by Gabriel Hunt
One punch split his lip against his front teeth and he gagged from the taste of blood. He felt the night’s liquor coming up and he made no effort to stop it. Vomit poured out of him, a day’s worth of food and drink expelled in foul batches. The men holding him yanked their hands away and Malcolm slid to the floor.
“Goddamn narrowback lush—” Another kick dug deep into his belly. From somewhere off to one side, Malcolm heard the click of a switchblade opening.
“Cut the sorry bastard—”
He forced his eyes open, rolled out of the way as the blade descended. It was the boy in the peajacket holding it. He swung again, and Malcolm lifted an arm to block it. He felt the blade slice through the sleeve and streak across the flesh beneath it.
“Stop that!”
It was a woman’s voice. Malcolm hugged his bleeding arm to his chest and looked for the source of the voice. A pair of legs approached, clad in nylons, a tan skirt ending just below the knee. The shoes were brown leather and scuffed, with low heels, the sort a certain type of girl would call “sensible.” On either side, a pair of paint-smeared dungarees turned in her direction.
“Leave him alone, or I’ll bring the police.”
“Stay out of this, love. It’s not your fight.”
“Oh, yes? And what do you call it when my husband is getting himself mauled by the likes of you?”
“You’re married to…this?”
“He may not be much,” she said, “but I’d just as soon not have him skewered over some tiff in a pub. Now would you be kind enough to help him up so I can bring him home?”
A tense moment passed, the blade still shining under the room’s lights. Then a pair of rough hands folded the switchblade shut. It disappeared into the long slash pocket of the peajacket. “He’s your problem, love. Help him yourself.”
“Jaysus,” one of the others said, “bird like you and an old harp like him. No bleeding justice, is there?”
“Bastard.” One of them got in a final kick, wiped the sole of his work boot on Malcolm’s shirt. Then the men’s legs went away. The woman’s stayed.
Malcolm wanted to raise his eyes, to look at the woman’s face, but his arm had started to throb and he found himself slipping in and out of consciousness.
The stockings took two steps forward, skirting the smear of filth beside him. The woman lowered herself to a crouch. The light was behind her and Malcolm could only faintly make out her features. She had a sharp widow’s peak and fair skin, and the largest, saddest eyes he could remember seeing.
“You’re Malcolm Stewart?” she said.
He nodded. She looked as though she’d been hoping he’d say no.
“Look at you,” she said. “I can’t take you to him like this.”
“To whom?” he said. He felt dizzy. “Do I know you?”
“My employer. He asked me to bring you to him. He has—” She paused to look him over again, and the disappointment in her voice was undisguised when she spoke. “He has an assignment for you, Mr. Stewart.”
“…an assignment?”
“I told him it wasn’t a good idea. I told him the reports he had were years old. But Mr. Burke’s not one to be put off.” She took him by his undamaged arm, pulled him not too gently to his knees. “Come along, Mr. Stewart. Let’s get you bandaged up and bathed, what do you say?”
“I say,” he mumbled, trying to think of the words. “I say ‘thank you’?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s a start.”
The iodine stung and the bandage smarted. He’d burned his tongue on the coffee she’d given him, and his chest was erupting with colorful bruises. His head was still ringing. But he’d showered (carefully, leaning against the wall) and he could feel sobriety returning to him, timidly, like a husband tiptoeing back into the house after an evening’s debauch.
“Have you got a name?” he said. “Or would you rather I just thought of you as an anonymous benefactor?”
She was watching him from one of the bedroom chairs, legs crossed primly at the ankles, hands laced in her lap. She had an admirable figure and a face just this side of beautiful. And she was young, too—still in her early twenties, Malcolm guessed, which would make her less than half his age. He could understand why the lads in the bar might have had a hard time picturing them as man and wife.
“My name is Margaret Stiles. But that’s not important. Only Mr. Burke is, and what he wants to talk to you about.”
“And what is that?”
