Book of Shadows (19 page)

Rupert Comfort looked at a sky streaked with the orange and red of a late sunset. It would be dark when his wife came back to the car. The white-haired man closed his eyes in a brief, silent prayer to his gods. Let them hold his wife in their hands and protect her. Let her be strong in their strength. Let her walk with all of the Celtic gods at her side.

He and his wife had barely eight days to bring the book back to their village. Eight days to save the lives of their daughter and grandson. Only the actress and the writer remained to be dealt with. One of those two had the book. Both of them would have to die.

But first …

Gregory Vandis peered through the peephole, then put the chain on the door before opening it slowly. His voice was husky with fear.

“Yeah? I mean, what do you want? My mother’s not here. She had to go out.”

“I know. We’ve been trying to ring you, but there’s some sort of trouble with your telephone. It doesn’t seem to be working. Anyway, that’s not important now. We’ve located the book and we need your help to get it. You’re to get your tools and come with us immediately.”

The fat boy’s jaw dropped. “You’ve found it?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not stand out here in the hall and tell the world. Your mother didn’t feel like walking up five flights of stairs, so she sent me instead. I thought all American buildings had lifts?”

“Lifts?”

“Elevators you call them.”

“We, we don’t. This is an old building. It’s kinda crummy. Living here can really gross you out. Where did you find it? Oh, I’m sorry.”

Gregory’s hand shook with excitement as he reached for the chain.

Rowena Comfort stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind her. Her cold, green eyes quickly took in the small, threadbare apartment. “I didn’t say we found it. I said we located it. That’s why we need you and your tools. The book’s in a safety deposit box in a bank on the Upper East Side. Your mother played some small part in helping us. She’s at the bank now.”

“Hey, that’s neat.”

The fat boy grinned, nervously shrugging his shoulders several times. He shoved both hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “When I first saw you just now I thought you might still be mad at me or something. I mean, twice I tried to get into that lady’s apartment and like I bombed out each time. Wow! But like you’re not mad, right?”

Rowena Comfort leaned against the door, both hands on the strap of her shoulder bag. She wore a short-sleeved blue dress and except for white gloves, her muscular arms were bare. “We’re not angry at you, lad. We need you. You’re the mechanical genius, are you not?”

He rubbed his head with both hands, grinning sheepishly. “I guess. Always thought I was kinda good. Did all right with Mr. Shields’ house and his safe. Hey, know something? I never worked on a safe-deposit box in my life. That’s gonna be some kind of a trip. Far out! I get to work inside a bank at night. That is really far out!”

He snapped his fingers. “Bet Mr. Bofil had something to do with getting us inside the bank, right?”

“He told us what to do, yes.”

“Man, I knew it. I just knew it. Know something, Mrs. Comfort? Mr. Bofil just might end up as president one day. He’s really smart and he knows everybody. I’m sorta glad he’s one of us.”

Gregory quickly ran over to the phone, picked up the receiver and listened. “Hey, you’re right. The line’s dead.”

To prevent us from being interrupted. To prevent you from telephoning your mother.

Gregory looked scornfully at the telephone. “Man, the phone company ain’t shit. I could fix this sucker like that. Maybe when I come back and it still ain’t working, maybe I’ll go down in the basement and check out the wiring. I’m putting together a ‘blue box,’ you know—the thing that lets you make long distance telephone calls for free? Man, when I’m finished I can call Hawaii or Texas or South America and it ain’t gonna cost me nothin’.”

Rowena Comfort said, “I thought I heard someone else in here.”

Gregory opened a closet door and took a black tool box down from a shelf. “You probably heard the TV. I was by myself before you came and I turned it off when you rang the bell. Me and my mother, we don’t have many friends outside of the coven, you know? Once in a while my mother she meets some guy, but that don’t last long.”

The tall woman pushed away from the door. “May I please use your bathroom before we go?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s right over there. We ran out of toilet paper so all we got is napkins. But they’re clean.”

He smiled at her. “Gee, Mrs. Comfort, I’m glad you’re not mad at me for screwing up.”

