by Debra Doyle
We declined dessert and went back up to the ground floor, where another sign directed us to the auction room, a reception hall down a short corridor off the lobby. The hall had a dais and a lectern at one end, with a bunch of comfy-looking leather chairs arranged facing it. A dour-faced rent-a-cop stood guard at a door off to stage right. No one else was in the room, but before long one of the interchangeable nice young men showed up to ask if we required anything.
“Could we get a private showing of the merchandise?” Maggie asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “All the slots are filled.”
“In that case, no.”
He escorted us out. On the other side of the lobby and around a corner we came to a solarium, the first place I’d seen inside that had natural lighting, where a long table of coffees and teas was laid out. The place wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty, either. Clots of men and women stood about, most of them wearing either sober dark suits or religious vestments. Hijabs beside yarmulkes beside turbans. A smattering of military uniforms. The blonde, brunette, and redhead wearing long unbound hair and antique Grecian gowns in dazzling white, who stood facing each other at the far end like an etching of the three Fates at afternoon tea, must have been who Father Aloysius had meant by the Chicks in Chitons. I figured them as possible Bacchantes, and moved on.
The billiard room and the library were similarly occupied. This auction had brought a lot of interest. “If you see Colonel Mustard clutching a candlestick,” Maggie said under her breath, “back away slowly.”
I didn’t laugh; I’d been thinking the same thing.
After that brief reconnoiter we went back up to our rooms. As soon as I entered mine I opened the note Father Aloysius had slipped me. It was brief: “Room 472. Twenty minutes. Important.” The word ‘important’ was underlined three times, so heavily that it dented the paper.
A knock sounded at my door before I’d quite finished reading the note; I stuffed it in my pocket and turned the knob.
The man standing outside was one of the suit-wearers, rather than one of the vestment-wearers or uniform-wearers. He looked like a mid-level lawyer or stockbroker, carefully groomed to be as unmemorable as possible—Generic White Male Business Person, One Each.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Are you a vampire?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then yes.”
He stepped inside. “I might have been lying,” he said.
“Wouldn’t have helped you,” I replied. I gestured to a chair. “Take a load off. What’s on your mind?”
He unbuttoned his jacket before sitting.
“I represent Google Research,” he said, pulling up the knees of his sharp-pressed trousers as he sat. Which was probably a lie; he had a No Such Agency look to him. “We have an interest in this document, as we do in all documents. We already have a fair idea of the contents, but we need to confirm our decrypt. Therefore, I am prepared to make it worth your while to ensure that we win the bid.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Worth your while personally,” he said, the last word heavy with obvious significance. I hoped that his bosses didn’t plan to use him for actual fieldwork any time soon. If they did, their standards were slipping.
“I don’t need any money,” I said. Which was true. Looked at one way, I owned nothing, but looked at another way I’d never lack for anything I needed.
“I wasn’t aware that I was talking about money,” he replied. “You don’t even need to agree. If, and only if, my company wins the auction, and if in retrospect your bidding or failing to bid brought about that result, our gratitude will be boundless.”
“And if you fail to win it?”
“Consider only the case where you win it,” the gentleman said. “I can assure you that our resources are greater than those of any other organization on the planet—so please believe that if you somehow win the bid, our considerable resources will be devoted solely to your ruin.” He leaned closer. “Personally.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Thank you for seeing it my way,” he said, standing. “I’ll let myself out.”
I waited a moment to give him time to clear out down the corridor. The twenty minutes had come and long gone, so I hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door and made my way to the fourth floor.
Something wasn’t right. A second later I saw what: Room 472’s door was ajar. I flattened myself against the wall adjacent, said an Act of Contrition, put my right hand on the butt of my piece, and pushed the door open with the knuckles of the other hand.
The hardwood floor of Father Aloysius’s room was exposed. The rug had been rolled up against the right-hand wall. The bed was propped on its side against the left-hand wall. And someone had chalked a pentagram inside a circle on the polished wooden floorboards, filling almost the entire room.
