Mandrax had told him that Belial was real; and he had said it with such conviction that Larry believed him. Or almost believed him.
If Belial were real, then Larry had to find him, and try to destroy him for good and all; or at least prevent his resurrection. And the quickest and most logical way to find Belial was to let Mandrax take him there; as frightening as that might turn out to be.
Larry said, “When are you going?”
“Soon as it’s dark, and the city’s settled itself down. It’s a good foggy day today, that’s the way I like it. You know what they call the fog, in Chile? The devil’s breath. What do you think of that?”
“I heard you were burned,” said Larry. “You, and the rest of the Brotherhood.” He could feel the sweat sliding down from his armpits.
“Lieutenant Foggia,” said Mandrax. “I’ve been burned and hanged and crucified over and over.” He sat down on the spice-sacks, and proceeded to lace up his boot. “But you know something… it doesn’t matter, when you’ve got an angel for a friend. All I needed was a little extra ectoplasm, and your mother’s parrot was kind enough to bring me that.”
“You took my ectoplasm?” asked Larry.
“From hand to coat, from coat to parrot, from parrot to William Mandrax. Nice job, hunh? You can always count on an angel to minister well to the afflicted Fallen or not, they can still work the same high miracles. He’s done it for me again and again.”
“You’re really going to take me to see him?” asked Larry.
“Sure! Sure I am! It’s about time you saw what you were supposed to be investigating!”
“And supposing I arrest you? And him for that matter?”
Mandrax shook his head dismissively, and grinned, and laughed. “On what count? You know what I’ve done, you know what I’m about to do, but you can’t prove anything. Admit it, you’re desperate! You must be! You brought Dogmeat Jones along to put the finger on me, didn’t you? Holy saints, Larry, you can’t arrest me! You can’t kill me, either. Because you can’t prove anything that’s why. You came here to kill me, but it didn’t work! One bullet, smack in the head. Judge and jury, that’s you! Lieutenant Larry Foggia, knight in shining armor, defender of the faith. A righteous vigilante cop. ‘I suspect, therefore I have the right to open fire.’”
“You killed all of those people,” said Larry, and for the first time in years he felt genuinely shocked. “You killed all of those families. You killed them, for Christ’s sake! Don’t you understand what you did? Joe Berry was a friend of mine. You raped his wife, you set fire to his children.”
Mandrax brushed his hand through his hair. He looked agitated, as if he were trying to think of something else. “They died, yes. I’ll have to admit that.”
“You tortured them! You cut out their tongues and you cut off their arms and their legs!”
“Yes, yes, quite,” said Mandrax, distracted. “But what you don’t understand is... the ritual. You know? The ritual.”
“What ritual?” asked Larry.
“The means by which Beli Ya’al can be resurrected, my friend. The ritual! Do you think that Beli Ya’al has been lying buried for a hundred and fifty years because he enjoys it?”
Larry took a deep breath and controlled his temper. “Why don’t you show me?” he said. “And why don’t you tell me all about it, on the way there.”
Mandrax nodded. “That’s what I had in mind. We can take your car, yes? Every patrol car in San Francisco is looking for my van. And you don’t mind if Edna-Mae comes with us, do you?”
“Edna-Mae?”
“She’s here. She’s quite well. Beli Ya’al will love her.”
He beckoned Larry toward the door. Larry hesitated, and then he followed him. They walked along the corridor a few cautious feet apart; but Mandrax seemed quite confident that Larry wasn’t going to attempt to shoot him. Either he realized that Larry needed him to help him find Belial, or else he knew something about Larry that even Larry himself wasn’t aware of.
“You’ve got the hand,” he remarked to Larry, almost casually, as they passed one darkened doorway after another.
Larry didn’t reply.
“Do you know how that happens?” Mandrax coaxed him. “How people get the hand?”
Still Larry said nothing. He quickly glanced around, to make sure that they weren’t being followed. He had the uneasy notion that they were both being watched. He couldn’t describe it, but it was one of those strong intuitive feelings that policemen can develop after years and years on the streets.
