Skin of the Wolf

by Sam Cabot

  “Good enough for now. That it?”

  “Hardly. The unies up in Riverdale called. Three people showed up at that house. Two men—long hair in braids, the older one with silver jewelry—”

  “Just say, ‘They look like Indians.’”

  “I don’t have the balls. And a woman a little later.”

  “Do they know who? Do they have photos?”

  “No. They’re at a distance and they have binocs but not long-lens cameras. Budget issue.”

  “Screw it. We’re on the way.”

  “You need backup?”

  “We’ll use the unies, and the precinct up there, if we do.”

  “There’s one more thing, but ask Framingham, because it’s bullshit.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” She clicked off and tossed the phone back to Framingham. She started across the campus at a fast clip.

  He trotted after her. “Where are we going?”

  “Riverdale. I’m supposed to ask you about something.”

  “Carbonariis.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what Ostrander said.”

  “To me he said it was bullshit.”

  “He did? I’m supposed to Wikipedia him.”

  “Carbonariis? He’s got an entry?”

  “Maybe he’s famous.”

  They climbed in the car. While she slammed it into gear and drove, Framingham bent over his phone, his thumbs tapping. “Oh. Oh, holy crap. Charlotte, you have to see this. No, dammit, wait till you stop!”

  She leaned over anyway. On the screen of his phone she saw a black line illustration, like an old woodcut. “Son of a bitch!” She turned her attention back to the street and the honking traffic. “That’s him. He is famous.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Framingham, “he’s also really, really old. What he’s famous for is founding the first Christian settlement in North America. In 1497.”

  “Oh. I guess we met a descendant. Do priests have descendants?”

  Framingham didn’t answer. He’d enlarged the picture on his screen and was staring at it.

  “Matt?”

  “Not a descendant.” Framingham spoke in an odd mixture of trepidation and excitement. “I told you, there was something seriously weird about that guy. This”—he waved his phone—“is the guy we met.”

  “Please tell me you’re just trying to lighten the mood.”

  “Charlotte. It’s this guy. You felt it, too, I know you did. His totally weird vibe. Totally weird. And how many of these guys could there be?”

  “At least two.”

  “No. It’s him. The simplest explanation is always the best. The simplest explanation: he’s not human.”

  “Sure,” Charlotte sighed, “I get it. A weird pale guy centuries old—he’s a vampire. Jesus Christ, Matt, if I didn’t know you were crazy, I’d think you were crazy.”

  56

  Abornazine drove steadily south on the last leg of their journey. Next to him, Tahkwehso sat, back straight, staring ahead. The lack of connection to the road and the unnatural speed with which distance could be covered made Tahkwehso uncomfortable traveling by car. Abornazine, knowing this, always hesitated to ask him to make a trip, but this time it was Tahkwehso himself who’d insisted.

  “He won’t stop,” he’d said, returning to Abornazine’s study after Michael Bonnard had driven away from Eervollehuis earlier in the day. When the brothers left the house Abornazine let himself be seen leaving also, and then hid in the woods, understanding that Michael would come back for him if Tahkwehso couldn’t turn his brother’s heart to their cause. If twin would not respond to twin, no words from Abornazine would convince, and his own physical powers were waning. There was no shame in retreat, no glory in howling defiance into your enemy’s teeth to spark a battle you knew you wouldn’t win.

  When Michael drove away Abornazine came back to the house, and when Tahkwehso also returned Abornazine could tell he’d Shifted, had inhabited his wolf-self for a time. The deep weariness that always accompanied his return to his man-form was with him, the weariness but also the electricity that came: the charge Abornazine could all but see throwing blue sparks around him. “My brother doesn’t stop,” he said. “From the time we were young. He moves untiringly along narrow paths. If he can’t find us he’ll find the Ohtahyohnee. If it’s in his power to stop us, he won’t let us continue. I had him. I should not have let him go.”

  “He’d have fought you,” Abornazine said, hoping to comfort. “Only one of you would have come out of that battle.”

