Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Let’s do it,” he said. Maria Chen nodded, slipped the map in her pocket, and skied gracefully ahead.

  There were two corpses in front of the house.

  Harod and Maria Chen huddled behind a thin screen of spruce trees and took turns looking through the binoculars at the bodies. From fifty yards away the two dark lumps in the snow could have been anything— bundles of abandoned laundry perhaps— but the binoculars showed the pale curve of a white cheek, the sprawl of limbs twisted at an angle that would have brought excruciating pain to a sleeping person. These two were not sleeping.

  Harod peered again. Two men. Dark overcoats. Leather gloves. One had been wearing a brown fedora; it lay six feet away on the snow. The snow itself was spattered with blood around the two bodies. A trail of red joined the footprints to the large french door of the old manor. Another thirty yards to the east, there were deep parallel gouges in the snow, another trail of footsteps to or from the house, and great circular ridges of powdery snow as if a huge fan had been pointed downward. Helicopter, thought Harod.

  There were no signs of automobiles, snowmobiles, or other ski trails. The lane that connected with the entry road where he and Maria had been stopped earlier was little more than a snowy break between the trees. They could not see the alpine cabin or bridge from here.

  The main house itself was something more than a typical mansion, definitely something less than a castle. A huge heap of dark stones and narrow windows, the estate broke off into wings and levels, giving the impression it had started out as an imposing central hall and been added onto over the generations. The color of stone and size of windows changed here and there, but the overall effect remained gloomy: dark stone, little glass, narrow doors, heavy walls painted with the shadow of bare trees. Harod thought that it suited Willi’s personality better than the banana republic villa in Bel Air.

  “What now?” whispered Maria Chen. “Shut up,” said Harod and lifted the binoculars to look at the two corpses again. They lay not far apart. The face of one was turned away, almost buried in the deep snow so that Harod caught only a glimpse of dark, short-cut hair stirring slightly when the breeze came up, but the other one, the one lying on its back, showed pale cheek and an open, white eye staring toward the line of evergreens as if awaiting Harod’s arrival. Harod guessed that they had not been dead long. It did not look like the birds or animals had been at them.

  “Let’s get out of here, Tony.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Harod lowered the binoculars and thought. They could not see the other side of the manor from this vantage point. If they were going to approach the house, it made good sense to stay in the woods and ski in a wide circle so they could survey the manor from all directions. Harod squinted out at the large clearing. The trees were scattered in both directions; it would take an hour or more to backtrack into the forest and approach carefully. Clouds had covered the sun and a cold wind had come up. It was beginning to snow lightly. Harod’s jeans were soaked through where he had fallen and his legs ached from the exercise. The fading light gave a sense of evening twilight even though it was not yet noon.

  “Let’s get out of here, Tony.” Maria Chen’s voice was not pleading or frightened, only calmly insistent.

  “Give me the gun,” he said. When she pulled it out of her waistband and handed it over, he used it to point toward the gray house and black lumps of bodies. “Go on up there,” he said. “On your skis. I’ll keep you covered from here. I think the fucking house is empty.”

  Maria Chen looked at him. There was no question or defiance in her dark eyes, only curiosity, as if she had never seen him before.

  “Get going,” snapped Harod and lowered the automatic, not sure what he would do if she refused.

  Maria Chen turned, moved aside the screening spruce limbs with a graceful flick of her ski pole, and skied toward the house. Harod hunched over and moved away from the place where they had been standing, finally stopping behind a broad hardwood tree surrounded by young pines. He raised the binoculars. Maria Chen had reached the bodies. She stopped, dug in both poles, and looked toward the house. Then she glanced back toward where she had left Harod and skied toward the house, pausing by the broad french doors before turning right and skiing the length of the manor. She disappeared around the right side of the building— the corner nearest the access road— and Harod snapped off his skis and crouched in a dry area under the tree.

  It seemed an absurdly long time before she appeared at the opposite end of the house, skied back to the central french doors, and waved toward where she thought Harod was waiting.