“It’s inherited.” said Mandrax. “It’s passed down, from father to son.”
Larry lifted his left hand. “What are you talking about? This picture? This face?”
“That’s right. Once you’ve committed yourself to Beli Ya’al, your hand is marked forever, and when you die your eldest son’s hands will be marked forever.”
“But that’s nonsense. My father didn’t have the hand,” Larry protested.
Mandrax reached the next darkened doorway, and turned around, and smiled. “Your father was Mario Foggia, right? Import-export?”
“That’s right. But—”
“But nothing. Sixteen years ago he ran out of money and he ran out of people who were willing to lend him any. He only had one place to turn. His old friend Dan Burroughs, Lieutenant Dan Burroughs of the San Francisco Police Department, as he then was. And he said, save me, Dan; and lo! Dan saved him. But then your father began to wonder if the price of being saved was more than he was prepared to pay; and he went back to Lieutenant Dan Burroughs and said, un-save me. But Lieutenant Dan Burroughs refused. So your father said, either you get me out of this squeeze or else I’m going to tell the Chief of Police that you’ve been dabbling in things that ranking police officers shouldn’t be dabbling in.
“So, do you know what Lieutenant Dan Burroughs did?”
Larry said, tautly, “Am I supposed to believe all this?”
Mandrax gave him a lipless grin. “You can believe what you like. But Lieutenant Dan Burroughs had your father hijacked one night on his way back from the warehouse, and two days later they dropped him into the Bay, weighted down with blocks of salt.”
“This is insane!” Larry snapped. “My father died of pneumonia.”
“So the coroner said.”
“You’re trying to suggest that Dan Burroughs murdered my father?”
“I’m not suggesting it, Larry. I’m telling you the truth. Your father wouldn’t behave himself. Wouldn’t keep quiet. There was no telling what he might have done. And Dan Burroughs was always so keen to resurrect Beli Ya’al before anybody else.”
“Now, hold up,” Larry told him. “Dan Burroughs wanted to resurrect Belial?”
Mandrax laughed. “Of course. Ever since he found out that Beli Ya’al was someplace in San Francisco—ever since he found out what Beli Ya’al could do...”
“You’re out of your mind,” said Larry.
Mandrax shrugged. “You can think what you like. But your father and Dan Burroughs weren’t the only ones. There was a whole syndicate of San Francisco businessmen and lawyers and politicians who wanted in on Beli Ya’al.”
“All right,” said Dan, “supposing there was. How did they find out about it?”
“Somebody told them. I don’t know who. Somebody who needed money and figured that it was worth the risk. Somebody close to the Black Brotherhood, I guess. Somebody who knew what we were into. Maybe it was Edna-Mae. Maybe it wasn’t. Whoever it was, when Beli Ya’al rises, they’re going to know what it’s like to suffer in hell.”
“But what would politicians and cops and lawyers want with a fallen angel?”
“Power, of course. Power, straight from heaven. God’s power. You don’t understand this at all, do you? God is sheer almighty unadulterated power, the kind of power you can’t even look at. Each of his angels has the power of a hundred nuclear power-stations; except that it isn’t the kind of power that lights up freeways and runs factories, it’s the power t
o do anything you want.
“If your father and Dan Burroughs and all the rest of those greedy men had found out where Beli Ya’al was, and how to raise him up, then believe me, Larry, life in San Francisco wouldn’t have been worth the living.” Larry stared at Mandrax for a long time without saying anything. It seemed ridiculous; this talk of a political conspiracy to raise a fallen angel. If Mandrax were capable of slaughtering and torturing dozens of people without any remorse, he was probably so far distanced from reality that he could invent and believe any explanation for anything—especially his own grisly rampage as the Fog City Satan.
Yet he still seemed so calm and matter-of-fact and rational; and if you could believe that such a thing as fallen angel actually existed. then it wasn’t demanding too much to believe that a syndicate of lawyers and politicians and policemen were searching to use its supernatural influence for their own ends.
