The Kingdom of Bones

THIRTY-NINE

Sebastian dragged Sayers into the dining room and turned to get the door shut behind them, only to find that two men had followed them through and were taking care of it. On the other side of the door, the uproar continued. Beyond the empty tables, waiters and club staff appeared from out of the kitchens and hesitated, looking worried.

The two clubmen turned and fell back against the door. They were laughing so hard that they could barely breathe. The Virginia lawyer was red in the face and his shorter companion was all but in tears.

“Well done, sir,” Calvin Quinn said as he struggled to recover. “Well done. You win the heart and mind of every man in the room and then ask them for the whereabouts of a particular whore.”

“That’s nothing like what I said!” Sayers protested.

“But it’s pretty much how everyone heard it. Come on, before they break the door down.”

That seemed like a real possibility, so Sebastian went along with it. The four of them hurried out through the porticoed entranceway and down onto East Franklin, where streetlamps lit their way toward the extensive gardens around the capitol.

At a safe distance from the club, they slowed. “Oh my,” Quinn said, recovering at last. And his companion said, “Thank the Lord I didn’t find a fool to take my bet. What kind of idiot would I seem now?”

“Sylvester found a mark and lost a hundred,” Quinn said, and that set them off again.

Through all of this, Sayers had been looking distracted and Sebastian hadn’t cracked a smile.

Now Sebastian said, “This is far enough for me, gentlemen. We need to thank you for your help and take our leave. Mister Sayers and I have some business to address.”

“Can’t that wait?” Quinn said, and then he looked at Sayers. “You can’t duck out now.”

And his companion said, “We’re taking you to the woman you’ve been looking for.”

Through empty streets that were not the safest part of the city when the sun was down, the four men made their way to the abandoned theater of varieties. Night had turned it into a chalk and pencil sketch of a ruin, all shadows and silver. It faced the street like a skull in the moonlight.

In its foyer, they found a few burned-down stumps of candles. Quinn’s companion hunted out a usable lantern. Both men seemed to know their way around.

Quinn stood in the middle of the foyer and called out, “Miss D’Alroy!” But this drew no response.

Long shadows danced across the auditorium as they crossed it. The stranger led the way up to the suite of rooms above the foyer. Sayers stayed close behind the stranger, whose name had not been mentioned. Sebastian stayed close behind Sayers.

“This isn’t looking quite so promising,” Quinn said.

They clattered up the uncarpeted stairs, emerging into the big room with the brick fireplace. There was a stink of food that had been left to rot; there seemed to be no doubt at all that this squat had been abandoned for some days.

Sebastian Becker crouched before the fireplace and picked over some of the ashes. He saw the half-burned remains of newspaper theatrical pages.

“She clings to what she knows,” he said to himself.

Sayers turned to the stranger, who was standing by the doorway. He said, “She’s actually been living here? Not just using the place for assignations?”

“That I can’t say for sure. But it’s the way that it looked to me.”

A sudden sound from one of the adjoining rooms had Sebastian and Quinn reaching for the revolvers they carried. Sebastian moved to the door and called out, “I warn you! We have guns! Whoever you are, show yourself!” and then he raised his boot high and kicked it open, bursting the latch. Anyone on the other side would have been startled and at a disadvantage, but their lights revealed no one.

They advanced into the room with caution, stifling a cough at the dust raised by Sebastian’s violent action. There was a table, a broken water jug on the floor, a pallet in the corner.

From behind them, the stranger said, “This was her room. The servants slept back there.”

The sound came again.

“Rats in the walls,” Sayers said. He went over to one of the dividing walls, its plaster long gone, and banged on the timber slats. There was an immediate flurry of panic and scuttling from the other side. More dust was shaken down, and a squeak or two helped to confirm the explanation.

Sebastian had Sayers raise the lantern high while he moved closer.

“Look at the boards,” he said.

“What of them?”

“They’re old. But the nails are not.”

Sayers looked more closely. The nails weren’t new, but their exposed heads showed clean metal. They’d been hammered sometime recently. He tested the slats, and they were firm.

He handed the lantern to Quinn and went over to the table.

“What are you doing?” Sebastian said.

“Stand back.” Sayers lifted the table and carried it toward the wall. Sebastian understood his intention and took the other side, and together they swung it against the boards. Where the forward edge met, the wood splintered inward.

The timber wasn’t rotted, or the job would have been easy. But with one of the slats broken, they could lever out the pieces and start on the board next to it. Something had been bundled into the space behind. Quinn and the stranger watched as the two men went at the work, uncovering an area of rumpled canvas.

“That’s a backcloth,” Sayers said. “Painted.”

He and Sebastian both took a hold on the backcloth and tried to pull it out through the hole, but it was heavy and the glue size in the paint had stiffened the material. No matter how hard they tugged on it, the canvas stayed wedged inside the wall.

So they ripped out a few more slats to enlarge the hole and tried again, one on either side, each taking a grip. Sayers glanced back and saw Quinn and the smaller man standing there with an expression of dread.

Sebastian said, “On three. One, two…”

On the third count, they heaved on the canvas. It came out of the wall. With the backdrop came the body that had been wedged into the space behind it. It was naked, and male. It flopped out in a cloud of white dust, tumbling onto the floor as if from the back of a cart. There it lay, all hunched up, while plaster swirled in the air all around it. That smell they’d noticed as they’d entered the rooms—it was not the rotting of abandoned food. It was this.

Sebastian picked up the lantern and held it for a better look. Curled up as he was, it was impossible to say how tall the man had been in life. His hair was all mussed and dusty, and he had a long mustache in the same condition. His mouth was wide open, and his jaw was right down into his chest, as if he’d died trying to sing the lowest note of his life.

He’d been in the wall long enough for his skin to begin drying out and shrinking; the contracting flesh had begun to expel a variety of sharp objects used to pierce and penetrate it. It was hard to be sure what their purpose was, other than to cause lasting discomfort. The rats had been at him as well.

Sayers looked toward their two local men. Neither appeared to have been expecting this.

“Do you know this man?” he said.

Both of them went on staring. Neither of them said yes or no.

Sebastian said, “Someone will.”