The Shape Stealer (19 page)

But then things seemed to move along with a welcome sense of momentum. The single line became a floating tube, then a thick cylinder, and the cylinder metamorphosed into a torso. Before he could have snapped his fingers a young man in his mid-twenties was standing before him, grinning meanly, dressed in evening clothes that seemed old-fashioned to Marduk’s frail concept of 2009. He was good-looking, dark hair swept back from a noble forehead, eyes that were all silver: no irises or pupils. They glowed as if they were made entirely of silver, and Marduk had to admit to himself that he liked the look, the primal nonhumanity of it. The Malefactor glanced at the bodies and asked, “Am I interrupting something? Indeed, that is my hope.”

“You are the scum of the universe, Malefactor. I only hope the metal in my bullets proves a match for your eyes. Afterward I look forward to cutting your eyes up for use as gems in rings, making a profit to add to my fortune.” He couldn’t control his rage after this short speech. He fired twice, hitting each eye in turn with deadly accuracy. But the bullets clanged harmlessly off their targets, and he had to duck out of the way of one of them as it ricocheted.

The Malefactor laughed. “You are wasting your bullets, lord of the ghouls. Unfortunately I have no authorization to slay you, or you’d already be dead. I am sorely tempted.” He nodded at the bodies on the floor. “I pity these innocent ones.”

Marduk tried a bullet in the vicinity of the creature’s heart, assuming he had one. It didn’t clang; it seemed to pass right through him as if he weren’t there, drilling a hole in the grimy wall behind him. The Malefactor showed no ill effects, and Marduk couldn’t block puzzlement from his features.

“You think I can pass through centuries in a millisecond but that it would be a problem for me to rearrange my molecules to expedite the passage of a bullet? You are delusional, dark lord who is not, I assure you, my lord. But they’re your bullets. Waste away, if you please.” He grinned.

Marduk held his fire. They stared at each other.

The blond woman groaned again.

“You trespass on my kingdom, Malefactor. Why?” Marduk finally asked. Crushing his windpipe with his hands was going to take a lot longer than a bullet would have. If it were even possible. It hadn’t been the other times. That was why he was going to try reasoning with him. After a manner.

“It’s leaking out into our world, what you and Dee are trying to do. We have our own big project going on at the moment, Marduk. So we thought it prudent to keep an eye on you, check in on you from time to time. So there’d be no interference. I got called away from your trading place but happened to subsequently be in the neighborhood and catch a glimpse of you accosting these poor souls. Why should these girls have to die a horrible death at the hands of a fiend? Unfortunately communication is slow with all the dislocations in time going on, and I haven’t yet received authorization to deliver justice. Or we wouldn’t be chatting.

“Malefactors are not heartless. We are misnomered enemies of the one true Malefactor, time, and kill when we have to in that war, but we’d rid the universe of evil like yours too, if we could. So take this visit as a warning. We are watching. You disgust us. I hope I get authorization before I have to leave Paris.”

But even as he spoke these last words his shape began to waver back toward shimmering cylinders, then lines. Marduk had an unbidden glimpse of a dinner party in the 1930s, and then the creature suddenly vanished. Though relieved, Marduk reflected on what the Malefactor had had to say. Maybe he should lay off his now stirring victims. Why add an enemy as treacherous as the Malefactors when already in the midst of such a vast scheme as the one he was involved with with Dee and Renoir? Why?

Because he was Lord Marduk, he told himself. Descendant of a Babylonian demonic deity. His anti-spirit had many historical achievements, from the crucifixion of Saint Peter to the Satanic possession of Germany in the same 1930s the Malefactor seemed to be returning to. The fifty million lives lost in World War II were a good start but well short of the annihilation of the species that was the goal. What were the two fleas on the floor compared to that goal?

He kicked them into semiconsciousness, disrobed them, and had his way with them, then feasted on their flesh, harder to find on the scrawnier one but still available. He had thought of enjoying them sequentially so one would pathetically know what had happened to the other, but wound up doing them in simultaneous stages. He thought maybe the Malefactor would appreciate this gesture; it was a more humanitarian procedure.

