Abel Baker Charley

by John R. Maxim

  “That wasn't your fault at all,” Baker told her.

  ‘That's the truth, lass,” Harrigan added. ”I didn't do so well against Stanley myself.”

  Tanner gripped the leather purse slung over her shoulder and held it out toward Harrigan. ”I have the gun you gave me,” she said. ”I had it all the time. I just couldn't bring myself to use it.”

  “Stanley would have pinned it to your hand, lass, before you even had a chance to point it.”

  ”I had the chance,” she insisted. “Before he tied me up he left us alone for a minute. It's not that I was afraid to reach into my purse for it. There's just been so much blood and dying that I...” She began to cry. Baker stood looking helpless until a glare from Connor Harrigan encouraged him to hold her.

  Tanner tensed at his touch. It was only for the smallest moment, but Baker felt it and Harrigan saw it.

  “It's the beastie, isn't it, lass.”

  She shook her head but changed it quickly to a nod. “I'm trying not to let it bother me.”

  Baker loosened his hold around her body. There was despair on his face. He looked as if he would drop his arms and walk away. Don't you dare, Harrigan's eyes told Baker.

  “It bothered me,” Connor said to her. “It scared the be-jaysus out of me, himself standing and grinning like a maniac about to pounce. And if it scared a tough old horse like myself, I'd have expected you to swoon dead away. But you're made of good stuff, lass. So is Baker here. If there's a way to put this other business aside, the two of you should look for it. The beastie wants Baker to himself, Miss Burke. We knew that in your hotel room. He wanted us to see him because he wanted to scare us off, especially you. It's up to you whether you let him.”

  Baker, through his sadness, almost smiled. Harrigan saw it. Why is that funny, Baker? he asked in his mind.

  Baker looked away. Harrigan was sincere, he knew, in his fashion. Harrigan liked him. He liked Tanner. He liked them both together. Together best of all. Baker would be so much easier to find after tonight if they were together. But it wouldn't work. Not as long as Abel was around. Even the memory of Abel. And you're wrong, Harrigan. Abel wasn't trying to scare you back at Levy's place. He wasn't trying to scare you at all.

  ”I don't think .. .” Tanner shut her eyes and then opened them, blinking. ”I don't think he was trying to scare me,” she told Harrigan. “He wasn't trying to scare you either.” She looked up at Baker as if asking him to complete the thought. ”I think he was trying tobe.. .”

  “Nice.” Baker supplied the word.

  “Nice?” Harrigan recalled the grin he'd seen only on Halloween masks and Cheshire cats.

  “He wanted you to like him.” Baker looked at his shoes.

  “That was Abel's idea of being engaging?”

  “More or less. What he really wanted was to show me I didn't have to hide him away. While he was at it, that gun business was to show you he could have hurt you if he wanted.”

  “Nice.” Harrigan chewed upon the word. The expression on his face was a mixture of relief and bemusement. “You'll tell the beastie for me, Baker, that he could use an hour or two with Dale Carnegie.”

  “baker.9’

  “Yes.”

  ”i hear her, baker, she's in williamsburg. it's where she went a long time ago with you and sarah.”

  “No, Charley. Williamsburg is too far. It's in Virginia.”

  “yes. yes. williamsburg houses and williamsburg rooms, where they have candle things on the walls and pictures of dead people and big high beds that have roofs on them.”

  ”I saw Williamsburg too, Charley, but it's because she's remembering it and dreaming it. Where is she having the dream?”

  “williamsburg,” Charley insisted.

  Tanner cocked her head. “Williamsburg?”

  Baker stared at her. “You can hear him?”

  “Who?” She shivered again.

  “Charley. Could you just hear Charley?”

  “No.” Her eyes opened wide. ”I was thinking about Tina. Suddenly I imagined her in Williamsburg, Virginia. I've never even been there.”

  “Well, she can't be there,” Baker repeated, passing over Tanner's astonishment at having the thought at all. “If we hear her, she's someplace close.”

  “williamsburg, tortora. sonnenberg.”

  “Wait a minute, Charley. You're hearing Sonnenberg and Tortora too in Williamsburg?”

  “tortora. williamsburg. sometimes sonnenberg.”

  “How come you can hear Sonnenberg all of a sudden?”

  “just a little, i don't know, baker.”

  “Well, I know, damn it,” he said aloud.

