All of this is to say I don’t really have a problem with the mafia or other iterations of the criminal element, in modern times or earlier. Sure, they can be dangerous and difficult to trust, but their naked self-interest and commitment to protecting their own is something I can get behind. I actually have more trouble trusting governments. At least with a criminal such as Dmitri, nobody is pretending to be following some weird set of rules. They are who they are.
One other thing I’ve noticed: the organized criminal elements of the world have always been overrepresented by members of species that are, technically, non-human. Elves and goblins in particular always thrived in these kinds of professions. I think it’s because they’re used to existing in secret, which just naturally lends itself to rule breaking. They’re also gifted thieves, which I’m sure has something to do with it.
* * *
“Please, have a seat,” Dmitri said, in a difficult-to-peg accent. It landed somewhere between Scandinavian and Slavic. He was skinnier than the average retired criminal, and his age only really showed in the laugh lines on his face when he smiled. My understanding was that he was at least sixty years old, but that was not at all obvious.
He was very pale, which was more a condition of his elven heritage than a reflection of his health.
We took seats around the table, and Go-Go left us, hopefully to fetch something alcoholic.
“Thank you for coming, Esteban, and for bringing your associates. This is your cousin, yes? I think I hired you once, dear girl.”
“You did, sir, yes.”
“I thought so. Was it to keep someone alive or the opposite?”
“As bodyguard, for one of your associates. It was some time ago. I’m surprised you remember.”
“Of course I do. You’re quite memorable.”
Mirella always described her former job as one of a bodyguard, which was what she was doing when I met her. But she worked as an assassin for at least a little while. We never really talked about it. Anyway, the two jobs have a lot more in common than most people realize. I knew a guy who went back and forth between the roles all the time. His favorite story was how he got fired from guarding someone one week, and hired to kill him the next. Needless to say, I never did business with him, but it was a great story.
“I’m Adam,” I said, extending my hand.
“Oh yes.”
For my handshake, Dmitri rose from his seat, and shook my hand with both of his. It was a strange greeting from the most powerful man on the island, and possibly the hemisphere.
“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to come down and introduce myself to you in particular, but… the truth is I hardly leave the house any more.”
“Well, it’s a pretty nice house. I bet this pool is popular enough.”
“It is. And now that you’ve said so I must invite you for one of our events.”
He sat back down again, which was the first time his age really showed. It was the knees. It’s always the knees. I’ve seen more people get old than pretty much anyone, and those always go first.
“We have get-togethers up here,” he said, to Mirella, sort of, “two or three times a month. You and… what shall I call you? Mr. Adam seems odd.”
“Adam is fine.”
“You should invent a furtherance of your name. A family identity with which to associate yourself. That’s what I did.”
Dmitri’s chosen last name was Romanov.
“You picked the name of a Czar,” I said.
“Yes, a symbol of strength and fear. My real name, much more pedestrian, not worth repeating here.”
“Romanov didn’t work out all that well for Nikolai Alexandrovich,” I said, in Russian. Because I’m a show-off.
Dmitri laughed.
“An immortal man with the testicles to go by the name Adam shouldn’t judge other people’s choices in naming,” he answered, in kind.
I decided I liked Dmitri. I also decided I needed to get him at least drunk enough so he could tell me who told him I was immortal, because that wasn’t something he was supposed to know. Maybe Esteban told him, but I didn’t think so.
“So, Capitan,” Dmitri said, switching back to the common tongue. “I understand we have some unwelcome intruders in our paradise. Forgive my arrogance for asking you here to update me personally, but as I said I don’t much leave the house any longer, and you can appreciate why such a thing would be a concern of mine. I of course speak for the council in this regard.”
It had been five days since Mirella and I were shown the crime scene. I’d spent most of those five days staring at the Proto-Elamite graffiti and getting nowhere in particular with it. The Internet, which seemed to have an answer for almost everything, was proving astonishingly unhelpful, so I began reaching out to linguists. I probably sounded like a crank, but the first one who took me seriously was going to get the surprise of a lifetime in their in-box.
“I do understand, Dmitri, but I’m sure you have nothing to worry yourself about,” Esteban said.
Dmitri smiled, but in a way that didn’t convey amusement. “I’m sure you’re right, but still, I would like it if you were to humor me.”
Esteban walked through the case for our host, omitting one or two key details, like the message and the fact that I hadn’t been able to translate it, and also that I had a strong suspicion I never would be able to translate it. (I actually hadn’t told Stubby this part myself.) Then he went through everything that had happened since.
A comparison of a month of ship’s manifests, with the hotel guests, the bungalow renters, the B&B folks, and the people visiting local relatives for the same period, turned up a list of twenty-five people whose stay on the island couldn’t be accounted for. (They did the same with the flight manifests, but those matched up perfectly. The plane is smaller, so there was less room for error.) Twelve of those people did end up being discovered after a little research, and had all been verified as leaving the island.
