The King of Satan's Eyes, page 3
Ten minutes later the tunnel branched, and he immediately took the right-hand path, slowing as the floor angled upward sharply, slipping in the invisible slime that coated it. He grunted when his shoulder banged against an outcropping of brick, stumbled when he reached the steps before he realized where he was.
He stopped and caught his breath.
His left hand grabbed a moist iron railing flaking with rust, and he hauled himself up, a step at a time, thinking perhaps he ought to quit smoking and give himself more wind. There’d been a time when he could take this route without losing so much as a single drop of sweat; now it coated his face and chilled his chest and back, and by the time he reached the top he was puffing so hard he had to lean against the wall.
Ahead of him was a thick wooden door elaborately banded in iron, its tapered oaken bar securely in place. When he was able to breathe again without wheezing he reached into his jacket and pulled out a key ring, hurried through it until he found what he wanted—a silver skull. He inserted it in the lock, jiggled it a few times, and turned over the bolt. The resulting clang was loud and he winced; his grunting as he lifted the bar was deafening and seemed to echo down the dark staircase behind him. But within moments he was through the door and had it closed and relocked with only a minimum of effort.
A second door—ten yards farther on and without a bar, though equally as solid—yielded to the death’s-head key.
A third five yards after that resisted until he kicked the rusted lower hinge.
The fourth was greystone, with only the barest of finger grips at the opening edge to give him purchase. He pressed his ear against it for a moment, straining and listening until he was sure there was no one on the other side. Then, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, he pulled it soundlessly to him, suddenly flung it back and darted through, yanking it closed and sitting on the ground, legs up, hands clasped casually about his knees.
A deep breath of relief, a grin, and he blinked his eyes to adjust to the starlight.
He was far above the main body of the town, directly at the top of the Knob in an exclusive high-walled and well-guarded cemetery whose occupants dated back to the War of 1812. He’d just come from the wide marble base of a fifteen-foot St. George, whose time-blunted sword was aimed directly at his back. There had once been a dragon curled at the knight’s feet, but vandals had long since removed most of the head, one of the flared wings, and the marble maiden clutched in its marble claws.
He gave himself precisely a minute to rest before he rose to his feet, brushed himself off as well as he could, and took the nearest winding tarmac path toward the rear entrance. The moon was bright, and the shadows snapped out to snare him as he walked, snapped back as if realizing who it was they were challenging. He smiled to himself at the fancy, and shook his head slowly.
And he hadn’t gone fifty yards before he heard the crunch of dead leaves behind him.
God, he thought as he quickened his pace, if it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
He took an abrupt smooth turn around a green marble mausoleum in the shape of an ark, allowing himself only a quick searching glance over his shoulder. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but he refused to slow down. His suddenly alert senses told him it wasn’t just a squirrel out for a late frolic. There was someone back there, someone determined not to be seen until he wanted to be seen.
Linc hated that.
Another ten yards and another quick turn, and the narrow pathway’s tarmac yielded now to hard-trodden, leaf-covered dirt as he reached the cemetery’s oldest and least tended section. The squared headstones here were made of dark stone much like clay, the simple poetic inscriptions almost totally erased by two centuries of harsh winters. Some were still straight over the graves they marked, more had been canted forward or back; and as his gaze drifted over them, one of them moved.
He stopped.
The headstone moved again, and he tensed, quickly looking left and right for someplace to hide, cursing himself for not bringing a weapon, and not being able in the darkness to find one to use.
Then the headstone resolved itself into a man wearing a deep black motorcycle jacket with gold epaulets at the shoulders and festooned with silver zippers, and thick blade boots winking with silver and red studs arranged in the outline of a coiled king cobra; he was just five and a half feet tall, stocky and redheaded, and charging toward him with bole-like arms spread to engulf him. He made no noise, and Linc did not run. Instead, he braced himself, and when the attacker finally reached him he leapt to one side and stuck out his foot.
