Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  And so by most standards it was a quiet night. But quiet is relative. A night can never be truly quiet when you can't forget the faces of the dead. The armored car's driver and the African guard...they would stay with him a long while. Even he wasn't sure why they'd died, so how could they have made any sense of what they'd faced in their last hour, last moments? They had died knowing only that they were under siege--one from without, one from within.

  That was the thing about the dead: They could so easily haunt, whether they meant to or not.

  With the new morning sky still gray in the west, Abe came up from below to join him, squatting on the deck beside Hellboy's chair. He seemed to expend no effort at all in keeping himself perfectly counterbalanced against the roll of the yacht.

  "We didn't talk much about what happened last night," Abe said.

  "Guess not."

  "But now that the sun's rising, and it'll be easy to see whatever might be up there, maybe we should."

  Hadn't wasted any time, had he? Probably kept watch at a porthole in his cabin down below.

  "What happened with that crew?" Abe asked. "I saw only the bodies. You saw the men."

  Hellboy had been running everything through his mind for hours, and still didn't have it all worked out.

  "The driver, he was okay. Scared, that's all. I vouch for him, alive or dead. He didn't seem to have any choice but to go along with what was happening," Hellboy said. "The one in the middle? The driver gave me a look at him with the door mirror. I don't know what kind of spirit was inside him, but whatever it was, it had been around long enough to wear the guy like an old glove.

  "The guard that loaded us in the back, none of us noticed anything wrong about him," he went on. "Just seemed to be doing his job. Then when things got heavy, at first I thought he must've been a plant...a mercenary, somebody's paid soldier. Or somebody's fanatic, on a mission. Until I got a look at him. Something was inside him too, Abe. But not like the other one. It must've happened not long before. Look deep enough and you can see the difference...two opposing minds looking out of the same pair of eyes, and the one that doesn't belong has got the one that does squashed over into one little corner."

  "But he couldn't have been in thrall to the one in the middle."

  "No, because that guy was the first to die."

  "So who was he?"

  "I'm curious about that myself."

  He'd given the body a quick search after they'd gotten to Ostia, although nothing of much help turned up--at least nothing to indicate who he'd been, where he'd come from, what he'd been mixed up in. He'd been wearing the same uniform as the other two guards, but his had fit poorly--too big around the waist, too short in the leg. It would've been an obvious conclusion that the uniform had been tailored for someone else even if its owner hadn't been discovered in an alley a couple of blocks from the Vatican's North Gate: one of the bodies that Kate had radioed about last night.

  The only thing of interest that the man in the middle had been carrying was his sidearm, a vintage piece with sleek lines, a long thin barrel, and a distinctive enough shape to leave no doubt as to what it was. Hellboy was by no means an expert on firearms--was usually doing good just to handle the one he carried--but was pretty sure he knew a German Luger when he saw one.

  Should've left it behind, maybe, for the Italian investigators. But his first impulse had been to take it along. Call it a jurisdictional dispute.

  As for those two bodies in the alley...well, dead men could still tell tales, but sometimes you couldn't make out what they were saying, and this was one of them. With five corpses in all, three belonging to the security crew, there was nobody left who could testify to how the armored car had been taken over. It was an armored car, for crying out loud. All they'd had to do was stay inside the thing.

  According to Kate, when they'd reached her from the Calista's VHF radiophone, about fifteen minutes after they had left the Vatican's North Gate last night, someone had spotted the lights of an ambulance and a pair of police cars converging down the Viale Vaticano. Two of the priests who'd been part of the scroll's guardian group--Father Artaud and his superior, Father Ranzi--had hurried down the street to the scene. At the time, they weren't thinking that this was around the same location as where the armored car had sat waiting, out of sight, until the BPRD trio was ready to board. They'd only gone in case someone was in need of Last Rites or some other assistance.

  Too late. Discovered by tourists, the pair was beyond help. One of them, a malnourished and even desiccated looking fellow--sounded like the one Hellboy had shot--was dead for no obvious reason. No wounds, no injuries, just an overall physical condition that implied he might have dropped dead of natural causes.

