That left the lieutenant’s uniform, a spare linen shirt, a hat, shaving gear, and a pair of shoes and socks, which the detective had not yet donned. There was a second concealed packet of money as well. A lot of it. And, at the bottom of the bag, the all-important documents that could save a man’s life: a lettre de transit and an exit visa for Remus Maxwell.
He stared at these last two items for a long time.
“It’s insane—not even to be thought of.” The Chameleon spoke the denial aloud. But already, his voice had begun to take on the mellifluous inflection of the great detective. His posture changed, straightened. “This could put you in a sticky situation, old chap. Best give it some thought.”
Good advice. Though this situation was hardly as sticky as the one he was fleeing. After all, though there was an assassin involved, the killer would have no reason to suspect that the great detective still lived. And the lettre de transit and the exit visa—these were worth more than gold.
Never an indecisive person, The Chameleon turned to the detective’s body and began undressing it. Everything was set carefully aside. Watch, fob, cufflinks, and signet ring first. Then came the suit. There was only a little blood on the coat, and he preferred to wear it instead of the uniform.
Using a handkerchief and his burnous, he opened his own skin-bag and used the last of the brackish water for bathing and to have a shave. The job wasn’t a complete one, but would have to do.
When his bath was done and the rapidly cooling body stripped of all outer garments, the new Remus Maxwell took hold of the corpse’s ankles and dragged it toward the side door where freight was loaded. He felt a twinge of regret for being so impolite to his benefactor’s carcass, but it was necessary that the body not be found for a while. Hiding it in someone’s luggage was not an option; a maid or valet was bound to notice it fairly quickly.
“Good-bye, old chap,” he said softly as he tumbled the corpse out into the cold sunset that surrendered the desert to night’s icy grip. “Thanks awfully for the help. And for the clothes.”
A bitter wind answered him, and Remus slid the door quickly shut. The cold abraded his nearly naked body and kept him from further sentiments of parting.
Remus dressed swiftly. The clothes fit well, except for the shoes, which he regarded with disfavor. They were too narrow. However, beggars most definitely didn’t get to be choosers, and in any event, he was alone, so he didn’t bother complaining out loud.
It took only a moment more to repack the valise, minus some of the currency, which he slipped into his pockets, and he was carefully settling his hat on his head when the train began to slow for the next station.
“And let the games begin,” he murmured.
Putting a polite smile in place, Remus opened the door that led to the last of the dining cars and away from the assassin. He entered the empty car casually, looking out for anyone else in a red and white burnous. No burnouses were present. In fact, there were no diners of any kind, just the lingering scent of lamb and mint jelly.
Two minutes later, he left the train, walking unhurriedly as he headed for the guarded exit from the train station.
Whatever the previous plan had been, Remus Maxwell was now going to Tangiers.
Alex paused long enough to pour himself what he chose to think of as a congratulatory cognac for beginning this book. His hands shook a little as he replaced the decanter, but he ignored their trembling.
“Ah, milady—those had been exciting days indeed! It was a pity that no one will ever know that it is all more or less true.”
The blue-eyed feline tilted her head and sneered a little. She wasn’t fooled by the hearty tone. She knew precisely how much effort he was expending on this attempted exorcism with paper and ink, and how frightened he was that he would fail to rid himself of his guilt.
CHAPTER ONE
General Dumas saw a priest, made his confession, and then died in his wife’s arms on the stroke of midnight. Alexandre, who had been sent to stay with a neighbor and was fast asleep, was roused by a loud knocking on the door. Without the slightest sign of fear, the boy ran to the door and attempted to unbar it.
“Where are you going, Alexandre?” the neighbor asked.
“You can see plainly,” Alexandre answered. “I am going to let in my Papa who has come to say good-bye.”
But no one was seen at the door and the boy was sent back to bed. The next morning, the neighbor was told the bad news of the general’s passing and left to break it to Alexandre that his father was dead.