“The only blessing is that they haven’t yet discovered where he is,” smiled Mandrax. “They have many clues. Once they came really close. But close isn’t close enough. For sure, they can use his influence. They can tap some of his power. He gave them the moving hand so that they could hunt out victims for him. But he never told them where he was because he doesn’t know. He’s half-asleep, dreaming. That’s why you see all those clouds on your hand, all those skeins. Those are dreams drifting by. And do you know what he dreams of?”
Larry looked at his palm again, although there were no pictures on it. “It always looks to me like the same man’s face, over and over. Tara Gordon said it was some guy called Sam Roberts, who used to run a wild bunch of vigilantes here in San Francisco back in the 1840s.”
“That’s right—Sam Roberts,” Mandrax smiled. “He was the man who brought Beli Ya’al to San Francisco in the first place.”
“Why should he have wanted to do that?”
“Same reason. Power, revenge. Brannan and Leavenworth had chased him out of San Francisco, and he wanted to come back and show them who was boss.”
“Where the hell would a man like that find a fallen angel?”
“He’d heard a story from an old Chileno, about a ship that was carrying a strange cargo round Cape Horn, in the 1820s. The cargo was supposed to be the greatest treasure on the whole of God’s earth; the greatest power that man had ever known. But the ship went down in a storm, and the cargo was lost. The old Chileno said that any man who found that cargo could be king of the whole world. So after Brannan and Leavenworth chased him out of San Francisco, Sam Roberts went to find it.
Mandrax’s eyes took on a strange steely shine, like polished ball-bearings. Larry thought he looked more than psychopathic, he looked inspired, as if he had been visited by a divine revelation. It was eerie, in a man who had butchered so many men and women and children; and the chill half-light of the old spice warehouse made it feel eerier still.
Larry felt that he had reached one of those heart-stopping moments when the whole world can be catastrophically changed, on the strength of one word.
Mandrax said quietly, “He sailed to Punta Arenas, and then through the Straits of Magellan and all through the islands of Cape Horn. It was the damndest, bleakest, most unforgiving place on the whole surface of the world. But the old Chileno had been right. The ship had run aground on the False Cape Horn, the Falso Cabo de Hornos; and the cargo was still lying on the shore beside it, after thirty years, and it was surrounded in every direction by the skeletons and the freshly decaying bodies of thousands of penguins, as far as your eye could see.
Mandrax interlaced his fingers and bent them backwards, noisily cracking his knuckles. “Roberts chartered a ship, and he managed to rustle up a crew who were more attracted by gold than they were frightened by superstition, and he sailed all the way back up the coast of South America; and every day he sat next to his prize and he whispered to it, and every night he slung his hammock over it and dreamed about it, and by the time he reached the Golden Gate he knew what it was all about and how he was going to resurrect it. He was going to let it loose on all of those blowhards and do-gooders and hypocritical house-Betties who were going to take everything that San Francisco had to offer for their own greedy ends, in the name of justice, and the name of God.
“That thing that Sam Roberts brought back from the False Cape Horn wanted its revenge on God, and God’s creations. It wanted it so bad you could almost hear its teeth grinding. That thing lives for nothing but devouring lives.”
Larry was sweating, shivering, both at the same time. “And you want to let it loose?”
Mandrax grinned. “Revenge has a special taste, pal. Sweeter than anything you care to mention.”
He checked his watch. “But—wasting time. Let’s get Edna-Mae and get ourselves out of here.”
Without saying anything else, he led the way into the darkened room. Reluctantly, Larry followed him, and stood in the blackness straining his eyes. He didn’t know how Mandrax was able to see anything.
“Mandrax?” he called. “Are you there?”
There was long, aching moment when he thought that Mandrax had completely vanished. The darkness was completely overwhelming, and he could smell that terrible distinctive smell of opened-up bodies. Jesus, he thought, supposing he’s left me here alone with Edna-Mae.
He reached behind him for his gun. His heart tightened; and he held his breath. The room was so silent that he could hear the molecules of air bombarding his eardrums. Outside, in the corridor, fog began to roll in over the windowsills, in a creepily appropriate parody of a Dracula movie.
“Mandrax? Edna-Mae?”
