“If you try to escape, you’ll be dead before your second step,” an English-accented voice said in his ear. “Is that clear?”
Since he was gagged, Gus assumed the speaker didn’t need him to answer with anything but obedience, but he nodded anyway. He felt himself being led a few feet from the van and then through a door. After a few more feet, one of the men shoved him hard, and he fell backward. Fortunately there was a chair to catch him. He could feel his bonds being adjusted, and he knew he’d been tied to this chair, too. At least it was padded, which was a huge relief after the van’s floor.
After a minute, Gus heard scuffling footsteps, and then the sound of a body falling into a soft chair. Then he felt hands touching his face, and his blindfold fell away from his eyes, followed seconds later by his gag.
He looked around quickly to see that Shawn was on one side of him and Kitteredge on the other. To his huge relief, the professor didn’t seem to have been beaten too badly. There were bruises on his face and a small trickle of blood from his lower lip, but compared to what Gus had imagined he might have just come back from a spa.
“Are you all right?” Shawn whispered.
“I’m fine,” Gus whispered back. “Professor?”
“Nothing a couple of Band-Aids and some lidocaine won’t fix,” Kitteredge said. “Fortunately, Polidori’s men don’t seem to have studied much of the history of torture. If they had, they might have tried some of the more arcane techniques, such as the Black Lady of Monmouth or—”
Gus was vaguely aware that Kitteredge was still talking, but he’d stopped making sense of the actual words after the professor said the name “Polidori.” Even after all that had just happened, he couldn’t believe he was actually at the heart of a conspiracy that had existed for hundreds of years, if not longer.
If it was really true, the conspirators had certainly found the perfect spot for their headquarters. An enormous warehouse, it was crammed full of what must have been the fruit of centuries of looting. There were statues in marble and bronze, stacks of paintings in gold frames, and furniture from every period of history scattered around the floor. There were so many pieces, each one of unimaginable historical and financial value, that there was hardly a square foot of unoccupied floor space.
“Want to put money on this?” Shawn said quietly to Gus.
“On what?” Gus said, glancing over to see that Kitteredge was still lecturing on the history of torture.
“Who comes in to question us,” Shawn said.
“You already know,” Gus said. “It’s Polidori. The man you said was a hallucination.”
“Of course he’s going to call himself Polidori,” Shawn said, ignoring the fact he’d denied the man’s existence only hours before. “That’s got to be the code name. Like James Bond’s boss. You don’t really think they keep finding people who are named M to run the spy agency, do you?”
“What makes you think that isn’t his name?” Gus said.
“First of all, if you’re running a global conspiracy, you probably don’t want to put your own name on the letterhead,” Shawn said. “More importantly, it would violate the rule.”
Part of Gus wished a heavy statue would fall on Shawn before he could finish. But another part welcomed this discussion as one last bit of normalcy before they became the Cabal’s latest victims. “Which rule?”
“Think about it,” Shawn said. “Have we met anyone named Polidori throughout this whole case?”
“One of the masked guys was called Chip,” Gus said. “I assume he was Professor Kitteredge’s former student, Chip Polidori.”
“If they’re masked, they don’t count,” Shawn said. “But since you seem to be so unclear on the concept, the answer is no. No, we haven’t met anyone named Polidori. Which means that it’s a fake name used by someone we’ve encountered along the way. The most obvious choice would be Flaxman Low, but any idiot could have figured that out ages ago. It could be that Hugh Ralston guy from the museum. But what would be really cool is if it turned out to be Lassiter. No one would ever see that coming.”
“Because it wouldn’t make any sense,” Gus said. “Lassie is not the head of a secret, worldwide conspiracy.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Shawn said. “Have you ever seen him and this Polidori in the same room together?”
“I’ve never seen Polidori at all,” Gus said. “And neither have you.”
“We’ll see about that,” Shawn said. “Very soon.”
