The Shape Stealer (11 page)

The bustle of crowds hustling past their table, the clamor of traffic, even the brilliance of sunlight glimmering in windows across the street all served as a chorus for his high spirits. Why then, he wondered as he finished up his bacon and cheese omelette and sipped the last few drops of
jus d’orange
, was he cursed to put up with the moroseness of a personality like Marduk’s? Tell the truth, reluctant though he was to admit it, he wouldn’t mind having breakfast instead with a spry young thing like that ingenue Garet James. She was on the wrong side of the battle, of course, but she had a twinkle in her eye and a bulge in her bodice that made Marduk look like the ghoul he was in comparison. (Even if Dee had in fact helped make him that.)

Eventually, Dee could ignore Marduk’s truculent silences no longer. He grasped the fellow’s wrist in exasperation, moved it not so subtly into a shaft of sunlight bisecting the table—to which Marduk evinced no response—and exclaimed, “My dear man. Have you no emotions? No sense of triumph, or even greed? We stand on the precipice of an enormous victory. And you personally, thanks entirely to me, have the freedom to move about twenty-four hours per day, more than doubling your life in these long summer days. Do you not exult?”

Marduk took his hand away and put it back in shadow, slowly. “What puts a damper on this for me is the need to masquerade as that puny offal, Will Hughes. Because I have fed on the young Will Hughes I haven’t gained the knowledge and experience of his older self. At least Kepler’s form came with some interesting facts about the stars. All I’ve gotten with this shape is an obsession with the watchtower and a propensity to think in metrical verse.” He grimaced, showing more teeth than was wise in a public venue. Dee hurried to reassure him.

“It’s unfortunate indeed that you could not feed directly on the older Hughes, but unavoidable. How were we to know he’d stay in 1602 and send his younger self to the present? But do not worry, I have made an exhaustive study of the world’s financial markets. We should have no problem as long as you do exactly as I say.”

“Is that so?”

Marduk took Dee’s wrist and moved it into the sunlight also, but squeezing so hard that Dee began to gasp. The man’s—creature’s—strength was abominable.

“I follow no man’s orders. I will try a fling at black pool stock trading tonight. It only takes place at night, right?”

Dee nodded, gasping, trying unsuccessfully to remove his wrist from the creature’s grasp. He didn’t want to beg or plead.

“Y-y-y-yes,” he finally stammered. “I can get you an address. And a little money to work with.” Anything to mollify the beast.

Marduk nodded. “Then I’ll decide whose identity I use for the plot. But don’t let anything untoward happen to Kepler in the meantime. Understand?”

Dee nodded that he did, and wouldn’t. Marduk let go of his wrist with a triumphant grin. And Paris no longer seemed quite as electric with benign energy to Dee, as it had just a moment or two before. He rubbed his aching wrist, averting his eyes from Marduk’s belittling gaze.

14

It Was Red

The apartment building on Rue E. Lumeau was the last place in Paris, or maybe in the world, that anyone would have suspected to house an activity as portentous as black pool stock trading. Dilapidated. That was the word that ran through Marduk’s mind as he beheld, from across the street, the six-story grime-encrusted façade of the building, in one of the seedier sections of northern Paris. But when he carefully checked the address on the slip of paper Dee had given him against that on the torn awning protruding over a set of crumbling stone front steps, they matched. And as he continued to stand there, dumbfounded, a sleek black limo pulled up in front of the entrance and two young men in expensive-looking suits got out. They went up the steps, each carrying thin valises that could have been briefcases or computers, Marduk couldn’t tell.

Curiosity overcoming him, he crossed the street after the men had entered the building, and he mounted the steps as well. The front door had a sturdy-looking lock, but a mild push against the door with one shoulder revealed that it was actually broken, and Marduk slipped inside. A narrow, rectangular lobby, which seemed to run far back into the building, was dark and foul-smelling, poorly lit by one Victorian-era lamp with a frayed shade on a splintered table. Marduk looked around, feeling further confusion. There was no directory, or elevator, or even furniture to sit on. Again he wondered if he was in the right place. He thought he detected a faint aroma of stale urine.

