That night, I spoke to Rachel for the first time since she’d left. Frank and Joan were at a local charity fund-raiser, and Rachel and Sam were alone in the house. I could hear music playing in the background: “Overcome by Happiness” by the Pernice Brothers, kings of the deceptively titled song.
Rachel sounded frantically upbeat, in the demented way common to those who are on heavy medication or who are trying desperately to keep themselves together in the face of imminent collapse. She didn’t ask me about the case, but chose instead to tell me what Sam had done that day, and talk of how Frank and Joan were spoiling her. She inquired about the dog, then held the receiver to Sam’s ear, and I thought I heard the child respond to my voice. I told her that I loved her, and that I missed her. I told her that I wanted her always to be safe and happy, and I was sorry for the things that I had done to make her feel otherwise. I told her that even if I wasn’t around, even if we couldn’t be together, I was thinking of her, and I would never, ever forget how important she was to me.
And I knew Rachel was listening too, and in this way I told her all the things that I could not say to her.
∗ ∗ ∗
The dog woke me. He wasn’t barking, merely whining softly, his tail held low while he wagged it nervously, as he did when he was trying to make amends for doing something wrong. He cocked his head as he heard some noise that was inaudible to me, and glanced at the window, his mouth forming strange sounds that I had never heard from him before.
The room was filled with flickering light, and now there was a crackling sound in the distance. I smelled smoke, and saw the glow of the flames eclipsed by the drapes on the window. I left my bed and pulled the drapes apart.
The marshes were aflame. Already, the engines from the Scarborough fire department were converging on the conflagration, and I could see one of my neighbors on the bridge that crossed the muddy land below my house, perhaps trying to find the source of the blaze, fearful that someone might be hurt. The flames followed paths determined by the channels and were reflected in the still, dark surface of the waters, so that they appeared both to rise into the air and to ignite the depths. I saw birds swooping against the redness, panicked and lost in the night sky. The thin branches of a bare tree had caught fire, but the fire engines had now almost come to a halt, and hoses would soon be trained upon the tree, so perhaps it might yet be saved. The damp of winter meant that the blaze would be easily contained, but the burned grass would still be visible to all for months to come, a charred reminder of the vulnerability of this place.
Then the man on the bridge turned toward my house. The flames lit his face, and I saw that it was Brightwell. He stood unmoving, silhouetted by fire, his gaze fixed upon the window at which I stood. The headlights of the fire trucks seemed to touch him briefly, for he was suddenly luminous in his pallor, his skin puckered and diseased as he turned away from the approaching engines and descended into the inferno.
∗ ∗ ∗
I made the call early the next morning, while Louis and Angel ate breakfast and tossed pieces of bagel for Walter to catch. They too had seen the figure on the bridge, and if anything, his appearance had deepened the sense of unease that now colored all of my relations with Louis. Angel seemed to be acting as a buffer between us, so that when he was present a casual observer might almost have judged that everything between us was normal, or as normal as it had ever been, which wasn’t very normal at all.
The Scarborough firemen had also witnessed Brightwell’s descent into the burning marsh, but they had searched in vain for any sign of him. It was assumed that he had doubled back under the bridge and fled, for the fire was being blamed upon him. That much, at least, was true: Brightwell had set the fire, as a sign that he had not forgotten me.
The smell of smoke and burned grass hung heavily in the air as I listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line, then a young woman answered.
“Can I speak to Rabbi Epstein, please?” I asked.
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Tell him it’s Parker.”
I heard the phone being put down. There were young children shouting in the background, accompanied by a timpani of silverware on bowls. Then the sound was drowned out by the closing of a door, and an old man’s voice came on the phone.
“It’s been some time,” said Epstein. “I thought you’d forgotten me. Actually, I rather hoped that you’d forgotten me.”
Epstein’s son had been killed by Faulkner and his brood. I had facilitated his revenge on the old preacher. He owed me, and he knew it.
“I need to talk to your guest,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why is that?”
“It risks drawing attention. Even I don’t visit him unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“How is he?”
