“I have a taximeter car outside,” says Fawnsley, already moving toward the door.
Soter finishes his drink, folds his newspaper, and picks up his coat and hat. Fawnsley pauses to make sure he’s being followed, and for an instant Soter feels the strongest urge to remain where he is, and let this Quayle find someone else to do his dirty work—for at such an hour, dirty work is all it can be. But it’s not just tiredness that causes him briefly to reconsider, or the warmth of the pub against the chill of the night. It is disquiet, such as a man might experience upon walking close to the edge of a precipice, and knowing that only the choice of an instant stands between him and oblivion.
“Mr. Soter?”
And then it passes.
“I’m coming,” says Soter.
And is damned.
* * *
PARKER LOOKED AT THE photograph of John Soter. It was formal in setting, with Soter seated against a neutral backdrop in a well-pressed sergeant’s uniform. He was clean-shaven, but looked older than his years. According to Johnston, Soter was only twenty-five when the picture was taken, but Parker would not have been surprised had another decade been added to that age. Each preceding generation led a harder life than the last. The evidence was etched into their faces, and haunted their eyes.
“Is this an official photograph?” Parker asked.
“No,” said Johnston. “The British military didn’t take pictures of its soldiers. If men wanted a portrait, they had to pay for it themselves. Soter probably had that one made for his wife, and a few close friends. After he disappeared, it was one of the photographs circulated to the public in an effort to trace him.”
“You said he was an officer,” said Louis, “but he’s wearing sergeant’s stripes.”
“He earned a battlefield commission to second lieutenant after Festubert in 1915, and to lieutenant at Vimy Ridge in 1916. It made him, in the language of the time, a ‘temporary gentleman.’ Had he stayed in the service after the war, he might have been allowed to keep the rank of second lieutenant, although probably not. Then he was shipped home, and the point became moot.”
“Did he ever find Maulding, this man he was employed to look for?” asked Parker.
“No, Maulding remained missing. Reading between the lines, it was assumed that Soter might have murdered him as well, and hidden the body.”
“Why?”
“Money, possibly. Maulding was a wealthy man.”
“So he killed Maulding for his money, and all these others—men, women, and children—because he was insane? That doesn’t sound right.”
“You’re the detective,” said Johnston. “I don’t have much more for you on Soter. He was last seen alive at the rail station at Maidensmere—that’s in the Norfolk Broads, in the southeast of England. Lionel Maulding had a home there, Bromdun Hall. The newspaper reports suggest that Soter left a note at Bromdun Hall before he vanished. Its contents were never made public, but if it was a suicide note, he didn’t supply a body to go with it.
“One last thing about Maulding, though: as a book collector, he retained a particular interest in the occult. His nephew, a professional idler named Sebastian Forbes, was the sole beneficiary of his will, a couple of university libraries apart. Forbes put his uncle’s entire collection up for sale after the executor of the estate succeeded in having Maulding declared legally dead for purposes of probate. The catalog caused a hell of a stir when it was issued.”
“Let me guess,” said Parker. “The executor of the estate was Atol Quayle.”
“The very same.”
Parker regarded again the photograph of John Soter, and thought of Johnston’s description of him: lost.
“It seems as though Soter was keeping bad company,” he said.
“Does that make him bad, too?” asked Angel.
“If only by association,” said Louis. “But all those people didn’t kill themselves.”
“That doesn’t mean Soter killed them,” said Parker.
“Do you feel sorry for him?” Johnston asked. “I know I do. I’ve seen his service record. A lot of them were destroyed during a bombing raid in World War Two, but his survived because it had been set aside during the murder investigations. The Forty-Seventh Division earned over twenty-five hundred awards for bravery during World War One, and Soter received the Military Cross for his actions at Vimy Ridge, along with that second promotion. He was a brave man, but the war did something terrible to him, and the loss of his family finished the job.”
