"I'll bear that in mind, Gerard," I said, shaking his hand once more before going to the car. Before getting in, I looked back toward the house, where the slight figure of Gerard Patreaux was silhouetted in the open doorway, black against light. I waved, but the figure remained still. I got into the limousine, and Carlo drove off into the night.
Chapter Seven
There was a message waiting for me when I returned to the hotel; it was brief, succinctly to the point, and both Garth and Veil had put their names to it. The message said, Stay put.
I found Garth and Veil's little communication to be off-putting and pretentious; I needed information, not orders. I considered calling one or both of them, then decided against it. It was almost midnight, too late anyway to consider moving to another hotel before morning, and I reasoned that Garth would have asked that I call if he'd had anything to report. I double-locked the door, jammed a straight-backed chair up under the knob, then went to bed.
Although I was exhausted, I slept only fitfully. My dreams were filled with violent, vivid images of branding irons, racks, electric generators, pincers, and cattle prods, and the blurred face of a mysterious man who could at once countenance the slaughter of innocent people, and who was a torturer himself who burned out men's eyes, but who would risk his own torture and death to right a wrong. That seemed a contradiction. John Sinclair himself was emerging as a contradiction, a paradox, a very dark and dissonant Chant in a crimson key of blood, pain, and death.
I awoke in the morning still tired, restless, and anxious, haunted by a sense of foreboding, convinced that still more terrible things were waiting to happen. I was in the eye of a maelstrom, and could see neither faces nor motives in the black winds that swirled around me. I picked up the phone, gave my credit card number, and called Garth's private number at the brown-stone. There was no answer, and his answering machine was not on. That annoyed me. Next, I tried Veil's loft, and a voice I recognized as belonging to Lee Miller, one of Veil's students, answered in the middle of the first ring.
"Lee, it's Mongo."
"Mongo! Are you all right?"
"Yeah. Where are Veil and my brother?"
There was a short pause at the other end of the line, then: "They're due to arrive at Zurich airport at eleven this morning, your time."
I said, "Shit."
"They said that if you called I should tell you that they're coming directly to your hotel, so just stay there, in your room. They have a lot of things to tell you. You should do absolutely nothing, and talk to no one, until they get there. They said to tell you that you're in a deep pile of shit."
"Wow. That's really great, Lee. It's precisely the kind of information I was hoping Garth could dig up for me. What flight are they on?"
"Swissair seventy-six, out of Kennedy." The other man paused, then added, "Mongo, you should know that Harper is with them. She insisted."
"Shit!" I said, and slammed down the receiver.
I'd asked Veil to ask Garth to do some digging for me, and what I was getting was a reunion, complete with the woman I loved. Three more potential targets for Chant Sinclair to aim at. It was just the kind of news I needed to start off my day.
I saw Garth, Veil, and Harper before they saw me. The three of them, striding briskly, emerged from the mouth of the wide corridor leading from Customs looking like two and a half grim-faced gunfighters marching down Main Street to face off with the bad guys. Garth and Veil, with their tall, lithe bodies and powerful physical presence, looked the part, but Dr. Harper Rhys-Whitney, the snake- and dwarf-charming love of my life, was barely five feet tall, and she looked very small and frail walking between my brother and Veil. I knew better. This small woman with the maroon, gold-flecked eyes and long, soft, silver-streaked brown hair was, in her own way, every bit as deadly as the two men who accompanied her. I wondered if she had declared to Customs the tiny, deadly krait she carried everywhere in a small wooden box in her purse. I doubted it.
This petite, explosive charge of a woman had spent many years with the Statler Brothers Circus, where I had met her, as a head-liner like myself, a fearless snake charmer. Now she was a research herpetologist, a world-renowned expert on venomous snakes who kept a thirty-four-foot reticulated python as a house pet. I loved her to absolute distraction, and the depth of my feelings, the loss of control over my own fate that implied, frightened me. I was still trying to figure out what to do about it.
Finally, Harper saw me. She came running across the terminal, threw her arms around me. As always, I had an instantaneous physiological reaction as I felt her lips on mine, her large breasts pressing against me. "Hello, sweetie," she whispered in her low, husky voice that always seemed so improbable in such a small body. "What nasty business have you gotten yourself into this time?"
It was a very good question. I was deliriously happy to see Harper, to be able to hold her in my arms, but I felt guilty for it, as if I were indulging my pleasure at risk to her life. "Harper, Harper, Harper," I murmured into her ear. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"You must be joking, Robby," she replied, releasing her arms from around my neck. "When I heard about the hotel massacre,
I just knew you had to be on the scene somewhere, probably being shot at. You need help. I was getting ready to fly over here on my own when Veil called. I just told him to wait for me. I flew my own plane to JFK, then came over here with him and your brother. Did you think I was going to just sit around in Florida while you were in trouble over here?"
"Foolish me," I said evenly, resisting the impulse to roll my eyes toward the ceiling. I satisfied myself with casting a grim and accusatory glance at my brother and Veil as they approached.
"I appreciate your wanting to keep me out of harm's way, Robby," Harper said, just the slightest edge to her voice, "but that's typical of your sexist thinking. Didn't I come in handy during that business with the loboxes and the circus?"
"Harper, I-"
"Since I've already saved your life once, I just thought you might like to have me around. I guess I'm the one who's foolish."
"Harper, I didn't want any of you here. There's nothing to do here but duck."
"Garth and Veil have important information."
"That's why phones were invented."
She tilted her head back slightly, sniffed. "Veil and Garth didn't argue when I insisted I was coming along. They both agreed they could use all the help they could get in handling you."
Garth and Veil had taken up positions on either side of us, and were standing very close as their gazes swept over the other people in the terminal. Seeing the two men together like this, working as a team to guard Harper and me, it would have been impossible for anyone else to detect the animosity that existed between them. Both of them had shoulder-length hair tied back in a ponytail, and they were about the same height; they might have been brothers.
By way of greeting, Garth put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. Veil offered me a curt nod, then went back to surveying the people around us.
"Handling me?" I said, looking up at Garth.
"You heard right, brother," Garth replied gruffly. "True to your character and track record, it looks like you've executed a perfect swan dive into one deep pile of shit."
"That was Lee's line. So, naturally, you and Veil had to dive right in with me, bringing Harper along for the ride. Why couldn't you just do what I asked? I don't need handling."