“My poor child,” the woman said. “Your father whom you love so well is dead.”
“Papa dead? But what does that mean?” Alexandre asked.
“It means you shall never see him again because the good God has taken him to Himself.”
“And where does the good God live?”
“In the sky.”
Alexandre said no more, but as soon as he was dressed he went home to his father’s study where a gun was hanging on the wall. He took it down and marched up the stairs. On the landing he met his mother, covered in tears.
“Where are you going, my poor boy?” she asked.
“I am going to kill the good God who has killed Papa and taken him to heaven.”
His mother dropped to her knees and took him in her arms. “You must not say things like that, my pet. We are already wretched enough as it is.”
—An account of the death of General Dumas
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
—Alexandre Dumas père
New Year’s Day, 2007
He had seen a dead man walking.
Which shouldn’t have surprised Alex much since he, too, was a dead man and quite able to move about as he willed. Yet Alex was very surprised because he had killed this man himself in Tangier in 1943. He’d ripped the heart out of his chest and then tossed the body off of a seawall where it rolled down a rocky cliff and into a roiling ocean whipped to frenzy by a sudden storm. The retelling of this event was to be the exciting climax of his new “novel”—though he might substitute a knife for his bare fist because it was more plausible.
Yet it now seemed that the impossible had happened and the sea had prematurely rendered up its dead. At least one of them. Maybe she couldn’t stomach Saint Germain any more than Alex could. Perhaps this was what happened when even hell wouldn’t take in heaven’s rejects.
The timing was unusual, though. Why would Saint Germain appear on the day after Alex began to tell the story of how they met? All answers he considered made him shiver.
Their eyes met as the lean man sauntered by Alex on the opposite side of a busy street. He continued down Rue Royale, passing Maxim’s and then disappearing down another street, leaving a trail in the air behind him that had other passersby wrinkling their noses as they passed through. Alex didn’t smell him above the car exhaust, but he could see the psychic trail of smog-colored miasma that boiled behind him.
Perhaps this man was a very good actor, but Alex was ready to swear that there was no recognition of his nemesis in the man’s blank black gaze. Yet it had to be Saint Germain. For one thing, only the Dark Man’s get had those hell-black eyes. Alex should know, because behind his own tinted lenses, he had the same shark eyes. But more distinct than that was the creature’s aura. It was the same boiling gray and red aura that had always surrounded the late Saint Germain. It was a signature, a fingerprint. No two people ever had the same exact aura. Yes, this was the Dark Man’s evil legacy.
“Alex, cher?” His companion touched his hand. Her fingers were an almost ethereal white and her hair golden blond. Her aura was a sunny yellow—just what he preferred in a woman. “What is wrong?”
“Wrong?” Alex forced himself to relax his posture and smile at the woman—Collette? Claudette?—he had chosen to spend his evening with. He felt a pang of sadness that passed nostalgia and neared actual pain. She was young—heartbreak
ingly so. They all were, though. No one was as old as he was. No one living. “Why, nothing, chérie.”
“Who was that man?” she asked, her green eyes slightly curious, but only slightly.
“No one really. Just one of my harsher critics. We came to blows once.” That was an understatement. He didn’t think it quite covered smashing through a man’s sternum and ripping his still-beating heart out of his chest, but he wasn’t about to say anything that would upset the evening.
Alex stroked a hand over the young woman’s wrist, testing her pulse, willing her to forget about Saint Germain. It was a challenge, because Saint Germain exuded immense sex appeal. Even Alex was aware of it.
“Is he French?” Her profile was lovely as she looked down the street where Saint Germain’s doppelganger had disappeared. Alex stroked her again, and her aura shifted to a soft golden yellow of candlelight with hints of burnt orange.
“Partly. Probably. No one knows for sure. The man is…an enigma. And a bore. So let us not waste time on him.”
