursuit of the man who had killed Susan and Jennifer, and I think Ross felt he owed me a little slack as a result of what had occurred. I even suspected that he had a grudging affection for me, but maybe that was the result of my watching too many TV cop shows in which gruff lieutenants secretly harbored homoerotic fantasies about the mavericks under their command. I didn’t think Ross’s feelings about me went quite that far, but then he was a difficult man to read sometimes. One never knew.

I called his office shortly after I was done with Grantley. I gave my name to Ross’s secretary and waited. When she came back on the line, she told me that Ross wasn’t available, but said she’d pass on the fact that I’d called. I thought about holding my breath while I waited for him to call back, but figured that I’d have blacked out long before that ever happened. From the brief delay in our exchange, though, I gathered that Ross was around but had tightened up since last we spoke. I was anxious to get back to Rachel and Sam, but I wanted to accumulate all the information that I could before I left the city. I felt I had no option but to take an expensive cab ride down to Federal Plaza.

The area was a peculiar clash of cultures: on the east side of Broadway there were the big federal buildings, surrounded by concrete barricades and adorned with weird rusting pieces of modern sculpture. On the other side, directly facing the might of the FBI, were storefronts that advertised cheap watches and caps while doing a profitable sideline in assisting with immigration applications, and discount clothing stores that offered suits for $59.99. I grabbed a coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, then settled down to wait for Ross. He was, if nothing else, a man of routine. He’d confessed as much to me, the last time we’d met. I knew that he liked to eat most days at Stark’s Veranda, at the corner of Broadway and Thomas, a government hangout that had been around since the end of the nineteenth century, and I just hoped that he hadn’t suddenly taken to lunching at his desk. By the time he eventually emerged from his office I’d been waiting two hours and my coffee was long since finished, but I felt a touch of satisfaction at my investigative skills when he headed for the Veranda, quickly followed by the pain of rejection when I saw the expression on his face as I fell into step beside him.

“No,” he said. “Get lost.”

“You don’t write, you don’t call,” I said. “We’re losing touch. What we have now just isn’t the same as it used to be.”

“I don’t want to be in touch with you. I want you to leave me alone.”

“Buy me lunch?”

“No. No! What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”

He stopped at the crosswalk. It was a mistake. He should have taken his chances with the traffic.

“I’m trying to trace one of your agents,” I said.

“Look, I’m not your personal go-to guy at the Bureau,” said Ross. “I’m a busy man. There are terrorists out there, drug dealers, mobsters. They all require my attention. They take up a lot of my time. The rest, I save for people I like: my family, my friends, and basically anyone who isn’t you.”

He scowled at the oncoming traffic. He might even have been tempted to draw his gun and wave it around threateningly in order to cross.

“Come on, I know you secretly like me,” I said. “You’ve probably got my name written on your pencil case. The agent’s name is Philip Bosworth. The OSM’s office told me he was no longer with the division. I’d just like to get in touch with him.”

I had to give him credit for trying to shake me off. I took my eye off him for just a second, and instantly he was skipping through oncoming traffic like a government-funded Frogger. I caught up with him, though.

“I was hoping you’d be killed,” he said, but secretly I knew he was impressed.

“You pretend you’re such a tough guy,” I said, “but I know you’re all warm and fuzzy inside. Look, I just need to ask Bosworth some questions, that’s all.”

“Why? Why is he important to you?”

“The thing in Williamsburg, the human remains in the warehouse? He may know something about the background of the people involved.”

“People? I heard there was one guy. He got shot. You shot him. You shoot a lot of people. You ought to stop.”

We were at the entrance to the Veranda. If I tried to follow Ross inside, the staff would have my ass on the sidewalk faster than you could say “deadbeat.” I could see him balancing the wisdom of stepping inside and trying to forget about me against the possibility that I might know something useful-that, and the likelihood that I would still be outside when he was done, and the whole thing would just start over again.

“Somebody set him up there, gave him a place to live and work,” I said. “He didn’t do it alone.”

“The cops said you were investigating a missing person case.”

“How’d you know that?”

“We get bulletins. I had someone call the Nine-Six when your name came up.”

“See, I knew you cared.”

“Caring is relative. Who was the girl they found?”

“Alice Temple. Friend of a friend.”

“You don’t have too many friends, and I have my suspicions about some of the ones you do have. You keep bad company.”

“Do I have to listen to the lecture before you help me?”

“You see, that’s why things are always so difficult with you. You don’t know when to stop. I’ve never met a guy who was so keen on mixing it up.”

“Bosworth,” I said. “Philip Bosworth.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Someone will get back to you, maybe. Don’t call me, okay? Just don’t call me.”

The Veranda’s door opened, and we stepped aside to let a gaggle of old women leave. As the last of them departed, Ross slipped inside the restaurant. I was left holding the door.

I counted to five, waiting until just before he got out of sight.

“So,” I shouted, “I’ll call you, right?”

Mark Hall couldn’t stop vomiting. Ever since he’d come home, his stomach had bubbled with acid, until eventually it just rebelled and began spewing out its contents. He had barely slept the night before, and now his head and body ached dully. He was just thankful that his wife was away; otherwise, she’d have been fussing over him, insisting that a doctor should be called. Instead, he was free to slump on the bathroom floor, his cheek flat against the cool of the toilet bowl, waiting for the next spasm to hit. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. All he knew was that whenever he thought of what he’d done to Larry, the smell of Crane’s last breath came back to him, like Larry’s ghost was breathing upon him from the beyond, and a fresh bout of puking would immediately commence.

It was strange. He had hated Crane for so long. Every time Hall saw him, it was as though he were watching an imp grinning at him from beyond the grave, a reminder of the judgment he must inevitably face for his sins. He had long hoped that Crane would simply crawl off and die, but as in wartime, Larry Crane had proved to be a tenacious survivor.

Mark Hall had killed his share of men during the war: some of them from far away, distant figures falling in the echo of a rifle shot, others up close and personal, so that their blood had spattered his skin and stained his uniform. None of those deaths had troubled him after the first, as the naive boy who had taken the bus to basic training was transformed into a man capable of ending the life of another. It was a just war, and had he not killed them, then they would surely have dispatched him. But he had believed his days of killing to be far behind him, and he had never envisioned himself taking a knife to an unarmed old man, even one as odious as Larry Crane. The shock of it, and the disgust that it engendered, had sucked the energy from him, and nothing could ever be the same again.

Hall heard the doorbell ring, but he didn’t get up to answer it. He couldn’t. He was too weak to stand and too ashamed to face anyone even if he could. He stayed on the floor, his eyes closed. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he remembered, the bathroom door was opening, and he was looking at two pairs of feet: a woman’s and a man’s. His eyes followed the woman’s legs over her skirt to her hands. Hall thought that he could see blood on them. He wondered if his own hands looked the same way to her.

“Who are you?” he said. He could barely speak. His voice sounded like the slow sweepings of a yard brush over dusty ground.

“We’ve come to talk about Larry Crane,” said Sekula. Hall tried to raise his head to look, but it hurt him to move.

“I haven’t seen him,” said Hall.

Sekula squatted before the old man. He had a clean, scrubbed face and good teeth. Hall didn’t like him one bit.

“What are you, police?” said Hall. “If you’re cops, show me some ID.”

“Why would you think we are police, Mr. Hall? Is there something you’d like to share with us? Have you been a bad boy?”

Hall dry-retched, the memory of Larry Crane’s death smell coming back to him.

“Mr. Hall, we’re in kind of a hurry,” said Sekula. “I think you know what we’ve come for.”

Dumb, greedy Larry Crane. Even in death he had found a way to ruin Mark Hall.

“It’s gone,” said Hall. “He took it with him.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“To hell with you. Get out of my house.”

Sekula rose and nodded to Miss Zahn. This time, he stayed in the room, just to make sure that she understood the urgency of the situation. It didn’t take long. The old man started talking as soon as the needle approached his eye, but Miss Zahn inserted it anyway, just to be sure that he wasn’t lying. By that time, Sekula had looked away. The stink of vomit was already getting to him.

When she was done, they took Hall, now blind in his left eye, and bundled him into the car, then drove him to where he had dumped the body of Larry Crane in a muddy hollow beside a filthy swamp. The box was cradled against Crane’s chest, where Hall had placed it before leaving his old war buddy to rot. After all, he figured that if Crane wanted it so badly, he should take it with him wherever he was going.

Carefully, Sekula removed the box from the old man’s grasp, and opened it. The fragment was inside, and undamaged. The box had been well designed, capable of protecting its contents from water, from snow, from anything that might damage the information it held.

“It’s intact,” said Sekula to the woman. “We’re so close now.”

Mark Hall, the Auto King, sat on the dirt in his old man pants, his left hand cupped to his gouged eye. When Miss Zahn took him by the hand and led him to the water, he did not struggle, not even when she forced him to kneel and held his head beneath the surface until he drowned. When he grew still, they dragged him to the hollow and laid him beside his former comrade, uniting the two old men in death as they had been united, however unwillingly, in life.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Walter Cole called me as I was driving from the city.

“I’ve got more news,” he said. “The ME has confirmed the identity of the remains found in Garcia’s apartment. It’s Alice. Toxicology tests also revealed the presence of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, in a small section of tissue that was found still adhering to the base of her skull.”

“I’ve never heard of it. What does it do?”

“Apparently it’s a hallucinogenic drug, but it has very particular symptoms. It causes feelings of paranoia and makes users hallucinate alien intelligences, or monsters. Sometimes it makes them think that they’re traveling through time, or onto other planes of existence. Want to hear something else that’s interesting? They found traces of DMT in Garcia’s body too. The ME thinks it might have been administered through the food in his kitchen, but they’re still running tests.”

It was possible that Alice had been given the drug in order to make her more cooperative, allowing her captors to masquerade as her saviors once the effects of the drug began to wear off. But Garcia had been fed DMT too, perhaps as a means of keeping him under some form of control by ensuring that he remained in a state of near-constant fear. The dosage wouldn’t have to be high: just enough to keep him on edge, so that his paranoia could be manipulated if required.

