A Book of Bones Read online

  And this, she understood, was what it would be like to die.

  * * *

  NOW MORS WAS SLEEPING while Quayle wandered the city, its modernity imperfectly concealed by the dark, so that it was just possible for him, if he kept to old paths, to walk with his other selves through lost times.

  It was probably as well that Mors should remain unconscious for as long as she could, he thought, because she would be in pain when she woke. He had almost killed her earlier. What his profound algor could not do, his bare hands might have accomplished. She was more conspicuous than he, and so her existence jeopardized his own, but he would need her in order to deal with Parker. Quayle would miss her once she was gone. She asked so little of him, and gave so much. Sometimes, when he was with her, he forgot the loneliness of the very old.

  But then, he had always been of a melancholic disposition.

  He passed a pharmacy, with its clean white shelves, its cheap perfumes and generic medicines, and brought to mind the stores that had preceded it, back to the apothecary who had tended to Quayle’s afflictions in another century, another version of this city. The apothecary was an old fraud, even by the standards of his profession. For Quayle’s melancholy he had recommended swallow water, specially created for him by a woman in Cornwall, or so he claimed: fifty baby swallows sourced from their nests before they could take their first flight, ground to a pulp, and combined in a solution of castor and vinegar, with a little sugar added to ease the consumption of the whole, guaranteed to make the heart take wing and ease one’s sorrows.

  Any doubts Quayle might have entertained about the contents of the bottle were laid to rest when he discovered a fragment of feather in the liquid on his spoon, and even though he had been in the deepest of desponds, still he had cast the swallow water aside as so much humbug, and instead medicated himself with Madeira wine. The apothecary had died some months later, along with his family: a wife and two daughters, killed in their beds. Rumors of rape. All very unpleasant. Despite the apothecary’s deficiencies, Quayle had regretted his passing. His commitment to quackery had been almost admirable. Quayle had bribed the constable in order to be permitted to view the bodies before they were removed from the premises, and was struck by the extent of the butchery, particularly the injuries inflicted on the females. They were startling in their savagery.

  A century later, a man named Hatton murdered his mistress in a similar manner in the same building, claiming to have been advised do so by the voices in the walls. Then, during World War I, a French merchant and his wife, who had taken rooms on the top floor, were assaulted and killed in the course of what appeared to be a botched robbery, their assailant or assailants never to be identified.

  Bricks and mortar could be contaminated just as easily as stone and soil—more so, perhaps, because there was form and substance to hold the memories.

  All these old places.

  All these old acts.

  All this old blood.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The bar of the Westin was quiet when Parker entered. He counted three couples, two single women, and a group of young businessmen drinking bourbon by the window. Ross had taken a corner table, where he could neither be overlooked nor overheard. He had not changed his clothes, and Parker caught traces of sand in his hair and on the shoulders of his jacket, and thought he could still smell the smoke of Lagnier’s junkyard about him, although that might have been his own imagination playing on memories of the day. Having resisted the lure of his bed, Parker was feeling hungry. He and Ross both ordered steak sandwiches, and Ross opted for a beer over Parker’s red wine.

  An anonymous manila envelope lay on the table in front of Ross. He left it unopened as he and Parker sat waiting for their food.

  “You didn’t need me at that junkyard today,” said Parker, “or at that farce of an interview with Hernández.”

  “I told you: I thought you should see the body, and you spotted things we hadn’t.”

  “You’d have figured them out, sooner or later—probably sooner.”

  “That hint of doubt is noted. As for Hernández, by your presence we were able to confirm that he knew who you were. Mors must have warned him about you.”

  “Well, thanks for that, because no harm can come from spending time with a member of MS-13, right? They seem like good guys.”

  “Mr. Hernández won’t live long enough to be a problem for you or anyone else,” said Ross. “He’ll be dead by this time tomorrow, either at the hands of his own people or those of the Federales.”

  “Is that how justice works now?”

  “It is down there, and forgive me if I bristle at being lectured about extrajudicial killings by you.”

  Their food arrived, and Ross ordered another beer. Parker had barely sipped his wine.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what’s in the envelope?” said Ross, once he’d made some inroads into his sandwich and fries.

  “If it makes you happy. What’s in the envelope, Agent Ross?”

  “Why don’t you take a look?”

  Parker did, revealing copies of two passport pages, along with blurred photographs of a man making his way through what appeared to be an airport terminal with signs in Spanish and English. The pictures had been pulled from a security camera. Most were poor—the subject was careful to keep his head down, and seemed to have an instinct for surveillance—apart from the final one. It had clearly been taken at an immigration desk, with the subject facing the camera. His hair was white, matched by a thin beard, his glasses thick-framed, exaggerating the size of his green eyes, but he was still recognizable as the man who had instigated a campaign of carnage from Indiana to Maine.

  “It’s Quayle,” said Parker.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. The eye color is different, and the hair and beard, but it’s him. Where was this taken?”

  “El Salvador International, shortly before the end of March.”

