by Rob Rogers
“In exchange for what?” Costas asked.
“My loyalty in return, of course,” the Robber Baron said. He poured in more tobacco, then began packing that in as well. “I can strengthen your position.” He twisted his thumb in the pipe. “When your uncle passes on, an alliance with me will cement your own role of authority within your family. You’ll keep your family in line with my agendas, and all of us will benefit as a result.”
“My grandfather lived to be ninety-six,” Costas said. “I expect Uncle Ilias to be around a very long time.”
“Hmm.” The Robber Baron half-chuckled. His pipe fully packed, he tied the drawstrings of the velvet pouch and replaced it in his pocket. “Nevertheless,” he said. “When the Hangman’s time has passed, when your uncle’s time has passed, you will become my ally, yes?” He pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket that held the pouch and carefully began cleaning the tobacco off the thumb of his glove. He still hadn’t lit the pipe.
Costas turned away from the other man and stared out the window. Darkness was falling quickly. The city below was streaked with the dull red of the dying sun. “I’ll have no part in anything that harms my uncle—”
The Robber Baron waved it off. “Of course, of course,” he said. “Nevertheless.”
Costas’s mouth was dry. He tasted bile. The Robber Baron was moving into Devil’s Cape. He already controlled the Ferazzolis. Costas had heard rumors of other alliances. The drug runners. Some of the politicos. If anything happened to Uncle Ilias, if the Hangman’s organization fell apart, the Kalodimos machine would either need to join with the Robber Baron or be crushed under his polished heel. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
The Robber Baron nodded gravely, as though yeah, okay were a solemn oath. And perhaps it was. He replaced the handkerchief and pulled out a book of matches. He tore one free, then struck it, placing it against the tobacco. He leaned into the pipe and puffed slowly, drawing the flame in.
“When and if that time comes,” Costas said.
The Robber Baron nodded again. When the match had nearly burned itself down to the fingers of his glove, he shook it out briskly, tossing the spent match into the car’s ashtray. Orange embers glimmered from the pipe. He folded the matchbook back and Costas noticed the insignia now. The Naked Eye. The Hangman’s favorite strip club. The Robber Baron followed his gaze and smiled, nodding and sliding the matchbook back into his vest. He inclined his head toward one of the buildings below them. Purple and blue neon lights flashed across its concrete walls. The Naked Eye. The Robber Baron had chosen this turn-off very deliberately. “The time has come,” he said.
And then Costas saw the smoke. Not the gently scented smoke of the pipe, slowly swirling in the Continental. Thick, gray, roiling smoke breaking out of the Naked Eye, billowing out into the setting sun. The purple and blue lights on the walls undulated as the smoke poured out of the building. After a long few seconds, Costas heard sirens in the distance, but they were far, far away.
“A fire,” Costas said, for lack of anything better to say. “And the Hangman and Uncle Ilias are inside.”
The Robber Baron said nothing. He just took a long draw from his pipe.
“They could get out,” Costas said. The pipe smoke was cloying now. He felt like it was choking him, though he knew that that was just a reaction to what he was watching below. “It’s just a fire. They could get out.”
The Robber Baron shook his head. “No one’s getting out,” he said.
Costas shoved the door open, the cold air sudden and cutting. He rushed out of the car toward the edge of the bluff. He could see flames now. The building didn’t have many windows, of course, and the ones it had were shaded, but he could see the blaze inside, flames creeping across the roof. And then he saw that the doors were blocked. A van was parked against one door, a trash dumpster shoved against another. A car had driven right up against the front door of the club, its bumper holding everything shut. He wondered how many people were trapped inside the club. Maybe a dozen strippers. Another dozen staff. Twenty or thirty patrons. And not just Uncle Ilias and the Hangman, but their bodyguards. His cousin Nick. He imagined he could hear screams, but it might just have been the howling of the wind.
He felt the Robber Baron’s hand on his shoulder. “The time has come,” the masked man said.
The sirens were still a long way away. “Yeah,” Costas Kalodimos said with a sigh. “Yeah, okay.”