Walking away from the site of his grotesque mockery of benevolence, Marduk found that, though his corporeal needs seemed satisfied, he still felt a brewing anger that needed to lash out. It stirred in him so fierily that he paused at a pay phone on the way to the Metro. Fumbling in his pockets, he found the list of phone numbers Dee had provided him for emergency use regarding the financial project. Renoir had a co-conspirator in the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, France’s rough equivalent of the SEC, whom they could call on in case there was any unexpected trouble with the authorities. He wouldn’t be there at this late hour, but why not leave a voice mail? And if someone other than the “safe” individual happened to hear the voice mail first, Renoir would be in a whole lot of trouble. Maybe Dee too. As for Marduk himself, he was leaving the country now anyway, in pursuit of Hughes. And he could make whatever fortune the conspiracy might have resulted in on his own, anyway. Because anything those imbeciles could do, he could do better!

He didn’t have to look far for an inspiration for his voice mail, either. The way Dee had ripped off Kepler long ago was an excellent model for it, especially on the point of eliciting sympathy. “Hello, Mr. Haussmanns,” Marduk began, when the voice mail picked up. “My name is Jean LaSalle and I am the treasurer of a small orphanage in Audierne, Brittany. We have invested our savings under the advice of a certain Jean Renoir, who is a very famous man, and we have now discovered that all the money has been stolen. Renoir is likely to have done it, and if you investigate bank account number 72-71-TAA at the Société Générale, you will find a paper trail that is astounding and confounding indeed. And he has had help from the infamous Irish banker, a Mr. John Dee, in his criminal pillaging. Please help me and the little boys and girls! Please!” He stifled a giggle as he hung up the phone.

Zany as the complaint might be, he had the thought that it just might work. Renoir was famous for having made enemies with his belligerent criticisms of the free-spending ways of national politicians and national banks around Europe. Some of his enemies would have paid for information like that Marduk had just doled out. And if they got a warrant to go into this exceptionally secure bank account, no doubt they would find all sorts of mind-boggling transactions, given the preparation Renoir was supposedly making for the gold manipulation scheme. Marduk’s anger immediately subsided.

Moving forward then with ruthless efficiency, he dropped the Metro idea, caught a cab to Charles de Gaulle Airport, and found a late-night flight to New York City. From there he’d go on to San Francisco. If this phone message worked, Paris—all of France—would no longer be safe for him. If it didn’t work, or not right away, Dee would be disappointed that he’d left so suddenly, but Paris seemed a little too thick with Malefactors for his taste, and anyway, to hell with Dee. Marduk would kill him soon enough.

And Will Hughes would soon die at his hands in San Francisco.

25

Nuclear Jigsaw Puzzle

Older Will’s vampirism had been diluted by sharing the same time with young Will. Along with his new ability to tolerate sunlight had come some reduction in strength and reduced immunity to violence. Where he’d previously only had to fear the silver bullet, now a copper bullet would be fatal—any bullet, in fact, was cause for concern.

But the psychological resources afforded by having lived over four hundred years—twice—were immense. Will was drawing on them now to convince himself that he could still be a full vampire whenever he wanted to be, that he could use that level of strength to confront Ruggieri. That was how he’d been able to acrobatically scale the outside of Madame La Pieuvre’s building, after being alerted by the watchguarding Lol to the emergency.

He’d enjoyed his climb, both for the beauty of his view of the city’s lights and for the confidence the climb gave him in his resurgent powers. Coming to rest now on the terrace, alarmed by what he had seen inside the apartment, he took a deep breath and shattered the window with a jab from his clenched fist, as if smashing a brittle film of ice.

Will had time only to observe Garet among the hostages before Ruggieri fired at him, three bullets in quick succession in the chest. To his relief, they passed through him harmlessly and flew on out into the night. His immunity to copper bullets might have been gone, but his extraordinary skill in manipulating his own atoms was still present, and he’d been able to part his flesh around the bullets’ trajectory, lining his atoms up with those of the bullets so empty spaces between nuclei and electrons in both passed by one another. Like intersecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Lol had instructed him in the nuclear arts quite recently, in both Paris and London. At her tiny size, she lived much closer to the atoms and had more of a mystic rapport with them than he did. He had learned the truth of her argument that the barriers among nerve cells, synapses, and the atoms that composed them could be artificial and illusory. Her practical training had been effective: Will could elongate and stretch his atomic spaces now the same way he could take deeper and slower breaths to relax.

