City Commissioner Bernard Carvelli awakened in the dead
of the night to the scream of a dying woman. He bolted upright in bed,
taken back to the last time he had heard that very same wail of agony
and despair. He had only been a boy then, a caretaker to a mansion near
Milan occupied by the Germans. So, so many years ago. Men in black
uniforms and death’s-head emblems had routed him in the middle of the
night to dispose of a pale body thrown upon a cart and covered with
canvas. No one would tell him what to do with it. No one had cared. He
had dumped it down a steep ravine at the edge of town, keeping his face
averted as it slid into the darkness and tumbled down the slope.
Again, he would have to deal with it, and with men no
better than those who had ruled his life as a boy. Anguish stabbed at
his heart with palpable discomfort. He put a hand to his chest, rose in
the darkness, and fumbled for the table lamp on the nightstand. Pudgy
fingers popped open a pill box of tiny nitro tablets beneath its warm
glow. Most sprayed across the rug at his feet. A precious few stuck to
his sweaty palm. One went beneath his tongue as he snatched his robe
from the back of a nearby chair.
“Dimitri!” he roared, knowing the source of his woe.
“Goddamn you, Dimitri!”
The robe fell to either side of his fifty inch gut
pounding along the upstairs hall. He yanked the rich crimson velvet
closed and whipped a knot in the sash storming down the spiraling
staircase. His whole body trembled with fear. What had Dimitri done now?
The boy knew better than to bring women to the house.
Bernard paused on the balcony overlooking a spacious
living room. Below, a single table lamp cast ghostly shadows. He
resisted the temptation to call the police and risk ruinous publicity.
He would first investigate for himself to see what had happened and give
himself time to gather his wits about him. There were others to call for
help should the need to be discrete arise.
He went down the stairs and flipped a wall switch. Light
from a century-old chandelier commandeered from a bombed cathedral near
Milan cast a sparkling light into the living room.
Nothing here.
He rushed down a shadowed hall toward the rear basement
entrance. Dimitri would most probably be found in one of the downstairs
dens. The sound had been dim, filtered through most of the three stories
and thirty rooms of the mansion. If the scream hadn’t struck such a note
of terror in his soul, its volume alone would never have awakened him.
Dimitri cried out in anger somewhere ahead. The door at
the end of the hall flew open. A girl in shorts, hardly more than a
child, rushed from the staircase and almost collided with him before
dodging to one side with a shriek of terror and ducking by. Dimitri
followed, fitting one leg and then another into a pair of trousers. He
nervously tossed from hand to hand a three thousand dollar Spanish
dueling foil dating from the thirteenth century, bloodied for the first
time in perhaps six hundred years.
“For the love of Mary, Mother of God!”
Startled by Bernard’s cry, Dimitri stumbled drunkenly. He
lowered his head and glowered at the older man through bloodshot eyes
burning with drunken rage. His narrow chest heaved. Sweat on his body
gleamed in the bright overhead light. And something darker.
More blood.
Bernard lumbered forward, anger bubbling through his
confusion. “How dare you bring your foul sickness into my home! You
drunken fool, I warned you!”
Dimitri’s eyes widened in surprise. Fear penetrated his
alcoholic stupor an instant before Bernard backhanded the much younger
and smaller man and sent him careening against the wall. The sword
clattered to the tiled floor. Dimitri floundered, muttering obscenities
forbidden in the house.
The dark stairs from which the girl and Dimitri had
emerged caught and held Bernard’s focus of attention. The blood was not
Dimitri’s, and the fleeing girl had been unharmed. A third presence was
in the house. An evil that hadn’t touched Bernard’s life in half a
century had been wrought in the den below.
Bernard retrieved the foil and started down the stairs,
holding the thin blade before him as a shield against the unknown.
Inwardly, he railed against his cowardice. Cowardice had ruled his life.
The self-hatred it engendered would torment him until the day his
faltering heart stopped for good.
“Father, no!” Dimitri cried out from the top of the
stairs. “Stay away from this! Let me handle it! Goddamn it, I can’t let
her get away!”
The escaping girl went out through the kitchen. A pot
clattered to the floor, and the back door slammed back against the
counter. Bernard felt a tinge of satisfaction at the silence that
ensued. The girl had escaped. Dimitri whirled about and launched himself
pursuit of her, leaving Bernard alone in the deathly quiet den.
