by Dana Cameron
“Little girl, I think you want the other room,” one of the men said, in English. “We have serious business to discuss here.”
“And serious drinking and eating to do, too!” said another.
“Mais non! Come, sit with us! Stay a while!” one shouted, to the approval of his friends.
“Pardon,” I said, backing out of there. I now was caught between that room of toughs and the seated killers.
The hostess came over to me. “The WC is downstairs,” she said in English. “That back there is most of the police detectives in this arrondissement.”
“Ah, I’m sorry to have bothered them.” A flash of inspiration. “Perhaps I should apologize again.”
“I do not think—” she began. I dashed back into the room.
“Ah, our little friend is back! Have a drink with us!”
“Or, two, or three,” I said. “Madame? Three bottles of—” I glanced at the chalkboard and pointed at a wine I’d never heard of, in the middle of the price range.
This met with a roar of approbation. I sneaked a look past Madame as she went for the wine; Clean-head was still out there.
Drinking with the rowdy detectives won.
An hour later, I was starting to get nervous. The three bottles of wine had only lasted so long, and others were ordered. My days of swilling vodka to tame the Beast had helped me keep up with them, but I was starting to feel the travel, the wine, and my flight across the rooftops and alleys of Paris.
As if responding to my worries, the detectives began to stand and sort themselves out. A few new ones joined us, and I realized it was shift change. Some of these guys were going to work, some were going home.
I stood up and started to shake the hand of the detective next to me.
“Non, mais non, not like that!” He grabbed my shoulders and kissed me roughly on each cheek.
And since I couldn’t kiss one and not the others, I went around in a circle. At the last cheek kiss, made scratchy by five o’clock shadow, I pretended to stumble.
“Alors! Be careful there!” Scratchy said as he steadied me. “You were drinking with professionals!”
“Veterans!” said another. “Of many campaigns!” More guffaws.
“A taxi, perhaps?” I said, seeing Clean-head glaring at me from the main room. “I need to get to the train station. I’ll ask Madame—” I wobbled again, my fingers crossed.
“Mais non! We will find you a taxi!”
“Come, come, our little friend!”
In a scrum, the entire shift of police detectives escorted me from the back room, right past Clean-head and out to the sidewalk. In a few more moments, a cab had been flagged down and an argument had about the best route the driver should take. Then another argument ensued just for form’s sake.
The cab took off. I was safe.
Once inside the station at Gare du Nord, I went to the ladies’ room. I closed myself up in one of the stalls and took out the spice container. Inside was a piece of crumpled plastic, and when I unfolded it, I saw that it was an ordinary artifact bag, about two inches by three inches, with a ziplock. Inside was something wrapped in cotton.
I pulled the bag open and carefully eased the cotton out of the plastic. I unrolled it, wondering what could have cost Grayling his life. Some vital clue, perhaps even valuable in its own right. Gold or silver? Diamonds? Perhaps a rare—
It was a piece of thin red pottery. Samian ware, I thought, terra sigilata. It wasn’t any bigger than a quarter, reddish-brown. It was just about the most ordinary sort of artifact one could find on any Roman site, apart from fragments of roof tile or brick. Like its cousin redware on American sites, it was ubiquitous, common as muck. Even if it wasn’t gold or silver, a coin or brooch, I reasoned, maybe it was valuable as all artifacts were, for the information they contained, unlocked to the right questions.
It was nearly flat. There weren’t any even molded patterns, which might have helped identify its origins. It wasn’t a rim sherd, a handle, a lip, or a spout; there was nothing to tell specifically what kind of vessel it came from, though there was a blotch of extra glaze on top of the glossy red surface.
It was, outside of its context, useless. Worse than useless, because at least if it had been left in whatever location it had been deposited, it might have told somebody something.
Of all the things that Grayling could have risked his life for, this piece of pottery was about the last thing on earth to be worth it.
