“Excuse me. Are you the guy that makes the keys?”
The man turned, one side of his crooked mouth approximating a grin. “I also play bass in a jazz quartet at the Jade Lounge on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You should come in some night.”
“Maybe I will,” smiled Mac.
He’d left the brown wax paper with the writing on it at home and now had the key wrapped in a paper towel, which he unfolded.
“Looks like a garden-variety skeleton key.” The guy squinted, pinching the key between thumb and forefinger, examining it in the sunlight. “Made of brass, not very unusual. You want a copy made?”
“No, I just wondered if you could tell me anything about it.”
The key-maker turned it over, looking closely at the fleur-de-lis head. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife, unfolding a tiny magnifying glass. “Don’t get to use this very often.”
He peered through the glass at the back of the keyhead, finding no unusual markings. “I don’t think it’s a mortise key, too short for most doors or gates. Probably opens a small box or locker, maybe a desk.”
“How old?”
The key-maker shrugged, “Early nineteen hundreds, maybe earlier.” He handed the key back. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
Mac appeared slightly disappointed. “I know more than I did five minutes ago. Thanks.”
The man took his Starbucks and loped to the back door of the hardware store. “Don’t forget, the Jade Lounge...”
“Every Tuesday and Thursday. Gotcha.”
The man nodded and entered, leaving Mac in the small parking lot with the key in his palm.
Mac drove out through the alley behind the store, bordered on one side by the rear of the storefronts and on the other by thick hedges. As he rolled down the narrow, pockmarked pavement, a dark figure burst from the shrubbery, lunging toward his moving car. Startled, Mac glanced over his shoulder to see a hunched figure, wide as a refrigerator but half as tall, with arms reaching nearly to the gravel, a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head.
Mac stopped at the end of the alley to check oncoming street traffic, and when he glanced back in the rearview, the figure was gone.
After carving the sinister being from face to breastbone with my broadsword, I quickly removed the palimpsest from its holy pedestal and placed it within my leather knapsack. Then, from our hostess’s bedchamber I heard the bone-chilling cry of one of my men in the throes of what was a deceptively pleasurable, though unquestionably hideous, demise.
With sword held forward, I raced through torchlit corridors to the dining hall where the rest of my men were gathered. They too had heard the horrifying screams and with weapons drawn were prepared to retrieve their comrades. Though many were still in a drunken state from their evening meal, all itched for battle (and it must here be noted that many a time have we conquered entire villages in the grip of wine and grog, so their abilities were not in question).
It was then a shriek pierced the air and into the dining hall floated our hostess in her true form, hair of writhing eels and tentacles for arms, her mouth an open wound from which emitted the ear-splitting sound. Without delay I ordered my men to retreat, and it was all I could do to shield my mental faculties from the creature’s hypnotic fugue long enough to escape with my troops and not succumb to her dark powers. As we raced from the tower in search of our mounts, she set her apelike minions upon us.
“I’m telling you, the thing looked like an ape in a hoodie,” Mac relived his encounter with the figure in the alley.
“Honey, please.” Mira sucked a mango smoothie, sitting across from him during her lunch break, the two of them in the open-air food court.
“He creeped me out.” Mac plucked fries from a greasy takeout bag and shoved them in his mouth.
Mira extracted from her purse a printed sheet. “I went online this morning, did a little Googling. Looks like you can chalk another one up to yours truly. I was right: the Khorad Dur, as far as I can figure, was in Northern Africa; Libya to be exact. Some nomadic tribes referred to it by that name, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. It was a dead river running through a rocky area called the Black Haruj. Great names, huh?”
“Sure.” He wasn’t too interested.
“If the guy who wrote the letter was planning on shipping the palimpsest ‘across the seas,’ he could only have been referring to the Mediterranean, which means he more than likely was shipping it somewhere in Europe. There’s no reason to think he was trying to get it to the States.”
“It could have come from Europe to New York; maybe whoever he shipped it to brought it with them when they immigrated over.”
Mira considered that. “That’s actually not a bad idea, hon.”
“Any way to find out what shipping line was operating in the Mediterranean back then?”
“Way ahead of you.” She flipped to another printed sheet. “The Ruby Seas ran cargo and passengers from Port Said and Tripoli to parts north.”
“Any way we can get copies of shipping manifests?”
“From over two hundred years ago? Hon, even if we could, the Ruby Seas had a liner that went down in a storm in eighteen ninety-two, killing all three hundred forty-eight people aboard. The man who owned the line was so overcome with guilt that he killed himself. Soon after that, Ruby Seas went bankrupt. There are no records. Not anymore.”
Mac slumped in his chair, a limp French fry drooping between his lips.
Mira stuffed the printouts into her purse. “Why don’t you just go to the family that held the auction? They might be able to tell you something. Maybe they even know what that key opens.”
“Are you kidding? They’ll want a piece of the action!”
“Need I point out that right now you have no action?”
“Once I get my hands on that palimpsest, I will.”
“If it’s even real.”
“It’s real.”
“Whatever you say, hon. Listen, I got to get back to work.” She leaned over to give him a quick kiss that tasted to him of tropical fruit.
He watched her walk away, grinning at the swish of her rear under her skirt. As she disappeared into the lobby of her building, his eyes scanned the crowd in the food court. Amid those hustling up and down the brick steps that led to the street were two figures, unmoving, both facing his direction.
One seemed hunched over, his face hidden by a dirty, hooded sweatshirt. Standing beside him was an Asian man in a navy blue three-piece suit, silver watch winking in the sun.
Mac squinted at the sun glare off the man’s watchband, shielding his eyes with his hands. By the time he shifted his head to look again, the two men were gone.
He scanned the crowd but saw no sign of the two. Quickly he stood up from the table, tossed his remaining fries in a trash can, and hustled toward the parking structure.
His tennis-shoed footsteps echoed softly off cool concrete as he marched to 2F, the letters highlighted in purple paint.
He heard laughter over his left shoulder and whirled to espy a young woman talking on her cell phone, stepping to her car.