Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “Doin’ the Lord’s work, Harry.” Cassidy smiled.

  “I don’t know. Everything’s crazy. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s that goddamn bomb.”

  The radio was powerful and he had no trouble picking up the World Series. The rain had grown sleety. It was hard to imagine a sun-washed diamond, the crack of the bat in the crisp autumnal breezes, the fly balls floating against the pale blue sky. It was crazy. Maybe Harry Madrid was right, maybe it was the bomb.

  Claude Passeau was pitching in the enemy’s ballpark but through five innings he’d held the Tigers hitless. He was marching toward baseball history, yet Cassidy’s mind kept wandering. What the hell was he doing, going to Maine in some damn storm, searching for a man who wasn’t there … ?

  There was no point in worrying about Andrew Folger who was probably Manfred Moller. Now that he had the minotaur again it was impossible to know what he might do. Would he try to reach Vulkan?

  Well, what if Karl Dauner had been Vulkan? Was Manfred Moller therefore alone and friendless? What then would be his state of mind? He could go back to ground somewhere … but where? It all depended on Vulkan. And if Vulkan was still alive, if he was still out there, could Moller be sure he could trust him?

  When it came to that, why did he take the minotaur back? Why did he kill Brenneman?

  That would make you think someone else had seen to Brenneman’s getting it. Manfred was reclaiming it. But who would have taken it from Manfred and transferred it to Brenneman?

  Had Dauner and Felix given it to Brenneman? It sounded like Brenneman thought they had … but that didn’t make sense. And it didn’t make it true. The minotaur had been in Boston, not New York. Which made you think somebody else, someone with Boston as the hub, had made sure the minotaur had stayed there … which made you think it wasn’t Dauner’s work. But Dauner had known about it, had done business with Brenneman before.

  Had the minotaur been stolen from Moller?

  Oh, for God’s sake!

  Who knew he had the damn thing? How could somebody steal it?

  Had Vulkan or someone else betrayed him? But, then, how had Moller known where the minotaur had been taken?

  Did the killing of Dauner somehow set Moller in motion? Did the killing of Dauner mean Brenneman was about to die? Had to die?

  Well, add it all up and that was why Cassidy and Harry Madrid were going to Maine.

  Cassidy saw only questions and nary an answer.

  They had no choice but to go back to the beginning, back to their first idea: find out where Moller had come into the United States and then reconstruct his trail. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had.

  The afternoon wore on and the dark day had turned to a bleak twilight. Out in Detroit Passeau had finished up a masterpiece, marred only by Rudy York’s single in the sixth. A one-hitter and the Cubs left Detroit leading the Series two games to one.

  Try as he might Cassidy couldn’t remember hearing York’s hit.

  Harry Madrid had been napping for a while but roused himself by some internal alarm system.

  The headlights probed at the night. The sleet had turned back to rain and then slacked off until the night was left with only the wind shrieking out of the forested hills they could no longer see.

  Harry Madrid blew his nose and pointed at the weather-faded road sign, TUGGLE.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “COULD BE WORSE,” TOM HAYES said, sucking on a corncob pipe that he was smoking upside down so the steady light rain wouldn’t dampen the tobacco in the bowl.

  “I’d like to know how.” Harry Madrid, covered in one of the khaki-green all-weather coats Hayes had dug out of the attic, was sitting on the brown pine needles under the towering tree where they were taking a break. He had his bowler determinedly clamped down on his huge head.

  They had left Tom’s pickup truck back on the dirt road that cut through the vast estates belonging to Tash Benedictus. From the roadside Hayes had pointed out a thin column of gray smoke rising from the forested hillside about four miles away, across a deep valley nearly black with pines. Hayes handed Cassidy his field glasses, pointing toward the smoke. Cassidy had focused the lenses and through the rain he’d made out the slate roof and single high pointed turret of the Benedictus castle, called—Cassidy hoped whimsically—Last Bastion. Hayes had said the idea was to steer well clear of the castle, given the owner’s attitude about strangers, poachers, and trespassers. So, for two hours, they had slogged through uncomfortable, nearly impenetrable country that scratched at them, lay traps and natural tripwires for their weary feet, and sucked wetly at them when it had the chance, pulling them toward the underworld. But old Seth Marson was the one who had the line on the crash and Seth said it was the Keyhole Lake area they needed to search. And it was toward Keyhole Lake that they were struggling.

