The landscape didn’t look treacherous, which only went to show you how looks could deceive.
Within the first ten yards Cassidy had wrenched his ankle in the hidden undergrowth and pitched forward, sprawled flat on his face. He struggled up to his knees and heard Harry Madrid moving slowly but surely, chortling. Tom Hayes moved ahead, more practiced, more of a woodsman. Cassidy waited on his knees until Harry Madrid drew even with him.
“This Seth Marson, you think he knows what the hell he’s talking about?”
“Well, I must say, Lewis, that’s how he struck me. He’s done a lot of poaching and I’m told that poachers—and this is quite understandable if you think about it—I’m told that poachers will always know the lay of the land better than anybody, better even than the gamekeeper. So, I’ve been figuring that our friend Seth knows whereof he speaks.”
“That’s a yes, then?”
“You could say that, Lewis.”
They forged deep into the pine woods but it was still a world of blinding whiteness in which you instinctively squinted, shutting out as much of the glare as possible. The snow fell steadily, slowly drifting, silently making things disappear. Tiny anonymous birds flitted from tree to tree but kept civil tongues in their heads. A squirrel peered out of a hole in the snow, looking somewhat disgruntled. The storm was four or five weeks ahead of schedule.
Pushing past boughs so heavily weighted that they lay exhausted on the ground, Cassidy loosed an avalanche from boughs above and was suddenly swamped by a billion icy crystals, snow down inside his collar, soaking him, turning his sweat into ice water. “Ah, goddammit!” he bellowed, brushing himself off, causing another avalanche.
Harry Madrid said: “What’d I tell you about nature, Lewis? It’s a bad and scary place. Reminds me of the old Jack London story, fella down to his last match, then all the snow slides down on him and—”
“Harry, for chrissakes, I know the story, everybody knows that story.”
“You think so?” He smiled benignly at Cassidy’s distress. “You’re so beautiful when you’re mad, son.” His cement jowls shook with mirth.
“Thank you, Harry.” It had never occurred to Cassidy that Harry Madrid had a sense of humor. He’d thought Harry was remorseless, a throwback, not much of a laugher. You lived and you learned.
They reached the snowy shores of the lake where Tom Hayes was waiting for them. He’d found the remains of the camp they’d made the night before. It was colder by the water, as if the lake created wind. They wrote off the area they’d traversed previously and sorted out where each would set out now. Harry Madrid got the first chunk of land, Cassidy the middle third, Hayes the farthest. They set out from the lake, relying on their eyes, searching the whiteness, stopping, blinking at the glare, trying to see past the glare and find the prize.
An hour passed, then two, then three and the sun was drooping toward the pointed pine tops in the west. They had all worked their way toward a central clearing hewn for no visible reason from the middle of the forest. They straggled around the edge, thankful to be out of the pressing trees. Cassidy was as wet as he’d ever been outside of a swimming pool. Sweat ran into his eyes, sweat mixed with the constant drifting snow on his face. He was breathing hard. Harry Madrid found a stump and looked out across the clearing. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards, maybe less, across the waving scrim of snow to the trees on the other side. They looked like something from a fairy tale, deep in the Black Forest of the Brothers Grimm.
“I’m too damn old for this.” Harry Madrid wiped his face with a blue bandanna. “Put a fork in me, Mama, I’m done.”
Cassidy nodded. “Looks like we’ve just about had it. Fucking snow …”
The snow had reached a depth of a foot in the clearing, where there were no trees to break its fall to earth.
The quietness was like nothing Cassidy had ever experienced. The isolation coupled with the muffling effect of the snow was too much. He realized it was frightening him. You could cease to exist in such a place, die so easily, just give up, give in. You could drown in the quiet, slip beneath the waves of snow, give up on trying to resurrect your life and bring your dead wife back from the grave. … It had looked like a pisser of a job going in and then there’d been that little shock of hope, the touch of the icy fingers up and down your spine, when she’d known how to get to the apartment on Washington Square. When she’d remembered those scenes, the gulls and the huge ships at the pier, the Christmas tree in the snow under the great archway at the foot of Fifth Avenue. There’d been hope all of a sudden. And then nothing. Nothing except watching her dance and realizing he still loved her. … So it was still a pisser and he knew damned well something would go wrong. He wouldn’t get the girl, and in the dark pit of his gut, for the first time in his life, he felt the premonition that you spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
He had the feeling that he was going to die over this goddamn Manfred Moller thing.
