Divine Night

by Melanie Jackson

  She didn’t want to talk about their close encounter in the gazebo either—not with God maybe listening in. However, Alex’s vast experience with creating new identities was something Harmony felt fine talking about.

  “How do you do it?” she asked, ignoring God and sexual attraction.

  “Disappear?” Alex said, still apparently able to follow her thoughts even when she didn’t voice them aloud. He didn’t pursue his explanations of the Almighty. “Various ways. You get good at faking records, faking deaths and births, and all kinds of financial sleight-of-hand so you can move your assets around. It’s getting harder, though. About the only place you can safely ‘die’ these days is in war-torn Africa.”

  “Computers?” She nodded to herself. “They’re everywhere. And databases are usually cross-referenced. Handy for me—at least sometimes.”

  “I admire you for dealing with them. I still think of them as the spawn of Satan. Certainly, in the wrong hands they are the-tools of Satan. Yet, there are ways around them. The machines are only as smart as the people who program them.”

  “I know.” She smiled a little.

  “I figured you would. You might have to give me a crash course on defeating them. It’s a technology I’ve been avoiding because of my effect on electronic things—and also because I have an aversion to anything that tyrannizes us as computers do…but I may not be able to ignore them much longer. Though I refuse to have a cell phone. I cannot understand why anyone would put themselves on an electronic leash.” Harmony couldn’t help but stare at the man next to her. The transformation of Alex was complete. The sophisticated Frenchman was gone. Now he looked, at least superficially, like any one of her wholesome activist friends who liked camping and hiking in the wilds.

  Still, she wasn’t fooled by the new facade. She had already seen what he really was. Alex moved silently, elegantly, not like a dancer but with every bit as much grace; and a whole lot more threat. Those long hands that gripped the wheel could deal death efficiently. It was amazing that the other people they encountered didn’t seem to see it.

  But his ruthlessness might be something only she noticed, because she was aware now of how lethally capable he was. Until he had put a gun in her hand and told her to shoot whatever came out of the crypt, she hadn’t been alert to anything about him except that he was the sexiest man she’d ever seen.

  “How do you not lose your sense of self?” she asked him. “I mean, changing identities all the time. It’s something I have tried to prepare for, in case I need to disappear one day, but I can’t quite imagine what it would be like.”

  “Who says I don’t lose my sense of self?”

  “You seem very much like your old self—confident and…”

  “Arrogant?” He grinned at her. His moods were mercurial. “I was originally born a Leo, you know. But my second birth happened in June. Now I am a Gemini. That seems fitting, since I have had two very different lives. I can live either with ease. And leaving behind my old life has always been easy. There was little of it that I wanted to keep.”

  “You’ve had more than two lives, it sounds like.”

  “Indeed. You should read more of my books—the new ones. The current one, supposing I can ever finish it, is a great romp.” But he didn’t sound as enthused as he should be. The idea that the great Alexandre Dumas could have writer’s block was a strange one.

  “Believe me, I have every intention of doing so the minute we find a decent bookstore or library.” Harmony took hold of the armrest and steadied herself. The road was worsening. “Do you really think you won’t make your deadline?”

  “I’ve never missed one before, but this situation is unusual.”

  “And then some,” she agreed. “I don’t suppose there is anything I can do to help with this.”

  “Probably not. But the thought is a kind one.”

  A cloud moved over the sun, and no longer trusting the sky to be benevolent, Harmony looked quickly about. But it wasn’t the harmless clouds forming overhead that she found disturbing, it was the sudden shift in light that made the gullies around her appear fleshlike, wounds carved in a giant beast. Beneath the flaking dirt there seemed to be not normal stone but gristle and bone. The earth was sick. Something had infected it. Harmony couldn’t repress a shiver.

  “It’s getting to you?” Alex asked. “I’m not surprised. Even before this recent evil, the land here was haunted. It isn’t an easy place to visit if you see ghosts. Sunrise and sunset, they gather here—humans and animals—looking for the old river that drowned them. I can see their shadow auras.”

  Harmony shivered again. She didn’t want to think about the unseen world that might be brushing up against her as they moved through it.

  “Please…talk about something else. Tell me more about when you were—”

  “Alive?” he asked.

  “Stop that! I mean still living in Paris,” she answered. Then: “Don’t be morbid, Alex. I already have the creeps.”

  “My apologies. Well, let’s see…Understand, Paris in those days was very different—emotionally—from the post-World-War city that you know. I was born at a time when the rationalism of the eighteenth century was being wooed by the new romanticism of the nineteenth. My father died when I was four, so much of what I know of him is from others. He was almost all reason and logic, at least to those he served with in the army, though not with my mother. He loved her passionately—even blindly. And I was, because of my profession but also by inclination, always an open romantic, even when it wasn’t fashionable. It was probably the company I kept. Think of the writers and composers who shared their creations in the coffeehouses every day. We were an inspiration and a goad to creativity. I still miss them.”

  “And Dumas fils? Was he also romantic?” she asked without thinking.

