Then, as abruptly as he had begun, his reflexes froze. His unnatural hand remained hidden.
“Well. We’re up, are we?” It was a voice he hadn’t heard in decades, and a face he had missed for as long. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Maggie?”
“Haven’t forgotten us, I see. I suppose that’s something, after all this time,” she answered, with a tone that somehow managed to convey both humor and sadness at once.
She smiled, and put a ceramic bowl on the table beside the couch. Entirely oblivious to the danger that lurked only inches from her throat, she took a chair and set it down, taking a seat beside Sean, whose hand tingled as it slowly regained its human shape.
Margaret Reilly, Maggie to her old friends from the neighborhood, retained a youthful smile, though the years had etched fine lines into the corners of her face. Her eyes were the same as always, though, sparkling and blue and exactly the way Sean remembered them.
They greeted him with a gaze that put his tensions at ease.
“Vince called you?” he asked, his eyes wandering unconsciously over her figure.
She wore a checkered apron tied over a dark wool suit. The folds of a white blouse peaked out from under her belted jacket. Uncrossing her legs, her stockings shimmering gently in the half-light, she reached out to lift the bowl from the table. Sean was less interested in the steaming soup than he was in the sight of her.
Her auburn hair was bound up, not like the pigtails she’d worn it in the last time he’d been so close to her. As she lifted the spoon to his lips, he thought he noticed a streak of gray running through it.
When he opened his mouth, it wasn’t to sip, but she stopped him in mid-breath, before he could say a single word.
“You need to eat. Then we’ll talk,” she said. For an instant he felt as though he’d been scolded by a schoolteacher, rather than the first girl he’d ever kissed.
Whatever the case, he simply nodded, content to enjoy the long-lost taste of oily chicken broth, and to watch her smile as she spooned it up and fed it to him.
His nerves soothed, Sean lasted only long enough to sip half the broth. Then his head spun and he faded from consciousness once more.
“Shhh. He just passed out again,” Margaret whispered when Vince barged in through the door a few moments later.
“He was up? Did you get a chance to talk to him?”
“Vince, he’s not in any condition to talk. Look at him. He’s been shot for Christ’s sake,” she answered, making no attempt to mask her hostility.
“Yeah. I know, Maggie,” Vince said as he knelt down and adjusted Sean’s blanket, pausing for a moment to turn the sleeping man’s face toward them, and to look carefully at it. “I’ll tell you, he aged pretty good, you know? Look at him; guy looks exactly the same as he did thirty years ago. Now how the hell did he pull that off? That’s what I want to know.”
“If we don’t take him to a hospital soon, you’ll probably never find out,” she snapped.
Vince shook his head.
“We went over this last night, we can’t do that. I just got a hold of an old partner of mine, you know him, Paddie Flanagan. Anyway, he’s still on the job, and I got from him that they’re lookin’ at this for a mob hit last night. Big Sammy Calabrese’s guys.
“Whatever the hell Sean’s gotten himself into, he’s in deep right now. We can’t move him, at least not until I look under a few more rocks, and see what else turns up.”
SIX
LA PIAZZA SAN MARCO WAS QUIET. A RARE THING FOR that most bustling of Venice’s many ancient squares. The hour was late, and growing later with every wave that washed against the bulwarks of the Doge’s palace.
Sean was there. And he was smiling.
He sat beneath the magnificent stone arcade, along the south side of the plaza, at a wrought iron table with a glass top, in a chair of similar fashion. Across from him, gleaming, sparkling as she smiled with him, was Orlanda.
Orlanda Santina.
Her skin was dark, all the more in the dappled light of moon-glows and candle-flames. Her hair was shoulder-length, dark and curled at the ends. But her eyes …
Her eyes reflected the warm evening glare, but not all of it. As Sean watched them, followed them when she shrugged or laughed, he knew that they held back some of the light they seized. Held it back deep within that dusky gaze. It made him think of Homer, and the “wine-dark sea,” and it made him happy.
She wore little in the way of cosmetics, a touch of rouge on the apple of her cheeks, a hint of gloss over her pink lips. A simple girl, her beauty was natural, the kind of face that make-up only muddies.
He thought he could watch her forever, and thought maybe he was going to, when the cameriere finally brought them a pair of espressos and their bill on a handwritten slip of paper.
Sean didn’t remember paying, or drinking the coffee, for that matter. But if he had stopped to consider it, he’d have been sure of doing both. As it was, the very next instant they were walking together on the other side of the square, under Byzantine towers that loomed high over the bay with their truculent spires.
“Resti con me, insieme, per sempre,” she whispered.
His command of the lyrical romance language was not perfect, but he had spent enough time in Italy to understand her. Sometimes even without words.
Often, in fact.
“Sì. I will stay with you forever.”
He couldn’t help but respond in English, even though she didn’t understand a word of it, if only to help him gather his thoughts for the translation. “Ti voglio bene, per sempre.”
The words were not exact, but the sentiment was all the same.
“Promesso?” she asked.
“I promise. Sì.”
So they kissed. And they walked. And they kissed.
