Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (8 page)

“Twelve hundred and sixty-three artifacts were collected from the area once known as Lydia,” Howard said, hovering over Noah. “Each one logged, described in exquisite detail, and later earmarked for distribution. The Smithsonian Museum, down in Washington, D.C., received the bulk of the artifacts, followed by the Metropolitan Museum here in New York. There were a number of donations to other museums across the country, and Dr. Ritchie, under the auspices of Columbia University, retained scores of relics for his department. Lastly, there were seventy-nine artifacts earmarked for the private collection of Colonel Langley, an eclectic mix of items, I must say, and prominent among them forty gold coins, 'staters' from the time of Croesus, referred to in the documents as 'the Lydian Croeseids.' ”

“There must be some mistake,” Noah said.

“Each coin a vivid yellow,” Howard said, “being of pure gold. Weight approximately ten point eight grams. Oval-shaped with the 'confronting foreparts of a lion and a bull' on one side of the coin, and an 'incuse punch' on the other.”

“A clerical error, surely.”

“Sound familiar, Mister Langley?”

“No, I've never seen any such coins.”

“Where are they, Mister Langley?”

“They're not here. I swear to you—by all that is holy—we haven't got them.”

“I'm not a patient man, Mister Langley.”

“Over the years my father gave away much of his private collection, to old friends, to museums, and bequeathed still more of it in his will. There's nothing left of it here in the house.”

“I don't believe you. Runs against the family grain.”

“Why don't you have a look around?” I said to Howard. “See for yourself.”

“Funny joke, Mister Trenowyth.” He bashed the side of my skull with his wrench in the same sly manner in which he'd bashed Patrolman Cox minutes before, and I too dropped to the floor on one knee. “Got anymore?”

I shook my head, not so much in answer to him, but to clear it of the darkness encroaching my vision from the edges. I recall Miss Buxton's grip on my shoulders and yet her expressions of concern seemed to emanate from far away, or through some wall or window pane, as the darkness overtook me . . .

When I returned to the world we inhabit while conscious I found my body more or less supine on the floor of the trail with Miss Buxton cradling my head in her lap and stroking my forehead. The blow, as it would turn out, had fractured the orbital bone encasing my right eye, and the swelling had already reduced my peripheral vision. (I'm sure you'll recall, Doctor, that when I first arrived here I looked as though I'd caught a mighty left hook from Jack Dempsey.)

From somewhere nearby I heard the scuffling of men, and a voice I recognized as Noah's cry out. I raised my head from Miss Buxton's thighs to find my client—well, I'd been fired by this point, so ex-client—being stripped against his will of more clothing, though he wriggled from the robber Cormac with a wild energy, slapped at garment-grasping hands. I got to my feet.

“Hold still, old man,” Cormac said, brandishing his buck knife, “or you gonna bleed.” The threat worked—until the knife returned to its sheath at Cormac's hip, when Noah resumed.

Of course the little man's resistance, whether driven by panic or moxie, proved ineffectual in the end. Cormac enlisted Willie's help, and together they stripped Noah of the aforementioned dungaree jacket and flannel bathrobe, stripped him of a tweed herringbone jacket and a tattered tuxedo shirt yellowed by dirt and sweat and most likely decades of wear, stripped him of four pairs of trousers, each patched to a considerable extent and worn atop one another in descending order of bagginess, in Russian nesting doll fashion, one might say. The multi-layers of clothing provoked dumbfounded queries from captors and captives alike.

“Saves on firewood,” Noah explained with a shrug. But when queried by Howard about the additional key rings found inside his pants pockets—bringing the total number of keys, in my estimation, to eighty or ninety—he refused to answer.

With a defiant glare, Noah stood shivering in his last remaining article of clothing, a red flannel union suit of the kind that I'd only seen before in sepia-toned tintypes from the post Civil War era, the extent of his undernourishment at last fully apparent to me. A rear view of the man revealed upper arms thinner than his elbow joints, and the drop flap in the back of his suit was missing its buttons, exposing a
derrière
so taut as to appear mummified.

