The Arcanum, page 4
Rasputin and Duvall share a glance. Nicholas glares at George.
“With due respect, my king,” Duvall says, “the Rosicrucians are a conflicted association—a group whose leaks I grow weary of plugging. Once they were entrusted with the secret of the Grail. That is more than enough, I think.”
“Well, what about Roosevelt and his Masonic friends in America?” the king persists.
The question is left unanswered.
Nicholas asks in English, “What is in the book, Konstantin?”
Duvall turns around, a rare shadow of fear in his gray eyes. “God’s mistakes, Tsar Nicholas. God’s mistakes.”
7
DOYLE STOOD AT his bedroom window and watched the mid-afternoon rain. That night, seven years earlier, Duvall had miscalculated. He had underestimated the leaders’ personalities, their egos, and their brewing enmities. The result had been a protracted negotiation for possession of the Book, resulting in its robbery and eventual resurfacing in the hands of Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia. Shortly thereafter, Ferdinand had been assassinated and the Great War had begun.
Doyle felt like a truant gardener returning to find ivy growing through the windows of his house—into his wife’s dresses, the cupboards, the sheets, the mouths of his children. The Book of Enoch was missing again. And though he knew nothing of its contents apart from Duvall’s cryptic words, he knew that it was—in part or in full—the cause of the worst conflict in the history of modern civilization.
And the reason for Duvall’s death.
A short butler with the jowls of a mastiff appeared at the study door. “Your luggage is prepared, Master Doyle.”
“Thank you, Phillip.”
The sky had darkened to purple, heavy and pregnant with rain. And stark against the brooding sky was Lady Jean’s reflection in the window. She was standing at the door, as pale as a wraith.
“Wasn’t it enough? Wasn’t losing Kingsley enough?” The words fell between them like shards of glass.
Doyle sighed and spoke to her reflection. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re old, Arthur. You’re an old man.”
“There is no one else.”
Lady Jean frowned. “And what makes you think they will join you? There’s been too much anger . . . too much pain. You’ll fight alone, Arthur.”
“I’m prepared for that.”
Lady Jean sighed deeply. Then, “No,” she said, “you’re not prepared. Not yet.” She lifted a battered and cracked leather satchel, and he smiled ruefully. His Jean had always been the stronger one.
He took the satchel from her hands.
Jean touched his cheek. “Forgetful as always,” she said.
Doyle undid the rusting buckles. “I thought I’d lost it,” he replied.
“No, I hid it.”
Doyle opened the case. The contents were as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror: an evidence-collection kit of small paper bags, evidence tags, string, paper coin envelopes, small vials and numerous glass containers, dental casting material and equipment, tweezers, scissors, rubber gloves, pencils, and a tape measure.
Of medical supplies there were forceps, a scalpel set, gauze bandages, a clinical thermometer, a vial of alcohol, hypodermic syringes, and a hand saw—beneath which were hidden a heavy leather sap and brass knuckles.
And, lastly, a crumpled deerstalker cap, frayed and weathered.
8
NEW YORK CITY—TWO WEEKS LATER
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, may I present to you the most sensuous, the most mysterious, and the most controversial talent of the Spiritualist age. Welcome, if you will, the infamous and extraordinary . . .” Barnabus Wilkie Tyson thrust his thick arms into the air, his massive body swelling in his seventy-fivedollar silk suit “. . . Madame Rose!”
Flash powder exploded, and a mob of skeptical reporters craned their necks to get a view of the medium as she ascended the four steps to the makeshift stage and stood beside Tyson, her promoter and manager. Her style was daring. She was wearing a sleeveless, black silk smoking suit and high heels. A long black scarf was tied around her hair, spilling down over her shoulders. A monocle was perched over her right eye, and a cigarette holder was clutched between her lips. That sealed it; she was a walking scandal.
Tyson set his own cigar stub on the table in order to light her cigarette, and breathed reassurances into her ear. But she only shifted away, her face belying the boldness of her dress. She didn’t smile at the photographers. In fact, she seemed quite ill at ease with the attention.
