The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3)

by Green, Layton

“High priest of the House of Lucifer,” Viktor murmured. That was indeed news. The House was the world’s largest official Satanic religion. “And the connection to the Paris murder?”

  “There are several, oui, which we can discuss after you view the crime scene. But the most obvious connection is the identity of the victim, Monsieur Xavier Marcel.”

  Viktor was lifting his glass to take another sip, and he eased the absinthe down. Xavier Marcel, also known as the Black Cleric, was both a wanted criminal and the underground leader of L’église de la Bête, or the Church of the Beast, Europe’s most infamous and dangerous Satanic cult.

  News indeed.

  MANHATTAN

  The long shadows of dusk greeted Dominic Grey as he stepped out of the teen homeless shelter and into the twilight world of Washington Heights. After a few months of teaching jujitsu in a makeshift gym, Grey now had seven semiregular students. Most of the troubled kids tried his class once and never came back.

  That pained him. He understood the martial arts were not for everyone, but he wanted to help each wary face that came through his door. Most of the kids yearned for knowledge and structure but weren’t ready to accept Grey’s strict code of honor.

  Grey’s step was especially heavy that evening. One of his favorite students, a fourteen-year-old Latino gang member named Frankie, had cursed another student in class. Grey showed him the door, and Frankie had cursed Grey on his way out. Though thin and wiry, Frankie was scrappy, smart, and didn’t know how to quit. He reminded Grey of himself.

  Frankie was also very proud, and Grey doubted he would come back. But that was the way it had to be. Grey had studied the martial arts since he was five, some of that time under one of the top Japanese jujitsu masters in the world. Grey’s own shihan had insisted that respect came before all else; no one should learn how to harm another human being before learning how to value one.

  Like the kids he now taught, Grey had also once been homeless. His father was a lifelong Marine who had mentally and physically abused Grey and his mother throughout Grey’s childhood. Mortally afraid his skinny, introspective son would fail to become a real man, he’d trained Grey to fight since he could crawl.

  When his father was assigned to Tokyo soon after Grey’s tenth birthday, he forced Grey to study Japanese jujitsu, one of the most brutal and effective martial arts in the world, designed to use an attacker’s own energy to exploit the weaknesses of the human body: joints, pressure points, organs, digits, soft tissue. Zen-Zekai, the style of jujitsu taught at Grey’s school, was particularly violent. Barely a day went by that Grey came home without blood on his gi.

  Grey’s mother died of stomach cancer when Grey was fifteen, and on the first anniversary of her death Grey’s father came home drunk yet again, reached for his nail-studded belt one too many times. Grey had never quite forgiven himself for beating his own father that night, but he wasn’t sure he would do anything differently if given the chance, and that pained him even more.

  After leaving his father crumpled on the floor, vowing to kill Grey as he walked out the door, Grey took to the backstreets of Tokyo, staying alive by fighting in underground street fights. Already a black belt in Zen-zekai, Grey thrived on Tokyo’s human cockfight circuit. But the underbellies of Japan’s throbbing neon cities were dangerous for a teenage boy, no matter how tough. He drifted to other cities and countries, yearning for a place to call home, grasping onto his fierce personal ethos as a lifeline. For to compromise his ethics, to mute that quiet inner voice, was to lose the one thing he could claim as his own.

  Grey left the trash- and graffiti-strewn streets of Washington Heights and approached his building, an abandoned high school converted into lofts, on the edge of gentrifying Hudson Heights.

  “Hey, Teach!”

  A shirtless teen was leaning against the steps of his building. Frankie. Two men in gang colors sat on the steps beside him, eyeing Grey like he had just kicked their dog.

  The streets were empty, a single streetlight illuminating the concrete steps. Grey kept an eye on all three. “Frankie,” Grey said evenly as he approached. “I’d like to see you in class again, despite what happened tonight. You have real talent.”

  “I dunno, Teach. I no think I need you no more.”

  Grey noticed the other two shift ever so slightly. Dressed in tank tops and baggy pants, they had prison tats on their necks and forearms, and the hardened eyes of street thugs. One was bald; the other had a Mohawk.

