The League of Night and Fog (5 page)

“I didn’t draft the message,” Kessler said. “It seemed obscure to me as well, but I understood the need for caution. Since my own father had disappeared, the reference to ‘recent losses’ made me realize the implications.”

“Implications?” Pendleton’s voice, though low, had the force of a shout. “We thought the message meant that some of my father’s old acquaintances had died! We thought we were being invited to a wake! We didn’t come all the way to Australia to risk exposing ourselves by going to Canada for toasts and tears!”

“Then your father’s all right?”

“No thanks to you! Coming all this way! Maybe letting our hunters follow you!”

“The risk seemed necessary.”

“Why?”

“Just a moment. Someone’s coming.”

Pendleton debated whether to stay or disappear.

“Two kids and a dog. They went up a fork in the path. It’s fine,” Kessler said.

“Answer me.
Why did you come?
We made it clear we want nothing to do with the rest of you.”

“Halloway told me that’s what you’d say. I’m aware Icicle was never known for being sociable. But the group insisted.”

“Despite our wishes? At the risk of endangering … ?”

“With a proposition,” Kessler said. “If Icicle feels no nostalgia for his former friends, no sense of kinship in mutual adversity, then maybe he—or you—can be swayed by a different motive.”

“I can’t imagine …”

“Money. The group’s been financially successful. We have resources. You and your father—we know what you are, what you
do. We’re willing to pay you handsomely to find out what happened to our fathers. And if”—Kessler’s voice became hoarse—“God help me for thinking it let alone saying it, if they’re dead, we want you to be our revenge.”

“That’s
what this is all about? You came all this way to
hire
me?”

“We don’t know what else to do.”

“No, it’s impossible. I can’t.”

“The fee …”

“You don’t understand. You could offer a fortune, it wouldn’t matter. It’s too risky.”

“But under the circumstances … old friends …”

“And lead the enemy to us, as you maybe have? I’m leaving.” Pendleton stood. “Tell them no.”

“I’m at the Captain Cook Lodge! Think about it! Change your mind!”

“I won’t.” Pendleton started to walk away.

“Listen to me!” Kessler said. “There’s something else you should know!”

Pendleton hesitated.

“Cardinal Pavelic!” Kessler said.

“What about him?”

“He disappeared as well.”

H
is chest aching, Pendleton rushed down a sandy slope toward Bondi Beach. It was half past five. His jogging suit clung to him. He’d switched taxis several times to elude possible surveillance. When the final taxi had been caught in a traffic jam near the beach, he’d paid the driver and run ahead.

He had much to fear. Not just the risk that Kessler’s arrival had posed. Or the disturbing information that the priest had disappeared. What truly bothered him was that his own father might vanish as the others had. Icicle had to be warned.

But when he’d called from a phone booth near the gardens,
he’d received no answer either at the dive shop or at the ocean-bluff home he shared with his father. He told himself that his assistant must have closed the shop early, though that had never happened before. He tried to convince himself that his father had not yet returned home from the beach, though his father never failed to get home in time to watch the five o’clock news. Closer to Bondi Beach, he’d phoned the shop again; this time his call had been interrupted by a recorded announcement telling him the line was out of order. His stomach felt as if it were crammed with jagged glass.

He reached the bottom of the sandy slope and blinked through sweat-blurred vision toward a line of buildings that flanked the ocean. Normally, he’d have had no trouble identifying his dive shop among the quick-food, tank-top, and souvenir stores, but chaotic activity now obscured it. Police cars, a milling crowd, fire engines, swirling smoke.

His pulse roaring behind his ears, he pushed through the crowd toward the charred ruin of his shop. Attendants wheeled a sheet-covered body toward an ambulance. Ducking past a policeman who shouted for him to stop, Pendleton yanked the sheet from the corpse’s face. The ravaged features were a grotesque combination of what looked like melted wax and scorched hamburger.

A policeman tried to pull him away, but Pendleton twisted angrily free, groping for the corpse’s left hand. Though the fingers had been seared together, it was clear that the corpse was not wearing a ring. Pendleton’s assistant had not been married. But Pendleton’s father, though a widower, always wore his wedding ring.

He no longer resisted the hands that tugged him from the stretcher. “I thought it was my father.”

“You belong here?” a policeman asked.

“I own the place. My
father
. Where’s—?”

“We found only one victim. If he’s not your father—”

Pendleton broke away, running through the crowd. He had to get to the house! Inhaling acrid smoke, he darted past a police
car, veered between buildings, and charged up a sandy slope. The stench of scorched flesh cleared from his nostrils. The taste of copper spurted into his mouth.

The home was on a bluff a quarter-mile away, a modernistic sprawl of glass and redwood. Wind-ravaged trees surrounded it. Only as he raced closer did he realize the danger he himself might be in.

He didn’t care. Bursting through the back door, he listened for voices from the television in the kitchen where his father always watched while drinking wine and preparing supper. The kitchen was silent, the stove turned off.

He yelled for his father, received no answer, searched the house, but found no sign of him.

He grabbed the phone book in his father’s bedroom, quickly paged to the listing for the Captain Cook Lodge, and hurriedly dialed. “Put me through to Mr. Kessler’s room.”

“One moment … I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Kessler checked out.”

“But he couldn’t have!
When?”

“Let me see, sir. Four o’clock this afternoon.”

Shuddering, Pendleton set down the phone. His meeting with Kessler had been at four, so how could Kessler have checked out then?

Had Kessler been involved in his father’s disappearance?
No. It didn’t make sense. If Kessler were involved, he wouldn’t have announced his presence; he wouldn’t have asked for a meeting. Unless …

The suspicion grew stronger.

