“Damn right it did.” His brother was missing because of it. “You know, if this were six months ago, I’d be looking around for a dog.”
She looked startled, then laughed. “You think I’m the Lady?”
Not really, what with the Lady still recovering. Wait—
“You know the Lady?”
“I know of her. We’ve never met face to face.”
She knows of the Lady and she collects Infernals…
“Who are you?”
“I believe I introduced myself. I’m—”
“Madame de Medici. Or so you’ve said. But those are just words.”
“They are words that will have to suffice.”
Jack stared at the Bagaq—an ugly thing with a dumb name. “I don’t think I want to do this.”
“It will not harm you.”
“They don’t call them ‘Infernal’ for nothing.”
“An excellent point, but you will not have to carry it around with you. You need only find a safe place for it—a location you will not share with me—and leave it there until the time is right for me to take it home again.”
“And when will that be?”
A shrug. “I cannot say. Until a fellow collector named Roland Apfel no longer wants it.”
“Why would he stop wanting it? If he’s a collector like you, the mania won’t go away.”
“No, but Roland will. He is dying—terminal cancer of some sort—and he believes the Bagaq has a mystical power to heal him.”
“Does it?”
“I have absolutely no idea. Rumors abound about each of the Infernals, but often they are false, or only partially true. The simplest, most superficial and intriguing parts of the story are passed on, while the deeper part, the part with all the caveats, is lost to time.”
“So, you’re hiding it from a dying man? Kind of cold.”
“Not necessarily. One should never expect to benefit from an Infernal.”
“No kidding. But where’s the harm in giving this Roland a chance to use it?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“Not even a loan?”
“Absolutely not.”
Jack sensed he was dealing with an immovable object here, but he pushed her anyway.
“Afraid he’ll scratch it or contaminate it?”
“Because he has threatened me. And if by chance the Bagaq should work some miracle cure—or if Roland merely thinks it has—he will never give it up. The Bagaq is mine and a key part of my collection. I do not lend pieces of my collection. Especially to his sort. He has intimated that he will kill to acquire it, and if he comes to believe that it will help him next time he falls ill, he will kill to keep it.”
“In a way, you’re ‘lending’ this piece of your collection to me.”
“To keep it from Roland.”
“I don’t know…”
He would forever regret the last time he’d allowed an Infernal into his home.
“The Bagaq is harmless.”
“That might be one of the partial truths you mentioned.”
“The only danger is from Roland. No one can connect you to me. All you have to do is hide it away while I visit one of my homes abroad—I’m thinking of my place in Luxor to escape these frigid temperatures.”
“Is Egypt safe?”
“Safer than here. If I stay around I fear Roland might abduct me and try to extract the whereabouts of the Bagaq through, shall we say, unpleasant means. He is a ruthless and cruel man. Much easier if I simply disappear and wait for Roland to die.”
“Why not take the thing with you?”
She frowned. “That sounds like the obvious solution, but frankly I’m afraid to fly with an Infernal. I don’t know what it might do. No one does. That is why it was shipped by sea from Iran.”
Good reason…if true.
But none of that mattered. Bottom line: Jack didn’t want to be responsible for an Infernal, didn’t even want to be in the same room with one. He needed a graceful way to bow out of this. How about pricing himself out of the market?
“All right, I’ll help you out, but seeing as it’s an Infernal, I’ll need two thousand dollars a day.”
She didn’t blink. “How much in advance?”
Oh, hell. This wasn’t good.
A sinking feeling began as he said, “A week will do.”
With a sly smile, she reached into her bag and produced a handful of gold coins.
“I believe these will cover the first week.”
He hid his shock. When she held them out, he had no choice but to take them.
From their weight he knew they were definitely gold. And definitely old, despite the sharply engraved eagles.
“What are—?”
“Ptolemaic—from the first century BCE. Before Cleopatra. Collector’s items and, if I may say, worth more than their weight in gold.”
“Awfully good shape for over two thousand years old.”
“The gold coins tended to be hoarded, and were rarely circulated. Any rare coin dealer will be overjoyed to take these off your hands.”
Yeah, Monte down at Municipal Coins would need a drool cup when Jack showed him these. If he showed him. Might want to keep them for himself.
“What if I’d said four thousand a day?”
Another sly smile as she jingled her bag. “I came prepared. I can afford it. I just want to be assured that you will take proper care of it.”
She certainly looked like she could afford it. And he looked to be stuck with the Bagaq.
A different story if she’d been asking him to safeguard her, which would have been a much more complicated proposition. But this lump of metal? Nothing to it. He knew just the place to hide it.
“How many weeks do you think this will go on?” He’d feel guilty taking sixty Gs from her, month after month.
“I don’t think Roland will survive the year.”
Which came to less than two weeks.
“Oh, well, that’s good. I mean, I don’t mean ‘good’ in a—”
“No, it is good. The world will be a better place when he is no longer polluting it with his presence.”
Obviously, no love lost between Madame and Roland.
She returned to the bay window for another gaze outside. He saw her stiffen.