“I’ve got one more thing for you,” said Walter. “The building in Williamsburg had a basement. The entrance was hidden behind a false wall. It seems we now know what Garcia was doing with the bones…”

It was the NYPD’s Forensic Investigation Division that found the basement. They had taken their time, going through the building floor by floor, working from the top down, checking the plans for the building against what they saw around them, noting what was recent and what was old. The cops who broke down the wall found a new steel door in the floor, nearly forty square feet and secured with heavy-duty locks and bolts. It took them an hour to get it open, backed up by the same Emergency Service Unit that had responded on the night Garcia died. When the door was open, the ESU descended a set of temporary wooden stairs into the darkness.

The space beneath was of the same dimensions as the main steel door, and some twelve feet deep. Garcia had been hard at work in the hidden space. Garlands of sharpened bone hung from the corners of the basement, meeting in a cluster of skulls at each corner. The walls had been concreted and inset with pieces of blackened bone to the halfway mark, sections of jawbones, femurs, finger bones and rib jutting out as though discovered in the course of some ongoing archaeological dig. Four towers of candleholders created from marble and bone stood in a square at the center of the room, the candles held in skull-and-bone arrangements similar to those I had discovered in Garcia’s apartment, with four chains of bones linking them, as though sealing off access to some as yet unknown addition to the ossuary. There was also a small alcove two or three feet in height, empty but clearly also awaiting the arrival of another element of display, perhaps the small bone sculpture that now rested in the trunk of my car.

The ME’s office was going to have a difficult task identifying the remains, but I knew where they could start: with a list of dead or missing women from the region of Juarez, Mexico, and the unfortunates who had disappeared from the streets of New York since Garcia’s arrival in the city, Lucius Cope among them.

I drove north. I made good time once I cleared the boroughs, and arrived in Boston shortly before 5 P.M. The House of Stern was situated in a side street almost within the shadow of the Fleet Center. It was an unusual location for such a business, audibly close to a strip of bars that included the local outpost of Hooters. The windows were smoked glass, with the company’s name written in discreet gold lettering across the bottom. To the right was a wood door, painted black, with an ornate gold knocker in the shape of a gaping mouth, and a gold mailbox filigreed with dragons chasing their tails. In a slightly less adult neighborhood, the door of House of Stern would have been a compulsory stop for Halloween trick-or-treaters.

I pressed the doorbell and waited. The door was opened by a young woman with bright red hair and purple nail polish that was chipped at the ends.

“I’m afraid we’re closed,” she said. “We open to the public from ten until four, Monday to Friday.”

“I’m not a customer,” I said. “My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to see Claudia Stern.”

“Is she expecting you?”

“No, but I think she’ll want to see me. Perhaps you might show her this.”

I handed over the box in my arms. The young woman looked at it a little dubiously, carefully removing the layers of newspaper so that she could see what was inside. She revealed a section of the bone statue, considered it silently for a moment, then opened the door wider to admit me. She told me to take a seat in a small reception area, then vanished through a half-open green door.

The room in which I sat was relatively unadorned, and a little down-at-the-heels. The carpet was worn and frayed and the wallpaper was wearing thin at the corners, heavily marked by the passage of people and the bumps and scrapes it had received during the movement of awkward objects. Two desks stood to my right, covered in papers and topped by a pair of sleeping computers. To my left were four packing crates from which piles of curly wood shavings poked like un-ruly clown hair. A series of lithographs hung on the wall behind them, depicting scenes of angelic conflict. I walked over to take a closer look at them. They were reminiscent of the work of Gustave Doré, the illustrator of The Divine Comedy, but the lithographs were tinted and appeared to be based on some other work unfamiliar to me.

“The angelic conflict,” said a female voice from behind me, “and the fall of the rebel host. They date from the early nineteenth century, commissioned by Dr. Richard Laurence, professor of Hebrew at Oxford, to illustrate his first English translation of the Book of Enoch, in 1821, then abandoned and left unused following a disagreement with the artist. These are among the only extant copies. The rest were all destroyed.”

I turned to face a small, attractive woman in her late fifties, dressed in black slacks and a white sweater smudged here and there with dark marks. Her hair was almost entirely gray, with only the faintest hint of dark at the temples. Her face was relatively unlined, the skin tight and the neck bearing only the slightest trace of wrinkles. If my estimate of her age was correct, she was wearing her years well.

“Ms. Stern?”

She shook my hand. “Claudia. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Parker.”

I returned my attention to the illustrations.

“Out of curiosity, why were the lithographs destroyed?”

“The artist was a Catholic named Knowles, who worked regularly for publishers in London and Oxford. He was quite accomplished, although somewhat derivative of others in his style. Knowles was unaware of the controversial nature of Enoch when he agreed to undertake the commission, and it was only when the subject of his work came up during discussions with his local parish priest that he was alerted to the history of the scripture in question. Do you know anything of the biblical apocrypha, Mr. Parker?”

“Nothing worth sharing,” I replied. That wasn’t entirely true. I had come across the Book of Enoch before, although I had never seen the actual text. The Traveling Man, the killer who had taken my wife and daughter, had made reference to it. It was just one of a number of obscure sources that had helped to fuel his fantasies.

She smiled, revealing white teeth that were yellowing only slightly at the edges and the gums.

“Then perhaps I can enlighten you, and you can in turn enlighten me about the object with which you introduced yourself to my assistant. The Book of Enoch was part of the accepted biblical canon for about five hundred years, and fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Laurence’s translation was based upon sources dating from the second century B.C., but the book itself may be older still. Most of what we know, or think we know, of the fall of the angels comes from Enoch, and it may have been that Jesus Christ himself was familiar with the work, for there are clear echoes of Enoch in some of the later gospels. It subsequently fell out of favor with theologians, largely because of its theories on the nature of angels.”

“Like how many can dance on the head of a pin?”

“In a way,” said Ms. Stern. “While there was at least some acceptance that the origins of evil on earth lay in the fall of the angels, their nature provoked disagreement. Were they corporeal? If so, what of their appetites? According to Enoch, the great sin of the dark angels was not pride, but lust: their desire to copulate with women, the most beautiful aspect of God’s greatest creation, humanity. This led to disobedience and a rebellion against God, and they were cast out of heaven as punishment. Such speculations found little favor with the church authorities, and Enoch was denounced and removed from the canon, with some even going so far as to declare it heretical in nature. Its contents were largely forgotten until 1773, when a Scottish explorer named James Bruce traveled to Ethiopia and secured three copies of the book that had been preserved by the church in that country. Fifty years later, Laurence produced his translation, and thus Enoch was revealed to the English-speaking world for the first time in over a millennium.”

“But without Knowles’s illustrations.”

“He was concerned about the controversy that might arise following its publication, and apparently his parish priest told him that he would refuse him the sacraments if he contributed to the work. Knowles notified Dr. Laurence of his decision, Laurence traveled to London to discuss the matter with him, and in the course of their discussions a heated argument arose. Knowles began casting his illustrations into the fire, the originals as well as the first copies. Laurence snatched what he could salvage from the artist’s desk and fled. To be honest, the illustrations are not particularly valuable in themselves, but I am fond of the story of their creation and decided to hold on to them, despite occasional requests that they be offered for sale. In a way, they symbolize what this house has always set out to do: to ensure that ignorance and fear do not contribute to the destruction of arcane art and that all such pieces find their way to those who would most appreciate them. Now, if you’d like to come with me, we can discuss your own piece.”

I followed her through the green door and down a corridor that led to a workshop area. Here, the secretary with the red hair was checking the condition of some leather-bound books in one corner, while in another a middle-aged man with receding brown hair worked on a painting illuminated by a series of lamps.

“You’ve come along at an interesting time,” said Claudia Stern. “We’re preparing for an auction, the centerpiece of which is an item with links to Sedlec, a quality that it shares with your own statue. But then, I imagine that you knew this already, given your presence here. Might I ask who recommended that you bring the bone sculpture to me?”

“A man named Charles Neddo. He’s a dealer in New York.”

“I know of Mr. Neddo. He is a gifted amateur. He occasionally comes up with some unusual objects, but he has never learned to distinguish between what is valuable and what should be discarded and forgotten.”

“He spoke highly of you.”

“I’m not surprised. Frankly, Mr. Parker, this house is expert in such matters, a reputation painstakingly acquired over the last decade. Before we came on the scene, arcane artifacts were the preserve of back-street merchants, grubby men in dank basements. Occasionally, one of the established names would sell ‘dark material,’ as it was sometimes known, but none of them really specialized in the area. Stern is unique, and it is rarely that a seller of arcana fails to consult us first before putting an item up for auction. Similarly, a great many individuals approach us on both a formal and informal basis with queries relating to collections, manuscripts, even human remains.”

She moved to a table, upon which stood the statue found in Garcia’s apartment, now carefully positioned on a rotatable wheel. Her finger flipped the button on a desk lamp, casting white light upon the bones.

“Which brings us to this fellow. I assume Mr. Neddo told you something of the image’s origins?”

“He seemed to think that it was a representation of a demon trapped in silver sometime in the fifteenth century. He called it the Black Angel.”

“Immael,” said Ms. Stern. “One of the more interesting figures in demonic mythology. It’s rare to find a naming so recent.”

“A naming?”

“According to Enoch, two hundred angels rebelled, and they were cast down initially on a mountain called Armon, or Hermon: herem, in Hebrew, means a curse. Some, of course, descended farther, and founded hell, but others remained on earth. Enoch gives the names of nineteen, I think. Immael is not among them, although that of his twin, Ashmael, is included in certain versions. In fact, the first record of Immael derives from manuscripts written in Sedlec after 1421, the year in which the Black Angel is reputed to have been created, all of which has contributed to its mythology.”

She slowly turned the wheel, examining the sculpture from every possible angle.

“Where did you say you found this?”

“I didn’t.”

She lowered her chin and peered at me over the tops of her half glasses.

“No, you didn’t, did you? I should like to know, before I go any farther.”

“The original owner, who was also probably the artist responsible, is dead. He was a Mexican named Garcia. Neddo believed that he was also behind the restoration of an ossuary in Juarez, and the creation of a shrine to a Mexican figurehead called Santa Muerte.”

“How did the late Mr. Garcia meet his end?”

“You don’t read the papers?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“He was shot.”

