The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (11 page)

The face staring back at him from the screen was the face of the man who had just featured in Viktor’s absinthe-fueled journey to the past.

A man who had once been his best friend.

LONDON, ENGLAND

D
ante went deep, deep into the heart of London’s East End, to a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification that housed the First Temple of New Enlightenment. Today it was a striking but modest building, a six-story cylindrical glass tower that would one day have sixty-six stories, and six hundred and sixty-six rooms. A house that would serve as the beating black heart of revitalized East London, a turning point in the religious history of the city that had long stood at the crossroads of the world.

It just wasn’t going to be the religion everyone thought it was.

Dante was impressed not just by the favor the Magus curried with their dark God, but also by his genius. Why shove something unpalatable down people’s throats in the beginning when you could introduce it gently, one doctrine at a time, building the new religion on the backs of the failed ones? Bait and switch was the essence of the phenomenal growth of many modern religious organizations, especially the ones that used pseudo-Christian ties as the bait.

The Magus took this tactic to a whole new level. And when the time was right, when enough people were assimilated, when mind-sets and prejudices had gradually shifted, when the traditional conception of God had weakened beyond repair, then more and more of the truth could be revealed.

As with the catacombs, Dante liked to pass through the dodgiest parts of East London on the way to the temple, absorbing the stares of the denizens of London’s worst neighborhoods. Even with his long black overcoat concealing
his knives, street thugs had a sixth sense when someone higher in the hierarchy of the jungle entered their realm, and they almost always looked the other way when Dante passed.

Almost. Before the First Temple broke ground, a crew of local toughs had challenged him on the street. Out came Dante’s knives, two of them flowing through the air and finding their victims’ hearts before anyone knew what was happening. And the last three Dante dispatched from close range, his blades spinning and striking so fast and with such skill that it must have looked to the bystanders like the neighborhood thugs had been gutted by a tornado.

Dante delivered his message to the crowd while standing amid the bodies, flanked by three other members of L’église de la Bête.
This is our territory now, and there will be no more questions
.

The message got through just fine.

He skirted the edge of Hackney and walked past block after block of crumbling, soot-covered tenements, then entered an even rougher area of abandoned buildings and black-market warehouses. Faces peered out of broken windows, thieves and gang members slinked between the graffiti-covered buildings. He was deep inside the wilderness of East London, a place as far removed from Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace as were the farthest outposts of the once-mighty British Empire.

He ducked through a hidden underpass, then came to a canal full of sludgy green water that would lead him to his destination.

East London reminded Dante of his childhood in Montreal, not because the culture was similar but because the poverty looked the same. The same trash-strewn streets and dilapidated tenements, the same drawn faces passing by, bodies and souls forever dampened from eking out an existence on the edge of society.

Despite his environs and a lifelong lisp, Dante had been a buoyant child, full of energy from his undersize feet to his long brown curls. His parents were kind and gentle, and that mattered far more than environment. When Dante
told his father how the kids at school made fun of him for his lisp, his father had convinced Dante they were only jealous of Dante’s unique way of speaking. As Dante grew older and confronted his father with the truth, his father told Dante that in his mind, he
had
spoken the truth.

But environment did matter, and it mattered most when Dante was thirteen, and a burglar, pistol in hand, entered Dante’s house the night of Christmas Eve. Dante’s father heard the noise and confronted the intruder. The intruder shot both his parents and disappeared, leaving Dante to deal with a screaming younger sister and two parents with their lifeblood pumping onto the frayed carpet.

His parents died before the paramedics arrived, and Dante lost most of his soul that night. He couldn’t take the sight of a gun from that moment forward. The pain from his loss, unbearable, began its dominion over Dante, growing stronger when Dante and his sister were placed in an institution. Not only had Dante lost his beloved parents, he now had to endure a wretched shadow existence in a state-sponsored kennel.

He preferred the institution to foster care, as he enjoyed the constant fighting that helped him expel his rage, but his sister, the only piece of himself he had left, was not faring so well. When she turned fifteen, Dante told the governess they were ready to move to a home. It was a choice Dante would forever regret.

Late one night, six months after they were placed in foster care, Dante held his sister’s jaw and forced her to tell him about the bruises on her thighs, the ones he had glimpsed when she slipped into her bedclothes. It took her all night, but as the sun slipped above the horizon and she told him everything, Dante didn’t hesitate. With his foster parents still in bed, he went to the kitchen, grabbed the butcher knife, and counted the fifty-two slashes he made into the spongy middle-aged flesh of the bastard who was raping his sister. When the wife intervened, he murdered her, too.

