Tales From the Black Chamber (22 page)

Ms. Weintraub picked up a file and led them into the room, where they saw a cherubic, dark-complected black boy of about seven or eight, dressed spiffily in a sweater vest and tie. Anne involuntarily took a half step back in a shock of recognition. His was the face from the mirror. His obviously concerned mother, whose clothes weren't quite up to the mark of those she'd bought her son, sat with her arm around the back of his chair. Anne, Claire, and Ms. Weintraub all sat down.

The director addressed the little boy. “Darrell, these are Special Agents Sotheby and Thatcher from the FBI. They're trying to find Monsignor Clairvaux to make sure he's ok. They just want to ask you a few questions. Is that ok with you?”

“Sure,” said Darrell in a soft voice, but with a lilt betraying a little excitement.

Ms. Weintraub turned to his mother. “Mrs. Green?”

“That's fine,” Darrell's mother said, with a little trepidation. Ms. Weintraub nodded to Claire and Anne.

Claire took the lead, as usual. “Hi, Darrell. I'm Special Agent Thatcher of the FBI. You can call me Hilda if you like. Here's my ID.” He examined it as if it were a precious grown-up thing that he couldn't quite believe he could play with. “We just want to ask you a few questions about Monsignor Clairvaux. Now, no one's in trouble, no one is in danger, do you understand?”

Darrell nodded happily, and showed Claire's FBI badge to his mother, who took it and looked at it intently for a second, then stared closely at Claire. Seemingly satisfied, she handed the ID back to Claire.

“Okay, so Monsignor Clairvaux is your Big Brother, right?”

“Yes. He's
great
.”

“So we hear from Ms. Weintraub. You guys do a lot of fun stuff together, it sounds like.”

“Oh yeah! We do
everything
! We go to the Natural History Museum—last time there was this cool movie about this guy Shackleton and his boat that got stuck in the ice at the South Pole. It was very sad because they had to kill all the dogs that they brought because there wouldn't be enough food for the poor dogs and they didn't want to let them starve and the man who took care of the dogs cried. But they got off the South Pole, and not a single person died. I think that Shackleton guy is a hero.”

“I think so, too, Darrell,” Claire said, smiling. All the adults in the room were smiling, even Mrs. Green, parental pride in her eyes. Claire asked, “Have you ever been to Monsignor Clairvaux's house?” and Mrs. Green's face darkened again.

“A few times. One time he showed me a book he had about some Aztec guys, because we saw this really scary exhibit of Aztec art at the Guggenheim. And I was really scared of Aztecs. But then he showed me this book, and it was only the art they made that was really scary. They looked just like normal people. Sort of like Indians. Not the India kind, but the American kind.”

Ms. Weintraub put in, “Monsignor Clairvaux asked for our approval any time before inviting Darrell over, and volunteered to have a supervisor present.”

“How many times were you there, Darrell?” asked Claire.

“Um, I don't know. About ten?”

Ms. Weintraub was looking at a paper from the file she'd brought. “We have one dozen approved visits over a two-year period.”

“Did you ever do anything interesting there?” Claire asked.

“Sure! We played the piano a few times, a couple times Monsignor showed me some magic tricks, and one time he showed me this awesome book about trains he had. It was real big, like one of those table-coffee books, and it had pictures of every kind of train in the world! His one grandfather was an engineer back when all they had were steam engines, but this book has all the diesels and electrics and even had some stuff on the maglev train they have in China and the TGVs in France, those aren't maglev trains, but regular ones that go about as fast. TGV means
train à grande vitesse
, which means ‘train of high speed.'”

Claire smiled. “That's very good!
Tu parles français bien.
”

“
Monsignor Clairvaux est un bon professeur. J'espére que je suis un bon étudiant.
”

“I'm sure you are a great student, Darrell,” praised Claire. “Your accent is great and your grammar is perfect.”

Anne leaned in. “
Et linguam latinam discis?
”

“
Disco
,” Darrell smiled, very pleased with himself.

“That's fantastic. I hope you keep up with those languages. They can be really helpful in life,” said Anne.

“The monsignor got Darrell a scholarship through high school in the Catholic school system,” said Mrs. Green. “He's taking those languages in school now, too.”

“They're pretty fun,” said Darrell. “But I like math best.”

“Yikes,” said Anne. “Not me. Can I call you when I'm doing my taxes?”

Darrell looked shy. “Sure.”

Claire said, “Darrell, did Monsignor Clairvaux say anything to you before he left town?”

Darrell nodded vigorously.

“And what was that?”

“He said that he was going away for a long time, and he wasn't sure when he'd be back, but when he came back we'd go to another Yankees game.”

“Did he tell you where he was going?” asked Claire.

“No, not really. Some place up north in Canada.”

Claire and Anne looked at each other in surprise. “Canada?” Claire asked.

“Uh-huh. One of his grandparents or great-grandparents or something used to live up there.”

“Did he mention the name of a town or a province or anything?” Anne asked.

“Nope. Just Canada,” said Darrell. “Do you think he'll be back soon?”

Anne felt her heart sink. “I don't know, Darrell. I really don't. If he does, I'm sure you'll be one of the first people he calls. But if not, you just keep doing what you're doing in school, and being good for your mom, and being so polite and gracious to strangers like us. He will be very, very proud.”

“Thanks,” said Darrell.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Darrell,” said Claire, reaching across the table to shake his hand.

“Thank you, the pleasure was mine,” Darrell said carefully, as if trying to remember the pleasantry exactly.

“Mrs. Green, you've got an amazing son,” Anne said, shaking her hand as they all stood.

“I know. I wish his father were alive to see him,” she said, choking up a little.

“I'm so sorry,” said Claire, shaking her hand.