“Oh. I thought he was an actor. He’s very pretty.” She didn’t know what the word enigma meant and Alex didn’t bother to explain; he hadn’t selected her because he was in the mood to play Pygmalion. Why expend the effort to educate her about anything? He would never see her again. She was to be a moment’s joy and nothing more. He didn’t allow any woman to be anything more to him.
“Come, chérie,” he said, making another gentle push against her thoughts. “We shall be late for the theater.”
The smile she turned on him was blank but lovely. She was exactly what he had set out to find. He tried not to feel disappointed that he had succeeded in finding her.
CHAPTER TWO
I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.
—Alexandre Dumas
He is blamed for being entertaining and prolific and prodigal. Would he have been greater had he been boring, sterile and miserly?
—Henri Clouard on Dumas père
Once the guests had gone, Dumas would take over my father’s desk and set to writing. The words flowed from his pen with incredible ease. He never reread or corrected anything. He had in front of him a packet of large sheets of white paper, wrote on one side of them only and tossed the sheets, once they were covered with writing, to the ground without giving any further thought to them. His secretaries would collect them later and put them in order. This work went on most of the night. He slept only a few hours in the morning.
—Henri Lhote, Souvenirs sur Alexandre Dumas père
Spring, 2007
Alex shoved aside his collection of yellowing scandal sheets that obscured his desk, a decorative affair from the old Persian room at Monte Cristo. The top was made of tortoiseshell and bronze marquetry and came from the palace of some potentate. Alex had repurchased the desk and a few other things from his estate after his “death.”
Though it annoyed his secretary, he read the American and British tabloids at least weekly. When Millie asked why, he told her that he loved the absurd. That wasn’t the entire truth. The rags were where mention of certain types of strange events often first appeared. For instance, it was in the scandal sheets that he first learned about the timely death of the Dark Man in New York. An investigation had satisfied him that the man who had killed the Dark Man was none other than his literary hero, Lord Byron.
Alex’s favorite tabloid was The Weekly World News. He told his secretary that he liked to keep up with Bat Boy sightings, but that, too, was a lie. The last edition had some very interesting stories about a burned-out ghost town in Mexico where some sort of werewolf creature had appeared. There had been few specifics, but something about the headline set his nerves to tingling. Alex checked the date. The paper was two weeks old. Probably it was too late to do any useful follow-up. Probably. Still, the itch at the base of his psyche was not settling itself. And though the timing was dreadful, he felt compelled to try.
Alex glanced at the notes for his new book that sat in a reproachful huddle at the edge of the desk. His attention had been only half given to what he had written, and he knew the notes were a mess and his secretary, Millicent Pierce, would complain bitterly when she began trying to transcribe them. Two centuries of practice had allowed him to write even when distracted, but he greatly preferred to focus his concentration on one task at a time. He sighed. It was annoying that the reappearance of Saint Germain and these stories about ghosts and monsters in Mexico should happen now when he had a book due.
Well, one-crisis at a time. The first thing he had to do was write a second, coherent draft of the first chapter of Night Train to Casablanca. He had delayed writing on it for several weeks, feeling a strange reluctance to tell this story now that the process had begun. He had had some trouble concentrating last night when the shadows of old ghosts had seemed endless. But now it was morning, and the sun was shining as it should in the spring. He could write now. Alex exhaled slowly and allowed his mind to let go of mysteries in modern Mexico and turn back to 1943. He picked up a pen.
Chapter One The Chameleon Makes a Friend
Crowds! How he loved them. There was nothing like a port town for getting lost in. It assimilated foreigners with joy, delighted to accept their money, their goods, their many plans and dreams. There was a flourishing trade in treason too—and despair as well—but that, like all black-market activities, was at least partially hidden. And Tangier, the White City, was so beautiful that it made it easy to forget both the danger within and the unfriendly, arid lands without. One might also forget that there was a prison.