“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. He does not say a great deal.”
“I’ll need to see him anyway.”
“May I ask why?”
“I think I may have encountered an old friend of his. A very old friend.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Louis and I took an early-afternoon flight down to New York, the journey passing in near silence. Angel opted to stay at the house and look after Walter. There was no sign in Portland or New York of Brightwell, or of anyone else who might have been watching us. We took a cab to the Lower East Side in heavy rain, the traffic snarled up and the streets thronged with glistening commuters heartily weary of the long winter, but the rain began to ease as we crossed Houston Street, and by the time we neared our destination the sun was spilling through holes in the clouds, creating great diagonal columns of light that held their form until they disintegrated on the roofs and walls of the buildings.
Epstein was waiting for me in the Orensanz Center, the old synagogue on the Lower East Side where I had first met him after the death of his son. As usual, there were a couple of young men around him who clearly had not been brought along for their conversational skills.
“So here we are again,” said Epstein. He looked the same as he always did: small, gray-bearded, and slightly saddened, as though, despite his efforts at optimism, the world had somehow already contrived to disappoint him that day.
“You seem to like meeting people here,” I said.
“It’s public, yet private when necessary, and more secure than it appears. You look tired.”
“I’m having a difficult week.”
“You’re having a difficult life. If I were a Buddhist, I might wonder what sins you had committed in your previous incarnations to justify the problems you appear to be encountering in this one.”
The room in which we stood was suffused with a soft orange glow, the sunlight falling heavily through the great window that dominated the empty synagogue, lent added weight and substance by some hidden element that had joined with it in its passage through the glass. The noise of traffic was muted, and even our footsteps on the dusty floor sounded distant and muffled as we walked toward the light. Louis remained by the door, flanked by Epstein’s minders.
“So tell me,” said Epstein. “What has happened to bring you here?”
I thought of all that Reid and Bartek had told me. I recalled Brightwell, the feel of his hands upon me as this wretched being reached out to me and tried to draw me to himself, and the look on his face before he gave himself to the flames. That sickening feeling of vertigo returned, and my skin prickled with the memory of an old burning.
And I remembered the preacher, Faulkner, trapped in his prison cell, his children dead and his hateful crusade at an end. I saw again his hands reaching out for me through the bars, felt the heat radiating from his aged, wiry body, and heard once more the words that he spoke to me before spitting his foul poison into my mouth.
What you have faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. . . . The things that are coming for you are not even human.
I could not tell how it came to be, but Faulkner had a knowledge of hidden things. Reid had suggested that perhaps Faulkner, the Traveling Man, the child killer Adelaide Modine, the arachnoid torturer Pudd, maybe even Caleb Kyle—the bogeyman who had haunted my grandfather’s life—were all linked, even if some of them were unaware of the ties that bound them to one another. Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and the whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.
“A woman told me of a book, a part of the biblical apocrypha,” I said. “I read it. It spoke of the corporeality of angels, of the possibility that they could take upon themselves a human form and dwell in it, hidden and unseen.”
Epstein was so silent and still that I could no longer hear him breathe, and the slow rise and fall of his chest appeared to have ceased entirely.
“The Book of Enoch,” he said, after a time. “You know, the great rabbi, Simeon ben Jochai, in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, cursed those who believed in its contents. It was judged to be a later misinterpretation of Genesis because of correspondences between the two texts, although some scholars have suggested that Enoch is actually the earlier work, and is therefore the more definitive account. But then, the apocryphal works—both the deuterocanonical books, such as Judith, Tobit, and Baruch, that follow the Old Testament, and the excised later gospels, like those of Thomas and Bart-holemew—are a minefield for scholars. Enoch is probably more difficult than most. It is a genuinely unsettling piece of writing, with profound implications for the nature of evil in the world. It is hardly surprising that both Christians and Jews found it easier to suppress it than to try to examine its contents in the light of what they already believed, and thereby attempt to reconcile the two views. Would it have been so difficult for them to see the rebellion of the angels as being linked to the creation of man? That the pride of the angels was wounded by being forced to acknowledge the wonder of this new being? That they perhaps also envied its physicality, and the pleasure it could take in its appetites, most of all in the joy that it found by joining with the body of another? They lusted, they rebelled, and they fell. Some descended into the pit, and others found a place here, and at last took upon themselves the form that they had so long desired. An interesting speculation, don’t you think?”
