Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  The four of them reached the place where Aristaeus had dropped. The place was marked by flattened grass and splatters of blood. To one side lay Aristaeus’ revolver.

  There was no body.

  “What the hell?” said the railroad cop who’d checked Stefan’s badge.

  “Ain’t no way he could’ve run off without us seeing something,” said the one with the flashlight. Even so, he panned his light across the edges of the grass, looking for signs of where Aristaeus might have retreated. The grass waved back, undisturbed.

  Aristaeus was gone.

  Nuri lay slumped against the wall, his hand clutching the hole just below the shoulder. He tried to keep pressure on the wound, but blood kept leaking through his fingers. His other arm lay useless at his side, warm and slick with blood. The wound, and the entire upper quarter of his chest throbbed with every beat of his pulse, as if a giant hand was squeezing the life out of him with every heartbeat.

  “Good lord, what’s happening here?” Oris Paxton Van Sweringen bent over him. The man was gathering up a bedsheet and bent over Nuri to press it to his wound.

  Before Nuri had a chance to speak, the door burst open a man stepped into the car. Nuri recognized Van Sweringen’s secretary. He looked as if he’d just fallen out of bed.

  “Are you all right, sir—” The man stopped when his gaze landed on Nuri. The carpet had already soaked up a pool of blood that nearly reached his feet.

  “I’m fine,” Van Sweringen said, wiping blood off of his mouth with the back of his hand. “This man needs to get to a hospital. Get an ambulance, and for heaven’s sake keep it out of the papers.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man turned on his heels and left.

  Van Sweringen shook his head as he tried to keep pressure on the wound. “Why are you here?” he whispered, half to himself.

  “Dietrich,” Nuri said. His voice was weak and tasted of blood.

  Van Sweringen showed no sign of surprise. In fact, he nodded. “He’s finished with me, isn’t he? Just like he was finished with Mantis.” His face took on a longing expression, and he shook his head a few times as if to clear it. “He was an assassin, wasn’t he? The man who shot you.”

  “Need to know—” Nuri started to say, but he began coughing up blood.

  “I know who you are. You walked into my office a few months ago. I chased you away.” He shifted the sheet over the wound and Nuri groaned. “It was fear. It kept me from doing more than I did. Even when I lost Mantis, all I could do was call in secret....”

  “What—” Nuri tried to form a question, but the pain and the blood wouldn’t let him. He felt as if he had started tumbling through empty space, and Van Sweringen’s face seemed impossibly far away.

  “I think you were too late,” Van Sweringen said. “I can taste my own death coming. Nothing left to be afraid of.” With his free hand he reached around his neck and removed a chain. Hanging from it was a large, plain cross. Van Sweringen dropped it over Nuri’s head.

  In his mind, Nuri tried to explain he was Jewish, but by then his brain seemed to have lost any connection with the rest of his body. He wondered if Van Sweringen was wrong about whose death he was probably tasting.

  Van Sweringen leaned forward, as if to kiss his cheek, and Nuri distinctly heard the words, “Cleveland Trust.”

  Then, as the world began fading away into a dull gray void, Van Sweringen’s secretary ran in saying help was coming. Van Sweringen nodded, and said, “Arrange for a new car to New York.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said, and vanished.

  Van Sweringen said other things, but Nuri was past hearing them.

  11

  Wednesday, December 2-Friday, December 4

  Nuri spent days in a drugged stupor, long enough for a dusting of snow to collect on the ledge of the window next to his bed. His arm was in a cast up past his collarbone, held upright by weights. Tubes entered and left his body, and the upper right quarter of his chest was home to an intolerable itching.

  Becoming conscious of his surroundings seemed an interminable process. It seemed an eternity before he could even focus on Stefan’s presence.

  “What ...” Nuri whispered when he finally managed to find the power to speak. It was as if he were trying to finish the question he had been asking Van Sweringen.

  Stefan leaned over and touched his good shoulder. “Rest.”

