Black City Saint

by Richard A. Knaak

  “I know what the bird is, Fetch.”

  “Very sorry about that, too, Master Nicholas, but I didn’t know the truth of that winged thing, either, until then. Imagine, she toying with me all those times . . .”

  I could imagine it very well, considering how Her Lady’d played me. “So she ordered you to the barrelhouse?”

  “Yes . . . yes. She . . . she said she’d tell you about the spear.” He said the last word with a combination of awe and more guilt.

  “She did. I saw you and Cortez. Sorry he got overexcited.”

  Somehow, Fetch managed to shrug. “I be better. ’Twas necessary for the flatfoot to find the stolen pieces, Master Nicholas. That’s what she decided, anyway. Oberon was getting too close. His mugs had been standing over them without knowing it, but they were on their way back after Oberon found out about where the loot was stashed!”

  So, I’d read matters differently than they’d been. Cortez had been sent on a false tip to the distillery at Her Lady’s decision so that he could “find” the armor and take it somewhere more secure. Naturally, she didn’t trust me with my own belongings.

  I could fathom only one way Oberon had found the hiding place so suddenly. He’d no doubt found tortures even the sentinel couldn’t withstand. It’d probably taken Oberon a little time to make sense of whatever information the creature had babbled, but he’d finally done so.

  Oberon and Her Lady were making an awful lot of fuss over a bunch of relics that could only hurt me if I let the dragon take over completely. Since I’d never do that, even with our new relationship, the spear and armor were just so much more rusting metal.

  At least, so I hoped. Fetch gave no sign of revealing any more pertinent knowledge where the spear and armor were concerned. He sat as if waiting for me to take command of the conversation.

  “Why’s she think Cortez’ll bring the stuff somewhere safe, Fetch? The precinct’s got to be rotten with corruption, and the Institute’s already proven it can’t protect things.”

  “I failed to ask her that question, if ye take my meaning.”

  True, for those of Feirie, questioning Her Lady could easily become a very fatal prospect. There had to be something or someone involved with the precinct that she believed could defend the relics from Oberon.

  Of course, I’d already seen that Her Lady could be very mistaken as to the security of the places she hid things.

  With Claryce asleep, I turned to the radio and listened for any news that might give me some hint of Oberon’s activity. There was curiously no story about Cortez’s raid, nor much about any continued violence in the ongoing liquor war. Both Capone and the North Siders had suddenly gotten very neighborly.

  Claryce joined us. She smiled at me and, before I could help myself, I smiled back.

  “Anything happen while I slept?”

  “No. It’s been quiet.”

  Her smile remained, but lost its warmth. “Don’t they say that’s what comes just before the storm?”

  I couldn’t argue with her there. The silence could only mean that Oberon’s plan was coming to fruition.

  That thought stirred me to a decision. “Let’s take a drive.”

  Fetch immediately rose. “‘Ride’?”

  Claryce wasn’t so eager. “Where to?”

  “I need to speak with Detective Cortez about something that was stolen from me.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “From you? When?”

  “When I was dead.”

  I’d never been to Cortez’s precinct, but for some reason it didn’t surprise me that it was almost exactly between the territories claimed by the two warring mobs. The vicinity itself looked fairly peaceful, but these days that peace could disappear in the blink of an eye, even around a police station.

  I had Claryce and Fetch wait in the Packard while I walked a block to the station. I hoped not to be long, but I knew that I had to see the spear. It was almost as if it called to me . . .

  There’d been no report of the relics’ return to the Art Institute, so I assumed that Cortez had them secured somewhere near him. Why he’d do that made me very curious.

  Two uniformed cops dragged a minor thug up the steps and into the three-story, brick structure. I hesitated a moment while they entered before crossing over to the building.

  “Shine, suh?”

  I started to shake my head when the voice caught my attention. Sure enough, I knew the elderly negro situated to the left of the station steps.

