‘I see forty miles of bookshelves six feet under the grass, joined by a tunnel to the library we just left. I see a great domed, octagonal Crystal Palace, built for a grand Exposition in 1853 on the park next to the monumental reservoir. I see a young Mark Twain visiting it. I see the palace burning down in a dreadful fire. I see a stooped, rail-thin man of advanced years named Tesla, gently feeding the pigeons in the park, forgotten and alone, dreaming of a world energy and radio system that no one will back him to build. I see General George Washington’s troops in retreat from the British, crossing the parkland. I see the penniless dead being buried in a potter’s field.’
‘Horace, was the fact that you and I met on that walking tour an accident?’
‘When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.’
‘My head is going to burst. Please stop now.’
‘There is no stopping. It can no longer be stopped.’
‘Will you come with me to the next waypoint?’
‘Consider me your bodyguard,’ he said, patting his jacket pocket.
They walked to 39th Street and took a cab directly west to the corner of Tenth Avenue.
When they got out, the Quad almost immediately acquired a signal and flashed ‘Arriving destination’. Horace read out the corresponding clue:
‘A tower of light holds the key to your plight
A hex marks the spot, ready or not
To vanquish the night, seek the inner eye’s sight
Up the spiral you wind
To pass the Trial by Mind’
Tower of Light.
‘I see it,’ Horace said immediately. He pointed to the tongue of asphalt that curved down into the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. There were more police than usual, because of the Convention. Early-afternoon traffic was relatively light.
On eachside of the tunnel entrance rose Art Deco towers like stylized radio masts, surmounted by powerful searchlights. They reminded Robert of Flash Gordon-era science fiction ray-guns. A spiral staircase ran up their core.
‘There are six platforms, you see?’
‘You can’t be seriously suggesting we go up one of those things?’
‘Not we. You.’
Robert walked west along 39th Street on the southside of the tunnel entrance, where the tower looked easier to get to. ‘This is the nearest one to the waypoint,’ he said.
‘Up you go.’
Horace handed Robert a bandanna. ‘Put this around your face.’
‘Are you insane? We’ll bothbe arrested.’
‘No, just you. Hex marks the spot. Hex and sex, both meaning six. The cache is on the top platform, I’m sure of it. We need that key. It will be part of a hexagon or a Seal of Solomon. Go.’
‘Horace –’
The old man’s anger flared. ‘If anything goes wrong, meet me at the Market Diner at 43rd and 1 ith. Now can you not trust me? Go!’
The towers were set on a brick base that rose above his head height. ‘Help me, then. Give me a leg-up.’
Horace interlocked his fingers and formed a stirrup, his back to the base, for Robert’s foot. He pushed up with remarkable strength as Robert clambered up. Then he walked nonchalantly away.
Atop the base, Robert pulled himself up further to the bottom platform, inside the tower, then climbed the spiral staircase. At any moment he expected to hear bullhorns, sirens, the crack of bullets. Up he rose, through each platform, along the spiral stair that twisted like strands of DNA. It was as though he were climbing one of the staircases between hexagonal floors in the Borges story.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said to the air. ‘I’m in the Library of Babel.’
At the top platform he stepped off the stair and looked around. Nothing. Bolted metal, thick black cables. The view of Manhattan was stunning.
It looked like he could go up another level, via a ladder, to where the lights were mounted. Carefully he climbed up and stuck his head through the gap in the platform. Right before his eyes, taped to one of the metal struts, was a film container in a sealed plastic bag. Stretching his arm forward, he reached it and put it in his pocket.
At that point he heard the first cop’s voice, through the speakers of a police car. ‘Stop! Don’t move. Stay where you are. Stay where you are. Slowly show your hands.’
Katherine saw it all.
She focused on Robert through the telescopic sight, bringing the crosshairs to bear on his forehead as he leaned out of the top of the light tower to show his hands to the police. Two hundred and fifty yards. She’d have one shot, two at most. It had been a long time since her specialized training. She’d have to use the laser sight. She reached for the switch to turn it on.
Robert looked down, leaning his upper body out of the tower.
A ring of policemen was around the base. An officer sat in the police car, keying the microphone. Horace was nowhere to be seen.
Robert made an overt display of showing his hands. For the love of God, what next? Suddenly he saw a flash of multicoloured light. The middle of his forehead lit up with sensation. He closed his eyes, and still could see.
Time halted. He with drew behind his eyes, behind his mind, to a place where, for an instant, he saw nothing but patterns upon patterns of light, streaming like rain from the sky, diffracting and interfering and weaving in colours he had never seen. It was world rain, unfiltered rain, a rain of light coalescing in and out of matter, twisting and arching back on itself, and he was simply a fold in it, an eddy, a swimmer in a sea of which he was himself made.
As above, so below; as within, so without.
He saw part of his mind filtering the stream of vibrations and light, the mercurial stuff of the universe, neither wave nor particle but both and neither, saw his mind building a representation of the world, a selection adapted to survival needs, an editing job so seamless as to be invisible.
Mind is the builder.
He saw the world being made. Every day. In every instant. He saw endless cycles of refinement, of evolution.