  Nuri turned and tried to focus on Stefan’s face. His memory was a feverish jumble of images. He knew he’d been here for a long time, and he knew that Stefan had been here at times, but the images and the memories never settled down into a coherent whole. It was frustrating, like trying to remember a dream as it slipped away.

  “Rest,” Stefan repeated. “You’ve been fighting an infection.”

  Nuri closed his eyes and rested.

  Later on he woke up and asked, “How long have I been here?”

  Stefan was still there, or he was there again. “Ten days.”

  Nuri looked sideways at Stefan, “What happened?”

  “How are you doing?” he asked. Stefan looked ragged, as if he hadn’t showered or shaved in days. “The doctors say you’ll be able to go home in a few days.”

  “What happened to Aristaeus? Van Sweringen?”

  “Aristaeus got away.” Stefan pulled his chair closer to the bed. “Van Sweringen’s dead.”

  Something sick filled Nuri’s chest as he heard that. “Dead?” he whispered. He kept thinking of the man saying he tasted death....

  “Heart attack on the way to New York,” Stefan said. He ran both hands through his hair and said, “We were too late.”

  “You don’t think it was a heart attack?”

  “I’m sure it was. Didn’t you see what Aristaeus was doing?” Stefan pulled a small bag out of his jacket pocket. It was wax paper, and Nuri could see brown stains inside of it. “He dropped this in Van Sweringen’s car.”

  “What is it?”

  “A vial of blood. Half empty. He was pouring it into Van Sweringen’s mouth when we showed up.” Stefan looked at it. “You listened to Iago, didn’t you? Melchior’s blood.”

  Nuri looked at the bag in Stefan’s hand, and looked at Stefan. “You think Van Sweringen was killed. With that?”

  Stefan nodded.

  Nuri didn’t know what to say. What Stefan was saying smacked of voodoo, of magic. Nuri had seen things were close to the supernatural, but he still clung to the belief that there had to be a rational explanation for what was going on.

  “Did he say anything to you?” Stefan asked, putting the envelope and its vial back into his pocket.

  “He said he tasted his own death.” He reached up to his neck and felt under his hospital gown. The cross was still there. Clumsily, he lifted the chain up over his head and gave it to Stefan one-handed.

  Stefan took it.

  “He gave it to me. You can have it.”

  Stefan held the cross up to the light. “Did he say anything about it?” He seemed to be studying it, turning it on edge.

  Nuri searched his memory and remembered the words. “Cleveland Trust,” he said.

  “Ah-hah,” Stefan said as he pulled the oversized cross apart. The cross split apart into two separate crosses hinged at the base. Sandwiched between them, glinting in the light, was a key.

  12

  Monday, December 14

  Downtown Cleveland was covered by a fresh dusting of snow. Christmas lights decorated the outsides of the department stores, and windows were draped with ribbons of red and green. As Stefan walked down Euclid, he heard carolers in the distance singing “Silent Night.”

  The season didn’t move him. He walked with his head lowered, seeing mostly the gray slush that covered the sidewalk. He held his trenchcoat close to him, holding his hat against the cold. In one hand he clutched the key that Van Sweringen had passed on.

  Stefan wished Nuri was with him. He felt isolated, alone. He walked past the holiday decorations and felt as if he was the only one who saw th
e darkness under the surface.

  He stopped at East Ninth, and looked across at the Cleveland Trust Building. It squatted at the opposite corner of the street, a neoclassical building with a domed roof. Even this staid building had a few wreaths in deference to the season.

  To Stefan, the way the late afternoon shadows had darkened every portal of the building, it resembled a massive tomb, the wreaths from some recent funeral.

  Stefan crossed the street and entered the edifice. Once inside, the small decorations, a ribbon here, a bough there, did little to dismiss the somber character of the bank. Stefan swallowed and walked toward the manager’s desk.

  It took some convincing, and the flash of his badge—which meant little since he and Nuri had been suspended—but the manager eventually allowed him down to the deposit vault to use the key.

