Book of Secrets (21 page)

Chapter 5

IN WHICH A FINAL TOAST IS DRUNK, AND THE SIBLINGS BID THEIR FAREWELLS

A pretty trick, Sister Jane
, spoke the brother, savoring the last of his glass,
turning on the
brigands using their own tactics.

  They deserved no better, I suppose,
answered the sister,
and we could do no worse. I wonder,
though, at your tale. From whence do you suppose
the children were brought to their island sanctu
ary? Another ship, perhaps, or from some
surpassingly unknown land?

  To that,
the brother replied,
I have scarcely an an
swer. It will remain, I would suppose, yet another of
the questions which shall remain unanswered, like
the floating island and the web-handed dwellers be
neath the waves. The seas are deep, as you well
know, and hold mysteries many and strange.
 

  The sister nodded her agreement, and then refilled their glasses, emptying the carafe of its dark wine.

  A final toast, then
, she recommended,
ere the
night is done. To the mysteries of the ancient sea.
She then lifted her glass on high, its crystal catching the light from the brassier and sending it in rainbow shards against the far wall. 

  And to the pursuit of justice
, seconded the brother, raising his glass in kind.

  The two brought the glasses one final time to

their lips, and drained them each dry. Then the brother stood, and straightened himself. 

  Yes,
she replied, standing herself.
We've much
to do in the coming days, and scant time until we
must take to the waves again.

  We must not wait so long a time again before re
uniting,
the brother instructed.
I grow lonesome 
for familial company.
  As do I, my brother.

  The two embraced, and then made for the hallway, where each retired to their personal chambers. Come the morning they attended to the business of readying their ships for another voyage, and within a fortnight each had again put to sea.

  The Black Hand, in his diverse guise, spread its fingers of justice over the waves once more, and held injustice in its grip. Two years would pass until the siblings again would reunite, and then for the last time. For the present, though, each sailed with a lightened heart, knowing they were not alone in the world, even when faced with mysteries the depths of which no man might ever hope to fathom.

I managed to sleep almost to noon the next day, awoken only by the untimely entrance of the housekeeper, the sound of her jangling keys working its way unsettlingly into my dreams. She backed out, apologizing in broken English, but by then it was too late. Catching a glance at the bedside clock and seeing the time, I immediately panicked, realizing only after jumping to my feet that I had nowhere to be for a good seven hours.

  I ordered up some room service, sticking to the old standards of pork products, breads and fruit. When it arrived, the fruit well past all concerns, the bread an insult to bakers everywhere, and the bacon and sausage menacingly discolored, I settled for a cup of coffee and flipped on the television. I'd learned years before that daytime TV was no place to spend any amount of time, and the disquieting children's programs and too-outrageous-to-be-true talk shows only served to deepen that conviction.

Giving up, I helped myself to another shower, made myself as presentable as possible and, packing up my gear, headed downstairs to check out.

  On the way out the doorman solicitously offered to have my car brought around front, obviously hoping for one last easy tip. What cash was left was going to be needed that night if things played as expected, so I politely declined. He dropped the act and stopped just short of kicking me off the curb.

  I had about a two-hour drive ahead of me, south across the border into Arizona, and had originally planned to spend the afternoon nosing around Marconi's haunts, seeing what I could find out. Amador's little performance the night before had gotten more of a reaction out of me than he expected, though, and I was a little gun-shy about making too many waves in the pool. It wasn't that I was particularly worried; I just didn't necessarily want to go looking for trouble. Best to let it find me at its own pace.

  I decided I'd probably overstayed my welcome in Vegas, figuring that if I were to stick around any number of people might come out of the woodwork and stumble across me, not least of which would be Marconi's landlord itching for his fat check. That in mind, I gassed up the car, stocked up on cigarettes and snacks, and headed out of town to the south.

* * *

I'd begun to feel like my whole life was spent in cars, driving to and from hotels. I was having trouble remembering the last time I'd stayed in the same place three days running, or slept in my own bed for more than a couple of nights in a row. The life of the carefree reporter, so attractive just a few years before, was beginning to wear a little thin.

  I had always laughed at people like my grandfather, tethered down and fenced in, like voluntary prisoners, rarely stirring even past their own front door. I knew that the old man had spent some time traveling when he was younger – the knickknacks and mementos that were crammed in the house to the rafters were proof enough of that – but from earliest memories he was just like another piece of furniture. I could remember seeing him out of the house only a handful of times, usually uncomfortable and suspicious. Now, a little more charitably, I could look back and see that in a sense the world had changed around him, and he seemed so ill at ease out in it because it was no longer the world he knew.

  Normally, I wouldn't have given the old man so much credit, but I was in for a drive, and car trips tend to make me sentimental. Thinking about the old man, and the papers and books he'd obviously collected for years, I started to think of him in terms of the stories he'd kept. Like the Richmond Taylor of the pulp novel, all sophistication and class, perfectly in his element among the elite and the dregs of society alike. Remembering the odd friends who turned up from time to time, ancient men who arrived unannounced to share a quiet drink with my grandfather and then disappeared again, that seemed to make sense. I'd never really thought about it, but few of those guys I'd have picked out of a lineup as my grandfather's "type." Some were money, sure, like O'Connor and his ilk, but others seemed like they'd be more at home splitting a bottle with Tan than sitting up in Richmond Taylor's study sipping a glass of port. But still they came, seeming more to respect the old man more than like him, and sometimes with little gifts or a pat on the head for my brother and me. We hated them, of course, though we accepted their gifts without question.