Candles burned in the corners of the pentagram, with letters and symbols chalked between them. And in the center of the circle lay the mortal remains of Father Aloysius. His mouth gaped open as if he’d been screaming, and his torso ended in a bloody stump of ragged flesh and spilled entrails. The rest of him was missing. Over the scents of hot wax and cooling blood I caught a smell like burnt matches.
The circle. The tooth marks on the body. The smell of sulfur. Demon sign. I firmly resolved to light a candle to the Virgin first chance I got.
Like my own room, this one had no windows and no obvious entrances or exits aside from the doorway to the hall.
My phone might be useless for calling out, but its camera still worked. I grabbed a quick picture for later and turned to go. No sense being Suspect Number One the minute some random character ambled down the passageway. I pulled the door closed and let the lock click, smearing my fingers to make the prints hard to recover. By the time DNA came back, if anyone was looking, the situation would have already resolved itself.
My next stop was the basement bar for a drink. I called for a shot of The Macallan and turned to face the door while sipping it. Jesuits don’t usually get ripped in half by demons. That was hitting pretty close to home. Father Aloysius had said that the four of us were the only Catholics on scene.
What I’d found in his room, now . . . I tried to reconstruct the crime. Aloysius couldn’t have known in advance that we were coming. So he spotted us in uniform, and decided to get rid of the competition. He went up to his room, chalked a circle on the floor, stood in it, and raised a demon to greet me when I arrived. And something went wrong. Maybe he was rushed. Maybe he was already planning to use the demon to steal the book. But now he needed to use it for something else. Because . . . ? Lots of possibilities, but none of them really persuasive.
I tossed back the rest of the Scotch, thought about calling for another, but slid off the bar stool instead. I did have another clue: The Jesuit hadn’t wanted me to talk with the Chicks in Chitons. That meant maybe I should.
I paused at the maître d’s station long enough to arrange for the kitchen to send a slice of chocolate cake up to Maggie’s room with the message ‘From Peter,’ then went in search of the Sorority Sisters.
I found them where I’d left them, in the solarium. I walked up to the center one, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi! My name’s Pete! I’m with the Temple! Ask me how!” Corny, but maybe Thomas had been trying to give me a recognition phrase for some deep-cover Temple asset.
The lady I’d addressed, the blonde, met my grip with a firm one of her own. “Professor Barbara Renwald,” she said. “Classical languages department, Bryn Mawr. You can call me Barbie.” She nodded to the redhead. “This is Cathy.”
“Professor Cathy. McIntyre.”
“Dr. Marguerita Trastámara,” the brunette said, sticking out her hand. “But mostly I go by Rita.”
“Can I buy you guys a drink?”
“I have a better idea,” Rita said. “Why don’t you come up to our room? Make it a party.”
“Best offer I’ve
had all day.”
You don’t often see a trio of Ph.D.s grinning. I wondered if it was as bad as a laughing nun and decided probably worse.
Their room, when we came to it, was like all the ones that I’d seen already: small, square, no windows, bathroom that could connect to the room next door if someone wanted to turn it into a suite.
“Make mine ambrosia,” Rita said, as Cathy went over to the mini-bar and Barbie sat on the bed, crossing her legs so the chiton opened high.
A clock was ticking, I was pretty sure, so I didn’t waste time with small talk.
“Father Aloysius says you’re a lot of fun to party with.”
“Like he’d know,” Cathy said, returning with a couple of glasses of something pale yellow. She handed one to Rita and turned back to me. “What was your impression of him?”
“I think he was a fake,” I replied. “If we checked all the dumpsters in town, my guess is we’d find the real Father Aloysius Laurence stuffed into one of them.”
“We concur,” Barbie said. “We made him after dinner last night. He was wearing his clothes like they were a costume.”
“You’ve been checking out the talent here?” Rita asked me.
