“He spent a long time here…but he isn’t here now. Are we near a hotel?”
Thompson blinked in surprise. “We’re on the doorstep of a big one.”
Hesha felt for the trail through the bead. “Southwest,” he said. The car rolled on, and within half a block, he knew the traces were colder than those he’d followed. “Back again. East from the hotel.” Again, there was a trail, but a stale one. “Stop. Back again.”
“Sir?”
“What is it?” asked Hesha, wearily.
“Let me drive around the block a few times. When you find a good lead, tell me. His ‘footprints’ are going to be a hell of a mess right in front of where he’s staying.”
“Do it.”
“Stop.” Hesha opened his eyes. “He’s here.” Thompson looked into the back seat. “Sir, I think maybe you’d better hurry.”
Hesha stepped onto the curb, and understood. They had pulled up outside Grand Central Station. Hesha very nearly ran to the entrance. He hurtled into the crowds on the main floor, his quick senses devouring the faces of the travelers he brushed past. He scanned the forms of the passengers and pick-ups waiting in the long rows of seats as his footsteps took him instinctively to the walls.
Kettridge was not, now, buying a ticket at the counters or eating at any of the stalls, but he had been to both. He had not, though Hesha’s search was taking time, left the building. The Setite drew slowly to a halt. It ill befitted him to run around the platforms and into the subways. He sought the solitude of an empty bank of phones, and pulled his own sleek model from his coat.
Behind him, one of the pay machines rang. He ignored it, and began dialing for Thompson, but it rang and rang until he grabbed it, checked the receiver reflexively, and put it to his ear.
“Hello, Ruhadze. How’s death treating you?”
“Professor Kettridge,” acknowledged Hesha.
“It’s been a long time since Syria, hasn’t it?”
“For you.”
“Yes,” said Kettridge. “for me. You haven’t changed, a bit, of course. No scars from that last firefight at Baalbek, I notice. I imagine I look like hell, though.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“I don’t intend for you to be able to.” The mortal’s voice held a sharper edge than before, and he continued, “You’re getting sloppy in your old age. Using a girl you were seen with so publicly to make the contact—hardly your usual finesse, is it?” Hesha said nothing. “Or were you behind the burglary attempt?”
“That might be a better guess.”
“I’ll give you credit, though, you weren’t behind the high bid.”
“I’d double it, if I thought you were interested.”
“We both know I’m not…. How about a trade, instead?” Kettridge inquired, thoughtfully.
“What would you take for the bead?”
“I’m not bartering beads today,” said the professor. “I’ll trade you information.”
Hesha considered. “I’m listening.”
“I’ll tell you where the high bid came from, if you’ll tell me why every dead man in the world seems interested in my little lucky charm.”
“Not good enough. There are probably five or more intermediaries between you and the bidder.”
“No, not this time. Someone was in an awful hurry.” Temptation brushed by Hesha, and she was smiling. “Tell me where the high bid came from, and I’ll answer three questions about your bead. Specific questions. How helpful the answers are will depend, of course, on how intelligently you put your questions.”
For nearly a full minute—which Hesha spent in efforts to pinpoint Kettridge and his “lucky charm”—the line gave up nothing but static.
“Harlem. What is the bead?”
“It’s the eye of a statue.”
Kettridge named a street. “Why does it pull me toward Atlanta?”
“It’s a subsidiary item to a more powerful artifact. Your eye can locate the main artifact. The main artifact is or was in Atlanta.”
“2417A. Basement entrance. How did you find me here tonight?”
“I have another eye of the statue. It can locate your eye. I can follow you anywhere you go, Kettridge,” said Hesha, and the mortal could hear the smile in the creature’s voice.
The professor, from his own booth deep within the maze of the station, felt a chill run down his spine. He hefted a duffel bag onto his shoulder, and felt the comforting metal lumps of his weapons within. “I wouldn’t recommend that, Ruhadze,” he said evenly. “I’ve learned a lot since Baalbek.”
