“I’m a lawyer,” said Quayle. “My duty is to question.”
“And mine is to find a murderer, and perhaps his accomplice.”
“Accomplice?”
“Someone entered Maulding’s home before the police were summoned by the housekeeper. Soter, in his manuscript, claims to have barricaded the doors of the house before locking himself in Maulding’s secret library, but the front door was open when the housekeeper arrived, as was that of the library itself. The doors to both had been broken from the outside. We found marks.”
“What kind of marks?”
“We thought at first that they might have been made by a crowbar, but now a rake appears more likely, or some implement with tines capable of scratching wood. We’ve questioned the groundsman, but he was at home throughout, and his family corroborates his statement.”
“Tines,” said Quayle thoughtfully. He raised his right hand before him and stretched the fingers, examining the neatly cut nails. If Hassard noticed the gesture, he said nothing about it.
“And the book of which Soter wrote,” said Hassard, “the one that he claimed to have burned?”
“Yes,” said Quayle. “The Fractured Atlas.”
“We found no traces of it in the fire.”
“It was a book,” said Quayle. “Books burn.”
“Yes, I suppose that must be it.”
Hassard tapped his pen on his notebook.
“Do you think that Soter was mad?” he asked Quayle.
“As I told you, I think he was disturbed.”
“If his manuscript is to believed, he thought that clocks were running backward, and the dimensions of this world were altering. He ascribed some dread purpose to a derailment that blocked two tracks and brought down the telegraph wires.”
“I remember a different Soter, a better one.”
“Did you know that, some weeks earlier, he’d gone to the home of General Sir William Pulteney and kicked up quite the racket? It’s lucky that the general didn’t end up a victim, too.”
“I did not, but Soter didn’t care much for Pulteney. In that, at least, he was not deluded or insane.”
“Maulding’s nephew didn’t take that view when I spoke with him.”
“Mr. Sebastian Forbes,” said Quayle, with no particular fondness. “He stands to inherit a great deal of money, once the details of Maulding’s estate are finalized.”
“Mr. Forbes is of the opinion that, as executor of his uncle’s will, you’re dragging your feet on making sure that he gets what is rightfully his.”
“Really?” said Quayle. “How odd. I think it’s safe to say that Mr. Forbes will get what’s his when the time is right.”
Hassard appeared about to say something in reply, then bit his tongue and put away his notebook.
“Are we finished?” asked Quayle.
“For now.”
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of more help to you.”
Hassard managed a smile.
“Are you really?”
“You’re very cynical, even for a detective.”
“Perhaps. One final question does strike me, though.”
“Ask it.”
“Do you believe that Soter is dead?”
Quayle considered.
“I believe that Soter will not be found alive on this earth,” he said at last.
“That’s an interesting reply.”
“Isn’t it, though?” said Quayle. “Come, let me show you out. Those stairs can be tricky.”
• • •
The night deepened. At last even the thin halo of light visible around the edge of Quayle’s drapes was extinguished, and the lawyer himself appeared in the courtyard. He crossed the cobblestones, unlocked the door directly across from his office, and closed it gently behind him. He had not even bothered to check if he might have been observed, for he was sensitive to every minor change in his environment.
After all, he had been there for a very long time, and before him stretched infinity.
He ascended the narrow staircase and entered his comfortable lodgings: a dining room, a living room-cum-library, a small kitchen, and a bedroom dominated by a massive oak bed of the same hue and vintage as the desk in his office. Again, had that mythical figure, the man with time on his hands and a particular interest in the lifestyle of the lawyer Quayle, been permitted entry, and enjoyed sufficient perspicacity, he might have noted that the square footage of the rooms, taken together, rather seemed to exceed the available space within the walls. Most of the volumes on the shelves were legal tomes, although interspersed among them were occult volumes of the most unique kind, including books named but never seen, and treatises cursed by the Church from the moment their existence became known.
