Grave Phantoms (13 page)

“We spend summers at a small villa in Spain, so we missed the wedding, unfortunately,” Mathilda added.

“Spain,” Astrid said. It sounded warm and exotic. Probably wasn't gray and dreary and flooding there.

“Maria's first husband was filthy rich,” Mathilda remarked casually. “Ricardo Navarro was a bastard of the highest rank, but I thank him daily for having the decency to die quickly—and with his enormous will intact—before I was tempted to do the deed myself.”

For the first time, it struck Astrid that the two women were lovers, and her face heated. She wondered if Bo had caught on. Probably long before now. He always had better instincts about people. It also struck Astrid that the two women weren't unlike her and Bo: two cultures, two
classes . . . a union unsanctioned by society. And yet, they were living together in a posh apartment building in Nob Hill. Lecturing in Mexico. Vacationing in Europe.

Pretending they were other people.

If they could do it, could she and Bo?

A dangerous thought, and one that struck a match inside Astrid's mind.

“Anyway,” Mathilda continued, pushing a lock of delicately waving white hair away from her face. “We finally met your brother a few months back—during a dinner at Hadley's family home in Russian Hill. Lowe was
most
entertaining.”

“And he gave us a wonderfully potent bottle of akvavit,” Dr. Navarro said. “But I suppose we have you to thank for that, don't we, Mr. Yeung? You work with the older brother, Winter, yes? Bootlegging must be
fascinating
work.”

Bo scratched the back of his neck as he struggled with a smile. “That wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe it, but I'm not complaining.”

“Indeed.” Mathilda gave him an appreciative once-over. “They say noble work should stimulate the mind, but
whose
mind is never specified. I would imagine you've stimulated thousands of minds all over the city.”

The corners of Bo's mouth curled. “I'll remind Winter of that when I'm asking for a pay increase.”

The women laughed and raised invisible glasses while Mathilda toasted, “Here's to noble work.”

Astrid found herself pulled down meandering conversational paths as the two ladies spoke about their career, and how they had lived and worked together in both Mexico City and San Francisco for thirty-odd years, and had finally decided to retire and share this penthouse. “To the eternal disappointment of a few tenants in the building,” Mathilda said with a wink.

“Yes, I believe we met one downstairs,” Bo said. “She had strong opinions about immigrants.”

“Mrs. Humphreys,” the two women intoned together.

“Her husband's a state senator,” Dr. Navarro said.

“He receives calls from ladies of the evening when his wife is away at their ranch,” Mathilda added. “Why he married that cow in the first place is beyond me.”

Bo and Astrid glanced at each other with twin expressions of delight.

Mathilda shrugged. “Maria owns the building”—
The entire building? Good God!
—“so they pay us rent, and being able to raise it whenever we damn well please is no small satisfaction, let me tell you.”

“I can only imagine,” Astrid said with a smile.

“Enough about us. I know you didn't come here to listen to two old ladies gossip,” Dr. Navarro said. “Hadley told me you had something interesting to show us.”

Bo unwrapped the idol. Dr. Navarro slipped on a pair of glasses that hung from a chain around her neck amongst long strings of beads. A small folding table was set up between her and Mathilda, and it was upon this that she inspected the turquoise figure. While she did, Bo gave them a very condensed explanation of how the idol came into their possession, smoothly leaving out all the details about Astrid's visions. In Bo's story, in fact, the idol mysteriously turned up on the pier when the yacht crashed into it.

Upon doling out this lie, he gave Astrid a look that said:
I know, I know. But how am I to account for why we haven't returned a priceless artifact to the yacht's owner?

And she gave him a look in return that said:
I am absolutely, positively crazy about you and don't give two hoots about what you tell them.

And in answer to
that
, Bo gave Astrid's legs a bold perusal that sent a quick thrill through her chest.

Unaware of their silent communiqués, Dr. Navarro studied the idol, turning it over carefully before giving Mathilda a turn. They looked it over for a long time, and when they were both done murmuring small exclamations and pointing things out to each other in Spanish, Dr. Navarro took off her glasses and smiled up at Bo and Astrid. “Hadley was correct, as usual. This piece was
certainly made in a style that was common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

“
Teoxihuitl
is what the Aztecs called turquoise,” Mathilda added. “It's a Nahuatl word that means ‘stone of the gods.' It was used in special religious and ritual items, and no one was allowed to wear it as casual jewelry, like they do today. That would have been sacrilege. Therefore, this is not an everyday object.”

“Do you recognize the figure?” Bo asked.

“I believe it's meant to be Ometeotl, who is a little mysterious. Many believe he was a supreme creator deity with a dual nature not unlike the Holy Trinity. Other scholars think he has been confused with another earlier god who makes life from bones—the Bone Lord, he was called. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we'd find a bone armature beneath the turquoise, were we to remove it.”