“Yeah. Hasn’t everyone?”
“I suppose so,” Cathy said. She paused. “What was your clue?”
“He mispronounced ‘khitōn’,” I said. “Whoever the Jesuits sent would be a linguist. This guy wasn’t.”
“You’re a linguist?” Cathy asked. “I wouldn’t take you for one.”
“I’m not. I’m just muscle.” Which was close enough to true to not even be a lie. “But I’m interested in what brought other people here. What’s your angle?”
“A bit of pride for the Seven Sisters. The library at the Mawr could use something to rival Yale’s collection.”
“And,” Rita offered, “I’ve always wanted to practice my Gothic on something that no one has ever translated before.”
“That’s it? I didn’t think that the Mawr had a big enough endowment to pay for this kind of item.”
Barbie sipped from her glass. “I’m not concerned with that. Are you sure you don’t want that drink?”
“Do you think we could join forces?” I asked.
“Almost certainly,” Barbie said. “I have a way of knowing things. Almost certainly.”
“Did you know things about Father Aloysius?”
“There’s all kinds of knowing out there,” Cathy said.
“True enough,” I said. “Know anything about demons?”
“What?” Rita’s surprise looked genuine.
“Aloysius is dead. You have anything to do with that?”
Barbie set down her glass.
“I think,” Cathy said, “that it’s time for you to leave.”
I knocked on Maggie’s door. She opened it carefully. “What brings you here?”
“Already ran into one surprise today. Don’t want to make it two. Anything happen while I’ve been going round about the earth and walking through it?”
“The world, the flesh, and the devil have come by, offering us kingdoms, power, and glory. If you’re going to ask me to throw the auction, or to share the loot, or to privately re-sell the document afterward—well, you won’t be the first.”
“Wonderful to know that it wasn’t just me.”
Maggie stood aside so I could enter. She gestured at a slice of cake on the desk. “So, you’re telling me that someone either has been or will be consumed by the devil. Cute.”
She was dressed in black, like before, only skin tight, with a subdued cross on her collar to show her vocation; a balaclava covered her hair. Two shoulder rigs held heavy automatics butts-foremost in her armpits.
Sister Thérèse was sitting in an armchair, rosary in one hand, breviary in the other, eyes darting from me to Maggie and back again. She was wearing her traveling cloak.
“I was hoping that you’d figure out the cake,” I said.
Sister Thérèse sniffed. “The dining room menu calls it ‘Chocolate Decadence’ and claims that it is ‘sinfully delicious.’ Decoding your warning wasn’t hard. The carrot cake with cream cheese frosting would have presented more of a challenge.”
Code and cipher snobs . . . the good sister was probably disappointed that I hadn’t used a one-time menu with a randomly generated pastry.
“We do what we can,” I said, and filled in Maggie and Sister Thérèse on Father Aloysius’s fate.
“That’s bad,” Maggie said. “Wonder when the body will be found?”
“Probably not until check-out time tomorrow, unless someone stops by to remind Aloysius about the auction.”
“You said you had a photo,” Sister Thérèse said. “May I see it?”
“Yeah, but it’s got some nasty stuff in it.”
“Young man,” said Sister Thérèse, “I’ve been quietly contemplating my own death for decades. I think I can quietly contemplate someone else’s.”
She took the phone and examined the photo. Blew it up, cocked her head.
“The writing is in hieratic script,” she said after a moment. “None of the text that I can see deals with summoning a demon for the purpose of asking it questions. Portions of it deal with identifying the friends of God. And . . . I believe the word ‘wisdom’ is there as well. Though there are other translations.”
She looked more closely. “Something behind the mattresses?”
“Can’t tell for sure.”
“Only one door?”
“Only one, not counting the bathroom.”
“Then there is a secret door.” She smiled. “The people who used that script were quite fond of secret doors.”
“Which implies a secret door in every room,” Maggie said.