“Most unfortunate. He appeared to have considerable talent, if he made this. It really is very beautiful. My guess is that the human bones used are not old. I see little evidence of wear. The majority are from children, probably chosen for reasons of scale. There are also some canine and avian bones, and the nails on the ends of its limbs appear to be cat claws. It’s most remarkable, but probably unsalable. Questions would be asked about the provenance of the child bones. There is the strong possibility that they may be linked to the commission of a crime. Anyone trying either to buy or sell it without involving the authorities would leave him- or herself open to charges of obstructing the course of justice, at the very least.”

“I wasn’t trying to sell it. The man who made this was involved in the killing of at least two young women in the United States, and perhaps many more in Mexico. Someone arranged for him to come north to New York. I want to find out who that might have been.”

“So where does the statue fit in, and why bring it to me?”

“I thought it might pique your interest and allow me to ask you some questions.”

“Which it did.”

“I’ve been holding one question back: What can you tell me about the Believers?”

Ms. Stern killed the light. The gesture allowed her a moment to compose her features and to hide partially the expression of alarm that briefly transformed them.

“I’m not sure that I understand.”

“I found a symbol carved inside a skull in Garcia’s apartment. It was a grapnel. According to Neddo, it’s used by a group of some kind, a cult, to identify its members and to mark some of its victims. The Believers have an interest in the history of Sedlec and in the recovery of the original statue of the Black Angel, assuming it even exists. You’re about to auction off a fragment of a vellum map that is supposed to contain clues to the location of the statue. I would imagine that would be enough to attract the attention of these people.”

I thought Ms. Stern was going to spit on the ground, so obvious was her distaste at the subject I had raised.

“The Believers, as they term themselves, are freaks. As I’m sure Mr. Neddo informed you, we sometimes deal with strange individuals in the course of our work, but most of them are harmless. They are collectors and can be forgiven their enthusiasms, as they would never hurt another human being. The Believers are another matter. If the rumors are to be credited, and they are only rumors, they have existed for centuries, and their formation was a direct result of the confrontation in Bohemia between Erdric and Immael. Their numbers are small, and they keep a very low profile. The sole reason for their existence is to reunite the Black Angels.”

“Angels? Neddo only told me about one statue.”

“Not a statue,” said Ms Stern, “but a being.”

She led me to where the man with receding hair was working upon the restoration of the painting. It was a large canvas, about ten feet by eight, and depicted a battleground. Fires burned on distant hills, and great armies moved through ruined houses and scorched fields. The detail was intricate, each figure beautifully and carefully painted, although it was difficult to tell if what I was seeing was the battle itself or its aftermath. There appeared to be pockets of fighting continuing in sections of the painting, but most of the central area consisted of courtiers surrounding a regal figure. Some distance from him, a one-eyed leader rallied troops to himself.

The work had been placed upon an easel and surrounded by lights, almost like a patient in an operating theater. Upon the shelves around it stood microscopes, lenses, scalpels, magnifying glasses, and jars of assorted chemicals. While I watched, the restorer took a thin wooden stick and scored it with a penknife, then pushed it into cotton and rotated it to create a cotton bud of the required thickness. When he was satisfied with his creation, he dipped it into a jar of liquid and began carefully applying it to the surface of the painting.

“That’s acetone mixed with white spirit,” said Ms. Stern. “It’s used to clean away unwanted layers of varnish, tobacco, and fire smoke, the effects of pollution and oxidation. One has to be careful to find the correct chemical balance for every painting, because the requirements of each one will be quite unique. The intention is to achieve a strength sufficient to remove dirt and varnish, even paint added by later artists or restorers, without burning through to the original layers beneath. This has been, and continues to be, a particularly painstaking restoration, as the anonymous artist used an interesting mixture of techniques.”

She pointed to two or three areas in the work where the paint appeared exceptionally thick.

“Here, he has used oil-free paints, giving his pigment an unusual consistency, as you can see. The impasto-the thicker areas of paint-have accumulated layers of dust in the grooves, which we’ve had to remove with a combination of acetone and scalpel work.”

Again her hands danced across the work, almost but not quite touching the surface.

“There is also a great deal of craquelure, this web effect where the old pigments have dried and degraded over time. Now, let me show you something.”

She found a smaller painting, depicting a solemn-looking man in ermine and a black hat. Across the room, her secretary abandoned her work and moved over to join us. Apparently, Claudia Stern’s master classes were worth attending.

“In case you were wondering, this is the alchemist Dr. Dee,” she explained. “We are due to offer this for sale at our auction, alongside the painting upon which James is currently working. Now, let me adjust the lighting.”

She turned off the large lights surrounding the paintings, using a central switch. For a moment we were in semidarkness, until our corner of the room was suddenly illuminated by an ultraviolet glow. Our teeth and eyes now shone purple, but the greatest change was visible upon the two paintings. The smaller work, the depiction of the alchemist Dee, was spattered with specks and dots, as though the entire work had been attacked by a demented student of Jackson Pollock. The larger painting, though, was almost entirely clear of such marks, apart from a thin half-moon in one corner where the restorer was still working.

“The dots on the portrait of Dee are called ‘overpaint,’ and they show the parts where previous restorers have retouched or filled in damaged areas,” said Miss Stern. “If one were to perform the same experiment in almost any great gallery in the world, one would witness the same effect on most of the works present. The preservation of works of art is a constant process, and it has always been so.”

Miss Stern lit the main lights once again.

“Do you know what a ‘sleeper’ is, Mr. Parker? In our business, it is an object whose value is unrecognized by an auction house, and that subsequently passes into the hands of a buyer who realizes its true nature. This battlefield painting is just such a sleeper: it was discovered in a provincial auction house in Somerset, England, and bought for the equivalent of one thousand dollars. It’s clear that the sleeper has not been restored at any point in its existence, although it appears to have been kept in relatively good condition, apart from the inevitable effects of natural aging. Yet there was one large area of concealment in the bottom right-hand corner, noticeable once the overpaint was revealed by the ultraviolet light. Originally, sections of this work had been crudely worked upon to conceal some of the detail it contained. It was uncovered relatively easily. What you are seeing here is the second stage of the restoration. Take a step back and look at that area with a new eye.”

The bottom right-hand corner showed the bodies of monks, all of them wearing white, hanging from the wall of a monastery. Human bones were stacked like kindling beneath their feet, and one of the monks had an arrow in the center of his forehead. A grapnel had been painted upon the front of each monk’s robes in what appeared to be blood. A group of mounted soldiers was riding away from them, led by a tall armored figure with a white mote in his right eye. Human heads dangled from their saddles, and their horses wore spikes upon their foreheads.

If the bearded figure was their leader, it was to one of his men that one’s eye was immediately drawn. He was not riding a horse, but instead walked alongside his captain, bearing a bloodied sword in his right hand. He was a fat imp, gross and deformed, with a great goiter or tumor at his neck. He wore a tunic of leather plates that failed to conceal the enormity of his belly, and his legs seemed almost to be collapsing under the weight of his body. There was blood around his mouth, where he had fed upon the dead. In his left hand he held aloft a banner bearing the symbol of the grapnel.

“Why was this hidden?” I asked.

“This is the aftermath of the sacking of the monastery at Sedlec,” said Miss Stern. “The killing of the monks during a period of truce was first blamed upon Jan Ziska and his Hussites, but this painting may be closer to the truth. It seems to suggest that the killings were the work of mercenaries, operating in the confusion of the aftermath and led by these two men. Later documentary evidence, including the testimony of eyewitnesses, supports the artist’s version of events.”

She spread the index and middle fingers of her right hand to indicate the bearded rider and the grotesque figure cavorting beside him. “This one”-she indicated the fat man-“has no name. Their leader was known simply as ‘the Captain,’ but if one is to believe the myths surrounding Sedlec, he was really Ashmael, the original Black Angel. According to the old stories, after the banishment from heaven, Ashmael was shunned by the company of the fallen because his eyes were marked by his last glimpse of God. In his loneliness, Ashmael tore himself in two so that he would have company in his wanderings, and he gave the name Immael to his twin. Eventually, they grew weary and descended into the depths of the earth near Sedlec, where they slept until the mines were dug. Then they awoke, and found the world above at war, so they began fomenting conflict, playing one side off against the other, until at last Immael was confronted and cast down into molten silver. Ashmael immediately commenced searching for him, but when he reached the monastery the statue had already been spirited away, so he avenged himself on the monks and continued his quest, a quest which, according to the tenets of the Believers, goes on to this day. So now you know, Mr. Parker. The Believers exist to reunite two halves of a fallen angel. It is a wonderful story, and now I plan to sell it in return for twenty percent of the final price. In the end, I am the only person who will profit from the story of the Black Angels.”

I was home before midnight. The house was silent. I went upstairs and found Rachel asleep. I didn’t wake her. Instead, I was about to check up on Sam when Rachel’s mother appeared at the door and, putting a finger to her lips to hush me, indicated that I should follow her downstairs.

“Would you like coffee?” she asked.

“Coffee would be good.”

She heated some water and retrieved the ground beans from the freezer. I didn’t speak as she went about preparing the coffee. I sensed that it wasn’t my place to begin whatever conversation we were about to have.

Joan placed a cup of coffee in front of me and cradled her own in her hands.

“We had a problem,” she said. She didn’t look at me as she spoke.

“What kind of problem?”

“Someone tried to get into the house through Sam’s window.”

“A burglar?”

“We don’t know. The police seem to think so, but Rachel and I, we’re not so sure.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t set the motion sensors off. The sensors weren’t disabled either, so we can’t figure out how they got to the house. And this is going to sound crazy, I know, but it seemed as if they were crawling up the exterior. We heard one of them moving on the outside wall behind Rachel’s bed. There was another on the roof, and when Rachel went into Sam’s room, she says she saw a woman’s face at the window, but it was upside down. She shot at it and-”

“She what?”

“I’d taken Sam out of the room, and Rachel had set off the panic button. She had a gun, and she shot the window out. We had it replaced today.”

I hid my face in my hands for a few moments, saying nothing.

I felt something touch my fingers, and Joan took my hand in hers.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I know that sometimes it might seem like Frank and I are hard on you, and I know you and Frank don’t get along too well, but you have to understand that we love Rachel, and we love Sam. We know that you love them too, and that Rachel cares about you, and loves you more deeply than she’s ever loved any other man in her life. But the feelings she has for you are costing her a great deal. They’ve put her life at risk in the past, and they’re bringing her pain now.”

