“Tha’s good. But truth be told, I donna care if they’re Irish.”
“How’s that?”
Padgett said, “Maybe them Hungarians come cheaper than Irish. You’ll get yourself a bargain.”
“And you won’t have to compete with any Irish for control.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s going to cost you.”
Padgett looked at Thaler and noticed the faint lines across his forehead.
“Yah, boss, it’s gonna cost you, too.”
AFTER SCHULTHEIS LEFT, GRIGG SWEATED through his clothes, and when his body temperature eventually fell, he began shivering.
The door creaked open, and he heard boot heels on the concrete floor.
Grigg caught the scent of jasmine and musk, and he felt a hand removing the blindfold. He blinked against the sunlight in the room, and a face came into focus.
She had high cheekbones, blue eyes, a fine nose, a square jaw and blonde hair. The woman pulled up a chair, and when she removed her coat, Grigg saw that her right hand and forearm were missing.
He recalled a story Kamp had told him about a bear, and his heart began pounding anew.
She said, “Your efforts to expose the Fraternal Order of the Raven haven’t gone unnoticed. You know that, right? Not gone unnoticed.”
Grigg didn’t answer, and Adams slapped him hard across the face.
She traced the red mark she made on his cheek with the nail of her index finger. “You were a lawyer. And a stylish one, they tell me. Handsome, clean-smelling.” She scanned him from head to toe. “And now, this.”
Grigg met her gaze. “Get me out.”
“Tell me where Kamp is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me where Nadine Bauer is.”
“I don’t—”
Adams slapped his face again.
“No one knows you’re here, Bartholomew, and no one cares.” She stood above him and gently stroked his forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m the only person who can help you now.”
“I can’t answer any of your questions.”
“But you do know what they intend to do to you.”
“No.”
“Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock the doctor will take an instrument somewhat like a screwdriver. He’ll ease the instrument all the way in at the corner of your left eye and then exercise it vigorously. The bad news is that you’ll never be the person you once were. The good news is you’ll be blissfully uninterested.”
TWENTY-TWO
“JAYSUS, NEF BAHR, BUT YOU’RE QUIET TODAY.”
In fact, she was simply exhausted. She and Angus had spent the night digging a deep grave and rolling in the bodies. When Nyx left for the mine just before first light, Angus was throwing the last shovelfuls of dirt into the hole.
Now, lying side by side in their tiny space, Nyx fought sleep. She focused on the sound of the pick hitting the coal and on Aodh’s breathing.
A memory began to play on the back of her eyelids. In it, she looked out her bedroom window at the mob kicking and spitting on the fiend Daniel Knecht. She saw a man she only vaguely recognized as her neighbor, Kamp, place himself between the mob and the accused murderer.
She watched him struggle in vain to keep them from finishing their grim business. Nyx saw the rope go tight and the noose bite into Knecht’s neck.
Then the memory became a dream. Nyx felt the rough fibers of a hanging rope around her own neck. She imagined trying to throw it off and running, going past the point where anyone could look for her. Even in her dream, there was no such place, or no way to find it. Her body dissolved, and she became the color and texture of the mine itself.
When she emerged from the dream, she looked at Aodh, lying on his side, twisted up and sideways, hacking into a crease. He was working without a shirt, and the sweat poured from his head and over his powerful shoulders. Purple scars from the explosion covered his back.
He knew some of her secrets. He’d met Angus, Kamp and Joe, and he must have discerned that their shared history was secret, and significant. If he went digging, he would surely determine who she was.
He paused his axe. “I can hear you thinking, Nef Bahr.”
“Really.”
“You’re trying to figure out how much I know about you, and whether I’ll figure out more.”
“That’s not at all—”
“Well, it donna matter t0 me. Donna matter who you are up there, or were.”
“But I want you to—”
“Fill your cars, an’ leave it at that.”
Then he put his coal axe back in motion. Nyx crawled to where he was working and put her hand on his shoulder to stop him.
“HOW LONG CAN WE STAY, JOE?”
They’d been chopping wood for the better part of two hours before Kamp asked his question. Joe rested the head of his eight-pound splitting maul on the ground and leaned on the handle. He took a couple deep breaths, blowing great clouds of steam when he exhaled. Joe tilted his head back and saw ravens twirling and tumbling in the sky.
“How did they do it?”
“Who?”
“Òpinkòk. How’d they get rid of you? You own your place. That’s what they care about, isn’t it? If you own it, they can’t make you leave.”
“Right.”
“So how’d they kick you out?”
“They made up a story about me. They used imposters, people who looked like us. Replaced us with them. Made us disappear without anyone knowing.”
Joe wiped the sweat from his brow and said, “Òpinkòk pretend their laws apply to everyone but only apply them to protect each other.”
“What’s your point?”
Joe stared past Kamp. “What they’re doing to you violates their way.”
“Are you asking me if I’m telling you the truth? Are you saying you don’t trust me?”
Joe raised the maul and swung it down hard, splitting the wood block into chunks.
ALONE AND LASHED TO THE BED, B. H. Grigg tried to force himself not to remember. Memories from his boyhood flooded his consciousness anyway, his mother’s fingertips on his forehead and her smell of jasmine, his father’s laugh in the next room, the first girl he kissed.
