Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  “I don’t have a partner. And that guy, you don’t want to get near that guy.”

  “Oh, yeah, and you’re such a prize.”

  He bared his teeth at her. “Enough of this. Give me the fucking film or I’m going to shoot you.”

  “Sure. Right. You’re my mama’s pet goon, no way would you shoot me.”

  He shot her.

  21

  SHE OPENED her eyes on a white plaster ceiling. It was a tall ceiling with a brown stain in one corner. A vague panic filled her, but she couldn’t name what she was afraid of. Something to do with a river. And ice.

  Then it all came back to her in a rush—the ponytailed man, the Japanese tourists, the barge, the dog, the river.

  Sergei with a gun.

  Had he shot her? Was she in a hospital?

  She didn’t feel hurt anywhere, but then she hadn’t tried moving yet. She turned her head and saw a red-beaded lamp sitting on a table next to an ornate silver clock. Beyond it a walnut armoire draped with a fringed Spanish shawl stood against a red-and-gold-flocked wall. Definitely not a hospital then, unless the French furnished their hospitals to look like Victorian bordellos.

  She jerked, struggling against a heavy pile of quilts to push herself up onto her elbows. Pain stabbed her head so fiercely she gasped out loud from the shock of it. Her blurred eyes focused on a brass footboard, then beyond to Sergei.

  He straddled a chair with his arms folded over the back. His face was in shadow so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt them.

  “What did you shoot me with?”

  “A tranq gun.”

  Zoe flopped back onto the pillows and shut her eyes. She had to think, but it hurt to think, so she just lay there and shivered. It felt as if she’d been shivering for years.

  “Cold,” she said. The word sounded as if it came out around a mouthful of marbles.

  “Cold is what you get when you go swimming in the Seine in February. You would’ve croaked from hypothermia if I hadn’t saved your ass after all those stupid, gutsy stunts you pulled. I had to hold you propped up under a hot shower for a good hour to get your body temperature back to something even close to normal.”

  “Don’t hold your breath waiting for a thank-you card.” There, that was better. She could get words out now without her teeth knocking together. His teeth had sure made a nice cracking sound when she’d smacked him in the jaw. Too bad she hadn’t laid him out cold.

  Something about him was different, though. For one thing, he was speaking perfectly good English, as before when he—

  The film.

  Zoe jerked back up and nearly blacked out from the pain that shot through her skull. “What’ve you done with my stuff?”

  He nodded to a chair upholstered in purple cabbage roses. Her satchel was in the chair, but Zoe saw that he’d taken out the reel of film. He’d set it on a round table, between an old-fashioned black telephone and a glass vase of tulips.

  Zoe lay back and closed her eyes again against a fresh wave of dizziness. He’d gotten what he wanted, so why hadn’t he just tossed her back into the Seine and left her to drown? She decided she wasn’t so scared of him anymore. Not as scared as she probably ought to be.

  “Will you tell me just one thing?” she asked him. “What is there about a home movie of a little girl blowing out birthday-cake candles that makes it worth killing for?”

  He said nothing.

  “Okay, I get it. You’re just a dumb vors. A goon who follows orders, no questions asked. Mr. Stepin Fetchit.”

  He still said nothing.

  “Are you here on a job for my mother?”

  “The pakhan believes your life is danger.”

  “My mother sent you along to protect me?” Zoe said with a snort. “Yeah, right.”

  More likely Anna Larina wanted for herself what her own mother had kept hidden away in the casket. That meant she’d known of its existence, but probably not where it was all these years. Had she known, she would have sent someone to the griffin shop to take it by force a long time ago. She didn’t have the fancy key to open it with, but a crowbar would’ve done the job.

  But, no, that still didn’t make sense. The thing of value in the casket should be the icon, especially to Anna Larina, who collected the things. Yet with Sergei, her hired thug, it was all about the film.

  He’d gone quiet again. Zoe’s head hurt too much to lift it and check out what he was up to.

