Quests of Simon Ark (21 page)

Vats could not believe it. “But—but something like that could never be presented to the Queen!”

“Exactly—which leads us to believe it was never meant for Queen Victoria. That merchant, Felix Rhineman, collected the money, had a cheap statue gold-plated and encrusted with imitation diamonds, then dropped word at a place where thieves like Hogarth and Slackly would hear of it. There was no danger from his standpoint. Even if they discovered after the robbery that the statue was a fake they could hardly report it to the police.”

“And Rhineman kept the money he collected,” I said. “He made a handsome profit and Queen Victoria never really lost anything.”

Simon Ark nodded. “The only losers were those five women who carried parts of Hogarth’s map.”

“Why did Slackly have to kill them, Simon? Especially the way he did?”

Simon Ark took out the parchment map and held it to the light, “This is not the usual parchment, my friend, made from the skin of a sheep or goat. Slackly mutilated their bodies after strangling them
so the
missing
pieces of flesh would go unnoticed.
You see, Hogarth paid those poor women to let him tattoo the five parts of his map on their skin.”

After that Simon walked for a long time with Inspector Flaver. Then Simon and I departed, leaving Ceritus and his rival Rood with Glenda Coxe and the Inspector. “But who killed Nesbett Coxe?” I asked on the drive back. “You never solved it, Simon!”

“My friend, I am not a detective, much as you would like to make me one. I am merely a wanderer, searching the world for evil. At times I find it in unlikely places. At times I find it in the eyes of a twelve-year-old child grown to adulthood.”

“You mean—?”

“The story of the Ripper’s treasure was either true or false. On the basis of what we found here, we concluded it was true, to the best of Raymond Slackly’s knowledge when he wrote the journal. But if the journal is true we must believe that Glenda Coxe found it where she said—in her father’s attic trunk. Now her uncle told us yesterday that her house burned down when she was twelve. She lost everything, including her parents. Therefore her discovery of Slackly’s journal and the map must have come
before
that fire!”

“Perhaps,” I was willing to grant.

“Not perhaps, but certainly! And can you imagine the effect this discovery would have on a child of that impressionable age? Her great-grandfather—the most terrible murderer in London’s history! We know it had an effect on her, because she kept it a secret all these years till now.

But I shook my head. “There’s a flaw in your reasoning, Simon. Suppose she found the journal sometime before the fire as you say. It would still have burned up, unless she deliberately removed it from the house before the fire.”

“Exactly, my friend.”

“You mean she burned down her own house? Killed her own—?”

“And now resurrected the journal to kill again, in such a way that Vats or Rood would be blamed for it. She needed two suspects, in case one of them could prove an alibi for last night. Remember that back door to her laboratory? An easy way out, and back in, while her coworkers thought she never left the building.”

“And you told all this to Inspector Flaver?”

“I did. The proof is up to him. I believe he’ll start with the fire fifteen years ago.”

“And the map, Simon?”

“I think it will go into Scotland Yard’s files, along with the journal. Someday, perhaps, when there is not already enough horror in the world, it can be revealed.”

We drove on toward London, and that was the last I ever heard of the treasure of Jack the Ripper.

I
T WAS SEVERAL DAYS
after Christmas when I arrived in Rio de Janeiro with Simon Ark, but the season was summer there and the wave of heat that hit us at the airport was a pleasant change from the wet snow we’d left behind in New York.

Simon had phoned and asked me to make the journey with him. “I need you, my friend,” he’d said. “You are one of the few stabilizing influences in a world gone increasingly mad.”

“Does the Devil wait for you in Rio, Simon?” I asked. After knowing him for twenty-five years I was too well aware of his interest in the diabolic and mystical.

“Perhaps,” he replied. “A lawyer I know there telephoned me this morning to report on an extraordinary crime. A mummy has been found washed up on Copacabana Beach.”

“A mummy! Wrapped up and everything? Like in Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it fell overboard from a ship. Is it very old?”

“It is surprisingly new. It is the mummy of the lawyer’s client, who disappeared from his home the day before Christmas.”

I knew then that I’d be going to Rio with Simon Ark.