“What about this?” Willie said, holding aloft a small note pad—three inches wide and six inches in length—which he'd extracted from the back pocket of Noah's innermost pair of pants.

“Read it,” Howard said.

Willie flipped to the first page. “Hey, what the . . . I can't read this.”

“Show me.” Howard passed Willie the gun in exchange for the note pad. He rifled through the pages, mumbling: “Gibberish . . . sheer gibberish.” He held the note pad up to Noah so that I could see a tiny, dense scrawl of black ink filling up the page being exposed. “It's a code of some kind, is it not, Mister Langley? A codebook?” No response. “And you carry it hidden on your person at all times, as with the keys, don't you? What's it for?” Still no response.

“Forget it, Howie,” Cormac said. “The coins!”

“You're right.” Howard flung the notepad away. It landed beside the staircase in one of several sand-filled fire buckets the cats had topped with their excrement. “Start cutting pieces off the old man, until he talks.”

Torture

Our voices, i.e., those belonging to Miss Buxton, Patrolman Cox, and myself, railed as one in protest at the barbarism planned for Noah, at the reminder of civilization's
thin veneer
, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Cormac unsheathed his blade and advanced on his target of aggression. At the same time, Noah, clutching his chest, doubled over as if in pain.

“My heart,” he gasped. “It can't . . . can't take much more excitement.”

Cormac grabbed a fistful of hair from the back of Noah's head and yanked upwards until the old man had been straightened out again. “Bum ticker, huh? Think we're that stupid?”

“It's true,” Noah said, his eyes a little cross-eyed taking in the blade at the tip of his nose.

“What'll it be, Howie? Ear? Finger? Toe?”

“Let's start with an ear,” Howard said.

“You'll kill him!” Miss Buxton said. “And then where will you be?”

“She could be right,” I said, though I knew she wasn't. Hadn't Noah trekked three miles on foot that first day when he'd shown up at Gaines, Trenowyth and Fenno? It had to be a bluff.

“It's true!” Noah said. “I swear to it! And I can prove it! We've a greenhouse, you see . . . give me a moment, I'm so very lightheaded, so dizzy . . . we've a greenhouse on the roof, where I grow digitalis purpurea . . . better known as purple foxgloves, or witch's gloves . . . I grind up the leaves to make my own digitalin . . . The cost of a physician's visit, of store-bought medicine, being what they are today, you understand.”

“Bollocks,” Cormac said.

“The digitalin is used to increase cardiac contractility. It's also an anti arrhythmic agent. That is to say, it steadies the beating of my heart. If you don't believe me I could show you where . . . where I store the bottles in the wine cellar.”

“An ear it is, Howie, the whole lug.” Cormac gripped Noah in a headlock and raised his buck knife. Miss Buxton gripped my arm. Noah, squealing, kicked his assailant—to no effect.

“Hold up!” Howard said. “Hold up! We kill him by accident, we'll never find the coins, not if we take a year to search.”

“He's faking!” Cormac said though he released Noah.

“Look at him,” Howard said. “He's so thin. Like a POW. He could be telling the truth. No, there has to be another way.”

“One of them?” Cormac said, thumbing at the other hostages behind him.

Howard weighed the option before shaking his head. “Mister Langley doesn't give a damn about any of them.” His eyes took in Noah. “Do you?” Noah shrugged. I couldn't tell whether it was a shrug of uncertainty or agreement. Howard's eyes searched the basement. “No, it's not people he cares about, at least not strangers or bare acquaintances . . .”

Howard turned from the group and ambled along the trail, whistling that popular new tune,
How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree')
, cats hissing and scattering, until he'd nearly reached the workbench, when he turned and ambled back to us. He picked up the monkey wrench he'd left behind on top of a broken-hinged ice box and employed it to bash out the motor car's left headlight.