  “Are you working with the other man who was chasing me? The guy with the ponytail?”

  “I already told you no.”

  “But you do know who he is?”

  “I got an idea.”

  “Mind sharing it?”

  He said nothing.

  “Damn you, he killed my grandmother,” she said, suddenly so furious she was near tears with it.

  She heard the chair scrape across wood; a moment later he came into her view. He went to a lace-curtained window and looked out. From her perspective all she could see was blue sky and a couple of cotton-ball clouds. Apparently while she’d been sleeping off the tranquilizer, a new day had dawned in Paris.

  “Where am I, anyway?” she asked.

  “A friend’s apartment on the Île St.-Louis.”

  “You have friends? Who knew?”

  She looked around the place again. It was just the one room with a tiny bathroom between the window and the armoire. A microwave and an espresso machine passed for a kitchen.

  Sergei hadn’t bothered to respond to her snark. He stayed with his back to her, his gaze on the street below, as if he were waiting for someone.

  The telephone rang.

  He quickly crossed the room to the table to snatch up the receiver on the second ring. He carried on a conversation in rapid French. Zoe couldn’t understand a single word.

  He hung up the telephone and came right at her. She met his eyes, and inside she felt a lick of fear.

  He reached into his coat pocket as he leaned over her, and she braced herself to be shot again with the tranquilizer gun. Instead he took out a pair of handcuffs, snapped one end around her right wrist and the other end around one of the brass pipes on the headboard.

  “Oh, for God’s sakes, gimme a break.”

  He startled her by laughing out loud.

  Then he left her.

  ZOE CALLED HIM every filthy name she knew while she jerked and wrenched at the handcuffs, but they were the real deal and weren’t going to pop open no matter how much she tugged at them.

  She thought for a while that maybe she could fold her hand in upon itself and slip it out of the rigid cuff, but she wasn’t small-boned enough. She tried shaking the brass pipe loose from the crossbar on the headboard, but it was welded solid.

  Damn the man. Damn him, damn him.

  She had to get out of here before he came back. She was the Keeper now, and even though she still didn’t know what it all meant, she figured she at least had to “keep” everything that had been in the casket out of the hands of men like Sergei. Was the film the altar of bones? No, she was being stupid again. Her grandmother had said the women of their line had been Keepers for so long the beginning had been lost in the mists of time. Yet the film had been made in the early 1960s.

  Zoe lay back, stared at the ceiling, and tried to think through the pounding pain in her head. A cloud passed over the sun, and the room darkened. She looked at the lamp sitting on the table beside the bed. A lamp with a shade made of hundreds of red glass beads strung on wires.

  SHE COULDN’T REACH the lamp with her free hand, and the silver clock on the dresser was ticking down the seconds like an ominous metronome. She doubted Sergei would be away long, he could come back through the door at any minute and she’d have no more chances to escape.

  She kicked off the heavy quilts and jackknifed her legs sideways, grabbing at the lamp with her feet. The lamp teetered and almost fell to the floor. At the last instant, she managed to snag it by the fringe with her toes.

  She pulled
it back onto the bed within reach of her free hand. It was harder to strip the beads off the wires than she had thought it would be. She ended up using her teeth.

  She stripped six wires and wove them together until they were about an eighth of an inch thick. She wanted to make it thicker, but there wasn’t time.

  She struggled one-handed with the pick, poking it into the cuff’s lock, jiggling it, poking, jiggling…. It wasn’t going to work and the damn clock was ticking louder than a drum now, louder than the pounding in her head—

  The lock on the cuff snicked open.

  Her nerves were screaming at her, Hurry, hurry, hurry. She jumped off the bed, and the floor tilted beneath her feet. Her muscles felt as mushy as overcooked spaghetti, her head throbbed.

  She snatched up the film and stuffed it back in her satchel. The icon and the postcard with the riddle were still there, wrapped up in the sealskin pouch, but oddly the Marilyn Monroe photograph was gone. She checked her money, passport, and credit cards—all still there.