“Which means,” I concluded, “that we have to get the talent out of sight, in case someone comes gunning for her next. The best way to avoid getting caught is to be somewhere else.”
“Way ahead of you. We need to go dark.” Maggie went to the closet and shrugged on a heavy leather jacket “So—how long after we go missing does someone come looking?”
“Quite a while, I hope. I have a way to make folks think they know exactly where we are. No one chases you if they don’t know you’re running. I have some stuff I want down in my room. I was hoping you’d help me make a tactical entry, in case there’s a demon waiting.”
My room still had the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside and, thankfully, no one else on the inside; we locked the doors and propped the furniture against them. I pulled an iPod with a pair of external speakers out of my bag and set it to playing an audio file called “Priests’ and Nuns’ Ball.”
Maggie regarded the lash-up with a quizzical expression. “So you just happened to have this with you?”
“I downloaded the file last night,” I said. “In case I needed it.”
“I won’t ask what you might have thought you’d need it for,” Maggie said. “Planning to visit your Father Confessor when we get back?”
“I always do.”
She looked at her watch. “We aren’t getting paid by the hour. Let’s do this.”
I tapped around the walls, listening for hollow places. Sister Thérèse fired up a censer and filled the air with smoke, while Maggie lit a candle and moved it close to the walls, looking for slight air currents.
Working together, it didn’t take us long to find the sliding panel opposite the hall door that I should have looked for earlier. I checked my own watch. Coming up on six pm. That gave us three hours of sneak-and-peek time before the auction. Someone coming to surprise us would hesitate to enter the room if he thought someone was in it. I already knew there weren’t any electronic bugs. What I needed was three hours’ worth of protection against a Mark One Earlobe pressed to the wall. A recorded conversation that didn’t take three hours to make would have obvious repeats that would blow the gaff—but between the sounds of squeaking bedsprings in the rhythm that said “missionary style” and some guy moaning “O lente,
lente, currite noctis equi!”, we had the time covered.
I pulled two sets of infrared goggles and an IR flashlight out of the heavier of the suitcases the Temple had given me and handed them to the nuns, then took a night-vision device and a low-intensity light source for myself. Then Maggie and I worked the catch on the secret door, slid it open, and slipped out with Sister Thérèse between us.
While the conference center itself was all old wood and carpet and William Morris wallpaper, on the other side of the door the construction turned to concrete and steel; stairways and corridors going from black to black in either direction, up and down. I put a chalk X on the opposite wall so we would know the spot again, checked my watch, and turned right to see where the corridor went. My thought was to find Father Aloysius’s room and do some snooping around.
“What’s your plan if we find someone else out here?” Maggie whispered.
“Stand between them and the talent while you guys skedaddle,” I said. “Either that or ask if this is the way to the bus stop. Meanwhile . . . up two flights, and turn left.”
We retraced my path from earlier that afternoon, only outside the rooms rather than through the central hall. Maybe this was the maids’ access so the guests wouldn’t be bothered by laundry hampers and trolleys full of clean towels, but I doubted it. Every twenty feet or so another sliding panel beckoned, obvious from this side under infra-red. They were unmarked. The maids would have had to have phenomenal memories to keep the rooms straight.
“I think this is—” I began.
“Someone’s coming,” Maggie said, in a voice so low I could barely hear it. We were standing beside another panel. No sounds came from inside the room, but from around the corner, in that outside passageway, I could hear the footsteps of several people approaching.
Father Aloysius won’t mind the intrusion, I thought, pushed the panel, and slid it aside. A moment later the panel was sliding closed again with us on the inside.
It was the wrong room.
The open closet held suits, three of them, in identical charcoal gray. The bedside table had a crystal ball on an ornate stand. And the bed held a desiccated corpse lying on top of the coverlet. At the bed’s foot, a meter-tall jar of white glazed porcelain, topped with a lid shaped like a jackal’s head, gazed out into the room.
