Seven Kinds of Hell (15 page)

Grayling nodded. “Absolutely. As long as you can add on the extra interest.”

Marco crumpled then. “I…I can’t. I can’t keep going on like this. I’m an old man, and I don’t earn like I used to. And…with this hand…” He held up his right hand, recently bandaged, the only thing on him that wasn’t greasy or worn. “Grayling. It’s been ten years, after all. Can’t you this once—?”

“I’ll be dead soon, and then you’ll be done, just as we said. Two days, with a point.”

“I can’t—”

Before Marco could finish, Grayling stood up and patted his shoulder. Then he slid his hand over Marco’s mouth, took his bandaged hand, and jammed it into the plate of steaming soup. Marco’s scream was muffled, barely.

“Hey!” I tried to get up, but my chair was so close to the wall, I was trapped. The Beast paced in its cage, but I couldn’t give in, not now…I needed this bastard. I tried to focus.

“Zoe, Marco stole from me and is paying me back. He’s been short twice, if memory serves.” He held up Marco’s hand; the man gasped, tears running down his cheeks. I could see stumps where there had been two fingers. “He pays me back, I don’t go to the police. We had an agreement. Gentlemen honor their agreements, don’t they, Marco?”

“Ye-es.” He swallowed. “Two days, a point.”

The violence past, the Beast was somewhat quieted. But it hurt not to be able to stop what had happened.

“Good.” Grayling sat back down, frowning at the stain on the tablecloth. “Otherwise I have as many kitchen knives as you have digits. Please, Marco, don’t make me. We used to be friends.”

Marco shook his head, backing away and clutching his hand. “I won’t, Grayling. Thank you.” He left with a rapid, unsteady gait that was painful to watch.

Grayling picked up his wine. “Why do you want…this particular piece?”

As if nothing had happened. As if I hadn’t just heard his threats—

Danny’s life is on the line, Zoe,
I thought.
Be cool.

I swallowed my protests. Jenny had warned me that the more I lied, the more it would show. I went with the truth.

“I need the piece to save my cousin. I’ve been sent by a man calling himself Dmitri.”

“‘Need’ and ‘save’ are interesting words. Can you tell me why I should help, when I’m sure Dmitri told you I would have nothing to do with him?”

The truth was all I had; why hadn’t Dmitri told me this would be an issue? “Dmitri kidnapped my cousin,” I whispered. “Is…threatening him, unless I can get that piece from you. Maybe he thought I could find a way to…persuade you.” I tried to look like I was open to anything, but the truth was I knew I was sunk.

“And yet he knows I would rather die than see him get something of mine.” He blotted his lips with a crumpled napkin. “I have neither the time nor the interest to help you.”

“I have money,” I said, desperate, thinking of Dmitri’s credit card. “I can pay, whatever you want.”

He frowned, looked ashamed for me. “Money’s not the point. As with Marco, there’s a principle at stake. The doctors give me six months. I can no longer travel, nor work to the level I wish. I am spending what time I have amongst my treasures, as quietly as possible.”

I couldn’t let the conversation end there. I was desperate to keep Grayling engaged until I could figure another angle.

“Show me them.” Maybe, if he was as crazy as Jenny said, it would get my foot in the door.

I knew my instinct was correct as soon as I said it. He hesitated, so I pushed a little more. “I want to see your collection.
If you haven’t much time, I may never get another chance to see material like this, all in one place, ever again.
If
it’s as good as I’ve heard. You know if Jenny made this introduction, I do know the field, I do know what I’ll be seeing.”

Pride and suspicion tore at Grayling. I made myself finish my wine and used every remaining bit of self-control to seem calm. Even if he wouldn’t sell me his figurine, I might learn something else I could use to force him to give me what I needed. I wished there had been more time to learn about my curse and powers, but I had to keep them under control. For now.

The opportunity to show his collection to someone who could properly appreciate it—the rarity, the perfection, the antiquity of it—was too much. Grayling carefully counted out the banknotes for his dinner and pushed his chair back. “Come along.”

I slapped a note on the table and followed him into a cab. We traveled back to King’s Cross station, which looked incredibly seedy at night after rush hour. We took another cab, doubling back somewhat before we crossed the river.

