Parker gestured at the bags.
“Good hunting?”
“Not bad, but not as good as it used to be. The Gotham Book Mart is gone, the Carnegie, Seven Gables. You still got the Strand, and Argosy, but the rest are too upscale for me. You can’t dig for treasure at Tiffany’s.”
Parker empathized. He missed trawling record stores in Manhattan; bookstores, too, but at least bookstores still survived, for now. It saddened him to think that Portland, a city of 70,000 people, had nearly as many bookstores as Manhattan, and certainly more record stores. Most recently, Other Music had closed, joining all the record stores that had once filled St. Mark’s, back when Parker had briefly lived there after—
After Susan and Jennifer were killed, but let those thoughts go. This is not the time.
Now only Academy was left, over on Eighteenth Street. There might have been one or two others of which Parker was no longer aware, and he knew that Brooklyn had some, but he rarely went over there now.
Susan and Jennifer again. This persistence of loss.
The server came to take their orders. Johnston glanced at the menu. After they’d given him some time to recover from the shock of the prices, and Parker confirmed that he was picking up the check, Johnston settled for the osso buco. They shared some appetizers, and eventually relaxed into conversations about the city, history, and culture, while carefully avoiding politics and religion, like gentlemen, until they came to the subject of Angel’s ongoing recuperation.
“Not that it’s any help to you, but I had cancer,” said Johnston. “That was a few years back.”
“What kind?” asked Angel.
Johnston tapped his mouth and throat.
“It sucked balls,” he said, which was about as succinct as a man could get on the subject, even though it might have been open to misinterpretation under the circumstances.
“And now?”
“It’s gone, and it hasn’t come back. I figure it will, in some form, but it’s been five years now, which isn’t bad. I don’t taste certain foods as well as before, but physically, that’s about the extent of the damage.”
“And aside from physically?”
Johnston took a moment before replying.
“I know that it’s in there somewhere, dormant, biding its time, and I don’t want to go through that pain again. I hope something else takes me instead. The only time I ever regretted not getting married was during the radiation treatment. My sister came down from Houlton to look after me, God bless her, but I never felt more alone. It’s good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn’t make it easier, but it sure doesn’t make it harder.”
He finished his beer, and asked the waiter for another.
“Hey,” said Louis.
“Yes?” said Johnston.
“Folks at the next table look like they’re having a good time. Maybe you should go over there, see what you can do about it.”
Silence reigned for four or five seconds, and then Johnston laughed. Parker had never seen him laugh before. He hadn’t been certain that Johnston was capable of it.
“I might just do that, if they get too cheerful.”
Louis’s mouth flickered a smile.
“I’ll keep you posted,” he said.
And thus dinner passed pleasantly. Their plates were cleared, and they declined dessert, but Louis and Johnston agreed on a brandy. Now that they had come to some understanding of each other, they commenced talking quietly between themselves, seemingly about country musicians who had shot people. They dealt with Billy Joe Shaver, and moved on to Johnny Paycheck. Parker wondered if he had somehow created a two-headed monster, but kept this to himself.
The tables nearby emptied, increasing their privacy.
It was time.
“Tell us,” said Parker to Johnston, “about the Atlas.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
Sellars gave up trying to sleep. He left Lauren lying unmoving beside him, her face barely visible under the blankets, her breathing deep. He put on his dressing gown and a pair of slippers, and went outside to smoke. He was supposed to be trying to give up. He told Lauren he was making a real effort, but didn’t think she believed him. She had a nose. She could smell the smoke on his clothes. But (a) he spent most of his working day around people who smoked, and it wasn’t as though he could deal with them from inside a protective bubble; and (b) she wasn’t that bothered if he wanted to kill himself with cigarettes, so long as he didn’t smoke anywhere in the house, or where the kids could see him. Out of sight, out of mind.
The police were all over Romana Moon’s death, and the cult angle had set the media barking like overexcited dogs. All the fuss and attention would increase the pressure on the police to find her killer, when they shouldn’t even have had a murder to solve; a disappearance, yes, but not a murder. If only Holmby hadn’t slipped; if only he’d managed to get the body safely back to his car, because there wasn’t supposed to be a body, only blood and memories.
Fucking Holmby.
Yes, the Northumbrian site was always going to be among the most difficult because it was so isolated, and part of the journey to and from it would have to be taken on foot. But it was important to Sellars that one of the killings should take place there, and Mors had offered no objection. It probably suited her employer’s ends: he wanted old sites of worship, and while the Familist shrine might not have stood for long in Hexhamshire, the god it venerated was more ancient than any Christian deity.
Sellars had offered to take care of it, but Mors warned that he was too close to this one. She, like Quayle, prized objectivity. Anyway, Holmby claimed to have found the perfect victim, and said he’d already started working on her. A roofie in her drink, he announced, and she’d be docile as a kitten; and she might have been, but light as she was, she still tipped the scales at more than a kitten, and dead weight was hard to carry. Sellars knew that from experience. Despite Mors’s objections, he and Holmby should have collaborated on the Northumbrian killing, just to be certain that Holmby was capable of finishing that first job. He had been, as it turned out, but had literally fallen at the final hurdle.
