The Showstone

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘If you want it, come with me. I’m not leaving you with her.’

  The big shoulders shrugged.

  As soon as Cal left with the intruder, Jessica began to strain at the plastic ties. It didn’t take her long to figure out that they were too thick and tight and that the oak bed board was too sturdy. She stopped struggling when her wrists throbbed terribly and she strained to hear what was going on downstairs.

  Cal went straight for the shoulder bag and was about to open it when Barzani told him to stop what he was doing and toss it to him.

  ‘Why?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Maybe you’ve got a gun in there.’

  ‘You think we’re in Texas?’

  ‘Give it to me.’

  Cal tossed him the bag. The big man kept his gun trained on Cal while opening it. He immediately felt the stone through its cloth and smiled when he exposed its blackness by partially unwrapping it with his thumb. He put the bag down on a chair to give Cal his full attention again but before he could speak Cal preempted him with a question.

  ‘Did you kill my mother?’

  Barzani’s expression was a cipher of impassivity. ‘We don’t need to discuss this.’

  ‘I think we do,’ Cal said.

  ‘This gun says we don’t, okay? This is what we need to discuss. Do you have the 49th Call?’

  Cal looked confused and asked him to repeat the question. He said it again. The 49th Call.

  ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

  Maybe it was because he was telling the truth but Barzani seemed to believe him. He shifted to a different question.

  ‘What about an old paper with writing? Was this with the mirror?’

  Cal still didn’t know what he was talking about, but a faint survival plan hatched. Despite the anonymity that a balaclava and gloves provided, Cal knew he wasn’t going to just walk away after this. ‘What kind of writing?’

  ‘Old writing. Arabaic? What’s the word?’

  ‘Aramaic,’ Cal said.

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so.’

  ‘You have it? The paper?’

  ‘It’s papyrus. Aramaic was written mainly on papyrus. People wrote Aramaic way before there was paper. You didn’t make yourself clear.’

  ‘You have it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Give it to me.’ Barzani’s voice showed excitement. Urgency. ‘Hurry.’

  ‘It’s here in my desk. I’ll get it for you.’

  Cal took a step toward his desk but was told to stop. The intruder probably figured that a desk would be an even better place for a gun.

  Barzani came around and had a look at all the little drawers in Cal’s father’s old roll-top desk.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Bottom left, second down.’

  His eyes didn’t leave Cal until the split second he reached for the drawer handle.

  That’s when Cal made his desperation move. He closed the distance between the two of them in one flying leap and used his clenched fist to chop down as hard as he could on the man’s gun hand.

  The element of surprise and the force of his blow were enough for the pistol to drop to the rug but Barzani was quick enough to loop his other arm around Cal’s neck from behind. Cal felt it clamping down. He could tell the man was strong enough to squeeze the life out of him, the way he’d likely done to his mother. So, he fought like hell.

  He rammed a heel into his knee.

  He slammed an elbow into his gut.

  He hammered his right fist four times in rapid succession over his head into the man’s nose.

  The last of the hammer-blows might have cracked cartilage. Barzani yelped and loosened his vise grip enough for Cal to squirm free and turn to face him squarely. They both eyed the pistol, but Cal got to it first with his bare foot, kicking it across the room where it came to rest partly under a colonial tall-boy chest that held a collection of his father’s artifacts.

  Barzani swore at him in Arabic then switched to English. ‘Now I’m going to kill you fast and kill your woman slow.’

  It was time to see if the guy could box.

  From upstairs, Jessica heard the sounds of fists landing on flesh and bone, shouts, and grunts. She started working the zip ties harder.

  Cal ignored the pain from his knuckles pounding the concrete block that was Barzani’s skull and he quickly had his answer. The man was no boxer. He was slow and wild with his punches. His instincts were more of a wrestler trying to get into a clinch to throw his opponent down. A strange calm settled over Cal as he faced his foe. Boxing was one of his comfort zones, a place where he could unhitch intellect and rely on pure physical skills. A lot of years had passed since he won prizes in the army, but he was still pretty good at it. When slamming into a rock-hard chin didn’t make inroads, he tried tagging the guy’s nose but the intruder’s long wingspan made it hard to reliably reach it. Cal sampled his midsection which was, unfortunately, hard as wood. The few times Cal got hit squarely weren’t pleasant. The man’s gloved fists were like iron mallets and the blows put him back on his heels. The one thing he couldn’t let happen was getting close enough to be ensnared in a wrestling move.

  After a minute or so of giving more than taking but not getting an upper hand, Cal decided that the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules were bullshit in a street fight. When the first opportunity presented itself, he planted a back foot and kicked him ferociously in the groin.

  Barzani didn’t go down but he gave out a low grunt and bowed his head. That gave Cal the chance to really lay a right uppercut into his bloody nose. That was the punch that staggered him and sent him down on one knee.

  Cal had the advantage now, but he hadn’t won. He’d been on the receiving end of fights that seemed over but had turned around in an ugly way. Before the guy could get himself straight, Cal made the decision to go for the gun. He took off across the room, but the big man pulled himself together enough to follow a couple of strides behind. Two trains barreled toward the same junction and Cal got his hand around the pistol grip first.

