We sat around the kitchen table while the marshes prepared to flood, waiting for the coming of the tides that would bring with them death and regeneration. Already the air felt different; there was a stillness to nature, a watchfulness, as though every living thing that depended on the marshes for its existence was attuned to their rhythms and knew instinctively what was about to occur.
I cleaned out the cuts on my arm, although I could not quite trace the chain of events that led to my receiving them. I still had a sense of vertigo, a dizziness that left me feeling uncertain on my feet, and I could not rinse the taste of sweet wine from my mouth.
I offered my visitors coffee, but they expressed a preference for tea. Rachel had left some herbal tea behind the instant coffee. It smelled a little like someone had taken a leak in a rosebush. The bearded cleric, who said his name was Martin Reid, winced slightly when he tasted it, but he persevered. Clearly, those years spent following his vocation had endowed him with a degree of inner strength.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“It wasn’t too hard to connect you to the events in Brooklyn,” he said. “You make quite an impression wherever you go. We learned a little more about you from Mr. Neddo in New York.”
Neddo’s involvement with these men was a surprise. I had to confess that Neddo now unconditionally gave me the creeps. I couldn’t deny that he had an extensive knowledge of certain matters, but the pleasure that he derived from it was troubling. Being around him was like keeping company with a semireformed addict whose ambition to stay clean was not as urgent as his love for the narcotic.
“I think Mr. Neddo may be morally suspect,” I said. “You may become tainted by association.”
“We are all flawed in our own way.”
“Maybe, but my closet isn’t filled with Chinese skulls fresh from the executioner’s gun.”
Reid conceded the point.
“Admittedly, I try not to delve too deeply into his acquisitions. He is, nevertheless, a useful source of information, and you have reason to be grateful to him for informing us of your visit to him, and of the path that your investigation is following. The gentleman on the road didn’t look best pleased by our intrusion into his business. If we hadn’t arrived when we did, it could have turned very ugly. Or in his case, uglier.”
“He certainly isn’t a looker,” I conceded.
Reid gave up on his tea. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I’ll still be tasting that on the day I die.”
I apologized once again.
“The man on the road told me that his name was Brightwell,” I said. “I think you know a little more than that about him.”
The younger priest, who had introduced himself as Paul Bartek, looked to his colleague. They were both Cistercian monks, based in Europe but staying for the present in a monastery in Spencer. Reid had a Scottish accent, but Bartek’s was harder to identify: there were traces of French and American English, as well as something more exotic.
“Tell me what happened on the road,” said Reid. “What did you feel?”
I tried to recall the sensations I had experienced. The memory seemed to intensify my nausea, but I persevered.
“One minute he seemed to be leaning against his car, and the next he was right in my face,” I said. “I could smell his breath. It smelled like wine. Then he was gripping my arm and dragging me toward his car. He made those cuts on my arm. The trunk opened, and it looked like a wound. It was made of flesh and blood, and it stank.”
Reid and Bartek exchanged a look.
“What?” I said.
“We could see both of you as we approached,” said Bartek. “He never moved. He didn’t touch you.”
I displayed the cuts for them.
“Yet I have these.”
“That you do,” said Reid. “There’s no denying it. Did he say anything to you?”
“He said that I was hard to track down, and that we had matters to discuss.”
“Anything else?”
I remembered the sensation of falling, of burning. I did not want to share it with these men because it brought with it a sense of great shame and regret, but something told me that they were trustworthy, even good, and that they were ready to provide answers to some of the questions that I had.
“There was a sense of vertigo, of descending from a great height. I was burning, and there were others burning around me. I heard him speak as he was dragging me to the car, or as I thought he was.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Found.’ He said I was found.”
If Reid was surprised by this, then he kept it hidden well. Bartek didn’t have his friend’s poker features. He looked shocked.
“Is this man a Believer?” I asked.
“Why would you say that?” said Reid.
“He had a mark on his arm. It looked like a grapnel. Neddo told me that they marked themselves.”
