The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  When she was done, they took Hall, now blind in his left eye, and bundled him into the car, then drove him to where he had dumped the body of Larry Crane in a muddy hollow beside a filthy swamp. The box was cradled against Crane’s chest, where Hall had placed it before leaving his old war buddy to rot. After all, he figured that if Crane wanted it so badly, he should take it with him wherever he was going.

  Carefully, Sekula removed the box from the old man’s grasp, and opened it. The fragment was inside, and undamaged. The box had been well designed, capable of protecting its contents from water, from snow, from anything that might damage the information it held.

  “It’s intact,” said Sekula to the woman. “We’re so close now.”

  Mark Hall, the Auto King, sat on the dirt in his old man pants, his left hand cupped to his ruined eye. When Miss Zahn took him by the hand and led him to the water, he did not struggle, not even when she forced him to kneel and held his head beneath the surface until he drowned. When he grew still, they dragged him to the hollow and laid him beside his former comrade, uniting the two old men in death as they had been united, however unwillingly, in life.

  15

  Walter Cole called me as I was driving from the city.

  “I’ve got more news,” he said. “The M.E. has confirmed the identity of the remains found in Garcia’s apartment. It’s Alice. Toxicology tests also revealed the presence of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, in a small section of tissue that was found still adhering to the base of her skull.”

  “I’ve never heard of it. What does it do?”

  “Apparently it’s a hallucinogenic drug, but it has very particular symptoms. It causes feelings of paranoia, and makes users hallucinate alien intelligences, or monsters. Sometimes it makes them think that they’re traveling through time, or onto other planes of existence. Want to hear something else that’s interesting? They found traces of DMT in Garcia’s body too. The M.E. thinks it might have been administered through the food in his kitchen, but they’re still running tests.”

  It was possible that Alice had been given the drug in order to make her more cooperative, allowing her captors to masquerade as her saviors once the effects of the drug began to wear off. But Garcia had been fed DMT too, perhaps as a means of keeping him under some form of control by ensuring that he remained in a state of near-constant fear. The dosage wouldn’t have to be high: just enough to keep him on edge, so that his paranoia could be manipulated if required.

  “I’ve got something else for you, too,” said Walter. “The building in Williamsburg had a basement. The entrance was hidden behind a false wall. It seems we now know what Garcia was doing with the bones.”

  It was the NYPD’s Forensic Investigation Division that found the basement. They had taken their time, going through the building floor by floor, working from the top down, checking the plans for the building against what they saw around them, noting what was recent and what was old. The cops who broke down the wall found a new steel door in the floor, nearly forty square feet and secured with heavy-duty locks and bolts. It took them an hour to get it open, backed up by the same Emergency Service Unit that had responded on the night Garcia died. When the door was open, the ESU descended a set of temporary wooden stairs into the darkness.

  The space beneath was of the same dimensions as the main steel door, and some twelve feet deep. Garcia had been hard at work in the hidden space. Garlands of sharpened bone hung from the corners of the basement, meeting in a cluster of skulls at each corner. The walls had been concreted and inset with pieces of blackened bone to the halfway mark, sections of jawbones, femurs, finger bones, and rib jutting out as though discovered in the course of some ongoing archaeological dig. Four towers of candleholders created from marble and bone stood in a square at the center of the room, the candles held in skull-and-bone arrangements similar to those I had discovered in Garcia’s apartment, with four chains of bones linking them, as though sealing off access to some as yet unknown addition to the ossuary. There was also a small alcove two or three feet in height, empty but clearly also awaiting the arrival of another element of display, perhaps the small bone sculpture that now rested in the trunk of my car.

  The M.E.’s office was going to have a difficult task identifying the remains, but I knew where they could start: with a list of dead or missing women from the region of Juárez, Mexico, and the unfortunates who had disappeared from the streets of New York since Garcia’s arrival in the city.

  I drove north. I made good time once I cleared the boroughs, and arrived in Boston shortly before 5 P.M. The House of Stern was situated in a side street almost within the shadow of the Fleet Center. It was an unusual location for such a business, audibly close to a strip of bars that included the local outpost of Hooters. The windows were smoked glass, with the company’s name written in discreet gold lettering across the bottom. To the right was a wood door, painted black, with an ornate gold knocker in the shape of a gaping mouth, and a gold mailbox filigreed with dragons chasing their tails. In a slightly less adult neighborhood, the door of House of Stern would have been a compulsory stop for Halloween trick-or-treaters.

  I pressed the doorbell and waited. The door was opened by a young woman with bright red hair and purple nail polish that was chipped at the ends.

  “I’m afraid we’re closed,” she said. “We open to the public from ten until four, Monday to Friday.”

  “I’m not a customer,” I said. “My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to see Claudia Stern.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, but I think she’ll want to see me. Perhaps you might show her this.”

  I handed over the box in my arms. The young woman looked at it a little dubiously, carefully removing the layers of newspaper so that she could see what was inside. She revealed a section of the bone statue, considered it silently for a moment, then opened the door wider to admit me. She told me to take a seat in a small reception area, then vanished through a half-open green door.

