The Black Angel

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We sat around the kitchen table while the marshes prepared to flood, waiting for the coming of the tides that would bring with them death and regeneration. Already the air felt different; there was a stillness to nature, a watchfulness, as though every living thing that depended on the marshes for its existence was attuned to their rhythms and knew instinctively what was about to occur.

I cleaned out the cuts on my arm, although I could not quite trace the chain of events that led to my receiving them. I still had a sense of vertigo, a dizziness that left me feeling uncertain on my feet, and I could not rinse the taste of sweet wine from my mouth.

I offered my visitors coffee, but they expressed a preference for tea. Rachel had left some herbal tea behind the instant coffee. It smelled a little like someone had taken a leak in a rosebush. The bearded cleric, who said his name was Martin Reid, winced slightly when he tasted it, but he persevered. Clearly, those years spent following his vocation had endowed him with a degree of inner strength.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“It wasn’t too hard to connect you to the events in Brooklyn,” he said. “You make quite an impression wherever you go. We learned a little more about you from Mr. Neddo in New York.”

Neddo’s involvement with these men was a surprise. I had to confess that Neddo now unconditionally gave me the creeps. I couldn’t deny that he had an extensive knowledge of certain matters, but the pleasure that he derived from it was troubling. Being around him was like keeping company with a semireformed addict whose ambition to stay clean was not as urgent as his love for the narcotic.

“I think Mr. Neddo may be morally suspect,” I said. “You may become tainted by association.”

“We are all flawed in our own way.”

“Maybe, but my closet isn’t filled with Chinese skulls fresh from the executioner’s gun.”

Reid conceded the point.

“Admittedly, I try not to delve too deeply into his acquisitions. He is, nevertheless, a useful source of information, and you have reason to be grateful to him for informing us of your visit to him, and of the path that your investigation is following. The gentleman on the road didn’t look best pleased by our intrusion into his business. If we hadn’t arrived when we did, it could have turned very ugly. Or in his case, uglier.”

“He certainly isn’t a looker,” I conceded.

Reid gave up on his tea. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I’ll still be tasting that on the day I die.”

I apologized once again.

“The man on the road told me that his name was Brightwell,” I said. “I think you know a little more than that about him.”

The younger priest, who had introduced himself as Paul Bartek, looked to his colleague. They were both Cistercian monks, based in Europe but staying for the present in a monastery in Spencer. Reid had a Scottish accent, but Bartek’s was harder to identify: there were traces of French and American English, as well as something more exotic.

“Tell me what happened on the road,” said Reid. “What did you feel?”

I tried to recall the sensations I had experienced. The memory seemed to intensify my nausea, but I persevered.

“One minute he seemed to be leaning against his car, and the next he was right in my face,” I said. “I could smell his breath. It smelled like wine. Then he was gripping my arm and dragging me toward his car. He made those cuts on my arm. The trunk opened, and it looked like a wound. It was made of flesh and blood, and it stank.”

Reid and Bartek exchanged a look.

“What?” I said.

“We could see both of you as we approached,” said Bartek. “He never moved. He didn’t touch you.”

I displayed the cuts for them.

“Yet I have these.”

“That you do,” said Reid. “There’s no denying it. Did he say anything to you?”

“He said that I was hard to track down, and that we had matters to discuss.”

“Anything else?”

I remembered the sensation of falling, of burning. I did not want to share it with these men because it brought with it a sense of great shame and regret, but something told me that they were trustworthy, even good, and that they were ready to provide answers to some of the questions that I had.

“There was a sense of vertigo, of descending from a great height. I was burning, and there were others burning around me. I heard him speak as he was dragging me to the car, or as I thought he was.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Found.’ He said I was found.”

If Reid was surprised by this, then he kept it hidden well. Bartek didn’t have his friend’s poker features. He looked shocked.

“Is this man a Believer?” I asked.

“Why would you say that?” said Reid.

“He had a mark on his arm. It looked like a grapnel. Neddo told me that they marked themselves.”

“But do you even know what a Believer really is?” said Reid. There was something skeptical, almost patronizing, in his tone that I didn’t care for.

I kept my voice low and even. It took a lot of effort.

“I don’t like it when someone assumes my ignorance, and by implication dangles the promise of enlightenment in front of me,” I said. “I don’t even care for it when people tease dogs with treats, so don’t overstep the mark here. I know what they’re looking for, and I know what they’re capable of doing to get it.”

I stood and retrieved the book that I had bought in South Portland. I threw it to Reid, and he caught it awkwardly with both hands, splaying the pages. I spit a volley of words at him as he examined its pages.

“Sedlec. Enoch. Dark angels in corporeal form. An apartment with human remains yellowing in a piss-filled bath. A basement decorated with human bones, waiting for the arrival of a silver statue with a demon trapped inside it. A man who sits placidly in a burning car while his body turns to ash. And a young woman’s skull, trimmed with gold, left in an alcove after she’d been murdered in a purpose-built tiled room. Are we any clearer now, Father or Brother, or whatever it is you like to be called?”

Reid had the decency to look apologetic, but I was already regretting my outburst in front of these strangers, not merely out of shame at my own loss of temper, but because I didn’t want to give anything away in my anger.

“I’m sorry,” said Reid. “I’m not used to dealing with private detectives. I always tend to assume that nobody knows anything and, to be honest I’m rarely surprised.”

I sat down once again at the table and waited for him to continue.

“The Believers, or those who lead them, are convinced that they are fallen angels, banished from heaven, reborn over and over in the form of men. They feel that they are incapable of being destroyed. If they are killed, then they roam in noncorporeal form until they find another suitable host. It may take years, decades even, before they do so, but then the process begins again. If they are not killed, then they believe that they age infinitely more slowly than human beings. Ultimately, they are immortal. That is what they believe.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I don’t believe that they’re angels, fallen or otherwise, if that’s what you’re asking. I used to work in psychiatric hospitals, Mr. Parker. A popular delusion among patients was that they were Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m sure that there is a good reason why they favored Bonaparte over, say, Hitler, or General Patton, but I never really cared enough to find out what that might be. It was enough to know that a forty-year-old gentleman from Pakistan who weighed two hundred pounds in his bare feet was, in all probability, not Napoleon Bonaparte; but the fact that I didn’t believe he was who he claimed to be made no difference to him. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether we go along with the convictions of the Believers or not. They believe, and they convince other weaker souls to adhere to that belief. They appear particularly adept at the power of suggestion, at planting false memories in fertile ground, but they and the people with whom they surround themselves are no less dangerous for being deluded.”

But there was more to them than that. The circumstances of Alice’s death gave clear evidence that these individuals were infinitely more unpleasant, and more powerful, than even Reid was prepared to acknowledge, at least here, and to me. There was also the matter of the DMT, the drug found in Alice’s remains and in Garcia’s body. It wasn’t just force of will that bound people to them.

“What did he mean by telling me that I was ‘found’?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s your prerogative.”

I let it go.

“What do you know about a company called Dresden Enterprises?”

It was Reid’s turn to be surprised.

“I know a little. It’s owned by a man named Joachim Stuckler. He’s a collector.”

“I’m supposed to meet him in Boston.”

“He contacted you?”

“He sent one of his flying monkeys to make the arrangements. In fact, he sent three flying monkeys, but two won’t be taking to the air again anytime soon. They tried to play clever too, incidentally.”

Reid looked uneasy at the implied threat.

“I’d remind you that we are also stronger than we appear, and that just because we wear collars doesn’t mean we won’t try to defend ourselves.”

“The men who stomped Stuckler’s envoys are named Tony and Paulie Fulci,” I said. “I don’t think they’re good Catholics, despite their heritage. In fact, I don’t think they’re good anythings, but they take a certain pride in their work. Psychotics are funny that way. I have no qualms about setting the Fulcis on you, assuming that I don’t decide to make your lives difficult myself, or hand you on to someone who makes the Fulcis look like missionary workers.

“I don’t know what you think is going on here, but let me explain it for you: the young woman who was killed was called Alice Temple. She was the cousin of one of my closest friends, but ‘cousin’ doesn’t explain the obligation he feels toward her, just as ‘friend’ doesn’t communicate the magnitude of my debt to him. We’re looking for the men responsible, and we will find them. You may not care much for my threats. You may not even be troubled by the possibility of being stomped by six hundred pounds of misplaced Italian-American pride. But let me tell you something: my friend Louis is infinitely less tolerant than I am, and anyone who gets in his way, or holds back information, is playing with fire and will get badly burned.

“You seem to be looking at this like it’s some kind of intellectual game with information as the forfeit, but there are lives involved, and right now I don’t have time to trade with you. Either help me now or get out and accept any consequences that arise when we come looking for you again.”

Bartek looked at the floor.

“I know all about you, Mr. Parker,” said Reid, haltingly at first. “I know what happened to your wife and your daughter. I’ve read about the men and women whom you’ve hunted down. I also suspect that, unknowingly, you’ve come close to these Believers before, for you’ve certainly destroyed some who shared their delusions. You couldn’t make the connection, and for some reason neither could they, not until recently. Perhaps it is to do with the difference between good and evil: good is selfless, while evil is always self-interested. Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.”

He smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m sorry, I have a tendency to wax philosophical. It is a consequence of dealing with such matters. Anyway, I know too that you have a partner now, and a little girl. I don’t see any trace of them here. There are dirty dishes in your sink, and I see in your eyes that you’re troubled by things that have nothing to do with this case.”

“That’s none of your business,” I said.

“Oh, but it is. You’re vulnerable, Mr. Parker, and you’re angry, and they’ll exploit that. They’ll use it to get at you. I don’t doubt for one moment that you’re prepared to hurt people who frustrate you or who get in your way. Right now, I don’t think you’d even need much of an excuse to do it, but believe me when I say that we were being cautious in our answers for good reason. Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe the time has come to be more honest with each other. So let me begin.

“Stuckler has two faces, and two collections. One he displays to the public, and the other is entirely private. The public collection consists of paintings, sculpture, antiques, all with ironclad provenance, and above reproach in both taste and source. The second collection betrays his origins. Stuckler’s father was a major in Der Führer Regiment of the Second SS Panzer Division. He was a veteran of the Russian front, and he was one of those who later carved a bloody trail through France in 1944. He was at Tulle when they hanged ninety-nine civilians from lampposts as reprisals for attacks on German forces by the Maquis, and he had gasoline on his hands after the slaughter and burning of over six hundred civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane. Mathias Stuckler followed orders, apparently without question, just as might be expected of one of the army’s elite.

“His other role was as a treasure seeker for the Nazis. Stuckler had a background in art history. He was a cultured man, but as with a great many cultured men, his taste for beautiful things coexisted with a barbarous nature. He helped to loot the Hapsburg royal family’s treasures from Vienna in 1938, including what some fool believed was the spear of Longinus, and he was a favorite of Himmler’s. Himmler had a particular passion for the occult; after all, this was a man who sent expeditions to Tibet to seek the origins of the Aryan race, and who used slave labor to renovate Wewelsburg castle to resemble Camelot, complete with round table. Personally, I don’t think Stuckler believed a word of it, but it gave him an excuse to loot and to acquire treasures for his own gratification and reward, which he set aside carefully as the opportunity arose.

“After the war, those treasures found their way to his son, and that is what we believe forms the bulk of the private collection. If the rumors are true, some of Goering’s art collection has also since found its way to Joachim Stuckler’s vaults. Goering attempted to send a train-load of stolen art to safety by train from his hunting lodge in Bavaria toward the end of the war, but the train was abandoned and the collection disappeared. A painting by François Boucher, stolen from a Paris gallery in 1943 and known to be part of Goering’s trove, was quietly repatriated last year, and Stuckler was reputed to have been the source. It seems that he made inquiries about selling it, and its provenance was discovered. To avoid embarrassment, he handed it back to the French, claiming that he himself had purchased it some years earlier under a misapprehension. Stuckler has always denied the existence of a secret cache, and claims that if his father did manage to assemble such a trove of looted items-and he has publicly stated his belief that this is a lie-then its whereabouts died with his father.”

“What happened to his father?”

“Mathias Stuckler was killed late in the summer of 1944 during an incident at the French Cistercian monastery of Fontfroide in the Corbière Hills. The circumstances have never been fully explained, but a party of SS soldiers, a number of civilian liaisons from the University of Nuremberg, and four Cistercian monks were shot to death during a confrontation in the monastery courtyard. Stuckler was doing his master’s bidding, but something unexpected occurred. In any event, the treasure at Fontfroide was denied him.”

“And what was the treasure?”

“Ostensibly a valuable fourteenth-century gold crucifix, various gold coins, a quantity of gemstones, two gold chalices, and a small, jeweled monstrance.”

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of haul that would drag the SS up a mountain in the face of the enemy.”

“The gold was a decoy. The real treasure lay in a nondescript silver box. It was a fragment of a coded map, one of a number of pieces placed in similar boxes during the fifteenth century, then dispersed. The knowledge contained within them has since been lost to us, which might have been for the best if the boxes too had been irretrievably lost.”

“Careless of you to mislay your own statue,” I said.

Reid flinched slightly, but otherwise gave no indication that my awareness of the Black Angel, and the story of its creation, was perhaps greater than he had anticipated.

“It wasn’t an item that the order was anxious to display,” he said. “From the beginning, there were those who said that it should be destroyed utterly.”

“Why wasn’t it?”

“Because, if one believes the myth of its creation, they feared that any attempt to destroy it would release what lay within. Those were more credulous times, I hasten to add. Instead, it was hidden, and the knowledge of its whereabouts dispersed to trusted abbots in the form of vellum fragments. Each fragment contains a great deal of ancillary information-illustrations, dimensions of rooms, partial accounts of the creation of the statue you mentioned-and a numerical reference alongside a single letter: either D or S, for ‘dexter’ or ‘sinister,’ right or left. They are units of measurement, all taken from a single starting point. Combined together, they are supposed to give the precise location of a vault. Stuckler was trying to assemble the map when he died, as many others before him had tried to do. The Fontfroide fragment disappeared following the attack and has not been seen since.

“You know that the statue is rumored to lie buried in the vault. That’s what Stuckler was attempting to recover, and that’s what the Believers are also trying to locate. Recent developments have given their search a new impetus. A fragment of the map was found earlier this year at Sedlec, in the Czech Republic, but subsequently disappeared before it could be examined. We believe that a second went missing from a house in Brooklyn some weeks back.”

“Winston’s house.”

“Which is how you came to be involved, for we now know that two women were present in the house when the killings occurred, and were subsequently hunted down in the belief that they were in possession of the fragment.”

“That’s two pieces, excluding Fontfroide.”

“Three more pieces, one from Bohemia, one from Italy, and another from England, have been missing for centuries. The contents of the Italian section have long been common knowledge, but the rest are almost certainly in the wrong hands. Yesterday, we received information that a fragment, possibly the missing piece from Fontfroide, may have been acquired in Georgia. Two veterans of World War II were found dead in a swamp. It’s not clear how they died, but both were survivors of an attack by SS soldiers near Fontfroide, the same SS soldiers who were subsequently killed at the monastery.”

“Was Stuckler responsible for the deaths of the veterans?”

“He may have been, although it would be out of character for him. We believe that he has at least one fragment, and possibly more. He is certainly driven in his quest.”

I couldn’t see Murnos colluding in the deaths of two old men. He didn’t seem like the type.

“Is Stuckler a Believer?”

“We have no evidence to suggest that he is, but they keep themselves well hidden. It is entirely possible that Stuckler is one of them, or he may even be a renegade, one who has chosen to take his chances against his fellows.”

“So it could be that he’s competing with them for possession of this map?”

“A fragment is due to be offered for sale this week at an auction house in Boston run by a woman named Claudia Stern. It is our understanding that this is the Sedlec fragment, although we cannot prove it. The map and the box went missing from Sedlec soon after the discovery, and before a proper examination could be made. We have investigated the possibility of taking legal action to stop the sale until its provenance can be determined, but we have been instructed that any such attempt would fail. We have no proof that it was taken from Sedlec, or that the Cistercian order has any claim to its ownership. Soon, all the pieces will be available for examination; and then the Believers will go hunting for the statue.”

I watched them leave as the evening grew dark and quiet. I hadn’t learned as much as I had hoped, but neither had they. We were still circling one another, wary of giving too much away. I had not mentioned Sekula to Reid and Bartek, but Angel and Louis had taken on the task of checking out his office once they returned to New York. If they found out anything more, then they would tell me.

I closed the door and called Rachel on her cell. My call went straight to her message system. I thought about trying her parents’ number, but I didn’t want to have to deal with Frank or Joan. Instead, I walked Walter along the marshes, but when we came to a copse of trees at the farthest extreme of the woods, he would go no farther, and grew agitated until we turned back to the house. The moon was already visible in the sky, and it was reflected in the waters of the little pond, like the face of a drowned man hanging in its depths.

Reid and Bartek drove toward I-95. They did not speak until they were heading south on the interstate.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” asked Bartek.

“I told him enough, maybe too much.”

“You lied to him. You said that you didn’t know what it meant to be ‘found.”’

“These people are deluded.”

“Brightwell isn’t like the rest. He’s different. How can it be otherwise, the way he keeps reappearing, unchanged?”

“Let them believe what they want to believe, Brightwell included. There’s no point in worrying him more than he is. The man already looks weighed down by his burdens. Why should we add to them?”

Bartek stared out the window. Great mounds of earth had been torn up for the widening of the highway. Trees lay fallen, waiting to be cut up and transported. The outlines of digging equipment were visible against the darkening sky, like beasts frozen in the midst of some great conflict.

No, he thought. It’s more than a delusion. It’s not merely the statue that they’ve been seeking.

He spoke carefully. Reid had a temper, and he didn’t want him sulking in the driver’s seat for the rest of the journey.

“He will have to be told, regardless of any other problems he may have,” he said. “They’ll come back, because of who they believe he is. And they’ll hurt him.”

Ahead of them, the Kennebunk exit was approaching. Bartek could see the parking lot of the rest stop, and the lights of the fast-food outlets. They were in the fast lane, a big rig on their inside.

“Bugger,” said Reid. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you along.”

He floored the accelerator, cut in front of the truck, and made the exit. Seconds later they were heading back the way that they had come.

Walter was already barking by the time their car pulled up. He had learned to respond to the warning noises from the motion sensor at the gate. Now that Rachel was gone, I had opened the gun safe and placed one gun in the hall stand and another in the kitchen. The third, the big Smith 10, I tried to keep close to hand wherever I was. I watched the big priest come to the door. The younger one stayed by the car.

“Lose your way?” I said as I opened the door.

“A long time ago,” said Reid. “Is there somewhere we can go to eat? I’m starving.”

I took them to the Great Lost Bear. I liked the Bear. It was unpretentious and inexpensive, and I didn’t want to be stiffed on a pricey meal by a pair of monks. We ordered hot wings, and burgers and fries. Reid seemed impressed by the selection of beers and went for some British import that looked like it had been bottled in the time of Shakespeare.

“So where were you stricken by remorse at your dishonesty?” I asked.

Reid shot Bartek a poisonous look.

“The voice of my bloody conscience started up somewhere beside a Burger King,” he said.

“It wasn’t quite the road to Damascus,” said Bartek, “but then you’re no Saint Paul, apart from a shared bad temper.”

“As you seem aware, I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about certain matters,” said Reid. “My young colleague here appears to feel that we should make clear the risks that you’re facing, and what Brightwell meant by your being ‘found.’ I stand by what I said earlier: they’re deluded, and they want others to share their delusions. They can believe what they want to believe, and you don’t have to go along with it, but I now accept that those beliefs can still be a threat to you.

“It goes back to the apocrypha, and the fall of the angels. God forces the rebels from heaven, and they burn in their descent. They are banished to hell, but some choose instead to wander the nascent earth, consumed by hatred of God and, eventually, the growing hordes of humanity that they see around them. They identify what they believe to be the flaw in God’s creation: God has given man free will, and so he is open to evil as well as good. So the war against God continues on earth, waged through men. I suppose you could term it guerrilla warfare, in a way.

“But not all of the angels turned their backs on God. According to Enoch, there was one who repented, and believed that he could still be forgiven. The others tried to hunt him down, but he hid himself among men. The salvation he sought never came, but he continued to believe in the possibility that it might be offered to him if he made reparation for all that he had done. He did not lose faith. After all, his offense was great, and his punishment had to be great in return. He was prepared to endure whatever was visited upon him in the hope of his ultimate salvation. So our friends, these Believers, are of the opinion that this last angel is still out there, somewhere, and they hate him almost as much as they hate God Himself.”

Found.

“They want to kill him?”

“According to their tenets, he can’t be killed. If they kill him, they lose him again. He wanders, finds a new form, and the search has to start over.”

“So what are their options?”

“To corrupt him, to make him despair so that he joins their ranks again; or they can imprison him forever, lock him up somewhere so that he weakens and wastes away, yet can never enjoy the release of death. He will endure an eternity of slow, living decay. An appalling thought, if nothing else.”

“You see,” said Bartek, “God is merciful. That is what I believe, that is what Martin believes, and that is what, according to Enoch, the solitary angel believed. God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn’t damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.”

“I always thought Judas got a raw deal,” said Reid. “Christ had to die to redeem us, and a lot of people played a part in getting Him to that point. You could argue that Judas’s role was preordained, and that, in the aftermath, no man could have been expected to bear the burden of killing God without despairing. You might have thought that there would have been a little room for maneuver in God’s great scheme for Judas.”

I sipped at an alcohol-free beer. It didn’t taste great, but I wasn’t about to blame the beer for that.

“You’re telling me that they think I might be this angel that they’ve been seeking.”

“Yes,” said Reid. “Enoch is very allegorical, as you’ve surely learned by now, and there are places where the allegory bleeds into the more straightforward aspects. Enoch’s creator meant the repentant angel to symbolize the hope of forgiveness that we all should hold within us, even those who have sinned most grievously. The Believers have chosen to interpret it literally, and in you they think they’ve found their lost penitent. They’re not certain, though. That’s why Brightwell tried to get close to you.”

“I didn’t tell you when we first met, but I think I’ve seen someone who looked like Brightwell before,” I said.

“Where?”

“In a painting of Sedlec in the fifteenth century. It was in Claudia Stern’s workshop. It’s going to be auctioned this week, along with the box from Sedlec.”

I expected Reid to scoff at my mention of a similarity to Brightwell, but he didn’t.

“There’s a lot that is interesting about Mr. Brightwell. If nothing else, he-or ancestors who looked startlingly like him-has been around for a long, long time.”

He nodded to his companion, and Bartek began spreading upon the table pictures and photographs from a file by his feet. We were right at the rear of the Bear, and the waitress had been told that we were okay for the present, so we would be left undisturbed. I drew the first picture toward me with my finger. It was a black-and-white photograph of a group of men, most of them in Nazi uniforms. Interspersed with them were civilians. There were about twelve men in all, and they were seated outdoors at a long wooden table littered with empty wine bottles and the remains of food.

“The man at the back, on the left, is Mathias Stuckler,” said Bartek. “The other men in uniform are members of the Special SS group. The civilians are members of the Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, incorporated into the SS in 1940. Effectively, it was Himmler’s research institute, and it was far from benign in its methods. Berger, its race expert, saw the potential for experimentation in the concentration camps as early as 1943. He spent eight days at Auschwitz that year, selecting over a hundred prisoners to measure and assess, then had them all gassed and shipped to the anatomy department at Strasbourg.

“All Ahnenerbe staff held SS rank. These are the men who died at Fontfroide. This photograph was taken only a few days before they were killed. By this point, many of Stuckler’s comrades from Der Führer Regiment had died trying to halt the Allied advance after D-day. The soldiers with him in this picture were all that remained of his most loyal cadre. The rest ended up in Hungary and Austria, fighting alongside the flotsam of the Third Reich until the last day of the war. They were committed men, albeit ones committed to the wrong cause.”