My wife Shelly was upset at my missing New Year’s Eve at home, but she understood as well as anyone my strange relationship with Simon Ark. It is a relationship that has brought us together sometimes after years apart, and carried us to distant places while Simon pursued his investigations of the strange and Satanic. I once edited a book of Simon’s on witchcraft, and my firm published it. Although I didn’t really believe his claim that he’d been searching out evil for nearly two thousand years, I had to admit he knew a great deal about it. And there were times, looking at his weathered face and tired eyes, when I’d have believed him to be just about any age he said.

So we were in Rio.

The lawyer who’d summoned us was an American named Felix Brighter, a portly man in his forties whom Simon had known in New York. When I asked what he was doing in Brazil, Simon only smiled wisely and said, “I believe there was some trouble with money. And of course Brazil has no extradition treaty with the United States.”

Whatever brought him there, Felix Brighter had made the best of it. His office in one of the big new buildings facing the ocean commanded a sweeping view of the Avenida Atlantica and the hundred-yard-wide expanse of Copacabana Beach beyond.

I stared out the window at the wavy mosaic pattern of Copacabana’s promenade far below. “It was almost opposite my building that the body was found,” Felix Brighter said, directing our gaze a bit to the south. “In fact, I saw the police cars and the crowd around the spot when I came to work that morning.”

“It’s a very wide beach,” Simon observed, “yet the body was by the water rather than here near the street?”

“Exactly. As if it had been cast up by the ocean.”

Simon and I resumed our seats opposite the lawyer’s desk. “Tell me everything you know about the victim,” Simon said.

“I’m afraid that’s very little. His name was Sergio Costa, and he operated a tourist shop just down the street with his brother Luiz. They sold native pottery and artifacts, and I did some legal work for them when it was needed. Sergio was divorced from his wife and living with his unmarried brother in a small house in the Canoa section. He disappeared on Christmas Eve, but Luiz didn’t think much of it at first. His brother had been depressed about the breakup of his marriage, and Luiz thought he was off getting drunk somewhere.”

“And the body?”

“Washed up on the beach two days ago. It was completely embalmed and wrapped in burial windings like an Egyptian mummy, as if it had been plucked from a tomb.”

Simon Ark nodded. “It seems like a terrorist act—something to throw fear into people. Have you been troubled with urban guerrillas here in Brazil?”

“Of course, and that is what the police think. But Sergio and Luiz were not wealthy men, and no ransom was demanded.”

“That may come later.” Simon pondered. “Perhaps this death was meant as an example, so that other merchants will pay up out of fear.”

The lawyer scowled. “Perhaps. But there is another possibility, and that’s the reason I contacted you, Simon. I remembered your interest in the bizarre, especially regarding religion and the worship of strange gods.”

“Some gods are so strange it is difficult to distinguish them from devils,” Simon remarked. “The spirit cults of Rio have both gods and devils to worship.”

“You know of their devil Exu?”

“Yes.”

“And the she-demon Pomba Gira?”

Simon nodded.

“Then you must know of the sea goddess Yemanja. She is portrayed as a beautiful black-haired woman in a long blue gown coming out of the ocean. Soon, on New Year’s Eve to be exact, that beach down there will be alive with her worshipers. They will cast offerings of flowers and jewelry and even sacrificial animals into the surf for their goddess. If the offering is carried out to sea, Yemanja’s aid and protection are assured. If it is washed back to the beach, it is a sign of her rebuff.”

“And you believe—”

“That Sergio Costa was killed and his mummy cast into the ocean as an offering to Yemanja, who rejected it.”

I was beginning to think that Felix Brighter had been living in Rio too long, but surprisingly enough Simon seemed to accept the theory in dead earnest. “That’s a possibility worth looking into,” he agreed. “But tell me, exactly what is your interest in this affair?”

“He was my client. I drew up his will and I’ll be probating his estate. I feel someone should try to find his killer. For the police it’ll be a routine investigation, quickly forgotten.”

“What about Sergio’s estate? Does his brother inherit?”