  “You know what, lad?” Harrigan's concentration was intense.

  “It's Charley.” Baker's eyes darted about the darkness of the park. “Tina's here somewhere. He also hears Tortora and Sonnenberg and he's not supposed to.”

  Both of Harrigan's brows went up. “Tortora and Sonnenberg together?”

  The question, and Harrigan's surprise, meant nothing to Baker. “He hears them both at different times. They're near here. It's in a place Tina thinks is Williamsburg or Egypt or... damn!”

  “The museum.” Tanner jumped. “The American Wing of the museum.”

  “Fools rush in, lad.” Three times now, Connor Harrigan had to restrain Baker, guiding him north by west in a wide swing around the perimeter of the rambling complex that was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They reached the circle where the obelisk stood. Cleopatra's Needle. From that spot, well inside the park, most of the darkened rear of the museum was in view. Harrigan stood sniffing the air.

  “There's no one else out here.” Baker scowled. “I'm going in.”

  “Patience, lad.” Harrigan raised a hand. “It leads to a long life for you and for Tina as well. The way to a short life is to play by the other fellow's rules.”

  ”I know I'm being set up,” Baker admitted. ”I don't know why, but Sonnenberg is setting this up. It's more than just a question of Tortora getting even for his son. Sonnenberg is playing me like a flute.”

  Harrigan and Tanner exchanged looks. Tanner's expression was one of surprised confusion, as if Baker had just said something he should have known was false. She started to speak, but Harrigan silenced her with a shake of his head.

  “Can I ask, lad, what's so remarkable about Charley hearing Sonnenberg?”

  “He's not supposed to. That's why you got all that gibberish in Tanner's bathroom when you tried to ask about him.”

  “Then you and Charley have been programmed, I take it, not to eavesdrop on the man.”

  “It's not hard to do,” Baker told him. “Any stage hypnotist can suggest a block like that. If Charley hears him now it's because Sonnenberg wants to be heard. The old bastard is still manipulating me.” Baker paced several steps toward the obelisk's base, restraining himself from kicking over a waste can. He stalked back to Harrigan. “You wanted to know how we found Tanner so easily in a town this size. The answer is we didn't find her. Sonnenberg gave her to us. From where we drove into Manhattan, there's no practical way to get where Sonnenberg told us to go without passing within a few blocks of Levy's building.” He turned to Tanner. “Sonnenberg knew that if you had anything at all on your mind, it would be me or Tina and Charley would hear you. Now I'm about to walk into that museum, not just because I want my daughter, but because Sonnenberg wants me in that museum up against Tortora.”

  “Could all this be a test of some kind, lad?”

  “What for?” Baker threw up his hands. “After today, Sonnenberg has to know I wouldn't cross the street for him.”

  An excellent point, Harrigan thought, and yet... “Think, lad. The man's a behaviorist. Everything he does is an experiment of one kind or another. He manipulates you, you saw how he manipulated Duncan Peck and his people, he probably even tested Tanner's ability to send and your ability to free her .. ”

  Baker waved off the discussion wearily. ”I just want my daughter, Harrigan.” He rubbed h
is eyes and rocked momentarily with the loss of vision balance. “Tanner, I'd like you to wait here.”

  “Like hell.” She stepped toward him. “You're so tired you can hardly stand.”

  “We'll go together, lad.” Harrigan touched his shoulder and steered him toward the museum. “We'll find your little girl together.”

  On the north end of the museum, where the glass wall of the American Wing borders on the Eighty-fifth Street transverse, Harrigan spotted the outlines of a car partly hidden in a stand of junipers. One car, he nodded to himself. Not an ambush fleet. And Baker seemed to feel no other presence. But Harrigan could not shake the feeling that there was more to this night's danger than whatever Sonnenberg and that crowd had in mind. It was the museum itself. Something about the museum. The buzz in the back of his head had not stopped since they'd fled from Sonnenberg's well. There was an answer there. He'd almost had it, he thought, in the car with Baker before the Tanner Burke business started. But it fell back, just out of reach.

  Simplify, Connor. See first to the business at hand. “There's a door.” He pointed. It was set belowground, to be reached by a short flight of steps. “My old eyes can't read the sign on it.”

  “Staff Only,” Tanner told him.

  “The administrative section.” Harrigan clapped his hands. “As quiet a route as any.”

  “How do we get in?” Tanner asked. “Won't there be an alarm?”