  The other, the fresh kill, had been the third original guard from the armored car. He'd died quickly, shot through the eye, and Hellboy wondered if this had been done with the Luger he'd confiscated. Once dead, the guard had been stripped of his clothes--no doubt the ill-fitting uniform worn by the hijacker Hellboy had killed, with the bit of brain on the collar--although they'd left behind the topcoat he'd worn. From what Ranzi managed to learn at the scene, the hijackers had tried to disguise the fact that they were leaving bodies behind by posing them as though they were sleeping vagrants--not an uncommon presence in Rome. Homeless equals invisible. Couldn't manage that nearly as well with a man naked but for his underwear and socks, though, and while they'd had spare clothes from the hijacker, it would've been no easy feat to re-dress the corpse in a hurry. Just curl him up and drape him with his topcoat. The illusion might have held up longer if not for the spreading blood.

  Ultimately, it was the coat that had raised the alarm with Father Ranzi, while he conferred with the police. Its breast bore a patch with the emblem of the security company whose armored car had not half an hour before rolled away carrying the Masada Scroll.

  "Who they were, how they did it...I'm not gonna worry about that right now. If there's anything to find out, Kate'll get to the bottom of it," Hellboy said. "What I'm more worried about is who put them up to it."

  "Not the Opus Angelorum, then?"

  "Last night, none of that seemed like their style. If I had to put a word to it, that was too earthy for them. Too down and dirty. It was just the opposite of a cleansing fire. No purity," Hellboy reasoned. "Seems like if the Opus had known we were on the move, they'd've just called in the flamethrowers again."

  "Instead, if they've lost their ritual site," Abe said, referring to the observatory that Monsignor Burke had revealed, "it's possible they're on the move as well. Maybe out of the picture. For now, at least."

  "Yeah. A group that's been around as long as Burke says this one has, hard to believe they'd let a little thing like eviction put them out of business permanently."

  "So we're looking at the likelihood of another faction whose presence has gone unknown until now."

  Hellboy nodded. "Except this one doesn't want the scroll destroyed. They just want it. Period."

  "But for what?"

  "Most of the time I'm smarter than I look," Hellboy said. "This isn't one of them."

  "If we knew who sold us out, that's one step closer to the answer."

  They tossed names back and forth, everybody they were aware of who had known their logistics. It was a short list: Artaud and Ranzi, the two archivists most directly connected with the scroll. Bertrand, the Swiss Guard Corporal who'd been assigned to them all day, and could easily have overheard their travel plans being made, although when the man could've gotten that information out, Hellboy didn't know. Then there was the head of the security company who'd furnished the armored car, although that seemed the least likely possibility; he hadn't even known what the cargo was, only that it was a valuable historical document. There was also Cardinal Capezza, who'd flexed connections to line up the car in the first place--a totally unknown commodity here, someone they hadn't even met. Instead, he'd been contacted by Archbishop Bellini, the plump guy who'd been nodding off at the beginning o
f yesterday morning's meeting in which they'd asked the BPRD to take custody of the scroll. So add Bellini to the list, too. Then there was Monsignor Burke to consider, if only because they'd spoken at length last evening, although he too was a long shot at best; Hellboy hadn't mentioned anything other than travel by sea, and Burke hadn't been involved in the plans for getting the scroll to the coast.

  Anyone else? Not that they knew of, but then, any one of the above could have violated common sense and mentioned it to someone else. Dumb, but far from impossible. Like any bureaucracy, the Vatican thrived on gossip and power plays, and they'd already been warned of spies.

  "Then again, at this point, does it even matter who sold us out?" Abe said. He reached across with one slim-muscled arm and tapped the attache case, resting beside the deck chair under Hellboy's oversized hand. "It's safe and I'm optimistic it'll stay that way. To get at it where it's going, they'd have to have a very long reach."

