heart attack.'
'How about that?' said Pinkus.
'If that was the case, then what prevented them from going right in and stealing the book?' asked Stern. 'The chain wasn't even broken.'
'Our sudden arrival interrupted them,' said Doyle. 'And what's the harm? They waited for another opportunity: Who was going to suspect he died of anything other than what it appeared to be?
'Except that Mr. Selig bravely marshaled his resources in the last moments of his life: Grabbing a handful of the clay from the monster—some still remained under his fingernails— he used it to trace an outline on the wall of this tattoo he had seen on one of his assailant's forearms.'
'How 'bout that?' said Pinkus, falling back again on what he always said whenever he had nothing to say.
'I guess it all makes a kind of sense, except how could they know Rupert had a heart condition?'' said Stern. ''Even I wasn't aware of that.'
'Mr. Selig lived in London; presumably they obtained the information from his doctor's office,' said Doyle. 'He told you he was being followed while you were there; how difficult could it have been?'
Stern weighed the possibilities; after the recent events he'd been through, he was hard pressed to dismiss the idea out of hand.
'Still seems like an awful lot of bother to go to just to get an old book,' said Innes, slightly petulant that his brother had failed to confide any of these conclusions to him earlier and in private.
'As Mr. Stern has told us, the Zohar is priceless and whoever hired these men is obviously willing to go to any lengths to obtain it.'
'I'd always thought it was nothing more than a collection of superstitious nonsense,' said Stern. 'What if the Zohar actually does contain some secret formula about the creation of life. Or its meaning ...'
'Then priceless isn't good enough by half,' said Doyle.
'Yeah and besides,' said Pinkus, eyes squinting, snapping his gum violently while he wrestled a tremendously obscure inner line of reasoning to the ground, 'if they ain't even stole the book yet, how'd they get this monster to walk around by itself anyway?'
Try as they might, to a note sounded from such a bottomless depth of stupidity, no one could respond.
Doyle left Innes and Pinkus to oversee removal of the assassin's body, delivered Stern into the care of officers and trudged back to his cabin alone by the feeble light of an oil lamp. Gripping hard to the rails as he fought the pitch and roll of the decks, Doyle realized a mid-Atlantic storm by itself would be hardship enough for most, although he had lived through many more perilous nights aboard smaller ships on the open sea. He was more deeply troubled by the lingering uncertainties he hadn't shared with the others of his company, details that no one else had lit upon and pursued.
If one of those coffins had been carrying a large clay figure, that left room in the others for four men to steal aboard. One of those dead by his own hand; a second gone overboard; the third member of the attack team had escaped past Pinkus in the second-class passageway. The fourth had most probably killed and then assumed the place of that young lieutenant on the bridge. That left two of them still on the
Five men. Four coffins.
The question: How did this Father Devine get on board the ship? He wasn't listed as a passager, and the ship's staff could find no trace of him. Doyle had been close to him that first day on deck and again at the seance; his age and girth didn't make him for one of the men in black, and that unfortunate lieutenant had been only twenty-three years old; Devine could never have replaced him on the bridge convincingly. And Doyle had encountered the man within an hour of their departure from port, not nearly enough time to have removed himself from a coffin in the hold; the hammering sounds from belowdecks hadn't been heard until that evening.
Think, Doyle: A priest mingling among a busy ship full of departing passengers would raise no eyebrows; suppose he drifted up the gangway amid a group of people as if to see them off, then simply removed himself from view until they'd sailed from harbor. Yes; that tracked.
There was also the matter of the design engraved on the dead man's arm. Doyle felt almost certain it had some hidden meaning, but try as he might he couldn't crack it....
As the ship climbed up and down the canyons of the waves, Doyle struggled to unlock and open his cabin door. Darkness inside; the door flapped back and forth with the rocking.
Someone inside.
Doyle slowly drew the pistol from his belt.
Light from the lantern penetrated the room: A knife pierced the floor near the bed, pinning down a note written in large red block letters.
'NEXT TIME WE'LL KILL YOU.'
'Close the door,' said a voice.
Father Devine stood motionless in the corner of the room, arms folded, obscured in the crease of a shadow. The ship rolled to starboard and seams in the walls groaned with the strain. Doyle closed the door, cocked the hammer of the pistol, covered Devine, and lifted the lantern higher.
A body lay twisted grotesquely at the foot of the bunk; a figure in black, still wearing a mask. One of the assassins. Strangled with his own garrote. Three men killed; only one of them left alive.
'What do you want?' asked Doyle.
Father Devine took one step forward, did not shield his eyes from the light, and Doyle saw him clearly, head on, for the first time since they'd boarded the ship; saw the jagged ivory scar along his jawline, saw the light in the man's eyes he hadn't taken in before, and it pummeled the breath from his lungs.
The priest smiled thinly, looking down at the body on the floor.
'This one was waiting for you,' he said, all the Irish in him gone. 'He died before I could learn anything useful.'
It wasn't possible.
Good Christ. Good Christ, yes it was. It was him.
Jack Sparks.
BOOK TWO
New York
chapter 5