  He wheeled around without having a moment to check whether a round was chambered or if the safety was off but with only an arm’s length separating the men, Barzani stopped short and backed off. That’s when Cal glanced at the pistol. The safety showed a red dot – red is dead – and it was cocked.

  ‘Get down on the floor,’ Cal shouted between panting breaths, ‘or I will shoot you.’

  Barzani kept backing up but when he got to the chair with the shoulder bag and the stone, he paused to look at it.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Cal warned, but Barzani ignored him and moved his arm to reach for it.

  It would have been the easiest thing in the world to aim center mass and put rounds into his vitals. The bastard killed his mother. He killed the bookseller. But as primitive as the fight had made him feel, he wasn’t an executioner, so the bullet he let fly blasted through the floor and wound up in his basement.

  The man froze; Jessica screamed from the bedroom.

  ‘The next one’s in your chest,’ Cal said. ‘Your choice. Get down on the floor or I’ll shoot you.’

  He heard Jessica call his name and he shouted back that he was okay and was calling the police.

  Barzani backed off a few paces without the bag.

  ‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ Barzani said, breathing hard. A short, deep snort came from the mouth hole of the balaclava. ‘You’re too fucking civilized.’

  Then Barzani did something that Cal, under the circumstances, failed to notice. He slid a finger under the band of his wrist watch and pulled out a round piece of metal, the size of a nickel, that he flicked onto the floor. It came to rest under one of the sofas.

  Cal was looking down the iron sights, lining up the perfect shot and thought: the son-of-a-bitch had gotten it right. Too fucking civilized.

  TEN

  The doorbell rang and one of the Cambridge policemen an
swered it. A group of officers and a couple of crime-scene investigators had been on the scene for an hour when Detective Gilroy made his entrance. The blonde detective put on booties and gloves and asked where Donovan was.

  Cal and Jessica were in the kitchen drinking one coffee after another.

  When Cal saw Gilroy he said, ‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this.’

  ‘You think?’

  Gilroy and Jessica introduced themselves and the detective pulled up a chair.

  ‘From what I’ve been told by the ranking officer this was a traumatic event for the both of you, but while it’s still fresh I need you to take me through what happened,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave out any details.’

  ‘You want a coffee first?’ Cal asked.

  The detective nodded. ‘Nothing’s open yet. I thought you’d never ask.’

  Cal started to spit out the events in sequence and when he got to what happened in the bedroom, Gilroy asked, ‘Okay, I know you say he was wearing a balaclava, but you both heard his voice. Did he have an accent?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Jessica said. ‘Middle Eastern maybe.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d agree,’ Cal said.

  ‘Can you pin it down more than that?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Cal said. ‘I’m not an expert in accents.’

  ‘By the way, any cameras in the house?’

  Cal shook his head.

  ‘Outside cameras?’

  There were none.

  ‘Do your neighbors have outdoor cameras?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Cal kept going with his story. Hearing that the intruder referenced Mulligan, the bookseller, Gilroy interrupted him.

  ‘He said, “You showed it to the man in the shop?” Exactly that?’

  ‘I think that’s verbatim.’

  ‘Did he say he killed Mr Mulligan?’

  ‘No and he didn’t make any other mention of him.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Cal thought for a few seconds and said he was absolutely certain.

  Then Cal got to the black mirror.

  ‘So, he was specifically after it,’ Gilroy said.

  ‘Except for something I’ll get to, he wasn’t interested in anything else in the house.’

  ‘And he’d been doing some kind of surveillance prior to the break-in. He knew you had only one car. He knew you had a visitor by the second car.’

  Cal said, ‘That’s my conclusion, yes.’

  ‘When was the last time you were here, Dr Nelson?’

  ‘You mean for a sleepover?’ she asked with a smile.

  ‘Anytime.’

  She had to check the calendar on her phone. It had been three weeks.

  ‘So not recently,’ Gilroy said. ‘Professor, this black mirror – this was the same one you showed me before? The one for talking to spirits.’

  ‘The same one.’

  ‘It didn’t look like much to me. Is it valuable? I mean, how much do you think it’s worth?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ Cal said. ‘From the little I know about it, it doesn’t have the type of provenance that would command big money at auction.’

  Gilroy looked up from his note pad. ‘I’m sorry but I didn’t go to Harvard myself. I don’t know what provenance is.’

  Cal was too tired and stressed out to apologize for using big words. ‘It means ownership and where it came from. If someone famous owned it and that was well-documented, then it might be worth a lot. As it is, I don’t know. A few hundred bucks, maybe more. As a curiosity.’

  ‘But he’s willing to go through all of this, maybe including a murder, to get his hands on it.’

  ‘Two murders.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Mulligan and my mother.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about her situation.’

  Cal remedied that.

  When he was done the detective said, ‘Based on the little you’ve told me, I’d say it’s a leap to think your guy was the perpetrator in New York. You’re the one who found the black mirror anyway, right?’

  ‘I think that’s what he was looking for.’

