Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (7 page)

The patrolman, his mustache realigned, told Howard: “I've your face memorized now, Kemble. Or whatever your real name may be. I'm well-trained and practiced in that department.”

Howard reapplied his mask and then slyly backhanded the patrolman with his monkey wrench. It was quite a vicious blow, and this time Miss Buxton did shriek—a high, shrill note fit for the discordant cat chorus. Cox fell to one knee and stayed down, groaning, bleeding from the ear, a fist on the floor for balance.

“Don't assume,” Howard said, “you'll get the chance to use that information.”

The Lydian Croesids

I felt certain that the flu masks had been worn in my office as disguises—on account of the receptionist, Miss Pimm, and the presence of other staff and attorneys—but I worried now, in the wake of Howard's brief unveiling and fiendish threat, that the masks no longer served to hide the faces of the robbers, but simply to ward off the mansion's exuberant malodors. I worried that these men would, in the end, murder us all.

The killing of a fellow human being—if you've never had the pleasure, Doctor—is surprisingly easy with a bit of experience, even for men who find their first kill a monumental challenge, a soul-crushing dehumanization. The trenches of Europe had taught me that firsthand.

Patrolman Cox struggled to his feet, telling Howard: “You should know I'm due to check in from my call box soon.” He consulted his watch, one of those novelties worn around the wrist. “Due in . . . thirty-five minutes, to be exact. I'll be missed if I don't call, and a motorized patrol wagon will be dispatched to search for me.”

“Ah,” Howard said, “but they won't think to look inside here, though, will they? And we'll soon arrange it so they can't. All locked up tight and barricaded. No one answering the doorbell. From all appearances status quo for this household.”

“Don't forget,” I told Howard, “we stood on the front porch together for twenty minutes. Some neighbor passing by might recall the patrolman as being among the people gathered there.”

“We'll be long gone before the cops resort to a door to door search,” Howard said. “They'll never find that hypothetical neighbor in time.”

“What about the newsie at the corner?” Patrolman Cox said. “The boy could've spotted me on the porch easy enough, and if he's still there when—”

“Better for you lot the cops don't catch on,” Cormac said. “They bust inside here”—he pressed his blade against my Adam's apple—“we'd slit your throats before we'd be off.”

A tiny gasp the duration of a hiccup escaped Miss Buxton. I locked eyes with her, the blade still at my neck, and spoke in a low register, the way one does with a dog to calm it down and attain compliance. “Easy, now.”

“You get me, mouthpiece?” Cormac said, digging his steel deeper into my skin.

“I get you.” The mere vibration of my Adam's apple in answering proved sufficient to draw a trickle of blood. My entire body stiffened with the knowledge until at last Cormac cackled and withdrew his weapon.

“Brady,” Howard said, “go grab that newsie, if he's still out there. One more hostage won't make a difference.”

“What, just nab him?”

“Only if you have to. But try not to draw any attention on the street. Tell the kid . . . tell him that old man Langley needs another hand moving some furniture. Promise some dough, and maybe give him two bits up front, though I'll bet”—a soft chortle squeaked out of him—“I'll bet that boy jumps at the chance to see the inside of a haunted mansion.”

“What if he's gone home already?”

“Then he's of no concern. In which case, just re-lock and re-barricade the front door to the building. Off with you now.”

“You rotters,” Cox said, his mustache off kilter again. “You'd bring a boy into this?”

“Just a nigger boy,” Cormac said. “You don't like it, shoulda kept your gob shut.”

“Now,” Howard said, waving at his hostages with a limp-wristed flick of the gun, “if you would all please remove your overcoats.”

Cormac collected the attire. Noah hadn't worn an overcoat, but removed instead his outermost garment: a morning coat, circa 1880 or thereabouts, and moth-eaten. His new outer garment became a gray dungaree jacket, worn over a red flannel bathrobe, and I suspected more layers beneath.

