Shadow Court

by Roger Weston

  Chuck heard sounds. He stopped and listened. Of course the wind was howling outside, but it wasn’t just that. He’d heard a sound like an object hit the floor. There was something creepy about being in a strange building at night, particularly a night like this. With winds pounding the building from above and storm surge tugging at it from below. It was no surprise that there would be sounds.

  Still, he didn’t reject the possibility that there could be someone in the building. It was not likely, but not impossible either. He backtracked and looked around but didn’t see anything, so he went down the same hallway and passed through a doorway.

  The first thing that struck him was that the ballroom had fifty-foot high ceilings. How could that be in an office building? he wondered. The answer was obvious. All of the windows of the top four stories were just to make the Sugar Exchange Building look like a regular office building. The Immortals did not want their headquarters and club to draw a lot of attention. Therefore, they placed it in an ordinary, almost dreary old building.

  The inside, however, was anything but ordinary. The fifty-foot high walls were covered with masterpieces of art. Chuck had always wondered what became of masterpieces by the great artists when they were stolen or were sold for millions of dollars. He’d assumed they ended up in the homes of billionaires. It was now clear, however, that some of them ended up right here in the Sugar Exchange Building. The upper thirty feet of the walls were covered with paintings. Many of them were huge.

  His flashlight passed over the Coronation of Napoleon, the Raft of the Medusa, and many other famous paintings that he’d always assumed were kept in the great museums of Europe. Now, however, he was wondering if the paintings displayed in those museums for the general public were really the originals, or whether they were just counterfeits for general consumption while the originals were reserved here for the elite. Paintings that caught his eye included Altdorfer’s “Battle of Andrew,” Remington’s “The Buffalo Hunt,” Munch’s “The Scream,” and David’s “The Oath of the Horatii.”

  He saw some of the great works of Rembrandt, Boldini, Walden, Michelangelo, Valdes Leal, and Picasso. On the opposite wall, he saw iconic paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Winslow Homer, and Paul Gauguin. These were just a few of the iconic paintings that anybody might recognize.

  He shined his tactical flashlight up at the ceiling and was amazed. The ceiling mosaic was the Apotheosis of Venice.

  While Chuck was staggered by art all around him, what surprised him even more was the almost 360-degree mosaic that covered the bottom ten feet of the walls. It looked like a system of painted veins that stretched across the walls, encircling the club room. These veins branched off at intervals creating new veins. What was distinct about these veins was that they were filled with hundreds of names. Chuck walked closer and moved his flashlight across the wall as he walked. He quickly understood the significance of the names. On one wall, the names were an illustration of the succession of leadership of Italy, Eastern Europe, Russia, Germany, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and many other countries. It was a timeline, illustrating the succession of leadership, illustrated with miniatures showing the faces of many of the kings, queens, emperors, pharaohs, tyrants, and presidents.

  The opposite wall was even more fascinating because over there, names filled the veins and showed the bloodlines of the great families of Western Civilization. The veins were stretched out like interconnecting family trees representing generations of the celebrated and the privileged. Names jumped out. Chuck saw the names of business tycoons, actors, bankers, and other luminaries. Again and again, he saw how the bloodlines crisscrossed. So far, there was nothing here to prove his innocence. There was no door to any Vault of Secrets.

  Then, once again, he thought he’d heard something, but it was hard to know for sure because the storm was causing a slight vibration. The wind moaned like a wounded whale. The building was literally sitting in the river of the flood surge. The forces at work all around him were beyond comprehension. It was a wonder that the building wasn’t carried away. That he heard sounds meant nothing…he hoped. He focused on his immediate surroundings.