“But do you even know what a Believer really is?” said Reid. There was something skeptical, almost patronizing, in his tone that I didn’t care for.
I kept my voice low and even. It took a lot of effort.
“I don’t like it when someone assumes my ignorance, and by implication dangles the promise of enlightenment in front of me,” I said. “I don’t even care for it when people tease dogs with treats, so don’t overstep the mark here. I know what they’re looking for, and I know what they’re capable of doing to get it.”
I stood and retrieved the book that I had bought in South Portland. I threw it to Reid, and he caught it awkwardly with both hands, splaying the pages. I spit a volley of words at him as he examined its pages.
“Sedlec. Enoch. Dark angels in corporeal form. An apartment with human remains yellowing in a piss-filled bath. A basement decorated with human bones, waiting for the arrival of a silver statue with a demon trapped inside it. A man who sits placidly in a burning car while his body turns to ash. And a young woman’s skull, trimmed with gold, left in an alcove after she’d been murdered in a purpose-built tiled room. Are we any clearer now, Father or Brother, or whatever it is you like to be called?”
Reid had the decency to look apologetic, but I was already regretting my outburst in front of these strangers, not merely out of shame at my own loss of temper, but because I didn’t want to give anything away in my anger.
“I’m sorry,” said Reid. “I’m not used to dealing with private detectives. I always tend to assume that nobody knows anything and, to be honest I’m rarely surprised.”
I sat down once again at the table and waited for him to continue.
“The Believers, or those who lead them, are convinced that they are fallen angels, banished from heaven, reborn over and over in the form of men. They feel that they are incapable of being destroyed. If they are killed, then they roam in noncorporeal form until they find another suitable host. It may take years, decades even, before they do so, but then the process begins again. If they are not killed, then they believe that they age infinitely more slowly than human beings. Ultimately, they are immortal. That is what they believe.”
“And what do you believe?”
“I don’t believe that they’re angels, fallen or otherwise, if that’s what you’re asking. I used to work in psychiatric hospitals, Mr. Parker. A popular delusion among patients was that they were Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m sure that there is a good reason why they favored Bonaparte over, say, Hitler, or General Patton, but I never really cared enough to find out what that might be. It was enough to know that a forty-year-old gentleman from Pakistan who weighed two hundred pounds in his bare feet was, in all probability, not Napoleon Bonaparte; but the fact that I didn’t believe he was who he claimed to be made no difference to him. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether we go along with the convictions of the Believers or not. They believe, and they convince other weaker souls to adhere to that belief. They appear particularly adept at the power of suggestion, at planting false memories in fertile ground, but they and the people with whom they surround themselves are no less dangerous for being deluded.”
But there was more to them than that. The circumstances of Alice’s death gave clear evidence that these individuals were infinitely more unpleasant, and more powerful, than even Reid was prepared to acknowledge, at least here, and to me. There was also the matter of the DMT, the drug found in Alice’s remains and in Garcia’s body. It wasn’t just force of will that bound people to them.
“What did he mean by telling me that I was ‘found’?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
I let it go.
“What do you know about a company called Dresden Enterprises?”
It was Reid’s turn to be surprised.
“I know a little. It’s owned by a man named Joachim Stuckler. He’s a collector.”
“I’m supposed to meet him in Boston.”
“He contacted you?”
“He sent one of his flying monkeys to make the arrangements. In fact, he sent three flying monkeys, but two won’t be taking to the air again anytime soon. They tried to play clever too, incidentally.”
Reid looked uneasy at the implied threat.
“I’d remind you that we are also stronger than we appear, and that just because we wear collars doesn’t mean we won’t try to defend ourselves.”
“The men who stomped Stuckler’s envoys are named Tony and Paulie Fulci,” I said. “I don’t think they’re good Catholics, despite their heritage. In fact, I don’t think they’re good anythings, but they take a certain pride in their work. Psychotics are funny that way. I have no qualms about setting the Fulcis on you, assuming that I don’t decide to make your lives difficult myself, or hand you on to someone who makes the Fulcis look like missionary workers.