“No!” shouted Noah, lunging with both hands for the wrench. Howard shoved him backwards so hard the old man crashed into a wall of junk and slid to the floor of the trail, a lobster crate tumbling down upon his head. Howard raised his weapon for another whack at the motor car. Noah cried: “No! Please don't! Please!” Tears stained his cheeks, his beard aglitter with bits of glass from the broken headlight. “I implore you, Sir, to consider the sentiment! The sentiment of a son for his father! The vehicle, you see, contains something of my father's spirit. I'm convinced of it. And whenever I wish to commune with his spirit, I come here. That's no motor car to me, but a temple! A temple! Please, do not desecrate it anymore! Oh, please, Sir!”

Howard bashed out the other headlight. “The coins!”

With a piercing wail, Noah threw himself down on the floor, abjectly hugging one of Howard's legs. “I swear to you, we haven't got them! We haven't! You must believe me, Sir!” Willie pried Noah's arms loose of Howard, who stepped knee-deep into the detritus surrounding the vehicle so as to take close aim at its windshield. With the wrench raised high above Howard's head, set to come crashing down, Noah cried: “Enough! You were right! We have the coins! The gold Croesids! They're here in the house! I'll take you to them! I'll take you to them! So help me, God, I'll take you to them!”

A Resolve on My Part

Noah dabbed at his tears with a white silk handkerchief leant to him by Miss Buxton. He seemed oblivious to the rhinestones in his beard and sprayed across the chest of his red flannel suit from when the headlights had busted to bits. “I'll need my note pad,” he said, nodding to the rows of sand-filled fire pails beside the staircase.

Willie retrieved the item from where it had been discarded in dried cat dung atop one of the pails and handed it over. Howard snatched it away from Noah and leafed through the pages.

“What's this got to do with it?”

“It's a record of where I've hidden the more valuable collections throughout the house,” Noah said. “You're not the first to attempt a break-in, after all. Only the first to succeed.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don't remember where—”

“I'm not much of a curator,” he said. “What I am is an ardent collector, as my father was, and my sister too, until her health failed. You've no idea how ardent. On the other hand”—his eyes canvassed the basement—“perhaps you've an inkling by now. And being sixty-three years old, my memory is not what it used to be. I'm rather forgetful these days, to tell the truth, and I don't believe I've laid eyes on those gold Croesids in . . . I'm not sure. Five or six years? At any rate, I can't recall where I hid them last.”

Howard handed Noah the note pad. “What sort of code is it written in?”

“One of my own invention. Only Elizabeth is familiar with it besides myself, though she's nearly blind now. It's protection in case the note pad should fall into the wrong hands. I keep it with me, on my person, at all times, you see.” He opened the note pad, glanced at his writing. “I'm afraid I'll need my spectacles in this light.” He pointed to the pile of clothing Cormac and Willie had tossed in a heap while stripping him down.

Cormac dug out from there a lady's lorgnette, of all things, with a bejeweled handle, gleaming as it must have gleamed at ancient soirees and operas, and passed it to Howard, who passed it along to Noah, who perched the spectacles upon his nose as delicately as any society matron and began to read.

“Ah,” he said shortly.

Howard snatched the pad away, studied the opened page, frowned when he couldn't decipher the code. “Well, where are they?”

“It doesn't say,” Noah answered. “My notes provide only an initial clue as to the locations of the various collections. Another precaution of mine, you understand, should the note pad ever fall—”

“Fall into the wrong hands,” Howard finished impatiently. “So what's the clue?”

“It's in the antechamber, where you first entered. We'll need to find a small, Japanese relic from the early Edo period. A statue of Hotei, the Laughing Buddha. Nine and one-half inches in height and made of copper. Purchased by my father from a monk in Kyoto, I think he told me.”

“Scavenger hunt!” Willie said and guffawed. “Kind of fitting, eh, Howie?”

“Shall I lead the way?” Noah asked.

Howard shut the note pad and dropped it into his coat pocket. With his left arm, he motioned magnanimously toward the staircase. “After you.” He told Cormac: “Stay within a foot of Mister Langley at all times, you hear?”

The mick snorted derisively. “What's he gonna do?”