  Stefan carried the box to a cubicle, wondering what Van Sweringen saw fit to hide here. The account wasn’t even in Van Sweringen’s name, which meant that the lawyers handling the Van Sweringen estate, and the lawyers handling its creditors, didn’t know this box existed.

  Alone, in a stall, Stefan lifted the lid of the safety deposit box.

  It finally felt a little like Christmas. On top was a copy of an agreement between the Van Sweringens and Eric Dietrich. It dated from September ’35, but seemed to carry hints of an agreement several years back.

  Stefan rifled through the other papers. There was documentation of European investment in the Van Sweringens’ pyramid of corporations. Stefan wasn’t an accountant, but the papers listed numbers that, to Stefan, seemed to have kept the whole Van Sweringen pyramid afloat much longer than it should have.

  Stefan suspected that without Dietrich’s money—the context made it clear who the money came from even if the benefactor was never named—the whole system of interlaced companies would have tumbled apart as early as ’31.

  By September 30, ’35, Eric Dietrich had become a full-fledged silent partner. It went far beyond what Stefan had expected. From the papers that he held, it seemed possible that Dietrich was in control of the largest rail empire in the country.

  Stefan had thought that, at the most, Dietrich had control of a few lines through his relationship to Van Sweringen. Stefan felt cold as he realized that the thing calling itself Dietrich had access, control of, lines from the Missouri Pacific to the Chesapeake & Ohio.

  He had planned to find Dietrich’s private car and use that as a point of attack. That target now seemed much more remote.

  13

  Friday, January 8—Sunday, January 10

  “You’re delaying,” Iago said.

  Stefan didn’t look at him; he knew what he would see in those eyes. Instead, he looked out over the frozen lake, toward the breakwater. The night was cold and quiet, Lake Erie black as onyx, refusing to reflect the feeble stars. “I don’t want any innocent bystanders caught in this.”

  “Do you know what we’re dealing with?” Iago said. “We cannot afford to be gentle.”

  “What is the point in fighting an evil if we ourselves become evil in the process?”

  Stefan could hear Iago pacing behind him. “You are quite clear in your belief that I am myself an evil worthy of damnation.”

  “I’ll move when I am certain that I can destroy Melchior without harming anyone else.”

  “The point is destroying him before he becomes unapproachable, if he isn’t already—”

  Stefan shook his head. “We’re dealing with explosives here. I won’t set off a bomb in the middle of the city.”

  Iago made a disgusted noise. “A train, then,” Iago said. “Which one?”

  “I need you to find that out for me.”

  There was a silence. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “I don’t want to know,” Stefan said, staring out at the black horizon. “What I need to know is a train he’ll be on, and when. One of the trains he’s using for his own purposes.”

  “This is all you need?”

  Stefan nodded, turning away from the darkness to face the lights of the city. “Yes,” he said.

  Iago was facing away from him, toward the city himself. “I’ll give you this. Stay by the phone the next three nights, be ready to act when I call.”

  Two nights later Iago wore the mask of Tragedy again. He carried the chained body of a person who in life was a prostitute named Rose Wallace. He had wanted one of Melchior’s human thralls, the ones who had yet to turn and had less of a bond to their master, but time was too short to be picky.

  He carried her into the darkness of another slaughterhouse, awash with the smell of chickens and blood. It was a different place than where he’d talked to Carlo Pasquale, but it hardly mattered. The place was the same concrete darkness filled with animal shrieks and the smell of blood.

  He dropped Rose Wallace on the ground and pulled out a hypodermic needle. In the darkness, the steel needle, twisted handle, its glass shaft, all seemed to be some obscure torture device.

  Iago slid the needle into the flesh of his wrist, the gap between glove and sleeve where a small strip of skin was visible. The needle sank in to the base, and Iago withdrew the plunger, allowing the glass tube to fill with his own black-rose-colored blood.

