Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  She told him.

  If you’re in Boston, you hobnob on Newbury Street. In Chicago, you don’t miss Michigan Avenue. In Devil’s Cape, look no further than Lockheardt Street for a taste of what the city has to offer.

  — Excerpted from A Devil’s Cape Traveler’s Guide

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  8:45 p.m.

  Julian lived in a penthouse apartment in Devil’s Cape’s Soirée Bleue Ward. Just north of the Silver Swan district, the Soirée Bleue had one long, crowded thoroughfare, Lockheardt Street, along which ran a series of antique streetcars that dated back to the 1910s. Lockheardt Street was also filled with foot traffic—Lehane University students going back and forth to their classes, dorms, and favorite watering holes in the area; street vendors selling Mardi Gras masks, knock-off Gambina dolls, bottles of perfume, and T-shirts; and a wide selection of tourists, amateur artists, and homeless. The other streets, though less crowded, formed a tangled maze of one-way roads, blind alleys, twists, and turns, the typical confusing mess attributed by some to the city’s pirates founders, by others to the pirates’ dogs, who, allowed to wander free in the area before it was well-settled, developed their own meandering paths.

  His uniform torn, his side still bleeding, Jason soared over the Soirée Bleue, his cape crackling behind him like a flag in a thunderstorm. Whipping by the gargoyles atop the Lehane University clock tower, he landed heavily on Julian’s veranda, which was green and purple with bougainvillea vines. Grabbing his brother’s sliding glass door with both hands, he yanked it and popped it off of its hinges, storming inside.

  “Julian!” he yelled.

  The sliding glass door opened into his brother’s living room. It was spare. An Oriental carpet stretched over bleached wood. A tan leather sofa faced bookshelves and a built-in entertainment center, in which rested a wide-screen television. A single print by a local artist hung from one wall—a trombone player standing alone in the middle of Lockheardt Street, body tilting back, back arched like a cat’s, belting out a song into the empty night.

  The kitchen, adjacent to the living room, sparkled with stainless steel utensils and chrome fixtures, barely touched. A wine rack against one wall held perhaps thirty bottles, and Jason guessed they’d probably be valued at more than $5,000; Julian’s tastes were expensive.

  Nothing seemed out of place. Jason felt no hint of his brother’s presence. He wasn’t home. Jason had flown over in an angry rush, but it wouldn’t have made sense for Julian to be there. He’d left the warehouse scarcely an hour earlier with Rusalka, wearing his mask, and would hardly have brought her to his own home.

  Jason walked through the rest of the penthouse anyway, looking for signs of where his brother might have taken Rusalka, but he knew there wouldn’t be any. Julian was too meticulous, too careful. And besides, his plan had apparently been to hold the woman at the warehouse for some period of time. Since the plan was disrupted, Julian would have been forced to improvise.

  What did he want the woman for in the first place? Was there something Uncle Costas wanted her to do? Or was it Julian himself?

  The phone rang. He picked it up off the cradle and pressed it to his ear without saying a word.

  “Water my plants while you’re there, won’t you?” Julian asked. “I think I forgot this morning.”

  Jason sighed. “I like the painting in the living room,” he said. “Is that a Kerageorgiu?” He knew it was. He had one in his own living room, though he hadn’t realized that Julian liked the artist, too. It wasn’t surprising.

  “Cost me a bit,” Julian admitted. “So how much damage have you done to the place? You tripped the alarm and the security company paged me. You’ll be relieved to know, if not surprised, that they know better than to inform the police.”

  “You’ll be relieved to know, if not surprised,” Jason echoed, “that I wasn’t killed when that little deathtrap of yours came tumbling down.”

  “I’ve been waiting for news with bated breath,” Julian said. His tone was sarcastic, but there was an edge to it.

  “You really were worried.” Though apparently not enough to do anything about it.

  “Did you catch the psychiatrist?” Julian’s voice was tense.

