by Anton Strout
“I don’t know,” he said, weary, “but it won’t be me. I am sure there is a surplus of eager young men out there willing to die for a good cause, but after almost falling into that hole, I’m not so sure anymore. I would like to see thirty, forty, and, God willing, eighty.”
“Nonsense,” Argyle said, a bit dismissive in a cheering sort of way. “You’re just shaken, is all. Come. We’ll have a few drinks down at Eccentric Circles. In a few hours, you’ll feel fine.”
The look on Mason’s face was a distant one. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t suppose I will ever feel fine leading a life like this.”
Quimbley clapped his partner on the back. “Save any decisions for the light of day,” he said. The two men started up the graveyard path together, but only one of them looked certain in his steps.
I pulled myself out of the vision, feeling a bit shaky from how long I had been in it. The Inspectre had his head down in one of the files on his desk, but looked up when I took in a deep breath. He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a small covered dish, and slid it across to me.
I pulled off the lid and looked inside. “Sugar cubes?” I asked.
“I am English,” he said. “I keep the sugar cubes around because I’m required by British law to take teatime. What did you see?”
I took turns between scarfing down the much-needed sugar like a show pony and explaining to the professor just what I had seen. He listened without interruption, giving a wan smile when I finished.
“I was probably around your age then,” the Inspectre said. “Thought a sword cane would be the most inconspicuous weapon, but I don’t think many young men of my time were seen with them.”
I looked down where it lay in my lap still and pulled the blade free from the cane. The metal was worn with age now and well corroded at the end where it had broken off. I rattled the hollow section of cane and the remaining piece of the sword slid out onto my lap. “You never fixed it.”
The Inspectre shook his head, solemn. “Some things are better left as a reminder of what can be broken,” he said. “My friendship with Mason, for one. He was my first partner in the field.” The Inspectre held his hands out. I set the pieces of sword in them, careful to lay the blades down flat. With care, the Inspectre slid them back into the cane, and then placed it back on the rim of the top shelf again. For several moments, he stood there with his back to me until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What happened?” I asked. “After that night.”
The Inspectre turned around, looking a little older. He sat back down in his chair. “Mason simply didn’t come in the next day. Or the day after that. I heard from a colleague who ran into him in the street that he looked different. Happy, if I remember it correctly.”
“So he just walked away from the Order?” I asked, anger creeping into my voice.
“Now, now,” the Inspectre said. “Don’t judge so hastily. Mason simply chose to live his life. . . differently.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked. “Did one of those ghouls actually bite him? He went evil?”
“Oh, heavens no! Surely you saw the look on his face when I pulled him out of that fissure. Mason was stone-cold scared and all too willing to walk away from this life.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if I had seen all that he had seen, I don’t think I could turn away from a life of fighting the dark horrors that haunt this city.”
The Inspectre looked at me over the top of his glasses, his face fixed in a very serious expression. “The Fraternal Order of Goodness is not for everyone, Simon. You have to remember that in the old days, there was barely even a Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Life within F.O.G. is thankless work with long hours and few benefits, even fewer now with these recent budget cuts from downtown. An agent of the Order has to love what they do, I suppose, in some perverse, masochistic way.”
Who was I to try to second-guess Mason Redfield? He was a man I had met only twice—once through a psychometric flash and once as a corpse. “I guess I understand.”
The Inspectre gave me a surprised smile. “Do you, now?”
I nodded. “When I came to the D.E.A., I was searching for something, something greater than a paycheck. Up until that moment, I would have gone on using my psychometry for heists and low-level thieving forever . . .”
“You would have eventually been caught,” the Inspectre corrected.
“That’s my point,” I said. “I chose the D.E.A. and becoming a F.O.G.gie because I almost was caught—caught up in betrayal by the old crowd I ran with. You do recall Mina Saria, don’t you?”
The Inspectre nodded. “That psychotic redhead, yes? Currently missing and in possession of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, I believe.”
“Correct,” I said, shuddering at the thought of her. My encounters with her were harrowing enough to fill a book. “Surviving those near misses in my old criminal life with her woke me up. I wanted control of my life, a sense of purpose. Doing good, as simplistic as it sounds, is a far more rewarding fit. It gave me a better purpose.”
The Inspectre steepled his fingers against his chin as he considered what I said. “That’s what I meant about the Order not being for everyone,” he said. “Mason Redfield had his sense of purpose scared out of him that night. He turned to another purpose that had caught his eye prior to joining the Order—his love of cinema and a desire to teach. Ironically, it was his love of horror films that drove him to the Fraternal Order of Goodness in the first place.”
It was hard to imagine the semifailed swashbuckler at the head of a classroom, but hey, it worked for Indiana Jones. “Turned to teaching film,” I said. “Makes sense. There, the monsters can’t really get you.”
The Inspectre’s face sobered. “I hadn’t really considered that when it happened,” he said. “I was too angry at him. You see, at the time I was new to the game myself. I hated Mason for abandoning what I thought was his true calling. I handled myself. . . poorly.”