  Hellboy ticked one eyebrow upward.

  "Of course I know it matters to you, and I know why," Abe said. "You wouldn't be you if it didn't. What I'm pointing out is now that we have this"--he tapped the case again--"our part in their affairs is over. The one priest yesterday, the one that looks like he belongs in a soup kitchen..."

  "Father Laurenti," Hellboy said. Something spooky about that guy...although not in a bad way. Spooky in the same way that somebody else might have leveled the same verdict against him, or Abe, or Liz, or even Kate, for that matter.

  "Laurenti, right. He couldn't have made it any plainer that they do not want us meddling in their affairs any more than is necessary to get the job done and keep the scroll safe."

  "And Monsignor Burke couldn't have made that any murkier by taking me to the observatory."

  "Yes, but your field trip notwithstanding, there's an official position, and it comes not just from a Church hierarchy, but from a sovereign state. That carries weight...even with a bureau like ours."

  He knew Abe was right. Didn't have to like it one bit, but there it was. Abe had always had more of the diplomatic about him.

  "And according to the monsignor, they've taken at least one prisoner in this ideological conflict," Abe went on. "Prisoners, arson, deaths...this has gotten ugly. It was ugly before we were even a part of it. And the worst part is, we don't know which side is going to prevail. Who should and who will are two different things. We may have our sympathies, you and I, but you probably know what kind of directive is going to come down."

  Here it comes, Hellboy thought. The P-word...

  "Politically, we can't take an official side any more than we already have. You and I may not like it, but regardless, we are part of a government agency. And when our work comes into conflict with the demands of state..." Abe let the words hang, then shook his head.

  And they were getting at the paradox of his whole existence, weren't they? Despite having spent his entire life in the care and then the employ of the government--or at least the only life he was cognizant of, given his apparent origins--he'd felt insulated from government's minutiae and dictates of policy. Face it: What they did in the BPRD, what they encountered, what they killed or were killed by...most senators and representatives and cabinet officials didn't even want to know about. True, the bureau had been founded in 1944 as a response to the Third Reich's increasingly successful occult experiments, seeking to turn the tide of the war back in their favor. Later, there'd been similar clashes with the Soviet Union. After which the bureau's political star had dimmed. This was inevitable. It had been decades since a government had harnessed such powers.

  But chaos rarely served a master. It sought entry anywhere it could. And surely that was the only reason an agency like theirs remained funded, even tolerated at all. They didn't so much defend the country as they defended reality itself.

  Easy, then, to forget that there was still a bureaucratic hammer over their heads, however unobtrusive it may have been most of the time.

  Hellboy glanced back past the cockpit, in the direction of the companionway, the stairs leading belowdecks. "Was Liz awake when you came up?"

  "Definitely not," Abe said, then stood and stretched out his long, lean body, sleek as an eel. He took a couple of steps toward the rail, gazing off across the water, a plain of gunmetal gray with a light chop starting to hurl back the highlights of the rising sun.

  "Go on, you know you want to," Hellboy told him. "But I'm not giving you mouth-to-mouth if you overdo it."

  Abe tossed a look of friendly scorn over his shoulder and then was gone in the snap of a finger. Even if the boat had been anchored in the middle of a glass-calm sea, Hellboy doubted that he would have heard a splash. Abe Sapien usually hit water like a knife.

  Hellboy left his deck chair and stepped over to the railing, stood there awhile staring down at the surface of the sea, where Abe kept pace with the prow of the yacht as it sliced westward. Agile as a porpoise, Abe moved through the water with a speed and grace that made even Olympic medalists look like dog-paddlers.

  It was moments like this in which he envied Abe a little.

  What, seventy-five, eighty percent of the earth's surface was covered in water?

  No wonder there were times when Abe seemed to belong in this world a lot more than he did.

  Later he dug into one of the deeper pockets of his trench coat--draped now over the back of the deck chair in deference to the warming day--and pulled out the Luger he'd taken off the dead hijacker. He turned it over and over in his hand until he got tired of looking at something that he couldn't interrogate, frighten, or wheedle into giving up any secrets.