Only one book was not shelved. It stood on a reading stand, its cover charred, its pages blackened. Just as Quayle entered, a section of the cover appeared to extend itself, if only by a fraction of an inch, covering a space that had previously been bare board. The Atlas was reconstituting itself.
Quayle set aside the sheaf of papers he had brought with him and took off his jacket and scarf. He approached a door set into the shelves, one which, had an intruder succeeded in opening it, would have revealed only a blank wall. But Quayle knew better than anyone the strangeness of the universe, and that what one saw did not always bear an accurate relation to what was actually being seen. He withdrew a key from his trouser pocket, inserted it into the keyhole, and turned it. Although he gave only a single rotation to the key, from behind the door came the sound of many locks working, and it seemed to echo over and over, gradually receding as though a near-infinite number of doors were slowly being unsealed.
Quayle seized the handle and twisted it. He opened the door outward, revealing the naked man who hung suspended before him, seemingly unsecured, floating against the blackness of space beyond.
Lionel Maulding never stopped screaming, but he made no noise in that place. Quayle watched for a few moments as a section of skin unpeeled itself from Maulding’s scalp and slowly tore a narrow strip through his forehead, along his nose, then his lips and his throat, moving steadily and evenly down his chest and belly . . .
Quayle looked away. He had seen the show before. He had even timed it. It took about a day for Lionel Maulding to be reduced to muscle and bone, veins and arteries, and then the process of rebuilding would commence. It seemed to Quayle that this was at least as agonizing for Maulding as the mutilation that necessitated it, but Quayle was entirely without pity for the man. Maulding should have known. There was nothing in the occult volumes that were his obsession to suggest the end to his explorations would be a pleasant one.
Beside Maulding hung Soter. His eyes were closed. His eyes were always closed, as were his ears, and his mouth, and his nostrils, all sewn shut with thick catgut, the same material that joined his arms to his body, and his legs to each other. Imprisoned inside that still form was Soter’s consciousness, trapped in a hell that resembled High Wood, for after a man had been through such suffering, there was little else that could be invented to torment him further. For Soter, Quayle did feel something like pity. Quayle was not human, even by the low standards of his profession, but some iota of humanity had infected him after all this time.
Behind these two figures hung hundreds of similar forms: men and women suspended like the husks of insects in a great web. Some had been there for so long that Quayle could not even remember their names, or what they might have done to merit this end. It didn’t matter. It was, Quayle supposed, all a question of perspective.
Deep in the blackness beyond the bodies, red veins were visible, like the fractures in volcanic rock. The universe was sundering, its thin shell cracking. In parts it was almost transparent. Quayle watched a massive form press itself against the barrier, a being to which entire galaxies appeared only as froth on the surface of a distant lake. He glimpsed jointed legs, and jaws within jaws. He saw jagged teeth, and a mass of black-gray eyes like frogspawn
in the depths of a pond.
Even after all this time, Quayle trembled in the presence of the Not-God.
Crowding behind it were others, so many others, not so great as the first but all waiting for the rifts to open and admit them. It would take time, of course, but time was nothing to them, or to Quayle. The world had been rewritten. The book had done its work, but when it was restored it would commence a new narrative, and the first chapter would tell of the creation of another kind of universe.
Quayle turned away. He locked the door behind him, went to his kitchen, and prepared a fresh pot of tea.
Then he sat, and watched The Fractured Atlas grow.
RAZORSHINS
My grandfather’s name was Tendell Tucker, and he was a hard man. He ran liquor for King Solomon during Prohibition, taking care of the road runs from Canada through Maine, and down to Boston. Mostly he answered to Dan Carroll, who was Solomon’s partner, because my grandfather preferred dealing with the Irish to working with the Jews. He never said why. He was just that kind of fella.