There was nothing very distinctive about any of the figures in the group, although Stuckler was taller and bulkier than the rest, and a little younger. His features, though, were harsh, and the light in his eyes was long spent. I was about to lay the photograph to one side when Bartek stopped me.

“Look beyond them, to the people behind.”

I examined the background. There were military men at some of the other tables, sometimes accompanied by women but more often surrounded by others of their kind. In one corner, a man sat drinking alone, a half-empty glass of wine before him. He was discreetly looking at the SS group while the photograph was being taken, so his face was partially visible.

It was Brightwell. He was marginally slimmer, and with slightly more hair, but his tumorous neck and the slightly feminine tilt to his features dispelled any doubts as to his identity.

“But this photograph was taken nearly sixty years ago,” I said. “It must have been doctored.”

Reid looked dubious. “It’s always possible, but we think it’s authentic. And even if this one is not, there are others about which there can be no doubt.”

I drew the rest of the images nearer to me. Most were black-and-white, some sepia-tinted. Many were dated, the oldest being from 1871. Frequently they depicted churches or monasteries, often with groups of pilgrims in front of them. In each photograph the specter of a man lurked, a strange, obese figure with full lips and pale, almost luminous skin.

In addition to the photographs, there was a high-quality copy of a painting, similar to the one Claudia Stern had shown to me, possibly even by the same artist. Once again, it depicted a group of men on horseback, surrounded by the clamor and violence of war. There were flames on the horizon, and all around them men were fighting and dying, their sufferings depicted in intricate detail. The men on horseback were rendered distinctive by the symbol on their saddles: a red grapnel. They were led by a man with long dark hair and dressed in a cloak, beneath which his armor could be seen. The artist had painted his eyes slightly out of scale, so that they were too large for his head. One had a white cast to it, as though the paint had been scratched to reveal the blank canvas beneath. To his right, the figure of Brightwell held a banner marked with a red grapnel in one hand. The other held the severed head of a woman by its hair.

“This is like the painting that I saw,” I said. “It’s smaller, and the horsemen in this one are the focus, and not just an element, but it’s very similar.”

“This painting shows the military action at Sedlec,” said Bartek. “Sedlec is now part of the Czech Republic, and we know that, as the myth has it, this was the site of the confrontation between Immael and the monk Erdric. After some discussion, it was decided that it was too dangerous to keep the statue at Sedlec, and that it should be hidden. The fragments of vellum were dispersed, in each case entrusted only to the abbot of the monastery in question, who would share this knowledge with just one other of his community as death neared. The abbot of Sedlec was the only member of the order who knew where each box had been sent, and once they had been distributed he sent the statue on its journey to its new hiding place.

“Unfortunately, while the statue was in the process of being moved, Sedlec was attacked by the men in the painting. The abbot had succeeded in hiding the Black Angel, but the knowledge of its whereabouts was lost, because only he knew the monasteries to which the map fragments had been entrusted, and the abbots in question were sworn to secrecy under threat of excommunication and perpetual damnation.”

“So the statue remains lost, if it ever existed?” I said.

“The boxes exist,” said Reid. “We know that each contains a fragment of some kind of map. True, it may all be a great ruse, an elaborate joke on the part of the abbot of Sedlec. But if it is a joke, then he was killed for it, and a great many others have died for it since.”

“Why not just let them look for it?” I said. “If it exists, they can have it. If it doesn’t, they’ve wasted their time.”

“It exists,” said Reid simply. “That much, in the end, I do believe. It is its nature that I dispute, not its existence. It is a magnet for evil, but evil is reflected in it, not contained within. All of this”-he indicated the material on the table with a sweep of his hand-“is incidental. I have no explanation as to how Brightwell, or someone who resembles him to an extraordinary degree, came to be in these images. Perhaps he is part of a line, and these are all his dead kin. Whatever is the case, the Believers have killed for centuries, and now is the time to put a stop to them. They’ve grown careless, largely because circumstances have forced their hand. For the first time, they think they are drawing close to securing all of the fragments. If we watch them, the order can identify them and take steps against them.”

“What kind of steps?”

“If we find evidence linking them to crimes, we can hand that information over to the authorities and have them tried.”

“And if you don’t find evidence?”

“Then it will be enough to make their identities known, and there will be others who will do what we cannot do.”

“Kill them?”

Reid shrugged.

“Imprison them, perhaps, or worse. It’s not for me to say.”

“I thought you said they couldn’t be killed.”

“I said that they are convinced that they can’t be destroyed. It’s not the same thing.”

I closed my eyes. This was madness.

“Now you know what we know,” said Reid. “All we can ask is that you share with us any knowledge that might help us against these people. If you meet with Stuckler, I would be interested to hear from you what he had to say. Similarly, if you succeed in finding the FBI agent, Bosworth, you should tell us. In all of this, he remains an unknown.”

I had told them about Bosworth on the journey into Portland. It seemed that they were already aware of him. After all, he had tried to tear apart one of their churches. Still, they did not know where he was, and I decided not to tell them that he was in New York.

“And finally, Mr. Parker, I want you to be careful,” said Reid. “There is a controlling intelligence at work here, and it’s not Brightwell.”

He tapped his finger against the copy of the painting, allowing it to rest above the head of the armored captain with the white mark on his eye.

“Somewhere there is one who believes that he is the reincarnation of the Captain, which means that he suffers from the greatest delusion of all. In his mind, he is Ashmael, driven to seek his twin. For the present, Brightwell is curious about you, but his priority is to find the statue. Once that is secure, he will turn his attention back to you, and I don’t think that will be a positive development.”

Reid leaned across the table and gripped my shoulder with his left hand. His right reached into his shirt and removed from it a black-and-silver cross that hung around his neck.

“Remember, though: no matter what may happen, the answer to all things is here.”

With that, he removed the cross and handed it to me. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it.

I returned to my house alone. Reid and Bartek had offered to accompany me, and even to stay with me, but I politely declined. Maybe it was misplaced pride, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the possibility that I needed two monks to watch my back. It seemed like a slippery slope that would eventually lead to nuns accompanying me to the gym, and the priests from Saint Maximilian’s running my bathwater.

There was a car parked in my driveway when I pulled in, and my front door was open. Walter was lying on the porch mat, happily gnawing on a marrowbone. Angel appeared behind him. Walter looked up, wagged his tail, then returned to his supper.

“I don’t remember leaving the door open,” I said.

“We like to think that your door is always open to us, and if it isn’t, we can always open it with a pick. Plus, we know your alarm codes. We left a message on your cell.”

I checked my phone. I hadn’t heard it ring, but there were two messages waiting.

“I got distracted,” I said.

“With what?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

I listened to my messages as I walked. The first was from Angel. The second was from Ellis Chambers, the man I had turned away when he came to me about his son, the man I had advised to seek help elsewhere. His words deteriorated into sobs before he could finish telling me all that he wanted to say, but what I heard was enough.

The body of his son Neil had been found in a ditch outside Olathe, Kansas. The men to whom he owed money had finally lost their patience with him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Few people now remember the name of Sam Lichtman. Lichtman was a New York cabdriver who, on March 18, 1941, was driving his yellow cab along Seventh Avenue near Times Square when he ran over a guy who suddenly stepped out in front of him at an intersection. According to the dead man’s passport, his name was Don Julio Lopez Lido, a Spaniard. In the confusion, nobody noticed that Don Julio had been talking to another man at the intersection before he made his fatal attempt to cross and that, as a curious crowd gathered in the wake of the accident, this second man picked up a brown leather briefcase lying near the body and disappeared.

The NYPD duly arrived, and discovered that Don Julio was staying in a Manhattan hotel. When the cops went to his room, they found maps, notes, and a great deal of material related to military aviation. The FBI were called in, and as they dug deeper into the mystery of the dead Spaniard, they discovered that he was actually one Ulrich von der Osten, a captain in Nazi military intelligence, and he was the brains behind the main German spy network in the United States. The man who had fled the scene of the accident was Kurt Frederick Ludwig, von der Osten’s assistant, and together the two men had managed to recruit eight accomplices who were passing details of military strength, shipping schedules, and industrial production back to Berlin, including the departure and arrival times of ships using New York Harbor and the numbers of Flying Fortresses being sent to England. The reports were written in invisible ink and mailed to pseudonymous recipients at fictitious foreign addresses. Letters to one “Manuel Alonzo,” for example, were meant for Heinrich Himmler himself. Ludwig was subsequently arrested, he and his associates were tried in federal court in Manhattan, and they each received a sentence of up to twenty years for their troubles. Sam Lichtman, with one surge of gas, had managed to cripple the Nazis’ entire intelligence network in the United States.

My father told me Lichtman’s story when I was a boy, and I never forgot it. I guessed that Lichtman was a Jewish name, and it seemed somehow apt that it should have been a Jew who knocked down a Nazi on Seventh Avenue in 1941, when so many of his fellows were already on cattle trains heading east. It was a small blow for his people, inadvertently struck by a man who then faded into folk memory.

Louis hadn’t heard the story of Sam Lichtman, and he didn’t appear very impressed with it when I told it to him. He listened without comment while I went through the events of the last couple of days, culminating in the visit from the two monks and the encounter with Brightwell on the road. When I mentioned the fat man, and Reid’s interpretation of the words he had spoken to me on the road, something changed in Louis’s demeanor. He seemed almost to retreat from me, withdrawing further into himself, and he avoided looking at me directly.

“And you think this might be the same guy who was watching us when we took G-Mack?” said Angel. He was aware of the tension between Louis and me, and let me know with a slight movement of his eyes in his partner’s direction that we could talk about it in private later.

“The feelings he aroused were the same,” I said. “I can’t explain it any other way.”

“He sounds like one of the men who came looking for Sereta,” said Angel. “Octavio didn’t have a name for him, but there can’t be too many guys like that walking the streets.”

I thought of the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop and the pictures and photographs that Reid and Bartek had shown me at the Great Lost Bear. I arranged the images in my mind in order of antiquity, progressing from paint strokes to sepia, then on to the man seated behind Stuckler’s group, before finally recalling the figure of Brightwell himself, somehow reaching for me without moving, his nails cutting me without a hand being laid upon me. Each time he got a little older, his flesh a little more corrupted, that terrible, painful extrusion on his neck a little larger and more obvious. No, there could not be many such men on this earth. There could not ever have been many such men.

“So what now?” said Angel. “Sekula’s dropped off the planet, and he was our best lead.”

Angel and Louis had paid a visit to Sekula’s building earlier in the week and had gone through his apartment and his office. They had found virtually nothing in the office: insignificant files relating to a number of properties in the tristate area, some fairly straightforward corporate material, and a folder marked with the name Ambassade Realty that contained just a single letter, dated two years earlier, acknowledging that Ambassade was now responsible for the maintenance and potential leasing of three warehouse buildings, including the one in Williamsburg. The apartment above the office wasn’t much more revealing. There were clothes and toiletries, both male and female, which made it seem more and more likely that Sekula and the improbably named Hope were an item; some suitably anonymous books and magazines that suggested he and his mate bought all of their reading material at airports; and a kitchen filled with drearily healthy foodstuffs, along with a refrigerator entirely devoid of food of any kind at all, apart from long-life milk. According to Angel, it looked like someone had cherry-picked and then removed anything that might have been remotely interesting about Sekula’s life and work in order to create the impression that here was one of the single most boring individuals ever to have passed a bar exam.

Louis returned the following day and questioned the secretary who had so chirpily answered the phone to me. If she was under the impression that he was a cop when she answered his questions, then that was clearly some kind of misunderstanding on her behalf and nothing to do with any vagueness on Louis’s part. She was just a caretaker, hired from a temp agency and required to do nothing more than answer the phone, read her book, and file her nails. She hadn’t seen Sekula or his secretary since the day she’d been hired, and the only means of communication she had for him was through an answering service. She said that some other policemen had called in to the office, following the discovery of the basement room in Williamsburg, but she could tell them nothing more than she had told Louis. She did believe, though, that someone had visited the office after hours, as she thought that some items might have been moved from the secretary’s desk and the shelves behind it. It was also her final day, because the agency had called to say that she was being transferred to another job and should simply activate the answering machine before she left that evening.

“We still have Bosworth, and Stuckler,” I said. “Plus, the auction is due to take place this week, and if Reid and Neddo are right, that map fragment is going to make some people break cover.”

Louis stood abruptly and left the room. I looked to Angel for an explanation.

“It’s a lot of things,” he said. “He hasn’t slept much, hasn’t eaten. Yesterday they released Alice’s remains for burial, and Martha took her home. He told her that he’d keep looking for the men who killed her, but she said it was too late. She said that if he thought he was doing all this for Alice, then he was lying to himself. She wasn’t about to give him a dispensation to hurt someone just so he could feel better about his life. He blames himself for what happened.”

“Does he blame me too?”

Angel shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s that simple. This guy, Brightwell, he knows something about you. Somehow, there’s a connection between you and the man behind Alice’s death, and Louis doesn’t want to hear that, not now. He just needs time to work it out in his own way, that’s all.”

Angel took a beer from the cooler. He offered me one. I shook my head.

“It’s quiet here,” he said. “Have you spoken to her?”

“Briefly.”

“How are they?”

“They’re doing okay.”

“When are they coming back?”

“After all this is over, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“You heard me.”

Angel stopped drinking and poured the remainder of his beer down the sink.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard.”

And then he left me alone in the kitchen.

Joachim Stuckler lived in a white two-story house on an acre of waterfront property just outside Nahant, down in Essex County. The land was high-walled and protected by an electronic gate. The grounds were neatly tended, and mature shrubs masked the walls on the inside. From the front, the main house looked like an above average dwelling, albeit one that had been decorated by drunken Greeks nostalgic for their homeland-the façade boasted more pillars than the Acropolis-but as I passed through the gate and followed the driveway I caught a glimpse of the back of the house and saw that it had been extended considerably. Large picture windows gleamed smokily in the sunlight, and a sleek white cruiser rested at a wooden jetty. The lapse of taste in decoration aside, Stuckler seemed to be doing okay financially.

The front door was already open when I pulled up in front of the house, and Murnos was waiting for me. I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t one hundred percent behind his boss’s decision to invite me over, but I got that a lot. I’d learned not to take it personally.

“Are you armed, Mr. Parker?” Murnos asked.

I tried to look sheepish.

“Just a bit.”

“We’ll take care of it for you.”

I handed over the Smith 10. Murnos then produced a circular wand from a drawer and wiped it over me. It beeped a little at my watch and belt. Murnos checked to make sure I wasn’t concealing anything potentially lethal in either, then led me to a living room, where a short, stocky man in a navy pinstripe suit set off by a raging pink tie stood posed by an ornate sideboard, just a few decades too late for Life magazine’s celebrity photographers to immortalize him in glorious black-and-white. His hair was dark gray, and brushed backward from his forehead. His skin was lightly tanned, and he had very white teeth. The watch on his wrist could have paid my mortgage for a year. The furnishings in the room and the art upon the walls could probably have covered the rest of Scarborough’s mortgages for a year. Well, maybe not out on Prouts Neck, but most of the folk on Prouts Neck didn’t need too much help with their bills.

He rose and stretched out a hand. It was a very clean hand. I felt kind of bad about shaking it, in case he was just being polite and secretly hoped that I wasn’t going to sully him with any form of contact.

“Joachim Stuckler,” he said. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. Alexis has told me all about you. His trip to Maine proved quite expensive. I will have to compensate the men who were hurt.”

“You could have just called.”

“I have to be-”

Stuckler paused, poised like a man in an orchard searching for a particularly ripe apple, then plucked the word from the air with a delicate hand gesture.

“-cautious,” he concluded. “As I’m sure you’re aware by now, there are dangerous men about.”

I wondered if Stuckler, despite his posturing and vague effeminacy, was one of them. He invited me to take a seat, then offered me tea.

“You can have coffee, if you prefer. It’s just a habit of mine to take midmorning tea.”

“Tea is fine.”

Murnos picked up the receiver of an old black telephone and dialed an extension. Seconds later a flunky arrived carrying a tray. He carefully set out a big china pot and two matching cups, along with a sugar bowl, milk, and a small plate of lemon slices. A second plate contained a selection of pastries. They looked crumbly and hard to eat. The cups were very delicate and lined with gold. Stuckler poured a little tea into a cup, then allowed it to flow more freely once he was content with the color. When both cups were filled, he asked me how I preferred to take my tea.

“Black is fine,” I said.

Stuckler winced slightly, but otherwise he hid his displeasure manfully.

We sipped our tea. It was all very pleasant. We just needed some dim bulb called Algy to wander in wearing tennis whites and carrying a racket and we could have been in a drawing room comedy, except that Stuckler was considerably more interesting than he appeared. Another call to Ross, this time answered a little more quickly than before, had given me some background on the neat, grinning man before me. According to Ross’s contact in the IWG-the Interagency Working Group, created in 1998 to delve into, among other things, the records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes in order to assess evidence of cooperation between U.S. organizations and individuals of questionable background from the former regimes-Stuckler’s mother, Maria, had traveled to the United States with her only son shortly after the end of the war. The INS tried to have a great many of these people deported, but the preference in the CIA and, in particular, in Hoover’s FBI, was to keep them in the States so they could report back on Communist sympathizers within their own communities. The U.S. government wasn’t too particular about whom it welcomed in those days: five associates of Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had played a part in the “Final Solution,” worked for the CIA, and efforts were made to recruit at least a further two dozen war criminals and collaborators.

Maria Stuckler bargained her way to the States with the promise of documents relating to German Communists secured by her husband during his dealings with Himmler. She was a clever woman, delivering enough material to keep the Americans keen and, with each disclosure, getting a little closer to her ultimate goal of U.S. citizenship for her son and herself. Her citizenship application was personally approved by Hoover after she handed over the last of her store of documents, which related to various left-wing Jews who had fled Germany before the start of the war and had since found gainful employment in the United States. The IWG concluded that some of Maria Stuckler’s information proved crucial in the early days of the McCarthy hearings, which made her something of a heroine in Hoover’s eyes. Her “favored person” status enabled her to set up the antiques business that her son subsequently inherited, and to import objects of interest from Europe with little or no interference from U.S. Customs. The old woman was still alive, apparently. She lived in a big house in Newport, Rhode Island, and all of her faculties were fully intact at the age of eighty-five.

Now here I was, taking tea with her son in a room furnished and paid for with the spoils of war, if Reid was right in his assessment of Stuckler’s private collection, and secured by an ambitious woman’s slow process of betrayal over more than a decade. I wondered if it ever bothered Stuckler. Ross’s contact had said that Stuckler was a generous contributor to a great many good causes, including a number of Jewish charities, although some had declined his largesse once the identity of the prospective donor became known. It might have been genuine pangs of conscience that led to his donations. It might also merely have been good public relations, a means of deflecting attention away from his business and his collections.

I realized that I had developed a sudden, deep-seated dislike for Stuckler, and I didn’t even know him.

“I’m grateful to you for taking the time to come here,” he said. He had no trace of an accent, German or otherwise. His tone was entirely neutral, contributing to the sense of an image that had been carefully cultivated to give away as little as possible about the origins and true nature of the man who lay behind it.

“With respect,” I said, “I came here because your employee indicated that you might have some information. I can take tea at home.”

Despite the calculated insult, Stuckler continued to radiate goodwill, as though he took great pleasure in the suspicion that everyone who came to his house secretly disliked him, and their jibes were merely honey on his bread.

“Of course, of course. I think perhaps I can help you. Before we begin, though, I am curious about the death of Mr. Garcia, in which I understand you played a significant role. I should like to know what you saw in his apartment.”

I didn’t know where this was leading, but I understood that Stuckler was used to bargaining. He had probably learned the skill from his mother, and applied it every day in his business dealings. I wasn’t going to get anything out of him unless I gave him at least as much in return.

“There were bone sculptures, ornate candlesticks made from human remains, some other half-completed efforts, and a representation of a Mexican deity, Santa Muerte, made from a female skull.”

Stuckler didn’t seem interested in Santa Muerte. Instead he made me elaborate on what I had seen, questioning me about small details of construction and presentation. He then gestured to Murnos, who took a book from a side table and brought it to his employer. It was a black coffee table volume, with the words Memento Mori in red along the spine. On the cover was a photograph of a piece that might have come from Garcia’s apartment: a skull resting upon a curved bone that jutted out like a white tongue from beneath the ruined jaw, which was missing five or six of its front teeth. Below the skull was a column of five or six similar curved bones.

Stuckler saw me looking.

“Each is a human sacrum,” he said. “One can tell from the five fused vertebrae.”

He flicked through fifty or sixty pages of text in a number of languages, including German and English, until he came to a series of photographs. He handed the volume to me.

“Please, take a look at these photographs and tell me if anything is familiar.”

I leafed through them. All were in black-and-white, with a faint sepia tint. The first depicted a church of some kind, with three spires set in a triangular pattern. It was surrounded by bare trees, and an old stone wall separated at regular intervals by columns topped with carved skulls. The rest of the pictures showed ornate arrangements of skulls and bones beneath vaulted ceilings: great pyramids and crosses; garlands of bones and white chain; candlesticks and candelabras; and finally, another view of the church, this time taken from the rear, and in daylight. The surrounding walls were thick with ivy, but the monochrome textures of the photograph gave it the appearance of a swarm of insects, as though bees were massing along the walls.

“What is this place?” I said. Once again, there was something obscene about the photographs, about this reduction of human beings to a series of adornments to a church. “Is this Sedlec?”

“First you have to answer my question,” said Stuckler. He wagged a finger at me in reproach. I considered breaking it. I looked at Murnos. He didn’t need telepathy to know what I was thinking. From the expression on his face, I imagined that a lot of people, maybe Murnos included, had thought about hurting Joachim Stuckler.

I ignored the finger and pointed instead to one small photograph of an anchor-shaped arrangement of bones set in an alcove beside a cracked wall. Seven humerus bones formed a stellate pattern with a skull at their center, supported in turn by what might have been portions of sternum or scapula, then a vertical column of more humerus bones, which met at last a semicircle of vertebrae curving upward on either side and ending in a pair of skulls.

“There was something similar to this in Garcia’s apartment,” I said.

“Is that what you showed to Mr. Neddo?”

I didn’t answer. Stuckler snorted impatiently.

“Come, come, Mr. Parker. As I told you, I know a great deal about you and your work. I am aware that you consulted Neddo. It was natural that you should do so: after all, he is an acknowledged expert in his field. He is also, I might add, a Believer. Well, in his defense, perhaps ‘was a Believer’ might be more accurate. He has since turned his back on them, although I suspect that he retains a faith in some of their more obscure convictions.”

This was news to me. Assuming Stuckler was telling the truth, Neddo had kept his connection to the Believers well hidden. It raised further questions about his loyalties. He had spoken to Reid and Bartek, and I could only assume that they knew of his background, but I wondered if Neddo had told Brightwell about me as well.

“What do you know about them?” I asked.

“That they are secretive and organized; that they believe in the existence of angelic, or demonic, beings; and that they are looking for the same item that I am seeking.”

“The Black Angel.”

For the first time, Stuckler actually looked impressed. If I was a little more insecure, I might have blushed happily in the light of his approval.

