City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  Skye hung up the phone and let out a deep breath. The buzzer on his desk startled him, and he slapped the button and half-shouted, "What?" at his secretary.

  "Agent Daly here to see you, sir."

  "Send him in."

  In less than ten seconds, a man entered the room. He was tall and so muscular that his carefully tailored suit could not disguise the thick boluses beneath. Some of the other agents called him Popeye.

  "Talk," Skye told him.

  When Peder Holberg had finally shown up at his midtown studio at six o'clock in the morning, fourteen hours after Adam Guaraldi had found him missing, he'd been barely coherent, and Guaraldi thought he must have been taking drugs, wherever he had been. But a few hours of sleep restored Holberg to his usual energetic self, and once again he swore that he remembered nothing about his disappearance.

  A few days later he started going uptown to hang with the goths. Guaraldi had seen goths around town and at some of the clubs. Most of them were kids, teenagers, or in their early twenties. Their attitudes bored Guaraldi's ass off. Okay, maybe love and death were the only two great things in life, but Jesus Christ, you couldn't think about them all the time.

  These goths were different, Peder had told him. There was an earnestness, a seriousness, a danger that he felt somehow drawn to. "There is something about them," Peder said. "It's as if . . . they know something I don't. But I should. Maybe from them I can find it out."

  "Find what out?" Guaraldi asked. "Where you go? Is that where you've been going, then? To be with these kids?"

  "They are not kids, Adam," Peder said, as if pleading with his lover to understand. "They have not the, what is it, the attitude the children who play at being the vampires have. And no, I do not go to them when I have these blackouts—I think not, anyway. You can come with me when I go to them, you know."

  Guaraldi went only once. He wanted to see if these goths played with sex or drugs, if that was what Peder was finding so attractive. But he learned quickly that such was not the case. He also learned that he did not want to see any of them again.

  As the weeks passed, Peder got more and more taciturn. He would visit the goths, always telling Guaraldi when he went, and he would also disappear. For some reason he couldn't name, Guaraldi began to disbelieve Peder when he told him he couldn't remember where he had been. Peder seemed daily to grow more inward. And though he had been able to function well on only a few hours of sleep a night, he looked constantly tired now, and terribly worried about something he did not share with Guaraldi.

  Three weeks before his next showing was due to open, Peder split with the goths. Guaraldi remarked that it had been several days since Peder had gone uptown to see his "kohl-eyed friends," as Guaraldi put it.

  Peder simply told him in a flat tone that he did not want to see them anymore: "If they ever call here, I am not in to them."

  Guaraldi tried to get Peder to tell him what had happened with the goths, what he had learned, if anything, about his fugue states, and why he was so unhappy of late, but Peder would share nothing with him. He had become increasingly more secretive, locking himself up for hours at a time in a loft that they had used for storage, and to which he retained the only key.

  Through all this, Peder somehow managed to continue working. He had always been of the peculiar belief that his works of art were best seen in the context of the space in which they had been created. Guaraldi and most of the critics had to admit he was right. The burned and battered wooden floors, the iron wall racks holding iron, the high, dark ceilings, the acetylene tanks—all paid testimony to the physicality of the work involved and made even the finished pieces seem parts of a work in progress that was Peder Holberg's life.

  Eight new sculptures were finished the week before the five-day showing was due to open on March 15. Five days was all the time Peder Holberg felt he could tie up his studio. He was an artist, after all, and it was his duty, and had been his joy, to work. Showing and selling pieces were tasks for merchants, and though his idiosyncrasy of showing in his studio required his participation, he did not like mingling with the arty set any longer than necessary.

  But this showing, unlike the previous ones, was hell getting ready for. Lionel Garraty, Peder's agent, was in charge of making all the arrangements for press releases, mailings, food and drink, valet parking (a real bit of organization, since the nearest garage was three blocks away from the studio), and everything else it took to make such an unorthodox manner of showing art seem uncompromising and daring rather than a pain in the ass. It was always a relative nightmare, but it was made doubly so by Peder's preoccupied air.