“I don’t know what you think is going on here, but let me explain it for you: the young woman who was killed was called Alice Temple. She was the cousin of one of my closest friends, but ‘cousin’ doesn’t explain the obligation he feels toward her, just as ‘friend’ doesn’t communicate the magnitude of my debt to him. We’re looking for the men responsible, and we will find them. You may not care much for my threats. You may not even be troubled by the possibility of being stomped by six hundred pounds of misplaced Italian-American pride. But let me tell you something: my friend Louis is infinitely less tolerant than I am, and anyone who gets in his way, or holds back information, is playing with fire and will get badly burned.
“You seem to be looking at this like it’s some kind of intellectual game with information as the forfeit, but there are lives involved, and right now I don’t have time to trade with you. Either help me now or get out and accept any consequences that arise when we come looking for you again.”
Bartek looked at the floor.
“I know all about you, Mr. Parker,” said Reid, haltingly at first. “I know what happened to your wife and your daughter. I’ve read about the men and women whom you’ve hunted down. I also suspect that, unknowingly, you’ve come close to these Believers before, for you’ve certainly destroyed some who shared their delusions. You couldn’t make the connection, and for some reason neither could they, not until recently. Perhaps it is to do with the difference between good and evil: good is selfless, while evil is always self-interested. Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.”
He smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m sorry, I have a tendency to wax philosophical. It is a consequence of dealing with such matters. Anyway, I know too that you have a partner now, and a little girl. I don’t see any trace of them here. There are dirty dishes in your sink, and I see in your eyes that you’re troubled by things that have nothing to do with this case.”
“That’s none of your business,” I said.
“Oh, but it is. You’re vulnerable, Mr. Parker, and you’re angry, and they’ll exploit that. They’ll use it to get at you. I don’t doubt for one moment that you’re prepared to hurt people who frustrate you or who get in your way. Right now, I don’t think you’d even need much of an excuse to do it, but believe me when I say that we were being cautious in our answers for good reason. Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe the time has come to be more honest with each other. So let me begin.
“Stuckler has two faces, and two collections. One he displays to the public, and the other is entirely private. The public collection consists of paintings, sculpture, antiques, all with ironclad provenance, and above reproach in both taste and source. The second collection betrays his origins. Stuckler’s father was a major in Der Führer Regiment of the Second SS Panzer Division. He was a veteran of the Russian front, and he was one of those who later carved a bloody trail through France in 1944. He was at Tulle when they hanged ninety-nine civilians from lampposts as reprisals for attacks on German forces by the Maquis, and he had gasoline on his hands after the slaughter and burning of over six hundred civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane. Mathias Stuckler followed orders, apparently without question, just as might be expected of one of the army’s elite.
“His other role was as a treasure seeker for the Nazis. Stuckler had a background in art history. He was a cultured man, but as with a great many cultured men, his taste for beautiful things coexisted with a barbarous nature. He helped to loot the Hapsburg royal family’s treasures from Vienna in 1938, including what some fool believed was the spear of Longinus, and he was a favorite of Himmler’s. Himmler had a particular passion for the occult; after all, this was a man who sent expeditions to Tibet to seek the origins of the Aryan race, and who used slave labor to renovate Wewelsburg castle to resemble Camelot, complete with round table. Personally, I don’t think Stuckler believed a word of it, but it gave him an excuse to loot and to acquire treasures for his own gratification and reward, which he set aside carefully as the opportunity arose.
“After the war, those treasures found their way to his son, and that is what we believe forms the bulk of the private collection. If the rumors are true, some of Goering’s art collection has also since found its way to Joachim Stuckler’s vaults. Goering attempted to send a train-load of stolen art to safety by train from his hunting lodge in Bavaria toward the end of the war, but the train was abandoned and the collection disappeared. A painting by François Boucher, stolen from a Paris gallery in 1943 and known to be part of Goering’s trove, was quietly repatriated last year, and Stuckler was reputed to have been the source. It seems that he made inquiries about selling it, and its provenance was discovered. To avoid embarrassment, he handed it back to the French, claiming that he himself had purchased it some years earlier under a misapprehension. Stuckler has always denied the existence of a secret cache, and claims that if his father did manage to assemble such a trove of looted items—and he has publicly stated his belief that this is a lie—then its whereabouts died with his father.”