“My dad died in Afghanistan,” said Darrell. “He was a Green Beret and he was really brave and he saved six other soldiers and killed nineteen Talibans. They came to our house to thank Mom and me. And then we got a medal for him from the President.”

“Medal of Honor,” said Mrs. Green in a low, tight voice, her eyes bright with tears.

“My dad was a hero. Like Shackleton. Only he died. We were really sad. I still miss him. I wish I remembered him a little better, but I have a great picture the other soldiers gave us.”

Anne swallowed a huge lump in her throat and said, “It sounds like your dad was a great, great hero. I'm really proud to meet his son,” offering her hand for him to shake.

Darrell took it solemnly, then smiled. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure,” Anne said, bending down, as he stood on tiptoe and cupped his hand to her ear.

He whispered, “I remember you from the mirror trick.”

Anne whispered back, “I remember you, too,” and then, before she knew what she was doing, she hugged him.

Claire shut off her cell phone and slipped it into her pocket as the Delta shuttle's stewardesses passed by checking her and Anne's seat belts.

“What did he say?” asked Anne.

Claire lifted an eyebrow. “Verbatim? He said, ‘Canada? Oh, shit.'”

“John doesn't like Canada?”

“No, it's just that we don't have the slightest jurisdiction in Canada. We're a branch of the U.S. government. Our legal authority stops at the border.”

“Oh, right. So, does Canada have a, you know,
chambre noire
?” She spoke softly and circumspectly, though the flight was only half full.

“No. At least we don't think so.”

“That leads me to a question. Who does have similar agencies?”

“That's a very good question. Again, we can't be sure that there aren't ones out there below the radar, but we know of a handful. The British do, and they have been known to operate in places like Canada and India, so there may be some Imperial or Commonwealth connection. The Russians do, but we're really not sure what they're up to these days. In the Soviet days, they were after power and dedicated to stamping out evidence of the supernatural, lest it discredit the state cult of atheism. Nowadays with the whole weird Caesaropapist alignment of the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church, we're not sure if that's affected their mission. In fact, it's possible that they've dropped below the Kremlin's radar. They were part of the GRU, not the KGB, so the Kremlin probably isn't as wired into them as they might otherwise be. Or they could have been abolished. Though that's never a safe bet with shady, spooky organizations.

“France does, but they're much more about the science of the supernatural, near as we can tell. Mostly gathering information, rather than running around with guns like we do. If you look in the library there's a volume on the biochemistry of lycanthropy produced by them that we obtained. It's very interesting. That said, if they've got a former French special-ops guy or two, that makes them as dangerous as we are with Steve. Steve always says that despite the French reputation for cowardice, his experience with their special forces is that they are very, very good and very, very ruthless.

“Um, let me think, who else? We're a little sketchy on East Asia. The Japanese might, but if they do, they play it very close to the vest. The Chinese do, we believe, and in fact, if you read some ancient texts the right way, it's arguable that they've had one for a thousand years. The Communist government is so closed, though, that we have no idea what's happened to them since 1949. Remember Herbert Yardley, our founder? He documented that an organization existed called the
Pai Tse Ko
, the Cabinet (or Chamber) of the White Marsh, and even saw their library, which he said had an amazing number of very old documents that he was told were written by members of the organization. But, of course, Mao might well have burned the place to the ground and killed everyone. Or they all packed up and moved to Tibet until the Commies got there in 1959. Or they're still there, hiding. Or, perhaps, they're actually out in the service of the People's Republic, keeping down all the hungry ghosts left over from the Great Leap Forward. It's one of those big ‘who knows?' questions.”

“Why ‘White Marsh?'”

“Ah, that's actually very interesting.
Pai Tse
not only means ‘white marsh' but it's the name of a legendary creature who dictated a book to Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, in which it described the appearance and behavior of the eleven thousand five hundred twenty supernatural creatures in the world and how to defeat and dispel them. The book, the
Pai Tse T'u
, was lost in antiquity, but fragments of it crop up in other works.”

“Aha. So it's a not-so-subtle clue that they're attempting to do the same thing.”

“So Yardley thought.”

“Wow.”

“Let me think, who am I missing? Ah, the Germans. That's an interesting case. You've heard of the
Ahnenerbe
, I assume?”

Anne smiled. “You assume incorrectly.”

“Ah, ok. All the big Nazis were freaks for the occult. Himmler was one of the biggest kooks on that score. He believed in these oddball historical theories whereby the Aryan race had been the most glorious civilization in world history until it was beaten down by those evil Romans, Christians, and Jews, more or less in turn.”

Anne nodded. “I've heard that. You run across a lot of b.s. occultism when you're going through estates or auction catalogs trying to find the good stuff. And it seems like you could slap a swastika on a washing-machine repair manual and get a bestseller, given the number of books about the Nazis out there.”

“Probably true,” Claire said. “So, in 1935, once the Nazis were firmly ensconced in power, Himmler, some of his race-theory buddies, and a historian of prehistoric antiquity set up the
Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe
, the ‘Research Society for German Ancestral Heritage,' a body for obtaining and scientifically documenting evidence of these prehistoric-Aryan-glory theories. They sent out expeditions to Sweden, France, Tibet, Finland, and the Middle East. They're what the
Raiders of the Lost Ark
villains were based on. Now, although many of them were crackpot Nazis, they had some very well-trained scholars with them who came up with all sorts of fascinating archaeological, anthropological, and paleontological stuff, though most of it was within their framework of race-war drivel. During the war, especially in Poland, a lot of their activities were flat-out looting. But they always clung tenaciously to a veneer of science. As did their medical-research branch, which did a lot of hideous experiments on Jews in concentration camps.”