“Yes, the Black Angel, although my desire for it is different from theirs. My father died seeking it. Perhaps you are aware of my background? Yes, I rather suspect that you are. I don’t believe you are the kind of man who fails to equip himself with information before meeting a stranger. My father was a member of the SS, and part of the Ahnenerbe, Reichsführer Himmler’s delvers into the occult. Most of it was nonsense, of course, but the Black Angel was different: it was real, or at least one could say with reasonable certainty that a silver statue of a being in the process of transformation from human to demonic existed. Such an artifact would be an adornment to any collection, regardless of its value. But Himmler, like the Believers, was of the opinion that it was more than a mere statue. He knew the tale of its creation. Such a story had a natural appeal for him. He began seeking the pieces of the map that contained the location of the statue, and it was for this reason that my father and his men were dispatched to the monastery at Fontfroide, after Himmler discovered that one of the boxes containing a map fragment was reputed to be hidden there. The Ahnenerbe boasted prodigious researchers, capable of unearthing the most obscure references. It was a dangerous errand, undertaken under the noses of the Allied forces, and it led to my father’s death. The box disappeared and, so far I have been unable to trace it.”

He jabbed a finger at the book.

“In answer to your earlier question, this is indeed Sedlec, where the Black Angel came into being. That is why Garcia was working on his bone sculptures: he was commissioned to create a version of the ossuary at Sedlec, an environment worthy of holding the Black Angel until its secrets could be unlocked. You think such a thing to be strange?”

There was a new fervor to him now. Stuckler was a fanatic, just like Brightwell and the Believers. His veneer of sophisticated give-and-take was falling away, and to my benefit. On the subject of his particular obsession, Stuckler could not contain himself.

“Why are you so certain that it exists?” I said.

“Because I have seen it replicated,” said Stuckler. “You have too, in a way.”

He stood suddenly.

“Come, please.”

Murnos started to object, but Stuckler silenced him with a raised hand.

“Don’t worry, Alexis. Everything is coming to its natural conclusion.”

I followed Stuckler through the house until we came to a doorway beneath the main stairs. Murnos stayed behind me all the way, even as Stuckler unlocked the door, and we descended into the cellars of the house. They were expansive, and lined with stone. Most of the area was given over to a wine collection, which must have stretched to a thousand bottles, all carefully stored, with a thermostat on the wall monitoring the temperature. We passed through the racks of bottles until we came to a second door, this time made of metal and accessed using a keypad and a retinal scanner. Murnos opened this door, then stepped aside to allow Stuckler and me to enter.

We were in a square stone room. Glassed alcoves around the walls contained what were clearly Stuckler’s most treasured items: there were three icons, the gold upon them still intact, the colors rich and vibrant; there were gold chalices, and ornate crosses; there were paintings, and small sculptures of men that might have been Roman or Greek.

But the room was dominated by a statue, perhaps eight feet in height and constructed entirely from human bones. I had seen a similar piece of sculpture before, except on a much smaller scale, in Garcia’s apartment.

It was the Black Angel. A single great skeletal wing was unfurled, its spines the slightly curved bones of the radius and ulna. Its arms were made from femurs and fibulae to achieve the sense of scale, its great jointed legs an ornate arrangement of skillfully wired bones, the barest hint of the joins visible between them. Its head was made up of fragments of many skulls, each carefully cut and fused to create the whole. Ribs and vertebrae had been used to construct the main horn that rose from its head and curved down to its collarbone. It rested on a granite pedestal, its clawed toes hanging slightly over the edge and gripping the stone. In its presence, I felt a terrible sense of fear and disgust. The pictures of the bone adornments at Sedlec had unsettled me, but at least there might have been some purpose to them, some recognition of the passage of all mortal things. Yet this was something without merit: human beings reduced to constituent parts in the creation of an image of profound evil.

“Extraordinary, don’t you think?” said Stuckler. I could not guess at how often he had stood here before it, but judging from the tone of his voice, his awe at this possession never faded.

“It’s one word for it,” I replied. “Where did it come from?”

“My father discovered it in the monastery at Morimondo in Lombardy, during the search for clues about the Fontfroide fragment. It was the first sign that he was close to the map. There was some damage to it, as you can see.”

Stuckler pointed out fragmented bones, a crudely repaired fissure in the spine, missing fingers.

“My father’s guess was that it had been transported from Sedlec, probably some time after the initial dispersal of the map fragments, and had eventually found its way to Italy. A double bluff, perhaps, to direct attention away from the original. He ordered it to be concealed. He had a number of locations for such things, and nobody dared to question his instructions on these matters. It was to have been a gift for the Reichsführer, but my father was killed before he could arrange for its transportation. Instead, it passed to my mother after the war, along with some of the other items accumulated by my father.”

“But surely anyone could have made this?” I said.

“No,” said Stuckler, with absolute conviction. “Only someone who had examined the original could have created it.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never seen the original?”

Stuckler strode across to one of the alcoves and carefully opened the glass cover. I followed him over. He activated a light inside. It revealed two small silver boxes, now open, with a simple cross carved into the lid of each. Beside them, carefully protected between thin layers of glass, were two pieces of vellum, each perhaps a foot square. I saw sections of a drawing, depicting a wall and window, with a series of symbols around the edge: a Sacred Heart entangled with thorns, a beehive, a pelican. There was also a series of dots on each, probably representing numbers, and the corners of what might have been shields or coats of arms. Almost immediately, I saw the combination of roman numerals and a single letter that Reid had described.

One manuscript was dominated by the drawing of a great leg, curving backward, and the clawed toes at its feet. It was almost identical to that of the statue behind us. I could detect the faintest trace of lettering concealed in the leg, but I could not read any of the letters. The second manuscript showed one-half of a skull: again, it was identical to the skull on Stuckler’s bone statue.

“You see?” said Stuckler. “These fragments have been separated for centuries, ever since the creation of the map. Only someone who had seen the drawing could have constructed a representation of the Black Angel, but only someone who had seen the original could have done so in such detail. The drawing is relatively crude, the actuality much less so. You asked me why I believe it exists: this is why.”

I turned my back on Stuckler and his statue. Murnos was watching me without expression.

“So you have two of the fragments,” I said. “And you’ll bid at auction for a third.”

“I will bid, as you suggest. Once the auction is complete, I will make contact with the other bidders in order to see who among them is also in possession of pieces of the map. Nobody knows of the existence of this cellar and its contents, apart from Alexis and I. You are the first outsider to have the privilege of seeing it, and only because of the imminence of the auction. I am a wealthy man, Mr. Parker. I will establish contacts. Deals will be struck, and I will acquire sufficient knowledge to make an accurate determination of the Black Angel’s resting place.”

“And the Believers? You think you can buy them out?”

“Don’t be fooled by the ease with which you dealt with the hired help in Maine, Mr. Parker. You were not regarded as a real danger. We can take care of them, if necessary, but I would prefer to reach an accommodation agreeable to both sides.”

I doubted if that would happen. From what I had learned so far, Stuckler’s reasons for seeking the Black Angel were very different from those of Brightwell and his kind. To Stuckler, it was merely another treasure to be stored away in his cave, albeit one with links to his own dead father. The Black Angel would stand alongside the bone sculpture, one darkly mirroring the other, and he would adore them both in his neat, obsessive way. But Brightwell, and the individual to whom he answered, believed that there was something hidden beneath the silver, a living being. Stuckler wanted the statue to remain intact and unexamined. Brightwell wanted to explore what lay within.

“Have you encountered a man named Brightwell?” I said.

Stuckler looked at me blankly.

“Should I have?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell if he was hiding his knowledge of Brightwell or genuinely didn’t know of his existence. I wondered how recently Brightwell had emerged from the shadows, impelled by his belief that the centuries-long search was nearing an end, and if that was the reason why Stuckler professed to be unaware of him. Despite Stuckler’s faintly comical bearing, he was clearly skilled in his business of choice, and had somehow managed to conduct his own search for the map fragments while avoiding the attentions of Brightwell’s kind. It was a situation that was about to change.

“I think you’ll be hearing from him, once he discovers that you share a common goal,” I said.

“I look forward to meeting him, then,” said Stuckler, and there was the hint of a smile upon his face.

“It’s time for me to go,” I said, but Stuckler was no longer listening. Instead, Murnos led me out, leaving his employer lost in contemplation of the ruined bodies of human beings, now joined together in a dark tribute to old, undying evil.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I met Phil Isaacson for dinner in the Old Port, shortly after returning from my meeting with Stuckler. It was becoming ever clearer that the following day’s auction would be a turning point: it would draw those who wanted to possess the Sedlec box, including the Believers, and it would bring Stuckler into conflict with them if he succeeded in acquiring the item. I wanted to be present at the auction, but when I called Claudia Stern she wasn’t available. Instead, I was told that entry to the auction was strictly by invitation only, and that it was too late to be added to the list of invitees. I left a message for Claudia, asking her to call me, but I didn’t expect to hear back from her. I didn’t imagine that her clients would be pleased if she allowed a private investigator into their midst, an investigator, moreover, who was interested in the eventual destination of one of the more unusual pieces to have come on the market in recent years. But if there was one person who could be relied upon to find a way into the House of Stern, and who might know enough about the bidders to be of assistance, it was Phil Isaacson.

Natasha’s used to be on Cumberland Avenue, close by Bintliff ’s, and its move to the Old Port was one of the few recent developments in the life of the city of which I was totally in favor. Its new surroundings were more comfortable, and if anything the food had improved, which was quite an achievement given that Natasha’s was excellent to begin with. When I arrived, Phil was already seated at a table close by the banquette that ran along the length of the main dining room. As usual, he looked like the dictionary definition of dapper: he was a small, white-bearded man, dressed in a tweed jacket and gray pants, with a red bow tie neatly knotted against his white shirt. His main profession was the law, and he remained a partner in his Cumberland-based practice, but he was also the art critic of the Portland Press Herald. I had no problem with the newspaper, but it was still a surprise to find an art critic of Phil Isaacson’s quality hiding among its pages. He liked to claim that they’d simply forgotten that he wrote for them, and sometimes it wasn’t hard to imagine someone in the news editor’s office picking up the paper, reading Phil’s column, and exclaiming: “Wait a second, we have an art critic?”

I’d first met Phil at an exhibition over at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery on Park Street, where June was showing work by a Cumberland artist named Sara Crisp, who used found items-leaves, animal bones, snakeskin-to create works of stunning beauty, setting the fragments of flora and fauna against complex geometric patterns. I figured it was something to do with order in nature, and Phil seemed to generally agree with me. At least, I think he agreed with me. Phil’s vocabulary was considerably more advanced than mine where the art world was concerned. I ended up buying one of the pieces: a cross made from eggshells mounted in wax, set against a red backdrop of interlocking circles.

“Well, well,” said Phil, when I reached the table. “I was beginning to think you’d found someone more interesting with whom to spend your evening.”

“Believe me, I did try,” I said. “Looks like all the interesting people have better things to do tonight.”

A waitress deposited a glass of Californian Zin on the table. I told her to bring the bottle, and ordered a selection of Oriental appetizers for two to go with it. Phil and I swapped some local gossip while we waited for the food to arrive, and he gave me tips on some artists that I might want to check out if I ever won the state lottery. The restaurant began to fill up around us, and I waited until every-one at the nearby tables appeared suitably caught up in one another’s company before I broached the main subject of the evening.

“So, what can you tell me about Claudia Stern and her clients?” I asked, as Phil finished off the last prawn from the appetizer tray.

Phil laid the remains of the prawn on the side of his plate and patted his lips delicately with his napkin.

“I don’t tend to cover her auctions in my column. To begin with, I wouldn’t want to put people off their breakfasts by detailing the kind of items with which she sometimes deals, and secondly, I’m not convinced of the value of writing about human remains. Besides, why would you be interested in anything she has to offer? Is this to do with a case?”

“Kind of. You could say it has a personal element to it.”

Phil sat back in his chair and stroked his beard.

“Well, let’s see. It’s not an old house. It was founded only ten years ago and specializes in what might be termed ‘esoteric’ items. Claudia Stern has a degree in anthropology from Harvard, but she has a core of experts upon whom she calls when the need to authenticate items arises. Her area of interest is simultaneously wide and very specialized. We’re talking about manuscripts, bones rendered into approximations of art, and various ephemera linked to biblical apocrypha.”

“She mentioned human remains to me when I met her, but she didn’t elaborate,” I said.

“Well, it’s not something most of us would discuss with strangers,” said Phil. “Until recently-say, five or six years ago-Stern did a small but lively trade in certain aboriginal items: skulls, mainly, but sometimes more ornate items. Now that kind of dealing is frowned upon, and governments and tribes aren’t slow to seek recovery of any such remains that are presented for auction. There are fewer difficulties with European bone sculptures, as long as they’re suitably old, and the auction house made the papers some years ago when it auctioned skeletal remains from a number of Polish and Hungarian ossuaries. The bones had been used to make a pair of matching candelabra, as I recall.”

“Any idea who might have purchased them?”

Phil shook his head.

“Stern is low-key to the point of secretive. It caters to a very particular type of collector, none of whom has ever, to my knowledge, complained about the way Claudia Stern conducts her business affairs. All items are scrupulously checked to ensure their authenticity.”

“She never sold anyone a broomstick that didn’t fly.”

“Apparently not.”

The waitress removed the remains of the appetizers. A few minutes later our main courses arrived: lobster for Phil, steak for me.

“I see you still don’t eat seafood,” he remarked.

“I think that some creatures were created ugly to discourage people from eating them.”

“Or dating them,” said Phil.

“There is that.”

He set about tearing apart his lobster. I tried not to watch.

“So, do you want to tell me why Claudia Stern should have come to your attention?” he asked. “Strictly between ourselves, I should add.”

“There’s a sale taking place there tomorrow.”

“The Sedlec trove,” said Phil. “I’ve heard rumors.”

One of Phil’s areas of interest was the aesthetics of cemeteries, so it wasn’t surprising that he was aware of Sedlec. Sometimes, the breadth of his knowledge was almost worrying.

“You know anything about it?”

“I hear that the fragment of vellum at the center of the auction contains drawings of some kind, and that in itself it’s worth relatively little, apart from a certain curiosity value. I know that Claudia Stern has presented only a tiny portion of the vellum for authentication, with the remainder supposedly being kept under lock and key until a buyer is found. I also know that there has been a lot of secrecy maintained, and care taken, for such a minor item.”

“I can tell you a little more,” I said.

And I did. By the time I was done, Phil’s lobster lay half-consumed on his plate. I had barely touched my beef. The waitress looked quite pained when she came to check up on us.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

Phil’s face lit up with a smile so perfect only an expert could have spotted that it was false, although his regret was genuine.

“Everything was divine, but I don’t have the appetite I once had,” he explained.

I let her take my plate as well, and the smile faded slowly from Phil’s face.

“Do you really believe that this statue is real?” he said.

“I think that something was hidden, a long time ago,” I replied. “Too many individuals are concerned about it for it to be a complete myth. As for its exact nature, I can’t say, but it’s safe to assume that it’s valuable enough to kill for. How much do you know about collectors of this type of material?”

“I know some of them by name, others by reputation. Those in the business occasionally share gossip with me.”

“Could you get a pair of invitations to the auction?”

“I think I could. It would mean calling in some favors, but you just told me that you believe Claudia Stern would probably prefer if you didn’t attend.”

“I’m hoping that she’ll be sufficiently distracted by all that’s happening to allow me to get a foot in the door with you by my side. If we arrive close to the auction, I’m banking on the hope that it will be easier to let us stay than to throw us out and risk disrupting the affair. Anyway, I do lots of things that people would prefer I didn’t do. I’d be out of a job if I didn’t.”

Phil finished his wine.

“I knew this free meal would end up costing me dearly,” he said.

“Come on,” I said. “I know you’re fascinated. And if anyone kills you, just think of the obituary you’ll get in the Press Herald. You’ll be immortalized.”

“That is not reassuring,” said Phil. “I was hoping that immortality would come to me through not dying.”

“You may yet be the first,” I told him.

“And what are your chances?”

“Slim,” I said. “And declining.”

Brightwell was hungry. He had fought the urges for so long, but lately they had become too strong for him. He recalled the death of the woman, Alice Temple, in the old warehouse, and the sound of his bare feet slapping on the tiles as he approached her. Temple: her name was somehow appropriate in light of the desecration that had been visited on her body. It was strange to Brightwell, the way in which he was able to stand outside himself and watch what occurred, as though his mortal form were engaged in certain pursuits while its guiding consciousness was otherwise occupied.

Brightwell opened his mouth and sucked in a deep breath of oily air. His fists clenched and unclenched, whitening his knuckles beneath his skin. He shuddered, recalling the fury with which he had torn the woman apart. That was where the separation occurred, the division of Self and Notself, one part seeking only to rend and tear while the other stood aside, calm yet watchful, waiting for the moment, the final moment. This was Brightwell’s gift, the reason for his being: even with his eyes closed, or locked in complete darkness, he could sense the coming of the last breath…

The spasming was increasing in frequency now. His mouth was very dry. Temple, Alice Temple. He loved that name, loved the taste of her as his mouth found hers, blood and spit and sweat intermingled upon her lips, her consciousness seeping away, her strength failing. Now Brightwell was with her once again, his ensanguined fingers clutching at her head, his lips locked against her lips, the redness of her: red within, red without. She was dying, and to anyone else, from a doctor to a layman, there would be only the sight of a body deflating, the life leaving it at last as it slumped, naked, in the battered chair.

But life was not the only element departing at that moment, and Brightwell was waiting for it as it left her. He felt it as a rushing sensation in his mouth, like a sweet breeze ascending through a scarlet tunnel, like a gentle fall making way for harsh winter, like sunset and night, presence and absence, light and not-light. And then it was within him, locked inside, trapped between worlds in the ancient, dark prison that was Brightwell.

Brightwell, the guiding angel, the guardian of memories. Brightwell, the searcher, the identifier.

Brightwell’s breathing grew faster. He could feel them within him, tormented and questing.

Brightwell, capable of bending the will of others to his own, of convincing the lost and forgotten that the truth of their natures lay in his words.

He needed another. The taste was on him. Deep inside him, a crescendo grew, a great chorus of voices crying out for release.

He did not regret all that had followed from her death. True, it had brought them unwanted attention. She was not alone in the world after all. There were those who cared about her, and who would not let her passing go unexamined, but the intersection of her life’s path with that of Brightwell was no coincidence. Brightwell was very old, and with great age came great patience. He had always retained his faith, his certainty that each life taken would bring him closer and closer to the one who had betrayed him, who had betrayed them all for the possibility of a redemption always destined to be denied him. He had kept himself well hidden, submerging the truth of his being, burying it beneath a pretence of normality even as the three worlds-this world, the world above, and the great honeycomb world below-did all in their power to demonstrate to him that normality had no place in his existence.

Brightwell had plans for him, oh yes. Brightwell would find a cold, dark place, with chains upon the walls, and there he would bind him, and watch him through a hole in the brickwork as he wasted away, hour upon hour, day upon day, year upon year, century after century, teetering on the brink of death yet never falling finally into the abyss.

And if Brightwell were wrong about his nature-and Brightwell was rarely wrong, even in the smallest of things-then it would still be a long, agonizing death for the man who had threatened to stand in the way of the revelation that they had long sought, and the recovery of the one that had been lost to them for so long.

The preparations were all in place. Tomorrow they would find out what they needed to know. There was nothing more that could be done, so Brightwell allowed himself a small indulgence. Later that night, he came across a young man in the shadow of the park, and he drew him to himself with promises of money and food and strange, carnal delights. And in time, Brightwell was upon him, his hands buried deep within the boy’s body, his long nails slicing organs and gently crushing veins, controling the intricate piece of machinery that was the human form, slowly bringing the boy to the climax that Brightwell sought, until at last they were locked together, lip to lip, and the surging sweetness filled Brightwell as another voice was added to the great choir of souls within.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Martin Reid called me first thing the next morning, leading Angel to question if he was actually in league with the very people he was supposed to be working against, since only someone involved with the devil would call at 6:30 A.M.

“Will you be attending today’s event?” he asked.

“I hope so. What about you?”

He grunted.

“I’m a little too well known to mingle unnoticed in such company. Anyway, I had a fraught telephone conversation with our Miss Stern yesterday, during which I stressed once again my unhappiness with her determination to continue with the sale, despite doubts about the provenance and ownership of the box. We’ll have somebody there to keep an eye on what transpires, but it won’t be me.”

Not for the first time, it struck me that there was something wrong with the way in which Reid was dealing with the sale of the Sedlec fragment. The Catholic Church was not short of lawyers, especially in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as anyone who had dealt with the archdiocese in the course of the recent abuse scandals could attest. If it were determined to stop the auction from going ahead, Claudia Stern’s business would have been crawling with oleaginous men and women in expensive suits and polished shoes.

“By the way,” he said. “I hear you were asking questions about us.”

I had checked up on both Reid and Bartek after my meeting with them. It took me a while to find anyone who was prepared to admit that they had ever set foot in a church, let alone taken holy orders, but eventually their identities were confirmed to me through Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, where both men were staying. Reid was officially based at San Bernardo alle Terme in Rome and was apparently responsible for instructing visiting clerics and nuns about the way of life of Saint Benedict, the saint most closely associated with the rules governing the order, through contemplation of places in which he spent crucial parts of his life: Norica, Subiaco, and Monte Cassino. Bartek worked out of the new monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, the first monastery to be built in the Czech Republic since the fall of Communism, and it was still under construction. He had previously lived in the community at Sept-Fons Abbey in France, to which he and a number of other young Czech men had fled in the early 1990s to escape religious persecution in their own country, but had also worked extensively in the United States, mainly at the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York. Sept-Fons, I remembered, was the monastery that Bosworth, the elusive FBI agent, had desecrated.

Still, Bartek’s story sounded plausible enough, but Reid didn’t strike me as the type who was content to sit at the front of a tour bus muttering platitudes through a microphone. Interestingly, the monk who explained all this to me-having first cleared it with the head of the order in the United States and, presumably, with Reid and Bartek themselves-told me that the two monks actually represented two distinct orders: Bartek was a Trappist, a group deriving its name from the Abbey of Our Lady of La Trappe in France and formed after a split in the order between those who subscribed to strict observance of silence, austerity, and simple vestments, and those like Reid who preferred a little more laxity in their duties and lifestyles. This latter group was known as the Sacred Order of Citeaux, or the Cistercians of the Common Observance. I also couldn’t help but feel that there was a certain amount of respect, bordering on awe, in the way the monk spoke about the two men.

“I was curious,” I told Reid. “And I also had only your word that you were actually a monk.”

“So what did you learn?” He sounded amused.

“Nothing that you didn’t give them permission to tell me,” I said. “Apparently, you’re a tour guide.”

“Is that what they said?” said Reid. “Well, well. They also serve who only stand and wait at the bus door for latecomers. It’s important that history is not forgotten. That’s why I gave you the cross. I hope you’re wearing it. It’s very old.”

As it happened, I had attached the cross to my key ring. I already wore a cross: a simple Byzantine pilgrim’s cross, over one thousand years old, that my grandfather had given to me as a gift when I graduated high school. I didn’t think that I needed to wear another.

“I keep it close,” I assured him.

“Good. If anything ever happens to me, you can give that a rub and I’ll be in touch from the next world.”

“I’m not sure I find that reassuring,” I said. “Like a great many things about you.”

“Such as?”

“I think you want this auction to go ahead. I don’t think you and your order made more than cosmetic efforts to stop it. For some reason, it’s in your interests that whatever is contained in that last fragment is revealed.”

There was only silence from the other end of the line. Reid might almost have abandoned the phone, were it not for the soft susurration of his breathing.

“And what reason would that be?” he asked, and there was no longer any trace of amusement. Instead, he sounded wary. No, not wary, exactly: he wanted me to figure out the answer, but he wasn’t about to give it to me. Despite all my threats of the combined wrath of Louis and the Fulcis being unleashed upon him, Reid was going to play the game his way, right until the end.

“Maybe you’d like to see the Black Angel too,” I said. “Your order lost it, and now it wants it back.”

Reid tut-tutted, and the mask was restored.