“He’ll want to tell you himself.”
“I see.”
“Please choose a shirt and get dressed,” she said. “We shouldn’t keep Mr. Burke waiting.”
There were three shirts laid out on the bed. Malcolm selected the softest of them, a red flannel, and drew it on over his bandaged arm. He winced as he buttoned it.
He was still wearing his own pants—they hadn’t been spattered as badly. And the boots were his as well. A quick dunk under the tap had restored them to whatever prior vitality they might have claimed. His shirt had been ruined. He imagined it was now being incinerated in some hidden chamber of this house.
“Your Mr. Burke knows I’m here?”
“I spoke to him while you were in the shower.”
“And he wants to see me now?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Why ‘in a manner of speaking’?”
“Come on,” she said, standing up. “We’ve lost enough time.”
“I want to know what you meant. He doesn’t want to see me?”
“I imagine,” she said, “that he would like to see you more than anything. But that’s hardly an option.”
“Any why is that?”
“His eyes, Mr. Stewart. He was blinded in North Africa.”
North Africa. The words brought a rush of painful memories. The press toward Libya, the desert winds in his throat, the baking heat, and in the middle of it all, between spells of tortured boredom, the moments of utter chaos: the mortar rounds tearing great gouts out of the sand, and out of the men who sped across it. So Burke had been an 8th Army man? And had paid for it dearly, though not so dearly as some.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. “I was in that campaign myself.”
“I know you were,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons he selected you, though perhaps he’ll think better of it once he meets you.”
“That’s rather harsh, my dear.”
“Harsh? Look at you. And what he’ll ask of you, Mr. Stewart…it’s ever so much worse than dealing with those three in the pub.”
“I’ve dealt with worse.”
“Yes, but recently?” She waited, but he had no answer for her. “Now will you please follow me?”
He stepped out into the hall. She led him down to the main floor on a staircase wide enough to hold four men abreast. The building was deceptive: From the front as they’d come in it hadn’t looked nearly as big as it turned out to be once you were inside. There was money behind this Burke, generations of it. It didn’t show in ostentatious ways—no chandeliers dripping with crystal or gold leaf on the picture frames. But the pictures themselves looked like they’d fetch a pretty sum at auction, and the carpeting was the sort that costs as much as most people spend to furnish their entire homes.
They passed from the entry hall into a library, and on through a short connecting corridor into the kitchen, where a woman in a cook’s smock stood cutting potatoes into a copper kettle. She looked up as they passed. He thought he spied a look of pity in her eyes.
“Another, Miss Stiles?”
Margaret moved them along without slowing.
Malcolm looked back over his shoulder. The woman was still watching, knife at the ready, supper temporarily forgotten.
Malcolm didn’t say anything till they were out of earshot. “What did she mean, ‘another’?”
“Never mind her.” Margaret stopped at a closed door. She tugged on a brass pull set into the doorframe at eye level. He could hear a bell ring w
ithin and, moments later, a man’s voice called out. “Miss Stiles?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got Mr. Stewart with you?”
“Yes.”
“Bring him in.” It was a deep voice, muffled by the door, but strong, Malcolm thought, and self-confident. He was put in mind of his commanding officers from the army—it was the sort of voice you were trained to use when marshalling troops for a charge across a noman’s zone. Some men didn’t need to be trained, of course. They’d learned it in the nursery or had it bred into them from birth.
Margaret swung the door open. He was surprised to see no light behind it. She made no move to turn one on.
“Come in, Mr. Stewart,” the voice intoned. “Don’t let the darkness bother you. Miss Stiles will show you to a chair.” She took him by the arm and steered him through the room, navigating obstacles he could see only dimly. It was oddly damp in the room, as though a window had been left open, but the only windows he could make out appeared to be shut and heavily curtained.
“It’s for my eyes, you understand,” Burke said. “Dark, cool, moist—I’m afraid it’s the only way for me to be comfortable any longer.”
