The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (3 page)

Like the kids he now taught, Grey had also once been homeless. His father was a lifelong Marine who had mentally and physically abused Grey and his mother throughout Grey’s childhood. Mortally afraid his skinny, introspective son would fail to become a
real
man, he’d trained Grey to fight since he could crawl.

When his father was assigned to Tokyo soon after Grey’s tenth birthday, he forced Grey to study Japanese jujitsu, one of the most brutal and effective martial arts in the world, designed to use an attacker’s own energy to exploit the weaknesses of the human body: joints, pressure points, organs, digits, soft tissue. Zen-Zekai, the style of jujitsu taught at Grey’s school, was particularly violent. Barely a day went by that Grey came home without blood on his
gi
.

Grey’s mother died of stomach cancer when Grey was fifteen, and on the first anniversary of her death Grey’s father came home drunk yet again, reached for his nail-studded belt one too many times. Grey had never quite forgiven himself for beating his own father that night, but he wasn’t sure he would do anything differently if given the chance, and that pained him even more.

After leaving his father crumpled on the floor, vowing to kill Grey as he walked out the door, Grey took to the backstreets of Tokyo, staying alive by fighting in underground street fights. Already a black belt in Zen-zekai, Grey thrived on Tokyo’s human cockfight circuit. But the underbellies of Japan’s throbbing neon cities were dangerous for a teenage boy, no matter how tough. He drifted to other cities and countries, yearning for a place to call home, grasping onto his fierce personal ethos as a lifeline. For to compromise his ethics, to mute that quiet inner voice, was to lose the one thing he could claim as his own.

Grey left the trash- and graffiti-strewn streets of Washington Heights and approached his building, an abandoned high school converted into lofts, on the edge of gentrifying Hudson Heights.

“Hey, Teach!”

A shirtless teen was leaning against the steps of his building.
Frankie
. Two men in gang colors sat on the steps beside him, eyeing Grey like he had just kicked their dog.

The streets were empty, a single streetlight illuminating the concrete steps. Grey kept an eye on all three. “Frankie,” Grey said evenly as he approached. “I’d like to see you in class again, despite what happened tonight. You have real talent.”

“I dunno, Teach. I no think I need you no more.”

Grey noticed the other two shift ever so slightly. Dressed in tank tops and baggy pants, they had prison tats on their necks and forearms, and the hardened eyes of street thugs. One was bald; the other had a Mohawk.

Grey kept his demeanor as relaxed as possible as he approached. Five more feet and it wouldn’t matter what they had stuck in the waistbands of those pants. It took three seconds for the average man to draw, enable, and point a gun, not to mention aim and hit. And three seconds was an eternity in close quarters.

“Hey Teach,” Frankie said softly. “You know wha’ we do about
gente
disrespect us?”

The two thugs rose and pulled switchblades as Frankie began to grin. Grey was on them before Frankie’s grin reached the corners of his lips. No one pulling a knife expects to be rushed, especially not when it’s three against one. Grey approached in a blur, halfway there before the blades were out, and he snapped a vicious side kick into the kneecap of the bald gang member, whose eyes told Grey he wasn’t expecting a low strike. Grey heard the crunch of a broken patella.

The thug with the Mohawk managed to raise his knife and lunge at Grey. Again Grey did the unexpected and stepped into the amateur thrust, fluid as a snake, sliding to the side of the knife and brush blocking the arm at the elbow. Grey turned the soft block into a strike, hitting the exposed throat with the hardened web of one hand while smacking the center of the lower back,
the vulnerable
ming men
point, with the other. The gang member fell to the pavement and grabbed at his throat, choking violently.

Grey kicked the knives away and moved towards Frankie, who had backed against the door at the top of the steps, now brandishing his own knife.

Frankie was shaking and waving the knife around. “
¿Qué hiciste, qué hiciste
? You kill him!”

Grey stopped advancing and put his hands out, palms up. “Put the knife down, Frankie. They’ll both live. I’ll call for help as soon as you drop the weapon.”

Frankie glanced at his two friends moaning on the ground. “
Hijo de puta madre
,” Frankie said. “You know wha’ this does to me?”

“It doesn’t have to do anything,” Grey said. “Leave the gang and train with me. I’ll protect you.”

Frankie’s eyes were wild, and he kept waving the knife in front of him as he lurched down the side of the steps, as far from Grey as he could get. When he reached the bottom he backed into the street.

“What’s out there for you, Frankie? I’ve been there, right where you’re standing.”

“You no know
shit
,” Frankie said, then turned and fled into the night.

Grey watched him go as the adrenaline seeped away, feeling a sadness for the world descend and settle into the pockets of his bones.

Frankie was wrong.

Grey did know.

After the police and ambulance left, Grey trudged to his fifth-floor loft. There had been a warrant out for the two men with Frankie. Both gang members, ex-cons, wanted for an assortment of violent crimes. Fair or not, the two older ones had chosen their path. Frankie was still young enough to decide.

