A Passing Curse (2011) (10 page)

Cheevy was shaking so badly he couldn’t put his pistol back together. He managed to sit, though, and open the desk drawer. He looked in the tiny bathroom mirror and was surprised he wasn’t bleeding and figured cops knew how to hurt you good without getting messy.

He picked up his hat, straightened out the crown and brim, and pulled it on his head. He sat behind his desk and removed a large purple grape from the drawer, a plastic grape from his mother’s kitchen centerpiece. He removed the stem, exposing a hole. He pulled a short hypodermic needle from the hole and shook out a small, tightly folded piece of tin foil. He fit the needle’s base into the hole, this time pointed outward. He squeezed the grape and let it go. Air whistled through the needle.

He emptied the powder from the bindle into a coffee spoon. His hands had quit shaking enough for him to pour a touch of Evian into the spoon.

He picked up a book of matches, pulled one loose, and lit a cigarette. He sharpened the needle, back and forth, on the matchbook’s striker. He clamped the cigarette in his teeth and squinted his eyes against the rising smoke. He held another match under the spoon until the water boiled. He stirred the cooling mixture with the needle point, holding the plastic grape tenderly. Next time he saw the cop, he’d shoot his ass.

When the mixture was clear, he tore a piece off his cigarette filter to draw through, wondering if the nicotine-stained cellulose might poison him.

Reese walked one block to a bus stop covered with a glass canopy and sides.

He watched the back of the vampire store, the large blue metal trash bin, the mo-ped linked to the back door with a long chain. He waited ten minutes.

Cheevy walked out the door and unlocked the chain. He re-locked the chain around the mo-ped’s frame. He straddled the machine and kicked once. The third kick started the engine.

Cheevy disappeared around a corner and then reappeared higher up, on the road to Ajax’s castle, the rim of his hat blowing backwards in the wind like a demented Pony Express rider.

The calf was going to the cow.

The lid of the blue dumpster squealed open. A man crawled over the side and dusted himself off. He coughed wetly and hacked onto the ground. He reached inside for a sack full of empty, clanking bottles and rambled off to what Reese guessed was the nearest liquor store.

8

Rusty Webber explored the expanse of Syrian dreams. At the end of a long, dark tunnel, she swung a bloated pick, over and over, pulling down layers of sandstone, dust swirling. She worked as if underwater, moving slowly and with effort. Dirt caked her face and arms. She could not breathe.

Clark was yelling now, “You’ve gone too far past the shoring!” She felt his hands on her shoulders, pressing in, shaking her, screaming, “Nothing this important!” She saw the dirt on his teeth, flecking his eyebrows.

She shrugged him off and swung. The point traveled through sand, through thousands of years, striking hard, ringing hard. She dropped the pick, scratched at the sand with bare hands, her nails filling with sand, packing them.

“The roof’s weak!” Clark shouted, his voice eerie and thin, “too much sand. It’s coming down!” She marveled at the voice. It was exactly his.

“I’ve found it!” she yelled. The sheen of ancient gold filtered through the dust, tinting her dream world dark-yellow. She scraped off more sand, more stone, and soon exposed half of the bull’s horn, one foot long, curved and smooth, the end rounded to a marble-sized ball.

Clark grabbed her shoulder. She slapped him away. She fought the sand until a bull’s eye, yellow and glaring, stared at her across three thousand years. “I knew it was here. I knew it.”

“Aschyll’s Bull,” he said into her ear, his breath hot. “Good. Let’s go. It’s coming down. We’ll have the crew put in shoring. We’ll do it right,” he urged. “We don’t want to get killed over this.”

“Aschyll’s Bull is worth two or three lives,” she said, wondering how the hell to get the bull out, and Clark still trying to drag her away.

“We have to run!” he yelled. “Now!”

She turned. Curtains of sand dropped from the roof. Clark pulled her arm.

“Not yet,” she said, pushing him away. She cleared more sand, revealing more gold, the ear of the bull, and reached for her camera. She snapped pictures, the flash shattering the dark, the bull stoic and graceless as cement in the white flare.

And then it started.

Rocks falling from the roof, hitting the ground, the vibration through her boots. Clark reaching through the dust, his hand strangely disembodied, his head suddenly in his torso, all jack-hammered into the ground by a huge boulder.