As the mick pawed through our pockets, presumably for weapons, I asked Howard: “So what is it you intend to rob from this household? You can't say there isn't much to choose from.”

“Something of extraordinary value.”

“That certainly narrows it down. The motor car perhaps?”

“Ha! Too complicated, that heist. And the car isn't nearly valuable enough to interest us.”

“That's right,” Noah said, “it's not valuable. Not really. How popular could a German car be in America, after all? It's only valuable in sentiment. Yes, in sentiment. To me and my sister and no one else.”

“Shut yer gob,” Cormac said. He extracted from the pocket of the old man's wretched morning coat a set of household keys on a steel ring.

Noah stepped toward Howard. “The vehicle is practically worthless on the open market, I should think.”

“Back it up, Mister Langley.” Howard pointed the gun barrel at his chest. “I didn't say you could move.”

Noah back-stepped. “It's pretty. Yes, I'll give it that. It's a pretty car, but then birds are pretty, and cats, aren't they? But how much are they really worth in terms of dollars and cents?”

“Dry up, already!” Cormac said. “We don't want your ol' da's car!” His glare shifted to his partner in crime, Howard. “He makes so little sense. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. Let's gag him, for feck's sake.”

“Not just yet. He has to tell us where it is.”

“Ask him then.”

Instead, Howard asked: “What's that you've found there?” Cormac had located a second steel ring of keys, about forty keys in total, I should think. He held them aloft.

“Pulled them out of the old bugger's raggedy coat. Which oughta be burned, by the way. P-U.” He jiggled the key rings up and down. “Mystery solved, eh, Howie? Jingle, jingle. Only we've a new mystery now. What are all these fecking keys for?” He peered at Noah. “No, forget that. Don't tell us. Because it wouldn't make a lick of sense, except to you, birdbrain.”

“We may need those keys,” Howard said.

Cormac rifled through my own overcoat, produced a silver flask. “Hooch!” he announced and screwed off the top to partake.

“Not hooch,” Howard said. “Laudanum. Isn't that right, Trenowyth?”

I shrugged. Cormac sipped. “Whew!” he said with a twisted face and screwed the top back on. “Bitter as a knocked up nun.”

He tossed the flask over a shoulder, grabbed a nearby fishing pole, and gave one of the hissing, humpbacked felines a vicious swat. The animal yelped and dove into a crevice in a stack of firewood made of chopped up wagon wheels and junked furniture.

“Don't hit them!” Noah said.

Cormac nonetheless lashed at another target. “Why don't you shoot one of these cats, Howie, see if they scatter. They're giving me a headache.”

“No!” Noah said, eyes shiny in the kerosene half-light. “Please, don't hurt them!”

“Too noisy,” Howard answered. “I'm only firing if absolutely—”

“Feck the noise,” Cormac said. “It's quiet as Connecticut down here—or it would be, if not for the cats. Just listen . . . No horns honking. No sleet bucketing. All this colossal shite acts like insulation. Sound insulation.”

“You're right,” Howard said. “Never thought of that.”

“We shoulda brung heat.”

“Well, we've got some heat now, but I'm not wasting bullets on any cats. Unless one scratches me.”

Cormac finished searching through the coats and—instead of returning the garments to their owners—left them heaped atop a vintage toy sled with swan-shaped finials. He proceeded to search me, i.e., my remaining habiliments. Meanwhile, Willie gave the patrolman a pat down.

In the midst of these bodily intrusions, I said to Howard: “You still haven't told Mister Langley what it is you intend to rob from him.”

Noah's reaction to my query was agitated and immediate. Howard said: “Relax, Mister Langley. We won't take much from you. Just some things that don't belong to you anyway. Not really. As your father robbed them from some people in a faraway land.”

“What?” Noah said. “You must be mistaken. My father would never—”

“His old man,” Howard said to Miss Buxton, “was a grave robber.”

