Drowning Pool (Miss Henry Mysteries) (6 page)

Juliet stopped, surprised that she had made
up all those gory details. But somehow it felt like an emotional truth so she didn’t try to correct anything. Nor did she add the part about the handmaiden coming back at the next full moon to suck her husband’s brain.

“
Allmächtig
!
”
Fröndenberger exclaimed. “And you wish to paint this? But why? It is so tragic.”

“Just the lily
and for my personal collection,” Juliet said, reaching for her glass of wine. “It would be a sort of memento mori. And is not life so often tragic? It is for the artist to find the beauty in it. For, after all, it is the art that be there after we have gone.”

This was pretty high flying rhetoric
for someone who designed t-shirts but Fröndenberger nodded, apparently struck by this idea.

Conversation started back up again and Juliet finally forced herself to turn and talk to San Marco. As he blathered on about his own inspirations, Juliet glanced at Raphael who was
clearly amused by her antics and then at Smythe who was looking quite inscrutable. That could have been because he was thinking hard, or because he was trying not to breathe in any of Guda Stoss’s rank atmosphere which was gradually drifting down the table. Did the creature think her talent would wash off if she bathed?

Her last place to look for an audience reaction was at her host, but he was addressing himself to Judith Karenina so she couldn’t tell if he approved
of her dramatic performance. She hoped that he had. Her desire to sketch water lilies and find a sculpture of the nasty Smoking Mirror would give her a great excuse to wander around the castle and the grounds and to generally be nosy in places where most people wouldn’t go, and he would hopefully think her too daft and poetic to be a threat to any illegal ventures that he was currently enterprising.

It would be nice if he were fooled because she had the feeling that Smythe
most definitely was not.

Juliet had done little more than taste each course, but she knew that if she went to bed too soon she would be fighting heartburn all night
. Besides, she wanted to have a little wander about after everyone had had a chance to get to sleep. Memories of her last visit to a castle crowded in like beggars with their hands outstretched. Knowing they would overwhelm her if she closed her eyes, Juliet got another turn around the room and stopped at her window. Across the plaza some other insomniac was pacing before an identical window.

What was she doing? Her last days at the NSA were plagued by vile emotions
and disloyal thoughts that they would have strip-mined from her had they suspected that they existed. It was not an experience that she wanted to relive even at a distance.

It was a relief when Raphael tapped at the connecting door
, breaking in on her incipient ruminations.

“Come in,” she said. “I was just sitting her
e repenting my sins of gluttony.”

“I gave up at course five,” Raphael admitted.

“I tried to be polite and try everything. Which was a mistake. What was that green stuff? It tasted like avocado, pesto, and wheatgrass—with maybe some grasshopper and dead prawn.”

“I think it was.” He rolled over to the fireplace where a small fire burned merrily. It was needed. The room felt chilly. “What do you think of our host?
Do you think that you’ll be able to find what you are looking for in this rather strange abode?”

“Do you think it is safe to talk?” she asked
softly, sitting down next to him.

“If we do it very
quietly and near the fire.”

Juliet leaned close
to the snapping flames that were crackling happily as they found pockets of pitch.

“Well, seducing him
for information won’t work. I doubt his sweet nothings run to blurting out where he keeps the family’s illegal treasures. Besides, I don’t think he is all that interested in women. Not that he’s gay. It’s just that he likes things more than people. I think it will all come down to observation, eavesdropping, and snooping. Maybe bribes or blackmail if I can get some leverage. For someone else to use,” she added as a matter of form.

Raphael raised an eyebrow.

“That may be so. Do you feel confident playing fox and hounds with this lot? I must confess that I am not sanguine of your chances of accomplishing much with so many guards about.”

“This isn’t play,
” Juliet assured him. “And I wish madly that Esteban was here. I also wish I knew whether Smythe was for or against us.”

“The secretary?
” he asked with mild surprise. “I saw you talking to him.”

“Ha! If he is only a secretary I’ll eat my hat. And to make matters worse, I think he might actually be smart.”

“That is unfortunate.” This was said without irony.

“Yeah, unless he’s on our side. I mean, not on von Hayek’s side.”

“And you think he may be?”

“Someone tipped
Merton off about the roundel.”

“
Hm. Are you going to do any wandering tonight?” Raphael kept his voice and face neutral but she knew he was worried.

“Maybe.
Time is short and I want another look at the library.”

“Shall I join you?” Raphael asked.

Juliet looked at his face, which was pinched with exhaustion.

“Nope. It’s just down the hall.
You didn’t get the funhouse tour of the great stairway so you won’t know how weird all this is. Lots of weapons and dead animals—but European and African ones. Animals that is. The weapons are mostly African and South American, I think. And the taxidermy all looks a bit scruffy. Like maybe they were acquired by Klaus von Hayek before he skipped Europe and since he has been ill, his son hasn’t bothered to keep the moths away. Sort of
the king is almost dead, long live the new king
.”

“Interesting.
I have wondered at Klaus von Hayek’s failure to appear.”

“
Me too. And other things. Like how, though there are lots of dead European animals, and African and Aztecan spears and blades and such, I haven’t seen any art from the old country anywhere in the castle—not medieval or Renaissance era at any rate. Except the crucified Jesus in the library—and that may be South American. Anyhow, though Asher will disown me for this, I can’t tell with the modern blots. So, I thought maybe I would have a look at the books on the shelves and see which way the von Hayeks’ taste is trending. Maybe they really don’t like the old masters at all and Merton got the wrong end of the stick. It wouldn’t be the first time that intel was wrong.”

