Azrael (2 page)

“Geez,” the young man said. He pointed over Roger’s shoulder at a sink Roger already knew was there. “Help yourself,” he said. “You want a beer or something? Soda? Ice water?”

To make it look good, Roger had already put down the case and made for the sink. He was splashing water over his face. It was part of the plan, but it felt good all the same.

He paused between double handfuls of water to tell Lou no thanks. When he was finished, he turned back to the young man and thanked him. “You probably saved my life.”

Lou smiled at him. “You’re still dripping,” he said.

“It feels good,” Roger told him. “A man has to be crazy to go door-to-door on a day like this. Nobody’s home, anyway. I don’t know what you were doing out, but thank God you’re here.”

The young man’s smile took on a slightly wicked gleam. “Heavy date tonight. Have to make sure the mechanical phallus is in perfect shape. Believe me, when I’m done here, I’m standing under a cold shower until it’s time to get dressed, then I’m hitting an air-conditioned movie.”

Roger said it sounded like a good idea to him. “Well,” he said, “better get going. Thanks again.” He bent to pick up his sample case, then straightened suddenly, swinging the case in a wide arc into the side of Louis Symczyk’s head.

The young man dropped to the floor like a pile of laundry. Roger put the brick-loaded case down again and bent over the young man. No moans. No detectable breathing. Roger brought his hands up close to his chest and carefully flicked them dry. Tiny drops of water beaded up on the skin of the young man’s face.

Carefully, Roger placed Louis Symczyk back on his mechanic’s dolly and rolled him back under the car. He made certain that the young man’s shoes stayed clear of the cement floor. This was not likely to be investigated too thoroughly, but if by any chance it should be, Roger was too professional to leave drag marks on clothes or shoes.

When he had the body positioned, he spent a few seconds taking stock. The head was under a suspension spring. Right. He’d put the bricks back at the construction site and burn the briefcase tonight. Right.

Mission accomplished. Or it would be, in just a second. Roger kicked out the left front block, and the car came down. Tendrils of red began to trace their way across the black grease on the floor.

Roger turned and left before any could reach him.

In some ways this would be the easiest job yet, in some ways the hardest. Easiest because it demanded no guile, no deception. The victim didn’t need to be lulled. Hardest because it involved breaking into a house, with others home. Breaking in was simple enough—a butter knife could move a window latch, and the rattle of raindrops and the banging of thunder from the late-summer storm tonight would cover any noise
he
happened to make.

But there was always a chance someone would walk in on him, wanting to “check on the baby” or something, and if that happened, everyone in the house had to die. That would be bad for two reasons: it would dilute the message his employers were trying to send, and it would force him to use fire. He didn’t like to use fire. Fire diluted the message
Roger
was sending.

Still, he had his mission. Window latch slipped, sash slid up during a crash of thunder. A roll of dry plastic taken out from under his jacket, spread out on the floor to save wet footprints on the rug. A few soft, crackling footsteps across the plastic to the crib.

He could hear voices from another room. He held his breath to hear better. Someone said, “Blake.” Television. Roger let his breath go.

The baby was asleep, which was good. Quieter. The wadded towel in one hand, the kid’s head in the other. It was over in seconds.

Now, a few quiet steps back to the window, pull the plastic out behind him and relatch with a piece of waxed dental floss. In the morning, or whenever, they would discover the tragic crib death. The water on the sheet, on the baby’s head, from Roger’s rain-wet hands, would have dried. And no one would ever know.

Except, of course, the one who was supposed to know. That, however, wasn’t Roger’s department. All he had to do now was go back to his other life and await further orders.

S
HE WOULD HAVE HAD
more fun if she’d gone to the funeral.

