The Music of the Spheres
Page 20
They talked quietly until the sound of Shakti Yoni’s patented singing style, the “space whisper,” heralded the beginning of The Flying Teapots’ revolutionary stage show. This singing style consisted of a mixture of whispers and high, airy shrieks with lots of reverb in the mix that sent chills down the spines of her admirers. The Teapots’ music was similar in many ways to The Wylde Flowers’, but it featured more concise songs, with thematic lyrics based around a fictional planet. The metaphorical lyrics illustrated various principles of Eastern philosophy, and the unpredictable, jerky music, powered by Mallorn’s glissando guitar and the virtuosic saxophone playing of blissed-out Frenchman Count Bloomdido, seemed designed to pull the audience quite rudely into a stage of enlightenment. The Teapots, whose music the public seemed unwilling to wholly embrace, were nonetheless a legendary live band and had acquired a diehard following that followed them wherever they went on tour.
Hastings was enjoying their set immensely, but halfway through their second number, “The Pot Head Pixies,” another wave of weariness fell upon him, and the smoky atmosphere suddenly seemed unbearably stuffy. Teresa and Marty had gone to the side of the stairs leading up to the stage, so he decided to seize the moment and step outside for some air. It was foolish, considering the potential danger, but he simply couldn’t stand to spend another moment in there.
“Just popping out for a moment,” he said to the guard nearest the door.
“Yer the boss.” The man shrugged carelessly and turned away.
Cold, clean night air greeted Hastings as the door swung open. He almost fell through the doorframe in relief and leaned up against the brick wall. The sky was clear for once, and what few stars could be seen fought the electric glow of the city for dominance. Unfortunately, the city always won. The rear of the club had a small parking area on an alley and a tiny vacant lot covered with dirt and scraggly weeds that was mostly filled with rubbish. Other buildings rose up all around the secluded area.
He heaved a sigh and crouched. Perhaps he had not yet completely recovered from the strain of the past two months; he let his head droop.
At that moment, a shadow loomed over him, and before his weary mind had time to react, a hand suddenly clamped down on his shoulder and a blade was at his throat.
“Simon Hastings,” the shadow hissed, “at last I have you.”
“The Murtherer” from
Thee Courte of Lucyfer or
An horribul revell of ye cityzens of Helle
by Sir Francis Roundtree (1574)
The Murtherer’s aboute by dai and nyte.
He killeth for fee ande also for spyte.
Wot nobel harte can nott forbere
To look upon hym as he rendeth and tere?
To kyll is butt hys one intente,
To evyl deeds hys wyll be bente.
In Satans service he doth perform,
From Goddes love forev’r torne.
Staie by thy harthe, straie nev’r oute,
Unlesse ye harte be strong ande stoute,
Or drag ye he mote downe to the mudde,
Ande mak hys feaste on your harte’s bludde.
twent y-One
All he could hear was the rapid, excited breathing of the shadow standing over him. The cold steel bit into his neck, and he could feel a small thread of blood trickling into his collar.
“Get up,” Rosas said. “Get up, damn you, or you die now!” His hoarse whisper was urgent.
Hastings had no choice but to follow along and wait for the unlikely opportunity to reach into his pocket. He realized that he was being led toward the band’s own van, the back door of which was open. Rosas shoved him in, shining a torch after him. He then climbed in himself, still brandishing the knife, which was as long as a machete.
“Lie on the floor and do not move a muscle,” Rosas commanded. Hastings could see his sallow, thin face, which glowed a jaundiced yellow in the torchlight. The narrow eyes were lit with fury. What reason does he have to hate someone like me? Rosas wore a black suit, which was ragged and torn. It didn’t look like he’d had an easy time of it during his stay in London. Rosas sat on the spare tire, still panting, and again held the knife to Hastings’ neck. With his free hand he fumbled in a bag, the same bag from which he had pulled his wares at the Elysian Fields what felt like ages ago. “You and your dirty friends have made my job very difficult. But you could only stay together for so long. Did you really think that sending some beer-swilling thug after me would keep me from my work? I am going to separate you one by one, and there is nothing you can do about it. I have spent far too long on this job.”
