The Fifth House of the Heart (5 page)

There were workshops at the back nearest the docks where restoration and repair were done, and offices at the front. An enormous walk-in safe near the offices, once a bank vault, contained objects of uninsurable value. Opposite the safe was a climate-controlled room for storage of paintings, paper, textiles, and other fragile things that required fresher air than the HVAC could provide. The river was a liability in warm weather, and Sax had been forced to spend a great deal of money on antihurricane measures as well.

Detective Jackson led Sax past the offices. Barry Lions emerged from the last one in the row, mewling.

“Thank God you're here,” he said. “I'm losing it, man.”

Sax liked Barry. A large, seal-like man, Barry knew the business and how to take care of people and things, and he liked to stay organized. This tendency was only a liability if you had a dead man in the warehouse. Barry was falling to pieces now, a plainclothes cop following him as he hurried to Sax's side.

“They asked me if
I
did it,” Barry said.

“Which you did not, I presume?” Sax said.

“Damn straight I didn't. He owed me money on the football pool.”

The attempt at bravado failed completely. Barry was frightened, not least because he'd had to wait for the police to arrive and was alone in the warehouse for half an hour with the corpse.

They approached the locus of police activity: halfway down the central aisle of the warehouse beneath the old-fashioned bulbs (fluorescent light was terrible for antique finishes), sprawled at the foot of a mahogany William and Mary hutch
écritoire
with a double-dome cornice, was the night watchman. He lay facedown on the concrete. His blue uniform was soaked with blood that ran from beneath his chest, across the floor, and down a drainage grate. His name was Alberto, and prior to tonight he had looked very well in uniform, unlike the police. There was a small flashlight on the ground beside the body, a ring of keys, and Alberto's baseball cap, turned up to the ceiling as if to accept pocket change from passersby. Each item had a small yellow evidence tent beside it.

Sax hated the sight of death. He'd seen it before, death in peace and in violence. Hard to avoid at his age. The watchman looked vulnerable, one half-closed eye visible, his cheek pressed to the floor. It occurred to Sax that Alberto had become like everything else in the warehouse: a relic of past life, something precious in its workmanship. He had a provenance as well. Barry wouldn't get closer to the corpse than fifteen feet and couldn't bear to look at it. Sax approached, waving away a couple of uniformed men who closed in as if to stop him falling across the body in his grief.

“Please,” he said. “He worked for me.”

Sax stooped stiffly beside the body under the watchful eye of Detective Jackson.

“This is Alberto Robledo?” she said.

“Yes,” Sax replied. He straightened his back and stepped away from the body. “If this is an opportune moment, I'll tell you everything I
know. Alberto's shift begins at nine. There's an alarm. It sends a call to Mr. Lions's home in addition to yourselves. I received a telephone call from Mr. Lions tonight, stating he had received the alarm and driven straight over from his residence, which is relatively near. He phoned me from his office here. To the best of my knowledge, there shouldn't have been anyone else present with Alberto. I have a staff of twenty-three people who work here full- or part-time. If you wish to inquire into their activities this evening, I can provide you with the necessary information.”

Jackson recorded this statement with a finger-sized device. Then she raised it to her own lips and added Sax's name and the time of the statement.

“Thank you, Mr., um, Saxon-Tang.” She made a sound like there was something else she wanted to add, but she didn't add it; instead, she took a new tack. “Can I ask if there's anything you see missing? I mean there's a lot of stuff, but I assume this was a burglary.”

Sax made a slow turn where he stood, looking up and around at his stock of beautiful artifacts. Robbery made no sense, not in the warehouse. This stuff wasn't jewelry. One would need moving trucks, dollies, and a dozen men to carry off a worthwhile haul, and selling it would be nearly impossible. The market was too small. Everybody knew everybody else. Although he kept rejecting the idea, there was only one individual object he could imagine might have led to this tragic circumstance. Sax considered not mentioning it. It would complicate the plans forming in his mind. But there was death here. He couldn't obstruct whatever efforts might be made to solve the crime. Still, he hesitated. Who knew what his ideas would lead to? An open case, detectives—complications.

