by Unknown
The first man, the taller of the two, was dressed all in gray, closely tailored, with a silk cravat at his neck and a shapely topper crowning his head. In his hand he carried a cane of ebony, capped in an intricate device of silver. On his lapel was a broach of silver, a stylized representation of a semicircular sun, caught either in the act of just setting, or just rising. He bore an almost bemused expression on his thin face, and his half-lidded gray eyes betrayed no fear.
Of the other passengers, the shorter man seemed almost a twin to the first, the gray of his suit a shade closer to white, his head bare, but in almost every other respect the mirror image of the other. He carried no cane, but on his lapel was another broach, the mate to the first. The woman, comporting herself with a haughty carriage, was dressed in a deep forest green, a bonnet tied around her elfin face, her auburn hair in a tight bun at her neck. Neither, like the first man, displayed the slightest fear or hesitation.
"Your valuables, gentles," the highwayman commanded. "Else you'll taste the spittle of these." Thereupon he indicated the pistols in his hands, with a grim nod of his head.
"We have little of value, as you would measure it," spoke the first man. "Take what you will and let us be on our way. We have pressing business in Paris, and I would not be late."
If the brigand was taken aback by the odd manner and forthright speech of his intended victim, he made no sign of it.
"I'll do my best not to delay you, monsieur," offered the highwayman, dipping his head in a mock bow. "But it would please me to know the names of such illustrious visitors." Here Taylor considered he might have netted bigger fish than originally he had suspected. Passing nobles might be good for an easy mark and a week of meals at a farmer's table, but someone of importance might prove more valuable indeed.
"Certainment," answered the tall man. "My name is Rahab, and my companions are called Salome and Samedi."
"Strange names for French highborns," Taylor commented.
"Indeed," replied Rahab, a slight smile playing about his thin lips.
"Tell me, Monsieur Rahab, of your 'pressing business' in the capital."
"Would that I could, sir, but I cannot," the tall man answered.
"Perhaps I have not made myself clear, monsieur," Taylor spoke carefully. "You consider my entreaty a polite question. It was not." Again, he made a meaningful glance at his pistols.
"I understood perfectly," Rahab replied. "It does not alter my response."
The highwayman's eyes narrowed.
"You seem confused, monsieur. Perhaps the weight of that heavy trinket," Taylor gestured to the half-sun broach with one cocked Dragoon, "has put you under some strain. If I might relieve you of it, perhaps your senses will return."
"Doubtful," spoke Rahab.
"What?"
"Doubtful that you might relieve me of my emblem, or that its lack would have any beneficial impact on my senses. My faculties, such as they are, are mine."
Taylor raised the pistol at his right, leveling it at Rahab's heart.
"I would have your 'emblem', monsieur, and I would have it now."
"Sir," Rahab answered calmly, "you may fire upon me, or either of my companions, at will, but you will not have anything from us."
"Noble sir," broke in the driver, panicked, "for the love of the holy mother give him what he wants!" The driver, though of stout enough heart, would not have any passenger of his shot down while in his charge. It might well have an adverse effect on his custom.
"I will not!" Rahab said firmly, only now allowing his voice to raise. "These emblems, though of little relative value, mark us as members of that holy fraternity, Les Enfants du Matin, and will not be handled by lesser hands!"
With that, Rahab took two long steps forward, and reached out his hand, wrapping it around the barrel of the pistol. Taylor, startled, flinched, and his twitching finger closed over the trigger. The pistol erupted with a flash and a sharp crack, and the shot was projected with unutterable force directly into the body of Rahab.
Taylor stared wide-eyed behind his mask, his mouth hanging open. In all this days and years working for the common good on the high roads, never before had he seen such a sight.
Standing before him, his hand still wrapped around the barrel of Taylor's pistol, was Rahab. The fabric of his gray jacket was torn and singed, marking the impact of the shot, but through the rent cloth Taylor could see no blood, no wound. Seeing his gaze, Rahab glanced down at his front, and then back up to Taylor's face, his expression grim.
