The League of Night and Fog (21 page)

The death merchant walked ahead of his bodyguard toward the restaurant. The chauffeur turned toward the limousine. Drew took a deep breath, preparing himself to attack the chauffeur as soon as he parked the car in the lot beside the restaurant.

But Arlene suddenly murmured, “Something’s
happening.”

It didn’t take long. Twenty seconds at most. But the length of time was difficult to determine. Too much occurred. The driver of a small red car stopped behind the limousine and got out, shouting obscenities at the chauffeur. The man wore a peaked cap that almost concealed his red hair. His face, though contorted with fury, was extremely pale. He was taller than the chauffeur but thin, almost emaciated. He shook his fists at the chauffeur, screaming insults at him for having blocked the driveway. The chauffeur strode indignantly to meet him.

At once another man appeared from the shadows of the parking lot. He wore a black knitted cap that didn’t completely conceal his blond hair. He was square-faced, tanned, and muscular. He pulled a canister from his Windbreaker and sprayed its contents at the face of the bodyguard, who fell, unmoving, as if he’d been clubbed. Bracing himself like a boxer, the blond man punched Medici’s chin and, even as the death merchant toppled, shoved him into the limousine.

The red-haired man confronting the chauffeur easily dodged the punch directed at him and chopped the chauffeur’s larynx with a force great enough to break it. The chauffeur fell. The red-haired man jumped into the limousine with the blond-haired man and Medici. The red-haired man backed the limousine onto the street, ran over the chauffeur, and sped away.

It had happened so swiftly, so smoothly that only when the limousine disappeared down the street did a crowd gather, staring down at the bodies. Almost as an afterthought, someone screamed.

D
rew pressed his foot harder on the rented Fiat’s accelerator. Tires squealed up the winding road.

“ ‘Professional’ doesn’t begin to describe it. Those guys were
artists,”
he said.

Arlene gripped the dashboard, bracing herself against the
car’s sudden swerves. “They had the same plan as we did. But instead of waiting for Medici to come outside after dinner, they moved in as soon as he arrived. Who
are
they? And why did they want Medici?”

“Let’s hope we soon find out.” Drew braked. His headlights gleamed toward Gatto’s estate. For the second time today, they were coming here for information.

The gate to Gatto’s villa was disturbingly open. Two guards lay dead beyond them, chests dark with blood. Drew sped up the lane to the Romanesque house. He rejected caution, suspecting that whoever had killed the guards had departed quite a while ago. The absence of lights in the villa confirmed his suspicion. The attack had occurred during daylight.

He stopped before the huge front door of the villa and raced from the Fiat, Arlene running beside him. Three guards lay dead on the steps. He charged through the open door, found a light switch and flicked it, staring in momentary paralysis at yet more bodies, then scurried from room to room.
Death. Everywhere death
.

Gatto lay on a lounge beside his swimming pool, his throat slit, his cotton robe soaked with his blood.

“The two men at the restaurant. The blond and the redhead,” Arlene said. “They must have come here.”

Drew nodded.

“It’s the only explanation I can think of,” Arlene continued. “They made Gatto talk. About Medici. They realized the perfect time to grab him, the same as we did.”

Dismay made Drew’s throat ache. “Coincidence? I don’t believe in it. What happened here and what happened at the restaurant are related.” He stared at Gatto’s corpse. “I wonder. What do you do to a man who’s dying from cancer? How do you add to his misery so much that his cancer can’t compare to the pain you cause him? How do you convince him to reveal what he doesn’t want to when death is a foregone conclusion?”

Drew tugged open Gatto’s robe, revealing the obscene mutilation inflicted upon him.

His mouth soured. “Yeah, those guys are geniuses, all right.”

“But Gatto didn’t tell them about us,” Arlene said. “Otherwise they’d have tried to take us out before they moved against Medici.”

Again Drew nodded. “I hope the Lord did look with mercy upon you, Gatto. In the end, you did damned fine.”

“The blonde and the redhead,” Arlene said. “What did they want with Medici?”

“Maybe their motive was the same as ours.”

“To find the cardinal?”

“I wish to God I knew. Are those two guys moving parallel to us? Or are they behind us?”

“Drew, they’re just skilled enough, they might be
ahead
of us.”

M
exico City. Using the phone in the backseat of his Mercedes sedan, Aaron Rosenberg called ahead to warn his bodyguards to double-check for suspicious strangers outside his home. Nothing had happened to persuade him an attack was imminent, but now that he and Halloway had decided to honor their business commitment, he’d become increasingly uneasy. The abduction of his father had filled him with foreboding. His wife’s affair with her bodyguard had further destroyed his peace of mind. Now, in spite of Halloway’s assurances that Seth and Icicle would root out the source of the Night and Fog, no reports of success had arrived. Yet Halloway’s prediction of their success had been the major reason Rosenberg had agreed to the danger of going ahead with delivery of the Devil’s merchandise. If the Night and Fog learned about the shipment, or if the Devil learned that the Night and Fog might be able to expose the nature of the shipment and who had ordered it, we’d face two enemies, Rosenberg thought. And both would attack, for different reasons.