The short man yelped and skidded across the path on his stomach, the two dozen flapping zippers sounding like Marley’s ghostly chains caught in a spin dryer.
Linc was hard on his back before the man had stopped moving, had a forearm around his throat, his free hand dug fiercely into a thicket of curly hair.
“I can’t breathe,” the man gasped, his head pulled back and his large watering eyes bulging in the moonlight.
“No kidding,” Linc said. He yanked once more to give the truth to his words. “Now what the bloody hell do you want, Unicov?”
Basil Unicov gagged and tried to ease the pressure of the arm across his throat. When he pointed at his mouth, however, Linc refused to give him release. He gagged again and said, “How … did you know … it was me?”
“I don’t give away my secrets,” Linc said harshly. He yanked again to warn the man not to reach for one of his jacket pockets, then loosened his grip, though his hand remained firmly clawed in the red hair. “What do you want?”
Unicov shook his head.
Linc tightened the forearm.
Unicov coughed, and his eyes rolled.
“C’mon, Uni, let’s not play games.”
Unicov glared.
Linc sighed and pulled his hair sharply. “Reddick sent you, right? Right?”
Unicov denied it with a choking, and a gagging.
For some reason, Linc’s instincts told him to believe it. The forearm loosened a second time. “What, Unicov? Come on, I haven’t got all night.”
“Eyes,” the man gasped, his hands pawing weakly at the arm.
Linc leaned back and frowned. “Eyes? What eyes?”
“You … know.”
“Uni, I’m getting impatient.”
He was about to retighten his grip when he heard footsteps on the pathway and two voices in low conversation. A man, a woman, and she was giggling: lovers on their way for a tryst among the dead.
He scowled, glared down at the struggling man, and finally, with a sigh, released his hold on the hair and jabbed Unicov expertly behind his left ear. Unicov stiffened for a split second before his eyes closed and he fell limply to the ground. Linc grabbed him under the arms then and dragged him behind a tombstone before darting across the grassy graves to the iron-barred exit. He was sure he’d not been heard, but he couldn’t take any more chances. He estimated the wall’s height and stepped back five paces, broke into a sudden run and vaulted to the top, peered down at the sidewalk and jumped.
He landed silently and ran across the street, keeping to the shadows, avoiding the fall of white from the streetlamps along the way.
The houses here were huge and old—gabled and porched, most of the garages for three and four cars, most of their land sweeping out to the back. He reached one that lurked behind a tall untrimmed hedge and darted up the driveway, skirting the side until he reached the back. He waited, listening for sounds of guests from the lighted dining room above him. When he was satisfied whatever noise he made wouldn’t be overheard, he moved slowly to the canted cellar doors, opened one and slipped into the dark.
At the bottom he pressed an indented button on the stone wall and waited again until he heard the unmistakable sound of a door opening in the far wall. There was no light, but he made his way unerringly across the uneven floor and through the portal. Once inside, the door closed, and locked.
Then a light was switched on, and he was temporarily blinded. When his vision returned seconds later he was looking at a man seated behind an ornate teak-and-brass desk. The man was smiling, and aiming a cocked gun straight at his heart.
“Good evening, Mr. Blackthorne,” he said, winked, and squeezed the trigger.
FOUR
The derringer’s silver hammer slammed forward and George Vilcroft brought the muzzle’s steady flame to his thirty-dollar Havana. He puffed a few times to be sure the cigar was burning, then released the trigger to snuff out the fire. A contented sigh as he studied the glowing tip for several seconds before tossing the lighter onto the desk. A glance to the star-shaped chandelier, and he visibly relaxed in a high-backed chair with diamond filigree at the top, gold-leaf representations of Chinese emperors around the sides, and ruby-encrusted lions’ paws at the armrests. He smiled again and gestured.
