The Scarlet Gospels (14 page)

It was she who had first said—when Harry unburdened himself of what he'd seen the day of his partner's death—that she believed every word of it and that she knew men and women around the city who could tell stories of their own that were evidence of the same Otherness, present in the daily life of the city.

As Harry drew within sight of the old building, he was surprised to find just how much it had changed over the years. The windows were either boarded up or broken and there'd apparently been a fire at some point in the building's history, which had gutted at least a third of the place, scorch marks blackening the fa
ç
ade above the burned-out windows. It was a sad sight, but more significantly, it was a troubling one. Why would Norma leave the comfort of her apartment for this godforsaken corner of nowhere?

All the doors were severely locked and bolted, but it wasn't a problem for Harry, whose solution to such a setback was always old-fashioned brute strength. He chose one of the boarded-up doors and pulled off several of the wood planks. It was a noisy, messy business, and if there'd been any kind of security patrolmen guarding the building, as several prominently placed signs announced there were, they would have certainly come running. But as he suspected, the signs were bullshit, and he was left to his own devices without interruption. Within five minutes of beginning his labor he had denuded the door of its boards and picked the lock that lay behind them.

“Nice work, kid,” he said to himself as he stepped inside.

Harry took out a mini flashlight and shone it into the room. He saw that everything that had distinguished the modestly elegant lobby in which Harry now stood—the deco sweep of the design on the mirrors, the etchings in the tile underfoot, and the shape of the lighting fixtures—had been destroyed. Whether the destruction was the result of a crude attempt to take up the tiles for resale and bring down the mirror and light fixtures intact for the same purpose or the place simply had been smashed by drugged-up vandals with nothing better to do, the result was the same: chaos and debris in place of order and purpose.

He walked through the litter of glass and tile shards until he reached the stairs; then he began to ascend. Apparently there were easier ways into the building than prying open one of the doors as he had, because the sharp smell of human urine and the duller stink of feces grew stronger as he climbed. People used this place, as a toilet, yes, but probably to sleep in as well.

He eased his hand around the revolver tucked snugly in its holster, just in case he found himself discussing real estate law with any bad-tempered tenants. The good news was how very inactive his tattoos were. Not an itch, not a spasm. Apparently Norma had made a smart choice for a bolt-hole. Not the most salubrious of surroundings, but if it kept her safely hidden from the adversary and its agents, then Harry had no qualms.

Dr. Krackomberger's office had been suite 212. The plush beige carpeting that had covered the passageway leading up to it had been rolled up and removed, leaving just the bare boards. With every second or third step Harry took, one of them creaked and Harry grimaced. Finally, Harry reached the door of his onetime psychiatrist's office and tried the handle, expecting it to be locked. The door opened without protest, and Harry was faced with yet another spectacle of vandalism. It looked as though somebody had taken a sledgehammer to the walls inside.

He chanced a word: “Norma?” Then several words: “Norma? It's Harry. I got your message. I know I'm early. Are you here?”

He went through into Krackomberger's office. The books that had lined the doctor's walls had not been taken, though it was obvious that at one point they'd all been stripped from the shelves and a pile of them used to make a fire in the middle of the room. Harry squatted beside the makeshift fire pit and tested the ashes. They were cold. Finding nothing more, Harry took a peek inside Krackomberger's private bathroom, but it was as trashed as the rest of the place. Norma was not here.

But she had led Harry to this place for a reason; of that he was certain. He chanced a glance at the bathroom mirror and there he saw, scrawled on the surface of the grimy glass, an arrow drawn in ash. It was pointing downward, toward the lower floors. Norma had left him a bread crumb. Harry left the office where he'd met his sightless friend so many years ago, and headed to the basement.

 

14

The members-only club that had once occupied the basement of the long-forgotten building had been designed for elite New Yorkers with more outr
é
tastes than could be satisfied at the sex emporiums that had once run along Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Harry had glimpsed it in operation many years before when he'd been hired by the building's owner—one Joel Hinz—to do some detective work regarding his wife.

Despite the fact that Hinz ran an establishment dedicated to hedonism of every stripe directly under the feet of the city's lawmakers, he was a deeply conservative man in his personal life and was genuinely distressed when he began to suspect his wife of being unfaithful.

Harry had done his investigations and about three weeks later had brought confirmation in the form of incriminating photographs of Mrs. Hinz to the grieving Mr. Hinz in a large manila envelope. As Hinz had requested, he'd sent his assistant J. J. Fingerman to take Harry down into the club and get him a drink and a quick tour of the premises. It was quite an eye-opener: bondage, whipping, caning, water sports—the club offered a smorgasbord of perversities, practiced by men and women, most of them dressed in costumes that announced their particular proclivities.

A fifty-year-old man whom Harry recognized as the mayor's right hand was tottering around on stiletto heels in a frilly French maid's outfit; a woman who organized celebrity fund-raisers for the homeless and the destitute was crawling around naked with a dildo impaled in her ass, from the base of which hung a tail of black horsehair. On the main stage one of the most successful writers of Broadway musicals was tied to a chair having the flesh of his scrotum spread out and nailed to a piece of wood by a young woman dressed as a nun. To judge by the state of the lyricist's arousal, the procedure was pure bliss.

When Harry's tour had ended, he and Fingerman returned to Hinz's office and found his door was locked from the inside. Rather than wait for the keys to be located, Harry and Fingerman kicked the door open. The cuckolded husband lay sprawled over his desk where the photographs Harry had taken of Mrs. Hinz in her various liaisons were spread. The photographs had been spattered with the blood, bone fragments, and brain matter that had emptied in all directions when Hinz had put his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The party was over. Harry had learned a lot that night about the close relation of pain and pleasure, in certain situations, along with what fantasy and desire could drive people to do.