“Now that's an outrage! An outrage, Sir!” Noah balled his fists and prepared to shout some more, but with the gun swinging to his chest, he diminished his tone. “You are obviously referring to my father's fieldwork in archaeology, and the charge you make is false, patently false. Everything my father excavated was done in the name of science, and sanctioned—Yes, sanctioned, Sir!—by the local government. Besides, there's nothing here in my home of which you speak. The artifacts were all donated to museums long ago.”

“Not all,” Howard said, “and not including the Lydian Croeseids.”

“The what?” I said.

“Forty rare gold coins.”

“You are mistaken,” Noah told Howard. “I've never heard of the coins you mention, and I'm sure neither has Elizabeth. We haven't any collection of gold coins here, nor silver, nor even nickel. Just some loose change about. That is to say, besides a small collection of copper pennies. Ordinary pre-Lincoln pennies. Mostly Flying Eagles and Indian Heads, the bulk minted between 1880 and 1909. A hobby of mine, you see.”

“How rare are these gold coins?” I asked Howard.

“Exceedingly,” he said. “The coins are estimated to be more than twenty-five hundred years old. The only ones of their kind, very nearly. Minted by the legendary King Croesus.”

That name! I flashed back to what my father had often said of the colonel, that the man was
richer than Croesus
—an ancient king from Lydia, the same land where, as legend had it, King Midas had washed the golden touch from himself into a local river, leaving behind deposits that would become the source of fabulous wealth to later rulers.

Had my father known of these old coins? Had
richer than Croesus
been an inside joke only he understood?

“They were the first gold coins ever to be minted in the history of the Earth,” Howard continued. “Today worth as much as half a million dollars a piece to private collectors, assuming they're in roughly the same condition they were when Colonel Langley and his team excavated them from an ancient burial tomb in western Asia Minor, circa 1874, and later described them in detail for the New York Times.”

“Twenty million smackers,” Willie said and dropped his mask momentarily to kiss the air. “Cut only five ways too.”

Later in the evening, I would contemplate the identity of the fifth person with a share of the robbery's proceeds, given there were only four robbers. At the time, the incredible sum Willie mentioned—sufficient to impress J.D. Rockefeller himself—distracted me from the incongruity, delayed my noting of it. I said to Howard: “Are you quite sure the coins are, uh, buried here?”

“Dead sure.”

“Please,” Noah said to one and all. “You must believe me. There are no gold coins.” I wasn't a prayerful man anymore, but I reverted to the practice when I contemplated what would happen if it turned out Noah was telling the truth.

Dear God
, I thought,
please let him be lying
.

The Codebook

With considerable relish Howard revealed himself to be the mastermind of the robbery. He said he'd been following the recent newspaper accounts of the Langleys and their cluttered mansion, initially “with the interest of your average reader.” But in the wake of a Daily News story that suggested the family were shareholders in at least two dozen companies, based on an interview with the mailman who delivered to their address, and a Post story—one I'd mentioned earlier, headlined
Fall of a Great American Family—
that described the archaeological treasures excavated by Colonel Langley in Egypt and in Asia Minor, his interest had turned professional.

“It was clear what we had here,” he said. “Two rich eccentrics, rather than a pair of impoverished nutters, and with the family affliction being, shall we say, a profound avarice for material things, I naturally wondered what objects of antiquity the Langleys had been hoarding for themselves—what treasures they'd held back from donation to public museums—ever since the colonel returned from his plundering of foreign lands all those years ago.”

Via yellowed back issues of the Times, which he'd read inside the New York Public Library, Howard had discovered that Colonel Langley's archaeological endeavors had been partially underwritten by Columbia University and conducted in partnership with one of its professors, a Dr. Simon Ritchie, so Howard had visited the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, posing as a reporter from the Times in order to obtain information on the excavations, particularly the disbursement of their finds. A university administrator had denied his request, though not before Howard had learned from a secretary where the records were housed. That night he'd broken into the building where they were kept—being a professional burglar, after all—and skimmed by flashlight all the extant documentation on the Langley-Ritchie expeditions, pilfering key pages.