  “Not tonight, lass. I think not tonight.”

  Tina was close, Baker knew. After all this time, a distance he could count in yards. Tanner slipped her hand into his. It kept him from lacking in the door that Harrigan was quietly forcing. It squeaked open. Harrigan entered first, a penlight in his hand, and cast its dim glow on a clutter of desks and card files, rows of binders and catalogues. On the far wall he found what he was looking for. A floor plan. A visitor's map mounted and framed. He stepped closer, beckoning Baker and Tanner Burke to follow.

  On the map, the administrative section appeared only as a general gray mass. Harrigan tapped a finger against a spot that approximated their position and traced a route to a narrow set of stairs that led to the Great Hall on the floor above. He moved off in that direction. Tanner tightened her grip on Baker's hand and fell in behind.

  The Great Hall, the immense high-ceilinged chamber that greets visitors from the main entrance on Fifth Avenue, seemed all the more cavernous in the darkness. No light reached it from the streetlamps outside, but a dim glow washed over the marble walls and columns. It came from pairs of small, recessed bulbs that marked the sides of portals and corridors at the edges of the hall. They cast no beam but reflected off the ornamental gilt of the ceiling and off the glass of the information booth and the display cases of the gift shop. Baker followed the pair of lights nearest the quiet breath of his daughter. She must have come this way, he was sure. Floated this way, she said. That meant carried. He wondered vaguely who could have carried her if Stanley Levy was as small and weak as Tanner remembered.

  Baker saw the Egypt that Tina had passed. Hooded figures carved in stone. A sarcophagus, several of them, some the size of a child. The smell of death was long gone from them, but the sight made Baker move more quickly. More recessed lights were set high in the walls. Those would be the desert stars Tina saw. Harrigan stopped at a standing sign and flicked on his penlight. The Temple of Dendur, it said, a larger tomb brought intact from the Nile's flooding banks, was ahead of them. The Hall of Arms and Armor was to their left. Knights. Baker nodded. Yes.

  ”Yesy Daddy. In through where the knights and swords are.”

  She was dozing, Baker knew. Her eyes were opening in fits. But through the fog of drugs she could hear him. She knew he was there and she was not frightened for him. Even Abel seemed to feel no sense of danger. He was quiet. And Harrigan. Baker looked at him. His gun was in his hand, but it dangled carelessly at his side. He looked not at all like someone about to face a man who'd almost killed him. To say nothing of Domenic Tortora and whatever help he'd brought.

  “Daddy? Come on, Daddy.”

  The Hall of Armor was still more dimly lit. A single set of night-lights glistened faintly off the polished steel of the weapons and suits of armor that lined the walls. In the middle of the floor a mounted knight was frozen in midcharge upon a horse also clad in steel from head to flanks. Ivanhoe. Baker moved past it, Tanner with him. Harrigan took the opposite wall. On Baker's side, his fingers brushed over a display of halberds, long poles with spear points and axes at their ends. It crossed his mind to choose a weapon. An ax would not help against guns if guns were waiting. Let Abel choose what weapons he might need. Still no warning came from him.

  Near the end of the Hall of Armor, Harrigan stopped and waited. There was a smaller room off to the left, Baker saw. The room was short, more like a foyer. Rifles and pistols, long useless, were displayed on its walls in glass cases. Beyond it was a much larger space bathed in a soft bluish light. Now Baker could see potted trees outlined against the high glass wall and backlit by the park lamps outside. Harrigan padded quietly to one side of the entrance. He motioned Tanner back and Baker to the other side. Tanner ignored him.

  “Williamsburg, Daddy”

  The huge room looked like a garden to Harrigan. An atrium. Park lights brighter than the moon filtered through tinted glass and spread over shrubs, sculptures, and stone benches placed against marble planters. He tensed at the sight of a human shape, then another. The pistol in his hand crept up and swept the room as his pupils opened and found a focus. Statues, he realized. Naked guys with swords reeling backward like they'd just been belted. A woman, also naked, drawing a bow against another figure in a tall stone carving that looked like a church pulpit. A preacher, maybe. Dressed in black. Or a judge. A Cotton Mather type.

  Baker's eye too was drawn to the sculptures, but they were familiar to him from Sunday visits long ago. Rimmer's Falling Gladiators. Saint-Gaudens's Diana the Huntress. Only the pulpit was new to him. To his right, covering a full wall, was the two-story stone facade of a nineteenth-century bank. The Federal Gallery, he knew, would be behind it. Williamsburg. Baker had already taken a step in that direction when Harrigan reached to touch his arm and pointed.