“What happened to his father?”
“Mathias Stuckler was killed late in the summer of 1944 during an incident at the French Cistercian monastery of Fontfroide in the Corbière Hills. The circumstances have never been fully explained, but a party of SS soldiers, a number of civilian liaisons from the University of Nuremberg, and four Cistercian monks were shot to death during a confrontation in the monastery courtyard. Stuckler was doing his master’s bidding, but something unexpected occurred. In any event, the treasure at Fontfroide was denied him.”
“Ostensibly a valuable fourteenth-century gold crucifix, various gold coins, a quantity of gemstones, two gold chalices, and a small, jeweled monstrance.”
“It doesn’t sound like the kind of haul that would drag the SS up a mountain in the face of the enemy.”
“The gold was a decoy. The real treasure lay in a nondescript silver box. It was a fragment of a coded map, one of a number of pieces placed in similar boxes during the fifteenth century, then dispersed. The knowledge contained within them has since been lost to us, which might have been for the best if the boxes too had been irretrievably lost.”
“Careless of you to mislay your own statue,” I said.
Reid flinched slightly, but otherwise gave no indication that my awareness of the Black Angel, and the story of its creation, was perhaps greater than he had anticipated.
“It wasn’t an item that the order was anxious to display,” he said. “From the beginning, there were those who said that it should be destroyed utterly.”
“Why wasn’t it?”
“Because, if one believes the myth of its creation, they feared that any attempt to destroy it would release what lay within. Those were more credulous times, I hasten to add. Instead, it was hidden, and the knowledge of its whereabouts dispersed to trusted abbots in the form of vellum fragments. Each fragment contains a great deal of ancillary information—illustrations, dimensions of rooms, partial accounts of the creation of the statue you mentioned—and a numerical reference alongside a single letter: either D or S, for ‘dexter’ or ‘sinister,’ right or left. They are units of measurement, all taken from a single starting point. Combined together, they are supposed to give the precise location of a vault. Stuckler was trying to assemble the map when he died, as many others before him had tried to do. The Fontfroide fragment disappeared following the attack and has not been seen since.
“You know that the statue is rumored to lie buried in the vault. That’s what Stuckler was attempting to recover, and that’s what the Believers are also trying to locate. Recent developments have given their search a new impetus. A fragment of the map was found earlier this year at Sedlec, in the Czech Republic, but subsequently disappeared before it could be examined. We believe that a second went missing from a house in Brooklyn some weeks back.”
“Winston’s house.”
“Which is how you came to be involved, for we now know that two women were present in the house when the killings occurred, and were subsequently hunted down in the belief that they were in possession of the fragment.”
“That’s two pieces, excluding Fontfroide.”
“Three more pieces, one from Bohemia, one from Italy, and another from England, have been missing for centuries. The contents of the Italian section have long been common knowledge, but the rest are almost certainly in the wrong hands. Yesterday, we received information that a fragment, possibly the missing piece from Font-froide, may have been acquired in Georgia. Two veterans of World War II were found dead in a swamp. It’s not clear how they died, but both were survivors of an attack by SS soldiers near Fontfroide, the same SS soldiers who were subsequently killed at the monastery.”
“Was Stuckler responsible for the deaths of the veterans?”
“He may have been, although it would be out of character for him. We believe that he has at least one fragment, and possibly more. He is certainly driven in his quest.”
I couldn’t see Murnos colluding in the deaths of two old men. He didn’t seem like the type.
“Is Stuckler a Believer?”
“We have no evidence to suggest that he is, but they keep themselves well hidden. It is entirely possible that Stuckler is one of them, or he may even be a renegade, one who has chosen to take his chances against his fellows.”
