The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (13 page)

The crowd murmured in approval.

“And what if such tragedies were to occur in the countries of the godless, where original sin brings them hobbled into the world, and eternal damnation
finishes the job? What kind of being creates humans so terribly flawed, and then condemns the majority to everlasting punishment?”

Simon clasped his hands and leaned forward in his chair. “Who then, I ask you, is the evil one? Ah, you say, but Hell is not literal, eternal damnation a myth. What then, I must ask, is the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice? From what is there to be saved?” He opened his palms. “I understand that many of you don’t believe in the concept of Hell or eternal damnation, but why cling to an ethos that includes such anachronistic concepts? Why not be free thinkers, free beings? What is there to fear except a life unlived?”

A look of infinite sadness lengthened Simon’s face. “Isn’t it time we redefined our concept of God? That we cast not us in His image, but His in ours? Our pleasure, our pain, all the aching beauty of our love and loss and longing: these hallmarks of human existence are all that we know. All that we have. Isn’t it time,” he said softly, “that we look for universal solutions to our problems, rather than unattainable ideals that divide our nations, our cities, our villages?”

Despite his knowledge of the speaker’s true identity, Luc found himself drawn into the speech. It was, quite simply, the God that everyone wanted, whether they admitted it or not. Wise, caring, devoted, fair, and just a little bit flawed. It was a modern God, a stay-at-home-dad God, a God more in line with the complexities of the world.

Luc could only smile.

Since becoming a member of L’église de la Bête, Luc had agreed with the wisdom of the old adage that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. But there was a reason for this trick, the Magus taught, and it wasn’t to spend eternity playing second fiddle.

On the contrary: When the time was right, when the tipping point had been reached and the balance of faith had shifted, the curtain would be yanked away and the illusion revealed to the crowd, shining and terrible beyond imagination.

His cell phone vibrated. When Luc saw the number he swallowed.

Dante.

Luc had done things in life that would make the Marquis de Sade blush, but talking to Dante made him feel ill and unbalanced. Looking at Dante was like looking at someone without a soul, a human cavity where nothing existed except those empty eyes and that horrific tattoo. The Magus might have his gifts from the Beast, but Dante was someone Luc would rather die than cross.

He excused himself from his friends, wading through the stench of the patrons and into the street.
“Oui?”

“A man named Dominic Grey is coming to ask questions. There is someone he should meet.”

The phone call ended as abruptly as it began, and Luc was left standing in the street with a silent cell phone clamped to his ear.

G
rey spent the flight to Paris half expecting the girl to pop up beside him, and he felt both relieved and disappointed as he stepped into the bright lights and cosmopolitan bustle of Charles de Gaulle Airport. He couldn’t shake her from his mind, and he realized he and Viktor had never finished discussing her strange appearance.

It wasn’t just the girl that made him uneasy. This case had just begun and he already felt a twinge in his gut, a knot of tension he hadn’t felt since Zimbabwe. Working with Viktor had challenged his perception of reality before, and Grey had the unsettling feeling that it would happen again on this case.

Or, he thought as he cleared security and the image of the girl flitted across his mind, maybe it already had.

Viktor had given him three things before he left: the address of Xavier’s flat, a phone number for Viktor’s Interpol contact, and the address of an ex–investigative journalist named Gustave Rouillard who had once researched the Church of the Beast. Apparently the Church was almost impossible to find, secretive and dangerous in the extreme, but Viktor said this man might help if Grey mentioned Viktor’s name. Grey had asked for a phone number, but Viktor said that after Gustave’s last encounter with the Church, which had left him crippled and homebound, he stayed off the grid.

Lovely.

After leaving his backpack at an airport hotel, Grey took a train into Paris. He always felt a little uncomfortable in the City of Lights, as if he were
a peasant invited to the lord’s ball, always saying the wrong things and stumbling into the furniture.

His first visit had been his favorite. He had loved the disheveled charm of the Left Bank, the grandeur of Champs-Élysées, the bakeries and street food that turned the entire city into an aromatic café. The underground fight circuit had been a joke, and after Grey trounced the city’s top fighters in a dingy gym, he gathered his winnings and treated himself to a solid meal, then took a bottle of wine to a bridge over the Seine and, under an amber moon, gazed at the sublime majesty of Notre Dame.

There would be no enchanted lights on this trip. He decided to start with the former residence of Xavier Marcel, known to most as the Black Cleric, known to his neighbors as Jean-Paul Babin. Grey called Jacques, the Interpol contact, and arranged to have an officer meet him at Xavier’s flat.

Following Jacques’s directions, Grey took the metro to the ninth arrondissement. He walked a few streets south of the Havre-Caumartin stop, to a flat on a street full of handsome ash-colored buildings. A man in a suit was leaning against the wall of Xavier’s building, with the rigid stance and active eyes of a police officer. There was something else, however, that Grey normally didn’t see in the eyes of a policeman.

Fear.

Grey opened the Interpol liaison identification Viktor had procured for him a few months ago, feeling strange as he used the ID for the first time.

The officer inspected the ID.
“Parlez-vous Francais?”

“Non, pardon,”
Grey said.
“Parlez-vous Anglais?”