“But what if there are those who believe it, who are convinced that they are these creatures?”
“Is that why you want to see Kittim again?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that I have become a beacon for foul things, and the worst of them are now closer than they have ever been before. My life is being torn asunder. Once, I could have turned away, and they might have passed me by, but it’s too late for that now. I want to see the one you have, to confirm to myself that I am not insane and that such things can and do exist.”
“Perhaps they do exist,” said Epstein, “and maybe Kittim is the proof, but we have encountered resistance from him. He very quickly built up a tolerance to the drugs. Even sodium pentothal no longer has any significant effect. Under its influence, he merely rants, but we have given him a strong dose in anticipation of your visit, and it may allow you a few minutes of clarity from him.”
“Do we have far to go?” I asked.
“Go?” said Epstein. “Go where?”
It took me a moment to understand.
“He’s here?”
∗ ∗ ∗
It was little more than a glorified cell, accessed through a utility closet in the basement. The closet was encased in metal, and the back wall doubled as a door, accessed by both a key and an electronic combination. It swung inward to reveal a soundproofed area, divided in two by steel mesh. Cameras kept a constant vigil on the area behind the wire, which was furnished with a bed, a sofa, and a small table and chair. There were no books that I could see. A TV had been fixed to the far corner of the wall, on the other side of the barrier and as far away from the cell as possible. There was a remote control device for it on the floor beside the sofa.
A figure lay on the bed, wearing only a pair of gray shorts. His limbs were like bare branches, with every muscle visible to the eye. He looked emaciated, thinner than any man that I had ever seen before. His face was turned to the wall, and his knees were drawn up to his chest. He was almost bald, apart from a few stray strands of hair that clung to his purple, flaking skull. The texture of his skin reminded me of Brightwell and the swelling that afflicted him. They were both beings in the process of slow decay.
“My God,” I said. “What happened to him?”
“He refused to eat,” said Epstein. “We tried to force-feed him, but it was too difficult. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that he was trying to kill himself, and, well, we were prepared to see him die. Except he didn’t die: he merely grows a little weaker with every week that goes by. He sometimes takes water, but nothing more. Mostly, he sleeps.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Months.”
The man on the bed stirred, then turned over so that he was facing us. His skin had contracted on his face, so that the hollows in the bone were clearly visible. He reminded me of a concentration camp inmate, except that his catlike eyes betrayed no hint of weakness or inner decay. Instead they glittered emptily, like cheap jewels.
Kittim.
He had emerged in South Carolina as an enforcer for a racist named Roger Bowen, and a link between the preacher Faulkner and the men who would have freed him if they could, but Bowen had underestimated his employee and had failed to understand the true balance of power in their relationship. Bowen was little more than Kittim’s puppet, and Kittim was older and more corrupt than Bowen could ever have imagined. His name hinted at his nature, for the kittim were said to be a host of dark angels who waged war against men and God. Whatever dwelt within Kittim was ancient and hostile, and worked for its own ends.
Kittim reached for a plastic beaker of water and drank from it, the liquid spilling onto the pillow and sheets. He raised himself until he was seated on the edge of the bed. He stayed like that for a time, as though building up the strength that he needed, then stood. He wavered slightly, and seemed about to fall, but instead shuffled across the cell toward the wire. His bony fingers reached out and gripped the strands as he forced his face against the mesh. He was so thin that, for an instant, I almost thought he might try to press his face between them. His eyes shifted first to Louis, then to me.
“Come to gloat?” he said. His voice was very soft, but betrayed no hint of his body’s decay.
“You don’t look so good,” said Louis. “But then, you never looked good.”
“I see you still bring your monkey with you wherever you go. Perhaps you could train him to walk behind you holding an umbrella.”
