by Rob Rogers
The house reflected Hicks’s experience with cannons. At first glance, it was in the traditional French Creole style. A wide gallery in the front, a timber frame covered with bousillage—a mixture of mud and Spanish moss dried, flattened, and pressed against the unfinished walls, forming a natural insulation—protected with weather boards. Thin wooden columns and French doors. Airy to fight the Louisiana heat. But further inspection showed the modifications that had been made, first by the pirate Jack Hicks himself, and later by others, probably Lorenzo Ferazzoli for the most part. There were narrow windows between the more traditional ones, the paneling around them reinforced by extra timbers. They slid open to form murder-holes—thin spaces through which the pirate could have fired his gun from relatively safety. Even more dramatically, Hicks had added four turrets to the house, one in each corner, almost like crows’ nests. A rusting cannon still rested in each as testament to tradition, but years ago Lorenzo Ferazzoli had added modern armaments to the turrets—some kind of mounted machine guns he’d ordered from Eastern Europe called KGKs. He’d once threatened to turn Costas into dog meat with one of them.
There were other modern modifications, too. There were electronic sensors, of course. Bright lights to turn the lawn into high noon even on a cloudy night. And every piece of glass in windows was bulletproof now, something else Lorenzo had bragged about. As if Costas would have shot him through a window. He chuckled a little to himself. As if the bulletproof glass had saved him when Costas had decided it was finally time for old Lorenzo to die.
“The house that Jack and Lorenzo built,” Costas Kalodimos muttered as he steered his Lexus onto Tony Ferazzoli’s cobblestone driveway, not bothering to acknowledge the guard standing on duty in the gate building.
“What’s that, Dad?” Costas’s son Nick—named after a cousin who had died years before in the infamous fire at the Naked Eye that had killed dozens, including Costas’s Uncle Ilias and the Hangman—sat beside him. Nick had an earpiece jammed in one ear and was nervously drumming his palms against his thighs. For whatever reason, although he hardly ever wore anything but T-shirts that showed off the muscles he was so proud of, Nick was wearing a crisp-collared long-sleeved blue shirt and hadn’t even rolled his sleeves up.
Costas waved a hand. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wondering who’s going to live in the house now Tony’s gone.”
“Probably Vinnie,” Nick said.
Vincent Marcus was Tony Ferazzoli’s nephew and served more or less as Tony’s lieutenant. It would be a good fit. A lean, dark man with spectacles and an accounting degree, Marcus was smarter than Tony had been. Hungrier.
Nick shrugged. “One goomba’s the same as another,” he said.
“A philosopher,” Costas said, smoothly parking the Lexus behind the Robber Baron’s huge crimson limousine and switching off the ignition.
Nick’s hands were still patting at his jeans. Probably rap music he was listening to. Or one of those party girl divas.
“Would it kill you to wear a nice pair of pants for a change?”
Nick looked over at his father and ran his hand through his short hair. He yanked the earpiece out and turned off the music player clipped to his waist. “It just might,” he said. He looked out the window. Even in the dim light, it was obvious that the lawn, usually meticulously landscaped, was in a state of decay. Thistles and dandelions pushed through patches of browning grass. Nick shook his head. “The new Ferazzoli’s letting things go to shit already,” he said. “How hard is it to get some spic to yank your weeds?”
Costas reached over and unclipped the music player from his son’s belt.
Nick glanced at his father, but didn’t respond. He tapped the glass instead, glancing back at the gatehouse, where there was no sign of movement. “No one even going to walk us inside? Tony was a sack of garbage on legs, but even he knew to treat us with a little respect, you know?”
“I know,” Costas said. He opened the door and stepped outside. The air was warm and dank. There was an edge to it, ripe. Like a feral animal was nearby. There was pipe smoke, too. The Robber Baron’s.
Nick got out, too, and slammed his door loudly. Making a point.
Costas gave him a withering look. “It’s early Sunday morning,” he said. “You pissed at Tony’s neighbors, too? Maybe one of them should have run out of bed and walked you to the door.”
Offended, Nick stomped up to Tony’s entryway.