Remus Maxwell—for The Chameleon had decided to remain the detective for the time being—sat in the cold sunshine of an outdoor bistro, the Café de Paris, enjoying his coffee and fresh croissant and watching the people stroll and scurry and march by. There were dark-skinned Africans, tall men with hawk-nosed faces and hard eyes. There were Arabs too, of course, and Indians, but also Greeks, Britons, and many Europeans. Laborers, refugees, fishermen, traders, and omnipresent Spanish police and soldiers—for Tangier was occupied these days. It must be so to keep the Germans out, sí? But even so, there were so many faces, so many styles of clothes, so many voices, all doing business in the supposedly neutral territory that was second in popularity only to Switzerland. Spanish and French, both familiar to The Chameleon, were the loudest of all dialects, but there was some German and English too. The babble of tongues was delightfully cacophonous.
He had been there for a week already, having come in on the Cape Malabata Road from Cape Spartel where a fishing vessel had dropped him—a town so lovely and untouched that even in winter it wore masses of vibrant rock roses and cork oaks. It was hard to believe that there was a war raging nearby. And the happy fact was that he could easily remain submerged in the foreign rabble while he found suitable transport to healthier climes.
Remus paid for his meal with some of the great detective’s purloined currency and then strolled for the quays. He enjoyed ambling the palmlined promenade that bordered the golden shore where Atlantic and Mediterranean met, though this was not solely what attracted him there every morning. There were always newly arrived ships tied up at the piers and docks, unloading cargo—salt, lamp oil, fish, and humans, always more humans—and replenishing their stocks of fuel and water from the dockside reservoirs and tanks that held the precious liquids that fueled travel.
He stood in the shadow of a water tank and evaluated his transportation options. A Sudanese fishing vessel carrying tuna, an Algerian oil tanker, other smaller boats that could get him to Gibraltar but no further. Sadly, there was nothing that interested him today. He would have to wait, spend another night looking at the twinkling lights of Spain and planning what next to do.
Remus next turned his eyes to the shallow pools where the seabirds congregated. There were a few herons picking delicately at the water. Farther out were pelicans, less fastidious with their table manners, and above them both were the ubiquitous seagulls. They, too, con
tributed to the babble.
There was a flicker of movement at the corner of his eye, a flash of color that caused a ripple of unpleasant awareness. He turned his head slowly, making no other betraying movement as he scanned the crowd. It was difficult to see into the milling throng, but he was almost certain that he caught a glimpse of a familiar red and white burnous. There was no sign of the Walther P-38 that had killed the great detective, but that didn’t mean the man was unarmed. One could carry an entire arsenal in the folds of those robes. The red and white burnous seemed to be traveling with a second cloaked figure, this one in white.
“Well, how bloody annoying,” Remus said softly. “Why didn’t you stay in Casablanca?”
If he recognized the burnous, the converse could be true of that man and Remus’s suit. It might be time for a change of wardrobe.
And identity?
No, not yet, The Chameleon decided. There were too many benefits to being the great detective. And it was very unlikely that anyone had actually met the real Remus Maxwell; not around here.
The man in the red and white burnous was annoying, though. This was a problem that had to be dealt with or it would spoil everything. Perhaps it was time to make its owner see reason. One way or another.
Remus turned and followed in the general direction the red burnous had gone. At a guess, the two men were headed for the Grand Socco, the giant market at the entrance to the old medina. Remus hadn’t spent a lot of time in the old Arab quarter; he felt more at home among the villas and mansions of the Montagne where the wealthy congregated than among the attractive but less affluent sugar-cube houses where the merchants and workers lived.
He heard the Grand Socco before he saw it. The cobbled squares echoed with voices, laughing children, shrilling mothers, merchants calling out their slates of goods, and the unhappy bleatings of the goats and sheep that would end the day on someone’s dinner table. The smell of spice and produce was everywhere, masking the less pleasant odors of dead fish, slaughtered chickens, and other butchered wares that hung in the open with a complete lack of concern for the flies and other insects that congregated on the meat.
Divine Night Page 2
