"Hebrew reads from right to left; this is the front of the book," said Stern.
"I see," said Innes, wishing he could swallow his fist.
Sparks stared at the parchment of the first page, yellow and crusted with age, densely covered with fading handwritten words.
"Let me see that pad," said Sparks.
Innes handed it to him. Doyle watched Jack: What was he on to?
"Is this a drawing of the Zohar, here?" asked Sparks, pointing to a sketch on the pad's margin: an open, leather-bound book, strikingly similar to the one before them. Matching script scribbled inside its front page.
"Could be," said Doyle.
Sparks took out a magnifying glass, leaned over and examined Stern's drawing then scrutinized the first page of the Gerona Zohar.
"Your father has never seen the Gerona Zohar?" asked Sparks.
"No."
"Then how has he in this sketch exactly reproduced its first • page?"
Sparks handed the glass to Doyle: The minute writing in Rabbi Stern's sketch was identical to the book. Stern examined the two fragments as well.
"I can't account for it," said Stern.
"What do you make of this?" asked Sparks, pointing to a dark shape on the pad drawn over the corner of the book.
"A shadow," said Doyle, looking closer. "A hand. Reaching for the book."
"Did your father ever talk about his dreams?" asked Sparks.
"Dreams? No, not that I can recall."
"What are you driving at, Jack?" asked Doyle.
Sparks looked at the pad and pointed to the drawing of the castle.
"I have seen this black tower before," he said.
"Seen it? Where?"
Sparks looked up at Doyle, hesitant. "In a dream."
"This same tower?"
"I could have sketched this myself."
"Sure it's not some place you saw once that's drifted up through your subconscious?" said Stern.
"Then how do we explain the drawing?" asked Doyle. "You said your father never left New York City."
"He came here from Russia as a young man," said Stern. "Perhaps something he saw there or along the way."
"Perhaps a picture he came across in a book," said Innes, taking the pad and the glass from Stern.
"What sort of dream, Jack?" asked Doyle, trying to keep him focused.
Sparks stared grimly at the drawing, then spoke softly, as if confessing something to Doyle. "I had the dream first three months ago. Keeps coming back, with greater intensity, always the same. This black tower. A white desert. Something underground. A phrase repeating over and over again in my mind. We are Six."
"Six? You mean—"
"Yes."
"Like the number Stern drew on the pad..."
"Yes."
"Who's Brachman?" asked Innes.
"Brachman? Where did you see that?" asked Stern.
"Written here, very small letters, on the edge of this drawing," said Innes, pointing to the pad with the glass.
"Isaac Brachman is a colleague of my father's, a rabbi at a temple in Chicago____"
"And a scholar of the Zohar?"
"One of the most learned. I may have mentioned him to you on the ship, if not by name. We obtained the Tikkunei Zohar, the addendum to the Zohar, for him to study. Rabbi Brachman was a principal organizer of the Parliament of Religions last year at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago."
"Did your father attend that convention?" asked Doyle.
"He (id; every major religion in the world was represented.... "
"When was the last time you spoke to Rabbi Brachman?"
"I don't recall; weeks ago, certainly before I left for London."
"You must wire him immediately," said Doyle.
"Why?"
"Doyle is suggesting that your father's gone to Chicago to visit Rabbi Brachman," said Sparks, coming out of his fog.
"Yes, of course, that would be possible, wouldn't it?" said Stern, suddenly hopeful.
And preferable to a number of the other alternatives, thought Doyle.
"Do you have the other book I asked for?" asked Sparks.
"Yes, it's right here," said Stern. He lifted a book similar in size and design to the Gerona Zohar from a cabinet and onto the table beside the original. "A copy of the Zohar, nearly indistinguishable, but this is a fairly recent re-creation: Only a scholar could tell them apart."
"You might want to have a look at this," said Innes, who had wandered away from the table to the window.
"What is it, Innes?" said Doyle.
"Not sure, but I'd say there's at least twenty of them."
An instant later they were at the window, looking down at the street.