"Had I the time," Rahab said, "I would take the cost of this suit from your own hide. As it is, that is a pleasure I must save for another day."
Rahab let his hand fall and, dusting off his front, turned to the driver.
"Driver, be so kind as to close your mouth, and then transfer to this man any of the baggage you think worth the trouble to this gentleman. Then to the seat with you, and let us be on our way."
With that Rahab motioned to his companions, and they climbed back into the carriage. Rahab made to follow them, and then turned back to the highwayman.
"In a rougher age I would have left you broken for this imposition, monsieur," said Rahab, "but I find that I have softened with the years. As it stands, I will leave you with this nugget of wisdom. You might do quite well terrorizing the small-minded and -hearted mayflies that buzz along your roads, cozened as they are by short, easy lives. But every man with even a small measure of vision must some day recognize that there are forces which walk the earth, older and stronger than his own. And before these, even the bravest of midges must inevitably fall."
With that, Rahab turned and climbed into the cab, closing the door behind him.
The driver, dazed, dumbly went about the business of handing the valuable cargo over to the highwayman and, without another word, climbed to the box and whipped the horses into motion. He drove on into the town, and the next morning on to Paris, were he discharged his passengers. Though he kept to the road until his death some fifteen years later at the hand of a drunken bravo, he never mentioned the events of that late afternoon, outside the town of Amiens.
As for Reginald Taylor's part, he soon returned to his native England, and shortly after emigrated to the New World, where he played some small part in the colonists' revolt. In later life he took to him a young planter's daughter as his wife, and settled in the wilds of Tennessee. By the time of his death at the age of seventy-two, long retired from the life of a highwayman, he had seldom mentioned his encounter with Monsieur Rahab. Often though, on late nights, watching mayflies swooping and darting around candle flames, singeing their wings and falling down to earth, he would reminisce to his children and grandchildren about the strange thin man and Les Enfants du Matin, and wonder after beings old and strong yet walking the Earth.
FOURTH DAY
I was awoken early in the morning by the sound of the phone ringing. I'd been sleeping pretty restlessly, dreaming unsettling dreams about gangsters and cowboys and bulletproof Frenchmen, and so managed to skip the unfrozen caveman routine. Still, it took my vocal cords a few beats to catch up with my brain.
"Yeah," I croaked into the receiver.
"Spencer, did I wake you?"
"No, no," I lied, reflexively. "I'm up, I'm up." I dug the heel of my palm into my lazy eye, and then thought to wonder, "Who is this?"
"It's Amador, man," came the reply. "You said to call you when I found something."
"Lover?" I asked, blinking hard. "What? Found what?"
"Your boy Marconi," Amador answered. "I found him."
"What?" I said, immediately awake. "Where's he staying?"
"You should be able to catch up to him no problem. He's currently staying at the presidential suite at the Las Vegas County Morgue."
I dropped back onto the bed, my head slamming into the pillow.
"Shit."
Amador told me all about it: how Marconi had been found a couple of days before in a ditch just outside of Las Vegas filled with more holes tha
n a wiffle ball. The local authorities had no suspect, no leads. It didn't matter much anyway. It didn't seem like the local cops were too sorry to see him go. The case was as good as closed.
I thanked Amador for the tip and asked him to keep me posted if anything new came up. He said he'd try, but managed to wheedle a pair of Rockets tickets out of me before he was through. I told him I'd do what I could.
Checking the clock, I could see it had only been a couple of hours since I'd come home. There not really being anything I could do, I decided to get a few more hours sleep before planning out my next step. It was a good idea. Sleeping usually is. It was too bad that I couldn't follow through on it.
I just laid there, staring up at my cracked ceiling, trying to figure out what I'd got myself into. One anonymous phone call and all of a sudden corpses are dropping left and right, and I still don't have a clue what's going on. All sorts of nonsense about mythological beings and ancient manuscripts, and all the while the lunacy my grandfather carried around with him all those years. It was getting to the point where I was having trouble keeping it all straight, trying to remember if the gangsters had anything to do with Odin, or whether that cowboy had stolen the book from Pierce.