Not, of course, that the funeral wouldn’t have been gruesome enough. God knew the other ones had. Weeping mothers. And fathers. Regina had been shocked and disappointed in herself to discover that a weeping man upset her much more than a weeping woman. A minister of God telling the mourners, as if he thought they didn’t already know, what a tragedy it was for a life to be snuffed out so young, with so much ahead of it. Back in May, the minister at the service for Keith Smith had told everyone to take comfort in the knowledge that God knows what he’s doing but that it is not always given to man to understand. He also assured them that God Never Tries Us Beyond Our Strength, and that Faith Would See Us Through. The priest at the services for Lou Symczyk had been much simpler about it—Lou was in heaven, and for that we should be happy.

Maybe so, Regina thought. It was hard, though, to be happy for someone whose head had been crushed by a ’77 Firebird slipping off a jack onto his head. Heaven had also been problematical, considering the number of speeding tickets and public scalps Lou had managed to accumulate with a succession of faster and faster cars in the three years between his reaching driving age and his death. He had even had the nerve to ask Regina to “go for a ride” with him once. She had, of course, refused. It would have been ridiculous. Regina was aware, though, that if she had been Lou’s age or younger, instead of four and a half years older, she might have been tempted.

Regina had spent an August morning sweltering in black at the side of Lou’s soon-to-be grave, hating every minute of it, as she had hated the glorious late-spring day she’d spent with the box containing little Keith Smith. She’d gone because, as her mother said, the Hudson Group was more than just a publishing concern. To the millions of people its two-hundred-odd local newspapers, radio and TV stations and cable systems reached, it was a spokesman, a teacher, and a goad. It informed them, spoke up for them, challenged them. To the readers of
Worldwatch
it was a fresh and different look at each week’s national and international news.

To the people of Kirkester, especially to those who had given up Manhattan or Chicago to come work here in the boonies at the home office, the Hudson Group was family.

Regina grinned. Speaking about the billion-dollar business Father and she (mostly she) had built, Mother had a tendency to sound like a rough draft of the introduction to the annual report.

But she meant every word of it, including the business about family. When tragedy struck, the Hudsons had to be there. It made no difference if the employee involved was top management, like Fred Smith, or a janitor, like Kasimir Symczyk. Duty called; Regina went.

But not today. Today they were burying a baby.

Clara Bloyd, age nine months, daughter of Tina Bloyd, typesetter. Sudden infant death syndrome. Crib death. Parents awoke to find perfectly healthy infants dead. Regina remembered it had been one of the first
Worldwatch
cover stories.

Regina had decided enough was enough. Yes, a journalist should be inured to all sorts of suffering and tragedy, and yes, Regina was going to be a first-rate journalist in spite of her name and connections. But she was damned if she was going to spend a beautiful, cool, October Thursday, with the sky bright blue and the trees trying to make up in a week for a year of single-color drabness, listening to sermons and lamentations over a small white wooden box. She’d stay in the office instead. Go over circulation reports. Relay her mother’s instructions to writers and artists and researchers. Wait for late-breaking stories.

Feel guilty.

And petty, and cowardly, and like a phony. Mother was at the funeral. Jimmy was at the funeral. Regina’s brother seemed to like nothing about the family business except the people who worked for it. He probably thought of, supervised and carried out more community and charity work than any nineteen-year-old in the world, with the possible exception of European royalty. Regina loved him, but she didn’t understand him very well.

She did understand that her mother and Jimmy were right about noblesse oblige. The way Old Man Symczyk had carried on, you might have thought it was a privilege for him to have his grandson die, if only as an occasion of proof of the respect in which he and his were held by the first family of the community.

Regina felt guilty about that, too, and guilty at the thought that at the age of twenty-four, when most of her friends were already disillusioned or divorced, she was still worried about her right to avoid an unpleasant experience versus her obligation to help other people get over theirs. Maybe she should suggest a Lifestyles piece on it—the Me Decade Meets the Old Guilt.

She was about half ready to start taking herself seriously when the phone on her mother’s desk buzzed.

And kept buzzing. Her mother’s secretary should have picked up, but he was probably in the bathroom or something. Regina sighed, punched a button, and picked up the phone.