“How so?” I asked.
The Inspectre’s face turned red and he shifted in his chair, unable to find comfort in it. “I took his leaving as a personal affront. All I knew was that I was left on my own within the Order. I hated him for abandoning me like that, selfish as I was. Stubbornly, I refused to break in a new partner, insisting on doing everything on my own from then on. Some called me foolish, reckless. . . but to me it only meant I had to work harder and be more careful. I kept myself busy and it made it easy not to get in touch with Mason much once he left the Order. By the time I worked through my foolish anger, too much time had passed. Any thoughts I had of reconciling the situation would only have been too little, too late.”
The Inspectre fell silent.
“So you never talked to him again?”
The Inspectre shook his head. “To what end?” he asked. “To give me closure? Mason walked away from it all, and who was I to come back into his life as a constant reminder of all the evils waiting to be confronted in the world? I kept tabs on him at first, naturally, making sure he was adjusting to the mundane world once again. He settled into the world of academia, and all I had to do was let things lie at that point.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I felt part of what you felt when I was in my vision. I saw the friendship you had with him. You could have still had that—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” the Inspectre snapped, barking at me. “Don’t you think I know what I lost that day?”
I jumped in my seat. Seeing the Inspectre this unnerved rattled me more than I expected.
“It kills me,” he continued, angrier with each word that flew from his lips, “that I should go so many years only to hear about the man’s death and worse, in a paranormal fashion on top of it. Do you know how much that guts me, how asleep on the watch it makes me feel?”
“Sorry,” I said. There was little healing power in the word, but maybe the Inspectre wasn’t looking to heal. Maybe he didn’t want someone to fix
it. It had been broken too long for me to think anything I said would actually help. It was like trying to put a Band-Aid on a shark bite. Sometimes people just needed to vent and get it out of their system. I decided on another tack—getting back to business.
“So he was a teacher,” I said. “That’s as good a place to start as any. I should probably ask around and see if any of his students or other faculty noticed anything strange about him over the past few weeks.”
The talk of the Inspectre’s dead friend in an investigative capacity seemed to help him compose himself. His anger faded from his face and he nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I would check his offices over at New York University. Take Connor with you. Mind you, use discretion.”
“Don’t we always?”
“Yes, my boy, but now more than ever, given our precarious state of affairs with the city. I would hate to give Director Wesker or Dave Davidson any reason to suggest any sort of impropriety when it came to handling this personal case over others. For instance, some might see this as me exploiting Departmental resources.”
“But Davidson brought us this case,” I said.
“True,” the Inspectre said, returning to the pile of papers scattered in front of him. “Nonetheless, exercise extreme prudence in your investigation.”
“Got it,” I said. I stood up and headed for the door.
“And, Simon,” the Inspectre said, lifting his head up out of his paperwork. “Please be careful. Given the supernatural nature of his death, maybe the good college professor wasn’t as out of the arcana business as much as I previously thought.”
8
New York University was big on film and theater, but thankfully not so much on security measures. At least, not for someone who looked like a student still and practiced psychometry. This late at night Connor and I didn’t have to worry about many students in the academic buildings, but every other lock getting to the professor’s office required either a quick psychometric blast to read the electronic ones or my skills with my lock picks for the rest of them. By the time we hit the professor’s office door, the repetition of picking the older locks had become easy. The professor’s door practically opened the second I inserted my torsion wrench and one of my half-diamond picks into the lock, swinging inward and revealing darkness in the office behind it.
“Jesus, kid,” Connor said. “You sure that one wasn’t already open?”
“Yup,” I said, shoving my picks back up my left sleeve. “I’m just that good.”
Connor pushed past me into the dark office, annoyed. “Nice to see you keeping it humble.”
“Hey, I don’t take pride in much, but let me have this, okay?”
I slipped into the office after him and flicked on the light just inside the door, then closed the door behind me. A pile of unopened mail sat underneath a mail slot on the floor to the right of the door. “Looks like no one’s taken notice of the professor’s absence yet.” I turned my attention to the rest of the room.
For a college professor, the office was pretty posh. The furniture was of the old-school drawing room variety, Gothic pieces rich with carved foliage, huge and chunky like they could withstand a hurricane. The walls were lined with academic texts and film memorabilia—books, statues, movie-related knickknacks, and artwork everywhere.
“Wow,” I said. “This guy had really been working his tenure here.”
Connor gave a low whistle. “I think we might have stumbled into the Museum of Television and Radio by mistake.”
I knew Professor Redfield had left the Fraternal Order of Goodness to return to his love of film and teaching, but there was more of an overabundance of film-related memorabilia mixed throughout the academic trappings than I had expected.
“Notice anything strange?” Connor asked.
I looked around the darkened office, trying to look for anything out of place.
“It’s very tidy,” I said.
Connor nodded, leaning over to run his hands along the smooth surface of the professor’s desk. “A little too, wouldn’t you say?” Outside of a few neat piles of paper on it, the desk was relatively clear. Compared to mine back at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, it was practically empty.
