I stared back at him and a half-dozen thoughts ran through my mind at once. I knew Valery had brought him the sphere found in the Caucasus, but what about the others? From where had they come, and how? Why would this “aberrant” assassin want them anyway? He had expressed his opinions about the Meq and the Remembering on several occasions, saying it meant little or nothing to him and we were wasting our time. So, why would he want to read the spheres? I knew one thing for sure. The Fleur-du-Mal never did anything that did not benefit himself. I asked him point-blank, “What’s in this for you?”
“Why, Zezen, you disappoint me again. My motive is simple curiosity. I want to solve the puzzle, break the code, find the message. After all, I am Meq, and I have had a change of heart regarding the Remembering.”
“You have a heart?”
“Oh, how clever! You are now a comedian as well as the Stone of Dreams. How do you do it?”
“Okay, then, why the change?”
The Fleur-du-Mal stood up and walked a few paces into his garden. He bent over a particularly beautiful red rose and examined it carefully, then snapped it off its stem and put it to his nose. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “I have my reasons,” he said, and dropped the rose on the ground. “The point is,
He was right and he knew I knew it. There was no way around it. “You got one of the spheres from Valery,” I said. “Where did you get the other two?”
He nodded and said, “A fair question, and I suppose you have a right to know. I acquired the first one nearly eighteen hundred years ago on Cyprus from a man with whom I often traded various services for … well, things I desired. That day, I traded for an object that had once been the possession of a Meq known as ‘the Thracian.’ He was an old one and he had perished on Thera, now known as Santorini, when the island exploded.” The Fleur-du- Mal paused. “Perhaps the Ethiopian told you about him. He was rather notorious.”
“If you mean Susheela the Ninth, she mentioned him, but she never knew him.”
“Yes, well, ‘the Thracian’ kept a hidden cache of properties on Cyprus. This cache was later discovered and passed down by the family of the man who sold it to me. The sphere itself was and is in a condition of deterioration, and many of the markings are worn away. It is without a doubt the oldest of the three. The second sphere, the one brought to me by Valery, is in a very good state, and in fact is quite beautiful.”
“I agree.”
The Fleur-du-Mal raised one eyebrow. “You have seen it?”
“Yes, but just briefly.”
“Well, well, well, you must tell me the story,
“Maybe someday,” I said. “What about the third one?”
“Ah, yes, the third one.” He plucked another deep red rose from its stem and twirled it between his fingers, admiring each velvet petal. “The last sphere I acquired only recently. The craftsmanship is exquisite and sublime, and it is the most mysterious and complex of the three. It was uncovered six years ago in a cave near the Portuguese coastal town of Marinha Grande. From there, its history is a bit murky until it was brought to my attention through the man you know as Sesine. In order to obtain it, I was forced to perform an odious task for an objectionable man who was quite insane, but the disservice has since been rectified. He made the unfortunate mistake of believing he had, shall we say, ‘won the chess match.’ ”
“Blaine Harrington?”
“Checkmate,” the Fleur-du-Mal said with a smile. “Now, come with me and I will take you to the milk barn.”
“To see the cows?”
Laughing, he threw the rose over his shoulder and said, “No,
The milk barn was anything but a barn and the only cow around was in the leather that covered the furniture throughout. Every chair and couch was designed in a distinctly western American style, and the exposed cedar beams as well as the pine flooring made it look and smell more like Montana than East Germany. The vast space inside had been transformed into a combined studio, laboratory, library, workshop, spa, and a few other areas for various arcane pursuits. I glanced around, but I couldn’t take in everything at once. It was obvious, although his flaws and crimes were countless and beyond endurance, that the Fleur-du-Mal was not lazy.
He flipped a switch on the wall and an area in the center of the room was lit from all sides by a bank of lights. Three stainless-steel cylinders about a foot in diameter and three feet tall stood in a line. They were anchored to the floor and shining brightly in the lights. Perched and resting atop each cylinder were the stone spheres. “There they are, Zezen,” he said. “Go closer.”
I stepped toward them. I couldn’t look away. I felt an instant connection and sense of awe. I remembered something Star had told me years earlier when she and Willie Croft were living in Cornwall at Caitlin’s Ruby. She said one weekend Willie drove her to see Stonehenge and she had an experience unlike any she’d ever had. Star said as she approached the megaliths, she became almost intoxicated with a presence, an “intelligence,” she called it. She said it was undeniable, silent, and overwhelming, and it emanated directly from the stones. As I gazed at the three spheres, I felt the same thing. The three of them together had a power that was profound.
The Fleur-du-Mal flipped another switch and the steel cylinders began to rotate, so slowly it was barely perceptible, but just enough to give the spheres another dimension. They seemed to float or drift, and the markings seemed to swim as the stones turned in the light. We both stood mesmerized by their beauty and mystery. Then he said, “You may not agree,
I didn’t agree; however, I did feel a sense of guilt because I was so excited about seeing the spheres and I couldn’t wait to study them.
The Fleur-du-Mal must have read my thoughts. “You need to lose your anemic, pathetic, obsolescent Giza morality, Zezen. Doing so would allow you to be much happier and probably do much better work. And while we are on the subject, I need to make one thing clear. I want you to tell Jack Flowers if he or any of his friends in Washington take any action whatsoever against Valery or me for the incident in Dallas, then they will sincerely regret it. I happen to have in my possession certain documents I removed from Blaine Harrington that clearly implicate several people in the Pentagon and other branches, people who could and would eliminate Jack and his entire family in one day. Jack is a smart man and I am sure he knows this to be true. But just remind him,
With little or no expression I told him I would relay the message. I then asked him to turn off the rotation of the cylinders and leaned over and felt the oldest sphere with my hands. Wherever it had been found, the stone had suffered from countless thousands of years of exposure to the elements. It was also the largest of the three, and its markings, or what was left of them, were spaced farther apart than on the other two. I walked around the sphere from Portugal and marveled at its sheer perfection. It was the smallest one, and its granite surface was infused with a reddish hue and had been polished until it was nearly smooth as glass. It looked as if its creators had only finished yesterday. The carved script was complex and sublime in every way. I glanced at the sphere delivered by Valery and thought back to the exhibit and Geaxi’s reaction to the Neanderthal bones.
“What do you make of the Neanderthal children’s bones found with this one?” I asked, pointing to the Caucasus sphere.
“I have no opinion … yet. That is one of the subjects we must investigate. The stones may reveal the reason in time. But, tell me, Zezen — what makes you so certain they are the bones of children? Because they are small and immature?”
My answer was another question. “Have you had any breakthroughs with the markings?”
“A few. So far, they are random and inconsequential, but there was something odd about each breakthrough, or rather each