Though his face was pressed onto the freezing metal of the floor, Hastings managed to croak out a few words. “Why? Who are you working for?” He was trying to move his left arm, inch by inch, closer to his coat pocket. He desperately hoped that the handle of the gun was close to the mouth of the pocket.
The assassin let out a wooden chuckle. “The thought of that has no doubt been tormenting you. Thinking of that has given me some pleasure. Why? Why indeed. I do not think I will tell you.” He had pulled out a syringe containing a dark liquid. “No, I am sure I will not. It will give my employer great pleasure to know that you died in an agony of uncertainty.” His eyes glowed in the half-light.
The joyous sounds of The Flying Teapots’ music could be clearly heard emanating from the club. Ironically, the song they were playing was titled “You Can’t Kill Me,” an energetic ode to the immortality of the soul. Hastings wondered whether he had been missed yet. But he had only been gone a few minutes; they would assume he was stuck on the toilet.
“Now I am going to kill you the way I killed your other friends, with the same poisons you use on yourselves every day, with some slight alterations. No one will ever believe that you did anything but overdose, or, I hope, perhaps they will finally decide that my former employers in Colombia are responsible through their negligence. The evidence, the Cartels’ packaging, will be right here beside you. Then I will move on your other idiot friends.” Once again, the dry, humorless chuckle.
The pressure of the knife lessened slightly, and Hastings felt a prick on his neck as Rosas searched for the vein. He used all of his strength to roll away, receiving a wild slash on the arm as a reward. At the same time, he plunged his hand into his pocket, which luckily gripped the handle of the gun. He brought it up, remembering suddenly, vividly, Alvarez’s instructions, and aimed it at Rosas’ head, pulling the trigger. A burst of bassy sound like a malfunctioning woofer was followed by a groan from Rosas. Hastings flung himself away toward the door, holding his arm and bashing his head on the roof in the process. Rosas seemed to recover for a moment and advanced again, still holding the knife, but his eyes clouded over with alarming speed, and he fell to his knees. The knife dropped from his suddenly lifeless hand, and he fell on his side, convulsing, blood streaming from his ear.
Hastings took one step closer to him and dropped to his knees. He grabbed Rosas roughly by the face. The man was rapidly slipping away. He stared at Hastings as though he was looking through to another world, and his pupils were so large that they seemed to occupy his whole eye.
“Who!” Hastings yelled. “Who, you fucking bastard! It doesn’t make any difference now. Tell me!”
Lost in the pain of his death, Rosas seemed to have forgotten his earlier refusal. His lips puckered as he said, “Schmidt.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Schmidt … Kässel.”
Did he mean Helga Schmidt? The CEO of KässelPharma, manufacturer of most of Hastings’ favorite recreationals?
“Why?”
Rosas’ head lolled over.
*
In a daze, he stumbled back into the building. The security guards had turned out to be completely undependable; there were none left backstage. Marty was the only person in the room, watching the set from the stairs and grooving awkwardly.
Hastings stumbled up to him. “Marty…”
Hastings pulled him away from the stage door. “Marty, where’s Teresa?”
“In the loo, I think. What’s wrong?”
“Come with me and see.”
He led Marty out to the van. Marty blanched when he saw the corpse lying contorted. “It’s him!”
“He attacked me, but I got him instead.”
Marty shook his head in admiration then stared at Hastings with a mix of respect and dismay. “Jesus, Simon, you’re quite the superhero.”
Hastings slumped down on the rear bumper. “What are we going to do with him?”
Marty rubbed his chin. “You’re right. We can’t have that kind of trouble. The police would love to take us down.”
“But they don’t even know who Rosas is. I’m sure he’s here with a false passport or something.”
After scanning the vacant lot for a few moments, Marty brightened. “Let’s just chuck him through that manhole there. He’ll never be found that way. He’ll go straight to the river, and if he’s found, it’ll be ruled a drowning.”
