by Simon Toyne
‘Ode to Joy’ piped up again and she pounced on the answer button before it had finished the opening bar.
‘Hi, Dr Anata?’ The voice belonged to a woman. American, she thought, or possibly Canadian — she could never really tell the difference; either way it was a big market for books.
‘This is she.’
‘Great,’ the woman continued. ‘Listen, I know you’re busy, but I could really use your help right now on some background information.’
‘Is this an interview request?’
‘Erm. . I suppose it is, yes.’
‘And what channel did you say you were with?’
The line went silent for a moment.
‘Dr Anata, I’m not calling from a news channel. . I’m part of the story,’ Liv said, before she had a chance to cut her off. ‘I’m. . I’m the monk’s sister.’
Miriam paused, not sure if she’d heard right — not sure if she believed her.
‘I’ve seen his body,’ Liv continued, ‘or photos at least. He disappeared before I got to see him in person. There were some markings on him, some kind of ritual scars. I wonder if you could take a look at them and give me your expert opinion on what you think they might mean.’
Miriam felt light-headed at the mention of scars. ‘You have these photos?’ she whispered.
‘No,’ Liv said. ‘But I can show you what they look like. And there’s some other stuff as well. Stuff that might have something to do with the Sacrament.’
Miriam leaned heavily against the vending machine. ‘What stuff?’ she asked.
‘It’s probably easier if I show you.’
‘Of course.’
‘When are you free?’
‘I’m free right now. I’m in a TV studio, close to the city centre. Where are you?’
Liv paused, cautious of revealing her location to anyone. A cop friend had once told her the best place to hide was in a crowd. She needed somewhere public and busy and close by. She looked at the newspaper with the picture of Samuel standing on top of the most visited ancient attraction in the world. ‘I’ll meet you at the Citadel,’ she said.
Chapter 88
Kutlar could still smell the garlic and sweat coming off the empty seat beside him. He blinked as the van emerged from the tunnel. A silhouetted figure walked down the alley between the car parks towards them.
Kutlar opened the notebook. He stared intently at the hourglass icon, watching the tiny black pixels tumbling inside it, virtual sand showing him how quickly his own time was running out.
Johann reached the van and swapped places with Cornelius as the street map on the screen reconfigured itself. An arrow pointed to the location of Liv’s phone. The hourglass re-appeared momentarily then the map widened to show a second arrow, above and to the left of the first — their own position, traced through Cornelius’s signal.
They were close.
Cornelius watched the arrow at the centre of the screen jump a little further up the street. ‘She’s moving.’
Johann turned towards the ring-road.
The next time the screen refreshed itself the second arrow was moving too, circling the first one now, like a buzzard homing in on its prey.
Brother Samuel’s body had been stripped to the waist and arranged with his arms outstretched, echoing the shape that loomed from the altar at the far end of the chapel of the Sacrament. The Abbot cast his eyes across the ruined flesh, glowing bright and waxy against the stone floor, pierced repeatedly by broken bones, held together by rough sutures where the coroner had sliced it apart.
Could these remnants of a man really rise up and fulfil the prophecy?
The Abbot noticed the thin tendril of a blood vine curl around the altar. He followed it into the darkness until he found its root twisting up from one of the wet channels cut into the floor. He wrapped it around his hand and tugged hard until it tore free then stepped over to one of the large hemp-and-tallow torches and held the sinewy plant over the flame. It hissed in the heat, shrivelling away to nothing but blackened fibre and a smear of red sap on the Abbot’s hand.
The torch flame guttered as the door opened behind him. The Abbot turned, rubbing his hand against the rough wool of his cassock where the sap was starting to irritate his skin. Brother Septus, one of the monks who had helped bring Samuel up the mountain, hovered on the threshold.
‘We are ready for you, Brother Abbot,’ he said.
The Abbot nodded and followed him to another room in the upper chambers of the Citadel, one that had lain mostly silent since the time of the Great Inquisitions.
The door closed behind them, sealing Brother Samuel inside with the Sacrament. The candles flickered once again in the displaced air, and their light shimmered gently across his body.
For a moment it seemed as if he was moving.
Chapter 89
Rodriguez was also looking at Samuel, standing on the famous bridge in Central Park, his arm draped over the shoulder of a girl who looked just like him. The photo was in a cheap clip frame that matched several others dotted across the wall of the apartment.
Breaking in had been easy enough. The girl lived on the ground floor of a purpose-built block close enough to the city centre to attract young professionals, and by the time he’d got there, everyone was out at work. He’d just had to hop into her tiny garden, with dense enough foliage to give plenty of cover, hold up his windcheater to deaden the noise and punch out a window. His brothers in Ruin would deal with the girl. He had to make sure she’d left no loose ends.
He hadn’t known Samuel that well inside the Citadel so seeing fragments of his previous life frozen on his sister’s wall was a strange experience. There was another shot of him looking much younger, sitting in a rowing boat with an equally fresh-faced version of the girl, both squinting against the sunlight. He’d spotted the photos by the phone, partially hidden by the tendrils of one of the many plants that covered practically every horizontal surface.