Across the warehouse, a door opened and three figures stepped in. Gus tried to make out their faces as they came through the maze of furniture and artworks, but there was always something in the way.
“Last chance,” Shawn said. “Ten bucks says it’s Lassie.”
Gus ignored him as he tried to peer through the dusty air to see the faces that were approaching them. Even Kitteredge seemed to have realized that he was not in a classroom and had given up the lecture. For a moment the only sound in the warehouse was the shuffling of feet around furniture.
And then three men stepped from behind a Second Empire armoire. The two in back were clearly the subordinates. They were barely out of their twenties and looked comfortable in their workers’ coveralls.
It was the man in front Gus stared at. He had a round face with a pronounced nose and ruddy cheeks. A bowler hat sat jauntily on his head, and his immaculate, pinstriped suit now had a carnation in its pocket. He looked like he was well past fifty, but he had been so well tended, it was difficult to tell.
Gus quickly catalogued the other details he could see—the folded umbrella under one arm, the briefcase in the other hand, the blue-and-red tie done in a perfect Windsor knot.
But all the details were swept away by the most important fact about this man: Gus had never seen him before.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” the man said, his posh accent accentuating his cheerful smile. “I am Charles Polidori, and I’m very pleased to welcome you to my establishment.”
Chapter Forty-one
Gus heard a gasp from the chair next to him.
“It is you, Polidori,” Kitteredge said. “After all these years.”
“Surely it hasn’t been so long,” Polidori said. “It seems only yesterday young Chip went off to university. Imagine, I tried to talk him out of going to the States. We have far better institutions here, I said. Imagine how foolish I felt afterward.”
“Who are you again?” Shawn said, peering closely at Polidori’s face.
“I apologize if I didn’t speak clearly enough,” Polidori said. “Charles Polidori. This is my son, Chip”—he turned to his left to introduce the taller of the other two, and to the right for the other—“and this is my assistant, Leonard Goldstone.”
Shawn squinted. “Are you sure we didn’t catch you embezzling from Aunt Kitty’s Soul Food last year?” Shawn said hopefully.
“I can’t say I know what that is,” Polidori said. “But I’m certain I’ve never been accused of embezzlement.”
“Nothing that trivial,” Kitteredge growled. “Only crimes against humanity.”
“I prefer to think of my enterprise as bringing unseen antiquities to a new audience,” Polidori said. “In today’s case, it is to be Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur. As soon as you provide me the final clues to its location.”
Shawn closed his left eye and studied Polidori with the right. “You weren’t the guy who stole the ponies from the petting zoo, were you?” he said.
“I haven’t set foot in the United States in twenty years,” Polidori said.
“Except to murder Clay Filkin,” Gus said. “And frame Professor Kitteredge for the crime.”
“I assure you, our only previous meeting was in that barn,” Polidori said. “Although it’s understandable you might not recognize me. I am a completely different person when I trade my chapeau for a ski mask. I do hope you won’t force me to reintroduce you to that other chap.”
“And so the Cabal will claim another victim,�
�� Kitteredge said. “I have only one request. And that is you let me see The Defence of Guenevere one last time before I die.”
Polidori exchanged puzzled looks with his helpers. “We don’t have the painting,” he said finally.
“You don’t?” Shawn said.
“We thought Professor Kitteredge stole it,” Polidori said. “It was all over CNN International. We assumed he’d destroyed it to keep anyone else from finding the clues.”
“I would never destroy a great work of art,” Kitteredge said, sounding like the accusation had wounded him more than the beatings.
“It’s true, Dad,” Chip said. “I tried to tell you.”
Polidori waved him off. “Yes, yes, you never tire of telling me how you knew him first. You are the great genius in the family.”
Shawn looked from one Polidori to the other, a light dawning in his eyes. Gus knew that look. It meant Shawn had figured out a large part of the puzzle—or at least thought he had. Gus thought back to the last few moments of the conversation and tried to figure out what he’d picked up on, but aside from a not-so-thinly veiled threat to start torturing them if they didn’t talk, he couldn’t spot anything of significance.