Inside the tiny bathroom, she closed the door and put her ear to it. Gregory was moving around, whistling and clinking tools together. From the street came sounds of police sirens, the wail of an ambulance, and the screech of tires as cars came to an abrupt halt. Rowena Comfort found New York to be a hell on earth, a city of damned souls piled one upon the other. Everyone here lived in a state of fear born of a random violence that had become the twentieth-century equivalent of a medieval plague.

New York was a rotting carcass, putrid and festering, a place where hideously tall buildings blotted out the sky and kept the wind from blowing free. Its people went through life driven by fear or hate, in ignorance of the existence of any higher principles. Because of their lack of comprehension they denied the existence of any god or deity. Like those who believed in nothing, New Yorkers were quick to believe in anything and it was these people who would use the
Book of Shadows
to find Rowena Comfort’s village and wipe it from the face of the earth.

If Gregory told the American police all he knew, Rowena Comfort’s village would face such a fate at the hands of people like these.

Gregory must not talk.

Stepping to the toilet, the tall woman flushed it and looked around. There were two cloth towels hanging on the bathtub faucets. Removing her ritual knife from her shoulder bag, she sliced one of the towels into several strips, then tied the strips together. Her eyes quickly flicked to the basin at her right.

Even though the all-important Mr. Bofil had convinced the Comforts of the necessity for killing Gregory Vandis, the Comforts had insisted on handling every detail of the killing themselves, from time and place to method. All Bofil had to do was lure Denise Vandis out of the apartment.

Anthony Paul Bofil was the most highly placed changeling in New York. He was of immense value to the Comforts’ people, for he was a major political force and could one day be a national figure. Yes, even president. Mr. Bofil was clever. Too clever by half, Rupert had told her privately.

Yet, if a changeling ever became president of the United States …

A staggering thought, Rupert had said.

Gregory, of course, had to die, but Rupert had made it clear to Mr. Bofil that there would be no more turning away from the active pursuit of the
Book of Shadows.
The Comforts didn’t want Gregory leading the police to them, which was why they had agreed with Mr. Bofil that the boy must be eliminated. Rupert, ever alert, had pointed out that Gregory’s death would also benefit Mr. Bofil, a fact Mr. Bofil didn’t deny, adding that a changeling could only protect the village if the changeling himself was protected.

This once, Rupert said. Only this once, Mr. Bofil.

And it must not look like murder.

Rowena Comfort removed her shoulder bag, placing it inside the bathtub. Then she unscrewed the one light, which was over a cracked basin. With her foot she pushed a faded bath mat into a corner, then did the same to a cheap bathroom scale. The tiles beneath her shoes were gray with ground-in dirt.

“Gregory! Come quick, lad! The toilet seems to have backed up! Oh dear, it’s quite dreadful! There’s a bit of flooding!”

“The toilet? Hey, how did that happen? Lemme take a look at it.”

She heard him running toward the bathroom. She exhaled. And waited.

He opened the door and automatically reached for the light switch.

“Damn! That ain’t workin’ either. Man, I told you this was a crummy building. Mrs. Comfort?”

He stepped into darkness.

Behind him, the tall woman kicked the door closed.

Rupert Comfort adjusted the rearview mirror and when he caught sight of his wife’s reflection, he sat up and frowned. Something was wrong. He sensed it from her walk, from the way she cradled her left arm in front of her. In seconds the white-haired man was standing on the sidewalk, waiting.

When she reached him she gritted her teeth and inhaled. “He fought,” she said. “Quite strong he was, quite strong. My arm.”

In the darkness lessened only by street lighting, the blood on her left forearm looked almost black.

“Bit me. The bloody bugger bit me with all the strength he had. Scratched me, too. Damn him!”

“I should have gone.”

“No. We agreed he’d be less suspicious if just one of us showed and that one a woman.”

He said, “Quick, get in the car!”

She was about to ask why when he said, as he pushed her into the vehicle, “Denise. She’s just returned. She’s getting out of a taxi.”

Inside the car, Rowena Comfort said, “Barely made it, we did. I thought Mr. Bofil was supposed to lure her away for an hour at least.”

“He did. It’s almost gone half past ten. You were there much longer than we’d planned. I’ve got to do something about that arm.”

