The Six Messiahs

chapter 4

DEAD SEA AROUND THEM. BLACK, OILY WATER, becalmed: a false peace and a certain promise of violence. Vague, evil shapes flickered along the surface. Squall lines hanging black curtains across the northern horizon. Drab light from the west, yellow, greasy on the scummy foam. A full moon rising soon behind them, precise counterweight to the setting sun.

Doyle stood at the aft starboard rail. Tried to roughly calculate their position at sea; nearing the 30th parallel, 50 degrees north. Nearest landfall the Azores, a thousand miles south. He heard the whine of the screws below. Engines laboring. Innes would be along any minute; no one would overhear them at this end of the ship.

Doyle stared at the sketch he'd made of the scrawl on Selig's wall, aching to make sense of it. He had worked throughout the day on the whole problem, agonizingly close to unraveling the mystery, but the last piece that would complete the puzzle remained just out of his reach. And still no sign of that priest, Father Devine. He felt reluctant to approach Captain Hoffner with only his current conclusions, but the danger was unmistakable; if he didn't, Lionel Stern might not live through the night.

Here was Innes.

"Aside from what they stowed in their cabin, Rupert Selig and Stern brought four pieces of luggage," said Innes, producing a list. "Steamer trunk, two valises, one crate. Saw them myself; sitting in the hold, undisturbed." Doyle raised an eyebrow. "I slipped this bloke in the engine room a fiver."

"Good work."

"Crate's sealed with an intact customhouse band. About the size of a large hatbox. Figure that for the Book of Zohar, what?"

Doyle said nothing.

"Where's Stern now?" asked Innes.

"Captain's cabin, well looked after for the moment. There's an inordinate amount of paperwork to sort out a civilian death at sea."

"Never even occurred to me: What do they do with the body?"

"Refrigerated lockers. Necessity on any cruise liner with their older clientele: a good many of them overfed, apoplectic, sclerotic ..."

Innes shivered involuntarily. "Not too near the kitchen, I hope."

"Separate area. Nearer the hold, where they store those coffins we saw them loading in port."

"Put a man right off his mutton."

"Listen: The ship's doctor insists on labeling Selig's a natural death," said Doyle.

"He can't be serious."

"All outward signs indicate Selig died of acute coronary failure. I can't dispute that, and that's surely what his killers would like us to. believe. There's no facility to conduct a proper autopsy on board; if there were, I'm not sure the results would contravene. And the last thing the Captain needs on board his luxury liner is idle talk about the murder of a passenger."

"But of course that's exactly what we think it is."

"Frighten a man to death? Send an excess of adrenaline racing through his system and literally explode his heart? Yes, I'd call that murder."

"What could have set him off?"

Doyle shook his head.

"Maybe he caught a glimpse of the ship's ghost wandering around belowdecks," said Innes.

"Good Christ." Doyle stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he'd been struck with a mallet.

"Are you all right, Arthur?"

"Of course; that's it. Well done, Innes."

"What did I do?"

"You've cracked it open, old boy," said Doyle, walking him rapidly toward the nearest hatchway.

"I did?"

"Call back that engineer of yours. Have him fetch a fireman's ax, a hammer, and a crowbar. It's time we had a few words with Mr. Stern and Captain Hoffner."

The engineer flashed the beam of his lantern into the dark recess of the storage bay, picking out a sealed, rectangular shipping crate from among the forest of cargo.

"Is that your crate, Mr. Stern?" asked Doyle.

"Yes, it is."

"I'm sure we are all most interested, Mr. Conan Doyle," said Captain Hoffner with chafed civility, "but I'm afraid I am not seeing the point of this exercise...."

Doyle raised the ax and with one short, economical blow smashed the cover of the crate to pieces. Stern gasped. Doyle reached down, picked through the splinters, and extracted the contents of the box: a large square sheath of blank white paper.

"Equivalently weighted to approximate your Book of Zohar," said Doyle to Stern, balancing the stack in his hand.

"I didn't know; I swear," protested Stern. "I mean I saw ; them; I was there in London when the Book was crated."

"It seems your late partner Mr. Selig had other plans, which may account for his disinclination to leave your cabin."

"What is the significance of this, please?" asked Hoffner.

"Begging your patience for the moment, Captain, I will | attend to that presently," said Doyle, dropping the paper and hefting the ax over his shoulder. "Now if you would be good enough to accompany us to our next destination. Innes?"

Innes gestured and the little engineer—secretly thrilled at the spectacle of his rigid, disciplinarian Captain kowtowing to this crazy Englishman—led the way through a maze of passages and hatches to an adjacent hold: a frigid, uninviting room dominated by a row of square steel-hood-handled vaults. Rows of bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, their pale auras failing against the odors of decay that permeated the air.

"May I be permitted to ask what we are doing in the morgue?" asked Hoffner.

With Innes holding up a lantern, Doyle cracked open one of the refrigerated lockers and rolled out its enclosed metal tray, introducing the rigid enshrouded outline of a corpse. He pulled the sheet away from the face and dispassionately yanked down the lower eyelids of the late Rupert Selig, revealing congested spiderwebs of blue and purple capillaries.

"Contrary to your ship physician's opinion that he was in perfect health for a man his age, Mr. Selig suffered from heart disease and severe high blood pressure, evidenced as you can see by these massively ruptured vessels in the soft tissue under his eyes—a condition he kept secret even from you, Mr. Stern. You were not aware of it, were you, sir?"

Stern shook his head.

Doyle showed them a small glass vial of medicine; round, white pills. "Mr. Selig carried this homeopathic remedy—a mixture of potassium, calcium, and tincture of iodine of no small popularity but little established benefit—in a hidden pocket sewn into the lining of his jacket."

"All very well and good, Mr. Doyle; it supports in fact my doctor's conclusion that a heart attack was being the cause of the gentleman's death, but what does it have to do with—"

Doyle raised a hand, cutting Hoffner off again. "One point at a time, Captain; there is a design at work here, if you will trust me to bring it to light in the appropriate sequence." Doyle tossed the sheet back over Selig's gray face and gave the tray a shove, and it slid home with a metallic clang that echoed through the grim room.

"Innes, if you please ..." said Doyle.

Innes took the torch from the engineer and illuminated the far corner of the room; an orderly row of coffins lined the floor next to the wall.

"You accepted these five coffins as cargo in Southampton, isn't that correct, Captain?"

"Yes, so?"

"All from the same shipping agent, I trust."

"That would be customary."

"I shall in short order wish to examine the bill of lading lor them," said Doyle, accepting the hammer and crowbar from the engineer. "There was only one insurmountable dif-ficulty in the resolution of my theory; as we saw while boarding the ship, security was airtight—which is more than I can say for this casket." Doyle shimmed the crowbar with the hammer into a gap beneath the mahogany lid of the first coffin.

