The Broken Ones (52 page)

The thin man didn’t break stride.

“In middle school,” Karl replied. “A boy named Dean Abernethy said it. He thought he was very clever.”

“How did you take it?”

“I told him huskies were obedient, hardworking dogs of moderate intelligence with no body odor. He said something to the effect that in that case I couldn’t be a husky because I stank like a faggot.” Karl nodded for Oscar to take a door on his right. “I seem to recall his house burning down the following night.”

Oscar felt the skin on his stomach crawl. That was not the sort of information you gave a policeman you expected would live. How long would it take Moechtar to get patrol cruisers here? Fifteen minutes? Ten?

“You’re quite good with fires, then?”

“Not bad.”

“You taught Naville?”

Karl paused while he held open a timber door, and Oscar stepped into a wide hallway that smelled of wax and flowers.

“There was fair exchange of information.”

Jon must have delivered the girls less than an hour ago. Oscar
listened, but all he could hear was his and Karl’s echoing footfalls, and the muted moan of the storm.

They reached a pair of glass-paneled doors. Oscar’s own reflection looked back at him, pale and scared. Karl’s thin white face was smaller, farther behind. Smaller still was a third face that remained unmoving even as Karl pushed the door open. Jamy waited ahead, less substantial even than the thin gaslight, watching anxiously. He gave Oscar a small nod.

“You could have spared the boy at school,” Oscar said as they moved through the larger space. His voice echoed, and it sounded stretched and thin. “You could have told him many great people also had heterochromia. Alexander the Great. Michael Flatley.”

Oscar heard the smile in his captor’s voice: “If only I’d known you sooner, Detective, what a different life I might have led.”

“What was it Alexander said?” Oscar asked, slowing. “ ‘Were I not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.’ Who would you be, Karl?”

“Why, Detective,” Karl prodded him with the pistol muzzle, “I’d be you.”

Oscar tried to hide his surprise. “Oh?”

“A less foolish version, of course. But Ms. Chaume is quite taken with you.”

“She tried to have me killed.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Karl smiled. “Given how you’re alive.”

Oscar’s clothes were drenched, and he realized that he was shaking. He willed himself to be warm. He was losing track of where they were in the building.

“Well, Diogenes was a cynic,” Oscar said. “Do you love her?”

“Ms. Chaume? Very much. She is a visionary. If anything, she is the one more like Alexander.”

“She wants to conquer the world?”

“No. Just the city.”

Ahead, half the hallway was taken up by two adjoining sets of carpeted timber stairs: one set rose; the other descended. Jamy stood anxiously at the central newel post. As they came closer, Jamy moved: he ascended three steps, then looked anxiously back at Oscar.

“Up or down?” Oscar asked, keeping his voice light, and turned his head a little to listen.

“Down, please.”

Oscar judged that he was about three feet ahead of Karl. Enough.

He dropped to the ground, lifted a knee, and spun. Karl was too surprised to use the gun and instinctively tried to hop over the approaching leg. As he did, Oscar brought his other leg down and hooked the thin man behind the knees and rolled. Karl’s eyes opened wider and his mouth became a surprised
O
as he fell and began to tumble down the stairs, grabbing wildly at the brass stair rods and banisters. He kept a firm grip on the gun.

Oscar scrambled to his feet and ran up the adjoining staircase, taking the treads two at a time. Jamy nodded briskly and ran silently ahead of him.

“Detective?” called Karl, a warning.

Oscar lifted his elbows high behind him, the handcuffs to the small of his back. He heard the wispy sounds of Karl getting to his feet in the darkness below. Jamy reached the top of the dark stairs and waited. When Oscar got closer, the dead boy ran along the top corridor, glancing backward to check that Oscar was keeping up. He came to a closed door. Oscar awkwardly twisted his wrists and turned the brass knob.

“Detective!” Karl called from the darkness behind.

Oscar followed Jamy down another, narrower hallway. This one was more brightly lit, with several gas sconces flickering at its far end, and a doorway with glass inserts admitted a warm glow. By its light, Oscar saw framed portraits of Anne Chaume, her father, and her grandfather. And at the very end of the corridor was a tiny semicircular side table: a half-moon no more than six inches deep. On it was a single vase and, in it, an orchid.