  The figure in the pulpit, the man all in black, had moved. He was standing now. Another man, smaller, appeared at the pulpit's base. Harrigan recognized Stanley Levy. A small startled cry came from Tanner. Harrigan, his eyes now accustomed to the light, allowed them to sweep the room. In the far corner he saw a third man, barely visible against a potted shrub. Harrigan could make out a scope-mounted rifle across his lap. He knew the man. Notre Dame. Harrigan touched his fingers to his head in an acknowledging salute. Notre Dame answered with his own.

  Baker saw him too. Roger Hershey, he was sure. The small man would be the one who took Tina. And the man in black would be the man who ordered her abduction. But why Hershey? He wondered. Why would Roger Hershey be with them?

  “Come closer, Mr. Baker.” The man in the pulpit leaned forward, his voice high and rasping. And Connor Harrigan smiled at the sound.

  “Tortora?” Baker squinted.

  “Mr. Tortora,” the man corrected. His hands clutched his lapels, making fists against his cheeks. “Come, Baker. It is time that you gave an account of yourself.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Harrigan swore softly through a set of his mouth that began to look like a grin. The grin reached his eyes and then, in an odd response, he folded his arms in the attitude of an amused spectator. Baker glanced at him, confused for a beat, then shook it off and took several steps toward the pulpit.

  “I'll take my daughter now, Tortora.”

  “Hold it a minute.” Harrigan raised a hand and took a step closer, again stopping Baker. He looked up at the man in the black hat. ”I bet I know your next line. It goes something like, ‘First you have my son to answer for.’ How's that? Pretty close, right?”

  The man in the pulpit blinked rapidly. Bewilderment clouded Baker's face as well. Stanley Le
vy straightened, his expression one of stunned disbelief at Harrigan's insolence. Only Tanner, though clearly frightened, seemed to know the meaning of Harrigan's behavior. Harrigan saw that.

  “You want to tell him or should I?” he asked.

  She shook her head, hugging herself against a new chill. Baker stared at Harrigan uncomprehendingly.

  “What's the matter?” he asked Baker. “Not enough light for you in here or are you as batty as he is? Look.” Harrigan pointed. “Look real close and tell me if you see anyone you know.”

  Baker, with Tanner Burke holding his elbow, moved across the marble floor to a set of four steps that led into the atrium's center pit. He took them past the Diana, whose arrow seemed aimed at the heart of the man he approached. At a distance of several yards he slowed and stopped, his head cocked to one side, in utter confusion as he peered up at the man now turning away from him slightly.

  “That's close enough.” Stanley Levy drifted into Baker's path, his right hand fingering the ice pick at the other wrist. He too seemed befuddled. Baker barely glanced at him.

  “Doctor?” he asked softly.

  The man in black shook his head.

  “Dr. Sonnenberg?” Baker repeated.

  “How the hell would he know?” Harrigan stepped up behind Baker, one eye on Stanley Levy. Roger Hershey hadn't moved. “Ivor Blount, Marcus Sonnenberg, Domenic Tortora, and Christ knows how many others. If you want to figure out which is which, Baker, don't count on him to help you. The guy's been so many people, there isn't any him anymore. I bet you the old bastard couldn't tell you what name he was born with.”

  The man in the pulpit began blinking rapidly again. Tanner was fascinated. He had the look of someone waking up from a nap. She was stunned at what was happening but something less than surprised. The answer had been there all the time. It was there last night, when Charley came out in her room at the Plaza. Harrigan began to get it then too. What was it? What was it Charley had said that started Harrigan thinking so hard? It was that Abel found Tortora's son because Tortora's son was thinking about his father. But then that Charley could only hear thoughts that were about Baker, or of Tina lately, or of Sonnenberg. The puzzle had stewed in her brain as it had in Harrigan's. All the time, the solution had been there. The simple answer. The idea that was too crazy to say aloud. It had to be that Sonnenberg and Tortora were the same. Charley had as much as said so. Almost. But not quite, as if even knowing the pieces of a truth, he'd been kept by Sonnenberg from putting that particular whole truth together. It was the block Baker mentioned outside. It explained why Baker, who knew so many things, could not know this.