The Witch of Babylon

by Dorothy J. Mcintosh

  A flurry of nerves hit me when we walked in. I thought I’d seen Laurel toying with the ring in the study off the family room, but I couldn’t be positive. The view out the French doors showed the plates and soggy dinner things still sitting on the terrace table.

  “What a mess,” the maintenance man said when we entered the study.

  It looked like it had been hit by a force-five hurricane—files and photos dumped all over the floor. Her laptop was gone.

  He gave me a suspicious look. “What’s happened here?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t have to manufacture a look of shock; I was as surprised as he. “I don’t know. She was probably getting ready to sort through this stuff when something else came up.”

  He didn’t seem convinced. “I’m going to have to call this in.” He took his pager off his belt and punched in some numbers.

  I sensed my opportunity to find the ring slipping away. I thought I’d seen it in the study, but where? I opened the desk drawers, thinking Laurel might have put it away. Memo pads, paper clips, things like that—but no ring. And then a rare piece of good luck—sitting on a recessed bookshelf over the desk were a man’s watch and wallet, and beside them, Hal’s ring.

  I heard the chirp of the maintenance man’s cell. In the few seconds he turned his attention away to answer, I pretended to reach for a book, then grabbed the ring and slipped it on my index finger. I bent down and rooted among the file folders on the floor, found one labeled Property Administration, and searched through it. I drew out an invoice for property taxes and straightened up. “This is it. This is what Laurel wanted.”

  The man held out his phone. “Gip wants to talk to you.”

  “Hi, Gip. Listen, everything’s okay. There’s a wallet and watch on the bookshelf in here. They weren’t taken, so I don’t think you need to worry about a robbery. It’s probably just a case of lax housekeeping. She’s not the most domestic person. I’ll ask Laurel to talk to you about it when she comes back.”

  I handed the phone back to the maintenance guy. He spoke to Gip, terminated the call, and looked at me. “Okay. He says to leave it for now. He’ll make out a report for the householder.”

  Before I left the building Gip noted the document I’d taken. I felt ecstatic about getting the ring, like a great weight had just rolled off my back.

  My hands were bigger than Hal’s and his ring was so tight I couldn’t get it all the way down my finger. It was a heavy, clunky piece, and I made my left hand into a fist to ensure it didn’t fall off. The minute I got a safe distance away from the building I took it off. A basketball game was in play on the West Fourth Street courts; a sweaty, raucous crowd of fans bunched along the wire-mesh fence. I’d spent many happy times at the Cage watching the tough, fast-moving action. I drifted over.

  I found an empty spot at the end of the fence and turned my attention to the ring. It looked old, with elaborate designs worked into the gold frame encircling the solitaire. I thought it was an antique, possibly a Victorian copy of an ancient Celtic poison ring. The goldsmith’s stamp on the inside of the band confirmed this—a mark not seen on contemporary rings. The diamond winked in the sun as if Mina’s spirit lived on inside it. It creeped me out.

  Thinking it might be a hinge, I put pressure on some scroll-work at the crown of the ring. I heard a faint click and nudged the face of the ring outward. A tiny piece of folded paper lay in the pocket underneath. I unfolded it with shaking hands.

  Hal’s spidery writing stood out in blue ink: Trinity—Janssen Tomb.

  I’d been right yesterday. I’d been so close! Hal had hidden the engraving in the cemetery mausoleum beside the Church of the Intercession after all. Even though Mina hadn’t been buried there, Hal would have still had legal access to it any time he wanted.

  Although I’d narrowly missed the engraving yesterday, finding the ring gave me a measure of peace. My best guess was that the Alchemy group had trashed Laurel’s study hunting for the engraving or new information leading to it. Probably because she told them to look for it there. Not knowing the answer herself, but hoping to buy some time, she’d tossed them a red herring. A clever detour on her part. That also meant she was not too far gone to think rationally. My cell showed 11:48 A.M. Nine hours left to free her.