“Close,” said Reid, “but no cigar for you, Mr. Parker. Look after that cross, now, and give my love to Claudia Stern.”

He hung up, and I never spoke to him again.

I met Phil Isaacson at Fanueil Hall, and from there we walked to the auction house. It was clear that Claudia Stern had taken certain precautions for the sale of the map fragment. A sign announced that the house was closed for a private sale and that all inquiries would be dealt with by phone. I rang the bell, and the door was opened by a big man in a dark suit who looked like the only thing he had ever bid on was the option of striking the first blow.

“This is a private event, gentlemen. Invitation only.”

Phil removed the invitations from his pocket. I didn’t know how he had acquired them. They were printed on stiff cards and embossed in gold with the word STERN and the date and time of the auction. The doorman examined them, then looked at both of us closely to make sure that we weren’t about to produce crosses and holy water and start sprinkling the place. Once he was satisfied, he stepped aside to let us through.

“Not quite Fort Knox,” I said.

“Still, more than one would usually encounter. I have to confess, I am rather looking forward to this.”

Phil registered at the desk and was handed a bidding paddle. A young woman in black offered us refreshments from a tray. In fact, there were a lot of people in black present. It looked like the launch of a new Cure album, or the reception after a Goth wedding. We both opted for orange juice, then took the stairs up to the auction room. As I had hoped, there were still people milling about, and we were lost in the throng. I was surprised at the size of the crowd, but even more surprised at the fact that most of them seemed relatively normal, apart from their monochromatic dress sense, although there were a few who looked like they might spend a little too much time alone in the dark pursuing unpleasant activities, including one particularly nasty specimen with pointed nails and a black ponytail who was only one step away from wearing a T-shirt announcing that he suckled at Satan’s nipple.

“Maybe Jimmy Page will be here,” I said. “I should have brought along my copy of Led Zep IV.”

“Jimmy who?” said Phil. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

“Led Zeppelin. A popular beat combo, Your Honor.”

We took a seat at the back. I kept my head down and looked through Phil’s copy of the catalog. Most of the lots were books, some of them very old. There was a facsimile of the Ars Moriendi, a kind of how-to guide for those hoping to avoid damnation after death, first published in translation by the Englishman Caxton in 1491, consisting of eleven block-book woodcuts depicting the deathbed temptation of a dying man. Claudia Stern clearly knew how to put together an impressive and enlightening sales package: from the couple of paragraphs describing the lot, I learned that the term “shriven” meant to be absolved of one’s sins; that therefore to be given “short shrift” meant being allowed little time to confess before death; and that a “good death” did not necessarily preclude a violent end. I also learned from a book of saints that Saint Denis, the apostle of Gaul and patron of France, was decapitated by his tormentors, but subsequently picked up his head and went for a walk with it, which said a lot for Saint Denis’s willingness to be a good sport and put on a show for the crowd.

Some of the lots appeared to be linked to one another. Lot 12 was a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, that dated from the early sixteenth century and was said to have belonged to one Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg, a fire-and-brimstone cathedral preacher in Strasbourg, while a copy of his sermons from 1516 was Lot 13. Geiler’s sermons were illustrated by a witch engraving by Hans Baldung, who studied under Dürer, and Lot 14 consisted of a series of erotic prints by Baldung, featuring an old man-representing Death-fondling a young woman, apparently a theme to which Baldung returned repeatedly in his career.

There were also statues, icons, paintings-including the piece that I had witnessed being restored in the workshop, now listed only as “Kutna Hora, 15th century, artist unknown”-and a number of bone sculptures. Most of them were on display, but they bore no resemblance to those that I had seen in Stuckler’s book or in Garcia’s apartment. They were cruder, and less finely crafted. I was becoming quite the connoisseur of bone work.

People began to take their seats as one o’clock approached. I saw no sign of Stuckler or Murnos, but eight women were seated at a table by the auctioneer’s podium, each with a telephone now pressed to her ear.

“It’s unlikely that any serious bids will come from the floor for the more esoteric items,” said Phil. “The buyers won’t want their identities to become known, partly because of the value of some, but mostly because such interests still remain open to misinterpretation.”

“You mean people will think they’re freaks?”

“Yes.”

“But they are freaks.”

“Yes.”

“As long as we’re agreed on that.”

Still, I guessed that Stuckler had someone on the floor watching the other bidders. He would not want to be entirely cut off from what happened during the auction. There would be others too. Somewhere among the crowd were those who called themselves Believers. I had warned Phil about them, although I believed that he at least was in no danger from them.

Claudia Stern appeared from a side door, accompanied by an older man in a dandruff-flecked black suit. She took her place at the podium, and the man stood beside her at a high table, a huge ledger open before him in which to take down the details of the successful bidders and their bids. Ms. Stern rapped the podium with her gavel to quiet the crowd, then welcomed us to the auction. There was some preamble about payment and collection, then the auction began. The first lot was an item familiar to me by reputation: an 1821 copy of Richard Laurence’s translation of the Book of Enoch, twinned with a copy of Byron’s verse drama Heaven and Earth: A Mystery dating from the same year. It aroused some mildly competitive bidding, and went to an anonymous telephone bidder. Geiler’s copy of the Malleus Maleficarum went to a tiny elderly woman in a pink suit, who looked grimly satisfied with her purchase.

“I guess the rest of the coven should be pleased,” said Phil.

“Know thine enemy.”

“Exactly.”

After five or six more items, none of which created any great stir, the twin brother of the door ape emerged from the office. He was wearing white gloves and holding a silver box adorned with a cross. It was almost identical to the ones I had seen in Stuckler’s treasury, but appeared in marginally better condition once its image was displayed on a screen beside Ms. Stern. There were fewer dents that I could see, and the soft metal was barely scratched.

“Now,” said Ms. Stern. “We come to what I feel will be, for many, the prize lot of this auction. Lot 20, a fifteenth-century box in Bohemian silver, cross inlay, containing a fragment of vellum. Those of you with a particular interest in this lot were given ample opportunity to examine a small section of the fragment and to obtain independent verification of its age where necessary. No further questions or objections will be entertained, and the sale is final.”

A casual visitor might have wondered what all the fuss was about, given the relatively low-key introduction, but there was a definite heightening of tension in the room and a brief flurry of whispers. I saw the women at the phones poised, pens in hand.

“I will open the bidding at $5,000,” said Ms. Stern.

There were no takers. She smiled indulgently.

“I know that there is interest in this room, and money to go with it. Nevertheless, I’ll permit a slow start. Who will give me $2,000?”

The satanist with the long nails raised his paddle, and we were off. The bids quickly climbed in increments of $500, passing the original $5,000 starting point and moving up to $10,000, then $15,000. Eventually, around the $20,000 mark, the bids from the floor dried up, and Ms. Stern turned most of her attention to the telephones, where, in a series of nods, the bidding rose to $50,000, then $75,000, and eventually reached the $100,000 mark. The bids continued to climb, finally passing $200,000 until, at $235,000, there was a pause.

“Any further bids?” asked Ms. Stern.

Nobody moved.

“I’m holding at $235,000.”

She waited, then rapped the gavel sharply.

“Sold for $235,000.”

The silence was broken, and the buzz of conversation resumed. Already people were drifting toward the door, now that the main business of the afternoon was concluded. Ms. Stern, sensing the same, handed the gavel over to one of her assistants, and the sale resumed with considerably less excitement than before. Ms. Stern exchanged a few words with the young woman who had taken the telephone bid, then moved quickly toward the door of her office. Phil and I stood to leave, and she glanced down as we did so, her face briefly wrinkling in puzzlement as though she were trying to remember where she had seen me before. Her gaze moved on. She nodded at Phil, and he smiled in return.

“She likes you,” I said.

“I have that white-bearded charm that disarms women.”

“Maybe they just don’t see you as threatening.”

“Which makes me all the more dangerous.”

“You have a rich inner life, Phil. That’s the polite way of putting it.”

We were at the first landing when Ms. Stern appeared from a doorway below. She waited for us to descend to her.

“Philip, it’s good to see you again.”

She turned a pale cheek for him to kiss, then extended a hand toward me.

“Mr. Parker. I wasn’t aware that you were on the list. I feared that your presence at this auction might make bidders uneasy, were they to become aware of the nature of your profession.”

“I just came to keep an eye on Phil, in case he got carried away by the excitement and bid on a skull.”

She invited us to join her for a drink. We followed her through a door marked PRIVATE and into a room cozily furnished with over-stuffed couches and leather chairs. Catalogs for past and forthcoming auctions were piled neatly on two sideboards and fanned across an ornate coffee table. Ms. Stern opened a lavishly stocked bar cabinet and invited us to make our selection. I had an alcohol-free Becks just to be polite. Phil opted for red wine.

“Actually, I was rather surprised you didn’t make a bid yourself, Mr. Parker,” she said. “After all, you were the one who came to me with that interesting bone sculpture.”

“I’m not a collector, Ms. Stern.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would be. In fact, you appear to be a rather harsh judge of collectors, as testified to by the late Mr. Garcia’s end. Have you discovered anything more about him?”

“A little.”

“Anything you’d like to share?”

Her expression was one of vague superiority, capped with a wry grin. Whatever I had to tell her about Garcia, she figured she knew already.

“He kept videos of dead and dying women. I think he played an active role in their creation.”

A ripple passed across Ms. Stern’s face, and the angle of her grin was reduced slightly.

“And you believe that his presence in New York was linked to the Sedlec box auctioned today,” she said. “Otherwise, why would you be here?”

“I’d like to know who bought it,” I said.

“A lot of people would like to know that.”

She readjusted her sights and aimed her charm at Phil. Its veneer was thin. I got the impression that she was displeased both by his presence, and by the fact that he had not come alone. Phil, I think, sensed it too.

“All of this is, of course, off the record,” she said.

“I’m not here in my journalistic capacity,” said Phil.

“You know you’re always welcome here, in any capacity,” she replied, but she made it sound like a lie. “It’s just that in this case, discretion was, and is, required.”

She sipped her wine. A thin trickle dripped down the glass. It stained her chin slightly, but she didn’t appear to notice.

“This was a very delicate sale, Mr. Parker. The value of the lot was directly proportionate to the degree of secrecy surrounding its contents. If the contents of the fragment were revealed before the sale-if, for example, we had permitted potential bidders to examine the entire vellum in detail, instead of just a portion-then it would have sold for far less than it did today. The majority of bidders in the room were merely curiosity seekers, faintly hoping to gain for themselves a link to an obscure occult myth. The real money was far from here. A total of six individuals went to the trouble of lodging deposits with us in order to be permitted to examine a cutting from the vellum, none of whom were in the auction room today. Not one person was allowed to view even one of the symbols or drawings depicted upon it.”

“Apart from you.”

“I looked at it, as did two of my staff, but frankly it was meaningless to me. Even were I able to interpret it, I would still have required the other fragments to place it in context. Our concern was that someone already in possession of additional drawings might view our fragment and add its contents to what he or she knew.”

“Are you aware of its provenance?” I said. “I understand that it was in dispute.”

“You’re referring to the fact that it was believed to have been stolen from Sedlec itself? There is no proof that this was the same box. The item came to us from a trusted European source. We believed that it was real, and so too did those who bid upon it today.”

“And you’ll keep the winning bid secret?”

“As best we can. Such things have a habit of filtering out eventually, but we have no wish to make the buyer a target for unscrupulous men. Our reputation rests upon preserving the anonymity of our clients, particularly given the nature of some of the items that pass through this house.”

“So you’re aware that the buyer may be at risk?”

“Or it may be that others are now at risk from the buyer,” she replied.

She was watching me carefully.

“Was the buyer a Believer? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Ms. Stern laughed, exposing her slightly stained teeth.

“I’m telling you nothing, Mr. Parker, merely pointing out that there is more than one conclusion to be drawn. All I can say for certain is that I will be a great deal happier once the box has left my possession. Thankfully, it is small enough to be passed to the buyer without attracting undue attention. We will be done with it by close of business.”

“What about you, Ms. Stern?” I said. “Do you think you might be at risk? After all, you’ve seen it.”

She drained a little more of her wine, then stood. We rose with her. Our time here was at an end.

“I have been in this profession for a long time,” she said. “In truth, I have seen some very strange items in the course of my dealings, and I have met some equally strange individuals. None of them has ever threatened me, and none ever will. I am well protected.”

I wasn’t about to doubt her. Everything about the House of Stern made me uneasy. It was like a trading post at the junction of two worlds.

“Are you a Believer, Ms. Stern?”

She put her glass down, then slowly rolled up each sleeve of her blouse in turn. Her arms were unmarked. All trace of good humor left her during the performance of the act.

“I believe in a great many things, Mr. Parker, some with very good reason. One of those things is good manners, of which you appear to have none. In future, Philip, I’d be grateful if you would check with me before you bring guests to my auctions. I can only hope that your taste in companions is the only faculty that appears to have deserted you since last we met, or else your newspaper will have to look elsewhere for its art criticism.”

Ms. Stern opened the door and waited for us to leave. Phil looked embarrassed. When he said good-bye to her she didn’t reply, but she spoke to me as I followed Phil from the room.

“You should have stayed in Maine, Mr Parker,” she said. “You should have kept your head down and lived a quiet life, then you would not have come to anyone’s attention.”

“You’ll forgive me for not trembling,” I said. “I’ve met people like the Believers before.”

“No,” she replied, “you have not.”

Then she closed the door in my face.

I walked Phil to his car.

“Sorry if I made life awkward for you,” I said, as he closed his door and rolled down the window.

“I never liked her anyway,” he said, “and her wine was corked. Tell me, though: does everybody react as badly to you as she did?”

I reflected on the question.

“Actually,” I said, as I left him, “that was pretty good for me.”

Angel and Louis were waiting for me nearby. They were eating oversized wraps and drinking bottled water in Louis’s Lexus. Angel, I noticed, had half the world’s napkin production laid over his legs, his feet, the parts of the seat not covered by his body, and the floor itself. It was a slight case of overkill, although some stray beansprouts and a couple of blobs of sauce had hit the napkins already, so it paid to be cautious.

“He must really love you if he’s letting you eat in his car,” I said, as I climbed in the back to talk to them. Louis acknowledged me with a nod, but there was still something unspoken between us. I was not about to broach the subject. He would do so, in his own time.

“Yeah, it’s only taken, like, a decade,” said Angel. “For the first five years, he wouldn’t even let me sit in his car. We’ve come a long way.”

Louis was carefully wiping his fingers and face.

“You got sauce on your tie,” I said.

He froze, then lifted the silk in his fingers.

“Motherf-” he began, before turning on Angel. “That’s your damn fault. You wanted to eat, so you made me want to eat. Damn.”

“I think you should shoot him,” I said, helpfully.

“I got some spare napkins, you want them,” said Angel.

Louis snatched some from Angel’s lap, sprinkled water on them, and tried to work on the stain, swearing all the time.

“If his enemies found out about his Achilles’ heel, we could be in real trouble,” I said to Angel.

“Yeah, they wouldn’t even need guns, just soy sauce. Maybe satay if they were really playing rough.”

Louis continued to swear at both of us and at the stain, all at once. It was quite a trick. It was also good to see a flash of his old self.

“It sold,” I said, getting down to business. “Two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.”

“What’s the house’s cut?” asked Angel.

“Phil reckoned fifteen percent of the purchase price.”

Angel looked impressed. “Not bad. Did she tell you who the buyer was?”

“She wouldn’t even tell me the identity of the seller. Reid figures the box was stolen from Sedlec just hours after the discovery of the damage to the church, then made its way to the auction house through a series of intermediaries. It’s possible that the House of Stern itself was the final purchaser, in which case Ms. Stern made quite a killing today. As for the buyer, Stuckler wanted it badly. He’s obsessed, and he almost certainly had the money to fund his obsession. He told me that he was prepared to pay whatever it took. Under the circumstances, he probably regarded it as a bargain.”

“So now what happens?”

“Stuckler gets his fragment delivered to him and tries to combine it with whatever material he already has, in an effort to locate the Angel. I don’t think he’s one of the Believers, so they’ll make a move on him once he reveals himself as the purchaser. Maybe they’ll offer to buy the information, in which case they’ll be rebuffed, or he’ll try to strike a deal with them. It could be that they’ll simply take the direct approach. Stuckler’s house is pretty secure, though, and he has men with him. Murnos is probably good at his job, but I still think they’re underestimating the people with whom they’re dealing.”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it works out,” said Louis.

“Probably badly for Stuckler,” I said.

Louis looked pained.

“I was talking about my tie…”

Brightwell sat in an easy chair, his eyes closed, his fingers rhythmically extending and relaxing as though from the force of the blood being pumped through his body. He rarely slept, but he found that such moments of quiet served to replenish his energies. He even dreamed, in a sense, replaying moments from his long life, reliving old history, ancient enmities. Lately, he had been remembering Sedlec, and the death of the Captain. A party of Hussite stragglers had intercepted them as they made their way toward Prague, and a stray arrow had found its mark in the Captain. While the others killed the attackers, Brightwell, himself injured, had clawed his way across the ground, the grass already damp from the Captain’s wound. He had brushed the hair away from his leader’s eyes, exposing the white mote that seemed always to be changing its form at the periphery while the core remained ever constant, so that looking at it was like peering at the sun through a glass. There were those who hated to see it, this reminder of all that had been lost, but Brightwell did not hesitate to look upon it when the opportunity arose. It fueled his own resentment, and gave him an added impetus to act against the Divine.

The Captain was struggling to breathe. When he tried to speak, blood bubbled up from his throat. Already, Brightwell could sense the separation beginning, spirit disengaging itself from host as it prepared to wander in the darkness between worlds.

“I will remember,” whispered Brightwell. “I will never stop searching. I will keep myself alive. When the time comes for us to be reunited, with one touch I will impart all that I have learned, and remind you of all that you will have forgotten, and of what you are.”

The Captain shuddered. Brightwell clasped the Captain’s right hand and lowered his face to that of his beloved, and amid the stink of blood and bile he felt the body give up its struggle. Brightwell rose and released the Captain’s hand. The statue was gone, but he had learned of the abbot’s map from a young monk named Karel Brabe before he died. Somewhere, the boxes were already being stored in secret places, and Karel Brabe’s soul now dwelt in the prison of Brightwell’s form.

But Brabe had told Brightwell something else before he died, in the hope of ending the pain that Brightwell was inflicting upon him.

“You make a poor martyr,” Brightwell had whispered to the young man. Brabe was still only a boy, and Brightwell knew great lore about the body’s capacities. His fingers had torn deep wounds in the young novice, and his nails were tearing at secret red places. As they snipped at veins and punctured organs, blood and words spilled from the boy in twin torrents: the flawed nature of the fragments; and a statue of bone, itself concealing a secret, a twin for the obscene relic they were seeking.

The search had taken so long, so long…

Brightwell opened his eyes. The Black Angel stood before him.

“It is nearly over,” said the angel.

“We don’t know for certain that he has it.”

“He has given himself away.”

“And Parker?”

“After we have found my twin.”

Brightwell lowered his eyes.

“It is him,” he said.

“I am inclined to agree,” said the Black Angel.

“If he is killed, I will lose him again.”

“And you will find him again. After all, you found me.”

Some of the strength seemed to leave Brightwell. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment he looked old and worn.

“This body is betraying me,” he said. “I do not have the strength for another search.”

The Black Angel touched his face with the tenderness of a lover. It stroked his pitted skin, the swollen flesh at his neck, his soft, dry lips.

“If you must pass from this world, then it will be my duty in turn to seek you out,” it said. “And remember, I will not be alone. This time, there will be two of us to search for you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

That night, I spoke to Rachel for the first time since she’d left. Frank and Joan were at a local charity fund-raiser, and Rachel and Sam were alone in the house. I could hear music playing in the background: “Overcome by Happiness” by the Pernice Brothers, kings of the deceptively titled song.

Rachel sounded frantically upbeat, in the demented way common to those who are on heavy medication or who are trying desperately to keep themselves together in the face of imminent collapse. She didn’t ask me about the case, but chose instead to tell me what Sam had done that day, and talk of how Frank and Joan were spoiling her. She inquired about the dog, then held the receiver to Sam’s ear, and I thought I heard the child respond to my voice. I told her that I loved her, and that I missed her. I told her that I wanted her always to be safe and happy, and I was sorry for the things that I had done to make her feel otherwise. I told her that even if I wasn’t around, even if we couldn’t be together, I was thinking of her, and I would never, ever forget how important she was to me.

And I knew Rachel was listening too, and in this way I told her all the things that I could not say to her.

The dog woke me. He wasn’t barking, merely whining softly, his tail held low while he wagged it nervously, as he did when he was trying to make amends for doing something wrong. He cocked his head as he heard some noise that was inaudible to me, and glanced at the window, his mouth forming strange sounds that I had never heard from him before.

The room was filled with flickering light, and now there was a crackling sound in the distance. I smelled smoke, and saw the glow of the flames eclipsed by the drapes on the window. I left my bed and pulled the drapes apart.

The marshes were aflame. Already, the engines from the Scarborough fire department were converging on the conflagration, and I could see one of my neighbors on the bridge that crossed the muddy land below my house, perhaps trying to find the source of the blaze, fearful that someone might be hurt. The flames followed paths determined by the channels and were reflected in the still, dark surface of the waters, so that they appeared both to rise into the air and to ignite the depths. I saw birds swooping against the redness, panicked and lost in the night sky. The thin branches of a bare tree had caught fire, but the fire engines had now almost come to a halt, and hoses would soon be trained upon the tree, so perhaps it might yet be saved. The damp of winter meant that the blaze would be easily contained, but the burned grass would still be visible to all for months to come, a charred reminder of the vulnerability of this place.

Then the man on the bridge turned toward my house. The flames lit his face, and I saw that it was Brightwell. He stood unmoving, silhouetted by fire, his gaze fixed upon the window at which I stood. The headlights of the fire trucks seemed to touch him briefly, for he was suddenly luminous in his pallor, his skin puckered and diseased as he turned away from the approaching engines and descended into the inferno.

I made the call early the next morning, while Louis and Angel ate breakfast and tossed pieces of bagel for Walter to catch. They too had seen the figure on the bridge, and if anything, his appearance had deepened the sense of unease that now colored all of my relations with Louis. Angel seemed to be acting as a buffer between us, so that when he was present a casual observer might almost have judged that everything between us was normal, or as normal as it had ever been, which wasn’t very normal at all.

The Scarborough firemen had also witnessed Brightwell’s descent into the burning marsh, but they had searched in vain for any sign of him. It was assumed that he had doubled back under the bridge and fled, for the fire was being blamed upon him. That much, at least, was true: Brightwell had set the fire, as a sign that he had not forgotten me.

The smell of smoke and burned grass hung heavily in the air as I listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line, then a young woman answered.

“Can I speak to Rabbi Epstein, please?” I asked.

“May I tell him who’s calling?”

“Tell him it’s Parker.”

I heard the phone being put down. There were young children shouting in the background, accompanied by a timpani of silverware on bowls. Then the sound was drowned out by the closing of a door, and an old man’s voice came on the phone.

“It’s been some time,” said Epstein. “I thought you’d forgotten me. Actually, I rather hoped that you’d forgotten me.”

Epstein’s son had been killed by Faulkner and his brood. I had facilitated his revenge on the old preacher. He owed me, and he knew it.

“I need to talk to your guest,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why is that?”

“It risks drawing attention. Even I don’t visit him unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“How is he?”

“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. He does not say a great deal.”

“I’ll need to see him anyway.”

“May I ask why?”

“I think I may have encountered an old friend of his. A very old friend.”