Which Oscar recognized.

He’d seen it growing in a greenhouse.

He slowed, his feet suddenly feeling disconnected. Jamy waited beside the door.

“Detective!” Karl snapped, his running footsteps ringing on the tiles.

Oscar dropped his weight onto the lever handle and stepped inside.

The sitting room smelled of pine smoke, tobacco, and flowers. A pleasant fire crackled in the large tiled fireplace; from the ceiling depended a long chandelier that reflected the warm flames in its facets. On a low coffee table were decanters of water, whiskey, and port wine. Six faces looked up from leather chairs, startled. Oscar recognized
them all. Five he’d seen at the party here just a few nights ago: Paul Roth, the state minister for economic development, the director of the Department of Public Works, a judge from the Supreme Court, and the commissioner of police. But it was the last face that made Oscar’s chest hollow and his legs as weak as traitors.

Inspector Benjamin Moechtar slowly got to his feet.

“Who is this?” the judge asked from under white planks of eyebrows.

“Nobody,” Moechtar said. “No one at all.”

Chapter
40

O
scar walked numbly, escorted by Karl and Moechtar, hardly aware as Karl’s thin, strong hands guided him down stairs, through doorways, along corridors. At some point, Oscar heard the expert snick of a semiauto’s safety coming off. At another, he thought he heard the sounds of girls laughing.

His mind clicked like an old combination lock as all its rust-flecked wheels finally came into alignment, the fence fell into its notches, and a heavy door swung wide revealing a stupidly obvious truth. Of course it was Moechtar. Moechtar, who’d kept the least influential detective assigned to the Jane Doe case. Moechtar, who had urged him to return the body. Moechtar, who had no doubt buried Oscar’s request for a DNA sample. Moechtar, who tried to have Oscar resign once his questions about the second altar became too dangerous.

“Why?” Oscar asked. His voice sounded like a doomed man’s. “I don’t understand.”

Oscar felt his inspector’s hand on his shoulder. “Never mind.” As it touched, thunder cannoned, and Oscar jumped.

There was no sign of Jamy.

This staircase was narrower, lined with brick on both sides. At the bottom of the stairs, the three men stepped into a utilitarian hallway with lower ceilings, painted brick walls, and chipped skirting boards. The air down here was cooler and still.

“I don’t mind doing this,” Karl said.

Moechtar shook his head. “It should be me.”

“It
should
be Gest. But I’ll do it.”

Moechtar grunted.

They stopped at swinging doors with porthole windows, and inside Oscar saw a single cook working over a blue gas flame. Karl went in, spoke briefly, and the cook turned off the gas and hurried away. Karl nodded through the glass, and Moechtar held the door open for Oscar.

“In here.”

Oscar stepped inside, leaving Moechtar in the corridor. The kitchen was whitewashed brick walls, stainless-steel benches, and cold slate floors. The blue-white light of gas lamps glittered off dozens of hard edges. A high line of windows was set in one wall; like Elverly’s, this kitchen was a basement room, almost underground. When lightning flashed, trees were frozen in mid-twist, cast silver, and wrenched by the wind. Oscar smelled blood. There was meat on the bench. His heart pounded behind his ribs, and he knew now how the horse in Kannis’s killing floor had felt. When he looked down, he saw that he stood over a drain grate in the floor. Karl had stepped quietly back. Karl was going to kill him here, and he didn’t want to die. Oscar’s mind reared like that horse, mad in a panic, wanting to kick out and find a weapon, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol.

“Thank you, Karl.”

Oscar turned to the familiar voice.

Anne Chaume stepped into the room. Her skin was as pale as ice, and her blue eyes seemed electric. Her hair fell like black water. Her red dress was fitted and ended just above her bare feet; her lips were the same shade of bloodlike carmine. White, black, red. She frowned deeply as she walked up to him. Oscar heard the shuffle of retreating footsteps and glanced around; Karl had performed his magic and was out of sight. Something dripped and echoed. Oscar realized that his sodden clothes were leaking into the drain, cold drops falling into subterranean darkness.

