He scrolled through a few stump removal services, then tried again: Abend bassard . . . Brüderlichkeit bassard . . . German bassard. . . .
That seemed to get him somewhere: Did you mean German bastard sword?
He shifted a little closer to the edge of the sofa. “I might,” he murmured to the living-room shadows. He was thinking of the longswords the BLK preferred to kill with. “I might mean that.”
The French épée bâtarde as well as the English bastard sword originates in the 15th or 16th century . . . irregular sword of uncertain origin. . . . The German langes schwert (“long sword”) . . . as opposed to kurzes schwert (“short sword”) or half-sword . . . hand-and-a-half sword later called bastard. . . .
He skimmed through it, but could see nothing meaningful, no connection to his charnel-house crime scene. Could there be some valuable old sword Abend was looking for? Something with some important history or symbolism maybe . . . ? He who pulls this sword from this stone shall be crowned mob boss of the Western world. . . .
He put a fist against his kidney and stretched his back, trying to figure it out.
We need to talk.
He shook the thought of Margo off, literally shook his head to make it go away. No sense worrying about it in the dead of night. Nothing he could do now. But, of course, he was worried—very.
He leaned forward again, resting his fingers on the keyboard, staring over the top of the monitor into the darkness, uncertain where to go from here.
Experimentally, he typed: stupe sword.
Did you mean stone sword? State sword? Stun sword? Stupid word?
He typed: stump sword.
A couple of video-game sites came up: The Stump and the Sword.
He who pulls this sword from this stump. . . .
He was about to try some other combination when he noticed, at the bottom of the page: Stumpf’s Baselard.
He remembered Mickey Paz: Stoomp bassard. . . .
“Stumpf’s Baselard,” he whispered into the quiet of the sleeping house. “What the hell’s a baselard?”
The search engine displayed the first two lines of the entry: By Gretchen Dankl. This abstract explores the history and legend surrounding a missing 15th-century dagger. . . .
A missing 15th-century dagger. . . . He tried to keep his mind easy, but he sensed that he had hit on something. More than that, the semi-accidental way he’d hit on it had an aura of providence about it, like it was a Meant Thing. Wouldn’t be the first time. Every cop depended on such heaven-sent coincidences. Hunches. Random chains of discovery. Nothing mystical about it, just something that happened from time to time. Every cop had a collar with a story like that attached.
Zach hit the link.
The page you have requested is no longer available.
He was midway through a curse of frustration when a new e-mail appeared, and he clicked over to the e-mail page and saw it was from her, from Margo.
Darling. I know you got my text today. I need to talk to you. Please don’t ignore me. Not after what we’ve meant to each other. M.
His whole body recognized her old fraught style. His whole soul soured at it. What we’ve meant to each other. It was black-magical in its power. Zach could picture her, in her Westchester mansion, sitting in her dark living room as he was in his, sitting at her computer as he was at his, pressing SEND. What we’ve meant to each other. Like casting a spell on him from a distance. The familiar melodrama of her diction seemed to suck him out of his life into a vortex that pulled him down, down, down. . . .
“Zach?”
His breath caught as he looked up and saw Grace on the stairway. Wifely in her flowery nightgown. All the love life he had ever cared about or wanted.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, baby, I’m okay,” he told her. Margo’s e-mail glaring at him from the laptop monitor. What if Grace came over and sat beside him, laid her head on his shoulder, saw? “I just couldn’t sleep, thought I’d get some work done. You go on back to bed.”
“All right. But come to bed soon. You need your rest.”
“I will.”
He deleted the e-mail even as she shuffled sleepily back up the stairs. As full of rage as his heart was, as full of fear and woe as it was, he couldn’t hate her—Margo—only himself.
He slouched back against the sofa cushions. Stared at the empty screen, his sick soul leaden.
His thoughts went random. The name Gretchen Dankl swam back into his mental ken. The woman who had written the article about Stumpf’s Baselard. He leaned toward the computer again. Typed in Dankl’s name, thinking, Could she be pregnant? Meaning Margo. But no, it had been six months since they had been together. Too late now for her to run that game on him.