Johnston was keeping his gaze averted from Parker, who understood that perhaps Johnston wished he hadn’t started speaking at all, not once he began to notice the increasing similarities between these two men: the first born before the turn of the last century, and the second seated beside him; separated by almost one hundred years, but united by their professions, by violence, and their experience of loss.
“Yes,” said Parker. “I feel sorry for him, too.”
* * *
SOTER, BECOMING INDISPENSABLE TO Quayle, or believing himself to be so; and his wife warning him against this association, for she meets Quayle once, seemingly by accident, on the Strand. Quayle greets her, although they have never crossed paths before, and she will wonder at how he comes to recognize her, she who should only be to him another face in the crowd.
“I didn’t like him,” she tells her husband. “He had pitiless eyes.”
“He’s a lawyer,” Soter replies. “They have their pity excised at birth.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Then again, I’m no lawyer.”
“And if you take his money, must you be pitiless, too? What is it you do for him, this Quayle?”
I find people who don’t want to be found, he thinks, and help others who would prefer to slip their moorings. I offer bribes to those who ought to remain quiet, for the sake of the reputations of their betters as well as their own good health, but if there’s rough stuff needed to reinforce the message, I leave it to coarser men, and pretend to know nothing of what follows. I shadow husbands who are cheating on their wives, and record the dates and times of their assignations; and I shadow women sleeping with men other than their husbands, and who will suffer more for their failings because of their sex. I conduct background checks, often on individuals of no apparent interest to anyone, and by the end am no wiser as to why they should have attracted Quayle’s attention to begin with, except to be certain it will do them only harm. Sometimes, he sends me to private libraries to peruse the shelves, with a list of titles to be on the watch for, even when the contents are not for sale. I tell myself that Quayle merely marks them in the event of some future auction, but I know better.
Little by little, I am selling my soul to him.
But “Nothing of interest” is all he offers in reply to his wife’s question.
“And how did he know who I was?” she asks.
Which is a more interesting question, and one Soter raises when next he is summoned to Quayle’s presence.
“Would you expect me to hire a man for delicate work without first knowing something of his own circumstances?” Quayle answers, and Soter is not hypocritical enough to find this unreasonable. He only wonders to whom Quayle entrusted the task of investigating him, and decides that, if Quayle knew what his wife looked like, then the lawyer probably undertook the duty himself.
“Now, I have another errand for you…”
Then the war comes, and every manner of dying. By the end of it, Soter is alone.
Alone, but for Atol Quayle.
* * *
THEY WERE NOW THE last table in the restaurant. A few people remained at the bar, the crowd bolstered by an influx following the conclusion of the jazz performance, but still no one was pressing them to leave. On the contrary, the offer of another round on the house was made, although Parker and Angel politely declined, Parker having drunk more that night than he had in years, and Angel, having eaten little, being mindful of his intake.
“And the
Atlas?” Parker said.
Because this, according to Johnston, was at the heart of it all, the prize sought by the man who had used the Quayle name only recently in the United States, despite the fact that the last true Quayle appeared to have died halfway through the preceding century.
“I didn’t write down what I discovered about it,” said Johnston. “There isn’t enough material to justify the paper, and as with the business affairs of Atol Quayle, I was reluctant to draw too much attention to myself by asking the right questions of the wrong people. Mostly, I just lurked on odd forums, and relied on mentions in other books. But if I’m right, Quayle is looking for the Atlas Regnorum Incogniturum, also variously known as the Atlas of Unknown Realms, or more commonly the Fractured Atlas. Depending on the source, it either doesn’t exist, shouldn’t exist, or exists simultaneously in a multiplicity of different forms. It’s alleged to depict universes beyond, or alongside, our own, but also reflects this one.”
“To what purpose?” Louis asked. “If these are imaginary universes—”
“Not ‘imaginary,’ ” Johnston corrected. “Unknown, or not proven to exist, which isn’t the same thing. There’s a whole branch of theoretical physics devoted to this: the idea that all possible pasts and futures are real, and each is represented by a universe, like lines diverging from a central axis before moving farther and farther away from the source, so they resemble the branches of an infinite tree. There’s a universe where we didn’t meet for dinner tonight, a universe where Angel accepted a glass of brandy on the house, a universe where you didn’t ask that last question.”