"Mein Gott, sir, think what you are doing...." Hoffner moved to stop Doyle from proceeding with the exhumation: Innes clamped a strong hand on his arm, holding him back, as Doyle continued.

"If a band of professional assassins have found their way onto the Elbe—and I assure you, Captain, that is exactly what we are dealing with here—they had to have managed it by some less conventional means than strolling up the gangplank in plain view—"

"I must order you to stop this at once...."

"You'll recall one of your passengers heard the cries of a 'ghost' from somewhere in the hold our first day out of port...." Doyle heaved at the crowbar; with a piercing shriek of protest from its nails, the coffin lid separated and lifted an inch from the sides. The shriek echoed hauntingly down the steel passageways around them. Doyle took a strong grip on the exposed edge of a coffin lid and pulled it open the rest of the way.

"This is a desecration...." Captain Hoffner broke free of Innes and rushed forward to discover that the plush pink satin-lined interior of the coffin was completely empty. Hoffner stared at Doyle, mouth agape.

"The 'ghost's' cries were followed shortly thereafter by a loud, rhythmic knocking."

Doyle dropped the lid shut and hammered the nails back in.

"Look closely and you can see the indentations made when they hammered the nails back in," said Doyle, beckoning Hoffner closer to the box. "Your cargo hands have assured me that each coffin carried the full, shifting complement of a body weight when they were carried aboard. If you examine them closely down here as well, Captain, you can see that minute holes were drilled in the corners for the circulation of air."

Hoffner ran a finger over the perforations. "I do not know what to say."

"An apology to Mr. Stern might be a prudent beginning. And the next time one of your passengers approaches you with concerns for their personal security, regardless of their religious or cultural persuasion, one hopes you will respond with a generosity more befitting your position."

Hoffner's face turned crimson; he grabbed the hammer and crowbar from Doyle; three minutes and four more open empty coffins later, a winded, chastened Hoffner laid down the tools.

"Mr. Stern," he said, standing tall. "Please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies."

Stern nodded, avoiding the Captain's eyes.

"You have five stowaways on board. Captain. There are dozens of places to hide on a ship this size. I don't need to suggest that you take all appropriate actions."

"No. Yes, of course. We shall conduct a search of the entire ship at once," said Hoffner, wiping his brow, mind racing. He considered himself a man of reason, above all, and second-most, a man of action.

"A concerted effort to find the Irish priest Father Devine would also be in order," said Doyle.

"Why is that?"

"Because this man is not a priest. He is their leader."

That's when the lights went out.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

To call this place the Devil's Kitchen does not do it justice, thought Kanazuchi, watching a rat chase a cockroach. He lay on a lice-infested blanket covering a wooden pallet he had secured the use of for the princely sum of two pennies a night. The beds of twenty other vagrants crowded the fifteen-square-foot room, one of four equally congested flops on the third floor of a five-story tenement in the middle of Tangrenbu, the twelve-square-block area of downtown San Francisco that the whites called Chinatown.

An opium den occupied the basement, and rumors circulated among these poor and illiterate peasants, many of them migrant farm workers who flooded the city each autumn when the central valley's harvest ended, that a demon roamed the hallways at night, tracking down souls to devour. The bodies of three men had been discovered recently in the alley behind the tenement; throats slashed, hearts ripped from their bodies.

Offerings left in shrines outside their doorways, what little money these Chinese could scrape together collectively, appeared to placate the monster. Each night they heard it prowling outside their doors and each morning the offerings were gone. But no one else had been killed in the week since the offerings began.

Of the four hundred men living in this building, only one had seen the demon and lived to tell about it: the building's trustee—a pockmarked, thick-necked bully in charge of gathering each day's rent and, more recently, the money for the offerings. This demon had the head of a dragon, a thousand eyes, and ten ravenous mouths, he testified, a first-rank demon, one of the ten thousand that figured in their complex belief system. He had watched it use its hideous talons to rip open the chests of the men found in the alley, as easily, he said, as if it were peeling an orange.

Each room was now locked by the trustee at night, but even if they had been able to, none of these men would dare venture into the halls after dark, which left personal sanitation a concern to be attended to locally. There were times when Kanazuchi wished his senses were not honed as sharply as the Grass Cutter that lay beside him in his bundle; the ripe stink of these unwashed provincials occasioned one of those moments.

Amid such fear, squalor, and destitution, Kanazuchi knew that since his arrival the day before no one had taken notice of him, but not being able to move freely at night was unacceptable. Sighs, guttural snoring, the whimper of a troubled dreamer, underscored the darkness around him. He did not want to leave the room until its occupants were sound asleep, and the thin man with the fever two beds down was still tossing and turning.

Kanazuchi had been visited by his dream again last night; one image leaped out with the solid clarity of a lead worth pursuing.

Chinese faces working in a tunnel.

His first two days in Dai Fow, the Big City, New Golden Mountain—what these Chinese called San Francisco—had failed to shed light on this mysterious image. Menials like these ignorant slum dwellers were of no use. He had considered cultivating the local merchants, but they spoke a more cultured dialect than the guttural Mandarin of the peasants he'd made the crossing with; it would take another week to master its nuances and they were notoriously tight-lipped to anyone outside their social tongs. His other option was to move beyond the ghetto into the white sections of the city, but every person he had spoken to in Tangrenbu had warned him not to. A wave of anti-Asian rage had swept through America in recent years; in Chinatowns up and down the western coasts, crimes of violence against Asian immigrants had grown steadily worse—murders, riots, lynchings. Whenever the whites needed someone to scapegoat for their economic misfortunes, the "yellow peril" was emphasized in public sentiment and these acts of racial barbarity inevitably followed. What more could you expect from such uncivilized people? Kanazuchi was hesitant to go into white areas, not for fear of being attacked, but only because killing any white men in public would trigger unnecessary complications.

First things first: A more direct path to the information he sought might lie right in front of him.

The man two beds down had settled, breathing strained but slow and regular. Kanazuchi shouldered his bundle and stepped between the sleepers, careful to avoid the four creaking floorboards. He stopped at the bed of the trustee next to the door. Using the tip of his wakizashi—his long knife—he delicately slipped the room key undetected from under the trustee's pallet. A length of rawhide secured it to a slat; he slit it with a flick of the wrist.

One minute later, he stood in the hallway, eyes already conditioned to the darkness. The air pungent with the smoke of the joss sticks burning on the shrines; each one still packed with fruit and coins. Kanazuchi examined the dust on the floor; no one had moved through the hall since their doors were locked at midnight, two hours before. He drifted to the center of the hall near the stairs, blended into the shadows, stood still, and listened.

Sleepers breathing in the four rooms on his floor. In the rooms above and below. Cockroaches scuttling behind the walls. He pushed the reach of his extraordinary senses further out; an old, familiar exercise, slipping into it as easily as a well-worn garment.