Lincoln immediately slumped into a brass-studded, red leather wing chair and crossed his legs at the ankles, his hands folded over his stomach. He returned the smile, but only vaguely, and figured that Vilcroft, under the circumstances, would forgive him for not bowing.
The man he faced across the four-foot-wide desk was almost seven feet tall, massive in girth, yet oddly unimposing. He wore a muted and narrow-lapelled off-white suit flocked with silver threads; his silken button-down shirt was pale blue, his Windsor-knotted tie black and threaded through with gold. On each hand he wore a blank, gold signet ring, and around his left wrist a finely linked silver bracelet. His blue eyes were frozen in a perpetual squint, his nose was bent to one side, and above his thick upper lip was a caterpillar mustache blazing preternaturally red—it was, in fact, the only hair on his head.
Linc had never asked him if he shaved or suffered a condition.
“You’re a mess, Lincoln,” Vilcroft said with a fleeting moue of distaste behind a cloud of blue smoke rings. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, you smell like a swamp.”
“I’ve had an evening, George.”
“So I gather.” His voice was profoundly and disturbingly deep, with a resonance that made Lincoln think of thunderstorms in caverns, or stampeding mustangs across a vast uncharted prairie. “Ah, you’ve been through that damned tunnel again.”
He shrugged. “I had no choice.”
“Pests, eh?”
“Pesky.”
“I see. Anyone I know?”
He hesitated before answering.
“Reddick.”
Vilcroft’s hairless left eyebrow rose in mild surprise. “My word, really? Lincoln, I thought you took care of him in Pretoria five years ago. Or was it our sister city in the Highlands?”
“So did I.”
A pause before Vilcroft leaned forward and picked up a tiny silver bell, rang it twice, and sat back again. Within moments a striking barefoot brunette in a snug, green silk dress that scarcely wrinkled when she walked, appeared quietly at his side. He smiled lovingly and tapped her once on the wrist.
“Wine for our guest, Clarise. He’s had a rather trying time of it this evening, poor fellow.”
She nodded without a smile or a hint of commiseration, and as she turned to the Regency sideboard behind the throne, Vilcroft reached over the desk blotter and punched a button on a small control panel tangled with wires. Seconds later, Mouret’s “Rondeau” fanfare trumpeted into the room.
Lincoln didn’t react. Instead, he allowed his breathing to slow and his perspiration to dry amid the Norman tapestries on the walls, the oriental and Persian carpeting beneath his feet, the erotic Etruscan carvings and jade Burmese statues Vilcroft had been collecting for over fifty years. There was barely room to walk, and it took Clarise a full minute to negotiate a path from the sideboard to his chair, pewter tray in hand, crystal goblet aboard. He took it and grinned at her; she nodded once, without smiling, and returned to serve Vilcroft. By the time she was gone, through an exit Lincoln was unable to locate, Vilcroft was staring at him impatiently.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Lincoln said, sipping at the brandy and wishing he knew whether it was good or not.
“Well, what are you doing here? I have guests, you know.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“We were meditating, my boy. We were discovering the inner self that makes us what we are.”
“All right.”
Vilcroft frowned. “You don’t believe in meditation?”
“I sleep a lot.”
“I see,” the man said with stern disapproval. “Lincoln, you will never get along in this world until you learn to get in touch with yourself. You have to know where, as they say, your head is at. You have a moral, perhaps even divine obligation to learn to commune and communicate with all that is the essence of you so that you may successfully and forthrightly commune and communicate with others.”
“All right.”
Vilcroft gestured impatiently. “You’re impossible.”
“I’ve been shot at. That tends to make me impossible.”
Vilcroft placed his glass carefully on the desk. “Shot?”
“At.”
“By Reddick?”
“By Reddick, Cashim, and a third man whose name I didn’t catch.”
“I see.” A blunted finger touched Vilcroft’s squared chin. “Machine guns?”
Lincoln nodded, shuddering at the memory, suddenly hoping that Carmel had minded her own business.