Not for the first time, Costas wished Nick could be a little more like his cousin Julian. Of course, that was part of the problem. Costas trusted Julian with more responsibility that he was willing to give his own son, and all three of them were painfully aware of it. Nick was younger, true, but he was old enough that that excuse was wearing thin. Costas sighed, walked past a pair of black-faced lawn jockeys—Tony had never been either politically correct or blessed with a modicum of taste—and rapped on the door.
They waited.
Nick rolled his eyes, brushing at his short hair again. His scalp glistened with sweat.
It was oddly quiet. On the other occasions when he’d been to the house—both in Lorenzo’s day and in Tony’s, usually when the Robber Baron wanted his lieutenants to make nice—there’d been a clamor of barking dogs. Doubloon dogs. But it had been quiet the first time after Lorenzo died, with his dogs put down and Tony not having any yet. And he supposed Tony’s dogs had been killed, too, though he had difficulty imagine anything being loyal enough to Tony Ferazzoli that it would mourn his death.
They waited.
“The hell,” Nick muttered.
Costas held out a hand for his son to be patient.
The door swung open with a squeak. At first, Costas thought it had opened all by itself, that the foyer was deserted. At one point, in the days of Lorenzo Ferazzoli, that entry point into the mansion had been grand. White walls and white marble floors. Bronze sconces and a crystal chandelier. Now it was a cluttered, jumbled mess. Tony or his wife had hung a Degas on one wall and a Kandinsky on the other. A Persian rug lay awkwardly in the middle of the floor, and someone had clearly used it to wipe his feet. Gold sun-catchers dangled amidst the bronze. A Victorian étagère with chipped black varnish stood against one wall, a looking glass propped against it.
But then Costas saw in the reflection in the looking glass that the room wasn’t deserted after all. A scaled hand held the door handle tight. The arm attached to the hand curved through the length of the foyer and around a corner toward Tony Ferazzoli’s living room like a thick, quivering snake.
Kraken of the Cirque d’Obscurité was there.
Costas and Nick looked at each other. Nick tugged uncomfortably at his sleeves, then stepped into the foyer, Costas behind him.
Kraken stepped forward, his hand still on the door, his arm shortening as he walked, the skin wrinkling like an elephant’s trunk and then slowly smoothing out. His face was completely hairless, the ears flat against the skull. When he smiled, they could see that all of his teeth ended in sharp points. He let go of the door and dropped his hand to his side. “Well, look who’s here,” he said. He wore a sleeveless red shirt and blue denim shorts. He was barefoot, walking oddly on the sides of his feet. The smile was menacing, challenging.
A portly man with thinning, graying red hair and a matching beard walked around Kraken into the entryway, and the temperature in the foyer climbed something like ten degrees in three seconds, going from cool to stifling. The looking glass against the étagère fogged over. Hector Hell. From what Costas had heard, most of the Cirque d’Obscurité wore normal clothing most of the time. Their otherness was enough to set them apart, to alienate and frighten those whom they wanted to alienate and frighten. But not Hector Hell. Even early in the morning in Tony Ferazzoli’s mansion, he was wearing a costume. He looked ridiculous in the form-fitting yellow spandex with the flame patterns running up and down his body like the decals on a 1977 muscle car. Even his flowing red cape and cavalier boots didn’t hide the fact that every extra ounce o
f body fat was on corpulent display. But the hint of flames flickered in his eyes, and the sheer heat coming off of him reminded Costas just how much danger he would be in if he crossed the man.
“Costas,” Hector Hell said, affecting a more genuine smile than Kraken’s. “Glad you could join us.” He reached out his hand.
Costas steeled himself and shook hands, afraid he would be burned. The other man’s palm was very warm, but not enough to scald. He could feel heat inside, though, like taking a hot pan out of an oven with a thin oven mitt. “Hector Hell,” Costas said with no inflection. “I didn’t realize you and your . . . people were going to be here this morning.”
Kraken chuckled. “You were expecting Tony Ferazzoli?”
“Shit, no,” Nick said, crossing his arms and standing up straight. “We just weren’t expecting you.”
