"Have the police talked to you?" Laika asked.
"Just after the explosion, that's it."
"Was this room kept open?"
"No, it was always locked. Peder had the only key." He smiled uncomfortably. "There are other people who will swear to that. And I say that because I think I know what you're thinking. That if Peder died, I stood to come into a lot of money. And that's true. But I had nothing to do with the bomb, if that's what it was." He looked around the brightly lit room, squinting against the glare of the lights. "Where did he go?" he asked in a pleading voice. "Where the hell did he go?"
"That's what we'd like to find out, too," Laika said. "Is there someplace a little more comfortable where we could talk for a while?"
"Sure. Let's go over to the apartment."
The main room there was huge and stark, but it felt enriched by the few pieces of warm furniture and the sensuous canvases that spanned the walls. There seemed to be none of Holberg's work there. Guaraldi poured them freshly made coffee. Then they sat and he told them about Holberg's seeming fugue states and his disappearances. "He seemed very strange, withdrawn, as though his mind was constantly on something else. A few weeks before . . . the explosion, he asked me some questions about explosives."
"Like what?" Laika asked.
"Like where you get dynamite. 'Adam, if you wanted to get dynamite, how would you do it?' Hypothetical questions, but so damned obvious. I asked him what the hell he wanted to get dynamite for, but he'd say he was just curious. Yeah, sure. And hell, I didn't know where to get dynamite, how would I? But after I asked why he wanted to know, he never mentioned it again. That was the only hint I had that he might be . . . cooking something up." He gave a deep sigh. "I guess he was."
"Well, these fugue states and mentions of dynamite are odd enough," Laika said, "but was there any other strange behavior on Mr. Holberg's part in the past few months?"
"Yeah. His infatuation with the vampire kids." Guaraldi gave his head a bitter little shake. "That's what I called them. They were goths. You know the lifestyle? Pale skin, dressing in black, lots of makeup on the women and men, most of it black or very dark red—the blood thing, you know."
"Mooning about liebestod," Joseph said. "Maybe drawing a little blood during sex."
Guaraldi nodded. "You keep up with things down in D.C. Anyway, he hung with these creeps for a while—and I mean creeps. I got the feeling that there was more to them than just an infatuation with vampires and full moons. Peder implied that he thought maybe he could find out where he went and what he did in his fugue states from these kids somehow. It didn't make any sense to me, still doesn't, but I think that's what he believed. The problem was that when he decided he'd had enough of them, they didn't want to let him go. Guess he was their first celebrity, or something."
"So what'd they do?" Tony asked.
"Called, showed up here. I finally chased them off, but they were persistent."
Laika set down her empty cup. "Where did he meet them?"
"A club down in SoHo. One of those dank cellar places—pretty big, though. I went there once with him. That was enough." Guaraldi got up and rummaged through a drawer in a pecan end table until he took out a card. "Here it is," he said, handing it to Laika.
"Thanks. Did Mr. Holberg have an office, someplace he kept his private papers?"
"Yes." Guaraldi walked to a door at the far end of the room, and the others followed. He opened the door, and Laika was surprised to see a small room as cluttered as the living room was open and bare. "I hardly ever went in here. Everything's just the way he left it. Feel free to look around all you want . . . files, desk drawers . . . the computer's running Windows 95."
"Thanks, I've heard of it," Joseph said with a smile, flicking on the power switch.
Guaraldi chuckled, then lost his smile. "Let me know what I can do. I'll help you any way I can."
"Thanks," Laika said. "Just one more thing before we start digging in here—that room that exploded, did it have any other ways in or out? Anything at all that you could think of?"
Guaraldi shook his head. "One door. I saw Peder go in. If he had come back out, I would have seen that, too. But I didn't, and he didn't. Please find him. Or at least find out what happened to him. Peder was my friend—he still is, I hope, and I love him. I was told that if anyone could come up with an answer to all this, you people could."
"We'll try."
Guaraldi seemed to realize that there was nothing more to be said. He nodded and left them to their work.
