by Lee Thomas
The iron chair crashed into Keane’s head and the back of his neck. The concussion sent the man sprawling to the flagstones, and the knife skidded away from his hand, coming to rest against a bit of shattered tile from the tabletop. Butch ran to the weapon and lifted it. Once his palm secured around the handle, needles of electric charge shot up his arms, and he experienced a moment of dread, briefly believing the knife had been booby-trapped. Except he knew this feeling; it was the same buzzing current he’d felt holding a key given to him by his uncle Spencer, only instead of seeing an array of doors, Butch saw a series of people who came and went in rapid succession. He didn’t know these people, yet he did. He knew that they’d all fallen victim to the blade, knew it as surely as he knew his own name. Men and women. The guilty and the innocent.
Butch shook off the intense reaction, and the faces behind his eyes vanished. He checked on Keane, who lay face down, moaning, and then Butch looked at the knife still thrumming in his hand. The arcing blades shifted and rippled. More than ever he had the impression of metallic flames flickering from the broad handle. He couldn’t make sense of this anomalous weapon but, just as he’d known the faces in his head had belonged to victims of this knife, he knew the dagger was his. It was an extension of his arm, no different from fingers or thumb.
He righted the chair and then hoisted Keane by the collar of his shirt, all but dragging him to the seat. Keane slumped forward, nearly collapsed. Butch placed the sole of his shoe on the man’s chest and pushed him back so that he sat upright in the chair, and then he waited for the man to come fully around.
Keane did so slowly. After several minutes, he reached up and cupped the back of his head. He moaned. His chin dipped as if he were again succumbing to grogginess. Finally, he pulled his head up and his eyes focused.
“What am I in the middle of?” Butch asked.
“I…I don’t…”
“Tell me about the necklace. You called it the Rose? What is it supposed to be?”
“Not…for you…” Keane said. His speech was slow. Muddled. “Only the Alchemi…”
“Who are the Alchemi?”
Keane frowned. He closed his eyes.
Butch removed his foot from the man’s chest and leaned in, grabbing his shirt with one hand and placing the knife in front of Keane’s face with the other. “I am not fucking around,” Butch said. “And I’m sick of this mysterious mumbo-jumbo. Now tell me something I can use.”
Keane opened his eyes and peered at the knife. His frown deepened until he wore an expression of immense sadness. “It dances for you,” he said. “It never danced for me.”
Butch glanced at the blades, and saw that Keane was right. The metal seemed to have turned soft, all but liquid, and the blades undulated and rippled like flames on a hearth. “Tell me about the necklace.”
He yanked on Keane’s shirt to get his attention, but the man was fascinated with the ripple of the blades. Butch repositioned the knife, taking it away from the man’s face and pointing it at his chest. He needed his attention, but already he saw tremendous distance in Keane’s eyes.
“So many years and it never danced for me,” Keane said. “Never for me.”
A tear appeared and slid down the weathered cheek, and the older man began to cry. He clutched the arms of the wrought-iron chair, and his face collapsed into misery. Shallow sobs sent tremors through his body as he stared at the ground, unable to stop the morose outpouring.
“What the hell is this?” Butch asked.
The sight of a man crying unnerved him. A man wasn’t supposed to behave like a disappointed child. He shook Keane, thought about slapping him or maybe using the tip of the knife to scald him back to his senses.
Instead he shook the man again and said, “Hey.”
“I spent my life studying the metals, learning their secrets, but they never lived for me. And you—an accident, a blind and ignorant accident—for you they dance.”
“Put away the bullshit,” Butch said, “and tell me about the Rose.”
“You’ll find out,” Keane said. His knuckles were white on the arms of the chair. “Soon enough, you’ll know more than I was ever allowed to know.”