The Mercedes was trapped in a line of stalled traffic. At the head of the line, steam gushed from beneath the hood of an open truck filled with crates of chickens. Bystanders gesticulated
around it. What the hell am I doing in this country? Rosenberg thought. For a nostalgic instant, he had a vision of mountains, streams, and forests. He jerked his head toward the bodyguard on his left, then with equal abruptness toward the bodyguard next to the driver. Madness, he thought. Before he realized what he was doing, he slid open the hatch on the bar built into the seat ahead of him, took out a bottle of tequila, filled a tumbler, and swallowed its oily contents in one gulp. As it jolted into his stomach, the Mercedes moved ahead, the stalled truck having been pushed to the side of the street.

But the air-conditioning in the Mercedes had been strained. Tepid, recycled air drifted over him. Combined with the tequila in his stomach, it made him want to gag. He raised his fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough and kept his dignity, anxious to reach the sanctuary of his home.

Perhaps Maria would be in the mood to do more “driving,” he fantasized. Anything to distract him from his troubles. She owed it to him, he concluded. Didn’t he heap upon her the bounty of his labor? Hadn’t he held off confronting her about her infidelity?

His driver managed to turn onto the spacious Paseo de la Reforma, gaining speed along the avenue, reaching the Spanish mansion squeezed between high-rise apartment buildings. Rosenberg’s bodyguards scrambled from the Mercedes, assessing potential dangers.

Nonexistent ones apparently. One of the bodyguards nodded to Rosenberg. The mansion’s security force stepped from the entrance. Rosenberg darted from the car, up the stone steps, and into the vestibule of his home, where he slumped against a wall. Admittedly his arrival hadn’t been dignified, but death wasn’t dignified either, no matter what form it took. His security force might joke among themselves about his fear, but he paid them well, and they could joke all they wanted as long as they did their job.

He straightened from the wall when he noticed his maid standing beside the curved staircase, surveying him in confusion.

“It’s quite all right,” he said in Spanish. “The heat overcame me briefly. Is your mistress upstairs?”

“No, Señor Rosenberg,” the servant said. “Your wife has gone out for the afternoon.”

“Gone out?” Rosenberg scowled. “Where?”

“She did not tell me, Señor.”

“With Esteban?”

“But of course, with her bodyguard.”

Her bodyguard? Rosenberg thought. Her body
violator
would be more accurate!

He charged up the stairs. Damn it, they fuck all day while I take the risks!

At the top of the stairs, he stopped abruptly, hearing voices from Esteban’s room at the end of the hallway. The voices were too muted for Rosenberg to identify them, but they belonged to a man and a woman, and Rosenberg had the keen suspicion that the maid had been either mistaken or instructed to lie. He was powerless to solve his other problems, but by God, he could settle
this
one right now.

He stormed toward Esteban’s room, and even when he’d gone sufficiently far along the hall to realize that the voices in fact came from the maid’s room—a television soap opera she’d forgotten to turn off—even then he was too committed to stop himself. He rammed Esteban’s door open, bursting in, fully expecting to find his wife and her bodyguard embracing on the bed.

They weren’t. The room was deserted, but what he saw on the bed was so much more shocking than the tryst he’d imagined that his knees wavered. He gripped Esteban’s bureau to steady himself and, as soon as the spasms in his legs subsided, lunged for the bedspread, clutching it to his chest. An iron band seemed to tighten around his rib cage. He spun, staring furtively behind him, apprehensive lest the maid might have followed him upstairs and seen what was on the bedspread. She still might come up and wonder about his actions. He had to get the bedspread out of sight.

He compacted the bedspread and shifted it from his chest to
his right side where the maid might not notice it as he hurried along the hallway, past the upstairs landing, and along the opposite hallway toward the master bedroom. He’d already entered the bedroom, closed the door, and rushed toward the dresser to hide the spread when he saw the reflection of his own bed in the dresser’s mirror—and what was
on
the bedspread.

It was identical to what he’d found on the spread in Esteban’s room. Huge, black, grotesque, so unnerving that after Rosenberg crumpled this spread too and shoved it into a drawer with the other, he didn’t consider driving to the secret office he maintained. He quite simply, absolutely panicked and lurched toward the bedside phone.

H
alloway was appalled by Rosenberg’s stupidity in using an unsecured phone. That lapse in procedure, combined with Rosenberg’s babbling, made clear that the man had obviously lost all control. “Slow down, for Christ’s sake,” Halloway urged. “What are you talking about? You found
what
?”

“A skull! A fucking death’s head! Painted in black on my bedspread! My wife’s bodyguard had one on
his
bed too!”

“Take it easy. This might not mean what you think. It might be just a death threat. There’s no reason to assume—”

“If we’re dealing with the Night and Fog, I
have
to assume! It’s more than just a death threat! You know what else the symbol means! Whoever painted those skulls wants to remind us they know all about us!”

Halloway kept his voice low, not wanting to attract the attention of his bodyguards outside in the corridor. “All right, suppose they
are
reminding us, what difference does it make? It doesn’t change things. We already
knew
they’d found us out.”

“It changes everything!” Rosenberg’s voice verged on hysteria. “It proves they weren’t content to take our fathers! Now they want
us!
The sins of the fathers! The next generation has to suffer!
And they can do it! They managed to sneak inside my home despite every possible security precaution!”

“We can’t keep talking about this on an unprotected phone,” Halloway warned. “Hang up. Call me an hour from now at …”

Rosenberg rushed on. “And that’s not all! Why
two
skulls? Why on my
bed?
Why on the bed of my
wife’s bodyguard?”