Louis and I took an early-afternoon flight down to New York, the journey passing in near silence. Angel opted to stay at the house and look after Walter. There was no sign in Portland or New York of Brightwell, or of anyone else who might have been watching us. We took a cab to the Lower East Side in heavy rain, the traffic snarled up and the streets thronged with glistening commuters heartily weary of the long winter, but the rain began to ease as we crossed Houston Street, and by the time we neared our destination the sun was spilling through holes in the clouds, creating great diagonal columns of light that held their form until they disintegrated on the roofs and walls of the buildings.

Epstein was waiting for me in the Orensanz Center, the old synagogue on the Lower East Side where I had first met him after the death of his son. As usual, there were a couple of young men around him who clearly had not been brought along for their conversational skills.

“So here we are again,” said Epstein. He looked the same as he always did: small, gray-bearded, and slightly saddened, as though, despite his efforts at optimism, the world had somehow already contrived to disappoint him that day.

“You seem to like meeting people here,” I said.

“It’s public, yet private when necessary, and more secure than it appears. You look tired.”

“I’m having a difficult week.”

“You’re having a difficult life. If I were a Buddhist, I might wonder what sins you had committed in your previous incarnations to justify the problems you appear to be encountering in this one.”

The room in which we stood was suffused with a soft orange glow, the sunlight falling heavily through the great window that dominated the empty synagogue, lent added weight and substance by some hidden element that had joined with it in its passage through the glass. The noise of traffic was muted, and even our foot-steps on the dusty floor sounded distant and muffled as we walked toward the light. Louis remained by the door, flanked by Epstein’s minders.

“So tell me,” said Epstein. “What has happened to bring you here?”

I thought of all that Reid and Bartek had told me. I recalled Brightwell, the feel of his hands upon me as this wretched being reached out to me and tried to draw me to himself, and the look on his face before he gave himself to the flames. That sickening feeling of vertigo returned, and my skin prickled with the memory of an old burning.

And I remembered the preacher, Faulkner, trapped in his prison cell, his children dead and his hateful crusade at an end. I saw again his hands reaching out for me through the bars, felt the heat radiating from his aged, wiry body, and heard once more the words that he spoke to me before spitting his foul poison into my mouth.

What you have faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching… The things that are coming for you are not even human.

I could not tell how it came to be, but Faulkner had a knowledge of hidden things. Reid had suggested that perhaps Faulkner, the Traveling Man, the child killer Adelaide Modine, the arachnoid torturer Pudd, maybe even Caleb Kyle-the bogeyman who had haunted my grandfather’s life-were all linked, even if some of them were unaware of the ties that bound them to one another. Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and the whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.

“A woman told me of a book, a part of the biblical apocrypha,” I said. “I read it. It spoke of the corporeality of angels, of the possibility that they could take upon themselves a human form and dwell in it, hidden and unseen.”

Epstein was so silent and still that I could no longer hear him breathe, and the slow rise and fall of his chest appeared to have ceased entirely.

“The Book of Enoch,” he said, after a time. “You know, the great rabbi, Simeon ben Jochai, in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, cursed those who believed in its contents. It was judged to be a later misinterpretation of Genesis because of correspondences between the two texts, although some scholars have suggested that Enoch is actually the earlier work, and is therefore the more definitive account. But then, the apocryphal works-both the deuterocanonical books, such as Judith, Tobit, and Baruch, that follow the Old Testament, and the excised later gospels, like those of Thomas and Bart-holemew-are a minefield for scholars. Enoch is probably more difficult than most. It is a genuinely unsettling piece of writing, with profound implications for the nature of evil in the world. It is hardly surprising that both Christians and Jews found it easier to suppress it than to try to examine its contents in the light of what they already believed, and thereby attempt to reconcile the two views. Would it have been so difficult for them to see the rebellion of the angels as being linked to the creation of man? That the pride of the angels was wounded by being forced to acknowledge the wonder of this new being? That they perhaps also envied its physicality, and the pleasure it could take in its appetites, most of all in the joy that it found by joining with the body of another? They lusted, they rebelled, and they fell. Some descended into the pit, and others found a place here, and at last took upon themselves the form that they had so long desired. An interesting speculation, don’t you think?”

“But what if there are those who believe it, who are convinced that they are these creatures?”

“Is that why you want to see Kittim again?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “that I have become a beacon for foul things, and the worst of them are now closer than they have ever been before. My life is being torn asunder. Once, I could have turned away, and they might have passed me by, but it’s too late for that now. I want to see the one you have, to confirm to myself that I am not insane and that such things can and do exist.”

“Perhaps they do exist,” said Epstein, “and maybe Kittim is the proof, but we have encountered resistance from him. He very quickly built up a tolerance to the drugs. Even sodium pentothal no longer has any significant effect. Under its influence, he merely rants, but we have given him a strong dose in anticipation of your visit, and it may allow you a few minutes of clarity from him.”

“Do we have far to go?” I asked.

“Go?” said Epstein. “Go where?”

It took me a moment to understand.

“He’s here?”

It was little more than a glorified cell, accessed through a utility closet in the basement. The closet was encased in metal, and the back wall doubled as a door, accessed by both a key and an electronic combination. It swung inward to reveal a soundproofed area, divided in two by steel mesh. Cameras kept a constant vigil on the area behind the wire, which was furnished with a bed, a sofa, and a small table and chair. There were no books that I could see. A TV had been fixed to the far corner of the wall, on the other side of the barrier and as far away from the cell as possible. There was a remote control device for it on the floor beside the sofa.

A figure lay on the bed, wearing only a pair of gray shorts. His limbs were like bare branches, with every muscle visible to the eye. He looked emaciated, thinner than any man that I had ever seen before. His face was turned to the wall, and his knees were drawn up to his chest. He was almost bald, apart from a few stray strands of hair that clung to his purple, flaking skull. The texture of his skin reminded me of Brightwell and the swelling that afflicted him. They were both beings in the process of slow decay.

“My God,” I said. “What happened to him?”

“He refused to eat,” said Epstein. “We tried to force-feed him, but it was too difficult. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that he was trying to kill himself, and, well, we were prepared to see him die. Except he didn’t die: he merely grows a little weaker with every week that goes by. He sometimes takes water, but nothing more. Mostly, he sleeps.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Months.”

The man on the bed stirred, then turned over so that he was facing us. His skin had contracted on his face, so that the hollows in the bone were clearly visible. He reminded me of a concentration camp inmate, except that his catlike eyes betrayed no hint of weakness or inner decay. Instead they glittered emptily, like cheap jewels.

Kittim.

He had emerged in South Carolina as an enforcer for a racist named Roger Bowen, and a link between the preacher Faulkner and the men who would have freed him if they could, but Bowen had underestimated his employee and had failed to understand the true balance of power in their relationship. Bowen was little more than Kittim’s puppet, and Kittim was older and more corrupt than Bowen could ever have imagined. His name hinted at his nature, for the kittim were said to be a host of dark angels who waged war against men and God. Whatever dwelt within Kittim was ancient and hostile, and worked for its own ends.

Kittim reached for a plastic beaker of water and drank from it, the liquid spilling onto the pillow and sheets. He raised himself until he was seated on the edge of the bed. He stayed like that for a time, as though building up the strength that he needed, then stood. He wavered slightly, and seemed about to fall, but instead shuffled across the cell toward the wire. His bony fingers reached out and gripped the strands as he forced his face against the mesh. He was so thin that, for an instant, I almost thought he might try to press his face between them. His eyes shifted first to Louis, then to me.

“Come to gloat?” he said. His voice was very soft, but betrayed no hint of his body’s decay.

“You don’t look so good,” said Louis. “But then, you never looked good.”

“I see you still bring your monkey with you wherever you go. Perhaps you could train him to walk behind you holding an umbrella.”

“Still the same old joker,” I said. “You know, you’re never going to make friends that way. That’s why you’re down here, away from all the other children.”

“I am surprised to see you alive,” he said. “Surprised, yet grateful.”

“Grateful? Why would you be grateful?”

“I was hoping,” said Kittim, “that you might kill me.”

“Why?” I replied. “So you can…wander?”

Kittim’s head tilted slightly, and he looked at me with new interest. Beside me, Epstein was watching us both carefully.

“Perhaps,” he said. “What would you know of it?”

“I know a little. I was hoping you could help me to learn more.”

Kittim shook his head.

“I don’t think so.”

I shrugged.

“Then we’ve nothing more to say. I would have thought that you’d be glad of a little stimulation, though. It must get lonely down here, and dull. Still, at least you have a TV. Ricki will be coming on soon, and then after that you can watch your stories.”

Kittim stepped away from the wire and sat down once again on his bed.

“I want to leave here,” he said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“I want to die.”

“Then why haven’t you tried to kill yourself?”

“They watch me.”

“That’s not answering the question.”

Kittim extended his arms and turned his hands so that the palms faced upward. He looked at his wrists for a long time, as though contemplating the wounds that he might inflict upon them, were he able.

“I don’t think you can kill yourself,” I said. “I don’t think that choice is open to you. You can’t end your own existence, even temporarily. Isn’t that what you believe?”

Kittim didn’t reply. I persisted.

“I can tell you things,” I said.

“What things?”

“I can tell you of a statue made of silver, hidden in a vault. I can tell you of twin angels, one lost, one searching. Don’t you want to hear?”

Kittim did not look up as he spoke.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Tell me.”

“An exchange,” I said. “First, who is Brightwell?”

Kittim thought for a moment.

“Brightwell is…not like me. He is older, more cautious, more patient. He wants.”

“What does he want?”

“Revenge.”

“Against whom?”

“Everyone. Everything.”

“Is he alone?”

“No. He serves a higher power. It is incomplete, and seeks its other half. You know this.”

“Where is it?”

“Hidden. It had forgotten what it was, but Brightwell found it and awoke what lay within. Now, like all of us, it cloaks itself, and it searches.”

“And what will happen when it finds its twin?”’

“It will hunt, and it will kill.”

“And what will Brightwell get, in return for helping it?”

“Power. Victims.”

Kittim lifted his gaze from the floor and looked unblinkingly at me.

“And you.”

“How can you know that?”

“I am aware of him. He thinks that you are like us, but that you fell away. Only one did not follow. Brightwell believes that he has found that one in you.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I do not care. I wanted only to explore you.”

He lifted his right hand and stretched his fingers, twisting them in the air as though it were flesh and blood through which his nails were slowly tearing.

“Now tell me,” he said, “what do you know of these things?”

“They call themselves Believers. Some are just ambitious men, and some are convinced that they are more than that. They’re looking for the statue, and they’re close to finding it. They are assembling fragments of a map, and soon they will have all the information that they need. They even built a shrine here in New York, in readiness to receive it.”

Kittim took another sip of water.

“So they are close,” he said. “After all this time.”

He did not seem overjoyed at the news. As I watched him, the truth of Reid’s words became clearer to me: evil is self-interested, and ultimately without unity. Whatever his true nature, Kittim had no desire to share his pleasures with others. He was a renegade.

“I have one more question,” I said.

“One more.”

“What does Brightwell do with the dying?”

“He touches his mouth to their lips.”

“Why?”

I thought I detected a note of what might have been envy in Kittim’s voice as he answered.

“Souls,” said Kittim. “Brightwell is a repository of souls.”

He lowered his head and lay down once more on his bed, then closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall.

The Woodrow was a nondescript place. There was no doorman in green livery and white gloves to guard its residents’ privacy, and its atrium was furnished with the kind of hard-wearing green vinyl chairs beloved of struggling dentists everywhere. The outer doors were unsecured, but the inner doors were locked. To their right was an intercom and three lines of bells, each with a faded nameplate beside it. Philip Bosworth’s name was not among those listed, although a number of the plates were blank.

“Maybe Ross’s information was wrong,” said Louis.

“It’s the FBI, not the CIA,” I said. “Anyway, whatever else I can say about him, Ross doesn’t screw around when it comes to information. Bosworth is here, somewhere.”

I tried each of the anonymous bells in turn. One was answered by a woman who appeared to be very old, very bad-tempered, and very, very deaf. The second was answered by someone who could have been her older, deafer, and even more cantankerous brother. The third bell rang in the apartment of a young woman who might well have been a hooker, judging by the confusion about an “appointment” that followed.

“Ross said the apartment was owned by Bosworth’s folks,” suggested Louis. “Maybe he has a different last name.”

“Maybe,” I conceded.

I ran my finger down the lines of bells, stopping halfway down the third row.

“But maybe not.”

The name on the bell was Rint, just like that of the man responsible for the reconstruction of the Sedlec ossuary in the nineteenth century. It was the kind of joke that could come only from someone who had once tried to dig up the floor of a French monastery.

I rang the bell. Seconds later, a wary voice emerged from the speaker box.

“Hello?”

“My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for Philip Bosworth.”

“There’s nobody here by that name.”

“Assistant SAC Ross told me how to find you. If you’re concerned, call him first.”

I heard what might have been a snicker, then the connection was terminated.

“That went well,” said Louis.

“At least we know where he is.”

We stood outside the closed doors. Nobody came in and no one went out. After ten minutes went by, I tried the Rint bell again, and the same voice answered.

“Still here,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“To talk about Sedlec. To talk about the Believers.”

I waited. The door buzzed open.

“Come on up.”

We entered the lobby. There was a blue semicircular fitting on the ceiling above us, concealing the cameras that watched the entrance and the lobby. Two elevators, their doors painted gunmetal gray, stood before us. There was a key slot in the wall between them, so that only residents could access them. As we approached, the elevator on the left opened. The top half of the interior was mirrored, with gold trim. The bottom half was upholstered in old yet well-maintained red velvet. We stepped inside, the doors closed, and the elevator rose without either of us touching a button. Clearly, the Woodrow was a more sophisticated residence than it appeared from outside.

The elevator stopped on the top floor, and the doors opened onto a small, windowless, carpeted area. Across from us was a set of double wood doors leading to the penthouse apartment. There was another blue surveillance bubble mounted on the ceiling above.

The apartment door opened. The man who greeted us was not what I had expected. He wore blue chinos and a light blue Ralph Lauren shirt, and there were tassels on his tan penny loafers. The shirt was buttoned wrongly, though, and the trousers were pressed and without a single wrinkle, indicating that he had just dressed himself in a hurry from his closet.

“Mr. Bosworth?”

He nodded. I put his age at about forty, but his hair was graying, his features were newly lined with pain, and one of his blue eyes was paler than the other. As he stepped aside to admit us he shuffled slightly, as though suffering from pins and needles in one or both feet. He held the handle of the door with his left hand, while his right remained fixed in the pocket of his chinos. He did not offer to shake my hand, or Louis’s. Instead, he simply closed the door behind us and walked slowly to an easy chair, holding on to its armrest with his left hand as he lowered himself down. His right hand still did not leave his pocket.

The room in which we now stood was impressively modern, with a pretty good view of the river through a row of five long windows. The carpet was white, and the seating areas furnished entirely with black leather. There was a wide-screen TV and a DVD player in a console against one wall, and a series of black bookcases stretched from floor to ceiling. Most of the shelves were empty, apart from a few pieces of pottery and antique statuary that were lost in their minimalist surroundings. A large smoked-glass dining table stood to my left, surrounded by ten chairs. It looked like it had never been used. Beyond it, I could see a pristine kitchen, every surface gleaming. To the left was a hallway, presumably leading to the bedrooms and bathroom beyond. It was like a show apartment, or one that was on the point of being vacated by its current owner.

Bosworth was waiting for us to speak. He was clearly a sick man. His right leg had already spasmed once since we had arrived, causing him some distress, and there was a tremor in his left arm.

“Thank you for seeing us,” I said. “This is my colleague Louis.”

Bosworth’s eyes flicked between us. He licked at his lips, then reached for a plastic tumbler of water on the small glass table beside him, carefully ensuring that he had it firmly in his grip before he raised it to his mouth. He sipped awkwardly from a plastic straw, then returned the tumbler to its table.

“I spoke to Ross’s secretary,” he said, once he had drained the last of the water. “She confirmed your story. Otherwise, you would not be here now, and you would instead be under the supervision of this building’s security guards while you waited for the police to arrive.”

“I don’t blame you for being cautious.”

“That’s very magnanimous of you, I’m sure.”

He snickered again, but the laughter was directed less at me than at himself and his debilitated condition, a kind of double bluff that failed to convince anyone in the room.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the leather sofa on the other side of the coffee table. “It’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of company, other than that of doctors and nurses, or concerned members of my own family.”

“May I ask what you’re suffering from?”

I already had some idea: the tremors, the paralysis, the spasms were all symptoms of MS.

“Disseminated sclerosis,” he said. “Late onset. It was diagnosed last year, and has progressed steadily from the first. In fact, my doctors say the speed of my degeneration is quite alarming. The vision in my right eye was the first obvious symptom, but since then I have endured the loss of postural sense in my right arm, weakness in both of my legs, vertigo, tremors, sphincter retention, and impotence. Quite a cocktail of miseries, don’t you think? As a result, I have decided to leave my apartment and abandon myself permanently to the care of others.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s interesting,” said Bosworth, seemingly ignoring me completely. “Only this morning, I was considering the source of my condition: a metabolic upset, an allergic reaction on the part of my nervous system, or an infection from some outside agent? I feel it is a malevolent illness. I sometimes picture it in my head as a white, creeping thing extending tendrils through my body, implanted within to paralyze and ultimately kill me. I wonder if perhaps I unwittingly exposed myself to some agent, and it responded by colonizing my system. But that is the stuff of madness, is it not? Agent Ross would be pleased to hear it, I think. He could pass it on to his superiors, reassuring them that they were right to end my career in the manner in which they did.”

“They said that you desecrated a church.”

“Excavated, not desecrated. I needed to confirm a suspicion.”

“And what was the result?”

“I was proved right.”

“What was the suspicion?”

Bosworth raised his left hand and waved it gently from side to side in a slow, deliberate movement, perhaps to distinguish the gesture from the tremors that continuously shook the limb.

“You first. After all, you came to me.”

Once again, I was drawn into the game of feeding information to another without exposing too much of what I knew, or what I thought might be true. I had not forgotten Reid’s warning from the night at the Great Lost Bear: that somewhere there was one who believed that a Black Angel dwelt within him, and so I did not mention the involvement of Reid and Bartek, or the approaches made to me by Stuckler. Instead, I told Bosworth about Alice, and Garcia, and the discoveries made in the Williamsburg building. I revealed most of what I knew about the map fragments, and Sedlec, and the Believers. I talked of the auction, and the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop, and the Book of Enoch.

And I spoke of Brightwell.

“All very interesting,” he said, when I had finished. “You’ve learned a lot in a short time. He rose painfully from his chair and went to a drawer at the base of one of his bookshelves. He opened it, retrieved what was inside, and placed it on the table between us.

It was part of a map, drawn in red and blue inks upon thin yellowed paper, and mounted on a piece of protective board. In the top right-hand corner was a black foot with taloned toes. The margins were filled with microscopic writing, and a series of symbols. It was similar in content to the fragments I had seen in Stuckler’s treasury.

“It’s a copy,” said Bosworth, “not an original.”

“Where did this come from?”

“San Galgano, in Italy,” said Bosworth, as he resumed his seat. “The monastery at San Galgano was one of the places to which a fragment was sent. It’s no more than a beautiful ruin now, but in its time, its façade was noted for the purity of its lines, and it was said that its monks were consulted during the construction of the Siena cathedral. Nevertheless, it was subject to repeated attacks by Florentine mercenaries, its revenues were plundered by its own abbots, and the Renaissance in Italy led to a falling off in the number of those willing to answer the monastic call. By 1550, there were only five monks left there. By 1600, there was only one, and he lived as a hermit. When he died, the San Galgano fragment was found among his possessions. Its provenance was not understood initially, and it was retained as a relic of a holy man’s life. Inevitably, rumors of its existence spread, and an order came from Rome that it should be entrusted to the care of the Vatican immediately, but by that time a copy had already been made. Subsequently, further duplicates were created, so the San Galgano section of the map is in the possession of any number of individuals by now. The original was lost on the journey to Rome. The monks transporting it were attacked, and it was said that rather than allow it to be seized along with their money and possessions, they burned it in a fit of panic. And so, all that remain are copies such as this one. This, then, is the only piece of the Sedlec map to which many people have enjoyed access, and the only clue that existed for many years as to the nature of the directions to the statue’s resting place.

“The original creator of the map invented a simple, but perfectly adequate, means of ensuring that the location contained within it remained unknowable without all the parts of the document. Most of the writing and symbols are merely decorative, and the drawing of the church refers simply to Bernard’s concept of how such places of worship should look. It is an idealized church, and nothing more. The real meat, as you’re no doubt aware, is here.”

Bosworth pointed to a combination of Roman numerals and a single letter D in one corner.

“It’s simple. Like any treasure map worth its salt, it’s based around distances from a set point. But without all of the distances involved, it’s useless, and even with all of them to hand, you still need to know the location of the central reference point. All the boxes, all of the fragments, are ultimately meaningless unless you have knowledge of the location in question. In that sense, the map might be regarded as a clever piece of sleight of hand. After all, if people were busy searching for what they believed to be crucial clues, then they would be less likely to try to find the thing itself. Each fragment does, however, offer one piece of useful information. Look again at the copy, particularly at the imp in the center.”

I stared at the document, and at the small demonic character Bosworth was pointing at. Now that I looked more closely, I could see from its skull that it was a very crude version of the bone statue that Stuckler had shown to me, barely more than a stick drawing. There was lettering visible around it, forming a circle that enclosed the figure.

“Quantum in me est,” said Bosworth. “As much as in me lies.”

“I don’t understand. It’s just a drawing of the Black Angel.”

“No, it’s not.” Bosworth practically seethed at my inability to make the connections that he had made. “See here, and here.” The trembling index finger of his left hand brushed the page. “These are human bones.”

Bosworth was right. It was not a stick figure, but a bone figure. More care had been taken with the illustration than first appeared.

“The whole illustration consists of human bones: bones from the ossuary at Sedlec. This is a depiction of the re-creation of the Black Angel. It is the bone statue that conceals the actual location of the vault, but most of those who have sought the Angel, wrong-footed by their obsession with the fragments and dismissive of this fragment because of its relative ubiquity, have been unable to acknowledge that possibility, and those who have correctly interpreted its message have kept the knowledge to themselves, while widening their search to include the replica. But I made the connection, and if this man Brightwell is clever enough, then he has made it too. The statue has been missing since the last century, although it was rumored to be in Italy before World War II broke out. Since then, there has been no trace of it. The Believers are not looking merely for the fragments, but for those who possess the fragments, in the hope that they may also have in their possession the bone sculpture.

That is why Garcia re-created it in his apartment. It is not just a symbol, it is the key to the thing itself.”

I tried to take in all that he had said.

“Why are you telling us this?” said Louis. It was the first time he had spoken since we entered Bosworth’s apartment.

“Because I want it found,” said Bosworth. “I want to know that it is in the world, but I can no longer find it for myself. I have money. If you find it, I will have it brought to me, and I’ll pay you well for your trouble.”

“You never explained why you dug up the floor of the monastery at Sept-Fons,” I said.

“There should have been a fragment there,” said Bosworth. “I traced its path. It took me five years of hunting rumors and half-truths, but I did it. Like so many treasures, it was moved for its own protection during the Second World War. It went to Switzerland, but was returned to France once it was safe to do so. It should have been beneath the floor, but it was not. Someone had taken it away again, and I know where it went.”

I waited.

“It went to the Czech Republic, to the newly founded monastery at Novy Dvur, perhaps as a gift, a token of their respect for the efforts of the Czech monks to keep the faith under the Communists. That has always been the great flaw in the Cistercians’ stewardship of the fragments over the last six hundred years: their willingness to entrust them to one another, to expose them briefly to the light. That is why the fragments have slowly come into the possession of others. The Sedlec fragment auctioned yesterday is, I believe, the fragment transported from Sept-Fons to the Czech Republic. It did not belong in Sedlec. Sedlec has not existed as a Cistercian community for nearly two centuries.”