  Tahkwehso had turned away, to the windows and the winter field beyond. “I would have been the one.”

  “Still. There must be some other way. He’s your brother.”

  Tahkwehso had not answered.

  Nor had he spoken since they’d left, just sat watching the road and the winter cliffs. Now, as the purple dusk gathered and they turned off the parkway to roll slowly down the curving Riverdale street, Abornazine said to him, “I may be wrong.”

  At first, silence. Then, “If you’re wrong, we’ll continue searching. We can’t stop now. It’s too important, and our goal is too near, to stop. Or to let my brother stop us.”

  They drove past large homes fading in the twilight. The irony was not lost on Abornazine: to the great estate they were headed for, from another—his own. What was wrong with his people, he asked himself as he had so many times, that they made “good” synonymous with “large”? For himself, he was thankful to have been permitted to put his house and his wealth in the service of the People.

  He gave his name—his white name—at the gate and was rewarded with a long silence and then a wordless buzz. Their arrival must have created the stir he’d anticipated, because the door opened before the car was parked and, alongside the redoubtable Hilda, Bradford Lane stood waiting in the doorway.

  “Christ!” Lane cackled as they approached. “It really is you, Peter van Vliet, you old fraud! I didn’t believe it when Hilda told me, and I can’t see worth a damn anymore but I’d know you anywhere—you still wear enough silver to sound like Santa’s sleigh.” He paused and frowned. “Who’s with you?”

  “Tahkwehso.” He introduced himself, reaching for Lane’s hand with both his own. “Abenaki. We’re grateful to be received in your home.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Van Vliet, you never change, do you? Fine, Tahkwehso, welcome. Hilda, they’re in, so you might as well bring coffee. Getting to be a regular Grand Central Station around here.” He turned and, with stiff but even steps—he was counting, Abornazine realized—he walked back through the entryway. They followed him across a living room bare-walled and empty-shelved to the warmth of the sunroom, where Lane settled into an armchair and waved his guests to seats. “So, Peter”—he grinned as though an argument were over and he’d won it—“what the hell are you doing here? If you were hoping to get your hands on the goodies before everyone else, you’re out of luck.” He spread his arms joyfully. “It’s all gone. You’ll have to go to Sotheby’s tomorrow and bid with the rest of the vultures.”

  “I can see everything’s gone,” Abornazine said. “I’m sorry. I know how you loved the things you had.”

  “For God’s sake, if it’s my funeral you’ve come for, you’re early. Write a eulogy if you want but don’t try it out on me. Tahkwehso, who the hell are you?”

  “A friend.”

  “Not of mine, so you must be a friend of this charlatan’s. You understand there’s nothing real about him except his money?”

  “I’ve found the truth to be different, but I’ll consider your words.”

  “You do that. Peter, I don’t think I’ve seen you in fifteen years. Last I heard you were out West living with some old Navajo.”

  “Atsa. He taught me many things.”

  “‘He taught me many things.’ You even talk like a B movie. Or
maybe I don’t get out much. Tahkwehso, do real Indians talk like that now?”

  Tahkwehso smiled. “People speak in many different ways.”

  “What are you, an Abenaki politician? Now: I don’t know anything about the murder at Sotheby’s. I never met the girl. I understand all my pieces are intact. The sales are going ahead. If any of those things are what you came about, there you are and you can leave before the coffee comes.”

  “We’re not here for those reasons,” Abornazine said.

  “Then I can’t imagine why you are here, and I can’t wait to find out. Where the hell is Hilda?”

  “I’m right here, Mr. Lane.” The unsmiling woman came down the steps and set a tray on the wicker side table at Lane’s elbow. “It’s getting toward evening. Your guests need light.”

  “Then turn it on, for God’s sake.”

  Abornazine bit his tongue. Soft winter twilight filled the room, the dusk within identical to that beyond the glass walls. No electric light could be as welcoming or as profound; nevertheless Hilda flicked a switch. Abornazine narrowed his eyes against the sudden, mundane brightness. Hilda cast an ominous look at the visitors as she turned and left.