Chapter 12
I stared at the sherd, willing it to be other than it was. Perhaps its very ordinariness meant that it had to be meaningful. I mean, people who aren’t archaeologists don’t just happen to have small pieces of Roman pottery in their kitchen cupboards.
I pulled the sherd up to my face and stared at the blob of glaze. It was so similar in color to the body that it nearly blended in. When I examined it more closely, I saw there was a series of numbers and letters.
Not glaze. Clear nail polish. Applied by some archaeologist to protect the numbers, which detailed where on the site the sherd had come from. I’d done tens of thousands of them myself.
This was more like it—this, I understood. A provenience mark…but how to tell which site it was from?
The combination of letters and numbers could have been for anywhere, on any site.
I stared at the sherd, my fatigue and fear crashing on me all of a sudden. To have gone so far, risked so much, for this? Some teaching specimen culled from the sifting pile of a long-abandoned site? This was worth lives?
I must have misunderstood what Grayling wanted me to do. I must have gotten something wrong. He was dying, he was delirious.
Maybe he was trying to get back at me, setting me up so the others could find me. Certainly Clean-head and company might be evidence of that.
But at one point, the sherd had meant something. No one makes marks like this for no reason. They have meaning. If it’s provenience, I could track it down, maybe in fifty years. If it’s something else, a code or coordinates, I’ll figure that out, too.
Another puzzle, and I still needed to negotiate what I’d found for Danny.
I left the stall and found a bench inside the station. I had some calls to make, but I didn’t want to use either my phone or the one Dmitri had given me. I still had some cash from the ATM at Logan, so I changed it and bought myself a phone with an international SIM card. Dmitri might have connections, but he couldn’t control all the kiosks in all the train stations.
I looked at my watch and risked a call to the Steubens. If I was very lucky, they were in England, having connected from Germany. After I struggled with the combination of country codes and area codes, someone picked up on the first try.
“Yes?” A female voice, strong but cautious.
“Claudia, it’s me.”
“Are you OK?” Either she was hoping to hear from me or her vampiric senses identified me.
“Yes.”
“And Danny?”
“Still alive, as of last night.”
“And did you find…what Dmitri wanted?”
“I think so.” I told her what had happened at Grayling’s house. I left out the bit about the other clues he’d given me, for the moment. Her talk of political divisiveness bothered me; I still didn’t know much about her, so until dangerous men stopped chasing me, I was only going to tell her as much as she was familiar with.
I did mention the clean-headed guy, though; he scared me. “I thought humans weren’t supposed to know about the, uh, Fangborn?”
“They’re not, but we’re not perfect. Dmitri, for example. There are others who’ve slipped through our safeguards, and believe me, we’re trying to catch them and make them forget. What next?” she said.
“I…I honestly don’t know.” My eyes started to burn, and it took a second to figure out it had nothing to do with the diesel fumes. My throat was tight; I was on the edge of tears. I wasn’t ready to share that with anyone. I shook myself and settled for an admissi
on I rarely made: “I don’t know what to do next.”
“We need to meet. Where are you?”
“Paris.”
“Good. We’re in London.”
I thought about the other Fangborn at Logan security, and that led to the wallet that Sean had—Sean. I hadn’t even had time to think about what kind of trouble he might be in. “Is Sean OK?”
“I talked the police into letting him go, yes. Good thing he showed up when he did; we would have had a much harder time getting you through. He’s here with us.”
Sweet of Sean to be so worried. Silly of him to have come so far. “You couldn’t just…you know. Make him forget?”
Claudia sighed. “I could have. But we couldn’t leave him for the others to find, and they’d be digging into his head with a whole lot less restraint—or skill—than I.”
“Wait, I thought you said Fangborn were good guys?”
“We are. It’s just…we all want the common good to prevail, we want to protect humanity. We just differ on what that looks like and how best to do it.” She paused, and I could practically hear a shrug. “We’re only human.”