Did you mean Gretchen Kunkel? Gretchen Runkel?
But underneath the suggested substitutions was a bona fide hit: Ludwig Wilhelm University, Freiberg. Gretchen Dankl, adjunct professor, literature. [email protected].
Dear Professor Dankl, he wrote to her. My name is Agent Zach Adams. I am a United States law enforcement officer with Homeland Security’s Extraordinary Crimes Division based in New York City. I am writing in connection with a murder investigation here, and looking for any information you might have about Stumpf’s Baselard. . . .
When he was finished, he snapped the laptop shut. With the monitor light gone, the living-room darkness was even deeper. He sat in it—the darkness—for several silent seconds—leaning back again, his arms stretched out on either side of him, rested along the tops of the sofa cushions—just sitting there with the whole Margo disaster a dead weight in his gut. He was unable even to muster a puling prayer for help he knew he didn’t deserve.
Then he made a noise of angry dismissal, pushed off his knees, and stood. He slung the laptop under his arm. Trudged wearily up the stairs. He hoped he was tired enough to sleep at last.
And he did sleep, eventually. But first he lay beside his wife for some unknowable eternity, breathing that mysterious air that came off her, that atmosphere that was weirdly like a memory, but like a memory of something better than he’d ever actually known. He lay there and yearned for her touch and love and comfort. But he would not wake her. So he lay alone and wallowed in a looping replay of that irretrievable split second of decision: Margo against the wall, her blouse off, her legs around him, him grunting in her, stupid, predictable, clownish, a human punchline in the Great Running Joke of the World.
Ridiculous. It was all so ridiculous.
But it had ruined everything.
4
REBECCA ABRAHAM-HARTWELL
Next morning, Goulart slapped Zach on the shoulder. “The Bitch Goddess wants an update on Paz.”
By the Bitch Goddess, he meant Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. She was the director of Extraordinary Crimes, their boss. Goulart hated her. She’d come up through the ranks as a lawyer, not a cop. That was one strike against her, in his book. Plus she was a woman—that was the other two.
Zach was at his gunmetal desk in Task Force Zero’s New York squad room. It was the usual broad common room of desks and cinderblock walls, corkboards covered thick with fliers and venetian blinds striped with a view of some side street. Zach was at his computer, searching Stumpf. Finding Stumpf the philosopher. Stumpf the banker. A couple of guys in the law-enforcement databases named Stumpf. A con man. A chop-shop guy. All of it garbage. Dead ends. Nothing.
He sighed and rolled his chair back. Stood.
“Waste of time,” Goulart was muttering—about their meeting with the director, not about Stumpf.
He looked especially sharp today, did Goulart. Light blue suit, white shirt, red striped tie, black hair combed to a fare-thee-well. A slick hook-up artist, was the thought that flashed through Zach’s mind. He reflected morosely that his partner’s marriage had ended in the typical cop-style divorce, complete with rage, hatred, guilt, recriminations, and one night when Goulart had waved his gun around so that an NYPD domestic incident report had to be discre
etly shredded. With droll self-pity, Zach congratulated himself that, if Margo Heatherton had her way, he and Goulart would soon be able to sit around bars together trading ex-wife stories. Something to look forward to, ha ha ha.
“Abraham-fucking-Hartwell,” Goulart sighed as he and Zach walked together down the shabby-tiled hall to the elevators. “What is that, anyway? Abraham-Hartwell? Is she Abraham or Hartwell? I mean, make up your mind, right?”
“Hartwell’s her husband’s name.”
“Some high-priced mouthpiece for Wall Street dickheads,” said Goulart, stabbing the elevator button with a stiff index finger. “Hartwell,” he said, drawing out the ‘a’ to make it sound hoity-toity. He and Zach waited there, shoulder to shoulder. “What, she doesn’t want a Jewish name anymore? Hey, I’m not passing judgment, but make up your mind. You wanna pass for WASP, dump the Abraham. Just be Rebecca Hartwell. You wanna assimilate, I say: go for it. Am I right?”
Zach looked down at him. Goulart was broader and thicker, but Zach was taller. “‘Are you right?’” he said. “Are you seriously asking me that?”