“Still the same old joker,” I said. “You know, you’re never going to make friends that way. That’s why you’re down here, away from all the other children.”
“I am surprised to see you alive,” he said. “Surprised, yet grateful.”
“Grateful? Why would you be grateful?”
“I was hoping,” said Kittim, “that you might kill me.”
“Why?” I replied. “So you can . . . wander?”
Kittim’s head tilted slightly, and he looked at me with new interest. Beside me, Epstein was watching us both carefully.
“Perhaps,” he said. “What would you know of it?”
“I know a little. I was hoping you could help me to learn more.”
Kittim shook his head.
“I don’t think so.”
I shrugged.
“Then we’ve nothing more to say. I would have thought that you’d be glad of a little stimulation, though. It must get lonely down here, and dull. Still, at least you have a TV. Ricki will be coming on soon, and then after that you can watch your stories.”
Kittim stepped away from the wire and sat down once again on his bed.
“I want to leave here,” he said.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I want to die.”
“Then why haven’t you tried to kill yourself?”
“They watch me.”
“That’s not answering the question.”
Kittim extended his arms and turned his hands so that the palms faced upward. He looked at his wrists for a long time, as though contemplating the wounds that he might inflict upon them, were he able.
“I don’t think you can kill yourself,” I said. “I don’t think that choice is open to you. You can’t end your own existence, even temporarily. Isn’t that what you believe?”
Kittim didn’t reply. I persisted.
“I can tell you things,” I said.
“What things?”
“I can tell you of a statue made of silver, hidden in a vault. I can tell you of twin angels, one lost, one searching. Don’t you want to hear?”
Kittim did not look up as he spoke.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Tell me.”
“An exchange,” I said. “First, who is Brightwell?”
Kittim thought for a moment.
“Brightwell is . . . not like me. He is older, more cautious, more patient. He wants.”
“What does he want?”
“Revenge.”
“Against whom?”
“Everyone. Everything.”
“Is he alone?”
“No. He serves a higher power. It is incomplete, and seeks its other half. You know this.”
“Where is it?”
“Hidden. It had forgotten what it was, but Brightwell found it and awoke what lay within. Now, like all of us, it cloaks itself, and it searches.”
“And what will happen when it finds its twin?”’
“It will hunt, and it will kill.”
“And what will Brightwell get, in return for helping it?”
“Power. Victims.”
Kittim lifted his gaze from the floor and looked unblinkingly at me.
“And you.”
“How can you know that?”
“I am aware of him. He thinks that you are like us, but that you fell away. Only one did not follow. Brightwell believes that he has found that one in you.”
“And what do you believe?”
“I do not care. I wanted only to explore you.”
He lifted his right hand and stretched his fingers, twisting them in the air as though it were flesh and blood through which his nails were slowly tearing.
“Now tell me,” he said, “what do you know of these things?”
“They call themselves Believers. Some are just ambitious men, and some are convinced that they are more than that. They’re looking for the statue, and they’re close to finding it. They are assembling fragments of a map, and soon they will have all the information that they need. They even built a shrine here in New York, in readiness to receive it.”
Kittim took another sip of water.
“So they are close,” he said. “After all this time.”
He did not seem overjoyed at the news. As I watched him, the truth of Reid’s words became clearer to me: evil is self-interested, and ultimately without unity. Whatever his true nature, Kittim had no desire to share his pleasures with others. He was a renegade.
“I have one more question,” I said.
“One more.”
“What does Brightwell do with the dying?”
“He touches his mouth to their lips.”
“Why?”
I thought I detected a note of what might have been envy in Kit-tim’s voice as he answered.
“Souls,” said Kittim. “Brightwell is a repository of souls.”
He lowered his head and lay down once more on his bed, then closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall.
