A ragged and demented figure was detained by the Strasbourg authorities down by the Rhine near the city wastedumps, in the industrial area known as Fontville. Tall, cadaverously thin, and impossibly cold, he was said to have been living off rats and the corpses of the many horses which had been dumped there in the wake of the war, and spoke in garbled, antique French, or what sounded like English, although the phrasing was almost as odd. Clearly some kind of revenant, and also an addict, he ranged the hospital he was taken to in search of poisons, and should have died from ingesting the arsenic he stole from the garden store, but huddled instead in the cellars and raved at people to leave him alone. Some of the physicians with an interest in insanity, or who’d read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, thought he might make an interesting subject for study, which seemed to distress him almost as much as exposure to the sun. But he was clearly intelligent in his lucid passages, and claimed to be an American, and to have access to money, if only the necessary telegrams of confirmation could be sent back to New York.
He was released into the care of a US-funded charity, and checks were made, and he was confirmed to be one Karl Haupmann, and a doctor of medicine as well. Obviously some problem with the birthdate, but that was settled with a few strokes of a pen. Passage, then, back to New York, with a fresh passport, and lying on a bunk in the belly of a thrumming steamer with a good supply of heroin, thanks to the funds which had grown in an old account.
The Statue of Liberty still came as a surprise to him, though, and the Jersey Shore was nothing but factories and smoke. And as for Manhattan… Karl Haupmann crossed the gangplank. Showed his papers. Wondered at the scale of the buildings and the sudden shortness of the women’s hair. Many of them were eating, or smoking, or openly putting on their makeup in the street, and looked like beautiful boys. Or perhaps they were. And this traffic—the reek of it, and the noise. Long, slow-moving rows of automobiles directed from tall towers at intersections by whistle-blowing cops. Hey, buddy, what the hell… Dodging tramcars and bicycles. Tripping over kerbs. Stumbling into people who shrank back from this cringing yet wild-seeming man. But here, at last, was the strung-out washing of the Bowery, still loomed over by the creaking, rattling, reassuring shadows of the El.
The house just stood there. Its shutters undrawn, its windows still intact, and the back door ground open into shunned darkness just as before. Karl, is that you? The stale air of memory like a long inheld breath.
The same old desk still waited in the same study with the cracked leather chair beside it, and the same dust lingered amid the echoes along the corridors, but the greyed face that loomed from the darkening mirror was no longer merely his own.
Once, there had been a man called Ezekiel Morel, a réparateur in God’s great city of Strasbourg, who’d looked out from the window of his workroom as the chimneys smoked and the storks danced, and dreamed simple dreams, hoped simple hopes. Then, a creature called Sibylla had arrived with the twilight, and a whole life had gone by quicker than falling, toward a dark full stop of slaughter, and the non-life that lay beyond.
Blood-seeker, soul-feeder, shape-changer, lycanthrope, vampire, loup garou, and succubae. There were words in every tongue, wrapped in cobwebs of superstition and prayer, for what Ezekiel Morel had become. He was the glance averted. He was the black of a blink. But not just the blood—no. Leering old face at the edges of everything, he rejoiced in the sour sigh, in the pleading release, and what did any of it matter, now Sibylla and everything else he’d once held sacred was lost? Breaking and re-breaking his fingers and prowling the edges of battle, following a crimson trail as some fool called Napoleon marched his armies across Europe, for there was never enough death.
But before that, and now, there was something else. A face unseen in that darkly opulent carriage. A sly, knowing withdrawal. A man who was not a man who’d dwelled in a palace beside the Rhine known as Fontville, and before that in a castle called Skala in the kingdom of Polska, or Poland, where something even worse had existed and still lingered as a shadow in the cellars below. And before even that, there had been the quiet village of Esbarun beneath the flanks of the Pahar Mountains, with its dark-breathing cave and those half-hieroglyphs in a hidden clearing, and another Sibylla its acolyte, oracle, and priestess, whom this figure, this creature, had somehow betrayed…
Age piled on age, myth upon mystery. And, just as he, Karl Haupmann, had returned to this house in the Bowery, the thing of a man who’d once been Ezekiel Morel had been drawn toward this so-called New World. Right here amid the old newspapers and shipping pages of his father’s old office, there were records of a vessel, the Tola, en route from Hamburg via Brest, which had beached on Morris Island near Charleston in 1821 with most of the crew drowned, but its few survivors telling of some ancient, blood-sucking stowaway with claws for hands. He could still almost hear the crashes and groans as the vessel keeled and broke apart on the rocks. Could taste the blood and the bilge.