She suffocated in the dream. She fought through dust. She grabbed for Clark, but came up with handfuls of sand. She was trying to remember if she could have saved Clark’s life when the click of the answering machine broke in:

“…I know you need to rest after what you’ve been through, but I have a splendid job for you in my own backyard. Nothing important, a few old bones that need to be catalogued.”

She struggled out of sleep, knocked the phone to the floor, and sat staring at it, hearing the disembodied voice. She grabbed the receiver. “Hello?” She was soaked with sweat. “Ajax?”

“Yes. I was very worried. You never called,” Ajax said. “I heard you were in London. I tried to find out what hotel. I wanted to make sure you were safe. I understand you had problems with the Romanian authorities.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it.” She told him the rest of the story, just in case he’d forgotten. She told him about the firing squad.

“I had no idea it would be that dangerous,” Ajax said contritely. “Otherwise, I never would have asked you to go. Truly, I would not. Was it the tomb of Vlad Tepes you found?”

“Of course not,” she said. “In Otopeini International they have posters all over saying that the tomb of Vlad Tepes is at the Snagov monastery, forty miles away. There’s a boat you take across the lake, a rowboat. It makes a nice poster.” Radu had told her that Snagov was merely a tourist trap for Americans, nothing to get excited about.

“That’s the tourist Vlad Tepes. Not the real one. Did you think I would go to all this trouble if I believed that Dracula was buried at Snagov?”

“That’s exactly what Radu said. The guide that you hired? The one that was killed?”

“Yes. I sent his family three years salary. I am very sorry. The entire endeavor was a disaster. Just all around bad luck. But the castle I sent you to had been built by Vlad Tepes. I knew it was a place to start. Do you have any idea who was in the tomb you found?”

“None,” she said. “I was found in the same tomb. So whoever put me there must have removed the original body, the remains, if any. Not that it matters. I’m not going back.” She stifled the urge to ask Ajax if he’d been in the coffin, hiding. Talking to him now, over the phone, it seemed an absurd question. “I’m not going back to Romania.”

“Certainly not,” he said quickly.

“The check you sent squares us.”

“I have another job - Workers found a skeleton at our local mission. They were making improvements, I guess. One never knows when you start digging around a mission.”

“The Santa Marina Mission?” she said, instantly regretting it, because working for Ajax was hazardous and another job might kill her.

“Yes, the skeleton is actually on a bit of land I own adjacent to the mission. It was being worked on without my permission. Anyway, I would like the bones classified. A simple matter for you, and a great favor to me.”

“That’s what you said about the last job.”

“This will be nothing like Romania. You’ll enjoy yourself, I promise. You’ll have a room at the Sheraton, full expenses. You will be in the sun. It will be like a vacation. A paid vacation. I feel I owe it to you.”

She stared at the receiver, daring herself to slam it down. No. She owed him the courtesy of not hanging up. She was still a professional. “Old bones found near California Missions are hardly noteworthy. The padres were very good at killing Indians.”

“Yes, I know,” Ajax said, almost like he did know. He delicately cleared his throat, a dry crackle. “But these bones were found on my land and I want the matter resolved. I feel responsible.”

“I’m really too busy,” she said, wondering why Ajax would feel responsible, trying to ignore the obvious reason: he’d buried the bones in the first place. Still, it wasn’t odd at all to find Indian bones in California, especially not near a mission. As an archeology student at Stanford, she’d gone out on numerous calls when a contractor dug up bones. It was funny how developers managed, out of thousands of square acres, to pick the site of an old Indian village to plop down a mall or a thousand tract homes. Was it coincidence, the Indians pre-knowledge of prime mall locations, or the dead calling out, Come find us, Come live with us.

“One thousand a day,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “A vacation. You can walk away if everything does not suit you. I promise. There’s no underground work. No soldiers. The weather is perfect. You’ll love it. Santa Marina is a paradise, it’s warm and sunny, nothing like Romania.” He laughed. “Most of the people even speak English.”

She ignored his attempt at humor. One thousand a day sounded like bait, major bait. What was he up to? “No thanks,” she said. “They have a good archeology program at UCSB. They’d love to help, for a lot less money.”