∗ ∗ ∗
The Woodrow was a nondescript place. There was no doorman in green livery and white gloves to guard its residents’ privacy, and its atrium was furnished with the kind of hard-wearing green vinyl chairs beloved of struggling dentists everywhere. The outer doors were unsecured, but the inner doors were locked. To their right was an intercom and three lines of bells, each with a faded nameplate beside it. Philip Bosworth’s name was not among those listed, although a number of the plates were blank.
“Maybe Ross’s information was wrong,” said Louis.
“It’s the FBI, not the CIA,” I said. “Anyway, whatever else I can say about him, Ross doesn’t screw around when it comes to information. Bosworth is here, somewhere.”
I tried each of the anonymous bells in turn. One was answered by a woman who appeared to be very old, very bad-tempered, and very, very deaf. The second was answered by someone who could have been her older, deafer, and even more cantankerous brother. The third bell rang in the apartment of a young woman who might well have been a hooker, judging by the confusion about an “appointment” that followed.
“Ross said the apartment was owned by Bosworth’s folks,” suggested Louis. “Maybe he has a different last name.”
“Maybe,” I conceded.
I ran my finger down the lines of bells, stopping halfway down the third row.
“But maybe not.”
The name on the bell was Rint, just like that of the man responsible for the reconstruction of the Sedlec ossuary in the nineteenth century. It was the kind of joke that could come only from someone who had once tried to dig up the floor of a French monastery.
I rang the bell. Seconds later, a wary voice emerged from the speaker box.
“My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for Philip Bosworth.”
“There’s nobody here by that name.”
“Assistant SAC Ross told me how to find you. If you’re concerned, call him first.”
I heard what might have been a snicker, then the connection was terminated.
“That went well,” said Louis.
“At least we know where he is.”
We stood outside the closed doors. Nobody came in and no one went out. After ten minutes went by, I tried the Rint bell again, and the same voice answered.
“Still here,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“To talk about Sedlec. To talk about the Believers.”
I waited. The door buzzed open.
“Come on up.”
We entered the lobby. There was a blue semicircular fitting on the ceiling above us, concealing the cameras that watched the entrance and the lobby. Two elevators, their doors painted gunmetal gray, stood before us. There was a key slot in the wall between them, so that only residents could access them. As we approached, the elevator on the left opened. The top half of the interior was mirrored, with gold trim. The bottom half was upholstered in old yet well-maintained red velvet. We stepped inside, the doors closed, and the elevator rose without either of us touching a button. Clearly, the Woodrow was a more sophisticated residence than it appeared from outside.
The elevator stopped on the top floor, and the doors opened onto a small, windowless, carpeted area. Across from us was a set of double wood doors leading to the penthouse apartment. There was another blue surveillance bubble mounted on the ceiling above.
The apartment door opened. The man who greeted us was not what I had expected. He wore blue chinos and a light blue Ralph Lauren shirt, and there were tassels on his tan penny loafers. The shirt was buttoned wrongly, though, and the trousers were pressed and without a single wrinkle, indicating that he had just dressed himself in a hurry from his closet.
“Mr. Bosworth?”
He nodded. I put his age at about forty, but his hair was graying, his features were newly lined with pain, and one of his blue eyes was paler than the other. As he stepped aside to admit us he shuffled slightly, as though suffering from pins and needles in one or both feet. He held the handle of the door with his left hand, while his right remained fixed in the pocket of his chinos. He did not offer to shake my hand, or Louis’s. Instead, he simply closed the door behind us and walked slowly to an easy chair, holding on to its armrest with his left hand as he lowered himself down. His right hand still did not leave his pocket.
The room in which we now stood was impressively modern, with a pretty good view of the river through a row of five long windows. The carpet was white, and the seating areas furnished entirely with black leather. There was a wide-screen TV and a DVD player in a console against one wall, and a series of black bookcases stretched from floor to ceiling. Most of the shelves were empty, apart from a few pieces of pottery and antique statuary that were lost in their minimalist surroundings. A large smoked-glass dining table stood to my left, surrounded by ten chairs. It looked like it had never been used. Beyond it, I could see a pristine kitchen, every surface gleaming. To the left was a hallway, presumably leading to the bedrooms and bathroom beyond. It was like a show apartment, or one that was on the point of being vacated by its current owner.