Then, seated for days at the long tables in New York’s Main Public Library, he could follow a roughly northward progression of records and half-memories, year after year, and death upon death. Towns, cities, and rural backwaters. The Smoky Mountains, and Maryland—then a slave state where almost every kind of life came cheap. The face at the window. The body exhumed. Rumours, exorcisms, and unlikely tales. Pottersville and Allentown. Parsippany and Paterson and the South Mountain Reservation, and then even Hackensack. So close he could see the growing skyline of New York, and hear the calling clamour of its voices. Then, once again, came the boom of guns and drums, and the march of armies, until everything narrowed, and there was a misted field in the Carolinas with easy pickings to be had among the nearly dead. Stop, in the name of the US Army! A voice, a presence, to be fled into a dark strand of trees, where Karl Haupmann and Ezekiel Morel tussled beside an iron-staved trench, and forever knew the other’s face.
He looked up along the brass reading lamps with a start. It was late. A dim hum of New York traffic and the bang of distant doors echoed in the Rose Reading Room, although he noticed as he gathered up his pens that another late reader was still seated at her desk. As people often did, she caught the chill of his attention, and looked up. A girl barely into her teens, mosey-haired and raggedly dressed, but something about the exchange, and the Sibylla green of her eyes, caught him before she finally turned with an angry flounce and snapped shut her book.
Ziggurat buildings crowded out the sky in a roar of jackhammer traffic. The churches empty, and all the old, decent tunes long gone, and raucous music tumbling from every basement bar, speakeasy, jump-joint, soda parlour, and temperance café as the Volstead Act spectacularly failed. Men in suits as sharp as their smiles. Women in clattering necklaces, plunging necklines and ever-shorter skirts. No hope and no modesty and no love left in this godless city.
Yet they were all so stubbornly happy. So doggedly merry. So very hard to keep up with too. No use, either, trying to fall back on Karl Haupmann’s fading credentials as a doctor; the Harrison Act had made possession of heroin illegal even for medical purposes. For a while there were druggists who’d kept stockpiles. Then even that supply gave out.
The best product by far was the pharmaceutical grade which came in, black market, from countries where heroin was still legal such Bulgaria, Britain, and Japan. Second best, a long way second, was what was concocted in clandestine, combustible laboratories here in the US. But hard to judge by reputations and appearances alone. Bottles could be tampered with, labels changed, and the white powder cut with anything from talcum powder to building cement.
Prowling, night after night, the rag-edges of the city. Clambering stairways beneath the crackle of old syringes, to stand on tarpaper roofs with the jewelled lights of the city spread all about amid verminous mattresses and the bodies of the lost and the near-dead. Mewls and whimpers and averted gazes. They, the so-called junkies who often collected refuse to finance their habit, came to know Karl Haupmann, and almost thought of him as one of their own. Is that you? He demanded answers. Wanted to know what they truly saw. Sometimes, it seemed as if that sly figure from the carriage in Strasbourg was just ahead of him, spreading dark welcoming arms. But everything always faded as he stumbled on.
For the sake of some kind of pretence of sustenance, he scraped up food from the rusted bins down in the kitchen in his house in the Bowery. Cold coffee, weevil-dotted semolina, old porridge, gritted flour, or tinned stuff that had lost its label and taste, which he’d bear back to his shuttered study on an old, cracked cornflower-pattern plate, and then sit waiting for the day to fade, and for the easing wings of his next syringe.
He stared down at the cornflower plate. He’d bought it with his mother, back when the accents along the Bowery were different, and the butchers still hung fresh-caught Harlem rabbits on hooks outside their stores, and there was no El. Oh my, Karl, does not the pattern of blue flowers on the plate in that little shop look wonderful? Then home to a house filled with echoes, and Mother’s laugh and the croak of her accent caught somewhere deep in her throat.