Dante went to juvenile prison without a shred of remorse, holding on to an even tinier piece of his soul for the visits from his sister. When his sister
killed herself a year later, unable to cope with a life in foster care without Dante, the last sliver of Dante’s soul slipped away, and pain became his only emotion, his only master, his only desire.

Dante padded through the underground entrance to the First Temple, making his way to the sixth floor. He stepped into the antechamber where the Inner Council met. The antechamber was an empty hexagonal room with ebony walls, as well as six armchairs crafted from the same dark wood. The rounded ceiling, painted by a master artist to resemble a star-filled galaxy, gave an illusion of depth to the room. A black-painted skylight allowed a splinter of light to slip through. It was a beautiful room and gave the effect of floating through the boundless void.

The sigil-inscribed door to the inner sanctum loomed opposite Dante. As far as Dante knew, the inner sanctum was for the Magus and his consorts alone, to commune with the Beast.

No, not the Beast, the Magus taught. Like the Old Testament God, Dante’s newfound deity dealt out both life and death. The Magus called him by another name but allowed him to be addressed as the Beast or even Satan, the adversary. Lucifer was not appropriate, because the Magus’s dark deity was not an angel.

He was a god.

The door to the inner sanctum swung wide. The Magus stepped into the room in his silver-starred robe, his presence commanding yet wise. “Thank you for coming. We have much to cover.”

“Before we begin,” Dante said, hating the sound of his lisp since his father had died, “I received a phone call from San Francisco.”

“Dissension in the ranks?”

Dante gave a raspy chuckle. “Oak would never dare. He received a visit from two men associated with Interpol. He found the visit troubling.”

“In what manner?”

“There was a tall one,” Dante said, “an expert on religion. He might become a problem. His name is—”

“Viktor Radek.”

The Magus’s eyes, the color of barely steeped tea, glowed with what Dante thought looked most akin to eagerness. It surprised Dante, because the Magus rarely showed emotion.

“Then you know of him and the investigation,” Dante said.

“Oh yes.”

“And this doesn’t worry you?” Dante said. “Interpol’s channels of communication can be bothersome.”

The Magus’s face regained its trademark equanimity, of someone in firm control of every situation. “I’ve anticipated his interest. You need not concern yourself with him.”

“And the other?” Dante said. “His name is Dominic Grey.”

“His partner.”

“Oak seemed to find him formidable,” Dante said.

“He’ll come to London or Paris, soon. I leave him to you.”

Dante ran his thumbs along the edges of his knives.

G
rey woke with the bizarre dream of the woman still lingering in his mind. The disappearance on the plane, those troubling images from the dream… it all left him unsettled and on edge.

He met Viktor at the same café. Grey stifled a yawn as he ordered a cup of coffee. He found Viktor in a secluded corner, legs crossed and head bowed in thought, an empty cappuccino on the table alongside a fresh one.

Still shaking off the dream, Grey said, “So what’s on tap for today? More witnesses, an arson expert, do a little checking into Oak’s activities over the last few months?”

“All good ideas,” Viktor said in a distracted voice. He finally looked up, and Grey was startled by what he saw. Though clean-shaven and dressed in his familiar black suit, his eyes betrayed a sleepless night. His broad face and dark brow, always intense, seemed locked in a duel with some unseen entity. Grey knew how tight a rein Viktor kept on his emotions, and knew he could magnify whatever manifested on Viktor’s face by twenty.

“Viktor? Everything all right?”

He composed himself. “Forgive me. I was pondering the preacher you requested I look into. Last night I viewed his press appearances.”

“Simon Azar?” Grey said.

“Yes, though that’s not the name I know him by.”

“You know of him?” Grey said. “From a previous investigation?”

Viktor’s massive head moved side to side. “He was once my best friend.”

At Viktor’s request, Grey and Viktor returned to the hotel before discussing Simon Azar any further. Viktor uncorked his absinthe with a distracted air, though it was not yet ten a.m. Grey sat on the couch with a fresh cup of coffee, waiting for Viktor to continue. Nothing could have surprised Grey more than what he had heard in the café. Viktor and Simon did look to be about the same age, late fifties, but that was the only similarity Grey could fathom.