Come to think of it, I pondered, there was a book in the cowboy story, wasn't there? And a guy named Pierce, too. I shook of the feeling of vertigo creeping over me. It was like the universe was conspiring to drive me crazy. I counted off the corpses: Stiles, Marconi… who was next? It occurred to me that I could just as well add my grandfather to that list when the phone rang again.
"Hello," I said, much quicker on the draw now that I was fully awake. "Amador?"
"You call me that again and I'll hang up," came the reply.
"Tan?" I asked. "What the hell are you doing up? It's got to be…"
"It's six in the morning here, slack ass," the old man growled. "It's when us grown-ups tend to get up."
I rolled over on my side and shut my eyes.
"What's up, you old crank?"
"I got a message late last night about our mutual friend." He answered.
"Who? Amador?"
"Say that name again and I swear to Christ I'm gonna hang up. Nah, your boy with the overdue book."
I shot upright, my eyes wide.
"Marconi?" I shouted into the phone. "Amador said he was dead."
"That's it," Tan hissed, and I heard the line go dead.
I waited all of two minutes, waiting for the phone to ring, and then punched in for call return. The line rang three times, and then I heard it click.
"I told you I'd do it," the old man said. "You didn't believe me, but I told you I would."
"Okay, okay. 'Someone' told me he was dead."
"Who?" he asked.
"Stop fucking with me, you senile shit; it's too goddamn early. Marconi, that's who."
"Oh, yeah," he sang through the line. "He's dead, you know."
I sighed deeply.
"What do you want, Tan?"
"If you're gonna speak to me like that I won't tell you." I stayed silent, and so did he. I knew this game. I knew how to win. "Alright, alright, I'll tell you. I made a few calls yesterday, people who knew Marconi, old gambling pals of mine, businessmen." He didn't specify what kind of "business," and I didn't press him on it.
"Anyway, I got this call late last night from this guy I knew from stir. He's a big dumb shit, good for nothing but hired muscle, but he tends to be around when important things are said and he keeps his ears open."
"Okay." I prompted. "Go on."
"Well, by some coincidence, right after Marconi turned up serrated in Vegas, there was an announcement about this charity auction gonna be held in Arizona."
"What kind of charity?" I asked.
"The best kind," he answered. "The 'Don't Ask Any Questions And You Won't Get The Wrong Answers' charity. See, the way it works is, say you're into a shark for a certain about of dough, right? And you can't pay up. So, like the walking clichés they are, they break your legs. Everybody knows this bit. But say after that you still don't pay. Sooner or later, your loan officer is gonna get impatient, and you end up in a ditch. Now, that makes the loan officer feel a whole lot better about everything, naturally, but it doesn't do a whole lot towards paying off your tab.
"So, they tend to take whatever you've got as kind of reverse collateral on the debt. If they like it, they keep it. If not, they sell it off. After this had gone on for long enough, somebody got the bright idea to organize things. You know, kill off a bit of bad debt, stack up the loot, and then invite your friends over to take it off your hands. Happens a few times a year these days. You can get some good shit, too. Better than a cop impound auction."
"What's all this got to do with Marconi?" I asked. "Did they take some of his stuff?"
"You bet they did. And they're auctioning it off with a bunch of other shit. Tomorrow night, as a matter of fact."
"Tomorrow, huh?"
"Yep, and you'll never guess what's on the docket."
"Not…" I began.
"You bet," Tan said. "A certain big book."
I stared up at the cracked ceiling and blew out a long sigh.
"Shit."
Five minutes later I was out of bed and wide awake, making plans to head to Arizona.
It seems that Tan's "friends" had figured that Marconi must have owed him something. Or at least, that Tan thought he did. Why else would he be asking after a worthless layabout like that? So in the interests of maintaining parity, they offered him a prized chair at the auction. Tan had no interest in sitting in it. I did.