“So it could be that he’s competing with them for possession of this map?”
“A fragment is due to be offered for sale this week at an auction house in Boston run by a woman named Claudia Stern. It is our understanding that this is the Sedlec fragment, although we cannot prove it. The map and the box went missing from Sedlec soon after the discovery, and before a proper examination could be made. We have investigated the possibility of taking legal action to stop the sale until its provenance can be determined, but we have been instructed that any such attempt would fail. We have no proof that it was taken from Sedlec, or that the Cistercian order has any claim to its ownership. Soon, all the pieces will be available for examination; and then the Believers will go hunting for the statue.”
∗ ∗ ∗
I watched them leave as the evening grew dark and quiet. I hadn’t learned as much as I had hoped, but neither had they. We were still circling one another, wary of giving too much away. I had not mentioned Sekula to Reid and Bartek, but Angel and Louis had taken on the task of checking out his office once they returned to New York. If they found out anything more, then they would tell me.
I closed the door and called Rachel on her cell. My call went straight to her message system. I thought about trying her parents’ number, but I didn’t want to have to deal with Frank or Joan. Instead, I walked Walter along the marshes, but when we came to a copse of trees at the farthest extreme of the woods, he would go no farther, and grew agitated until we turned back to the house. The moon was already visible in the sky, and it was reflected in the waters of the little pond, like the face of a drowned man hanging in its depths.
∗ ∗ ∗
Reid and Bartek drove toward I-95. They did not speak until they were heading south on the interstate.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” asked Bartek.
“I told him enough, maybe too much.”
“You lied to him. You said that you didn’t know what it meant to be ‘found.”’
“These people are deluded.”
“Brightwell isn’t like the rest. He’s different. How can it be otherwise, the way he keeps reappearing, unchanged?”
“Let them believe what they want to believe, Brightwell included. There’s no point in worrying him more than he is. The man already looks weighed down by his burdens. Why should we add to them?”
Bartek stared out the window. Great mounds of earth had been torn up for the widening of the highway. Trees lay fallen, waiting to be cut up and transported. The outlines of digging equipment were visible against the darkening sky, like beasts frozen in the midst of some great conflict.
No, he thought. It’s more than a delusion. It’s not merely the statue that they’ve been seeking.
He spoke carefully. Reid had a temper, and he didn’t want him sulking in the driver’s seat for the rest of the journey.
“He will have to be told, regardless of any other problems he may have,” he said. “They’ll come back, because of who they believe he is. And they’ll hurt him.”
Ahead of them, the Kennebunk exit was approaching. Bartek could see the parking lot of the rest stop, and the lights of the fast-food outlets. They were in the fast lane, a big rig on their inside.
“Bugger,” said Reid. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you along.”
He floored the accelerator, cut in front of the truck, and made the exit. Seconds later they were heading back the way that they had come.
Walter was already barking by the time their car pulled up. He had learned to respond to the warning noises from the motion sensor at the gate. Now that Rachel was gone, I had opened the gun safe and placed one gun in the hall stand and another in the kitchen. The third, the big Smith 10, I tried to keep close to hand wherever I was. I watched the big priest come to the door. The younger one stayed by the car.
“Lose your way?” I said as I opened the door.
“A long time ago,” said Reid. “Is there somewhere we can go to eat? I’m starving.”
∗ ∗ ∗
I took them to the Great Lost Bear. I liked the Bear. It was unpretentious and inexpensive, and I didn’t want to be stiffed on a pricey meal by a pair of monks. We ordered hot wings, and burgers and fries. Reid seemed impressed by the selection of beers and went for some British import that looked like it had been bottled in the time of Shakespeare.
“So where were you stricken by remorse at your dishonesty?” I asked.
Reid shot Bartek a poisonous look.
“The voice of my bloody conscience started up somewhere beside a Burger King,” he said.
“It wasn’t quite the road to Damascus,” said Bartek, “but then you’re no Saint Paul, apart from a shared bad temper.”