“Sir?” Detective Jackson was staring at him. He stared at her. Her lower lip projected in a furrowed bow like the shell of a Brazil nut. She looked tired because the outside corners of her eyes were lower
than the inside corners. And because she
was
tired. Sax decided to do the decent thing, however inconvenient. If by some remote chance God was waiting for him, upon his own death Sax could point to this moment as a mitigating factor when it came time for sentencing. He took a long breath.

“Let's have a look in my office,” he said.

As he suspected, the ormolu clock was gone.

3

New York City

The apartment appeared to be the aerie of a woman three times ­Emily's age, albeit one of good taste. Emily lived on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, in one of the brick buildings with a fire escape on the front façade. There was a Tibetan imports shop and a café on the ground floor. Emily occupied the fourth-floor front apartment.

Asmodeus Saxon-Tang made his way slowly up the stairs of the building, wheezing, clutching a gift box. Emily was not waiting at her door, as that would have been vulgar; Sax preferred his struggle with the stairs to go unobserved. Once he had caught his breath, Emily answered the door at the first knock and ushered Sax in with a sincere hug. She put the kettle on for tea.

The apartment was furnished with nondescript antiques, mostly knock-around brown Victorian pieces, the floors covered in worn Persian rugs. Mismatched bookshelves occupied every available wall, old family photographs peering out from the gaps in the books. In wet weather, the dowdy tufted chairs smelled of horsehair. It was the kind of place that ought to have a Manx cat slithering around the ankles, but
Emily had never possessed a cat. It was a thrifty, genteel space, such as a set decorator might conjure up if called upon to create an elderly music teacher's flat.

Asmodeus Saxon-Tang proffered the gift box to his niece. She wore a sheath of rough oat-colored silk, belted with a broad, knotted
kamarband
of magenta cotton, a gold circlet on her left wrist, and on her feet, Greek-style goatskin sandals. The simple outfit perfectly suited her rosewood-colored skin and black, softly rumpled hair. Emily accepted the box, turning it in her hands. She knew her uncle's ways. A gift from him was never shaken or manhandled. One never knew: it could be a battery-powered alarm clock he'd bought in the street from a Haitian costermonger, or it could be a Fabergé egg. Emily had received both from her beloved uncle. Everything came in the same sort of stout white cardboard boxes he used to pack things at his shop.

“It's heavy,” she observed, winging up her black brows.

Emily was not a prompt riser. The gift alarm clock had gotten her through many sleepy mornings. The Fabergé egg had gotten her through graduate school. It was, her uncle had said with the sidelong wink of the born thief, one of the eight missing imperial eggs. He knew it for a fact. Unfortunately he couldn't admit he knew it for legal reasons, so he gave the thing to Emily, and with his blessings she sold it without its extraordinary history for a tenth what it would otherwise have realized at auction. The tenth she
had
gotten was quite sufficient.

Emily was the only thing in the world Sax trusted, besides gold. She knew it and didn't make anything of it, and that was half of why Sax trusted her. In addition, she found him charming, rather than amusing, which was the scourge of a mincing old creature like himself; of all the family, it was she who understood and accepted his self-invented scruples. Uncle Sax had a moral code as rigid as that of the Puritans and as heartfelt as godfaith, insofar as his interests were concerned; it
was just that 90 percent of his interests ran counter to popular standards. Besides, he and Emily were the outsiders in their old, brittle family. Exotic and demure, like the subject of a Gauguin painting, and not a bit Saxon looking, she was a
love child
, always spoken in italics; he was anything but.

The box was square, wrapped in crisp Japanese paper with a chrysanthemum pattern in red and gold. Exactly the right size to hold a human skull, a two-slice toaster, or a handbag.