It was going to take me a while to digest that.
“Where and when do we meet?” she said.
“Not here. Berlin,” I said all of a sudden. I needed more information about my figurine, supposedly a key. “There’s…there’s someone I should talk to there.”
“Can you trust him or her?”
That is what I liked about Claudia, I realized. She didn’t tell me to wait, she didn’t tell me to stop. She seemed to trust me to make good decisions. “I think so. There’s no reason for anyone to suspect I’m there, and I hope it will answer a few questions.”
“Good. Can we meet before you do? We need to talk.”
“Sure.” All I knew about Berlin came from a call for papers for a conference in Germany and what I’d read in National Geographic. “There’s a place, loud, busy, touristy—the Sony Center. Meet me there—when?” I figured there’d be lots of ways in, lots of ways out, and lots of crowds to melt into.
“When can you get there?”
I looked at the schedule; there was a train leaving this evening. “Tomorrow morning. You can find me?”
“No problem. We’ll call you when we get in. Take care, Zoe.”
“You, too.”
I hung up. Luck was on my side, and I booked the last seat for Berlin.
A little after eight, I settled in for the long train ride. Other, smarter passengers had booked a cabin and were making a party of the trip; I had to make due with a reclining seat for twelve hours. I could make the best of the discomfort with rest and research. I stowed my bag, took out my phone, and Googled Dmitri, but didn’t find anything extra that told me more than the files that Gerry had sent. There was nothing new about Grayling’s death, or Clean-head. I found a couple of references to Jenny’s colleague, Professor Schulz, who’d written on everything about Greek pottery, from decoration and style to regulations about standardized volume measures.
Academic research usually chills me out, but the prickling in my spine wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse.
It might have been exhaustion, seasoned with a lifetime’s worth of paranoia and a week of monster stories and worry about Danny. On the other hand, maybe my paranoia was part of the Beast, part of being Fangborn.
Or at least half-Fangborn. It suddenly occurred to me: Ma sure wasn’t a werewolf and probably not a vampire, either. Maybe she was some kind of oracle—was that what Claudia had called them? But though she’d complained of hearing voices in her letter, I’d never seen her do anything…Fangborn-y. I’d have to ask the Steubens.
I walked to the bathroom and back and didn’t see anyone suspicious. I strolled down to the café car and bought some dinner—with something to take in my pack—for later. No one sprouting fangs or wielding machine guns there. Drunken students, uncomfortable families, late-traveling businessmen, lovers necking like it was the only thing that mattered. I remembered how it felt; now it just made me sad.
I went back to my seat and convinced myself it was nerves. Sleep came eventually, but no sooner did I nod off than it seemed that we arrived in Köln for the transfer.
Blearily I shouldered my bag, found the correct track, and found another seat. As I settled in for what I hoped would be several hours of uninterrupted sleep, I glanced out the window.
A beloved form, familiar features, a crooked smile.
There was Will MacFarlane, staring at me from the opposite platform.
What the hell was he doing here?
I ducked down. It was too much of a coincidence—wasn’t it? I mean, he might be abroad for fieldwork. He might be here for any number of reasons.
I knew it wasn’t any of these things. Somehow I knew he was looking for me.
Too many people were looking for me.
Nonsense. It couldn’t possibly be Will. I peeked up; Will gestured to himself. Zoe, it’s me, I could see him mouth. And of course it was: short light-brown hair, strong jaw, the skeptically raised eyebrow…
The train started moving.
He’d seen me. Will held up his hand—in greeting? Recognition? To stop me?
He started running.
I panicked and ducked back down.
My train picked up speed. If I could have gotten out and pushed, I would have. I leaned out the window to make sure it was really him. Disastrously, the train slowed.
Will ran faster, head back, arms pumping, legs a blur.
Of all the times I could have seen Will again, this was the worst. Even if it was coincidence, I didn’t want him to see me up to my neck in this nightmare. If it wasn’t, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to know why he was looking for me just now.