Then it was evening, with Mother sitting at one end of the long table and Father at the other, and Mother making polite plate-and-spoon noises as the long, dark silences rolled along the corridors, and the muffled shouts of the kids came from outside. “Kike” meant “Jew.” But the Haupmanns didn’t have hats and beards, or dress like crows. Didn’t even go to church on Sundays either, when the rest of the Bowery fell almost quiet.
Much better to be up in the vast, tented ship of Mother’s bed, reading A Thousand and One Nights. Or creeping out together from the house like escapees from the sultan’s dungeons to stroll the battlements of Croton Reservoir. And is it not wonderful, Karl, for us to be up here, and you holding my hand as if you are mein galan… my beau?
Mysteries within mysteries. Worlds within worlds. All whispered, shared. A secret? Yes so many secrets. Unfolding her hands from the place it seemed wrong to call her belly, where a little brother or sister was growing. An idea far stranger than any of Scheherazade’s tales. A brother, a sister, a playmate, a spiderweb constellation of hopes, until something in Mother’s room began making low, bovine bellows, and buckets sloshed up and down the stairs. Then Cook rushed past with red stains on her apron, and something like a skinned rabbit clutched in a towel. And that, it seemed, was all.
Then, late at night, a voice that couldn’t be Mother’s began shrieking words that didn’t even belong out on the street, and, next morning, a whistling carpenter put up heavy shutters at her windows, and a new lock on her door. Study, especially Latin, was a reassurance because of the way it all fitted so neatly together. As was math. Diagrams, as well, in a book about horses and dogs, which revealed them to be very like rabbits, at least when stripped of their fur and flesh.
Karl, is that you?
The words tickled like cobwebs as he passed along the familiar corridor. Turning the new key in the new lock, shadows the colour of old paper fled around the great bed upon which they’d once sailed to magical lands.
“Is it almost night again, Karl? Even with these shutters locked, I can tell from the change in sound. Come here…”
He stood firm with his fists balled when she patted the edge of her bed.
“Oh…? Well. I do not mind.” She gave a long, slow swallow. Then an even slower smile. “But perhaps you could do this one thing for me, mein liebste, my darlingest, and unlock those shutters so that your mother might see the sun before the last of the light fails? I believe it is the same key as the one you hold in your hand.”
Metal turned. Wood creaked. The sunset sky flung deep crimson across all New York.
“Ah! So much better… Please, please, leave them open. It will be our little secret, yes? Like the ones we used to share…”
Then it was night, and even the Bowery finally fell silent until everyone was awoken by a stablelad’s screams. A window had been flung open, and there was a shape, as if of a winged and bloodied angel, sprawled on the street.
Karl Haupmann put aside the cornflower-patterned plate and slid open a drawer in his father’s desk. Felt the weight of the Navy Colt for the first time in… What? More than fifty years. Admired its simple sense of power and purpose. Almost a kind of innocence, for what was the worst thing a gun could ever do?
Inside the cylinder were the last two of the bullets he’d once had made by a silversmith in St. Louis, back when this pursuit still seemed to have some meaning. He turned it around, angling it up until he was looking down into the dark heart of its barrel. Then from outside in the city came the rattle of the El, and, as its passage sparked and faded, he put the weapon down. For an evil far worse than the thing he believed he’d been chasing when he was on the trail of Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley was close in this gleaming city of spires and towers.
Five men sat behind a scratched desk in a painfully bright room in New York’s Bellevue Hospital. They affected beards, glasses, and a wearied yet scholarly air. One had brown stains on his cuffs. Another, although Karl Haupmann had no idea why it should be needed, wore a stethoscope. They looked from him to the letter he’d sent them, and frowned. There was a smell of cherries, rot, and formaldehyde.
“So your father was also a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“And your grandfather a merchant?”
“Yes.”
“But your great-grandfather served as a physician with the Union during the Civil War?”