Rodriguez pressed the flashing message button and listened to the playback while he piled all the paper he could find in the middle of the living-room floor. There were two calls, both from what sounded like her boss, bawling her out for skipping town without filing copy.
He dragged her duvet off the unmade bed and added it to the heap, remembering a film he’d seen as a kid about some guy who was obsessed with aliens and filled his house with a mountain of junk like this.
He felt like an alien now.
When he’d gathered enough flammable material in the living room he went through the rest of the apartment splashing gasoline over the bed, the carpets, the couch. He didn’t have time to check the place thoroughly so he needed to make sure everything would be destroyed.
He went back out the way he’d come in, then tossed a lit match through the broken pane, heard the other windows crack with the pressure wave as the gas fumes caught. He didn’t stop to watch it burn, though he’d have liked that a lot. He had two more stops to make before he could fly away from here for ever.
He was doing God’s work. There was no time for pleasure.
Chapter 90
Liv didn’t need the map to find the Citadel. All she’d had to do was head in its general direction until the main flow of tourist traffic picked her up and swept her along, all the way past the ticket stands, through the gates and up the narrow streets towards the most famous mountain in the world.
She had never really appreciated how ancient the place was until she entered this, the oldest part of it. The streets here were cobbled, but it was the buildings on either side that really brought it home. They were all tiny, with miniature windows and low doors, built for people with bad diets and hard lives who seldom lived beyond thirty. They were also constructed and repaired from various bits of material salvaged from throughout the city’s long history. Roman pillars emerged from medieval walls with the gaps between filled with oak beams and wattle and daub. She passed a partially opened door with an iron hand of Fatima curling downwards from its
centre, a reminder of the long Moorish occupation of the city during the time of the Crusades. Beyond it lay a small courtyard surrounded by scalloped arches and bursting with assorted greenery, lemon trees in blossom, and banana plants unfurling their long scrolled leaves, all spilling out over elaborately mosaiced walls and floor. The next house along looked like an eighteenth-century Italian townhouse; the one next to that half Ancient Greek villa, half Napoleonic fort. Occasionally a gap would open up between the mis-matched houses and she would see modern buildings on the plains below, stretching away in the distance, clear to the red-rocked, serrated edge of the mountains that enclosed the city on all sides.
A breeze tumbled down the narrow street bringing warm air and a smell of food, which reminded her how hungry she was. She drifted upwards, drawn to the stall from which the tempting aromas had come. It sold flat breads and dips, another reminder of how the city had sucked up different influences over the centuries. For all the bloody history that had swirled around the Citadel, and all the religious wars that had been waged in its shadow, all that now remained of those lost empires were the solid staples of architecture and good food.
Liv fished a banknote out of the petty cash envelope and exchanged it for a triangular piece of bread, studded with seeds, and a tub of baba ghanoush. She scooped up the thick paste and shovelled it into her mouth. It was smoky and garlicky, a mixture of toasted sesame oil, roasted aubergine, and cumin with some other spices dancing around in the background. It was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten. She dipped the bread back in the pot, and had just loaded it up again when her phone rang in her pocket. She stuffed the bread in her mouth and reached for it.
‘Hello,’ she said through a mouthful of food.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Rawls yelled down the phone. Liv groaned inwardly. She’d turned her phone on when she’d left the newspaper offices so the Ruinologist could contact her; she’d forgotten all about Rawls.
‘I’m worried sick over here,’ he hollered. ‘I just saw you on CNN getting bundled into the back of a police cruiser. What the hell’s going on over there?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Liv replied through a mouthful of food. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So why didn’t you call me? I told the girl at the office to get you to call me.’
‘Must’ve slipped her mind. She seemed a little ditzy.’
‘So tell me what’s going on.’
This was exactly the conversation she’d hoped to avoid. ‘I’m just trying to find out what happened to my brother,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.’
‘You sound out of breath.’
‘I am out of breath. I’m walking quickly up a really steep hill.’
‘Oh right. Well you still shouldn’t be wheezing that way. You need to look after yourself. You should quit smoking.’
Liv realized that, despite the high-stress situation she found herself in, she hadn’t craved a cigarette in hours. ‘I think I have,’ she said.
‘Good. That’s good. Listen, I need you to do one thing for me.’ Here it was. She’d known he couldn’t be calling out of overwhelming concern for her wellbeing. ‘Write down this number,’ he said.
‘Hold on.’ She grabbed her pen and scribbled the number on her hand.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked.
‘It’s that traffic cop you watched give birth to twins the other night.’
‘Bonnie?’
‘Yeah, Bonnie. Listen I know this is a real bad time, but I need that story to run this weekend. I still got a hole in the Lifestyle section, so I need you to call her up and smooth the way for someone else to pick up the story, OK?’
‘I’ll call her right now. Anything else?’
‘No, that’s it. Just you be careful — and take lots of notes.’ Liv smiled.
‘I’m always careful,’ she said. Then she hung up.
Rawls snapped his phone shut and closed his front door. He was late for a fundraiser over at City Hall and wanted to meet the guy everyone was tipping as the next mayor. It always paid to get close to the incoming king.