“The park,” she said. “We’ll find the leaves and roots we need there. Blast!”

She let her head flop back against the seat and as he drove away, Rupert Comfort watched Denise Vandis disappear into her apartment building and he was glad her son was dead, if only for what he’d just done to Rowena, a consecrated priest of a religion as old as wind and rain and sun. Gregory Vandis and his mother, while believers in the craft of the wise, lived in a world that Rupert Comfort felt was committing slow but certain suicide. Gregory had just been removed from that world, for which he should be thankful.

On seeing the dead body of her son, Denise Vandis’s screams were so shrill and hideous that two of the neighbors who came to aid her embraced her with more than casual force in order to calm her down. The screams permeated apartments above and below hers, and were so powerful that even the most indifferent in the building could not help but be affected by them. The nerves of those living near the voluptuous and fading beauty that was Mrs. Vandis could not rest easy while she cried out in her grief.

Her neighbors came to her. They came to shut her up and stayed to silently stare at what caused her agony.

Gregory Vandis was on his knees, his head tied tightly to a faucet by towel strips joined together. His head was also face down in water, which now overran the basin and splattered on the dirty cracked tile floor.

“Dude drowned hisself,” murmured an onlooker. “Ain’t that a bitch?”

The light over the basin was on.

Denise Vandis tore herself free from the couple holding her and ran into the bathroom, throwing herself on the wet corpse of her son, clinging to the fat boy and mingling her tears with the running water.

T
HE FOOD AND LIQUOR
for Robert Seldes’ Los Angeles to New York flight was improperly loaded on the plane and had to be restacked before takeoff. Thus Robert arrived in New York an hour later than scheduled. The delay allowed Marisa to save his life.

A depressed Robert had telephoned her from California. Hollywood was giving him a hard time and he was returning to New York for a few days. He insisted she meet him at the airport. His ego had been crucified. He needed stroking. Marisa agreed to pick him up in a limousine and help him lick his wounds; over the phone she refrained from saying
I told you so.

But she had warned him. Hollywood was a tough town, with no more heart than you could stuff in a thimble. It was a city of users, and no one was invited there unless he or she could be exploited. You were a commodity and were paid accordingly, and the whole town was quite upfront about that.
You don’t beat Hollywood,
she’d said.
The best you can do is survive. Not
w
in, just survive.
Hollywood was a shit sandwich and every day you took a bigger bite.

But Robert, ambitious Robert, was confident he could handle fruit-and-nut city. He had more ass than Hollywood had teeth, and anyone who bit him had better bite hard.

Someone had.

The producer who’d bought the film rights to Robert’s book didn’t want a script just yet. Without coming out and saying so, he first wanted Robert to learn the unspoken but rigid rules of movie making, most of which were designed to establish the pecking order. Writers, Robert had to learn, were at the bottom.

The laying down of rules, as with most things in Hollywood, was done to Robert in a polite and laid-back fashion, with smiles and flattery and promises and against a background of sun, sea, expensive homes, and pretty faces.

The producer began with meetings and conferences at the studio, followed by poolside lunches in Bel Air, cocktails at the Polo Lounge, dinner at Ma Maison and La Scala. None of this involved any actual writing. First there had to be an exchange of ideas between Robert and the producer, plus “input” from various sources: the producer, a director, a couple of big-name actors, studio officials, money men. You couldn’t do a film without “input.”

Then Robert had to come up with a concept, a brief summary of what he planned to put in the script. Yes he had written the book, but the producer was very interested in a concept. Written.

Then they talked about a treatment, a longer summary of the story. Again the producer had “input” to add, meaning the treatment might have to be rewritten several times until he and others were satisfied. Eventually Robert would be allowed to write the script, but only after these steps and stages were followed. That’s how it was in the movie business—past, present, and future.

Robert found it difficult to adjust to this method of working. As an author he had always worked alone, avoiding any collaboration. Hollywood’s way of doing things was tough to swallow. Furthermore, hadn’t he already written a highly successful book? What did he have to prove to anybody? How did Hollywood expect him to come up with a screenplay if he had to get the approval of a dozen people before he could move on to the next page?