  Harod waited another two minutes, hunched over, and moved toward the house in a crouching run. He had thought he could maneuver better without the skis. It was a mistake. The snow only came up to his knees, but it slowed and tripped him; he would cover ten feet on the frozen crust and then crash through and have to posthole his way forward. He fell three times, once dropping the automatic in the snow. He made sure the barrel was not plugged, brushed powder off the grip, and staggered ahead.

  He paused by the bodies.

  Tony Harod had produced twenty-eight movies, all but three with Willi. All twenty-eight of the movies had held ample elements of sex and violence, often with the two intertwined. The five Walpurgis Night films— Harod’s most successful ventures— had been little more than a succession of murders, mostly of attractive young people before, after, or during sexual intercourse. The murders were viewed primarily through subjective camera simulating the view of the murderer. Harod had dropped in often during the shooting and had seen people stabbed, shot, impaled, burned, eviscerated, and decapitated. He had hung around special effects long enough to learn all of the mysteries of bloodbags, airbags, gouged eyes, and hydraulics. He had personally written the scene in Walpurgis Night V: The Nightmare Continues where the baby-sitter’s head explodes into a thousand fragments after she swallows the explosive capsule substituted by Golon, the masked murderer.

  In spite of all this, Tony Harod had never seen a real murder victim. The only corpses he had ever come near were his mother and Aunt Mira in their cosmeticized coffins, surrounded by the buffering distance of funeral home and mourners. His mother’s funeral had been when Harod was nine; Aunt Mira when he was thirteen. No one ever mentioned the death of Harod’s father.

  One of the men lying outside Willi Borden’s family estate had been shot five or six times; the other had had his throat ripped out. Both had bled copiously. The amount of blood present struck Harod as absurd, as if some overzealous director had poured buckets of red paint on the set. Even just glancing at the bodies, the blood and the imprints in the snow, Harod thought he could reconstruct some of the scene. A helicopter had landed about one hundred feet from the house. These two had emerged, still in polished black street shoes, and walked to the french doors. They had begun to fight there on the flagstones. Harod could picture the smaller of the two, the one lying with his face in the snow, turning suddenly and jumping at his partner, biting and clawing. The bigger man had backed away— Harod could see heel prints in the snow— then raised the Luger and fired repeatedly. The little man had kept coming, perhaps even after being shot in the face. The smaller corpse had two ragged, bruised holes in the right cheek. There was also a chunk of muscle and tissue still locked between the little man’s exposed teeth. The larger man had staggered several yards after the smaller man had gone down; then, as if realizing for the first time that his throat was half gone, his artery severed and pumping blood into the cold German air, his larynx torn out, he had fallen, rolled over, and died staring at the line of evergreens where Harod and Maria Chen would appear some hours later. The large man’s arm was half-raised, locked in the sculpted grip of rigor mortis. Harod knew that rigor mortis began and ended a certain number of hours after death; he could not remember how long. He did not care. He had pictured the two as associates, leaving the helicopter together, dying together. The footprints were not absolute proof of that. Harod did not care.
Another trough of footprints from the french doors to the depression that may have been a landing site showed where several people had left the house and departed by he li cop ter. There was no hint of where the helicopter had come from, who was flying it, who from the house had entered it, or where it was going. Harod did not care.

  “Tony?” Maria Chen called softly. “Just a second,” said Harod. He turned, staggered away from the great circle of blood, and vomited in the snow. He bent low, tasted again the coffee and thick German sausage he had had for breakfast. When he was finished he scooped up some clean snow, rinsed his mouth with it, rose and made a wide are around the corpses to join Maria Chen on the flagstones.

  “The door’s not locked,” she whispered.

  Harod could see only curtains through the glass. It was snowing hard now, the heavy flakes obscuring the line of trees two hundred feet away. Harod nodded and took a breath. “Go on out there and get that guy’s gun,” he said. “And check for I.D.”

