The Sixteen Burdens (11 page)

“I had no idea. I only knew I was likely to win.”

“Why…how…”

Gray watched the horses and jockeys getting up. None of them seemed injured, just shaken. Chaplin stood.

“Humor changes the mood of a space. It has a way of turning the tables in your favor. Well, in
my
favor.”

Down the balcony, Mayer cursed in anger and threw his booklet over the ledge.

“Mr. Mayer did say he wanted more action,” Chaplin said.

He folded the drawing of Newton’s Eye and handed it to Gray.

“I believe you are in a unique position to help us find Newton’s Eye and rescue your mother. These Artifacts are dangerous. Men have stolen, cheated, and killed to get them.”

Gray pocketed the paper.

“And what makes you think I can find this Artifact thing?”

“Because,” Chaplin said, “I believe you
are
one.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

D
ARKO
A
TLAS
WATCHED
the blood drip down Pickford’s cheek. It was beautiful.

The steel rod had hit her just above her temple, causing a nasty gash. Marco had given her a fraction of an elephant sedative, then bandaged her head and stitched up her forearm.

Atlas ripped a piece of roasted meat off a bone as he watched the unconscious woman. He could stare at her all day long. Was it the supple, creamy skin? The plump, naturally vermillion lips? Pickford didn’t have the statuesque, refined features of Lucile Littlefield or the sultry, seductive looks of Nina Beauregard. She was, instead, the girl next door—the one whose smile you longed to see each day, the one who was both a best friend and a lover. She was the one you were lucky to settle down with.

Atlas hadn’t given any credit to beauty as a useful talent, but last night changed his mind. Someone like Pickford could capture people’s allegiance in a way forcible strength never could.

Beauty to gain people’s loyalty; strength to keep it.

What an unstoppable pair we could make.

Pickford sat slumped against the back side of the cage. It was a standard wooden circus pen with thick metal bars on the long sides. It sat two feet above the dirt, on large wagon wheels. She smelled of moldy straw and old bear droppings, and yet somehow even that was endearing about her.

“Don’t forget to blink from time to time.”

Sugar had approached Atlas from behind.

“Don’t be jealous,” he said. “What do you expect? She’s the most beautiful woman on Earth.”

She reached through the bars and caressed the side of Pickford’s face.

“She is pretty,” Sugar said. “But pretty skin cuts just as easy as any other kind.”

Atlas grabbed Sugar’s arm.

“You will not touch her. Not until we get the answers we need.”

“And then?”

Then I will marry her.

Then I will kill her.

“Get Deda,” Atlas said.

The tents were set up in a rough circle, in a clearing Atlas had made in the center of a vast orange grove. The few dozen trees he had ripped from the ground now lined the edge of the clearing, a rudimentary barrier to hide them from anyone who might wander off the dirt road a mile south of them. Now that they had captured Pickford, there was no need to continue with the charade of a circus.

Sugar entered the grubby stand-alone fly tent where Deda spent most of his days. The old man filled his time mixing health tonics for himself from plants he collected during their travels. These may have extended his life, but what a lonely, pathetic life it was.

The old man squinted as Sugar wheeled him out into the daylight. Even in warm weather he wore that wretched coat of human hair, the only vestige of his past. He was a shriveled thing, with skin so loose they could have stretched it out for the acrobats to use as a trampoline. Hunched over in a ball, he looked like a deformed fetus.

“You don’t look well,” Atlas said.

“My tonics,” he said. “I’ll be well soon.”

Atlas stuck a long bullhook in the cage and gently turned Pickford’s face toward Deda.

“Look, I’ve found a friend.”

Deda beckoned to Sugar. She wheeled him closer to the bars of the cage. He looked at Pickford’s sleeping form through his milky, squinting eyes.

“It’s her.”

Deda reached out and caressed a bar on the cage as if it were her face.

“The four physical Burdens together in one place.”