He opened his eyes. He saw that he was both free and predestined: that he had wanted and chosen everything that had happened to him, that his task was to learn why he had created this life, these events, for himself.
He resigned himself to whatever would happen.
Katherine saw the red dot dance about Robert’s head and settle on his brow. She held her aim on him, breathing deeply in, saying a quiet prayer to herself to calm her nerves.
Robert saw the senior officer talking to uniforms, pointing to the car and up at him. There was a dumbshow of reluctance, of remonstrance, of consideration. Then everyone at once stopped and stared up at Robert. He could see alarm spreading through the group.
The senior police officer spoke into his walkie-talkie agitatedly.
Katherine saw they’d seen the laser dot. They’d be radioing to check whether it was one of their men and not a rogue sniper. Then they’d realize one of their own sharpshooters wasn’t answering his radio. She’d give them another minute to do this. Then she’d have to move very fast.
Robert saw the policemen nervously taking positions of better cover. Two started gesturing to him to come down.
Then a voice boomed over the police-car loudspeaker: ‘Come down slowly and calmly, sir. Come down.’
He started back down the spiral staircase.
Katherine shifted her aim down towards the policemen.
‘Good boy, Robert,’ she whispered. ‘Keep moving.’
She brought the laser dot to rest on a cop’s chest, just long enough for the police commander next to him to notice it, then moved it up to the policeman’s forehead just as Robert reached the bottom of the tower.
She saw Robert jump down to the street as the cops flew in all directions to take cover from her.
‘There you are, baby.’
Then a shadow entered Katherine’s soul. She aimed the laser sight again at Robert’s head.
She had a clear shot.
‘I love you, Robert,’ she whi
spered.
She refocused her aim. Then Katherine emptied her lungs of air, and between two heartbeats softly squeezed the trigger.
Robert looked up towards the muzzle flash and then time stopped. His mind ripped along the trajectory of the bullet, and he knew Katherine was at the other end of it, and he felt in her mind the terrifying shadow of the Iwnw.
A bullet was coming, and he couldn’t move. He could see it, frozen in mid spin, a glint in the air, and then there were minds trying to reach his. He felt Adam, and behind him the Iwnw. He felt Horace. Duck your head to the right. Duck your head to the left. Look up. Look down. Pressure in his head, forcing him this way and that, paralysing him as each fought to nudge his head an inch either way.
He could feel Horace failing, desperately trying to block the murderous intent of the Iwnw through Adam’s raw pain. He saw how seriously he had hurt Adam. Blood was pumping internally, he was bleeding to death within his own body. Robert saw the pooling blood, distended tissues. Horace was losing his grip, exhausted from the fight at Grand Central, and now Robert felt his head being tipped against his will, down and to the right, into the path of the flying bullet…
Had Adam crossed over or not? Was he still playing a double game? Robert felt he’d lost control to the Iwnw now. He was allowing them to feed into Katherine through him. He was trying to force Robert to duck into the bullet. He was Robert’s enemy. He had become the enemy. Dear God.
Robert could let him die. Adam was bleeding out. If he just held the balance between the forces trying to tip his head this way and that for a few minutes longer, Adam would die and the Iwnw’s gateway would collapse. He reached out again with his mind to Adam. He could even accelerate the bleeding.
Adam Hale. The brother he wished he’d had. Troubled, crazy, lovable Adam. Robert could not believe the good was lost.
Drawing on the powers of earth and water, fire and air, ether and mind, Robert looked into Adam’s injuries and closed the internal wound. He stopped the bleeding and fired every repair and recovery mechanism in Adam’s battered body. Then, in a blaze of burning mental light, he threw Adam and the Iwnw from his consciousness and twisted his head a millimetre up and to the left.
Robert heard the zip of an angry wasp and felt the bullet’s shock-wave as the skin of his forehead split. The windshield of an empty car ten yards from the policemen shattered, and a boom echoed among the buildings. The policemen all hit the deck. Robert ran.
Katherine felt the shadow lift from her. She fired off two more shots in quick succession to cover Robert’s escape, hitting two more police cars in the tyres. She saw him pull off the bandanna and make the corner. Then she put her escape plan into operation, emerging three minutes later on to the street in a business suit, unruffled and smiling.
Horace was waiting for him in a booth at the diner, his face white with shock, when Robert entered. A handkerchief jammed against his forehead to mask the blood, barely able to speak, Robert sat down and started to shake.
‘I lost you,’ Horace said. ‘You saved yourself. I’m so sorry.’
For minutes neither said another word.
Robert put on the table between them a copper-red fragment of metallic glass, part of a hexagon.
He took a deep breath. Tried to calm his mind.
‘The design of these keys is hundreds of years old,’ Horace said. ‘Perhaps more. Exquisite. The full hexagon will show a six-pointed star, forming another hexagon at its core. Within that shape, another Star of David, and so on, each nesting in the other, to an exquisite degree of detail.’
‘Horace, are we safe here? Shouldn’t we be moving?’ Police sirens were sounding now in the street.
Horace closed his eyes. ‘We have a few minutes.’
‘I healed him. I healed Adam.’
Horace looked deep into Robert’s eyes. ‘You did well.’
