Book of Secrets

by Chris Roberson

  He stepped forward, the gun trained on Taylor, until he was only a few feet away.

  "You, I think, Mr. Hand," Matthews finally said.

  "I think not," Taylor replied and, splitting his bonds, drove his feet into Matthews' knees. Matthews tottered, shooting blind, and staggered back, moaning. The bullet rushed past Taylor's ear, striking the wall behind him and sending splinters of wood flying into the back of his neck. Taylor pulled the now severed binds from his ankles and sprang to his feet. In his hand he held the slim blade he'd managed to pull from the hollow heel of his shoe, and with which he'd cut the rope wrapped round and round his arms and legs.

  Matthews stood stock still, gaping, not sure what had happened, and as he brought the pistol once more level with Taylor's chest the man of mystery rushed towards him. Disoriented, Matthews shot wildly, but if any hit Taylor he didn't slow down. An unstoppable engine, he plowed into Matthews, driving him back.

  Matthews, crazed, struck at his attacker with the pistol, and then flung it away. Taylor was inhuman, unstoppable, and bullets couldn't hurt him. Taylor slowed his advance. Matthews staggered back, and then turn to flee. He took only two steps into the shadows and was brought up short, screaming.

  Taylor, blood dripping from the bullet wound in his shoulder, stepped forward slowly, but it was too late. Matthews, in the darkness, had run directly into the iron hook, and with the force of his movement had impaled himself there. Now he hung, lifeless, listing slowly this way and that. The Talon had met his death on his own claw!

  8

  After recovering his hat and mask, and freeing Louise, Taylor had returned to Nick's waiting cab. From there, he was driven to Louise's building. Nick helped the masked Taylor up the stairs to Louise's apartment, and then stayed to help her dress the Black Hand's wounds. When they were done, still masked, Taylor thanked Nick for his loyal service and asked him to depart.

  "Sure, boss," the cabbie answered. "I'll let myself out. And call any time."

  Once he had left, Taylor drew the mask from his face and called for Louise to bring him the phone. Dialing, he flexed his shoulder, testing the dressing.

  "Good work, Miss Aldridge," he complimented. "I am always grateful I was able to lure you away from the medical profession."

  "Anytime, Mr. Taylor," she answered, smiling. "And if you think being a nurse is more exciting than this, you've got another think coming."

  "Yes," he replied, nodding. "I suppose you're right."

  The line continued ringing, until at last came the sleeping voice at the other end of the line.

  "Yes."

  "Joseph," Taylor said, "I apologize for disturbing your rest, but I have information regarding the Talon. Direct your colleagues to the empty warehouse at Pier 31, and there you will find the Talon. I believe you will discover that the warehouse is in the possession of Matthews Industries, and that, with the knowledge that the man you will find was the face behind the Talon's hood, should be all you will need to know."

  "Yes sir," Martenson answered. "Right away, sir."

  Taylor dropped the handset back into its cradle, and then eased back onto the couch.

  "Miss Aldridge," he finally spoke, his eyes half lidded. "I am afraid I will have to ask another favor of you."

  "What?" Louise shot back, feigning indignation. "What could you possibly need now?"

  "The use of your couch until morning," Taylor replied. "I'm afraid I'm not going anywhere."

  Louise smiled, and drew a quilt over him.

  "You got it, Mr. Taylor," she answered, "but I need something from you, too."

  "And what is that?" Taylor asked, almost succumbing to sleep.

  "You still owe me a dinner on the town," she replied, "and I mean to collect."

  Taylor laughed, smiling, and then closed his eyes. Tonight, at least, justice would sleep.

  SECOND DAY

  Morning came early with a spike in my head and an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I lay sprawled on top of the bed sheets and felt myself being baked by the white hot light that knifed into the stale air through the part in the curtain. I rolled off the bed and bumped the air conditioner down a couple of notches, but it gave a sad wheeze and sputter and then stopped working entirely.

  Figuring this as good a time as any to get moving, I thumbed the television on to the morning news, and stripping off my clothes climbed into the shower. I got as wet as I could under the little trickle eking its way out of the shower head, and did my best with the doll-sized soap and shampoo provided for my convenience. Finishing, or rather just stopping a few moments later, I tried as much as possible to dry off using the little tissue-sized towels all cheap motels seem to come equipped with. I was used to the drill, never getting wet enough when in the shower, never getting dry enough once out.

  As I rubbed the little towel against my head, I caught strains from the television in the next room. The usual stuff: stock market down, the wrath of God descending on some trailer park somewhere, some politician caught in some kind of scandal. When I heard the name "J. Nathan Pierce" my ears pricked up, and I ambled into the other room.

  There was a commercial break, and then the anchor returned to pick up on the teaser he'd dropped just before.

  "And in business news, sources close to land and oil magnate J. Nathan Pierce announced today that he had closed a deal to sell his interest in Vista Incorporated…"

  The bobbing blow-dried hairdo dissolved and was replaced by a shot of an elderly giant of a man, dressed in an expensive suit and standing in the middle of what looked like a private library. There was a towering shelf of books behind him, a bronze bust of some dead white man to his right, and a large book with a silver disc on the cover in a glass case to his left. Along the bottom of the screen appeared the legend, "FILE FOOTAGE."