A lot of people don’t know it, but Dan Carroll was a cautious man, which might explain why he lived so long. During Prohibition, most of his shipments came ashore from boats at night and were met by trucks that brought his booze to warehouses for distribution, but he liked to cover his bets when he could. He wasn’t a gambler, not like Abe Rothstein, or even Solomon himself. Carroll would calculate his outlay, and the potential profit to be realized from each shipment, then split it accordingly. So if he’d invested $30,000 in Canadian liquor and was looking at a return of $300,000, he would work out how many cases were needed to cover his initial costs, and then run them into Boston separately, usually in specially converted Cadillacs. That way, if the coast guard came sniffing, or the feds, and a shipment was seized, he wouldn’t be out of pocket.
That was where my grandfather came in. He was born in Fort Kent, just on the border between Maine and Canada, so he knew the country and the people. He ran the road crews for Carroll: recruiting drivers, checking that the cars were well maintained, and greasing palms to make sure that the local cops stayed out of the way. “There were more cops than criminals in the bootleg business,” my grandfather used to say, and he was right, just as it always amused him that the politicians who passed the Volstead Act were first in line for the illegal booze that resulted from it.
Dan Carroll trusted my grandfather. A harsh word was never spoken between them.
And King Solomon?
Well, King Solomon wasn’t the trusting kind, which was how the trouble began.
• • •
You have to understand something about Maine. Back in the nineteenth century, it was considered the drunkest state in the Union. The mayor of Portland, Neal Dow, was a Quaker, and a founding member of the Maine Temperance Society. Consequently, he didn’t much care for the reputation that the state had acquired. Hell, he only needed to take a walk from the lower end of Congress Street to Munjoy Hill to see what his city had become. That’s a distance of about a mile, and in Dow’s time it boasted about three hundred establishments where a man or woman could get a drink. You didn’t even have to step off the sidewalk: grocers prepared rum punch in tubs outside their stores and served it up in tin cups. Eventually Dow had enough, and just about single-handedly forced through a prohibition law in 1851. It stood for nearly five years, until the Rum Riot of 1855 led to shooting and killing, and put the kibosh on both prohibition and Dow’s reputation. So, you know, Maine’s relationship with liquor was kind of complicated, to say the least, even before the Volstead Act came to pass.
And my grandfather did well out of Prohibition, like a lot of people who saw opportunity in a flawed law, and had the determination and organization to take advantage of the situation. Organization was the important word, because Prohibition created organized crime: with so much money to be made, order and discipline were crucial. My grandfather understood that, and so did Dan Carroll. He paid my grandfather generously for his work and gave him a cut of any shipments that made it safely to Boston, which was most of them. But then, in January 1933, King Solomon sent a man named Mordecai Blum to Maine.
Blum arrived at my grandfather’s house in Portland the day before he was due to travel to Vanceboro to pick up eighty cases of premium whisky that were coming across the border from McAdam. My grandfather knew that Blum was on his way: Dan Carroll had called ahead to warn him. There had been a falling-out between Carroll and Solomon over a shipment that had gone astray. The story was that a boat went down in Machias Bay, but some of the liquor subsequently turned up in a garage owned by Bill Sellers, who worked for Carroll. Anyway, Carroll claimed to have known nothing about the deception, and Sellers ended up in a hole in the ground, but it cast a shadow over the working relationship between Solomon and Carroll for a time. For my grandfather, that shadow was Mordecai Blum’s.
Blum was a squat, humorless man, with small, lifeless gray eyes that peered out from under heavy lids. His head was long and oversized, and did not narrow at the neck. It looked, my grandfather recalled, like a huge thumb protruding from the collar of his shirt. He was abominably hirsute: my grandfather caught a glimpse of him in his drawers while he was shaving and swore that only his face and the palms of his hands were hairless. The rest of his body was entirely covered with a wiry black pelt so that his skin was barely visible through it.