  Ducett. Julian had thrown Ducett off the building. He hadn’t seen Ducett turn into the devil-thing—Bedlam.

  “Yes,” he said. “He’s alive.”

  A pause. “Good,” Julian said. “I felt a little bad about him.” A little bad about trying to murder someone.

  “What the hell are you doing, Julian? She’s a psychopath.”

  “Cute, though.”

  Jason stared into space. A framed picture of their parents rested on Julian’s bookshelf beside a copy of Crime and Punishment. In the picture, they were on a rare vacation, a long weekend in La Pesca. Pop wore a tasseled sombrero, Mama a sun dress. They were smiling, lifting frozen margaritas to the camera. “You’re not—” Jason said.

  “No,” Julian said. “No, I’m not touching her.”

  “Where are you, Julian? I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk. Turn up the thermostat a few degrees, too, will you? It might be a few days until I get back and I don’t need to pay for all the AC.”

  Jason was tempted to turn the temperature all the way down, but it felt childish. He looked away from the picture of their parents. It felt odd to him, standing there in his brother’s empty apartment, the Argonaut uniform wrapped around him. He glanced down. He was bleeding on his brother’s expensive rug. “Julian, please,” he whispered.

  There was silence for a few seconds, then, “Uncle Costas is scared. I’ve never seen him like this before.” He swallowed. “Tony Ferazzoli’s dead, you know.”

  Tony Ferazzoli was the only son of Lorenzo Ferazzoli, who had led the Ferazzoli crime organization for nearly thirty years. A dynamic figure, known for the pin-striped suits and wide, brightly colored ties he wore, his thick head of white hair, and his passion for horse racing, Lorenzo had had a long and bitter rivalry with Costas Kalodimos, its roots dating back to the men’s grandfathers and Prohibition. Both men had ultimately been beholden to the Robber Baron, but they sparred with each other, indulged in petty and vindictive behavior—Jason remembered a brisk winter day when he and Julian had discovered Uncle Costas’s Doberman pinscher dead on the street, shot between the eyes—and tried their best to edge each other out of the Robber Baron’s favor. Lorenzo had died under mysterious circumstances about six years earlier. His crushed body was found in historic Bullocq Park, not far from his home, in the middle of a cluster of rose bushes. He’d fallen from a great height, though no tall buildings were nearby. Jason had always suspected Julian, but he had never asked.

  Tony Ferazzoli, who had stepped into his father’s place as leader of the family business, had lacked Lorenzo’s flair and drive. He had a canny but disorganized mind. He was prone to superstition and had gained more than fifty pounds in the first year after his father’s death. He was perceived as weaker than his father and had had little open conflict with Uncle Costas; he was too busy defending himself from threats within his own family to worry about external enemies.

  “When did that happen?” Jason asked.

  “A week or so ago.”

  Jason hesitated. “Did you—”

  Julian grunted. “Not me,” he said. “And not Uncle Costas. He didn’t like Tony Ferazzoli, but he liked the fact that the Ferazzolis had their wings clipped with him in charge. I bought him a bottle of ouzo when it happened. We’d shared a few glasses after Lorenzo bought the farm.” He said it like Lorenzo’s death was an act of nature, a natural event in the great path of the cosmos, not as though it was something he himself had caused. But he had, Jason knew. “But he shoved it away. He was pale. Sweating. ‘I’m going to need some help,’ he said to me.”

  Jason pulled a towel out of a drawer in Julian’s kitchen and pre
ssed it against the wound in his side. It quickly blossomed red with blood. “How did Tony die?”

  “No one’s seen a body,” Julian said. “But there are rumors.”

  “Marcus?” Vincent Marcus was Tony Ferazzoli’s oldest nephew, his second in command and also one of his main rivals for control of the family.

  “No, Marcus was surprised when it happened. You should have seen his face—he looked like he won the lottery and landed a Bandits cheerleader on the same day.” Jason wondered just under what circumstances Julian had seen Vincent Marcus’s face when the man had learned of his uncle’s death.