“Yes.” He nodded, stiff in a new suit. “Although his father before him was another merchant. And I, although I can’t claim to have put my skills to much use since the war, also have medical qualifications.”
“You seem almost young, Doctor Haupmann, to have qualified and worked in that way.”
“That’s what people often say—almost. And I also know how to drive a motor vehicle. And, of course, how to deal with the dead. That, and I have small independent means.”
Shrugs and glances were exchanged. “But none of this tells us why you should want to involve yourself in this line of work.”
“Because I believe I can do it. And, frankly, because I doubt if there are many other qualified men prepared to drive around this city at night collecting corpses, especially on the sort of salary you’re offering.”
The doctors of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, generally known as the OCME, were harried, ostracised, and short of resources. Occasional moments of flashbulb glory on the courtroom steps only added to the hostility from their fellow professionals, and a public mixture of curiosity and revulsion toward their work. Always, there were too many bodies. No time left, certainly, to pick over the causes of deaths, which already seemed obvious.
So many of them. Starvations and suicides. Automobile accidents, exposure and simple old age. Drownings in the bathtub, or in the East River. Office heart-attacks, subway heatstrokes and barroom stabbings. Gangster killings. Poisonings from denatured alcohol sold as hooch. Forgotten old ladies with mice nesting in their skulls. Tammany Hall city fathers found sprawled in brothel beds.
All to be borne to the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital in a nondescript black van, and there pronounced formally dead. Some, mostly those with money or family influence, or because of the luridness of their deaths, were given attention and carefully autopsied, and became the subject of formal inquests and newspaper reports, and sometimes grew into cause célèbres. But just as many were taken away, still unknown and unidentified, to be buried in mass graves at New York’s Potter’s Fields.
Karl Haupmann already knew that exsanguination, death from sudden loss of blood, left very few signs. It was something you had to be actively looking out for—absence of perfusion of the capillaries, skin too pale at the lips and mottled at the extremities, evidence of lesion or laceration that hadn’t been caused by post-mortem decay, insects or vermin—and even then it was hard to be sure.
But still. A society banker, and a ticket collector on the subway, and a hobo found curled in his wheelbarrow, frozen rigid by the frost. Lives so very different in their living, but all exhibiting the same small punctures on or around the neck, or at some other prominent vein in the body, and dying for no other good reason, here in New York, under the darkest of moons.
Sometimes, standing at the edge of a back alley or the lip of a staircase, Karl Haupmann was certain that something else had lingered to watch, and that his presence had become just another part of some sly, eternal ritual. After all, it must be hard to be so very old, and alone. He could almost hear the approaching rattle of a haughty carriage, although these days he supposed it would be some fancy car. Karl, is that you? Can you dance? The unknown voice which crooned to him as he plunged in the next syringe, night after night, corpse after corpse.
Mornings back in the Bowery after finishing delivering the corpses in the black van remained an important ritual to him. Cold porridge and month-old coffee in the shuttered study, and reading today’s New York Times before adding it to the piled decades, for it was more vital than ever that he strive to keep up.
The year was now 1929 and there were adverts for this season’s latest styles, and furnished rooms to let, no blacks, no dogs, while Life Saver candies offered exciting new flavours, and it was scientifically proven that Mint Parasols made with finest Virginia tobacco freshened the breath. And Hirohito was the new emperor of Japan, and the Pope was shaking hands with Mussolini, and then there were the sports reports, and then the stocks and business pages which, in their talk of endless profit, now struck him as far too fantastical to be true. Then came the columns covering upcoming auctions and sales, where a small photograph showed the portrait of a beautiful but unknown woman, part of an “extraordinary triptych,” the other two described as “too disturbing for public display,” which were among the many lots of treasures which were being auctioned by an art dealers called Mantons that afternoon at the Biltmore Hotel, and his heart seemed to stop.