Which was odd, since the rumor mill spun hot and heavy around Madame Rose. She broke the hearts and marriages of the richest men in town, and flaunted it all in the gossip pages. Toss into the mix a reputed talent for conversing with spirits and the only séance in America where ectoplasm was guaranteed, and you had the ingredients for bona fide celebrity.
And Tyson was, if nothing else, a great trend spotter—and the first promoter of his kind to discover the unified field theory of publicity: Sex plus violence plus scandal equals money. Sensing a slight decline in the draw of his vaudeville acts, Tyson had poured his energies into the burgeoning Spiritualist Movement. It was a fertile garden in which to plant his greedy seed. Ruthless, cruel, and ill-mannered to those close to him, Tyson was still capable of dispensing enormous charm. He settled his hand on Madame Rose’s arm and savored the curious buzz that filled the Waldorf Astoria ballroom. Madame Rose was his phenomenon, and this rare press conference was an opportunity to squeeze even more ink out of the reporters.
“Now, let us be courteous in our questions,” he said, “and show Madame Rose some of that old New York charm we’re known for the world over.”
“Why’s she wearin’ pajamas, Barnabus?” a lanky Times reporter asked.
“Do you believe in free love, Miss Rose?”
Both Madame Rose and Tyson ignored the question.
“In the back.” Tyson pointed.
“Are you a home-wrecker?” someone shouted.
“That depends who you’re asking,” Madame Rose answered, to the amusement of the assembly. She took a long draw on her cigarette.
“Are the rumors true about you and Ivor Novello, the nightclub owner?” another reporter asked.
“Is he leaving his wife?”
Madame Rose smiled. “I didn’t know that he was married.”
Tyson grinned at the amused gasps and mutters from the crowd.
“What about Valentino?” someone asked testily, sounding as if they’d lost a bet.
“Please,” Madame Rose said scornfully.
“We thought it was Dempsey.”
“Who’s he?”
“The boxer.”
“Ugh, how appalling. Now, Douglas Fairbanks is a different story.” And she vamped to the whistles and catcalls.
“Let’s behave ourselves,” Tyson said, loving every minute.
“Haven’t we any real questions?” Madame Rose purred, warming to the audience.
“Is Mina Crandon a fake?” a Gazette writer shouted.
“I think a better question is: Why are we afraid? Why are we so obsessed with disproving this phenomenon?”
“Eileen Garrett says you’re a fraud.”
“Poor darling, she’s just insecure.” Madame Rose tapped ash on the tablecloth. “There have been seers since before ancient Egypt. Prophets and mystics have turned the tide of history at every crucial juncture. The dead speak. And it is our duty to listen, to learn from them.”
Most of the reporters wrote her words down, if only to justify their presence. But in the silence that followed . . .
“Do you worship the Devil?” a voice demanded from the back.
Tyson made a face. “What sort of question is that?”
There was a sudden shift in the energy of the room, a pall of discomfort.
Madame Rose stiffened in her chair, her eyes searching the audience. “Of course not. What an absurd question! This goes to the heart of the ignorance I’m referring to.”
“Perhaps I’ve mistaken you . . . for someone else.” The voice belonged to a man standing near the back, far behind the cameras. His coat collar was pulled up, concealing his features, and the brim of an English cap shadowed a set of bulging eyes.
“Who are you?” Madame Rose demanded.
“A friend,” he answered. “Of the family.” The last word was uttered with bite.
Madame Rose paled.
“What paper are you from?” Tyson snarled.
The doors swung shut. The man was gone.
Hands shot up from the crowd.
“Who was that?” someone yelled.
“What’d he mean?”
“Are you a witch?”
The questions piled up.
Madame Rose whispered “I’m leaving” into Tyson’s ear and stood, inadvertently knocking her chair backwards.
Flashbulbs popped.
“Okay, enough. That’s all!”