  The club room was filled with tables. On the far side, the lineology that covered the lower ten feet of the walls was broken on the back wall, which had two ten-by-twenty foot paintings. These paintings mounted at floor level and were fenced off with velvet ropes and brass posts. The center of this back wall, between the two big paintings, featured a set of double doors—ten-foot high twin wooden doors featuring an elaborate carving of a beast and various serpents. The doors were carvings; the beast and serpents were the doors. These wooden serpents emerged from the thick door as bigger than life representations. Altogether, the elaborate doors were over two feet thick in some parts because of the creepy wooden carvings. Chuck had to pull hard to open one of the heavy doors. It weighed hundreds of pounds and was mounted on what looked like twenty-five pound hinges.

  Chuck turned off his flashlight and stood there for a minute looking over his shoulder into the darkness of the club room and the door on the far side. He listened to the building which creaked like a wooden boat. He let the massive door with the carved beasts close behind him.

  The next room was also dark and just as big as the clubhouse had been. Chuck walked around the perimeter with his flashlight on. It took just a minute to realize that he was in a grand opera house. The room was full of theatre-style chairs, but the perimeter walls featured four stories of heavily-ornamented, gold-trimmed box seats. The stage itself was world-class with forty-foot high gold curtains—capped off with a dome-shaped mosaic of a golden eagle with an all-seeing eye.

  The howling wind outside changed from one eerie pitch to another.

  Chuck returned to the Immortal Hall clubhouse and took a closer look at the ground-level paintings that flanked the doors to the opera house. One was a painting of a wall mosaic of Neptune and Amphitrite. Chuck stepped over the velvet ropes and felt along the side of the frame. There was nothing unusual. It was just a painting.

  The other painting was a grim, ten-by-twenty foot image of Nero’s tomb by an unknown artist. It was not signed. It was a cold, blunt painting of a large, plain tombstone. Chuck stepped over the velvet ropes and felt along the side of the frame. This time he felt a button behind the frame. He pushed the button and heard a clicking sound. The painting parted from the wall by a couple of inches. He swung it back on hinges the size of coffee-table books. The ten-foot high, twenty-foot wide painting was a secret door on hinges. He shined his flashlight behind the painting and saw a huge, walk-in safe, similar to the one he’d entered in the old bank building in Issaquah, Washington.

  Chuck got out the combination numbers that Maroz had given him. He turned the dial left and right. Then he cranked down the lever and heard an echoing click. He swung back the thousand pound door. Shining his tactical flashlight inside, he was staggered by what he saw.

  There in the vault was an old grand piano. Mounted on the piano was a two-foot high crystal tripod, which held up a crystal globe, a larger version of the globe on the key chain that Erica had hidden on Chuck’s fishing boat in Port Gamble, Washington. But what really caught his attention was the brass plaque on the piano. It said, “Mozart’s piano.”

  He recalled now the notes the antiquarian had left for him shortly before his death and the story about Mozart performing for the Immortals but then rejecting them, a prelude to his death.

  It was a pathetic sight. They’d been rejected by a man with great talent and immortal power, yet they protected Mozart’s piano. They’d silenced the music by locking up the piano after they’d failed to lock down the man’s soul.

  Next to the piano was an oversized glass lectern with a huge, leather-bound book on it. Chuck walked in and looked at the title. It was the Book of Deeds. Dozens of matching volumes filled bookshelves covering the walls of the vault.

  Chuck opened the volume on the lectern. The pages we
re twenty-four inches high and eighteen inches wide. This was the book that Erica had told him about. It chronicled the deeds of the Immortals going back two thousand years. It was a secret history. It told all the dirty deeds that the public had never known. It told the real motives and the secret crimes. The praise lauded upon the Immortals through the generations was unrestrained. Actions that would shock and disgust regular people were considered the mark of the Immortal class, those who were above the law and above morality. Chuck turned pages in utter fascination. The events were similar to those he had studied in history, but the hidden intrigues and the alternate motivations were astounding. Never before had he felt such a profound and suffocating sense of the darkness in the world. The Book of Deeds was kept for one reason, to glorify the families of the elite. It was a private history for the elite financial class. They tried to outdo each other, the ultimate victory being to make a splash, as Napoleon used to say. To make noise. To dazzle and astonish. To shock. To cause upheaval. To incite revolutions and seize power. To make noise was the way to win because these people had more money than they could ever use. They wanted glory.

