I had told them about Bosworth on the journey into Portland. It seemed that they were already aware of him. After all, he had tried to tear apart one of their churches. Still, they did not know where he was, and I decided not to tell them that he was in New York.
“And finally, Mr. Parker, I want you to be careful,” said Reid. “There is a controlling intelligence at work here, and it’s not Brightwell.”
He tapped his finger against the copy of the painting, allowing it to rest above the head of the armored captain with the white mark on his eye.
“Somewhere there is one who believes that he is the reincarnation of the Captain, which means that he suffers from the greatest delusion of all. In his mind, he is Ashmael, driven to seek his twin. For the present, Brightwell is curious about you, but his priority is to find the statue. Once that is secure, he will turn his attention back to you, and I don’t think that will be a positive development.”
Reid leaned across the table and gripped my shoulder with his left hand. His right reached into his shirt and removed from it a black-and-silver cross that hung around his neck.
“Remember, though: no matter what may happen, the answer to all things is here.”
With that, he removed the cross and handed it to me. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it.
I returned to my house alone. Reid and Bartek had offered to accompany me, and even to stay with me, but I politely declined. Maybe it was misplaced pride, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the possibility that I needed two monks to watch my back. It seemed like a slippery slope that would eventually lead to nuns accompanying me to the gym, and the priests from Saint Maximilian’s running my bathwater.
There was a car parked in my driveway when I pulled in, and my front door was open. Walter was lying on the porch mat, happily gnawing on a marrowbone. Angel appeared behind him. Walter looked up, wagged his tail, then returned to his supper.
“I don’t remember leaving the door open,” I said.
“We like to think that your door is always open to us, and if it isn’t, we can always open it with a pick. Plus, we know your alarm codes. We left a message on your cell.”
I checked my phone. I hadn’t heard it ring, but there were two messages waiting.
“I got distracted,” I said.
“With what?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
I listened to my messages as I walked. The first was from Angel. The second was from Ellis Chambers, the man I had turned away when he came to me about his son, the man I had advised to seek help elsewhere. His words deteriorated into sobs before he could finish telling me all that he wanted to say, but what I heard was enough.
The body of his son Neil had been found in a ditch outside Olathe, Kansas. The men to whom he owed money had finally lost their patience with him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Few people now remember the name of Sam Lichtman. Lichtman was a New York cabdriver who, on March 18, 1941, was driving his yellow cab along Seventh Avenue near Times Square when he ran over a guy who suddenly stepped out in front of him at an intersection. According to the dead man’s passport, his name was Don Julio Lopez Lido, a Spaniard. In the confusion, nobody noticed that Don Julio had been talking to another man at the intersection before he made his fatal attempt to cross and that, as a curious crowd gathered in the wake of the accident, this second man picked up a brown leather briefcase lying near the body and disappeared.
The NYPD duly arrived, and discovered that Don Julio was staying in a Manhattan hotel. When the cops went to his room, they found maps, notes, and a great deal of material related to military aviation. The FBI were called in, and as they dug deeper into the mystery of the dead Spaniard, they discovered that he was actually one Ulrich von der Osten, a captain in Nazi military intelligence, and he was the brains behind the main German spy network in the United States. The man who had fled the scene of the accident was Kurt Frederick Ludwig, von der Osten’s assistant, and together the two men had managed to recruit eight accomplices who were passing details of military strength, shipping schedules, and industrial production back to Berlin, including the departure and arrival times of ships using New York Harbor and the numbers of Flying Fortresses being sent to England. The reports were written in invisible ink and mailed to pseudonymous recipients at fictitious foreign addresses. Letters to one “Manuel Alonzo,” for example, were meant for Heinrich Himmler himself. Ludwig was subsequently arrested, he and his associates were tried in federal court in Manhattan, and they each received a sentence of up to twenty years for their troubles. Sam Lichtman, with one surge of gas, had managed to cripple the Nazis’ entire intelligence network in the United States.
My father told me Lichtman’s story when I was a boy, and I never forgot it. I guessed that Lichtman was a Jewish name, and it seemed somehow apt that it should have been a Jew who knocked down a Nazi on Seventh Avenue in 1941, when so many of his fellows were already on cattle trains heading east. It was a small blow for his people, inadvertently struck by a man who then faded into folk memory.
Louis hadn’t heard the story of Sam Lichtman, and he didn’t appear very impressed with it when I told it to him. He listened without comment while I went through the events of the last couple of days, culminating in the visit from the two monks and the encounter with Brightwell on the road. When I mentioned the fat man, and Reid’s interpretation of the words he had spoken to me on the road, something changed in Louis’s demeanor. He seemed almost to retreat from me, withdrawing further into himself, and he avoided looking at me directly.
“And you think this might be the same guy who was watching us when we took G-Mack?” said Angel. He was aware of the tension between Louis and me, and let me know with a slight movement of his eyes in his partner’s direction that we could talk about it in private later.
“The feelings he aroused were the same,” I said. “I can’t explain it any other way.”
“He sounds like one of the men who came looking for Sereta,” said Angel. “Octavio didn’t have a name for him, but there can’t be too many guys like that walking the streets.”
I thought of the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop and the pictures and photographs that Reid and Bartek had shown me at the Great Lost Bear. I arranged the images in my mind in order of antiquity, progressing from paint strokes to sepia, then on to the man seated behind Stuckler’s group, before finally recalling the figure of Brightwell himself, somehow reaching for me without moving, his nails cutting me without a hand being laid upon me. Each time he got a little older, his flesh a little more corrupted, that terrible, painful extrusion on his neck a little larger and more obvious. No, there could not be many such men on this earth. There could not ever have been many such men.
“So what now?” said Angel. “Sekula’s dropped off the planet, and he was our best lead.”
Angel and Louis had paid a visit to Sekula’s building earlier in the week and had gone through his apartment and his office. They had found virtually nothing in the office: insignificant files relating to a number of properties in the tristate area, some fairly straightforward corporate material, and a folder marked with the name Ambassade Realty that contained just a single letter, dated two years earlier, acknowledging that Ambassade was now responsible for the maintenance and potential leasing of three warehouse buildings, including the one in Williamsburg. The apartment above the office wasn’t much more revealing. There were clothes and toiletries, both male and female, which made it seem more and more likely that Sekula and the improbably named Hope were an item; some suitably anonymous books and magazines that suggested he and his mate bought all of their reading material at airports; and a kitchen filled with drearily healthy foodstuffs, along with a refrigerator entirely devoid of food of any kind at all, apart from long-life milk. According to Angel, it looked like someone had cherry-picked and then removed anything that might have been remotely interesting about Sekula’s life and work in order to create the impression that here was one of the single most boring individuals ever to have passed a bar exam.