  Grey kept his demeanor as relaxed as possible as he approached. Five more feet and it wouldn’t matter what they had stuck in the waistbands of those pants. It took three seconds for the average man to draw, enable, and point a gun, not to mention aim and hit. And three seconds was an eternity in close quarters.

  “Hey Teach,” Frankie said softly. “You know wha’ we do about gente disrespect us?”

  The two thugs rose and pulled switchblades as Frankie began to grin. Grey was on them before Frankie’s grin reached the corners of his lips. No one pulling a knife expects to be rushed, especially not when it’s three against one. Grey approached in a blur, halfway there before the blades were out, and he snapped a vicious side kick into the kneecap of the bald gang member, whose eyes told Grey he wasn’t expecting a low strike. Grey heard the crunch of a broken patella.

  The thug with the Mohawk managed to raise his knife and lunge at Grey. Again Grey did the unexpected and stepped into the amateur thrust, fluid as a snake, sliding to the side of the knife and brush blocking the arm at the elbow. Grey turned the soft block into a strike, hitting the exposed throat with the hardened web of one hand while smacking the center of the lower back, the vulnerable ming men point, with the other. The gang member fell to the pavement and grabbed at his throat, choking violently.

  Grey kicked the knives away and moved towards Frankie, who had backed against the door at the top of the steps, now brandishing his own knife.

  Frankie was shaking and waving the knife around. “¿Qué hiciste, qué hiciste? You kill him!”

  Grey stopped advancing and put his hands out, palms up. “Put the knife down, Frankie. They’ll both live. I’ll call for help as soon as you drop the weapon.”

  Frankie glanced at his two friends moaning on the ground. “Hijo de puta madre,” Frankie said. “You know wha’ this does to me?”

  “It doesn’t have to do anything,” Grey said. “Leave the gang and train with me. I’ll protect you.”

  Frankie’s eyes were wild, and he kept waving the knife in front of him as he lurched down the side of the steps, as far from Grey as he could get. When he reached the bottom he backed into the street.

  “What’s out there for you, Frankie? I’ve been there, right where you’re standing.”

  “You no know shit,” Frankie said, then turned and fled into the night.

  Grey watched him go as the adrenaline seeped away, feeling a sadness for the world descend and settle into the pockets of his bones.

  Frankie was wrong.

  Grey did know.

  After the police and ambulance left, Grey trudged to his fifth-floor loft. There had been a warrant out for the two men with Frankie. Both gang members, ex-cons, wanted for an assortment of violent crimes. Fair or not, the two older ones had chosen their path. Frankie was still young enough to decide.

  Grey’s studio loft had exposed brick walls, a stained concrete floor, and a shoji screen separating his sleeping area. The furniture consisted of a platform bed and a tatami mat, along with a few chairs he had picked up at an estate sale. The built-in bookshelves contained a selection of novels, philosophical works, and travel and language guides. The latest Time Out New York, earmarked at the cheap eats and off-Broadway sections, had been tossed on the bed.

  Sick of hotels, he had rented the studio for a year. His job with Viktor required frequent travel, and Grey supposed New York was as good a base as any.

  He showered, poured himself a cold sake, and was pleased to see he had a voice mail from Viktor. When
he had long spells between cases he grew restless. He had worked on a couple of small investigations in the last few months, but nothing major since the tragic case involving the Egyptian biotech company. Tragic, and incredible. Stretching the limits of his beliefs was quickly becoming part of the job description.

  In his message Viktor said there was a new case requiring immediate attention, and that Grey should check his e-mail for travel details. Grey logged on and found a plane ticket to San Francisco leaving at six a.m. the next morning, along with a hotel reservation for three nights at the Fairmont. He was to meet Viktor in the hotel lobby at two p.m. tomorrow.

  Grey stared at the empty street below his window as he finished the sake, wondering where Frankie would sleep that night, wondering what the new case with Viktor would be like, wondering how renting a half-furnished loft in a forgotten corner of a city of ten million people, without a friend or barely even an acquaintance, was that much different from braving the streets of Tokyo when he was a teenager, alone and unsure.

  He pushed away from the window and started packing, happy to be working again.