An alley cat tipped a trash can outside. Rats foraging. A carriage clipping by. Drunks laughing. The shrill negotiations of a prostitute. Horses shifting, stamping their feet, snorting in the stables next door.

Footsteps; nearer.

He reeled the net of his senses back in and cast it down to the tenement's first floor.

One man entered. Heavy. Tall, by the length of the stride. Western leather boots. A sack dragging on the ground behind. Rattling, hissing like a snake. A soft scoop, then the clink of coins falling together. Banging sounds; a clash of tinny cymbals.

Sleepers waking on the lower floors. Fearful whispers. Cowering. No one moving from his pallet.

Footsteps climbed the stairs. Second floor. Drumbeats, cymbals louder: hissing and rattling. More coins collected: moving closer.

Terror spread through the building. Prayers mumbled, worry beads clacking frantically. Kanazuchi turned his mind away from the chattering peasants and toward the leaden footsteps coming up the stairs.

The demon turned at the landing. A bulky, intimidating figure; dragon's head, feathered limbs, avian claws clutching a tambourine that banged against its hip. Large burlap sack behind, bumping up the risers.

As the demon reached the third floor, a coin dropped at its feet; it stopped, looked down. Gold; the demon reached for it. A shadow moved; the demon's mind registered confusion and a flash of something silver moving toward him in the instant before consciousness ceased. The sword cut so quickly the demon's eyes were still sending information to its brain—the room spinning out of control—as its head tumbled backward down the stairs away from the still-stationary body.

Kanazuchi cut up at an angle so the demon's body would shoot no blood onto his clothes. He sheathed Grass Cutter, reached out in time to lower the body silently as the arteries began to pump onto the floor. He jumped lightly to the landing, and pulled the demon's head out of the cheap paper dragon costume—eyes and mouth caught wide open in surprise; the flat, stupid face of a common thug.

Kanazuchi pulled the flute from his belt and headed back toward his room.

When the trustee heard the demon stop outside, he reached for his key, then for his knife when he found the key was missing. The knife was gone, too. Just then the door swung open and he heard the hollow, reedy whistling of an evil wind. The rest of the men in the room huddled under their blankets.

The bright paper dragon head peeked around the corner of the open doorway. A clawed finger pointed at the trustee and beckoned him forward.

What the hell was Charlie doing? thought the trustee. This is not how things are supposed to work.

Annoyed, the trustee walked out into the hall. The wind stopped suddenly; the door closed behind him. A sulfurous white cloud of smoke billowed before him in the hall, and in a flash of light he saw the head and body of his cohort, Charlie Lee, laid out on the blood-soaked floor. Before his legs could run, an iron vise grabbed him around the throat and lifted him straight off the floor. His captured breath swelled in his chest like a balloon.

"The gods are unhappy with you," said a harsh whisper in the trustee's ear.

What a horrible voice! He kicked his legs futilely and struggled for air: Nothing moved inside him. Surely he was about to die....

"They have sent me to punish you with the death of a thousand torments."

Heaven protect him: a real demon!

"Maybe you don't deserve such mercy. Maybe I should just eat you one piece at a time."

The demon shook him like a helpless kitten.

"Lucky for you I am in a good mood. Return the money you've stolen from these men and maybe I will let you live."

The trustee tried to nod his head: anything! A trickle of breath slipped through the demon's grip, keeping him on a thin edge of consciousness.

"Tell me: Do you steal this money for yourself?"

The trustee frantically shook his head no.

"Really? Then who told you to steal this money?"

The grip relaxed enough for him to croak out an answer. "Little Pete."

"Little Pete? What sort of name is that for a civilized person?"

"Real name is ... Fung Jing Toy. Chinatown boss."

"Which tong does he lead?"

"Sue Yop Tong."

"Where will I find Little Pete?"

"On Leong Society Building," croaked the trustee.

"The Chamber of Tranquil Conscientiousness?"

The trustee nodded again. For a Chinese demon, this one spoke pretty good English, he thought, just before its grip tightened on his neck like a band of iron; another blinding flash in the air. The trustee blacked out.

When he came to, a crowd of men from all the building's rooms milled around the decapitated remains of well-known neighborhood tough Charlie Lee. The trustee scrambled to his feet, sharing their happiness that the reign of terror had come to such a satisfying end: It wasn't a demon after all! Picking up the extortionist's grab bag, the trustee began to distribute its coins to the residents: What a stroke of fortune! He took none for himself; a change of heart had come over the trustee, a spurt of generosity that might last as long as another two days: The demon had let him live!

In his elation, the trustee took no notice of the slender, quiet man who had come in the day before, the last to leave his pallet and step into the hallway with the others. The man stood near the back of the crowd, apart from them, his bundle over his shoulder. Ready to go.

Fung Jing Toy noisily sucked out the marrow between the webbing of the pickled duck's foot. A delicacy his lower-caste family could never afford, duck's feet served every afternoon was one of the more genteel ways in which Little Pete reminded himself of the good fortune that twenty years of back-breaking work and self-sacrifice had given him. Although of modest stature befitting his nickname and an outwardly mild disposition, Little Pete was in his basic nature a man of ravenous appetites, and he rarely obeyed any impulse to hold them in check.

He was the only tong leader with whom "Blind Chris" Buckley and the corrupt white political establishment of San Francisco could negotiate comfortably; the rest of these top-dog Chinamen acted too high and mighty by half for their taste. Little Pete was the only one of them who laughed at the insults they casually tossed in his face, a clown who bowed and scraped in a manner reflecting his inferior racial status.

But Chris Buckley and his cronies recognized in Little Pete a man fiercely dedicated to an objective dear to their own hearts: the perpetual containment, subjugation, and enslavement of the city's Chinese population. The residents of Tangrenbu lived in mortal fear of Pete and the vicious henchmen of his Sue Yop Tong. Although five other criminal tongs owned significant holdings in Tangrenbu, Little Pete's On Leong Society controlled the flow of opium into the quarter. He owned many of the sweatshops where addicts slaved away for the pennies they spent to fill their bowls every night and most of the verminous flophouses where they slept it off.

In trade for their cooperation with the political machine, the six tongs had been granted sole responsibility for the importation and regulation of all workers from mainland China. And through Buckley's cozy association with the powerful railroad barons of San Francisco—Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford—Little Pete had become chief supplier of "coolie" labor for the expansion of the western lines. In Mandarin dialect, kuli signified "bitter strength."

So for the privilege of resettling in this land of opportunity, once a lower-caste worker passed through the sheds at the embarcadero he was chattel, owned and exploited to the grave by Little Pete and the Six Companies. At which point one of Pete's funeral parlors would perform the cremation and turn a tidy profit on shipping the ashes—by no means necessarily those of the worker—back to the departed's family in China.

Bitter strength, indeed.

