The Marble Mask

by Mayor, Archer

  He pointed to a small log building precariously near the inferno. “They’re in that garden house—Scott and the guy you warned us about. Sammie’s with them.”

  “We were told there was another guy, too.”

  But Willy Kunkle grabbed Frank’s lapel in his fist before he could answer me, shaking him as he shouted, “What the hell do you mean, Sammie’s with them? That place is about to go up, you stupid bastard.”

  I laid my hand on his and shook my head. “What’s going on, Frank?”

  Auerbach had freed himself and was already walking toward the building, circling around to keep it between the flames and us, since the heat was almost unbearable.

  He spoke over his shoulder. “Our first units got here just as Scott was being dragged out of the house by what’s-his-name. The other guy got away—he was seen running off and we haven’t been able to find him.”

  “So it is Michel Deschamps in there?”

  “Right. He had a gun, held them off, and barricaded himself in the garden house. Sammie went in to negotiate before I could stop her, and she won’t come out.”

  “God damn her,” Willy snarled. “Typical.”

  We were about thirty yards away from the building’s front door, shielding our faces with our hands to avoid being burned by the towering flames beyond it. Frank spoke into his portable radio, and one of the deck guns mounted to a distant fire truck swung over and doused us with a cooling, drenching shower—an incongruous sensation in an otherwise sub-zero night.

  “Okay,” he yelled, “let’s go. I talked to the fire chief just before you landed. We’ll be lucky if we have ten minutes before that place ignites.”

  Doubled over in our watery cocoon, we headed toward the cottage, straight toward the searing, howling, air-sucking maelstrom over-arching it, straining to see what was happening beyond the doorway. A hundred feet shy of the cottage, however, there was a sudden low rumble, like the sound of a truck entering a tunnel at high speed, followed by a huge, round, boiling bubble of fire that burst from the open door and the two windows on either side of it.

  We stopped dead in our tracks, stunned by what we’d seen, utterly and instantly convinced that no human could have survived it.

  Willy began running toward the heat, screaming.

  Frank and I only hesitated a second before following. Although that one fireball had come and gone in an instant, there was little doubting its effect. We were giving chase to save Willy’s life, and no more.

  Inside, the light was red and yellow and orange in a dancing demonic medley, throwing shadows against the walls like a slide projector gone wild, making visibility difficult and confusing. Also, now free of the water’s protective mantle, my skin instantly began to sting in the oven-hot heat.

  Willy was on his knees, his back to us, before an upended slate potting table, his one arm flailing as he threw what looked like gunny sacks over his shoulder, finally revealing a startled Sammie Martens lying dazed beneath them.

  “Cut it out,” she yelled at him, struggling to sit up. “I need those to protect my face.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he said in a half sob, frozen in mid-motion.

  After a split-second pause, she reached up and gently touched his cheek with a grimy hand. “It went overhead. I’m okay.” She pulled herself up by the table edge, trying to see beyond it into the room. “What about Michel?”

  The rest of us then followed her gaze, suddenly reminded of what had brought us here.

  There, against the far wall, leaned a wide-eyed Michel Deschamps—his hair gone, his face blotched red and peeling—crouching behind a wheelchair-bound and slumped over Roger Scott. He had a gun jammed against the crippled man’s temple, although it wasn’t clear the latter was even alive.

  We dropped down immediately as Michel screamed in English, “Back off or I’ll shoot him. I swear I will.”

  We shuffled up next to Sammie, who, barely glancing at us, shouted, “Relax, Michel. This is a no-win situation. There’re dozens of cops outside and you’re badly hurt. Just put down the gun so we can get you out. You did what you came to do—the house is toast and the treasure along with it. Scott’s a pauper now. Your family’s avenged. Come on, Michel. There’s not much time left. It’s a miracle we’re all still alive.”

  “I don’t need time,” he answered above the freight train rumbling of the fire behind the wall. “I need this man dead.”

  “Then shoot the son of a bitch and get it over with,” Willy shouted.