“Jack…would you come here and look at this man?” She sounded alarmed.
He stepped up beside her. “What man?”
“That one with the bald head across the street, in the flannel shirt and short pants. I thought he was looking up here.”
Jack recognized him immediately. Didn’t know his name but…
“He’s a neighbor. Owns that brownstone with the green door. He’s okay.”
The guy never appeared in long pants. Always wore shorts, no matter what the temperature. Jack had watched him shoveling snow in shorts.
His attention was drawn toward the fellow he’d seen earlier with the Honda, still out there. He was parked by the hydrant and had the engine cover off, ratcheting something down inside. Couldn’t see his face because, though his visor was up, his head was down.
“And what about that old one—staring up at us with that shocked look on his face?”
Oh, hell. Glaeken. He tended to go for extended walks when Magda’s nurse was tending to her. Sometimes he strolled Jack’s street. But his expression did indeed look shocked.
“He’s a local too.”
“But his reaction…”
“Maybe seeing me with a woman.”
“You are homosexual?”
“He knows I rarely have company.”
“That is a relief. I thought he was watching me.” She drew him from the window. Jack gave Glaeken a little wave as he moved away. “I am leaving, but I have one request before I go.”
“And that would be…?”
“I wish to see your copy of the Compendium.”
Another stunner. His mouth felt a little dry.
“How do you know so much about me?”
“I know about the Compendium. I used to own a copy.”
“A copy?”
She nodded. “Yes. There were more than one—quite a few, in fact. But only a handful now remain, if that many.”
How did she know all this? How did she know he had it?
“Well?” she said, tapping her booted foot. “May I see it?”
He hesitated. “How do I know you won’t try to steal it?”
She smiled. “I’m quite sure you’re capable of preventing that. But in truth, I have no need of one. My copy was lost in…I guess you could call it a flood. I have no desire to replace it. As I said, it is not one of a kind. I collect only unique objects.”
Uneasy, he said, “Maybe you should go now.”
She looked offended. “Why?”
“Because you know too much about me and I know nothing about you.”
She laughed. “Dear boy, I know about antiquities—all about them. Infernals and the Compendium are antiquities. I keep track of them. Don’t flatter yourself—I find them far more interesting than you.”
Jack had to laugh. “Burned!”
“I will show you the entry about the Bagaq and you can read for yourself.”
Since she already knew about the Compendium, he couldn’t see any harm in letting her see it. He retrieved the thick tome from the TV room and placed it on the oak table.
“This is in poor condition,” she said, opening the cover.
The text in the Compendium appeared in whatever language the reader grew up speaking. Jack wondered what language she saw.
She began muttering angrily in some strange tongue as she flipped through it.
“The pages are out of order.” Her amber eyes flashed. “This has been sorely mistreated.”
“It’s changed hands quite a bit recently.”
Jack had stolen it from a cult, then had it stolen from him, then stole it back.
She seemed more angry than annoyed. “I won’t be able to find the Bagaq entry so you’ll have to take my word. Even if I did wish to replace my copy, I would not want this one. It is useless.”
Not if you have an eidetic memory, Jack thought.
Weezy had one and she was mentally indexing the Compendium as she read through it, page by disconnected page.
She slammed the cover closed. “I find this very distressing.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to fix it, would you?”
“No. Sorry. I must go now and pack for my flight to Egypt.”
“How do I reach you?”
“You do not reach me. I reach you.”
He wasn’t sure he liked this. No, he was quite sure he didn’t like this. She was turning the tables, keeping the upper hand.
She thrust out one of those hands. “Good bye, Mister Jack.”
Their hands met. She’d been wearing gloves when she’d entered. Her hands were bare now and she squeezed his, maintaining her grasp.
“Something about you…”
Uh-oh. She knew an awful lot. Did she know that?
“My scintillating personality?”
Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, delusional people do tend to be more interesting than the perfectly rational.”
He decided he liked her.
“No,” she added, “it’s something else.” Finally, she released him and began pulling on her gloves. “It will come to me. Take good care of my Bagaq.”
He couldn’t help thinking of Bobby Vee’s Take Good Care of My Baby as he let her out onto the landing and watched her start down the stairs. After closing the door behind her, he grabbed the Bagaq and placed it on the top shelf of the front closet where it joined a katana with a damaged blade, known as the Gaijin Masamune, leaning at an angle next to his main-carry Glock 19.
He’d have to find a better place for it, but at the moment, on a Sunday morning, this was the best he had to offer.
Right now he had to go hunt a lost cryptid.
3
Tier watched Madame de Medici leave the brownstone. He stiffened as she turned his way. He’d expected her to walk back in the direction she’d come, but she continued west. She’d pass within arm’s reach.
Fortunately, the cover he’d prepared for hiding in plain sight would work for him now. He’d parked the bike at the empty curb before a fire hydrant and opened the engine cover. He had his tool kit out and was pretending to work on it.
He kept his face averted as she approached, but checked out her shoulder bag after she passed. The triangular leather sack that had bulged before entering the brownstone now lay flat against her.