In August twenty-three years ago, the Devil’s Cape press corps was surprised to be summoned to an impromptu press conference by the Omega, a Chicago-based superhero who held the conference on the steps of City Hall, in the shadow of the bronze statue of the pirate St. Diable.
A former Navy SEAL named Lieutenant Dale Thorp, the Omega gained his powers, which included astonishing strength and speed, during the course of a mission that has yet to be declassified. Upon retiring from the Navy, Thorp took on the Omega identity and earned a reputation as one of America’s greatest heroes, revered for his bravery, self-effacement, and calm in the face of adversity.
So if the reporters gathered there on that hot day were surprised to see the Omega in Devil’s Cape, they were even more surprised at his demeanor. . .
— Excerpted from The Masks of Devil’s Cape, special documentary airing on WTDC News, Jason Kale reporting
Chapter Three
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
August, twenty-three years ago
The Omega stood at the top of the City Hall steps looking down at a throng of men and women armed with cameras and notebooks. Tall, muscular, and ruggedly handsome, he had a pale complexion and shortly cropped black hair that flickered in the faint, humid breeze. His uniform was navy blue at the chest and shoulders and the center of his stomach, the boots a matching shade. The rest was crisp and gray, with the exception of a red belt and a red omega symbol with white borders in the center of his chest. The Omega had never worn a mask or gloves. He wasn’t sweating like the crowd below him. The sunlight in his eyes didn’t make him squint. But his face was flushed and angry.
“I have come to Devil’s Cape today,” he said, “to clean up a mess that the citizens of this cesspool should have cleaned up themselves.” He turned and pointed at the statue of St. Diable. “This is your city’s beloved founder. A pirate. A brigand. A criminal. You venerate your pirate origins.” He turned back, sweeping his hands wide. “You tolerate your criminal reputation.” He shook a fist. “And you assassinate the people who try to pull you up to something better.”
He stomped his foot on the concrete, which shook and cracked from the loud blow, dust rising and curling around his boot.
“I lost a friend yesterday,” the Omega said. He lowered his head, and the cameras zoomed in to capture the tears in his eyes. “Navy Lieutenant Victor Hobson joined the Devil’s Cape police force to try to clean up some of your corruption for you.” He pointed at the reporters. “He told me that in particular, he was trying to find enough evidence against the man you call the Robber Baron to force even your crooked judicial system to put the man behind bars.”
The Omega lowered his hand and the anger leached out of his face. He looked tired, sad, and a little confused.
“Victor was found murdered yesterday,” the Omega said. “Shot in the back of the head with a shotgun. His fellow police officers, the ones who should be moving heaven and earth to uncover the truth of his murder, have already labeled the evidence inconclusive and told me they have no real leads.” He shook his head. “I’m amazed that people still come to this city. People come here to live. Tourists come in by the busloads to see the pirate artifacts and live on the wild side. You even have crime tours that celebrate some of the worst tragedies this city has inflicted.” He shook his head again, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. “I wonder if Victor’s death will stack up.”
The reporters looked at each other. They hadn’t even had time to ask him a question yet.
“I’ve had enough,” the Omega said. “If you won�
��t address your problems, I will address them for you. I am going to find out who is responsible for murdering my friend. And heaven help anyone who stands in my goddamn way.”
With that, he turned his back on the gathered reporters and walked away from them, making his way into Devil’s Cape’s Government Center district.
That was the last time anyone ever saw the Omega, at least anyone who would admit to it. It was as though he had disappeared off the face of the earth, or as though Devil’s Cape had swallowed him whole.
The site of his last speech is a regular stop on the city’s popular crime tours.
— Excerpted from The Masks of Devil’s Cape, special documentary airing on WTDC News, Jason Kale reporting
Ma’s Spectacular Amusements offers Action, Adventure, Sensation, and More Fun.
— From the side of a carnival truck
Chapter Four
Langdon Fork, Louisiana
August, twenty-three years ago
Although they were coated with dust and spattered with mud and muck, the three trucks stood out against the green and gray expanse of the Louisiana swamp like flaming cinders in the ashes of a dying fire. The thick haze of dusk and the coating of debris weren’t enough to dim the bright red and orange and cerulean paint that decorated the trucks carrying the sideshow performers from Ma’s Spectacular Amusements traveling carnival.