  Michael grinned wide, showing white, white teeth. “Well! If it isn’t the gentleman goin’ to see the art! How are you, suh?”

  “I’m fine, Michael—it is Michael, isn’t it?”

  “Yessuh! Michael as in the good archangel! Care for a shine?”

  I’d nearly started at his mention of the other Michael. There was nothing about the man before me that bespoke of his Heavenly namesake except what sounded like a good-natured honesty in his voice. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even trust that honesty at the moment. “Pretty far from where I saw you last time. Why here?”

  “Well, my boy—not the one I told you about but an older one—I’ve got seven young, though some aren’t so young anymore—workin’ not far from here. He wanted me to come for a visit for a while, so I thought, why not make a little business when he’s at his job! Got a friend who had a spot here who was planning on being away for a short while anyhow, so things worked out just right . . .”

  “Sounds like good sense.” Nothing about Michael seemed different than what I could see on the surface, but running into him so soon in another part of a city as large as Chicago seemed like too great a coincidence. I hadn’t changed my mind about coincidences in general, but Michael was at least making me question my choice in that regard.

  “So . . . can I give you a shine?”

  I was tempted to question him while he polished my shoes, but now was not a good time. “Maybe another day.”

  “Fine, fine, suh. They find what you lost?”

  He had my attention again. “What makes you ask that?”

  Michael ran a hand through the thinning white curls atop his head. “Well now, you seem a fine, upstanding citizen, suh, and you’re walking calmly into the station, so I figure you must’ve lost somethin’ and think they’ve found it. That’s all, suh.”

  He smiled wider, then tried to get the attention of a well-dressed man coming up from the other direction. I stood there for a moment, then moved on. Until Michael stood before me with wings on his back and wielding a blazing sword, I’d just assume that he was what he appeared now.

  I started toward the front desk, only to have Cortez walk out from one of the side hallways. He took one look at me and pursed his lips before heading my direction.

  “Nick Medea,” the detective muttered, in a tone that wasn’t at all welcoming. “Ready to make that statement, huh?”

  He steered me back to the hallway from which he’d come, then to an office that at first glance I’d thought was empty. Instead, behind the musty windows was a neat if spartan room in which the only personal items that marked it as Cortez’s was the small figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe standing next to a photo of a dark, pretty Mexican woman and two small children, obviously hers.

  I’d never seen his Maria before, but she more than fit the descriptions Cortez had given of her. “Nice family . . .”

  “You’ve never seen them? Forgot that.” Talk of his loved ones briefly cheered the detective, but then his dour mood returned. “Why’re you here?”

  “I heard you found the stuff stolen from the Art Institute. Wondered if I could see the items for a moment.”

  “Now what would make you think I still had them?”

  I gave him a look. Cortez lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of his desk.

  “How do you like this nice place?” he asked, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “My very own office! I tell Maria it’s snazzy. She won’t be coming down here, so it’s safe to say. Imagine if she saw it, you know?”<
br />
  “They just move you in here?”

  “Yeah. Seven months ago. Been promised it’ll be fixed up all this time, you know?”

  I’d seen a lot of hatred over sixteen centuries, some of it warranted, most of it not. I’d seen many people in Cortez’s position, too; picked out to work on a task no one else wanted to do and treated badly while trying to fulfill his orders.

  But while I sympathized with him, I had a lot more troubles to deal with. “The relics?”

  “Yeah, they’re here, Nick Medea. Got ’em stashed nicely. Didn’t know what to do with them at first, but at least I finally got some help there. Some captain out of headquarters popped down here right after we got the things into my office. Don’t know how he heard so fast, but I tell you I really appreciated his taking over.”

  I wondered if Her Lady had a second changeling around or if it’d been the same one using a different shape. Either way, I hoped that nothing’d been done that would endanger those in the station. “What’d he do? Take it with?”