Now that Holmby was incapacitated, it made sense for Sellars to remain out of contact with him, because it wasn’t as though Holmby could be of any help for the next few weeks. Sellars would continue alone, which suited him. In addition, if Holmby had been careless, and left DNA at the scene or on the body, then he, not Sellars, would be the one the police went after.
Sellars stopped puffing on the cigarette. It suddenly tasted bad to him. He stubbed it out against the outside wall of the kitchen, and flicked the butt over the neighbors’ wall. The house next door was rented to a bunch of students, and they wouldn’t notice another cigarette end in the yard.
He hadn’t left a body to be found, but Holmby had. If Holmby had been inattentive enough to lose his footing on the moors, what else might he have failed to notice? If the police did manage to connect Holmby to Moon, what would Holmby do when they came knocking on his door? Would he brazen it out? Would he keep his mouth shut? Sellars and Holmby weren’t friends. They’d never even met before they came together at Fairford. True, Sellars—aided by Mors, or whatever techie she was paying for the trouble—had tracked Holmby for months on the Darknet, where he liked to lurk. Holmby was adept at lurking, and knew his way around the Net in all its forms, but he left a trail, mainly at sites specializing in images of dead women—murdered, mostly, although he tended to shy away from the more sadistic material. Holmby wasn’t interested in torture. He was a purist. He just wanted to know what it might be like to kill someone, preferably a woman. I2P, the Invisible Internet Project, had finally enabled Sellars to begin chatting securely with Holmby online, and the rest was easy. Now they were just two men, formerly strangers, currently acquaintances, who’d been tasked with killing an indefinite number of women—or males, if the opportunity arose, but females were easier, and more potent.
Two men serving old gods.
&nb
sp; “What are you doing out here?”
He nearly jumped out of his skin. Lauren had come down the stairs, through the kitchen, and opened the back door, all without alerting him. Sellars thought that if the police ever did arrive to arrest him, they could probably do it with sirens blaring and a band playing, and he still wouldn’t notice until they put the cuffs on him.
“Doing my best not to have a heart attack,” he said. “You scared me half to death.”
Lauren folded her arms, and shivered.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I came out for some air.”
“You came out for a cigarette, too.”
“Wasn’t me. That was one of the students next door. You’d think they’d know better, but they don’t.”
“Liar,” she said, but didn’t bother to fight about it. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“No, I’m not sick.”
“You’re worried about something, though. You wouldn’t be standing alone in the dead of night if you weren’t.”
He had to throw her a bone. He didn’t want her nosing about.
“Work stuff. I’ve been offered more hours, and I’m not sure that I want to take them. But if I don’t agree, I could be in trouble.”
There was some truth to this. Additional shifts and longer hours were on offer because business was good, but they were not compulsory.
“Have they said that to you?”
“Not in so many words, but you know…”
She shrugged. “We can always find ways to spend the extra money.”
“Yeah, but it’ll mean I’ll have to be away from home even more than I already am.”
She looked up at him then, and he felt a little part of himself break. He could see her sadness, and a future where he was no longer in her life, except for every second weekend when he arrived to pick up the kids so they could stay with him for a couple of nights, while he and Lauren exchanged awkward words on the doorstep.
But all she said was “We’ll manage.”
She wrapped her gown tighter around her body, and the shiver returned.
“I’m going back to bed.”
“I’ll be up in a minute.”
“Fine.”
She was almost in the kitchen when he spoke again.
“Lauren?”
“Yes?”
“There’s no one else.”
The look flashed again, but fainter now. She was tired, tired of everything.
“I could understand it better if there was,” she said. “Don’t forget to lock the door.”
And she left him alone with the dark.
CHAPTER XL
Quayle was taking the night air—and also taking a chance by doing so, if only a small one. The modern building that towered over him still had lights on in some of its offices, but Quayle had spent time watching it before entering its environs, and detected no signs of activity, while no surveillance cameras monitored this area, so he would not be troubled by security. He had made sure of the positioning of the cameras many years earlier, before they were even installed. In his hand was the key to the partners’ entrance, shiny and new since the most recent changing of the locks.
Where he stood had once been his cobblestoned courtyard, overlooked not by an edifice of glass but a trio of stoop-shouldered buildings, blackened by centuries of pollution and forever bathed in shadow, the configuration of the edifices being inimical to the best efforts of sunlight. From this location, he had monitored the changes in the city and his chosen profession, altering his own performance accordingly like an actor anticipating the reactions of his audience, so that the firm of Quayle might survive, even thrive, without suspicion.
Quayle could recall a time when lawyers were of a single breed, when barristers, or “apprentices at law” as they were termed, dealt with their clients personally instead of through an intermediary attorney, just as attorneys might plead for their clients from the sidebar of the court. But as the two professions of barrister and attorney—or later, “solicitor”—grew more distinct, Quayle decided that his firm should follow the latter path; he was no great pleader of cases, and something in his character caused judges and juries to look askance at him, and penalize his clients accordingly. Also, a solicitor had a lower public profile than a barrister and, if he so desired, might be seen by none but his own clients. It also suited Quayle to be excluded from the social burden of the Inns of Court, even as the solicitors’ own Inns of Chancery decayed, and to be beyond the reach of the discipline of the judiciary.