The driver of the front truck was immensely tall and muscular, bald, and covered from throat to toes with tattoos. His body was big—he topped seven feet—and his head was disproportionably larger, like a barrel placed on his neck. That humid summer night, he wore a sleeveless black shirt and cut-off jeans with no shoes. He was called the Behemoth by others in the carnival. He’d abandoned his real name—Zechariah Woods—long ago, and though he was billed as “the Bayou Barbarian Behemoth” and carnival owner Justin Ma had taken to calling him “Triple B” in a failed attempt at bonhomie, it was “the Behemoth” that stuck.
The bullshit back story that Ma had come up with for him involved him being discovered living alone in the bayou as a child, already covered with tattoos, with no family but a nest of alligators. The spiel continued with the heroic Ma rescuing him, taking him in as his own son, and trying in vain to civilize him. Onlookers would gawk as the Behemoth scurried around hunched over in a cage, knuckles dragging the ground, howling and snapping his jaws like a gator. Sometimes he’d end the bit by catching a chicken that had “accidentally” made its way into his reach, biting its head off and drinking its blood. Other times he’d climb a wall, unscrew a light bulb, casting dark shadows into the cage, and then proceed to eat the bulb, crunching the glass in his teeth like peanut brittle. And then the lights would go out, the audience would be shuffled on to the next attraction, and if the Behemoth were lucky, he’d have five or ten minutes to relax with a cigarette and a Flannery O’Connor or Faulkner paperback before the next set.
Frank Horodenski, the carnival electrician or “juice man,” shifted restlessly in the seat next to the Behemoth, holding up a copy of the Devil’s Cape Daily Courier and tilting it this way and that, trying to catch the last few rays of fading sunlight so that he could finish his story. Lean and young, with mud-brown hair, Horodenski sported a perpetual sunburn. The Behemoth wished he’d stayed with the generator truck and the other carnival trucks, already on their way to Jackson, Mississippi, but Horodenski was one of those who liked hanging out with the freaks, and it hadn’t seemed worth the effort of dislodging him.
One of the trucks behind them had something fouled in its engine, and it popped and wheezed and smoked as they drove along. As the dirt and gravel road made a lazy curve, following the edge of an old creek bed, they could hear that truck’s engine stuttering and coughing, like someone was banging rocks together underneath the hood.
“Fouled carburetor, probably,” Horodenski said, looking up from the paper. “Sounds like it to me.”
The Behemoth grunted noncommittally.
Horodenski squinted at the paper one last time, then set it down beside him with a sigh. “Did you hear about the Omega?” he asked.
The Behemoth reached forward and turned the truck’s headlights on. He thought about turning the interior light on so that the juice man could finish his paper, but he decided he didn’t want to.
Horodenski rolled on as though the Behemoth’s silence were an invitation to continue. “Comes in two days ago and makes a big stink,” he said. “Planning to take on the Robber Baron, clean up the crime in Pirate Town. Yells at a lot of people. Then nothing. Nobody knows where he is.”
“Probably found himself a whore,” the Behemoth said.
“You think so?” Horodenski poked at his own forearm, testing to see how bad his sunburn was. He shrugged, fishing around in his pockets for a cigarette. “I wonder if the Robber Baron chased him off.”
The Behemoth slowed the truck without warning, swinging it over to the side of the road. The brakes of the truck behind them squealed in protest. “Just stay here,” he said to Horodenski. “We’ll be back on the road in five.”
He cut the engine, shoved the door open with a clank, reached one hand over to the handrail on the side of the cab and lowered himself to the ground, the entire weight of his body suspended in transit by one tightly flexed arm. As he lowered himself, the tattoo of a skeleton in a sombrero danced on his forearm.
“I think this is far enough,” he called out to Hector Nelson Poteete, the driver of the second truck, who waved back in acknowledgment and cut his own engine.
The Behemoth peered back down the dirt road, then out into the bubbling swamp, and finally up into the darkening sky. They were a good fifteen minutes outside of Langdon Fork, a tiny hamlet that was itself a good thirty miles from the edge of Devil’s Cape. Aside from the three sideshow trucks, he saw no sign of other people.