  “Could be worse,” Tom Hayes said again. “Could be summer. Nothing a whole lot worse than summer in these woods. A man can be out there on the lake having the time of his life, fishing up a storm, working the silveriest trout you ever seen, but you can’t stay out on the water forever. And when you come ashore—you got a bag full of trout or salmon or bass, whatever, you’re a happy man—and then, Mother o’ God, the blackflies got you.” He sucked on the pipe, took it out of his mouth, knocked the dottle out on a flat stone. He ground the ash under his heel. They were all wearing green wellies from the attic stock. “And when the blackflies get you, you’d know just how much worse it can get.” He grinned from Cassidy to Harry Madrid, both of whom were sweating like pigs in the forty-degree weather. “Blackflies, they’re hellfire, they get at you, up your nose, in your eyes, damn things can get inside your clothes, make a beeline right for your arsehole. …”

  “Shut up,” Harry Madrid said. “Just be a pal, Tom, and shut up.”

  Hayes laughed, tucked his corncob back into his pocket.

  Cassidy looked at his watch. It was just past noon. They’d be playing ball in Chicago in a couple hours. They might as well be on the moon. “How much farther to Keyhole Lake?”

  “Coupla hours,” Hayes said.

  “Big lake?”

  Hayes shook his head. “Not so big.” He picked up the rightly rolled bed kit. “Might as well be on our way, gents.”

  They were each carrying a bedroll and a small packet of provisions for overnight. Hayes also carried a cooking kit, nothing heavy, all useful. “Funny thing about blackflies,” he said. “Folks used to say they never bothered pretty women. Just a superstition. Cheap whore probably safest of all. Damn blackflies won’t go near perfume. Stronger the better.” He chuckled and set off, leading the way single file. “Blackflies can kill a man. They just start chewing on you, they can just keep chewing until you’re dead, y’know.”

  “Shut up, Tom,” Harry Madrid said.

  Cassidy couldn’t stop sweating. The exertion of fighting the thick, grasping undergrowth, coupled with the terrible humidity, was drenching him, soaking every stitch inside the rubberized coat. He tried to pull as much air into his lungs as possible, he tried to will his heart to slow its heavy thudding. He had to hand it to Manfred Moller if the son of a bitch made it through this alive

  The two hours dragged past, turned into three, before they collapsed on a spiny ridge looking down toward a narrow sand beach spotted with bits of wood, charred remains of campfires from the summer, a fireplace crudely built of stones. Keyhole Lake.

  The light was beginning to fade, the low, dark gray clouds turning purple, ripe with more rain. Hayes pointed down at the lake, a hundred yards away, where a tiny inlet flowed under the boughs of several giant pines.

  Hayes sighed, stood stretching his back. “Make camp down there, get a fire going, take the damp outa the bones. Come on, gents.”

  Hayes had a gift for building fires out of what seemed to be waterlogged pine boughs and blowdown and undergrowth. He got the flames licking up through the brown-and-green brush and the smell of burning pin
e needles swirled around them like the smoke caught in the lake breeze. The surface of the lake was quiet but for the rain that blew across the water like a gossamer curtain. Cassidy had seen the same mesmerizing effect from the tunnel under the stadium, with the leather pads beneath his jersey soaked with rain and heavy, had seen the rain blowing in sheets across the field, blurring the white yard stripes, the fans huddled under blankets and umbrellas in the darkening stands. Here it was as if the giant pines, rising in the tiers on the hillsides surrounding Keyhole Lake, formed the stadium and he was looking out from a tunnel formed by the heavy, drooping branches above him.

  “It’ll be dark soon enough,” Cassidy said. “Whattaya say, Harry? Let’s have a look.”

  Harry Madrid grunted, dumping water from one of his wellies. A rock dropped out and he grunted again. He tugged the boot on again. “It’s a fool’s errand, Lewis.”

  “Well, that must be us. Let’s look around.”

  By six o’clock they’d battled their way through several hundred square yards of pine forest bordering the northeast quadrant of the lake. Seth Marson had been very specific on the detail map as to where he’d been, where he judged the crash to have taken place, where he’d smelled the oil fire though he’d not actually seen it. And by six o’clock they hadn’t seen anything either. They trooped back to the inlet where the flickering campfire burned a bright red-orange hole in the darkness.