  “I like to believe that he was a romantic too—though he did his best to appear otherwise. I think that much of what he wrote about women was his version of rebellion.”

  “Really?”

  “If you consider it, you’ll see that it’s hard to mutiny against parental teachings when your parent is openly licentious and sets no limits on his own or his children’s behavior. There’s really no way to do it except by being tiresomely moral.”

  Harmony nodded slowly. She had read Dumas fils’ thoughts on women. He had supported the idea of education for females, but he had also been harsh with those who gave in to their sensual natures. His letters to his lovers were a mix of tenderness and criticism.

  He had also been in favor of a homeland for Jews—another romantic idea rather ahead of the political thoughts of the rest of Europe. Even without Alex’s personal reminiscences, Harmony had thought that his son must have been a very unhappy person.

  “You think it’s in the blood, then? There’s a gene for romanticism that can pass from parent to child?”

  “Perhaps. I think it can be a mistake to try and explain anyone simply by their heredity, but I have to admit that in my case—and that of my son—certain traits must be labeled as familial, not least among them a gift with words and a bloody-minded stubbornness when it comes to writing and doing what we wanted. And it must be nature, not nurture, that caused this, because my father died when I was only four and I saw little of my son until he was grown. We all grew up as wildflowers; untended if not unwanted. Our only guidance was what came within the parental seed.”

  “From what I’ve read, it seemed like a lot of wine, women, and song was going on after Dumas fils moved in with you.” Harmony regretted speaking these words almost immediately. She really didn’t want to hear anything more about Alex’s past loves. She had read some of his love letters back in college when she had taken a class in French literature, and they had been frankly erotic. She’d developed the worst crush on him and had been teased mercilessly for it. Given what she was now thinking—and what she had so recently been feeling—she didn’t want to chance Alex picking up on any stray embarrassing thoughts.

 
“Certainly women.” Alex smiled a little. “But more poetry than music—though Donizetti and Rossini were good friends of mine, and Donizetti gave me my favorite pasta recipe. And there was always politics, of course. We argued often. My family had an absolute genius for getting on the wrong side of political movements. My father and son were especially affected, because they tried so hard to shape social morality with these means and took each failure to heart. That they persisted in these endeavors even in the face of authorities’ open disdain did not endear them to those in power, especially not with Saint Germain and the Dark Man always in the background making sure that we were kept from office or any other form of mass influence.”

  “Except, they failed with you and your writing.”

  “To a degree. Much of my work was actually suppressed.”

  “Really?” This was startling. Alexandre Dumas had been one of the most prolific writers to ever live. That he could have written even more stories and plays that were censored was amazing.

  “Yes. It sadly is true.”

  “You were made Minister of Antiquities, though,” Harmony pointed out, then winced as she was thrown against the jeep’s door. The road was little better than a goat path now, and just as narrow. “You led the first dig on Pompeii.”

  “They appointed me only to get me out of the country during the elections. Hmm. No one knows about this except tiresome scholars. You’ve been studying me a bit too much, I think. You need a new hobby.” Alex couldn’t let go of the wheel on this rough road to wag his finger at her, but she knew he wanted to.

  “Literature major in college. I wrote a paper on you,” she confessed as she was again tossed against the jeep’s door. Her right arm was beginning to feel bruised. “Damn! Where the hell are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alex admitted. “But we are headed in the right direction.”

  “How can you tell?” Harmony asked. “Everything looks the same and I haven’t seen a sign in hours.”

  “Intuition. Or maybe Fate. In any event,” Alex said blithely, “you will find that I am always exactly where I need to be.”

  “And here I was thinking we were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Harmony muttered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Victor Hugo: Would you believe it, there’s a wretched scribbler who claims Vigny invented historical drama!

  Alexandre Dumas: The fool! As though everyone didn’t know that it was I!

  At present I am living by my penmanship, but someday I shall be living by my pen.

  —Dumas père when hired as a copyist by the Duc d’Orleans

  Normally Alex didn’t like flying, but he was actually quite pleasantly distracted from his usual nervousness by watching Harmony alternately scowl and bite her lip as she read and reread the file on her portable computer. Watching her hand hover and then retreat from the delete button, he recognized her difficulty at once. It was first-book-itis, a condition that rendered a new author incapable of deciding when it was time to call a chapter finished and move on to the next. In his experience, it was best to let a writer work his way through decision-making processes alone whenever possible, but beyond a certain point there were no more lessons to be learned from editing and reediting.

  Finally, when he could endure it no longer, he decided to take pity on her.

  “Would you like me to read that? I promise I can be honest and yet humane with my comments.”

  Harmony hesitated for only a moment.

  “Yes, please—if you truly don’t mind. I’m afraid that I’m so close to this that I can’t tell if what I’ve written is actually passable or if it’s just crap.” She tried to hand him the portable computer, but he shook his head.

  “Best if you hold it. I’m hard on electronics. You’ll notice that I don’t wear a watch or have a cell phone. That isn’t solely because I loathe them.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Alex began to read, hoping that Harmony had some talent. He could fix anything, of course, but it would be better if she was actually gifted.