  Parker examined the reproductions of the passport pages. Koninkrijk der Nederlanden: Kingdom of the Netherlands; issued two years earlier in the name of Axel de Bruijn by the Burgemeester van Amsterdam.

  “Was he flying to the Netherlands?”

  “Paris.”

  “Is this the same passport he used to enter the United States?”

  “No, there’s no immigration record for this Axel de Bruijn. Take a look at the rest of the papers, see what you think.”

  Parker dug deeper into the file, and found Customs and Border Protection data on a dozen men and six women. He went through it slowly, and when he was done the information on two men and one woman had been set aside.

  “Quayle could be either of these two men: possibly the first, but more likely the second. The woman is definitely Mors.”

  The first man, Ernst Bourdon, had arrived in the United States early the previous December on a French passport; the second, Hans Herbert Haffner, had come in on an eight-year-old Dutch passport at about the same time. Both were of similar age and build, but Bourdon looked unwell, and his face was a little thinner than Quayle’s. Haffner, by contrast, appeared healthy: his cheeks were fuller, and his eyes brighter. Parker couldn’t have said for certain that it was Quayle, not without more than these images, but there was something familiar about Haffner.

  The woman, meanwhile, was named Angelika Piek, and her hair was dark brown, with silver visible at the roots. The alterations to her aspect had been less successful than Quayle’s, assuming Haffner was indeed Quayle, perhaps because Mors was so much more distinctive in appearance. The skin was darker, the lips plumper, the eyes brown instead of pond-scum gray, but it was definitely her. The baseness of her nature seemed to seep from the paper itself. Piek/Mors had arrived on a Dutch passport—again, as with the de Bruijn document, issued in Amsterdam two years earlier. Even the date of issue was the same in each case.

  “Any idea of how Mors might have got out?” Parker asked.

  “Not yet. She could still be in North America.”


  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m keeping an open mind. We’ll continue searching, but it would be a hell of a risk for her to take.”

  “What if she had no choice?”

  “You mean the gunshot wounds? Unless Hernández was lying, she had recuperated sufficiently to supervise the dumping of a decoy body. My feeling is she’s gone. Spend enough money, and even someone like her could be spirited from the continent like she’d never existed.”

  Parker thought about it and decided Ross might be correct. He wondered why Quayle hadn’t taken the same route, instead opting to leave openly, if on a false passport: arrogance, maybe, or a lack of time to arrange an alternative route. Perhaps, in the end, he just wanted to get back to wherever it was he came from as quickly as possible, particularly now that he believed himself to be in possession of the missing pages he had traveled so far to find.

  Parker replaced the documents in the envelope, closed it, and pushed it back toward Ross.

  “What are you going to do with all this?” he asked.

  “Nothing, or next to nothing.”

  Parker waited. He knew that they were at last getting to the real reason why Ross had brought him all the way to Arizona.

  “Officially,” said Ross, “I know a certain amount about Quayle and Mors, most of it gleaned from the law enforcement agencies in the jurisdictions in which they committed their crimes, and the rest from you. Unofficially, I know more: again, most of it from you. I can only act on the first body of knowledge, not the second.”

  Parker understood something of the balancing act that Ross was attempting to pull off. Originally, Ross had been tasked with investigating the crimes of the Traveling Man, which had inevitably brought him into contact with Parker; but as Ross’s inquiries progressed, it became apparent that the Traveling Man might have represented just one manifestation of a larger conspiracy. At the very least, the Traveling Man had come into contact with men and women who believed in the existence of realms beyond this one, and some of those individuals were committed to the search for what they termed the Buried God, a search governed and funded by a cadre known only as the Backers.

  The nature of the Buried God was unclear—a religious icon of some kind, possibly; a fallen angel, perhaps; or something far worse—and whether it truly existed or not was largely irrelevant, at least as far as even the most sympathetic of Ross’s superiors in the Bureau were concerned. What mattered was that the Backers, and those working with them, were believed to be responsible for a litany of illegal acts, including corruption of institutions of the law, and of state and federal government; copious financial crimes; and multiple homicides. Ross had been tasked with identifying the Backers, a duty complicated by inadequate resources—because there were those at the Bureau’s highest levels who regarded all talk of Backers and Buried Gods as the stuff of fairy stories, and a drain on funds that could be better directed elsewhere—and the possibility that the reach of the Backers might extend to the FBI itself.

  And now there was the matter of Quayle, because he, too, had links to the Backers. Earlier in the year, a man named Garrison Pryor had been tortured to death in his Boston apartment. Pryor, the head of an investment group thought to be a major conduit for the Backers’ money, had been under investigation by the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section, largely at Ross’s instigation. Ross was of the opinion that just a little extra pressure might have resulted in Pryor turning federal witness, and revealing what he knew of the Backers. Before that pressure could be applied, Pryor was silenced, and footage from security cameras, as well as eyewitness statements, suggested that a woman resembling Pallida Mors had entered Pryor’s apartment building shortly before his arrival home, and departed two hours later, having presumably butchered the financier in the interim. Why, Ross wondered, would Mors have killed Pryor, unless it was at the behest of the Backers? A favor returned, but for what?