“As you seem aware, I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about certain matters,” said Reid. “My young colleague here appears to feel that we should make clear the risks that you’re facing, and what Bright-well meant by your being ‘found.’ I stand by what I said earlier: they’re deluded, and they want others to share their delusions. They can believe what they want to believe, and you don’t have to go along with it, but I now accept that those beliefs can still be a threat to you.
“It goes back to the apocrypha, and the fall of the angels. God forces the rebels from heaven, and they burn in their descent. They are banished to hell, but some choose instead to wander the nascent earth, consumed by hatred of God and, eventually, the growing hordes of humanity that they see around them. They identify what they believe to be the flaw in God’s creation: God has given man free will, and so he is open to evil as well as good. So the war against God continues on earth, waged through men. I suppose you could term it guerrilla warfare, in a way.
“But not all of the angels turned their backs on God. According to Enoch, there was one who repented, and believed that he could still be forgiven. The others tried to hunt him down, but he hid himself among men. The salvation he sought never came, but he continued to believe in the possibility that it might be offered to him if he made reparation for all that he had done. He did not lose faith. After all, his offense was great, and his punishment had to be great in return. He was prepared to endure whatever was visited upon him in the hope of his ultimate salvation. So our friends, these Believers, are of the opinion that this last angel is still out there, somewhere, and they hate him almost as much as they hate God Himself.”
Found.
“They want to kill him?”
“According to their tenets, he can’t be killed. If they kill him, they lose him again. He wanders, finds a new form, and the search has to start over.”
“So what are their options?”
“To corrupt him, to make him despair so that he joins their ranks again; or they can imprison him forever, lock him up somewhere so that he weakens and wastes away, yet can never enjoy the release of death. He will endure an eternity of slow, living decay. An appalling thought, if nothing else.”
“You see,” said Bartek, “God is merciful. That is what I believe, that is what Martin believes, and that is what, according to Enoch, the solitary angel believed. God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn’t damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.”
“I always thought Judas got a raw deal,” said Reid. “Christ had to die to redeem us, and a lot of people played a part in getting Him to that point. You could argue that Judas’s role was preordained, and that, in the aftermath, no man could have been expected to bear the burden of killing God without despairing. You might have thought that there would have been a little room for maneuver in God’s great scheme for Judas.”
I sipped at an alcohol-free beer. It didn’t taste great, but I wasn’t about to blame the beer for that.
“You’re telling me that they think I might be this angel that they’ve been seeking.”
“Yes,” said Reid. “Enoch is very allegorical, as you’ve surely learned by now, and there are places where the allegory bleeds into the more straightforward aspects. Enoch’s creator meant the repentant angel to symbolize the hope of forgiveness that we all should hold within us, even those who have sinned most grievously. The Believers have chosen to interpret it literally, and in you they think they’ve found their lost penitent. They’re not certain, though. That’s why Brightwell tried to get close to you.”
“I didn’t tell you when we first met, but I think I’ve seen someone who looked like Brightwell before,” I said.
“Where?”
“In a painting of Sedlec in the fifteenth century. It was in Claudia Stern’s workshop. It’s going to be auctioned this week, along with the box from Sedlec.”
I expected Reid to scoff at my mention of a similarity to Bright-well, but he didn’t.
“There’s a lot that is interesting about Mr. Brightwell. If nothing else, he—or ancestors who looked startlingly like him—has been around for a long, long time.”
He nodded to his companion, and Bartek began spreading upon the table pictures and photographs from a file by his feet. We were right at the rear of the Bear, and the waitress had been told that we were okay for the present, so we would be left undisturbed. I drew the first picture toward me with my finger. It was a black-and-white photograph of a group of men, most of them in Nazi uniforms. Interspersed with them were civilians. There were about twelve men in all, and they were seated outdoors at a long wooden table littered with empty wine bottles and the remains of food.