Kraken’s smile broadened. “Hadn’t you heard?” he asked. “This is our place now.” By the tone of his voice, it might have meant the mansion. Or it might have meant Devil’s Cape itself.
* * * * *
The whole gang of Cirque d’Obscurité freaks was assembled in Tony Ferazzoli’s living room, clustered around the Robber Baron like he was holding court. Costas supposed he was.
The living room itself was a typical Tony mishmash. Tony had picked his furniture and decorations and toys because they were expensive, not because they were beautiful or functional. Tony Ferazzoli had no problem putting a Louis XIII sitting chair in front of a Danish Modern desk on top of a Persian carpet, then using the desktop as a place to store the remote controls for all the electronic equipment he never bothered to figure out how to use.
It was a big, low-ceilinged room. The Robber Baron sat in a leather recliner, legs crossed, puffing on his meerschaum pipe, gray smoke flowing across the ceiling in gentle waves. The woman—Osprey—sat on the edge of the chair, her side just barely pressed against the puffy sleeve of the Robber Baron’s arm. She wasn’t dressed in the full armored leather regalia that Costas had heard she usually wore into battle, but she still was wearing a lot of black leather. A fetish, maybe? A tight leather halter top left her tanned belly exposed. Her belly button was pierced—a diamond glittered there. She wore a leather miniskirt, too, with some kind of trench knife strapped to her calf. Huge feathered wings stretched out of her back. She had them spread out wide and they cast shadows over the Robber Baron. Costas wondered if she was sleeping with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Nick gaping at her, and elbowed his son gently.
The Behemoth stood at the back of the room—towering, bare-chested, arms crossed, head bent slightly to keep it from grazing the ceiling. He was grotesquely muscular, veins bulging. With the exception of his face, his entire body was covered with tattoos. Many of them were stretched and distorted, torn apart by whatever had changed him from what he had been into what he had become. But there were enough remaining to get the gist. They were animalistic and violent. A snarling tiger here, a black widow in a web there. A king cobra fanned out and preparing to strike. A twisted tree trunk with a haunting face, limbs outstretched. A red devil holding a pitchfork. Thick tusks jutted from the Behemoth’s lower jaw. His nose was squashed flat like a gorilla’s, the nostrils gaping. He ignored Nick and eyed Costas with wary intelligence, a smile curving slightly over those huge tusks.
The Werewolf was perched on the Louis XIII chair by the desk, feet tucked under him. He looked not too different than Costas might have imagined from a horror film—fur covering his body, an elongated snout, jutting ears like small sails. A long tail protruding from a hole cut into the back of his jeans. He growled softly as he saw Costas looking at him, and Costas’s heart skipped a beat. But the old Greek refused to look away. The Werewolf wore a sleeveless white wife-beater shirt with the slogan Come break your balls at Butler’s Billiards on the front. Cut-off jeans and no shoes. Costas had heard that the Werewolf could look human if he wanted to. Handsome, even. But this morning he sat there covered in fur, staring at Costas with angry yellow eyes, idly digging furrows into the leg of a four-hundred-year-old chair with a clawed hand.
The mass of scar tissue they called Gork stood behind the Robber Baron. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans and had a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda strapped in a shoulder holster across his chest. His neatly pressed clothing contrasted with his visible skin. He was covered with burns scars and some wounds that looked fresh, like nothing ever healed quite right for him. A trickle of blood ran down one side of his head, curving down the ear and soaking into the collar of his shirt. He didn’t seem to notice, nor did he seem bothered by the smoke curling out of the Robber Baron’s pipe and into his face. He just stood there staring hungrily at Osprey, jaw slack.
Hector Hell and Kraken followed Costas and Nick into the room, shutting the door behind them. Costas could still feel the heat coming off of Hector Hell. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.
Costas felt frightened in that room as he never had with Lorenzo or Tony Ferazzoli, as he never had with the Hangman or the Robber Baron. There was a sense of otherness about the Cirque d’Obscurité, of wrongness. They made him want to run.
Instead, he forced his attention to the Robber Baron, looking into the other man’s eyes through the mask. “Baron,” he said. “this isn’t quite what I expected when I got your call.”