  Iago withdrew the needle and knelt next to Rose Wallace. He slid the needle into a vein in her neck. Her body jerked as he injected the blood into her system. He watched the blood push from the tube, knowing that it was now a matter of his survival or Rose’s. Once his blood was taken into her body, he couldn’t allow her to leave. Melchior could not be allowed to taste Iago’s blood on one of his thralls.

  Knowing that he would have to destroy Rose, whatever she managed to reveal to him, made him feel that Stefan Ryzard was right. His kind was evil.

  He could feel the pull toward Rose as his blood sank into her system. He didn’t hope to displace Melchior’s influence as completely as he did with Carlo, but he hoped that he connected deeply enough to have Rose answer his few questions.

  He knelt over her and watched as Rose Wallace’s eyes opened. In them Iago saw a maelstrom of terror and betrayal. Iago began asking his questions.

  The phone tore Stefan from sleep. He ran and grabbed the receiver.

  “There’s a special run of the Nickel Plate, February fifteenth. It leaves the Union Terminal at three in the morning. He will be on it, the last car.”

  “Iago?” Stefan asked. Something sounded odd about Iago’s voice. It had always sounded diabolically confident, superior. Something had drained out of it.

  “I must go. You won’t hear from me until it’s done.”

  Stefan opened his mouth to ask a question, but the line was already dead. His hand shook as he laid the receiver back in the cradle.

  This was it. He had the information he wanted. Now he just had to go through with it.

  That Sunday, Stefan saw Father Gerwazek before Mass.

  He had been going more regularly since all this had started happening, trying to rebuild some relationship with God. He was unsure if it was working. He still felt as if the divine was impossible to reach from where he was. Yet, he went to the confessional, like he had when he was a child, like he had before his own wife and child had died.

  He knelt in the booth, and for a time it was completely dark. He could feel a surge of claustrophobia. Then the door on the other side of the screen slid aside, letting in light and dappled shadow.

  Before anything else was said, he asked, “Do you believe in the supernatural, Father?” The question came out of him in a rush. He had never talked to Gerwazek about the things he’d been experiencing, about Dietrich, about Iago’s kind. His confessions had been about more mundane matters.

  There was a pause, as if Gerwazek was gathering his thoughts after the break in form. “I believe in the supernatural,” he said. “I believe in God. I believe that the host becomes the flesh of Christ. I believe in the possibility of divine intervention in worldly affairs.”

  “And Satan? Tangible physical
evil?”

  “That, too, is part of my faith.” Gerwazek paused. “What troubles you?”

  “I believe that I am fighting a supernatural evil.”

  There was a longer pause, then, slowly, Gerwazek told him, “You must pray, my son. There is only one good in the realm of the supernatural, and that is what comes from God. If what you fight is not worldly, then your only aid can come from Him.”

  Stefan opened his mouth to say more, but something inside him felt as if he had said enough. It was time to purge himself of his burdens. Slowly, Stefan began to tell Gerwazek of his sins.

  Afterward, he took Mass.

  14

  Monday, February 15

  Stefan waited in the darkness and prayed. He stood in a concrete alcove deep under the Union Terminal Tower. Beyond the track in front of him the darkness was subdivided into a forest of girders. There were a few lights, red and green and sodium yellow. None seemed to reach very far. The smell was damp and musty, heavy with soil and grease.

  Stefan cupped a flashlight with his hand and shone it so it only illuminated the watch on his wrist. His train had ten minutes to arrive. His breath was short and burned the back of his throat with the taste of copper.

  At his feet was a satchel, pushed far back against the concrete wall. It was heavy, and carried enough dynamite to reduce a railroad car to kindling. It also contained the blasting caps, wire, several rolls of cloth tape, a pair of wire cutters, and a small hand-held plunger.

  Stefan had wanted a timer, but he was lucky he could get his hands on what he did. What it meant was that he was going to be on the train when Melchior’s car detonated. He would just have to hope he was far enough away.

  It was noisy down here, even at this time of the morning, with the trains coming and going through the underground passageways. So Stefan felt the oncoming train before he realized he heard it. It was early.