The third truck was the one whose engine was stuttering. The Behemoth pointed at the driver, then drew his finger across his throat, just over the black spider-web tattoo there. The third driver turned his engine off, too, and the sudden reduction in noise almost rocked the Behemoth back. He cupped a hand to his ear and listened. He heard crickets and fish, the bubbling of swamp gases, the rustling of something large—probably an alligator—moving through the muck. But no other cars, no approaching boats. He nodded his oversized head in satisfaction.
“What the hell are we doing way out here in the swamp?” The driver of the third truck trotted forward, his steps long and awkward. He was walking with the outer edges of his feet on the ground, the soles of his feet pointing toward each other. Clayton Xavier Stecker was the carnival’s “Indian” rubber man, and he was so used to twisting his double-jointed limbs that normal locomotion seemed to be beyond him. “Did you hear that sound my rig was making?”
The Behemoth sighed. It was just one damned thing after another. “Go back to your truck, Stecker,” the Behemoth said. His brown eyes were flat.
Although he was over six feet tall when standing straight, Stecker—“the Karnivorous Kraken of Kiribati”—was a thin, blond stick of a man. That night, he was wearing an old orange Florida Gators T-shirt and red running pants, and his tanned limbs jutted out of his clothes like broken broomsticks. He tilted his head over to one side, peering up at the Behemoth. If the Behemoth had seen someone else with a neck tilted like that, he’d figure the person was dead. But he knew it wasn’t unusual for the contortionist.
Stecker reached up to poke the Behemoth in the chest. “You get a promotion I don’t know about, makes it so I can’t ask you questions?”
The Behemoth looked past Stecker toward the second truck and the driver inside, Hector Poteete, the fire swallower. After all, this unscheduled detour was Hector’s gig. He should be the one dealing with Stecker and his questions. Poteete looked back at the Behemoth, nodding to acknowledge the situation, but then he busied himself gathering together some items in the cab. Passing the buck.
Stecker scratched at the collar of his shirt. “Did you get us
lost? You show me a map, I can point you back in the right direction.” He shrugged philosophically. “Ain’t no shame you can’t read a map, big old blockhead like yours.”
The Behemoth dropped a heavy hand onto the rubber man’s shoulder, the thumb pressing into the hollow of the other man’s collarbone. Stecker gasped in pain. The Behemoth dug in harder. “They call it macrocephaly,” he said. “The big head. It doesn’t mean I’m slow. It doesn’t mean I’m crazy. All it means is I’ve got a big damn head.” He leaned toward Stecker, smelled onions on the other man’s breath. “Albert Einstein was macrocephalic,” he said.
Stecker nodded, tears in his eyes as the Behemoth’s fingers grated harder into his collarbone. He quivered.
“You going to go back to your truck now, Stecker?” The Behemoth leaned closer so that their foreheads were nearly touching. There was something stuck in Stecker’s teeth, a piece of chicken, maybe. He thought about breaking Stecker’s collarbone. The skinny little shit just pissed him off. Rumor was he’d come to Ma’s Spectacular Amusements because the police were looking at him for a string of rapes—something like half a dozen coeds from across the Florida panhandle during spring break. The Behemoth didn’t care much about the rapes except for what they said they said about Stecker—that he was a petty, stupid little shitweasel who could bring trouble on all of them if they weren’t careful. And that he had good reason to be looking for anything he could trade to the cops if he ended up getting caught.
He heard footsteps brushing through the dirt behind them. Hector Poteete—billed as “Hector Hell, the Foremost Fire-Eater of His Generation”—had finally climbed out of the second truck and was making his way over, dragging his leather sandals through the dirt. Short and paunchy, Poteete had thinning red hair and was the only fire-eater who the Behemoth had ever heard of who wore a beard. The beard was a point of pride for the man, and the Behemoth had to admit that it was impressive that he’d managed to avoid burning the thing off before now—especially since Poteete never seemed to shy away from an open flame. That level of skill put him a cut above the other working acts, at least in the Behemoth’s eyes.