Then he heard a distant clamor of voices, perhaps from several flights above, muffled, as if from a crowd in a tapestried room. He started up the stairs, which were toward the back of the lobby. At the top of the second flight, he took one stride onto the landing, where an amateurish portrait of Napoleon hung in a cheap frame, turned to go up the next flight, and found himself in a different world.

A sheet of polished metal that could have been steel but gleamed like silver blocked off the rest of the second floor hallway; the polished wooden landing under its reflection was bright, almost incandescent. An oval-shaped door, with a series of small red bulbs bordering it, was in the center of the metal sheet. In front of the door, a young man in a white, iridescent jumpsuit that resembled an astronaut’s uniform sat a desk with a computer in front of him. “Credentials, sir?” he asked Marduk.

“What?”

“Your credentials. No one is admitted to the trading room without at least three forms of identification, one of which must be a letter of certification, including bonding, from the CAC Quarante. The Paris Stock Exchange.”

Marduk eyed the empty stairs below him. Short-tempered under the best of circumstances, he was of a mind to strangle this arrogant sentry, anxious as he was to start trading now that he’d come this far. At first he saw no potential witnesses below him, and the sheet of metal seemed to block any view from above. But then he heard voices, belonging to young persons judging by their laughing tone, floating toward him from the first flight of stairs. He strained his eyes downward and spied a few young men, dressed more casually than the others he’d seen, glancing up at him and sending looks of friendly recognition his way.

“Will! Where have you been?” the first up the stairs, a tall, gangling blond man asked.

“Haven’t seen you in over a month!” a red-haired companion in an orange and white sweater exclaimed. The little group increased their pace up the stairs toward him, and soon three men, the third with dark hair and wearing a shirt with a photo of Elvis Presley on it, emerged onto the landing.

“Glad you fellows happened along,” Marduk said. “I’ve forgotten my wallet and apparently this novice”—he indicated the man at the table with a nod—“has not heard of Will Hughes!”

The entry clerk, who mumbled apologies for being on only his third night on the job, was familiar with the new arrivals, for he opened the door for them without an ID request or further word. “We’ll vouch for Will,” the blond man told him, and Marduk joined them without further challenge.

The tunnel stretching out before them now seemed remarkably long given the external dimensions of the building. An optical illusion of some sort, Marduk speculated. It was oval-shaped like the door, made of luminescent white plastic with rows of twinkling red lights extending along it. The thick, rose-colored carpet they walked on, luxuriant as the Turkish carpets he had encountered during years spent adventuring in the Ottoman Empire, ran down the middle. Marduk tried to focus not on the modern and spacious design within such a rundown and cramped building but on parrying conversational forays from the others that he found disconcerting, given that they were based on aspects of Will Hughes’s life he was not familiar with given that they concerned an older Will than the one he’d fed on. Forays concerning various “honeys,” accompanied by laughter Marduk found shrill. Did these men go out drinking every night before they went to work here? he wondered. No wonder the economy was in the trouble it was in! He tried to confine his responses to grunts and monosyllables until one of the trio, the red-haired man, grew especially persistent.

“C’mon, Will. You recall. The one on your arm at the club last month.” The man had the trace of a Scottish brogue. “Don’t tell me you can’t even remember her name!”

“They all have names,” Marduk said, meaninglessly.

“I’ll bet he remembers other things about her,” the Elvis Presley fan piped up.

Raucous laughter. Marduk glanced behind him; the tunnel was empty. They were secluded enough for him to consider strangling all three, which he doubted would take him more than a minute. With a certain crushing pressure on the hollows in … but he backed off his dark idea, concerned there might be other checkpoints he’d need them for up ahead.

“Will’s preoccupied with a trade,” the Presley fan offered. “Any ideas you’d like to share with us, Will?”

“I’ll share them after I’m done with them,” Marduk rasped, angrily. “I’ll share exactly how many millions I’ve made tonight.” His voice sounded even to him like a growl, and he realized he’d forgotten to imitate Will Hughes for the moment.

