“Craig… What does it say?” Jethro asked, his patience beginning to wear thin.
Dr. Allen cleared his throat and translated: “Yatzar mamash me-tohu ve-oseh et ayno yeshno… He formed substance out of chaos and out of nothing He made something. But I’ve always been partial to the admittedly inaccurate phrasing ‘…from the empty void He made the solid earth, and from the nonexistent He brought forth Life.’”
Jean let out a long, rattling sigh, wrapping her arms around her midsection and curling down over herself. Jethro reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Jean, what is it?”
“Are you all right, Miss Farrell?” Dr. Allen asked, craning over his mountain of books.
“Yeah… Fine,” Jean replied, shaking her head. She looked over at Jethro. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
Chapter 5
BIG TOP, BIG TROUBLE
“I have a bad feeling about this, Herr Leutnant.”
Caraway leaned forward against the steering wheel and gave his less than enthusiastic “partner” a bemused expression. “Look, buddy, you’re clearly a smart cookie, seeing as you made it all the way to Colonel, or whatever the hell you people call it,” he said, tapping the ranking pins on Gan’s lapel, “so I’m not going to spell it out for you.”
Gan sat in the passenger seat, massaging his temples. “Spell it out, please. Pretend I am an imbecile. Pretend I am you.”
Caraway sighed audibly. “Fine. Our little encounter with Pomatto got me thinking. Much as I hate to admit it—and I really do hate it—you’re probably right that he isn’t the man we’re looking for. Sure, Pomatto’s got the height, right? But nothing else matches up. So, I started thinking about what your buddy Johann was saying. The man we’re after is tall, but he’s also got some major scarring on his forehead. That narrows the field a bit, but still doesn’t give us our man. Then I saw that”—Caraway pointed at the large poster across from them—“and I got to thinking it all sorta fit together a little too perfectly.”
Gan glanced over at the poster and then shot Caraway a skeptical look. “I think you’re being ridiculous, Herr Leutnant.”
“Don’t tell me you krauts don’t have circuses over there.”
Gan looked at the massive painted poster of the exhibit touted as the World’s Tallest Man: “Gorgeous Gordon.” The poster claimed that Gordon was over seven feet tall and the strongest man in the Western Hemisphere. To underline these declarations, the poster showed Gordon resting one elbow on what was meant to be a normal-sized man whilst lifting a large barbell with the other arm.
“Ja, we have circuses in Germany, but this is a fool’s errand.”
“You’re more than welcome to sit this one out. In fact, I insist! We don’t want you goose-stepping your way into another international incident, do we?” Caraway said as he got out of the squad car, slamming the door behind him.
“Arschloch,” Gan grumbled after a moment, crossing his arms and letting his anger steam up the inside of the car. The investigation was only a little more than a day old and it was already becoming a wild goose chase. Working with Caraway had only compounded the issue—Gan had been tempted toward homicide more times in the past day than in all his years. Gan knew the longer this farce continued, the further he would be from achieving his purpose here. And so, as much as he hated it—and he did hate it—he would continue to work with Caraway until they could find some solution to this mystery. Gan shoved open the car door and chased after Caraway, who was already near the entrance of the main tent.
“Told you, you could stay in the car.”
“And miss watching you make a fool of yourself? I think not.”
Caraway had his men stationed just outside the fairgrounds so as not to arouse any suspicion amongst the circus folk—he didn’t want to deal with another incident like they had with Pomatto—so for now it was just him and Gan. It was still a few hours before the show was scheduled to begin, but they could still hear music emanating from within the tent. As they walked through the entrance, he expected to find the performers wrapping up a last-minute rehearsal, but was surprised to find the center ring empty. The ethereal music continued to play on, echoing around them and sending shivers down his spine.
“When was the last time you went to the circus, Gan?” Caraway whispered, nervously scratching at his mustache.
“I was four,” Gan breathed.
Caraway glanced over at Gan’s balding head. “So that was, what, 1885?”
“Believe it or not, Herr Leutnant, I am only thirty two.”