  One time, when the old man was feeling uncharacteristically familial, he had my brother and me sit on the floor snacking on cookies Maria had baked while he sat talking with another old guy. His name was Martin, or Martinson, or something like that, and he was a big, beefy bruiser of a guy. Bald headed, red as a beet, he had hands like hams and laughed loud and long whenever the chance permitted. He brought us little plastic police badges and cap-guns, and I liked him immediately.

  The two of them were talking about old guy stuff, my brother and I not really paying attention, when the bald bruiser started in on the time my grandfather had spent out west. Suddenly my grandfather jumped out of his chair, told his friend to be quiet, and ordered my brother and me out of the room. The friend looked embarrassed, like he said something he knew he shouldn't have, and kept his head down while we kids shuffled out of the room, pocketing a couple more cookies as we went.

  In retrospect, it's hard to imagine what my grandfather didn't want us to hear. It wasn't as if he cared about us hearing people talking about sex, or crime, or drugs. To be honest, he seemed hardly to care what we heard at all, so long as we kept ourselves clean and out of trouble. Later, he'd insist on intense study and physical exercise, which helped me make my eventual decision to leave, but when we were younger we were unwanted pets, to be tolerated underfoot on occasion, but best kept out of sight and out of mind.

I often wondered just what the old man hoped to accomplish with his work schedules and exercise regimen. After a few years of that, the toughest training Tan could think to put me through seemed like elementary school recess. But though I despised my grandfather for years for putting us through it, I never once really understood the point.

  After studiously ignoring us from the age of five on, when we turned twelve suddenly we were the focus of every bit of the old man's attention. The day before we were to start the seventh grade, after Maria had taken us shopping and helped pick out new school clothes and tried unsuccessfully to get us into coordinated outfits, my grandfather called us both down to the study and had us stand in front of his desk while he paced back and forth behind it.

  He was quiet for a long while, aimlessly wandering along the wall and running his wrinkled hands over the stacked papers and books, brushing the display cases and framed prints. We were getting restless when, finally, he spoke.

  He told us that we'd been wasting our time all the years we'd been with him, not once taking advantage of his obvious wisdom and years of experience. He had let it go on long enough, and had decided it was time for a change.

  My brother and I risked a glance at one another, and I could tell he was thinking the same as me: the old man had finally lost it. Patrick, always braver in these situations than I, was about to speak when our grandfather came around the desk and put a heavy hand on my left shoulder, another on Patrick's right.

  He kept talking, shaking us as he did, telling us about the dangers the world presented day in and day out. He said it was getting worse, that horrors unimaginable when he was our age had simply become routine, and that terrors undreamt of in those days were now being unleashed on the world.

  For these reasons, he said, and for others he hoped one day to reveal, we had to improve ourselves, to be better equipped for the challenges of a changing world.

  At this point I was starting to worry. This was sounding like something that might threaten to cut into my free time, already booked solid with MTV and superhero comics, and I could tell Patrick felt the same way. We had little choice, though, terrified of the old man as we were, and so we waited patiently while he spelled out his grand scheme. From what we could tell, it involved very little sleep, lots of study and even more exercise.

  Up an hour before school for calisthenics, a cold shower, and then a ten block run to school. Then our normal classes, where we were naturally expected to excel, a midday meal of fruits and carbohydrates, then the ten block run home, an hour of martial arts exercises, and two hours of intense study in addition to our regular schoolwork. A few hours sleep, and up the next morning to do the whole thing again. Weekends varied only in that the ten-block run was a round trip, with a brief pause at the school playground for a drink of water, and the extra hours for study and exercise. Every day, seven days a week, every week of the year.

  I managed to make it almost two years of that before finally throwing in the towel, packing a bag, and running away to New Orleans. But by that time it was too late. Though I could take on any grown man barehanded, and was better educated than most of my teachers, I carried away with me only two things: I hated my grandfather, and I never wanted to get up before dawn again.

I pulled into the town of Sizemore with time to spare and enough gas to get me the rest of the way, so I stopped at a fast food joint to fill up before continuing on. Sizemore was little more than an off-ramp and a blinking red light, with the requisite truck stops and fast food eateries. Identical to every other blip on the map, it didn't look like the town had been there more than ten years which, from what Tan had told me, sounded about right.

  The auction, Tan had said, was to be held at one of the more secure locations in the American Southwest, which he figured would have proved a test to break into even in his best days. Built a decade before, an oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert, it had originally been intended as a health spa, to put it charitably, or a fat farm when you got right down to it. It did pretty well the first few years, made the investors real happy, and then the bottom fell out when their resident nutritionist was discredited by every medical journal in the country. Even the alternative types, having no problems with sticking yourself full of needles and setting them on fire, thought this guy was just a bit too far out. It could be said that the world simply wasn't ready for a diet composed entirely of reconstituted human waste, or the "Second Harvest" as the brochures discretely put it, but then again maybe it was just a horribly wrong idea.

  In any case, when it was all said and done Second Harvest Enterprises was left with vast tracts of developed land in the ass end of nowhere, with the little gas-stop town of Sizemore the only thing to have profited from the whole farrago – understandably, as it was the only place within one hundred miles to offer non-feces-based foodstuffs to the starved and starving guests of the spa. Efforts to unload the property on the public market failed miserably, the entire affair having left in the mouths of investors a bad taste.