Immortal at the Edge of the World (33 page)

“I think you should kill him,” Mirella said. “They won’t kill Clara or Paul if he doesn’t return. They’re more important than he is.”

“They can suffer a whole lot without being killed, sweetie. Ask your smelly little friend about that.”

Jerry, it should be noted, could have released himself from the bag on the ground by now, but hadn’t done so. I would have been concerned about this if I was concerned about Jerry. “If I let you go, what happens?” I asked Smith.

“Well, first off, I clean up this mess here before it becomes a major news story.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“You should. There’s cameras everywhere now, Captain Caveman. At least one or two have your face on them. Nowadays that shit can go global in under a day, especially if this ends up looking like a terrorist thing. You think having a drawing of your mug in
The Boston Globe
is bad, wait’ll you see how easy it is to get around when everybody with a smart phone is looking for you.”

“Will
you
stop looking for me?”

“Nah, probably not. But you’ll have a great head start. I don’t really care if you live or die, Adam. I just don’t want you fucking up what we’ve got going on. Maybe you can learn to deal with the idea that in a generation or two you’re not going to be the only immortal man walking around.”

“So I stay away, you leave me alone?”

“You stay away, I don’t try very hard to find you.”

I lowered the sword. “All right.”

“Adam, you can’t—”

“Let him go, Mirella,” I said, handing her the sword. I shot a glance at Brenda, who shrugged. She had no idea what was going on anyway.

“You won’t regret this, Adam,” Smith said, taking out a phone.

“I already do.” I grabbed the astrolabe, the picture of Paul, and the bag of Jerry. “Let’s get out of here before his cleanup crew arrives.”

*
 
*
 
*

Brenda’s new apartment was a huge improvement over the little space she used to have in Chinatown. It was a basement apartment in Brookline that had multiple rooms, carpeting, a working bathroom, overhead lighting, and electricity powering that lighting. It was even decorated somewhat tastefully.

After leaving Smith we had fled to the rental car and debated on where to go next for as long as it took Brenda to point out how close we were to her home. Since Smith was clearly unprepared for Brenda, he must not have known where she lived, which made it a safe place to be. Safer, at least, than the motel. The plane was also probably no longer safe, but it was not safe and in Rhode Island, so the option was moot.

“You can put him on the counter,” Brenda said as soon as she got some lights on. She had a galley kitchen that looked entirely unused, because it was. I didn’t open the refrigerator but I imagined if I had I’d see lots of blood and no beer.

I put the bag with Jerry still inside on her counter. It had been a fifteen-minute drive from Harvard Square to Brookline, and Jerry hadn’t moved or spoken in that time. I looked inside the bag on the way, just long enough to note that what was inside was bleeding a lot.

Mirella turned to Brenda. “Do you have first aid?” she asked.

“I do. Hang on.” Brenda put down her armload of semiautomatic weapons on the couch and disappeared into the bathroom.

I opened the bag. Jerry slid out onto the formerly pristine linoleum. He was a mess of dried and fresh blood, and it was difficult to tell where the wounds were and what had caused them.

He was still breathing, though.

“They flayed him,” Mirella said, horrified. “He’s missing patches of skin.”

Let me reiterate that I had no love for Jerry the iffrit. There were many days when I wondered why I had ever let him live after what he’d done to me. Smith had called me a killer, and I guess that’s true because only a killer would lament having
not
killed someone. But I would never have done to Jerry what Smith did. I wouldn’t have done this to
anything
.

Jerry shivered and shook, and fresh blood came from one of the cuts on his side.
 

“Towel,” I said.

Brenda reappeared with a first aid kit, saw blood, and froze for a half second before disappearing again. She returned a few seconds later with a hand towel. I swaddled him in it like a baby.

“Jerry,” I said.

“He’s in shock,” Mirella said.

“I know. Jerry, can you hear me? It’s Adam.”

Jerry’s eyes fluttered, but didn’t open.

“Asshole,” he whispered.

“There you are.”

“Kill those fuckers for me, would’ja?”

“Jerry, I need to know what happened to the astrolabe.”

“Isn’t that what this thing is?” Brenda asked, holding up the one Smith had given me.

“It’s the wrong one,” Mirella said.

Jerry laughed. It was a hoarse sound that betrayed the amount of liquid in his lungs. “Knew they were watching. Neat trick, huh?”

“Yes, that was very clever, Jerry. You’re very clever. But now I need to know what you did with the real one.”

“Hey, Adam . . . you remember Hanratty’s? What a place, huh? I wish . . .”

He coughed up a load of blood and fell silent.

“Jerry?”

He wasn’t breathing. I didn’t know how to resuscitate an iffrit.

“He’s gone,” Mirella said.

“Awww,” Brenda said. “He seemed like an okay guy.”

“He kind of was,” I said. “In his own way.”

*
 
*
 
*

Brenda actually did have some beer in the refrigerator. I briefly considered pouring some of it into Jerry’s mouth to see if it revived him, and then just because it didn’t seem right for blood to be the last thing to pass over his lips. Then I decided just to drink it myself, while sitting on Brenda’s living room couch next to a pile of guns, in the dark. It seemed like an appropriate tableau given the current circumstances.

After a little while Mirella came in and sat on the coffee table in front of me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I think the cut has healed,” I said. “We should probably take the stitches out when we have a chance.”

“You know that isn’t what I mean.”