That left thirteen people potentially still ashore, who shouldn’t be.
All anyone was really sure of was that room four twenty-two didn’t have thirteen people in it, or if it did, not all at once.
I thought at least ten of the thirteen were the result of a clerical error, and maybe all of them, because I didn’t think the people in that room came to the island by way of the chartered boat. There was too much vetting involved.
If I were planning a secret incursion to a secret island, I would find a way to get there that avoided the need for a passport: I would take my own boat.
You could charter a boat to the island, get within a mile and brave the sharks while swimming ashore from there. You could also get a boat right up to the shore and scuttle it. Both plans were risky, but neither was as difficult as getting past the vetting procedure necessary to get to the island via conventional means.
Whatever method they used to get ashore, what they did after that just made no sense. Squatting in a hotel room for a week meant risking detection, and then leaving it in the condition in which it was left meant notifying the authorities of your presence, which just seemed contrary to the whole spirit of being an illegal immigrant.
If it were my investigation, trying to figure that part would be where I’d spend most of my time, but it wasn’t my investigation. Also, how they got here did still need answering. To that end we had learned that tourism and immigration control was a lot more vague than anyone realized.
“I appreciate that you are in a delicate circumstance, Dmitri,” Esteban said, “but so far I’ve seen no reason for an elevated concern.”
“Thank you, Esteban, I’m glad for your opinion. The number, though, it seems a large number.”
“Thirteen uncounted persons is not thirteen missing persons. At this time our search is for the people who occupied that room, whether they are a part of the thirteen or not. All I believe we have proven to date is that the approach whereby we compare the ship register with the hotel ledger is inadequ
ate.”
“And you, Adam, what do you think?”
I didn’t know I was there to have an opinion. We were tagging along because Esteban stopped by our home on his way up the hill, said where he was going, and asked if we could join him. I would probably have jumped at any excuse to get out of the house by then—trying to match a dead language phonetically to a written language is a good way to go insane—but this was a particularly good excuse.
“I think Esteban’s probably right,” I said. When this was met with silence and a long stare, I added, “I’m just consulting. We both are.”
“Yes, I’m told. Why is that?”
“He has some expertise regarding certain details,” Esteban said, without elaboration.
“You mean the message in blood on the wall, in a dead language,” Dmitri said flatly.
Esteban sighed. “Di-Di, if you already knew all of this, why did you call me up here?”
“To hear it for myself?” Dmitri said. “No? All right, I have another reason for you to be here. For all three of you to be here, to be exact.”
“Pool party?” I asked.
“I will invite you when the next one is scheduled. But for now…” he looked at his watch. “Well, it should happen in another moment.”
I looked at my own watch. It was 11:25 A.M. locally. This wasn’t a singularly interesting time of day so far as I was aware.
Then we heard a sound.
“What was that?” Mirella asked, looking at me.
“There will be two more,” Dmitri said, still looking at his watch. “I wouldn’t say they are clockwork as to when they begin, but they do happen, consistently, forty-seven seconds apart.”
The second noise was slightly further away.
“They travel down the hill. I’ve spoken to a neighbor from around the mountain and downslope, he can confirm that after these three, the soundings continue, on his side.” To me he asked, “What kind of animal makes this noise?”
It was almost a trill, like the sound a bird might make.
In the bush, centuries back, when we hunted, we signaled one another with a similar vocalization, but this was no human, and it didn’t sound like a bird either. I could have come up with a list of land animals theoretically capable of issuing this sound, but all of them were very large, most were extinct, and none lived in the tropics. A mastodon could almost have made that sound, for instance, but you just don’t run into them around these parts, or at all any more.
The problem was the bass note. It was just too low to be anything issued by a bird. At the same time the rapidity of the trilling could just about only have been done by a bird, or something with a quick tongue. It was such a deep, low note I could feel it in my groin. It was low enough that I was pretty sure I wasn’t even hearing all of it, like there was more outside of my register.
I didn’t think I’d heard it before.
“Some sort of instrument,” Mirella suggested.
“A horn,” her cousin agreed.
“Here it comes again,” Dmitri said, and then we heard the third blast, but only just barely. As he predicted, this was the farthest of the three.
“It’s not a horn,” I said. “Or rather, it’s not an instrument, or a tool, or a conch shell or anything that could be that loud.”
“Why do you think this?” Mirella asked.
“It’s hard to explain. There’s a quality to all those things that’s absent. You can almost hear the effort put into them, or… the air being forced through, I guess. This is a vocalization. When did they start?”
“Eight days ago. And I agree with you, which is why I again ask, what sort of animal can do this?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Have you tried to track it?”