This seemed to be the only quick and convenient way to dispose of the evidence, so they found a piece of old, rusting metal in the rubbish pile near the back door and pried the grate off the drain.
Hastings felt like vomiting as they dragged the inert corpse with its still-open eyes across the winter-hardened ground, onto the pavement, and tossed it with some difficulty down the hole, followed by Rosas’ bag. Well, there it was. He had known that one day he would have to come face-to-face with the assassin, and one of them would likely die. Simon Hastings now had a death, albeit the death of a thoroughly unpleasant person, on his conscience.
“Marty, he told me who he was working for.”
Marty jumped about a foot directly in the air. “Really? Bloody hell!”
Hastings looked wildly around him, as though expecting to be confronted at any moment by a German contract killer. “Come back inside. I don’t think we should tell anyone about this until we figure out what to do about it.”
Hastings visited the toilet to get some paper to wipe his wounds. When he washed it his neck, he found that it didn’t look too severe, resembling a bad cat-scratch. He turned his collar up, put on a different jacket, and returned to Marty, who was giving himself a quick hit of Harmless Heroin to calm himself down.
He sat down beside Marty and lit up a Dunhill. He pulled in the smoke so deeply that he was overcome briefly by lightheadedness, something that hadn’t happened to him since he was a schoolboy. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Marty looked like he was going to burst. “What the fuck did he say?”
“The last things he said were ‘Kässel’ and ‘Schmidt.’ You know who that means.”
“KässelPharma? Helga Schmidt?”
Hastings shrugged. “It appears Rosas was paid by Schmidt to kill us. Or so he claimed.”
“But why?”
Hastings searched his mind for what he knew of the reclusive CEO. Helga Schmidt had been hired as chief executive officer of KässelPharma about ten years before, after she had begun the building of the Rauchstern Food Products empire, which controlled most of the supermarkets in the German-speaking world. That company had taken a hit when most of its Eastern European holdings were vaporized in the nuclear wars. Schmidt had wisely left the company and its rebuilding process for Kässel, which had been a mainstream producer of painkillers and other prescription drugs. When recreational drugs were legalized in Germany in 1959, she had immediately recognized the opportunity for growth and had in ten short years built up the largest line of recreationals in the industry. She had also engineered a buyout with a group of investors that made her the de facto controlling owner.
An unmarried recluse, she lived in a sixteenth century castle near Augsburg and had moved the company’s headquarters and manufacturing center onto the same grounds. She had not been seen in public for several years, leading to widespread speculation about the soundness of her physical and mental condition. She was known to be eccentric and romantically inclined, with a passionate hatred for the modern world and its accompanying openness and “loose morals.” Schmidt had supported the anti-Jewish New Reich movement of Göring that had almost started another Europe-wide war but had escaped the jailer in the aftermath with the aid of massive bribes. She had also opposed the giving of aid to her war-ravaged neighbors after the terrible atomic strikes and had tried to have a law passed to restrict immigration from Germany’s former African colonies; she was rumored to espouse some bizarre racial theories. However, as she aged, she had participated less and less in the country’s political life and had concentrated on running her company with an iron fist.
The monumental irony of an old-fashioned conservative supplying the youth of the world with inexpensive, safe highs was not lost on the observant, and she had been the object of much ridicule outside of Germany. But there had never been a word of response or protest to the hecklers as profits grew steadily with each quarterly report.
The famous businesswoman’s sanity had obviously at long last cracked for good, and she was playing angel of death. They had rid themselves of her agent, but who was to say that this mad person, with her limitless financial resources, would not send someone else after them? She would have to be brought down.
Not only did pondering all of this make Hastings doubly incensed, but he also became angry with himself and his own hypocrisy for buying so many Kässel products over the years, blithely ignoring just who his money was benefiting.
“Well, it buggers me,” Marty said, still shaking his head in astonishment. The Teapots were now well into their encore, the “Eat that Phonebook Coda.” Teresa still had not returned and was no doubt enjoying the conclusion of the show from the audience’s perspective.