Kessler might have been a decoy, to separate father and son, to make it easier to grab Icicle.

Of course, there was an alternative explanation, but Pendleton didn’t feel reassured. Someone else could have checked Kessler out, the checkout permanent. To spread the reign of terror. In that case, Pendleton thought, the next logical victim ought to be …

Me.

Professional habits took over. He withdrew his father’s pistol
from a drawer, made sure it was loaded, then went to his own room and grabbed another pistol. He searched the house again, this time more thoroughly, every alcove, not for his father now but for an intruder.

The phone rang. He swung toward it, apprehensive; hoping it was his father, he picked it up. The caller broke the connection.

His muscles became like concrete. Wrong number? An enemy trying to find out if I’m home?

He had to assume the worst. Quickly he took off his jogging suit and put on warm woolen outdoor clothes. Dusk cast shadows. Creeping from the house, he reached a nearby bluff from which he could watch every approach to the building.

Timer lights flicked on. The phone rang again; he could hear it faintly. After two rings, it stopped. Before he’d left the house, he’d turned on his answering machine, which now would instruct the caller to leave a message. Though desperate to know if the call was from his father, he couldn’t risk going back to the house to listen to the tape. He’d anticipated this problem, however, and brought a cordless phone with him, leaving it turned off so that it wouldn’t ring and reveal his position on this bluff. But now he switched the phone on. As if he’d picked up an extension within the house, he heard the end of the machine’s request for a name and number. But as before, the caller simply hung up.

A police car arrived, presumably because of the fire at the shop, though maybe this wasn’t a real police car. An officer knocked on the door and tried to open it, but Pendleton had left it locked. The officer went around to the back door, knocked and tested it as well, then drove away. No one else approached the house.

His father had disappeared! Just like all the other fathers. But unlike the sons of those fathers, Pendleton wasn’t typically second-generation, wasn’t an amateur. Icicle had trained him well.
One day, the enemy will return
, his father had warned.

Indeed it had. And taken his father.

So now it’s my turn! Pendleton inwardly shouted. He’d refused the job the other sons had offered him because he had to avoid attracting attention to his father. But avoiding attention no longer mattered. I’ll do it! he thought. But this isn’t business! This is personal!

If my father isn’t back by tomorrow, after forty years you bastards will finally get what’s coming to you!

For Icicle!

For me!

N
orth of Beersheeba. Israel. Hearing a sudden rattle of gunfire, Saul threw his shovel to the ground, grabbed his rifle, and scrambled from the irrigation ditch. He’d been working in this field since dawn, sweating beneath the fierce sun as he extended the drainage system he’d constructed when he first came to this settlement almost three years ago. His wife, Erika, had been pregnant then, and both of them had been anxious to escape the madness of the world, to find a sanctuary where the futility of their former profession seemed far away. Of course, they’d realized that the world would not let them ever escape, but the illusion of escape was what mattered. In this isolated village where even the conflict between Jews and Arabs was remote, they’d made a home for themselves and the baby—Christopher Eliot Bernstein-Grisman—who’d been born soon after.

The villagers had commented on the boy’s unusual name. “Part Christian, part Jewish? And why the hyphen?”

Bernstein was Erika’s last name, Grisman Saul’s. Christopher had been his foster brother, an Irish-Catholic with whom he’d been raised in an orphanage in Philadelphia. Eliot had been their foster father, the sad-eyed gray-faced man who always wore a black suit with a rose in his lapel, who’d befriended Chris and
Saul had been the only person to show them kindness, and had recruited them for intelligence work, specifically to be assassins. In the end, their foster father had turned against them. Chris had been killed, and Saul had killed Eliot.

The bitterness Saul still felt over what had happened—the grief, disgust, and regret—had been his main motive for wanting to escape from the world. But love for his foster brother and indeed, despite everything, for Eliot had prompted him to want to name the baby after the two most important men in his life. Erika, understanding, had agreed. Generous, wonderful Erika. As graceful as an Olympic gymnast. As beautiful as a fashion model—tall, trim, and elegant with high strong cheeks and long dark hair. As deadly as himself.

The sound of gunfire scorched his stomach. Racing frantically toward the village, his first thought was that he had to protect his son. His second was that Erika could protect the boy as well as he could. His third was that, if anything happened to either of them, he’d never rest till their killers paid.

Though he hadn’t been in action since he’d come to Israel, old instincts revived. Some things apparently could never be forgotten. He leaped a stone wall and neared the stark outline of the village, making sure that dust hadn’t clogged the firing mechanism or the barrel of his rifle. Though he always kept it loaded, he inspected the magazine just to be certain. Hearing screams, he chambered a round and dove behind a pile of rocks.

The shots became louder, more frequent. He stared at outlying cinder-block buildings and saw strangers wearing Arab combat gear who fired from protected vantage points toward the homes at the center of the village. Women dragged children down alleys or into doorways. An old man lurched to the ground and rolled from repeated impacts as he tried to reach a young girl frozen with fright in the middle of a street. The girl’s head blew apart. An invader tossed a grenade through an open window. The blast spewed smoke and wreckage. A woman shrieked.

Sons of bitches! Saul aimed from behind the pile of rocks. He counted six targets, but the volume of gunfire told him that at
least six other invaders were on the opposite side of the village. The shots increased, other rifles joining the fight. But the sound of these weapons was different from the characteristic stutter of the Kalashnikovs that the invaders were using and that he himself used, preferring a weapon whose report would blend with that of the type Israel’s enemies favored. No, the rifles that now joined the fight had the distinctive crackle of M-16s, the available weapon that Saul had taught the teenagers of the village to shoot.