  Her first sentence made him laugh.

  THE SPIDER By Anonymous

  Prologue

  “I want that sodding son of a bitch’s head on a platter!” Captain Jack roared, upsetting the stack of unread reports gathering dust on the edge of his desk.

  “Was that with or without an apple?” inquired the lately retired Detective Inspector Dan Tracy, sotto voce from the back of the room. He had been called in by Captain Jack to assist in the town’s crisis in the vain hope that Tracy could solve the case without recoursing to his former and unwanted (at least by Captain Jack) employers at the Yard.

  No one so much as cracked a smile at the quip. The quiet town of Dunnstone was having a bout of upper-class hysterics, and the constabulary were all too tired—too bloody pissed—from chasing this phantom spectre over slate rooftops of the picturesque village and down blind, cobblestone alleys to find anything humorous in Tracy baiting the chief.

  “What were you lot doing last night that you managed to miss him?” The chief’s question was purely rhetorical, which was just as well, as the shaken bobbies were understandably reticent about answering this unfair accusation; they’d done all they could to defend against the foe’s incursion. It just wasn’t enough to stop the seemingly supernatural force that was attacking Dunnstone.

  There were few lasting stars in England’s firmament of famous crime—Jack the Ripper, Deacon Brodie, perhaps Robin Hood. But a new sun was racing toward ascendancy in Albion’s night sky. A nouvelle folk hero of the environmental movement was blazing criminal trails, and, according to the chief—and most unfortunately for the men in the briefing room—the Dunnstone police constabulary had been cast in the role of bumbling foe.

  Added to their woes, Captain Harry Jack was very unhappy about heading up the local chapter of the Keystone Kops, and said so frequently and with increasing bitterness to anyone who would listen. As his wife and friends were avoiding him these days, that left the luckless men in his employ to hear the ever more acrid tirades. Consequently, every last man who worked under the irate chief was also very, very unhappy, and growing more bitter by the day.

  The point had been driven home over the past weeks that Dunnstone’s forces of law and order were no match for the master criminal who, with preeminent artistry and dextrous hands, left behind a wake of dismantled alarm systems, empty safes and—most distressing to the victims—missing computer hard drives and captured diskettes whose contents showed up in the hands of “sensation-seeking reporters” and the “lunatic fringe” that made up the political arm of the environmental movement.

  And the private detectives hired in London by the hysterical victims, the police’s paid snitches, the story-hungry tabloids, none of them had a reasonable guess as to who The Spider might be. Even a gigantic reward for “information leading to the arrest of…” had failed to elicit a favorable response from the underworld. It was frustrating for the men on the side of law and order.

  The weary constables filed out of the captain’s small office a short while later, looking and feeling thoroughly mauled.

  “Harry.” Dan Tracy paused in the chief’s door.

  “What?” Harry had calmed down some, but he was still growling.

  “You’re going to have to call in the Yard.” Tracy’s tone was apologetic as he stated the distasteful fact. “The press is going to get wind that The Spider’s moved north, and you’ll have hostile press and the Yard shoved up your arse if you haven’t made an effort to coordinate with London.”

  “I know,” the chief surprised him by answering. “But I still want to be the one who catches the cocky bastard. He has some nerve waltzing up north to have a flutter on my home turf.”

  “Well, yes. I see your point, but you shouldn’t take it so personally—”

  “Well, I bloody well do!”

  “—because he’s after Carter! And only Carter. No one else lives up here.”

  That wasn’t strictly true; Du
nnstone boasted a population of nearly a thousand souls, some of them well-heeled enough to attract regular burglars. But none of them mattered in terms of the current crime wave.

  Harry Jack glared at his friend but didn’t argue. They both knew that The Spider was after anyone and everyone who had stuck a thumb in Terry Carter’s latest mining venture. Harry could even sympathize with The Spider’s feelings about what Carter did to the lands he bought, because “rape” was too mild a word to describe his methods of mineral extraction.

  But that didn’t alter the fact that a third high-profile robbery had been carried out at the Carter estate, the sixth theft from Carter’s many properties. Those were the seventh, eighth, and ninth in a string of burglaries directed against both Carter and Tewson, Tewson being the man who’d arranged for the probably illegal sale of undeveloped land to Carter.

  “I’ll authorize double shifts. Double pay. But I must find that bloody thief before he strikes again,” the chief said emphatically, marking each syllable with a flat-handed blow to his desk that shook his overfilled tray and brought his magazine pile ever closer to the edge of the desk.

  Dan Tracy rolled his eyes, but left the room without further argument. They could quadruple the hours and the pay and it wouldn’t make any difference. The Spider was a criminal like a character of wildest fiction, and Dunnstone’s meager police force wasn’t going to catch him.

  “Wow,” Alex said at last. He added enthusiastically, “I’m impressed. This is excellent for a first draft. Do you have more?”

  “A few chapters—actually quite a few chapters—but none of them is very polished. I keep thinking I may be writing for the wrong reasons.”