“May I open it now?” Emily asked.

“You might as well, I suppose,” Sax replied with studied indifference. Emily relished his show of unconcern. It concealed a love of giving, or more precisely, of distributing things to their right places. Sax had been alive for too long, and in the game of antiques too long, to harbor any illusions about possession. To give, to receive: merely an addition to the object's provenance. For him, the joy of giving was in seeing the object suitably disposed. If useful, better yet. But so many old and wonderful things were useless. In that case, they were called “art,” and thus became useful again.

“It's won't be useful, I hope,” Sax added, because Emily was taking too long stripping the paper off the box. He preferred the way she did it as a child, greedily ripping through paper and box alike with small fingers, but he knew she now liked to save the paper to make jackets for her softcover books. At last she got the paper off, primly folded it on the tea table at her elbow, and gave the box another turn in her hands. Her fingers were long, arched, with unpainted nails as thin and bright as a salmon's scales. Sax crossed and uncrossed his legs. She was rather overplaying the opening business, he thought. Toying with him.

At last she pried up the interlocking ears of the box top, revealing the nest of springy pine shavings in which he packed everything: he got the stuff in bales, sold as horse bedding. Emily rested the box on her
knees and carefully wriggled her fingers into the shavings, looking not into the box but at her uncle's face.

Sax beamed indulgently. Emily's expression became quizzical as she felt the object inside, then drew it up from the ruffled pine. It was silver, or skinned in silver; its weight, five or six pounds, suggested a core of iron inside. The thing was nine inches long, shaped somewhat like a sharp stub of pencil. The end corresponding with the eraser appeared to be the face of a mallet, its surface dimpled and rough as if used to drive spikes. Emily saw there was an oblate hole through the shaft, so the object must indeed be the head of some kind of large hammer. The pointed end was octagonal in section, tapering to a bright needle tip; the entire length of the point was deeply notched, so that if it were driven into something, it would make a star-shaped hole. Throughout the piece, the silver was richly chased with what looked like Aramaic characters and decorative motifs, though much blurred by time and use.

“A war hammer,” Emily said. “You shouldn't have.”

“Yes, I probably shouldn't,” Sax agreed, his anticipation giving way to concern.

“It
is
a war hammer?”

“Twelfth century,” Sax said, almost with regret. “French Crusades. Probably made by a Palestinian craftsman on commission.” His chin had sunk to his chest and he pinched it between thumb and forefinger. Emily waited for some further explanation, but her uncle was off in a cloud of thought.

“Uncle Sax? Why did you give me a war hammer?” Sax blinked and returned to the present. Emily was amused, it irritated him to observe.

“It's not strictly a war hammer,” he replied. “I mean that's what it's thought to be, what I insured it as, and certainly one could use it for that sort of thing, knocking people off horses and poking holes in their
armor. But that silver, of course, is too soft for martial use. It would smash to bits the first time you stuck it up somebody's cuirass.”

“Really, Uncle Sax.”

“Don't be coarse. A cuirass is the breastplate in a harness of armor.”

“So it's just a parade weapon, then,” Emily said.

Sax leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and his hands mimed what he spoke. “Except as you can see,” he said, “it's had considerable use in the last eight hundred years, yes? The bludgeony end has been beaten into lumps and the pointy end has been sharpened. So it's a war hammer, not intended merely for display, or for use against an armored opponent, the customary purpose of such an article. Therefore,” he said, and then stopped.

“Therefore,” Emily concluded for him, “it's for use against an unarmored opponent.”

“Precisely.”

“It's lovely,” Emily said. “Thank you, Uncle Sax.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, spilling horse bedding on the threadbare Sarouk carpet.

“Don't you want to know what it's for?”

“You said it's for bashing unarmored opponents,” Emily said. “I'll have a handle made for it and keep it by the door.” Sax suspected she was deliberately being obtuse. Normally she indulged his penchant for the dramatic reveal. He might as well get it over with.