“We live in this jungle, but we aren’t part of it. The burden of the modern man, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wouldn’t characterize it as a burden.” To Esteban, I said, “you should consider putting a party together.”
“Of whom? Bar patrons? Hotel maids? My own people have larger concerns.”
“Are you certain, Esteban, that the strange noises are unrelated to your missing guests?”
“Dmitri, I’m here to reassure you that the island’s stowaways are not hired assassin. I’m not prepared to address concerns that they may be changelings who have transformed into forest sprites.”
“There’s no such thing as forest sprites,” I said.
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Nymphs, those are real. That wasn’t a nymph.” If I knew there was a wood nymph in this forest, I’d be on the first plane out.
Esteban decided to ignore me. “My point is that I don’t believe these people escaped the hotel and disappeared into the forest and are now associating with strange animals. It’s probably a rare species of… something. I strongly doubt it’s related, however.”
Dmitri turned his attention to me. “And you?”
“I’m pretty curious. He’s probably right. It’d be a stretch to say a new animal on the island had anything to do with the missing people. I mean, unless they were eaten by whatever that is.”
“Adam…” Mirella said.
“Not that I’m saying that, of course.”
“Of course,” Dmitri said somberly. “The sounds began at roughly the same time the hotel room was evacuated, unless I have the timeline incorrect.”
“We don’t know when the room was abandoned,” Esteban said. “It fits, but again…”
“I know, you can see no connection.”
“Whatever it is, there are at least six of them,” I said. “The only way to know any more than that is to get out there and track one down.”
“I agree,” Dmitri said. “I can give you two men. When can you start?”
“Two men?”
“Goblins.”
“I’d be better off with satyrs, do you have any?”
Mirella coughed loudly.
“Adam, can I speak to you in private?” she asked.
She escorted me by the wrist to the other side of the pool and well out of earshot. I would like to say I went willingly, but whether she intended it or not, the grip she used would have broken the wrist if I resisted. I told myself that was just her instinct kicking in.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I don’t understand the question.”
“You’re looking for danger again.”
“Again?”
“It’s what you do.”
Looking for danger is the exact opposite of what I do. What I do is look for alcohol, and then I look for a place to sleep. If I’m unattached, I may also look for company, but that’s about all.
“I don’t do anything of the sort,” I said.
“I’ve heard your stories. And I spent a year with you in which we both nearly died several times, when you were in a position to disappear at your own whim. I know you, Adam. You tell yourself you want nothing more than to do nothing, but you will jump into a dangerous situation with both feet and not a single contrary thought in your head. It’s… it’s heroic, and I love you for it, but we’re here because we are done with all of that. I’m no longer a bodyguard and you’re no longer a person in need of being guarded. So stop looking for trouble.”
“I didn’t think I was. A little hunting expedition is all.”
“No, no, no, that’s how it starts. You and two satyrs and soon they’re both dead and there’s a giant monster in the woods. We’re retired. Let Dmitri slay the monster with those big guns.”
“All right. But I was just curious. I don’t see new things all that often, so you can imagine how I might find that appealing.”
“I do. But the new things you find end up wanting to kill you at an unacceptably high rate.”
I could swear she wasn’t right about most of this. I mean, of course I have stories about barely surviving this threat or that, whether it’s a sea serpent or a rakshasa, or just an act of piracy or gangsters with guns. But that’s the point
of a story: something happened, there was great peril, I barely escaped with my life, blah, blah, blah. Sure, a lot of stuff has happened to me, but look at the vast stretch of nothing that happened between the stories. If my life was nothing but jumping from one danger to the next I wouldn’t have made it this far.
“I won’t go,” I said. Because that was a lot easier than arguing, when I was going to lose anyway.
“Thank you.”
“It’s probably just a bird or something, anyway.”
“It’s not a bird. But we’ll let someone else figure out what it is.”
“Yes, dear.”
* * *
The happy medium between my not helping Dmitri in any way and my going on a week-long upper island hunting expedition was to offer him advice on how to locate the source of the mysterious sound on his own.
The advice was basic to anyone who’s ever stalked prey over a one- or two-week period, which I guess nobody is really good at any more. Basically, they had to triangulate the feeding ground of the creature to within a few hundred yards, with the goal being to eventually be there before the prey is, preferably with some sort of net, gun or sharp thing, depending on their intent. I expected it would take two or three weeks if they did it right, longer if the thing they were stalking was smart enough to recognize it was being stalked. I also recommended a number of species on the island that might be good at this sort of thing. Goblins with sub-machine guns weren’t at the top of the list.
An hour later we were back home and I was staring at the graffiti again.
“You’re angry with me, for not letting you play in the woods,” Mirella said after a time. The photograph of the untranslated text was on the big flat-screen television, which made it about the same size as it was on the wall of the hotel room.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 10