  Maria Chen looked at Harod a second and skied out to the bodies. She had to pry open the taller corpse’s hand to free the pistol. The tall man carried his I.D. in his wallet; the other corpse had a billfold and passport in his coat pocket. Maria Chen had to roll both corpses over in the snow before she found what Harod wanted. When she returned to the flagstone, her blue sweater and goose-down vest were liberally spotted with blood. She kicked off her skis and rubbed snow on her arms and vest.

  Harod flicked through the billfolds and passport. The taller man was named Frank Lee, international driver’s license, temporary Munich address, three-year-old Miami driver’s license in the same name. The other man was Ellis Robert Sloan, age thirty-two, resident of New York, visas and passport stamped for West Germany, Belgium, and Austria. Eight hundred dollars American and another six hundred German marks remained in the billfolds. Harod shook his head and dropped the three things to the flagstones. They had revealed nothing important— he knew that he was stalling, delaying the entry into the house.

  “Follow me,” he said and stepped inside.

  The estate was large, cold, dark, and— Harod fervently hoped— empty. He no longer wanted to talk to Willi. He knew that if he saw his old Hollywood mentor, Harod’s first response would be to empty the clip of the Browning into Willi’s head. If Willi allowed him to. Tony Harod had no illusions about his own Ability in comparison to Willi’s. Harod might tell Barent and the others of Willi’s declining powers— and mean some of it— but he knew in his gut that, at his weakest, Willi Borden could mentally overpower Tony Harod in ten seconds. The old bastard was a monster. Harod wished that he had not come to Germany, had never left California, had never allowed Barent and the others to force him into association with Willi. “Be ready,” he whispered urgently, idiotically, and led Maria Chen deeper into the dark heap of stones.

  In room after room, furniture lay neatly covered with white sheets. As with the bodies outside, Harod had seen this in innumerable films but, encountered in reality, the effect was unnerving. Harod found himself pointing the automatic at every covered chair and lamp, waiting for it to rise up and come stalking toward him like the sheeted figure in Carpenter’s first Halloween.

  The main entrance hall was huge, black-and-white tiled, and empty. Harod and Maria Chen walked lightly, but their footsteps still echoed. Harod felt like a horse’s ass walking around in the cross-country ski boots with their square toes. Maria Chen walked calmly behind him, the bloodied Luger held down at her side. Her expression showed no more tension than if she were wandering through Harod’s Hollywood home, hunting for a misplaced magazine.

  It took fifteen minutes for Harod to be sure that no one was on the first floor or in the echoing, extensive cellar. The huge house had the feel of abandonment to it; if the corpses outside were not there, Harod would have been sure no one had been in the house for years. “Upstairs,” he whispered, still holding the automatic high. His knuckles were white.

  The west wing was dark, cold, and devoid even of furniture, but when they entered the corridor to the east wing, both Harod and Maria Chen froze. At first, the hallway seemed blocked by some huge pane of rippled ice— Harod thought of the scene where Zhivago and Lara returned to the winter-ravaged country house— but Harod moved forward cautiously and realized that the weak light was reflected off a curtain of thin, translucent plastic hung from a ceiling strip and sealed down one wall. Six feet farther on and another clear curtain slowed them. It was a heat baffle, simple insulation to seal off the east wing. The corridor was dark, but pale light came from several open doors along the fifty feet of hallway. Harod nodded at Maria Chen and moved forward stealthily, both hands on the automatic, legs apart. He swiveled around doorways, ready to fire, alert, poised as a cat. Images of Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood danced in his head. Maria Chen stood near the plastic curtain and watched him.

  “Shit,” said Harod after almost ten minutes of this. He acted as if he was disappointed and— in the aftereffects of the flow of adrenaline—was a little disappointed.

