The Anubis Gates (51 page)

Dundee took a breath, then let it out. “It’s just muscle cramps, Claire. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

She pursed her lips. “Is the cramp gone now?”

Dundee groped for the stopper and poked it back into the decanter neck. “Yes. You can go back to bed.”

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “Maybe I’ll stay here with you for a little while.”

“I don’t think—” he began hastily, but was interrupted by a knock at the hall door.

A muffled voice asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes, Joe, no problem,” Dundee called. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

“I could bring you a cup of rum coffee if you’d like, sir.”

“No thank you, Joe, I—” Dundee hesitated, glanced at his wife, then said, “Thank you, Joe, yes, that might help.”

Footsteps receded away down the carpeted hall, and Claire stood up.

Knowing she wouldn’t take him up on it now, Dundee raised his eyebrows and said, “I thought you were going to stay here for a bit.”

Claire’s mouth was a straight line. “You know how I feel about Joe.” She strode back into her own room and closed the door.

Dundee stood up, clawed the hair back from his forehead and crossed to the window. He pulled the curtain aside and stared down at the broad curve of St. James Street, the uniformly elegant housefronts all palely lit in amber by the flickering street lights. The sky was less black toward the east—it would be dawn soon, a clear Sunday in March.

Yes, my dear,
he thought bleakly,
I do know how you feel about Joe. But I certainly can’t explain to you why I need to support him and keep him around. I wish to hell he’d get a new body, though, so I could tell you I fired him and hired this new guy—but he likes Maturo’s body, and I don’t dare try to force him. After all, he’s going to be my partner long, long after you’ve died of old age, my dear… after I’ve taken the best of our sons, and then our grandsons, and then great-grandsons, getting richer and buying more and more during my successive stays in each descendant’s body, until by the time 1983 rolls around again I will be the secret owner of all the world’s important corporations. I’ll own whole cities—whole countries. And after 1983, when old J. Cochran Darrow disappears, I’ll be able to come out of hiding, step out from behind the screen of corporate links and overlaps and figureheads and front men, and I’ll damn well no exaggeration rule the goddamn world.

If I can keep Joe happy.

So you see, my poor bride of two months—during which time I still haven’t been able to consummate the marriage and set to work on the second generation of the Dundee line—you’re replaceable. Joe’s not.

The richest man in London sighed, let the curtain fall back across the window and sat down on the bed to wait for his rum coffee.

In the pantry Joe the butler had climbed up onto the counter—for though he’d been able to touch the ground without pain ever since he ceased practicing high level magic nine years ago, he seemed to be able to think better when slightly elevated—and he was slowly sifting his fingers through a bowl of gray-green powder.

I’ve learned a great deal from the nervous young master,
he thought.
I’ve learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you’ve got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

He’s got a lot of it. And he’s got a truly beautiful young wife who may as well be his sister, and who hates the way old Joe looks at her… though it seems to me somebody ought to look at her, aye, and do more than look. She’ll turn to vinegar in the cask if she’s not tapped.

Yessir, young Dundee,
thought Joe,
you’d still be a dying old man if it weren’t for me—and what do I get in return for setting you up? Employment as a butler. It’s not fair as it stands right now. Things aren’t balanced. But I’ve got a solution to everyone’s problems right here in this bowl. Miss Claire’s handsome young husband will become much more affectionate, and poor old butler Joe will commit suicide. Everybody will be happy.

Except, of course, the one who’s in Joe’s body when it hits the pavement.

He reached up to a shelf, took down a jar of ground cinnamon, and shook a lot of it over the powder in the bowl. He put the jar down and stirred the mixture with his fingers, then tapped it all into a big mug, added a hearty slug of rum, and then hopped to the floor, lifted the now ready pot of coffee and filled the mug with the steaming black brew.

He stirred it with a spoon as he walked down the hall and up the stairs. When he rapped quietly at Dundee’s door, Dundee told him to come in and set it on the table. Joe did, and then stepped back respectfully.