Bosworth was waiting for us to speak. He was clearly a sick man. His right leg had already spasmed once since we had arrived, causing him some distress, and there was a tremor in his left arm.
“Thank you for seeing us,” I said. “This is my colleague Louis.”
Bosworth’s eyes flicked between us. He licked at his lips, then reached for a plastic tumbler of water on the small glass table beside him, carefully ensuring that he had it firmly in his grip before he raised it to his mouth. He sipped awkwardly from a plastic straw, then returned the tumbler to its table.
“I spoke to Ross’s secretary,” he said, once he had drained the last of the water. “She confirmed your story. Otherwise, you would not be here now, and you would instead be under the supervision of this building’s security guards while you waited for the police to arrive.”
“I don’t blame you for being cautious.”
“That’s very magnanimous of you, I’m sure.”
He snickered again, but the laughter was directed less at me than at himself and his debilitated condition, a kind of double bluff that failed to convince anyone in the room.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the leather sofa on the other side of the coffee table. “It’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of company, other than that of doctors and nurses, or concerned members of my own family.”
“May I ask what you’re suffering from?”
I already had some idea: the tremors, the paralysis, the spasms were all symptoms of MS.
“Disseminated sclerosis,” he said. “Late onset. It was diagnosed last year, and has progressed steadily from the first. In fact, my doctors say the speed of my degeneration is quite alarming. The vision in my right eye was the first obvious symptom, but since then I have endured the loss of postural sense in my right arm, weakness in both of my legs, vertigo, tremors, sphincter retention, and impotence. Quite a cocktail of miseries, don’t you think? As a result, I have decided to leave my apartment and abandon myself permanently to the care of others.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s interesting,” said Bosworth, seemingly ignoring me completely. “Only this morning, I was considering the source of my condition: a metabolic upset, an allergic reaction on the part of my nervous system, or an infection from some outside agent? I feel it is a malevolent illness. I sometimes picture it in my head as a white, creeping thing extending tendrils through my body, implanted within to paralyze and ultimately kill me. I wonder if perhaps I unwittingly exposed myself to some agent, and it responded by colonizing my system. But that is the stuff of madness, is it not? Agent Ross would be pleased to hear it, I think. He could pass it on to his superiors, reassuring them that they were right to end my career in the manner in which they did.”
“They said that you desecrated a church.”
“Excavated, not desecrated. I needed to confirm a suspicion.”
“And what was the result?”
“I was proved right.”
“What was the suspicion?”
Bosworth raised his left hand and waved it gently from side to side in a slow, deliberate movement, perhaps to distinguish the gesture from the tremors that continuously shook the limb.
“You first. After all, you came to me.”
Once again, I was drawn into the game of feeding information to another without exposing too much of what I knew, or what I thought might be true. I had not forgotten Reid’s warning from the night at the Great Lost Bear: that somewhere there was one who believed that a Black Angel dwelt within him, and so I did not mention the involvement of Reid and Bartek, or the approaches made to me by Stuckler. Instead, I told Bosworth about Alice, and Garcia, and the discoveries made in the Williamsburg building. I revealed most of what I knew about the map fragments, and Sedlec, and the Believers. I talked of the auction, and the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop, and the Book of Enoch.
And I spoke of Brightwell.
“All very interesting,” he said, when I had finished. “You’ve learned a lot in a short time. He rose painfully from his chair and went to a drawer at the base of one of his bookshelves. He opened it, retrieved what was inside, and placed it on the table between us.
It was part of a map, drawn in red and blue inks upon thin yellowed paper, and mounted on a piece of protective board. In the top right-hand corner was a black foot with taloned toes. The margins were filled with microscopic writing, and a series of symbols. It was similar in content to the fragments I had seen in Stuckler’s treasury.
“It’s a copy,” said Bosworth, “not an original.”
“Where did this come from?”