“Good. Let me offer you some advice.” Hesha whispered into the phone. “Get out of New York as fast as you can. I won’t come after you—yet—but if the address you gave me is correct, you have half the hounds of hell on your tail.”
“I know. I’ve singed some. Your kind don’t like crowds or fire, do they?”
“Don’t assume anything. Don’t call them my kind,” hissed Hesha. “And if you want to rely on crowds for protection, don’t go to Atlanta or the other riot zones.”
Kettridge looked down at his tickets: Amtrak to Atlanta—through D.C. and Raleigh. He was suddenly afraid. “Damn it, Hesha—your telling me not to is a good reason to go! Why should I trust you? Why warn me? Why all these mindgames? God, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation—give me a reason why I should believe a single fucking thing you’ve said, from start to finish?”
“I would rather that you kept the bead, Jordan, than have it fall into the hands of the high bidder. In the riot zones, they won’t care about witnesses. Understand?” He waited. “Jordan?”
The line was dead, and though Hesha quickly found a phone still warm from his rival’s hand, he felt the red eye speeding away south. In ten minutes, he could no longer sense it at all.
part two:
maryland
Friday, 2 July 1999, 6:20 PM
Laurel Ridge Farm
Columbia, Maryland
Elizabeth strained to see through the twilight. The woods around them looked much like the woods they’d been traveling through for the past ten minutes, and the road was the same nearly unmarked, two-lane affair it had been. She knew that Columbia was a large, built-up suburb. Logically, there should be houses, shops, lights, and larger streets nearby, but she hadn’t seen any since the last stop sign.
The sedan passed a yellow diamond with the most elaborate squiggle on it that Elizabeth had ever seen. She grasped the armrest tightly, and they took a series of curves like a drunken roller coaster. Thompson flicked up the headlights halfway through a sweeping arc, and gray tree-trunks flashed by in a blur. They sped around one last corner and turned up a driveway. It clung to a creekside and then edged its way up the side of a hill, passing a mailbox, unmarked. They bumped gently and slowly over gravelly macadam, crested the shoulder of the hill, and Elizabeth had her first sight of the house of Hesha Ruhadze.
In the center, facing the drive, was a solid massif—a majestically proportioned old house with tall, mullioned windows, grand double-doors under a neoclassical lintel, and perfect symmetry. As the car pulled around, she saw a later addition, tacked on by a lesser architect for a larger family. The back wing tried to echo the front, but it was cluttered with odd side-roofs, long eaves, dormer rooms, and gables that projected at impossible angles. The whole mess was painted white—not recently, and not for the first time. Good red brick showed at the corners, where the winds had had the best chance to knock the flakes away. The roof was verdigris-green copper in excellent repair, and behind a morass of bracken and wildflowers, Elizabeth could see a real fieldstone foundation running underneath it all. It was shabby. It wasn’t what she had expected. It did have charm.
Thompson eased the car over the weed-eaten drive and pulled up to a slightly more modern-looking barn. He touched a button on his console and the broad doors slid open. The black sedan rolled gingerly into place beside a car that might have been its twin, and stopped.
Elizabeth stepped
onto the clean-swept brick floor. She dragged her carry-on, her purse, and satchel out with her. Thompson walked around, pulled her checked bags from the trunk, and groaned.
“What do you have in here, bricks?”
“They’re books. I’m working on my doctorate in Art History. That one rolls, by the way. We can pile everything else on top of it.”
“What’s your concentration?” he asked, as he swung the lighter suitcase into place and clipped it down.
“It’s rather obscure…call it comparative symbology.”
“What does that mean?” Thompson began trolling the double-decker baggage along a moss-covered path of slate flagstones.
“Um. Take a bull in a painting—a painting you don’t have captions for because you can’t read the script the people wrote in. Does it represent fertility? A sacrifice? An amount of goods for barter? A god? If it is a god, which god is it, and why did the painter use the allegory of ‘god as bull’? And did it represent that god before or after an invasion from another culture that happened to have a thing for cattle?”