  Unless there were hidden rooms, the house was empty. Four of the rooms along this corridor showed signs of recent habitation— unmade beds, stocked refrigerators, hot plates, desks with papers still strewn across the top. One room in particular, a large study with bookcases, an old horse hair sofa, and a fireplace with ashes still warm to the touch, made Harod think that he had missed Willi by only a few hours. Perhaps the unwelcome visitors in the helicopter had caused the sudden departure. But there were no clothes left, nor other personal belongings; whoever had been staying here had been ready to leave. In the study, near a narrow window, a heavy table held a huge chess set, expensively carved figures deployed in mid-game. Harod walked over to the desk and used the automatic to poke through the few papers still lying there. The adrenaline rush was fading, replaced by a shortness of breath, an increasing shakiness, and a tremendous urge to be elsewhere.

  The remaining papers were in German. Even though Harod did not speak the language, he got the sense that they were of trivial matters— property taxes, reports on land use, debits and credits. He swept the desk clean, poked through a few empty drawers, and decided it was time to leave.

  “Tony!”

  Something in Maria Chen’s voice made him whirl with the Browning pointed.

  She was standing by the chess table. Harod stepped closer, thinking she had seen something out the high, thin window, but it was the large chess set she was looking at. Harod looked too. After a minute he lowered the automatic, went to one knee, and whispered, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

  Harod knew little about chess, had played only a few times when he was a kid, but he recognized that the game being played out on this board was in its early stages. Only a few pieces, two black, one white, had been lost and moved to the side of the board. Harod edged forward, still on one knee, so that his eyes were inches from the nearer pieces.

  The chess set had been hand-carved from ivory and some ebony wood. Each piece was five or six inches tall, chiseled in exquisite detail, and must have cost Willi a fortune. Harod knew little about chess, but what he knew suggested that this was a very unorthodox game. The kid who had beaten Harod in his second and final game almost thirty years earlier had laughed when Tony had moved his queen out early in the game. The boy had sneered something about only amateurs using their queens early on. But here both queens obviously had been engaged. The white queen stood in the center of the board, directly in front of a white pawn. The black queen had been removed from the game and stood alone on the sidelines. Harod leaned closer. The ebony face was elegant, aristocratic, still beautiful despite carefully carved lines of age. Harod had seen the face five days earlier in Washington, D.C., when C. Arnold Barent had shown him a photograph of the old lady who had been shot in Charleston and who had been so careless as to leave her macabre scrapbook in her hotel room. Tony Harod was staring at Nina Drayton.

  Harod looked urgently from face to face on the chessboard. Most of the faces he did not
recognize, but some leaped into clarity like the startling zoom-into-focus that Harod used in some of his movies.

  The white king was Willi; there was no doubt, although the face was younger, features sharper, hair fuller, and the uniform was no longer legal in Germany. The black king was C. Arnold Barent, business suit and all. Harod recognized the black bishop as Charles C. Colben. The white bishop was immediately recognizable as the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter. Kepler sat securely in the front row of black pawns, but the black knight had jumped over the row of static pawns to join in battle. Harod turned the piece slightly and recognized the pinched and prissy features of Nieman Trask.

  Harod did not recognize the dumpy, old-woman face of the white queen, but he had little trouble guessing her identity. “We will find her,” Barent had said. “All we want you to do is kill the meddling bitch.” The white queen and two white pawns were far into the black side of the board. Harod did not recognize the pawn that seemed surrounded by threatening black pieces; it looked to be a man in his fifties or early sixties, with beard and glasses. Something about the face made Harod think Jew. But the other white pawn, the little one four squares in front of Willi’s knight and seemingly exposed to attack from several black pieces at once— this pawn, when slowly turned, was instantly identifiable. Tony Harod was staring at his own face.

  “Fuck!” Harod’s shout seemed to echo in the huge house. He screamed again and swept the barrel of the Browning across the board once, twice, a third time, scattering ivory and ebony pieces to the floor.

  Maria Chen stepped back and turned her gaze to the window. Outside, the last of the day’s light seemed to have fled as the clouds came lower, the dark line of trees faded into a gray mist, and the heavy snow gently covered the two corpses lying like fallen chess pieces on the manor lawn.