  I stopped in at Garber’s Hardware and bought a penlight and a battery-powered hacksaw to cut the padlock. The hacksaw was only about two hand lengths long and therefore easy to conceal. I dumped my clothes into a trash can to make room in my bag for the engraving. Taking another look around to check for Eris or her people, I flagged a cab.

  Inside the cemetery I scanned the grounds for the caretaker, but there was no sign of him. There wasn’t a soul to be seen. Luck might be on my side for once. I walked straight up to the unnamed mausoleum, assuming this had to be the Janssen Tomb by default. When I tugged the padlock it fell off. The hasp had been cleanly cut through. The doors swung open easily, unimpeded by dirt or debris, another sign someone had been here before me.

  I pocketed the padlock and once inside, pulled the doors shut. I flicked on my penlight and swept it across the dim interior. Pale centipedes and spiders dashed back into the dark corners, escaping from the painful flare of my light. Stone coffins lay against each of the side walls, one with its lid shoved aside. My light glanced off a jumble of brownish bones, not laid out in the usual symmetrical form. Cool in this tomb and damp. Aside from the bones and a net of cobwebs nothing else was there. The second coffin held an intact, undisturbed skeleton. The engraving was gone.

  I felt numb with despair, the last hope I had of freeing Laurel swept away.

  As I emerged from the tomb, a voice pierced the air. “Just one minute. You were here yesterday. I thought I made myself clear then.” The caretaker walked down the rise behind the mausoleum, no friendly smile on his face this time.

  Angling my body so he couldn’t see the missing padlock, I said, “After you directed me to the columbarium I learned they had no record of my great-aunt’s name. So I came back here, where my cousin had originally said to look.”

  “A little odd since this particular mausoleum isn’t even identified.”

  “I thought there may have been some indication, something I’d missed.”

  “And you conveniently forgot you’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Something like that.”

  He eyed me for a few seconds. “What is it with you people? I had to throw someone else out early this morning. Some tourist with a backpack. Nobody can read I guess.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “A bit like you but shorter and skinnier. Dark hair.”

  “Did he have an accent?”

  “Yes, but his English was good.”

  Tomas. I apologized for the intrusion and hustled away from his angry glare.

  I racked my brains trying to understand how Tomas had figured this out. He said he’d taken some courses at Columbia, so it was possible he’d solved the anagram. Except the ring was intact and in my possession. He didn’t have the benefit of Hal’s final clue. Could it have been my conversation last night when I’d opened up to Ari? I’d told him about my visit to the cemetery. Had he passed that along to his brother? He must have. I knew in my gut that I couldn’t trust Tomas.

  Whatever. Tomas had Nahum’s engraving now. The enormity of his duplicity staggered me. He’d betrayed me and left Laurel to die. I’d tear him apart if I ever got near him again.

  Anger is a useless ally. It fogs the mind. But even with my senses on full alert I wouldn’t have seen it coming. As I passed through the Amsterdam entrance the jester, lurking behind the high stone wall, jammed a gun into my belly.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Pain roared through my gut and then seemed to expand, turning my whole body into one gigantic, throbbing wave of hurt. I fell, twitching on the sidewalk like a slaughtered lamb. I couldn’t breathe. I had a vague memory of being dragged into a vehicle, the stink of exhaust, a woman’s voice. When I t
ried to move, my body lay like a dead weight.

  “Where is it?” Eris glared at me. She yanked open my bag, and swore when she realized it was empty.

  “He shot me.” I tried to raise my hand and press it to my abdomen.

  “Tasered you,” she corrected. “What did you do with the engraving?”

  Still groggy, I raised myself up to a sitting position, sucked in a couple of deep breaths, and closing my trembling fist, took a violent swing at her. She easily deflected it and twisted my arm painfully behind my back. She pulled out the Taser.

  “You’d like more of this? Fifteen hundred volts straight to your temple this time?”

  “Then you’ll never find it.”

  She frowned in exasperation. “Okay, I’m repeating myself here.

  Where did you put it?”

  “It wasn’t there.”

  “You’re lying.” She clicked something on the stun gun and pressed it against my temple.

