34
Darina Flores learned of the deaths of Becky Phipps and Davis Tate shortly before she and the boy moved against Marielle Vetters. Darina had been concerned when she had not immediately heard back directly from Phipps; they had been searching for a definite clue to the location of the plane for so long, yet hours went by with no contact. Darina, always cautious in such matters, was reluctant to disseminate what she had learned any wider than was necessary, but preparations needed to be made.
While she debated what further action to take, she received confirmation from Joe Dahl that he was ready to move when she was. Dahl had been hers for a long time: she and her agents ensured that the inveterate gambler was permitted to fall deeper and deeper into debt until everything he owned was effectively theirs.
And then they let him keep it all: his car, his house, what little of his business remained, all of it. They simply held onto the paper on his debt, and waited. It didn’t take long. Dahl was an addict, and he had not yet been cured of his addiction. On the evening that he tried to use his car as security on a cash loan so he could hit Scarborough Downs, Darina paid him a visit, and Joe Dahl was cured of his gambling vice forever. Darina had kept him in her pocket ever since, ready to be used once they had solid information about the plane. Unlike the others, she had not gone on random searches of the woods, chasing wisps of information that dissipated like morning mist in the sunlight. She considered such ventures unwise: they risked drawing attention to the object of the search, and she believed that it was better to wait until a solid lead emerged. True, the plane and its secrets represented a ticking device that could go off at the moment of discovery, but while it remained lost its danger was potential, not actual, and even the list itself was meaningless unless it found its way into the right hands. The mystery of the passenger and his fate troubled her more. He shared her nature, and he was lost.
Grady Vetters, gagged with a scarf and bound with plastic ties, woke just as daylight was fading. He was bleary, but his head began to clear when he took in the boy staring at him from the couch, and the woman cleaning her gun at the kitchen table, and he smelled Teddy Gattle, even through the closed bedroom door. Darina could see Vetters weighing his options. She preferred to keep him alive for as long as possible, but if he proved difficult she would be forced to do without him.
Darina slipped the magazine into the little Colt and approached Grady. He tried to squeeze himself further into the corner of the room, and said something unintelligible through the gag. Darina didn’t care to hear what it was, so she left the scarf in place.
‘We’re going to pay a visit to Marielle,’ she said. ‘If you do as we tell you, you’ll live. If you don’t, you and your sister will die. Do you understand?’
Grady didn’t respond immediately. He was no fool: she could tell that he didn’t believe her. It didn’t matter. This was all a game, and he would play his part until an alternative offered itself. The easiest way to ensure that he stayed alive and remained compliant was to make him want to stay alive by not doing anything foolish, and so he would do as he was told until they reached Marielle’s house. If he died before they got there, he could be of no help to his sister. Alive, he could always hope.
But there was no hope, not really. Darina’s entire existence was predicated on that belief.
Grady breathed in deeply against the scarf, and his nose wrinkled as he again took in the smell of Teddy Gattle.
‘If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t an act of betrayal on his part,’ said Darina. ‘He thought that he was helping you. If you wouldn’t use your knowledge of the plane to make some money, then he would do it on your behalf. I think he loved you.’ She smiled. ‘He must have, since he died for you.’
Grady glared at her. The muscles in his arms tensed as he tried to force the plastic ties apart. His knees were drawn up to his chest, and she could see him preparing to gather his strength to spring at her. Perhaps she had misjudged him. She pointed the gun at his face, said, ‘Don’t,’ and his body relaxed. Darina kept him under the gun as the boy advanced, the syringe once again in his hand.
‘Not so much this time,’ she warned. ‘Just enough to keep him compliant.’
She waited until Grady’s eyes grew heavy again before making two more calls. The first was to Marielle Vetters’ house to ensure that she was home. When a woman answered the phone, Darina hung up.
The second call she made more reluctantly, not simply because she preferred Becky Phipps to be her primary point of contact, but because the Backers did not like to be drawn into such matters. It was important to them that they should not be linked to acts of blood. It was why they used companies, offshore bank accounts, proxies.
