As the sun fell upon his face, Michael thought of the path. Of McCarren and Gaby, the underground passages, Camille and Mouse, the rooftop battle at the Paris Opéra, the fight in the woods before Berlin, Mouse’s ruined house and ruined life, the Iron Cross that meant nothing. He thought of the Reichkronen, and Harry Sandler’s murder train, the kennels of Falkenhausen, and the long flight to Norway. Of Kitty, and a knife with a hooked blade.
There had been another path, too: he had been walking it since a boy chased a kite into a Russian forest. It had led him through a world of joy and sadness, tragedy and triumph, to this point in time, and beyond this point lay the future.
Man or beast? he wondered. He knew now which world he truly belonged to. By accepting his place in the world of men, he made the miracle true. He did not think he had failed Wiktor. In fact, he thought Wiktor might be proud of him, as a father is proud of a beloved son.
Live free, he thought. If that were at all possible in this world, he would try his best at it.
A buzzer went off on the receptionist’s desk. She was a small, lantern-jawed woman with a carnation on her lapel. “He’ll see you now,” she told them, and got up to open the door into the inner sanctum.
The man within, bulldog stocky, got up from his desk and came forward to meet them. He had heard grand things about them, he said. Please sit down! He motioned them to three chairs. The medal ceremony, he said, would be a small, quiet affair. There was no use in alerting the press to such a sensitive undertaking. Did they agree to that? They did, of course.
“Would you mind if I smoked?” he asked Chesna, and when she said she wouldn’t, he produced one of his long trademark cigars from a rosewood cigar case on his desk and lit it. “You must realize the service you’ve performed for England. For the world, actually. Incalculable service. You have friends in high places, and you’ll all be well taken care of. Ah, while we’re on the subject of friends!” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out an envelope sealed with wax. “This is from a friend of yours, Major Gallatin.”
Michael took it. He recognized the seal on the blob of wax, and smiled faintly. The envelope went into his coat pocket.
The prime minister went on at length about the ramifications of the invasion and that by the end of summer the Nazis would be fighting on the borders of Germany. Their chemical warfare plans had been miserably dashed; not only in this Iron Fist affair, he said, but also because of Gustav Hildebrand’s … ah … shall we say dissolution?
Michael studied his face. He had to ask a question. “Excuse me, sir?”
“Yes, Major?”
“Do you … just happen to have any relatives in Germany?”
“No,” Churchill said. “Of course not. Why?”
“I … saw someone dressed up to resemble you.”
“Ah, the cheeky bastards!” the prime minister growled, and puffed a gout of blue smoke.
When their audience with the prime minister was ended, they left the building and stood on Downing Street. A car with an RAF driver was waiting for Lazaris. He embraced Chesna, one-handedly, and then hugged his comrade.
“Gallatinov, you take care of Goldilocks, eh?” Lazaris smiled, but his eyes looked a little damp. “Around her you act like a gentleman … which means like an Englisher, not like a Russki!”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He thought, however, that Lazaris was a fine gentleman, even for a Russki. “Where will you be?”
Lazaris looked up, at the cloudless blue. He smiled again, slyly, clapped Michael on the shoulder, and got into the waiting car like a member of the royal family. The RAF driver pulled them away from the curb, and Lazaris gave Michael a salute. Then the car merged with traffic, and was gone.
“Let’s walk,” Michael said. He took Chesna’s hand and guided her toward Trafalgar Square. She was still limping a little, but her ankle was healing with no complications. He liked Chesna’s company. He wanted to show her his home, and who knew what might come of that? Something lasting? No, probably not. They were both moving in different directions, but now linked by hands. For a time, at least … it could be sweet.
“Do you like animals?” he asked her.
“What?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Well … dogs and cats, yes. What animals do you mean?”
“A little larger,” he said, but did not elaborate. He didn’t want to scare her before they left their London hotel. “I’d like for you to see my home, in Wales. Would you care to go?”
“With you?” She squeezed his hand. “When do we leave?”