  He seemed to have no opinions on any of the matters that Lionel or Guaraldi brought up, and might either disappear or lock himself in the loft storage room at any time of the day or night. Finally, the day before the showing, Lionel lost his temper. "Don't you care?" he bellowed. "Don't you care at all? Because if you don't, let's forget it right now, I'll make calls, I'll call the whole thing off, just let me know, Peder!"

  The outburst was great enough to bring some life back into the sculptor. He assured Lionel that everything would be fine, that he wanted to have the show, and that he was sorry he was so preoccupied, but that he was thinking about his work, which was a bald-faced lie if Guaraldi had ever heard one.

  The goths didn't help matters any that last week. Peder might have broken with them, but they, for one reason or another, had not broken with him. Several calls came in every day asking for Peder. Guaraldi knew from the sepulchral tones who it was. At first he made excuses, next he hung up on them, and finally he stopped answering the phone completely, letting the machine take the urgent and finally threatening messages.

  The day before the showing, after coming back to the studio with Chinese food, Guaraldi saw two of the sallow-skinned ghouls standing outside the studio door. They seemed to know who he was and stood in front of him, blocking his way. "We want to see Peder," the more lively looking of the pair announced.

  "I don't doubt it. Sorry. He's getting ready for his showing."

  "No, you don't get it. We have to see him."

  "No, you don't get it, Dracula. Peder can't see anybody right now, and he especially doesn't want to see you guys. So take a hike."

  The talker stared at Guaraldi then as if he were trying to hypnotize him. Guaraldi wasn't scared of them, unless they had knives or guns or something he couldn't see. They were so skinny he thought he could snap their arms and legs in two if he had to. So he stared back at the man, bugging his eyes mockingly. "Sorry, sweetheart," he told him, "you're not my type. Now, back off."

  The man gave one more glower, then moved aside as Guaraldi walked past him and unlocked the door. As the locks disengaged, Guaraldi looked back over his shoulder. "Don't even think about it. Just go hit another midnight showing of The Crow, okay?" He went in and slammed the door behind him, whispering, "Assholes," in the dark. He didn't mention the goths to Peder. There was already enough on the artist's mind.

  Peder kept to himself the day of the showing, while caterers and cleaners and Lionel's assistants and hangers-on scurried about the studio, preparing for the eight o'clock opening. He spent much of his time in the apartment and an hour or so alone in the windowless loft.

  Still, when his fellow artists, patrons, and critics began to come in shortly after eight, he seemed to brighten, chatting with those he knew, being introduced by Lionel to those he did not, accepting compliments, and making small talk. But for all Peder's surface amiability, Guaraldi thought he seemed preoccupied, and he wasn't surprised to watch the sculptor moving away from the crowd and up the stairway to the sanctuary of the locked loft.

  He was surprised, however, when, only a minute after Peder had gone in and locked the door behind him, an explosion rocked the studio.

  The sound was enormous, a gigantic crump that felt like someone had slapped both of his ears with open palms. The building shuddered and seemed to take several seconds to settle, the sculptures teeteri
ng precariously. Some people fell to their knees, others grabbed whatever was handy. Men and women shouted and screamed, and several ran out the door and down the stairs.

  Most, however, finding themselves unharmed except for the ringing in their ears, looked around the studio to try and determine the source of the explosion. When Guaraldi looked up toward the loft, it was all too obvious.

  Thick, dark smoke was drifting out of the room. The door hung only by the top hinge, and the concrete block wall bulged outward slightly. For an instant, Guaraldi thought of the naked belly of a pregnant woman. Then he realized that Peder Holberg was still in that room.

  He cried out Peder's name and ran toward the wooden steps and raced up them two at a time. The stairway had been damaged by the blast, and one of the steps buckled under his weight, but he grabbed the railing and hauled himself up. He heard other people behind him.