The two toughs outside had multiplied tenfold, and a dozen more were pouring down the block to join them.
"Street gang," said Sparks.
One of the gang looked up, saw the four men outlined in the window, pointed at them and whistled sharply.
At his signal, the gang rushed across the pavement, toward the doors of the tenement.
chapter 7
The hunt for the murdering Chinaman started poorly and went downhill fast. Troops mustered from the Territorial Prison at Yuma told anyone willing to listen that they were a lot handier dealing with criminals who were already behind bars, with their dependable tendency to stay put. What this mob knew about chasing fugitives you could print on the back of a postage stamp. Nor were they exactly at their spit-and-polish best when the call came in to rush down to the rail yard at five in the morning since most of them had been out drinking themselves comatose until two.
The railroad bulls and Pinkerton men who had lived through the Yuma Yards Massacre—as it inevitably came to be known, frontier journalism being what it was—were so consumed with shock, grief, or blinding rage that pulling them into a cohesive militia unit would have been beyond any officer less commanding than Robert E. Lee. That was certainly no description anyone had ever tried to hang on Sheriff Tommy Butterfield.
Sheriff Tommy was the most senior local lawman at the scene that morning. He spent the first ten minutes after he saw the carnage throwing up and the next fifteen wandering around in a daze. Wasn't as if Tommy added to the confusion rampaging through the camp; it's just that at a moment when these men needed a leader to pull them together, Tommy's passivity allowed the vigilante impulse to spin out of control and fracture into a dozen squabbling splinter groups, each with their own ideas about how to find this killer. Tommy had been elected sheriff on a peace platform—the territory was looking toward statehood, working to clean up its image in order to attract some serious money—and this soft-bellied, fat-headed political hack who'd never shot a man, even in anger, was a lot more adept at getting people to like him than he was at telling them what to do.
It didn't help that no two surviving witnesses could agree on a single characteristic of the man responsible, aside from the fact that he carried a sword, and that was hard to swallow even with one leg and two severed heads on the ground. Why would anybody in this day and age carry a sword when with the helpful hand of modern technology you could ventilate a man's lungs from a quarter mile away?
Neither could anyone confirm in which direction the maniac had made his escape, which left them with eight compass points to argue about. The bums could have filled in some blanks for them, particularly Denver Bob Hobbes, but figuring wisely that when the powers that be got around to handing out the blame for this they'd be on top of the list, the hobos were busy making tracks in those same eight directions.
But somebody somewhere heard somebody else say that the killer was a Chinaman, and when that idea raced through camp, it stuck hard and fast: Who else but an unhinged rice monkey would chop suey a bunch of white men with a sword? An Apache, for one, somebody said, and that set off a debate on the relative barbarism of the red and yellow man.
Sheriff Tommy Butterfield couldn't recall later if he was the first person to mention calling in Buckskin Prank—he wasn'
t—but being the consummate politico, Tommy was more than willing to take credit for the idea: If using Frank worked out, he could plug it right in as the keystone of his next campaign. Tommy knew there'd be a barrel full of details to sort out before they could spring him, but there was one thing the mob in camp could agree on that morning: If any man in the Arizona Territory could track down this homicidal heathen, it was Buckskin Frank McQuethy.
Unlike Sheriff Tommy, Buckskin Frank had shot, stabbed, and strangled a number of individuals on both sides of the law. Frank began his illustrious career as a deputy under Arizona's genius of publicity, Wyatt Earp, during Tombstone's heyday in the early '80s. Long before Wyatt reinvented himself as an ail-American folk hero, Frank had worked with the Earps as bouncer and bartender at the Oriental Saloon, one of the grandest whorehouses in the West. Wyatt was a charismatic son of a bitch—Frank couldn't help but admire his verve and relentless ambition—and when the Earps seized economic control of Tombstone, Frank rode their coattails to prosperity and minor celebrity.
