Fury and the Power

by Farris, John

  Well done, she heard in her mind. Then Leoncaro raised his eyes to something he sensed was lurking above them, on the outside of the small dome with its cupola of stained glass.

  Eden had a glimpse of it too—catlike, shadowy, climbing surreptitiously to the highest point of the cupola, looking down into the chamber some thirty feet below. Small brimstone eyes in a blunt monstrous head. She'd last seen it in the video shot by Etan Culver in Amboseli National Park during the fearful display of rage and power by the elephant known as Karloff. Bright splinters of light from the sky above the cupola hurt her eyes. And the part-feline phantom was already losing definition, as if it had been accidental; a burst of dirty smoke from a chimney, vanishing even before she could be certain it was really there.

  "I don't suppose I'm going to get my walking stick back" Tom Sherard grumbled. He was gazing at the gold lion's head and the inch of dark wood socketed between the simian shoulder blades of the motionless creature.

  "Remember what we talked about? That thing isn't dead," Bertie reminded him. "Only inert. But it will stay that way as long as the stick is there. How long do you think mopane wood is good for?"

  "I reckon a thousand years, in a dry place."

  "I know of just such a place," Leoncaro murmured, kneeling beside the shape-shifter and making the sign of the cross above its head. An eyelid flickered, prompting a shocked reaction from caped ecclesiasticals drawn to the scene. The Pope wasn't bothered but he did seem annoyed that there was no door to close on the chamber as he rose stiffly, waving aside helping hands. "A tomb," he concluded, "where others much like this one are interred." He looked again at Eden with an unexpectedly warm—considering the tumult echoing through the Apostolic Palace—smile of welcome.

  "So good to meet you, at last. We'll talk soon. Right now I believe we both have more pressing concerns, Eden Waring. Do you have knowledge of the whereabouts of your alter ego?"

  Eden said, with an expression of surprise—how could he know about doppelgangers?—"Not yet, Holiness. I don't think that's good news. She—she must respond if she's able?'

  He glanced up at the dome again before giving himself over to a phalanx of Swiss Guards in mufti. The blood of outrage in his face caused the old scar impinging on his upper lip to stand out in ivory relief.

  "You must do everything in your power to retrieve her" he said to Eden, "before we meet again."

  Chapter 29

  LAS VEGAS

  OCTOBER 23

  9:25 P.M. PDT

  "Lewis," Charmaine complained, "I know you explained it all to me a couple times already, but I'm standing here twenty minutes at this table and I still don't know when you win or lose, or why?'

  "Mostly I'm winning," Gruvver said, absorbed in the action at the Caesars Palace craps table. He indicated the four-inch stack of red chips, with a growing stack of green beside it. Now that the dice were in the hands of a shooter who had numbers working, Gruvver was making come-bets on every roll, with odds. Working up a sweat, rolling his shoulders, putting his own momentum behind the bouncing dice. "This is when the game gets good."

  "What are those green chips worth again?"

  "Twenty-five each."

  "Oh. And what is the high-roller trying to do?"

  "He's not necessarily a high-roller; he's just the shooter. But it's happening for him. What he doesn't want to do now is seven-out." The point was nine. "Yeah!" Gruvver exulted.

  "You win again?" Charmaine said, liking this part.

  "Four hundred big ones on that roll."

  Charmaine helped him stack the chips he pulled in. Behind them the lilt and bingle of slot machine city, a rhythmic patter of payoffs that was part of the mega sell come-on, the hallelujah energy of a rural come-to-Jesus beneath spyglass ceilings that hid most of the casino watchdogs and their hardcore eavesdropping technology.

  "Come, don't come, stickman, hard-on, everybody gettin' lathered up," Charmaine said teasingly in Gruvver's ear. "This game's just about havin' sex in public. No wonder most of the women watch while the men play with themselves, rubbin' up and blowin' on those dice."

  A woman next to Charmaine, overhearing some of this, said in a middle-European accent, "For a man, everything is about sex. Money? It just buys better sex."

  Charmaine offered a polite expression of interest but no encouraging comment. Not liking the way the woman was staring past her at Gruvver. Vegas seemed to be full of people who looked as if they harbored secret manias and were there to be exorcised, not entertained.