The trio surrounding him fell uneasily silent, exchanging glances among themselves but keeping whatever thoughts they might be having about “Will Hughes” and his sullen selfishness to themselves. When they resumed their chatter, he was not, to his relief, included in it. They went on about stocks and women of various names and nationalities, as if they were interchangeable commodities, but without the good-humored undercurrent of earlier. Marduk was relieved when they arrived at the unmanned entrance to the trading room; he’d had to suppress the strong urge to throttle their superficial and inane selves every step of the way there.

As if making an ironic point, the black pool room had an intensely white decor. Marduk found the array of white objects greeting his eyes bewildering, and he wondered why all the traders weren’t wearing white coats. White desks; white chairs on wheels; white computer consoles (though bits of color representing stock symbols flecked the screens); white walls, ceiling, and floor; white lamps above each console. But he wasn’t there to critique the decor, he reminded himself—he was there to make money. If Will Hughes could do it, he could!

He looked around for the nearest empty trading post and spied one two-thirds of the way down the closest aisle. But just as he reached it and began pulling the chair out, he was accosted by a trading room attendant (who was in fact wearing a white coat)—a short-haired young person, revealed to be female only by the pitch of her voice, who asked, “Mr. Hughes? Why aren’t you going to your post? We’ve been keeping it open for you.”

Marduk, with great effort projecting some semblance of a personality, clapped his hand to his forehead and mumbled, “I confess to being distracted. Apologies. Can it be that age is creeping up on me?” He tried to smile.

He was acting lamely, he considered, but he didn’t see an alternative. Certainly his first reaction—as always, to kill—was not practical with all these people around. Could he credibly say he’d forgotten where his post was when he was there to trade millions of euros in positions he had to keep by memory in his head?

When he didn’t move right away, the attendant, after a quizzical look at him, took him by the elbow and led him to his post, two corridors farther away from the entrance. There, he found himself at a particularly grand-looking console and desk, set apart from the others and, alone among all the equipment in the huge room, not white. It was red.

Marduk was curious to know the thinking behind that color choice, which at the least showed Will Hughes to be a distinctive figure among stock traders. But this was not the time to be asking questions. The attendant left, and Marduk settled in before the screen. He was confident that he had mastered the necessary basics for this trading in the crash computer course Dee had given him during the afternoon, and Dee had assured him that his password, even though it wasn’t Hughes’s personal one, would work at this location this evening. And it did.

And it was remarkable how little time it took him to lose the entire ten million euro line of credit Dee had carved out for him for this one evening only.

He had been sitting at the screen only a few minutes when he started to get a visceral sense of how, whatever money might mean in the world generally, it meant something different during stock trading. Or, it meant nothing. The values of positions, especially the currency options and derivatives that Hughes—judging from the positions left over from his last session—traded, changed with shocking frequency, and seemingly in unpredictable directions. But Marduk had his mantra. A monster, which he reveled in being, could have a mantra. If Will Hughes could do it, he, Marduk, could do it even better.

Buy and sell. That was what Will Hughes did. Any idiot could do that, let alone an awesome being like he was. So he bought 100,000 options on the euro to rise in value against the US dollar from $1.3855 to $1.3875 during the six hours following the option purchase. The options cost about seven euros each, or about 700,000 euros all told, and “controlled,” according to the screen—namely, gave a right to buy—hundreds of millions of euros in exchange. Granted, six hours wasn’t so long a time, but it seemed a phenomenal amount of money to gain a gateway to for so little cost in return.

But in less than fifteen minutes, these options had a breathtaking plunge in value, from seven euros to under one, all of it because the euro had diminished from $1.3855 to $1.3819 in the blink of an eye. Marduk’s position was nearly wiped out! Panicking, he sold it all for fear it would plunge to zero, so at least he’d have some money left from this mishap when the night was over. But he’d lost over six hundred thousand euros in less than fifteen minutes.

A half hour later, Marduk noted that his opening position, had he kept it, would now have more than doubled from its original price and would have increased many times over from the low point at which he’d sold it. For the euro, fluctuating extravagantly, was now at $1.3897, and the options had moved up to approximately sixteen euros each accordingly. Meanwhile he’d lost similar overall amounts in two other attempts at trades.