Stalking the Nightmare (6 page)

He read every word on every page Siri had written; and he vowed silently that he would pick up her quest where she had fallen. But he could not go to her informant. His assistance had cost her too much, and she had been unable to go on. The price was too high.

But there were clues to the trail of the artifact that was True Love. And he took the bahut and left the apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street, and never returned. He had money to continue the search, and he would do it without help from things that dragged long, rubbery arms through the dust of fallen temples.

All he had to do was wait for the end of the war.

By 1975 Christopher Caperton had traced it to New Orleans. He was thirty-five years old; he had been married and divorced because in a moment of weariness he had thought
she
might suffice in place of True Love; and he wrote this in his journal:
It is the vanity of searching for embodiments.
Fleches d’amour.
Incarnations which are never satisfactory, which never answer
all
longings and questions.

Once, when he had thought he might die of a jungle fever contracted while running down a false clue in Paramaribo, he heard himself cursing Siri’s memory. If she had not told him it actually existed, he might have settled for something less, never knowing for certain that there was more. But he
did
know, and in his tantrum of fever he cursed her to Hell.

When he recovered, he was more than ashamed of himself. Considering who she had been, where she had gone, and the owners of her spirit, he might have called down a sentence on her that she did not deserve. One never knew the total cost, nor at what point the obligation was considered voided.

After he had been rotated home in 1970 he spent a few months tying up all previous relationships—family, friends, business associates, acquaintances—and set out on the trail that had grown cold since 1946.

Without dipping into capital he was able to underwrite his expenses handsomely. Even though the gnomes of Zurich had done away with unnumbered, secret accounts, he had made his money in a way that caused no concern among the assessors, customhouse officials, tithe-seekers and running-dogs of the IRS desiring duty, levy, tribute, tallage, liver and lights. He moved freely under a variety of passports and a number of names. He came to think of himself as a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Greene suspense novel.

There were clues, beginning with one of the appraisers who had worked on the Ford bequests. He was quite old by the time Chris located him in a retirement trailer camp in Sun City, but he remembered the item clearly. No, he had never seen it; it was crated with specific instructions that it should not, under even the most extreme circumstances, be opened. If he was lying, he did it well. Chris was paying a high enough premium for the information that it didn’t matter either way. But the trail picked up with the old appraiser’s recollection that whatever the crate had contained, it had been bequeathed to a contemporary of Henry Ford’s, a man with whom he had been friends and then fallen out, fifty years before.

Chris managed to locate the bills of lading and traced the crate to Madison, Indiana. The recipient of the crate had been deceased for fifteen years. The contents of the crate had been sold at auction …

And so it went. From place to place. From clue to clue. And each clue indicated that having been in touch with the artifact, the owner had known great joy or great sorrow; but all were dead. The Holy Grail always lay just ahead, always just out of Chris’s reach. Yet he could never bring himself to take the easy way out: to summon up the horror Siri had called Adrammelech. He knew if he finally gave in, that even if he found True Love he would never be able to savor it.

In January of 1975 Christopher Caperton followed a clue from Trinidad to New Orleans. His source had assured him that the artifact had passed into the hands of a
houngan,
a priest of the
con-jur,
a disciple of the voodoo of Doctor Cat, a pioneer of mail order Voodoo in 1914.

On Perdido Street, in a back room lit only by votive candles in rubyglass jars, Chris met “Prince Basile Thibodeux,” whose title at birth had been merely Willie Link Dunbar. Prince Basile swore he had known and loved the real and true Marie Laveau. As the old black man looked no more than sixty—though he claimed to be ninety-two—such a claim was, either way, highly dubious. Absolute proof exists that Marie Laveau, the first of the many Marie Laveau’s, died on June 24th, 1881, at the approximate age of eighty-five. Two years before Willie Link “Thibodeux” had been born, if he was ninety-two; and thirty-four, if he was lying.

Christopher Caperton did not care what lies Prince Basile told to sell his worthless hoodoo goods in the drugstore of Love Oils, Goofer Dust, Devil’s Shoe Strings and War Water, as long as he told him a straight story about the artifact.

When he walked into the little back room, washed in bloody shadows from the candles, he was prepared to pay a premium price for the information he sought, or to assure Prince Basile that there were two men living on Prytania Street who would, for only a fraction of that premium price, inflict great bodily sorrow on a sixty or ninety-two-year-old black man, and he would worry about the black goat dancing on his grave at a later time. But Prince Basile took one look at him and fear filled the withered face.

“Doan put dat
gris-gris
on me, mistuh,” he pleaded. “Jus’ whatever you want, that’s be what you gone get. Ah’m at y’service.”

And Chris walked out of the little back room on Perdido Street with the information—that he knew to be absolutely reliable because no one that terrified could he without dying in the act—that Willie Link Dunbar had worked on a smuggling operation from the Islands to the Keys in 1971 and he had seen the artifact. He swore before Damballa that he could not remember what it looked like … but it had been as lovely as anything he knew. His face, when he said it, was a strange mix of terror at the sight of Chris and joy at the last scintilla of memory of what he had seen.

And he told Chris the name of the smuggler who had taken the item from the boat.

And when Chris asked him why he was so frightened of just another white man, Prince Basile said, “You been kissin’ the Old Ones. I kilt a hunnerd crows and cocks I couldn’t save mah soul if you was t’touch me, mistuh. I be jus’ playin’ at whut I does, but
you…
you knows the fire.”

Chris shuddered. And that was only from a minor, weak servant of Adrammelech. He left hurriedly.

