Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (18 page)

“And he
is
a detective?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, certainly,” George answered.

“An investigator,” Peter added, speaking for the first time since she’d shut him up.

But she didn’t shut him up this time. No, this time, as George opened a bag he had brought and began to disinfect and then bandage her arm, she smiled right at him and George thought he saw something being born in her eyes right then, a spirit he had never had. It was George’s turn to be quiet.

“So, who are you then, really?” Meaghan asked Peter, and at first he seemed not to understand the question. And then he sat a little higher in his seat before replying, his eyes still quite serious.

“I’m sure after all this there’s very little you won’t believe, so the truth will do as well as anything. I was born May twenty-ninth, 1420, in the city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire. Once the capital of the world. My birth name was Nicephorus Dragases, and I’m the bastard son of Constantine the Eleventh, Palaeologus, the last Byzantine emperor.

“So, if you want to get all technical about it, you could say I’m the last Prince of Byzantium. Technically.”

And, finally, he was smiling, but now George was not.

“You never told me that.”

He’d known of Peter’s past, even his real name, but not of his lineage.

“You never asked,” Peter answered, still smiling.

And now George looked at Meaghan, who seemed mesmerized by the whole thing. He could read it in her face—the undead she could accept, monsters and death were no problem, but a living piece of history sitting on her couch sipping tea? George knew how she felt. His ancestors would have knelt at Peter’s feet, for Byzantine they were.

“Ah,” George grunted in mock disgust, “a tidbit he holds on to for use in impressing girls.”

Carnage!

Mulkerrin loved the carnage, loved the absolute destruction of a human life. His passion for the massacre was unmatched by any other emotion he had experienced. In many ways, it made the fact of his celibacy a moot point.

Yes, he had a gift. Unfortunately, his superior expected him to separate the art from the work. Get the job done was the only criterion, ignoring the quality of the work in favor of the efficiency of the job. But he didn’t want to be a hack painter mass-producing landscapes, he wanted to be a true artist.

And he did have the talent.

But sometimes it got in the way. Sometimes he lingered a bit too long before forcing a point, waiting perhaps for just the right slant of sunlight for the shadows he felt compelled to portray. Sometimes he messed up.

This was one of those times.

Wasn’t it enough that the janitor had survived his first attack? Wasn’t it enough that the lawyer had gotten involved, and the other girl and the detective? And yet it could all have been taken care of. No one would have complained that he had waited too long to savor his art, too long to force Guiscard to give up the whereabouts of the book. As long as all the loose ends had been tied up, and he had been confident that they would be, before he retrieved the book and returned to Rome to prepare for the Blessed Event.

No. Nothing would have come of it. Another job well done, Garbarino would have said, and he would have retained his artistic integrity.

But that would have been too easy. The detective was the scourge of the earth, a Defiant One, and the human woman probably nothing more than his fatted calf. Had he known in advance, he could have destroyed the creature easily. Even now, with the Defiant One alarmed, he could almost certainly destroy it. But time was running out. More important, there could be no possibility of the creature getting its hands on the book.

That would spell disaster.

But Mulkerrin reassured himself, the cleanup had already begun. Once he’d realized, on his way out of the hospital, exactly what had happened in the Gallagher woman’s apartment, which events had caused Liam no small amount of physical pain due to his link with the corpse, he’d begun the cleanup right away. No more dillydallying for Father Mulkerrin.

A visit to Daniel Benedict’s office, through doors whose alarms he hadn’t allowed to sound when broken open, revealed that the police had been through Benedict’s things and, not finding anything of interest, obviously not knowing what to look for, had left everything pretty much as it was. Even Benedict’s Rolodex was still on the desk. Mulkerrin found such inefficiency amusing and appalling at the same time. He would never put up with it from his own men, but he almost expected it now from others. Corruption, stupidity, and just plain laziness were the order of the day. As far as the cops were concerned, any clues to be found in Benedict’s office would not be easy to find, therefore it was not worth the trouble of finding them.

But the Defiant One, Octavian, he would look more closely, and Mulkerrin couldn’t allow that.

The “lightning bug” Liam conjured had done the job nicely. A common demon, an easy spell, but oh so efficient. With a flutter of his fingers and a jumble of words, he had caused the thing to appear in Benedict’s office. One more word, and the creature had flared, its explosion destroying not just the office, but a rather large portion of that corner of the building. All Mulkerrin needed was a couple of days’ uncertainty as to the origin of the fire. He’d be long gone by then. Not as if they could trace it to him in the first place. Not as if they would if they could.

No. He was covering his tracks. He would love to get rid of Octavian and Gallagher, but he would have to come back for them. The book was of prime importance. Any longer and he could jeopardize the efficiency of the Blessed Event, and that would be the ultimate transgression.

No, he had to get the book back to Rome within forty-eight hours, which gave him one day and night to accomplish his task.

And Guiscard. Oh, Guiscard would definitely have to die.

Ted Gardiner drifted slowly off to sleep, hoping desperately that he would not dream of the hospital. He was pleased with himself. Just minutes ago he’d called in for messages and been told about Dan Benedict’s office exploding. His eyes fluttered open one last time and he grinned sleepily as he looked at the rectangular piece of cardboard on the nightstand.