“So someone put it there.”

Bosworth nodded eagerly. “Someone wanted it to be found,” he said. “Someone wants to draw attention to Sedlec.”

“Why?”

“Because Sedlec is not merely an ossuary. Sedlec is a trap.”

Then Bosworth played his final card. He opened the second folder, revealing copies of ornate drawings, each depicting the Black Angel from different angles.

“You know of Rint?” he asked.

“You used his name as a pseudonym. That’s how we found your bell. He was the man who redesigned the ossuary in the nineteenth century.”

“I bought these in Prague. They were part of a case of documents linked to Rint and his work, owned by one of Rint’s descendants, who I found living in near penury. I paid him well for the papers, much more than they were worth, in the hope that they would provide more conclusive proof than they ultimately did. Rint created these drawings of the Black Angel, and according to the seller, there were once many more than this, but they were lost or destroyed. These drawings were Rint’s obsession. He was a haunted man. Later, others copied them, and they became popular among specialized collectors with an interest in the myth, but Rint made the originals. The question was, how did Rint come to create such detailed drawings? Were they entirely products of his own imagination, or did he see something during his restoration that allowed him to base his illustrations upon it? I believe that the latter is the case, for Rint was clearly greatly troubled in later life, and perhaps the bone sculpture still rests in Sedlec. My illness prevents me from investigating further, which is why I am sharing this knowledge with you.”

Bosworth must have seen the expression on my face change. How could he have failed to do so? It was all clear now. Rint had not glimpsed the bone sculpture, because the bone sculpture had long been lost. According to Stuckler, it spent two centuries in Italy, hidden from sight until his father discovered it. No, Rint saw the original, the Black Angel rendered in silver. He saw it in Sedlec when he was restoring the ossuary. Bosworth was right: the map was a kind of ruse, because the Black Angel had never left Sedlec. All those centuries, it had remained hidden there, and at last both Stuckler and the Believers were confident that all the information they needed to recover it was within their grasp.

And I knew also why Martin Reid had given me the small silver cross. I rubbed my fingers across it, where it rested alongside my keys. My thumb traced its lines, and the letters etched on its rear in a cruciform shape.

S

L E C

D

“What is it?” said Bosworth.

“We have to go,” I said.

Bosworth stood and tried to stop me, but his weak legs and wasted arm made him no match for me.

“You know!” he said. “You know where it is! Tell me!”

He tried to raise himself, but we were already making for the door.

“Tell me!” screamed Bosworth, forcing himself up. I saw him stumbling toward me, his face contorted, but by then the elevator doors were closing. I caught a last glimpse of him, then we were descending. I got to the lobby just as a pair of uniformed men emerged from the doorway to the right of the elevator bank. Inside I could see TV monitors and telephones. They stopped as soon as they saw Louis. More precisely, they stopped as soon as they saw Louis’s gun.

“Down,” he said.

They hit the ground.

I went past him and opened the door. He backed out, then we were on the street, running fast, melting into the crowd as the last minutes ticked away and the Believers commenced the slaughter of their enemies.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

They first appeared as shadows on the wall, drifting with the night clouds, following the moonlight. Then shadow became form: black-garbed raiders, their eyes distended and their features hidden by the night-vision goggles that they wore. All were armed, and as they scaled the walls, their weapons hung down from their backs, the combination of mutated eyes and slim, stingerlike black barrels making each seem more insect than man.

A boat waited offshore, sitting silently upon the waters, alert for the signal to approach if required, and a blue Mercedes stood beneath a copse of trees, its sole occupant pale and corpulent, his green eyes unencumbered by artificial lenses. Brightwell had no need for them: his eyes had long been comfortable with darkness.

The raiders descended into the garden, then separated. Two moved toward the house, the others to the gate, but at a prearranged signal all stopped and surveyed the dwelling. Seconds ticked by, but still they did not move. They were four black sentinels, like the burned remains of dead trees enviously regarding the slow coming of spring.

Inside the house, Murnos sat before a bank of TV monitors. He was reading a book, and the figures surrounding the property might have been interested to see that it was a concordance to Enoch. Its contents fueled the beliefs of those who threatened his employer, and Murnos felt compelled to learn more about them in order to understand his enemy.

“They shall be called upon earth evil spirits, and on earth shall be their habitation.”

Murnos had grown increasingly uneasy with Stuckler’s grand obsession, and recent events had done nothing to assuage his concerns. The purchase of the latest fragment at auction was a mistake: it would draw attention to what was already in Stuckler’s possession, and Murnos did not share his employer’s belief that an agreement could be reached with those others who were also seeking the silver statue.

“Evil spirits shall they be upon earth, and the spirits of the wicked shall they be called.”

Beside him, a second man watched the screens, his gaze flicking carefully across each one. There was a single window in the room, overlooking the garden. Murnos had warned Stuckler about it in the past. In Murnos’s opinion, the room was unsuited to its primary purpose. He believed that a security room should be virtually impregnable, capable of being used as a panic room if necessary, but Stuckler was a man of many contradictions. He wanted men around him, and he desired the impression of security, but Murnos did not think that Stuckler really considered himself to be at risk. He was his mother’s creature in every way, the knowledge of his father’s strength and the nature of his sacrifice instilled in him from an early age, so that it verged on the sacrilegious for him to indulge in fear, or doubt, or even concern for others. Murnos hated the old woman’s occasional visits. Stuckler would send a limousine for her, and she would arrive with her private nurse, wrapped in blankets even in the height of summer, her eyes shaded by sunglasses all year round, an old crone who persisted in living while taking no joy in any aspect of the world around her, not even in her son, for Murnos could see her contempt for Stuckler, could hear it in her every utterance as she looked upon this prissy little man, softened by indulgence, his weaknesses redeemed only by his willingness to please her and his hero worship of a dead father so intense that occasionally the hatred and envy that underpinned it would bubble through, contorting him with rage and transforming him utterly.

“No food shall they eat, and they shall be thirsty; they shall be concealed, and shall rise up against the sons of men…”

He looked at Burke, his coworker. Burke was good. Stuckler had initially balked at paying him what he asked, but Murnos had insisted that Burke was worth it. The others, too, had all been approved by Murnos, even if they were not quite in Burke’s league.

And still Murnos believed that they were not enough.

A light began to flicker rhythmically on a panel on the wall, accompanied by an insistent beeping.

“The gate!” said Burke. “Someone’s opening the gate.”

It wasn’t possible. The gate could only be opened from within, or by one of the three control devices contained in the cars, and all of the vehicles were on the property. Murnos checked the monitors and thought for an instant he saw a figure beside the gate, and another leaving a copse of trees.

“…for they come forth during the days of slaughter and destruction.”

And then the screens went dead.

Murnos was already on his feet when the window beside them was blown apart. Burke took the brunt of the first fusillade, shielding Murnos for valuable seconds and enabling him to get to the door. He scrambled through as bullets pinged off metal and pock-marked the plaster on the walls. Stuckler was upstairs in his room, but the noise had woken him from his sleep. Murnos could already hear him shouting as he entered the main hallway. Somewhere in the house, another window shattered. A small man with a gun appeared from the kitchen, barely more than a shadow in the gloom, and Murnos fired at him, forcing him back. He kept firing as he made for the stairs. There was a Gothic-style window on the landing, and Murnos saw a shape pass across it, ascending the outside wall toward the second floor. He tried to shout a warning as he heard more shots, but he stumbled on the stairs, and the words were lost in an instant of shock. Murnos gripped the banister to lift himself up, and his hands slid wetly upon the wood. There was blood on his fingers. He looked down at his shirt and saw the stain spreading across it, and with it came the pain. He raised his gun, seeking a target, and felt a second impact at his thigh. His back arched in agony, his head striking hard against the stairs and his eyes briefly squeezing shut as he tried to control the pain. When he opened them again there was a woman staring at him from above, the shape of her clearly visible beneath her dark clothing, her eyes blue and hateful. She had a gun in her hand.

Instinctively, Murnos closed his eyes again as death came.

Brightwell drove to the front of the house and entered the grounds. He followed Miss Zahn down to the cellar, through the racks of wine, and into the treasury that now lay open to him. Above him loomed the great black statue of bone. Stuckler was kneeling before it, dressed in blue silk pajamas. There was some blood in his hair, but he was otherwise unhurt.

Three pieces of vellum were handed to Brightwell, taken by his raiders from the shattered display case. He handed them over to Miss Zahn, but his gaze was fixed upon the statue. His head came almost to the level of its rib cage, the scapulae fused to the sternum at the front and to each other at the back, like an armored plate. He drew back his hand and punched hard against the mass of bone. The sternum cracked under the impact.

“No!” said Stuckler. “What are you doing?”

Brightwell struck again. Stuckler tried to stand, but Miss Zahn forced him to stay down.

“You’ll destroy it,” said Stuckler. “It’s beautiful. Stop!”

The sternum shattered under the force of Brightwell’s blows. The skin on his knuckles and the back of his hand had been torn by the sharp bone, but he did not seem to notice. Instead, he reached into the hollow that he had created and explored it, his arm buried within the statue almost to the elbow and his face tensed with the effort, until his features suddenly relaxed and he withdrew his hand. There was a small silver box clutched in his fist, this one entirely unadorned. He opened his hand and displayed the box to Stuckler, then carefully removed the lid. Inside was a single piece of vellum, perfectly preserved. He handed it to Miss Zahn to unfold.

“The numbers, the maps,” he said to Stuckler. “They were all incidental, in their way. What mattered was the bone statue, and what it contained.”

Stuckler was weeping. He reached for a shard of shattered black bone and held it in his hand.

“You did not understand your own acquisitions, Herr Stuckler,” said Brightwell. “ ‘Quantum in me est.’ The details lie in the fragments, but the truth lies here.”

He threw the empty box to Stuckler, who touched his fingers to the interior in disbelief.

“All this time,” he said. “The knowledge was within my grasp all this time.”

Brightwell took the final piece of fragment from Miss Zahn. He examined the drawing upon it and the writing above. The drawing was architectural in nature, showing a church and what appeared to be a network of tunnels beneath it. His brow furrowed, then he began to laugh.

“It never left,” he said, almost in wonder.

“Tell me,” said Stuckler. “Please, allow me that much.”

Brightwell squatted, and showed Stuckler the illustration, then rose and nodded to Miss Zahn. Stuckler did not look up as the muzzle of the gun touched the back of his head, its caress almost tender.

“All this time,” he said “All this time.”

Then time, what was and what was yet to be, came to an end, and a new world was born for him.

Two hours later, Reid and Bartek were walking back to their car. They had stopped to eat at a bar just south of Hartford, their last meal together before they were due to leave the country, and Reid had indulged himself, as was sometimes his wont. He was now rubbing his belly and complaining that chili nachos always gave him gas.

“Nobody made you eat them,” said his companion.

“I can’t resist them,” said Reid. “They’re just so alien.”

Bartek’s Chevy was parked on the road, beneath one of a long line of bare trees that filigreed the cars beneath in shadow, part of a small forest that bordered green fields and a distant development of new condos.

“I mean,” Reid continued, “no decent society would even con-”

A shape moved against one of the trees, and in the fraction of a second between awareness and response, Reid could have sworn that it descended down the tree trunk headfirst, like a lizard clinging to the bark.

“Run!” he said. He pushed hard at Bartek, forcing him into the woods, then turned to face the approaching enemy. He heard Bartek call his name, and he shouted: “Run, I said. Run, you bastard!”

There was a man facing him, a small, pie-faced figure in a black jacket and faded denims. Reid recognized him from the bar, and wondered how long they had been watched by their enemies. The man did not have any weapon that Reid could see.

“Come on, then,” said Reid. “I’ll have you.”

He raised his fists and moved sideways, in case the man tried to get past him to follow Bartek, but he stopped short as he became aware of a stench close by.

“Priest,” said the soft voice, and Reid felt the energy drain from him. He turned around. Brightwell was inches from his face. Reid opened his mouth to speak, and the blade entered him so swiftly that all that emerged from his throat was a pained grunt. He heard the small man moving into the undergrowth, following Bartek. A second figure accompanied him: a woman with long dark hair.

“You failed,” said Brightwell.

He drew Reid to him, embracing him with his left arm even as the knife continued to force its way upward. His lips touched Reid’s. The priest tried to bite him, but Brightwell did not relinquish his hold, and he kissed Reid’s mouth as the priest shuddered and died against him.

Miss Zahn and the small man returned after half an hour. Reid’s body already lay concealed in the undergrowth.

“We lost him,” she said.

“No matter,” said Brightwell. “We have bigger fish to fry.”

He stared out into the darkness, as though hoping that despite his words, he might yet have the chance to deal with the younger man. Then, when that hope proved misplaced, he walked with the others back to their car, and they drove south. They had one more call to make.

After a time, a thin figure emerged from the woods. Bartek followed the line of the trees until he found at last the splayed figure, cast aside amid stones and rotten wood, and he gathered the body to him and said the prayers for the dead over his departed friend.

Neddo was seated in the little office at the back of his store. It was almost dawn, and the wind outside rattled the fire escapes. He was hunched over his desk, carefully using a small brush to clean the dust from an ornate bone brooch. The door to his place of work opened, but he did not hear it above the howling of the wind, and so engrossed was he in the delicate task before him that he failed to notice the sound of soft footsteps moving through his store. It was only when the curtain moved, and a shadow fell across him, that he looked up.

Brightwell stood before him. Behind Brightwell was a woman. Her hair was very dark, her shirt was open to her breasts, and her skin was alive with tattooed eyes.

“You’ve been telling tales, Mr. Neddo,” said Brightwell. “We indulged you for too long.”

He shook his head sadly, and the great wattle of flesh at his neck wobbled and rippled.

Neddo put the brush down. His spectacles had a second pair of lenses attached to them by a small metal frame, in order to magnify the piece upon which he was working. The lenses distorted Brightwell’s face, making his eyes seem bigger, his mouth fuller, and the red-and-purple mass above his collar more swollen than ever, so that it appeared to be on the verge of an eruption, a prelude to some great spray of blood and matter that would emerge from deep within Brightwell, burning like acid everything with which it came into contact.

“I did what was right,” said Neddo. “If only for the first time.”

“What were you hoping for? Absolution?”

“Perhaps.”

“ ‘On earth they shall never obtain peace and remission of sin,’” Brightwell recited. “ ‘For they shall not rejoice in their offspring; they shall behold the slaughter of their beloved, shall lament for the destruction of their sons, and shall petition for ever, but shall not obtain mercy and peace.’”

“I know Enoch as well as you, but I am not like you. I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sinners…”

Brightwell stepped aside, allowing the woman space to enter. Neddo had heard about her but had never seen her. Without fore-knowledge, she might have appeared beautiful to him. Now, facing her at last, he felt only fear, and a terrible tiredness that prevented him from even attempting escape.

“…the resurrection of the body,” Neddo continued, his speech growing faster, “and life everlasting. Amen.”

“You should have remained faithful,” said Brightwell.

“To you? I know what you are. I turned to you out of anger, out of grief. I was mistaken.” Neddo commenced a new prayer: “‘Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for all my sins, because they have offended thee…’”

The woman was examining Neddo’s tools: the scalpels, the small blades. Neddo could hear her working her way through them, but he did not look at her. Instead, he remained intent upon completing his act of contrition, until Brightwell spoke and the words died in Neddo’s mouth.

“We have found it,” said Brightwell.

Neddo stopped praying. Even now, with death so close, and his protests of repentance still wet upon his lips, he could not keep the wonder from his voice.

“Truly?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where was it? I would like to know.”

“Sedlec,” said Brightwell. “It never left the precincts of the ossuary.”

Neddo removed his glasses. He was smiling.

“All of the searching, and it was there all along.”

His smile grew sad.

“I should like to have seen it,” he said, “to have looked upon it after all that I have heard and all that I have read.”

The woman found a rag. She soaked it with water from a jug, then stepped behind Neddo and forced the material into his mouth. He tried to struggle, pulling at her hands and her hair, but she was too strong. Brightwell joined her, pushing Neddo’s hands down into the chair, his weight and strength keeping the smaller man’s body rigid. The cold of the scalpel touched Neddo’s forehead, and the woman began to cut.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We flew into Prague via London, arriving late in the afternoon. Stuckler was dead. We had hired a car in New York and driven north to his house after our meeting with Bosworth, but by the time we arrived, the police were already there, and a couple of calls confirmed that the collector and his men had all been killed, and that the great bone statue in his treasury now had a hole in its chest. Angel joined us in Boston shortly after, and we left for Europe that night.

The temptation was to press on for Sedlec, which lay about forty miles east of the city, but there were preparations to be made first. In addition, we were tired and hungry. We checked into a small, comfortable hotel in an area known as Mala Strana, which seemed to translate as “Lesser Town,” according to the young woman at the reception desk. Close by, a little funicular railway ran up Petrin Hill from a street named Újezd, along which old trams rattled, their connections occasionally sparking on the overhead lines and leaving a crisp, burned smell in the air. There were cobbles on the streets, and some of the walls were obscured by graffiti. Traces of snow still lingered in sheltered corners, and there was ice on the Vltava River.

While Louis made some calls, I phoned Rachel and told her where I was. It was late, and I was worried that I might wake her, but I didn’t want to just leave the country without letting her know. Her main concern still seemed to be for the dog, but he was safely housed with a neighbor. Sam was doing fine, and they were all planning on visiting Rachel’s sister the next day. Rachel was quieter, but more like her old self.

“I always wanted to see Prague,” said Rachel, after a time.

“I know. Maybe another time.”

“Maybe. How long will you stay there?”

“A couple of days.”

“Are Angel and Louis with you?”

“Yes.”

“Funny, isn’t it, that you’d be somewhere like Prague with them instead of me?”

She didn’t sound like she found it funny at all.

“It’s nothing personal,” I said. “And we have separate rooms.”

“I suppose that’s reassuring. Perhaps, when you get back, you’ll come here and we can talk.”

I noticed that she didn’t say when, or if, she was coming home, and I didn’t ask. I would go to Vermont when I returned, and we would talk, and perhaps I would drive back to Scarborough alone.

“That might be an idea,” I said.

“You didn’t say that you’d like to do it.”

“I’ve never had anyone tell me that we should talk and come out of it feeling better than when I went in.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way, does it?”

“I hope not.”

“I do love you,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I know.”

“That’s what makes it so hard, isn’t it? But you have to choose what life you’re going to lead. We both do, I guess.”

Her voice trailed off.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Fine.”

“Good-bye, Rachel.”

“’Bye.”

The hotel booked us a table at a place called U Modre Kachnicky, or the Blue Duckling, which lay on a discreet side street off Újezd. The restaurant was heavily decorated with drapes and rugs and old prints, and mirrors gave an impression of spaciousness to the smaller, lower level. The menu contained a great deal of game, the house’s speciality, so we ate duck breast and venison, the various meats resting on sauces made from bilberry, juniper, and Madeira wine. We shared a bottle of Frankovka wine and ate in relative silence.

While we were still finishing our main courses, a man entered the restaurant and was directed to our table by the hostess. He looked like the kind of guy who sold stolen cell phones on Broadway: leather jacket, jeans, nasty-colored shirt, and a growth of beard that was frozen somewhere between “forgot to shave” and “hobo.” I wasn’t about to point any of this out to him, though. His jacket could easily have contained two of me inside it, as long as someone found a way to release its current occupant from it without tearing it apart in the process, because the leather seemed to be a little tight on him. I wondered if he was somehow related to the Fulcis from way back, maybe from when man first discovered fire.

His name was Most, according to Louis, who had apparently dealt with him before. Most was a papka, or “father,” of one of the Prague criminal brigades, related by marriage to the Vor v Zakone, the “Thief in Law” responsible for all homegrown organized crime. Criminal organizations in the Czech Republic were mainly structured around these brigades, of which there were maybe ten in the entire country. They dealt in racketeering, the smuggling of prostitutes from former Eastern Bloc countries, pandering, automobile theft, drugs, and weapons, but the lines of demarcation between criminal gangs were becoming increasingly unclear as the number of immigrants increased. Ukrainians, Russians, and Chechens were now among the main participants in organized crime in the country, and none of them were reluctant to use violence and brutality against their victims or, inevitably, against one another. Each group had its own areas of specialization. The Russians were more involved in financial crime, while the aggressive Ukrainians favored bank raids and serial robberies. The Bulgarians, who had previously concentrated on erotic clubs, had now branched out into auto theft, drug trafficking, and the supply of Bulgarian prostitutes to brothels. The Italians, less numerous, focused on purchasing real estate; the Chinese favored running casinos and illegal brothels, as well as people smuggling and kidnapping, although such activities tended to remain within their own ethnic groups; and the Albanians had a piece of everything from drugs to debt collection and the trade in leather and gold. The homegrown boys were being forced to battle for their turf against a new breed of immigrant criminal that didn’t play by any of the old rules. Compared to the new arrivals, Most was an old-fashioned specialist. He liked guns and women, possibly both together.

“Hello,” he said. “Is good?”

He indicated the deer medallions in bilberry sauce on Angel’s plate, surrounded by a pile of spinach noodles.

“Yeah,” said Angel. “It’s real good.”

An enormous finger and thumb plucked one of the remaining medallions from Angel’s plate, and dropped it into a mouth like the Holland Tunnel.

“Hey, man,” said Angel, “I wasn’t-”

Most gave Angel a look. It wasn’t threatening. It wasn’t even mildly menacing. It was the look a spider might have given a trapped fly if the insect had suddenly produced a small bill of rights and begun complaining loudly about infringements on its liberty.

“-eating that anyway,” finished Angel, somewhat lamely.

“Way to stand up for your rights,” I said.

“Yeah, well I don’t know what you’re looking so smug about,” he said. “You’re sharing the rest of yours to make up for it.”

The big man wiped his fingers on a napkin, then stretched out a hand to Louis.

“Most,” he said.

“Louis,” said Louis, introducing Angel and me in turn.

“Doesn’t ‘Most’ mean ‘bridge’?” I said. I had seen signs on the streets directing tourists to Karl?v Most, the Charles Bridge.

Most spread his hands in the gesture of delight common to all those who find visitors to their land making an effort. Not only were we buying guns from him, we were learning the language.

“Bridge, yes, is right,” said Most. He made a balancing gesture with his hands. “I am bridge: bridge between those who have and those who want.”

“Bridge between fucking Europe and Africa if he fell over,” muttered Angel, under his breath.

“Excuse?” said Most.

Angel raised his knife and fork and grinned through a mouthful of deer.

“Good meat,” he said. “Hmmmm.”

Most didn’t look convinced, but he let it slide.

“We should go,” he said. “Is busy time for me.”

We paid the check and followed Most out to where a black Mercedes was parked on the corner of Nebovidská and Harantova.

“Wow,” said Angel. “Gangster car. Very low-key.”

“You really don’t like him, do you?” I said.

“I don’t like big men who throw their weight around.”

I had to admit that Angel was probably right. Most was a bit of a jerk, but we needed what he had to offer.

“Try to play nice,” I said. “It’s not like you’re adopting him.”

We got in the car, Louis and Angel taking a seat in back while I sat in the passenger seat beside Most. Louis didn’t look uneasy, despite the fact that he didn’t have a gun. This was purely a business transaction for him. In turn, Most probably knew enough about Louis not to screw him around.