But Shawn wasn’t waiting for him to figure it out. “The tears!” he cried. “The rusty tears!”
The three standing men leaned in toward Shawn. Kitteredge would have, too, if he hadn’t been tied down.
“I see tears,” Shawn said again. “Rusting tears.”
“We’ve heard this part,” Polidori said.
“What is that you say, O spirits of the poem?” Shawn chanted to the ceiling. “Take the sword to the tears?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Polidori said.
“No,” Shawn moaned. “Not to the tears. At the tears. The sword lies with the tears!” Shawn’s body went limp as he slumped in his chair. Then he bounced back up again, or at least as much as he could while tied down. “What did I miss?”
Polidori gazed at him suspiciously. But Kitteredge was already working.
“The sword lies with the tears,” Kitteredge said. “What is a tear? It is water that runs from an eye.”
“Yes, obviously,” Polidori said. “But what does this mean? Whose tears? And how can they still exist a century and a half later?”
“It has to be a metaphor,” Kitteredge said. “It’s a location, after all.”
“Professor, what are you doing?” Gus said. “You’re helping Polidori find Excalibur!”
A wave of shame passed over the professor’s face. “I have to know,” Kitteredge said. “Don’t you see? Even if it means aiding my direst enemy, I have to see that sword just once.”
“He killed your friend Malko,” Gus said, outraged at this betrayal. “Murdered him in cold blood. He’ll do the same to all of us.”
“Our lives are but flickers of a candle flame,” Kitteredge said. “I would trade all my remaining years for one glimpse of the thing I’ve been hunting for so long.”
“And ours, too,” Gus said.
“Give it up, Gus,” Shawn said. “Excalibur is the only thing he’s cared about. He’s not going to give it up for you or me.”
Kitteredge looked away from him, ashamed. “We are looking for a place where water runs from an eye in London.”
The assistant named Leonard shot his hand in the air. “That’s it, sir!” he said. “The London Eye. It sits on the banks of the Thames.”
There was a long moment of silence. Polidori looked like he was trying to stop himself from hitting his head on the floor. “My sister’s boy,” he said apologetically. “Nice kid, but not really cut out for this line of work.”
“What?” Leonard said.
Chip smacked the back of his head. “The London Eye was built in 1999, almost one hundred and fifty years after the poem was published.”
“Maybe there was an earlier version of the Eye,” Leonard said stubbornly.
Chip was going to smack Leonard again, but Polidori waved him off. “The first Ferris wheel was constructed in 1893, still far too late to be our answer,” Polidori said. “William Morris had many talents, but I’ve never heard anyone claim he had psychic abilities. Unlike our friend here.”
“It would have saved him lots of trouble if he did,” Shawn said.
“So now that we have ruled out one eye, what is left to us?” Polidori said.
“Maybe it’s not a literal eye,” Chip said. “Could it be a famous observation point? A lookout of some kind?”
Polidori thought that over for so long that Gus thought his carnation was going to start wilting. Then his face lit up. “An observation point overlooking water is far too vague,” Polidori said. “But there is another kind of eye—and I know of one in London. One which stands by the water, and has stood there for almost two centuries.”
Kitteredge stared at him, trying to make sense of the puzzle. “It can’t be . . .”
“It must be,” Polidori said. “And I’m going to do you the supreme honor of allowing you to come along to watch me uncover Excalibur before your unfortunate death.”
Chapter Forty-two
Gus had hoped to be able to keep track of the turns in the road from inside the back of the windowless van, so he could reproduce the journey should they manage to get away from Polidori and find a policeman.
Two minutes into the trip, though, Gus was hopelessly lost. It wasn’t just the fact that they made some kind of turn every twenty feet, or that they seemed to drive around every roundabout four times before choosing an exit. It was that he kept being distracted by the gun that Leonard was pointing at him.