  Hayes was squatting beside the fire frying slabs of ham in a folding frying pan. He looked up, eyebrows raised, corncob pipe clamped between his widely spaced teeth. “Any luck?”

  “Ha!” Harry Madrid sat down on a rock cushioned by his bedroll. It was not a mirthful laugh.

  By the light of the campfire Cassidy unfolded the map Marson had marked for Hayes and Harry Madrid. They had just finished searching about a tenth of the area Marson felt so sure of and it had been hard work. They were trespassing, for one thing, and the lake was awfully inaccessible, for another. How much could they do the next day? Then they’d have to fight their way out and load up on more provisions, then fight their way back in again. The whole idea seemed hopelessly difficult and desperately quixotic. It was no surprise that the plane had never been found. If it was there at all. And if it had gone down in the thick forest, the idea that Manfred Moller survived the crash seemed farfetched. It all seemed farfetched and the preternatural calm of the drenched forest added to the feeling that this, here, was real, while the hugger-mugger of Boston and New York was make-believe. What would Winchell have made of the forest, the campfire, the rain, and the severely dropping temperature?

  “Wha’d I tell you, Lewis?” Harry Madrid was rubbing his hands together. They were pink, chapped by the damp and cold. “Colder’n a witch’s tit. My God, how I hate the country life. This would just never, ever happen to a man in the city. Any city. Only out in the godforsaken wilderness.”

  “Soup’s on.” Tom Hayes pointed to the tin plates.

  There was ham, fried bread, white Vermont Cheddar, apples, Black & White scotch and a measured amount of water.

  “It’s funny, but I always thought camping out like this would be sort of cozy.” Cassidy frowned. “Mainly I’m stiff and cold.”

  “You get that warped view from reading The Open Road for Boys,” Hayes said.

  “If I don’t make it through the night,” Harry Madrid said, “just fix me up with a Viking funeral. Right here on this miserable fucking lake. Your reward will come in Heaven.”

  They swigged at the scotch whiskey and nibbled on cheese and then they rolled out their sleeping bags. Things occasionally moved in the underbrush, cracking a fallen branch, bumping into stumps. Loons or some damned thing called across the lake and from time to time there was a splash in the lake, a cry across the water.

  “Are we safe out here?” Harry Madrid looked up from his quiet contemplation of the fire. He sprinkled it with more twigs and smoke billowed out at him. He fanned it away. “It’s awful damn noisy around here all of a sudden.”

  “We’re pretty safe, I guess,” Tom Hayes said. He was nursing scotch from a telescoping tin cup. “Only thing that’s likely to hurt us is a bear.”

  “Well, my God, Tom, that’s a relief,” Harry muttered. “I was all set to get worried there.”

  “Or a moose. I suppose a moose gets all riled up he could do a man some damage. Catch you in the nuts with those big antlers mebbe. Worse, a moose could fall on you. Now that’d be a horse of another color.”

  Harry Madrid groaned. “Lew, what am I doing here? No, don’t bother to answer. There is no answer, son.”

  By his watch, in the low light of the campfire, it was only half past seven, but Cassidy’s bones were weary and aching. His eyelids dragged him down like anchors and he kept yawning. Harry Madrid was already snoring, an immense bulk inside his sleeping bag. Cassidy was sprawled on top of his, warming himself as close to the fire as he could get. Tom Hayes had wandered off into the shadows to relieve himself. The splashing sounds continued erratically out in the lake. There was a dull grayish-silver glow behind the clouds and the rain had stopped as the temperature fell. One night out in the elements was one too many so far as Cassidy was concerned, but how the hell else could you find the plane? And unless you found the plane how could you retrace the path of Manfred Moller?

  Still, he felt like an idiot. A very cold, very uncomfortable idiot.

  Tom Hayes came back into the penumbra of firelight, carefully buttoning his heavy gamekeeper’s trousers. “Get tired real early out in the woods,” he said. “Old Harry’s sawing wood.” He chuckled. “You better knock off. Don’t worry about the fire, I’ll keep feeding it.” He set the tin camping dishes he’d just washed down at the lake on a bed of pine needles near the fire. “Got some good country sausages for breakfast,” he said almost to himself. “Now get some shut-eye. We’ll find your airplane in the morning. If it’s around here, anyway, we will.”