Looking around, I noticed it was true. “For a guy who was murdered so suddenly, this place looks like it was taken care of beforehand. Either he was knew he was going to die, or he was a neat freak, or someone cleaned this place up after killing him.”
“I’ve never known a professor who kept a tidy office,” Connor said. He leaned farther over on the top of the desk, his face practically touching it. He inhaled deeply. “The smell of polish is relatively fresh.”
I stepped to the display case along the wall behind the late professor’s desk and pulled on my gloves. It was covered in an array of figurines that all looked like they were monsters or characters from ancient Greece. I grabbed one of the figures off the shelf behind the desk. The thing looked something like a cross between the classic Godzilla and a Tyrannosaurus rex. “Well, they’re not Zuni fetish dolls or anything, but some of these pug uglies sure look evil enough, not that the professor was supposed to be dabbling in arcana these days. Check this out.” I threw the figurine over to Connor. He caught it and turned it over. His eyes went wide after marveling at it for a moment.
“What is it?”
“Careful,” he said, holding the figurine up gently. “This is an original Harryhausen.”
My blank stare was enough to garner a disappointed look from Connor. He shook his head at me. “You’re in my territory now, kid. Movie paraphernalia.” He held the mechanical beastie up, almost like a ventriloquist dummy. “This little ugly guy here is from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Ray Harryhausen was the special-effects wizard who created all the old-school stop-motion monsters. The man did King Kong, for goodness’ sake.”
“I thought Hepburn and Bogie were your thing,” I said, looking over the other figures on the shelf. Now that Connor had pointed it out, some of the creatures looked vaguely familiar from movies I had seen, but I felt a little bit ashamed I hadn’t figured it out for myself. That was what I got for relying so heavily on my psychometry over the years—instant expertise without becoming an expert on anything.
“Sure,” he continued. “I have my favorites, but these are a classic of a different kind. I bet these are worth a mint.”
Connor held the figure out to me, but I didn’t take it, instead moving away from the display.
“You put it away,” I said.
Connor gave me a suspicious look, but did as I said and put the figure back on the shelf. “You okay, kid?”
“It’s probably best not to give the priceless shiny to the ex-thief psychometrist who still needs to make his hefty SoHo maintenance fees this month.”
“Can’t understand why you went for a fringe government job,” he said. “No way you’re going to be able to finance that apartment forever.”
“Either way,” I said, “no need to tempt me. I’ll find a way.”
“You could sell the place,” Connor said, turning to look over the professor’s desk.
A small ball of panic bunched up in my chest. “No way,” I said, defensive. “It was my last hurrah when I gave up my old life. My past crimes paid the way for my future, for my freedom.”
“Still,” he said. “Ill-gotten goods funded it. Maybe it’s time to give the place up. Unless you’re expecting some kind of year-end bonus that I’m not aware of . . . ?”
I stopped looking around the room and turned to Connor, a hint of anger in my voice. “I’m not giving the place up. It’s just a lot harder trying to live honestly than I thought, okay?”
Connor flipped open a teacher’s planner on the desk and looked through it. “There’s one way you could make your life easier financially, kid.”
“Oh?” I said.
“You could have Jane move in,” Connor suggested. “That halves all your bills instantly.”
The residual emotion
s of the tattooist pressed their way to the surface and I snapped in anger. “Has Jane talked to you about this, too?” I asked. I stared into his eyes, searching them.
“Nope,” he said, “but would her moving in be such a bad idea?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head to clear it and get rid of the growing sensation. “I don’t want to jinx it. Things are good as they stand.”
“What’s to jinx, kid?”
“I don’t think I do relationships well,” I said, the anger turning to rampant insecurity. “Let’s look at my track record. My last girlfriend was a high-priced art thief.”
Connor laughed. “I take it The Scream is still missing?”
I nodded. “I bet she’s got it hanging on the wall in her lair somewhere. Mina was messed up—abusive, demeaning, everything a wannabe badass thief should want in a girl. When I smartened up, we went our separate ways, which left her vacillating between stalking me, killing me, or handing me over to cultists. I can’t help but wonder. . . what did I really do to bring that out in someone? I mean, yeah, I used to be a dick when I was dating her, but I’d like to think I grew past that.”
Connor scrunched his face and held his hand up, rolling it back and forth in the air. “More or less.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I just don’t trust myself after that and now I keep getting these flare-ups of anger and jealousy from the tattooist.”
“I thought so,” he said. “You don’t snap on me all that often.”
“Sorry,” I said, concentrating on relaxing. I felt almost normal again.
“Kid, you’ve got a good woman now. Don’t drive yourself crazy overthinking it. If you’re happy, you’re happy, but don’t let your past control you on this. Sure, be mindful of it, but don’t live in it.”
“It’s just hard to change my thinking. I need to rewire my brain or something.”
“At the very least, you should limber it up,” Connor said, crossing back to the professor’s desk. He grabbed a Lucite block from the corner of it and handed it to me. “Try this for a little psychometric gymnastics.”
