Styx (29 page)

The next morning, it took Styx almost an hour to drag himself the mile from Marc Gerard's house southwest to the office of Dr. S. Vrancken, his orthopedist, in the Dorpstraat in Mariakerke, just across the street from the historic Our Lady of the Dunes Church.

Ever since his encounter with Gino Tersago the previous evening, Styx felt his physical condition improving. He wasn't exactly reborn, not that, but he certainly felt
better
. Except for his hip, which continued to plague him.

Could gnawing on Gino have had some kind of restorative effect on him? That seemed a logical explanation—if it wasn't absurd to use the word
logic
under these conditions.

But then what about his hip?

He hesitated before the security camera's electronic eye, asking
himself for the third time in as many minutes if he could really go through with this.

Unlike some doctors, Dr. Vrancken didn't have open consulting hours; he was available by appointment only. Styx didn't have an appointment, but Vrancken would hopefully agree to see him without one. He chose his moment carefully, avoiding the doctor's usual hours.

Without some relief for his hip, he didn't see how he could possibly go on. Emergency surgery and an artificial hip were probably out of the question, but he remembered what Vrancken had told him the last time they'd met:

“With a little luck, you might be able to hold out for a couple of years. I can prescribe painkillers, if you need them, and, if it gets really bad, I can give you a shot of cortisone, which takes effect within a couple of days and can help reduce the irritability of the joint. But we'll have to follow up. I want you to get an X-ray, just to be sure.”

Thanks to Gino Tersago, he now knew a handy home remedy for most of the thousand natural shocks that zombie flesh turns out to be heir to, but all the long pig in the world apparently wasn't going to mend a broken hip. This puzzled him.

Cortisone
, he thought.
That's the ticket
.

It was worth a shot, anyway.

Shot. Cortisone. Ha.

He pulled off the ski mask, leaned close enough to the camera lens to blur the image, and rang the bell. If the doctor didn't faint at the sight of him, maybe he'd be willing to help. If not, he'd have to force him to cooperate.

How would that work, exactly? Would he be able to overpower him? He was about ten years younger than Vrancken, and the old Raphael Styx could have taken the doctor with one hand tied behind his back. But he wasn't sure how well the new Styx would fare in a fight.

“Can I help you?” a disembodied male voice said.

“Good morning,” he said carefully. “I'd like to see the doctor.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don't, but it's an emergency.”

He waited for what seemed like an unusually long time, and was about to give up and walk away when the door clicked open.

A moment later Styx found himself in Dr. Vrancken's small waiting room. Whenever he had visited in the past, there were always other patients on the sofa and in the row of wooden chairs, flipping half attentively through old issues of boring magazines, and a receptionist behind the desk's sliding glass windows, but today the waiting room was completely empty.

Styx took a seat on the couch. Soft Muzak trickled through speakers. A tall cactus stood in an earthenware pot on the marble floor. The fringe on the Persian throw rug was unraveling in spots. Three rectangles on the wall were darker than the wallpaper around them, suggesting that some redecoration was in progress.

Several minutes crawled by, and Styx amused himself thinking how the expression “time stood still” takes on new meaning when you're dead. What would he do, he wondered, if Vrancken decided to call the police? There weren't really all that many options open to him.

He decided to call the police himself, fished out his phone, and punched in Delacroix's number.

“Styx?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened last night? I waited for you, but you never came out of the bank.”

“The café. I wasn't in there that long.”

“I waited for over an hour.”

“Only seemed like a couple minutes to me. I guess time works differently in the past.”

“Whatever. I finally gave up and went home,” said Delacroix. “I hope you're not mad.”

“Uh-uh. Want to know where I am now?”

“At Ensor's house?”

“I'm in my orthopedist's waiting room.”

“Jesus Christ. What are you doing there?”

“Hoping he'll give me an injection for my hip. I can't take the pain anymore.”

“What's wrong with your hip? It's in worse shape than the rest of you?”

“Gotta start somewhere. An ounce of prevention's worth—”

“Prevention?” scoffed Delacroix. “You're way past that point, Inspector. There's no cure for what you've got.”

“What's your problem? Get out on the wrong side of bed?”

“I've been thinking about our little adventure last night. You painted a lovely picture of what you say you saw, but I didn't see a thing.”

“I'm not lying, Delacroix.”

“Maybe not. But that doesn't mean what you're saying is true. I saw you walk into a bank, and that's
all
I saw. Maybe you had a spare key?”

“You think I just imagined it?”

“I'm a cop. I need facts, not stories.”

“How much help have the facts been in this investigation so far?”

“About as much as your cozy little chats with dead painters. You really think they're going to help us take down the Stuffer?”

“Ensor said some things that made sense,” said Styx. “But I still haven't figured it all out. The key to the whole case is right in front of me. I just can't quite get a handle on it.”

“You're letting all this romantic, melancholy shit from the past distract you. But I'm keeping my eyes on the here and now, Inspector.
I'm not dead. I have to go with my brains, not some spooky ‘sixth sense.' Interrogations, alibis, motives, witnesses. That's the key to this case.”

There was a confidence in Delacroix's voice that Styx hadn't heard before. “I'm getting back to actual police work today,” said Delacroix. “We're bringing Paul Delvaux in for further questioning.”

“Paul Delvaux's got nothing to do with it,” Styx told him. “Not
your
Paul Delvaux.”

“Don't be so sure. He's got no alibi for the Pignot murder. And he's on the board of trustees of the art school where she was killed, so he could have had easy access to the building.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“It's
something
. You've got nothing but a few
tableaux vivants
and some hallucinations.”