Madame Rose swayed on the steps. Tyson took her arm, waving off the photographers.
“I said that’s all, damn it,” he barked.
The reporters surged forward, and Tyson found himself tangled in the curtains as his medium vanished backstage.
9
FROM THE GANGPLANK of the Marie Celeste, Doyle marveled at the monstrous growth of New York City since his last visit, only six years before. Overnight, it seemed the metropolis had blossomed into an electric, sky-scraping, man-made forest. It was humbling. Disturbing.
He stepped up onto a trembling running board and into a Dodge sedan taxi off Pier 14. “The Penn Hotel, please.”
“Yes, sir. Welcome to New York, sir.”
A confirmed car fanatic, Doyle had bought a capsulelike Wolsey for country drives in England. Now he leaned over the front seat to watch the driver use the self-starter, for the newer cars no longer required the drivers to jump out and crank. Suddenly, and with unexpected speed, the driver released his foot from the low-speed pedal and the sedan launched into a circus of traffic.
Trolleys rumbled down the streets like the mechanical invaders from an H. G. Wells novel, while the newer and faster Briscoe and Maxwell automobiles swerved wildly around the slower and rarer horse-drawn carriages.
Times Square was a sensory assault of light and sound. Gigantic banners, the size and the like of which Doyle had never seen, were rimmed with thousands of sparkling lights advertising Lucky Strikes and Fatima Turkish Cigarettes, B. F. Keith’s Palace Theatre and the Million Dollar Mystery. There were crowded dance halls with recorders blaring “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “I’ll Say She Does.”
The whole world, Doyle mused, rushed headlong into an industrialized age that transformed daily life—daily. First the steam engine, then the gas-engine automobiles, electric typewriters, paper clips, Quantum theory, silicones, animated cartoon film, the hydraulic centrifugal clutch, Relativity, Vitamin A, tear gas, stainless steel, tanks, and air-conditioning. It was a non-stop maelstrom of progress that left the whole world breathless.
The Futurists saw this galloping pace as the signature of an idealized age, just within reach. Others saw it as the beginning of The End.
Doyle eyed these changes with a distinct caution. He knew firsthand that scientific genius was no guarantor of morality. Quite often it could be a harbinger to madness. And such an age required greater vigilance over the occult world than ever before; magic and science were quarrelsome sisters ever entwined. Mankind was scraping the surface of the Mysteries and naming what it found. It made men proud to catalog and quantify their world. Command it. Bend it. Shape and dissect it. This was science. The Mysteries, however, were likely to recoil from this leeching curiosity. Recoil and strike.
Doyle remembered the words of a colleague.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a dark new age . . .”
BANISHED AND FORBIDDEN knowledge, this was H. P. Lovecraft’s food and drink, his very reason for existence. Nothing else mattered to him—certainly not friendships or loyalties.
He was an enigma from the very beginning—a dark prodigy gifted beyond fairness with a mind like a knife and a flawless recall. His scholarship at nineteen had shamed occult masters four times his age, and his arrogance had enraged the rest. He suffered no fools, and offered the bluntest of opinions without concern for emotions or feelings, for which he showed utter disdain.
But that was Lovecraft’s paradox, for within his genius lay a boy on the verge of madness, completely isolated from the world. Doyle had never trusted him, but knew that he now needed him, more than ever.
As dusk spilled down the long walls of the Flatiron Building, Doyle warmed at the thought of his first trip to America: the most publicized literary tour since Oscar Wilde’s in 1881. Now he was anonymous, as he meant to be; as he had to be.
ONLY A FEW blocks south of Doyle’s taxi, Detective Sergeant Shaughnessy Mullin pinched his nose with a handkerchief to ward off the body’s stench. The place reeked enough of fish without the rot of a human to make it worse. It was a hell of a scene. The rats had already taken their due.
Lanterns swung in the haze as more blue boys gathered on Pier 5, and a dense mist sat over the Hudson. Two officers tried to straighten out the body, but it was clenched like a fist.
Backwards.