Observing the failure of Ruggieri’s gunshots, the Malefactors fired, gleaming yellow filaments from their silver rods that headed straight for Will’s head like lightning bolts. They lit him up like a luminescent statue, to the horror of the hostages, but had no more impact than the bullets. Will diverted their electric charges into nervous-system atoms that could readily absorb them.

Then he took a giant stride toward Ruggieri and began throttling him with powerful hands, turning even the ghoulish sequence of his alternating features purple as Ruggieri lost all capacity to breathe. The Malefactors, observing Will’s strength and immunity to weaponry, began a prudent retreat. Limbs shrank to branches, heads to fruit, torsos to slender trunks, and as Will strangled the last of the life out of Ruggieri, they vanished.

The transformation in Ruggieri’s appearance as he became a corpse got the attention of everyone in the room. As he slumped onto the elegant marble floor he gradually became shorter, his legs thicker and stumpier, his brow and features more apelike. Lying with a stiff finality, he looked like a bloated chimpanzee, hairy face smeared with blood, hand clutching a sharpened rock that had appeared out of nowhere.

Everyone stared at this hominid corpse. Garet noticed Dr. Lichtenstein’s transfixed gaze; she wondered again how old he was and if his presence had anything to do with Ruggieri’s corpse’s peculiar devolution. Then she observed that the older Will had vanished. He had apparently gone back out the window. If he had left any other way he would have had to cross her field of vision. Garet cast a longing glance at the open window and the night sky beyond it. When she turned her gaze back to the room, the younger Will was no longer to be seen either.

Everyone was startled to see Ruggieri undergo one more transformation. All that remained of him suddenly was a small pile of silver ash, a pyramid of silver dust on the gleaming floor.

*   *   *

Despite the disruption and its apocalyptic finale, Octavia was bent on bringing the dinner party to a successful conclusion. She ushered the guests back to the table with a solicitousness more suitable to interruption by unpleasant argument than by paramilitary event. But no guest had been injured, and there seemed little point to calling the police when the chief perpetrator was a pile of ashes and his cohorts had vanished to a different dimension in time. So vaguely normal conversation ensued as the dessert of crème brûlée and a choice of cappucino or brandy was served, accompanied by candlelight and a violinist who had suddenly turned up.

The conversation turned more serious. Jules and Annick were strong on the point that the available portal clues all pointed to Père Lachaise and, according to Pui Ying Wong’s poem, to Jim Morrison’s grave in particular. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to be all they had, and it was crucial to find a portal. That would enable Jules and Annick to reunite with their fellow
chronologistes
, including, hopefully, Annick’s grandfather. Kepler might find his bookstore and at a minimum expel Dee from his part ownership of it. And young Will could return to 1602, enabling the older Will and Garet to move forward in a more complete manner. But Garet in particular seemed nervous about visiting Père Lachaise, especially in the middle of the night, as Jules and Annick were proposing. Kepler supported the idea.

“I don’t quite see the logic of it,” Garet said.

“We’ll wander around,” Kepler responded, “and maybe run into a further clue. It’s not a math equation, or the diligent calculations by which I found the orbits of the planets. It’s more a logic of the wind. But the world’s a funny place, dear Garet. Sometimes we must let instinct, and the wind, rule.”

The others nodded in assent, and it was agreed that Octavia would call a car to transport the group to the cemetery. Dr. Lichtenstein, though he had not participated in the discussion, appeared to be listening intently. Octavia’s acquiescence in his presence during this conversation revived speculation, for Garet, about whether or not he belonged to some obscure, neolithic category of fey. Certainly his familiarity with evolution and his fascination with the way in which Ruggieri had deteriorated backward through time, were suggestive.

“Doctor, what did you make of the way Ruggieri decomposed?” she asked. “As if he went through the stages of the prehistory of man?”