“San Galgano, in Italy,” said Bosworth, as he resumed his seat. “The monastery at San Galgano was one of the places to which a fragment was sent. It’s no more than a beautiful ruin now, but in its time, its façade was noted for the purity of its lines, and it was said that its monks were consulted during the construction of the Siena cathedral. Nevertheless, it was subject to repeated attacks by Florentine mercenaries, its revenues were plundered by its own abbots, and the Renaissance in Italy led to a falling off in the number of those willing to answer the monastic call. By 1550, there were only five monks left there. By 1600, there was only one, and he lived as a hermit. When he died, the San Galgano fragment was found among his possessions. Its provenance was not understood initially, and it was retained as a relic of a holy man’s life. Inevitably, rumors of its existence spread, and an order came from Rome that it should be entrusted to the care of the Vatican immediately, but by that time a copy had already been made. Subsequently, further duplicates were created, so the San Galgano section of the map is in the possession of any number of individuals by now. The original was lost on the journey to Rome. The monks transporting it were attacked, and it was said that rather than allow it to be seized along with their money and possessions, they burned it in a fit of panic. And so, all that remain are copies such as this one. This, then, is the only piece of the Sedlec map to which many people have enjoyed access, and the only clue that existed for many years as to the nature of the directions to the statue’s resting place.
“The original creator of the map invented a simple, but perfectly adequate, means of ensuring that the location contained within it remained unknowable without all the parts of the document. Most of the writing and symbols are merely decorative, and the drawing of the church refers simply to Bernard’s concept of how such places of worship should look. It is an idealized church, and nothing more. The real meat, as you’re no doubt aware, is here.”
Bosworth pointed to a combination of Roman numerals and a single letter D in one corner.
“It’s simple. Like any treasure map worth its salt, it’s based around distances from a set point. But without all of the distances involved, it’s useless, and even with all of them to hand, you still need to know the location of the central reference point. All the boxes, all of the fragments, are ultimately meaningless unless you have knowledge of the location in question. In that sense, the map might be regarded as a clever piece of sleight of hand. After all, if people were busy searching for what they believed to be crucial clues, then they would be less likely to try to find the thing itself. Each fragment does, however, offer one piece of useful information. Look again at the copy, particularly at the imp in the center.”
I stared at the document, and at the small demonic character Bosworth was pointing at. Now that I looked more closely, I could see from its skull that it was a very crude version of the bone statue that Stuckler had shown to me, barely more than a stick drawing. There was lettering visible around it, forming a circle that enclosed the figure.
“Quantum in me est,” said Bosworth. “As much as in me lies.”
“I don’t understand. It’s just a drawing of the Black Angel.”
“No, it’s not.” Bosworth practically seethed at my inability to make the connections that he had made. “See here, and here.” The trembling index finger of his left hand brushed the page. “These are human bones.”
Bosworth was right. It was not a stick figure, but a bone figure. More care had been taken with the illustration than first appeared.
“The whole illustration consists of human bones: bones from the ossuary at Sedlec. This is a depiction of the re-creation of the Black Angel. It is the bone statue that conceals the actual location of the vault, but most of those who have sought the Angel, wrong-footed by their obsession with the fragments and dismissive of this fragment because of its relative ubiquity, have been unable to acknowledge that possibility, and those who have correctly interpreted its message have kept the knowledge to themselves, while widening their search to include the replica. But I made the connection, and if this man Brightwell is clever enough, then he has made it too. The statue has been missing since the last century, although it was rumored to be in Italy before World War II broke out. Since then, there has been no trace of it. The Believers are not looking merely for the fragments, but for those who possess the fragments, in the hope that they may also have in their possession the bone sculpture. That is why Garcia re-created it in his apartment. It is not just a symbol, it is the key to the thing itself.”
I tried to take in all that he had said.
“Why are you telling us this?” said Louis. It was the first time he had spoken since we entered Bosworth’s apartment.
“Because I want it found,” said Bosworth. “I want to know that it is in the world, but I can no longer find it for myself. I have money. If you find it, I will have it brought to me, and I’ll pay you well for your trouble.”