“The question stands,” said Louis, “so that’s at least two universes in which I asked it and didn’t get an answer: What’s the purpose of the Atlas?”
“To allow one universe to flow into, and alter, the other.”
“Excuse me?”
“The best analogy I discovered is that of a pane of glass standing between two artists, each of them with a pen in hand. One draws what he sees on the glass, and the other draws what she sees. The pane is then flipped, and the reality on one side becomes the reality on the opposite side, but holding the form drawn on the glass. In other words, it looks almost the same, but isn’t.
“And for now, that’s pretty much all I have, except that the Atlas has some connection to the Netherlands. It might have been made there, because it was certainly discovered in Tilburg toward the end of the sixteenth century, although allusions to it long precede that discovery. In any case, there are more Dutch references to it than any other, which ties in with the passports your FBI contact mentioned.”
No one said anything. In some other universe, four men were dismissing the idea of a book that could alter worlds, but in that universe two of those men had not glimpsed vellum pages from an unknown source disrupting the typography of a collection of fairy tales, and causing mutations to appear among its illustrations.
“You did well, Bob,” said Parker, finally.
“What now?” Johnston asked.
“We’ll follow the two leads—the Netherlands and London—until we find Quayle and Mors.”
“I’d like to go with you,” said Johnston. “I have some money put by, and can pay my own way. There are libraries in England with source material that might be useful, and collectors that don’t advertise their presence on the Internet. I have names, and contacts, that you don’t. Also, I know about books, and whatever the truth of what’s happening here, it comes down to a book. Finally, I’ve got nothing better to do. I’m an aging man, and I’ve never been outside the continental United States. I’ve only seen the world through the pages of books, but I figure it might be interesting to have a different point of comparison before I die.”
“Quayle and Mors are killers,” said Parker. “If they’re intelligent, which they are, they’re expecting us to come after them, and they’ll be prepared.”
“I understand,” said Johnston, “and I’m not pretending for a moment that I’m not frightened by them, or disturbed by all that’s been done in the name of the Atlas. But this is something I can do, and better than you or most anyone else I know. If Quayle has the Atlas, or most of it, then it stands to reason that if I can follow the book’s trail, it will lead us to him. I’ve reached the limits of what I can achieve from a desk in Portland.”
“Man says he can pay his way,” said Angel. “And we’ll need beer money.”
“We’re not taking his money,” said Parker.
“Killjoy,” said Angel.
Parker turned back to Johnston.
“I think you just talked your way into a trip,” he said. “And we can cover your expenses. We have some federal funding.”
“Damn,” said Johnston, “I knew I was right to cheat on my taxes.”
* * *
SOTER, IN THE OFFICES of the firm of Quayle; Sebastian Forbes slouched in a chair: this fop, this pauper with a millionaire’s tastes, anticipating the death of his uncle so that he may wallow in dissipation.
“We should like you to find Mr. Lionel Maulding and return him to the safe and loving embrace of his family,” says Quayle. “That is a fair summation of the situation, is it not, Mr. Forbes?”
And Forbes nods, like the idiot he is, because he does not know the truth of the situation, not as Quayle does. But neither does Soter, and nor will he ever, not even as he watches the Atlas burn, and glimpses the end of all things.
* * *
BOB JOHNSTON TOOK A cab back to his hotel near Penn Station, while Parker returned to his room at Angel and Louis’s place. He was tired, and unused to drinking more than a glass or two of wine. He went to bed, but was woken in the dead hours by a man shouting, yet when he went to the window, he could see no one outside. He drank some water, and listened to the voice. It seemed to fade in and out, and Parker thought that it might have come from one of the neighboring buildings, although their residents and condo boards weren’t the kind to tolerate noisy drunks, or not for long, not unless they were very wealthy noisy drunks. Under other circumstances, he might have gone to investigate, or called the cops, but he was too weary for the former, and Angel and Louis would not have appreciated the involvement of the latter.