  He read of inductees from past centuries as well as those who were rejected. Two names caught his attention on the list of rejected members—Beethoven and Mozart. Evidently both had attended meetings and played for the members but ultimately rejected the society.

  Truly, the dark bloodlines had lived for thousands of years and still lived. Many people had no idea of the evil done in secret by the Immortals behind closed doors.

  Chuck turned to 1940 and looked up the Lancastria. He wanted to see if the ship had really been sunken just to silence the lips of one woman. He found a reference. The entry didn’t give a lot of detail—just the name of the ship, over 9,000 dead, and the name of one woman—and “Deceased.” Then it said, “Attack precipitated by Gerhardt Kielce.”

  Then Chuck remembered what Lawrence had told him about the much worse disaster in Byelorussia: “The operations that the elder Maroz and his mobile killing units participated in were horrific. Working with Sicherheitspolizei security police, Einsatzgruppen was responsible for the deaths of two million Jews.” Chuck remembered what Lawrence had told him about Todd Kielce’s ancestor, Gerhardt Kielce, who had been a chief of Émigré Affairs for Hitler’s SS. Part of his duties had included the formation and implementation of mobile killing units in Byelorussia. These Einsatzgruppen killing units consisted of ruthless native collaborators.

  Since the Book of Deeds was organized in chronological order, he turned to the early forties and paged through it until he saw references to the ancestors of Maroz and Kielce. As he skimmed down the lines, he felt his blood run cold.

  The Byelorussia collaborators had exterminated their own people with cold efficiency. It was all right there in the Book of Deeds. Mayors and other trusted government officials did the dirty deeds. They betrayed their people.

  The Byelorussian collaborators carried out extermination on a breathtaking scale. The Nazis chose the heavily Jewish city of Borissow as ground zero for mass extermination.

  One roundup of Jews overseen by the elder Maroz began at 3 a.m. Local collaborators, including police, surrounded the ghettos and rounded up families. They were forced into trucks that took them out the Poletzala Ulitsa road leading to the airport. Mass graves had already been dug with bulldozers. Groups of men were forced down into the trenches and shot. Then the next groups were sent down to arrange the bodies side by side so that the maximum number of bodies would fit into the trenches. Then those victims were shot. When the bottom of the trench was covered with bodies, other Jews had to spread sand over the bodies. The process was repeated all day long.

  Some of the guards, including the ancestors of Maroz and Kielce, raped women before taking them to the pits. Bodies were mutilated. Babies were thrown into the pits alive to save bullets. They buried the babies alive.

  Chuck felt sick. He was thankful that Erica abandoned Maroz but sorry that he had let her come with him to Iguantola Island. He had to find her.

  Chuck kept reading. He soon learned that not all of the Byelorussian guards were happy about their role in the slaughter. They weren’t happy about it at all. Some of them got drunk to help them get through the horror; others turned it into a demonic sport, however—chasing down fugitives, herding and dominating the crowds, intimidation, forcing the doomed down into the pits. Babies were swung by their feet as their heads were smashed on rocks. The Book of Deeds made a special point that the elder Maroz always remained sober. For him it was a work of passion. He never drank until after the killing.

  Chuck covered his face with his hand. The things he read made him ashamed to be alive. Sometimes he hated the world that he lived in. Jesus was right, he thought. Loving your neighbor would make the world a better place. The world could be so, so much better.

  He turned a page. When victorious Russian troops entered Byelorussia, they saw miles and miles of mounds and bulldozer scars in the ground along the highways. They didn’t understand what they were for.

  “Why would they?” Chuck mumbled, bitterly. “Stalin sent most of his millions of victims to Siberia. Much cleaner.”

  At the end of the war, the collaborators changed their identities and offered to help the Allies gain intelligence against the Communists, who were the next major threat after the defeat of the Allies.