  "…the company which he began out of his father's garage during the depression and which made him a billionaire – to the multinational information giant Lucetech."

  The hairdo reappeared, and was soon followed by a computer graphic that hovered over his left shoulder. It showed a circle enclosing two intersecting sine waves, almost like a yin-yang symbol doubled and laid over itself at an angle. Below was the name "LUCETECH".

  "The details of the arrangement at this time are still unclear, and it has yet to be announced whether Pierce will step down from his position as CEO of Vista, or whether he will be kept on in an advisory capacity. And now for a look at sports…"

  I switched off the set as another, jauntier hairdo appeared, and sat down on the edge of the bed, dripping water onto the threadbare carpet. Though I doubted the vapid puppet of an anchorman had understood the importance of what he had just said, to me it was clear. Vista Incorporated, which Pierce had begun by purchasing up distressed real estate with his daddy's oil money back in the thirties, had always been the cornerstone of his financial empire. It was the parent company of all his oil production, real estate and property management, brokerage and consultation operations. With the sale of Vista, Pierce was left with a big house, a fleet of cars, a private jet and lots of money in the bank. But no financial power, and no leverage to obtain anything more. For any normal human being that would be well and good, to live out life driving a different car every day of the week and using hundred dollar bills as scratch paper, but Pierce wasn't exactly a normal human being.

  I got dressed and scooped the pile of photos and notes back into the box. I had decided that the answer to a lot of the questions I kept tripping over was somewhere in that box, and I just needed to go to the man who could find it for me. And that meant a trip to New Orleans.

  Back in the car, driving along the wide road to Louisiana, I found the same spectrum of religious broadcasting, but this time with Christian Hip Hop added into the mix. I switched it off and smoked one cigarette after another, the smoke drifting in a wide circuit around the interior of the car before being drawn out the cracked window.

  I kept coming back to the story I'd read the night before. I wondered i
f my grandfather had kept the Black Hand magazine because the character had his same name, or whether the character had been named after him in the first place. I wasn't aware that the old man had known any writers in his life, but then I didn't know much about him at all. Still, another Texan high roller with the same name seemed an unlikely coincidence. The only major difference between the two was that, as far as I knew, my grandfather was never lunatic enough to go around playing Zorro. When I had the chance, and had nothing better to do, I figured I could check into Walter Reece, the writer of the story, and see what I could find out.

  In the meantime, I was on my way to New Orleans to ask the help of the greatest man I'd ever met.

  At the age of fourteen, I ran away from home. I suppose I'd had enough of living in San Antonio with the old man, and my brother was starting to get on my nerves, so I packed up a few things in a duffel bag and hit the road. I went to New Orleans, which I'd seen once in a movie, and after my money ran out in the first couple of days was reduced to eating out of dumpsters. The city lost a lot of its luster from that angle, so I decided to try a different approach. Remembering my life long dream, I decided to become a burglar.

  The whole idea of sneaking into people's houses, and sneaking out with all their good things, seemed daring and romantic, like Errol Flynn in a ski mask. I half expected to meet some beautiful girl doing it, just coming out of the shower, wrapped up in a towel. She'd fall in love with me, help me mend my evil ways, and we'd take off together for Paris or somewhere like that.

  As it turned out, I only broke into one place, and I didn't meet the girl of my dreams. Instead, I got a kiss in the mouth with a steel cane and lost a couple of teeth. I still rub my tongue over the gaps in my smile whenever I get too cocky, just to remind me never to let dreams run away with me. My first night on my new career as a burglar, I broke into Tan Perrin's house.

  Once upon a time, Tan was the greatest cat burglar this country had ever seen. He was a legend, but nobody knew his name. The papers, the cops, they all knew his handiwork, but nobody had ever caught him. Tan was an artist. He'd break into museums just to rearrange the paintings, and come back the next morning to see how folks liked them. He once broke into the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, stole the hundred dollar plates, and mailed them to the Treasury Department in Washington. Sent a note along saying they might think about hiring some girl scouts to guard the place for them.

  Tan was true innovator, a pioneer, Michelangelo reborn as a thief. Twenty years at it, and he never got caught. Then time and luck caught up with him.

  He was breaking into a museum where they were keeping some of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. He claims he didn't want to take them; he just wanted to look at them up close. I tend to believe him. He was up on the roof, on his way down, when a security guard up there sneaking in a cigarette caught a glimpse of him in the moonlight. The guard got off a lucky shot; Tan got a bad break and caught the bullet in his spine. He just laid there twitching, bleeding his life out, while the cops took their own sweet time sending an ambulance over. By the time they got him to the hospital, he was paralyzed from the waist down.

  After that came the hospital, the court room, and the penitentiary, in that order. Twenty years all together, and when he was finally released he was just another withered old man in a wheelchair. He went back to New Orleans, where he'd been born, and moved into a large second story apartment. He'd socked away quite a bit of money over the years, on jobs no one even knew about, and hidden it where the feds could never find it. I think he intended to just live out his life in luxury, drinking twelve year old Irish whiskey and betting on the races. That's when I came along and he realized just how bored he'd become. He took me in and became my teacher.