“It's for killing vampires,” Sax said, and sat back again, to observe the effect of his pronouncement. It was suitable. Emily's brow crinkled and she stopped rotating the hammer in her hands, then sat up straight, hands and hammer resting on the edge of the gift box.

“Vampires?” she said. “Like Dracula?”

“Dracula wasn't a vampire. Listen. I don't think it's of any use to you. I certainly
hope
not, as I said. Unlikely, but possible.”

“Explain,” Emily said sternly, as if Sax had committed a conversational faux pas.

“It's one of a dozen made at the same time; they are called the Twelve Apostles. This one is Simon. Peter, Thomas, Judas, and a couple of the others are lost. James Alphaeus is in the Tower of London. John and Thaddeus and possibly Philip are in the Vatican. Grasping swine, those Romans. Matthew is in a private collection in Switzerland. They're all legendary for killing vampires. Real ones, I mean.”

Emily sat stock-still, as she had done since childhood: her uncle Sax had conjured up these mad tales of old things and the long, cometlike tails of history that trailed after them. He had never lied to her before, always marking conjecture from established fact. Theodore Roosevelt's hobbyhorse from his childhood home. The ring of a Plantagenet. A faience
wedjat
from Egypt's Third Intermediate Period. Now he spoke of vampires in the same way.

“When the Crusaders claimed the Holy Land, they split open an ancient order of things, like a spider mound. Within that place, where the desert sun never reached and the cries of Christian and Saracen could not pierce, there were vampires.” Sax saw the astonishment on Emily's face and hurried his narrative along. He needed her to listen, not wonder if he'd gone mad.

“These weren't as you think of them, sexy fellows with widow's peaks and hypnotic eyes, but
proper
vampires—diseased old shape-shifters with cold breath and the smell of decay on their skin. The Europeans were entirely incapable of handling this new threat to their ridiculous venture. It wasn't until the Third Crusade that they got a system sorted out. These little fellows”—here he indicated the silver hammerhead in Emily's hands—“were instrumental in wiping out much of the coven. According to legend, the one you're holding, Simon, was wielded by Conrad of Montferrat. It slew the vampires Abbas and Myrion, amongst others. No proof of any of it, naturally,
but the slaying aspect is genuine enough. Someone I know quite well used this very instrument to put a great big hole in the vampire Corfax in 1965, eighteen years before you were born. I assure you, it does work.”

“Are you serious?” Emily asked, her brows risen almost to her hairline.

“Deadly serious, if I may,” Sax replied. “I'm not sure how to explain this. Bear along. Vampires are real, of course. Not like elves or fairies or anything of that nature. It's sheerest vanity we humans imagine ourselves to be the dominant species just because there are so many of us. Sheep may entertain similar delusions. Like all predators, the vampires are few, but extraordinarily successful and dangerous. And they look like us, more or less, so one might never know. But they're not the same. They take on the appearance of their prey. A thousand years ago, half of them were more wolf than man. Not so easy to spot now.

“I've discussed them with scientists, you know. The few that are aware of them. Vampires come from something different from us. They're a different form of life. That's the main thing. All monster myths may descend from them. They're the living clay from which nightmares are shaped.”

As if regretting the mad horror of his words, Sax chuckled.

“Forgive my mood. I don't anticipate
you'll
have any, ah, difficulties, but they are also damnably clever creatures, and if one of them detected my relationship with you—”

“Uncle Sax?”

“Yes, Emily.”

“How do you know—?”

“Well. That's a very long story.”

“But for now.”

“For now,” Sax said, and shrugged an apology for being mysterious, “consider this a bit of insurance. I have the handle to it at the shop, but
the box was too big to carry. It's as long as my arm. Keep it by the bed, I suppose. Seriously. I don't think there will be any difficulties at all, but if there were, they would wind up on your doorstep, I'm afraid.”

“Vampires, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“I think it's time we discussed putting you in a home.”