Chapter 21
Joseph opened the computer files while Tony explored the desk drawers, then the bookshelves. Laika busied herself with the four-drawer filing cabinet.
After ten minutes, Joseph said, "Nothing much here at all. I think he used this more as a toy than a business tool. Doom, Quake, aha, Civilization II. An intellectual."
"Keep looking," Laika told him. "Open everything, just in case."
A few minutes later, Tony stepped down from a short stool that provided access to the higher bookshelves. "Here's something," he said, riffling a small sheaf of papers. "These were stuck behind some books. They're bills and canceled checks. I found some others in the desk—usual stuff, rent on this address, Amex, utilities, art supplies. But these are for rent on a place in the Bronx. The landlord's address is out on Long Island, but the property is listed as 'Brennan Warehouse.' Looks like it's just off the Third Avenue Bridge." Tony flipped through the checks. "The checks in the desk were made out by a different hand than Holberg's, maybe Guaraldi. But these checks are all in Holberg's script. And it's even a different account."
Laika took the checks and went into the other room where Guaraldi was sitting, and asked him if he knew anything about the warehouse.
"No," he said, looking puzzled. "I wrote all the checks for Peder to review and sign, but I never wrote these. That's his handwriting, all right." He looked up at her, an idea dawning on his face. "Do you think that's where—"
"Where he went during his fugue states?" Laika finished. "Maybe. We'll go up there and see what we find."
"May I come along?"
She hesitated. "Not yet. I think we should go up first. Maybe later."
"He could be there," Guaraldi said hopefully.
"Maybe. Did Mr. Holberg have a key ring?"
Guaraldi nodded. "It was still in the door when it blew open. It held together, though. I'll get it."
He stepped into another room and came back with a simple metal ring with seven keys on it. The metal of both ring and keys was scratched and dusty. "These three are to the downstairs door, the studio, and the apartment. This is the car key, which he hardly ever used, this one's the key to the loft in the studio. I don't know what these two are. Maybe this warehouse?"
"Can we hang on to these?"
"Sure. Come in and check out the studio whenever you like. Or the office. Just ring beforehand so I know you're coming up."
The three ops spent another hour in the office. On the same shelf where he had found the other hidden papers, Tony found some bills for iron pipe and other metal pieces, as well as acetylene torches, to be delivered to the Bronx warehouse. The checks paying for the supplies were also made out and signed by Holberg. When, on the way out, they showed the invoices to Guaraldi, he claimed to know nothing about them. "But Christ," he said, looking through the papers, "that's one helluva lot of pipe." He shook his head incredulously. "I don't think Peder would use that much in the studio in a year."
"These bills for materials and rent stretch over a period of four months," Laika observed. "About as long as you say he had these fugue states."
"You think he was . . . working all that time?" Guaraldi asked.
"Depends on what we find out when we visit the warehouse," Laika said.
They spent several hours looking through the rubble of the studio, but found nothing to explain how Peder Holberg might have escaped the explosion that tore the loft to pieces. "You don't think," Joseph said, half seriou
sly, "that he could have disintegrated, do you?"
"You mean, been blown to bits?" Tony said. "There was a lot of plastic here, but there wasn't that much. No, they'd have found something red and sticky. Might blow him apart, but the flash wouldn't burn blood, muscle, and bone. Hey, you know better than that."
"Just making conversation."
"You know how long it takes just to cremate a guy?"
"I know, I know, forget I brought it up. . . ."
Tony shook his head and continued to pick through the rubble. "'Disintegrate' . . . jeez. . . ."
When they decided there was nothing more to look through, they said good-bye to Adam Guaraldi and promised to tell him the following day what they found at the warehouse. They went back to the apartment, where Laika boiled spaghetti while Tony whipped up a quick but tasty sauce, and made plans for the evening. Laika and Joseph would drive out to the Bronx warehouse, while Tony would take a cab to the Blud Flat in SoHo, the club where Holberg had met his goths, and try to find out what Holberg's relationship was with them.