Dundee seemed preoccupied, and a faint frown rippled his unlined brow. “You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”

Joe considered it. “Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.”

Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal… stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action. What’s in this?”

“Cinnamon. If you don’t like it I could make another cup without.”

“No, it’s all right.” Dundee stirred it with the spoon and took another sip.

Joe waited for a while, but Dundee didn’t seem to have any further instructions, so he left the room and closed the door quietly.

“Hey, Snapp? That you?”

Jacky looked around. A stocky little dark-haired man sprinted lightly up to her from the other side of the street.

“Who’s that?” asked Jacky, not sounding interested.

“Humphrey Bogart, remember? Adelbert Chinnie, Doyle.” The man grinned excitedly. “I’ve been walking up and down this damn street for an hour, trying to find you.”

“What for?”

“My body—my real body—I’ve found it! The fellow that’s in it has grown a little moustache and he dresses and walks different, but it’s me!”

Jacky sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Humphrey. The body-switching man was caught and killed three months ago. So even if this person you’ve found really is in your old body—which is damned unlikely; he’d never fail twice in a row to kill the discarded host—there’s no conceivable way you can switch with him. There’s nobody around anymore that knows how to do the trick.” She shook her head wearily. “Sorry. Now if you’ll excuse me … “

The grin had fallen from Chinnie’s face. “He’s dead? Did—did you kill him? God damn it, you promised me—”

“No, I didn’t kill him. A crowd in an East End pub did. I heard about it next day.” She started to walk on.

“Wait a moment,” said Chinnie desperately. “You heard about it, you say. Have many people heard about it?”

Jacky stopped and said, with exaggerated patience, “Yes. Everybody—except you.”

“Right!” said Chinnie, beginning to get excited again. “If I was the body-switching man I’d do the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I went looking for depilatory shops, remember I said I would? Places where they take hair off so it won’t grow back. And I learned that there was one in Leadenhall Street where the people really could do it, something to do with electricity. The place closed down last October, but that doesn’t mean the process was lost. Hell, the body-changer might have bought the place. Anyway, if I was him, and now had the option of being able to stay in a body without turning into an orang-outang, why, I’d let myself be recognized, and caught, and then just as I was falling through the gallows trap, I’d switch into another body. Let ‘em all think they’d killed me so they’d call off the hunt.”

Jacky slowly walked back to where Chinnie stood. “Right,” she said softly, “I like it so far. But what’s all this about your old body? He’d already moved on out of it—when he was hanged he was a skinny old man.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he put someone else in my body just to hold it while he went off to get killed, and then he switched back into it. Or maybe—yes—maybe he’s placing wealthy but elderly people in young bodies for tremendous fees. Or maybe any number of things. It’s getting hold of the hair-killing trick that made it all possible.”

“This person in your old body,” Jacky said, “what’s he doing? How’s he situated?”

“He’s living high. Offices in Jermyn Street, big house in St. James with servants and everything.”

Jacky nodded, feeling the old excitement building in her again. “That fits well enough with your idea. It could be an old man that paid Dog-Face Joe to make him young and healthy again—or it could be Joe himself. Let’s go have a look at that house in St. James.”

“Why, but,” sputtered the disconcerted doorman, “you said, sir, that it would be an hour at least before you’d be needing the carriage. Yustin’s just gone off in it for a spot of supper. Ought certainly to be back in a—”

“Yustin’s fired,” rasped Dundee harshly, his face looking, in the lamplight, as drawn and pinched as an old man’s. He strode away down the sidewalk, the heels of his elegant boots locking against the cobbles like the works of an old clock.

“Sir!” the doorman called after him. “It’s late to be walking unaccompanied! If you’d wait a few minutes—”

“I’ll be all right,” Dundee answered without pausing or turning around. He reached inside his coat and touched the butt of one of the pair of miniature pocket pistols he’d had specially made for him by the Haymarket gunsmith Joseph Egg. Though no bigger than a bulldog pipe with the stem pulled out, each of the guns fired a .35 caliber ball from a charge detonated by a thing Dundee called a percussion cap, which he’d diagrammed for the fascinated gunsmith.

