The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  Zoe stared at the clay thing’s malformed face.

  “It’s because they’re virgins,” Zoe said quietly. “Virgins make the best sacrifices.”

  Of course, Oscar thought. Adolescent girls, away from their parents, untouched because of their afflictions.

  Zoe turned to look at Oscar. In the candlelight, her green eyes were black. “What are they trying to raise?”

  “The Queen of the Dead,” he replied.

  The room fell silent.

  Oscar’s telephone rang and they both jumped. He looked at the screen. The number was blocked. Zoe watched him carefully.

  “Mariani,” he answered.

  “Detective.” The voice at the other end was smooth; apologetic without sounding the least bit sorry. “I realize it’s late. Commiserations about your father.”

  Oscar put a face to the voice.

  “Thank you, Karl. What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering if you had a moment.”

  Chapter 34

  Oscar stepped onto the porch and drew the front door closed with a loud click.

  Across the street was Chaume’s long, gull-gray Bentley Karl stood inspecting the street with the repose of a man admiring a well-executed landscape painting. He didn’t seem to notice the drips of rain that fell from trees and beaded on his tailored wool suit. As Oscar crossed the road, he unhurriedly opened the car’s rear door.

  The deep leather seats were empty.

  “Where is Ms. Chaume?”

  “Not far,” Karl replied. “Inspecting a property.”

  The big car rode in near-silence, up the street to the ridge road. It sailed like a ghost ship past dark shuttered shopfronts, blank-eyed houses, and rambling, tangled gardens to the road’s highest point, where Karl slowed and stopped.

  The back door opened again, and a gust of cool air tossed Oscar’s hair. He stepped out. Karl pointed, then got back behind the wheel, leaving Oscar to make his own way.

  The Church of St. Brigid speared like a sharp-knuckled fist of red brick from the peak of the hill. Here were the buttressed walls where Delete addicts hovered around fires, where deep shadows held the gruntings of sex or violence close under tall spires and narrow windows. Oscar walked past the black cavities between the buttresses, and his fingers instinctively hunted under his jacket for a pistol that wasn’t there. But he heard none of the rough sounds. The place seemed deserted. The parasites had fled. High above, something flapped, and his eyes jerked upward. Tied to the crenellated wall was a large sign: THATCH CONSTRUCTION. He walked past the building across the asphalt church grounds. At their edge was a parking lot bordered by a short brick wall that dropped away sharply, and beyond it was the panorama of the city: a grounded galaxy of weak stars. The suburbs far to the east, near the ocean, were obscured by an invisible curtain of rain that swept like the train of some goddess’s black dress, trailing behind her as she stepped out to sea.

  Oscar didn’t see Chaume; rather, he noticed an absence of light. Like some distant, unknowable planet, she caused the space around her to shift. As he came closer, he made out her shape against the winking lights below. She stood on the edge of the brick wall, her back to him, staring out at the city.

  “Detective,” Anne Chaume said, not turning.

  She wore a coat of dark fur, and her jet-black hair fluttered like a wing. He stopped below her.

  “You’re not scared?” he asked.

  Chaume’s eyebrows rose. “Of?”

  She took a step along the wall edge. Oscar could see the sheer drop an inch from her shoe, and the soles of his own feet twitched vertiginously. She watched not the ground but him. Her pale eyes shone like polished metal.

  “I don’t really get scared,” she said. “I thought we had that much in common.”

  “I seem to be scared a lot lately.”

  “Ah.” She turned her face back toward the view. “Don’t you love the city?”

  “I used to,” he admitted.

  Her long fingers swept a length of silken hair behind a tiny ear. “I do. There’s so much of it.”

  “You’ve bought this?” he asked, indicating the church.

  She turned and smiled.

  “Have you ever noticed that Catholic churches are always on the high ground? Nearer to God? Or, simply, most valuable? They knew what they were doing. What do you think I should do with it?”

  Oscar looked up at the brick church.

  “Keep it,” he said, thinking of Neve. “Religion’s not dead. People will rally.”