  “Then who?”

  “It was the Robber Baron,” Julian said. “Or the Cirque d’Obscurité on his orders. The word is that they won’t be finding his body because the Werewolf barbecued him in some honey and cayenne pepper and ate him.”

  Jason closed his eyes then looked at his side again. The bleeding had nearly stopped, but the cloth was filled with blood. He winced as he pulled it from his side, ripping part of the wound open again, and replaced it with another cloth. He threw the first one in the trash. “You believe that?”

  Julian clucked his tongue. “I don’t know about the specifics,” he said. “But yeah, the Robber Baron gave the order, and his monster squad pulled it off.”

  “Why? And why is Uncle Costas scared?”

  Julian was silent for a moment. “I think he did it because Tony was incompetent. He was screwing up too much, and the Robber Baron was tired of it. And Vincent Marcus isn’t getting the nice little package wrapped in a bow that he thinks he’s getting. The baron’s going to turn the Ferazzolis’ operations over to Hector Hell.”

  “But the Cirque d’Obscurité are mercenaries,” Jason said. “They’re hired goons the Robber Baron brought into town. They’re not the type to take over organizations like the Ferazzoli crime machine.”

  “And yet . . .” Julian said.

  “So Uncle Costas is afraid that the Robber Baron’s going to do something similar to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Rusalka? He wants her as what? A bodyguard?”

  “No,” Julian said. “An assassin.”

  The sudden appearance of a new Doctor Camelot in Devil’s Cape has stirred Vanguard City from its grief, giving the city of gold new hope and new focus.

  — Excerpted from “Return of Camelot?” by Leslie Flannigan, Vanguard City Crier, the morning after the warehouse collapse in Devil’s Cape

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  8:45 p.m.

  “Impressive,” Samuel said as Kate returned to her lab.

  She’d been walking inside, a smile behind her faceplate, exulting in the unexpected success of the evening, but she stopped and stared when she caught sight of him, perched on the edge of her desk. He was less than six inches tall. Instead of his Sam Small uniform, he was wearing the same blue jeans, Hawaiian shirt, and sandals he’d been wearing earlier, only smaller. “Look, Malibu Ken,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I knew intellectually that you were Sam Small,” she said. “I knew about your powers, knew that you could shrink, but seeing it in reality—”

  He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” He adopted a faux radio voice. “The amazing Sam Small, the ultimate in miniaturization. Just slip him into your pocket and go!” He shrugged, returned to his normal voice. “It’s comfortable sometimes.”

  Kate carefully removed her helmet, setting it on a stand she’d put in place for that purpose. She’d have to do something to get all the dust off. And the bugs that had splattered against it. She looked sideways at him. “That’s not why you shrank this time, though, is it?”

  “Would it make you more comfortable if I returned to normal?”

  She began to remove her armor. She wondered how it was that his clothes shrank with him—were they specially treated in some way, or did the effect arise with him? What if he took off his shirt and left it there? Would it eventually revert to its normal size? Reports she’d read on him indicated that he could still lift as much while small as he could at normal size, despite the decreased muscle mass. Was that accurate? And why wasn’t his voice higher pitched when he was small? She brushed her questions away. This wasn’t the time. “That’s up to you,” she said. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

  He jumped to the ground. It was a drop of perhaps thirty inches, but proportionally, that was like a drop of thirty feet for him. He landed without difficulty, bowed slightly, and then began to grow back to his normal height. “Voila,” he said. The process of growing had taken him just a few seconds. “You got that under control?” He gestured at her armor.

  She stepped out of the rest of it. “I’ll need to clean it,” she said.

  He nodded and grabbed a rag, carefully lifting her helmet from its resting place and starting with it, buffing it vigorously with the cleaner she passed over to him. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s easy to get caught up in the amazing aspects of the things we do and lose track of the banalities.” Pressing a finger into the rag, he scraped a splattered mayfly off her faceplate.