But Phipps always called back within an hour – always, day or night – and so Darina dialed the number of the one that she thought of as the Principal Backer. Darina was not frightened of him; she was frightened of very little to do with men and women, although she found their capacity for self-destruction disturbing, but she was always careful around this Backer. He was so like herself and her kind that sometimes she wondered if he was really human at all, but she could detect no trace of otherness about him. Nevertheless, there was a difference to him, and she had never been able to penetrate his veneer and discover what lay beneath it.
He answered the phone on the second ring. The number was in the possession of only a handful of individuals, and used only when the seriousness of the situation warranted it.
‘Hello, Darina,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time, but I know why you’re calling.’
Thus it was that Darina learned of how Becky and Davis had met their ends. Becky had sent out a warning before she fled, but Darina’s call had gone to her home number on the assumption that she would still be recuperating: a minor lapse on Becky’s part, and understandable if she was running for her life.
The Collector had never moved against them in this way before. Oh, they knew that he suspected their existence, but the Backers had hidden themselves well, and Darina and the others were comfortable in the shadows. Darina understood then that Barbara Kelly had lied to her before she died. She had admitted to reaching out to the lawyer Eldritch and the old Jew, but she had assured Darina that she had offered only the promise of material, and not the material itself. Even when Darina took out her left eye as punishment for what she had done to her own sight, and threatened to leave her blind by cutting out the right as well, still Kelly denied that she had taken more than the first faltering footsteps toward repentance.
But the Collector could not have targeted Davis Tate without the list. On the other hand, Kelly would not have handed over the entire list to their enemies. It was her only bargaining tool. She would have tempted them with part of it, certainly no more than a page or two: a page to the Jew Epstein, perhaps, and a page to the Collector and his handler.
Just as the Collector had never declared outright war upon them, prevented from doing so by his own caution and their cleverness, they too had kept their distance from him. His was a minor crusade for the most part, a picking off of the vicious and the damned, although his victims had been growing in importance in recent years. The possibility of a strike against him had been mooted, but, as with her ambivalence toward the Principal Backer, the Collector presented a problem. What was he, exactly? What motivated him? He seemed to have knowledge of matters known only to Darina and her fallen brethren, and to share their comfort with the darkness, but he was an unknown quantity. So far, the advantages of removing him from the board had been outweighed by the risk of precipitating a violent reaction, whether from the Collector himself, if he survived such an attack, or from his allies.
And Darina had heard rumors about a detective, one who had crossed paths with those like her, although he remained of little concern to her. Selfishness and viciousness were the curse of her breed, so much so that many of them had forgotten their true purpose on this earth, so lost were they to wrath, and sorrow at all that they had sacrificed in their fall from grace. Even Brightwell had been driven by his own urges, his desire to unite the two halves of the being he worshiped, and he was among the best, and oldest, of them. When he had briefly blinked out of existence, his spirit separating from its host, she had experienced the pain of it so strongly that she had called out to him, willing him to come to her. She had felt his presence near to her, straining to remain close, and she had found a man that night, and in this stranger’s act of insemination, Brightwell had been reborn inside her.
But a crucial element was missing. Aspects of his true nature had manifested themselves early, almost as soon as he could walk, but he seemed to have no memory of how his old form had been taken from him, and with that came his silence. He was traumatized, she supposed, but she could as yet find no way to break down the wall that kept him from truly becoming himself once more.
She watched the boy now as the Backer spoke. The Backer sounded worried, as well he might. His final words left it to Darina to take action against those who were moving against them. The death of Becky Phipps had tipped the balance against the Collector, and his fate now lay in Darina’s hands.
But the plane was the priority: the plane, the list, and the passenger and his fate. She could not allow herself to be distracted, not now. She flipped through the names in her head, for Darina required no list. She had disputed the need for its existence right from the start, but human evil seemed to have a desire to record, to order. It was, she guessed, a function of mortality: even the worst among them, consciously or not, wanted their deeds to be remembered. Something of that need to record had infected her kind.