Blum radiated a kind of primitive power, and it was known that he did Solomon’s killing for him. “Motke the Mortician,” that was what Dan Carroll called Blum, and he advised my grandfather to keep a close eye on the man, and not to turn his back on him, if he could help it. Carroll didn’t think my grandfather was in any immediate danger from Blum, not if he was straight, which he knew my grandfather to be. Tendell might have been a criminal, but he was an honest one, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. In any case, he was smarter than to steal from Dan Carroll, and could account for every case of liquor that passed through his hands. Still, he did not share Carroll’s faith in Blum’s ability to distinguish between honesty and dishonesty, or his willingness to do so. My grandfather knew that the death of Sellers was not enough to satisfy King Solomon, and he had no desire to be sacrificed as an example to others.
My grandfather and Blum drove up to Vanceboro together, mostly in silence. Blum wasn’t a talkative individual, and my grandfather preferred to keep his own counsel with strangers. He did learn that Blum didn’t touch alcohol of any kind. Apparently wine and hard liquor disagreed with Blum’s insides, and he didn’t even care much for the taste of beer. Here they found some common ground. Tendell’s father had been a drinker of the worst stripe, a foul and physically abusive man who died a violent death at the hands of some lobstermen he’d crossed down on Commercial Street. He was gutted with a gaff and left hanging from a wharf bitt. Personal experience, therefore, had left Tendell with a distrust of men who couldn’t hold their liquor, and an innate caution in his own consumption. I never saw him drink more than one glass of rum or whisky at a single sitting, and even a beer would have gone flat by the time he got around to finishing it.
Eventually they reached Vanceboro, where the cars and drivers were waiting for them. Shortly after ten P.M., a pair of trucks arrived from across the border, and the process of transferring the whisky to the Cadillacs began. Blum took no part in it. He watched the work, and then interrogated the Canadian drivers, who had been doing the run for four or five years and disliked their honesty being called into question. They might have been crooks, but they too were straight, and stole no more than they believed to be their due. Blum had a little notebook, and in it were recorded details of every run that had been made in the previous twelve months. He went through each one with the drivers, cross-checking what they could recall of their shipments with what my grandfather and Dan Carroll had ultimately delivered to Boston. When he wasn’t satisfied with their answers, he would place a question mark beside the relevant entry in his notebook. My grandfather watched it all
without comment, even though Blum was effectively implying that he might be a liar, and alienating the Canadian drivers in the process. Snow clouds gathered above them, and my grandfather was anxious that they should be on their way, but Blum would not be rushed. So it was that the first flurries had begun to fall by the time they were done, and their little convoy had not traveled more than ten miles when the road ahead was lost to them.
“We need to find shelter,” said Tendell. “We don’t want to get stuck out on this road with liquor in back.”
“I thought your bribes kept the police quiet,” said Blum. He removed his notebook from his pocket and began reciting various sums of money, and quantities of liquor, that Tendell had listed as bribe expenses over the preceding months.
Tendell was tempted to point out that Blum’s questioning had delayed them, and otherwise they might have been a little farther ahead of the storm, and closer to a town, but he saw no sense in alienating Solomon’s man.
“I can pay off cops,” said Tendell, “but not the prohis, at least not the new ones who’ve only been up here since November. Some of the old guys, maybe, but the Bureau has started sending us true believers, and they frown on bribery. They’re no fools, either. They know that we use these roads.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“A guy named Wallace lives not far from here. He has a barn that he lets us use from time to time. It’ll cost us a case of liquor, but it’ll be worth it. We can wait out the snow there. If need be, Wallace has a tractor and a plow blade. He’ll help us get back on the road tomorrow.”
Blum didn’t look happy at the thought of spending a night in the North Woods, but Tendell couldn’t imagine a situation where Blum would look happy. His demeanor didn’t seem to allow much for positive emotions.
“A whole case?” said Blum. “That sounds like a lot.”
“He’s taking a risk, plus he does a little bootlegging and moonshining of his own on the side. My guess is that he’ll take what we give him and turn it into five times as much rotgut.”