“Hey, you guys … Jesus, you guys! Look!”
Hayes was standing out at the edge of the trees, twenty or thirty feet along the circle, staring out into the falling snow, his voice a supercharged whisper. “C’mere, over here.” He was beckoning to them, waving his arm.
Cassidy picked his way through the mounds of snow growing like crazy fungus on the clots of underbrush, came to stand beside Hayes. Harry Madrid was puffing along behind him. Hayes pointed across the clearing, through the snow. “There, through the snow, see where I’m pointing. Jesus, he’s big as a house. …”
Cassidy strained to see through the snow, looking along the rim of stubble and pine boughs. “What the hell are you talking about?” He breathed the words, knowing that it was time to whisper.
Harry Madrid said: “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun. I see it. Big ain’t the word!”
Then Cassidy saw it. Just inside the trees edging the clearing, camouflaged against the dark boughs mottled with clumps of snow.
A moose, looking about the size of an elephant.
There it stood, its great spread of scooplike antlers, its long nose-heavy face: it stood quietly in the snow like the world’s only big moose statue. It was staring thoughtfully ahead, almost in profile from where they stood. The antlers were blotched with snow. It turned slowly, just its big drooping head, to have a look at the three of them. The moose did not seem overly impressed. The massive head turned back to what had engaged its attention in the first place.
It took several minutes of standing there peering across the clearing until the thing, the object, took form like something in a puzzle. Cassidy saw the truth of it first, realized what the moose found so fascinating, and he smiled.
The snowy fuselage and tail section of an airplane, its nose squashed down into the earth.
The moose seemed to be chewing on a broken, dangling piece of pontoon.
The plane hadn’t quite made the lake.
It had been an old crate to begin with and a spring, summer, and early fall out in the elements hadn’t done it any good. Most of the paint had peeled away and the metal had rusted in spots. The rivets had been worked loose when it had hit the ground. There were streaks of blackened, burned oil traces where the engine housing had burrowed into earth. Some broken, browned pine boughs, a few lopsided trees indicated the downward path as the crash had occurred.
The pines were so high, so full, that they must have cushioned the impact, creating a kind of slide-chute effect as it settled down to rest. Some faint words painted on the door over the wing said & HAL FAX, N A SCO . The one pontoon had been ripped clear off, nowhere to be seen. The other—the one the moose had been pushing about with its nose—hung sideways, dangling by a metal strut. One wing had been crumpled back and sheared off, lay twenty feet away in the snow. The other wing had torn loose from the fuselage, held only by a couple of rivets, wedged against the scarred trunk of a pine that was rather the worse for the encounter.
The moose had ambled away as if it had sensed it had nothing to fear fro
m these men, two of whom at least had no business whatsoever in the middle of the woods.
They had to work fast. The light was going, long purple shadows slumping down on them from high up in the trees. The wind had come up, whistled in the pines, and the snow kept falling, heavier yet. Tom Hayes had a flashlight in his pocket but none of them wanted to be stranded short of the road in the dark with nothing but a flashlight.
Fortunately the fire during the crash hadn’t amounted to much, which made looking around considerably simpler than it might have been. Cassidy climbed up onto the loose wing, ducking the dangling pontoon, and prized back the door on the pilot’s side of the cockpit.
The pilot himself was still strapped into his seat, a ramshackled bucket with stuffing coming out and the frame showing. His head rested forward on his chest; or rather the skull, which had lost most of its flesh and skin and the entire complement of eyes. The flight jacket was torn, also the trousers. Animals, birds, all the little carnivores who lived in the woods, had made a feast of the pilot. His fingers were stripped of skin and one thumb had simply disappeared. But the animals of the forest hadn’t killed him. Neither had the crash. What killed him was the bullet that had entered the right temple and blown most of the left side of the cranium away. The bullet had kept on going through the fuselage.