Goulart silent-laughed. Which was one of the things—along with his being a great cop—that made it impossible for Zach not to like him: he’d laugh at himself the same as at anyone. “Hartwell,” he said again. “What the hell is he thinking? I’d rather get a blow job from a rattler than touch that skank.”
They weren’t alone when they got in the elevator. There were two people in the little box with them: a clerical, female, and a uniform, male. Did that stop Goulart? Shoulder to Zach’s shoulder against the back wall, he went on.
“These fucking meetings, too.” Muttering, but loud enough for the whole box to hear. “S’what I mean about women in positions of power. Gotta talk about everything. Bah-de-ba-de-ba.” He got an over-the-shoulder glance from the clerical. He smiled good morning at her until she turned back around. “We could be hunting these savages down but no, we have to discuss. We have to process. It’s hormonal, I’m telling you.”
Zach couldn’t help but snort—it broke out of him—which only encouraged Goulart. The clerical woman was shaking her head at the elevator door. Luckily, it opened now. She and the uniform both got out. One of the local detectives got in. Stooped, silver-haired guy. Nodded respectfully to the two Zero boys.
The door closed and Goulart muttered, “I mean, look: women—they can’t even go to the bathroom by themselves. One gets up, they all go, right? Like a flock of sheep. They gotta be directed. That’s their nature.”
The silver-haired guy looked at Zach. Zach rolled his eyes. The local detective grinned.
“Rebecca—I’m not saying she’s not a nice person, all that. Whatever,” Goulart continued. “I’m just saying: she’s not a leader, that’s all. All these meetings—everything she does—it’s all about what the bosses think of her, what the press thinks of her. She’s over-responsive to authority, what I’m saying. See, a woman, if she doesn’t have a man to tell her what to do, then she’s gotta have the man tell her what to do. Makes life a misery for all of us.”
And again, this was the thing about Goulart—about him and his whole belligerent say-the-unsayable routine: crazy as he was, there was always just enough truth in what he said to keep it interesting. Because in the wake of the Paz murders, there was, in fact, a media frenzy (SLAUGHTERHOUSE! was the headline on the Post’s website) and there was, in fact, pressure from D.C. and Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. . . .
Well, Zach liked Rebecca. And he respected her. She was smart, clear-eyed, and well-intentioned. But Goulart had a point: she did worry too much about what the media thought of her and what her bosses in Washington thought of her and even what they, Zach and the other agents, thought of her. And she did waste their time with too many meetings, too. But then she was the one who had to answer to the federal bureaucracy, not Zach.
“You look like shit, by the way,” Goulart said as they came down the upstairs hall to her office.
“Thanks.”
“Not sleeping?”
“I had a bad night, yeah.”
“That text you got yesterday, I’m guessing.”
“Just a lot of things,” said Zach, with no hope of fooling him. “Personal crap.”
“Woman trouble?”
“Right,” said Zach with a laugh, as if that were an idea too absurd to contemplate. “I got ’em running hot and cold, that’s me. Can’t sleep for fighting ’em off.” Try to keep a secret in a building full of cops. . . .
The Director’s office door was open and her secretary nodded them in—then Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell herself waved them in from the far end of the room. It was a distracted gesture. She was standing over the flatscreen TV on her wall, holding the remote in her hand, staring down at the images. She had one of those modes working that showed four different channels at once: all news, it looked like, all shots of burning buildings and running mobs and cops in riot gear.
“Crazy,” she said. “London. Paris. Berlin. Look at that: that’s the Acropolis,” she added, pointing to one of the fires. “The Louvre—look at that. Eesh.” The sound was on low. Reporter’s voices murmuring: Unions . . . Islamists . . . Fascists. . . . She muted them now. “Sit down, sit down.”
She pointed them to the sofa, then took her place in the armchair in front of her vast wood-veneer desk, her thin legs crossed. The men sat shoulder to shoulder on the oversoft cushions, looking at her where she was framed in the glare of day from the big window behind her. The gleaming right triangle that topped the Citibank office tower was wedged into the gray autumn sky out there. The flaming images on the TV set were half-visible on the wall to their left.
Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell was small and taut and wiry. Hair short and wiry. A big nose on a long face—looked like a depressed pony, Goulart once said, a description Zach could never quite get out of his mind. She always wore pants suits, always dark colors—dark blue today—with something bright for contrast—a bright green jacket now. Zach imagined she had gotten this fashion strategy from some magazine article about “Power Dressing” or something. But that was just a guess; such things were beyond his ken.
“So, where are we on Paz?” she said. She addressed herself to Zach. She loathed Goulart. No big surprise. It wasn’t as if he was discreet in expressing his opinions about her. And he was just the sort of swinging dick she generally hated on sight anyway. So while she prided herself on her objective appreciation of his professional skills, blah, blah, blah, she would have loved to reassign the guy to a school crossing somewhere.
“Still canvassing, looking for any more videos,” said Zach—while she peered at him with her big, dampish eyes in a very intent I-am-all-business-Buster sort of way. “Waiting for the ME prelim, though I’ve got a hunch our vics died from being chopped into pieces. Our main lead is the boy. He says Abend was looking for something.”
“Something or someone,” Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell corrected him brusquely. “He said Abend was asking about a ‘stupid bastard.’”
Zach didn’t want to undercut April Gomez—and didn’t want Goulart to open his big mouth and undercut her—so he disregarded this and pushed on.
“Since Paz was a fence,” Zach said, “we’re going on the theory that what Abend’s after is likely some item of stolen merchandise that passed through his hands—or something Abend believes passed through his hands. Whatever it is, if the boy is right, Abend was willing to show up personally to torture Paz into telling him where it is. We figure he either got the information he wanted out of Paz before he killed him, or Paz didn’t have what he wanted, so he killed him as the perfect end to a perfect evening. Either way, we figure if we find out what Abend wants, we have a chance of finding Abend.”
“Ideas?”
And what’s with all her clipped one-word, two-word sentences? Goulart sometimes ranted. Is that supposed to make us understand just how tough and efficient she is? Talk like a human being, for Christ’s sake!
“We’re trying to run down wh
o Paz was doing business with,” Zach went on. “And any storage facilities where he might’ve been warehousing the hot goods.”
“Good,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. “Follow up on that.”
No, Zach knew Goulart would say later, we thought we’d just let it lie there like a lox. Which was a particularly irritating thing about Goulart: the way he got in your head so you would actually think the things he was going to say later. You basically ended up saying them for him as if to save him the trouble.
“There’s something else,” said Zach. “Could be nothing, but. . . . The boy said Abend was asking about ‘stoomp bassard’ or ‘stupe bassard’ or something. I turned up something online called Stumpf’s Baselard. According to the dictionary, a baselard is a kind of sword or dagger folks wore in the 14th and 15th, maybe 16th, centuries. And Stumpf’s Baselard—well, we’re not sure. It seems to be a dagger that’s gone missing. Maybe valuable or something. Anyway, some professor in Germany wrote an article about it and I’m trying to track her down.”
“Interesting,” Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell said. She looked from one to the other of them, waiting for more. That was all they had worth telling. “Okay.” She practically leapt out of her seat in that I’m-all-business way she had. “Back to work.” But then, as Goulart started for the door, she said, “Give me a second, Zach, there’s something unrelated I wanted to ask you about.” Adding a look at Goulart that said: Zach alone.
Goulart hesitated, but what was he going to do? Throw a tantrum? “I guess I know when I’m not wanted,” he said with a show of good humor.
“Good,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. “And if you don’t mind, close the door on your way out.”
When he was gone, when Zach was seated on the over-soft sofa again, she brought her chair around the side of the little coffee table and moved it in close to him, her knees near his. Blocking his view of the TV set, of the smoke and fire on the screen, she jutted her long face at him.
“We need to talk about Goulart,” she said.
Zach managed not to groan, but only just. If there was one thing he hated, it was office politics. He considered it girly kindergarten stuff: If you’re friends with him, you can’t be friends with me. Goulart didn’t like Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell, Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell didn’t like Goulart. So what? Deal with it. Catch bad guys. Do your job.
Werewolf Cop Page 4