He slid behind the wheel of his Mustang, absolutely nothing to do with his midlife crisis, and was about to turn the key in the ignition when he heard the tap on the window. He turned and saw the wide muzzle of a gun pointing at him. The man who held it motioned for him to wind the window down. He was wearing some kind of red windcheater and had a beard that looked wrong on his young, thin face.
Rawls held his hands up and did as he was told. When the window was halfway down a large bottle of mineral water was pushed through the gap. ‘Hold this,’ the gunman said. Rawls took it. ‘What do you want?’ He noticed the fumy smell clinging to the plastic bottle and realized it didn’t contain water at all.
‘I want your silence,’ the man replied, and fired a piece of burning magnesium from the flare gun, through the bottle of turpentine and into Rawls Baker’s chest.
Chapter 91
Bonnie’s answer-phone kicked in just as Liv passed through the large stone arch leading to the square by the public church. Listening to the small-town voice politely asking her to leave a message whilst being confronted with the massive Gothic splendour of the church was a surreal experience.
‘Hey, Bonnie,’ she said, drifting across the square along with the hordes of tourists. ‘This is Liv Adamsen — from the New Jersey Inquirer. Listen, I hope everything’s going great with you and Myron and the twins, and I’m really, really sorry to spring this on you, but I’ve had to leave town for a few days. We love your story, though, so someone else will be calling you real soon to pick right up where I left off. I know they still want to get you into the weekend edition, if that’s OK. Listen, I’ll call you when I’m back in town. Take care.’ She hung up and passed through the second archway.
She emerged from the shadow, squinted up into the brightness — and stopped. There in front of her, rising up like a wall of darkness, was the Citadel. Seeing it this close was both terrifying and awe inspiring. Liv’s eyes lifted to the summit then dropped slowly down, following the path of her brother’s fall. As her gaze reached the bottom she saw a large crowd of people gathered next to a low stone wall. One of them, a woman with long blonde hair and a long dress, was holding her arms out by her sides. The sight sent ice spiders scuttling across Liv’s skin. For one awful moment she thought the ghost of her brother was standing there. The crowds of tourists bumped her as they pushed past, nudging her closer to the group, until she began to see a blaze of colour at the centre of the crowd. It was a sea of flowers, laid there by strangers and looking now as if they had seeped up through the broken flagstones and bloomed in silent tribute to the man who had cracked them. Liv’s eyes moved across them, reading hidden meanings in their colours and forms: yellow daffodils for respect, dark crimson roses for mourning, rosemary for remembrance, and snowdrops for hope. Cards stuck out here and there like the sails of boats half-sunk in a shallow sea. Liv picked one up and felt a cold finger run down her spine when she saw what was on it. There were two words ‘Mala Martyr’, and above them, filling the uppermost part of the card, was a large ‘T’.
‘Miss Adamsen?’
Liv whipped her head round, instinctively leaning away from the voice as her eyes sought the source of it.
Standing over her was a stylish woman in her fifties wearing a charcoal grey pinstripe suit a few shades darker than her precisely cut hair. She switched her gaze from Liv to the flowers stretching out on the ground behind her, then back again.
‘Dr Anata?’ Liv asked, rising up to greet her. The woman smiled and held out her hand. Liv shook it. ‘But how did you know it was me?’
‘I’ve just come from a television news studio,’ the woman said, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘And you, my dear, are very much breaking news.’
Liv glanced nervously across at the crowd. Their attention was currently split between the mountain and the spectacle of the
silent woman holding her arms out. No one was looking at her.
‘Shall we go somewhere a little quieter?’ Dr Anata suggested, gesturing further along the embankment to where a small army of plastic tables spilled out from several cafes.
Liv looked back at the shrine marking the place where her brother had died, then nodded, and followed Miriam as she led her away.
The van pulled up by the wall of the old town close to the southern gate. Cornelius glanced at the screen. The arrow remained steady, pointing to a spot by the dry moat on the old embankment. The girl hadn’t moved for the last few minutes.
He slipped out of the passenger seat and held the door open. Kutlar closed the electronic notebook, handed it to Cornelius and slid stiffly across the seat to join him on the pavement. The drop down to the ground was not high but the moment his foot connected with the street it felt as if someone had shot him in the leg again. He gritted his teeth against the pain, determined not to appear weak; felt the sweat beading up beneath his shirt. He held on to the door to steady himself, his head drooping forward as he forced his leg to straighten. In his peripheral vision he could see Cornelius’s boots pointing in his direction. Waiting. There was no way he could do this on his own.
Kutlar reached into his pocket and pulled out the bottle of pills he had been denying himself for the last few hours, unscrewed the top and tipped a few gel capsules into his damp palm. The label said he was supposed to take one every four hours. He threw two into his mouth, nearly gagging as he dry swallowed them down.
He looked up and past Cornelius towards the Southern gate. She was somewhere in the old town. And as he was the only one who knew what she looked like, and bikes were the only things allowed up the steep, ancient streets, they were going to have to walk. He stuffed the pills back in his pocket, let go of the van and started limping towards the ticket booths by the entrance. His leg was already numb by the time he was halfway there.