Wouldn’t Peter be surprised. Two could play that Sherlock Holmes game, he’d tell his friend when they met at noon to start the hunt.
The game is afoot
, he’d say, waving the card in Peter’s face. His little trip by Benedict’s office earlier had probably saved them hours of legwork.

His fellow officers had left everything in the office intact, but Ted had slipped that one rectangle into his pocket. His conversations with Peter had made it stick out like a sore thumb. After the explosion, Ted had realized they were probably far closer to the end of this thing than any of them knew.

It was a card from Benedict’s Rolodex. On the card was a name, a number, and a hotel.

Octavian wasn’t the only one who’d be surprised.

“HOW DID IT START?” MEAGHAN ASKED, HER eyes squinting with concentration, with fascination. “How did you first meet Von Reinman?”

George looked up, first at Peter, then at Meaghan. He was still amazed at the level of acceptance she had reached in such a short time.

“Memory is a strange thing for my kind,” Peter said, sipping his tea. “Humans lose many things in the haze of time, but we lose weeks, months, even years. Recall is active, rather than passive. An exercise, if you will. But what memory I do have is clear as crystal, as if I lived it only moments before. Fortunately, my first meeting with Karl is still with me.”

“Sort of like having it on video,” Meaghan said, and George smiled.

“Not really,” Peter answered, smiling as well, “but if it helps you to think of it that way, it’s close enough.”

There was a moment of silence then, and Peter’s face relaxed, a slight smile still on his lips and the look in his eyes very far away.

“Tell us,” George said, only now realizing how little he truly knew.

“It was Thursday, the twenty-fourth day of May, the year of the Lord fourteen hundred and fifty-three. The Turks were at the wall. Indeed, they had been at the wall for what seemed like forever to us then. ‘Us’ meant myself, Gregory, young Andronicus, and an Italian sailor named Carlo.”

“Your friends?” George asked.

“Yes,” Peter said, sipping his tea once again. “My old friends.”

It was impossible not to notice how much he missed them.

“We were soldiers in the service of Lucas Notaras, the megadux, but we’d been assigned to assist the German, Johannes Grant, in preventing the Turks from tunneling under the city walls. Half the time we wasted covering sections of the wall supposedly protected by the troops of Minotlo Bocchiardi, the Venetian—there were a lot of Italians, mostly sailors, and other Christians there, defending the city. Mainly we dug countertunnels by the Caligarian Gate on the Blachaernae Wall, dropping down on the Turks and the Serbian silver miners they had pressed into service.

“While the sultan surrounded the city’s fourteen miles of wall with more than eighty thousand men, inside we numbered less than seven thousand. We’d had few casualties, but there were many wounded, and supplies of food and arms were running low. Even so, we might have held out until help could arrive; the Venetian captain Trevisano had held the Turks in the strait of Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara; they could not pass the boom which guarded our bay, the Golden Horn. But the Turks did the impossible—they moved their ships
overland
into the Horn.

“So now we dug countertunnels and fought each new siege against the wall, knowing that the city’s fate had already been decreed. That day, the twenty-fourth, had been very strange. As we worked, a procession passed us carrying our holiest icon, of the Mother of Christ, to whom the city was dedicated. Every man, woman, and child who could be spared from the walls had joined the procession.”

“And they dropped it,” Meaghan said. “I read about this, but I can’t believe you were there.”

George said nothing.

“Oh, yes, I was there,” Peter continued. “Not only did they drop it, but for several moments after, they could not lift it up.
Could not lift it.
Period. Eight men tried to do so. Not only were people terrified that Mary had forsaken them, but the icon had landed on one of the men, shattering his leg, and they struggled to free him. That went on for several minutes, the statue impossible to move, and then it did, returning to its usual weight, light enough for four men to comfortably march with it on their shoulders.

“Needless to say, the procession was over. But as the people scattered, matters worsened. The sky literally split open and water poured from the heavens like nothing I’d ever seen before or have ever seen since. A flash flood washed through the city, taking several lives. Our saving grace was that rain fell on the Turks as well; otherwise that might have been the end right there.

“That night, when we had time to ourselves, my friends and I sat in the grove, drinking and sharing our fear. There the strange events continued, and that night I met Karl Von Reinman. . . .

It was a warm, bitter wine that tasted the way Nicephorus imagined the urine of oxen might. But it was all they had. The wine was passed around in silence, the four men lost in their own thoughts. Women and children and the men assigned to the task after nightfall worked steadily to repair the damage done by cannon fire during the day. Where these four sat, the light of the full moon filtered through tree limbs above them, where nightingales sang.

“
Strange, isn’t it?” an unfamiliar voice asked, and the four turned to see a stranger approaching.

“
What, besides yourself?” Nicephorus answered.

The new arrival raised an eyebrow and smirked as if amused and leaned against a tree. When he spoke, it was with an accent they all recognized as German. After all, they worked with Johannes every day.

“
The nightingales. You would think, especially in light of what will happen here fairly soon, that they would have migrated with all the other birds. But they are still here, and they continue to sing.”

“
Why should they not?” Gregory asked. “Do you think they feel an obligation to the emperor, and that is why they stay? They stay because they wish to . . . who can know a bird? And they sing because that is what birds do.”