So Darina went to work, and the order was given to wipe their enemies from the face of the earth.
And while Darina conspired in his destruction, the Collector paid a visit to a church in Connecticut. The final service of the day had concluded, and the last of the congregation had trailed out into the evening. The Collector looked kindly upon them: they simply worshiped a different aspect of the same God.
When the last of them had gone, he watched as the priest said goodbye to the sacristan at the back of the church, and the two men separated. The sacristan drove away while the priest walked through the church grounds and used a key to unlock a gate in the wall: behind it was a garden, and his home.
The priest saw the Collector approach while the gate was still open.
‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
He had a faint Irish accent, altered by his years in the United States. A security light on the wall beside him illuminated his face. He was a middle-aged man with a full head of hair, but no sign of gray. Instead, the light caught unnatural tints.
‘Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wish to make a confession.’
The priest looked at his watch. ‘I was about to go to dinner. I take confession every morning after ten o’clock mass. If you were to come back then, I’d be happy to listen.’
‘It’s a matter of some urgency, Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I fear for a soul.’
The curious formulation of the statement passed the priest by.
‘Oh well, I suppose that you’d better come in,’ he said.
He held the gate open and the Collector entered the garden. It was carefully arranged as a series of concentric circles, shrubs and hedges alternating with cobbled paths, and winter flowering plants adding color to it all. Between a pair of elegant box trees stood a long stone bench. The priest sat at one end of it, and indicated that the Collector should sit at the other. The priest took a stole from his pocket, kissed the cross, and placed the vestment around his neck. He quickly whispered some prayers, his eyes closed, and then asked the Collector how long it had been since his last confession.
‘A very long time,’ replied the Collector.
‘Years?’
‘Decades.’
The priest did not look happy to hear that. Perhaps he thought that the Collector might feel compelled to unburden himself of a lifetime of sins, and he would be forced to sit on the cold bench and listen until breakfast. The priest made the decision to cut to the chase. The Collector suspected that this was not the orthodox approach, but he did not object.
‘Go on, my son,’ said the priest. ‘You said that you had a matter of some seriousness to discuss.’
‘Yes,’ said the Collector. ‘A killing.’
That made the priest’s eyes open wider. He started to look worried. He didn’t know the Collector from Adam, and now here they were in the garden of the priest’s own home, about to discuss the death of another human being.
‘You’re talking about – what? An accidental death, or something worse?’
‘Worse, Father. Much worse.’
‘A . . . murder?’
‘It might be viewed that way. I couldn’t really say. It’s a matter of perspective.’
The priest had moved from being worried to actively concerned for his own safety. He saw an out.
‘Maybe you should come back tomorrow after all, once you’ve had a chance to properly consider what it is that you wish to confess,’ he said.
The Collector looked puzzled.
‘Done?’ he said. ‘I haven’t “done” anything yet. I’m going to do it. I was wondering if I could have absolution in advance, as it were. I’m very busy. I have a lot to fit into my days.’
The priest stood. ‘Either you’re making fun of me, or you’re a troubled man,’ he said. ‘Whatever is the case, I can’t help you. I want you to go now, and think hard about yourself.’
‘Sit down, priest,’ said the Collector.
‘If you don’t go, I’ll call the police.’
The priest didn’t even see the blade being drawn. One moment the Collector’s hands were empty, and the next there was a flash of light in his hands, and the Collector had risen, the knife pressed hard against the soft flesh of the priest’s throat. The priest heard the garden gate swing on its hinges. His eyes moved to the right, hoping to see someone enter, someone who might help him, but instead there were only deeper shadows moving. They took the form of men in hats and dark clothing, their long coats drifting behind them like smoke, but that wasn’t possible, was it? Then the shapes became clearer, and he could make out the pale features beneath the old fedoras, the eyes and mouths nothing more than dark holes, the skin around them wrinkled like old, rotting fruit.
‘Who are you?’ said the priest, as the shapes drew closer.
‘You betrayed her,’ said the Collector.