Parker heard footsteps below, and Angel coughing. Moments later came the sound of someone moving in the kitchen. Parker went downstairs, and found Angel making hot milk.
“You okay?” Parker asked.
“Can’t sleep. This helps, or maybe just making it helps. By the time it’s ready, I’m usually tired again. You?”
“I heard someone shouting.”
“Yeah? I didn’t hear anything.”
“It was pretty loud. I think I can still hear it.”
“Huh. Show me where.”
* * *
QUAYLE OPENED THE DOOR behind the library shelves, using a key that he kept always in the right pocket of his trousers. As he turned the key, the lock released, but it did so with the sound of many mechanisms, the echoes gradually fading until they fell beyond the realm of hearing,
Behind the door stood a wall—and no wall. Both were possible, and so both states existed. A naked man hung suspended against the void beyond: a mute Lionel Maulding, still enduring his torments almost a century after his disappearance, although Quayle had largely ceased to notice the blood, so familiar was he with the show. Quayle could not have said where Maulding was, precisely. He supposed that some might have called it Hell, had Hell existed, except that Maulding had done nothing to earn this punishment beyond hunting for, and finding, the Atlas. Planes of existence held spaces between them, and in one of those rifts Lionel Maulding now dwelt.
At least he was not alone: others hung with him, each representing a life that had come into contact with the Atlas—and frequently, by extension, with Quayle—and ended as a consequence. He could name them all, even after all this time, right back to his former partner, Couvret. But only one interested him at this moment, because only one had changed.
When last Quayle had lo
oked on John Soter, he was pendent and unmoving, his eyes, nose, and ears sewn shut with catgut, his arms and legs restrained. Inside that body, Soter’s trapped consciousness roamed Delville Wood and Vimy Ridge, or walked through the shell of a bombed-out terraced house in Stepney, searching for a wife and two children long gone from this world, their bodies reduced to fragments of flesh and bone by German Gotha bombers. Quayle had been hearing stories for decades about the figure of a man glimpsed wandering Stepney by night, dressed in an old suit, calling a woman’s name. He thought it might be Soter, or some aspect of him, and wondered if a similar figure might have been seen at Delville, or Vimy. The ways of the Atlas were peculiar, even to Quayle.
Now Quayle stared at Soter—and Soter stared back at him. He had somehow torn the catgut from his mouth, shredding his lips in the process, and done the same with the threads through the lids of his eyes, so that he appeared to be weeping tears of blood.
“Here!” Soter cried. “I’m here! Find me! Help me!”
As he spoke, the catgut tried to wind its way back through the holes in order to blind and silence him again, but he resisted by blinking his eyes and opening his mouth, and all the time he continued to shout—“Help me!”—until finally the catgut overwhelmed him, and he was quiet once more.
* * *
“IT’S GONE NOW,” SAID Parker, as he and Angel stood in the guest room.
“Someone’s bad dream,” said Angel.
“Must have been. It sounded like he was calling for help.”
“If you hear it again, let me or Louis know.”
“I will.”
But the voice did not return, and eventually Parker slept.
THE PARTNER
HE SHOULD NEVER HAVE JOURNEYED to england, couvret thought. He should have stayed in the Netherlands, or returned to France to die, there to be buried in the same country as his wife and child, even if he could never have discovered the precise location of their bodies. He was first told that they had fallen victim to the red plague, but later discovered this not to be the case. Marianne and Jeanne had died at the end of a sword, slaughtered by those who were seeking Couvret himself, and in his absence were forced to content themselves with his family. Of the exact circumstances of their end only their killers might speak, but Couvret could guess the general, if not the specific: to be doubly penetrated, first by rape, then by a blade. Often in such cases the women were imprisoned, and the girls sent to convents, where they might yet be saved by immersion in the tenets of Catholicism. Marianne and Jeanne, he now knew, had not been so fortunate.
A Book of Bones Page 19