They strolled along the waterfront, by where the ferries and the gondolas were tied, rocking along in the wind-tossed sea.
They passed across a footbridge, over a canal between two very old buildings. They wandered through winding, shadowy, dusty streets that were more like corridors of plaster and stone than actual roads.
Hours stretched meaninglessly, the waltz of the moon across the cloudy eve like the silent melody to their endless dance.
Venice was tranquil, stirred not at all but for their footsteps and their laughter. It was not a city of wild nightclubs and all-hours parties. It wasn’t like Paris, or Munich, or his own, long-lost New York. It was serene, and it was theirs. All theirs.
Until there came another.
It was just shuffling at first. A rustle in the darkness. But then it was more. The sound of feet. Whispers.
Orlanda noticed it. She broke from their embrace.
Few were out and about, to be sure, but the city was never completely deserted. At least that was what Sean assured her. They were safe. Nothing would bother them.
He promised.
Again they stopped, and they kissed. Lost in the contemplation of each other, neither of them saw the dark figures as they emerged into the light.
They surged forth from the dim, born whole from the shadows, expelled from the belly of the night. Everything about them was as drab as the dark from which they sprang, long coats, flat-brimmed hats, trousers, and shineless boots. All was black, except their scythe-like blades.
Those shone silver. Menacingly. Evil in their sharpened elegance.
The three moved as one. They swept upon the lovers like a plague.
Orlanda screamed when she saw them. It was already too late.
The moments seemed to accelerate, as though the violence had disturbed the orderly flow of time itself. Sean reeled. He thrust Orlanda behind him. The assailants were on three sides. The canal was at his back, several feet down.
A swipe cut at him from the left. Another slashed from the right. Blood spilled from his arm.
Orlanda screamed again. He parried. His swing missed, opening up his middle for an instant. The third man stabbed at
him from in front. The strike cut his shirt. Razor-edged steel tore across his chest.
He felt the blood, but his return blow was already in motion. This time his punch landed. Sean’s roundhouse connected with a crack. The force of it knocked the mystery man’s hat from his crown.
Sean gasped between breaths.
The corrupted face of a middle-aged man stared back. But what startled Sean was his fractured jaw. His fist had ripped the man’s lower mandible from his face. Teeth were scattering like raindrops mixed with blood. A piece of the bone dangled from a tether of raw skin.
Sean recognized the sign immediately. He was facing his own kind. The Morrigan had found him again.
He had no time to ponder it.
Another blow came, from the side. Another angry slice opened his veins. Orlanda, behind him, had quieted her screams. She was reciting Ave Marias one after another like a drone.
“We don’t want to hurt you Mulcahy. Come with us. Join the fold. Don’t make us kill you,” the one on his left said.
The man spoke in an eerie whisper, a tone that was far too intimate for the circumstances.
“The girl must be killed, unfortunately. But you need not die as well. Save yourself. Join with us,” said the other.
The third breathed heavily from the gaping red wound where his mouth had been.
Sean did not bother to respond. He could dispatch them all in an instant, but not with Orlanda there. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t know.
Why couldn’t they just let him live?
Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?
An instant later the decision was made for him.
A final blow caught him across the throat. It knocked him from his precarious foothold at the canal’s edge. He tumbled in a bloody mess, down past the stone blocks and into the cold, cloudy brine.
Then the three closed in on Orlanda, crimson dripping from their blades. She tried to scream again, but found that her voice would not oblige her.
Time had grown short. Though the streets were still deserted, her cries would soon bring others, and the killing this night was to be kept to a minimum. The one with half a face held her, wrapped her in his thick arms. Her throat bared, he forced her down to the cobblestones like a hunted beast. The other two raised their daggers.
An instant of peculiar calm fell over the grisly scene. One of the men raised his knife.
The blade fell, but it did not pierce flesh. It clanged and broke against the street when its wielder was suddenly, violently hauled down from behind. The man’s face smashed against the ancient stones. He never saw the thing that had torn him away from the deed, for even as the tentacle that had coiled about his ankles loosened, his mangled head tore free from his shoulders.
The others, and Orlanda with them, did see the slayer, however. They saw it in all its savage, demonic fury as it closed in on them.
It was a beast for certain, but nothing that could have been spawned from nature’s noble pantheon. What skulked up from the murk in those agonizing moments was horrid. Green, or maybe black of skin, if it even had skin. The moonlight reflected off it in a myriad of foul shades. A dozen or more writhing tentacles lurched at its base, the bony spikes on their ends chipping the old Venetian stones.
It stank of the oily, briny bilge from which it crawled.
The torso was insect-like. The seven arms that sprang from either side of the exoskeleton bore claws that resembled swords, black, serrated blades as wide and fearsome as Scottish claymores. Sticky red ooze drooled from the one that had ripped the first assailant in half.
Most ghastly of all was that the creature, despite its hybrid, unnatural madness, bore the face of a man. An all-too-human head and neck grew from the nape of the beast. As it glowered upon the three, it appeared for all the world like some poor, damned soul had been swallowed by the hideous abomination.
That poor soul was Sean himself. It was his face that bore down upon the cowering trio.