  Sammie broke her concentration to stare at him.

  “I want you out of here,” he told her.

  “Michel,” I called out. “It’s Joe Gunther. I just came from Sherbrooke. It’s all over. Your father’s dead. Let’s end this. You put your gun down and we’ll bring that man to justice—hold him accountable for killing your uncle and grandfather both. It’ll be clear to the world what he did. You die in here, nobody’ll know. You’ll just go down as being a madman.”

  I could barely breathe because of the heat by now and had stripped off most of my upper clothing despite my burning skin. In the shifting, crimson light, the rafters and window casings were beginning to smoke, building up to a second, perhaps permanent blowout.

  “We got to get out of here,” Auerbach warned. “That’s not a request.”

  “I can get them out alive,” Sammie said barely audibly, her arm still balanced on the table’s edge, her weapon pointing directly at the two before us.

  But it was no longer her call to make. In a gesture as fatalistic as it was born of a survivor’s instinct, Roger Scott suddenly came alive, swept back with one arm and caught Michel on the side of the head, throwing him off balance.

  Michel staggered out from behind his human shield just long enough for Sammie to say, “Shit,” and shoot him between the eyes.

  As Michel slumped to the floor next to the wheelchair, however, Scott leaned over and snatched the pistol from his dying hand. A hellish smile on his parboiled face, he then pointed the gun at us, yelled, “Get it done!” and began firing.

  Willy and Sam both emptied their magazines into him.

  Auerbach didn’t hesitate. As the first rafters overhead suddenly burst into flames, he shouted, “Out, out, out!” and started grabbing shoulders and arms, pushing us toward the open door.

  As we ran toward the welcoming cool darkness, a muffled roar told us the entire garden house had burst into flame.

  · · ·

  We stood in a circle outside the Stowe PD command post a few hundred feet from the flames—a large truck equipped with radios, cell phones, and things to eat and drink—being tended to by EMS people who were trying to cover us with blankets and treat our burned faces and hands, although we weren’t being too cooperative. Everywhere I looked, I could see flashing red and blue lights—all of them made paltry by the towering pyre before us.

  “What a way to go,” Sammie said, still shaken by the ordeal.

  “Scott chose his,” Willy said simply, pausing to drink from a Styrofoam coffee cup, either recovered from his emotional outburst or working hard to pretend it hadn’t happened. “Took a little trip back to the good ol’ days and died like a Forceman should. I don’t know about Michel.”

  “I doubt Michel knew either,” I admitted. “He had so many devils dancing in his head, I don’t think he had a clue anymore. He just plain ran out of options.” I gave Sammie a look. “Nothing you could’ve said would’ve changed that.”

  “I suppose,” she murmured, looking both defeated and exhausted.

  “That wasn’t true for Scott, though,” Auerbach argued. “We had nothing on him that would’ve stuck.”

  Paul Spraiger had been standing on the edge, staring at the blaze, seemingly lost in thought. He turned at Frank’s comment and pointed to the fire. “We weren’t part of his thinking. He’d already died with that… His whole life is in those flames—the life he created from scratch, probably from the day he stole Roger Scott’s dog tags from his corpse
, not even knowing why.”

  He turned to face me directly. “Sammie told me about the mask you saw when you visited him.”

  I nodded vaguely. “Yeah—ugly thing.”

  “Ugly maybe, but pretty important.”

  I glanced at him. “How?”

  “I found a picture of it and showed it to her. If she’s right, it was called Mask of a Faun—believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo when he was fifteen. A priceless work of art—unique.”

  “You think it was the same one?”

  “It vanished in 1944, from a hiding place outside Rome.” We all fell silent for a while, contemplating the wreckage we’d witnessed.

  “You think the mask could survive a fire like that?” I finally asked.

  Paul thought a moment. “If they don’t find it in the ashes—which isn’t likely—we may never know. Real or fake, it’s probably been pulverized by the heat and debris… Unless it vanished just before this was set.”