With that, Keane pushed himself forward onto the knife. It passed into his chest as easily as a pin entering wet clay. Convulsions shook him. The scent of burning skin and hair poured thickly from his pierced chest. He threw his head back in agony, mouth gaping open. Butch stumbled away, leaving the knife wedged between the man’s ribs. In an instant Keane’s clothes ignited in flame; they burned like paper, revealing skin already bubbling with blister. Blast-furnace hot, the gusting air pushed Butch farther across the patio. Amid the consuming fire, Keane’s skin blackened and cracked and fat reduced to clear bubbling streams sizzled through the fissures. Fire erupted from his open mouth and burned through his eyes, creating puddles of flame in the sockets, and the stench of roasting meat grew thicker, cloying. Disgusting in its savory aroma.
For a time, Butch could do nothing but look on in stunned silence as the flames consumed Keane. They rose like a pillar around the chair and the man seated in it. The knife handle remained visible like a sturdy branch protruding from a rushing orange river; the body that held it was shriveled, sunken, and charred. Butch turned from the pyre and ran.
Chapter 29
The Cold City
Mr. Hayes stood on the balcony of his hotel room. Bitter afternoon wind sliced his cheeks and neck. He peered over the city—a filthy place. Soot and the fat of rendered meat covered the buildings in grim paste. His spirits had been low for days. The death of Mr. Bell and all that had followed—preparing the body, waiting for an intern to arrive from 213 House by train to collect the car and the macabre bundle stored in its trunk, writing the report to his associates—were exercises in draining morbidity. He didn’t sleep well, unable to push away thoughts of Mr. Bell’s last living moments (How horrible they must have been) and he’d begun to feel a persistent haze clouding his mind as he moved through the days. Mr. Brand was similarly distracted, and this too added to the problem. Guilt as thick as the filth covering the downtown buildings had settled on Hayes for having ordered his colleague to remain in this city, away from the woman he loved, who was about to find out her brother had been murdered. It was an ugly business and one that didn’t leave sufficient room for compassion.
At his back, the door opened and Mr. Brand stepped onto the balcony. He held one of his daggers in his withered hand and a polishing cloth in the other.
“213 House just rang,” Brand said. “They reported a call from 437 House in the South. Delbert Keane, a former associate, told them that he’d found Butch Cardinal, said he’d seen the Galenus Rose.”
“Keane?” Hayes asked.
“He’s an associate who left the Southern Home a number of years ago. Outside of research, he showed only a sliver of talent. When it became clear he could not attune himself to the metals, he retired to New Orleans. That’s where the call came from.”
“So he has the Rose?”
“They don’t know,” Brand said. He rubbed the edge of his knife with the cloth. “Keane said he was going to take it from the wrestler. No word since. 213 House received the call a little over thirty minutes ago.”
“Did Keane leave the Alchemi in good standing?”
“He was not dismissed, if that’s what you mean. Not like Musante.”
“Thank you, Mr. Brand. You should begin packing your things. I’ll go to the lobby and retrieve the train schedules from the concierge.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Brand said, speaking about Butch Cardinal. He eyed Hayes, as if challenging his associate to protest.
But Hayes had no intention of protesting. “I know you will,” he said. “Now, please get your things together. We may have to leave when I return.”
Brand stopped polishing the blade of his dagger. He appeared uncertain, eyeing Hayes with suspicion, something that should never rise between them. But Brand knew Hayes was a stic
kler for procedure, and killing the wrestler might or might not prove warranted, depending on the circumstances. Hayes knew his partner had expected a lecture, a recitation of rules and regulations, but he didn’t have the strength to even feign commitment to Alchemi policies on the matter. Anyone who could subject a boy like Humphrey Bell to such agonies was beyond the protection of procedures. More than likely Cardinal would need to be killed in order to retrieve the Galenus Rose, but whether need entered the equation or not, Hayes felt the same as Brand. He wanted the man dead.
Chapter 30
Violent Sport
Rain poured in hissing sheets. The storm had begun after Butch stepped onto the streetcar and it had intensified steadily during the brief ride. Butch trembled but not from chill. The wounds on his forearm and chest stung something fierce, but these didn’t preoccupy him either. His thoughts were filled with flame and confusion. The scent of cooked meat remained in his nostrils, and he thought it might never fade. Keane had brought about his own death. Butch had been no more responsible than a desk drawer in which the blade could have been wedged for Keane’s suicide, but he felt guilty and, standing in the streetcar, gripping a strap so tightly his hand ached, he believed everyone sharing the trolley had been a witness to the crime—his crime—and they simply waited for the right moment to accuse.