“Soon. My house is very quiet. There we’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
Again, she was puzzled. “Talk? About what?”
“Oh … myths and folklore,” he said.
Chesna laughed. Michael Gallatin was one of the most curious—and certainly unique—men she’d ever met. His nearness excited her. She said, “Will we only talk?”
Michael stopped, in the shadow of Lord Nelson, put his arms around Chesna van Dorne, and kissed her.
Their bodies pressed together. Citizens of London stopped to gawk, but neither Michael nor Chesna cared. Their lips merged together like liquid fire, and as the kiss went on Michael felt a tingling sensation.
He knew what it was. Black, sleek wolf hair was rippling up his backbone, under his clothes. He felt the hair rise over his back and shoulders, tingling in this moment of pure, intense passion and joy, and then his flesh itched as the hair began to recede.
Well, there was always more where that came from.
Michael kissed the corners of her lips. Her aroma, cinnamon and leather, was in his soul. He hailed a passing cab, and he and Chesna got in and headed for Piccadilly and their hotel.
On the way he took the envelope from his pocket, broke the waxed seal, and removed the letter. There were two words, written in a familiar handwriting: Another mission?
He returned the letter to the envelope and the envelope to his pocket. The man in him yearned for peace, but the wolf in him yearned for action. Which one would triumph? That he couldn’t say. Chesna leaned against him, her head on his shoulder. “Is that something you need to take care of?”
“No,” Michael told her. “Not today.” A battle had been won, but the war went on.
Mine
Thanks to Julie Keeton for the title inspiration. And thanks also to Dale Davis for the technical help.
To the survivors of an era when the whole world was watching
Contents
What’s Past Is…
I. SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY
1. A Safe Place
2. A Careful Shopper
3. The Moment of Truth
4. Mr. Mojo has Risen
5. Perpetrator Down
II. UNKNOWN SOLDIER
1. Bad Karma
2. A Friend’s Message
3. The Darker Heart
4. Thursday’s Child
5. Gaunt Old Dude
6. Big Hands
7. A Hollow Vessel
III. WILDERNESS OF PAIN
1. Pigsticker
2. Armed and Dangerous
3. When the Candles Went Out
4. Hope, Mother
5. Into the Vortex
6. Belle of the Ball
IV. WHERE THE CREATURES MEET
1. Shards
2. The Pennywhistle Player
3. Eve of Destruction
4. A Crack in Clay
5. Reasonable
6. A Real Popular Lady
7. The Devil of All Pigs
V. THE KILLER AWOKE
1. Damaged Goods
2. The Idiot’s Dream
3. The Secret Thing
4. Crossroads
5. Roadchart Through Hades
6. Light Hurts
VI. ON THE STORM
1. Happy Herman’s
2. The Terrible Truth
3. Good Boys
4. White Tide
5. Doctor Didi
> 6. Sanctuary of Wishes
VII. FUNERAL PYRE
1. The Power of Love
2. Strip Naked
3. He Knows
4.Thunder Lizards
5. Fight the Furies
6. A Harley Man
7. Little Black Snakes
8. Castle on a Cloud
9. The Thunder House
What’s Past Is…
THE BABY WAS CRYING again
The sound roused her from a dream about a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she’d been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she’d hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Sometimes she regretted being a mother, sometimes the baby killed her dreams. But she sat up in bed and slid her feet into her slippers because there was no one else to take care of the child.
She stretched, popping her joints, and stood up. She was a big, heavy woman with broad shoulders, and she was six feet tall. Amazon Chick, she’d been called. By whom? She couldn’t remember. Oh, yes; it came to her. By him. It had been one of his pet names for her, part of their secret code of love. She could see his face in her mind, like a blaze of beauty. She remembered his dangerous laugh, and how his body felt hard as warm marble atop hers on a bed fringed with purple beads…
Stop. It was torture; thinking of what used to be.