  I glanced at him and he shrugged. “Along with Michel’s mysterious companion.”

  Chapter 26

  I’D JUST SHUT MY SUITCASE WHEN WILLY KUNKLE KNOCKED on the open door and entered my motel room. Our blistered faces made us look like we’d spent too much time on the beach.

  “Headin’ home?” he asked.

  “Eventually. I’ve got to wrap up a few things with the brass in Waterbury, and I want to say hi to Gail in Montpelier. Feel like I haven’t seen her in months. But then I’ll head home. Be nice to take a few days off, turn something out in the woodworking shop. What’re you up to?”

  He was wandering around the room, brushing his fingers along whatever surface was near. “I don’t know. Maybe goof around a little. Go over to New York State. Whatever.”

  I straightened and looked at him. “I didn’t know you went in for sightseeing trips.”

  He didn’t return my gaze. “Yeah, well… It’s Sammie’s deal.”

  I smiled and turned away, pretending to fidget with the suitcase some more. “Sure—should be fun. I ought to get Gail off for a weekend soon. Give her a break.”

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  “I’m really glad she made it out alive,” I said softly.

  He sighed and finally settled down on the edge of the window sill. “God, I was so scared…”

  I didn’t speak, startled by an emotion I’d never before witnessed in Willy, and continued my fiddling.

  He cleared his throat. “So… about this VBI job…”

  “You want to stick with it?” I asked, looking up at last.

  He gave a half shrug. “I doubt it’s up to me, and they strike me as a pretty snotty bunch.”

  I picked up my bag and headed for the door. “You know how I feel about it, and you’re looking good in my report. You might be surprised—we may catch ’em at a weak moment.”

  I paused on the threshold to look back at his silhouette, framed against the window’s white gauze curtains. His head was bowed as he stared at the floor, his one good arm stretched out, his palm resting on the sill. A complicated, difficult man, fighting more internal battles than any of us could know, except—maybe eventually—for Sammie, if she could stick it out. I was suddenly tempted to ask him what he was thinking about—to gain access to some of that turmoil. But I guessed what his reaction would be, so I resisted, closing the door instead to leave him with his thoughts.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed The Marble Mask, look for Tucker Peak, twelfth in the Joe Gunther series.

  Tucker Peak

  BAKER STREET IS JUST A BLOCK beyond one of Brattleboro’s more beaten paths—an overlooked extension west of an otherwise busy four-way intersection. The other three streets either lead downtown or to shortcuts to the south side. But Baker falls off a slight embankment, part of a closed loop bordering a large empty field near the Whetstone Brook—out of sight and largely out of mind.

  The buildings along it run from decrepit to slightly better, in varying stages. The address Don Matthews had given me was a two-story apartment building, once a home, now cut into four small, dark sections, each one neglected, stagnant, but cheap. The windows were all covered with familiar brittle and tattered plastic wrap, once put up to help stop the freezing air from whistling through the gaps, but left to age through all four seasons, year after year, until its only remaining effectiveness was to proclaim the hopelessness of those barely sheltered behind it.

  Willy and I had decided on a quiet approach, parking up the street and coming around the corner on foot. The weather was good—clear, sharp, and cold enough to make your nose hairs tingle—and I didn’t mind the chance, however oddly presented, to be outside and away from the stifling indoor heat most people found comforting during the winter.

  We walked down the middle of the street. There was no traffic, and the sidewalks had been left to reemerge in the spring, typical of most of the town’s less stringently tidy neighborhoods.

  “Anything we should know about Jorja Duval?” I asked Willy as the house loomed nearer.

  “Nothing you couldn’t guess,” he said. “On welfare, on drugs, small history of dealing, tricking, and petty theft. Featured in a few domestics, according to Bratt PD, always as the punching bag. I knew her father back in the old days. Always figured he was banging her, although no charges were ever brought. He’s at St. Albans now on a manslaughter charge. Jorja had a brother, too, but he OD’d about five years ago.”