  So Ross had further justification for pursuing Quayle and his acolyte, but was officially reluctant to delve too deeply into their reasons for being in the United States to begin with. It was Parker who had informed Ross of Quayle’s search for the missing vellum pages. Quayle had recovered two of those pages, but unbeknownst to him, Parker had managed to secure one more, found concealed in the spine of the book of fairy tales. So far, he had elected not to share this fact with the agent.

  Ross had decided that Parker should try to find out as much as he could about the vellum inserts, and Quayle and Mors, while the FBI hunted for the two culprits in its own manner. Two parallel investigations: one official, one unofficial, with the latter funded by Parker’s consultancy retainer from the bureau. Where possible, Ross would feed Parker information relevant to his inquiries, and in return would expect to be kept apprised of any progress—of which, so far, there had been little, or none that Parker was yet prepared to share. As already noted, trust was lacking in their relationship.

  Which brought them back to the Westin, and two sandwiches, and an envelope containing identity pages from a selection of European passports.

  “What do you want me to do?” said Parker.

  “The passports appear to be genuine, but if you’re right about Quayle, he’s British, not Dutch.”

  Quayle had specifically claimed to be English, and a lawyer. A law firm bearing that name had operated in London for centuries, but ceased to exist shortly after World War II. It was assumed that Quayle had appropriated the name and the profession, one more identity to add to Haffner, de Bruijn, and however many others he might have accumulated.

  “He said he was English, and sounded like he was,” said Parker. “But there’s obviously a Dutch connection.”

  “Which we haven’t yet managed to establish.”

  “Can you see Quayle and Mors taking a trip to Amsterdam every time they need new passports?”

  “One imagines there are easier ways to secure them.”

  “A middleman.”

  “Or middlewoman, gender being no impediment to fraudulent pursuits. My thought was that you might know someone with experience of such matters, someone who might have had occasion in the past to operate in Europe under a false identity.”

  Louis.

  “I’m not sure he’s ever been to the Netherlands,” said Parker.

  “Actually, he has.”

  Ross knew more about Angel and Louis than either of those men might have wished, given the abundance of criminality in their backgrounds. This added another layer of complication, and obligation, to Parker’s relationship with Ross.

  “I’ll ask.”

  “I think you’ll find him remarkably knowledgeable on the subject.”

  “Do you want me to come back to you with what he says?”

  “Only if he can’t help, but I’d be surprised if that’s the case.”

  “And if he can?”

  “Then he might like to return to the Low Countries, and make some further inquiries in person.”

  “He prefers to travel first class.”

  “Business.”

  “He won’t be happy.”

  “Neither will the taxpayer,” said Ross, “but all things are relative.”

  CHAPTER XV

  As this conversation was concluding, its subject was in the New York apartment he shared with the love—and, sometimes, bane—of his life. Louis was sitting with Angel, who was unable to sleep due to pins and needles in his fingers and toes, a side effect of chemotherapy. Earlier in the year, Angel had undergone the removal of part of his bowel, and although he had avoided a bag, if only narrowly, chemo was destined to be a regular part of his life for the foreseeable future, a development about which Angel remained volubly unhappy.

  At least he had a future, as his partner liked to remind him. Angel was an unusual human being. He had always stood out from most of the crowd, in large part because any members of a crowd with an instinct for self-preservation would have taken a step or two away from Angel in order to avoid having their valuables stolen, but a
lso due to a dress sense that tended toward—if one were feeling charitable—the individualistic. But Angel was also profoundly moral in his way, particularly since his decision to set aside larceny as a lifestyle choice, and was far less compromised in this regard than his partner.

  Where he did not differ from most men was in his distrust of doctors, and his response to virtually any ailment had generally been to ignore it in the expectation that it would eventually get bored and leave his body, or to tackle it with the aid of whatever was on special that week at CVS. Unfortunately, tumors of the bowel rarely responded well to such courses of treatment, and Angel had finally been browbeaten into consulting an internist, with the result that he was now in possession of less of his own body than before. Rather than convince Angel of the error of his ways, this experience had simply hardened him in his attitude toward doctors. The quality of the medical profession, in Angel’s view, had only deteriorated since the days when barbers performed surgery, because back then at least a man was assured of a decent haircut for his trouble.

  “My fucking feet,” said Angel. “I feel like I’m being tortured.”

  He had woken up cold. That was part of the problem. Angel had never liked sleeping in a warm room, but he’d have to get used to it if he was to mitigate this particular torment. The nausea was less of a problem, because the medication helped, but then, they were still learning how to cope with all this, he and Louis both. Otherwise, Angel appeared largely untraumatized by his diagnosis, surgery, and ongoing treatment. Louis had read about people being deeply affected emotionally and psychologically by their cancer, but Angel was not one of these, or so Louis believed. Perhaps it was because Angel had already suffered so much in the past—at the hands of abusers in childhood, and from the violence of other men in adulthood—that he was able to face this latest assault on his being with a degree of equanimity, pins and needles excepted. But he was quieter than before: not maudlin or depressed, just more introspective. Louis had registered this, at least.