“Wow. That’s depressing.”
“This is ridiculous,” Gan said as they found themselves in the center ring. “I shall not wait here for the next shoe to drop. HELLO! Is anyone there?!”
The music continued to play. Gan looked over at Caraway.
Caraway shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
Just then the music died down, leaving an eerie silence behind.
“Aw… This can’t be good,” Caraway murmured.
Something honked behind them. Startled, they spun around to find themselves face to face with a short “tramp” clown, a canted derby hat over his scruffy black hair, an oversized flower on his lapel. They stared at each other in silence for a moment before Caraway spoke up. “We’re looking for Gorgeous Gordon, the World’s Tallest Man.”
The clown opened his mouth to respond, but simply honked.
“Another mystery solved,” Gan added sarcastically.
Caraway grabbed the clown. “Quit honking, and tell me where the big boy is.”
The clown honked again.
“Aw, hell and damnation.” Caraway gritted his teeth, lifting up the tiny clown so their eyes met. “Listen, bucko, we’re looking for a murdering psychopath who ripped up a bunch of this kraut-boy’s little buddies. Now, I don’t have time for any more honking or squirters or buzzers, so tell us where we can find your friend Gorgeous Gordon?”
“Right here, copper.”
Gan met Caraway’s eyes before they turned around to find Gorgeous Gordon and his circus friends standing behind them. Gan counted at least six clowns, two strongmen, a bearded lady, and one elephant surrounding the seven-foot-tall man. All of them looked incensed, especially the clowns.
“It’s gonna be one of those nights.” Caraway shook his head, letting go of the clown he held who scampered over to the gang of circus performers.
“You want one of us, copper,” the Bearded Lady bellowed, “then you want all of us.”
“That’s right!” one of the clowns squeaked.
“I really don’t like you, Herr Leutnant,” Gan said out of the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t worry, buddy, the feeling’s more than mutual.” Caraway cracked his neck as he rolled up his sleeves. “All right, kiddies. Who’s first?”
“That would be me, monsieur,” a bald and mustached strongman said as he pushed through the crowd. Dressed in a leotard, arms like tree trunks, the strongman cracked his knuckles, the sound of popping joints echoing out into the silence.
Caraway lowered his arms and looked over at Gan. “You Germans aren’t too big on the French, right?”
Gan’s eyes went wide. He grimaced at Caraway and shook his head quickly, as if to say: Don’t you dare.
Caraway responded with a smile and turned back to the strongman.
“He’s all yours, buddy,” he said with a nod before hastily stepping away.
With one massive step, the strongman moved in front of Gan, raised his fist and said in an uncompromising tone: “Un bon Allemand est un Allemand mort.”
“Arschloch,” Gan snarled at Caraway before bringing up his fists and addressing the strongman in heavily accent French. “Avancez alors.”
“Oui. Commençons,” the strongman said with a smile. He dived forward, swinging a left hook, but Gan was too fast for him, sidestepping the blow with ease. With nothing to absorb his momentum, the bald headed circus performer lurched forward, letti
ng out a grunt of surprise. Using this to his advantage, Gan spun around and extended his leg in front of his stumbling assailant. The strongman tripped to the ground face first with a loud flop!
“Willy!” the other strongman called out for his compatriot as he barreled toward Gan.
Gan, for his part, remained crouched on the ground and waited until the second strongman was almost on top of him before he swung his elbow up into the more sensitive region of the man’s body. The strongman screamed a high pitched howl, and Gan let the man collapse forward onto his back, catching him and then throwing him into a pile with the other strongman in one fluid motion.
A clown cartwheeled toward Gan, honking as he did. As the clown hit mid-revolution, Gan jabbed his palm into the performer’s midsection. The next sound he let out certainly was somewhere between a bark and a bray of pain.
Standing up, Gan turned to face the remaining assortment of clowns and circus folk, all of whom took an immediate step back. He straightened his uniform and quietly said: “Herr Gordon, would you come with us now, please?”
