The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(42)

The little dark-haired man pauses to buy a paper from a newsboy. The white envelope slips from his jacket and falls on the path when he digs into his pocket for change. The boy scoops it up, slips it into the folds of the man’s newspaper before handing it back to him. During this exchange, which lasts no longer than thirty seconds, Mr. Faulk pauses to light another cigar. I pass him and murmur without stopping, “Stay with him; I have the boy.”

Apparently, the dark-haired man bought the boy’s last paper, for the boy shoulders his bag, abandons his post, and hurries toward the park exit on West Fifty-ninth Street. I count to ten after he passes me, then turn on my heel to follow.

Several trolley stops and a dozen blocks later, I find myself on Elizabeth Street in the heart of Little Italy, where the unusually mild weather has drawn hundreds from their crowded tenement nests. The sidewalks are choked with hawkers and hustlers, pickpockets and petty thieves, solitary men in threadbare coats, lean-cheeked and hard-eyed, not one of whom fails to notice my expensive coat and leather shoes, and gangs of young boys as lean as their elders but not quite as hard-eyed, not yet, and mothers sitting on the stoops with little ones in white bonnets bouncing on their laps, the street clogged with rickety carts attached to overworked, underfed horses, and everywhere the smell of boiled rabbit and fresh flowers and wood smoke and horse shit, and the Italian songs floating through open windows and the hysterical, desperate babble of a thousand human souls stuffed into a three-block radius.

The boy did not hurry through the throng; I easily kept up with the little hat bobbing along, the hat that reminded me of another hat, two sizes too small, which belonged to another boy in another age. Occasionally I could see the newspaper bag popping up and down against his back and thought I could discern a bulge there the size of the large white envelope.

He passed a tiny closet of a restaurant and ducked into the alley that ran beside it. He turned at the first juncture, disappearing behind the building with the restaurant. And that’s where I lost him. I turned the corner, and he was gone. The door beneath the rickety fire escape hung slightly ajar; had he gone in? Yes, obviously, unless he’d sprouted wings and taken off into the blue.

I stepped into the narrow back hallway and eased the revolver from my pocket, pausing to allow my eyes to adjust to the sudden falloff of light. I smelled bread baking, heard the clink and clatter of plates and a man’s strident voice speaking loudly in the lyrical Sicilian cadence. Light flooded across the hall from an open doorway several paces in. I pressed my back against the wall, sidestepped to the opening, and, holding my breath, slowly turned to peek into the room.

The boy was sitting at a table with three men, two of whom were very large and wore heavy coats, their heads bent low over plates of steaming pasta, a half-empty bottle of wine between them. The third man was not quite so large and his coat not quite as heavy, and it did not appear he had touched his food nor any of the wine, for Pellinore Warthrop frowned upon anything that muddied thought or dulled senses. I spied the white envelope beside one of the brutes’ plates.

My internal debate did not last long. No, I did not see the monstrumologist bound and gagged and awaiting execution. Though he did not appear particularly happy, there was no look of distress, no panicky glance at his companions; he even gave the boy one of his pained, humorless smiles as the child tucked the long napkin under his chin and dove into his meal with unrestrained ardor. But I did see the shotgun leaning against the wall within easy reach of the man to his left. And I did not see the “prisoner” get up and thank his captors for their hospitality, despite the successful consummation of the transaction. The money had arrived, yet Warthrop did not stir from the chair. That sealed it. I swung around and stepped into the room.

The one on Warthrop’s left reacted instantly, lunging for the shotgun with surprising litheness for a man his size. The gun was two feet away, but it might as well have been in Harlem. My bullet tore into his neck, severing his carotid artery, and blood a brighter and more vibrant red than his wine spewed from the gaping wound. The boy dove under the table. Warthrop shot out of his seat, his arm outstretched, but I was blind to him, blind to everything but the other thug fumbling with the handgun he had dragged from his coat pocket. I had the sensation of traveling at great speed down a dark tunnel, at the end of which his face burned with the energy of a thousand suns. I saw his face and that was all I could see. It was all I needed to see.

I rocketed past the monstrumologist, traveling at the speed of light, brought the gun within an inch of the man’s expansive forehead, and pulled the trigger.

That left the boy.

FOLIO XIII

Paradiso

AND I, NOW DRAWING CLOSER TO THE END

OF EVERY LONGING, LIFTED TO THAT END,

JUST AS I SHOULD, THE FLAME OF ALL MY LONGING.

—DANTE, THE PARADISO

Canto 1

ONE

I circumnavigate the years to come round again, for time is the unforgiveable lie, and Mother and Father forever waltz in flame and a stranger forever leans over me, asking Do you know who I am?, and this is the thing I must tell you, this is the thing you must know: that we are infinitely more and nothing less than our reflections in the amber eye.

Are you listening; do you understand? Circles have no end: They go on and on like the cries of dead men long since gone. Have you known eternity in an hour? Have you seen fear in a handful of dust?

The universe gibbers. The center will not hold. There is a space one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision, and in that space a pinprick, a singularity, a wordless, lightless, silent, numb Nothingness without dimension, infinitely small, infinitely deep, like the pupil of the amber eye, darkness that goes all the way down to the bottomless bottom, the end of the circle without end.