"You going to pack?" Joseph asked, as they were washing and drying the dishes.
"I always pack," said Tony.
"Well, you'd better pack this, too." Joseph put a dishtowel around Tony's neck, then raised his right hand, fingers down like a spider, and said in a poor imitation of Bela Lugosi, "They biiiite. . . ."
"You asshole," Tony said, and tossed the dishtowel back. But he smiled, and so did Laika.
"Da cheeldren of da night," Joseph proclaimed. "Vat music dey make!"
Tony patted the .38 special in the hollow of his back. "Yeah," he said. "Rock and roll. . . ."
Chapter 22
Children of the night, Tony thought. That Joseph was one piece of work. Smartass know-it-all, a cross between the class clown and a computer nerd. Still, Tony had to admit he liked the guy. He nearly made him laugh, and Tony didn't laugh a whole lot. He had left too many people dead behind him.
He hadn't gone to mass for several weeks and hadn't made a confession for longer than he cared to remember. Though he didn't know whether he still believed the way he had when he was younger, confession always made him feel better, though he suspected it didn't do the same for the priests.
He could tell them only so much, and if he said that he had been sanctioned by the government to do what he did, that would have been blowing his cover, and Tony didn't even trust a priest to keep that secret. So he let them think he was a mob guy, though he never actually came out and said that, since lying was a sin in itself. It probably gave the priest a thrill, and he was sure that in some parishes where he had made confession he wasn't the only hitman, sanctioned or otherwise, who'd ever come to be shriven.
Sitting back in the cab, watching the lights of the city blur past, Tony wished he had sins of a more carnal nature to confess. He hadn't been with a woman for months and was feeling the absence. Laika was very attractive, but she was a colleague, and that was one rule he had never broken. Maybe he'd pick up a vampire babe tonight. He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. Fat chance. The average age of these goths would probably be around fifteen.
"Lemme out at the corner here," he told the cab driver. According to the card, the Blud Flat was in the middle of the block. As he paid the driver, he watched an assortment of kids, nearly all of them dressed in black, moving back and forth along the block. They were young, all right. And the few older ones he spotted looked worn-out, like they really had had their blood drained over the years. Tony wondered if they actually tried to look like junkies, or if it just came with the territory.
He paid the driver and walked toward the club. He had chosen an all-black ensemble himself—black T-shirt, black jacket, black slacks—but he felt ridiculous as he looked at his reflection in the store windows. Usually when he went undercover, it was as a businessman or a construction worker or a hotel employee, all roles in which he felt comfortable. But being a thirty-year-old goth didn't sit well with him, and he just felt silly. The occasional snickers he heard from some of the drunker and younger kids didn't help his self-image any. At least he didn't have a spare ounce of fat, even if he wasn't the walking skeleton that so many of these goths seemed to find the height of desire.
A dozen gawky, black-clad kids were hanging around a stairway that led down. A blood-red neon sign read, "The Blud Flat," and more red neon formed an arrow pointing straight down. Without excusing himself, Tony pushed through the kids and walked down the steps. He figured that courtesy would be suspect.
If the attitude of the doorman was any indication, he was right. "Ten-buck cover," he said, holding out a hand. His eyes were ringed with kohl, and his lips were defined by a dark shade of lipstick outlined with black eyeliner. Tony put a ten in his black-nailed hand and pushed open the door.
A haze of smoke, thick with the smell of cloves, engulfed him. He took one more quick breath of the far fresher New York City air and let the door drift closed behind him. The club was illuminated with red and blue lights, giving a sickly cast to every exposed bit of flesh. A few blond and white heads shone like floating islands in the murk, but nearly everyone's hair was black, so that the large room seemed filled with white masks.
A band played on a stage at the far end of the cavern, but the ceiling was so low that their heads nearly touched it. There would be no leaping and pogoing from this crowd, Tony thought. A bar was along the left wall, and most of the stools were taken. Tables were in the center and on the right, and those farthest back were lost in the smoke and the dark. A few people seemed to be dancing on a small area in front of the stage, but Tony couldn't be sure. Maybe they were only swaying.