  Chaume watched him for a moment. “I’m counting on it.”

  She stepped catlike down from the wall. Her face was china pale and seemed almost to glow. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was.

  She smiled at him. “You left in a hurry the other night.”

  “My partner was murdered.”

  “I was sorry to hear it. And to learn about your father.”

  Oscar nodded.

  “I read that your husband died,” he said. “Sometime back.”

  Chaume nodded. “He did. Went and got himself a parasitic infection, poor silly fellow.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave him. “Not quite so tall. A bit tidier.”

  She put out her hand. He crooked an elbow, and she slid her arm through it. His heart beat a bit faster. He felt foolish, and foolishly proud, and traitorous all at once. They walked beside the wall.

  “You don’t seem a very happy man, Detective Mariani,” she said.

  “I’m working on it.”

  She was silent a long, easy moment. “What could make you happier?”

  He could smell her scents: French creams and verbena and immaculately clean clothes. She walked lightly, and he could feel her arm shift under the expensive fur. He imagined her skin bare and struggled to change the thought.

  “I’ve considered becoming a multimillionaire,” he said. “It seems to agree with you.”

  She made a noise, unimpressed.

  “No? Are the rumors true, then?” he continued. “Money can’t buy happiness?”

  “Oh, money is like milk in the fridge,” she said. “Handy to have, but you can live perfectly well without it.”

  “So you’ve tried living without milk?”

  She smiled. “I did, once. I went through a phase where I despised my father, and everything he supposedly stood for, and I ran away from home. Do you know what that’s like?”

  She seemed already to know his answer.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Where did you run away to?”

  “To be with a man I thought I loved. I was sixteen. It’s easy to love men when you’re sixteen. Every year after that, it gets just a little bit harder. Or maybe men just get a little bit duller. More scared.”

  Oscar realized that she had pulled his arm closer to her own body. Beneath the fur, he could feel the swell of her breast against his triceps.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “I’ve seen these all over the city.” He indicated the Thatch Construction banner behind him. “What happens if those projects fail?”

  She inclined her head. “They won’t.”

  “Are you that rich?”

  She turned her profile to him as she considered this. “Money gets you so far, but then its influence runs out. Beyond that, you have to offer something else. Power. Sex.” She looked at him. “Serenity.”

  “Serenity,” he said. “Hence the church?”

  “Fuck the church.” Her voice was soft. “I want the high ground.”

  They reached the end of the wall, and stopped. The view of the city was uninterrupted, horizon to horizon. She turned to him. “What do you want?”

  “I’ll take the serenity,” he said.

  Chaume leaned closer. And, as she did, her ice-blue eyes appeared like bubbles from a dark pond. Her breath was sweet. Her lips glistened, reflecting the faint light.

  “I can help. What are you going to do? Now that your case is closed, I mean. Now you
’re on the market.”

  Her words were simple but rich with promise.

  “I’m suspended,” he said with effort. “Not unemployed. And I don’t think the case is closed.”

  “Really?” she said softly. “I heard you got your bad guy.”

  “I got a cog,” Oscar said. “I want the whole clock. And the guy who wound it. That would give me some serenity, Ms. Chaume.”

  Someone moaned, high up behind him. Oscar turned sharply, only to realize that it was the wind through the bell tower. The tops of the buttress walls were peaked and looked like massive teeth. When he turned back, Chaume’s face was shadowed.

  “Does that mean you’re unavailable?” she asked.

  “For what?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “Unavailable.”

  “Your father’s son.” She reached up, just the little she needed to, and kissed him softly on the lips. She backed away and became once more a strange planet. “Another time, perhaps.”

  She climbed again onto the low wall and turned to the vista—ten thousand yellow diamonds on a wide black silk. “This city!”

  When she didn’t turn back, he left.

  Karl said nothing on the drive back home. He pulled up outside Oscar’s house and left the engine rumbling while he opened the back door.

  “Goodbye, Detective.”

  The Bentley did a smooth U-turn, became a pair of taillights in the dark, then was gone.