The weather had turned wet, but this world full of daylight still seemed preternaturally strange to him as grey flocks of umbrellas shone along Madison Avenue and long cars pulled up in sighs of spray. There were Negro porters and a smell of wet coats inside the Biltmore, and waiters in the domed ballroom where the auction was to be held were offering glasses of something called “strawberry champagne.” People touched each other as they talked, as if engaging in some subtle game, and threw back their heads to laugh as they puffed from long ivory cigarette holders. But the atmosphere wasn’t completely alien. Karl Haupmann had encountered the same sense of excitement disguised as boredom years ago in the dockland bondhouses, and so had Ezekiel Morel in the Cathedral of Our Lady on festival days in Strasbourg.
Nothing was yet on display, but there was a fat catalogue for sale at a price which should have bought several of the objects it described. Lot seventy-eight being “this striking triptych of an unknown female saint” which had been painted by “an anonymous ecclesiastical artist” in “a late-medieval style” and possibly showed “the influence of the Flemish Primitives.” Some damage to the third panel, while the real intent of depicting “the stages of age and decay through life and on into death” remained unknown. The sale not at the instruction of some impecunious lord or duke, but of the Conseil Général of the Département of Bas-Rhin in the Préfecture of Strasbourg. The panels had probably been lying in the municipal cellars below him as he ploughed through papers almost thirty years before in the records hall of what had then been the Deutsches Reich.
He found a chair near the back. There were knowing murmurs as each new item was borne onto the stage followed by discreet flurries of hands and subtle nods. Furniture. Paintings. Statues. Swords. First and second folios of the famous words of starving poets. The frontage of an entire Florentine palce, brought here brick by numbered brick. All the money of this city—of ironworks and shipping lines, of whisky stills and hit Broadway tunes—swirled around this grand ballroom, lot by lot by lot.
“Now ladies, gentlemen…” The auctoneer straightened his bow tie. “You’ll have seen reports about the next lot in some of the papers. But, in their strangness and peculiar beauty, they remain unsurpassed. Three painted wooden panels, believed to have been executed in Strasbourg during the later part of the Ancien Régime, artist unattributed, as these naïve religious works generally are.”
A shudder passed through the entire audience as men in brown overalls placed the panels on easels at centre stage. Someone gave a barking laugh. Another sobbed. Several people got up noisily and left.
The auctioneer was right. No grainy photograph or florid description could do justice to these panels. Sibylla, Sibylla, and Sibylla. Once young, once impossibly elderly, once, in the smeared paint and the scarred wood of the final panel, in some state that seemed beyond even death. It wasn’t the horror of these changing images which made them so disturbing, but the contrasting sense of joy in life and creation which came not from Sibylla Lys, but from the hands and heart of the man who’d once been Ezekeil Morel.
The smells of the workroom. The dancing storks and the cries of the street vendors and the squeak of chalk, and a smile of welcome on Grete’s plainly beautiful face. It all came back to him. And now here he was in this machine of a city, dragged ever further into a future he couldn’t comprehend.
“Ladies. Gentlemen…” The auctioneer measured the room’s mood, and the first bid, and also the second, came in surprisingly low. Karl Haupmann’s raised hand received a nod. A counter bid was followed by a scatter of others, and the price rose into the thousands as the other players began to show their intent.
He still had some shares, which had risen greatly in price, and credit nowadays was ridiculously easy to obtain. He could work overtime at the morgue—days, even, if he had to—and sell the house on the Bowery, for whatever it was worth. Live on the streets. Change lives again. Plead and mutter and beg. The ballroom dimmed. He bent hard at his fingers, feeling the bones straining to snap. All that mattered was possessing these panels. But even as he thought these thoughts, the Karl Haupmann who’d lived far too long in New York knew that the Sibylla Triptych was beyond his reach.
Applause, part admiration and part relief, surged as the auctioneer rapped his gavel at a figure which would have once bought an entire Midwestern state, and brown-coated men bore the Sibylla Triptych away. Soon, the entire auction was finished, and Karl Haupmann hurried in search of whoever had made the winning bid.
“Sir? Excuse me?”
“Oh yes?” The tall, elegant man half-turned to him, pulling up his fur collar as he awaited a taxi beneath the Biltmore’s dripping awning.
“I was wondering why you bought lot seventy-eight.”
“I bought those items,” he drawled in a waft of cologne, “for the same reason I buy most things.”