“Petra Hudson’s office,” she said. She had always loved the idea of somebody’s office answering the phone. One of Regina’s small triumphs at the Kirkester
Chronicle,
the hometown paper her mother had given her to run the way other mothers give their children the wooden spoon to lick, was to forbid the practice of sending memos attributed to your desk. Some of the old-liners, the I-was-working-here-before-anybody’d-ever-heard-of-your-father crowd, had grown very protective of the authority of their desks, but Regina was in charge, Regina had made a decision and Regina had made it stick. Desks did not send memos, people did. If a newspaper couldn’t say what it meant, what good was it?

Regina’s mother had watched the memo war with a sort of absent amusement. Petra Hudson could have settled the matter by fiat at any time, but Regina would be damned if she was going to ask, and Mother, to her credit, did not volunteer. It was one of the things Regina admired about her mother—she didn’t meddle.

Regina admired a lot of things about her mother, and respected her, and even loved her, but it was a distant kind of love, communicated through the media of nannies’ reports and letters to and from boarding schools here and abroad, while Mother fought the good fight to keep the Hudson Group in Hudson hands after the death of James Hudson, Sr.

Sometimes it seemed to Regina that she was not so much a daughter as she was a Chosen Successor. The feeling had been stronger over the last few years, since it had become obvious that Jimmy had no interest in the family business, but it had always been there. Why else had they named her Regina, for God’s sake, if they didn’t expect that someday she would reign?

Thank God she loved the business.

Now Regina sat (temporarily) on her mother’s throne, holding her mother’s electronic scepter to her ear.

“Western Union calling,” a voice of indeterminate sex announced.

Regina smiled. It was appropriate that somebody’s office should pick up the phone to find an entire corporation on the other end of the line.

“We have a message for Ms. Hudson.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Ms. Hudson?”

Regina wondered when Western Union had gotten so picky. “I’m Ms. Hudson,” she said truthfully. Her mother was going to be in no mood to chase down messages after she got home.

“Deepest condolences for your loss,” the voice began.

“What?” It took a split second for Regina to realize this was the beginning of the message, rather than some kind of gentle insult, but it was still bewildering. Petra Hudson hadn’t suffered any loss her daughter knew about.

“Deepest condolences on your loss,” the voice said again. “It is well known how you feel about your family. Tragedy can strike at any time, but strength and wisdom can see us through. Best personal regards.”

There was a silence. Regina doubted it was a pause for effect, since the whole thing had been read in the mechanical singsong of a court stenographer.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“There is a signature.”

“Okay,” Regina said. “Whose?”

“It’s signed, Cronus.”

There’d been some expression in the voice that time, and there could be no doubt that the pause had been intentional. Regina was losing her patience.

“Cronus,” she said.

“You heard me correctly,” the voice said. It was less Western Union-like all the time.

“And who the hell,” she said, “is Cronus?”

But even if she’d been expecting an answer, she wasn’t going to get one. The owner of the voice had hung up before she’d even gotten to “hell.”

T
HE PEOPLE MAY HAVE
come to the child’s funeral to mourn, but they stayed to gossip. Petra Hudson had good ears, better ears than the gossipers thought she did. They kept choking off their sentences or lowering their voices a split second too late. Petra heard the fragments of insult and insinuation all the way from the gravesite to the car.

“... her ‘driver.’ Too democratic to say ‘chauffeur’ ...” This with a finger pointed through the crook of an elbow at Wes Charles, who held his cap in one gloved hand and his employer’s elbow in the other, helping her over the muddy spots.

“... sleeping with him?” another voice said.

“... never needed a driver before this year. Drove herself. Said she liked it that ...” Petra recognized that last voice, one of the photo editors on
Worldwatch.
She was ready to whirl on the man and fire him on the spot, but that would have been madness. A child had just been laid to rest here, an infant. A young mother was facing the greatest grief imaginable. This was no time to make a scene.

And, she decided, there never would be a good time to fire the man. Not for gossiping about her, at least. It was, she reminded herself, a free country, and this was part of the price you paid for being the boss.