“You never explained why you dug up the floor of the monastery at Sept-Fons,” I said.
“There should have been a fragment there,” said Bosworth. “I traced its path. It took me five years of hunting rumors and half-truths, but I did it. Like so many treasures, it was moved for its own protection during the Second World War. It went to Switzerland, but was returned to France once it was safe to do so. It should have been beneath the floor, but it was not. Someone had taken it away again, and I know where it went.”
I waited.
“It went to the Czech Republic, to the newly founded monastery at Novy Dvur, perhaps as a gift, a token of their respect for the efforts of the Czech monks to keep the faith under the Communists. That has always been the great flaw in the Cistercians’ stewardship of the fragments over the last six hundred years: their willingness to entrust them to one another, to expose them briefly to the light. That is why the fragments have slowly come into the possession of others. The Sedlec fragment auctioned yesterday is, I believe, the fragment transported from Sept-Fons to the Czech Republic. It did not belong in Sedlec. Sedlec has not existed as a Cistercian community for nearly two centuries.”
“So someone put it there.”
Bosworth nodded eagerly. “Someone wanted it to be found,” he said. “Someone wants to draw attention to Sedlec.”
“Why?”
“Because Sedlec is not merely an ossuary. Sedlec is a trap.”
Then Bosworth played his final card. He opened the second folder, revealing copies of ornate drawings, each depicting the Black Angel from different angles.
“You know of Rint?” he asked.
“You used his name as a pseudonym. That’s how we found your bell. He was the man who redesigned the ossuary in the nineteenth century.”
“I bought these in Prague. They were part of a case of documents linked to Rint and his work, owned by one of Rint’s descendants, who I found living in near penury. I paid him well for the papers, much more than they were worth, in the hope that they would provide more conclusive proof than they ultimately did. Rint created these drawings of the Black Angel, and according to the seller, there were once many more than this, but they were lost or destroyed. These drawings were Rint’s obsession. He was a haunted man. Later, others copied them, and they became popular among specialized collectors with an interest in the myth, but Rint made the originals. The question was, how did Rint come to create such detailed drawings? Were they entirely products of his own imagination, or did he see something during his restoration that allowed him to base his illustrations upon it? I believe that the latter is the case, for Rint was clearly greatly troubled in later life, and perhaps the bone sculpture still rests in Sedlec. My illness prevents me from investigating further, which is why I am sharing this knowledge with you.”
Bosworth must have seen the expression on my face change. How could he have failed to do so? It was all clear now. Rint had not glimpsed the bone sculpture, because the bone sculpture had long been lost. According to Stuckler, it spent two centuries in Italy, hidden from sight until his father discovered it. No, Rint saw the original, the Black Angel rendered in silver. He saw it in Sedlec when he was restoring the ossuary. Bosworth was right: the map was a kind of ruse, because the Black Angel had never left Sedlec. All those centuries, it had remained hidden there, and at last both Stuckler and the Believers were confident that all the information they needed to recover it was within their grasp.
And I knew also why Martin Reid had given me the small silver cross. I rubbed my fingers across it, where it rested alongside my keys. My thumb traced its lines, and the letters etched on its rear in a cruciform shape.
S
L E C
D
“What is it?” said Bosworth.
“We have to go,” I said.
Bosworth stood and tried to stop me, but his weak legs and wasted arm made him no match for me.
“You know!” he said. “You know where it is! Tell me!”
He tried to raise himself, but we were already making for the door.
“Tell me!” screamed Bosworth, forcing himself up. I saw him stumbling toward me, his face contorted, but by then the elevator doors were closing. I caught a last glimpse of him, then we were descending. I got to the lobby just as a pair of uniformed men emerged from the doorway to the right of the elevator bank. Inside I could see TV monitors and telephones. They stopped as soon as they saw Louis. More precisely, they stopped as soon as they saw Louis’s gun.
“Down,” he said.
They hit the ground.
I went past him and opened the door. He backed out, then we were on the street, running fast, melting into the crowd as the last minutes ticked away and the Believers commenced the slaughter of their enemies.