Something caught in my throat when I tried to speak. I took a sip of coffee to try to dislodge it, but it would not be moved.

“Rachel has told you about her brother, Curtis,” said Joan.

“Yes,” I said. “He sounded like he was a good man.”

Joan smiled at the description.

“Curtis was pretty wild when he was a teenager,” said Joan, “and wilder still when he was in his twenties. He had a girlfriend, Justine, and, boy, he drove her crazy. She was much gentler than he was, and though he always looked out for her, I think he kind of frightened her some, and she left him for a time. He couldn’t understand why, and I had to sit him down and explain to him that it was okay to cut loose a little, that young men did those kinds of things, but at some point you had to start behaving like an adult, and rein in the young part. It didn’t mean that you had to spend the rest of your life in a suit and tie, never raising your voice or stepping out of line, but you had to recognize that the rewards a relationship brought came at a price. The cost was a whole lot less than what you got in return, but it was a sacrifice nonetheless. If he wasn’t prepared to make that sacrifice by growing up, then he had to just let her go and accept that she wasn’t for him. He decided that he wanted to be with her. It took some time, but he changed. He was still the same boy at heart, of course, and that wild streak never left him, but he kept it in check, the way you might train a horse so you can harness its power and channel its energy. Eventually, he became a policeman, and he was good at what he did. Those people who killed him made the world a poorer place by taking him from it, and they broke so many hearts, just so many.

“I never thought I’d be having that conversation again with a man, and I understand that the circumstances are not the same. I know all that you’ve gone through, and I can imagine some of your pain. But you have to choose between the life you’re being offered here, with a woman and a child, maybe a second marriage and more children to come, and this other life that you lead. If something happens to you because of it, then Rachel will have lost two men that she loved to violence; but if something happens to her or to Sam as a consequence of what you do, then everyone who loves Rachel and Sam will be torn apart, and you worst of all, because I don’t believe that you could survive that loss a second time. Nobody could.

“You’re a good man, and I understand that you’re driven to try to make things right for people who can’t help themselves, for those who’ve been hurt, or even killed. There’s something noble in that, but I don’t think you’re concerned with nobility. It’s sacrifice, but not the right kind. You’re trying to make up for things that can never be undone, and you blame yourself for allowing them to occur even though it wasn’t in your power to stop them. But at some point you’re going to have to stop blaming yourself. You’re going to have to stop trying to change the past. All of that is gone, hard as it may be to accept. What you have now is new hope. Don’t let it slip away, and don’t let it be taken from you.”

Joan rose and emptied the remains of her coffee into the sink, then placed the mug in the dishwasher.

“I think Rachel and Sam are going to come stay with us for a little while,” she said. “You need time to finish whatever it is you’re doing, and to think. I’m not trying to come between you. None of us is. I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you if that was the case. But she’s frightened and unhappy, and that’s not even taking into account the aftermath of the birth and all the confused feelings that brings with it. She needs to be around other people for a time, people who’ll be there for her round the clock.”

“I understand,” I said.

Joan placed her hand on my shoulder, then kissed me gently on the forehead.

“My daughter loves you, and I respect her judgment more than that of anyone else that I know. She sees something in you. I can see it too. You need to remember that. If you forget it, then it’s all lost.”

The Black Angel walked in the moonlight, through tourists and residents, past stores and galleries, scenting coffee and gasoline on the air, distant bells tolling the coming of the hour. It examined the faces of the crowds, always seeking those that it might recognize, watching for eyes that lingered a second too long upon its face and form. It had left Brightwell in the office, lost among shadows and old things, and now replayed their conversation in its head. It smiled faintly as it did so, and lovers smiled too, believing that they saw in the expression of the passing stranger the remembrance of a recent kiss, and a parting embrace. That was the Angel’s secret: it could cloak the vilest of feelings in the most beautiful of colors, for otherwise no one would choose to follow its path.

Brightwell had not been smiling when earlier they had met.

“It is him,” said Brightwell.

“You are jumping at shadows,” the Black Angel replied.

Brightwell withdrew a sheaf of copied papers from the folds of his coat and placed them before the angel. He watched as its hand flicked through them, taking in snatches of headlines and stories, and with each page that it read its interest grew, until at last it was crouched over the desk, its shadow falling upon words and pictures, its fingers lingering upon names and places from cases now solved or buried: Charon, Pudd, Charleston, Faulkner, Eagle Lake, Kittim.

Kittim.

“It could be coincidence,” said the angel softly, but it was said without conviction, less a statement than a step in an ongoing process of reasoning.

“So many?” said Brightwell. “I don’t believe that. He has been haunting our footsteps.”

“It’s not possible. There is no way that he can know his own nature.”

“We know our nature,” said Brightwell.

The angel stared intently into Brightwell’s eyes and saw anger, and curiosity, and the desire for revenge.

And fear? Yes, perhaps just a little.

“It was a mistake to go to the house,” said the angel.

“I thought we could use the child to draw him to us.”

The Black Angel stared at Brightwell. No, it thought, you wanted the child for more than that. Your urge to inflict pain has always been your undoing.

“You don’t listen,” it said to him. “I’ve warned you about drawing attention to us, especially at so delicate a juncture.”

Brightwell appeared about to protest, but the angel stood and removed its coat from the antique coat stand by its desk.

“I need to go out for a while. Stay here. Rest. I’ll return soon.”

And so the angel now walked the streets, like a slick of oil trailing through the tide of humanity, that smile darting occasionally across its face, never lingering for more than a second or two, and never quite reaching its eyes. Once an hour had gone by, it returned to its lair, where Brightwell sat patiently in a shadowy corner, far from the light.

“Confront him if you wish, if it will confirm or disprove what you believe.”

“Hurt him?” said Brightwell.

“If you have to.”

There was no need to ask the last question, the one that remained unspoken. There would be no killing, for to kill him would be to release him, and he might never be found again.

Sam lay awake in her crib. She didn’t look at me as I approached. Instead, her gaze was fixed raptly on something above and beyond the bars. Her tiny hands made grabbing motions, and she seemed to be smiling. I had seen her like that before, when Rachel or I stood over her, either talking to her or offering her some bauble or toy. I moved closer, and felt a coldness in the air around her. Still Sam didn’t look at me. Instead, she gave what sounded like a little giggle of amusement.

I reached across the crib, my fingers outstretched. For the briefest of moments, I thought that I felt a substance brush against my fingers, like gossamer or silk. Then it was gone, and the coldness with it. Immediately, Sam began to cry. I took her in my arms and held her, but she wouldn’t stop. There was movement behind me, and Rachel appeared at my side.

“I’ll take her,” she said, her arms reaching for Sam and irritation in her voice.

“It’s okay. I can hold her.”

“I said I’ll take her,” she snapped, and it was more than annoyance. I had been called to scenes of domestic arguments as a cop and seen mothers latch on to their children in the same way, anxious to protect them from any threat of violence, even as their husbands or partners attempted to make up for whatever they had done or had threatened to do, once the police were there. I had seen the look in those women’s eyes. It was the same as the one that I saw in Rachel’s. I handed the baby to her without a word.

“Why did you have to wake her?” said Rachel, holding Sam against her and stroking her gently on the back. “It took me hours to get her down.”

I found my voice.

“She was awake. I just went over to look at her, and-”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s done now.”

She turned her back to me, and I left them both and undressed in the bathroom, then took a long shower. When I was done, I went downstairs and found a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, then headed into my office and rousted Walter from the couch. I’d make a bed there for the night. Sam had stopped crying, and there was no sound from upstairs for a time, until at last I heard Rachel’s soft footfalls on the stairs. She had put on a dressing gown over her nightshirt. Her feet were bare. She leaned against the door, watching me. I couldn’t say anything at first. When I tried to speak there was again that tickling in my throat. I wanted to shout at her, and I wanted to hold her. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that everything would be all right, and I wanted her to say the same to me, even if neither of us was telling the entire truth.

“I was just tired,” she said. “I was surprised to see you back.”

Despite all that Joan had said, I still wanted more.

“You acted like you thought I was going to drop her, or hurt her,” I said. “It’s not the first time, either.”

“No, it’s not that,” she said. She moved toward me. “I know you’d never do anything to harm her.”

Rachel tried to touch my hair, and to my shame, I pulled away. She started to cry, and the sight of her tears was shocking to me.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s-you weren’t here, and someone came. Something came, and I was frightened. Do you understand? I’m scared, and I hate being scared. I’m better than that, but you make me feel this way.”

Now it was out. Her voice was raised as her face contorted into an expression of utter hurt and rage and grief.

“You make me feel this way for Sam, for myself, for you. You go away when we need you to be here, and you put yourself in harm’s way for-for what? For strangers, for people you’ve never met? I’m here. Sam is here. This is your life now. You’re a father, you’re my lover. I love you-God Jesus, I do love you, I love you so much-but you can’t keep doing this to me and to us. You have to choose, because I can’t go through another year like this one. Do you know what I’ve done? Do you know what your work has made me do? I have blood on my hands. I can smell it on my fingers. I look out of the window and I can see the place where I spilled it. Every day I glimpse those trees, and I remember what happened there. It all comes back to me. I killed a man to protect our daughter, and last night I would have done it again. I took his life out there in the marshes, and I was glad. I hit him, and I hit him again, and I wanted to keep hitting him. I wanted to tear him to pieces, and for him to feel every second of it, every last iota of pain. I saw the blood rise in the water, and I watched him drown, and I was happy when he died. I knew what he wanted to do to me and to my baby, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. I hated him, and I hated you for making me do what I did, for putting me in that place. Do you hear me? I hated you.”

Slowly, she slid to the floor. Her mouth was wide-open, her lower lip curled in upon itself, tears falling and falling and falling, misery without end.

“I hated you,” she repeated. “Don’t you understand? I can’t do this. I can’t hate you.”

And then the words ceased and there were only sounds without meaning. I heard Sam crying, but I couldn’t go to her. All that I could do was reach out to Rachel, whispering and kissing as I tried to quell the pain, until at last we lay upon the floor together, her fingers on my back and her mouth against my neck as we tried to hold on to all that we were losing by binding ourselves to each other.