  “Nah. We got it here. I thought we were supposed to bring it to the Institute, but they need it for evidence in some bigger heist. In the meantime, it’s right in the room with us.”

  That surprised me. I hadn’t sensed anything—not that I was sure I would—and I certainly hadn’t seen anything. “Nicely hidden, if it is. Does that mean I can’t see it?”

  He pressed the tip of the cigarette into the ash tray on the corner of the desk. As usual, Cortez hadn’t taken more than two or three puffs. If he was trying to quit, he was still building up an expensive habit in the meantime.

  “Actually, I want you to see them.” He walked around the back of the desk. The wooden floor creaked as he did, making me think at first they’d simply put the spear and armor under the boards. However, the detective instead continued on to a wooden file cabinet almost as tall as him and about as wide.

  He didn’t reach for one of the drawer handles, but instead reached back and pulled the cabinet forward.

  “Wanna give me a hand?”

  I joined him just as he turned the cabinet halfway around. Only then did I notice that it seemed deeper than it should’ve.

  “Grab the edge, will you.”

  To my further surprise, he was referring to the wall behind, not the cabinet. I saw he had one hand on a barely discernible nail and that he was looking at another one near me. Taking hold of the second nail, I waited.

  “Tug.”

  The nail was hard enough to grip, even harder to try to pull. I saw why. We started to pull out part of the wooden wall.

  “Is this normal storage in a police station, or did the department save money and turn some speakeasy they raided into a precinct house?”

  Cortez chuckled. “Seven months and I never knew this was here. The captain, he said he’d been assigned here right after it opened. Too many guys on the take even then. This’s how they hid the pricey stashes back then, even before Prohibition passed. Somewhere along the way, folks forgot about it.”

  I’d be willing to bet that Her Lady’s servants here had seen to the influencing of whoever had designed and built this place. While on the surface that seemed far-fetched, one didn’t survive in Feirie for centuries without always setting aside hidey-holes and other safe places to not only store “pricey stashes” but themselves, too, if the balance of power shifted badly. With Her Lady assuming Oberon alive even after I thought he was dead, she’d no doubt set up dozens of these places, big and small, around Chicago.

  And then I pushed aside all thought of the mad intricacies of Feirie minds as I saw set into the back of the hidden space the spear. So ancient, it should’ve been a couple of rusting fragments far too fragile to be hanging before me, but what I saw instead was a gleaming weapon looking freshly honed and ready for war.

  The armor was in far worse order, more akin to what I’d expected to find. Why that was made no sense, until I thought of what I’d done the night before facing the dragon. While I’d not been aware of his endless task, I had been aware of his armored hide, his sharp claws, and his monstrous teeth. I also knew that he was rumored to breathe fire. Even for someone with a strong belief in God’s work, it was a daunting confrontation.

  I’d prayed for guidance, and guidance had come in the form of a grizzled hermit outside of Silene who’d heard my mumbled words to Heaven.

  “If God is in your heart now, he will be in your hand tomorrow,” the hermit had told me over the meager rations I’d offered him as a guest by my fire. “But if you set any stock in my humble life, I would be happy to ask that you receive Heaven’s guidance when you face the wyrm.”

  “Can you ask Heaven to guide my spear?” I’d countered, taking up the weapon from beside me and holding it toward him.

  In answer, he’d touched the tip with his gnarled fingers and smiled. For some reason, that’d been enough to comfort me. In fact, I’d grown so comforted that I’d fallen asleep shortly after . . . and when I’d awakened, it was to find him gone.

  And only now, seeing how the fragments had, like myself, been put back together—made more than whole—did I suspect that the hermit had been other than mortal. I felt a tremendous urge to return outside and see if old Michael was who I thought he was. Still, I held back, suspecting that if I was meant to know I’d have been told.

  “Doesn’t even look real, does it?” Cortez remarked at that moment, drawing me back. “Been told it is, though. Me, I don’t know what’s so fantastic about an old sticker, but I got to admit there’s something about it that makes me just want to see it’s taken care of right.”