Little Pete was a creature of habit. One of his established routines: hearing requests from his constituents during the business day lunch hour on the second-floor balcony of his Kearney Street town house. Little Pete liked to stuff himself heartily while his workers and shopkeepers humbled themselves before him. On occasion, if a request was sufficiently innocuous or inexpensive enough, he would demonstrate his rare and therefore legendary magnanimity.

But here it was half past noon; already on his third helping of duck's feet and no one had yet arrived to petition him with their stupid problems. He yelled out to his houseboy, Yee Chin: Why is no one here? If they have been left waiting downstairs, someone will be punished!

No answer. He threw down the bones on his plate and demanded more food. No one appeared. Now he was angry: His kitchen boys had orders to stand by inside the balcony with extra helpings to bring out the moment he called; they had all felt his crop on their back when a dish landed on his table cold. Little Pete rang the little porcelain bell he kept by his plate and shouted again.

Nothing. Yee Chin would catch unholy hell for this incompetence.

Little Pete wedged his bulbous stomach from behind the table, lifted his generous behind off the silk pillows on his hand-carved Tang dynasty chair, picked up his riding crop, and waddled into the sitting room, thinking of creative new ways he was going to punish these useless domestics.

A silver dome covered the serving that waited for him on the cart inside the door. If his next course had gone cold, heaven help Yee Chin. He lifted the dome off the tray....

Little Pete fell to his knees and violently retched up his lunch, mind blanked, senses obliterated; blind, deaf, and dumb.

There were feet on the tray.

Human feet.

Little Pete crawled quickly away on hands and knees, instincts for survival surfacing. Where were his bodyguards? Four on duty downstairs around the clock; someone got past them. The attack could come from any direction, at any moment. He would have to defend himself. There had been a time when no one bested him with a knife, but he hadn't been in a fight that mattered for over ten years.

A pistol in the top drawer of that table. Little Pete scampered over, pulled the gun out, hands shaking wildly, gripping onto the table for support. He wiped the drool from his lips with the sleeve of his gun hand, tried to summon enough voice to call out for his guards, but the words died in his throat; heart beating too hard, tongue cottony and sluggish.

Slow, slow down now, Pete. This is a good place. You can see every door and window from here. Steady the gun with both hands. Wait until they come close: Don't waste any bullets____

A tremendous force slammed his head down from behind onto the tabletop. The layer of thick glass covering its hardwood surface cracked, his face locked in place motionless against it; Little Pete felt heat run down his face, saw his own blood flowing freely into the splinters. His arm wrenched backward and the gun was taken from his hand like a rattle from a baby.

"You understand how easily I can kill you," said a quiet voice.

"Yes," croaked Little Pete.

"Your guards are dead. No one is coming to help you. Answer my questions; don't waste time and you will live."

The voice spoke flawless, unaccented Mandarin. He didn't know this man. Little Pete tried to nod in agreement, grinding the shattered glass deeper into his face.

"You sell workers to the railroads," said the voice.

"Yes,"

"Tunnel men. Chinese. Good with explosives."

"Yes, a few ..."

"There can't be many of them."

"No, not good ones."

"You would know who they are, then, the good ones."

What in heaven's name was this about?

"Yes. If they're demolition; they used to be miners mostly. They came here for the gold rush...."

"You sent some out to the desert."

Little Pete's mind raced: There weren't many Chinese demolition men left, the good ones were always in demand—hard to think now....

"Answer or I'll kill you."

They worked in teams; his offices handled sale and shipping of dynamite as well. Couldn't remember; he would have to check his ledgers—that would take time—would this man let him live long enough to do it?

Wait. Something coming back; yes.

"SF, P and P."

"What is that?"

"Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railroad. One team."

"When?"

"Six months ago."

"Where exactly did you send them?"

"Arizona Territory. Working the line west from Tucson. From Stockton, they come from Stockton, California. I don't remember anything else; I don't know their names but I could find out for you. Four men ..."

The man's hand palmed Little Pete's head and rammed the soft center of his temple against the table edge. Little Pete slumped into a pile on the floor, unconscious.

Kanazuchi walked to the balcony, rapidly scaled a trellis up to the roof, and faded away. No one had seen him enter; no one saw him leave.

By the time Little Pete came to his senses and the uproar over the murders in his town house spread through Tangrenbu like a grass fire—the feet of one of his bodyguards had been severed and served as Little Pete's lunch and he was forced to eat them, according to more extravagant versions—Kanazuchi had already moved well beyond the San Francisco city limits.

Eerie silence belowdecks: The ship's engines had died along with the lights. The Elbe sat dead in the still water. The hold seemed as dark and inhospitable as the belly of a whale.

"Gott im Himmel—"

Doyle shushed him. They stood and strained to listen....

Someone was moving down the passageway toward the bay forty feet below the water line where the five men stood beside the empty coffins.

Doyle took the crowbar from Captain Hoffner, grabbed the lantern from Innes, and closed its shutters, plunging them into darkness.

"Stand against the walls. Away from the door," he whispered to the others. "Not a word from anyone."

They waited and watched. A small flame flickered to life fifty feet down the passage; a match igniting. It bobbed toward them, died out, then another took its place and continued forward. Doyle tracked the progress of the shuffling footsteps, and as the advancing figure reached the hatch to the hold he stepped out and uncovered the lantern right in the face of the man, blinding him. The man cried out, dropped the match, and shielded his eyes.

"For crying out loud, what'd you have to go and do that for?"

"What are you doing here, Pinkus?" said Doyle.

Ira Pinkus bent over, trying to rub the dancing spots away from his field of vision, too disoriented to organize a lie.

"I was following you," said Pinkus.

"You've picked a very inopportune time—stand away from the door, Pinkus; someone might shoot you," said Doyle, maneuvering the little man against a bulkhead and closing the hatch behind him.

"I was halfway down a flight of stairs when everything went black...."

"And keep your voice down."

"Okay," whispered Pinkus. "Jesus, I can't see a thing: Everybody looks like a light bulb—so anyway, what gives with the skull and crossbones stuff, Mr. Conan Doyle—oh, hello, Innes, nice to see you again."

"Hello."

"What's your name, friend?"

"Lionel Stern."

"How are ya? Ira Pinkus. And this must be Captain Hoffner; very pleased to meet you, sir, been looking forward to it; very fine ship you have here—Ira Pinkus, New York Herald...."

"Why is this man following you?" asked Hoffner of Doyle.

"I'm writing a series of articles about transatlantic steamship travel, Captain, and I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to interview you...."

"Pinkus," said Doyle ominously.

"Yeah?"

"Be quiet or I'll be compelled to throttle you."

"Oh. Sure, okay."

The silence that followed was broken by a series of kicks and shuddering metallic groans from somewhere aft and above them in the ship.

"Emergency generator," said the engineer.

"Trying to restart the screws," said Doyle.

Hoffner nodded. They listened.