The expense account provided to me by the publisher of Logion was coming in handy, no doubt about it, but I admit I was growing a bit anxious about the day the bills came due. With any luck, though, I'd have a story by then, and all would be forgiven. If not, I might find myself taking advantage of all those free drinks at Moon & Son a little more often.
Deciding there was no point in trying for any more sleep, I made a couple of calls to airlines and booked a flight to Vegas for early that afternoon. The auction was to be held a couple of hours outside of the City of Sin, south in Arizona, just after dark of the following day. If I got into Vegas early, I could poke around and ask questions about Marconi, get a good nights rest, and still have a chance to rent a car and get to the place with time to spare. I was getting in on the strength of Tan's good word, so I wasn't worried on that account. I only hoped I wouldn't do anything that would put the old man in Dutch with his old "friends."
At about nine o'clock, when I was fully ambulatory and trying to crib together something resembling breakfast from the odds and ends in the kitchen, there was a knock at the door. I decided it was to be expected. It was shaping up to be a day of surprise phone calls, unannounced visits, and unexpected travel plans. I dropped a dollop of honey onto bread so stale I didn't even need to toast it and made for the door.
There on the outside, his enormous girth almost entirely blocking the strained morning light, was Royce.
"Morning, Spencer," he boomed. "Am I in time for breakfast?"
My head rang with his every word, and without complaint I limply handed him the honeyed bread. He took it from me gratefully in one huge hand, and with the other held forth a small package.
"UPS came early," he announced, dropping the package in my hands. He smiled broadly and folded in the bread.
"Um…thanks," I managed, and then turned back inside. Absently waving Royce to follow, I padded on bare feet across the dusty wooden floors to the dining room and dropped down into a chair. Tearing the wrapping from the package in a long strip, I came up with a VHS cassette tape. "Oh yeah," I said, finally remembering what I was supposed to expect. With a groan and accompanying creaks, I pried myself off the chair and went looking for the VCR, left to gather dust in a closet after I'd bought the DVD player. Once I'd wired up the VCR and popped in the tape, it whirred unhappily and then sprang to life. Punching on the television, I fell back onto the chair.
"You join some kind of tape club, Spencer?" he asked. "I thought everybody'd switched over to DVD."
"Nah," I answered, "just a bit of research."
"Oh."
That out of the way, we leaned back and watched the tape. It was the standard Barbara fare, nice shots of her and the interviewees walking slowly through English gardens, accompanied by faithful dogs, standing by water, skipping stones, all while her commentary rattled over the top like an aluminum roof in a hail storm. I recognized Pierce right away from the casual swagger of his walk and the insincere shit-eating grin that split his wrinkled face. Then the scene cut indoors to a quick tour of Pierce's Houston mansion while they talked. If you've seen one billionaire's private fortress, you've seen them all. Last came the actual interview, a two camera setup with Barbara and Pierce facing each other at an angle in matching Louis Quatorze, Pierce shifting uncomfortably back and forth in his chair. They were in his study.
Seeing the bookcases lining the walls, the rare prints, the sculptures, I felt for sure I'd seen that room before. It was to the first commercial break before I had it. It had that same crowded look as my grandfather's study, except you could tell that Pierce didn't live in his, and kept it mainly for show.
It was a few minutes after the commercial break that I noticed something over Pierce's shoulder and scrambled for the remote. I punched the rewind button and ran the tape back to the Pierce Mansion Tour.
"What?" Royce asked, leaning forward, still rubbing his necklace. "What did I miss?"
"I'm not sure yet," I answered. "Watch."
The tape had almost run back to skipping stones by the pond, so I hit play and let it resume normally. Again the cut to the interior of the Mansion, again the tour. Through the main hallway, the dining room, the den, and into the study. Once in the study, Pierce leads Barbara around the room, pointing out the masterpieces. An original Degas, a sword worn by Napoleon, an original edition of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. On and on. Then it happened. I hit the pause button.