She said, “Hush, hush,” in a voice raspy with sleep. The baby kept crying. She loved this child, better than she’d loved anything for a long time, but the baby did cry a lot. He couldn’t be satisfied. She went to the crib and looked at him. Tears were rolling down his cheeks in the dank light from the Majik Market across the highway. “Hush,” she said. “Robby? Hush, now!” But Robby wouldn’t hush, and she didn’t want to wake the neighbors. They didn’t like her as it stood. Particularly not the old bastard next door, who knocked on the walls when she played her Hendrix and Joplin records. He threatened to call the pigs, and he had no respect for God, either.
“Quiet!” she told Robby. The baby made a choking sound, flailed at the air with fists the size of large strawberries, and his crying throttled up. She picked up the infant from his crib and rocked him, while he trembled with baby rage. As she tried to soothe his demons, she listened to the noise of eighteen-wheelers rushing past Mableton on the highway that led to Atlanta. She liked it. It was a clean sound, like water flowing over stones. But it made her sad, too, in a way. Everybody was going somewhere but her, it often seemed. Everybody had a destination, a fixed star. Hers had burned brightly for a time, flared, and dwindled to a cinder. That was a long time ago, in another life. Now she lived here, in this low-rent apartment building next to the highway, and when the nights were clear she could see the lights of the city to the northeast. When it rained, she saw nothing but dark.
She walked around the cramped bedroom, crooning to the baby. He wouldn’t stop crying, though, and it was giving her a headache. The kid was stubborn. She took him through the hallway into the kitchen, where she switched on the light. Roaches fled for shelter. The kitchen was a damned mess, and anger burst in her for letting it get this way. She swept empty cans and litter off the table to make room for the child, then she laid him down and checked his diaper. No, it wasn’t wet. “You hungry? You hungry, sweetie?” Robby coughed and gasped, his crying ebbing for a few seconds and then swelling to a thin, high keening that razored her skull.
She searched in vain for a pacifier. The clock caught her eye: four-twelve. Jesus! She’d have to be at work in little more than an hour, and Robby was crying his head off. She left him flailing on the table and opened the refrigerator. A rancid smell drifted from it. Something had gone bad, in there amid the cold french fries, bits of Burger King hamburgers, Spam, cottage cheese, milk, half-empty cans of baked beans, and a few jars of Gerber’s baby food. She chose a jar of applesauce, then she opened a cupboard and got a small pot. She turned on one of the stove’s burners, and she drew a little water from the sink’s tap into the pot. She placed the pot on the burner and the jar of applesauce down into the water to heat it. Robby didn’t like cold food, and the warmth would make him sleepy. A mother had to know a lot of tricks; it was a tough job.
She glanced at Robby as she waited for the applesauce to heat up, and she saw with a start of horror that he was just about to roll off the table’s edge.
She moved fast for her one hundred and eighty-four pounds. She caught Robby an instant before he fell to the checkered linoleum, and she hugged him close as he squalled again. “Hush, now. Hush. Almost broke your neck, didn’t you?” she said as she paced the floor with the crying infant. “Almost broke it. Bad baby! Hush, now. Mary’s got you.”
Robby kicked and wailed, struggling in her arms, and Mary felt her patience tattering like an old peace flag in a hard, hot wind.
She shoved that feeling down because it was a dangerous thing. It made her think of ticking bombs and fingers forcing bullet clips into the chambers of automatic rifles. It made her think of God’s voice roaring commandments in the night from her stereo speakers. It made her think of where she’d been and who she was, and that was a dangerous thing to lodge in her mind. She cradled Robby with one arm and felt the jar of applesauce. Warm enough. She took the jar out, got a spoon from a drawer, and sat down in a chair with the baby. Robby’s nose was running, his face splotched with red. “Here,” Mary said. “Sweets for baby.” His mouth was clamped shut, he wouldn’t open it, and suddenly he convulsed and kicked and the applesauce spewed onto the front of Mary’s plaid flannel robe. “Damn it!” she said. “Shit! Look at this mess!” The child’s body jerked with fierce strength. “You’re going to eat this!” she told him, and she spooned up more applesauce.