  “How old is she?”

  Willy hesitated. “Twenty-five? Maybe younger.”

  We drew abreast of the house, took it in quickly with a practiced eye, and then struggled our way up a pathway that had been cleared in the Walter Skottick fashion—not at all.

  The peeling front door sported four rusty mailboxes by its side, none of them labeled. There were also no doorbells. I raised an inquiring eye at Willy.

  He pointed to the window above us and to the right. “That one,” He said softly, and twisted the doorknob.

  The door swung back to reveal a gloomy, barefloored hallway with a set of stairs heading up. The odorous fog that crept out to envelop us was rancid and flavored with mildew and a smell of humanity reminiscent of an overripe diaper pail. Neither one of us reacted, since as working environments went, this was pretty standard fare.

  We both paused for a moment, watching and listening, taking nothing for granted, knowing full well that inhabitants of such places were capable of anything.

  Hearing nothing, we headed upstairs. There was an extra stillness to the cold air I didn’t like, though, and I could sense Willy felt the same way. He unbuttoned his coat, and removed his gun from its holster.

  Walking on the balls of our feet to partially muffle our shoes and the squeaking of old floor boards, we moved to either side of Jorja Duval’s apartment door and paused once again, listening to nothing but our own breathing.

  I finally reached out and rapped on the door, looking up and down the hallway as I did so for any movement from the other two apartments on the landing. “Jorja Duval? This is the police. Open up.”

  The response was immediate, otherworldly, and psychologically chilling. From inside, we heard a single, high-pitched animal howl, followed by a series of thuds, crashes, and the sound of claws scrabbling across bare wood at high speed. It was as if my knock had unleashed some demonic pin ball that was now smacking off every wall and obstacle inside the apartment.

  “What the hell?” I muttered, and grasped the door knob, twisting it slowly.

  The door opened and a tabby cat flew out and froze for a split second at the sight of us, its hair on end, before shooting off like a rocket down the stairs. But not before I’d seen that all four of its paws were crusty with dried blood.

  “Jesus,” Willy burst out, his hand tight on the gun.

  Still recovering from the surprise, I chanced a fast glance around the corner, my own gun out as well. Pulling my head back, I described what I’d seen to Willy. “Short hall, two closed doors opposite each
other. Big room beyond. All I could see there were two legs sticking into the middle of a big blood stain, and red paw prints all over the place.”

  “We call for backup?” he asked.

  I paused, thinking of the eerie stillness I’d noticed earlier. “No time. Ready on three?”

  I held up three fingers, one at a time, and the two of us entered the small hallway as one, covering both the distant room and the two closed doors.

  The precautions proved unnecessary. The place was empty except for the dead woman in the middle of the floor, lying face up, spread-eagle, with her throat cut wide. The room was dingy, dark, barely furnished, splotched with blood, and seemed far less comfortable than the average coffin.

  “This Jorja Duval?” I asked Willy.

  He holstered his weapon. “Was.”

  About the Author

  Over the years, Archer Mayor has been photographer, teacher, historian, scholarly editor, feature writer, travel writer, lab technician, political advance man, medical illustrator, newspaper writer, history researcher, publications consultant, constable, and EMT/firefighter. He is also half Argentine, speaks two languages, and has lived in several countries on two continents.

  All of which makes makes him restless, curious, unemployable, or all three. Whatever he is, it’s clearly not cured, since he’s currently a novelist, a death investigator for Vermont’s medical examiner, and a police officer.

  Mayor has been producing the Joe Gunther novels since 1988, some of which have made the TEN BEST or MOST NOTABLE lists of the Los Angeles and the New York Times. Mayor has also received the New England Booksellers Association book award for fiction.

  Find him online at www.ArcherMayor.com

  Also by Archer Mayor

  The Joe Gunther Mysteries

  Open Season

  Borderlines

  Scent of Evil

  The Skeleton’s Knee

  Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

  The Dark Root