  Cassidy closed his eyes but when he came awake he couldn’t remember falling asleep. Blearily he looked at his watch again. It was only a quarter past eight.

  But something was wrong.

  He leaned up to see what Harry Madrid and Hayes were doing and his head bumped into something. Something hard.

  He spun his head and the hard thing got in the way of his cheek and the damn thing hurt. He forced his eyes open. A very large shape was standing over him, quite literally blocking out the moon.

  “The jug can bump the stone,” it said, “or the stone can bump the jug, but no matter how you cut it, it’s bad for the jug. Why don’t you just sit still, friend?”

  The hard thing was the business end of a double-barreled shotgun that was pressing against his nose and mouth, forcing his head back down. He couldn’t move his lips, couldn’t have spoken if he’d had anything pertinent to say. And he didn’t.

  A blinding light hit him head on. It was like he imagined a needle would feel, driven into your eyeball. He squeezed his eyes shut. All he could see then was a glare, bright red.

  A voice that wasn’t coming from the man with the shotgun came from somewhere else, off to the side, a different voice. Whoever it was seemed to be an Englishman.

  “I say, you chaps,” the voice said, at ease, laconically. It was like a parody of someone in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. Bertie Wooster, maybe. Perhaps the man with the gun was Jeeves. “You awake, old man?”

  Cassidy tried to nod.

  “Come, come, Porter,” the voice said. “No need to actually insert the weapon.” Cassidy felt the gun’s twin muzzles withdraw. He heard Harry Madrid and Hayes rustling, coming awake. “Now, you chaps are in the soup, I’m afraid. Which is to say you’re off limits.” Mercifully the light slid away from Cassidy’s face and pinned Madrid and Hayes to their sleeping rolls. One of them was spluttering with indignation.

  The large shape—Porter by name and possibly by occupation—moved away to point his shotgun in the general direction of the others. Another man stepped into view, above Cassidy, whose
eyes were returning to something like normal. This new visitor was stocky, wore a cap and a tweed hacking jacket with a heavy scarf wrapped around his throat. His left sleeve was empty, tucked into his jacket pocket. His right arm was partially extended, a gloved hand holding what looked like a Colt .45. He wore jodhpurs and lace-up hightops.

  “What’s going on?” Cassidy’s mouth was dry with sudden fear.

  “Well, how to put it? You’ve been nicked in the act of trespassing, old dear. You’ve no business in the world being on my land.”

  He came closer. He had a round, almost cherubic face, full-cheeked, the tweed cap pulled low on his broad forehead. He was smiling, his mouth the bottom half of a circle above a dimpled chin that became a couple of chins in no time at all. The pleasant aspect of his face, seemingly made for smiling, was marred somewhat by the fact that he only had one eye. A black patch was strapped to his left eye, the black band bisecting his forehead and crossing a curled lump of tissue where his left ear had been. Something very bad had once happened just to his left. Very, very bad. “Come along, lads. Collect your bits and pieces. We’re going for a ride.” He never stopped smiling. But the .45 didn’t waver either.

  Cassidy stood up slowly. He heard Harry Madrid and Hayes getting up. The former was grousing. “Be careful with that gun, young man,” he said, “or I might have to wrap it around your neck.” It occurred to Cassidy that Harry Madrid wasn’t kidding.

  “By the way,” the smiling man said, “my name is Benedictus.”

  “And I’m one of Snow White’s dwarfs,” Harry Madrid muttered.

  Benedictus laughed lightly.

  “Grumpy, I presume,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “YOU’RE RIGHT, OF COURSE, THE torches are a nice touch,” Benedictus observed, his footsteps echoing on the cold stone floor of the entrance hall. The walls were constructed of immense blocks of what appeared to be stone. They looked so heavy, so real, that Cassidy doubted their authenticity. He’d seen so many movies that featured such elaborate castles, frequently presided over by a gaga scientist in the familiar person of Lugosi or Karloff. His father had also taken him to visit movie sets when he was a boy and he had seen more when he’d been in Los Angeles with Karin while she worked on her own pictures. The more real things looked the more likely they were to be made of papier-mâché.