“My God,” I said. “What happened to him?”
“He refused to eat,” said Epstein. “We tried to forcefeed 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 up 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 near 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 anony
mous 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, and 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 five 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 doors opened. The man who faced us 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 his 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? SAC 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 Stu
ckler. 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 location.
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