"But it's not working," said Innes.

"That generator was inspected and fully operational before we left Southampton," said Captain Hoffner.

"But then, I assume, so were the engines," said Doyle.

Hoffner stared at him. "You are not suggesting ..."

"Sabotage?" piped in Pinkus, somewhat gleefully.

The word hung in the air. Pinkus looked back and forth from Doyle to Hoffner like a man watching table tennis.

"What is your standard procedure in such a situation?"

"The crew will distribute lamps and escort all passengers who are abovedecks back to quarters."

"How long will that take?"

"Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour."

"And all passengers are then expected to remain in their cabins."

"Yes, until power is restored."

"Captain ... does anyone else know we're down here?" asked Doyle.

"My first officer," said Hoffner. "Whoever else is on the bridge."

"Are they after me?" asked Lionel Stern glumly.

On the verge of answering, from the corner of his eye Doyle caught Pinkus's puppy-dog eager expression. "Mr. Pinkus, would you please be good enough to go over there and stand in the corner for a while?"

"Really? What for?"

"This is a private conversation," said Doyle, lighting the way for him with the torch.

Pinkus shrugged congenially and followed Doyle's beam to the far corner, with an uneasy glance at the vacant coffins.

"You want me to face the wall?"

"If you would be so kind."

"Hey, no problem at all," said Pinkus. He gave a friendly, overfamiliar wave and turned away.

Doyle gestured for the others to form a tight ring around him; he held the torch under his jacket and the five faces pushed into the faint glow.

"These men have every intention of killing you, Mr. Stern," said Doyle, his voice a barely audible whisper. "If doing so will bring the Book of Zohar into their possession."

"Why don't we just give it to them?" said Hoffner.

"But we have no idea where it is...."

"It is in my cabin," said Doyle.

Astonished exclamations.

"Gentlemen, please," pleaded Doyle, shining the light over to Pinkus just as he whipped his head back around to face the wall. "There will be time for explanations when we are in different company, unless you'd prefer to read about them on the front page of a newspaper."

"I could not agree more," said Hoffner.

"Since they seem perfectly aware that the Book of Zohar was not in its crate in the hold, our stowaways presumed it was still in your cabin, Mr. Stern, where they originally tried to take it from Mr. Selig. Your cabin is where they plan to strike again now under this cover of darkness."

"But why now? Out here, in the middle of the ocean?" asked Stern.

"As opposed to a day away from shore, when their chances of escaping undetected would be that much greater?" said Doyle, about to elaborate.

"Because they've realized we know they're on board and they can't afford to wait any longer. Obviously," said Innes.

Jolly good, Innes, thought Doyle.

"How could they know this?" asked Hoffner.

"A breach in security," said Doyle. "On the bridge."

"Impossible."

"Not one of your men, Captain. One of theirs."

"In uniform?"

"You may regrettably discover that one of your officers has gone missing."

"Mein Gott, then we will scour the ship top to bottom, we will find these men...."

"We shall do even better than that, Captain, but we need to act without delay, we have less than thirty minutes." Doyle turned to the engineer. "Do you have any red phosphorus on board?"

The engineer turned to Hoffner, who translated the question.

"Yes, sir," answered the engineer.

"Good. Bring as much as you've got to us here at once."

The stout little engineer, whose incomplete command of English had left him utterly perplexed by these developments, felt enormous relief at having such a straightforward task to discharge. He saluted smartly and marched out of the cargo bay.

"Captain, can you secure us some firearms?"

"Of course; they are kept under lock and key on the bridge—"

"Without alerting any of your officers?"

Hoffner tugged down on the edge of his tunic and screwed up his Teutonic pride to its fullest measure.

"I believe I can manage this much."

"What are we going to do, Arthur?" asked Innes.

"Set a trap," said Doyle:

"Really? Tremendous! Can I help?" asked Ira Pinkus.

Doyle turned the light on him; Pinkus had crept within five feet of them, and had been huddling there for God knows how long.

"As a matter of fact, you can," said Doyle.

Twenty minutes later. Velvety moonlight through the porthole and unearthly quiet inside Stern's cabin.

The first sound: a pick sliding smoothly into the keyhole. Scratching as it worked its way through the pins, each one freezing until with a barely audible click the lock yielded, the handle turned. The door opened slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, until it met resistance from the reattached chain. Wire cutters moved through the gap and gripped the chain; a steady increase of pressure until the pincers sliced through the last link. A gloved hand caught the strands of the chain before they could fall back to scrape against the metal door and laid them to rest.

Now the door swung open just wide enough to admit the first blackclad figure; black from head to toe, crepe-soled shoes, a mask taut over its head. The figure took stock of the room, looked at the stationary form lying in the lower bunk, then held the door for a second identically dressed figure to enter. It moved slowly and purposefully to the edge of the bunk; a thin sliver of steel in its hand gleamed in the moonlight pouring through the porthole.

Now, thought Doyle.

As the figure in black reached for the blanket, a ghastly cry came from the corridor outside; a miserable moan of torment, rising in pitch and volume.

Easy, don't overdo it.

Both men turned to the door; a third identically dressed figure stuck its head in, beckoning them over. They glided outside and looked down the passageway at the strangest spectacle.

The incandescent outline of a ship's officer illuminated the far end of the dark corridor. A glowing, ethereal outline of a man, chains draping its tattered uniform, its eyes black holes recessed in the green-gray plane of its lamentable face. The disturbing specter moaned again, rattled its chains, raised its arms menacingly, and took a step toward the three men in black.

The figures balked, momentarily distracted.

Doyle threw off the blanket, sat up in the bunk, and leveled a shotgun at the three men in the doorway.

"Don't move," ordered Doyle.

At the sound of his voice, the door directly across the hallway flew open: Innes holding a pistol....

One of the figures dove and rolled at Innes's knees, chopping him to the ground; his pistol discharged, the bullet pinged off the metal ceiling and died into the carpeted floor. By the time Doyle pulled the trigger, the other two figures in black had with incredible speed bolted down the passage in opposite directions; the shot ricocheted harmlessly off the bulkheads. Doyle raced to the doorway. One of the fleeing assassins ran into and leveled the "ghost" of the Elbe—Doyle saw its luminescent form go tumbling ass-over-teakettle—and disappeared around a corner. The second intruder was sprinting directly toward the hatchway where Captain Hoffner, Stern, and the engineer were laying in wait.

The third assailant jumped up out of the opposing doorway to follow the others; Innes reached out and grabbed hold of his ankle. The man turned and cracked his free foot down on Innes's left wrist; Innes cried out, releasing his grip just as Doyle raised the butt end of the rifle and clubbed the figure across the back of the head, slamming him face first hard into the far wall, but instead of collapsing the man spun out of the collision and mule-kicked Doyle in the midsection, propelling him back through the open doorway where he collided rudely with the unforgiving frame of the bunks.

