by Dan Willis
“What?” Alex asked, trying not to be defensive.
“What about the murdered girl?” he said. “The calculator for the government.”
“That’s not my case,” Alex said, though he saw how whoever killed Alice Cartwright might not know that.
“She has access to government secrets,” Iggy pointed out.
“And she’s been communicating with someone in a highly complex code,” Alex finished. “Detective Nicholson was right, Alice Cartwright was a spy.”
“It’s certainly possible,” Iggy said with a nod. “Even probable. You need to break that code to prove it, though.”
Alex thought about that. He’d left the details of the code to Detective Nicholson. Nicholson was a decent enough sort, but his abilities as a detective were mediocre at best. Harcourt, the government man, had insisted Alice Cartwright was in possession of top secret information, but Alex had considered that to be self-important hot air.
What if it wasn’t?
Stifling a curse, Alex stood up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I need to let Detective Nicholson know that those coded messages might be correspondence with a Nazi agent. If they went after me, they might go after him too.”
“Surely he’s not carrying them around on his person,” Iggy said as Alex made his way to the phone.
“No,” Alex acknowledged, “but killing Nicholson would be a great way to sideline his investigation.”
Alex picked up the phone and dialed the Central Office. It was just after five, but he managed to catch the Detective before he left.
“I’m not having any luck with those love letters,” he said when Alex got him on the line. “Nobody has any idea how that code even works, much less how to crack it.”
“You need to call Harcourt,” Alex said. “The government is bound to have a code cracker that can figure it out.”
“I’m not turning my case over to that jackass,” Nicholson fumed.
Alex took a deep breath and told Nicholson about the shooting in the five and dime and its possible connection to Alice Cartwright’s murder.
“I thought you said that if Miss Cartwright was a spy, she wouldn’t keep the letters,” Nicholson shot back. “She would’ve burned them, right?”
“People do stupid things,” Alex said. “Maybe that’s why she was killed, her collaborator found out she hadn’t destroyed them. In any case, a German man tried to kill me today and I don’t have any other cases that involve Europe or potential spies.”
“So how will bringing Harcourt in help?” Nicholson growled. “He’ll just take the coded letters and disappear.”
“Probably,” Alex admitted. “But if you keep them, whoever came after me might come after you. And, if you don’t turn them over and Harcourt finds out…”
“He could level a treason charge at me,” Nicholson said, then he swore. “All right, I’ll call him first thing Monday morning.”
“Why wait so long?”
Nicholson laughed.
“You don’t know these government types, do you, Lockerby? It’s ten after five, he’s gone home, and he won’t be back till Monday. So has anyone who might be able to tell me where he lives or his phone number.”
Alex hadn’t considered that, but Nicholson had a point, the government kept banker’s hours. Since tomorrow was Saturday, Harcourt wouldn’t be back to his office for two days.
“Just make sure those documents are locked up somewhere safe,” Alex said. “And keep your eyes open.”
Nicholson promised that he would, then he hung up.
“You don’t sound convinced,” Iggy said as Alex came back to the table.
“Nicholson reminded me that I thought Alice Cartwright’s coded letters were from a lover,” Alex said. “Because if she were a spy, she would have burned them.”
“Possibly,” Iggy said. “I guess it depends on what the letters really say.”
“I still think I’m missing something,” Alex said. Iggy wasn’t a big believer in intuition, but Alex had learned to trust his gut over the years.
“Take your time and think it through,” Iggy encouraged him. “Just don’t take too long. We’ve got an appointment at the spa and since you’re home early, we might as well go over right after dinner.”
It was after nine when Alex and Iggy got back to the brownstone. The life transfer rune had performed exactly as expected, and Iggy recovered from the experience in less than half an hour. Alex had wanted to use his vault to go home, but Iggy had felt so good that he insisted they go to a nightclub and have a belt. One turned into a few, which turned into a few more, and now the old man was feeling a bit more jovial than usual.
“I haven’t had that much fun in years,” Iggy said, hanging his hat on one of the pegs in the hallway.
Alex followed him, shutting the vestibule door and hanging up his hat as well. His night hadn’t been quite as enjoyable. Since someone had already tried to kill him in a public place, Alex was wearing his 1911 in its shoulder holster, and he’d only had two drinks.
“What say we have a cigar and I’ll tell you about the book I’ve been thinking of writing,” Iggy suggested.
“Is that wise?” Alex asked. “What if someone recognizes your style?”
“Tosh,” Iggy said. “Lots of writers these days use the same style. I’m going to put on my smoking jacket,” he declared. Then before Alex could say anything, his mentor ran up the stairs, two at a time.
Alex laughed at that and opened the humidor on the reading table, taking out two of Iggy’s finest Cubans. He’d just finished trimming them when Iggy returned, resplendent in his embroidered jacket.
“You look ten years younger,” Alex said, passing him a cigar.
“I feel twenty years younger,” he said, sitting down to light the cigar.
Alex moved to the liquor cabinet, setting out two tumblers and a bottle of Iggy’s best twenty-year old Scotch.
“So what will you do with it?” he asked, as he poured two fingers of the amber liquid into each glass.