The memories wanted to play on his mind’s stage to exhort him to live or maybe as a summation of moments. To allow himself to indulge them would be to plunge headlong into madness. If so, his last memory of himself would be dark and lonely indeed. He needed rational thought now as well as to be in the present. Grigg slowed his breathing, focusing on each inhalation as the onrush of pictures and sensations gained intensity.
NYX FELT HER SENSES heightened beyond what she thought she could bear. She laid her fingertips on Aodh’s shoulder and began to caress it.
He stopped working, and she felt him shudder.
“I have to tell you right now,” she said.
“Tell me what?”
“The truth. All of it. I don’t want you to wonder. I’ll show you.”
KAMP STOOD UP A LOG and an instant later, Joe’s block buster came down, gliding past Kamp’s ear and splitting the log cleanly in two. He stood up another one, and again Joe’s maul hit it square. They continued without stopping until Joe, out of breath, sweat soaked, stood up and paused.
Joe turned to face him and said, “You can stay here as long as you want to.” Then he turned away again.
“But.”
“Òpinkòk will find you one day, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.”
“Not necessarily. I won’t bother anyone.”
“They’ll put my home to the torch. My daughter and my granddaughter will die because of you.”
He respected this man and the sorrows he’d endured. Joe’s words tapped into the well of shame Kamp thought he’d taught himself to ignore.
“We’ll have nowhere to go.”
“You’re beginning to understand, nkwis.”
WHEN THE TORRENT OF MEMORIES subsided, Grigg found himself exactly where he’d been
before it started, strapped to the wooden bedframe with leather belts and iron buckles. As his mind cleared, his thoughts turned to escape.
He reckoned he had at least twelve hours until his appointment with the surgeon. Grigg wiggled his hands and feet, testing them against his binds. Large movements were impossible, but there was some give, a fraction of an inch, in the bind on his left ankle. By moving his left foot back and forth, it loosened ever so slightly.
NYX FELT AODH starting to relax as she massaged his shoulders. She wanted to free herself of the rough wool shirt she wore and beneath that, the bandage that flattened her breasts. Aodh reached back and ran his hand along her hip.
“Nef Bahr, I don’ know what you have in mind, but I think it’s time for you to get back to work.”
“I want you to know who I am,” she said.
Aodh turned to look at her, their faces inches apart.
“I already do,” he said and unbuttoned the first two buttons on her shirt.
The moment was broken by a deep rumble in the mine and then shouting. Nyx and Aodh listened to the sound of approaching feet and men’s excited voices.
“I know he’s in here,” one said.
Another said, “This way.”
Nyx and Aodh scrambled backward out of their tiny space. Men in black wool uniforms, led by a miner, rushed into the room.
The miner pointed a finger and said, “There he is. That’s him!”
GRIGG WAS DRENCHED IN SWEAT from the work of freeing himself. He could turn his left ankle in the bind now, and he moved his foot back and forth until it came free.
For a moment he savored the ability to bend his knee and lift his leg off the bed. Then he remembered he had to free the other foot and both hands. He slowed his breathing and focused his attention on his right hand which was still bound fast to the frame.
He found that he could turn his wrist a fraction of an inch. After a few turns, the strap loosened. It was a matter of time until he slipped all the cuffs, but he didn’t know how long he had.
When Grigg heard the bolt slide and the door open, he slipped his foot back in the bind. He couldn’t tell who’d entered the room until the face of Alistair MacBride appeared above him.
The doctor surveyed him head to toe, and in a soothing voice said, “My goodness, Bat, you look an awful mess.”
“Bat?”
“That’s your nickname, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“That’s not what your mother said.”
Grigg breathed a long sigh and closed his eyes.
“Indeed. They talked to her.”
“Who did?”
“Representatives of the hospital went to her home to deliver the news and to console her. In the course of their visit, she told them stories of your youth, reminiscences of childhood pastimes, frivolities, hypocorisms, and so forth. They said it was evident that she loved you so very much and that she wept and wailed.”
“I don’t understand why you need to—”
“Son, no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, but they did what they had to do. They explained that her son, Bat, had suffered a devastating break with reality and that, in spite of the hospital’s best efforts to save him from himself, he took his own life.”
“This gets you nothing.”
“Don’t you think it was better that she heard it from them?”
“What makes you think—”
“Don’t you realize that’s better than your mother having to learn of it by reading the newspaper?”
MacBride let the question hang and surveyed Grigg’s body. His gaze fell on Grigg’s left ankle. With his first two fingers, he inspected the cuff and discovered how loose it was.
He gave a pitying look and said, “Oh, Bat, we had such high hopes for you. You had so much potential.”
“WHAT AM I BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND?”
Joe didn’t answer Kamp’s question and instead went back to chopping wood.
Kamp persisted. In a loud voice he said, “What don’t I understand?”
Joe paused with the maul resting on a split log. “You all think everything is about you,” he said.
“Who?”
Joe rarely showed anger, but his eyes flared now.
“You. Òpinkòk. White men. You drag your problems with each other wherever you go, and then you make all of creation suffer.”
