Game of Cages

seat and hustled around the front. He opened the back door like a chauffeur.

A small woman slipped into the backseat. From above I didn’t have the best view of her, but I saw that her very dark hair was parted severely down the middle and curled into a librarian’s bun. She had a dark complexion and wore a gray suit.

The chauffeur closed her door, got behind the wheel, and sped off. If she was leaving before the others, she worked for Mr. Yin, which meant she was the Well-Spoken Woman who was so casual about asking other people to kill for her. I hoped Catherine was in position to snap a photo.

I mentally ran through the list of bidders Horace had given us: Yin’s people were all out on the hillside hunting for the predator. I hadn’t seen Yin himself, only his gunman and Well-Spoken Woman, who was his representative. Kripke and his biker bodyguard were accounted for and not doing very well. I’d seen Professor Solorov and about half of her mismatched, badly dressed Fellows; on their own, they didn’t impress, but their guns were dangerous enough.

And there was Tattoo, who had to be the German with the harsh voice. I didn’t like the look of him, especially since Horace had said he was one of the “old man’s” people. The professor had said the old man would have eaten Kripke, and based on previous experience, I knew there was a good chance she meant it literally. I didn’t want to meet that old man.

That meant I’d had at least a glimpse of each of the four groups of bidders. Hopefully, what I’d learned would be useful to the society.

I went back into the hall and heard the faint jabbering of a radio. I peered into the darkness and noticed a tiny sliver of light shining from under a door. I had a hunch I knew who was behind that door, and if I was right, the guesthouse could wait.

“I can hear you out there!” Regina shouted. “You can’t fool these old ears.”

Fair enough. I opened the door and went inside.

The bright light hit half a second before the smell. Who ever brought Regina up here hadn’t expected her to sleep. Maybe they didn’t care. Three halogen lamps filled the room with an acid-yellow light—there was no way to nod off in here without a blindfold.

The room also stank of unwashed bedpans, sweat, and neglect. My initial impulse was to flee back into the musty shadows of the hall.

“I know,” Regina said. I guess I wouldn’t have made much of a poker player in that moment. She switched off a small transistor radio on the bed beside her. Her niece had buckled her left wrist to a bolt in the frame. She was still wearing the dirty nightgown, and I wished she would pull it down over the black-and-blue patches on her legs. They gave me goose bumps. “It sickens me, too. Just be glad you don’t have to live this way.”

“I am. My name is Ray.”

“I’m Regina Wilbur. When I was a girl, my father would have had you thrown out of this house for introducing yourself to me. You’d have left with a muddy boot print on your derriere.”

“Things have changed,” I said, for lack of anything more profound to offer.

She rattled the short chain on her restraint. “So they have. What have you done with Armand?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know who that is,” I said, hoping it would prompt her to explain.

Instead, she sighed bitterly and looked around the room. “This house was mine once. My father built it with timber money. My husband built four more just like it all over the country, and one in the Italian Alps, too. He took my father’s fortune and doubled it five times. Trucking lines, at the beginning, then tires and road building. He was a bastard, but most are. At least he had the decency to die young.

“But now Stephanie has taken it all, and the little bitch didn’t even have the good manners to wait until I had dirt over my face. She’s going to sell it, just like the ones in Carolina and Maine, so she can live in California.” She said that word with special distaste. “All auctioned off! All the history here. All the gifts from politicians and people desperate to do business. Even from enemies who wanted my blessing …”

Her voice trailed off and she stared across the room. Her eyes were like dark river stones. The whole situation made me uneasy.

She seemed to have forgotten me. To prompt her, I said: “Was Armand one of those gifts?”

“Yes,” she said, savoring the word like it was candy. “He was a gift from one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, Nelson Taber Stroud. Dead now, of course. He and I clashed over all sorts of garbage over the years, especially mining rights, but that changed once Armand arrived. Nothing else mattered after that. Armand was everything.”

What is he? I wanted to ask. That seemed too direct. Regina may have been in a bad spot, but she was still sharp. And she hadn’t asked for my help, hadn’t even hinted that she wanted it. She was either tough as hell or completely crazy.

“It sounds like you loved him very much.”

“You bet I did. I made sure Ursula kept his cage clean and stayed with him in his house. He was loved, and I made sure he knew it.”

She looked at a nightstand loaded with pictures in silver frames. I circled the bed toward it. I had to move in front of a window, but the glass was so dirty that I wasn’t worried about being spotted. The closest picture, though still out of her reach, was of a much younger Regina holding a Scottish terrier to her face. The dog wore a diamond necklace. “Is this Armand?”

She twisted her mouth in disgust. “That’s the first Armand. Give me that.”

I handed the picture to her. She snatched it with her free hand and flung it across the room. It smashed against a radiator with a noise I thought the whole house could hear.

Damn. Now I understood why it had been out of her reach. I slid my hand into my pocket next to my ghost knife, just in case someone came to investigate.

“That’s what I think of that,” she said with finality. She turned back to the other pictures.