  "Howdy, Cachelle," I said as I stepped through the beaded curtain into the back of the palm reader's shop. The palm reader, Madame Divinity herself, was heating up a pan of fried vegetables over a hot plate, her back to the door.

  She turned around, all two hundred and fifty pounds of her, the jewelry on her wrist, neck and ears ringing like the bells at the University of Texas clock tower.

  "Spencer, you little bastard," she said, smiling broadly. "How long has it been?" She held her arms out wide, bracelets clattering.

  "Too long, beautiful," I answered, and stepped into her arms. She hugged me like a professional wrestler, almost lifting me off the ground.

  "Let me look at you," Cachelle said and held me out at arms' length. Her eyes took me in, head to foot. "Why didn't you call, let me know you're coming?"

  "Well, I lost my cell, and–" I answered sheepishly, before she cut me off.

  "You are eating right, aren't you?" She wagged a finger at me.

  "I get by. But nothing like your cooking."

  She laughed.

  "Boy, are you full of shit." She glanced at my feet again. "I like the boots though."

  "Thanks. A gift."

  "A gift?" she asked, frowning. "You know that in the Philippines it's considered bad luck to give shoes as a gift. You got to be more careful."

  "Bad luck for the person giving or the person getting?" I asked. Madame Divinity, better known to her friends as Cachelle Humphries, was the world's unacknowledged expert on crazy superstitions. I half expected that she made up most of them, but nobody ever challenged her on them.

  "Aw, hell, I don't know. Who give 'em to you? Not a Filipino, I hope."

  "Nope," I replied. "A beautiful Italian gal who didn't think that anyone from Texas should get to walk around wearing normal people shoes. She ended up leaving me for a painter, but she let me keep the boots."

  "You are one hard luck case, aren't you?"

  "Like I said, I get by." I glanced around the room. This was the backstage, where Cachelle came to relax between performances. The front room was all incense and effigies and altars to the Loa, but back here she was just a middle-aged black woman from small town Louisiana fixing her dinner. "Is the old bastard around?"

  "Yeah, he's up there," she answered. "You better get on up there; he'll be wanting to see you." She paused, scowling. "You really should get by more often. That man's not going to be around forever, you know."

  "I don't know about that," I replied, smiling and putting an arm around her wide shoulders. "Sometimes I think he's going to end up burying all of us."

  "Not without a fight, honey," she said laughing, her mood lightening instantly. "Not without a fight."

  I said my goodbyes to Cachelle, promising to stop by before I left, and went around the back to the stairs. I walked on up, silently like the old man had taught me, and let myself in the door. Before I'd taken two steps into the cloakroom I caught a steel cane in my shins.

  "You still make more noise than a chorus line of fat tap dancers," a gravelly voice said, and then laughed.

  "And I could smell you two miles away," I answered, not turning around. "Aren't you ever

  going to take a bath?"

  "Why don't you kiss my boney ass?"

  I turned in the doorway and saw the old man in the wheelchair. His head was shiny bald, his face clean shaven, and his sky blue eyes were buried in a spider's web of laugh lines. He wore a sleeveless white t-shirt, baggy black trousers, and rope sandals on his useless feet. His arms lay poised on the armrests of the chair, and even relaxed the muscles stood out like cords under the skin. In the years I'd known him, he didn't seem to have aged a day.

  "You bathe," I replied, "and maybe I'd think about it." I walked over and hugged him, his arms circling my shoulders like steel cables. He pounded me on the back a few times, and then pushed me away.

  "It's good to see you, boy," he said, his voice breaking only slightly. "It's been too long."

  "I know, Tan," I answered, lowering my eyes. "I've been busy."

  "Busy? Shit. Why don't you get a real job?"

  "Ah, come on, Tan, you know me. I never had the chops to be a good thief."

  "Bullshit. You were always just too lazy. You coulda been a pretty
good burglar if you put your mind to it."

  "Well…"

  "Not like that little Mexican boy you used to bring around. Shee-it, he was good for nothing. What was his name? Elbow, Humidor–"

  "His name is Amador, you old bastard," I interrupted, "as you well know." Pulling off my coat, I dropped it on a low table and then tossed my wallet, keys and knife on top. I turned, and made for the main room.

  "Come on, Tan," I said. "I need a drink, and then I'm going to need your advice."

  Without a word, the old man swung the wheelchair around and followed me down the hall.

  Besides the cloak room, and a small bedroom on the other side, the entire second floor of the building was one large room. Two entire walls were made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down on Royal and St. Peter Streets. The floor was hardwood, polished to a mirror finish, and the walls plain and unadorned. In the center of the room was a skylight, and the ceiling was covered with hooks, exposed beams, suspended ropes and ladder-looking affairs that ran from one end of the room to the other. There was no furniture in the middle of the room, and only a single table and a couple of chairs in the far corner. Along the wall near the next corner over stood a tall cabinet, dark wood with brass fittings. Otherwise the room was empty.