  The room in which I sat was relatively unadorned, and a little down-at-the-heels. The carpet was worn and frayed and the wallpaper was wearing thin at the corners, heavily marked by the passage of people and the bumps and scrapes it had received during the movement of awkward objects. Two desks stood to my right, covered in papers and topped by a pair of sleeping computers. To my left were four packing crates from which piles of curly wood shavings poked like unruly clown hair. A series of lithographs hung on the wall behind them, depicting scenes of angelic conflict. I walked over to take a closer look at them. They were reminiscent of the work of Gustave Doré, the illustrator of the Divine Comedy, but the lithographs appeared to be based on some other work unfamiliar to me.

  “The angelic conflict,” said a female voice from behind me, “and the fall of the rebel host. They date from the early nineteenth century, commissioned by Dr. Richard Laurence, professor of Hebrew at Oxford, to illustrate his first English translation of the Book of Enoch, in 1821, then abandoned and left unused following a disagreement with the artist. These are among the only extant copies. The rest were all destroyed.”

  I turned to face a small, attractive woman in her early fifties, dressed in black slacks and a white sweater smudged here and there with dark marks. Her hair was almost entirely gray, with the faintest hint of gold at the temples. Her face was relatively unlined, the skin tight and the neck bearing only the slightest trace of wrinkles. If my estimate of her age was correct, she was wearing her years well.

  “Ms. Stern?”

  She shook my hand. “Claudia. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Parker.”

  I returned my attention to the illustrations.

  “Out of curiosity, why were the remaining drawings destroyed?”

  “The artist was a Catholic named Knowles, who worked regularly for publishers in London and Oxford. He was quite accomplished, although somewhat derivative of others in his style. Knowles was unaware of the controversial
nature of Enoch when he agreed to undertake the commission, and it was only when the subject of his work came up during discussions with his local parish priest that he was alerted to the history of the scripture in question. Do you know anything of the biblical apocrypha, Mr. Parker?”

  “Nothing worth sharing,” I replied. That wasn’t entirely true. I had come across the Book of Enoch before, although I had never seen the actual text. The Traveling Man, the killer who had taken my wife and daughter, had made reference to it. It was just one of a number of obscure sources that had helped to fuel his fantasies.

  She smiled, revealing white teeth that were yellowing slightly at the edges and the gums.

  “Then perhaps I can enlighten you, and you can in turn enlighten me about the object with which you introduced yourself to my assistant. The Book of Enoch was part of the accepted biblical canon for about five hundred years, and fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Laurence’s translation was based upon sources dating from the second century B.C., but the book itself may be older still. Most of what we know, or think we know, of the fall of the angels comes from Enoch, and it may have been that Jesus Christ himself was familiar with the work, for there are clear echoes of Enoch in some of the later gospels. It subsequently fell out of favor with theologians, largely because of its theories on the nature of angels.”

  “Like how many can dance on the head of a pin?”

  “In a way,” said Ms. Stern. “While there was at least some acceptance that the origins of evil on earth lay in the fall of the angels, their nature provoked disagreement. Were they corporeal? If so, what of their appetites? According to Enoch, the great sin of the dark angels was not pride, but lust: their desire to copulate with women, the most beautiful aspect of God’s greatest creation, humanity. This led to disobedience, and a rebellion against God, and they were cast out of heaven as punishment. Such speculations found little favor with the church authorities, and Enoch was denounced and removed from the canon, with some even going so far as to declare it heretical in nature. Its contents were largely forgotten until 1773, when a Scottish explorer named James Bruce traveled to Ethiopia and secured three copies of the book that had been preserved by the church in that country. Fifty years later, Laurence produced his translation, and thus Enoch was revealed to the English-speaking world for the first time in over a millennium.”

  “But without Knowles’s illustrations.”

  “He was concerned about the controversy that might arise following its publication, and apparently his parish priest told him that he would refuse him the sacraments if he contributed to the work. Knowles notified Dr. Laurence of his decision, Laurence traveled to London to discuss the matter with him, and in the course of their discussions a heated argument arose. Knowles began casting his illustrations into the fire, the originals as well as the proof copies. Laurence snatched what he could salvage from the artist’s desk and fled. To be honest, the illustrations are not particularly valuable in themselves, but I am fond of the story of their creation and decided to hold on to them, despite occasional requests that they be offered for sale. In a way, they symbolize what this house has always set out to do: to ensure that ignorance and fear do not contribute to the destruction of arcane art, and that all such pieces find their way to those who would most appreciate them. Now, if you’d like to come through, we can discuss your own piece.”

  I followed her through the green door and down a corridor that led to a workshop area. Here, the secretary with the red hair was checking the condition of some leather-bound books in one corner, while in another a middle-aged man with receding brown hair worked on a painting illuminated by a series of lamps.

  “You’ve come along at an interesting time,” said Claudia Stern. “We’re preparing for an auction, the centerpiece of which is an item with links to Sedlec, a quality that it shares with your own statue. But then, I imagine that you knew that already, given your presence here. Might I ask who recommended that you bring the bone sculpture to me?”

  “A man named Charles Neddo. He’s a dealer in New York.”

