Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (22 page)

Across the hall, Davenport’s door opened. Mitch pressed his eye to the peephole. “Ok,” he said, his voice suddenly tense. “This is it. Hat and coat — and he’s headed for the elevators. I can’t…. Wait, he’s caught one. Come on.”

One thing, Alma thought, there were plenty of elevators. They caught one almost at once, reached the lobby in time to see Lewis whisking out the main door. Mitch lengthened his stride to catch up, and as she hurried at his side, Alma caught a glimpse of Lewis making his way south on Dearborn. Davenport had to be ahead of him, but she couldn’t see him, and didn’t spot him until they caught up with Lewis at the next intersection.

“Well?” Mitch asked, and Lewis looked over his shoulder.

“He went up there.”

He nodded to the iron stairs that led to the elevated railway station across the street. Mitch looked at the stream of cars, the white-gloved policeman with his whistle directing traffic, and muttered something under his breath. But then the policeman gave another shrill blast, stopping the cars, and they joined the other pedestrians hurrying up the steps.

Luckily, the platform was crowded. Alma allowed herself one quick glance to be sure Davenport was there — yes, there he was, at the far end of the platform, looking distinguished and a little impatient — and melted back behind Lewis. The train arrived with a screech of brakes, and she hung back with the others until they were sure Davenport had gotten aboard, and then stepped into the next car. Lewis forged his way down the corridor until he was almost at the connecting door, where he could see into Davenport’s car, and Alma dropped reluctantly into one of the wooden seats. The train lurched into motion.

She had only the vaguest idea of Chicago’s geography. Jerry knew the city well, of course, he’d been a student here, but he wasn’t with them. She hoped one of the others had thought to buy a guidebook, or something. They were heading south, though, she could tell that much, under skies that were steadily darkening. She hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella or a raincoat, either, and hoped they wouldn’t get caught in a downpour. Lewis was still standing by the connecting door, relaxed and easy; after the first few stops, she decided there would be plenty of time to get off when Davenport did, and she let herself relax a little.

The train made its way slowly along the elevated tracks, brakes scraping on every corner. The buildings were close on either side, backs of tenements and apartments and shops, so that she wondered how anyone stood the noise. You’d get used to it after a while, she supposed, but still. Five stops, seven, ten…. The train kept heading steadily south, the crowd thinning with every stop, until Lewis had to take a seat, or become too conspicuous. Alma craned to see the station signs. Forty-Seventh Street, Fifty-First, Fifty-Fifth. The train slowed again, and she saw Lewis rise to his feet. The train pulled into the Fifty-Eighth Street Station, and she followed Mitch onto the platform. There weren’t so many people here, but Davenport seemed oblivious, and headed for the stairs as though he was in a hurry to get where he was going before the rain came.

At least it was easier to keep him in sight along these streets. He was heading east now, past houses and open lots and the occasional neighborhood shop. Trees rose ahead, a public park, and Lewis looked over his shoulder.

“Why would he — is he meeting someone, do you think?”

“No idea,” Mitch answered, but his voice was faintly worried.

Alma took a careful breath as they plunged into the tree-shaded walks. Whatever Davenport wanted here, at least she could feel the ground beneath her feet, the familiar solidity of earth untrammeled by the city. It was a comfort, if it came to a confrontation, to know it was there for her. They skirted a lagoon without stopping, and came out on the park’s eastern edge. The buildings were more crowded now, square, handsome buildings in brick and granite, and she realized they had reached the University.

“Mitch,” she began, and he answered, “Yeah. I see it.”

A new building rose ahead of them, its sign proclaiming it the Oriental Institute Museum. Davenport looked neither right nor left, heading up the steps into the shadowed doorway.

“Isn’t that where Jerry was going?” Lewis said, and Mitch nodded.

“We’d better find him,” Alma said.

T
he museum downstairs was not open yet, plastered walls still waiting for paint, signs proclaiming that soon it would be a luxurious and modern home for the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s famed collection of Middle Eastern antiquities. The building was new and very large, boasting the best amenities scholars could want, and if the museum was not yet open the library and reading rooms on the second floor lacked nothing. Certainly the collection of classical works belonging to the University of Chicago was impressive. It was even better than it had been when Jerry finished his doctorate here in 1916.