“My habits are too well known these days,” he said, taking my arm. “I like to be careful.”

He’s crazy,
I thought.
The urge to show off his collection borders on lunacy. Why else take the risk of showing me, a stranger?

We climbed the stairs to a row house on a short block. I turned away discreetly when he entered his alarm code. That I have excellent peripheral vision and make a habit of picking up and remembering information like other people’s alarm codes by their tones, he didn’t need to know. A click, and we were in. Air—cool and dry like a museum’s—washed over me, and I realized he had environmental controls in his house to store his collection safely.

It wasn’t until after he locked the door behind us that I began to worry whether I’d gotten myself into even more trouble than I’d expected. Than I could manage. Even before the restaurant and
Marco, I’d known through Jenny that Grayling was a borderline personality. I knew he was more than half a criminal, given his “profession.” What other plans might he consider to amuse himself at the end of his life? When had I ever gone alone to a stranger’s house like this?

It was for Danny, so I was prepared to risk everything. But Jenny’s reference, and her knowledge that I was with Grayling, suddenly seemed like a very thin sort of protection. The very unreliable powers of the Beast didn’t reassure me, much.

The house held a collector’s dream. I forgot almost everything else at the sight of it all. It was a hodgepodge: Some rooms had been designed to show off one spectacular piece. In others, artifacts were piled up on every flat surface, stacked without regard for their age or provenience.

One room was nearly a shrine—a mosaic floor with a three-dimensional pattern, plaster walls painted with the muses, an apparently genuine Roman table, and in a case, three perfect, beautiful clay bowls with molded patterns. It reminded me of the villas from Pompeii. With a jolt, I realized it was because an entire room had been removed and reconstructed here, if not from Pompeii, then some other site, ravaged for its finds.

In a moment, within arm’s reach of these amazing antiques, no Plexiglas barrier or velvet rope between me and them, I understood exactly what drove Grayling. I understood his impulse to want to touch and to own such things and have them all to himself. I understood what it was to crave something, to remove it from the shared view of the rest of the world.

The stolen figurine in my backpack was testament to that—and why, oh dear God, hadn’t I left
that
someplace safer?

But in that house, I saw no space for Grayling, no place that was where
he
lived. For him, it was ownership, or with regards to Dmitri, the denial of that pleasure to someone else. For me, my only instance of unethical archaeological behavior—actually
stealing something—had gotten me into
serious
trouble. I wasn’t built for crime.

And then I saw
it.

It was a marble statuette, a Venus, modestly posed as if caught emerging from the bath, maybe twenty inches high, but perfect in every way. Intact sculptures of this sort were rare, and when they were found, much was made of them. This one had been displayed at the Hermitage with huge fanfare. I remembered because it made all the news and was the sort of find people asked you about, no matter what part of the discipline you specialized in. Three months later, a curator and a security guard were murdered late one night and the statuette taken. Nothing else—including gold and religious objects—had been touched. It had been a brutal, and very specific, robbery.

I now couldn’t imagine Venus’s marble without bloodstains.

Rupert Grayling wasn’t an aging crank with a fetish for classical history. He wasn’t someone who skimmed the rough edge of unethical behavior, buying goods with a provenience no more detailed than “the private collection of a recently deceased gentleman from Geneva.”

He was someone who dealt in violence to feed his obsessions.

What would happen if he figured out I had the clay figurines with me now? I thought of the dead museum employees. Marco’s maimed hand.

He caught me staring at the statuette a little too long. He knew that I knew its recent history and he was waiting for my reaction.

Would he prefer my horror, fear, or disgust? Quick, Zoe! What would set him off, what would placate him? What would get me what I needed to save Danny?

Something nudged me, and I took another risk.

I went closer and examined the marble carefully. Never touching it, yet giving every indication I wanted to.

Finally I looked up. “It’s superb. Extraordinary.”

He beamed.

“It’s almost perfect.”

A dangerous light kindled in Grayling’s eyes. “Almost?”

“There’s a certain heaviness about the legs that I think diminishes it. But that slight flaw, that element of human imperfection, of course adds to its…charm.”