It was a terrible death. The woman was naked, found curled around a buoy thirty feet off the pier. The parts of her face not eaten away showed an expression of agony unmatched in Mullin’s experience.
And Mullin had plenty of experience. His consciousness was tattooed with the sort of images that, when witnessed at a young enough age, can shatter psyches. Mullin carried around a special one—one that asserted itself more than the others. A domestic dispute call two years before. A tenement building. The husband had fired a shotgun into his wife’s face at close range. Mullin recalled marveling at the pieces of head scattered over the living room carpet. Red meat tossed with tufts of hair. An eye. A few teeth embedded in the wall. Bones and a tongue hung from the lampshade. Amazing what drunk husbands could do to wives.
Mullin had an ex-wife, and God knows he had a drunken fury. Many were the nights he’d waved a pistol in her face. She’d left him; no explanation had been necessary. Mullin was unfit for most of the demands of society. He kept that image, though, in his back pocket. He wasn’t sure why. He just couldn’t seem to shake it.
This one would linger awhile, too.
The corpse was bent from the lower back almost like a wagon wheel, her heels nearly touching the back of her head. Her hands were clenched into fists by her cheeks, like a child in a frozen tantrum. Mullin had only seen this sort of rigor with strychnine poisoning. While attempting to straighten her out, one of the blue boys had pulled too hard, and everyone winced at the loud crack of her snapping ribs.
Mullin scowled. “Leave ’er be.”
The blue boys retreated. Mullin was pugnacious and fierce, thanks to a life lived hard. Born premature into a destitute and starving family in Cork, Mullin fought God’s will at every turn. An early battle with diphtheria robbed him of hearing in his left ear. While siblings were killed by influenza, Mullin survived. And once they managed to cross the ocean, the trials didn’t stop. One of Mullin’s eyes was clouded thanks to a street-gang fight in Brooklyn’s “Irish Town.” He gained a reputation as a street fighter, making up for his short reach by getting inside on opponents and working the body. Though Mullin’s father died soon after their arrival in America, his “Ma” was still an enormous influence in his life. He was devoted to her and she, in turn, still boxed his ears.
In 1919 Manhattan, the journey from street thug to police officer wasn’t a long trip. Mullin had convenient ethics and few qualms over solving complicated problems with violence. He wasn’t a champion of reform. He disdained idealists. Accepting a bribe now and again didn’t hurt anybody. And though Mullin, like most other cops, treated poor people the same as criminals, he had a soft spot for mothers—especially those struggling to feed fatherless children.
His thick red moustache twitched as he gazed on the girl. “Where is her ma?” he wondered aloud. He squatted down and turned the body so the lantern could shine on her back. The damage was merciless. Some butcher had carved her like a pumpkin, torn out her spine. This was no drunken rape gone awry, no drug fiend robbing for a fix. Even the wharf rats of Fourth Ward were above such depravity.
No, this was the work of an intelligent maniac, operating out of some private belief system. There was a purpose to this crime, and messages on the body that Mullin wasn’t yet able to read. And he was running out of time—because this wasn’t the first.
Sweater Martha, a kind but senile old woman who wore a dozen sweaters at one time and sniffed out orphans in the dangerous haunts of Chinatown, the Bowery, and Chatham Square, had been found in a ditch, torn open like the young girl at Mullin’s feet. At first, the police thought it might’ve been one of her troubled youths. Most if not all of them had prior records and severe emotional problems, but Mullin was beginning to think otherwise.
The similarities between the cases were disturbing, but this time, there was one difference.
This time there was a witness.
“I’ll see ’er now,” Mullin growled as he stood up.
He followed one of his boys down the pier to a medical wagon and rapped on the door.
A pale doctor, roused from sleep only one hour prior, stepped out of the wagon. Over the doctor’s shoulder, Mullin saw a woman, a prostitute by the looks of her, seated upright with bandages over both eyes. Her lips quivered as words spilled out in a breathy whisper. The doctor shut the door.