He should have kept the knife. That was the thought that continued to circle in and around his paranoia. The weapon held power, or he’d given the weapon power, Butch didn’t know. He just knew he should have had the thing tucked into a pocket, close to him.
Holding that knife had woken something. Seeing what the blade had made of Keane, cinder and char, had recalled his childhood and a brief encounter with magic, but it was more than that. He’d felt the knife unite with his palm, felt it become part of his body. Unless he had completely lost his senses, Butch was not only a witness to magic, but also an instrument of it. He’d felt no such union with the necklace, the bauble Keane had called the Rose, but it must carry a power of its own—a secret like the inferno harbored in the knife’s blade. Butch reached into his pocket and wrapped his palm around the charm and squeezed, hoping to feel a communion with the cool metal, but no bolts of charge worked into his palm. Not so much as a tingle of static.
Battering rain met him as he stepped off of the streetcar. He jogged across the road and continued running, sidestepping gray pedestrians and their black umbrellas and splashing through low puddles as he hurried back into the Quarter. Taking shelter in the lobby of a hotel, Butch saw by the large clock behind the front desk, that he still had two hours before his appointment with Dauphine Marcoux, an appointment he could no longer imagine keeping. His nerves hummed miserably. He felt sick. He needed time to think. Time to recover from the sight of a man burning alive.
If only he’d gotten more information from the man. There was no doubt in his mind now the Rose meant something, perhaps had a power equal or greater to that of the blade, but the nature of the thing remained a mystery. And what of the Alchemi? Keane had spoken of the outfit like they were famous and important. Another gang? Another pack of predators on his heels?
If that proved true, then the progress he’d made with Keane amounted to a step forward and down. He knew something more about the ugly piece of jewelry, but he had also discovered this new threat: the Alchemi. As if the cops and both sides of a Chicago street war weren’t enough.
The men behind the hotel’s front desk leaned close to one another to confer. Butch assumed he was the topic of conversation. Figuring he had enough trouble at this point, he pushed on the door and returned to the rain.
• • •
Hollis’s home was unnervingly quiet when he entered. In his room he stripped off his suit jacket and his shirt, and then realized he had no change of clothing. The wound at his chest, two inches long, had cauterized instantly, but blisters had formed at its edges. He touched these. Winced. A single red welt, hardly a burn at all, marred his forearm where Keane had pressed his blade. The injuries were a minor annoyance, likely to heal in no time at all. But he couldn’t leave the house in his ruined shirt. He was still a wanted man, and the last thing he needed were eyes lingering on him, putting together violence and his face.
Hollis must have spare shirts upstairs, Butch reasoned. He climbed the spiral staircase and crossed to Hollis’s bedroom, where he found the man standing before a wardrobe. He wore only a pair of hunter-green trousers and smiled as he saw Butch in the doorway.
“Got a deluge, huh?” he asked.
“Sure,” Butch said. Hollis’s powerful musculature, despite having softened over the years, remained impressive, and Butch found himself distracted. Having always been as smooth as a child above the waist, he found himself fascinated by the density and richness of the hair covering Hollis’s torso. When he realized he was staring, he forced himself to look away. “Yeah.”
“Happens a lot this time of year,” Rossington said. “I imagine you didn’t find the umbrellas in the stand downstairs?”
“No, I left early. Wasn’t thinking about the weather.”
“What happened there?” Hollis asked, indicating the wound on Butch’s chest with a nod of his chin.
“An accident,” Butch said. A momentary flash of image startled him. He saw Keane on the end of a knife, flames guttering up around his chin, shooting like fountains from his eyes.
“As long as you’re not badly injured. You’ve spent enough time using this place as a hospital room. It’s about time you started enjoying your visit.”
Though he saw no chance of that, Butch thanked him.