Finally, unlike barristers, solicitors could charge clients directly, and were not reliant on a legal colleague to pay them for their services. There was money in being a solicitor, if one went about it the right way: money in wills, in property. So it was that the firm of Quayle retreated into the umbrous regions of the profession, the business being handed down from one family member to another, always bearing the name of Quayle, and always boasting the distinctive profile of that line—to such a degree, it was said, that a man might struggle to distinguish this Quayle cousin from that uncle, or that brother from this nephew, so strong was their blood, as though they were all minor variations on a single theme. But since no two Quayles ever appeared to occupy the same room, or govern their firm during the same period, such opportunities for comparison never arose.
For the first time in many years, Quayle recalled Fawnsley, the last of his clerks, who had continued to serve the firm until well into his eighties. Fawnsley, with a pot of tea forever brewing beside him, thick as treacle; Fawnsley, with his foul soups of salvaged vegetables, the dregs of the market stalls; Fawnsley, with his pauper’s sandwiches stuffed with unidentifiable meats already on the turn, even though Quayle paid him well enough. There was no Mrs. Fawnsley, Fawnsley not being of “the marrying kind,” as the euphemism of the day went, although Quayle was convinced the clerk had never acted on his urges. It lent the man an additional patina of sadness, and frustrated desire.
Back in 1929, or perhaps 1930, a fellow solicitor had remarked to Quayle, more in sorrow than any great surprise, at Fawnsley having been glimpsed in the vicinity of Lady Malcolm’s Servants’ Ball, an infamous gathering of the city’s working-class sodomites and other assorted degenerates.
“Did he participate in the festivities?” Quayle asked.
“My chap couldn’t say. Said he was lingering outside. Might have been considering joining in, I suppose. Just thought you should know.”
The news had merely confirmed what Quayle already suspected, but he said nothing of this to Fawnsley, not directly; it would have broken the man’s heart for shame. Nevertheless, the following Friday he invited Fawnsley to join him in a small sherry as he was preparing to close up shop for the weekend, and in the gentlest and most roundabout of terms indicated that the firm of Quayle dealt in matters most private and delicate, and the guardians of those secrets—namely Fawnsley, and Quayle himself—must forever be vigilant in case they should inadvertently leave themselves open to intimidation or, perish the thought, blackmail.
He thought that Fawnsley might have paled slightly in response, although it was difficult to be certain given that the man spent most of his days in the tenebrous surroundings of the office. Whatever the case, there were no more reports of Fawnsley loitering at Lady Malcolm’s, nor was he ever glimpsed in the precincts of the city’s molly houses. But Quayle, in whom unexpected traces of humanity occasionally flashed like small, primitive fish somehow surviving the slow contamination of their environment, would wonder, as the years went by, if he might not have fastened Fawnsley in his loneliness and celibacy by even this most circumspect of interventions.
Yet Fawnsley, too, had also been most tactful, in his way. If he suspected his employer of involvement in affairs that might charitably have been described as esoteric, but more accurately as deeply occult, he gave no indication of it; and Fawnsley always found some business that required his immediate absence from the practice wheneve
r Quayle had visitors of a more arcane stripe, just so Quayle might have no fear of his listening at the keyhole.
It was after Fawnsley’s death that Quayle decided to shutter the firm. The old man had been with him for too many years to be easily replaceable, and Quayle lacked the energy to commence training Fawnsley’s successor, even had he found a clerk he could trust. The legal profession, too, had changed, or perhaps Quayle was suffering the inevitable lethargy and melancholia of the excessively long-lived, and had become fatally infected by nostalgia. He had witnessed the dissolution of Clifford’s Inn, the last of the old Inns of Chancery, in 1903. The solicitors no longer required such premises for the purposes of education and accommodation, or for dining and the convening of moot courts, although Quayle had sensed some general sadness at the disposal of Clifford’s, at this final severing of ties that went back to the settlement of the royal courts at Westminster in the fourteenth century. The loss was more profound for Quayle, who had also been present for the destruction of Thavie’s Inn in 1769, the first to fall, and had therefore been cursed to witness both the beginning and conclusion of the disbandment.
Or perhaps he had only imagined such matters. After a time, it became difficult to distinguish between memory and dreaming.
Fawnsley was with him on the day Clifford’s was sold. They had raised a glass to its memory.
“Most regrettable,” Fawnsley had said, shaking a dandruffed head. “Most regrettable indeed.”
Years passed. More venerable buildings were razed, and new growth ascended from the city floor to take their place. Fawnsley became older, grayer, frailer, until finally he, too, was gone.
Most regrettable. Most regrettable indeed.
But by then Quayle had also secured the Atlas, if in an incomplete form. He had passed the years since in trying to gather the missing leaves. The search had left so many bodies in its wake as to be uncountable, and still their sum seemed destined to increase. There would be no end to them, not while the Atlas remained deficient.
A Book of Bones Page 17