  She was about to run out of the apartment when she suddenly realized that all she was wearing was her bra and panties. All this time she’d been half-naked, she thought, laughing out loud, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  She found her leather jacket, boots, and socks next to the radiator, her jeans and sweater hanging over the towel bar in the bathroom. They were damp and clammy and smelled of the river, and she shuddered as she put them on.

  Something was in her jeans back pocket … two soggy sheets of—Oh, please, God, no … But it was. Her grandmother’s letter.

  Sudden tears burned her eyes, her chest ached. She must have stuck the letter into her back pocket when she’d left the museum, and then she’d gone and jumped in the Seine. Her grandmother’s words were gone now, just smears of blue ink and—

  Downstairs a door slammed, and she froze. Then she heard footsteps walking away out on the sidewalk and she let out a long, slow breath. She put her grandmother’s letter into her satchel, even though it was ruined now, and headed for the door.

  SHE WALKED INTO the first bank she came to and rented a safe-deposit box. She wanted to put the icon and the film where no one could get at them.

  While she was in the room with the safe-deposit box, she started to enter into her PDA the parts of her grandmother’s letter she could remember, but then it occurred to her that the battery might run out before she could recharge it, so she wrote it all down on a piece of the bank’s notepaper instead.

  She left the bank with her satchel feeling a thousand pounds lighter. A trendy boutique blasted throbbing hip-hop music next door. She went inside and bought another pair of black jeans, a black wool turtleneck, some more underwear, and finally a new, trendier black leather jacket that was going to put a serious dent in her bank account.

  The clerk was young, and friendly, and wanted to practice her English. Zoe asked her where she could get a taxi to take her to the Musée de Cluny.

  Now that she was thinking again, she realized she should go back to the griffin shop and talk with Boris some more. He’d recognized Lena as a Keeper the first time they met because of her resemblance to the Lady. Surely there was some history, some more folklore, to go with the icon that he could tell her.

  ZOE ASKED THE cabdriver to let her out across from the museum. But when she rounded the corner of the little side street, she was shocked to see a crowd gathered in front of the old man’s shop, along with an ambulance and two cop cars with whirling red bubble lights.

  She pushed through the crowd, her heart pounding slow, dull beats. Please don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead.

  She wedged herself between a young couple, and a man wearing a stained butcher’s apron, just as the door to the shop opened and two EMTs in white smocks came out carrying a body bag on a stretcher. She heard the young man say in English to his girl, “One of the cops just said the guy’s eye was cut out.”

  The ground lurched beneath Zoe’s feet, and she almost fell. She spun around, hot bile rising in her throat. She put a hand up to her mouth and pushed back through the crowd.

  Oh God, oh God. This was all her fault. She must have led the pony-tailed man right to the griffin shop yesterday, and now he’d killed the old man. But not before cutting out his eye, and there’d been no reason to do that. Boris didn’t have the icon anymore, and he had no way of knowing where it was.

  She wove blindly down the jostling sidewalks, not knowing or caring where she went. Once she almost stepped off the curb and into the path of a bus.

  She passed a huge multiplex movie theater and thought about losing herself inside, yet she walked on. She needed to find a hotel, a place with a shower and a bed. A place to lie low and think about what to do.

  She found one that looked promising off one of the narrower side streets. It had a threadbare carpet and a half-dead palm tree in the lobby—definitely not a hotel you’d expect American tourists to flock to.

  The man behind the front desk had a pathetic mustache and a snooty nose. He claimed to have only one vacancy, a small room on the top floor, facing the street and with only a shower, no bathtub. Was madame sure …?

  Madame was sure.

  The elevator was smaller than a phone booth. Madame took the stairs.

  NOT UNTIL SHE sat down on the bed did she realize how badly her legs were shaking. She was hungry, but she was afraid if she tried to eat now, she’d be sick. She couldn’t get the image of that body bag out of her head.