  “I know of Mr. Neddo. He is a gifted amateur. He occasionally comes up with some unusual objects, but he has never learned to distinguish between what is valuable and what should be discarded and forgotten.”

  “He spoke highly of you.”

  “I’m not surprised. Frankly, Mr. Parker, this house is expert in such matters, a reputation painstakingly acquired over the last decade. Before we came on the scene, arcane artifacts were the preserve of backstreet merchants, grubby men in dark basements. Occasionally, one of the established names would sell ‘dark material,’ as it was sometimes known, but none of them really specialized in the area. Stern is unique, and it is rarely that a seller of arcana fails to consult us first before putting an item up for auction. Similarly, a great many individuals approach us on both a formal and informal basis with queries relating to collections, manuscripts, even human remains.”

  She moved to a table, upon which stood the statue found in Garcia’s apartment, now carefully positioned on a rotatable wheel. Her finger flipped the button on a desk lamp, casting white light upon the bones.

  “Which brings us to this fellow. I assume Mr. Neddo told you something of the image’s origins?”

  “He seemed to think that it was a representation of a demon trapped in silver sometime in the fifteenth century. He called it the Black Angel.”

  “Immael,” said Ms. Stern. “One of the more interesting figures in demonic mythology. It’s rare to find a naming so recent.”

  “A naming?”

  “According to Enoch, two hundred angels rebelled, and they were cast down initially on a mountain called Armon, or Hermon: herem, in Hebrew, means a curse. Some, of course, descended farther, and founded hell, but others remained on earth. Enoch gives the names of nineteen, I think. Immael is not among them, although that of his twin, Ashmael, is included in certain versions. In fact, the first record of Immael derives from manuscripts written in Sedlec after 1421, the year in which the Black Angel is reputed to have been created, all of which has contributed to its mythology.”

  She slowly turned the wheel, examining the sculpture from every possible angle.

  “Where did you say you found this?”

  “I didn’t.”

  She lowered her chin and peered at me over the tops of her half-glasses.

  “No, you didn’t, did you? I should like to know, before I go any farther.”

  “The original owner, who was also probably the artist responsible, is dead. He was a Mexican named Garcia. Neddo believed that he was also behind the restoration of an ossuary in Juárez, and the creation of a shrine to a Mexican figurehead called Santa Muerte.”

  “How did the late Mr. Garcia meet his end?”

  “You don’t read the papers?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “He was shot.”

  “Most unfortunate. He appeared to have considerable talent, if he made this. It really is very beautiful. My guess is that the human bones used are not old. I see little evidence of wear. The majority are from children, probably chosen for reasons of scale. There are also some canine and avian bones, and the nails on the ends of its limbs appear to be cat claws. It’s most remarkable, but probably unsalable. Questions would be asked about the provenance of the child bones. There is the strong possibility that they may be linked to the commission of a crime. Anyone trying either to buy or sell it without involving the authorities would leave him- or herself open to charges of obstructing the course of justice, at the very least.”

  “I wasn’t trying to sell it. The man who made this was involved in the killing of at least two young women in the United States, and perhaps many more in Mexico. Someone arranged for him to come north to New York. I want to find out who that might have been.”

  “So where does the statue fit in, and why bring it to me?”

  “I thought it might pique your interest and allow me to ask you some
questions.”

  “Which it did.”

  “I’ve been holding one question back: tell me about the Believers.”

  Ms. Stern killed the light. The gesture allowed her a moment to compose her features, and to hide partially the expression of alarm that briefly transformed her features.

  “I’m not sure that I understand.”

  “I found a symbol carved inside a skull in Garcia’s apartment. It was a grapnel. According to Neddo, it’s used by a group of some kind, a cult, to identify its members and to mark some of its victims. The Believers have an interest in the history of Sedlec and in the recovery of the original statue of the Black Angel, assuming it even exists. You’re about to auction off a fragment of a vellum map that is supposed to contain clues to the location of the statue. I would imagine that would be enough to attract the attention of these people.”

  I thought Ms. Stern was going to spit on the ground, so obvious was her distaste at the subject I had raised.

  “The Believers, as they term themselves, are freaks. As I’m sure Mr. Neddo informed you, we sometimes deal with strange individuals in the course of our work, but most of them are harmless. They are collectors, and can be forgiven their enthusiasms, as they would never hurt another human being. The Believers are another matter. If the rumors are to be credited, and they are only rumors, they have existed for centuries, and their formation was a direct result of the confrontation in Bohemia between Erdric and Immael. Their numbers are small, and they keep a very low profile. The sole reason for their existence is to reunite the Black Angels.”

  “Angels? Neddo only told me about one statue.”

  “Not a statue,” said Ms. Stern, “but a being.”

  She led me to where the man with receding hair was working upon the restoration of the painting. It was a large canvas, about ten feet by eight, and depicted a battleground. Fires burned on distant hills, and great armies moved through ruined houses and scorched fields. The detail was intricate, each figure beautifully and carefully painted, although it was difficult to tell if what I was seeing was the battle itself or its aftermath. There appeared to be pockets of fighting continuing in sections of the painting, but most of the central area consisted of courtiers surrounding a regal figure. Some distance from him, a one-eyed man rallied troops to himself.