It seemed likely the Sibylla Triptych would be of interest to a private collector with a taste for the bizarre—or something far worse. For a moment, Karl Haupmann had thought his long search might have ended. But this man was simply too real, too businesslike, and too innocently pleased. “You’re a dealer? You plan to make a private sale?”
“That’s already taken care of.”
“So you purchased it for a client?”
A moue of disgust crossed the man’s face. “My name is Grey Garthside, and I’m a connoisseur and great friend to the art world.” He looked Karl Haupmann up and down, took in the long features, the black gloves, the tinted glasses, and the same stained black coat and workmanlike shoes he wore for his duties at the morgue. “And who exactly are you?”
“Just another interested party.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ve lost your chance. These auctions can be cruel affairs, especially for those unfamiliar with how they work. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
Karl Haupmann grabbed the man’s arm as he turned away. “I’d be very interested to speak to your client.”
“Impossible, I’m afraid. Discretion and privacy is everything, as you’d understand if you knew anything at all about this field.” Grey Garthside was holding his ground. Although, as with most people who stood too close to Karl Haupmann, his eyes betrayed a widening unease. “But, as you clearly don’t—”
“He lives in New York, this client of yours? He collects things? You do other work for him?”
“As I say—”
“I can help you.”
He frowned. “Help me to do what?”
“I’ve travelled. I’ve been to Europe. France. Germany. Poland. The Ottoman Empire. I have knowledge… connections…”
Other people were starting to look their way as they put up umbrellas and climbed into limousines. He let go of Grey Garthside’s arm, and watched as he slipped into the next taxi and disappeared into the lights and rain.
He worked on in a daze. Sibylla and Sibylla and Sibylla, but another shift needing doing, and another after that, and the night streets of the city parted once again to receive Karl Haupmann and his black van.
A catholic priest found dead in his confessional. A junior copywriter, finally noticed slumped in a subway carriage by night cleaners at the rail yard. A suicide mother discovered when a neighbour beat down the door to complain about her baby’s screams, although by then the baby was also dead. He laid them all on a gurney and brought them to the morgue.
Then came a call to an address on the edge of the Lower East Side past the Third, Second, and First Avenue tenements. An area he thought of as being filled with gaunt poverty, but things had changed in the sudden, inexplicable way of this city, and new blocks of smart apartment houses were now crowding to get a view of the East River from under the Queensboro Bridge. He saw the cop cars parked beside a new glass-fronted apartment in somewhere called Beekman Place, and pulled up.
“Say, if it ain’t the Grim Reaper,” said the cop, who was standing guard in a wax jacket on the steps. “Might have to hang around awhile before you get to carry off this one…” He shook his head and spat. “You know what it’s like when a rich fruit gets dead.”
Karl Haupmann squeaked his gurney through the marble foyer past a mill of other residents and a worried property agent, and took the elevator to the third floor. A moneyed smell of cut flowers and floor polish up here, and the apartment was awash with gilt mirrors, leather-lined bookcases, and dark, ancient paintings of saints, but despite the OCME’s continued pleas, cops were cops, and the scene was messed with bootprints, gum wrappers, screwed-up coffee cups, and cigarette butts. Not, in this case, that anyone expected to find any evidence of foul play, but this was a better place than most to pass the night.
Grey Garthside was seated, half-turned, in what Karl Haupmann reckoned you might possibly call a Louis XIV chair, and seemed, as much as the dead ever did, to be at rest. He wore a herringbone jacket and pale turnover slacks. He might have just sat down to take off his street shoes. The alarm had been raised by a laundry maid who’d arrived at the apartment at eight that evening. No reports of any other visitors and, as yet, the body displayed no evident rigour, although the flesh had an oddly waxy chill and seemed surprisingly pale.
With a feeling of falling, he drew down the loose white cravat, and saw flecks of blood and small, neat, twin punctures on the left side of the neck. Glancing back to check that the cops were still absorbed in ruining a potential crime scene, he patted the pockets. Found coins and keys, and some cash in a wallet. That, and the acceptance form that Grey Garthside had taken from an auction house functionary at the Biltmore Hotel a few days before. Now it was countersigned, in fresh black ink, in the same indecipherable sideways scrawl he’d last seen decades earlier, and back in Strasbourg, on a deed for the transit of goods from the city of Warsaw, dated 1651.