‘He can still be saved. There is still good in him, even if he no longer sees it himself. I couldn’t kill him.’
‘Yet he was your enemy when you healed him.’
‘He was.’
‘Your abilities are becoming greater than Adam’s, greater than mine.’
‘No.’
‘There is another who needs healing. One who is deeply afraid.’
‘Terri.’
‘Tell me, when you were at the Worth Monument, was there anything Adam said to you that has stuck in your mind?’
‘Well, he kept going on about the two Metropolitan Life buildings at Madison Square Park. I couldn’t figure out why. He loves to go off on tangents like that, but it was odd.’
‘He wanted to lodge a phrase in your mind. What exactly did he say?’
‘MetLife. He kept saying MetLife.’
‘And what do you conclude from that?’
‘Not much, I’m afraid.’
‘He was telling you where Terri is hiding. He was telling you while masking it even from himself.’
‘What?’
‘Did he pronounce it just like that? MetLife? What did he actually say?’
‘Actually, he pronounced it oddly. As if he’d developed a speechimpediment. The F was more of an S. At first I thought it was the phone, but it seemed very marked. Very odd.’
‘So. Solve it.’
‘MetLice… So basic a riddle, he said. He said that twice. So basic a riddle. MetLice.’
‘And so?’
‘Metal ice, so basic –’
‘Stop there. It’s a riddle involving those letters. What was the context? What else did he talk about around then?’
‘Umm… he mentioned a sex club, to be honest.’
‘What name did he give?’
‘None.’
‘Very well. Use your mind, Robert. He was telling you something, in the language of the full mind.’
‘So, a basic life met…’
‘Keep going. Write it down if you must.’
Robert scribbled letters into a notepad, turning them over in his head. ‘Boite à malice. Good God. It’s an almost perfect anagram of boite à malice.’
‘And boite in French means nightclub, I believe? Or place of work?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That is where she will be hiding. Such an establishment, of that name, where she may have worked or which she may have frequented. He will have managed to shield that information, but not for long, especially not from himself. He bypassed even his own conscious mind to tell you that. You must find her as soon as possible.’
Robert googled variations on the club name on the Quad, coming up blank on all of them. He tried other searchengines. Nothing.
‘Some of these places are public, though discreet, but others are very word of mouth, I believe,’ Horace said. ‘Even the New York Times has written about them.’
Robert racked his memory for any indication Terri had given that might help. Finally, he called an acquaintance who freelanced for Time Out and other publications, including occasionally GBN, about nightlife.
‘Matt, I need to ask you a question of some delicacy. It’s quite urgent, and it requires great discretion.’
Matt said he’d never heard of La Boîte à Malice but would ask around.
Horace scribbled a note to Robert on a napkin. Does he need money? Robert shook his head. Matt either liked you or he didn’t.
‘The next ten minutes, Matt, would be ideal.’
Robert regarded his old friend for a moment. ‘You don’t eat, Horace? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat.’
‘At my age one is careful about what one puts into one’s system. Let’s move to another location now.’
By a circuitous route, they moved to another restaurant several blocks further away from the scene of the shooting. Robert heard police sirens off in the distance, near where they had been sitting.
Matt called him back in fifteen minutes, just as they were sitting down.
La Boîte à Malice was neither a sex club nor a floating kink party that moved from private loft to private lof
t, as he had imagined. It was something very high end, extremely discreet and very expensive: a consulting agency, run by a woman, that was said to offer imaginative problem-solving services, using methods from psychic to sexual, with a trademark sense of humour. The name, in that sense, could be loosely translated as the Mischief House, or even Tricks ’R’ Us.
‘Matt says it has a very strange vibe, cool and scary at once, and people talk about it as if it were an urban legend. It only employs witches, they say. And no one ever messes with them,’ Robert told Horace.
‘Is there a name for the woman who owns it? Some way to get in touch? Or,’ Horace added with a smile, ‘do they contact you?’
‘It’s the sort of firm Adam would know about. Matt had a phone number, but no address.’
Horace took from his pocket the map of New York with the Tree of Life shape sketched on to it and placed it flat on the table.
‘Do you have anything that Terri has worn? Anything she is attached to, or worn close to her skin?’
Robert hesitated. Then he took a chain from around his wrist. It was the chain she had worn around her neck on the day they’d made love. He felt it glow in his hand. ‘This is the chain that held the second key.’
Horace took it between his fingertips and closed his eyes. For more than a minute, he sat perfectly still, breathing deeply.
Without opening his eyes, he asked Robert to write down the phone number for the Mischief House and give it to him. He placed his palm down flat on the piece of paper while still holding the chain in his fingers.
‘Personal items have resonance,’ he said. ‘With the red gold on my person, I may be able to find a matching resonance. Do you have any idea where Terri usually lives?’
‘She said Adam called her his Red Hooker.’
Horace concentrated harder.
‘She’s not in Brooklyn.’
After another minute of intense concentration, he suddenly grimaced. ‘I have found her fear… And pain. Call that number.’
Robert keyed it in and heard it ring. After six rings it cut over to an answering machine. No voice to identify the firm or confirm the number. He cut the line.
The Malice Box Page 33