Cassidy climbed down, went around the tail section, and found the door on the passenger side of the cockpit hanging open, stiff and set with rust on its hinges.
Harry Madrid surveyed the scene.
“Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened. Our man Moller’s a hardy little fart. They crash-land, pine trees cushion the impact and save their lives. Moller kills the pilot. … Pilot was a dead man from the moment he agreed to fly him in, I guess, doncha think, Lewis?”
“I think absolutely anybody who gets in Moller’s way is a dead man.”
Harry Madrid nodded. “Göring picked the right man for the job. He’s a man who gets the job done. Kind of your killing machine …” He harrumphed. “Well, I’ve run up against lots of killing machines in my time.” He spat into the snow. “They all get dead somewhere along the way.”
Tom Hayes flicked on the flashlight and handed it to Cassidy. “I’d advise you fellas to think about heading up to the road. It’s nearly five.”
Harry Madrid said, “How time flies.”
Cassidy shone the light around the interior of the cockpit, looking for something that might prove that Manfred Moller had been there, had killed and survived. Snow and dead leaves and a bad, rotting smell, that was the interior. To hell with it.
He climbed down and stood looking at the wreckage.
Then, as a last thought before packing it in, he dropped to his knees and looked for a compartment in the belly of the fuselage that might have been used for luggage.
He found the handle but it was locked. He gave it a tug to no avail. Of course, Moller wouldn’t have survived the crash and then neglected to take his minotaur with him, his minotaur and whatever else he might have had.
Harry Madrid grunted and knelt beside him. “Here, use this to pry it open.” He handed Cassidy a heavy bit of broken strut.
Cassidy took it, handed the flashlight to Harry Madrid. Their breath blew out in thick visible clouds. The temperature was diving again as night fell. He fit the flattened end of the strut into the narrow gap and pushed. The door popped open easily, like a toy. Harry Madrid leaned up, pointed the light into the compartment.
Nothing.
Cassidy hadn’t been expecting anything, had only hoped. He leaned back on his haunches and looked at Harry Madrid.
“Well, Lewis, we found what we came for. Cheer up.”
As he stood up the flashlight slipped from Harry Madrid’s hand, dropped to the thin snow covering the leaves beneath the plane’s belly. The flashlight hit something just dusted by the snow, something bright that the light had picked out.
Cassidy dropped to his knees again and dug his nails into the snow and leaves, looking for the flash of something shiny and green in the wet mush of dead leaves. He found it and brushed it off, held it up. Tom Hayes was looking over Harry Madrid’s shoulder at it and gasped.
A broad smile crossed Harry Madrid’s normally impassive monolithic face. “Musta dropped off that minotaur thing during the getaway.”
Tom Hayes wiped his mouth with one hand, took off his red-and-black cap, and ran his other hand through his hair. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, damned to hell and back if I won’t.”
In his hand Lew Cassidy was holding one very large, very green emerald.
They reached the road and stood calf-deep in the snow by its side. Cassidy leaned forward, hands on knees, breathing deeply. The wind blew across the road’s surface, kept it smooth, the snow not as deep as it was in the gullies and the shoulders that slanted away.
Porter hadn’t come down with the truck yet and it was just past six o’clock.
Harry Madrid was puffing, looking up the ribbon of road. “I hate to face it, but I think we’d better start walking. If he comes for us he can pick us up on the way. This stuff is only six or seven inches deep.”
Darkness was landing on them with a terrible thud.
It was a long hard walk and Porter never showed.
Harry Madrid was puffing like a steam engine.
Cassidy kept thinking about Manfred Moller, tried not to think about how tired he was, how cold his feet were, how brittle and numb his hands felt. All right, so Moller made it to Maine, survived the crash, killed the pilot … lost an emerald …
But where had he gone? There he’d been, out in the middle of the Maine woods, probably pretty badly shaken up, carrying his treasure on him, looking for the man code-named Vulkan. What had the poor lost son of a bitch done?