We slept together that night. In the morning she packed some things, put the baby in the child seat in Joan’s car, and prepared to leave.

“We’ll talk,” I said, as she stood by the car.

“Yes.”

I kissed her on the mouth. She put her arms around me, and her fingers touched the back of my neck. They lingered there, and then were gone, but the scent of her remained, even after the car had disappeared, even after the rain came, even after sunlight faded and darkness rose and the stars scattered the night sky like sequins fallen from the gown of a woman half-imagined, half-recalled.

And through the emptiness of the house a cold crept, and as I fell into sleep a voice whispered:

I told you she would leave. Only we remain.

A touch like gossamer fell upon my skin, and Rachel’s perfume was lost in the stink of earth and blood.

And in New York, the young prostitute named Ellen woke from her place beside G-Mack and felt a hand upon her mouth. She tried to struggle, until she felt the cool of the gunmetal against her cheek.

“Close your eyes,” said a man’s voice, and she thought that she recognized it from somewhere. “Close your eyes and be still.”

She did as she was told. The hand remained over her mouth, but the gun was moved away from her. Beside her, she heard G-Mack start to wake. The painkillers made him drowsy, but they usually wore off during the night, forcing him to take some more.

“Huh?” said G-Mack.

She heard five words spoken, then there was a sound like a book being dropped upon the floor. The hand was removed from her mouth.

“Keep your eyes closed,” said the voice.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut until she was certain that the man was gone. When she opened them again, there was a hole in G-Mack’s forehead and the pillows were red with his blood.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Without Rachel and Sam around, I fell into a black place. I don’t recall much of the twenty-four hours that followed their departure. I slept, I ate little, and I didn’t answer the phone. I thought about drinking, but I was already so consumed by self-loathing that I was unable to lower myself further. Messages were left, but none that mattered, and after a time I just stopped listening to them. I tried to watch some television, even flicked through the newspaper, but nothing could hold my attention. I pushed thoughts of Alice, of Louis, of Martha far from me. I wanted no part of them.

And as the hours crept slowly by a pain grew inside me, like an ulcer bleeding into my system. I lay fetally upon the couch, my knees drawn into my chest, and spasmed as the hurt ebbed and flowed. I thought that I heard noises from upstairs, the footsteps of a mother and a child, but when I went to look there was nobody there. A towel had fallen from the clothes dryer, the door of which now stood open, and I could not recall if it was I who had left it that way. I thought about calling Rachel every second minute, but I did not lift the phone. I knew that nothing would come of it if I did. What could I say to her? What promises could I make without doubting, even as I spoke the words, that I would be able to keep them?

Again and again, Joan’s words came back to me. I had lost so much once; such a loss would be unendurable a second time. In the new and unwelcome quiet of the house, I felt time slipping once more, so that past and present blurred, the dams that I had tried so hard to erect between what was and what yet might be weakening still further, spilling agonizing memories into my new life, mocking the hope that old ghosts could ever be laid to rest.

It was the silence that brought them, the sense of existences briefly halted. Rachel still had clothes in the closets and cosmetics on her dressing table. Her shampoo hung in the shower stall, and there was a strand of her long red hair lying like a question mark on the floor beneath the sink. I could smell her on the pillow, and the shape of her head was clear on the cushions of the couch by our bedroom window, where she liked to lie and read. I found a white ribbon beneath our bed, and an earring that had slipped behind the radiator. An unwashed coffee cup bore a trace of her lipstick, and there was a candy bar in the refrigerator, half-eaten.

Sam’s little crib still stood in the center of her room, for Joan had retained the one used by her own children, and it was easier to simply retrieve that from her attic rather than disassemble Sam’s own crib and transport it to Vermont. I think, perhaps, that Rachel was also reluctant to remove the crib from our house, knowing the pain it would cause me with its unavoidable implications of permanence. Some of Sam’s toys and clothes lay on the floor by the wall. I picked them up and put the dirty bibs and tops into the laundry basket. I would wash them later. I touched the place where she slept. I caught her baby smell on my fingers. She smelled as Jennifer once did.

And I remembered: all of these things I did before, when blood lay drying in the cracks on the kitchen floor. There was discarded clothing upon a bed, and a doll on a child’s chair. There was a cup on a table, half-filled with coffee, and a glass bearing traces of milk. There were cosmetics and brushes and hair and lipstick and lives ended in the middle of tasks half-done, so that for a moment it seemed as though they must surely return, that they had merely slipped away for a few moments and would come back eventually to finish their nighttime drinks, to place the doll on the shelf where it belonged, to resume their lives and permit me to share that place with them, to love me and to die with me and not leave me alone to mourn for them, until at last I grieved so long and so hard that something returned, phantasms conjured up by my pain, two entities that were almost my wife and child.

Almost.

Now I was in another house, and again there were reminders of lives around me, of tasks left unfinished and words left unsaid, except that these existences were continuing elsewhere. There was no blood on the floor, not yet. There was no finality, here, merely a pause for breath, a reconsideration. They could go on, perhaps not in this place, but somewhere far away, somewhere safe and secure.

Fading light, falling rain, and night descending like soot upon the earth. Voices half-heard, and touches in the darkness. Blood in my nose, and dirt in my hair.

We remain.

Always, we remain.

I awoke to the sound of the telephone. I waited for the machine to pick up the message. A man’s voice spoke, vaguely familiar but nobody I could place. I let the cassette roll on.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, I walked Walter as far as Ferry Beach and let him play in the surf. Outside the Scarborough Fire Department, men were cleaning down the engines with hoses, the winter sunlight occasionally breaking through the clouds and causing the droplets to sparkle like jewels before they disintegrated upon the ground. In the early days of the fire department, steel locomotive wheels were used to summon the volunteers, and there was still one outside Engine 3’s station over at Pleasant Hill. Then, in the late 1940s, Elizabeth Libby and her daughter, Shirley, took over the emergency dispatch service, operating out of the store on Black Point Road, where they lived and worked. They would activate their Gamewell alarm system when a call came in, which in turn set off air horns at the station houses. The two women were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and in their first eleven years in charge of the service they went away together only twice.

One of my earliest memories of Scarborough was of watching old Clayton Urquhart presenting a plaque to Elizabeth Libby for long service in 1971. My grandfather was a volunteer member of the fire department, helping out when the need arose, and my grandmother was one of the women who worked the mobile canteen that provided food and drink to the firefighters when they were tackling big blazes, or fires of long duration, so they were both there for the presentation. Elizabeth Libby, who used to give me candy when we visited her, wore winged glasses and had a white flower pinned to her dress. She dabbed happily at her eyes with a small lace handkerchief as people she’d known all her life said nice things about her in public.

I tied Walter to the cemetery gate and walked to the place where my grandfather and grandmother were interred. She had died long before he, and I had few lasting memories of her apart from that occasion when Elizabeth Libby received her plaque. I had buried my grandfather myself, taking a spade after the mourners had gone and slowly covering the pine casket in which he lay. It was a warm day, and I hung my jacket upon a headstone. I think I talked to him while I worked, but I don’t remember what I said. I probably spoke to him as I had always done, for men are ever boys with their grandfathers. He was a sheriff ’s deputy once, but a bad case poisoned him, taking hold of his conscience and tormenting it so that he knew no rest from the thoughts that pursued him. In the end, it would be left to me finally to close the circle and help to bring an end to the demon that had taunted my grandfather. I wondered if he left those agonies behind him when he died, or if they followed him into the next world. Did peace come to him with his last breath, finally silencing the voices that had haunted him for so long, or did it come later, when a boy that he had once danced upon his knee fell on the snow and watched as an old horror bled away to nothing?

I pulled a weed from beside his headstone. It came away easily, as such plants will. My grandfather taught me how to distinguish the weeds from the plants: good flowers have deep roots, and the bad ones dwell in shallow soil. When he told me things, I did not forget them. I filed them away, in part because I knew that he might ask me about them at some future date, and I wanted to be able to answer him correctly.

“You have old eyes,” he used to tell me. “You should have an old man’s knowledge to match them.”

But he slowly began to grow frail, and his memory began to fail him, the Alzheimer’s stealing him away, little by little, relentlessly thieving all that was valuable to him, slowly disassembling the old man’s memory. And so it was left to me to remind him of all that he had once told me, and I became the teacher to my grandfather.

Good flowers have deep roots, and bad ones dwell in shallow soil.

Shortly before he died, the disease gave him a temporary release, and things that had seemed lost forever returned to him. He remembered his wife, and their marriage, and the daughter they had together. He recalled weddings and divorces, baptisms and funerals, the names of colleagues who had gone before him into the last great night that glows faintly with the light of a promised dawn. Words and memories rushed from him in a great torrent, and he lived his life over again in a matter of hours. Then it was all gone, and not a single moment of his past remained, as though that flood had scoured away the final traces of him, leaving an empty dwelling with opaque windows, reflecting all but revealing nothing, for there was nothing left to reveal.

But in those last minutes of lucidity, he took my hand, and his eyes burned more brightly than they had ever done before. We were alone. His day was drawing to a close, and the sun was setting upon him.

“Your father,” he said. “You’re not like him, you know. All families have their burdens to bear, their troubled souls. My mother, she was a sad woman, and my father could never make her happy. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t hers. She was just the way that she was, and people didn’t understand it then. It was a sickness, and it took her in the end, like cancer took your mother. Your father, he had something of that sickness in him too, that sadness. I think maybe that was part of what attracted your mother to him: it spoke to something inside of her, even if she didn’t always want to hear what it said.”

I tried to remember my father, but as the years passed after his death it grew harder and harder to picture him. When I tried to visualize him, there was always a shadow across his face, or his features were distorted and unclear. He was a policeman, and he shot himself with his own gun. They said that he did it because he couldn’t live with himself. They told me that he killed a girl and a boy, after the boy seemed about to pull a weapon on him. They couldn’t explain why the girl had also died. I guess there was no explanation, or none that could suffice.

“I never got to ask him why he did what he did, but I might have understood it a little,” said my grandfather. “You see, I have some of that sadness too, and so do you. I’ve fought it all my life. I wasn’t going to let it take me the way that it took my mother, and you’re not going to let it take you either.”