Thompson manhandled the cases up three wooden steps to the porch. “Why can’t it just be a bull?” He punched a code into a keypad next to a wasps’ nest and opened the door to let her through.
“Sometimes it is. But my specialty is very primitive motifs. The farther back in history you go, the less plain doodling you get, and the more each symbol means something important to the person who made it.”
Elizabeth turned to look around her. They’d come into the long, narrow kitchen. The appliances were ultra-modem, but the cabinets and table looked, to her experienced eye, as if they were original to the house. She drifted a little into the working end of things, and fiddled idly with a white enamel drawer pull.
“Just set your stuff down here,” said Thompson. “You have your choice of rooms, so I’ll show you around and let you pick before I take your bag of bricks anywhere. Come on.”
He led her through a wide hall into the older half of the building and up a dark and creaking staircase.
“My room is down that way,” he said, inclining his graying head to the back of the house. “And the cook’s, too; you’ll meet him later. The guest rooms are in the front.” Thompson leaned into an open doorway, turned a lamp on inside, and stepped away for Elizabeth to have a look. “Or, if you aren’t claustrophobic, you can come downstairs. Some people don’t like the idea of basements….”
“No, that’s fine. I worked under the Met four summers running, and you feel the traffic through the tabletops down there.”
The cellar door from the kitchen still led down to the cellar—but where the original inhabitants had left packed earth floors, Hesha Ruhadze had laid shining planks stained nearly black. The fieldstone foundations formed the walls, and support pillars four feet square stood in carefully cut gaps in the dark wood.
The main room was filled with display cases and glass-fronted shelves. Here and there a couch and table, a chair and desk, or stool and workbench were grouped near the exhibits. Several huge tables held binding supplies, pieces of pottery in reconstruction, and other temptations for the historian. Elizabeth dragged her feet past a long, low table full of things that needed her ministrations, and only when Thompson cleared his throat and called her could she turn away. On the other side of the long hall—at what she thought must be the outer edge of the house upstairs—he waited at the bottom of short flight of wide, slate steps, holding open a door made in the same style as the floor.
“This was Mr. Vegel’s room,” he said.
“Mr. Vegel?” The little apartment was richly furnished in a very Victorian, masculine fashion. Three walls were paneled and the fourth was wood only to waist height; above the chair rail it was covered in white satin fabric, and discreet silver pins held papers, photographs, and pieces of fabric to it as if to a huge bulletin board.
“Mr. Ruhadze didn’t mention him?” Thompson asked. She shook her head but didn’t show much curiosity. He let the subject go. “Books and so forth here,” he said, unnecessarily. The entire wall was shelves, not full, but comfortably crowded. He and the Asp had had a rough day going through Vegel’s apartment. Hesha’s list of items forbidden to the newcomer was long, and there weren’t many safe places to store the really dangerous things. After the clean-out, Thompson’s practiced hands had massaged the gaps in the shelves. Unless you knew how full Vegel had kept his office, you’d never realize anything was missing. Thompson watched the girl react to the room, her fingers wandering along the rows of rare and expensive editions, and decided that the boss’s guess had been correct. It always was.
“Mr. Vegel was the previous curator. He lived down here, mostly. Of course, you’re the only guest. You could turn this room into office space, work area, whatever you need, and actually sleep upstairs. The guest rooms do have nice views, particularly in the summer.”
“Oh, no,” said Elizabeth, looking at the desk and the library. “This will be perfect.”
“I’ll bring down your things.” As he left, Thompson smiled in satisfaction. Trust Hesha to know what was catnip, and for which kitties…. He pressed a code on the kitchen intercom, and spoke into it. “Sir?”
“Yes, Thompson?”
“Miss Dimitros is here. She’s chosen Vegel’s room. I’ll bring her things down in a moment. I’ve left the impression that you won’t be available for at least an hour yet.”
“Thank you. I’ll see her when Janet and I have finished.”
Thompson cut the connection. He picked up Elizabeth’s carry-on, and took from the closest drawer an object that manifestly did not belong in a kitchen—a hand-held metal scanner. All the bags were clean.