This time, Orlanda’s voice did not fail. Her scream was the equal of a banshee.
The two who had only moments before tried to kill her, now feebly attempted to use her for a shield. It was to no avail. Two of the claws melted from their armored state, shifting in an instant into a pair of very long, but very human-looking hands.
They took hold of Orlanda, gently, and wrested her from the grasp of the two remaining assassins. They set her aside, screaming all the while as she stared in horror at the defiled face of the man she had asked never to leave her side.
The two did not even bother to mount a defense. They knew that their moment had come. They were not given much time to ruminate on the fact.
The living blades cut them to shreds. In a whirl of organic steel, their clothes, their limbs and their very skulls were sliced and chopped so many times that there remained at the end nothing more than chum to be shoveled into the canal; fish food and scraps of cotton in a broth of almost-human blood.
When it was done, he turned to Orlanda.
Then she saw something only possible in nightmares, something no one should ever have to see, and few humans before her had. She stood dumbfounded, beyond words or cries, as the beast contorted, compressed, and turned in upon itself. She watched in disbelief, still, despite all that she had seen, as the skin of the creature shifted like muddy water. Stinking yellow pus oozed from the joints where arms or limbs were receding into the core of the thing.
It didn’t take long, though, but then why should it? Something so terrible and unreal?
In a few moments, Sean was standing there before her again. He was naked, dripping in slime and blood. But it was clearly him, and she’d seen every second of his horrid metamorphosis.
“I should have told you. I wanted to. But how could I?” he said, taking a moment to find the words in her language, and then repeating the phrase so she could understand.
She simply stared back at him. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t in pain. But her face had changed. Those eyes that had once been so warm, so dark and so sweet were now cold. Their stare was empty, like a corpse.
He reached out a hand to her, and took a step. A siren blared, and police arrived just around the corner.
“Please. I only want to be with you. I’m sorry,” he said.
But she just ran away.
He wanted to run too, to follow her, but he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t.
Instead he fell to his knees. Tears blended with the muck on his cheeks, and he screamed out her name.
“Orlanda! Orlanda! Orlanda!”
Then he woke up.
Maggie was there by his side. She had a wet towel pressed against his forehead.
“It’s only a dream. You’re okay. It’s just a nightmare, Sean,” she assured him.
He opened his eyes. He saw her through the tears.
“What is Orlanda?” she asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Who,” he answered. “Who.”
SEVEN
VINCE WAS NO STRANGER TO THE SUNSET CLUB, OR to the connected guys who patronized it. His years on the force had been marked by their constant association, payoffs, kickbacks from numbers games, and during Prohibition, the occasional raid. It was unavoidable, a simple fact of life, and not at all as glamorous or exciting as the movie houses made it out to be.
The reality of it was that the rackets were a closed shop, from the beat cops and the back-room bookmakers all the way up to the detectives and the street bosses. The thing they never got right, those Hollywood types with their natty cardboard-cutout lawmen and sneering George Raft bad guys, was that the whole lot crawled out of the same pool. It was a dirty, polluted cesspool of petty fraud and wink-and-a-nod sanctioning, kept alive by enough hard cash to go around, and jolted every now and again by murder when there wasn’t.
But it was still just one pool.
Vince had grown up with most of those guys, with their brothers and cousins, mentored by their fathers and uncles. He knew better than most that among the din
gy pubs and taverns of the West Side, the Bowery, and the Lower East Side that cops and hoods alike spent as much time rehashing twenty-year-old stickball games and sordid tales of the girls back in the day as they did discussing their actual business.
Which wasn’t to say that nothing ever got done. When the busts were made, they were made. When there was a score to settle, it got settled. Bad blood fueled more posturing and backstabbing than just about any other motive, except perhaps the old reliable green.
But two sides? Cops against robbers, white hats against black?
It had never been, nor would it ever be that simple.
Nevertheless, Vince found himself taking a few deep breaths as he crossed Mulberry Street at the corner of Hester. The steamed-up kitchen windows were open at Gennaro’s across the street, slathering the cold breeze with welcome drafts of breaded veal cutlets frying in olive oil. He politely sidestepped a pair of hunched little widows in black shawls chattering to each other in Sicilian, and pushed open the creaky old side door to the Sunset.
It was suitably dim and quiet inside. The thick shades were drawn over the windows, as always. The house lights were set on low.
Vince scanned the room. The un-lacquered tabletops were bare. Some of the chairs were still upside-down on top of them. The black-and-white tile floor was wet in places from a recent mopping. But near the back, a few seats were occupied. One in particular caught his attention, beneath a cheap painting of Garibaldi holding a tri-color emblem.
“Hey, Paulie Tonsils,” the ex-cop said, recognizing an old pal with a cigar and a bad comb-over sitting under the hero’s portrait.
Paulo Giannini had gotten his nickname when he was seventeen, almost half a decade after he began working for Sam Calabrese. Most kids had their tonsils out in grade school, or a little later. Paulie, however, had been laid up for weeks when his throat glands finally got bad enough to require extraction—about a month before high-school graduation.
The Lucifer Messiah Page 3