  A phone rang. Eris reached into her purse and pulled it out. After a brief, terse conversation, she looked out the window and then turned to me, smiling. “We’re just about there,” she said. “He’s going to come down to see you.”

  “Whoever he is, he can screw off too.” “We’ll dig it out of you then.”

  Twenty-six

  The car pulled into a sizeable parking garage that I assumed belonged to the building on West Thirty-fourth Street. We stopped at a loading platform. Eris and the jester hustled me roughly through the gloomy space and up a few steps to a steel door.

  At first glance the room we entered reminded me of a funeral parlor, a ritzy one dressed up for rich folk. Plush mushroom-colored broadloom covered every inch of the floor. A large silver vase sat on a Queen Anne buffet, the top so glossy it reflected the vessel perfectly. Embossed around its base were the signs of the five ancient planets I’d seen on the Alchemy Archives website: Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Mercury. A cloying scent hung in the air, as if someone had tried to cover up a bad odor with cheap floral spray. The place carried with it a kind of hush, of breath caught in the throat, like you find in an emergency waiting room or at the side of a grave.

  “Sit here.” Eris motioned to a row of upholstered chairs.

  I glanced around the room, trying to find some way to make a break for it, and heard a voice behind me.

  “I think this time we’ll have a more honest conversation.”

  When I turned, Jacob Ward was standing a few feet away. My momentary surprise faded. Here, I had no doubt, was Jupiter. I couldn’t imagine him in any role but that of kingpin. My mind raced. Jacob Ward was Tomas’s contact. Had this whole thing been a setup? Ward had a keen enough interest in the period and deep enough pockets to buy the artifact. But if he and Tomas had Nahum’s engraving, why was Ward strong-arming me now?

  “I’ll say one thing for you, Ward, you’ve got talent. How have you managed to hide the fact that you’re no better than some deadbeat killer in Rikers?”

  He reddened slightly and ran a hand over his jaw as though I’d just spit on his face.

  “Where’s Laurel? Take me to her right now.”

  The way he was dressed, black bespoke suit, plain white shirt, conservative tie, made him look like a funeral director. I saw him twitch, the only hint at the tension he carried.

  “I quite enjoyed your company at my home, John. Let’s avoid getting off on the wrong foot today.” He took a few steps forward and gave me a pat on the shoulder, the kind of gesture an uncle would make toward a favored nephew.

  I jerked away from his pudgy hand, in no frame of mind for any pretense of politeness. “You didn’t answer me. I said I want to see her.”

  “And what if we refuse? You’ll come out swinging, both gun barrels blazing?” He laughed. “Madison, think of this as a dogfight. We’re the rottweilers and you’re the poodle—one of the small ones. It’s no contest. Let’s go somewhere else to talk; people are always coming and going through here.”

  Venting my rage might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help Laurel. I’d be further ahead playing along with them and finding some angle I could exploit. We walked down the corridor to an elevator. The jester wandered off, leaving Eris as rearguard behind us. Ward pressed the button for the fifth floor and we exited into a huge room. Floor to ceiling, the height of the place rose almost two stories. The space was circular and vast. It had no windows; I assumed the ones I’d seen on the exterior had been blocked off. The walls were finished with expensive paper in lustrous white. The ceiling, a gentle dome, was topped with an oval central skylight framed in bronze. I could see an ellipse of sky overhead but most of the light came indirectly, the actual fixtures probably hidden behind the rolled cornice. The room had an otherworldly cold, flat tone. Around its circumference was a series of glass-fronted cases customized for the circular walls.

  Ward swept his arm in a wide arc. “Our gallery,” he said.

  White plastic monitors, each with a row of winking green lights, were affixed to the cases. Almost two-thirds contained artifacts, and the rest books and manuscripts. I assumed not all of them were legitimate, having either been looted or fabricated. I thought I could identify a statue stolen from the National Museum. With one phone call, I could probably clear up a significant number of open FBI files.