Grey’s studio loft had exposed brick walls, a stained concrete floor, and a shoji screen separating his sleeping area. The furniture consisted of a platform bed and a tatami mat, along with a few chairs he had picked up at an
estate sale. The built-in bookshelves contained a selection of novels, philosophical works, and travel and language guides. The latest
Time Out New York
, earmarked at the cheap eats and off-Broadway sections, had been tossed on the bed.

Sick of hotels, he had rented the studio for a year. His job with Viktor required frequent travel, and Grey supposed New York was as good a base as any.

He showered, poured himself a cold sake, and was pleased to see he had a voice mail from Viktor. When he had long spells between cases he grew restless. He had worked on a couple of small investigations in the last few months, but nothing major since the tragic case involving the Egyptian biotech company. Tragic, and incredible. Stretching the limits of his beliefs was quickly becoming part of the job description.

In his message Viktor said there was a new case requiring immediate attention, and that Grey should check his e-mail for travel details. Grey logged on and found a plane ticket to San Francisco leaving at six a.m. the next morning, along with a hotel reservation for three nights at the Fairmont. He was to meet Viktor in the hotel lobby at two p.m. tomorrow.

Grey stared at the empty street below his window as he finished the sake, wondering where Frankie would sleep that night, wondering what the new case with Viktor would be like, wondering how renting a half-furnished loft in a forgotten corner of a city of ten million people, without a friend or barely even an acquaintance, was that much different from braving the streets of Tokyo when he was a teenager, alone and unsure.

He pushed away from the window and started packing, happy to be working again.

INNER SANCTUM OF L’ÉGLISE DE LA BÊTE, PARIS CATACOMBS

D
ante’s black duster swept around his ankles as he strode through the gloom, the steady drip of sewer water his constant companion, the pentagram tattoo splayed across his shaved head catching the occasional drop.

Most of the members of L’église de la Bête chose to enter the catacombs through one of the secured hidden routes, but Dante preferred to walk in plain view of the homeless, thieves, murderers, and worse who occupied the levels near the surface streets. He enjoyed the way they scattered or looked down as he approached, careful not to meet his gaze. And there was always the chance that someone new had arrived in the underworld, someone unfamiliar with Dante and his knives.

He left the rat- and filth-infested sewers behind, descending into a section of the catacombs of which polite society was unaware, and to which most of impolite society dared not go.

Dante had been a member of L’église de la Bête for more than a decade. For most of that time, he had been the right-hand man of Xavier Marcel, the Black Cleric. Dante had not feared Xavier, but he had respected Xavier’s capacity for cruelty and devotion to cause.

Dante felt no remorse about his new allegiance to the Magus. The Magus had given Xavier a choice, and Xavier had chosen to stand against him. Dante was a weapon, not a politician, and while L’église de la Bête was his church,
he had only one true ethos, and that was pain. He would worship and follow whoever granted him the most access to it. For the present that was L’église de la Bête, and the Magus.

Pain
. Suffering had already polluted Dante’s soul by the time he entered prison at the tender age of eighteen, but during his decade of incarceration, his internal torment transformed from an emotion into a calling.

Dante’s slight lisp had not gone over well in prison, until he disemboweled someone with a shiv for mimicking it. He participated in so many fights that pain became irrelevant, and he became known as someone who would never quit during a fight, no matter how much injury he suffered. It made him a feared man.

In prison he met two men who would define the rest of his life. The first, a Filipino man also in prison for killing a child molester, became Dante’s only and last friend. The Filipino was an expert knife fighter in the
eskrima
tradition and taught Dante everything he knew, practicing with smuggled kitchen knives and wooden shunts. Dante devoted himself to training, turning his trim, iron body into a sort of knife itself. He mastered the art of throwing knives under the tutelage of an ex-soldier in the French Foreign Legion, who taught him how to weight the hilt with liquid mercury to make the weapon fly more true.

The second man who would define Dante’s life was avoided by the other inmates. One of the rare few who, like Dante, belonged to no gang and yet no one dared touch. Dante learned he was from Paris, a member of a Satanic church called L’église de la Bête. Dante, immune to the terrible rumors of what befell someone who meddled with a member of L’église de la Bête, cornered the man in the yard one day. His name was Xavier Marcel, and instead of fighting, Xavier told Dante about his religion. Dante learned that this religion also valued pain and decided to accept a rare invitation.

When Dante left prison he followed Xavier to Paris, inked a very special tattoo on his head, filed his incisors to a sharp point, and dedicated himself to his two religions.

Pain and L’église de la Bête.

The Magus appreciated Dante’s service; in fact, Dante suspected his new leader actually understood his motives, which had never been the case with Xavier. Xavier had used Dante to stay in power, and Dante had allowed him to do so because it was expedient.