  "Peder!" he cried again, yanking the broken door aside and looking into the room. It was large, twenty feet square, with a high ceiling. The light bulbs inside had been shattered by the blast, and in the darkness and smoke Guaraldi could see nothing but a few stray tongues of flame that were going out even as he watched. He could not see Peder.

  "Call 911!" he shouted down to the people on the floor. "Lionel! Bring me that cord light!" He pointed to a coiled mechanic's light hanging on a peg on the wall. Lionel grabbed it and cautiously brought it up the stairs.

  Guaraldi plugged it into a socket on the outer wall, and it flashed into light. He took it inside, trailing the cord as he went. Several men followed.

  The room was chaos. Pieces of sculptures that Peder had rejected were stored here for salvage, and the iron was now twisted as though an unseen force had rent it. A huge work table that used to sit at the far end of the room had become nothing but shards and splinters. Those sculptures closest to the table had been wrenched apart by whatever had caused the blast, and rods and bars of iron lay scattered like a giant's toothpicks.

  The tiles on the ceiling twenty feet above had been blown from their grids and covered the floor, charred brown squares that no longer hid the naked plaster and the pipes that, having burst from the blast, sent water hissing onto the hot surfaces below.

  "Peder?" Guaraldi said, but though he shone the light all around the room, kicked aside the shattered table, and clawed away the fallen tiles, he could see no trace of Peder Holberg.

  There was not a drop of blood, not a scrap of flesh.

  And most puzzling of all, there was no way that Peder Holberg could have gotten out of the loft.

  "Where is he?" Adam Guaraldi whispered, and then everyone was asking the same question. But the ruined room gave no answer.

  Chapter 13

  "What have we got?" asked Laika.

  She sat in a small room in Plattsburgh Memorial Hospital. Tony Luciano sat across from her on a smooth leather chair whose seat showed more duct tape than leather. He was dressed in medical whites, and his hands bore traces of the white powder he had worn under his latex gloves in the adjacent autopsy room. "We've got a mess," he said. "It doesn't help that these guys have been on ice for a few months. They're really burned, burned bad."

  "That follows," Laika said. "The local police have already established that the lodge was torched. At least six gallons of gasoline, sparked by white phosphorous."

  "Tallies with what we're seeing in there. They must've been soaked with the stuff."

  "Were they dead when they were torched?"

  "Yeah. The locals got that right. There was enough cyanide in their stomachs to kill three times as many men."

  "What about the teeth?" A doctor walked into the room from the hall, but stopped dead at the sharp looks he received from Laika and Tony. He mumbled an apology and went back out.

  "I think we scared him," Tony said.

  "We should. I told the administrator that we were to be left alone. Hinted that if anybody interfered in our research, this hospital might not only lose some grants, but a few people might even be—" She shrugged.

  "Audited?" Laika nodded. "Man, you're wicked. What's Laika mean anyway? 'Ass-kicker' in Swahili?"

  "It's Russian. I'll explain later. Besides, I'm Flo, did you forget?"

  "Dammit," Tony said, lowering his voice, "I always have trouble with cover names." Their National Science Foundation papers identified them as Dr. Florence Kelly, Dr. Kevin Tompkins, and Dr. Vincent Antonelli.

  "Anyway, the teeth?"

  "Oh, yeah. What's left of them looks like really old stuff. There are traces of this guttapercha, what they used to make golf balls out of? And a lot of lead. There was even the trace of a wooden denture, and those haven't been used for decades."

  "Was there anything . . . how shall I put this . . . alien in nature about the physiology of the corpses?"

  "You mean, like Alien Autopsy, Part 2? No, they're just normal human beings, except for their teeth. So far, anyway."

  "What about prints?"

  "That's what we're working on now. Most of the flesh is burned so badly that I doubt we'll get any. Still, you never know. I'd better get back to it."

  Tony returned to the morgue, and Laika went back to the makeshift office she had been given and began to go over what data they had on the men who had gathered and died at the lodge. Several cars had been found near the lodge, and by interviewing car rental agencies and airplane and rail counter clerks, she had been able to determine where several of them had come from.