He looked up and muttered at the cloudless blue sky, toward a partial moon visible near the horizon. A prayer of thanksgiving, perhaps.

“May we wake her?” Deda asked.

“I suppose so.”

Atlas turned his body so that he was facing away from the cage. Sugar went around back and stuck her hand through the bars. She waved a bottle of smelling salts under Pickford’s nose, then retreated. In a flash Pickford was wide awake and looking around. She jumped to her feet and took a step, only to trip and fall hard to the ground. Her leg, she saw, was chained to a large metal eye bolt in the floorboards.

“It’s nicer than the prison Houdini put me in,” Atlas said to her.

“You put yourself there,” Pickford said. “By attacking Harry and then killing two police officers while resisting arrest. I’m surprised they let you out after only ten years.”

“For good behavior,” Atlas said. “It’s hard to get into trouble when you’re alone in a concrete pit fifty feet deep.”

With only yourself to talk to.

And me too.

Pickford noticed Deda staring at her, drool pooling at the corner of his mouth.

“Hello,” Pickford said to him. “Would you unchain me, please?”

“Yes, of course.”

The old man tried to raise himself out of his chair, but he couldn’t get himself up. After a brief struggle he fell back into it.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “I’m too weak.”

Deda was grasping the armrests of his wheelchair with his frail hands.

“I’ve never met a beauty so strong,” the old man said. “There’s something different about you.”

Atlas stepped in front of Pickford but avoided eye contact. If he fell under her spell, they would all be done for.

“I don’t believe you’ve met
Deda
. It means grandfather. He’s not much help when the elephant dung needs to be scooped, but he’s a wealth of information. He helped me find you.”

“And how did he do that?” Pickford asked.

“Because of who he is. I’ll bet you’ll never guess.”

From a nearby table, Atlas picked up a plate of roasted leftovers from last night’s dinner. He slid it through a narrow gap in the cage meant for feeding animals. From the corner of his sight he could see Pickford eye the plate hungrily, but she didn’t take from it. Not yet.

“I’ll give you a hint,” he said. “You are familiar with the Ottoman Empire?”

She sat genteelly on the dirty floor with her legs folded under her.

“History was never really my subject.”

“It was one of the most powerful forces in the world since the 14
th
Century,” Atlas said. “This old man here lived through most of it.”

She looked at the shriveled heap in front of her.

“That’s impossible. He’d be five or six hundred years old.”

“Five hundred and nine,” Atlas said. “As far as he can remember.”

Pickford gasped.

“No one has seen the person gifted with health for centuries!”

Atlas sucked the cartilage from a small bone and then threw it to the ground.

“That’s because it has been the same man for centuries,” he said. “Despite his withering body, he’s in perfect health. Never so much as a sniffle. How he hasn’t gotten shot, stabbed or crushed by a horse carriage in five hundred years is the real miracle.”

The old man reached for Pickford’s hands. She seemed to take pity on him and took his shriveled hands into hers.

“I have met the person with your gift twice before in my life,” he said. “The first was a servant girl of the caliph, whom I met in Egypt when I first fled the Kingdom of Hungary in 1477. The second was Marie Antoinette in 1778, after I had moved to France. You, my dear, far outshine both of them.”

“You’re very kind,” Pickford said. She turned to Atlas. “You’re holding the poor man prisoner.”

“He’s a valued guest. And he can leave whenever he likes.”

He couldn’t leave even if he wanted to.

Good luck making it to the road.

Atlas picked up a long piece of meat from the platter and began gnawing on it like a cob of corn.

“I’ve been researching your talent ever since I learned that the person gifted with beauty took Newton’s Eye,” Atlas said. “That servant girl the old man speaks of died of the Black Death before turning eighteen. And that pretty head on Marie Antoinette may have won her the hand of King Louis XVI, but it was the first thing the revolutionaries lopped off when they had the chance.”

“What’s your point?” Pickford asked.

“Beauty never seems to live long.”