Overturned chairs littered the floor. Bernard eyed
emptied liquor bottles at the bar, and empty glasses. The smell of death
permeated the room, and Bernard turned aside and vomited in a powerful,
subconscious protest of the long forgotten stench of blood and loosened
bowels. Slowly, he recovered and continued the search. There was nothing
in view from his vantage point. He wanted to see nothing more. He backed
away slowly, hoping that nothing at all had happened. His faltering
heart could stand only so much excitement.
But he had to know for certain, and every second counted
if he hoped to stop Dimitri from compounding the consequence of his
madness. Bernard shuffled to the bar and snatched the handset of the
extension from its cradle. A pudgy finger quivering with tension paused
over the buttons.
Countless phone numbers spilled through his mind, the
home and office numbers of every major city official, of contractors and
mobsters, of friends and family. Numbers were his stock and trade. If he
closed his eyes, he could all but see the scrolling computer screens in
the new accounting offices spilling forth the life blood of a city. No
mystery there. Numbers, clean and neat. No blood in any but a
metaphorical sense. Numbers had no odor. They did not feel sticky upon
the hand, nor were they ever so irrevocably spilled into the dust.
His fingers tapped out a number. It surprised him, the
evidence of sanity at work beneath his panic. The phone buzzed and
clicked. A muffled voice sounded at the other end. “Karl Garko. Who are
you and what do you want?”
Bernard’s voice broke. He squeezed tears from his eyes.
Self-deprecation seared him. Always this plea for help in times of
crisis, always this dependency upon forces in his life that used him as
they might a pawn upon a chessboard.
“Bernard?” said the hesitant voice on the other end of
the line. “Carvelli, is it you? My friend, you know better than to call
me at this number. This is for emergencies only. Is this an emergency,
Carvelli?”
Bernard took a shuddering breath of air. “Dimitri. . .”
Karl Garko muttered a profanity, and then an angered
sigh. “Dimitri,” he spat. “What has he done now?”
“I don’t know. Karl, there’s blood. Dimitri brought women
home!”
Karl’s voice went deep and cold. “I’ve warned you about
that boy, Carvelli. He’s sick and he’s dangerous. Dangerous to all of
us. Did he hurt someone, Carvelli? Do you want me to send help, or can
this wait until morning?”
Bernard eyes darted about the room. Morbid curiosity and
the need to satisfy Karl Garko’s question sent Bernard’s head bobbing
from side to side in search of the inevitable body. He caught sight of
white flesh showing from between the pool table and an upholstered
chair. His breath caught in his throat.
“Bernard?”
A white breast, a rose aureole and its nipple glowed like
lifeless wax in the dim light. A naked woman, not breathing. A tiny
wound in her solar plexus leaked blood, and another lower on her belly.
Bernard Carvelli whimpered. Karl snapped at him over the
phone, bringing him back into focus.
Bernard’s voice went flat. “He killed a girl, Mr. Garko.”
Karl groaned. “Stay put. I’m sending men over. Don’t call
the police. We’ll take care of this ourselves. Where’s Dimitri now?”
“Mr. Garko, there was a second girl. I think she got
away. Dimitri went after her.”
“Christ! Bernard, stay put! I’ll get some men over right
away!”
The handset clicked and buzzed. Bernard lowered it, his
eyes fixed on the cross-section of torso visible through the furniture.
He shuffled forward until the cord pulled the handset from his hand and
it banged against the side of the bar.
He studied the body long enough to confirm the obvious
for certain, and then he turned away. The scream had belonged to this
girl. It had been her death he had heard echoing through the empty
house. Once again he had witnessed murder. Once again he would be used
like a tool to hide sin from the eyes of society. And poor Dimitri. By
morning, Dimitri would be sober enough to know that he had sealed his
own doom. If only he could be stopped before he hurt anyone else. The
girl he pursued had been but a child.
Bernard backed to a stool and sat. He had lost his own
flesh and blood, his only begotten son. He did not grieve Dimitri’s
inevitable death. He grieved for the life that had eluded him all of
these lost decades. Garko would clean up the mess he and Dimitri had
made and leave no evidence to the sins that had been committed yet
again. The only witness was the only one that ultimately counted, the
Almighty Himself.
He had known this day would come.
Novels by
William G. Tedford