  She curled up in a ball on the bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. She knew she ought to go to the French police and tell them about the ponytailed man, but she was afraid they would make her turn over the icon and the film because those things came from what was now a crime scene. She could even become a suspect herself, and she hadn’t heard very nice things about Parisian jails.

  She lay there for a while, until hunger pangs penetrated her numb brain and she could smell the river on herself. She wanted to stay on the bed, curled up in a ball, but she made herself get up, shower, and change into her new clothes.

  She left her ruined things in the hotel, but brought everything else along with her in her satchel. She took a table at the first café she came to, sat beneath a green-and-gold awning, and ordered a salade Niçoise and a bottle of Evian.

  She knew she needed to make herself think, but she sat there, numb, still cold and feeling so very alone. A big old stone church was across the street. She wondered if churches still offered sanctuary for the hunted. The streets around her were jammed with cars and people, and she watched the bustle while she wolfed down the salad and half a loaf of bread. There were supposed to be over 2 million people in Paris. She could lose herself among so many, surely.

  Except you couldn’t make a move in today’s world without leaving a trail of numbers. Credit card, passport, driver’s license, Social Security. Even her library card had a bar code and a number. If Mr. Ponytail had a source in the French police, he might already be waiting for her back at her hotel. Sergei, as one of her mother’s enforcers, would be even quicker to find her, with contacts in the Russian mafiya, whose tentacles reached into every major city government throughout the world.

  A shadow fell over her table.

  22

  IT WAS a woman, a stranger. Okay, a beautiful woman in a to-die-for red designer suit, and because they’d made eye contact, Zoe smiled at her, then scooted her chair closer to the table, thinking the woman wanted to squeeze by. Instead she pulled back the chair opposite Zoe and sat down.

  “Ms. Dmitroff—no, don’t pop up like a jack-in-the-box, for heaven’s sake. That’s the last thing you want to do right now.” The woman placed a black leather Chanel bag on the table, folded her hands on top of it, looked carefully around her, then leaned in close. “After all, we don’t know who else might be watching.”

  The woman looked all around her again, then opened the Chanel bag, pulled out a matching wallet, and flipped it open long enough to flash some sort of lamina
ted ID card with her picture and a government seal on it.

  “My name is Yasmine Poole. I’m an operative with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Zoe snorted, because all this nightmare needed right now to make it complete was the CIA. “And I’m Batgirl. Sorry, I’m afraid I left my decoder ring back at the hotel.”

  “Oh, puh-leeze, Ms. Dmitroff. You’re intelligent enough to know that not all secret agents run around on Jet Skis and flying motorboats like James Bond, saving the world from master villains. I’ve worked for the Agency for over ten years, yet most days you will find me sitting behind a desk at Langley analyzing what affect a half-a-tael rise on the price of rice in Mongolia will have on the world’s economy.”

  She smiled, Zoe didn’t smile back.

  “Most days,” Zoe said, “you would find me on the phone in my cubbyhole of a Mission Street law office, trying to wrangle a plea bargain out of an ADA who thinks defense attorneys rank somewhere below pond scum. Yet here I am and here you are—so how did that happen?”

  “I followed you just now from your hotel. We had you located fifteen minutes after the man at the front desk ran your credit card.”

  “I guess it’s nice to have a fancy badge. Beats a decoder ring any day of the week.” Zoe finished the last of her water and patted her mouth with her napkin. “So what do you want with me?”

  “This is going to sound all melodramatic and surreal to you, but we believe a certain item has fallen into your possession which could have grave consequences on national security. It’s vital that you turn the item over to me now, before it falls into the wrong hands.”

  Zoe’s mouth had gone dry, even though she’d expected something like this. From here on out she was going to have to be careful. Somehow she was going to have to get as much information as possible out of this woman without revealing her own ignorance. For as her grandmother had warned her, ignorance was a poor shield against danger.