Again, he defied her. Applesauce dripped from his mouth down his chin. It was combat now, a battle of wills. Mary caught the infant’s face with one large hand and squeezed the babyfat cheeks. “YOU’RE GOING TO MIND ME!” she shouted into the glistening blue eyes. The infant quieted for a second, startled, and then new tears streaked down his face and his wailing pierced Mary’s head with fresh pain.
Robby’s lips became a barrier to the spoon. Applesauce drooled down onto his sleepsuit, where yellow ducks cavorted. Mary thought of the washing she was going to have to do, a chore she despised, and the frayed thread of her temper broke.
She threw aside the spoon, picked up the infant, and shook him. “MIND ME!” she shouted. “DO YOU HEAR WHAT I SAID?” She shook him harder and harder, his head lolling and the high-pitched wail still coming from his mouth. She clamped a hand over his lips, and his head thrashed against her fingers. The sound of his crying went up and up, a crazy spiral. She had to get ready for work, had to put on the face she wore every day outside these walls, had to say “Yes ma’am” and “No sir” and wrap the burgers just so and the people who bought them never knew who she had been, they never guessed, no never never in a million years did they guess she would rather cut their throats than look at them. Robby was screaming, the apartment was filling up with screaming, somebody was knocking on the wall, and her own throat was raw.
“YOU WANT TO CRY?” she shouted, holding the struggling infant under one arm. “I’LL MAKE YOU CRY!”
She knocked the pot off the stovetop, and turned the burner up to high.
Still Robby, a bad seed, screamed and fought against her will. She didn’t want to do this, it hurt her heart, but what good was a baby who didn’t mind his mother? “Don’t make me do it!” She shook Robby like a fleshy rag. “Don’t make me hurt you!” His face was contorted, his scream so high it was almost inaudible, but Mary could feel its pressure sawing at her skull. “Don’t make me!” she warned, and then she held him by the scruff of his neck and slapped his face.
Behind her the burner was beginning to glow.
Robby would not bend to her will. He would not be quiet, and somebody might call the pigs, and if that happened…
A fist was hammering on the wall. Robby flailed
and kicked. He was trying to break her, and that could not be tolerated.
She felt her teeth grind together, the blood pulsing in her temples. Little drops of crimson ran from Robby’s nose, and his scream was like the voice of the world at the end of time.
Mary made a low, moaning sound, deep in her throat. She turned toward the stove and pressed the baby’s face against the red-hot burner.
The little body writhed and jerked. She felt the terrible heat rising past him, washing into her own face. Robby’s scream went on and on, his legs thrashing. She kept her hand pressed hard on the back of his head, there were tears in her eyes, and she was sick at heart because Robby had always been such a good baby.
His struggling ceased, and his scream ended with a sizzle.
The baby’s head was melting.
Mary watched it happen as if she were outside her body looking down, a remote bystander cool in her curiosity. Robby’s head was shrinking, little sparks of flame kicking up, and the pink flesh running in glistening strands. She could feel the heat beneath her hand. He was quiet now. He had learned who was in control.
She pulled him up off the burner, but most of his face stayed on the hot coils in a crisp black inside-out impression. Robby was dead.
“Hey, you crazy freak!” A voice through the thin wall. The old man next door, the one who went out on the highway collecting aluminum cans in a garbage bag. Shecklett, the name on his mailbox said. “Stop that hollerin’ or I’ll call the cops! Hear me?”
Mary stared at the black-edged hole where Robby’s face had been. The head was full of smoke. Plastic sparked on the burner, and the kitchen was rank with the sickeningly sweet smell of another infant’s death.
“Shut up and let a man sleep!” He struck the wall again, and the pictures of babies clipped from magazines and mounted in dimestore frames jumped on their nails.
Mary stood looking at the doll, her mouth half open and her gray eyes glassy. This one was gone. This one was ready for heaven. But he’d been such a good boy. She’d thought he was the best of them all. She wiped her eyes with a sluggish hand, and turned off the burner. Bits of plastic flamed and popped, a haze of blue smoke filming the air like the breath of ghosts.