Pickford pulled her hands away from Deda and turned a steely gaze upon Atlas.

“That’s not a threat,” the strongman said. “Merely an insight. Strength never seems to live long either. Just look at poor Samson. Or Alexander the Great. He made it to thirty-two. Or Crazy Horse, the Indian who died prematurely of a bayonet wound. The physical Burdens all die young, with the exception of health, of course. Why is that?”

“Being strong attracts trouble,” Pickford said. “So does being pretty.”

“I imagine so.”

Atlas was feeling strong today, more powerful than he had in a long time. There was something about Los Angeles that was making him stronger than ever. Or perhaps it was because he had been eating so well. There was power in meat.

Was it the bear?

You know very well.

Atlas picked a piece of skin out of his mouth.

“I think it’s safe to say that both of us are living on borrowed time. And neither of us has fulfilled our purpose. We have a destiny together, you and I.”

Pickford snorted.

“I’m sure that’s what Clyde told Bonnie.”

It was Deda who had revealed to Atlas his destiny. After his brother was imprisoned in Sarajevo and the rest of his family slaughtered, the old man had taken Atlas and fled to Switzerland. There, in a small town nestled high in the mountains, Deda had educated Atlas and provided for him with funds that seemed to appear from nowhere. For four years he lived in seclusion, until the Great War was over. By then Atlas was eighteen, and strong, and ready to take the lead.

“I want us to work together,” Atlas told Pickford. “To stop the tyranny in this world.”

“You don’t want to end tyranny,” Pickford said. “You just want to be the tyrant.”

Pickford was as confrontational as the other actresses he had kidnapped, but he needed to treat her gingerly until he got answers from her.

“I’ll give you one day to tell me where the Eye is,” he said. “After that, we’ll see how much of your beauty remains when we begin carving pieces out of you.”

Atlas walked over to the animal cage closest to Pickford’s. He opened the back and yanked hard on a chain. The thing on the other end slithered to the ground and wriggled across the uneven dirt. Atlas attached his end of the chain to Pickford’s cage. She poked her head through the bars just as the crocodile jumped up and snapped at her face. Pickford scuttled backward.

“The wonderful thing about animals,” Atlas said. “Is that they don’t care how attractive their prey is. I suggest you don’t try to depart prematurely.”

Atlas turned to leave.

“Ask her about the young man,” Deda said.

In his excitement over capturing Pickford, Atlas had nearly forgotten about the young man she had stepped into the ring to save.

“Yes, who is that fellow you saved?”

Pickford said nothing.

That blood of the young man was strange; there was power in it. Atlas had felt energy coursing through him when they touched.

Sugar approached the cage. She ran her knife along the bars.

“I been reading the gossip columns in newspapers since I was a girl. It’s how I learned to read. The Pickford woman left the country a long time back to be getting herself some kind of beautification surgery. We know now that was a cover story. But covering up what? As I remember, that was about fifteen years back.”

Atlas did the math. He risked a quick glance at Pickford; her downcast face had gone white and she was clenching her lips together.

“You think the young man at the circus is her son?”

Sugar nodded.

“Let me find him. Either he will have the Eye, or he’ll be giving your beauty here the motivation to share its whereabouts.”

“Very well,” Atlas said. He turned to Pickford, his gaze averted. “And you—you don’t look so well. You’d better eat to keep up your strength.”

Pickford didn’t move. Atlas put his hand on one of the thick bars and bent it, ever so slightly, with just the pinching strength of his fingers.

“I said eat.”

Pickford picked up the smallest piece on the platter and raised it to her mouth to nibble. She stopped short and dropped the piece to the wooden floor. It rolled near the edge of the cage.

“What’s wrong?”

Pickford seemed unable to speak. Atlas picked up the piece and looked at it. Attached at one end of it was a half-burned, brightly painted, red fingernail.

“What do you expect when you choose a bony piece like that? Try a piece of thigh instead. Nina Beauregard really does have the best legs in Hollywood.”