“Someone has already altered it,” Bo pointing toward the word “NANCE.”

“Yes, that is a disgrace,” Mathilda said, shaking her head. “No museum will buy it, of course. And I'd wager that's someone's name. Names have great power. Tell them, Maria.”

Dr. Navarro stretched out her legs and lay back against her chair, pulling her shawl over her arms. “When Mathilda and I lived in Mexico City, we occasionally heard a legend from other anthropologists about a group of royal soothsayers who advised the Aztec nobility for almost two hundred years. They weren't native. They were said to have come from a foreign land—where, exactly, was unknown. But the interesting thing about them is that they supposedly performed a secret ritual once every decade in order to extend their life.”

“Immortality?” Astrid said.

“More like . . . a Fountain of Youth to give them extra time,” Mathilda explained. “It was a ritual performed over water—over Lake Texcoco, which was the home of the Aztecs. They established their empire on an island in the
middle of that lake. Mexico City was later built on top of it, and the lake was drained.”

Ritual performed over water. Astrid thought of the
Plumed Serpent.

“And how is this legend connected to our idol?” Bo asked.

Dr. Navarro leaned closer, as if someone might overhear them, and spoke in an exhilarated tone. “Because the soothsayer's ritual involved the use of ceremonial turquoise idols purported to be very much like this.”

“Very much,” Mathilda agreed.

Bo frowned at the idol, and Astrid wondered if he was thinking about the ritual in her vision. She certainly was. “Would this ritual also have involved human sacrifice?” she asked.

Dr. Navarro shrugged. “Perhaps. Sacrifice was common in pre-Columbian cultures. They believed life was cyclical—birth, death, rebirth. Death was not the end of life, but part of it.”

“Your Viking ancestors were known to sacrifice a few souls themselves,” Mathilda said to Astrid. “And your Chinese ancestors, too, Mr. Yeung. We are all descended from barbarians.”

“Barbarians and lovers of grandiose drama,” Dr. Navarro said “The Mayans sometimes anointed their sacrifices' bodies with blue pigment and shot them through with arrows.”

Blue pigment . . .

Excitement made the hairs on Astrid's arms rise. The yacht survivors were performing a ritual to extend their lives. The people she'd seen in the burlap sacks were human sacrifices. Sacrifices! Could this really be possible in this day and age, here in San Francisco?

Dr. Navarro pointed to the idol. “All of that aside, the symbol on the front is not Aztec. It's not Central American at all, which is very odd. If we entertain the notion that this actually might be one of the ceremonial idols used by the soothsayers of legend, then perhaps it is proof that the soothsayers were, indeed, foreigners.”

When pressed, neither woman had a guess as to the cultural origin of symbol on the golden disk. Its style was both too generic and, at the same time, unique enough for them to rule out anything either of them had seen before.

Which was utterly disappointing.

“Is it possible the entire idol isn't Aztec at all?” Bo asked.

Dr. Navarro shook her head. “I say at least most of this is genuine, and the style matches other known turquoise work from that period.”

Mathilda gave the idol another close inspection. “In the legend, the soothsayers died off when their ritual idols were stolen. I suppose they did not see the future very well that day,” she said with a mischievous smile.

Dr. Navarro snorted. “They must have been terrible oracles altogether not to see the Spaniards coming nor the outbreak of smallpox that would ravage the Valley of Mexico.”

“You said the idols were stolen,” Bo said. “Stolen by whom?”

“Spanish explorers, most likely,” Dr. Navarro said. “When the Aztecs were conquered, their temples were looted.”

Mathilda crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “And then, of course, there was a French privateer by the name of Jean Fleury. He famously captured two Spanish galleons carrying Aztec treasure back to Spain. Most of that treasure was given to the king of France, but who can tell where all of it eventually ended up?”

Bo made a small noise and stared at Astrid with a look of amazement widening his face. He said only one word. “Pirates.”

Upon leaving Dr. Navarro and Mathilda, Bo and Astrid excitedly talked about the Pieces of Eight Society while they called for the elevator and waited for it to ascend. The more they talked about how it might fit in with the ladies' legendary soothsayers, the more electrified Astrid got—and in no small part because she now knew
ab-so-positively
that her visions hadn't been mere figments of her imagination.

Not that she had much doubt before today, but it was good to be proven right.

“Do you think the survivors are actual pirates who've been keeping themselves alive for hundreds of years?” she murmured to Bo. “One of the survivors was a woman. Imagine that—a female pirate. God, Bo. This is exciting. I feel like we're gumshoes who've stumbled upon the case of the century. Oh! What about Mrs. Cushing? And none of this explains where the yacht disappeared to for an entire year, and—”

“Christ, slow down, Typhoon Astrid,” Bo whispered, but he wasn't really irritated. He struggled to control a
smile and his face betrayed his excitement. “Let's think for a moment. All this talk of human sacrifice is making me nervous. If it weren't for your visions and your . . . unhealthy aura, I'd just return the idol to Mrs. Cushing and be done with it.”