“With what, dear boy?” Iggy asked, blowing out a plume of fragrant smoke.
“Eternity.”
Alex passed his mentor a tumbler, then took his seat on the far side of the reading table. As he sipped his Scotch, Iggy just sat, considering Alex’s words.
“Do you really think I look younger?” he asked after a long pause.
“Maybe not ten years,” Alex admitted, “but yeah. I suspect next time it will be even more. Give it a few years and you’ll look my age.”
Iggy furrowed his brow and contemplated his Scotch for a long time while Alex puffed on his cigar.
“It is an interesting question,” he said. “I’d be a young man again.”
“We could both work at the agency,” Alex said.
Iggy chuckled at that.
“I think I’ll leave that to you,” he said. “But I could open a medical practice or start a new writing career. It certainly fires the imagination. Although I suspect that the Immortals will have something to say about it. I doubt Moriarty revealed the possibility of immortality to you without some kind of long-term plan.”
Alex felt the muscles in his jaw tighten and he nodded.
“Diego said pretty much the same thing,” he said.
“Don’t let it bother you, lad,” Iggy said. “We’ll deal with that when it comes. Right now, let’s just enjoy this moment.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Alex said, holding out his glass. Iggy reached across the table and clinked his glass against Alex’s.
The next moment Alex was thrown to the floor as a massive explosion rocked the brownstone. The sound seemed to roll on like echoing thunder, long after the floor stopped shaking.
Alex pushed himself to his feet. Iggy lay on the floor by the window, rolling slowly onto his back. The windows were cracked in spiderweb patterns, but the glass was still intact, because the runes that protected the house had kept the shards in place. Dozens of books had been thrown from t
he shelves and covered the floor. Luckily the weather was still warm because if there had been a fire in the grate, embers would have been scattered all over the fallen books.
Reaching down, Alex took Iggy’s hand and helped him to his feet. His lips were moving, but all Alex could hear was a ringing in his ears.
Realizing Alex couldn’t hear, Iggy pointed toward the vestibule.
Alex stepped over the ruin of his broken tumbler and the fallen books. As he rounded the corner into the foyer, the glass sidewall and door of the vestibule were shattered but still held in place by the magic. He couldn’t see well through the spiderweb patterns of cracks, but as he pulled the vestibule door open, the front door beyond was completely gone.
All Alex could do was stare. The door to the brownstone could withstand a crew with a battering ram, but now it was entirely missing. One of the brass hinges hung, twisted from the remainder of the frame, clinging vainly to a tiny sliver of the vanished door. Beyond the gaping hole where the door had stood, the paving stones of the stoop were fractured and broken, radiating out from a central point a few feet away from the threshold.
Alex jumped as something hit his shoulder and he whirled around to find Iggy yelling at him. Reaching up, Alex tapped his ears and the ringing subsided a bit.
“-reful,” Iggy’s voice finally came to him. “You don’t know what’s out there.”
Alex turned back to the gaping hole, but he couldn’t see much beyond the stoop as the outside lights had been blown out as well. What he could see was tiny shards of what looked like glass in the very center of the blast radius. He reached up under his left arm and pulled his 1911 free from its holster.
Taking a tentative step out through the door, Alex looked around, keeping the gun low. Already lights were appearing in the brownstones across the street and heads were appearing in windows. Feeling like it would be safe enough, he took another step and crouched down where he’d seen the glass. There were several curved shards of thin glass lying in a rough circle in the exact center of the spiderweb cracks in the masonry of the stoop.
“What the devil is that?” Iggy said, looking over Alex’s shoulder.
“Unless I miss my guess,” Alex said, holding the glass up so he could see its curving surface, “it’s a piece of a snow globe.”
“What does that mean?
Alex stood up, his eyes sweeping the streets to the right and left, trying to penetrate the darkness.
“It means Diego Ruiz just tried to blow our house down.”
Iggy glanced around as if he expected Diego to suddenly appear.
“Is he after you?”
“I doubt it,” Alex said. “He seemed genuinely pleased to meet me earlier.”
“Then why do this?”
“He wants to find a way to circumvent the damnation rune,” Alex said.
Iggy nodded, catching Alex’s train of thought.
“He thinks you have the Archimedean Monograph,” he guessed.
Alex stood and tossed the bit of glass away.
“And he just tried to come in and take it.”
24
Expropriation
“Long night, son?”
The voice pulled Alex from a fitful sleep and he startled awake. His neck hurt, along with his back, and the air smelled cool and musty.
“What?” he muttered as his eyes tried and failed to focus.
“I asked if you had a long night,” the voice came again, this time tinged with amusement. “But I can tell you must have.”
Alex’s vision finally cleared and he found himself in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, sitting in an empty pew. A man in a black cassock and white collar sat in the next row up, looking back with a grin on his face.
“Oh, hi, Father di Francesca,” Alex said, sitting up straight and rubbing his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep in the Mass.”
The Father laughed. He was a thin man with bad skin, dark eyes, and a ready smile. He’d emigrated from Italy when he was a young man, but he still had a bit of the old country in his accent.