He gripped my hand tighter. A look of confusion passed across his face. He stopped talking and narrowed his eyes, trying desperately to remember what it was that he wanted to say.

“The sadness,” I said. “You were talking about the sadness.”

His face relaxed. I saw a single tear break from his right eye and slip gently down his cheek.

“It’s different in you,” he said. “It’s harsher, and some of it comes from outside, from another place. We didn’t pass it on to you. You brought it with you. It’s part of you, part of your nature. It’s old and-”

He gritted his teeth, and his body shook as he fought for those last minutes of clarity.

“They have names.”

The words were forced out, spit from his system, ejected like tumors from within.

“They have names,” he repeated, and his voice was different now, harsh and filled with a desperate hatred. For an instant he was transformed, and he was no longer my grandfather but another being, one that had taken hold of his ailing, fading spirit and briefly reenergized it in order to communicate with a world it could not otherwise reach. “All of them, they have names, and they’re here. They’ve always been here. They love hurt and pain and misery, and they’re always searching, always looking.

“And they’ll find you, because it’s in you as well. You have to fight it. You can’t be like them, because they’ll want you. They’ve always wanted you.”

He had somehow raised himself from his bed, but he fell back, exhausted. He released his grip, leaving the imprint of his fingers on my skin.

“They have names,” he whispered, the disease surging forward like ink clouding clear water and turning it to black, claiming all of his memories for its own.

I dropped Walter back at the house and played my unheard messages for the first time. The walk had cleared my head, and the time spent tending to the grave had brought me a little peace, even as it had reminded me of why Neddo’s words about the names of the Believers had seemed familiar to me. It might also have been the fact that I had come to a kind of decision, and there was no point in agonizing any longer.

None of the messages came from Rachel. One or two contained offers of work. I deleted them. The third was from Assistant SAC Ross’s secretary in New York. I called her back, and she told me that Ross was out of the office, but promised to contact him in order to let him know that I’d called. Ross got back to me before I had time to make a sandwich. It sounded like he was in Stark’s Veranda again. I could hear dishes banging behind him, the tinkling of china against crystal, and people talking and laughing as they ate.

“What was the big hurry with Bosworth, if it was going to take you half a day to call back?” he asked.

“I’ve been distracted,” I said. “Sorry.”

The apology seemed to throw Ross.

“I’d ask if you were doing okay,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want you to start thinking that I cared.”

“It’s fine. I’d just view it as a moment of weakness.”

“So, you still interested in this thing?”

It took me a while to reply.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m still interested.”

“Bosworth wasn’t my responsibility. He wasn’t a field agent, so he fell under the remit of one of my colleagues.”

“Which one?”

“Mr. ‘That Doesn’t Concern You.’ Don’t push it. It doesn’t matter. Under the circumstances, I might have dealt with Bosworth the same way that he did. They put him through the process.”

“The process” was the name given to the Feds’ unofficial method for dealing with agents who stepped out of line. In serious cases, like whistleblowing, efforts were first made to discredit the agent involved. Fellow agents would be given access to the personnel file for the individual involved. Colleagues would be questioned about the agent’s habits. If the agent had gone public with something, potentially damaging personal information might in turn be leaked to the press. The FBI had a policy of not firing whistleblowers, as there was a danger that by doing so the Bureau might lend credence to the individual’s accusations. Hounding a recalcitrant agent, and smearing his or her name, was far more effective.

“What did he do?” I asked Ross.

“Bosworth was a computer guy, specializing in codes and cryptography. I can’t tell you much more than that, partly because I’d have to kill you if I did, but mostly because I can’t explain it to you anyway since I don’t understand it. It seems he was doing a little personal work on the side, something to do with maps and manuscripts. It earned him a reprimand from OPR”-the Office of Professional Responsibility was responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct within the FBI-“but it didn’t go to a disciplinary hearing. That was about a year ago. Anyway, Bosworth took some leave after that, and next thing he popped up in Europe, in a French jail. He was arrested for desecrating a church.”

“A church?”

“Technically, a monastery: Sept-Fons Abbey. He was caught digging up the floor of a vault in the dead of night. The legate in Paris got involved and managed to keep Bosworth’s background out of the papers. He was suspended with pay when he returned and ordered to seek professional help, but he wasn’t monitored. He came back to work in the same week that an interview with an ‘unnamed FBI agent’ appeared in some UFO magazine alleging that the Bureau was preventing a proper investigation of cult activities in the United States. It was clearly Bosworth again, burbling some nonsense about linked map references. The Bureau decided that it wanted him gone, so he was put through the process. His security clearance was downgraded, then pretty much removed entirely, apart from allowing him to switch on his computer and play with Google. He was shifted to duties beneath his abilities, given a desk beside a men’s room in the basement, and virtually cut off from contact with his colleagues, but he still wouldn’t break.”

“And?”

“In the end, he was given the option of a ‘fitness for duty’ examination at the Pearl Heights Center in Colorado.”

Fitness for duty examinations were the kiss of death for an agent’s career. If the agent refused to submit to one, he or she was automatically fired. If the agent submitted, then a diagnosis of mental instability was frequently the outcome, decided long before the agent even arrived at the testing center. The evaluations were carried out in medical facilities with special contracts to examine federal employees, and usually stretched over three or four days. Subjects were kept isolated, apart from their interactions with medical personnel, and required to answer up to six hundred yes-or-no questions. If they weren’t already crazy when they went in, the process was designed to make them crazy by the time they left.

“Did he take the test?”

“He traveled to Colorado, but he never made it to the center. He was automatically dismissed.”

“So where is he now?”

“Officially, I have no idea. Unofficially, he’s in New York. It seems that his parents have money, and they own an apartment up on First and Seventieth in a place called the Woodrow. Bosworth lives there, as far as anyone can tell, but he’s probably a basket case. We haven’t been in contact with him since his dismissal. So now you know, right?”

“I know not to join the FBI, then start dismantling churches.”

“I don’t even like you walking by the building, so recruitment is hardly a concern for you. This stuff didn’t come for free. If Bosworth is tied in with this thing in Williamsburg, then I want a heads-up.”

“That’s fair.”

“Fair? You don’t know from fair. Just remember: I want to be informed first if Bosworth smells bad on this.”

I promised to get back to him if I found out anything he should know. It seemed to satisfy him. He didn’t say good-bye before he hung up, but he didn’t say anything hurtful either.

The most recent call was from a man named Matheson. Matheson was a former client of mine. Last year, I’d looked into a case involving the house in which his daughter had died. I couldn’t say that it had ended well, but Matheson had been satisfied with the outcome.

His message said that someone was making inquiries about me and had approached him for a recommendation, or so they claimed. The visitor, a man named Alexis Murnos, said he was calling on behalf of his employer, who wished to remain anonymous for the present. Matheson had a highly developed sense of suspicion, and he gave Murnos as little to go on as possible. All he could get out of Murnos, who declined to leave a contact number, was that his employer was wealthy and appreciated discretion. Matheson asked me to call him back when I got the message.

“I wasn’t aware that you’d added discretion to your list of accomplishments,” Matheson said, once his secretary had put me through to him. “That’s what made me suspicious.”

“And he gave you nothing?”

“Zilch. I suggested that he contact you himself, if he had any concerns. He told me that he would, but then said that he’d appreciate it if I kept his visit strictly between the two of us. Naturally, I called you as soon as he left.”

I thanked Matheson for the warning, and he told me to let him know if there was anything more that he could do. As soon as we were done, I called the offices of the Press Herald and left a message there for Phil Isaacson, the paper’s art critic, once they’d confirmed that he was due in later that day. It was a long shot, but Phil’s expertise extended from law to architecture and beyond, and I wanted to talk to him about House of Stern and the auction that was due to take place there. That reminded me that I had not yet heard back from Angel or Louis. It was a situation that was unlikely to last very much longer.

I decided to drive into Portland to kill some time until I heard from Phil Isaacson. Maybe tomorrow I would leave Walter with my neighbors and return to New York, in the hope that I might be able to get in touch with former special agent Bosworth. I set the alarm system in the house and left Walter half-asleep in his basket. I knew that as soon as I was gone he would make a beeline for the couch in my office, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to have him around, and his hairs on the furniture seemed like a small return for the company.

“They all have names.”

My grandfather’s words came back to me as I drove, now echoing not only Neddo but also Claudia Stern.

“Two hundred angels rebelled…Enoch gives the names of nineteen.”

Names. There was a Christian bookstore in South Portland. I was pretty certain that they’d have a section on the apocrypha. It was time to take a look at Enoch.

The car, a red 5 Series BMW, picked me up at Route 1 and stayed with me when I left the highway for Maine Mall Road. I pulled into the parking lot in front of Panera Bread and waited, but the car, with two men inside, headed on by. I gave them five minutes, then moved out of the lot, keeping an eye on my rearview mirror as I drove. I saw the BMW parked over by the Dunkin’ Donuts, but it didn’t try to follow me this time. Instead, after making a couple of loops of the area, I spotted its replacement. This time the BMW was blue, and it had only one man in the front, but it was clear that I was the object of his attentions. I almost felt resentful. Twin BMWs: these guys were being hired by the hour and being paid cheap. Part of me was tempted to confront them, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to control my temper, which meant there was a good chance that things could end badly. Instead I made a call. Jackie Garner answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Jackie,” I said. “Want to break some heads?”

I sat in my car outside Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. The blue BMW was in the Maine Mall’s lot across the street, while its red sibling waited in the parking lot of the Sheraton. One at each side of the road. It was still amateurish, but it showed promise.

My cell phone rang.

“How you doing, Jackie?”

“I’m at the Best Buy.”

I looked up. I could see Jackie’s van idling in the fire lane.

“It’s a blue BMW, Mass. plates, maybe three rows in. He’ll move when I move.”

“Where’s the other car?”

“Over by the Sheraton. It’s a red BMW. Two men.”

Jackie seemed confused.

“They’re using the same badge?”

“Same model, just a different color.”

“Dumb.”

“Kind of.”

“What are you going to do about the guys in red?”

“Let them come, I guess, then we can deal with them. Why?”

I got the sense that Jackie had an alternative solution.