  He walked it back to the cockpit, where the captain was taking another turn at the wheel. Bastiaan Karabachos was one of those men who looked as though he might as well be welded to the wheel of his ship, his veins running with the blood of mariners who, so he claimed, went all the back way to the time of Homer. Hellboy allowed him his fantasies--it was a good marketing ruse for the more naive among his legitimate customers. Even so, with his weathered face--the skin roughened by the elements and the corners of his eyes cut deep by squinting into fifteen thousand suns--and his bush of hair that looked windblown even indoors, you could imagine Homer taking a gander at some ancestor of his, nodding, and saying, "Yes, here is my Odysseus."

  "Hey. Bastiaan," Hellboy said. "Knowing what I do about the rest of your business, you're going to disappoint me if you don't have someone on this boat who knows as much about guns as he does rigging sails."

  With a grin, Bastiaan nodded at the Luger in Hellboy's hand. "What is this, you're traveling lighter these days? For a hand like yours, that thing isn't any more than a derringer." He laughed, then yelled over his shoulder to a younger crewman he called Nikos, who was standing at the stern rewinding a thick coil of rope they'd used to haul Abe back aboard after his morning swim.

  "Don't let his face fool you," Bastiaan said. "Nikos has some expertise."

  Up close, in the daylight--Hellboy hadn't seen him very clearly when they'd boarded last night--Nikos seemed not much more than a kid, with the large, dark eyes and flawless skin that gave some young Mediterranean men an almost feminine appearance. That he'd buzzed his hair down to stubble seemed like nothing so much as an attempt to look older, tougher.

  But damned if he didn't know guns. A boyhood obsession, maybe, fixated on firearms instead of something healthier, like soccer. When Hellboy handed the pistol over for a look, Nikos gazed upon it the way other men might stare at Ming vases, handwritten Mozart manuscripts.

  "Something interesting about this?" Hellboy asked.

  "A Luger in general, no," he said. "But the age and condition of this one...where did you get this?"

  "Nazi gun, right?"

  Nikos curled one corner of his mouth. "This is possible. But just as possible not. Yes, Lugers were used then, but very early in that war the German military replaced them with Walther P-38s. Lugers were in much more common use in the First World War."

  "That early, huh?"<
br />
  "And this one, she was made even before the war. Here, look, look at this." Nikos tilted the top of the pistol toward him and pointed to the rounded toggle lock near the back, ran his finger along a monogram--DWM. Hellboy had noticed it already, just hadn't thought much about it. "As good as a fingerprint. This was a private munitions company that manufactured them before the war, along with the German government. You have a real antique. I never saw one this old, not with my own eyes, only pictures. It's seen some use, but the condition...beautiful...it could have been in a museum most all this time."

  "Not likely," Hellboy said. Giving serious thought to what the hijacker of an armored car was doing with a well-preserved firearm that was eighty-five, ninety years old.

  "Maybe a time capsule, then, eh?" Nikos said, and over the next half hour offered to buy the thing four or five times before deciding his effort was futile. Unless it had something to do with Hellboy's musing aloud if it would take a good solid backhand to get him to take no for an answer.

  Sometimes it could be so hard to tell.

  Chapter 10

  Liz was up at midmorning, emerging from below with both hands wrapped around a gargantuan and copiously steaming mug of coffee. She scuffed over to him, her bare feet making soft slaps across the deck and her reddish-brown hair straight as a stick and blowing loose around her shoulders.

  "My god, just look at you," she said. "You've been sitting out here so long you've gotten the worst sunburn I've ever seen."

  He pretended to glare but unfortunately had the kind of face that didn't show much distinction between pretend and the real thing. He thought Liz got it this time.

  She had him hold her coffee and forbade him to drink it while she retrieved another deck chair from the rack along the front of the cockpit, dragged it over next to him, and settled in.