“
More likely everything has been put away while the art show is going on. Very well. It sounds safe enough. But wake me if you need me.” He touched her hand. “Juliet, I mean this. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I will,” she promised. But only if she really, really needed him.
Juliet knew she was opening Pandora’s box and felt no enthusiasm for the job, since the lock-picks and directives had been thrust into her hand by David Merton, who was a company man from the ground up, but he was also power-hungry and all about carving out his own empire. She was working with the assumption that whatever he wanted, it couldn’t be good. Juliet had had little choice, but there was no reason for Raphael to catch the blowback if things went wrong.

She thought about mentioning how grateful she was for their relationship that free of underlying motives and agendas, but she decided that might sound too much like a speech from someone who was marching off to die and decided to save it. Besides, he already knew how she felt.

Wandering castles that belonged to war criminals with armed guards was not Juliet’s favorite way to spend the long reaches of the night, but, thanks to her nap, she thought that she might actually manage to stay awake long enough to explore the library and check book titles for clues. She preferred to do this without someone looking over her shoulder. And if someone did see her—well, it was likely enough that she might want something to read.

She had a flashlight which she brought in case the generator
or batteries or whatever powered the lights were turned off before she was done. And because it was more discreet than leaving a path of burning lamps through the castle like a trail of blazing breadcrumbs that anyone could follow. Especially Calderon, the less-evolved head of security who had a very shallow brainpan.

There was no need to creep down the hall since
her shoes’ soles were made of leather, and the stone floor didn’t creak, and the doors to the bedrooms were a good four inches thick and would block the sound of anything less noisy than a marching band. But she tried to move quietly and quickly anyway, avoiding the many recesses where dead animals stood with their mouths frozen in disturbing snarls, since they looked so lifelike in the dim light which seemed to scatter and break into ineffective pieces every time it encountered something.

The library, which had seemed a lot closer in daylight
, was finally reached. She did not turn on the banks of lights though there was a switch by the wall. She preferred that no one notice that there was someone using the room if they happened to glance up at the window. But she found that the small light of her torch was easily swallowed by the room’s enormous size and many deep recesses. She had to move slowly.

Juliet began on the ground level
, moving as swiftly as she could in the dark, noting that the furniture all seemed to have been taken from Bluebeard’s castle, even the tapestries whose fleur-de-lis looked more like scorpions than stylized flowers. In the back of her mind she kept expecting someone with a Romanian accent and a cape to start talking about
the children of the night
.

She knew when she had found the special books, the ones most prized by their owner.
Juliet braced herself, expecting anything from ancient erotica to the
Malleus Maleficarum
.

It was impossible to read every title
on the shelves but she had found the books on the open shelves grouped by subject matter. That was probably not the case of the one section kept behind locked glass.

The cabinet that stored the most precious volumes and folios was done in some sort of inlay that looked like smallpox craters and which she suspected was some kind of bone—hopefully not human
but given who her host was, she supposed that anything was possible.

Juliet moved her flashlight up against the glass
and squinted at the small halo of yellow light. The leather binding of the first book was old and looked like it had tattoos on it. Juliet was revolted but not surprised. She had seen a French Bible bound in tanned human flesh that dated from the thirteenth century, though the
trend for anthropodermic bibliopegy began in the late sixteenth century when they started doing unintentionally ironic things like binding anatomy books in the skins of dissected cadavers, and law books in the hides of convicted murderers as a sort of punishment that surpassed even death. So much for carrying rancor to the grave but no further. The most famous case of a murderer’s flesh being used for binding was of that was John Horwood of the notorious Red Barn Murders, but there were many others.
Medical students made money on the side by supplying breast skin from female corpses for binding erotica. Doctors and lawyers were the largest connoisseurs and creators of this morbid art, but they were not the only ones who collected. Or created.

Juliet grimaced, thinking that she had believed her training in criminology would never overlap her art career.
Her mind was a warehouse of gruesome information all tucked away in drawers that she had hoped she would never have to reopen. Like the one on human skin relics.

There were
many cases of people leaving their flesh to bind their own memoirs. What a Christmas gift, she thought with a grimace. The French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, had a tubercular admirer leave him a copy of his works bound in her own skin. This was in 1877. Juliet had also seen a copy of
Lincoln Unbound
at Temple University “
taken from the skin of a Negro at a Baltimore Hospital and tanned by the Jewell Belting Company.”

These
, horrible as they were, were the “legitimate books” that made legal use of cadaver skin. But there were other books too, made by people whose interests in taxidermy and murder had collided. These were not confined to Europe or the pre-twentieth century.
There were all kinds of collectors who paid a lot for books bound in human skin. Especially the illegal, serial-killer, cottage-industry kind.

“Yuck.” She straightened, shuddering and feeling a little sick.
Thank goodness the books were behind glass because though centuries had passed—she hoped—the fatty wax smell sometimes lingered. It was an odor which, once experienced, haunted a person forever. She also knew why they were in a sturdy cabinet. Large numbers of the human skin books had ended up in the bellies of unlucky rats. The cured leather killed them but apparently the smell was irresistible. “Enough already.”

The closer she looked the more sinister and yet banal things seemed. She didn’t doubt that she was in the presence of evil
, but the expected kind given her host’s identity. And that made things tedious as well as dangerous.