“God will forgive you,” he said easily. “I hope you weren’t out carousing, though.”
Alex shook his head.
“You hear about that gas explosion over on the East Side?” he said. Gas explosion was the official explanation for the damage on Iggy’s block.
Father Di Francesca’s face blanched and he took hold of Alex’s arm.
“Was that near you?” he gasped. “Was anyone hurt?”
“It was right outside Dr. Bell’s house,” Alex said, “but it happened after ten so there wasn’t anyone on the street.”
“Praise God,” the Father said with a relieved nod.
Alex nodded in agreement, then sighed.
“Dr. Bell and I were up most of the night, writing mending runes to fix the broken windows at our neighbors’ homes.”
“That’s a very Christian thing to do,” Father Di Francesca observed. He patted Alex’s arm and stood up. “Now, you need to go home and get some rest. Even the Savior rested now and again.”
“Thank you, Father,” Alex said, grabbing the back of the pew in front and pulling himself to his feet. “And thanks for the Mass. What I heard was great.”
He shook the Father’s hand and headed out to the street. Tired as he was, Alex had a lot to do before he’d be able to get any rest. He and Iggy had managed to patch up the neighboring houses with several hundred dollars’ worth of standard mending runes, but the brownstone was still a wreck and in need of a front door. Add to that the fact that Alex promised Andrew Barton that he’d install a long-term barrier rune in the Brooklyn tower, and Alex had plenty to keep him occupied.
Since it was Sunday, there wasn’t anyplace to get a decent cup of coffee, so Alex just got on the skycrawler a block from the church and headed south and east. He had to change lines near City Hall, but then it was a straight shot across the river and out to Brooklyn. The view as the crawler crossed the East River was still amazing, but Alex had seen it so many times in the last weeks that he didn’t even notice, dozing as the crawler zipped along the steel beam that supported it.
A few minutes later, Alex knocked on the door of the Brooklyn Relay Tower until the surly weekend guard let him in. The guard gave Alex a look that spoke volumes, but the man knew better than to offer an opinion to someone who was often in the company of his sorcerer boss.
Alex rode the elevator up to the top floor and smiled when the door opened and he saw the chalked outline of a door on the wall opposite. He crossed to it and opened his vault immediately. The knowledge that his vault bed, the bed in the brownstone, and the one in his apartment in Empire Tower were easily accessible sent a wave of weariness cascading through him, but Alex had a job to do.
“Miles to go before I sleep,” he quoted, shuffling to one of the two heavy workbenches on the right side of his workspace. On top of the bench, a plate of bronze sat on a drying rack, glistening with now-hardened lacquer. Alex had painted it over once he’d finished engraving the rune and filling the lines with the prepared inks that would allow it to work. Since this was a standard barrier rune, the ingredients in the ink were more exotic than for a minor rune, which only required pencil lead. The lacquer would protect the plate from corroding, which could interfere with the rune.
Alex picked up the plate, feeling the magic in it, waiting just below the surface. Closing his eyes, he let the sensation bombard his senses. He’d learned, early on in his career, that runes, even uncast ones, would give off energy that he could feel. If the rune was done right, the feeling was like a musical chord, everything in harmony. A bad rune felt more like nails on a blackboard.
The rune on the plate hummed with his touch, all the energies in line, ready to be activated. Alex sighed with satisfaction. He was so tired, he hadn’t been completely sure he’d done the rune correctly until that moment.
“All right,” he said out loud to jar himself into action. “Let’s get you in place.”
He
left his vault and headed toward the pillar that held up the transfer plates in their glass case. Above him, the trusses that held the ceiling up were still visible, but he could no longer see the doughnut-shaped projection antenna above. The workmen already had the metal sheeting in place that would make up the new roof.
Barton must be paying very well to get the job done this fast.
As he stepped around the cement pillar that held up the transfer plates, he felt the bubble of the energy from the rune he’d put on the night before pass over him. Just like last night, it felt stronger than he expected it would, but there were a few hours left before it would fade completely, so that wasn’t anything to be worried about.
Setting the brass plate on top of the glass case, Alex took a minor binding rune from the pocket of his shirt and dropped it onto the plate. Igniting it with his lighter, the paper flared and vanished, locking the plate to the glass it sat on. With that done, Alex touched the rune etched into the plate, activating the magic within it. He could still feel the remnant of the previous rune, but the power of the new rune quickly eclipsed it.
Alex leaned against the case for a long moment, just reveling in the simple act of checking something off his list. Finally he sighed and pushed himself up. The lure of his vault was even more tempting, but he walked purposely back to the little hall by the elevator and pushed the call button. While the door opened, he crossed the hall and pulled the heavy door of his vault shut. Waiting until the door melted away into the wall, he entered the elevator car and headed back down to the ground floor.
Sunday was usually Alex’s day to not worry about his cases. He respected the Sabbath, but beyond that, most things were closed on Sunday, which prevented any serious investigation. This time, however, he had a stop to make.
Something about the warehouse thefts still bothered Alex. At first it had seemed like some competitor had wanted to sabotage his competition, but that theory fell apart when Alex learned that the radio parts had been ordered by different stations in different areas.