The Robber Baron puffed on his pipe. He leaned over slightly to one side, pressing his arm against Osprey’s side. She leaned into him.
Sleeping together, then.
“You were expecting Vincent Marcus?” the Robber Baron asked. “A changing of the guard from one member of the Ferazzoli clan to another?”
“Something like that.”
The Robber Baron puffed again.
Hector Hell chuckled. It was a harsh, false sound.
The Robber Baron gestured expansively with the pipe. “We went through that before,” he said. “With Lorenzo’s unfortunate passing.” His eyes were cold as he watched Costas. He hadn’t been happy when Lorenzo Ferazzoli had died. “That didn’t work out very well,” he said. “Tony was an incompetent. He nearly exposed me more than once. Vincent Marcus is a cut above that, but only barely. There’s a place for him in my organization, but not at my side.”
“Speaking of incompetent,” Hector Hell said with a sneer. “What’s the deal with the Troll?” He held out his palm and a small blue and orange flame surged in the center of it. He watched it flicker, mesmerized, a smug smile on his face.
Costas’s stomach went tight. The Troll was the new leader of a black gang in Crabb’s Lament called the Concrete Executioners, or the CEs. The CEs pushed most of the drugs in Crabb’s Lament. They got the drugs from Costas’s organization. Costas looked at the Robber Baron. It was bad enough if the Robber Baron blamed Costas for the Troll’s arrest. But Hector Hell piping in like that and questioning Costas . . . it just wasn’t the kind of thing people did in front of the Robber Baron.
But the Robber Baron didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look perturbed at Hector Hell. He just stared at Costas, the top of a graying eyebrow appearing above his mask.
“The Troll’s already out on bail,” Costas said shortly. “There’s nothing there.”
Kraken settled himself into a cushioned leather couch, limbs twisting together in knots. He scratched at the scales on his neck. “He was caught by some guy called Argonaut,” he said.
Costas glanced at him. “So what?” He turned back to the Robber Baron.
“Argonaut’s a Greek name,” said the Werewolf. His voice was clear despite the lupine face, his accent Germanic. Costas turned to him. The Werewolf was still scratching at the Louis XIII chair. Tiny wood shavings fell to the carpet.
“Hey, that’s a funny accent you got,” Nick said, bristling and glaring. “That German or German shepherd?”
The Werewolf popped to his feet, growling deep in his throat, the hair at the back of his neck standing up.
“Errando!” Hector Hell snapped. “Not now.”
The Werew
olf glared at Nick, who glared right back. But then the Werewolf twisted his head just a bit to one side, his throat turned toward Hector Hell—a sign of submission. And he sat back down.
Costas felt a mix of exasperation and pride. Yeah, it was a bad time to be mouthing off, but Nick wasn’t backing down to the same kind of fear that his father was feeling. He looked at the Robber Baron. “I don’t know anything about this Argonaut,” he said.
The Robber Baron nodded. “He’s a curiosity,” he said. “But not much more. Others have tried to take this city away from me, but it hasn’t worked out well for them.”
“Sure as hell didn’t work for the Storm Raiders,” Gork said. His eyes glimmered. He was remembering helping to kill them, Costas thought. He had enjoyed it.
“Frank,” the Behemoth said from behind him, “zip it.”
The Robber Baron waved a gloved hand. “Not to worry,” he said, taking another puff on the pipe. “Costas is loyal. If we can’t talk openly amongst ourselves, then we would live in fear, wouldn’t we?” His eyes burned into Costas’s.
Costas’s heart hammered. What did the Robber Baron know? What did he suspect?
The Behemoth shook his head. He uncrossed his thick arms, and Costas saw that he was holding something in his huge, clawed hands. A gray squirrel, squirming and struggling to get free, its puffy tail shaking back and forth. It bit his finger, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he stroked its back with a long, jagged claw. “How do you know he’s loyal?” he asked. “A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.”
“Hey!” Nick shouted. He reached for his gun.
Costas grabbed his son’s arm. For a second, he had visions of Nick dying. Hector Hell burning him, Osprey stabbing him, Kraken strangling him. He felt as though he might vomit. “No,” he said. “No, Nick.”