His voice echoed flatly. He kept peering into the darkness but it was too complete for him to be able to make out anything. It was worse than having a black bag over his head.
He was about to step backward out of the room when a huge white shape appeared out of the darkness, shuffling and swaying. For a split-second, he thought that Edna-Mae was unaccompanied; and he was about to break all records for running down a San Francisco fire-escape. But then Mandrax appeared, too, with a bland smile that wasn’t quite straight on his face.
“She’s ready, what a beauty.”
“Where are we taking her?” asked Larry, backing away.
“You’ll see when we get there. You can drive, I’ll give you directions.”
Edna-Mae swayed and made a terrible dribbling, whistling noise. Under the flap of her bedsheet covering, Larry could make out a flat, cellulite-rippled face, with crimson eyes.
He felt like dropping Mandrax here and now, as he had originally meant to. Blow his head off, finish this grisly charade of superstition and butchery. But if Dan Burroughs had been searching for Belial for nearly twenty years and still hadn’t been able to find him, there wasn’t much chance that Larry was going to be able to locate him on his own.
Together, an extraordinary and incongruous trio, they descended the fire-escape.
The fog was so thick now that they couldn’t see Larry’s car across the street. Their feet made a slow scraping sound on the rusty rungs of the fire-escape. The handrail was corroded and cold and wet with the touch of fog. Off to their right, in the Basin, a small boat suddenly let out a high whip, whip, whooop, and Larry’s heart almost stopped.
They crossed the debris-strewn street, Edna-Mae’s bare feet shuffling on the concrete. As he reached his car and unlocked the door, Larry looked around, unsettled. He had that feeling again: that feeling of being watched. Closely observed detectives. He opened the rear door for Edna Mae, and Mandrax helped her in. The car’s suspension creaked under the weight.
“All right, let’s go,” grinned Mandrax, climbing in beside Larry and slamming the door. “Head for Front Street, and drive due north, until I tell you.”
Larry switched on the headlights and turned the car around.
As he drove, he kept flicking his eyes up to his rearview mirror to look at the white shapeless bulk in the back seat. The stench was more subdued now, with the airconditioning turned up to Hi, but th
ere was still a cloying brownish odor in the car.
“Just drive easy and natural and stop at all the reds,” said Mandrax. He seemed surprisingly relaxed for a man who appeared to be unarmed, and who had freely admitted to six sickening mass-killings to an armed police officer. Or armed suspended police officer. How better could Larry get his suspension revoked than to bring in the Fog City Satan singlehanded?
All he had to do was to ignore the threat of Belial, which was probably all a delusion in any case.
But he kept on driving northwards through the fog because he had seen the other side for himself, and he knew that it was true; and so Belial could be true, too.
“You’re wondering why I’m taking you along,” said Mandrax, a little more tensely now. “You’re thinking to yourself, this man is psychopathic. He’s a killer, I’m a cop. I’ve been hunting him down, and now I’ve found him, and what’s he doing? He’s going to show me his greatest secret. He’s going to show me everything he’s been struggling to do for longer than I can imagine. All I have to do then is arrest him; and arrest Beli Ya’al; and I’m a hero.”
Larry cleared his throat. “The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Of course it did—and why not? But the point is, you’re not going to arrest Beli Ya’al, because Beli Ya’al isn’t exactly the kind of being you can arrest. And quite apart from that, you’re not going to arrest me, because you, my friend, are Larry Foggia, son of Mario Foggia, and you have the moving hand. Your father said some vows, a long time ago, and made some oaths. In return, a blood vessel burst in your Uncle Sylvester’s brain as he was driving to work and your Uncle Sylvester left your father three-quarters-of-a-million dollars which your father sorely needed.
“Your father promised that you would always do Beli Ya’al’s bidding; and that your son would always do Beli Ya’al’s bidding; and so on, for a thousand generations, when the score would be considered settled.”
Larry felt a leaden feeling in his spine, but all the same he said, “I don’t have to do anybody’s bidding right now. And, what’s more, I never will.”
Black Angel Page 31