  "It's hard way, Charmaine," Gruvver corrected her as she pressed closer to him. He was avidly following the tumble of dice off the padded end wall. "But that's a sucker's bet. Yeah! Man made his point again."

  Charmaine nipped his earlobe with her teeth. "Are we ever gonna eat supper tonight?"

  "Reservation's at ten."

  "Think I'll go play roulette then." It seemed safe to leave him alone; the woman had drifted off to another table. "That game is easy to understand. It's red, or it's black. Put your money on a number, little white ball lands on that number, bingo, thirty-five to one. Could I have some money, Lewis?"

  "There's a fifty in my wallet."

  "I'll play your birthday, like I did yesterday at Mandalay Bay."

  Charmaine reached inside his suit coat and extracted his wallet. "Why don't I keep this? That way I know you'll come looking for me when you're flat busted."

  That wasn't happening yet. The shooter had made another point and Gruvver was in ecstasy. Charmaine dropped his wallet into her purse and sauntered off. What she really wanted was a kir royale, but if she sat down at the bar by herself two things were inevitable. She'd get carded. Because she was still a few weeks shy of twenty-one, she wasn't supposed to be in the casino.

  Or before she could even order her kir royale, someone from casino security would stop by to chat and then ask to see a room key. Charmaine had one, although they weren't staying at Caesars; but it was annoying to think she could be mistaken for a hooker.

  Might as well settle for a Coke at the soda fountain with all the kids.

  At a table in one corner of the ice cream parlor she took Gruvver's old wearing-out wallet from her purse and idly looked through it. Receipts stuck just about everywhere; she needed to establish a better filing system for him. And there were a couple of articles he had clipped out of the local newspaper today. One was just a squib under World News Briefs that he'd circled. The supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhists had been flown to Los Angeles for treatment at the UCLA Medical Center. The nature of his illness was undisclosed. Charmaine had no idea why Gruvver would be interested in a Buddhist; he was benignly negligent about attending his own church, even though his mama called him promptly at seven A.M. every Sunday to remind him. Charmaine had come close on a couple of mornings while half asleep next to him to picking up the phone herself, which probably would have jeopardized the marginally good opinion Lewis's mother had of her.

  The other article had a one-column head:

  VATICAN DISTURBANCE

  BLAMED ON CHILDREN

  Apparently, Charmaine learned, hundreds of visitors to the Holy See the day before, at about three forty-five in the afternoon Rome time, had been shocked to hear terrified screams emanating from the Apostolic Palace while the Pope was in audience with a group of "prominent American lay people." A dozen security men had rushed to the second floor of the palace, followed shortly by a medical team. Everyone inside the basilica at the time was quickly ushered out and security personnel closed off all access to the palace.

  The official explanation from the Pope's spokesman was that one of the visiting Americans had suffered a fatal seizure, and the sight of the unfortunate victim writhing on the floor had greatly upset a group of mentally challenged children who happened to be passing by the papal library at the time. Thus the screams that were heard.

  The alleged seizure victim was not identified, pending notification of next of kin.

  Charmaine, although her curio
sity wasn't exactly at fever pitch, brought up the newspaper clippings after they'd completed their dinner selections at Spago. Gruvver was still relishing every fortunate roll of the dice that had enabled him to leave the craps table with twenty-six hundred in folding cash.

  "You don't happen to know anybody who was visiting the Pope in Rome yesterday, do you, Lewis?"

  "Huh-uh. Why?"

  "Oh, when I was borrowin' that fifty from your wallet, couldn't help noticin' your little newspaper articles about the head Buddhist from Thailand who is in Los Angeles, and the poor man who died during his audience with the Pope."

  "Oh, yeah," Gruvver said, somewhat guardedly.

  "So I just wondered why you were interested in them, that's all. More detective work? Le travail du agent?"

  "Well, the Buddhist Patriarch and the Pope his own-self fit in with what I've been thinking since we closed out the Jimmy Nixon case, particularly that so-called disturbance reported at the Vatican yesterday."