“Only Sergio’s half interest in the shop, which isn’t worth much. His house went to his ex-wife in the divorce settlement, along with much of his cash. He was still supporting her and their two children.”

“I should speak with the police,” Simon decided.

“The local police are working with a government detective named Marcos Orleans. I will arrange an appointment.”

Brighter dialed a number and spoke briefly in Portuguese, listened, and then spoke again. When he hung up he said, “Orleans can see you in an hour. He suggests you meet at the city morgue. If you learn anything, I’d appreciate your letting me know at once. Orleans says he will help in any way possible.”

“That needn’t include showing us the remains,” I grumbled.

But of course I went along with Simon to the morgue.

Marcos Orleans had curly black hair and a pencil-thin mustache. He was younger than I’d expected and there was a gleam in his eyes that hinted at a zest for more pleasant pursuits than the grim business at hand. He introduced himself as a member of the federal police and led us to one of the sheet-covered morgue tables.

“A terrible crime. Terrible!”

“How was he killed?” Simon asked.

“We suspect poison, and we’ll remove certain tissues for examination. Of course with the body already embalmed it’s impossible to state just when he died.”

Simon bent to examine the corpse’s skin, perhaps searching for needle marks. “Do you have any leads on who embalmed him?”

“None,” the detective admitted. “Our federal industry is not as well regulated as it might be. We have the poor living in those shacks on the hillsides, and often they are dead and buried without anyone even knowing. Naturally we are checking all undertakers for any embalming they did on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but if the killer passed off Sergio as a poor slum-dweller there might be no record of it.”

Simon straightened up. “Do you believe the embalming was done as part of an offering to the sea goddess Yemanja?”

“I am not a superstitious man, Mr. Ark. There is no place for superstition in police work.”

“I think the lawyer, Felix Brighter, summoned me because he is a superstitious man.”

Marcos Orleans smiled for the first time. “He has an office high above Copacabana Beach. I have been there. From his window, looking down at the tiny specks of humanity moving on the sand below, one might easily imagine himself to be something of a god. And, after all, gods are superstitious, are they not?”

Simon merely smiled. I could see he admired the detective without necessarily agreeing with him. Perhaps they had both seen something of Felix Brighter’s character that I’d missed.

“Then you have no leads?” Simon asked as we were departing.

The detective shrugged. “Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and the great night of Yemanja’s festival. The candles will burn on the beach, and the sea itself might give us an answer. I will be there.”

“I thought you weren’t superstitious.”

“I’m not, Mr. Ark, but maybe the killer is.”

Simon paused at the door. “One more thing. Is there anyone in Rio who could tell me more about Yemanja and the spirit cults?”

The detective considered his question. “Go see Father Rudolph at the Church of Santa Catarina. He is an American who has labored long among our people.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Now he will be among the poor on the hillsides, but go in the morning when he says Mass.”

“Thank you,” Simon said.

We went out into the sunlit street and I was thankful for the fresh air after the closeness of the morgue. Feeling the warmth on my face it was hard to believe it was winter back home. “Now what?” I asked Simon.

“Now we visit the surviving brother, Luiz Costa.”

The Costa brothers had known how to choose a good location. Their shop fronted on the six-lane Avenida Atlantica, next to a sidewalk cafe where tables with blue-and-white umbrellas offered a respite from the tropic sun. I followed Simon Ark through the front door, past display counters loaded with carved animals and woven baskets.

“We’ll be closing soon,” the man behind the counter informed us. “A death in the family.”

He was short and clean-shaven, with black hair that half covered his ears. With the addition of a mustache he might have passed for the man I’d just seen in the morgue. “You are Luiz Costa?” Simon asked.

“Yes.”

“I have come from New York to investigate the strange death of your brother.”

“Who would care about my brother as far away as New York?”

“Your lawyer, Felix Brighter, asked me to come. I have had some experience in this sort of thing.”

“You, an old man? How will you find Sergio’s killers?”

“First by discovering the motive,” Simon told him. “Who wanted your brother dead?”

“No one.” But immediately he corrected himself. “Except maybe that ex-wife of his, Rosetta. That woman would stop at nothing.”