“Well,” he said, “you see, I brought some friends. Do you want this done quietly?”

“Jackie, if I wanted it done quietly, would I have called you?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So who did you bring along?”

He tried to avoid the question, but I pinned him down.

“Jackie, tell me: who did you bring?”

“The Fulcis.” He sounded vaguely apologetic.

Dear God: the Fulci brothers. They were mooks for hire, twin barrels of muscle and flab with more chips on their shoulders than all the employees of the Frito company put together. Even the “for hire” part was misleading. If the situation offered sufficient scope for mayhem, the Fulcis would happily offer their services for free. Tony Fulci, the elder of the two brothers, held the record for being the most expensive prisoner ever to have been jailed in Washington State, calculated on a length-of-stay basis. Tony did some time there at the end of the nineties, when a lot of prisons were hiring out their inmates to large corporations to do telesales and call-center work. Tony was given a job phoning people on behalf of a new ISP named FastWire, asking its rivals’ customers to consider switching service from their current provider to the new kid on the block. The sum total of Tony Fulci’s only conversation with a customer went pretty much as follows:

Tony (reading slowly from an idiot card): I am calling on behalf of FastWire Comm-

Customer: I’m not interested.

Tony: Hey, let me finish.

Customer: I told you: I’m not interested.

Tony: Listen, what are you, stupid? This is a good deal.

Customer: I told you, I don’t want it.

Tony: Don’t you hang up that phone. You hang up that phone, and you’re a dead man.

Customer: You can’t talk to me like that.

Tony: Hey, fuck you! I know who you are, I know where you live, and when I get out of here in five months and three days I’m gonna look you up, then I’m gonna tear you limb from limb. Now, you want this piece-of-shit deal or not?

FastWire quickly abandoned its plans to extend the use of prisoners as callers, but not quickly enough to prevent it from being sued. Tony cost Washington’s prisons $7 million in lost contracts once the FastWire story got around, or $1.16 million for every month Tony was incarcerated. And Tony was the calm one in the family. All things considered, the Fulcis made the Mongol hordes look restrained.

“You couldn’t have found anyone more psychotic?”

“Maybe, but they would have cost more.”

There was no way out of it. I told him I’d head toward Deering Avenue and try to draw the solo tail away, with Jackie following. The Fulcis could intercept the other guys wherever they chose.

“Give me two minutes,” said Jackie. “I just gotta tell the Fulcis.

Man, they’re juiced. You don’t know what this means to them, getting to do some real detective work. Tony just wished you could have given him a little more notice. He would’ve come off his meds.”

The Fulcis didn’t have to go far to take the red BMW. They simply blocked it off in the Sheraton’s lot by parking their truck behind it. The Fulcis drove a customized Dodge 4X4 inspired by the monster-truck DVDs that they watched when they weren’t making other people’s lives more interesting in a Chinese way.

The BMW’s doors opened. The driver was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in a cheapish gray suit that made him look like an executive for a company that was struggling to make ends meet. He weighed maybe 150, or roughly half a Fulci. His companion was bigger and swarthier, possibly bringing their combined weight up to a Fulci and a quarter, or a Fulci and a half if Tony was abusing his diet pills. The Fulcis’ Dodge had smoked-glass windows, so the guy in the suit could almost have been forgiven for what he said next.

“Hey,” he said, “get that fucking tin can out of the way. We’re in a hurry here.”

Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, while the Fulcis’ primitive, semimedicated brains tried to equate the words they’d heard spoken with their own vision of their beloved truck. Eventually, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a very large, very irate Tony Fulci jumped gracelessly from the cab to the ground. He wore a polyester golf shirt, elastic-waisted pants from a big-man store, and steel-toed work boots. His belly bulged under his shirt, the sleeves of which stopped above his enormous biceps, the material insufficiently Lycraed to make the stretch demanded of it by his pumped arms. Twin arcs of muscle reached from his shoulders to just below his ears, their symmetry undisturbed by the intrusion of a neck, giving him the appearance of a man who had recently been force-fed a very large coat hanger.

His brother Paulie joined him. He made Tony look a little on the dainty side.

“Jesus Christ,” said the BMW’s driver.

“Why?” said Tony. “Does he drive a fucking tin can as well?”

Then the Fulcis went to work.

The blue BMW stayed with me all the way to Deering Avenue, hanging back two or three cars but always keeping me in sight. Jackie Garner was behind him at every turn. I had picked the route because it was guaranteed to confuse anyone who wasn’t a native, and the fact that he was still within the Portland city limits, instead of being led into open country, would make the tail less likely to believe that he had been spotted and was about to be confronted. I reached the point where Deering becomes one-way, just before the intersection with Forest, forcing all traffic heading out of town to make a right. I took the tail with me as I turned, then went left onto Forest, left again back onto Deering, and took a hard right to Revere. The BMW had no choice but to stick with me every time or risk being dumped, so that when I braked suddenly he had to do the same. When Jackie shot in behind him he realized what was happening. There was no other option for the BMW except to try to use the bread company’s lot to buy himself some space and time. He pulled in fast, and we came at him in a V, trapping him against the wall.

I kept my gun tight against my body as I approached. I didn’t want to scare anyone who might happen by. The driver kept his wrists on the wheel, his fingers slightly raised. He wore a baggy blue suit with a matching tie. The wire of his cell phone earpiece was clipped to the lapel of his jacket. He was probably having trouble raising his buddies.

I nodded to Jackie. He had a little snub-nose Browning in his right hand. He kept it fixed on the driver as he opened the door.

“Get out,” I said. “Do it slowly.”

The driver did as he was told. He was tall and balding, with black hair that was just a little too long to look good.

“I’m not armed,” he said.

Jackie pushed him against my car and frisked him anyway. He came up with a wallet, and a.38 from an ankle holster.

“What’s this?” said Jackie. “Soap?”

“You shouldn’t tell lies,” I said. “They’ll turn your tongue black.”

Jackie tossed me the wallet. Inside was a Massachusetts driver’s license, identifying the man before us as one Alexis Murnos. There were also some business cards in his name for a company named Dresden Enterprises, with offices in the Prudential in Boston. Murnos was the head of corporate security.

“I hear you’ve been asking questions about me, Mr. Murnos. It would have been a lot easier to approach me directly.”

Murnos didn’t reply.

“Find out about his friends,” I told Jackie.

Jackie stepped back to make a call on his cell. Most of it consisted of “uh-huh’s” and “yeahs,” apart from one worrying interjection of “Jesus, it broke that easy? Guy must have brittle bones.”

“The Fulcis have them in the bed of their truck,” he told me when he was done. “They’re rent-a-cops from some security agency in Saugus. Tony says he thinks they’ll stop bleeding soon.”

If Murnos was troubled by the news, he didn’t show it. I had a feeling that Murnos was probably better at his job than the other two jokers, but somebody had asked him to do too much too quickly, and with limited resources. It seemed like time to prick his professional pride.

“You’re not very good at this, Mr. Murnos,” I said. “Corporate security at Dresden Enterprises must leave a little something to be desired.”

“We don’t even know what Dresden Enterprises is,” said Jackie. “He could be responsible for guarding chickens.”

Murnos sucked air in through his teeth. He had reddened slightly.

“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me what this is about, maybe over a cup of coffee, or do you want us to take you to meet your friends? It sounds like they’re going to need a ride home, eventually, and probably some medical attention. I’ll have to leave you with the gentlemen who are currently looking after them, but it’ll only be for a day or two until I find out more about the company you’re working for. That will mean paying a visit to Dresden Enterprises, possibly with a couple of people in tow, which could be very professionally embarrassing for you.”

Murnos considered his options. They were kind of limited.

“I guess coffee sounds good,” he said, finally.

“See?” I said to Jackie. “That was easy.”

“You got a way with people,” said Jackie. “We didn’t even have to hit him.”

He sounded mildly disappointed.

It transpired that Murnos was actually empowered to tell me a certain amount, and to deal with me directly. He just preferred to sneak around until he was certain of all the angles. In fact, he admitted that he had amassed a considerable quantity of information on me without ever leaving his office, and he had partly guessed that Matheson would contact me. If worse came to worst, as it just had, he would then get a chance to see what I did when my feathers were ruffled.

“My colleagues aren’t really bleeding in the back of a truck, are they?” he asked. We were sitting at a table in Big Sky. It smelled good in there. Behind the counter, the kids who did the baking were cleaning down baking trays and freshening the coffee.

I exchanged a guilty look with Jackie. He was eating an apple scone, his second.

“I’m pretty certain that they are,” I said.

“The guys that took care of them, they ain’t too particular about these things,” said Jackie. “Plus one of your people said something insensitive about their truck.”

I was grateful to Jackie for all that he’d done, but it was time to get him out of the way. I asked him to find the Fulcis and make sure they didn’t inflict any further damage on anyone. He bought them a bag of scones and went on his way.

“You have interesting friends,” said Murnos, once Jackie was gone.

“Believe me, you haven’t even met the most entertaining ones. If you have anything to share with me, then now’s the time.”

Murnos sipped his coffee.

“I work for Mr. Joachim Stuckler. He is the CEO of Dresden Enterprises. Mr. Stuckler is a venture capitalist specializing in software and multimedia.”

“So he’s wealthy?”

“Yes, I think that would be a fair comment.”

“If he’s wealthy, why does he hire cheap labor?”

“That was my fault. I needed men to help me, and I’d used those two before. I didn’t expect them to be beaten for their trouble. Neither did I expect to be cornered in a parking lot and relieved of my weapon by someone who then offered to buy me coffee and a scone.”

“It’s been one of those days for you.”

“Yes, it has. Mr. Stuckler is also a collector of note. He has the wealth to indulge his tastes.”

“What does he collect?”

“Art, antiques. Unusual material.”

I could see where this was leading.

“Such as little silver boxes from the fifteenth century?”

Murnos shrugged. “He is aware that you were the one who found the remains in the apartment. He believes that your case may impinge upon something of interest to him. He would like to meet you to discuss the matter further. If you were free, he would appreciate a few hours of your time. Naturally, he will pay you for your trouble.”

“Naturally, except I’m not really in the mood for a trip to Boston.”

Murnos shrugged again.