  “Help yourselves,” Lane said. “Someone pour me one. Black with two sugars.”

  Abornazine did that, and poured a cup for himself. Tahkwehso rarely took caffeine, but a guest didn’t refuse a host, so he prepared a cup with a lot of milk.

  “All right,” Lane said. “You’re not here for the gory murder details—you knew about that, though?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you bring me any gory details?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, hell. And you didn’t come sniffing around for anything I own?”

  “No.”

  “Then please enlighten me. To what do I owe this dubious honor?”

  Abornazine exchanged a glance with Tahkwehso. “We want to talk about the Ohtahyohnee.”

  “Hah! I should’ve known. I’ve had people here all day talking about the damn Ohtahyohnee. Detectives, and a priest, and some woman who’s as phony as you are, Peter. Claimed to be here for the conference but about Native art, she doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “What about an Abenaki?” Tahkwehso asked suddenly. “Has another Abenaki come to ask about it?”

  “Not unless one of those detectives was one. I suppose that’s possible, now that I think about it. If either one was, though, they didn’t say.”

  “The Ohtahyohnee,” Abornazine said, watching Lane closely. “I was right, then? It is yours?”

  “So what? That cat’s out of the bag. I don’t care.”

  “Bradford, it’s not real.”

  “Oh, no!” Lane gulped coffee and clinked his cup into his saucer. “Don’t you start! That woman tried the same thing on me. Peter, if you’re trying to drive the price down, I swear I’ll have your head on a platter. Though I’d heard you weren’t bidding.”

  “No, I hadn’t planned to.” Quite the contrary: Abornazine had taken pains to conceal his desire for the Ohtahyohnee, avoiding the auction house, the talk and the fuss, the consortium of his fellow collectors hoping to buy it for the Met. He and Tahkwehso had no doubt of Tahkwehso’s ability to acquire it as they needed to, and the ease of his rooftop leap and entry into Sotheby’s through the open terrace had proved them right. The only catastrophic hitch in their plans had been the mask’s false nature.

  “Then what do you care whether it’s real or not?” Lane demanded. “And how would you even know? The Met says it is, the Quai Branly says it is, Sotheby’s experts say it is. What do you know that they don’t?”

  “He knows nothing,” Tahkwehso said quietly. “I know.”

  Lane frowned. “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re an expert? A scholar? You have some secret knowledge no one else has?”

  “I have no knowledge. But I have a way of knowing. About these masks, there is a way to know.”

  Lane sat silent. “No,” he said finally. “Really. You cannot be trying to feed me that line. Gentlemen, I may be old and blind but my mother raised no stupid children. If you think you—”

  “There is a way,” Abornazine said with gentle firmness, “and Bradford, you clearly know what that way is. The mask’s not real.”

  “The only way I know”—Lane spoke carefully, as though enunciating for people having trouble following him—“is what’s written in the oldest stories. If that’s what you’re trying to say, that amounts to you, Tahkwehso, telling me to my face that you’re a shapeshifter. Since, for one thing, no real shapeshifter would ever do that, and since, for another thing, there are no goddamn real shapeshifters”—he leaned back in his chair—“I have to ask myself what is the point of all this. And whether it might be time to call Hilda to throw you two lunatics out.”

  Abornazine looked in the direction of the unseen river beyond the windows. Their own reflections met his gaze, and nothing was visible in the blackness outside. He turned back to Lane. “The point,” he said, “is that we need the real mask. I believe you had that, once. I believe the one now at Sotheby’s was substituted at some time and you never knew. We’re asking you to help us. Please. To try to find out when the switch was made, and by whom, and why. And where the real Ohtahyohnee is now.”

  “You’re insane. Get out of my house.”

  “We need the mask,” Abornazine went on as though Lane hadn’t spoken, “to perform the Awakening Ceremony. Yes, Tahkwehso is a Shifter. He breaks his oath to say it, and that should give you a sense of how urgent our need is. There are others like him, and once we’ve performed the Ceremony with the power of the Ohtahyohnee, there will be many more. Think whatever pleases you, but what harm could come from giving us your help?”

