Tales From the Black Chamber (21 page)

They'd gotten off the Metroliner at the next stop and caught the first train back to New York, but they hadn't gotten back to the brownstone until eleven o'clock. They'd waited outside for some time to check for any lights or sign of movement from inside. On re-entering the house, they'd found it empty. It took them less than half an hour to find and open the secret door.

Steve signalled for Joe and Anne to wait in the middle of the staircase, and cautiously raised his head and gun over the level of the floor. He swept his flashlight and gun back and forth, up and down several times, then said, “Okay, come on up,” and holstered his gun.

When they got to the top of the stairs, Anne and Joe saw that the entire third floor had been gutted at some point. It was one large room. Shelves, cabinets, worktables, and a writing desk were arrayed along the walls. Thick curtains blacked out the windows. Steve found a light switch at the top of the stairs and illuminated the room. It was mostly empty, the contents of the shelves and worktable mostly gone. A forlorn Rolodex and a portable phone were all that sat atop the desk. Anne spotted some books across the room and started to walk towards them. Steve reached out and grabbed her arm. She looked over and he pointed to the floor, which was covered in smudged-out chalk marks that must have described various geometries and words, as well as blotches of candle wax and some dark, unidentifiable, troubling stains.

“You don't want to step on any of that,” said Steve.

“Oh, right, evidence,” said Anne.

“That and hoodoo,” said Joe flatly.

Anne's flesh crawled a bit as she navigated her way to the bookshelf. “Junk, junk, junk,” she said, flipping through a variety of modern works on demonology, necromancy, and the like.

“Bad taste in reading?” Joe asked.

“No, no, some good stuff. Kieckhefer, Elliot Rose. Just not worth anything. You want to read up on necromancy?” Anne asked.

“Pass,” Joe answered.

“Oh my God!” Anne shouted.

Steve and Joe immediately drew their guns and frantically scanned the room. After a second, Steve asked, “What? You okay?”

“Oh, no, sorry. It's this book,” Anne said. Steve and Joe looked at each other dubiously as they holstered their guns. “It was just at the bottom of a pile of modern books. He must have forgotten it. This is a fifteenth-century Greek
Key of Solomon
. There's only one known to exist. It's in the British Library. Holy God. This is almost literally priceless. Well, nothing's
priceless
. I mean, if you put this on the block, I'd guess seven figures, easily. Maybe eight.”

“Well, congrats. You can take it home, read it in bed, and when you get around to it, add it to the Coolidge Foundation library,” said Steve.

“Really?” Anne was a little disturbed and a lot excited.

“Really,” explained Joe. “Under the Charter, we get to keep any evidence or goods we deem appropriate. Heck, if we wanted to push it, we could probably confiscate this house. But I think we'll just scrub the attic.”

“No wonder you guys don't scrimp on expenses,” said Anne.

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” muttered Steve.

“So you think he took all his good books, Anne?” Joe asked.

“Looks like it. Don't know how he forgot this one, though. He must have left in a hurry.”

“Hey, check this out,” Joe said, pulling something large and shiny from the bottom shelf of a worktable. He held it up, revealing a lovely silver serving tray about two feet long and eighteen inches wide. “This has got to be sterling. It's ridiculously heavy.”

“Let me see that,” said Anne, crossing the room gingerly in a macabre parody of hopscotch. “Look at the lip on it. Do you see any water stains?”

“Sure, a few,” said Joe.

Anne sighed with relief. “I think I can look in a mirror again. That's exactly the kind of thing that some medieval scrying spells describe. You put water or oil on it, then say some mumbo-jumbo, wave something over it or drop something into it.”

“You think they've given up?” asked Steve.

“I guess so. I mean, maybe he's taken a second salver or something with him, but I think he'd have a lot bigger problem disappearing with that little boy,” Anne said.

Joe laughed grimly. “Yeah, that's a quick way to get thirty-seven different police departments coming after you.”

“It's possible,” Steve hypothesized, “that having obtained the breviary and the Voynich Manuscript, he's far enough along in his plan, whatever it is, that your being able to figure out what he's up to is no longer threatening.”