  One had flown in from New York City, another had rented a car in Baltimore and driven it to the lodge, and a third had purchased a car in Albany. But the payments had all been made in cash, and the credit cards used for identification and as security on the rental car had all been fakes.

  The surnames were of English or Scottish origin, and Laika now ran them through the data banks, but the character of the responses told her that they were most likely temporary aliases. Whoever these dead men were, they had been good at covering up their trail.

  After another hour, there was a knock on her door and Joseph Stein opened it. There were black and rust stains on his hospital whites, and Laika didn't much like to think about what had made them. "We've got three," he said. "Three good fingerprints out of, what, a hundred and ten?" He gave a grim smile. "One of them must have clutched a table leg when he fell. His fingers were still around it during the fire, so the tips weren't totally burned."

  "Fine. Let's run them then," Laika said.

  With the codes Skye had given them, their new covers had connections to every major police department in the world, including the FBI, Scotland Yard, the Sûreté, Interpol, and, of course, Langley. And with the state-of-the-art laptops with which they were equipped, they had nearly instant access over any data transmission line.

  "Vincent's sending them now," Joseph said—rather smugly, Laika thought. She heard footsteps in the hall, and Tony stood in the doorway behind Joseph. "Make that sent," Joseph said.

  "How long before we hear back?" she asked.

  "Hopefully hours, I'd think a day at most," Joseph said.

  "Well," Tony said reluctantly, "it might take longer than that. I told the data hounds at Langley that I wanted them compared with every print on file worldwide." He paused.

  "Yeah?" said Joseph. "So?"

  "I told them I wanted a check back to the 1890s." Tony looked quickly down at the floor, his tongue probing inside his lower lip.

  Laika felt her face flush and heard Joseph give a snort of disbelief. "For Christ's sake, why?" she said.

  "Well, the rumor is that these guys were supposed to be immortal, right?"

  "Uh, excuse me," Joseph said, "but their corpses prove they're not."

  "Okay, so really, really old, then," Tony replied. "I figured we might as well go as far back as we can . . . just in case."

  "In case of what?" Joseph said. "In case they were committing crimes a hundred years ago? You think that seems likely?"

  "No, I don't mean in case they're really that old. This helps
prove they're not, see? To prove that, we have to go back as far as we can." He sighed. "Look, these guys may have been up to something weird, and they apparently had some nasty enemies, so odds are more than even that one of them has had a run-in with the law. If this one guy has, we'll get a match."

  "Maybe," Joseph said. "But if we do, you know damned well the match will be no earlier than the sixties. The nineteen-sixties, that is."

  "Sure," said Tony. "But this way, nobody says we didn't find out who this guy was because we didn't go back far enough."

  "Prints that old won't be on the computer," Laika said. "Do you have any idea how long it's going to take to compare them to the prints in those old files?"

  Joseph nodded. "I imagine they'll be pulling yellowed cards out of dusty files at Scotland Yard for several days, depending on how many people they have working on it."

  "I did request highest priority," Tony said, "and Skye set us up with a lot of juice."

  Laika looked at him with hard eyes. Right now she felt like a Swahili ass-kicker, sure enough. But maybe he was right. This way the National Enquirer or the Star or the other rags that might cover this story couldn't say that the government ghostbusters hadn't done their homework.

  "All right," she finally said. "There are other things to do. We haven't seen the lodge yet."

  There wasn't much to see. The only thing left standing was the fireplace and its chimney. The rest of the lodge was a pile of ashes and blackened timbers, thrown helter-skelter when the authorities pulled out the bodies. Small green plants were already beginning to push up from the ashes, and birds were singing their spring songs in the trees that surrounded the lodge site.

  "They have no idea who was responsible for the murders," Laika told the others. "The local police chief suspects a mass suicide, but when I asked him how the victims were able to immolate themselves, he said he figured that the last man did it, set the fire, then took the poison."