I retreated to the fire, toppling the spit and sending the hunk of now-charred meat into the flames. For the first time, I realized how recently this must’ve all gone down —the meat, though burned, had yet to cook off the spit, and though the air was hot and thick with moisture, the bodies weren’t bloated, and showed no signs of rigor. Whoever’d done this had beaten me by a matter of minutes. Of course, that knowledge didn’t help me much —a few minutes was plenty of time for any Collector worth his salt to disappear. I pushed aside all thought of pursuit, instead focusing on my immediate task. I shoved one of the support branches from the spit into the embers until it caught. Then I returned to Varela’s body, torch in hand.
The flame danced in the sudden breeze as I swung the branch at the writhing mass of bugs that blanketed Varela’s chest. Reluctantly, they parted, frightened by the fire but unwilling to relinquish their blood meal. As they shifted, I caught a glimpse of something odd —letters, three inches high, carved into the dead man’s flesh.
I lost my patience with the flame and dropped to my knees, scattering the remaining insects with a sweep of my arm. Beneath them was a message, ragged and crusted brown with drying blood:
SAM –
WE NEED TO TALK.
YOU KNOW WHERE.
That bastard, I thought. I should’ve known.
I must’ve spent a half an hour sitting there, marveling at the presumption, the sheer arrogance that pervaded every grisly slice. Eventually, though, I rose and left the camp behind, plunging once more into the jungle —this time heading south.
Toward Bogotá.
Toward Danny.
2.
The first time I met Danny Young, I wanted to kill him. I don’t mean figuratively, like he was some jackass who rear-ended me at a stoplight when I was late for an appointment. I mean I literally wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze until his face went purple, his eyes bulged out of their sockets, and that incessantly wagging tongue of his was finally still, so I could sit and sip my drink in peace. Not the kindest of impulses, I’ll grant you. But in my defense, I was having one hell of a lousy day.
It was the fall of ’53, and I was in a dingy basement pub in Amsterdam, a few blocks south of De Wallen, where, in the shadow of the Old Church, prostitutes peddled their wares. Ten yards of earth and stone were all that separated the place from the canal beyond, which no doubt contributed to the damp chill that had settled in my weary limbs. Of course, it wasn’t the ambience that brought me here so much as their reputation for a heavy hand with the jenever —a local spirit that tastes like gin and turpentine in equal measure. I’d had three of them, maybe four, and still I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. I told myself it was the cold, but I wasn’t yet drunk enough to believe it. Not after the job I’d just pulled.
His name was Arnold Haas. A doll-maker by trade —and from what I’d heard, a damn good one. The way Lily told it, his dolls weren’t the type you’d see dragged along the sidewalk by some jam-handed toddler —they were more the fetch-five-figures-atauction sort of deal. Now, you might be wondering why I’d care about a thing like that, but normally, that kind of information is pretty helpful to a Collector. See, there’s two kinds of folks who wind up marked for collection: contract kills and freelancers. Contract kills are the ones who went and made themselves a deal with a demon, usually chasing fame or fortune, or maybe love, or lust, or revenge. Most contract kills are decent enough people —they just want a better hand than they’ve been dealt. Believe me when I tell you, most times, it ain’t worth the price. Freelancers, on the other hand, are a nasty lot. They’re the ones whose actions are so heinous, hell won’t wait around for them to die. Given the quality of Haas’s work, I’d assumed he was the former.
I was wrong.
It was dusk when I’d arrived at Haas’s house. Amber streetlights shone against a sky of deepening blue, and reflected off the still waters of the canal that ran parallel to Haas’s street. The house itself was an elegant brick row house in the Dutch style, with tall, narrow windows and a gabled roof shingled in slate. The porch light was unlit, and the windows, save for one, were dark. I spent the length of a cigarette watching the house from beneath one of the many bare, skeletal elms that crowded the banks of the canal. Occasionally, a shadow would pass across the face of the one lit window —a bedroom, no doubt, as it was situated in the top-left corner of the house, just beneath the steep pitch of the roof, and three stories above the street on which I stood.
Good, I thought —that means he’s home.
The lock was nothing to sneeze at: a thick, meanlooking deadbolt I couldn’t have picked in a week. But the door was inlaid with several squares of leaded glass, and those weren’t so hard to handle. I wrapped a kerchief around my fist and knocked out the pane nearest the knob. In seconds I was inside.
I hesitated a moment, just inside the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The house, I realized, was cold —bitterly so. The air was thick with the spicy scent of potpourri, and something else as well, earthy and unpleasant. Beyond the entryway was a tidy living room —a floral couch, draped with lace; two highbacked armchairs, camel-colored and accented at the arms and legs with dark-stained wood; a thick mahogany coffee table, gleaming faintly by the light of the streetlights that trickled in through the sheer white curtains. A small iron fireplace sat unlit in one corner of the room, set into a rose-colored wall. But for that three-foot strip of wall, which stretched from mantle to ceiling, the entire room was lined with shelves —heavy, floor-to-ceiling shelves, stained so dark they appeared black in the dim light, and lined with thousands upon thousands of dolls. Some of them were made of simple cloth, with hair of yarn and button eyes, while others stared at me with eyes of glass, set in faces of ghost-white porcelain. All were resplendent in their Sunday best, an oppressive cacophony of bold prints and elaborate brocades, of chiffon and satin and lace. Their blank, implacable gazes unnerved me as I passed, cutting through the living room to the stairs that lay beyond.
I left my shoes at the foot of the stairs, and headed upward in my stockinged feet, as quiet as could be. The staircase walls were graced with floating shelves at irregular intervals. Too small to support whole dolls, these shelves were adorned with delicate porcelain hands and feet and eyeless heads —stark white and unfinished. Something about those empty sockets bothered me, though why, I didn’t know. I ignored them and pressed on.
At the second floor, the staircase turned. The unpleasant odor I’d caught wind of downstairs was stronger here, but I was so focused on finding Haas, I didn’t pay it any mind. Through the delicate balusters above, I caught a glimpse of a half-closed door, silhouetted by the light of the room beyond. I headed toward it. The landing floorboards creaked in protest beneath my weight, and I winced. But this Haas was a doll-maker, I told myself, not some hardened criminal —what did I care if he heard me coming? So like an idiot, I threw caution to the wind, taking the stairs two at a time, and sprinting toward the open door. When I reached it, I kicked it inward —and then I froze. Haas wasn’t there. But what was there was so fucking awful that for a moment, I forgot myself and just stood there, agape and staring.
There were three of them, propped around a table laid with silver as though they were enjoying a midday tea.