cold.
He had caught the smell of the god again, that wonderful clean fragrance of sunshine and massed flowers. Here it was even stronger than it had been beside Robbie’s grave. But the air did not darken and there were no trembling flashes of light. The god smell was natural, not supernatural. A slight meandering breeze took it away, then brought it to him again. Then Poole saw a rank of lolling blue and white wildflowers off to his left and knew that they were the source of the magical scent. They had bloomed in the sudden good weather and had somehow survived the fall in temperature. He could not identify the flowers, which were as tall as tulips, with wide blue blossoms striped white toward the center. They grew before a group of oak trees, and their sturdy green stalks protruded like spears up out of the leaf mold. The powerful scent came to him again.
When he looked forward, the man in the grey topcoat was leveling his index finger at him.
“… want that man out of there right now, Watkins,” Poole heard.
Watkins took a slow step forward, and the cemetery official shoved him in the small of his back.
“Get a move on!”
Watkins began to half-stumble, half-trot toward Poole. He was shading his eyes to see into the woods, and Poole knew that his form must have been flickering in and out of sight, like Koko’s a few minutes earlier. Watkins’ arms pumped, and his big belly heaved. The pale blob of his face looked set and unhappy.
“Nothing’s wrong!” Poole yelled, holding out his hand.
Watkins moved to run in on the same wandering path Poole had taken. He ducked to pass beneath the dark slanting line of the dead ash tree.
The man in the grey coat stepped forward as if he were going to chase after Poole himself, and Watkins took another heavy, lumbering step into the shade, and toppled over out of sight.
Poole heard him thud into the ground. He began to run toward him. Watkins’ big fuzzy head showed above a tangle of crisp vines, and his face turned toward Poole and showed a round O of mouth. Then the O began to emit ragged screams.
“Shut up,” said his boss.
“He cut me!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Watkins held up a hand streaming with blood. “Look, Mr. Del Barca!”
Del Barca squared off in front of Poole and pointed his index finger at him again. “Stop right there,” he said. “I’m having you arrested. You were trespassing on private cemetery grounds, and you injured my employee here.”
“Calm down,” Poole said.
“I demand to know what you were doing back there.”
“I was trying to find the man who strung up this booby trap.” Poole moved over the last bit of ground between himself and the fallen man. Watkins lay on his side with his left leg out before him. He was red in the face, and his fuzzy hair was matted with sweat. A widening blurry line of blood had already soaked through his left trouser leg.
“What booby trap?” Del Barca asked.
“Just relax,” Poole said. “I’m a doctor, and this man needs my help. He ran into a wire, and it did some damage to his leg.”
“What goddamned
Poole bent down and ran his hand over the ground four or five inches behind Watkins. There was the wire, shiny and taut. It looked very much like razor wire. He lightly touched it. “You’re lucky it didn’t cut his leg off. Did you hear me telling him to stop?”
“You telling him?” Del Barca shouted. “Whose fault is this?”
“Yours, for one. Suppose you see what this line is connected to at either end. If it’s anything but a rock or a tree trunk, leave it alone.”
“Check it out,” Del Barca told his other employee, a younger man with the face of a moustached gerbil.
“Don’t touch anything.”
Poole knelt beside the man and gently urged him to lie flat on the ground. “You’re going to need stitches,” he said, “but we’ll see how bad the damage is.”
“You better be a real doctor, buddy,” Del Barca said.
“John. John,” the undertaker said in a soft, urgent voice. “I know him.”
Poole hooked his fingers into the cut in the fabric and ripped. A big bloody flap of cloth came away in his hand. “That line might still be hooked up to explosives,” he said to the young man with the gerbil’s face. The young man jerked his hand away from the wire as if he had been scalded. There was a deep gash in Watkins’ leg from which blood pulsed out at a slow steady rate. “You need St. Bart’s emergency ward,” he said, and looked up at Del Barca. “Give me your necktie.”
“My what?”
“Your tie. Do you want this man to bleed to death?”
La Barca resentfully untied his necktie and handed it to Poole. He turned to the undertaker. “All right, who is he?”
“I don’t remember his name, but he’s a doctor, all right.”
“My name is Dr. Michael Poole.” He wound Del Barca’s Countess Mara necktie three times around Watkins’ leg to stop the flow of blood and twisted it tight before knotting it. “You’ll be okay as soon as you get to St. Bart’s,” he told Watkins, and stood up. “I’d get him there as soon as you can. You could drive right up here and put him in your car.”
An almost aesthetic expression of distaste passed over Del Barca’s features. “Wait a second. Did you set up this … this booby trap?”
“I just recognized it,” Poole said. “From Vietnam.”
Del Barca blinked.
“That wire’s just tied to trees on both ends,” called the rabbit-faced boy. “Cut right through the bark.”
Watkins whimpered.
“Go on, Traddles,” Del Barca said. “Use your hearse. It’s closer.”
Traddles nodded gloomily and padded away downhill toward his hearse. His assistant followed him. “I was here for the Talbot funeral,” Poole said to Del Barca. “I walked over here to look at my son’s grave, and I saw a man disappearing into these woods. He looked so odd that I followed him, and when I saw that tripwire I got interested enough to follow him deeper into the woods. Then you started yelling at me. I guess the man just got away.”
“Musta been parked alongside the expressway,” said the younger man.
They watched Traddles drive toward them along the narrow lane. When he had come as close as he could, he got out of the cab and waited by the door. The assistant ran around and opened the back.
“Go on, get him up,” Del Barca said. “You can stand, Watkins. It wasn’t exactly an amputation.” He turned a sour, suspicious face to Michael. “I’m going to the police about this.”
“Good idea,” Michael said. “Have them check out that whole area back there, but tell them to be careful.”
The two men watched the big man limp off toward Traddles’ hearse, leaning on his small companion and hissing with every step. “Do you know the name of those flowers growing just inside the woods?” Michael asked Del Barca.
“We don’t plant flowers.” Del Barca gave a grim little smile. “We
“Big blue and white ones,” Poole persisted. “With a strong, carrying scent.”
“Weeds,” Del Barca said. “If it grows back there, we pretty much let it go to hell by itself.”
6
When Michael returned to Conor’s empty apartment he looked out of the window down onto Water Street. He did not expect to see Victor Spitalny looking back up at him, for Spitalny would have had no trouble melting into his particular form of invisibility among the crowds of tourists that filled the renovated Water Street all during the