“Yes.” I took a deep pull on the beer, and noted that there were two empty bottles on the end table next to me. I had apparently been sitting on the couch for a little while. “I don’t know what it’s like to have a child. Shouldn’t I feel something?”

“I’m sure you do feel something.”

“I guess, but I don’t know what.”

Familial bonding is essentially the only thing I have never experienced. Oh, I’m sure I had parents, and siblings, but it was so long ago I have almost no memory of it. Every now and then a smell or a sound will trigger something in me, a feeling—I guess—of being cared for. An ancient animal memory of my mother is how I think of it. But I don’t remember her face or anything about her.

“You will know when you see him,” Mirella said.

“Do you have children?”

“No,” she laughed. “Not yet. Probably not ever. I have no plans for them.”

“Me neither.”

I have seen what parenthood can do to a person. When I had fewer scruples I used it to my advantage, especially in wars but also in business negotiations and the like. Finding a man’s eldest son was like discovering an especially vulnerable nerve cluster. Hit it often enough and you will have the man on his knees agreeing to whatever terms you need him to agree to. And I imagine a part of me always wondered what it must feel like to be that involved in the life of another person.

Now that I had such a person, I didn’t know what I was going to end up agreeing to, or if anybody was going to stop me from making that deal when the time came.

“We’re going to have to find them,” I said. “It’s not the smart play. The smart play is to go to that tropical island you were talking about. I bet you look great in a bikini.”

“I do,” she said. “But he’s your son.”

“He’s my son. So let’s go do some incredibly stupid things.”

*
 
*
 
*

Going right back to the plaza where we had only just recently killed two people was an incredibly stupid thing, so of course we did it first. In my head it didn’t seem all
that
stupid, because ultimately if Smith and his cohort were looking for us they wouldn’t be checking there, but then we arrived at the scene and it just seemed like a bad idea altogether.

“I don’t see anything unusual,” Mirella said. We were standing a safe distance away at the corner of a building on the far side of Oxford Street. She had the eyepiece of a rifle sight in her hand and was using it to check out the building. I was fighting the urge to pace.

To the naked eye it looked the way it was supposed to, with a large amount of foot traffic consisting mainly of Harvard students. There was no obvious police presence.

Mirella put away the lens. “Two dead men, ten concussed men, and Smith amidst a five-second explosion of flames in the middle of the night, and there’s no evidence any of it ever happened. You should find this disturbing.”

“I do,” I said. And I certainly did. It took a lot of juice to make a crime scene simply not happen. “But right now I find it very convenient. Let’s go before I change my mind.”

*
 
*
 
*

The Harvard Science Center was very much as Brenda had described it. There was a wide-open main floor that included an old IBM computer that was the size of a small truck, encased in plastic and probably no longer functional. Opposite that was a guard desk with a bored-looking Harvard security guard. Beside him was a set of elevators and a directory.

“The third and fourth floors,” Mirella said, reading the directory and parroting Brenda. “That’s where it would be.”

“That’s where it
used
to be,” I said. “We’re going to assume he got it out of there and put it somewhere else.”

“Why are we going to do that?”

“Because otherwise we’re back where we started and I don’t like that conclusion.”

“I greatly prefer the idea that our search might be confined to two partly secure floors rather than this entire building.”

“We don’t need to search the whole building. We only need to think like an iffrit.”

Thinking like an iffrit brought us to the building’s small cafeteria. It wasn’t much more than a deli sandwich counter with a small grill and a soda machine, and definitely not the kind of place Jerry would appreciate.

“They don’t have alcohol here,” I noted.

“That’s a good thing. If he’d set the building on fire it would have been counterproductive.”

“I know, but when I decide to think like an iffrit that’s the only thing I can come up with.”

“He would have needed food, too. This is where the food is.”

“Maybe.”

I stood in the center of the mostly empty cafeteria and spun in a slow circle. There was a chain door at the entrance that would have closed off the space in the off-hours, but that wouldn’t have stopped him any more than the vault holding the astrolabes had. He would have come in through a ceiling tile or a fault in a wall, or a vent, or something. I never really knew how he got into about half the places he managed to get into, actually.

I could only hope Jerry anticipated the possibility that he would not be the one returning to fetch the astrolabe and had made plans accordingly. And if that were true I’d be looking for something only I was expected to notice.

But maybe that was giving him too much credit.

“Let’s walk around some more,” I said.

*
 
*
 
*

Only about half the ground floor was publicly accessible, with the rest of the space taken up by closed-door lecture halls. We walked the floor twice without noting anything before trying the stairs that led down to a sublevel. This was mostly a dead end as well, as it led to more lecture halls, public bathrooms, and the computer lab.

And two vending machines.

Both of the machines had
out of order
signs and yellow caution tape across the front of them. Mirella walked around one and peered at the back. “It looks like mice got into the candy.”

“It’s supposed to,” I said. “Okay, so I’m an iffrit. I think there might be someone outside waiting to snatch me up.”

“Why do you think this?” she asked.

“I don’t know, maybe he saw something unusual, but he knew. He said so. Whatever that was, it convinced him to take a dummy astrolabe.”

“If he knew he was going to be taken, why did he risk leaving?”

“I don’t know. But he couldn’t stay in here forever.”

I pulled one of the machines away from the wall and crouched down to Jerry’s height. The machine’s electrical cord had been chewed through, I noted. “Do you have a flashlight?” I asked.

She had a penlight, which was close enough. “People are staring,” she said when she handed it over.

“Try and look like we’re supposed to be here,” I offered, as I checked out the wall.