He’d been twenty-seven then, a promising young scholar in the field. Whatever disadvantages anyone had dared to mention had been long since overcome. He’d worked on a dig in Palestine and another in Turkey, studied with Dorpfeldt and written a paper that earned the approbation of Arthur Evans. Perhaps some of his theories were a little outré, especially in terms of giving so much credence to early syncretic elements as evidence of cultural influence, but Evans had become a colossus by going out on a limb. Risk is how societies, and men, advance.

The war had changed all that, of course. Mathematics had proved useful for artillery, but it was being fluent in Italian that had sent him to Venice, to defend the city against the Austrians. And then there had been Gil.

He’d tried to return here, in the fall of 1919. He’d been more than welcome, a special assistant to a professor who had believed in him. A wound is an honorable thing, of course, especially one taken in the saving of precious civilization from the barbarian hordes. But there had been blood clots in the damaged foot, the last one cutting off circulation so that it swelled up alarmingly, the skin stretched tight like the surface of a balloon. Given the choice of his foot or his life the decision was logical. He read Seneca in the hospital, hoping it would serve.

A few weeks and he’d be back at work. Surely. But Stoicism did not conquer facts. A cold Chicago winter stretched ahead, living in rooms in a boarding house on an upper floor that he could not get to in his wheelchair, still too weak to transfer from wheelchair to bed without help. He’d sent a casual letter from the hospital. Doing fine, pesky foot. And he’d known or at least hoped what would happen.

Gil looked better. Well, a corpse would look better than Gil when he’d seen him last, in the hospital in Venice just before he’d been shipped home. They hadn’t thought Gil would live. They hadn’t known the war would end. Jerry had said goodbye, Gil wavering in and out of consciousness, knowing it would be final.

And now he sauntered in, his hair more gray than brown now, and the lines in his face deeply graven, but with a bounce in his step. “Come on, Jerry. We’re here to spring you.”

“Spring me?” He’d still been taking morphine by injection then. His head wasn’t clear.

“We’re taking you back to Colorado. Now don’t worry about a thing. You’ll go in top comfort by air, just like you were the President!” Gil came over and put his hand to Jerry’s brow. “And you know Alma is as good as a nurse. She’s seen it all in the ambulance service. Better than a boarding house, and you know it.”

He did know it. He knew perfectly well he couldn’t live alone, but he’d hardly dared to hope….

Alma’s smile was warm. “How are you doing, Jerry?”

“I’m fine,” Jerry said, looking from Gil to Alma, her conservative black hat looking incongruous on her. He’d never seen her dressed like that, never seen her dressed like a lady. “I’m just fine now.”

He’d gone to sleep on the plane, an injection of morphine to ease the discomfort of travel, the pain of being jostled over and over. He’d gone to sleep to the white noise of the engines. Alma sat beside him, her profile sharp against the window as she read a book. She looked up, caught his drowsy gaze. “We’ll be home soon,” she said as he drifted off.

Nine years ago, now. He’d probably never go in the field again, not with his leg, and if he couldn’t go in the field he was more or less useless to any faculty. Still, there was utility in synthesis, and he was welcome at the Oriental Institute even if thirteen years meant that most everyone he had known at the University of Chicago were gone. He still had some contacts, still had the respect of some fellow scholars, even if they did feel terribly sorry for poor Dr. Ballard, whose career had seemed so promising.

He kept abreast of the work, of course, and still took every journal. He even wrote some, mainly reviews of other scholars’ work that he liked to think were sparkling with dry wit. He’d been able to keep up with that even during Gil’s final illness. He’d like to think it was a contribution.

At least, Jerry thought, looking up from the table in the main reading room, he’d kept abreast enough to have an idea of where to look for the information he needed. There had been some very promising work on Ephesian Diana since Hogarth’s excavations before the war, new votive material that was being worked on by a veritable army of graduate student translators. It was quite possible that the correct form of an Artemisian binding could be inferred. Hopefully it would not involve anything impossible, like sacrificing a bull.