“Yes,” Vilcroft said, drawing the word into a hiss. “Yes. And there were three men, you say?”
“Three inside the shop. I don’t think there was anyone else outside in the hearse.”
“The hearse? Well! Well, well. Reddick and Cashim. Well, well. I would say then that the third one was Arnold Krawn. I gather from your expression that you don’t know him. No matter, my boy. He is a man of little consequence in the scheme of things. He’s not in touch with himself.”
“He was in touch with me about an hour ago,” Linc complained. “And he wasn’t the only one.”
A short laugh rumbled in Vilcroft’s chest. “Carmel’s father, no doubt.”
“No, Basil Unicov.”
“Oh dear.”
Linc finished his drink in a swallow and ignored the pained expression on the big man’s face. Instead, he placed the goblet on the floor beside his chair and shifted to the edge of the cushion. “George, are you trying to tell me something?”
“What?” Vilcroft almost rose. “Are you saying I sent those men after you?”
“Well, maybe not Reddick.”
“Certainly not Reddick.”
“Uni?”
“That toad? He rides around on that oversized motorized bicycle wearing those ridiculous clothes and still thinks to call himself a human being. I would not think to have him in the house. Clarise thinks he’s full of shit.”
“Clarise doesn’t like anybody. She doesn’t even like me.”
Vilcroft said nothing. He stared for a long moment at the emerald crystals in the star-shaped chandelier, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a key ring, selected one, and unlocked the desk’s center drawer; there was a hesitation and a glance at Linc before he extracted a thin wooden box that seemed ready to splinter the moment he breathed on it. A flourish, and the box was on the blotter, open, its lid to one side. Lincoln could not see what was inside, but he knew he was going to find out. He also knew he wasn’t going to like it.
“Reddick, Cashim, Krawn, and Unicov,” the big man said quietly, pushing the box from side to side with his index finger. “A veritable quartet of incompetence.”
“They weren’t so incompetent tonight,” Lincoln said sourly.
“You’re alive, so they’re incompetent.”
Lincoln shrugged. He really didn’t much care now, as long as he knew why he was being hunted.
Vilcroft’s hand moved again, this time to extinguish the overhead light, turn off the music, and switch on the Tiffany lamp on the desk. His face instantly fell into deep shadow, a shadow as deep as the roll of his voice. The silver threads in his white suit glittered; the gold threads in his black tie winked.
“Lincoln, you’re in trouble.”
“Me?” He stood and strode to the desk, one hand out to guide him through the artifact maze. “Me? For god’s sake, George, what the hell did I do?”
“Nothing,” said Vilcroft sadly. “It’s terrible, isn’t it, but for a change you haven’t done a thing.”
Lincoln gripped the edge of the desk and glared. “I know that, George, and apparently you know that. But what about those other idiots? Why don’t they know that?”
“Because I haven’t told them.”
He nodded as if he understood, sniffed once and made his way back to his chair. He sat stiffly this time, hands gripping the armrests, wishing the man would turn up the heat—he was beginning to sweat, and a chill walked his spine. The box still lay in the center of the blotter, and all he could see of Vilcroft was his chest, and his hands.
“You will explain,” he said at last. It wasn’t a question, and Vilcroft shifted slightly.
The room remained silent.
“George.”
“Give me a moment.”
“You don’t have a moment. You have now.”
Vilcroft inhaled deeply. “I collect things, Lincoln,” he said at last, sounding less authoritative, more apologetic. “My house is a veritable museum of antiquity and contemporary superb taste. You know this because you have been instrumental in several of my acquisitions—this very desk for example.”
Lincoln remembered, especially the time he had had trying to get it through customs. Eventually, he’d been forced to create a diversion, one that had effectively closed the airport for a week and a half. It was one of the hazards of playing with exposed sheep-dip.
“Well, I’m on to something else.”
Lincoln waited. Patience was hard to come by, but he forced himself to wait.