  Zoe was in bed. He lay beside her, listening to her breaths, thinking of Anne Chaume’s lips.

  “Who was that?” Zoe asked.

  “No one.”

  He heard her inhale, smelling the air around him.

  They both stayed awake a long time.

  He woke and looked at his watch; it was early afternoon. He went through the house on bare feet. Zoe had left. Her bags of toiletries and books were gone. His semiautomatic service pistol was nowhere to be found. He found some biscuits and ate them with water and went back to bed.

  When he woke again, the bedroom was dark. He wondered why his phone hadn’t rung and checked it. The battery had plenty of charge. Then memories returned, tapping into each other like falling dominoes.

  Oscar went to the kitchen, heated water, washed, and dressed. He used more of his precious tea and finished the biscuits he’d found earlier. He wondered what to do with the cat food that was left. Into his mind flashed the picture of that foul and horrible casting he’d found in the garden—the football-size, acrid lump of fur and gristle and bone.

  He paced the hall.

  He went to the kitchen, found his phone, and texted Jon, rain-checking their catch-up.

  He pulled on his jacket and grabbed Lovering’s motorcycle key.

  Chapter 35

  He parked at the back of his father’s house and let himself in with the key under the maidenhair fern. The basement floor was wet again, a patchwork of brackish puddles. The beam of his flashlight bounced off them and reflected onto the joists overhead, the jittery light picking out strands of dusty cobweb and little oases of mold. Sandro would never have tolerated it, not in his prime; his kitchen and workshop had always been fastidiously neat. In one respect, it was a good thing that Vedetta had succumbed before Gray Wednesday and its consequent power outages; she would have spent her last years bent over a copper boiler and scrubbing floors on her hands and knees before letting her house go to ruin.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Oscar took off his damp-soled boots and set them neatly aside. He followed the flashlight beam upstairs, into the kitchen, and lit a hurricane lamp. Something smelled. The kerosene fridge had run out of fuel. He opened it and sour air puffed out at him. He emptied the milk carton down the sink and ran the tap, and threw the greening cheese and oily salami knob into the bin. He stared. In the plastic bag was the crust of a half-eaten sandwich, curled and drying. He picked it out and ran a finger along the sandpapery bread. His father’s last meal here. On the drainer, a knife, breadboard, spoon, plate, and teacup. Sandro had tidied up before heading out to the street where he had collapsed. The island bench had been wiped clean. Oscar stared at the space where his parents had spent so many hours, weeks, years of their lives, kneading dough and stuffing meats and pickling vegetables, talking and arguing, singing and silent. The spot where Oscar had seen Sandro stare lovingly down at his empty, nesting hands. Only they hadn’t been empty to him.

  A boy, Haig had said. An infant boy. He’d lived two days.

  Oscar felt eyes on him and looked up.

  Across the room, the dead youth stood beneath a painting of Monreale Cathedral and its asymmetrical towers. The house was silent.

  “Do you ever sleep?” Oscar asked. “Do you get time off?”

  The boy licked dry, pale lips. The holes where his eyes should be seemed to shift and curl. Oscar looked away. How did it work? he wondered. Did Sandro now find himself standing over a newborn infant? Would that child—maybe a little boy—grow up with a proud, stern-faced man watching over him?

  Oscar looked across the shadowy room to the dead boy.

  “What happens when I die?” Oscar asked. “Are you freed then?”

  The boy gave Oscar a small shrug, and his dark nylon coat lifted silently, too big on his narrow shoulders. He put his hand to his chest.

  Something tapped the window behind Oscar and he turned.

  There was nothing outside. He lifted the lantern to the window and stared at his own ghostly reflection. A moth, perhaps, drawn to the light.

  He carried the lantern down a hall lined with vibrant wallpaper to a set of stairs and climbed.