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said.
“Come,” Burke said. “Sit by me, and Miss Stiles will join us.”
She put his hand on the arm of a chair, and he sat. Now that his eyes had begun to adjust, Malcolm could make out the outline of Burke’s face where he sat two feet away. He wore a beard, and his hair curved up from his forehead in uneven curls. The man leaned forward with his left hand out. Malcolm took it. Burke’s grip was firm.
“What happened?” Malcolm said. “To your eyes, I mean. Shrapnel? Or fire?”
For a moment, Burke didn’t say anything, and Malcolm thought perhaps he’d crossed a line. But for Christ’s sake, the man had brought the subject up himself. And after all, hadn’t Malcolm served in the same campaign, hadn’t he seen plenty of friends lose eyes and worse—?
“No,” Burke said. “Not shrapnel, nor fire, nor any of the other causes you’d imagine. I’ll tell you what happened, Mr. Stewart, but that is the end of the story, not the beginning. Miss Stiles, could you turn up the fan? Thank you.”
Malcolm heard Margaret’s footsteps retreat and return. A mechanical hum he hadn’t noticed before got louder, and he felt the air stir.
Burke leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. Malcolm could see he wasn’t wearing anything over his eyes—no dark glasses, no patch. He didn’t seem to blink, either. Of course, perhaps he had glass eyes…but no, that wouldn’t explain the need to sit in the dark and keep things as damp and cool as a cellar.
“Mr. Stewart, I want to thank you for hearing me out. I need your help. Or to put it another way, I need the help of someone who knows his way around a part of the world I understand we have in common. Someone who’s not easily frightened or put off the scent. I’ve asked around and people think highly of you.”
“You must not have asked anyone in town,” Malcolm said. “You’d have gotten a different picture.”
“Yes, Miss Stiles told me about the scene in the pub. Most regrettable. You drink too much, Mr. Stewart.”
“Or not enough.”
“More and you’d be dead of it, and no use to me. Let’s not fence with each other, shall we? You were a good man once. I heard it from men I trust. Until your wife died, I gather, and since then it’s been one long bender, hasn’t it?”
Malcolm flinched. “Not so long.”
“Three years, man. And you once a good soldier. Where’s your backbone?”
“I left it behind in the sand,” Malcolm said, “where you left your eyes.”
“Nonsense. You’ve still got a spine, man, you’ve just let it soften in that embalming fluid you insist on pouring into yourself. If you’re to work for me, you’ll do it dry, you understand?”
The voice of command—Malcolm almost felt himself sitting up straighter in response, against his will. “And am I to work for you?”
“I hope to god you are—I’ve exhausted everyone else.”
“What is it you want done? I don’t see you as the type to raise a private army, and I’m out of the soldiering business anyway.”
“No. I’ve never been a soldier myself. What I have been—what I am, Mr. Stewart—is a student of history. When I went to North Africa it was not because of the war but in spite of it. I wasn’t part of the military action, I was there on my own, pursuing one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world.”
“Greatest mysteries of the ancient world”? The man sounded like a radio program. But he had a job to offer, apparently, and such offers were not plentiful these days.
“I understand,” Malcolm said. “You were in Africa hunting something, but instead of finding it, you came across the military action instead?”
“No, Mr. Stewart. I found what I was looking for. I found it exactly where I thought it would be. I saw it with my own eyes. I’d searched for a decade and more, and by god, I found it.” He fell silent.
“What happened?” Malcolm said.
“Some antiquities, Mr. Stewart, are hidden by time alone—a cave’s entrance is covered in a sandstorm and forgotten, and no one sees its contents again for a thousand years. But others are kept hidden deliberately, passed from generation to generation in secret. The price for learning the secret is a vow to preserve it, and the penalty for revealing it is death. It is antiquities of this sort that are the harder to find. They aren’t lost, you see, and the people who know where they are have an interest in keeping them from you.”
“But you did find…whatever it was.”