“The man at the back, on the left, is Mathias Stuckler,” said Bartek. “The other men in uniform are members of the Special SS group. The civilians are members of the Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, incorporated into the SS in 1940. Effectively, it was Himmler’s research institute, and it was far from benign in its methods. Berger, its race expert, saw the potential for experimentation in the concentration camps as early as 1943. He spent eight days at Auschwitz that year, selecting over a hundred prisoners to measure and assess, then had them all gassed and shipped to the anatomy department at Strasbourg.
“All Ahnenerbe staff held SS rank. These are the men who died at Fontfroide. This photograph was taken only a few days before they were killed. By this point, many of Stuckler’s comrades from Der Führer Regiment had died trying to halt the Allied advance after D-day. The soldiers with him in this picture were all that remained of his most loyal cadre. The rest ended up in Hungary and Austria, fighting alongside the flotsam of the Third Reich until the last day of the war. They were committed men, albeit ones committed to the wrong cause.”
There was nothing very distinctive about any of the figures in the group, although Stuckler was taller and bulkier than the rest, and a little younger. His features, though, were harsh, and the light in his eyes was long spent. I was about to lay the photograph to one side when Bartek stopped me.
“Look beyond them, to the people behind.”
I examined the background. There were military men at some of the other tables, sometimes accompanied by women but more often surrounded by others of their kind. In one corner, a man sat drinking alone, a half-empty glass of wine before him. He was discreetly looking at the SS group while the photograph was being taken, so his face was partially visible.
It was Brightwell. He was marginally slimmer, and with slightly more hair, but his tumorous neck and the slightly feminine tilt to his features dispelled any doubts as to his identity.
“But this photograph was taken nearly sixty years ago,” I said. “It must have been doctored.”
Reid looked dubious. “It’s always possible, but we think it’s authentic. And even if this one is not, there are others about which there can be no doubt.”
I drew the rest of the images nearer to me. Most were black-and-white, some sepia-tinted. Many were dated, the oldest being from 1871. Frequently they depicted churches or monasteries, often with groups of pilgrims in front of them. In each photograph the specter of a man lurked, a strange, obese figure with full lips and pale, almost luminous skin.
In addition to the photographs, there was a high-quality copy of a painting, similar to the one Claudia Stern had shown to me, possibly even by the same artist. Once again, it depicted a group of men on horseback, surrounded by the clamor and violence of war. There were flames on the horizon, and all around them men were fighting and dying, their sufferings depicted in intricate detail. The men on horseback were rendered distinctive by the symbol on their saddles: a red grapnel. They were led by a man with long dark hair and dressed in a cloak, beneath which his armor could be seen. The artist had painted his eyes slightly out of scale, so that they were too large for his head. One had a white cast to it, as though the paint had been scratched to reveal the blank canvas beneath. To his right, the figure of Brightwell held a banner marked with a red grapnel in one hand. The other held the severed head of a woman by its hair.
“This is like the painting that I saw,” I said. “It’s smaller, and the horsemen in this one are the focus, and not just an element, but it’s very similar.”
“This painting shows the military action at Sedlec,” said Bartek. “Sedlec is now part of the Czech Republic, and we know that, as the myth has it, this was the site of the confrontation between Immael and the monk Erdric. After some discussion, it was decided that it was too dangerous to keep the statue at Sedlec, and that it should be hidden. The fragments of vellum were dispersed, in each case entrusted only to the abbot of the monastery in question, who would share this knowledge with just one other of his community as death neared. The abbot of Sedlec was the only member of the order who knew where each box had been sent, and once they had been distributed he sent the statue on its journey to its new hiding place.
“Unfortunately, while the statue was in the process of being moved, Sedlec was attacked by the men in the painting. The abbot had succeeded in hiding the Black Angel, but the knowledge of its whereabouts was lost, because only he knew the monasteries to which the map fragments had been entrusted, and the abbots in question were sworn to secrecy under threat of excommunication and perpetual damnation.”
“So the statue remains lost, if it ever existed?” I said.