Hollis crossed the room and eyed the wound closely. “Are you sure you’re okay? This looks nasty.”
“No, I’m good,” Butch said. The scent of Hollis’s shaving soap put him off guard. It was a familiar brand. Butch used it himself. His father had used it. He took a step back. “I was just wondering if you might have a spare shirt? Mine’s about done in.”
“Of course,” Hollis said. “I should have realized you couldn’t wear the same clothes day after day.”
Hollis displayed good spirits for the first time since Lowery’s departure. His smile was friendly and his eyes were lit with the anticipation of having an enjoyable project ahead of him. He crossed the room and clapped Butch on the shoulder. His chest brushed lightly against Butch’s arm as he did so. “I have some suits from a few years back that might just about fit you.”
Butch’s face went red. His heartbeat stampeded up his throat and into his ears.
“I really just need a shirt,” Butch said. “The suit will dry okay.”
“Don’t be silly. Any luck with that list I gave you?”
“A bit.”
“So you’ve found something?”
“Nothing concrete,” Butch said. “But I think I’m on the right track.”
“Well, fine,” Hollis said. “I keep my older clothes, the ones I wore before my gut took over, in the room at the end of the hall.”
Butch followed his host into the hallway. Hollis gave him a crisp white shirt and a fresh collar, and the man chatted amiably as Butch changed into the garment. As Butch examined a rust-colored tie, Hollis said, “I was thinking of taking a night off from the club.”
“Yeah?”
“I thought we could use a night out. A gent’s night. We can forget about this Chicago business for a few hours and gab about the ring.”
“Sure,” Butch said. “Sounds good.”
Hollis slapped him on the back again. “Excellent. We’ll have supper at Galatoire’s and see where that takes us.” Hollis retrieved a forest-green fedora with a brown band from the shelf of the armoire and handed it to Butch. He then reached into the back of the wardrobe and removed a matching trench coat. “And be sure to take one of the umbrellas from the stand if you’re going back out. These rains can go on for days.”
“Thank you,” said Butch, fitting the hat on his head. It sat well on his brow, but he’d gone without wearing one for
so long it felt awkward, restrictive. “But I think I’m in for the day. Haven’t quite shaken the bug. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Hollis told him. “Good luck.”
After Hollis left the bungalow, Butch rested on the guest-room bed and stared at the ceiling. The sight of Delbert Keane’s last moments played behind his eyes, but it wasn’t alone there. In addition to the despondent man’s suicide, Butch thought about Hollis, about the way the brush of his chest had brought a flush to his face. Keane’s shirt erupted in flame. Hollis Rossington grasped him by the arms and pulled him close. Fire plumed from a dead man’s eyes and firm lips pressed against his as a strong hand slid down his belly and…
Seward had told him that he could still find joy in the world; that for some men it was the only knowable magic. For some men that might be true, but Butch knew that additional magics littered the world. He’d seen them. He’d felt them. But in that moment on a bed in Hollis Rossington’s home, he believed that joy might be the one magic that would undo him completely.
Chapter 31
Bleach
Death makes angels of us all.
Lennon thought this as he slammed the highball glass down on the polished counter of the bar in the banquet room of McMaster’s Chophouse. The room was full. Beneath the chandeliers and between the finely paneled walls, the place brimmed with police officers and low-level city officials, all of whom had turned out to celebrate the life and commiserate the death of Curtis Michael Conrad. All evening, whispers had been running through the room that the chief of police and the mayor would be attending Conrad’s funeral and making speeches. If that were true, the planting ceremony tomorrow would be a circus. Neither of the officials had known the detective; both were likely memorizing his name or jotting it down on note cards so they didn’t embarrass themselves. Conrad had little in the way of blood relations, at least as far as Lennon knew. He had mentioned a brother in Milwaukee, a furniture salesman if Lennon remembered correctly. No wife or kids. That made the politicians’ jobs all the easier because they wouldn’t have to share the microphone with civilians, men and women who weren’t part of the big machine, normal people who might not be able to lie with such abandon.