  “It’s real all right.” As I put my left hand near it, I felt a warmth grow through my body from my heart. It took much inner struggling to make me not just snatch it up and raise it to the sky. “Maybe . . . maybe we should seal this again.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  When we shut the hidey-hole, I felt like I was sealing up my own tomb. I wanted to tear the wall away again, reclaim what was mine. I knew, though, that it was better if I didn’t hold the spear right now. I didn’t know why, but I knew that.

  “Who all knows about this, Cortez?”

  “Just a couple . . . and you now.”

  I thought I detected some tone in his voice, but his expression was all innocence. I decided I’d better keep pressing the logical question, so that he’d not wonder why I took all this for granted. “This is still seeming like a heck of a lot of mystery and trouble to me. Secret passages in police stations hiding odd antiques? Doesn’t make much sense . . .”

  Cortez sought for his cigarettes, but only came up with an empty package. He went around to the back of the desk, while I maneuvered toward the door.

  “I like you, Nick Medea,” he responded, as he located another package of Luckies in the top drawer, “even if I don’t always trust everything you do.”

  He had a right to the last thing, but I still pretended offense. “Listen, Cortez—”

  The detective raised both hands in mock defense against my anger. “Easy, Bo! We all got our secrets, you know? Like you being a private dick on the side, though there’s no license to be found . . .”

  I’d laid the groundwork for such an assumption long ago, aware that someone might wonder why a ghost chaser would show up in some unlikely places. Cortez was the first person to get that far, even though in the end he was following a dead lead. Still, it was better than him knowing the truth. “It’s there and all legal. You just have to know where to look.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me . . .”

  “Where’s the fun in that, Cortez?”

  “True.” Drawing another cigarette, the detective joined me by the door. “Listen, Nick Medea . . . there’s something big out there . . . maybe bigger than the Outfit. Something that a bigwig like Delke seems to be part of. Maybe the head.”

  “Why’re you telling me all this?”

  He shrugged. “Because a nice skirt we both know seems right in the middle of it. That�
��s all.”

  I gripped the door knob. “Listen, Cortez, I appreciate your letting me see the relics. If I find out anything that might help, I promise I’ll tell you.”

  The detective only nodded. I let myself out. The short walk through the station gave me just enough time to study the sergeant’s desk again. The thin, scarred officer answering the telephone didn’t have the voice I was most interested in, but I turned toward him nonetheless.

  “Can I help you?” His polite, nasal tones didn’t take away from the obvious fact that he’d faced some tough times on the beat before reaching this point in his career.

  “I was looking for the sergeant who gave me some information earlier. Gruff voice. Colorful way of speaking about . . . some other people.” I treaded a bit of a fine line with the last part of the description. There was a very good chance that this sergeant was good friends with the other one. If he thought I actually had a complaint against a fellow cop . . .

  But all he did was shake his head. “Don’t know who you mean. I’m generally here most of the day, each day.”

  “Every day?”

  He chuckled, then swung the chair to the side so I could see his right leg . . . or where the upper half of it still was.

  “Thought I’d make captain once the war was over,” the sergeant explained good-naturedly. “Now, it’s permanent desk. Every day. When’d you talked to this guy?”

  I told him.

  “Must have your precincts mixed up. I was definitely here at that time, then.” He rolled back behind the desk. “Funny, I’d say it’s O’Rourke you’d be looking for if not for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  Much of the sergeant’s pleasantry disappeared as he answered, “Liam O’Rourke was gunned down six months ago when he was leaving the station. The bastard who did it was some dago trying to slip custody. Got poor Liam through the heart just by accident with one of his guards’ gun . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you anymore . . .” Nodding gratefully, I carefully retreated from the sergeant, who was now dwelling on the loss of a comrade.

  “Liam Michael O’Rourke,” he went on, no longer paying attention to me. “A good man . . .”