  INNER SANCTUM OF L’ÉGLISE DE LA BÊTE, PARIS CATACOMBS

  Dante’s black duster swept around his ankles as he strode through the gloom, the steady drip of sewer water his constant companion, the pentagram tattoo splayed across his shaved head catching the occasional drop.

  Most of the members of L’église de la Bête chose to enter the catacombs through one of the secured hidden routes, but Dante preferred to walk in plain view of the homeless, thieves, murderers, and worse who occupied the levels near the surface streets. He enjoyed the way they scattered or looked down as he approached, careful not to meet his gaze. And there was always the chance that someone new had arrived in the underworld, someone unfamiliar with Dante and his knives.

  He left the rat- and filth-infested sewers behind, descending into a section of the catacombs of which polite society was unaware, and to which most of impolite society dared not go.

  Dante had been a member of L’église de la Bête for more than a decade. For most of that time, he had been the right-hand man of Xavier Marcel, the Black Cleric. Dante had not feared Xavier, but he had respected Xavier’s capacity for cruelty and devotion to cause.

  Dante felt no remorse about his new allegiance to the Magus. The Magus had given Xavier a choice, and Xavier had chosen to stand against him. Dante was a weapon, not a politician, and while L’église de la Bête was his church, he had only one true ethos, and that was pain. He would worship and follow whoever granted him the most access to it. For the present that was L’église de la Bête, and the Magus.

  Pain. Suffering had already polluted Dante’s soul by the time he entered prison at the tender age of eighteen, but during his decade of incarceration, his internal torment transformed from an emotion into a calling.

  Dante’s slight lisp had not gone over well in prison, until he disemboweled someone with a shiv for mimicking it. He participated in so many fights that pain became irrelevant, and he became known as someone who would never quit during a fight, no matter how much injury he suffered. It made him a feared man.

  In prison he met two men who would define the rest of his life. The first, a Filipino man also in prison for killing a child molester, became Dante’s only and last friend. The Filipino was an expert knife fighter in the eskrima tradition and taught Dante everything he knew, practicing with smuggled kitchen knives and wooden shunts. Dante devoted himself to training, turning his trim, iron body into a sort of knife itself. He mastered the art of throwing knives under the tutelage of an ex-soldier in the French Foreign Legion, who taught him how to weight the hilt with liquid mercury to make the weapon fly more true.

  The second man who would define Dante’s life was avoided by the other inmates. One of the rare few who, like Dante, belonged to no gang and yet no one dared touch. Dante learned he was from Paris, a member of a Satanic church called L’église de la Bête. Dante, immune to the terrible rumors of what befell someone who meddled with a member of L’église de la Bête, cornered the man in the yard one day. His name was Xavier Marcel, and instead of fighting, Xavier told Dante about his religion. Dante learned that this religion also valued pain and decided to accept a rare invitation.

  When Dante left prison he followed Xavier to Paris, inked a very special tattoo on his head, filed his incisors to a sharp point, and dedicated himself to his two religions.

  Pain and L’église de la Bête.

  The Magus appreciated Dante’s service; in fact, Dante suspected his new leader actually understood his motives, which had never been the case with Xavier. Xavier had used Dante to stay in power, and Dante had allowed him to do so because it was expedient.

  The Magus was different.

  The Magus knew.

  As he entered the final tunnel, Dante heard the guttural intonations of the Black Mass, inhaled the first whiff of burning flesh that saturated the air in the cathedral of L’église de la Bête. He left the tunnel and entered the cavernous underground grotto, saw the crush of members gathered around the lantern-lit pedestal. He decided to wait in the background.

  Xavier had placed great emphasis on the Black Mass, believing it channeled just as much spiritual power as the Christian ritual it mocked. The Black Mass had been performed by Satanists for century upon century, and participation was required. Everyone important would be in attendance.

  Dante could tell the ritual neared its conclusion. The reversed Ten Commandments would have already been recited, the unclean host from the sacrifice ingested and imbibed. He saw some of the more devout members walking backwards on their hands and feet, crablike, towards the effigy of the Beast at the base of the huge inverted cross.