  “The glass is shatterproof,” Ward said. “You could set off a grenade in here and it wouldn’t break. The whole thing is screened against ultraviolet light. Inside there’s even a separate airflow system; it keeps the atmosphere humid and at a constant temperature. As you probably know, Iraqi soil is very salty. When clay objects are removed from the earth they dry out, crack, and disintegrate. I make time every day to come in here. You can feel them, you know, the ancient craftsmen speaking to you through the glass.”

  Many of the books and manuscripts had pages that were parchment thin and brownish, the pages almost transparent, fragile as elderly skin. They perched on small wooden platforms or custom frames like miniature lecterns. I pressed my hand against the glass to slide it open, forgetting it would have been locked.

  “The artifacts are available to buyers but this section is my own collection. Some of them are very rare. I can get one out if you want to see it.” Ward pointed to a leather-bound tome with clasps like I’d seen on the Picatrix. “That’s Secretum Secretorum, The Secrets of Secrets. Goes back to the twelfth century.”

  He gestured to the right. “The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, a German book about forbidden rites. It’s in Latin. The volume beside it is a work on astrology by the Russian Vladimir Apriagnev. And here’s my pride and joy—a French title, Le Mystère des Cathédrales. The author vanished in 1953; no one knows what happened to him. Some speculate he found the key to immortality.” Ward tapped the glass in front of the book. “Only three hundred copies originally printed. Considerably fewer in circulation now.”

  “You really believe in all those preposterous fairy stories? Immortality? Alchemy?”

  Ward colored. “Explain why Himmler took it seriously then. He planned to use alchemical gold to finance the Nazi Party.”

  “You’re expecting the engraving to lead you to, what, some kind of formula to make gold?”

  Eris, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet, butted in. “We don’t have to justify ourselves to you, Madison.”

  I decided right then to puncture their balloon. “No, you don’t. But you’re not completely up to date. Vanderlin’s game has been solved and Tomas Zakar has the engraving.”

  I’d taken a bold step telling them Tomas had it, but I got the response I was hoping for. The news came as a shock. To Ward especially. His inability to hide his anxiety told me how hard the information had hit him. He rubbed the side of his cheek as though he’d just been stung by a wasp. When he spoke, his voice sounded weak. “Where is he?”

  I looked straight at him and tried to force a smile. “Your guess is as good as mine. Somewhere over the Atlantic I assume. He left Laurel and me out to dry. You’ve wasted y
our time by hauling us in here.”

  “Don’t think, Madison, that my current good humor toward you means anything.” Ward nodded toward Eris. “Laurel’s already had a taste of Eris’s talents. She’s quite effective at teasing out people’s secrets.”

  “Right. Like Hal’s. She certainly blew that.”

  “He tried to end-run us,” Eris said defensively.

  I masked my surprise. The pieces were finally falling into place. Laurel had been right. Hal had been part of their group and ended up paying for that with the same sickening fate as Hanna Jaffrey. Jesus, Hal. What did you get yourself tangled up in?

  “He was willing to sell the piece. You didn’t have to kill him.”

  “He wanted six million. Far too much. I didn’t achieve all this by being a fool,” Ward said.

  “The engraving is worth way more than that.”

  “Undoubtedly, but I like to be the one to maximize profits.”

  I felt the fear. But you can’t be good at sales without reading people well, and something told me there was bluff mixed in with his threats. “A word of advice. Your time would be better spent tracking Tomas and letting Laurel and me go. Squeezing us won’t get you any further.”

  He rounded on me, the supercilious smile finally wiped off his face. “I guess the afternoon we spent at my house gave you the wrong impression. The purpose of that cordial interlude was simply to allow me to size you up. You can buy your freedom only by telling us where Tomas is.”

  I reared back from him. The sudden motion sent jolts of pain through my stomach.

  “Tomas deceived me. I imagine he’s heading for Iraq but I don’t know for sure.”

  Eris focused her cold gaze on me. “How did he get out of the country? He didn’t buy an airline ticket.”

  “He flew in to a private airstrip in the States and probably left the same way.” I was still furious about the Zakars’ deception and wanted any repercussions aimed straight at them. Ward eyeballed me for a few seconds, trying to sort out whether I was telling the truth.