As if awaiting my admission of desperation, the train sped up again, this time beyond even Will’s capacity for speed.
He ran five times a week. Rain or shine, promise of Christmas presents or promise of sex, he ran seven miles. But not even Will was faster than a speeding locomotive.
The city gave way to countryside, and when I was sure I was safe, I had to put Will out of my mind. I simply didn’t have the bandwidth for him at the moment. I slept a while, out of sheer physical and emotional exhaustion.
When I awoke, early, I checked my phone; there was the scheduled picture of Danny with today’s Herald Tribune. Danny looked bad; pale, tired, thin, as if he’d been deprived of sleep or food. Dmitri texted me; we would meet shortly. He was delayed, investigating Grayling’s sudden and bloody death. I replied I had lost my pursuers in London and would soon be in Berlin. I would meet him there late tomorrow, with the figurines.
I put my phone away. I tried to convince myself it was a good thing I’d bought myself another few hours to explore what the figurines—keys?—might mean. Maybe there was still a chance I could get some leverage out of them before trading them for Danny.
It was hard, though. Danny looked like hell, and I was taking chances with his life.
It’s Dmitri, I told myself fiercely. Dmitri was the one who kidnapped him, not me!
Dmitri took him because of you, a little voice said. Because you took the first figurine from the museum.
Hours later, I stretched painfully, listening to my joints crack like wine-glass stems and feeling my muscles protest. I got out in Berlin HBF and found some breakfast in the station, a plate of cold cuts, bread, and cheese. I’ve always been hungrier than most girls—or at least more willing to admit it—and now I knew why. It was more than just low blood sugar or the habit of intermittent poverty. I needed to feed the Beast. I needed to keep my focus and get my cousin back.
I decided to walk the mile or so to the Sony Center to stretch my legs and orient myself. I was struck by how modern Berlin was compared to London and Paris, no surprise because so much of the city had been destroyed by war. Glass was used in all the buildings, in swoops and curved lines as well as in stark, uncluttered rectangles. Steel and brick, clearly t
he geometry of the late twentieth century; I was so used to the idea of Europe as “older” than the United States, and it took me a minute to miss buildings that might have been built in earlier centuries. This was a city that radiated youth and energy emerging from the past.
I was early, with plenty of time for another cup of coffee and a croissant. As I ate, I studied a tourist map of Berlin I’d snagged at the train station, located the museum where Professor Schulz worked, and tried to figure out some of the complexities of the U-bahn and S-bahn transit systems.
I put down my cup; I felt…something. Not a scent, but my sense of smell sort of…opened? Widened? Like another sense was just behind it, working overtime. It’s hard to explain, but just as I was starting to realize my senses were in overdrive for a reason, Claudia and Gerry arrived, harried and relieved to see me.
Sean was with them, to my relief. He looked like hammered shit.
Gerry ordered breakfast in reasonable German; when I looked surprised, he said, “Our grandfather came over from Germany. He taught me some.”
I nodded. Their food came—eggs and sausage and more lunch meat—and I waited while they put it away. No point in talking with their heads down like that. Claudia was very polite, but she ate even more than I had.
Sean was probably hungover and jet-lagged. He barely touched his coffee, barely spoke after a muttered greeting. Claudia’s suggestion was probably still at work; he didn’t ask any unanswerable questions.
When they came up for air, I told them what had transpired at Grayling’s and at the Paris apartment. At first I omitted the piece of pottery I’d found, but both Steubens frowned so obviously that I found myself back-pedaling fast, but playing it down. I wondered about the extent of the Fangborn psychic ability, or their ability to detect truth. Useful skills, if I could develop them, too.
“The numbers and letters could refer to its location on a site,” I finished. “Provenience marks generally indicate a position on a site and its depth below surface. But we have no way of knowing where the site itself is. And this kind of pottery, well, there’s nothing special about it.”