“I don’t.”
Joe stared a long moment at him. “You brought shame on them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, nkwis. That’s between you and them.”
“But I let it go.”
“Yes, well, they didn’t.”
NYX BRACED HERSELF. She’d been running for more than a year, and now she was caught.
Instead of grabbing her, though, they knocked down Aodh and kicked him until they were certain he wouldn’t overpower them in spite of their numbers.
When they hauled him to his feet, blood trickled from his nostrils and left eye socket.
He slurred when he said, “Jaysus, boys, all ya had to do was ask.”
The Black Feather sergeant, a stout man with a salt-and-pepper moustache said, “Don’t give us no trouble.”
Nyx said, “What’s this for?”
Aodh said, “Peace, Nef Bahr.”
“What’s this for?”
As the black wool uniforms dragged Aodh out of the room, the sergeant looked straight at Nyx and said, “Shut up and get back to work.”
TWENTY-THREE
OFFICER FALKO STIER HAD NEVER BEEN MUCH OF A READER. He liked to speak with his hands, to communicate with action and not to confuse things with words. And to this point in his life, without realizing it, he’d strongly resisted the notion that words could change his perception of how things are and how they ought to be.
He was rummaging through a cabinet in the police station, searching for shotgun shells when he found a sheet of paper at the bottom of the drawer.
It was an old police report, bearing the official crest of the city and the signature of a hero, the fallen Deputy Chief of Police, Markus Lenz. But what led Stier to read the report wasn’t Lenz’s name but another name, Wendell W. Kamp.
Kamp. That wrong-headed, stiff-necked son of a bitch who didn’t understand the meaning of law and order. The fact that the man had once been a sworn officer of the law infuriated Stier. The thought of him made Stier wish he’d gotten rid of him when he had the chance.
He recalled, of course, that he’d been under strict orders not to kill him. And those orders were all that had prevented him from dropping the lit match and setting that rotten asshole ablaze.
Alone now in the station, by the light of his lantern, Stier read the report, written in pencil:
At midnight, the prisoner began speaking incoherently in his cell. He appeared desperate and then withdrawn. At one thirty-five a.m. the prisoner complained of hunger and thirst. I went to the kitchen, and when I returned, the prisoner was hanging by the neck in his cell. He had affixed his own belt to the rafter. I freed the prisoner from the makeshift noose and laid him on the floor. Efforts to revive the prisoner were unsuccessful. Wendell W. Kamp perished at one forty-three a.m. Signed, Markus Lenz, Deputy Chief of Police, Bethlehem.
Stier felt a pronounced shift in his thinking, though at first he didn’t know why, and he tried to deny the realization. It must have been a mistake. Kamp obviously hadn’t killed himself, so why did Lenz say he had? Maybe he’d confused Kamp with someone else, or maybe there was another person with the same name. Perhaps the report was a forgery.
As minutes turned to hours and the dark of the night shift gave way to dawn, Falko Stier arrived at a series of conclusions. He felt certain that someone, probably Lenz himself, had lied. And if the report were a lie, it was possible that Lenz concocted a story to cover up what he’d intended to do. That raised the possibility that Kamp had acted in self-defense.
Falko Stier wasn’t a man given to creating chains of assumptions based on speculation
, but if Kamp had acted in self-defense, it stood to reason that the police meant to do him wrong. They could still be doing him wrong now.
As the first rays of morning slanted through the blinds, Stier tasted bile on his tongue. He couldn’t tell if the bad taste came from not eating or from the gut feeling that his reality had just crumbled on the basis of mere words.
WHEN MACBRIDE LEFT THE ROOM, the attendants filed back in, and after scolding Grigg and slapping his face a few times, they cinched all his binds even tighter than before.
As the attendants left the room, the first one said, “Don’t go nowhere,” and the second one laughed.
Grigg immediately set about loosening the binds once more. He knew he could slip them, although it would take hours. He began twisting his wrists and ankles simultaneously, as if each were the tumbler of a safe, and he the safe cracker. He kept shifting and turning, working without thought or reason, letting his limbs communicate directly with each cuff.
Losing sense of time and even of himself, his body writhed in a rhythm that loosened the binds, imperceptibly at first and then with discernible progress. Sweat flowed from his pores, soaking the iron buckles and leather straps, a mad baptism.
He didn’t notice the perspiration or the way layer upon layer of skin burned off from friction. By the time he arrived at the silence of pre-dawn, all physical sensation had fallen away, and there was only motion, the working of flesh and bone against the binds.
NOTHING PREPARED FALKO STIER for a world in which basic reality had come into question. He set down the police report and gazed out the window at the grey-purple dawn.
For the past year, he’d overheard enough drunken ramblings of men in the holding cell to know that the citizenry believed wholeheartedly in the existence of a secret society called the Fraternal Order of the Raven.
They believed in it and feared it, so much so that they didn’t speak of it in public, at least not when sober. Stier didn’t believe the rumors, but from the story Lenz concocted in the police report, Stier felt he had glimpsed a malicious plan. Had Markus Lenz answered to the Order?
Kill the Raven: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 3) Page 12