“In other words,” said Joe, “we may be in much worse shape than we thought.”

“You know, as ominous as all that is, it doesn't overshadow my joy at the prospect of putting on eyeliner,” said Anne, as they went back to searching.

A few minutes later, Steve was pulling one worktable away from the wall. “Hey, come look at this,” he said. Joe and Anne crossed the room and looked between the heavy table and the wall. There was a strange leathery object that must have fallen down behind the table. Steve reached down for it.

“Don't touch that!” said Anne, alarmed.

“Huh?” said Steve, pulling his hand back quickly.

“Hey, I've been paying attention in orientation. ‘Black magic, bad,' right?” she said.

“Right,” said Steve and Joe almost in unison.

“Well, that's some bad juju,” Anne said, feeling a little like one of the guys, when finally getting to tell
them
something and to indulge in some dark humor. She then explained, “It's a
main de gloire
.”

“Amanda who?” asked Steve.

“A
main de gloire
. A Hand of Glory.”

“Sick,” said Joe, stepping back.

“A what?” asked Steve. “Remember, I'm just the muscle here.”

“A Hand of Glory,” explained Anne. “You take the severed left hand of a hanged man, desiccate it in some particular salts, and then make a candle out of the fat of his body and set it in the palm. Or just use the fat as fuel to daub on the fingers. See down there, those pointy bits are fingers, and they're scorched on the ends.”

“That is sick,” said Steve.

“Hey, you're supposed to be the tough guy,” joked Anne, punching him lightly in the arm.

“I'm just not big on, you know, mutilated corpses. So, what do you
do
with that?” Steve wondered.

“You rob people,” Anne said, to their evident surprise. “It supposedly has two effects. First, anyone in a house where it's lit who's asleep stays asleep until it's extinguished. Second, it casts light that only you can see.”

“So, uh, does it work?” Joe asked.

“How do I know? Before I ran into you people, I'd have laughed it off as a particularly gruesome superstition. Now, I don't know. I mean, I doubt it, but do you really want to mess with something like that?”

“Good point,” said Steve. He pulled on a pair of gloves, produced a Ziploc bag, picked up and sealed in the Hand, and gave it to Anne. “You're the Librarian. This definitely goes in the Archive.”

“Fair enough,” said Anne, gingerly taking the bag by a corner, and slipping the grotesque trophy into the black bag she'd brought.

An hour later, and they'd searched the entire room to no further avail. Anne dropped the Rolodex and the portable phone in her bag to take back to the office to go through for information.

“When this is over, we'll have to come back and scrub these floorboards,” said Joe.

“My favorite part of the job,” said Steve.

“A Hand of Glory. I wonder if he has a
Grimoire of Pope Honorius III
. That's got a
main de gloire
recipe, I think,” Anne said, mostly to herself, considering it'd be a considerable addition to the Coolidge Foundation's library, if it were as old as his
Key of Solomon
. Then, suddenly, she said, “Hey, guys, can we stop at an all-night Duane Reade before we check into a hotel? I really want a facial tonight.”

11

A few days later they were back in D.C. with no further breaks in the case. There were no addresses in the Rolodex or numbers in the phone's memory that yielded any leads. A general mood of gloom settled back on the Black Chamber, replacing the momentary euphoria of having identified a suspect and brought back such exotica as the Greek grimoire, the scrying tray, and the
main de gloire
, the last of which John was particularly excited to see, as he'd read a fair bit about them but had never actually seen one. Mike was moved to inaugurate a series of awful puns, beginning with attempting to dub the case “The Hand Job,” which earned him a welt on the back of the head from a fat paperback C++ manual Joe winged at him.

Anne mostly worked on her Memoranda, which were what the Black Chamber called first-person, written accounts of incidents that were submitted to the Historian, who would draw up a complete, edited third-person account to be entered in the Chamber's History, which also served as a reference. Alas, the History was silent on the topic of medieval necromancy or the lore of Tibet or Mongolia, much less a connection between the two.