  His parents’ bedroom was small. “Big enough for sleeping,” they had said. Vedetta’s duchess was beneath the window where it had always been, and her crystal perfume bottles were neatly dusted. Oscar opened the wardrobe and looked at his father’s clothes, hanging ironed and neat on hangers. He’d have to decide what to do with them: which to sell, which to gift, which to keep. At the back, crinkled plastic reflected the lantern glow. Sandro’s police uniform. On the shelf above the rail was a cardboard box. Oscar pulled it down and put it on the bed. Inside were his father’s visored officer’s cap, a neatly curled belt, and a set of epaulettes sealed in cling wrap. And one more item. A little key ring, with two mismatching keys.

  Movement in the doorway made him jump.

  The dead boy stood there. He wasn’t watching Oscar. He was looking across the bed and out the window.

  Oscar followed his sightless gaze.

  The window was a blank eye behind floral curtains. Nothing moved.

  “What?” Oscar asked, looking at the boy.

  He bit his pale lips and raised a hand—a signal for attention.

  Oscar picked the keys from the box. He knew what they were for.

  In the upstairs hallway was a polished mahogany writing desk: turned legs, two drawer stays with brass handles on the front, a large inlaid drop lid that would swing down to reveal a green leather writing pad, a clever stack of pigeonholes, stationery shelves, and miniature drawers. But from the moment he set foot in this house Oscar had been forbidden to touch the desk, which was kept locked by the smaller of the two keys now in his hand.

  Oscar set the lantern on the floor and slid the key into the desk’s brass lockplate. He looked behind him. The dead boy stood at the top of the stairs. His feet shifted silently. Seeing that Oscar was looking at him, he sharply raised both pale hands and waved them anxiously.

  “I’m busy,” Oscar said. He’d been waiting thirty years for this.

  He pulled out the desk’s two velvet-topped stays, turned the key, and dropped the lid down.

  There were surprisingly few items. Good paper for thank-you notes. A fountain pen and a silver letter opener. A small brass abacus that Sandro had actually used. And a dozen envelopes of various sizes, stacked on their ends in one of the pigeonholes. Half were unsealed; half had been neatly sliced open along their top edge. Oscar flicked through them.
The largest was marked “Wills, Copy.” He opened it. Inside were two nearly identical four-page documents: one his mother’s, one Sandro’s. It took Oscar just a moment to find the clause that said if both his parents were dead the estate was to go to him. He felt hollow.

  Marriage certificate. The death certificates of Vedetta’s parents and Sandro’s parents. On a yellowing police-service letterhead, Sandro’s formal letter of appointment as a sworn officer. Another death certificate: Primo Alessandro Mariani. Age at death: two days. In the same envelope, a receipt from a funeral home, including payment in advance for reinterment upon his mother’s death. The infant was buried with Vedetta.

  They hadn’t told him.

  The last envelope was marked in Sandro’s hand: “Adoption.”

  Oscar held it loosely in his fingers and slipped it back among the others.

  The air shifted.

  He looked across to the dead boy. He was still at the top of the stairs, staring down into darkness. A stronger breeze tugged from the stairwell.

  A door had been opened down there.

  Oscar felt the hairs on his neck rise. The boy’s jaw was set tight, his slight frame tense. He suddenly lifted his colorless, narrow face to Oscar and pointed down the stairs.

  Oscar carefully removed the key from the desk and quietly screwed down the wick of the lantern. Darkness squeezed in with every turn until the lantern was out. Then he remembered that he had no weapon.

  But he had the key ring. The second key was for Sandro’s gun safe, in the basement.

  To get there he had to go downstairs.

  The light coming in through the windows was gossamer thin. He could make out the rectangles of doorframes, the vertical teeth of banisters, the sallow triangle of the dead boy’s face. He was mouthing something, but Oscar couldn’t tell what.

  Oscar went to the top of the carpeted stairs and looked down into the living room. Oblongs of faint gray light fell over the furniture, picking out the curves of chair arms and the angles of bookshelves but leaving most of the room in pitch darkness. The shadows moved. Curtains were blowing. A door banged, and Oscar dropped to a crouch. He watched. The shadows stopped moving. Whatever door had opened was now shut.