Grayling’s mouth twitched, then went still. Under his stare, I felt exactly like one of his artifacts. His was a weighty and penetrating gaze.

I’d called an astonishing artifact “charming,” as if it was Grandma’s quilt or a Victorian silhouette. He’d either kill me, stroke out, or…

“Almost perfect, indeed. Quite right.”

There was an invitation in his words. I prayed I wasn’t mistaken. “What do you have that
is
perfect? That’s truly peerless?”

I could tell by the way he fussed over a speck of dust on the base of the marble. He wanted to show me something else, and yet he still hesitated.

“You wish to see that which is peerless. You come with a startling reference, one I certainly never expected to see. It is almost enough to recommend you to me. You come with a story, one guaranteed not to please me, but which has the ring of truth. That interests me. But you claim to know Dmitri. Knowing him, in whatever capacity, works against you.”

I held my breath. The longer I kept him engaged, the better chance I had of getting near that figurine.

“Follow me,” he said finally. “Touch nothing.”

I’d passed some kind of test.

We went into the kitchen; even those hoarders on TV would have drawn back in disgust. No wonder he ate out. There was no room to eat here among the filthy plates and piles of reeking trash bags, so different from the other rooms. A door that led, presumably, to the basement or a mud room, or whatever it was called in
England, had another door behind a shelf. He moved a dusty jar and hit a switch or a lever I couldn’t see. The shelf unlatched from the floor, and he was able to swing it out on hidden hinges. The door behind it was nearly invisible, certainly not recognizable as a door, until he pressed a release, and that swung away, too, to reveal a panel. He looked at me pointedly, until I turned my back. I heard him press in a code.

Like I said, I’d always had pretty good hearing, though, and a memory for sounds. Just recently, I’d found out why those skills came to me so easily.

An almost inaudible
click,
and another door opened. Layers and layers, but all to protect his pride and joy, I hoped.

I was only slightly surprised, then, to see a small room, nearly empty, save for a chair, a pedestal, and a carefully adjusted light that flickered on as the door opened. Triggered, no doubt, by the correct alarm code signaling the owner’s entrance.

On the pedestal was the crowning glory of Grayling’s collection. His prized “perfect” object.

It might have been perfect, but it wasn’t peerless.

I had two of them in my backpack.

This figurine was the same size as mine, about four inches long. It too had a human body, but this one had the obvious helm and shield of Athena. Amazingly, the spear and arms were intact—such slender clay fragments should have broken off long ago—and the painting was less faded than on the figurines I had. With her arms outstretched, I could now see how the figurine would fit the curve of the pot it decorated.

It wasn’t the archaeologist in me that was riveted; it was the Beast. Oddly, it wasn’t snarling for release, but quiet, patient.

Wait
was the surprising impulse I had from it.
Restraint.

Circling the pedestal, taking it in from every angle, I realized it was the closest to pure reverence I’d ever felt. I reached for it, then caught myself, glancing at Grayling, who nodded once. His
own eyes were riveted by the object, and to judge by the wear on the chair and the floor, he’d owned this for decades. Stared at it for hours at a time.

It was cold to the touch; I’d expected it to be warm, the way it glowed, blue-white. Then I realized it might not be glowing; it was some trick of my Beastly eyes.

I could barely tear my gaze away from it. I felt certain that if I turned, I would miss something terribly important. For all its humble appearance, it was, quite literally, enchanting.

“So?” I said, finally turning my back on the thing, working to make my voice casual, even dismissive. “Maybe it’s not tourist junk from the nineteenth century like I thought when I first saw one; but it’s not even a votive offering. It’s some kind of pottery decoration. Old, but not that valuable.”

“So wrong, so wrong. You see, it’s the key to Pandora’s Box.”

“Pandora’s Box—?”

“Of course you’ve heard of it. Pandora, the first woman, created by Hephaestus, and given all the gifts of the gods: talents and curiosity. When Prometheus gave fire to mankind, as part of his punishment, Zeus gave Pandora to his brother Epimetheus. He also gave her a vessel, which he warned her never to open. With her gods-given curiosity, she couldn’t resist, and on opening it, unleashed all evil onto humankind. Which was the plan of Zeus all along, if you believe the traditional stories.”