He stood in the darkness of the alley off Perdido Street and thought about it, about True Love, whatever it was. He had wanted it for so long, had sought it in so many women, had glimpsed hints of its totality so many times, that he only now paused to examine what he had become. Even if he got it, would he be worthy of it? Wasn’t the one who found the Holy Grail supposed to be pure in every way, perfect in every way, without flaw or blemish or self-doubt? Knights on white chargers, saints, defenders of the faith; those were the candidates for the honor. Prince Charming always won Snow White, not Porky Pig.

Without flaw. No, not without flaw. He had come too far for perfection. He had had to experience too much.

Yet he knew he was closer to True Love than anyone had ever been. Not even those who had possessed it had known what to do with it. He knew he had it within himself to become one with True Love, as no one before him ever could. No one. Not one of the perhaps thousand owners of it before and since it found its way to the Palace of Minos, no matter how fine or great or deserving they had been.

Christopher Caperton knew his destiny was to hold True Love in his hands. Known to demons, casting no shadow, he walked away from the fear in Perdido Street.

The final clue was so mundane he could not even breathe a sigh of relief. True Love had been sold in blind bid auction at Sotheby’s in April of 1979. It now belonged to a man who lived high above the rest of the human race, in a tower overlooking New York, where almost eight million people gave a portion of each day to wondering where True Love resided.

From Siri’s notebooks Chris recognized the name of the man. In 1932 he had visited New York City for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall. The artifact had been stolen from him. He had spent forty-seven years trying to regain his lost property. In the process, somehow, he had become enormously powerful, enormously wealthy, enormously secretive.

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.

Christopher Caperton took one final look at the cover of the December 1980 issue of
Esquire.
It showed a woman in a seductive bridal gown. The cover illustrated an article called
Looking for a Wife
and the slug-line read “With all the beautiful, intelligent women out there, why is she so hard to find?”

He smiled thinking they might have done the reverse on
Ms.
magazine, with a photograph of an equally unreachable male.

The model they had selected for the shot was achingly innocent, yet seductive; poised in a timeless moment of utter perfection. Had he been anyone else, this might well have been the physical manifestation of True Love for him.

But it was only the most recent in a congeries of photos, motion pictures, billboards and women glimpsed in cars going past on city streets who were idealized manifestations of what he sought.

Tonight he would hold the real thing. Tonight he would obtain True Love.

He put the last of the vials from Siri’s bahut he might need in the capacious pockets of his London Fog topcoat, and left the hotel. It was thirty degrees in the Manhattan streets, and the wind was blowing in off the East River. By tomorrow, perhaps before two
am
, there would be snow. It was the sort of evening he had always imagined for this final leg of the journey.

Christopher Caperton was forty years old.

Every bribe had been well-placed. The boiler room door was unlocked. The key to the private service elevator had been properly copied. No one stopped him.

He walked through the palatial tower suite in darkness. He heard a door closing away off in the rear of the apartment. The floor-plan he had been given was precise and he touched nothing as he walked quickly to the door of the master bedroom.

The old man was lying in the exact center of the huge bed. As reported, he was dying.

Chris closed the door behind him. Only one light near the bed illuminated the room. The old man opened his eyes and looked at Chris. His eyes were very blue.

“There’s never enough money to buy silence, boy. You can buy entrance, but not silence. There’s always some mouth that’s hungrier.”

Chris smiled and walked to the bed. “I would have tried to bargain with you if I’d thought it would do any good. I’m not a thief by profession.”

The old man snorted softly. He didn’t seem to be in pain. “No price.”

“Yes, I rather thought that might be the case. But look on the bright side: you can’t take it with you, it won’t do you any good on the other side; and I’ve been looking for it for a long time.”

The old man laughed gently, no more strenuously than he had snorted. “What the hell do I care how long you looked for it, boy? Not as long as I looked for it.”

“Since Christmas, 1932.”

“Well, well. You did your homework, did you?”

“I’ve paid as much as you, in all kinds of coin.”

“Not my concern, boy. You’ll never find it.”

“It’s here. In this room. In the safe.”

The old man’s eyes widened. “Smarter than I thought. Didn’t stop any of that cash you were doling out; got good people working for me; didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t pick up a few extra dollars; they’ve got families to take care of. Didn’t expect you’d know about the safe.”

“I know about it.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll look forever and never find it. Even if you do, you’ll never get it open.” He coughed shallowly, smiled at the ceiling and recited: “Hidden where you can’t find it; but if you do you’ll be looking at six foot thick walls of concrete reinforced with molybdenum-steel alloy cords, backed by a foot of tempered high-carbon high-chromium steel, another foot of unseamed silico-manganese shock-resisting steel and six inches of eighteen-tung-sten, four-chrome, one-vanadium high-speed industrial tool steel. The vault door is stainless steel faced, an inch and a half of cast steel, another twelve inches of burn-resisting steel, another inch and a half of open-hearth steel, and the pneumatic hinges are inside the sandwich. The vault door has twenty bolts, each an inch in diameter: eight on one side, eight on the other, two top and two bottom. This holds the door into a sixteen inch jamb of moly-tungsten high speed steel, set into eighteen inches of concrete crosshatched by burn-resisting steel bars running horizontally and vertically.” He coughed once more, pleased with himself, and added as a fillip, “The door’s precision-made so you can’t pour nitro in between the seam of the door and the vault.”

Chris let a beaten look cross his face. “And I suppose that isn’t even all of it. I suppose there are thermostats that trip some kind of trap if the temperature rises … if I used a torch.”

“You got some smarts, boy. Tear gas. And the floor gets electrified.” He was grinning widely now, but what little color had been in his face was gone. His eyes were closing.