Chaume stopped just out of the range of any lunges or kicks. Oscar wondered if he had the strength to do anything. It didn’t feel like it.

“Where are the girls?” he asked.

Chaume looked him up and down, taking in his drenched clothes and wet hair, his battered face.

“You should be more worried about yourself,” she said.

Lightning flared again, turning the room into a flash pan of white and silver, and making her red dress spark like a slap. Red lips. Ice-blue eyes.

“Have you figured, Detective, what it’s all about?”

“Ereshkigal,” he said.

“Yes.” She smiled, pleased.

“But why?” Oscar said. “Three girls dead already. And four more for four other—”

“People of influence?” she finished for him. “Yes.”

“Why?” he repeated.

The beautiful woman was staring at his face as if it were a puzzle. “To take their ghosts away.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Chaume’s voice was soft. “The world’s a mess, Oscar. These ghosts. People can’t work. They can’t think, they can’t fuck, can’t buy, can’t sell. These dead things are sea anchors, dragging at the world. Slowing commerce. I can’t afford them. So I found a way to get rid of them.”

Oscar smiled wryly. All this killing, for fool’s gold.

“You don’t believe me?” Chaume asked.

The nearest gas lamp flared suddenly, then its mantle cooled to a candle-flame orange, guttered, and went out. Chaume’s face was now lit from one side only, and her eyes became strange yellow disks that reminded him of the owls. “Have you seen the change in Paul Roth, now he’s lost the albatross round his neck? He’s a new man.” Lightning flashed, and Oscar could see Chaume’s alabaster face beaming proudly. “I can unburden people. I can free them of their ghosts.”

Oscar watched her. “And all you need to do is torture and murder girls.”

Her eyes went hard, like stones in a winter stream.

“It’s not murder, not for these girls. It’s a mercy.”

“Strapped down while they’re cut open? You have a strange sense of mercy.”

Chaume moved a step closer to Oscar. Her dress moved lightly on her body. Oscar could see the points of her breasts, a smooth curve of hip. He smelled her skin; for the first time, it repulsed him. “You have a broken one, here. Your Megan. Do you think she loves the life you gave her, Oscar?”

He hated the truth. He hated her for telling it.

“It’s not for me to know,” he said.

“
I
know,” Chaume said, stepping closer still. “I know that for the cost of candles already spent, we can get back the sunlight. That’s a good trade.”

“Why are you telling me?”

She was close enough for him to reach her with a kick or to strike at her with his head. But she knew he wouldn’t move while Karl was hovering in the shadows with his steady hands and his gun.

“Because I despise waste.” She smiled and continued, “Gest is a brute. Useful, but an opportunist. Untrustworthy. You are a stranger thing. You’re an honest man.”

A horrible feeling slid into Oscar’s chest. Hope. Hope that he might live.

“And what would I have to do?”

Chaume’s voice was sweet and gentle. “Turn a blind eye. That’s all. What will that cost you? Nothing. You haven’t got a job. You haven’t got a wife or children. You do have a burden, though. But she’ll be freed, whether you accept or not. I’d just rather keep you.”

“Whatever you called up, you asked to send its creatures after me,” he said.

“Just warnings,” Chaume said. “But I like that they didn’t stop you.”

“You had Naville sacrifice Frances White to get rid of whose ghost?” Suddenly, he knew. “Karl’s.”

Chaume nodded.

Oscar stared into Chaume’s tourmaline eyes. Maybe he was, after all this, still a Nine-Ten detective. He felt a cold smile on his face. It all made sense now. He continued, “When you knew it worked, you had Penny killed for her stepfather, your barrister. Another good man to have onside. Pity her mother found out. And then”—Oscar nodded to the house above them—“you had all your guests upstairs here the other night. At your party. You wanted me to stay, too. For your demonstration. Whose ghost did you get Ereshkigal to remove with Taryn Lymbery’s death? Yours?”