The officer gave a half smile as he unlocked the door for Grey.
“Non.”

The officer signaled with a wave of his hands that Grey was free to roam. Grey stepped into the flat expecting to see walls encrusted with blood, or pentagrams chalked into the floor. Instead, he saw the home of a meticulous man. Everything was in order, the floors polished, the furniture carefully arranged, the spines on the bookshelves aligned by size.

He moved through the spacious living room and into the study, feeling a little chill as he saw the title of the book that lay closed and bookmarked on
the desk:
Le Livre de Lucifer
. As if this were a typical upper-middle-class home, except the Book of Lucifer had replaced the Bible in the study.

A bookshelf had been built into the wall behind the desk. Grey always felt a bookshelf was the best judge of personality, and the Black Cleric’s bookshelf did not disappoint. Grey spoke Spanish and recognized enough Latin cognates to figure out most of the titles. Again, the books were well organized, classics on one shelf, history and philosophy on another, religious books from a surprising variety of faiths on a third, and then the shelves Grey expected to find: tome after tome on magic, the occult, and Satanism, some with shiny new bindings and some looking old enough to crumble into dust if touched.

Grey riffled through the desk and found nothing of interest, then moved into the wood-floored bedroom, where the police report indicated that Xavier had died. The room looked innocuous: a queen-size bed along the wall, a mahogany armoire that matched the headboard, and a bedside table topped with a lamp and an alarm clock. A bathroom off the bedroom contained the expected items: soap, a collection of men’s skin-care products, a shaving kit, two toothbrushes, and a portion of the counter allocated to Xavier’s girlfriend: makeup, deodorant, feminine hygiene products, a cone-shaped bottle of perfume.

He opened the closet door, then grimaced. A curved knife with a jeweled handle hung on the wall. Grey knew the reputation of the Black Cleric, and he knew the purpose of this knife.

There was nothing else of interest. After he left, the detective locked the door and hurried to his car. Grey knocked on the door of the neighboring flat. A few moments later an older man in a suit opened the door, his eyes going at once from Grey to Xavier’s flat.

He swallowed.
“Oui?”

Grey flashed his badge and said, “
Parlez-vous Anglais?
”

“Yes. I have already spoken to the police.”

“I understand,” Grey said. “You were here the night of Xavier’s death?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anything unusual?”

“No.”

“Did anyone enter with Xavier?”

The man’s eyes slinked to Xavier’s flat. “I did not see him enter.”

Grey pursed his lips, the man’s extra blink giving away his lie. “Was there someone with him?”

“
Pardon?
” the man said, as if he did not understand the question.

“I understand you had no love for your neighbor, but anything you can tell me might help the next person.”

“
Que alors?
No love? My neighbor was a
monster
. I have already contacted my estate agent, I will not stay in this house.”

“Did you see anyone enter the house at any time that day?” Grey said.

“There was a woman, but there was always a woman. Even before I knew what he was, I knew he had a”—he waved his hands—“how do you say… voracious… appetite.”

“What’d she look like?”

“She was wearing a coat and a hat. I did not see her face.”

“When did she arrive?” Grey said.

“I don’t remember.”

“But you didn’t see Xavier enter?”

“Why would I? I do not spy on my neighbors.”

“You saw the girl,” Grey said.

“I was walking my dog.”

He tried to close the door, and Grey stopped the door with his hand. “Was she thin, tall, white, black? Blond hair, dark hair?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Try harder.”

His face sagged, and his eyes flicked to Xavier’s flat again. He took a step back. “I am sorry, monsieur. There’s nothing more.”

Grey removed his hand and the man shut the door. Grey stood alone as a stiff breeze swept the street.

V
iktor left the Fairmont and strode towards Polk Street to meet Zador Kerekes, the Hungarian owner of a used and rare bookstore specializing in the occult. Worry for Grey fluttered through him as he walked, turning into tendrils of fear that snaked up and constricted his chest.

L’église de la Bête was a frightening cult. Viktor had investigated them once before, when twin girls from a wealthy Paris suburb had been the victims of ritual murder, but Viktor had been unable to penetrate the cult. It was one of the few failures of his career, and he considered himself lucky to have survived that investigation with his life.

Grey was a formidable adversary, but L’église de la Bête was based in Paris, and they didn’t play by the same rules as everyone else. Not to mention whichever faction had murdered the Black Cleric. That had shocked Viktor. He didn’t know anyone in the underworld who dared raise a hand against Xavier.

He walked down California Street and through the quiet chic of Nob Hill, the wind whipping through the streets like a heat-starved missile, racing beneath the fabric of his suit. Viktor had visited Zador before, both to conduct research for an investigation and to find select works for his personal library. Zador himself was a magician, rumored to be a rare Ipsissimus of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a storied group of sorcerers that claimed Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Algernon Blackwood as members. Though the
Order had officially dissolved a century ago, many claimed that Samuel Mac-Gregor Mathers had disbanded the original Order to escape the public eye, and that its work continued unabated in secret.

Viktor neither knew nor cared about that rumor, but he did know that Zador, for all his eccentricities, had his finger on the pulse of the occult community. If, as Viktor thought, someone had recruited Oak in San Francisco to work against Matthias, then Zador was a good place to start asking questions.