  ‘Look, color me skeptical. Let’s not get sidetracked, okay. Keep going with what happened here tonight in my city.’

  Cal didn’t fight it. He carried on and talked about the intruder asking for the 49th Call.

  ‘And what is that?’ Gilroy asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

  Gilroy seemed exasperated, prompting Jessica to say, ‘Well don’t look at me. It’s not a scientific or medical term, that’s for damned sure.’

  ‘So, he asks for something you’ve never heard of and then what happens?’

  ‘I pretended I had a papyrus written in Aramaic in a drawer. He said it was written in Aramaic. I assumed he meant papyrus, not paper. He wanted to get it himself because he was worried I might have a weapon. That’s when I jumped him.’

  ‘You jumped a guy almost twice your size with a gun.’

  Cal shrugged wearily. ‘I didn’t love my odds, but I hated them if I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘He wasn’t going to leave us alive.’

  ‘How do you know that? His face was covered. He was wearing gloves. You couldn’t identify the guy, not definitively anyway. What does he gain by killing you?’

  ‘He killed before.’

  ‘Chances are he didn’t walk into the book store wearing a balaclava. Mulligan could have ID’d him.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cal said. ‘I just think he was going to shoot us. Call it a strong impression.’

  ‘I think Cal’s right,’ Jessica said. ‘I think we’d be leaving here in body bags. That’s my strong impression too.’

  ‘All right, noted. Go on.’

  Gilroy stopped taking notes during Cal’s rendition of the fight. Jessica had heard an abbreviated version that Cal had given to the uniformed cops but its detail made her shudder. Cal stopped to make sure she was okay.

  ‘The two of us went to a boxing match at Foxwoods a couple of weeks ago,’ she said to the detective. Her voice trailed off a bit. ‘And now this.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you’re handy with your fists, Professor. Otherwise, well. You think this guy was a wrestler?’

  Cal played back the way he moved in his mind. ‘I can’t say for sure but his foot work, the way he held his arms – that’s what he seemed like. He was looking for an angle to do a takedown.’

  ‘Then you get to the gun first.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you fire one off into the floor.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to go for the ceiling. The bedroom’s above the living room.’

  Gilroy shouted for someone to bring him the gun. It was in a see-through evidence bag.

  ‘The serial number’s been filed off clean,’ Gilroy said. ‘Very professional of him. Still, we’ll see if the ballistics match any other spent casings in NIBIN.’ Jessica made him explain the acronym. ‘Sorry, it’s the national ballistics database system. Okay, so you get the guy to leave the bag with the black mirror behind and he leaves.’

  ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘You let him leave.’

  ‘I ordered him to lie on the floor while I called 911 but he wouldn’t. What was I supposed to do? If I shot him, you’d have me in handcuffs now, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Gilroy put his empty coffee cup into the sink and told them that he was done for now, but that he might come back later with more questions.

  ‘What about my mother?’ Cal asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘How are you going to investigate the link between what happened here to my mother’s murder?’

  Gilroy stuffed his notepad into his jacket. ‘First of all, I think it’s a stretch to link the cases. Second, New York City isn’t my
jurisdiction. I’ve got enough on my plate, thank you. You do want me to catch the guy who did this to you, am I right?’

  Cal felt his blood rising. ‘Seems to me that this is something the FBI would be interested in.’

  Gilroy gave him a snarky look and said, ‘Knock yourself out, Professor. Their number’s in the phone book.’

  When the house emptied out, they crawled up to bed, dead tired. A marked police car with a couple of officers was parked out front for the night in case the attacker returned.

  ‘You can’t stay here, you know,’ Jessica said. ‘At least not without an alarm system installed and maybe a giant dog.’

  ‘I like dogs but I’d need a bunch of cute dog sitters and walkers, preferably in short-shorts and tank tops.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘No way. I’m not exposing you to more of this.’

  ‘My building’s got security.’

  ‘So did my mother’s. No, I’ll check into a hotel and order up a burglar alarm for the house.’

  ‘Are you really going to call the FBI?’

  ‘Hell yes. I’m not going to rely on some dumb-ass local detective.’

  She pulled the covers up to her neck. ‘Did you really not know what he was talking about? The 49th Call?’

  ‘That was the truth. I didn’t.’ He reached for Eve Riley’s book on the night table. Before Jessica had come in and interrupted his reading with her lacy gear, he’d scanned the table of contents and its chapter titled ‘Learning the 48 Calls’. ‘But I’m betting that this gal knows the answer.’

  Five days passed and Cal was in his Divinity School office tying up the loose ends of the semester and shooting the breeze with Joe Murphy, who’d stopped by for a chat and a coffee.

  ‘Any news then about your mystery man?’

  ‘The Cambridge police won’t tell me more than “we’re working on a variety of leads.”’

  ‘Did the FBI ring you back?’

  ‘They did, actually. A nice enough fellow from the Boston office called and asked me a bunch of questions.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. Haven’t heard jack shit.’

  ‘Jessica tells me you haven’t been back home since.’

  ‘When’d you speak to her?’