On a sudden impulse he turned left a block sooner than he usually did.
I’ll walk halfway down this block, he thought, and then cross to St. James through the service alley. I’ll come out just across the street from my house, and if that loafer I’ve seen hanging about is still there I’ll shake an explanation out of him—and if he tries any funny business he’ll be the first man in history to be killed by a percussion cap pistol.

In the fog the street lamps were just shifting yellow blurs, and tiny drops of moisture began to collect on Dundee’s little moustache. He scratched it irritably. You’re awfully short-tempered these days, he told himself. That poor devil you shouted at in the conference room back there probably won’t do business with you now, and those patents and factories he has to sell will be damn useful in a decade or two. Oh hell—wait and buy ‘em from his heirs.

He paused when he turned into the service alley. Well, he thought, as long as you’re sneaking, you may as well do it right. He took off his boots, held them both in his left hand and then padded noiselessly down the dim alley. His right hand rested on the knob grip of one of the Egg pistols.

Suddenly Dundee froze—he’d heard whispering up ahead. He drew the pistol out of its little holster and tiptoed forward, probing the fog with the two-inch barrel.

Two floors overhead someone rattled a window latch and Dundee nearly fired—and then nearly dropped—the gun, for abruptly, totally and without any warning he had remembered the last part of his recurring nightmare, the part he’d never been able to recall after he woke up. With photographic clarity he’d seen the thing that in the dream had made the random knocking sound in the fog overhead, the thing the corpse-figure of Doyle had pointed up at.

It was the body of J. Cochran Darrow dangling from a rope tied around its neck, its booted feet knocking against the wall like the devil’s own wind chime, and its head, twisted into a posture exclusive to hanged men, staring down at him with a rictus grin that seemed to bare every single one of the yellow teeth.

His gun hand was shaking now, and he was more aware of the clammy chill of the air, as though he’d shed an overcoat. Ahead he could see a brightening stain of yellow light, for he was nearly through to the St. James sidewalk, and a street lamp stood only a few yards from the alley mouth.

There was more whispering from in front of him, and now he could see two vague silhouettes standing just inside the alley.

He raised the gun and said, clearly, “Don’t move, either of you.”

Both figures exclaimed in surprise and leaped out onto the sidewalk. As Dundee stepped forward out of the alley to keep them both covered he let his boots clop to the pavement and drew his other pistol. “Jump like that again and I’ll kill both of you,” he said calmly. “Now I want an explanation, fast, of what you’re doing here and why you’ve—”

He’d been looking at the younger of the two ragged lurkers, but now he glanced at the other.

And the color drained from his features and was instantly replaced by sweat as cold as the fog, for he recognized the man’s face. It was Brendan Doyle’s.

At the same instant Chinnie realized who it was behind the pistols. “Face to face at last,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “We’re going to change places, you and I…” He took a step toward Dundee.

The gunshot had a flat sound in the thick fog, like someone slapping a board against a brick wall. Dundee began sobbing as Adelbert Chinnie stepped back and then sat down on the sidewalk. “God, I’m sorry, Doyle!” Dundee wailed. “But you should stay dead!”

The other gun wobbled toward Jacky, but before it could train on her she lunged forward and brought the chopping edge of her hand down hard on Dundee’s wrist. The little gun clattered onto the pavement and she dove for it.

Dundee, jolted out of his hysteria by the sharp pain in his wrist, was right on top of her.

Jacky grabbed the gun just as Dundee’s weight slammed her onto her knees and his right forearm hooked around under her chin; his free hand was scrabbling at her wrist, but weakly—her blow must have numbed it. From the opposite side of the street came the sound of a window breaking, but both of the gasping combatants were too busy to look up; Jacky was fighting to get her legs under her and keep air passing through her constricted throat, and Dundee was striving with considerably more strength to prevent those things. Jacky couldn’t raise the gun without pitching face down onto the pavement. The pulse in her head sounded to her like labored strokes of a pickaxe through frozen topsoil.