“Listen to me,” said Styx. “Ensor said something interesting last night about masks and a possible motive for the murders. We assumed the killer's just trying to give Death a hand, but he's not.”

“So what
is
he doing, then?”

“The perp's interested in resurrection, in life after death, which might explain the sand sculptures. At least, that's what I understood from Ensor. He was talking about the ancient Egyptian high priests who mummified the dead kings, and how man's not immortal and even the doctors can't—”

“And this is all going to help us catch the bastard how?”

Styx heard a door close somewhere in the office suite. “Let me know about Delvaux,” he said, and broke the connection.

A voice echoed faintly in the distance, as if Dr. Vrancken was talking on his own cell phone or saying good-bye to another patient.

Styx hadn't seen the orthopedist in quite a while—their last visit had been, in a very real way, a lifetime ago. All he could remember were the surgical scrubs: no lab coat, but a blindingly white short-sleeved
shirt and drawstring trousers, as if Vrancken had been modeling the latest OR fashions for a magazine spread. Oh, and a white surgical mask that hung around his neck, like a general practitioner would wear a stethoscope.

Now
that
was a true professional.

Styx waited for the door leading back to the doctor's consulting room to open.

He waited and waited, but no one came.

Was this what purgatory was? A lonely wait in an empty room and piano music floating from the office stereo?

Again he heard a voice behind the door. He seemed to recognize it. It was the same voice that had responded to his ring at the front-door bell a few minutes ago, but he was sure he'd heard it somewhere else, not long ago.

He sat bolt upright on the sofa. No, that had to be a coincidence. Over a cheap electronic intercom system, all male voices sound pretty much the same.

He remembered looking into the camera lens in the lobby of the mysterious Spilliaert's apartment building in the Hofstraat, remembered the sound of the voice that had then responded to his ring. Could that voice and this voice possibly be the same?

He struggled up from the sofa. The longer he sat, the more pain radiated from his hip down through his leg to his foot. He stepped closer to the wall and examined the rectangles of unfaded wallpaper. He couldn't remember what exactly had hung there on his previous visits, but he had a vague recollection of colorful art prints. It was one of the things that had impressed him about S. Vrancken: the doctor, he remembered thinking, had taste.

But . . . ?

What had happened to the framed pictures?

He heard a soft cough from the other side of the door, which led
from the waiting room to the back of the office suite. Could that be Dr. Vrancken or his nurse coming to usher him into the consulting room? He turned away from the missing pictures and looked back and forth between the two doors. One would take him deeper into Vrancken's territory, the other would return him to the street. Which way should he go?

He was frozen to the spot, unable to move in either direction.

Something was holding him fast, refusing to permit him either to advance or retreat.

What was it?

He knew the answer had something to do with those missing pictures—and then he had it.

The Surrealists!

He remembered the doctor's confident, comforting voice, and the white surgical mask he always wore around his neck. According to James Ensor, even the absence of a mask is just another mask.

“My God,” he whispered.

Man wasn't made to be immortal. We age, we sicken, we die. We fight against it—think of the medical profession—but the battle has never, will never, can never be won.

What did doctors do if not fight against death? Could it be the Stuffer lurking behind Dr. Vrancken's waiting-room door?

Had the doctor recognized him on the surveillance cam's monitor, just as he'd recognized him in the lobby of the mysterious Spilliaert's apartment building in the Hofstraat and buzzed him in?

Did one of the missing frames here in the waiting room once hold a reproduction of a painting by Léon Spilliaert?

He couldn't remember. His brain was a sieve, and he could no longer tell the difference between his memories and pure hallucination.

Styx stumbled back a few steps. He'd come here for an injection, not to confront the Stuffer. He reached for his phone and was about to
call Delacroix again when some faint sound or fainter instinct warned him that S. Vrancken was shuffling about his office.

What was he doing? Styx silently turned the knob and eased the waiting-room door open. At the end of the hall, the door to the doctor's office stood ajar. He could hear someone moving around in there. There was the rustle of papers, files, reports. How much longer before the doctor came for him?

Styx retreated back through the waiting room and out to the street. Moments later he had Delacroix on the line.

“I think I've got something,” he said.

But Delacroix didn't let him finish. “Us too. Delvaux's gone. Packed his bags and put his penthouse up for sale.”

“What?”

“You need me to spell out for you what this means?”

“But—”

“What have
you
got?”

Styx was at a loss for words. Was he wrong? Was he losing his mind? It had all seemed so logical. But now, speaking with Delacroix, it all seemed like mere superstition and coincidence.

“Chief Inspector?”

“Yeah.”

“You still there?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Delacroix. “We've put an APB out on Paul Delvaux, and we've got every available man looking for him. But there's something else.”

“What?”

There was a long pause, and then Delacroix said, “Your funeral.”

“What?”

“You heard me. It's official. They've announced that you're dead.”

“They haven't found a body!”

“It's going to be a sort of memorial service. Burial at sea. Isabelle says that's in your will—which she found. Under the woodpile next to the fireplace, right?”

Burial at sea
, Styx thought. Yes, that's what he had wanted.

He'd even specified a recording he wanted played at the service, a catchy little rock song called “Come Sail Away.”

I'm sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea
 . . .

Kind of a no-brainer, really. He remembered his mother playing the record for him back in the late seventies, when he was just a kid, and telling him proudly that the musicians who wrote and sang it had created it just for him. They were an American band, Mama told him, and their name, like his, was Styx.

“It's tomorrow morning,” Delacroix said. “You want to go?”