“I did, and I did it the hard way. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was a stronger man than you, and faster, and better with a gun. I knew what I was after. I hunted it and the men who kept it, I hunted it through nine countries on three continents, and I found it, Mr. Stewart.” His voice broke. “I found it. But I couldn’t keep it. They caught me, and for several days they held me while they discussed what to do with me. Then they cut off my right hand—I’d touched it with that hand, you see. And of course I’d seen it, Mr. Stewart. I’d seen it.”
Burke leaned over the side of the chair and pressed a switch on the desk beside him. A shaded light went on—low wattage, but enough to illuminate one side of Burke’s face. The other side remained in shadow until he turned to face Malcolm full-on. Burke’s eyes were wide open and leached of all color, only the faintest outline of concentric circles to hint where pupil and iris had once shown.
“They cut off my eyelids, Mr. Stewart. With the sharpest of knives, and gently, so gently, holding my head so I couldn’t scream or injure myself. They wiped the blood from my eyes with silk. With silk, Mr. Stewart—I’ll never forget the touch. Then they carried me out into the desert west of the Gattara Depression, left me in the Great Sand Sea, completely naked, left me to go blind and mad and then die—and I would have, surely, if I hadn’t been found by a pair of soldiers from a British regiment who had wandered off course. They saved me from madness and death, Mr. Stewart. But it was too late to save me from blindness.”
He switched off the light, but the image of the lidless, sun-bleached eyes hung between them. “The touch of light is quite painful still,” he said. “But I wanted you to see. There should be no mystery between us.”
It took a moment for Malcolm to find his voice. “What is it that you want me to do?”
“I’ve found it again,” Burke said. “It has taken me years, and more money than you can imagine. It’s cost several good men their lives. But I’ve found it, and this time it won’t get away from me. Not with your help.”
“And why should I help you?”
“There will be money, of course—quite a lot. But I know what you’re going to say: Of what use is money if you’re not around to spend it? And that’s so. But there’s more. This is your chance to be a part of something much greater than yourself, greater than me, greater than all of us. You w
ill play a role in unraveling one of the greatest unsolved riddles of all time.”
“Is that what you told the other men? The ones who died helping you?”
“Yes, Mr. Stewart, it is. It was the truth.”
“And they took the job.”
“I pay extremely well. And the men I chose had something in common with you.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing to lose,” Burke said.
It stung, but only because it was true. He had no family and no employment. His army pension kept his glass full as long as his tastes were cheap, and occasional under-the-table assignments paid the rest of his bills. He’d fetched and carried for some of London’s worst, had ridden shotgun for questionable deliveries, had taken part in labor actions on whichever side cared to have him. It was a life, but only in the barest sense. Even when he’d had reason to, he’d never shrunk from risking it. Why would this be the assignment to make him put his foot down at last? And yet the image of Burke’s lidless eyes was a hard one to rid himself of.
“Tell me, Mr. Burke, what it is that I’d be collecting for you, and how much you would pay me for it.”
“I’d pay enough that you’d never need work again,” Burke said.
“If you please, I’d prefer a number.”
“Fifty thousand pounds, or its equivalent in any currency you choose. Gold, if you like.”
Malcolm’s mouth went dry. “You can’t be serious. What are you asking me to do, steal the crown jewels?”
“Oh, something much more valuable than that. Do you remember your Bible, Mr. Stewart?”
“Not too well.”
“There’s a story in it about a man called Moses,” Burke said. “You may recall he went up into the mountains for forty days, leaving his people behind. We’re told they grew restless, that when he didn’t return as promised, they called on his brother, Aaron, to make them an idol to protect them. A figure of a calf fashioned from the melted-down gold of their earrings and wristlets and such. When Moses returned and saw them worshipping this golden calf, the Bible says his anger was terrible. He smashed the tablets he was carrying, ordered the calf destroyed—ground to powder—and then mixed the powder with water and made his people drink it.”