The remaining performers all turned to Gorgeous Gordon, waiting for his response. The mountain of a man looked Gan directly in the eyes, crossed his arms, and gave a smile that would have loosened the bowels of a weaker man. “You fight well, fascist,” Gordon boomed. “But I’ve still got the elephant.”
“Aw, Gottverdammt nochmal.”
“Jean. You’re shaking,” Dumont said, lightly placing his ringed hand on Jean’s.
The women in fur coats and men in suits and ties all stole a glance at the harried young woman sitting across from one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, reserving their juicy remarks until they were out of earshot. This would surely make it into the gossip columns tomorrow morning.
Jean looked up into those eerily familiar eyes and shook her head softly. “Only a little,” she said with a melancholy smile. She pulled her hand out from beneath Dumont’s. “When are you plannin’ on taking that Hebrew stuff to the priest?”
“Rabbi,” Dumont corrected. “I think I’m going to wait to hand it off to Dr. Pali and let him take it from there. This is all beyond my expertise. But speaking of Pali… Do you want to talk about what happened earlier…?”
“Look, I appreciate you taking me out to dinner and all, especially some place this ritzy,” she said with a wave of her hand. She had never seen so many fancy dresses in her life. “Hell, I can’t remember the last time I was even waited on… It’s just been one of those ‘Green Lama’ days, y’know? A little worse than usual, but I guess that’s to be expected when you hang around a guy dedicated to ‘derring-do and the greater good’ for too long: eventually they’ll get to you. So, yeah, I’m fine.” She ran her finger over the edge of the teacup and watched as the liquid rippled from the vibrations.
“How long is ‘too long’?” Dumont asked, and Jean didn’t miss the sound of genuine concern in his voice, as if he were personally invested in her association with the Green Lama.
Jean shrugged. “I’m not sure anymore.”
“The Buddhist teachings emphasize that we must learn endurance if we want to succeed.” Dumont leaned back in his chair with a thoughtful expression. “With endurance, even failure is another step forward. Slowly, step by step, a donkey can make its way around the world…”
“‘Endurance?’” Jean repeated cynically under her breath. Her eyes blazed when she looked back up at Dumont, never realizing she was shouting. “Endurance?! Jesus Christmas, you weren’t there, buddy! What’ve you endured recently, huh? You got to chat with a professor of linguistics. Big honking deal. I had a building fall on my head and right before that I saw—” Her voice got caught in her throat. “Something… Whatever it was, it had no eyes and yet I felt it staring right through me. And it wasn’t like— Oh, to hell with it, why am I even bothering telling you any of this?” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “I’m gonna go back to my apartment, climb into bed, curl up under the covers, and pray to God that whatever boogeyman I saw today won’t jump out of the closet again.”
Marching out of the restaurant, Jean ignored the turning heads and chorus of whispers, and pushed through the double doors out onto the street. A cool breeze blew through the cloudless night, the starshine visible in spite of the lights of the city. Her breath wafted out through her lips like cigarette smoke and as she watched it dissipate into the air. She made her way to cross the street when she hesitated, feeling the buildings loom above her, the sky with its innumerable stars press down, and once again saw in her minds eye, the hollow, glowing gaze of the creature.
How utterly small she really was.
“Something is off balance,” she said, repeating what Pali had murmured when they had discovered the wall covered in Hebrew lettering. She couldn’t pinpoint it, couldn’t define it, but when she had looked into that creature’s vacant eye sockets, something inside her shifted. And then there was that phrase from the parchment, “…From the empty void He made the solid earth, and from the non-existent He brought forth Life.” Where had she heard that before? Just thinking about it tied her stomach into knots, and yet she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she knew the phrase.
She lit a cigarette and began heading back toward her apartment at the theatrical rooming house downtown. It was a crappy hole of a place, but for now it was home. More to the point, it was the only place she could really afford. Despite what they show in the pictures, there wasn’t much glamour in being an actress. Not so far as she could tell. Sure, she had a couple of shows here and there—Our Town being the biggest—but unless you were a Fay Wray you were lucky if you were paying rent only a month late.