He looked longingly at the hall leading into the old house. In the space between the walls, there was a hidden elevator. But Elizabeth might not be in her room when the car opened in the first basement, and so he slung her bag full of books over his broad shoulders, and used the stairs. The girl was deep in a book when he brought the luggage in, but she smiled and offered to help.
“No thanks,” said Thompson. He put the heavy case in a convenient corner—blocking her off, he hoped, from finding the door hidden there—and in two more trips all her things were with her.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have some chores to see to, and business arrangements to make for Mr. Ruhadze’s townhouse. If you need anything, there’s an intercom here by the door,” he said, sliding open a wooden panel. “Just press the green button and speak into it.” He closed the tiny cabinet again, walked out, and shut the door softly behind him.
Elizabeth looked up from her unpacking. Was that a knock? She closed the drawer on her socks, crossed the room—now rather cluttered with open suitcases and boxes of notes—and opened the door.
“Good evening, Elizabeth.”
“Hello, Hesha.”
They wavered on the threshold. “Come on in,” she said, smiling. “I’m still in the messy stages of the explosion, I’m afraid.” She backed into the room, and gestured vaguely.
Hesha lowered himself into Vegel’s chair, stretched his legs out, and watched her move. She rattled off expressions of gratitude, compliments for Thompson, and amazement at the house. She had questions about the building, and he answered them with his connoisseur’s voice and attitude…a stock character, a mask held up for her to look at while he studied her. She was nervous, but comfortable with the surroundings. It was he himself who made her fingers restless and the tiny muscles of her face unsettled. Every time she looked to him, a question was in her eyes, and he made sure to keep all the answers out of his own.
He found himself relieved that the Beast remained calm in her presence…and was shocked to realize that he had been worried unawares. What was it that had given the thing so much strength in her apartment? The statue? His worries about the Sabbat’s machinations? Vegel’s disappearance? He determined to watch the Beast and his own mind more closely—the weakness could not be allowed to remain.
“Are
you tired?” he asked, changing the subject.
Elizabeth stopped in mid-fold. “No.”
“But you had to think about it?”
“It’s nearly ten, isn’t it? I suppose that I should be—I had to be up early to pack—but I’m too excited about the work. I caught a glimpse of some of the pieces coming down here.”
He nodded understandingly. “Would you like a tour?
Absolutely.” Halfway to the door she stopped and faced him earnestly. “Unless you’re tired. I don’t want to keep you from your schedule….”
“I confess that I succumbed to temptation earlier. West Coast lawyers are the worst, I think. I had the cook bring down some coffee…Turkish coffee. I’ll be awake all night,” he sighed, “but it was the only way I could deal with the fools who were chattering at me. Besides, tomorrow is Saturday. Only my international affiliates will try to get at me, and my secretary can say ‘No’ in forty languages.”
Elizabeth chuckled and followed him out.
“…And the ventilation system is fully labeled…if you have any problems, do let Thompson know,” said Hesha. He turned to another corner of the workshop.
“This flat file is full of paper that needs acid-balance treatment. The vertical stores contain ten or twelve paintings that need work of one kind or another, and I have all kinds of stabilization projects, of course. I know that painting restoration is a specialty of yours. If you’ll finish just that section during your stay here, I’d be amply compensated for your expenses. However, if you’d like to try your hand at more unusual things…” He paced back into the main room at a businesslike clip. “Here,” he said, almost smiling, “is the emperor of all jigsaw puzzles.”
It was under glass, on the longest, narrowest table in the entire museum. On smooth fabric lay what once had been a scroll. “Papyrus,” said Hesha. “Part of the grave goods of a pharaoh. Thieves robbed the tomb but the left the ‘rubbish’ behind—baskets, clay pots, food. This was in a plain wooden case, and they ignored it. More literate thieves picked it up later. Unfortunately, it has been shaken and jarred, and some fool tried to unroll it.”
Clan Novel Setite: Book 4 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 8