“The boxes exist,” said Reid. “We know that each contains a fragment of some kind of map. True, it may all be a great ruse, an elaborate joke on the part of the abbot of Sedlec. But if it is a joke, then he was killed for it, and a great many others have died for it since.”
“Why not just let them look for it?” I said. “If it exists, they can have it. If it doesn’t, they’ve wasted their time.”
“It exists,” said Reid simply. “That much, in the end, I do believe. It is its nature that I dispute, not its existence. It is a magnet for evil, but evil is reflected in it, not contained within. All of this”—he indicated the material on the table with a sweep of his hand—“is incidental. I have no explanation as to how Brightwell, or someone who resembles him to an extraordinary degree, came to be in these images. Perhaps he is part of a line, and these are all his dead kin. Whatever is the case, the Believers have killed for centuries, and now is the time to put a stop to them. They’ve grown careless, largely because circumstances have forced their hand. For the first time, they think they are drawing close to securing all of the fragments. If we watch them, the order can identify them and take steps against them.”
“What kind of steps?”
“If we find evidence linking them to crimes, we can hand that information over to the authorities and have them tried.”
“And if you don’t find evidence?”
“Then it will be enough to make their identities known, and there will be others who will do what we cannot do.”
“Kill them?”
Reid shrugged.
“Imprison them, perhaps, or worse. It’s not for me to say.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t be killed.”
“I said that they are convinced that they can’t be destroyed. It’s not the same thing.”
I closed my eyes. This was madness.
“Now you know what we know,” said Reid. “All we can ask is that you share with us any knowledge that might help us against these people. If you meet with Stuckler, I would be interested to hear from you what he had to say. Similarly, if you succeed in finding the FBI agent, Bosworth, you should tell us. In all of this, he remains an unknown.”
I had told them about Bosworth on the journey into Portland. It seemed that they were already aware of him. After all, he had tried to tear apart one of their churches. Still, they did not know where he was, and I decided not to tell them that he was in New York.
“And finally, Mr. Parker, I want you to be careful,” said Reid. “There is a controlling intelligence at work here, and it’s not Bright-well.”
He tapped his finger against the copy of the painting, allowing it to rest above the head of the armored captain with the white mark on his eye.
“Somewhere there is one who believes that he is the reincarnation of the Captain, which means that he suffers from the greatest delusion of all. In his mind, he is Ashmael, driven to seek his twin. For the present, Brightwell is curious about you, but his priority is to find the statue. Once that is secure, he will turn his attention back to you, and I don’t think that will be a positive development.”
Reid leaned across the table and gripped my shoulder with his left hand. His right reached into his shirt and removed from it a black-and-silver cross that hung around his neck.
“Remember, though: no matter what may happen, the answer to all things is here.”
With that, he removed the cross and handed it to me. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it.
∗ ∗ ∗
I returned to my house alone. Reid and Bartek had offered to accompany me, and even to stay with me, but I politely declined. Maybe it was misplaced pride, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the possibility that I needed two monks to watch my back. It seemed like a slippery slope that would eventually lead to nuns accompanying me to the gym, and the priests from Saint Maximilian’s running my bathwater.
There was a car parked in my driveway when I pulled in, and my front door was open. Walter was lying on the porch mat, happily gnawing on a marrowbone. Angel appeared behind him. Walter looked up, wagged his tail, then returned to his supper.
“I don’t remember leaving the door open,” I said.
“We like to think that your door is always open to us, and if it isn’t, we can always open it with a pick. Plus, we know your alarm codes. We left a message on your cell.”
I checked my phone. I hadn’t heard it ring, but there were two messages waiting.
“I got distracted,” I said.
“With what?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
I listened to my messages as I walked. The first was from Angel. The second was from Ellis Chambers, the man I had turned away when he came to me about his son, the man I had advised to seek help elsewhere. His words deteriorated into sobs before he could finish telling me all that he wanted to say, but what I heard was enough.
The body of his son Neil had been found in a ditch outside Olathe, Kansas. The men to whom he owed money had finally lost their patience with him.