We drove over the Vltava, past tourist restaurants, then little local bars, eventually leaving behind a big railway station before heading in the direction of the enormous TV mast that dominated the night sky. We turned down some side streets until we came to a doorway with an illuminated sign above it, depicting a figure of Cupid shooting an arrow through a heart. The club was called Cupid Desire, which made a kind of sense. Most pulled up outside and killed the engine. The entrance to the club was guarded by a barred gate and a bored-looking gatekeeper. The gate was opened, Most handed the car keys to his employee, then we were descending a flight of steps into a small, grimy bar. Eastern European women, some blond, some dark, all bored and worn down, sat in the murk nursing sodas. Rock music played in the background, and a tall, red-haired woman with tattoos on her arms worked the tiny bar. There were no men in sight. When Most arrived, the tattooed woman uncapped a Budvar for him, then spoke to him in Czech.

“You want something to drink?” Most translated.

“No, we’re good,” said Louis.

Angel looked around the less-than-glorified bordello.

“Busy time?” he said. “What the hell is it like when it’s quiet?”

We followed Most through into the heart of the building, past numbered doors that stood open to reveal double beds covered only by pillows and a sheet, the walls decorated with framed posters of vaguely artful nudes, until we came to an office. A man sat on a padded chair, watching three or four monitors that showed the gate to the club, what appeared to be the back alley, two views of the street, and the cash register behind the bar. Most passed him and headed to a steel door at the back of the office. He opened it with a pair of keys, one from his wallet and the other from an alcove near the floor. Inside were cases of alcohol and cartons of cigarettes, but they took up only a fraction of the space. Behind them was a small armory.

“So,” said Most, “what would you like?”

Louis had said that we would have no trouble acquiring weapons in Prague, and he was right. The Czech Republic used to be a world leader in the production and export of armaments, but the death of Communism led to a decline in the industry after 1989. There were still about thirty arms manufacturers in the country, though, and the Czechs weren’t as particular about the countries to which they exported arms as they should have been. Zimbabwe had reason to thank the Czechs for breaching the embargo on the export of weapons, as had Sri Lanka and even Yemen, that friend to U.S. interests abroad and the target of a nonbinding UN embargo. There had even been attempts to export arms to Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, facilitated by export licenses covering nonembargoed countries, which were then used to redirect their cargoes to their true destinations. Some of these weapons were legitimately acquired, some were surplus weapons sold on to dealers, but there were others that came through more obscure channels, and I suspected that the bulk of Most’s inventory might have been acquired in this way. After all, in 1995 the Czech national police’s elite antiterrorist unit, URNA, was discovered to be selling its own weapons, ammunition, and even Semtex explosive to organized crime elements. Miroslav Kvasnak, the head of URNA, was sacked, but that didn’t stop him from later becoming the deputy director of Czech Army Intelligence, and later the Czech defense attaché to India. If the cops were prepared to sell guns to the very criminals they were supposed to be hunting, then the free market appeared to have arrived with a vengeance. If nothing else, the Czechs, flush with the newfound joys of capitalism, clearly understood how to go about creating an entrepreneurial society.

Against the far wall were racks of guns: semiautomatic weapons mainly, along with some shotguns, including a pair of FN tactical police shotguns that were clearly just out of the crate. I saw CZ 2000 assault rifles, and five 5.56N light machine guns mounted on their bipods and lined up on a table beneath their smaller brothers. M-16 mags and M-249 saw belts were stacked neatly beside each. There were also AK-47s and rack upon rack of similar Vz.58s. Beside them were two further racks of various automatic and semiautomatic weapons, and arrayed on a pair of oilcloth-covered trestle tables was a selection of pistols. Nearly everything on display was new, and a lot of it appeared to be military issue. It looked like half of the Czech army’s best weaponry was being stored in Most’s basement. If the country was invaded, they’d have to make do with peashooters and cusswords until someone cobbled together enough money to buy the guns back.

Angel and I watched as Louis checked his weapons of choice, working the slides, chambering rounds, and inserting and ejecting clips as he made his selections. He eventually opted for a trio of Heckler amp; Koch.45 pistols, with Knight’s suppressors to reduce flash and noise. The guns were marked USSOCOM on the barrel, which meant that they were made originally for U.S. Special Operations Command. The barrel and slide were slightly longer than on the usual H amp;K.45, and they had a screw thread on the muzzle for attaching the suppressor, along with a laser-aiming module mounted in front of the trigger guard. He also picked up some Gerber Patriot combat knives, and a Steyr nine-millimeter machine pistol for himself fitted with a thirty-round magazine and a suppressor, this one longer than the pistol itself.

“We’ll take two hundred rounds for the.45s, and I’ll take three thirties for the Steyr,” said Louis when he was done. “The knives you’ll throw in for free.”

Most agreed a price for the guns, although his pleasure in the sale was dimmed a little by Louis’s negotiating skills. We left with the weapons. Most even gave us some holsters, although they were kind of worn. The Mercedes was still parked outside, but this time there was another man behind the wheel.

“My cousin,” explained Most. He patted me on the arm. “You sure you don’t want to stay, have some fun?”

The words “fun” and “Cupid Desire” didn’t seem a natural fit to me.

“I have a girlfriend,” I said.

“You could have another,” said Most.

“I don’t think so. I’m not doing so good with the one I have.”

Most didn’t offer girls to Angel and Louis. I pointed this out to them on the ride back to the hotel.

“Maybe you’re the only one of us who looks like a deviant,” suggested Angel.

“Yeah, that must be it, you being so clean-living and all.”

“We should be there now,” said Louis.

He was talking about Sedlec.

“They’re not dumb,” I said. “They’ve waited a long time for this. They’ll want to look the place over before they make their move. They’ll need equipment, transport, men, and they won’t try to get to the statue until after dark. We’ll be waiting for them when they come.”

We drove to Sedlec the next day, following the highway toward the Polish border because it was a faster road than the more direct route through the villages and towns. We passed fields of corn and beet, still recovering from the harvest, and drove through thick forests with small huts at their edges for the hunters to use. According to the guidebook I’d read on the plane, there were bears and wolves farther south, down in the Bohemian forests, but up here it was mainly small mammals and game birds. In the distance I could see red-roofed villages, the spires of their churches rising above the houses. Once we left the highway we passed through the industrial city of Kolin, the crossroads for the railways heading east to Moscow and south to Austria. There were crumbling houses and others in the process of restoration. Beer signs hung in windows, and chalk-written menus were displayed by open doors.

Sedlec was now almost a suburb of the larger town of Kutna Hora. A great hill rose up before us: Kank, according to the map, the first big mine opened in the city following the discovery of silver on the Catholic Church’s property. I had seen paintings of the mines in the guidebook. They reminded me of Bosch’s depictions of hell, with men descending beneath the earth dressed in white tunics so that they could be seen in the dim light of their lamps, leather skirts at their backs so that they could slide down the mine shafts quickly without injuring themselves. They carried enough bread for six days, for it took five hours to climb back to the surface, and so the miners stayed underground for most of the week, only coming up on the seventh day to worship, to spend time with their families, and to replenish their supplies before returning to the world beneath the surface once again. Most kept an icon of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners, upon their persons, for those who died in the mines did so without benefit of clergy or the speaking of the last rites, and their bodies would probably remain below ground even if they could be found amidst the rubble of a collapse. With Saint Barbara close by them, they believed they would yet find their way to heaven.

And so the town of Kutna Hora still rested on the remains of the mines. Beneath its buildings and streets were mile upon mile of tunnels, and the earth was mingled with the bones of those who had worked and died to bring the silver to the surface. This, I thought, was a fitting place for the interment of the Black Angel: an ancient outpost of a hidden hell in Eastern Europe, a little corner of the honeycomb world.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We hung a right at a big Kaufland supermarket and came to the intersection of Cechova and Starosedlecka Streets. The ossuary was on the latter, directly before us, surrounded by high walls and a cemetery. Across from it was a restaurant and store named U Balanu, and around the corner to the right was a hotel. We asked to take a look at the rooms, eventually finding two that gave us a good view of the ossuary, then went to view the ossuary itself.

Sedlec had never wanted for bodies to fill its graves: what the mines, or plague, or conflict could not provide, the lure of the Holy Land fulfilled. The fourteenth-century Zbraslav Chronicle records that in one year alone, thirty thousand people were buried in the cemetery, a great many of them brought there specifically for the privilege of being buried in soil from the Holy Land, for it was believed that the graveyard held miraculous properties, and that any decedent buried there would decompose within a single day, leaving only preserved white bones behind. When those bones inevitably began to stack up, the cemetery’s keepers built a two-story mortuary containing an ossuary within which the remains might be displayed. If the ossuary served a practical purpose by allowing graves to be emptied of skeletal remains and freed up for those more in need of a dark place in which to shed their mortal burden, it also served a spiritual purpose at least equally well: the bones became reminders of the transience of human existence and the temporary nature of all earthly things. At Sedlec, the border between this world and the next was marked in bone.

Even here, in this foreign place, there were echoes of my own past. I recalled a hotel room in New Orleans, the air outside still and heavy with moisture. We had been closing in on the man who had taken my wife and child from me, and coming at last to some understanding of the nature of his “art.” He too believed in the transience of all human affairs, and he left behind his own memento mori as he traveled the land, tearing skin from flesh, and flesh from bone, to show us that life was but a fleeting, unimportant thing, capable of being taken at will by a being as worthless as himself.

Except that he was wrong, for not all that we tried to achieve was without value, and not every aspect of our lives was unworthy of celebration or remembrance. With each life that he took, the world became a poorer place, its index of possibilities reduced forever, deprived of the potential for art, science, passion, ingenuity, hope, and regret that the unlived existences of generation upon generation of progeny would have brought with them.

But what of the lives that I had taken? Was I not equally culpable, and was that not why there were now so many names, of both good men and bad, carved upon that palimpsest I bore, and for each of which I might justifiably be called to account? I could argue that by committing a smaller evil, I had prevented a greater one from occurring, but I would still bear the mark of that sin upon me, and perhaps be damned for it. Yet, in the end, I could not stand by. There were sins that I had committed out of anger, touched by wrath, and for those I had no doubt that I would at last be charged and found wanting. But the others? I chose to act as I did, believing that the greater evil lay in doing nothing. I have tried to make reparation, in my way.

The problem is that, like cancer, a little corruption of the soul will eventually spread throughout the whole.

The problem is that there are no small evils.

We passed through the cemetery gates and skirted the graves, the more recent stones often marked with photographs of the deceased inset into the marble or granite beneath the word rodina, followed by the family name. One or two even had alcoves carved in the stone, protected by glass, behind which framed portraits of all of those buried beneath the ground sat undisturbed, as they might have done on a sideboard or a shelf when those depicted were still alive. Three steps led down to the ossuary entrance: a pair of plain wooden doors overlooked by a semicircular window. To the right of the entrance, a steeper flight of steps led up to the chapel, for the chapel stood above the ossuary, and from its window, one might look down on the interior of the ossuary itself. Inside the door, a young woman sat behind a glass display case containing cards and trinkets. We paid her thirty Czech koruny each to enter, or barely four dollars between us. We were the only people present, and our breath assumed strange forms in the cold air as we looked upon the wonders of Sedlec.

“My God,” said Angel. “What is this place?”

A stairway led down before us. On the walls at either side, the letters IHS, for Iesus Hominum Salvator, or “Jesus Savior of Humanity,” were set in long bones, surrounded by four sets of three bones representing the arms of a cross. Each arm ended in a single skull. At the base of the stairs, two sets of parallel columns mirrored one another. The columns were made up of skulls alternated with what appeared to be femurs, the bones set vertically beneath the upper jaw of each skull. The columns followed the edges of two alcoves, into which had been set a pair of enormous urns, or perhaps they might have been baptismal fonts, again constructed entirely from human remains and lidded by a circle of skulls.

I stepped into the main area of the ossuary. To my right and left were chambers containing huge pyramids of skulls and bones, too many to count, topped in each case by a wooden crown painted gold. Two similar barred rooms faced me, so that they occupied the four corners of the ossuary. According to the information leaflet thrust into our hands at the door, the remains represented the multitudes facing judgment before God, while the crowns symbolized the kingdom of heaven and the promise of resurrection from the dead. On one of the walls, beside the skull chamber to my right, there was an inscription, again inset in bone. It read:

FRANTIŠEK RINT Z CESKE SKALICE 1870

In common with most artists, Rint had signed his work. But if Bosworth was right, then Rint had seen something while he was completing the reconstruction of the ossuary, and what he had seen had haunted him to such a degree that he had spent years re-creating its image, as though by doing so he might slowly begin to exorcise it from his imagination, and bring himself peace at last.

The other chamber to my left was marked by the coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family, who had paid for Rint’s work. Once again, it was made entirely from bone: Rint had even constructed a bird, a raven or a rook, using a pelvic bone for its body and a section of rib for its wing. The bird was dipping its beak into the hollow eye socket of what was supposed to be a Turkish skull, a detail that had been added to the coat of arms as a gift from Emperor Rudolf II after Adolf of Schwarzenberg had curbed the power of the Turks by conquering the fortification of Raab in 1598.

But all of this was merely a sideshow compared to the centerpiece of the ossuary. From the vaulted ceiling a chandelier hung, fashioned from elements of every bone that the human body could supply. Its extended parts were hanging arm bones, ending in a plate of pelvic bones upon which rested, in each case, a single skull. A candleholder was inset into the top of each head, and a ribbon of interlinked bones formed the suspension chains, keeping them in place. It was impossible to look upon it and not feel one’s sense of disgust overcome by awe at the imagination that could have produced such an artifact. It was simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, a marvelous testament to mortality.

Inset into the floor beneath the chandelier was a rectangular concrete slab. This was the entrance to the crypt, within which were contained the remains of a number of wealthy individuals. At each corner of the crypt stone stood a Baroque candelabra in the shape of a Gothic tower, with three lines of seven skulls set into each, again with an arm bone clasped beneath their ruined jaws, and topped by angels blowing trumpets.

All told, the remains of some forty thousand persons were contained in the ossuary.

I looked around. Angel and Louis were examining a pair of glass cabinets, behind which were contained the skulls of some of those who had died in the Hussite campaigns. Two or three bore the small holes of musket balls, while others had gaping wounds inflicted by blunt force. A sharp blade had almost entirely cleaved away the back of one skull.

Something dripped onto my shirt, spreading a stain across the fabric. I looked up and saw moisture on the ceiling. Perhaps the roof was leaking, I thought, but then I felt a rivulet of sweat run down my face and melt upon my lips. I realized that I could no longer see my breath in the air, and that I had begun to perspire heavily. Neither Angel nor Louis appeared troubled. Angel, in fact, had zipped his jacket up to his chin and was stamping his feet slightly to keep warm, his hands jammed into his pockets.

Sweat ran into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to clear it by wiping the sleeve of my coat across my forehead, but it seemed to make matters worse. The salt stung me, and I began to feel dizzy and disoriented. I didn’t want to lean against anything, for fear of setting off the alarms about which we had been warned at the door. Instead, I squatted on the floor and took some deep breaths, but I was teetering slightly on my heels and so was forced to put my fingers to the ground to support myself. They touched against the crypt stone, and instantly I felt a wave of pain break across my skin. I was drowning in liquid heat, my whole body aflame. I tried to open my mouth to say something, but the heat rushed to fill the new gap, stilling any sound from within. I was blind, mute, forced to endure my torments in silence. I wanted to die, yet I could not. Instead, I found myself sealed, trapped in a hard, dark place. I was constantly on the verge of suffocation, unable to draw a breath, and still there was no release. Time ceased to have meaning. There was only an endless, unendurable now.

And yet I endured.

A hand was placed upon my shoulder, and Angel spoke. His touch felt incredibly cool to me, and his breath was like ice upon my skin. And then I became aware of another voice beneath Angel’s, except this one repeated words in a language that I did not understand, a litany of phrases spoken over and over again, always with the same intonation, the same pauses, the same emphases. It was an invocation of sorts, yet one bound up entirely with madness, and I was reminded of those animals in a zoo that, driven insane by their incarceration and the never-changing nature of their surroundings, find themselves endlessly stalking in their cages, always at the same speed, always with the same movements, as though the only way they can survive is to become as one with the place in which they are kept, to match its unyielding absence of novelty with their own.

Suddenly the voice changed. It stumbled over its words. It tried to begin once more but lost its place. Finally, it stopped entirely, and I became aware of something probing the ossuary, the way a blind man might stop the tapping of his cane and listen for the approach of a stranger.

And then it howled, over and over again, the tone and volume rising until it became one repeated shriek of rage and despair, but despair now, for the first time in so long, leavened by faint hope. The sound of it tore at my ears, shredding my nerves, as it called to me over and over and over again.

It is aware, I thought. It knows.

It is alive.

Angel and Louis brought me back to the hotel. I was weak, and my skin was burning. I tried to lie down, but the nausea would not go away. After a time, I joined them in their room. We sat at the windows and watched the cemetery and its buildings.

“What happened in there?” said Louis at last.

“I’m not sure.”

He was angry. He didn’t even try to hide it.

“Yeah, well you need to explain it, don’t matter how weird it sounds. We got no time for this.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I snapped.

He eyed me levelly.

“So what was it?”

I had no choice but to answer him.

“I thought, for a moment, that I felt something down there, under the ossuary, and that it knew I was aware of it. I had a sensation of being trapped, of suffocation and heat. That’s it. I can’t tell you anything more.”

I didn’t know what to expect from Louis in response to this. Now, I thought. Now we have arrived at it. The thing that has come between us is wriggling its way to the surface.

“You okay to go back in there?” he said.

“I’ll wear a lighter coat next time.”

Louis tapped his fingers gently, in time to some rhythm that only he could hear.

“I had to ask,” he said.

“I understand.”

“I guess I’m getting impatient. I want this to end. I don’t like it when it’s personal.”

He turned in his chair and stared at me.

“They’ll come, won’t they?”

“Yes,” I said. “Then you can do whatever you want with them. I promised you that we would find them, and we have. Isn’t that what you wanted from me?”

But he still wasn’t satisfied. His fingers drummed on the windowsill, and his gaze seemed drawn again and again to the twin spires of the chapel. Angel was seated on a chair in one dark corner, carefully maintaining a stillness and silence, waiting for what divided us to be named. A sea change had occurred in our friendship, and I did not know if the result would bring an end to it, or a new beginning.

“Say it,” I said.

“I wanted to blame you,” said Louis, softly. He did not look at me as he spoke. “I wanted to blame you for what happened to Alice. Not in the beginning, because I knew the life that she led. I tried to look out for her, and I tried to make other people look out for her too, but in the end she chose her own path, like we all do. When she went missing, I was grateful. I was relieved. It didn’t last long, but it was there, and I was ashamed of it.

“Then we found Garcia, and this guy Brightwell came out of the woodwork, and suddenly it wasn’t about Alice no more. It was about you, because you were tied into it somehow. And I got to thinking that maybe it wasn’t Alice’s fault, that maybe it was yours. You know how many women make their living on the streets of New York? Of all the whores or junkies they could have chosen, of all the women who might have gotten involved with this man Winston, why should it have been her? It was like you cast a shadow on lives, and that shadow was growing, and it touched her even though you’d never met her, didn’t even know she existed. After that, I didn’t want to look at you for a time. I didn’t hate you for it, because it wasn’t intentional on your part, but I didn’t want to be around you. Then she started calling to me.”

He was reflected clearly in the glass now, as the night drew in. His face hung in the air, and perhaps it was a flaw in the glass that duplicated his reflection, or maybe it was something more, but a second presence seemed suspended in the darkening air behind him, its features indistinguishable, and the stars were shining through its eyes.

“I hear her at night. I thought at the start that it was someone in the building, but when I went outside the apartment to check, I couldn’t hear her no more. It was only inside. I only hear her when there’s nobody else around. It’s her voice, except it’s not alone. There are other voices with it, so many of them, and they’re all calling different names. She calls mine. It’s hard to understand her, because someone doesn’t want her calling out. It didn’t matter to him at first, because he thought nobody cared about her, but now he knows better. He wants her to stay quiet. She’s dead, but she keeps calling out, like she’s got no peace. She cries all the time. She’s afraid. They’re all afraid.

“And I knew then that maybe it was no coincidence that you found Angel and me either, or that we found you. I don’t understand everything that goes on with you, but I do know this: whatever happened was meant to come to pass, and we’re all involved. It’s always been waiting in the shadows, and none of us can walk away from it. There’s no blame to be laid at your door. I know that now. Sure, there are other women who could have been taken, but what then? They’d have disappeared, and it would be their voices calling, but there would be no one to hear them, and no one would care. This way, we heard, and we came.”

At last, he turned back to me, and the woman in the night faded away.

“I want her to stop crying,” he said, and I could see clearly the lines upon his face and the tiredness in his eyes. “I want them all to stop crying.”

Walter Cole called me on my cell that night. I had spoken to him before we left, and had told him as much as I knew.

“You sound a million miles away,” he said, “and if I were you, I’d keep it that way. Just about everyone you’ve ever talked to on this thing is dead, and pretty soon people are going to start looking for you to answer some questions. Some of this you may not want to hear. Neddo’s dead. Someone cut him up badly. It might have been torture in order to gain information, except there was a rag stuffed in his mouth, so even if he had something to give up, he wouldn’t have been able to speak. That’s not the worst of it, either. Reid, the monk who spoke with you, was stabbed to death outside a bar in Hartford. The other monk phoned it in, then disappeared. Cops want to talk to him too, but either his order is protecting him or they really don’t know where he is.”

“Do the cops think he did it? If they do, they’re wrong.”

“They just want to talk to him. There was blood on Reid’s mouth, and it wasn’t his own. Unless it matches Bartek’s, then he’s probably in the clear. It looks like Reid bit whoever killed him. The blood sample has been fast-tracked to a private lab. They’ll get the results in a day or two.”

I already knew what they would find: old, corrupted DNA. And I wondered if Reid’s voice had now joined Alice’s in that dark place from which Brightwell’s victims called out for release. I thanked Walter, then hung up and returned to my vigil upon the ossuary.

Sekula arrived on the morning of the second day. He didn’t come alone. There was a driver who waited behind the wheel of the gray Audi, and Sekula entered the ossuary in the company of a small man in jeans and a sailor’s coat. After thirty minutes, they came out and took the stairs up to the chapel. They didn’t stay there long.

“Checking out the alarm,” said Angel, as we watched them from the hotel. “The little guy is probably the expert.”

“How good is it?” I asked.

“I took a look at it yesterday. Not good enough to keep them out. Doesn’t even look like it’s been upgraded since the last break-in.”

The two men emerged from the chapel and walked around the perimeter of the building, then headed back to the Audi and drove away.

“We could have followed them,” said Louis.

“We could,” I said, “but what would have been the point? They have to come back.”

Angel was pulling at his lower lip.

“How soon?” I asked.

“Me, I’d get it done as soon as possible if the alarm wasn’t a problem. Tonight, maybe.”

It felt right. They would come, and we would know everything.

There was a small courtyard beside the U Balanu store across the street from the ossuary that doubled as an outdoor area for the restaurant during the summer. It was an easy matter to gain entry to it, and that was where Louis took up position shortly after dusk the following evening. I was in the hotel room, where I could get a good overview of all that was taking place. Louis and I had agreed that we would make no move alone. Angel was in the cemetery. There was a small shed with a red-tiled roof to the left of the ossuary. Its windows were broken, but guarded by black steel grates. At one time it might have functioned as the gravedigger’s cottage, but it now contained just slates, bricks, planks of wood, and one very cold New Yorker.

My cell phone was switched to vibrate. All was silence, apart from the distant growl of passing cars. And so we waited.

The gray Audi arrived shortly after nine. It made one full circuit of the block, then parked on Starosedlecka. It was followed minutes later by a second, black Audi and a nondescript green truck, its tires thick with accumulated mud and the gold lettering along its body faded and unreadable. Sekula got out of the first car, accompanied by the little alarm specialist and a second figure wearing black trousers and a calf-length hooded coat. The hood was up, for the temperature had dropped considerably that day. Even Sekula was identifiable only by his height, as a scarf covered his mouth, and he wore a black knitted cap on his head.