  “You do need help, but not the kind I can give. Tahkwehso, are you as crazy as he is?”

  “I know the same truths he knows.”

  “So the answer’s yes. If I could see, I’d say prove it. Turn into an eagle or a wolf or whatever it is, right now. But you know I can’t do that, don’t you? You know you could put on a fur coat and tell me anything you wanted to. Get out, both of you.”

  “Bradford—”

  “Goddammit, Peter! Even a blind man can see through this! I stand to make several million dollars tomorrow on that Sotheby’s sale. Provided no one suddenly says, ‘Lane isn’t sure anymore. He thinks that madman van Vliet might be right when he says the masks were switched at birth.’ One word of doubt from me on the Ohtahyohnee and the authenticity of everything in the collection is suddenly in question. What are you trying to do to me?”

  “Whatever you tell us, no one would know.”

  “Really? How do I know you’re not wired for sound? You could be transmitting every word we say back to that consortium you say you’re not part of. You might—”

  Abornazine’s cell phone started to ring.

  “Hah!” Lane chortled. “That’s them, telling you to give up now that you’re busted. Hello, you thieves! Go to hell!”

  Abornazine looked at Tahkwehso as he took his phone from his pocket. Little was more important than what they were doing now, but this could be someone from Eervollehuis to tell him Michael had returned. The number wasn’t familiar, but once he answered, he knew the voice and the name. He was about to say he couldn’t speak now, when he heard words that froze him.

  “I have the mask.”

  “What?”

  “The Ohtahyohnee. The true one. I have it now.”

  Abornazine was at a loss.

  “You know the one at Sotheby’s isn’t real, don’t you? I have the real one. I want to give it to you. But there’s something I want, too.”

  57

  Livia focused on her driving, trying not to get caught up in the riptides of emotion around her. Her Noantri senses p
icked up heart rates, stress hormones, and sweat as easily as strained voices and tense postures; in a car with Spencer angry and worried, Thomas Kelly confused and anxious, and the extraordinary Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis glittering with doom, it was all she could do to stay steady on the road.

  They were in her rented Malibu heading for Fordham’s Bronx campus. “Where else would he have gone?” Spencer snapped once they’d discovered Michael had slipped away while they were busy with the detectives. “He’d just learned from Father Kelly that Father Maxwell had a connection to Tekakwitha and possibly to the mask. He has to assume his brother might have somehow learned the same, and in any case it’s the only new idea we have. Oh, why won’t he answer his cell phone?”

  “Because it’s off, Spencer. He told you he was keeping it off. And in case the police are tracking yours, you should turn that off, too.”

  “Damn the police. Then please give me yours.”

  She had, and Spencer, sitting beside her, was using it to try to reach Michael every ninety seconds.

  He’d just lifted it to his ear again when it rang. Scowling, he handed it to Livia. “Whoever it is, explain that you’re busy.”

  She took the phone and said, “Livia Pietro.”

  “Livia, it’s Michael.”

  “Michael! Where are you?”

  Livia got no further; Spencer snatched the phone from her. “Michael? What are you doing? Of course you couldn’t, you insisted that I turn it off. Where are— What? I’m sorry, what?” He listened, and when he spoke again his voice was more subdued. “Oh. Oh, I see. Yes. No. As it happens we’re already headed there, and if you’d waited— Of course we are. Well, I’m sorry if that’s what you want, but I categorically refuse to stay away if you— No, I’ll— What? He is? Now? No, Michael, don’t hang up! Put me on hold, I’ll wait— Michael, do not hang up! Michael! Michael?” Spencer lowered the phone, his lips pressed tight together. “Extraordinary. Father Carbonariis, are all Indians like that?”

  “It’s not an easy question to answer,” said the spectral form in the backseat, “since I have no point of reference. What do you mean by ‘that’?”