One thing Cassidy knew for sure. If Tash Benedictus had found him he’d have been one dead bloody German.
They straggled the last hundred yards to the castle with the wind howling at them, the last survivors of the lost legion, back from the far side of beyond.
They had the very hell of a time raising anyone. Finally the butler opened the heavy door, stood in his cardigan and carpet slippers, mouth agape as if the three men in the night had entirely slipped his mind. “My goodness,” he said, standing back as they tramped in, dripping in the huge echoing foyer. “You must be exhausted. Are you all right? You’ll be wanting toddies. Hot buttered rum?”
The fire was roaring in no time. The butler brought the boiling water, the butter, the rum, sugar cubes, bitters. And the news.
There was no one to tell of their find.
The Benedictuses, with Porter in tow, had decamped for parts unknown. Twenty-one pieces of luggage, by actual count. No, the butler didn’t know where they were going and that really wasn’t so unusual; Mr. and Mrs. Benedictus were an impulsive couple—it could be Palm Beach or the other castle, the one in Killarney, or Beverly Hills or the mountain place, or even just down to New York for a few weeks. There was just no telling. When it was relevant for the staff to be informed, Mr. Benedictus would certainly inform them.
“The man’s got a passion for castles,” Harry Madrid said.
“Well, only the two, sir,” the butler said. “This one and the one in Ireland. Mr. Benedictus is very fond of castles, collecting his art, and riding. Riding to hounds and … well, just plain riding.”
“And very fond of Mrs. Benedictus,” Cassidy said.
“And all with only one arm and one eye,” Harry Madrid said. “What a guy!”
“Mr. Benedictus is a remarkable man.” The butler was dropping the butter into the hot water and rum.
While they warmed themselves at the fire, finishing the drinks, the butler reappeared with trays of cold roast beef, bread, mustard, pickles, steaming bowls of beef-and-barley soup. They ate with a certain devotion to the task.
“How’s the World Series going?” Cassidy asked.
“I beg your pardon, sir?” The butler was clearing the trays.
>
“Baseball. The Tigers and the Cubs.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a baseball enthusiast, sir.”
Cassidy looked over at Harry Madrid, who had lit up a Roi-tan. “You know, Harry, I was reading this article about this new process. Television. This article said someday people will be able to watch the World Series—watch it, like a movie, Harry—right in their own homes. Baseball, football, movies. Think of it, Harry—”
“Wise up, Lewis.” Harry Madrid chuckled. “It’ll never happen. A sucker’s scheme, get people to invest or some damn thing.” He yawned.
“You think I could call the newspaper in Bangor or some place, find out the results?”
Tom Hayes said, “No luck on the phone, I’m afraid. Just tried to call the wife. She must be worried sick. …” He threw up his hands, his face forlorn. “Phone lines are down. Always happens, every damned storm we get, bang, down the bastards go. …” He shook his head at the perfidy of the phone lines. “The lights’ll go next, mark my words.”
Half an hour later the lights flickered and went out.
Fortunately the wall sconces, the nice Hollywood touch, were oil-fed and burned on. Tom Hayes said, “Wha’d I tell you guys?”
They slowly stumbled off to bed carrying candles the butler provided. “We’re used to this sort of thing. It’s the country, after all, isn’t it? No electricity at all in the Killarney castle. No telephone either. Well, sleep well, gentlemen.”
Harry Madrid knocked on Cassidy’s door ten minutes later. When Cassidy opened the door he said, “Go to sleep, Harry. It’s late.”
Harry Madrid was chewing on the dead Roi-tan. “Lemme see the rock again, old son.”
“I was just admiring it myself.” He went back to the bed and picked it up from on top of the blanket. He flipped it to Harry Madrid.
“It’s Nazi green, Lew. As I live and breathe.” He placed it back on the blanket. “Sleep tight, son. We are most definitely on the trail.”
“Are we, Harry?”
Kiss Me Twice Page 18