“We need evidence,” Hastings said. “We’re going on tour and stopping in Germany. We’ll have to think of something. The authorities here, and in Germany too, won’t believe us, we know that. There’s no point in asking for assistance without evidence.”
“Aye, that’s for sure.” Marty was glum. “I don’t see what we can do.”
But Hastings had already come to a sort of conclusion. If their problems, which had suddenly grown even more menacing, were going to be solved, he would have to do it.
“I don’t think we should tell anyone about this, not even Teresa. I’ll tell her when I think it’s appropriate. We have too many hot-headed friends who might do something stupid. For now, keep it under your hat, and try not to look too relieved. Rosas is dead, but the threat isn’t. We’ve just got some breathing room.”
“All right, whatever you say, boss.” Marty broke into a sudden rueful grin as the Teapots came clattering cheerfully down the stage stairs. “We’ve got a pantry full of Helga’s products. The first thing I’ll do when we get home is flush them.”
Hastings had to laugh at that.
Twent y-two
After all the gear had been packed up and the hall was deserted once more, a huge gang of revelers retired to the band house, which had become the epicenter of their large group of friends. Everyone seemed in higher spirits than they had been in a long time. Hastings was glad that they had not told anyone, especially Teresa, who was looking quite radiant after what was the finest night of rock music anyone had ever experienced. He wished he could share in that joy. He had explained away the long, shallow cuts on his neck and arm, saying he had slipped in a puddle of beer and got the scratches on the side of a table; he had, however, been very careful to sterilize his wounds with peroxide in the lavatory. Rosas’ knife could have been in all sorts of nasty places.
At around quarter to five in the morning, when the crowds had finally dispersed or fallen asleep (aside from a few raucous stalwarts determined to welcome in the morning in at least a semiconscious state), Hastings s
lipped out onto the front steps to ponder the matter further. He was bone-tired, but there was little time to waste on rest. During the course of the festivities, he had tried to formulate a coherent plan but had been constantly interrupted by well-wishers. Now, a strange clear-headedness, possibly brought about by the crisp early dawn air and residual adrenaline, allowed him to identify his options.
He had remembered with an uncomfortable shock at one point in the evening that his own brother had been boasting about obtaining a situation with none other than KässelPharma at their Empire office in London. Henry might possess some inside information about the security of the company’s location and other tidbits of gossip about Schmidt. It was even possible that he had visited it by now and would know his way around; whether he would divulge any information was another topic. As loathsome as the prospect of spending even five minutes in his brother’s company had become to him, it was too coincidental an opportunity to miss, despite the remoteness of the likelihood that Henry had ever even met the reclusive Schmidt.
Another, even more unlikely possibility had also occurred to him, which presented moral difficulties. There was only one person Hastings had ever met who was equipped to offer him tangible aid or advice in the area of corporate espionage: Ricardo Alvarez, director of security for the Colombian Cartels. The opportunity to strike a blow against one of his company’s chief rivals would no doubt be too tempting to pass up for the ruthless Alvarez. The thought of trying to reach such a powerful man seemed daunting until he remembered that Alvarez, before putting him on a plane for Britain, had written his private telephone number on a scrap of paper and told him to use it if he ever needed help, an offer Hastings had not wanted to accept. He was not sure exactly what kind of aid Alvarez might offer, and he was still not sure he’d take it.
Hastings, though intensely reflective, was also a very practical man who liked to see himself as a straight-talker and a clear thinker. He recognized (as he thought any truly intelligent person must) that human moral systems, in all their diversity, really have no objective rational basis beyond our tiny planet and the survival needs of our species, unless an all-powerful deity should someday reveal itself, but he had found principles like honor and compassion to be of much solace, despite their irrationality; and besides, he couldn’t help himself. He was raised that way. He still felt, although his actions had been entirely in self-defense, guilty and shocked by the death of Rosas, and a sense of responsibility for the death of Gonzalez, as well as a strong desire to see the deaths of Guy, Ed, and Hunter Burlington avenged. If it took making a deal with the devil to assuage his guilt and his need to see justice done, then so be it. He had no desire to die any time soon.