“And let her and her cronies sacrifice more helpless people in the future?”

“These people may be more dangerous than we originally thought.”

“Pfft. Max didn't even have a weapon. What kind of pirate doesn't carry a weapon?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“This is serious, Astrid. There's a chance the idol's done permanent damage to you—not to mention that you could have died that night on the yacht.”

“But I didn't. Velma said it might not necessarily be bad. Maybe I should just stay away from cursed turquoise and I'll be fine.”

He shook his head with quick, deliberate movements. “Too dangerous to take that chance. I won't risk your well-being on a ‘maybe,'” he said, ever the protector.

She tied the belt of her coat around her waist while the clack of the approaching elevator grew louder. “I'm more concerned that these people got away with murder—for God knows how many centuries.”

Bo groaned, but Astrid's mind was turning too fast to put on brakes. Mrs. Cushing and the survivors could very well be killers, but Astrid and Bo couldn't take their theory to the police. What would they tell the chief?
I had a magically induced vision and I think six people may have drowned in the Bay, but I don't know who they are, and it's just my word against some high-society dame who's probably ten times richer and a good deal less infamous than my family.

As much less infamous as centuries-old murdering pirates could be, anyway. But even if it didn't sound utterly insane, when did Magnussons go to the police for help? Never, if they could help it.

And they'd already told everyone in the family about
it, and none of them wanted any part of this. If they were going to do anything more about it, they'd be on their own. Maybe it wasn't worth the trouble, but what if Bo was right? What if she truly
were
damaged from her initial contact with the idol? Velma said she couldn't perform a counterspell without knowing the nature of the original magic. They knew at least part of it now, but they still didn't know the origin of the idol's strange symbol . . .

No, there was no way around it. They had to see this through. Together. She just needed to convince Bo of that.

The elevator clunked to a stop and the scissor gates opened. Astrid heaved a long exhalation and stepped inside with Bo following. It wasn't until the gates were shut that she realized their previous friendly Jack Johnson–look-alike operator was no longer working the elevator. And it wasn't until he pulled the lever too fast that she smelled a very familiar fruity cologne.

She glanced toward Bo and saw his eyes widen. Saw him reach inside his jacket, but his hand froze halfway through the motion . . . at the exact moment she felt something cold and sharp pressed to her throat.

“Nuh-uh-uh,” the man warned Bo. “Hands up, please. I'd rather not get blood on this suit, but I will slit her open like a fish if I have to. This knife has felled large beasts, soldiers, and thieving whores. It will easily slay a tiny woman.”

Bo complied.

Astrid didn't move her head, just her eyes.

She saw the ornately carved ivory handle of the knife that pressed to her neck. And to her side, she saw Max's full lips and wide-bridged nose.

“Hello, again,” he said with a dark smile that didn't climb to the blue eyes shadowed by his fedora. He looked awful. Sickly, with a strange grayish pallor. Dark circles like day-old bruises hung beneath his eyes.

He used his free hand to pull the lever and bring the elevator to a jarring stop between the second and third floors. The movement caused a sharp sting on her throat and a warm trickle below the knife's blade.

“You just made the biggest mistake of your life, friend,” Bo said in a low, dangerous voice.

“Now, now. We seem to have gotten off to a bad start.” Max quickly swapped out the hand holding the knife and grabbed Astrid's arm roughly to pull her in front of him. She didn't like his body pressed behind hers. It made her feel trapped. “All I want to do is have a private conversation with Goldilocks here, and you'll never see me again.”

Astrid barely heard him. She was too busy scanning his hands out of the corners of her eyes. Though she didn't relish the idea of having her throat cut, she also wanted to avoid his touching her with his turquoise signet ring again. It should be on his knife-wielding hand, but she couldn't see it from her precarious and very limited angle.

Bo spoke again, and this time he sounded approximately two seconds away from ripping Max's throat out. “If you want to talk, take the knife off her and put it on me.”

“No, I think I'll leave it where it is,” Max said. His strong cologne made her brain shrivel up and ache. “Miss Magnusson, I believe, has something of mine. And I want it back.”

“I have
no
idea what you're talking about,” Astrid said.

“You were on the yacht after it docked, and you stole something that didn't belong to you. A small blue statue. Sound familiar?” His voice was graveled and weary. Was he sick? She hoped it wasn't contagious.

“Not really,” she said.

“I had a little chat with a police officer down at the pier who says differently.”

Officer Barlow. Dirty little rat.

“Does that jolt your memory, Miss Magnusson?” Max asked.