But for a man who made his living with a gun, when it came to outright murder Frank had an inconvenient sense of right and wrong, and it led to a falling-out with the Earps when he refused to help slaughter the Clanton clan, a rotten bunch of horse-thieving half-wits who made the fatal mistake of horning in on their operations. With Wyatt busy transforming that nasty, one-sided ambush into the triumph of the O.K. Corral, Frank wandered north and solidified his hard-nosed reputation with a stint as an Army scout in the Geronimo Campaigns. His nickname came from the yellow buckskin jacket he took to wearing; the minute he put it on, the papers started writing that Buckskin Frank could track a man across a hundred miles of hardscrabble and shoot the eyes off a rattlesnake, but then he had learned the art of self-mythologizing from a master.
Except when he was drinking, Frank McQuethy was never anything less than a gentleman. Unfortunately, he had been drinking that night in '89 when he pushed Molly Fanshaw, his favorite girl, off the balcony of Whitely's Emporium in downtown Tombstone. Frank had been so pickled he couldn't even remember what they were fighting about—Molly was a mean drunk and had no doubt provoked him beyond human endurance—but he'd killed the only woman he'd ever loved in front of a crowd, plain and simple, so he pleaded guilty, took his life sentence like a man, and for the last five years had been a model prisoner at the Territorial Prison. And Frank hadn't touched a drop of liquor since Molly went over the rail.
Fellow inmates, the warden, even the guards, were all crazy about Frank; his courtesy, the not too obvious effects of his education, the way he held his head high in spite of his hard time, most of which he spent in the infirmary as chief assistant to the resident sawbones. During the cholera epidemic of '92, at considerable risk of contagion, Frank deprived himself of sleep for weeks to stand by their beds and ease the suffering of die afflicted. Frank's buckskin jacket hanging in a glass case remained the hands-down highlight of the twenty-five-cent tour the prison offered the paying public. Nearly every day, guards at the gate had to turn away some impressionable young dove who'd come to catch a glimpse of Frank exercising in the yard, brokenhearted that law would not allow her to speak with him face-to-face.
But Frank never failed to answer their letters, delicately suggesting that yes, it was likely they were destined never to meet, but perhaps a letter to the governor attesting to his character from such an upstanding woman—or anyone else of weight she might know in the community—could persuade him to reconsider his life sentence and make their meeting a reality. The governor even now had before him a petition to pardon Buckskin. Frank had sown the seeds of his freedom with the diligence of Luther Burbank, but it took the blood of a massacre to fertilize the field.
Sheriff Tommy called in every favor owed him. Warden Gates wired the governor and by breakfast they'd hammered out the deal: On a conditional furlough, he was still to be considered a prisoner and never left alone. But it was quietly agreed that if Frank could capture the man responsible for the Yuma Yards murders, clemency would be right around the corner.
At eight that morning, the guards unlocked Frank's cell; one carried his buckskin jacket like a piece of the true cross. By nine, Frank arrived at the shanty camp ready to play the savior and was met by the sorriest excuse for a posse working the sloppiest crime scene he'd ever come across.
Bodies, limbs, and heads of the victims had been jumbled like jigsaw pieces; every key witness was lost, exhausted, or hysterical; the muddy ground had been slogged into a quagmire. Frank's spirits, which had flown high as the warden explained their arrangement, settled around sea level. Five years in prison and he suddenly felt his age: Forty was old out here, and a new breed was taking over the West, stiffs like these, businessmen, desk jockeys. One of the last bona fide shooters, John Wesley Hardin, had been gunned down in El Paso in August, plugged in the back. Buckskin felt a real loss when he heard that news: For all their petty thievery and bullshit, the Earps, John Wesley, and Frank had been birds of a feather. One good look at this bunch and he knew those days were gone for good.
Frank walked the perimeter, followed by this pack of sap-heads; he found one faint set of tracks, a man moving at a dead run toward the swing bridge heading east over the Colorado. While the posse waited breathlessly behind him, he rolled a smoke, stood on the bridge, and asked himself: Where would he go if he'd done a crime like this?
Mexico, less than five miles downriver from where he was standing.