If she were honest with herself, she would admit that theatre probably wasn’t the world where she belonged. Ever since she had met the Green Lama aboard the S. S. Cathay she had found herself steadily losing interest in the stage and increasingly fascinated by the daily police blotter. She began compulsively carrying a sidearm, hanging around crime scenes, and on more than one occasion tailing police cars across town on the slim chance there might be a firefight. It was how she had gotten herself into this whole mess in the first place. She lied when she told the Green Lama that she was “an actress … a creature of the night.” In fact, she had been sitting up all night, listening to the police broadband, waiting for anything exciting, when she had first heard about the attack on the consulate. Maybe it was the fact that she was from Montana, so accustomed to running through her father’s farm, hunting deer on horseback in the wilderness, the mountain air kissing her neck; or maybe she just liked the idea that she was doing some good. Whatever the reason, she found she was happier running into a building full of criminals, guns blazing, than she ever was prancing around on stage.
Jean kept walking through pools of lamplight and past drunken revelers of the night, watching them stumble about in song and dance without a care in the world. She lit another cigarette and turned down an alley that would lead her directly to the rooming house. The shadows in the alleyways were long and deep, plunging her into darkness as she walked through. She heard the sound of a faint whisper, as if someone were standing right behind her, their lips inches from her ear. Before she could make out the words she suddenly realized her feet were painfully cold. She looked down and saw she was ankle deep in water, the waves crashing against the sand.
It was like waking up into a dream. Shivering, she spun around and ran onto the shore, the city nowhere to be seen. Her shoes and trench coat were laid neatly beyond the water line, dry and undamaged. The bottom of her dress was only slightly damp from the waves, which meant she couldn’t have been there long, but she had no idea how she had gotten there. The moon, which had been high in the sky only moments ago—or so it seemed to her—was now low on the horizon. She was bending down to pick up her coat when she stopped short. Her hands were caked in sand, granules stuck deep underneath the nails. She turned them over in disbelief and stumbled back until she tripped in a l
arge divot, landing hard onto the ground. Stretched out before her, written deep into the sand seven times each—and almost definitely by her own hands—were the words Truth and Death.
Chapter 6
MISSING!
Jean was missing.
“Om! Tare Tuttare Ture Soha,” Jethro whispered, hoping to liberate himself from the fear that coursed through his veins and ignore the tightness that formed in his chest. He had followed after her, giving her distance so as to let her calm down, but had somehow lost her at the turn of an alley. He walked back to where he had seen her enter the alley, at first thinking she had somehow doubled back, but it was quickly apparent that she was no longer nearby. What was most disturbing, however, was the sensation that the fabric of reality had been ripped ever so slightly again, but whereas before it had been from a distance, he was now directly next to the tear. Dizzy, Jethro stumbled back, whispering “Om! Ma-ni Pad-me Hum!” over and over, hoping the sensation would subside. If anything it grew worse, as if his strength were slowly being drained from within. Massaging his head, Jethro stumbled out of the alley, into the nearest public booth and dialed the theatrical boarding house.
“Magga, I apologize for being so brief, but has Miss Farrell returned home yet?”
“No, she hasn’t. Is everything all right, Tulku?” Magga asked with genuine concern.
“I don’t know yet. Thank you, Magga,” Jethro said before hanging up the phone.
He ran back to his Park Avenue penthouse, a human blur, bypassing taxis and the subway in favor of the increased speed granted by the radioactive salts. He entered the apartment by way of a hidden entrance three blocks away, pressing down on a false brick that opened up to a narrow passageway that lead directly to his private study. As the gears and pulleys pulled away the bookshelf door, Jethro burst into the room and rushed toward the hidden closet where he kept his Green Lama robes, slipping them on in a single motion. Tsarong, visibly concerned by his friend’s pale visage, cornered Jethro as he was about to drink another glass of radioactive salts.
The Green Lama: Horror in Clay (The Green Lama Legacy Book 2) Page 5