As the man in black kicked, Innes swept a leg under him; the man went airborne and met the floor with a thud. Innes scrambled to his knees and landed a crushing punch to the man's head. Doyle rushed back into the hall, pinned the barrel of the rifle against the prostrate man's chest, and jacketed a live round into the chamber.

"Move and I'll shoot," said Doyle, wheezing to recapture his wind.

The figure lay still. Doyle gasped for air: thank God Innes was so handy with his fists. Cool under pressure, too. The Fusiliers had taught him well.

"Did we get him?" asked the ghost of the Elbe, standing cautiously ten feet away in the hall.

Startled, neither of the brothers could react quickly enough as in one move the figure in black produced a derringer from a sleeve, drew it directly to the side of his own head, and fired.

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God, is he dead?" said the ghost.

"Of course he's dead, Ira," said Innes, thoroughly annoyed. "He shot himself in the head."

"Well what in bejesus would a fella go and do a crazy thing like that for?" said Pinkus, leaning back against the wall, absentmindedly wiping the compound of phosphorus off his gloves.

"You're the reporter," said Doyle, equally irritated. "Why don't you ask him? Stay here, Innes. I'll be back."

Doyle moved quickly away down the corridor to their left.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joe-seppie, I was spooked something fierce, Innes, and I don't mind saying it. I think I even scared myself," said Pinkus, fanning himself with his luminescent hat. "Say, how'd I do? I do okay?"

"If all else fails, you could always find work haunting a house."

"Gee, that's terrific, thanks."

"Give me a hand. We should stow him out of the way before the tourists get wind of this."

"Sure, pal, whatever you say."

Pinkus reached down and Innes got a closer look; the clotted rivulets of phosphorescent sweat running off him made it look as if his face were melting. "Probably a good idea if we stow you out of sight as well."

Doyle found Lionel Stern and the engineer kneeling in the dark outside the hatch at the end of the corridor, attending to Captain Hoffner, who clutched a wounded arm.

"We heard the shots," said Hoffner. "Mein Gott, he was on us so quick I have had no time—"

"Like a shadow," said the engineer.

"He ran right through us," said Stern. "Everything happened so fast I couldn't even tell you which way he went."

"That's all right'"said Doyle, bending down to examine the deck. "He'll show us himself."

He pointed to the walkway and the thin layer of phosphorus he'd laid down when they finished coating Pinkus. Doyle instructed Stern to stay with Hoffner, and along with the plucky little engineer, who clutched a huge monkey wrench in both hands, they followed the path of glowing footprints leading away from the phosphorus out into the void of the open deck.

The moon drifted behind an advancing cloud bank, and the darkness rendered the glow of the man's tracks even easier to read. Rolling heavily amidships with no power to steer into the heavy swells of the approaching storm, spray dousing her deserted decks, taut lines twanging like harp strings in the whistling wind, the Elbe felt less like a luxury liner and more like a steamship version of the doomed Flying Dutchman.

"Dis man," whispered the engineer, as they paused before cautiously rounding a corner. "He is like der Teufel."

"The Devil," said Doyle. "Yes. But he is also just a man."

As Doyle bent to examine another footprint, he heard a faint, steady metallic tapping, then noticed the wrench, shaking in the engineer's hands and knocking against the rail.

"What's your name?"

"Dieter. Dieter Boch, sir."

"You're a good man to have around, Dieter."

"Tank you, sir."

They traced the steps up a flight of stairs to the rear deck, and through the clabbering gloom ahead Doyle thought he could make out the shape of a large man standing at the far end near the stern rail. Doyle reached for his pistol but the ship yawed severely as it dove down into the trough of a wave. Both men staggered to hold their balance; when Doyle looked up again, the figure at the rail was gone. He questioned his companion; the engineer had seen nothing. They pressed on. Lengthy gaps between their quarry's footprints indicated the man in black had continued to run; the prints led right up to the edge of the top deck and ended abruptly.

"Er ist going overboard?"

"So it appears," said Doyle.

"Into dis wasser?" asked Boch, looking out anxiously at the towering crests of the waves. Like so many other seagoing men he lived in constant terror of the ocean. ' 'Why would dis man do such a thing?"

Why, indeed? thought Doyle: Why would two men take their own lives rather than face capture?

For the theft of a book?

They moved the Gerona Zohar from a hidden compartment in Doyle's steamer trunk to the safety of the ship's vault and placed it under twenty-four-hour guard. His injured arm in a sling, Captain Hoffner returned to the bridge, rallied his officers, and initiated a room-by-room search. As Doyle had predicted, the ship's first lieutenant could not be accounted for, although many swore they had seen him—a young, handsome blond man—in uniform on the command deck since the storm began.

Mechanics swarmed over the engine room, finally coaxing the emergency generator into operation; with running lights on and one quarter power restored to the screws, the Captain ruddered the Elbe into the teeth of the squall as it closed its jaws around them. While the crew redoubled efforts to repair the primary generator, passengers remained confined to cabins, rules of emergency in force, with strict instruction to lock their doors; the storm and complications posed by their loss of power were convincingly given as the rationale for these impositions. No mention made of the assassins still presumed to be at large somewhere on board the troubled ship.

Guards posted outside the door, the corridor in either direction cordoned off-limits to passengers, Doyle, Innes, Stern, and Pinkus—with whom they were now saddled, more reluctant to let him out of their sight than to endure his company— huddled in Stern's cabin around a kerosene lamp and the body of the black-clad suicidal assailant.

Removing his mask revealed a man of about thirty with clipped, straight black hair and a brown, broad-browed face— Javanese, perhaps Filipino, thought Doyle. A small distinctive tattoo of abraded skin discolored the hollow of the man's left elbow: a broken circle, penetrated by three jagged lines. This design matched exactly the drawing on the piece of paper in Doyle's pocket, sketched from the scratchings on the wall near Selig's body. Upon examination, Doyle realized the mark was not a tattoo but a severe burn. Of the sort one would find on branded cattle.

The man's clothes were fashioned from plain black cotton. Six weapons concealed on his person: knives holstered up each sleeve and pant leg, the suicidally employed double-barreled derringer, and a thin length of wire around his waist—a deadly garrote. Scars crisscrossed his burled knuckles and callused palms, knife wounds; a seasoned warrior. The bruises Innes and Doyle wore from their brief engagement with him bore vivid testimony to the man's mastery of hand-to-hand combat. Conclusion: a cold, efficient killing machine. They had no compelling reason to believe his surviving accomplices would be any less deadly.

Doyle dropped a sheet over the corpse. All four men had to continually brace themselves against the bulkhead or bunks to fight the grinding up-and-down gyrations of the storm.

"You still haven't explained, Mr. Doyle," said Stern. "How did the Zohar end up in your cabin?"