Then he had to ask himself a harder one: If one man armed only with a sword could slice his way. through a whole gang of seasoned railroad bulls like a stand of green saplings, how could he and this roundup of candy-ass amateurs ever "bring him to ground?
Two pleasant thoughts occurred to Frank at once: These knuckle draggers had no idea what their killer looked like except he was a Chinaman, and no white man he'd ever met could tell one of them from the other. Which meant as soon as he had a reasonable suspect in sight, he could drop the son of a bitch with a buffalo gun from a hundred yards and no one would be the wiser. Fuck this sword stuff.
He lit his cigarette.
The other thing was, if it all turned to shit, before this bunch ever caught up with him he could probably make it to Mexico himself.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
As Frank stood smoking on the bridge, Kanazuchi slipped out of a boxcar in the morning freight arriving at the Phoenix yards. He made his way cautiously along the tracks between trains, alert to dangers resulting from his escape. The fight was regrettable but capture was not acceptable. Reviewing his behavior in light of the circumstances, no other action had been practical. He willed the matter out of his mind; further examination would cause unnecessary distraction. His brothers had chosen him for this mission because of his fierce dedication to mastery of budo.
Sensei's voice came to him: Do not think about winning, losing, taking advantage, impressing, or disregarding your opponent. That is not the Way.
Tired, half-starved, and thousands of miles from home, he reminded himself those perceptions were illusions resulting from an over identification with the concerns of the small self. That was not the Way, either. The future depended on him; if the missing Book was not returned, their monastery would weaken and die like a tree cut from its roots. The Way would fail. Thoughts of failure would only lead to failure.
In the absence of food or water, let that thought sustain me.
The early morning air carried the promise of heat; the ground flat and dusty, alien to him. As Kanazuchi drew within a hundred paces of the terminal, he heard voices approaching; he rolled beneath a car and hung from its undercarriage, tucking himself out of sight like a spider. Footsteps of a dozen men passed within ten feet of his hiding place; loud and purposeful, slamming open doors, examining the cars of the freight he had traveled on. He sent himself into their minds, felt tension and fear turned around into assertive, self-protective violence.
Identify with all things and all people; kill the small self inside and
everything in creation can be known.
Word had been sent ahead along the singing wires and they are looking for me, he realized: One of the men had said the word "Chinaman."
After they passed, Kanazuchi lowered himself to the ground, pulled out his knife, and with one stroke sliced off his queue. He buried the hair under a rail tie: time for the "Chinaman" to vanish.
Crawling out, he continued toward the station, inching his way behind a long stack of cotton bales. Kanazuchi observed the bustling terminal; looking past the crowd of passengers, he could see the offices of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railroad, his original objective. But his plan would have to be delayed indefinitely until this pursuit quieted and he could assemble a new identity.
Fifty paces to his right, workers were unloading large canvas-draped cargo from a boxcar onto rolling sleds, which they hauled to a smaller train on a nearby track. A tall, fat man in a feathered hat strutted around, puffed up and busy as a rooster, pointing this way and that, squawking in a loud, empty voice, but the workers weren't even listening to him.
A steamer trunk tumbled off one of the sleds and opened on impact, spilling out its contents: packed layers of men's and women's clothes, heavy brocaded cloaks, clusters of shoes. The man in the feathered hat stood up on his toes and hectored the worker unmercifully; the worker ignored him and casually heaped the garments back into the trunk. The man in the hat pulled them back out and threw them on the ground again, demanding the worker fold the clothes properly before repacking them.
"Hey."
Kanazuchi wheeled to his left; a man had walked in behind him, standing six feet away. He wore a blue uniform and hat and a badge on the breast of his tunic. They stared at one another for a long moment—then Kanazuchi saw a look of fear cross the man's coarse features; before he could react, the man raised a whistle to his lips and blew one shrill, piercing note. He was reaching with his other hand for a gun holstered at his waist when Kanazuchi broke his neck and dragged the body down behind the bales.
Maybe no one has seen this, he thought.