He walked to the bar and sat at the empty stool at the end. The bartender ignored him until Tony raised a hand and asked for a draft lite. He could drink a number of them without feeling it. Drink in hand, he moved through the thick crowd, looking for people who appeared to take everything a little more seriously than the usual pierced-nose-and-surliness throng.
At the far end of the room, Tony found a door he assumed led to whatever passed for backstage. But on the right wall, there was another opening covered by a black curtain. He started to look behind it when someone said, "Hey. . . ."
Tony turned to his right and saw a Brandon Lee lookalike, his chair leaned back against the wall, his feet propped on the table. "Can't go back there."
"Looking for the john," Tony said.
"Either side the stage—boys left, girls right."
He had been wrong about them being stage doors. "Nothing's marked," he said.
"Nothing has to be. Everybody knows." Tony definitely felt a sense of exclusion.
He thought he heard some voices behind the black curtain, singing, or possibly chanting. "What's goin' on in there?"
"The Order's meeting."
"What order?"
"You are a newbie, aren't you?" The man pursed his lips. "Maybe you'd like a friend to explain it?"
Tony got it and smiled. "Sorry. Don't travel that way."
"The road of blood has many paths," the man said enticingly.
"Yeah, well, I'll take the high road tonight. Thanks for the offer." Tony saluted with his beer glass and walked back toward the front of the club. There he finished his beer and watched the band, keeping an eye on the black-curtained doorway.
Just after midnight, what Tony assumed was "the Order" began to come through it. There were eight of them, five men and three women. Though their faces and attitudes bore the despair and hedonism of the other goths, their eyes were more alive. An extreme intensity seemed to roll off them in waves like a thick scent.
They crossed the room, ignoring the band and the greetings of those bold enough to address them, walking to a large table that suddenly emptied as they approached. A barmaid, dressed in black, of course, brought over a tray of drinks as though by a prearranged signal. In the strange light, the liquid in the long-stemmed glasses looked black, or at least dark green.
These, Tony surmised
, were the people he needed to talk to. They seemed to be the dark princes and princesses of this dingy realm. But they didn't look like the type you'd just walk over and start chatting to. In fact, none of them was saying a word. They must have done all their talking in the back room. Now they were just sitting there, looking dead ahead like zombies, every now and then bringing whatever concoction they were drinking to their lips.
After ten minutes or so, one of the girls, who had blonde hair cut in a pageboy, said a few words that Tony couldn't hear over the music, got up, and walked back to the women's restroom. Tony, making sure the remaining seven weren't watching him, followed.
The girl came back out a short time later. She was tilting her head and sniffing. She appeared to be older than most of the teenyboppers in the club. Without the Vampira makeup and the dozen or so knobs and hoops that pierced her nose, lip, and eyebrows, she'd be pretty cute, he thought. Time to see if the old guinea charm still worked. He had a way with the women, but whether it extended to those who'd rather suck blood than other things, he didn't know. Maybe it would take blood to break the ice.
As the girl walked by him, he held up a hand to stop her, and then pointed to her lip, which was pierced, along with other pins, by a hooded skull less than an inch in diameter. "'Blood,'" Tony said solemnly, "'was its avatar.'"
The girl smiled loopily. "'And its seal.' Yeah, you got it."
Tony smiled back. "Masque of the Red Death. One of my favorites. You wearing any other Poe on you?" he asked, looking appreciatively at her ornaments.
"No. A lot of other symbols, though."
"Yeah, I see—the ankh, an inverted cross—very nice, pentagram, magic circle. . . ." Then he looked at her rings, an assortment of gold skulls and serpents. "Those are wonderful," he said, taking her hand with the excuse to see them better. She didn't pull away, but only smiled, all the more at his compliments.
Then he noticed a dark spot on the inside of her wrist and turned her hand over to reveal a small but highly detailed tattoo. "My God," he said. "Now, that is really exquisite."
City of Iron Page 13