  She stepped over to her computer monitor and entered a few commands. She’d set a program to capture and record any media references to Doctor Camelot, and after her appearance at the collapsed building tonight, there were a lot of them. Setting three of her monitors on silent playback of the coverage, she grabbed a rag of her own and began to work on the armor’s torso. The words Doctor Camelot IV appeared brightly on the screen across footage of her removing rubble from the site. “So you reminded me of your amazing power,” she said, “as a way of helping to keep me grounded.”

  He smiled. “You’ve spent a lot of time with me the past few days,” he said. “I’m short. I sweat. I stammer over my words sometimes. My hair’s growing gray. And I can’t bring myself to like jambalaya no matter how many times I try it.” His hand dragged the cloth briskly over the helmet. “I’m an ordinary guy with my own baggage and demons and bad habits. But when I shrink down, when you see a man the size of a G.I. Joe standing there, you forget that. Even though you know me pretty well by now.”

  On the monitor a video was playing footage of her pulling Bedlam from the wreckage, lifting him up. The cameras spotlighted them for a second, the female knight in shining armor sitting on a broken piece of concrete wall, the demonic-looking man spread unconscious across her lap. From the camera angle, they looked very briefly like Michelangelo’s Pietà. That image, she realized, would be on the front page of the paper in the morning. She turned her attention back to Samuel. “So you’re saying that these people I met, Argonaut and Bedlam, no matter how amazing they appear, they’re normal, too.”

  He nodded. “And flawed,” he said. And any hint of a smile dropped away from his face. “Remember this, too, Kate. They’re from Devil’s Cape, which is probably the most corrupt place in all the world.” He shook his head. “In Devil’s Cape, you can’t trust anybody.”

  I understand and support my brother’s intentions in this matter. But it seems to me that our building was meant to be a home more than a prison. I am disturbed by the reports we have heard, and were Janus not so ill right now, I would make haste to see the situation for myself.

  — Excerpted from a letter written by Harvey Holingbroke to the caretakers of his son, niece, and nephew, 1915

  Chapter Forty

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Nine days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  7 a.m.

  After a long night’s sleep, Cain’s first stop back at Holingbroke was a guard’s station on the third floor. The guard posted there in the mornings, a hulking, moon-faced bigot named Cletus, was notorious not only for paying too much attention to the female patients, but also for leaving his spot unattended for long bathroom, coffee, and smoke breaks. He rarely bothered to secure his equipment, either. Cain had complain
ed about the man half a dozen times, but even in today’s job market, it was hard to find people willing to pull guard duty at an asylum, and the administration had hung on to the man.

  Sure enough, Cletus’s station was deserted. Barely breaking stride, Cain reached down and snatched the man’s shotgun from where it sat on a shelf below his desk, snagging a non-regulation baseball bat at the same time. The shotgun was loaded with special “bean bag” ammo used as a last resort to subdue dangerous patients, not kill them, and Cain knew it might come in handy in the night to come. He wouldn’t mind getting Cletus in trouble again, either. Maybe this would be the straw that broke the man’s job security.

  He had just stowed the weapons in his office when he heard a knock at the door. Without really thinking about it, he knew before letting his visitor in that it was his friend and fellow psychiatrist, Eli Rosencrantz. Tall and lean, with wavy black hair and a soft voice, Eli had a keen mind and a gentle manner.

  They talked idly for a few minutes before Eli slipped in the real meaning for his visit. “Detective Daigle went out of her way to bump into me in the hallway yesterday,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Cain said. “Did she come out and ask you if you think I freed my patient, or did she beat around the bush?”

  Eli grinned nervously, fingering a silk tie. “I don’t think she’s much the beating around the bush type,” he said, “though she tried. I believe the conversation went from ‘How about that heat wave?’ to ‘I met your friend Dr. Ducett—what an interesting guy’ to ‘Do you think he was doing the patient?’ in less than thirty seconds.”

  “Did you tell her that if I wanted her free, there were a lot easier ways—including pronouncing her cured of all mental irregularities?”