“You were looking for a woman,” he said matter-of-factly. “Mr. Stuckler may be able to provide you with some information on those responsible for her disappearance.”

I glanced over at the kids behind the counter. I wanted to hit Murnos. I wanted to beat him until he told me all that he knew. He saw that desire in my face.

“Believe me, Mr. Parker, my knowledge of this affair is limited, but I do know that Mr. Stuckler had nothing to do with whatever happened to the woman. He merely learned that you were the one who killed Homero Garcia, and discovered human remains in his apartment. He is also aware of the opening of the chamber in the basement of the building. I made some inquiries on his behalf, and discovered that your interest lay in the woman. Mr. Stuckler is happy to share whatever insights he may have with you.”

“And in return?”

“You may be able to fill some gaps in his own knowledge. If you cannot, then Mr. Stuckler is still willing to talk with you, and to tell you whatever he feels may be of help to you. It is a win-win situation for you, Mr. Parker.”

Murnos recognized that I had no choice, but he had the decency not to gloat. I agreed to see his employer over the next couple of days. Murnos confirmed the arrangement in a cell phone conversation with one of Stuckler’s assistants, then asked me if it was okay if he left. I thought it was nice of him to ask, until I realized that he was only looking for his gun back. I accompanied him outside, emptied the bullets down a drain, and handed the gun to him.

“You should get another gun,” I said. “That one isn’t much use to you on your ankle.”

Murnos’s right hand flexed, and I was suddenly looking down the barrel of a Smith amp; Wesson Sigma.380, four inches long and a pound in weight.

“I have another gun,” he said. “It looks like I’m not the only one who hires cheap.”

He kept the muzzle trained on me for just a second longer than necessary before allowing it to disappear back into the folds of his coat. He smiled at me, then got into his car and drove away.

Murnos was right. Jackie Garner was a lunkhead, but not as big a lunkhead as the guy who employed him.

I drove back toward Scarborough, stopping off first at the Bible store. The woman behind the counter was happy to help me, and seemed only slightly disappointed when I didn’t add some little silver angel statues or a MY GUARDIAN ANGEL SAYS YOU’RE TOO CLOSE bumper sticker to my purchase of two books on the apocrypha.

“We sell a lot of those,” she told me. “There’s a heap of folks who think that the Catholic Church has been hiding something all these years.”

“What could they be hiding?” I asked, despite myself.

“I don’t know,” she said, speaking slowly as she would to an idiot child, “because it’s hidden.”

I left her to it. I sat in my car and flicked through the first of the books, but there wasn’t much that was of use to me. The second was better, as it contained the entire Book of Enoch. The names of the fallen angels appeared in Chapter 7, and, in this particular edition Ashmael’s was among them. I glanced quickly through the rest of the book, much of which seemed fairly allegorical in nature, apart from the early descriptions of the angels’ banishment and fall. According to Enoch, they were not subject to death, even after they fell, nor would they ever be forgiven for what they had done. Instead, the fallen angels set about teaching men to make swords and shields, and lecturing them on astronomy and the movements of the stars, “so that the world became altered…And men, being destroyed, cried out.” There were also some details about the Greek theologian Origen, who was anathematized for suggesting that the angels who fell were those “in whom the divine love had grown cold” and that they were then “hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men.”

I saw again the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop; the figure of the Captain; the bloody grapnel on the dead monks’ robes; and the grossest body of all-the fat, distorted creature marching by his leader’s side, all bloodied and grinning with the joy of killing.

I picked up a sandwich at Amato’s on Route 1 and filled up on gas before heading east for home. At the pump beside me, two men, one bearded and overweight, the other younger and trimmer, were consulting a map in their grimy black Peugeot. The bearded man was wearing a gray hand-knitted sweater. A clerical collar was visible at his neck. They didn’t pay me any attention, and I didn’t offer them any help.

As I drew near my house, I saw a car parked in front of the driveway. It wasn’t quite blocking me, but it would be difficult to go around it without slowing down. A man was leaning against the hood, and the weight of his body had forced the front of the car down so that the fender was on the verge of nuzzling the ground. He was taller than I by five or six inches, and massively, obesely overweight, shaped like a great egg, with a huge wad of fat at his belly that hung down over his groin and lapped at his thighs. His legs were very short, so short that his arms appeared longer than they were. His hands, far from being flabby and awkward, were slim and almost delicate, although the wrists were heavy and swollen. Taken together, the various parts of his body appeared to have been inexpertly assembled from a variety of donors, as though a young Baron Frankenstein had been let loose in his toy box with the leftovers from a massacre at Weight Watchers. He wore plain black shoes on small feet, and tan trousers that had been altered at the legs to fit, the ends folded inside and inexpertly stitched, making it possible to judge the extent of the alterations by the circle of holes halfway up his shins. The bloating at his stomach was too big, or too uncomfortable, to encompass, so the waistband of the trousers ran underneath it, thereby allowing it to hang free beneath his billowing white shirt. The shirt was buttoned almost to the neck, constricting it to such an extent that the great swelling concealing the collar was a violent reddish purple in color, like the terrible discoloration that occurs in a corpse when the blood has gathered at the extremities. I could see no hint of a jacket under his brown camel-hair overcoat. There were buttons missing from the front, possibly after some futile and ultimately doomed attempt to close it. His head balanced finely on the layered fats of his neck, narrowing from a very round skull to a small, distinctly weak chin, an inverted sparrow’s egg atop the larger ostrich egg of his body. His features should have been lost in jowls and flab, sunken into them like a child’s drawing of the man in the moon. Instead, they retained their definition, losing themselves only as they drew nearer his neck. His eyes were closer to gray than green, as though capable only of a monochrome version of human sight, and no lines extended from them. He had long eyelashes, and a thin nose that flared slightly at the end, exposing his nostrils. His mouth was small and feminine, with something almost sensual about the curvature of the lips. He had small ears with very pronounced lobes. His head was closely shaved, but his hair was very dark, so that it was possible to see the imprint of the faded widow’s peak above his forehead. His resemblance to the foul creature in the painting at Claudia Stern’s auction house was startling. This man was fatter, perhaps, and his features more worn, but it was still as though the figure with the bloodied mouth had detached himself from the canvas and assumed a new existence in this world.

I stopped my Mustang a short distance from him. I preferred not to draw up alongside him. He didn’t move as I stepped from my car. His hands remain clasped below his chest, resting upon the upper slope of his belly.

“Can I help you?” I said.

He thought about the question.

“Perhaps,” he said.

His washed-out eyes regarded me. He did not blink. I felt a further slight glimmer of recognition, this time more personal, as when one hears a song playing on the radio, one that dates from one’s earliest childhood and is recalled only on the faintest of levels.

“I don’t usually conduct business at my home,” I said.

“You don’t have an office,” he replied. “You make yourself difficult to find, for an investigator. One might almost suspect that you didn’t want to be traced.”

He moved away from his car. He was strangely graceful, seeming almost to skate across the ground rather than to walk. His hands remained clasped on his belly until he was only a couple of feet away from me, then his right hand extended toward me.

“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Brightwell. I believe we have matters to discuss.”

As his hand moved through the air, the sleeve of his coat dangled loosely, and I glimpsed the beginnings of a mark upon his arm, like twin arrowheads recently burned into the flesh. Immediately I backed away, and my hand moved for the gun beneath my jacket, but he was faster than I, so fast that I barely saw him move. One moment there was space between us, the next there was none, and he was pressed hard against me, his left hand digging into my right forearm, the nails tearing through the fabric of my coat and into my skin, drawing blood from the flesh. His face touched mine, his nose brushing against my cheek, his lips an inch from my mouth. Sweat dropped from his brow and fell upon my lips before slowly dripping onto my tongue. I tried to spit it away but it congealed inside, coating my teeth and adhering to the roof of my mouth like gum, its force so strong that it snapped my mouth closed, causing me to bite the tip of my tongue. His own lips parted, and I saw that his teeth came to slightly blunted points, as though they had gnawed too long on bone.

“Found,” he said, and I inhaled his breath. It smelled of sweet wine and broken bread.

I felt myself falling, tumbling through space, overcome by shame and sorrow and a sense of loss that would never end, a denial of all that I loved that would stay with me through all eternity. I was aflame, screaming and howling, beating at the fires with my fists, but they would not be extinguished. My whole being was alive with burning. The heat coursed through my veins. It animated my muscles. It gave form to my speech and light to my eyes. I twisted in the air and saw, far below, the waters of a great ocean. I glimpsed my own burning shape reflected in them, and others beside me. This world was dark, but we would bring light to it.

Found.

And so we fell like stars, and at the moment of impact I wrapped the tattered remnants of charred black wings around me, and the fires went out at last.

I was being dragged somewhere by the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to go. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, so that the world drifted between darkness and half-light. I heard myself speaking, muttering the same words over and over.

“Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.”

I was almost at Brightwell’s car. It was a big blue Mercedes, but the backseat had been removed to enable him to push back the driver’s seat and give him room to enter. The car stank of meat. I tried to fight him, but I was weak and disoriented. I felt drunk, and the taste of sweet wine was upon my tongue. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with burning flesh. My eyes closed for the last time.

And a voice called my name.

“Charlie,” it said. “How have you been? I hope we’re not interrupting.”

I opened my eyes.

I was still standing at the open door of my Mustang. Brightwell had moved a few steps from his car, but had not yet reached me. To my right was the black Peugeot, and the bearded man with the clerical collar had jumped from the car and was now pumping my hand furiously.

“It’s been a long time. We had some trouble finding this place, let me tell you. I never thought that a city boy like you would end up out in the boonies. You remember Paul?”

The younger man stepped around the hood of the Peugeot. He was careful not to turn his back on the huge figure watching us from a short distance away. Brightwell seemed uncertain of how to proceed, then turned around, got in his car, and drove in the direction of Black Point. I tried to make out the license plate, but my brain was unable to make sense of the numbers.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Friends,” said the bearded man.

I looked down at my right hand. There was blood dripping from my fingers. I rolled up my sleeve and saw five deep puncture wounds upon my arm.

I stared at the road ahead, but the Mercedes was gone from sight.

The cleric handed me a handkerchief to stem the bleeding.

“On the other hand,” he said, “that was definitely not a friend.”