Harry found a cluster of light switches at the top of the stairs and flicked them on. Only two of them worked, one turning on a light directly over Harry's head, which spilled down the black-painted stairs, the other turning on a light in the booth where guests had paid their entrance fee and received a key for a little changing room where they could shed their public skins and don the masks of who they really were.

Harry cautiously headed down the stairs. There were a few small twitches and a flutter of activity in one of his tattoos: the rendering of a ritual necklace that Caz had dubbed the Scrimshaw Ring. While many of Caz's tattoos were simple talismans and made no pretense to solidity, the Scrimshaw Ring had been so meticulously rendered in the trompe l'oeil style, the shadow beneath it so dense that it made the necklace appear to stand proud on Harry's skin.

Its function was relatively simple: it alerted Harry to the presence of ghosts. But given that the spirits of the dead were everywhere, some in states of panic or agitation, others simply taking the air after the suffocations of death, the Scrimshaw Ring discriminated nicely and did not alert Harry's presence to any revenants except those that posed the greatest possible threat.

And apparently there was one such ghost—at
least
one—in Harry's immediate vicinity now. Harry paused at the bottom of the stairs, contemplating the very real possibility that this was another trap. Perhaps it was a ghost hired by the powers he'd confronted and embarrassed in New Orleans. But if they wanted revenge why come all this way to send only a few phantoms? They could frighten the unwitting, to be sure, but Harry was scarcely that. A little spook show wasn't going to leave him trembling. Harry pressed on.

The club seemed to have been left in the very state it had been in when Hinz put a bullet through his brain. The bar was still intact, the bottles of hard liquor still lined up, waiting for thirsty customers. Harry heard the glasses stacked underneath the bar start to chime as one of the ghosts began its performance.

When he ignored the noise and continued his advance, the spirit threw several of the shot glasses into the air. They were then pitched down onto the bar with such violence that a few of the flying shards struck Harry. He didn't respond to the display. He simply made his way on past the bar and into the big room with the Saint Andrew's cross set on the stage, where whip wielders once showed off their expertise.

Harry ran his light around the room, looking for some sign of the presence here. He stepped up onto the dais, intending to continue his search for Norma backstage, but as he crept closer toward the velvet curtain he heard a noise off to the right. His gaze shot in the direction of the sound. The opposing wall there had an array of canes, paddles, and whips hung on it—maybe fifty instruments in all. A few of the lighter items dropped to the floor and then one of the heavy wooden paddles was pitched in Harry's direction. It hit his knee, hard.

“Ah, fuck this!” he said, jumping off the stage and walking straight into the assault. “My tattoos are telling me you're a threat. But I'm not remotely intimidated by whoever you are, so if you go on throwing shit at me I will spit out a syllogistic that'll make you wish you'd never died. I promise you.”

Harry had no sooner voiced this threat than one of the biggest whips on display was pulled down off the wall and drawn back, in preparation for a strike.

“Don't do it,” Harry said.

His warning went disregarded. The phantom wielding the whip either was very lucky or knew its business. With the first strike it caught Harry's cheek, a sharp sting that made his eye water.

“You dickhead,” he said. “Don't say I didn't warn you.” He started to speak the syllogistic, which was one of the first he'd ever learned:

“E vuttu quathakai,

Nom-not, nom-netha,

E vuttu quathakai,

Antibethis—”

He was barely a third of the way through the utterance, but the incantation was already revealing the presences in the room. They looked like shadows thrown up on steam, their edges evaporating, their features scrawled on the air like an artist was working on the rain. There were three of them: all men.

“Stop the syllogistic,” one of them moaned.

“Give me one reason why I should.”

“We were only following orders.”

“Whose orders?”

The phantoms exchanged panicky looks.

“Mine,” said a familiar leathery voice from the darkness of the next room.

Harry let his guard down immediately. “Norma! What the hell?”

“Don't torment them, Harry. They were only trying to protect me.”

“All right,” Harry said to the phantasms. “I guess you guys get a reprieve.”

“Stay at your posts, though,” Norma said, “He could have been followed.”

“Not a chance,” Harry said, all confidence as he walked into the back room.

“Famous last words,” said Norma.

Harry tried the light switch, and the wall-mounted lights went on, the bulbs red so as to flatter the nakedness of the old customers' gristly hides.

Norma was standing in the middle of the room, leaning on a stick, her hair gray, going to white, unpinned for the first time in all the years Harry had known her. Her face, though still possessed of the elegant beauty and power of her bones, was slack with exhaustion. Only her eyes had motion in them, the colorless pupils appearing to watch a tennis match between two absolutely equal players—left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left, the ball never once fumbling.

“What in God's name are you doing down here, Norma?”

“Let's sit. Give me your arm. My legs are aching.”

“They're not being helped by the damp down here. You should be more careful at your age.”

“We're neither of us as young as we used to be,” Norma said as she led Harry through to what had been the room where the players only went when they were in the mood for the extreme games. “I can't do this much longer, Harry. I'm damn tired.”

“You wouldn't be damn tired if you were sleeping in your own bed,” Harry said, looking at the tattered mattress that had been laid on the floor, strewn with a few moth-eaten blankets to keep her warm. “Christ, Norma. How long have you been down here?”

“Don't worry about that. I'm safe. If I was in my own bed now I'd be dead. If not today, then tomorrow, or the day after. Goode set us up, Harry.”

“I know. I walked into a serious trap at his place. Barely made it out alive.”

“God, I'm sorry. He was damn convincing. I think I'm slipping. This never would have happened if I were a younger woman.”

“He got us both, Norma. He was working with some powerful magic. You know all the magicians that have been murdered? One of them is still alive. Well … depending on your definition.”

“What?”

“It's a long story, but I know who killed them. A demon. I met him at Goode's house. He's a serious player.”