Three people emerged from the second vehicle. One was the charming Miss Zahn. She didn’t seem troubled by the cold. Her coat was open and her head was uncovered. Given the temperature of what was running in her veins, the night probably felt a little balmy to her. The second person was a white-haired man whom I did not recognize. He had a gun in his hand. The third was Brightwell. He was still wearing the same beige clothes. Like Miss Zahn, the cold didn’t appear to bother him unduly. He walked back to the truck and spoke to one of the two men inside. It looked like they were planning to transport the statue if they found it.

The two men climbed down from the cab and followed Brightwell to the back of the truck. Once the door was opened, two more men climbed out, swaddled in layers of clothing for the cold journey in the unheated rear. Then, after a brief consultation, Brightwell led Miss Zahn, Sekula, the unknown individual in the hooded coat, and the alarm specialist to the cemetery gate. One of the hired hands followed them. Angel had locked the gate behind him when he was making his way to the hut, but Brightwell simply cut the chain and the group entered the grounds of the ossuary.

I took a brief head count. Outside we had the driver of the Audi and three of the truck crew. Inside the grounds there were six more. I buzzed Louis.

“What can you see?” I said.

“One guy now at the ossuary door, inside the grounds,” he said quietly. “The driver, standing at the passenger door, back to me.”

I heard him shift position.

“Two amateurs from the truck at either corner, keeping watch on the main road. One more at the gate.”

I thought about it.

“Give me five minutes. I’ll come around from behind the truck and take the corner guys. You have the driver and the man at the gate. Tell Angel he has the door. I’ll buzz you when I’m ready to move.”

I exited the hotel and worked my way as quickly as I could around the block. Eventually, I had to climb a wall and walk through a green field containing a children’s play area, the cemetery to my left. I buzzed Angel as I entered the field.

“I’m in the field behind you. Don’t shoot me.”

“Just this once. I’m gonna move with you.”

I heard a low noise from the cemetery as Angel emerged from the shed, then everything was quiet again.

I found a gate at the far end of the field. I opened it as quietly as I could. To my left I could just see the back of the truck. I kept to the wall until it began to curve toward the main entrance. The shape of the guard at the gate was clearly visible. If I attempted to cross the street, there was a good chance that he would see me.

I buzzed Louis again.

“Change of plan,” he said. “Angel’s taking the door and the gate.”

Inside the cemetery, the guard at the ossuary door lit a cigarette. His name was Gary Toolan, and he was little more than an American criminal for hire based in Europe. Mostly he just liked women, booze, and hurting people, but some of the people for whom he was now working gave him the creeps. They were different, somehow: alien. The guy with white hair, the looker with the strange skin, and most of all the fat man with the swollen neck made him very uneasy.

He didn’t know what they were doing here, but he was certain of one thing: he had their number, and that was why he had received payment in advance. If they tried anything, he had his money, he had a backup pistol, and the men that he had sourced for these freaks would stand by him in the event of trouble. Toolan took a long drag on his cigarette. As he dropped the match the shadows around him shifted, and it took him a second to realize that the falling light and the mutating darkness were unrelated.

Angel shot him in the side of the head, then moved toward the gate.

Louis checked his watch. He still had the phone to his ear. I waited.

“Three,” counted Louis. “Two, one. Now.”

There was a soft pop, and the man at the gate crumpled to the ground, shot from behind by Angel.

I ran.

The Audi driver immediately went for his gun, but Louis was already moving to take him. The driver seemed to sense him at the last minute, for he was starting to turn when Louis’s bullet entered the back of his skull. Now one of the men at the corner was shouting something. He ran to the cab and almost managed to open the door before he slid down the side and tried to reach for the small of his back, where my first shot had taken him. I shot him again on the ground and took the last man as he loosed off a round. It blew out a chunk of crumbling masonry from the wall beside my head, but by then the man who had fired the shot was dead.

Louis was already pulling the body of the driver into the restaurant courtyard. He stopped when he heard the shot. Nobody emerged from any of the nearby houses to see what was going on. Either they had taken the shot for a car backfiring, or they just didn’t want to know. I pushed the bodies of the two men under their truck, where they would not easily be seen, then Louis and I ran to the ossuary. Angel was crouching at the door, casting quick glances into the interior.

“One more down inside,” he said. “He heard the shot and came running. It looks like they’ve got the crypt stone up, and there’s a light burning by the hole, but I don’t think there’s anyone else in there. I guess they’re all belowground.”

The heat inside the ossuary was intense. At first I was afraid that I was about to experience a return of the nausea that I had felt the previous day, thus confirming Louis’s worst fears about me, but when I looked at Angel and Louis, they had both begun to sweat profusely. We were surrounded by the sound of dripping water, as rivulets ran from the ceilings and walls, dropping on the exposed bones and washing like tears down the white cheeks of the dead. The body of the alarm specialist lay inside the door, already speckled with moisture.

The crypt stone had been ejected from its resting place and lay to one side of the entrance, beside which a battery-powered lamp burned. We skirted the hole, trying not to expose ourselves to anyone waiting below. I thought I could detect, however faintly, the sound of voices, then stone moving upon stone. A flight of rough steps led down into the gloom, a trace of illumination visible from an unseen light source in the crypt itself.

Angel looked at me. I looked at Angel. Louis looked at both of us.

“Great,” whispered Angel. “Just great. We should be wearing targets on our chests.”

“You’re staying up here,” I told him. “Keep to the shadows by the door. We don’t need any more of them arriving and trapping us down there.”

Angel didn’t object. In his position, I wouldn’t have objected either. Louis and I stood just out of sight of the steps. One of us would have to go first.

“What’ll it be?” I said. “Age, or beauty?”

He stepped forward and placed his foot on the first step.

“Both,” he said.

I stayed a couple of steps behind him as he descended. The floor of the ossuary, which doubled as the crypt ceiling, was two feet thick, so we were almost halfway down before we could see anything, and even then half of the crypt remained in darkness. To our left was a series of niches, each occupied by a stone tomb. All were ornately carved with coats of arms or depictions of the resurrection. To our right was a similar arrangement of tombs, except that one of the stone coffins had been overturned and its occupant’s remains spilled across the flagged floor. The bones had long since disarticulated, but I thought I could faintly see traces of the shroud in which the body had been interred. The niche, now empty, revealed a rectangular opening previously concealed by the tomb, maybe four feet high and as many feet across. I could see light filtering through the gap from behind. The voices were louder now, and the temperature had risen noticeably. It was like standing at the mouth of a furnace, waiting to be consumed by the flames.

I felt a breath of slightly cooler air at my neck, and in the same instant spun to my right, pushing Louis to one side with as much force as I could muster before I hit the floor. Something sliced through the air and impacted on one of the columns supporting the vault. I smelled a hint of perfume as Miss Zahn grunted with the shock of the crowbar’s impact upon the stone. I struck out as hard as I could with my heel and caught her on the side of the knee. Her leg buckled, and I heard her scream, but she whipped the crowbar instinctively in my direction as I tried to rise, striking me on my right elbow and sending a shock wave through my arm that paralyzed it immediately. I dropped my gun and was forced to scramble backward before I felt the wall at my back and could raise myself using my left hand. I heard a shot fired, and even though it was suppressed it still echoed loudly in the enclosed space. I couldn’t tell where Louis was until I scrambled to my feet and saw him pressed against one of the tombs, locked in close combat with Sekula. The lawyer’s gun now lay on the floor, but with his left hand he was keeping Louis’s own gun away from him while his right scratched at Louis’s face, looking for soft tissue to damage. I couldn’t intervene. Despite her pain, Miss Zahn was limping around me, looking for another opportunity to strike. She had removed her jacket to allow herself some respite from the heat, and in the course of her attempts to strike me the buttons on her black shirt had popped. A shaft of light caught her, and I saw the tattoos upon her skin. They seemed to move in the lamplight, the faces twisting and contorting, the great eyes blinking, the pupils dilating. A mouth opened, revealing small, catlike teeth. A head turned, its pug nose flattening further, as though another living being inside her had pressed itself hard against her epidermis from below, trying to force itself through to the world outside. Her whole body was a teeming gallery of grotesques, and I could not seem to draw my eyes from them. The effect was almost hypnotic, and I wondered if that was how she subdued her victims before taking them, entrancing them as she moved in for the kill.

My right arm ached, and I felt as if all the moisture was being drained from my body by the heat. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just shoot me. I stumbled backward as Miss Zahn feinted at me. I lost my footing, and then the crowbar was moving in a great arc toward my head when a voice said, “Hey, bitch!” and a booted foot caught Miss Zahn in the jaw, breaking it with a sharp, snapping sound. Her eyes squeezed shut in shock, and in the shadowy light I thought that the faces on her body responded in turn, the eyes briefly snapping closed, the mouths opening in silent roars of agony. Miss Zahn looked to where Angel lay sideways upon the stairs, just beneath the level of the ceiling. His right foot was still outstretched, and above it he held the.45.

Miss Zahn dropped the crowbar and raised her left hand. Angel fired, and the bullet tore through the palm. She slid down the wall, leaving a trail of dark matter behind. One eye remained open, but the other was a black and red wound. She blinked once, and again all the tattooed eyes on her skin seemed to blink in unison. Then her eye closed, the painted eyelids on her body drooping slowly in turn until at last all movement ceased.

As she died, the energy seemed to leave Sekula. He sagged, giving Louis the opening that he sought. He forced the muzzle of his gun upward into the soft flesh beneath Sekula’s chin and pulled the trigger. The noise of a shot reverberated around us once again, the sound finding material expression in the dark fountain that struck the vaulted ceiling. Louis released Sekula and allowed him to crumple to the floor.

“He stopped,” said Louis, indicating Sekula. “I was under his gun, and he stopped.”

He sounded puzzled.

“He told me that he didn’t think he could kill a man,” I said. “I guess he was right.”

I sagged against the damp wall of the crypt. My arm ached badly, but I didn’t think there were any bones broken. I nodded my thanks to Angel, and he returned to his post in the ossuary itself. Beyond us lay the opening in the wall.

“After you this time,” said Louis.

I looked at the remains of Miss Zahn and Sekula.

“At least I might see the next person who attacks us,” I said.

“She had a gun,” he said, pointing at the pistol tucked into Miss Zahn’s belt. “She could have just shot you.”

“She wanted me alive,” I said.

“Why? Your charm?”

I shook my head.

“She thought I was like her, and like Brightwell.”

I stooped and passed through the gap, Louis steps behind me. We were in a long tunnel, with a ceiling barely six feet in height that prevented Louis from standing up straight. The tunnel stretched ahead into the darkness, curving gently to the right as it went. On either side were alcoves or cells, most of which appeared to contain nothing more than stone beds, although some had broken bowls and old empty wine bottles on the floor, indicating that they had been occupied at one point. Each had a kind of portcullis arrangement to close it off, the barred gate capable of being raised and lowered through a pulley and chain system outside each alcove. In nearly every case, the alcoves were unbarred, but we came to one on the right upon which the gate had been lowered. Inside, my flashlight picked out clothed human remains. The skull still retained some of its hair, and the clothing was relatively intact. The stench was foul from within.

“What is this place?” said Louis.

“It looks like a jail.”

“Seems like they forgot they had a guest down here.”

Something rustled in the closed cell. A rat, I thought. It’s only a rat. It has to be. Whoever was lying in that cell was long dead. It was tattered skin and yellowed bone, nothing more.

And then the man inside moved on his stone cot. His fingernails dragged across the stone, his right leg stretched almost imperceptibly, and his head shifted slightly where it rested. The effort it took was clearly enormous. I could see every wasted muscle working on his desiccated arms, and every tendon straining in his face as he tried to speak. His features were buried deep in his skull, as though they were slowly being sucked inside. The eyes were like rotted fruits in the hollows of the sockets, barely visible behind his emaciated hand as he sought to shield himself from the light while simultaneously trying to see those that lay behind it.

Louis took a step back.

“How can he still be alive?” he said. He could not keep the shock from his voice. I had never heard him speak like that before.

Like the half-life of an isotope: that remained the only way I could fathom it. The process of dying, but with the inevitable end delayed beyond imagining. Perhaps, like Kittim, this unknown man was proof of that belief.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Leave him.”

I saw Louis raise his pistol. The action surprised me. He was not a man known for conventional mercies. I laid my hand on the barrel of the gun, forcing it gently down.

“No,” I said.

The being on the stone slab tried to speak. I could see the desperation in its eyes, and I almost felt something of Louis’s pity for it. I turned away, and heard Louis follow.

By now we were deep beneath the ground, and far from the cemetery. From the direction in which we were heading, I believed that we were somewhere between the ossuary and the site of the former monastery nearby. There were more cells here, many with the portcullises lowered, but I glanced only in one or two as I went by. Those who had been incarcerated in them were now clearly dead, their bones long separated. They probably made mistakes along the way, I thought. It was like the old witch trials: if the suspects died, they were innocent. If they survived, then they were guilty.

The heat grew more and more intense. The walls were hot to the touch, and our clothing became so burdensome that we were forced to shed our jackets and coats along the way. There was a rushing sound in my head. Threaded through it, I thought, I could discern words, except they were no longer fragments of an old incantation spoken in madness. These had purpose and intent. They were calling, urging.

There was light ahead of us. We saw a circular room, lined with open cells, and a trio of lanterns at its center. Beyond them stood the obese figure of Brightwell. He was working at a blank wall, trying to free a brick at the level of his head, using a crowbar. Beside him was the hooded, jacketed figure, its head lowered. Brightwell registered our presence first, because he turned suddenly, the crowbar still in his hands. I expected him to reach for a gun, but he did not. Instead, he seemed almost pleased. His mouth was disfigured, his lower lip crisscrossed with black stitches where Reid had bitten him during his final struggle.

“I knew,” he said. “I knew that you’d come.”

The figure to his right lowered its hood. I saw a woman’s gray hair hanging loose, then her face was exposed. In the lanternlight, Claudia Stern’s fine bone structure had taken on a thin, hungry aspect. Her skin was pale and dry, and when she opened her mouth to speak I thought that her teeth seemed longer than before, as though her gums were receding. There was a white mote in her right eye, previously hidden by some form of concealing lens. Brightwell handed the crowbar to her, but he made no attempt to move toward us or to threaten us in any way.

“Nearly done,” he said. “It’s good that you should be here for this.”

Claudia Stern inserted the crowbar into the gap Brightwell had made, and strained. I saw the stone shift in its place. She repositioned the bar, then pushed hard. The stone moved some thirty degrees, until it was perpendicular to the wall. In the gap revealed, I thought I saw something shine. With a final effort, she forced the stone away. It fell to the floor as she continued to work at the bricks, forcing them apart more easily now that the first breach had been made. I should have stopped her, but I did not. I realized that I, too, wanted to know what lay behind the wall. I wanted to see the Black Angel. A large square patch of silver was now clearly visible through the hole. I could pick out the shape of a rib, and the edge of what might have been an arm. The figure was rough and unfinished, with droplets of hardened silver fixed upon it like frozen tears.

Suddenly, as though responding to an unanticipated impulse, Claudia Stern dropped the crowbar and thrust her hand into the hole.

It took a moment for me to notice the temperature rising again, for it was already so hot in the chamber, but I began to feel my skin prickle and burn, as though I were standing unprotected in intense sunlight. I looked at my skin, almost expecting it to begin reddening as I watched. The voice in my head was louder now, a torrent of whispers like the rushing of water at a great fall, its substance unintelligible but its meaning clear. Close to where Stern was standing, liquid began to drip through holes in the mortar, sliding slowly down the walls like droplets of mercury. I could see them steaming, and I could smell the dust burning. Whatever lay behind that wall, it was now melting, the silver falling away to reveal whatever lay concealed within. Stern looked at Brightwell, and I could see the surprise on her face. This was clearly beyond her expectations. All of the preparations that they had made indicated that they had intended to transport the statue back to New York, not to have it melt around their feet. I heard a sound from behind the wall, like the beating of a wing, and it brought me back to where I was, reminding me of what I had to do.

I pointed my gun at Brightwell.

“Stop her.”

Brightwell didn’t move.

“You won’t use it,” he said. “We’ll come back.”

Beside me, Louis seemed to jerk his head. His face contorted, as though in pain, and he raised his left hand to his ear. Then I heard it too: a chorus of voices, their words raised in a cacophony of pleading, all coming from somewhere deep within Brightwell.

The silver drops had become a series of streams, seeping out through cracks in the walls. I thought I heard more movement behind the stones, but there was so much noise in my head that I could not be certain.

“You’re a sick, deluded man,” I said.

“You know it’s true,” he said. “You sense it in yourself.”

I shook my head.

“No, you’re wrong.”

“There is no salvation for you, or for any of us,” said Brightwell. “God deprived you of your wife, your child. Now He’s going to take a second woman away from you, and a second child. He doesn’t care. Do you think He would have allowed them to suffer as they did if they really mattered to Him, if anyone really mattered to Him? Why, then, would you believe in Him, and not in us? Why do you continue to have hope in Him?”

I struggled to find my voice. It seemed as though my vocal cords were burning.

“Because with you,” I said, “there is no hope at all.”

I sighted carefully along the barrel.

“You won’t kill me,” said Brightwell once more, but there was now doubt in his voice.

Suddenly, he moved. All at once he was everywhere, and nowhere. I heard his voice in my ear, felt his hands on my skin. His mouth opened, revealing those slightly blunted teeth. They were biting me, and my blood was pooling in his mouth as he tore into me.

I fired three times, and the confusion stopped. Brightwell’s left foot was shattered at the ankle, and there was a second wound below his knee. The third shot had gone astray, I thought, then I saw the spreading stain upon his belly. A gun appeared in Brightwell’s hand. He tried to raise it, but Louis was already on top of him, pushing it away.

I moved past them both, making for Claudia Stern. Her attention was entirely focused on the wall before her, mesmerized by what was taking place before her eyes. The metal was already cooling upon the ground around her feet, and there was no longer any silver to be seen through the gap in the wall. Instead, I saw a pair of black ribs encased by a thin layer of skin, the exposed patch slowly increasing in dimension around the area where her hand remained in contact. I grasped the woman’s shoulder and pulled her away from the wall, breaking her contact with whatever was concealed within. She screamed in rage, and her voice was echoed by something deep within the walls. Her fingers scraped at my face, and her feet kicked at my shins. I caught a flash of metal in her left hand just before the blade sliced across my chest, opening a long wound from my left side all the way up to my collarbone. I struck her hard in the face, using the base of my hand, and as she stumbled away I hit her again, forcing her back until she was at the entrance to one of the cells. She tried to slash at me with the knife, but this time I kicked out at her, and she fell onto the stones. I followed her in, and removed the knife from her hand, placing my foot against her wrist first so that she could not strike out at me. She made an attempt to scramble past me, but I kicked her again, and I felt something crack beneat my foot. She let out an animal sound and stopped moving.

I backed out of the cell. The silver had stopped bleeding from the walls, and the heat seemed to dissipate slightly. The streams upon the floor and wall were growing hard, and I could no longer hear any sounds, real or imagined, from the presence behind the stones. I went to where Brightwell lay. Louis had torn away the front of his shirt, exposing his mottled belly. The wound was bleeding badly, but he was still alive.

“He’ll survive, if we get him to a hospital,” said Louis.

“It’s your choice,” I said. “Alice was part of you.”

Louis took a step backward and lowered his gun.

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand this, but you do.”

Brightwell’s voice was calm, but his face was contorted with pain.

“If you kill me, I’ll find you,” he said to me. “I found you once, and I’ll find you again, however long it may take. I will be God to you. I will destroy everything that you love, and I will force you to watch as I tear it apart. And then you and I will descend to a dark place, and I will be with you there. There will be no salvation for you, no repentance, no hope.”

He took a long, rasping breath. I could still hear that strange cacophony of voices, but now its pitch had changed. There was an expectancy to it, a rising joy.

“No forgiveness,” he whispered. “Above all, no forgiveness.”

His blood was spreading across the floor. It followed the gaps in the flagstones, gradually seeping in geometric patterns toward the cell in which Stern lay. She was conscious now, but weak and disoriented. She stretched a hand toward Brightwell, and he caught the movement and looked to her.

I raised the gun.

“I will come for you,” said Brightwell.

“Yes,” she said. “I know you will.”

Brightwell coughed and scraped at the wound in his belly.

“I will come for them all,” he said.

I shot him in the center of the forehead, and he ceased to be. A final breath emerged from his body. I felt a coolness upon my face, and smelled salt and clean air as the great choir was silenced at last.

Claudia Stern was crawling across the floor, trying to resume contact with the figure that still stood trapped behind the wall. I moved to stop her, but now there were footsteps approaching from the tunnel behind us. Louis and I turned and prepared to face them.

Bartek appeared in the doorway. Angel was with him, looking a little uncertain. Five or six others followed, men and women, and I understood finally why no one had responded to the shot on the street, why the alarm had not been replaced, and how a last crucial fragment of the map had found its way from France to Sedlec.

“You knew all along,” I said. “You baited them, then you waited for them to come.”

Four of those who had accompanied Bartek stepped around us and surrounded Claudia Stern, dragging her back to the open cell.

“Martin revealed its secrets to me,” said Bartek. “He said that you’d be there at the end. He had a lot of faith in you.”

“I’m sorry. I heard what happened.”

“I will miss him,” said Bartek. “I think I lived vicariously through his pleasures.”

I heard the jangling of chains. Claudia Stern started to scream, but I did not look.

“What will you do with her?”

“They called it ‘walling’ in medieval times. A terrible way to die, but a worse way not to die, assuming she is what she believes herself to be.”

“And there’s only one way to find out.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“But you won’t keep her here?”

“Everything will be moved, in time, and hidden once again. Sedlec has served its purpose.”

“It was a trap.”

“But the bait had to be real. They would sense it if the statue were not present. The pretence of its loss had to be maintained.”

Claudia Stern’s screams increased in intensity, then were suddenly silenced.

“Come,” said Bartek. “It’s time to leave.”

We stood in the churchyard. Bartek knelt and brushed snow from a headstone, revealing a photograph of a middle-aged man in a suit.

“There are bodies,” I said.

Bartek smiled.

“This is an ossuary, in a churchyard,” he said. “We will have no trouble hiding them. Still, it’s unfortunate that Brightwell did not survive.”

“I made a choice.”

“Martin was afraid of him, you know. He was right to be. Did Brightwell say anything before he died?”

“He promised that he’d find me.”

Bartek placed his hand upon my right arm and squeezed it gently.

“Let them believe what they will believe. Martin told me something about you, before he died. He said that if any man had ever made recompense for his wrongs, no matter how terrible they were, it was you. Deserved or not, you’ve been punished enough. Don’t add to it by punishing yourself. Brightwell, or something like him, will always exist in this world; others too. In turn, there will always be men and women who are prepared to confront these things and all that they represent, but in time, you won’t be among them. You’ll be at rest, with a stone like this one above your head, and you’ll be reunited with the ones that you loved and who loved you in return.

“But remember: to be forgiven, you have to believe in the possibility of forgiveness. You have to ask for it, and it will be given. Do you understand?”

I nodded. My eyes were hot. I dredged up the words from my childhood, from dark confessionals inhabited by unseen priests and a God who was terrible in His mercy.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

The words spilled out of me like a cancer given form, a torrent of sins and regrets purging themselves from my body. And in time, I heard two words in return, and Bartek’s face was close to mine as he whispered them in my ear.

“Te absolvo,” he said. “Do you hear me? You are absolved.”

I heard him, but I could not believe.