That morning, however, Wilhelmina walked into the brainstorming conference with a twinkle in her eye. “I got it,” she said, smiling broadly.

“Got what?” asked Claire.

“I've got your next lead,” she said triumphantly.

“Really?” asked John. “Please tell.”

“The little boy.”

“The one I saw in the mirror,” Anne said with a sense of realization.

“Right,” said Wilhelmina. “I figure he's got to have found the boy somewhere, and he couldn't have taken off with him or murdered him without someone noticing. I know you said he was black, and in even the poorest parts of the community, you'd have a hard time finding a mother, however degraded or desperate, who'd let her child go off with a strange white man, even a priest.”

“Maybe especially a priest. The papers make them all sound like degenerates. Most of that stuff was in the '70s and '80s, though,” said Mike, warming to a topic.

“Mike,” said Joe. “Focus.”

“Right,” said Mike. “So how do we find him?”

“How do you think the bad guy found him?” asked Wilhelmina.

Joe spoke up. “Was he part of a parish? Because if he was, we should check the parochial school.”

“No,” said Mike. “I checked all of his institutional affiliations. He's a free agent. He's under the Archdiocese of New York, but they said that he basically does his own thing. He can afford to, as he's got not only his own money, but a big donor roll, with some heavy hitters in the world of liberal philanthropy. The Ford, Gates, and other foundations, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, hell,” said Claire suddenly. “I know what it is. I was going through his Rolodex, working the contacts. There was one card that said BB&S, and when I called it turned out to be Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. There were a fair number of charitable organizations in there, so I didn't think twice about it. I'm sorry.”

“Not at all,” said Anne. “None of us thought of it. Including me, who actually saw the kid. Let's see what we can do.”

The following day, Anne and Claire, again posing as FBI agents, sat across from Judith Weintraub, the director of the Manhattan office of Big Brothers Big Sisters.

“Let me start by repeating again what I said on the phone, Ms. Weintraub,” began Claire. “This is not a criminal matter, nor are we looking to get anyone in trouble. We were asked to look into Monsignor Clairvaux's disappearance by his concerned colleagues when they couldn't get in touch with him. We have no reason to believe there's been any foul play or that his Little Brother would be or has ever been in the least bit of danger. We just want to ask him a few questions to see if he knows anything, and then we're done.”

“I understand,” said the director. “We'd like to cooperate, which is why we're talking. Our children's privacy is of paramount importance to us.”

“We wouldn't have it any other way,” said Claire.

Anne spoke up. “Can I ask you one question, Ms. Weintraub? Monsignor Clairvaux was obviously a Catholic priest, and I mean, there have been some problems with Catholic priests and little boys, so how exactly did he get approved?”

“I'm not sure I like your tone,” said Ms. Weintraub, “but I understand your concern. First, we don't regard priests as greater risks than your average unmarried male off the street. The statistics bear that out. That said, before pairing him with a boy, we did do a background check. We spoke to a number of Monsignor Clairvaux's former girlfriends, and although most of them weren't particularly well-disposed towards him, to a woman, they all confirmed that he was definitely heterosexual—perhaps voraciously or unpleasantly so—and had no concerns about his taking care of a little boy. And, frankly, he's proved to be one of our best Big Brothers. He took his Little Brother to museums, art galleries, zoos, music recitals, and even an off-Broadway revival of
Little Mary Sunshine
that his Little Brother still talks about as being the funniest thing he's ever seen. He taught the boy the rudiments of playing the piano, and a little French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. His Little Brother adores him, and since you called, I've been worried about the monsignor too.”

Claire and Anne were taken more than a little aback at the director's encomium to Monsignor Clairvaux. They'd both been expecting him to have acted sinisterly or to have put himself under suspicion. Anne couldn't think of what to reply, but Claire, rarely at a loss for words, said, “Well, we certainly hope he's just in a retreat house somewhere outside cell phone range, but it's our job to check. Would it be ok if we were able to talk to his Little Brother?”

“Since we all understand each other, of course. He's waiting in the conference room next door.”