Gus tried to console himself with the thought that having a gun trained on him was better than being tied up again. The ropes had been sliced off back at the warehouse, and after several minutes of agony, his arms and legs even felt normal again. Of course, the advantage to being tied up was that if the van hit a pothole, the rope was much less likely than Leonard’s pistol to go off and put a bullet in his head. But he supposed that being shot couldn’t hurt any more than Kitteredge’s betrayal.
Shawn didn’t seem bothered by any of it. He sat on a wheel well and tried to engage Leonard in conversation. “I guess all the smart people get to ride up front,” Shawn said.
Leonard just glared at him and shifted the gun in his direction.
“No, I get it,” Shawn said. “The Polidoris would rather ride with someone who understands the same things they do. Gus has the same problem.”
“I do?” Gus said.
“Imagine what it’s like for poor Gus, being the only nonpsychic member of a psychic detective agency,” Shawn said. “He must feel like he’s left out of everything. You thought he was pathetic back in the warehouse when Kitteredge sold him out for a glimpse at an old sword? That’s what it’s like for him every day.”
Another betrayal, Gus thought. First Kitteredge, and now, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand, Shawn was turning on him, too. But even as the notion crossed his mind, he rejected it, realizing that only his exhaustion allowed him even to entertain the idea. Shawn was planning something. Gus just didn’t understand what.
Then he caught a flicker of sympathy in Leonard’s eye. And Gus got it. “You keep telling yourself that,” he said defensively. “Not everybody cares about all your precious psychic stuff.”
“Not everybody,” Shawn said. “That’s my point. When I want to talk psychic stuff with my colleagues, you’d just be bored. It’s better if you don’t come.”
“Like when you and your psychic buddies decided to pool your powers and pick the winning lottery numbers?” Gus sulked. “I wouldn’t have been bored by that.”
“But you couldn’t have contributed, either,” Shawn said. “So it wouldn’t have been fair to the others.”
“You could have taken my money and given me a share of what you won,” Gus said.
Shawn shook his head wearily and turned back to Leonard. “He just doesn’t understand that people with a higher under
standing naturally want to be together,” he said. “I’m glad you do.”
“They’re pumping the professor for information,” Leonard said, although a touch of uncertainty had entered his voice.
“That’s the spirit,” Shawn said. “They’re your friends, no matter what.”
Leonard stared down at his gun. Time for stage two, Gus thought.
“Are you going to let them do this to you?” Gus said.
“Do what?” Leonard said.
“Cut you out,” Gus said.
“No one’s cutting Leonard out of anything,” Shawn said. “They’re just having a nice chat about history and things like that.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said dubiously. “I mean, they’re pumping him.”
“Then why were they so quick to dismiss your idea about the London Eye?” Gus said.
“Because it’s only been there for a few years,” Leonard said.
“I didn’t hear them mention what might have been on that spot before,” Gus said. “And whether it was called the London Eye, too.”
Leonard’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Was it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Gus said. “I’m not a historian. But they sure changed the subject fast. And I didn’t hear anyone say where we were actually going, did you?”
“Stop it, Gus,” Shawn chided him. “I’m sure the Polidoris only have Leonard’s best interests at heart.”
“Sure,” Gus said. “Just like you did when you cut me out of your psychic investment club because it was just too confusing for me. And then told me you’d lost all my money, even though the rest of you made a fortune.”
“I told you, we were doing what was best for you,” Shawn said. “And when there’s something you need to know, we’ll tell you. Until then, you need to keep out of things you can’t understand.”
Leonard looked like he was about to ask a question when the van pulled to a stop and the engine switched off.
“I guess we’re here,” Gus said. “Wherever here is.”
After a moment, the back doors swung open. Chip grabbed Shawn and pulled him out, gesturing for Leonard to do the same with Gus. Behind him, Gus could see Polidori holding on to Kitteredge’s arm.
A Fatal Frame of Mind Page 21