"Along with the pills sewn into the lining of Mr. Selig's jacket, I found this key," said Doyle, holding it up for display. "Obviously not the key to your room or any passenger cabin, although it bears the identifying stamp of the Elbe, here...." He pointed out a minute version of the ship's insignia.

"What's it for?" asked Pinkus impatiently.

"I applied the key to every lock I could find convenient to this room. There is a seldom-used storage closet behind the gymnasium—you'd never see it unless looking for it; its entrance is obscured every morning and night by stacks of lounge chairs and seat cushions. This key opened that door. Inside this shallow closet, I found a recessed panel in the wainscoting; a neglected and no longer serviceable fuse box. Mr. Selig moved the Zohar from its original hiding place here—a simple hole cut into his mattress, by the way; small wonder he was so reluctant to leave the room—to this other location yesterday evening, after the Captain refused your request to use the ship's safe, the conversation I overheard."

"I had no idea ..." said Stern.

"No. He must have made the transfer while you were attempting to reach me before the seance last night, about an hour before the murder."

"And how did his killers manage that without laying a hand on him?" asked Innes.

Doyle produced two small packets of paper from his pocket and opened them for the others to see. ' 'When we discovered Mr. Selig's body last night, I found a small clump of clay just inside the door. I removed this second identical sample this evening from inside one of the coffins in the hold; a good amount of it, over a pound, but only in one coffin."

"Okay, fine, Doc. So what's a little dirt got to do with the price of beer?" asked Pinkus, with all the impartial tact of a seasoned journalist.

"Mr. Selig was a more devoutly religious man than yourself; is that a fair statement to make, Mr. Stern?" asked Doyle.

"Yes."

"So am I correct in assuming as a practicing Jew he would have been conversant with aspects of Judaic history and mythology?"

"Absolutely: Rupert studied for many years."

"Would it also be fair to say Mr. Selig took what those studies might have given to him very close to heart; one might almost say as gospel?"

"Definitely—what are you driving at?"

Doyle lowered his voice and leaned in over the lantern, the light from below setting off his features in a dramatically sinister way. "Are you at all familiar, Mr. Stern, with the legend of the golem?"

"The golem? Yes, of course, I mean, in a passing way; as a boy my father told me the story many times."

"Golem? What's'zat?" said Pinkus, who still emitted a faint sickly greenish glow in spite of an hour's scrubbing with a stiff steel brush.

"The word golem derives from the Hebrew for fetus, or unformed life," said Doyle. "Said to be the name that Jehovah gave Adam when he breathed life into the figure he molded from the common clay of Eden."

"Jehovah?" asked Pinkus, popping his chewing gum. "You mean ... jumpin' Jehovah?"

"Jehovah is the Hebrew name for God," said Stern, amazed at the depths of the man's blockheadedness.

"But the story of the golem that is more relevant to this discussion," said Doyle, turning to Stern, "begins in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the late sixteenth century. A campaign of bloody pogroms was brought against the Jews of Prague, as there had been throughout Eastern Europe. But the attacks in Prague were particularly vicious and bloodthirsty. One of the elders of the temple was a scholar by the name of Rabbi Judah Low Ben Bezalel, a gentle, almost saintly figure. Rabbi Low desperately sought a way to protect the Jews in the ghetto from this deadly persecution. He spent years searching through the old temple libraries looking for an answer. One day, so the story goes, buried deep in the cellar of the Great Synagogue he found an ancient book of great and mystical power...."

"Not the Book of Zohar, by any chance," said Innes.

"The name of this book is not specified, but a copy of the Zohar would surely have been in the synagogues of Prague; a man of Rabbi Low's learning would certainly have known of it. In any case, as he read through this book, the Rabbi allegedly stumbled across a passage that contained a secret coded formula that with his incredible scholarship he was able to decipher....

"The entire Zohar, by the way, is supposedly written like that, every sentence hiding some metaphysical mystery," added Stern.

"So like what are we talking about here, some kind a' turning lead into money-type deal?" asked a wide-eyed Pinkus.

"This passage revealed to Rabbi Low nothing less than the formula for bringing human life out of base earth that Jehovah used for the creation of Adam, the first man."

"You gotta be kiddin' me," said Pinkus.

"It's ... a legend, Pinkus," said Doyle.

"How did he allegedly do it?" asked Innes.

"Using pure water and clay from a pit dug in sanctified ground, he crafted the limbs, head, and torso of a giant figure crudely resembling a man. Then, according to the precepts of the ritual, he connected the pieces together and wrote a sacred Hebrew word on a slip of paper which he inserted under the figure's tongue...."

"What word was that?" said Innes.

"You'd have to ask Lionel's father about that, I'm afraid," said Doyle.

"So did the golem come to life?" asked Pinkus anxiously.

' 'The next thing he knew, the golem, as he called it, sat up and began to move. When he spoke to it, the golem did exactly as he ordered; Rabbi Low realized he had created a servant that would follow his instructions to the letter. Eight feet tall, powerful arms and legs; small rocks in place of eyes, a crudely fashioned mouth. He used the golem for household labor until his confidence about its obedience grew; then Rabbi Low began to send the golem out into the night, frightening away anyone who might come into the ghetto to harm the Jews.

"Every evening he would insert the paper, giving life to the monster. When its work was done at dawn, the golem returned home, the Rabbi removed the paper, and the golem lay like a statue in the Rabbi's basement. And people were so terrified of this horrible being roaming through the night that violence against the Jews in the ghetto came to a halt."

"Not a bad yarn," said Pinkus, holding on to the bunk beds for dear life. "Kind a' like that whachamacallit, that Frankenstein guy."

"It's been suggested that Mary Shelley derived a large part of her famous work from the legend of the golem," said Doyle.

"No kiddin'," said Pinkus, with not the slightest idea who Mary Shelley might be.

"There's more," said Doyle. "One Sabbath morning, when Jews make their religious observances and must stop all manual labor until sunset, Rabbi Low forgot to remove the slip of paper from the golem's mouth."

"Uh-oh," said Pinkus. "I smell trouble."

"You would be right, Mr. Pinkus. With Rabbi Low's control over the golem lost, the monster went on a terrible rampage. Block after block of shops and houses broken and ruined; many innocent people killed, most of them Jews, crushed and trampled by its mindless fury. Nothing could stop the golem until Rabbi Low finally tracked it down and removed the paper, saving the rest of the ghetto from certain destruction."

The others were silent, hanging on every word.

"The myth of the golem has always seemed to me to be a perfect metaphor for the apocalyptic power of unchecked human rage, as well as a wonderful parable about the life-affirming compassion of the Judaic tradition," said Doyle.

Innes and Pinkus glanced sideways at each other like mystified schoolboys, both drawing a total blank.

"Well, jeez," said Pinkus.

"So what happened to the golem?" asked Innes.