  Charmaine waited attentively, hands folded under her chin, wondering if she was supposed to guess where his mental processes and nosing around had taken him the past couple of days. Charmaine had occupied her afternoon changing her hairstyle to something smarter, vampish, a big blade of hair down swept over part of her face, the incognito look. Gruvver avoided the tough-love expression in the single brown eye that was revealed to him.

  "Sooner-later you're gonna tell me," she said. It wasn't an ultimatum but he knew she was serious. "I'm first-rate, Gruvver-man; don't you go treatin' me like second place in your life, or I won't be there for long." That was the ultimatum; Charmaine let him absorb it. "Now then. Yesterday you had me go out there to the Grayle Theatre with you where I did a number on that nice PR lady they have there, pretend I was writin' an article on the Magic Man for the Atlanta J-C. It upsets me to tell a lie, Lewis, but I was helping you. You said."

  "You're a bona fide journalist; that's no lie."

  "What I am is campus correspondent for the paper, and once in a blue moon I get a couple paragraphs into the Constitution."

  "Better things are just ahead," Gruvver said with an attempt at a flattering smile.

  A young black man with small eyes, a shorn skull, and powerful sloping shoulders was making his way through the dining room, escorted by ex-pug bodyguards, flashy consorts, and some elegant quail. Complete strangers looked up, smiled, called him Champ. Diamonds glittered in his cruel mouth.

  A waiter poured red wine for Gruvver and, without hesitation, a glass for Charmaine.

  "Anyway," she said to Gruvver, "thanks to me you got that list you wanted, Lucky Ticket holders to his shows for the past three years. It's a long list, and you were up to three this morning studyin' it."

  "Was it that late?" Gruvver said, suppressing a yawn.

  "Now suppose you tell me what's important about that list?"

  "It's a weird fucking story, and I probably don't know half of it yet."

  "Lewis, your mouth," Charmaine said, glancing at the diners nearest them in the packed restaurant, hoping none of them had overheard. In the time they had been going together, Charmaine felt she had made good progress in two vital areas: toning down his vocabulary and improving his taste in neckwear.

  "Sorry. But too many things add up already, and it's gettin' scarier."

  "You're scared?" she said with a nervous shrug of her bare shoulders, flicker of lamplight in her widening eyes. Still, she was fascinated. "Of what? The magician?"

  "Didn't say I was scared. The situation—the case—has a lot of weird elements. What I know beyond a doubt is, at least three young people, Jimmy bein' the youngest, attended Grayle's show and afterward got to spend time with him backstage. Weeks or months later they were responsible for two killings of prominent religious figures and an assault on another, the Dalai Lama, that didn't take his life. Method each time was the same—they bit like wolves or some other kind of large predator. Now, yesterday"—Gruvver joined his hands and leaned toward Charmaine, keeping his voice low—"there was that reported disturbance at the Vatican, and a man died. Today the Pope went about his business like any other day, held his regular Wednesday audience. So he must be okay. I don't know the name of the man who the Vatican Press Office says had that seizure, but I do know"—he leaned back and fished a folded sheet of paper from an inside coat pocket—"four of the sixteen people at yesterday's private audience with the Pope are on the Lucky Ticket holder list as well. Now that just can't be a coincidence." He unfolded the paper. "Their names were published yesterday in L'Osservatore Romano, if I'm sayin' that right; anyhow, it's the Vatican newspaper and I took this off their Internet site. The four are Max and Irene Hudlow of Denver, and Frank and Roberta Tubner from Santa Rosa, California."

  Charmaine raised her wineglass, staring blankly at him. "Well, so?"

  "I'm on the come line that the Pope was attacked yesterday by one of these sixteen people at their audience, and the Vatican has hushed it all up. Which of course they can easily do. If there were any 'mentally challenged' kids in the Apostolic Palace at the time, then that's what they saw, something would really give them cause to have screaming fits."

  Charmaine ran a finger around the outer rim of her wineglass. "Lewis, when we get back to the hotel, I think I need to take your temperature."

  "I'm runnin' hot, but it's not the flu, baby." He placed the folded papal audience list beside his plate, tapped it with a forefinger. "If it did happen, then all of these people saw it. But curial counselors at the Vatican, their own Catholic psychiatrists, maybe the Pope himself, will have briefed them to keep shut about what went down. Why? Because something diabolical, I'm thinking, was loose in a sacred place, and they don't ever want that kind of publicity."