Obviously, she’d dropped something off in that third-floor apartment. He knew she’d visited the third floor because she’d been good enough to stand in the bay window up front. Not once but twice—the second time with whomever she was visiting. Couldn’t have done a better job of pinpointing her location if she’d been working for him.
He quick-quick stowed his tools, replaced his helmet, and started pushing the bike after her. He hurried to catch up as she hung a left on Amsterdam Avenue, but when he reached the corner seconds later—
No Madame de Medici.
What the hell? Where’d she go?
Not like she could hide in a crowd, because a crowd didn’t exist at 9:40 on this frigid Sunday morning. Scattered people—most of them walking their dogs—wandered Amsterdam Avenue, but very few of the stores were open, so no one had much of a reason to venture out in the cold. And even if scads of people had been milling about, she’d be hard to miss in that coat and hat.
He started pushing his bike downtown past a computer place, a dry cleaner, and a restaurant—all closed. And then he came to a little park with empty tennis courts behind it. The branches of trees and bushes inside the park’s wrought iron fence were bare; no place to hide in there, even if she’d managed to get in. He backed up to the buildings and tried the door that led to the apartments above street level but found it locked.
Tier propped the bike on its kickstand and did a slow turn. No subway entrance in sight for blocks around, so she hadn’t ducked into one; she hadn’t had time to cross the street without his seeing her, so where the hell did she go? People didn’t just vanish into thin air, but Madame de Medici seemed to have done just that.
Okay, this was embarrassing.
She’d practically led him to that apartment, but now she’d managed to ditch him after half a block. How?
An old woman with swollen legs and a cane was trudging his way. She definitely qualified as spavined, but he took no pleasure in using his Word of the Day.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “Did you happen to see a woman in a white fur hat just a few moments ago?”
“Fur hat?” she said in a thick accent he couldn’t identify. “I have fur hat but my daughter won’t let me wear it. ‘Fur is dead!’ she says. Over and over, ‘Fur is dead!’ I know it’s dead. Of course it’s dead, but that’s all she says, over and over whenever I bring it out.”
“I’m sorry about that, but did you see—?”
“Will you come home and tell her that I know fur is dead?”
Tier shook his head. “I’m kind of busy right now—”
“Then what good are you?”
He backtracked toward the brownstone she’d visited and was a couple of doors away when the guy he’d seen at the window with her came out and hurried down the front steps to the sidewalk. He turned east and headed away toward Columbus Avenue. He wasn’t carrying a package of any sort…
Well-well-well… maybe fortune was smiling on Tier Hill after all.
He walked past the brownstone and chained the Honda to the nearest tree. He always kept his lock-pick set in the bike’s storage compartment, so he grabbed that and, keeping his helmet on, trotted up the steps and into the vestibule. He raised the visor enough to see that this particular brownstone had only one apartment per floor. The tenant on 3 was listed only as “Jack.”
After receiving no response to three long ri
ngs on the buzzer, he found a suitable bump key that had the inner door open in a flash. As he ascended to the third floor, he considered his options after retrieving the Bagaq.
A) Disappear and wait for Roland to die, then sell it to a dealer. Tier would receive only a fraction of its value, but a fraction of “priceless” could mean heavy bread.
B) Hide the Bagaq and keep charging Roland a hefty per diem as he supposedly continued the search, then turn it in for an additional bonus.
C) Tell Roland he’d found it and extort a huge price for it.
D) Simply turn it over and collect the finder’s fee, hoping it was truly “generous.”
The aces part of finding the Bagaq meant he wouldn’t have to ’fess up about Madame de Medici somehow giving him the slip. Still couldn’t imagine how she’d managed it, but the fact remained that his rep was based on his ability to track without being seen. If this got out…
Damn her.
As for his various choices, he knew he’d wind up with D. He had a sterling reputation in a field acrawl with lowlifes. That meant something to him. He didn’t want to wander into Poncia’s zone.
However, upon reaching the third-floor landing, all his choices were rendered null and void.
“Aw, shit.”
The guy had a 14-button combo lock on his door—ten numbers plus four freaking letters. The possible combinations ran into the millions.
Goddamn him!
Tier’s lock kit contained a small tempered steel pry bar which he dutifully tried. The fact that the door was steel wouldn’t have mattered much if it had been hung in a wood frame—he couldn’t get over how many people did that. But this guy had his steel door set in a steel frame, with a super-thick latch guard. He was pretty sure he’d need a battering ram to get through, and even then…
Double damn him.
Okay. Time to get out of here and figure his next move… which would mean going back to the Allard and keeping watch for the Medici gal’s return. His report to Roland would somehow omit mention of losing her trail this morning.
4
Jack slowed when he saw the flashing lights of the cop car behind him. A wasted day—at least so far. And this cop could make it a lot worse.
The dashboard clock read 4:40. The sun had just set, leaving him in the growing dark after a day of cruising the streets of Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, and Howard beach.
The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel Page 9