Not that he had a moral objection to the sacrifice of bulls. Jerry ate beef. No different from slaughtering a steer for consumption, but not something they could manage easily in one of Henry’s aircraft hangars. Now, on a farm….

Jerry looked up as the door to the reading room opened. He blinked. For a moment he thought he was imagining things. He’d been concentrating so hard on the subject of Davenport and the
animus infernus
that he imagined him there.

But no. There was Bill Davenport standing in the doorway next to the docent, staring at him with what could only be described as a look of horror.

Jerry looked back. Anything he’d meant to say died on his lips, suddenly very, very aware of the amulet in his pocket. He stared at Davenport – no, at whatever it was that wore Davenport – and it stared back.

And then, suddenly, it let out a horrible, bloodcurdling scream. Or maybe it was Davenport who screamed, the terrible plea of a man in anguish, and turned around and dashed for the door, nearly knocking the elderly docent down in the process.

Jerry got to his feet faster than he would have thought possible. He hurried around the table, his only thought that he couldn’t let it get away, couldn’t let it jump into some perfectly innocent graduate student who happened to be walking in, into the secretary at her typewriter in the front office or the plasterer just inside the museum doors on his ladder. He had to stop it somehow.

There were the stairs, and he had just reached the head of the stairs to the main lobby when he heard another scream below. Grabbing the rail, Jerry manhandled himself down the first few steps, enough to see. Just as Davenport had come down the stairs Mitch, Alma and Lewis had been walking in the front doors. Lewis was still holding the door open, Alma just ahead of him, Mitch a step in the rear.

The secretary looked up from her desk. The plasterer turned around. An old man in a three piece suit stood arrested by the secretary’s desk, a letter in his hand.

Jerry felt it gather, like a leopard tensing to spring. Trapped. Cornered. There was no way out. This was a trap prepared by the hunters, by Her hounds. For one moment Jerry saw it all in tableau, and then it leaped. There was no other way to put it. It was like the invisible shimmer of air, a sudden wave of heat, as it sprang at Alma.

Her eyes met its. For a moment Jerry thought they would darken, change, that he would see her become nothing. And then it recoiled like a cat that has sprung at a bird and unexpectedly met a window pane.

Davenport screamed again, his head flung back as it rebounded, and then he ran at the doors with all his strength, shoving them out of Lewis’ hand. The door caught Mitch full in the chest, knocking him back against the wall, his head cracking on the ornamental marble, and Davenport ran past him like a quarterback with a clear field sprinting for the touchdown.

With Lewis at his heels. Lewis didn’t hesitate, just turned in pursuit.

Mitch staggered up, shaking his head and lowered it like a bull. It took a lot of punishment to get to Mitch, Jerry thought, as Mitch took off after Lewis, his coat open and his tie flying.

Jerry hurried down the steps, altogether too aware of the docent behind him, recognizing the elderly man by the desk as one of his former professors, Dr. Keating, someone who surely knew both him and Davenport by sight.

“What in the world?” the docent exclaimed. “I have no idea!”

“That was William Davenport,” Dr. Keating said with astonishment. He looked at Jerry sharply, taking in his foot and his harried manner both. “And Ballard?”

If he was ever going to be able to set foot in here again, Jerry thought, he’d best make a good story of this. “Dr. Keating,” he said. “It’s good to see you, sir. That was Davenport, all right. But I have no idea what the difficulty was.” He gestured to the docent. “I’ve been working here all morning, until this gentleman showed in Davenport who took one look at me, screamed and left. I had no idea I was so alarming!” Jerry grinned. “Bill’s always been a bit odd, but the last few years….”

“Those two men….” Keating began.

Alma blinked winningly. “They held the door for me. I couldn’t say.”

Jerry came over and took her arm. “Dr. Keating, may I introduce a very particular friend of mine? This is Mrs. Gilchrist. She was doing some shopping while we are here in Chicago and came to meet me for lunch. Alma, darling, are you all right?”

“Of course,” Alma said brightly. “Just a little startled. I had no idea archaeology could be so exciting.”

“You’d be surprised,” Keating said dryly. “It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Gilchrist. And Ballard, it’s good to see you around again. We’ve missed you here.”