  "Diabolique? The devil?" Suddenly Charmaine was looking at Gruvver with the rounded eyes of an impressionable ten-year-old. There were Pentecostal preachers in her extended family, and from an early age she'd been subjected to visions of torment and hellfire the way other preschoolers absorbed the gentle morality tales of Dr. Seuss. Charmaine's present level of sophistication, Gruvver reminded himself, was largely physical. He waved away the spectre he'd called up.

  "No need to go that far. But we both know spells can be worked on susceptible minds." Charmaine nodded. He tapped the audience list again. "When these people get back home, won't take me but two or three phone calls to confirm what really happened. I can smell a cover-up long distance like it was fresh dog poop on my shoe."

  As he concluded that remark the antipasto arrived. Charmaine only picked at hers, looking, in a childlike manner, very worried. She glanced at him a couple of times before saying, "Magicians are kind of freaky, but that's got to be an act. Casting spells on innocent people—what reason would Lincoln Grayle have to do that?"

  "Charmaine, I've dealt with criminal psychopaths most of my working life. They're all around us, matter of fact—" Charmaine was instantly uneasy again; he had to smile. "I don't mean here at Spago; but my point is you couldn't easily pick one out of a crowd. They put up a good front, all smiles, easy talkin', but they're all the time wonderin' what they can get out of you. Or how best to get rid of you, if it comes to that. Those people are devious, clever, and emotionally cold. What motivates the worst of them is strictly what they want, got to have, at a given moment. Then their compulsion lights them up like a pinball machine."

  "So—if Grayle is one of those, and he's got it in for religion or religious figures like Pledger Lee Skeldon or the Pope, then he'll just keep on keepin' on? Is that why you cut out that little article about the Buddhist big shot checking in to the UCLA hospital?"

  "Right. Because I'm wonderin', assume I had time enough to check out every name on the Lucky Ticket list, would I learn that one of them is a medical professional on staff or an employee of the hospital? Already programmed by Mr. Magic to do damage to a prominent religious, should the occasion arise? I researched a whole other list of potential victims around the world: Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, the Eastern O
rthodox Church."

  "But what can you do, Lewis? Those lists don't prove anything."

  Gruvver's broad shoulders fell slightly, and he looked so frustrated Charmaine felt sorry for him.

  "That's the tough part. The man is a solid Vegas citizen. Home-grown. Employs three hundred people in his various enterprises. If he's also programmin' zombies and sendin' them out to commit murder, he's two-for-four to this point, which must be a disappointment, but only one of his zombies is left to wail her tale. If she's coherent at all. I'd have to take a trip to India to find out. Probably Lise Ruppenthal is sittin' in a cell with fungus all over the walls and a leaky ceiling, wonderin' how the hell she came to be there in the first place."

  "Do you want any more of this salad?" Charmaine asked him after a few moments, determined not to see him brood about his presumed inadequacies.

  Gruvver sighed. "No, thanks, Charmaine."

  "Were you plannin' to go back to the tables after we eat?"

  "My philosophy is, once you walk away a winner, you're a sure loser if you go back the same night." And he added, whimsically, "Get behind me, Satan."

  "Well, we still got two whole days left in Vegas town, so I guess my philosophy is, let's put away those lists and make the most of our time together. I bless you for bein' the man you are. But you can't solve all the troubles and miseries of the world, Lewis."

  Gruvver finished the wine in his glass, then drank hers, which perked him up marginally. "If the Forum shops are still open," he said, "we might see after supper if we can get shed of some of this cash in my pocket, buy you something to match that sparkle in your eye."

  He put the papers back into his coat pocket as two waiters arrived to serve their dinner. Meat loaf with port wine sauce for Gruvver; a lean veal chop with sage hollandaise for Charmaine.

  It didn't seem to be a time to mention—if ever there was going to be a time—that one of the names on the Lucky Ticket list was that of Gruvver's half brother Cornell Crigler. The same Cornell who had said to Gruvver two nights ago that magic shows were not his thing. And that he had never seen Lincoln Grayle perform.