  The Americans and Brits were desperate for intel. They hired hundreds of immigrants returning from Russian camps. Byelorussian collaborators blended in with the immigrants and got themselves hired by American intelligence. As the Third Reich was collapsing, the collaborators removed the double crosses from their collar tabs. They hid their flags, ditched their records, pretended to be escaping POW’s.

  Chuck read about the Nuremberg trials. Most Einsatzgruppen commanders had been sentenced to death at Nuremberg, but a few leaders like Maroz hid under their fake identities and escaped punishment. Others traded windfalls of intelligence against the communists in order to avoid the firing line. The Book of Deeds claimed that they’d escaped due to the fog of war.

  Maxim Maroz the elder worked as an informer for American intelligence. They were so desperate for intel that even after they began to suspect his true identity, they kept him on the payroll. They eventually brought him to America and set him up. He worked as an espionage agent until his retirement. His son became a multi-millionaire with a string of car lots. His grandson Andrew Maroz made a fortune as a media mogul. Chuck shuttered now to think about Andrew Maroz, the very man who’d told him about the location of this vault, the front man responsible for putting a million dollar bounty on his head, had such a dark family history. Maroz and Kielce were carrying out the twisted agendas planned by their fathers and grandfathers. Only now Hackworth had seized power, and he was even more cunning and ruthless.

  Chuck closed the book. He’d read enough.

  A rare eighteenth century antique Chinese-trunk lock-box rested in the back corner of the vault. He tried to open it but it was locked. He was about to break it open when he got an idea. He removed the glass key attached to the little crystal globe that Erica had hidden on his boat back in Port Gamble, the key that the antiquarian had died over. He slid the key into the lock of the Chinese trunk and turned it. The lock mechanism clicked back. He opened the trunk and let the lid fall back against its support chains. The trunk was empty other than it had what looked like a fold-up map inside. Chuck unfolded the paper, spread it out on the trunk lid, and shined his flashlight onto it. It was a diagram of some kind, an elaborate web chart of interconnected bubbles. All of the bubbles featured a name and most had lines connecting them to other bubbles. The names were not real names, however. They were Code names. The entire map would have been meaningless accept that Chuck recognized a couple of the code names—The Chin and The Hood. He recognized them because he’d encountered them on recent missions. They were both utterly appalling excuses for human beings.

  The shock of seeing their names
on a chart along with a hundred other names was a frightening moment. Who on earth were the other hundred? Was this a map of a criminal organization, a coded network of shadow players involved in the secret world of global crime? Chuck only had code names, but if he got out of here alive, he would try to find out who these criminals were that were members of the network. Maybe they’d all contributed to the bounty on his head of a million dollars.

  A chill ran down his back as he left the vault.

  As he swung the big painting back and stepped into Immortal Hall, he heard a shuffle of feet to his left. He ducked, turned, and raised his flashlight but a chair flew at him. The chair bounced off him and crashed against a table. Chuck landed hard on his side. The flashlight spun out of reach. A bearded man grabbed another chair and attacked. As he swung it downward with vicious force, Chuck rolled away. He sprung up and gained his feet as pain swelled through his shoulder.

  His tactical flashlight was on the floor, but the beam was still ignited, so he could see the dark shape of the man.

  “Who are you?” Chuck said.

  “Your worst nightmare. The man who is going to kill you with his bare hands.”

  “You’re a sick case. What, did you escape from the asylum?”

  “No, I’m with CERBERUS, but after what I do to you, they may want to lock me up there.”

  “Get a life. Back off and I won’t hurt you.”

  The attacker executed a reverse kick that caught Chuck with a boot in the chest. No sooner had Chuck landed on his back when he found the attacker sitting astride him, choking him with both hands. Chuck forced his left hand over his arm and grabbed his collar. Chuck brought his right hand over his arm to join his left hand and began to choke the attacker. Then Chuck rolled to his left, pulling the attacker over onto his back, breaking his hold.