The train was black as night. Blacker. He watched it come, mesmerized. Soon it would glide silently to a stop, and Arcott would scramble toward it, a little afraid as always, but also trembling with anticipation, imagining the weight of treasure that would soon be his, the cold beauty and clean utility of the stones, raw and cut, all the angles of symmetry, indices of refraction, directions of cleavage, the semiprecious stones gathered from a thousand places….
The gift from the west, from the Ghostlands.
In due time, the train passed through a wavering mist like a night mirage and drew to a stop on the outskirts of a slumbering town. Steam hissed from the locomotive’s ribs like a foul breath, like a killing fog.
(Inigo recalled the fog in London that had killed all those people on a bleak day in the previous century, in the 1950s; his father had related it to him like a fairy tale, stressing the imperative moral of the story-that the world can turn hostile in a moment, that it can kill you.)
From his perch atop the passenger car where he lay silent and still, Inigo watched the man in the long black coat emerge from the front of the train. The other man was waiting for him beside the tracks, younger, with wavy dark hair and bright blue eyes, and the overalertness of the scholar, the intellectual.
Without his heightened senses, Inigo wouldn’t have been able to see him clearly, to make out his smooth olive skin, the faded bomber jacket that gave little protection against the brittle night.
Or to smell the fear and eagerness radiating off him like sweat on a hot summer day.
The man in black strode toward him, and as he crossed the headlight beam of the locomotive like a hellish eye, Inigo saw the man’s silhouette change like a gargantuan black umbrella unfurling. Then he was through the searchlight and his outline was a man again.
Bomber Jacket had seen it, too, and grown pale, taken a shaky step back.
“Jesus, I hope they grade you on a curve,” the man in black said contemptuously, and he laughed.
It made Inigo’s skin crawl even more than the insect feel on the skin of the train.
The man in black canted his head back toward the train, murmured something Inigo couldn’t hear over the hiss of steam.
The big doors on the black passenger cars slid back, and the twisted forms so like Inigo in shape and unlike him in soul began unloading the shipment, the precious cargo Bomber Jacket craved so much that it held him there despite his fear.
The man in black leaned idly against a pillar, lit up a cigarette and stood inhaling the frosty blue smoke, stirring it about on his tongue, then lazily exhaling it. Inigo caught a dusky whiff of the exotic tobacco and was impressed, for he knew despite all appearances that the dread visitor’s smoke was not tobacco, and its source not the illusory “cigarette” but rather the visitor himself.
Bomber Jacket worked up his courage, and hesitantly approached his deliverer.
“Something to add?” the man that was not a man asked, and in his casualness sounded oh-so-threatening.
“Um, the schematics…they’re clear, but…challenging.”
Smoke eddied about the visitor, the wind whipping it into mist devils, enshrouding him as though he were a phantom paying a call, death on vacation.
“It’s not anything I can’t do-in time.” Fear and nervousness made Bomber Jacket gabble in relentless staccato, machine-gun bursts of words. “But an assistant, a Pretorius, if you will, if one of them could just come out for a day or two, not more, surely not more, to provide some guidance, I mean, just to elucidate some of the physics, untangle a cat’s cradle, a string or two-”
Bomber Jacket stopped abruptly as he caught the low sound coming from the other.
He was chuckling.
The man in black extended a hand palm up and affected a quavering voice that was an obscene mockery of a child’s. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”
Then he dropped the hand, and his voice was his own again. “They could send someone but, trust me, you wouldn’t have the furniture.”
He stepped through his curtain of smoke, brushing it aside, glowering down at the trembling young man. “Hit your mark, say your lines, get off the stage. Now, is that so hard to do?”
“N-no,” Bomber Jacket blurted, backing away. Inigo could tell he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the man in black was talking about.
But then, Leather Man’s message hadn’t been for him.
Unobserved, Inigo slipped off into the night and, within minutes, was miles away.
TEN
The snow no longer falling, Cal sought out a spot thirty yards behind the Sears Automotive Center, given over now to the wind and a solitary gray owl circling overhead in a last foray as the night wore down. Big stacks of worn-out truck tires provided a windbreak there, and the ground was soft enough to bury Big Mike deep and away from the predations of men or beasts. Doc expertly closed the dead man’s wound, then Mike Kimmel and Flo Speakman washed the body and found enough discarded garments left in the Big and Tall Men’s Shop to lay Olifiers out in fresh, if musty, new clothes.
From Manhattan to Boone’s Gap to Chicago to the Fun Place in Iowa, Cal thought. Another Kodak moment. Another funeral.
As he helped Kimmel and Doc and Colleen enfold the body in a king-size silk sheet recovered from Macy’s (in their travels, it always surprised Cal the incongruity and illogic of which items were scavenged and which remained), Cal surveyed Olifiers’s beefy, innocent face, saw the release, the look of serenity there.
Big Mike had paid his life out, sacrificed it in a moment, for him, for Cal.
And why?
They need you, he had said, or tried to, in his last dying moments.
“I don’t have the answer,” Cal had pleaded with him earlier that night.
And unshaken, Olifiers had simply replied, “Nobody else even seems to know the question.”
No more running for Olifiers, no more fear. Just, at the end of the road, certainty.
The moon dipped low over the powdered earth as the long night waned, and they lowered Big Mike into the ground by the light of Goldie’s spheres, lowered him with the lengths of chain their attackers had brought to drag Big Mike and his kindred back to slavery.
Free now.
All of them stood along the gravesite, Al Watt and Krystee Cott and Rafe Dahlquist and the others, and they looked to Cal to say something.
But what was there to say?
The man with the question…
Unfortunately, Olifiers had never gotten around to discussing with Cal just what that question might be. Certainly there were any number of tantalizing items on the menu, mouthwatering delicacies laced with cyanide….
What dark mentality lay at the heart of the Source? What was stealing away flares? Why was it stealing them away? What integral piece was Fred Wishart in that equation, or the other scientists on the list Agent Shango had given Cal in the woods of Albermarle County-Marcus Sanrio or Agnes Wu or Pollard or Sakamoto or any of the rest?
I don’t know how to beat it, Cal had told Colleen.
But standing in the fierce November wind looking down at the hole gouged in the earth like a bloody wound, Cal knew the question the currency of Olifiers’s death had purchased him.
How do we beat it?
Cal’s eyes moved along the somber, calm faces of Olifiers’s mourners. The fact of any of their deaths was no surprise to them, given the lives they’d been living, only the specific time and place of it.
Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist; Krystee Cott, who had been a soldier; Al Watt, who knew how to find information; so very many of them…