The coroner’s report gave pulmonary aneurysm as the cause of death, and the few brief newspaper articles were equally anodyne. Grey Garthside was regarded as a collector rather than a dealer, and kept no accounts, filed no tax returns, and ran nothing as vulgar as a gallery or, heaven forbid, a store. Here was someone who had many acquaintances, but few, if any, friends. He certainly had habits—attending the opera, taking lunch with academics and fellow specialists, going to a Fifth Avenue tailor who made his suits, and an upmarket drugstore for his handmade cigarettes—but had lived discreetly and determinedly alone.
Apart from the laundry maid, there was no evidence of any other visitor to his apartment on the night of his death, less still of a break-in or assault, nor any record of any recent dealings with his clients, who clearly all treasured their well-earned privacy, and the fee for the triptych that he’d collected by taxi from Mantons had been paid by an anonymous banker’s draft.
In any other time and in any other city, the impenetrable gloss of the man’s existence might have seemed false. But not now. Not here. Even the taint of tax evasion, secreting the proceeds of crime and receiving stolen goods couldn’t grub Grey Garthside’s elegant cuffs. He was just another cunning citizen of this brashly naïve city. Even more than its metamorphic bedrock, he was part of the foundation of the dream on which New York was built.
But there had to be something else, something much darker and more dangerous, out there in this bright city. Something that had wanted the triptych, had the wealth to buy it, and was always prepared to kill to cover its tracks. Extraordinary, really, a kind of miracle, to think that such a creature could still exist in this modern world. The figure in the carriage, the master of Skala who’d beckoned a blonde-haired girl called Ila down a room of flickering tapestries. Changed her into the Sibylla he, it, had betrayed in another age. A hole punched through the heart of all hope and reason, which must be destroyed.
He glared at the dead laid on their gurneys, and the living crowding the streets, daring them to give up the truth. Karl, is that you? Can you dance? He was the stumbling, fumbling fool in some eternal jester’s court.
Another parade. There were always parades in this city, and Broadway was blocked just ahead. But this time there were no cotton candy carts and piggyback kids, and the approaching boom of drums and brass roused jeers and a jostle of competing banners among the crowd. Scuffles started, the cops were shouldering people back. There was a gritted, bilious atmosphere Karl Haupmann recognised, and detested, from other cities, times and lives.
Here they came. Hooded in white and bearing crosses. He had sat through The Birth of a Nation in the flickering dark of a movie house, and knew about eugenics and the Ku Klux Klan. Knew, too, how the Knights of Columbus thought themselves the last bulwark against Zionism. But it seemed to him, as the hooded men were followed by others in straining, belted uniforms, that the proponents of such ideas would make fare better if they weren’t all so ugly, bald, and fat.
“You’re all monsters, murderers, bastards!”
Fists were shaken, and the commotion intensified as the crowd surged into the parade and the cops took out their batons. The music grew ragged. A huge bass drum leapt down the street and bounced, with balletic precision, through the window of a kosher deli. Elbows jabbed. Fists were flung. As protestors and marchers swarmed, there was a sense that this was exactly how today had always been planned. They might as well have been rival factions of nationalists, anti-slavery marchers, or sans culottes.
“You don’t stand for the people! You stand for the bosses! You’re a disgrace to your class…!”
One young woman stood yelling amid the maze of arms, flags, and swinging crosses, then kicked and struggled as she was borne off in handcuffs by the police.
“Get your hands off me! You have no right…”
Her chin was bloodied, she was wearing mannish workman’s dungarees, and her brown hair was short beneath a drooping scarf, but she was beautiful and her eyes blazed green. Once again he was surprised by a hooded visitor up in a Strasbourg workroom, and everything had turned around at that moment, and had been turning ever since.
She was the girl from the Rose Reading Room. Not Sibylla Lys. Or not exactly. But unbelievably, impossibly, achingly close.