He paused. She thought the phone connection had been broken until, finally, “I read your paper on the temple at Arysur.”

“What?” She had no idea, at first, what he was talking about. And then she remembered.

“The paper you wrote about the lost ruins in Pakistan. The Temple of Arysur? Your theory that Alexander the Great is buried there? Remember?”

“What are you talking about?” The paper had been a student project, she thought, nearly anonymous, and it surprised her how much Ajax knew about her past.

“The article you wrote for Archeology Digest? Surely you must remember.”

“It was a thesis I wrote in college years ago.” It had been a cut-and-paste job, pure fantasy. She was surprised it had been published. More surprised that Ajax had read it. She remembered the small check Archeology Digest had sent her for first-time printing rights. What had it been? Ten? Twelve years ago?

“You’ll need financing,” Ajax said.

For ten minutes he droned on while she kept telling him, No. But he kept promising to sponsor the entire dig, with her as boss.

To test him, she insisted on complete control, guaranteed in writing, hoping that he’d back off, but he never did. She even told him the bill could easily run as high as ten million dollars, but he laughed as if the amount were chump change.

She could have whatever she wanted, he assured her. Money was no problem. He finally told her good-bye after she promised that she would think about it.

She sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. It was four in the afternoon. She’d only slept one hour in the last twenty-four. Her head throbbed. A far off dog barked. The train to San Francisco came through. Ten minutes later the train to San Jose.

Clark had been killed four months ago. An accident, a tunnel collapse, things that happen when you dig underground. But when the Syrian Antiquities Minister heard about the golden bull from one of his camp spies, he used Clark’s death as an excuse to seize the camp and detain the laborers. She was stuffed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven to Damascus.

The minister accused her of murdering Clark and threatened her with a public stoning. She made it out of Damascus, but only after she told the minister all the details about the golden bull and where to find it. And only after the minister developed her pictures and saw the proof.

She’d been lucky. One night in a dank cell, a mild groping by the guard.

Then the rumors started that her ambition had killed Clark, that she’d been more worried about artifacts and glory than safety, and the job offers dried up. And then she was forced, more or less, into chasing after vampire bones for a slightly loony blood tycoon. But now she had enough “fuck you” money to make a choice. She didn’t need Ajax. She could put her life together. She was not over Romania, yet.

In front of Ajax’s towering cathedral doors, Cheevy admired his reflection in the beveled glass. He adjusted the brim of his hat and straightened his jacket. He looked bad, a bad ass. Tarrant had blind-sided him. He’d finally put the pistol together. He’d see how tough Tarrant was the next time they met.

The doors opened automatically, catching Cheevy by surprise. He had not touched the bell. “Bad ass,” he muttered and stepped inside. The hall stretched forty feet to a fireplace big enough to stand in.

Purple drapes, twenty feet high, covered the windows; huge tapestries, men on horseback with crossbows and lances, hung from the walls.

At the top of the sweeping stairs, Ajax cleared his throat. He wore a black smoking jacket, wrapped with a scarlet sash. His voice boomed. “Cheevy, my boy, I’ve been waiting for you.” He beckoned with a thin arm. “Quick, now.”

Cheevy took the stairs two at a time. He saw Ted, Ajax’s huge and crazy-looking butler, his face a mass of ripe-looking scars, dodge around a corner. He followed Ajax through the red doors flashed with gold dragons. They sat on opposite sides of an ebony desk in the huge surprisingly bare office. Bronzed windows framed Santa Marina’s green hills, the orange tiled mission, the blue tired sea. Ajax poured large brandies from an ebony sidebar.

“Reese Tarrant came,” Ajax said. “Did he not?”

“Just like you said.”

“Did he mention Homer?”

“Some crazy shit about you sending Homer to LA.” He was not telling Ajax everything, especially Reese taking his pistol. The fucker had blind-sided him. “Tarrant isn’t all that tough. He’s a punk.”

“What else?”

Cheevy thought that Ajax looked pale today, paler than usual. “I told him that vampires don’t breathe.” He hadn’t told Reese that, but he suddenly wasn’t sure if Ajax was breathing or not and it scared him. He added, “Why breathe if you’re dead?”

Ajax raised his eyebrows. “Then, how do vampires talk? How do they push air through the vocal cords? They talk in the movies.”