"The body of the golem was carried by Low and his friends to the cellar of the Great Synagogue of Prague, where it supposedly lies buried to this day, waiting for its life to be restored."

Struggling to keep his balance as the battered ship took a particularly nasty twist, Doyle took out another piece of paper. "Gentlemen, I have here the ship's copy of the agent's manifest for those five coffins in the hold. Would you like to hazard a guess as to their port of origin?"

"Not Prague," said Innes.

"Exactly," said Doyle.

"You gotta be joshin' me," said Pinkus.

"Please, Mr. Doyle. You're not seriously suggesting that the golem of the ghetto of Prague was in one of those boxes," said Stern.

"Or that an eight-foot-tall clay monster is still roaming around somewhere on board the ship," said Innes.

"I suggest this," said Doyle. "If you're trying to obtain something from a man on board a ship in the middle of the ocean and you wish to attract no undue attention to yourself—''

"Eight-foot-tall clay monsters are a choice idea," said Pinkus smartly.

"—and you're aware that the man from whom you wish to obtain this object has a history of heart trouble and that he's aware of a legend about an eight-foot-tall clay monster that may be connected to the object you're attempting to steal and that you need to kill this man in order to get it but circumstances demand that his death not appear to be an obvious murder..."

"You scare him to death," said Innes, the pieces falling into place.

"Smuggle four men and one coffin full of clay covering an armature of some kind on board. Label the coffins as coming originally from Prague, to support the superstition. Remember: The passenger who heard the 'ghost' shriek also saw a large gray figure roaming in the hold and these second-class cabins are only two flights of stairs away; when the knock came at Mr. Selig's door last night and he opened it as far as the chain would allow ... I believe it was the sight of this 'golem'— being held by these two men—standing outside that precipitated his fatal heart attack."

"How about that?" said Pinkus.

"If that was the case, then what prevented them from going right in and stealing the book?" asked Stern. "The chain wasn't even broken."

"Our sudden arrival interrupted them," said Doyle. "And what's the harm? They waited for another opportunity: Who was going to suspect he died of anything other than what it appeared to be?

"Except that Mr. Selig bravely marshaled his resources in the last moments of his life: Grabbing a handful of the clay from the monster—some still remained under his fingernails— he used it to trace an outline on the wall of this tattoo he had seen on one of his assailant's forearms."

"How 'bout that?" said Pinkus, falling back again on what he always said whenever he had nothing to say.

"I guess it all makes a kind of sense, except how could they know Rupert had a heart condition?'' said Stern. ''Even I wasn't aware of that."

"Mr. Selig lived in London; presumably they obtained the information from his doctor's office," said Doyle. "He told you he was being followed while you were there; how difficult could it have been?"

Stern weighed the possibilities; after the recent events he'd been through, he was hard pressed to dismiss the idea out of hand.

"Still seems like an awful lot of bother to go to just to get an old book," said Innes, slightly petulant that his brother had failed to confide any of these conclusions to him earlier and in private.

"As Mr. Stern has told us, the Zohar is priceless and whoever hired these men is obviously willing to go to any lengths to obtain it."

"I'd always thought it was nothing more than a collection of superstitious nonsense," said Stern. "What if the Zohar actually does contain some secret formula about the creation of life. Or its meaning ..."

"Then priceless isn't good enough by half," said Doyle.

"Yeah and besides," said Pinkus, eyes squinting, snapping his gum violently while he wrestled a tremendously obscure inner line of reasoning to the ground, "if they ain't even stole the book yet, how'd they get this monster to walk around by itself anyway?"

Try as they might, to a note sounded from such a bottomless depth of stupidity, no one could respond.

Doyle left Innes and Pinkus to oversee removal of the assassin's body, delivered Stern into the care of officers and trudged back to his cabin alone by the feeble light of an oil lamp. Gripping hard to the rails as he fought the pitch and roll of the decks, Doyle realized a mid-Atlantic storm by itself would be hardship enough for most, although he had lived through many more perilous nights aboard smaller ships on the open sea. He was more deeply troubled by the lingering uncertainties he hadn't shared with the others of his company, details that no one else had lit upon and pursued.

If one of those coffins had been carrying a large clay figure, that left room in the others for four men to steal aboard. One of those dead by his own hand; a second gone overboard; the third member of the attack team had escaped past Pinkus in the second-class passageway. The fourth had most probably killed and then assumed the place of that young lieutenant on the bridge. That left two of them still on the Elbe, unaccounted for. And their leader, the man who had called himself Father Devine.

Five men. Four coffins.

The question: How did this Father Devine get on board the ship? He wasn't listed as a passager, and the ship's staff could find no trace of him. Doyle had been close to him that first day on deck and again at the seance; his age and girth didn't make him for one of the men in black, and that unfortunate lieutenant had been only twenty-three years old; Devine could never have replaced him on the bridge convincingly. And Doyle had encountered the man within an hour of their departure from port, not nearly enough time to have removed himself from a coffin in the hold; the hammering sounds from belowdecks hadn't been heard until that evening.

Think, Doyle: A priest mingling among a busy ship full of departing passengers would raise no eyebrows; suppose he drifted up the gangway amid a group of people as if to see them off, then simply removed himself from view until they'd sailed from harbor. Yes; that tracked.

There was also the matter of the design engraved on the dead man's arm. Doyle felt almost certain it had some hidden meaning, but try as he might he couldn't crack it....

Let the unconscious mind work on this, he counseled himself. Effort won't help; the answer may bubble up to the surface when I least expect it.

As the ship climbed up and down the canyons of the waves, Doyle struggled to unlock and open his cabin door. Darkness inside; the door flapped back and forth with the rocking.

Someone inside.

Doyle slowly drew the pistol from his belt.

Light from the lantern penetrated the room: A knife pierced the floor near the bed, pinning down a note written in large red block letters.

"NEXT TIME WE'LL KILL YOU."

"Close the door," said a voice.

Father Devine stood motionless in the corner of the room, arms folded, obscured in the crease of a shadow. The ship rolled to starboard and seams in the walls groaned with the strain. Doyle closed the door, cocked the hammer of the pistol, covered Devine, and lifted the lantern higher.

A body lay twisted grotesquely at the foot of the bunk; a figure in black, still wearing a mask. One of the assassins. Strangled with his own garrote. Three men killed; only one of them left alive.

"What do you want?" asked Doyle.

Father Devine took one step forward, did not shield his eyes from the light, and Doyle saw him clearly, head on, for the first time since they'd boarded the ship; saw the jagged ivory scar along his jawline, saw the light in the man's eyes he hadn't taken in before, and it pummeled the breath from his lungs.

The priest smiled thinly, looking down at the body on the floor.

"This one was waiting for you," he said, all the Irish in him gone. "He died before I could learn anything useful."

It wasn't possible.

Good Christ. Good Christ, yes it was. It was him.

Jack Sparks.