  The Mass ended, but before the orgy could begin, Dante made his presence known. He waded through the crowd, the worshippers scrambling out of his way when they recognized him. Dante had been known to whip out his knives for anyone who failed to move fast enough, and by the time he was halfway to the platform the path was clear.

  A veil of silence dropped as Dante climbed the stepladder and stood upon the wooden platform, his black coat and tattooed head a wreath of darkness within the halo of dim light. He spoke in harsh, raspy French, and with the lisp that had always plagued him.

  “I know many of you are having trouble accepting the rule of the Magus.”

  Shouts of agreement rose from the crowd, as well as several cries of blasphemy from those outside Dante’s line of view.

  “I hear some believe it was I who did this thing,” Dante said.

  A voice from the crowd: “Who else could do this? Who is this new prophet, and where is he?”

  “Trust me, my brothers and sisters, it was not I.”

  Dante sensed the presence behind him even before he saw the shocked faces of the worshippers. Without turning he knew what they were seeing: the huge cross now aflame, the figure in the black robe on the dais a few steps above Dante, looking down on the crowd. Fear was not an emotion Dante experienced—he was not sure that he experienced emotion at all anymore—but Dante could sense the awe and terror ricocheting through the cavern.

  What Dante did feel was the heat from the burning cross a few feet behind him. He hoped the Magus hurried his speech.

  Someone cried out, “It’s the Angel of Death, the Beast himself.”

  A voice behind Dante boomed forth, somehow amplified to ring throughout the cavern. “I, too, have heard the rumors, and have come to set your hearts and minds at ease. It was I who deposed Xavier, but I am neither angel nor beast.”

  Dante recognized the next voice as Margaux Fournier, the oldest female member. “Then who are you?”

  “I am the Magus. I came because Xavier refused to recognize the one true God. I remain because I do.”

  “Then you’re our enemy.” The firmness in Margaux’s voice surprised Dante.

  “Enemy? I’m your new prophet. Keep your symbology and your chants, practice your religion how you will. B
ut know that your theology is primitive. I ask you: Would you worship a beast, a discarded fallen angel, or would you worship a god?”

  A ripple of noise scuttled through the crowd. “Why should the God of Abraham have sole claim to that title?” the voice behind Dante continued. “Why waste your time mocking an inferior religion? Be free of that yoke, and worship the one who came first, the one your Satan was searching for when he rebelled.”

  The crowd murmured and then quieted, until the licking of the flames behind Dante was the only thing he could hear. Sweat poured down his neck and back, the heat almost unbearable.

  “You have a new mission,” the voice said, “a departure from the black cross alone. A mission worthy of the One who sent me.”

  Another undulation of noise from the crowd.

  “Dante will appoint your new leader, and he will instruct you further. Heed his words and know them as my will.”

  Dante again had a sensation, this time that the presence behind him was gone. Unwilling to show weakness, yet knowing he had to leave the platform before the intense heat overcame him, Dante raised one of his knives. The crowd followed his every movement, wondering who among them had been chosen. Framed by the hellish glow of the flames, Dante pointed his knife at a man in front named Luc Morel-Renard, leader of France’s fastest growing far-right movement and a rising political voice among the disenchanted.

  Luc raised his fist, and Dante stepped off the platform.

  Grey slid his lean six-foot-one frame into an aisle seat in the rear of the plane. Whether restaurant, train, or plane, Grey preferred no one had his back. The seats next to him were empty, and he kicked off his boots and rubbed his week’s worth of dark stubble. The day might be a long one and he hadn’t fallen asleep until after three a.m. He was dozing before the plane took off, in a state of half awareness cultivated in his missions with Marine Force Recon.

  Grey’s attempt to exorcise the ghost of his father by joining the Marines, to follow the same path yet prove he was different, had been a disaster. He soon found himself in a dusty Iraqi city brimming with misery, lying on a terra-cotta rooftop a mile from the targets, seeing a human outline in his scope and realizing he did not even know the sex, could not snuff out a faceless life. He already struggled with the violence that kept a constant vigil, like a diseased candle, deep inside. He had closed his eyes and let the weapon lie loose in his grasp.