Bo gave her a guarded look. He didn't want her to answer. Fine, she wouldn't. But she really didn't care for the way he slowly leaned to one side of the elevator car. He'd better not be trying anything heroic. It was far too cramped in the elevator, and there weren't many directions a bullet could go. Two of those directions she wanted to avoid completely—hers and his.

Max could go hang himself.

“I don't know what you think you'll do with it,” Max continued, speaking against the side of her head. “It's not worth anything in the antiquities market. If you want it for any other reason, you'll find it's quite useless if you don't know what you're doing. And I promise that you
do not
.”

A handful of thoughts popped into Astrid's mind at once. The Wicked Wenches talking about human sacrifice. The burlap sacks from her vision. The old priestess in the red robe inside the ritual circle. Mrs. Cushing stopping to stare at Astrid when she was in the hospital bed. The Pieces of Eight Society.

Pirates.

God in heaven, just how old
was
Max? She knew he looked older at Gris-Gris! And for the first time, in her mind's eye, she now saw him with blue paint smeared over his face.

Panic slithered down her scalp.

“You were on the yacht,” she whispered. “I saw you with the other survivors . . . and with the people in the burlap sacks.”

She had his attention now. He put pressure on the blade and forced her head back on his shoulder to peer down at her. She now saw the turquoise gleaming on his finger. She also saw Bo moving in the corner. Her fingers began to tremble.

“We don't have access to it right now,” Bo said suddenly. “But we're going to need something in exchange. Tell us what the symbol means and you can have the idol back.”

Max shook his head. “This isn't a negotiation.”

“Not now, maybe,” Bo said darkly. “But wait until your back's turned. I'll see if I can't change your mind.”

A loud noise outside the elevator made Astrid flinch. Running footfalls echoed in the hallway and someone shouted, “Here! I found him!”

Max mumbled under his breath as a dark figure squatted in front of the third-floor scissor gate and peered inside.

“Jesus Christ!” the real elevator operator swore through the metal grating.

Bo started to lunge but stopped short when Max swung the knife toward Bo's stomach, quick as a snake. Metal gleamed. Bo dodged the strike, grunted, and feinted left to dodge another. But when Astrid tried to shove Max off balance, he grabbed her hair, pounded the heel of his knife-wielding hand on the lever, and pointed the tip of the knife against her ribs. The car jerked upward with a loud jolt, and her Jack Johnson operator disappeared from view as they rose.

There wasn't even time for Astrid to draw in a shaky breath before Max used his elbow to push the lever again, this time slamming to a stop between floors three and four—mostly on four. Reaching up, he kept the knife on her while using his free hand to slide open the fourth-floor gate.

“I want what's mine returned,” he said to Astrid. “This is not a game. If I don't have it in my hands by the end of the week—”

More noise from outside the elevator. Astrid wasn't sure which floor it was coming from. Max had to step up to the fourth floor. He put a hand on the open elevator doorway and peered down at them over the bloodied blade of his knife—
my blood
, she thought. And so much of it!

“By the end of the week, Cushing Manor, Presidio Heights,” Max said. “Or things are going to take a nasty turn.”

Max pushed away from the elevator, and as he turned on a heel, Bo spat out a string of angry words in Cantonese that sounded positively filthy. He pushed Astrid toward the floor and drew his gun on Max's retreating form. Astrid covered her head as a shot exploded inside the cramped elevator car and spent gunpowder filled the air, along with a single, soft sound of success from Bo: he'd gotten him.

Astrid jumped to her feet and peered down the hallway. Max had been hit in the leg. But it wasn't slowing him down much. He just pressed a hand over his thigh and launched into a hobbled run.

Bo wasn't giving up. The elevator groaned as he leapt onto the fourth floor and took off after Max.

They'd kill each other!

Astrid stepped up onto the fourth floor to follow him. Damn, but he was fast. She saw Max disappear around a sharp corner down the hall directly in front of her, Bo trailing several yards behind, but gaining speed. A posted sign told her that Max was headed toward the stairwell exit. She sailed down the corridor, inverted triangles of light from chrome wall sconces blurring in her peripheral vision.

Bo was nearing the corner. He stopped suddenly, hugged the wall, and poked his head around it. Another shot exploded from his gun. Astrid reflexively swerved sideways and ducked as Bo's angry bellow echoed down the hallway. She lifted her head, throat tight with fear, and saw him stumble away from the corner.

He made a strangled noise as his back hit the wall.

She heard the distant slam of the stairwell door as Max escaped, and behind her, apartment doors flying open as she pushed away from the wall and barreled toward Bo. When she came to a stop in front of him, his chest heaved as he clutched himself on his side, near his ribs.

He pulled out his hand from beneath his jacket.

It was covered in blood.