The Eye of Midnight (12 page)

For the first time since their arrival, the two girls found themselves alone in the middle of the warehouse. Seizing the opportunity, they began working desperately to free themselves from their bonds. They writhed and strained, but the baling wire only bit deeper into their wrists, and finally they slumped against the steel column in resignation.

Maxine closed her eyes and sighed. “Nura,” she said, “I'm sorry about how I treated you when we met. I'm afraid I wasn't very kind. I wish we could start over.” She twisted her head, trying to see Nura's face behind her. “I just—I just really wanted to do something right. I had a crazy idea that maybe I could bring Grandpa the package myself. Make him proud. I guess I wanted him to think…”

“To think what?”

“I don't know, to think that I was smart. Special.
Useful.
”

“I'm sure you are all those things,” said Nura. “You are here with me now when you might have left, and that makes you very useful to me.”

Maxine flushed gratefully, but her smile died on her lips. “Yeah, well, that's more than I can say for Will,” she muttered. “I can't believe he just left us stranded here.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“Maybe not,” said Nura suddenly.

Maxine craned her neck and lifted her eyes to a catwalk below the warehouse ceiling. There in a dark corner just beneath the rafters, she made out a small door along the outer wall. It was opening slowly, and William's head appeared, looking left, then right, checking the room cautiously.

Maxine caught her breath, and her eyes darted anxiously to Binny and his men at the far side of the warehouse.

William edged to the railing and surveyed the floor below. Spotting the girls, he put his finger to his lips and crept toward a rickety staircase at the end of the loft. The wooden stairs groaned beneath him, and the girls flinched, certain that he would be heard, but the gangsters continued their work without pause.

William disappeared from view, and then a minute later they could feel damp fingers fumbling with the wire on their wrists.

“How'd you get in here?” asked Maxine in a low voice.

“I climbed a fire escape out back. Why'd you have to go and get yourselves caught?”

“Shhh! Just get us out of this place, will you?”

“All right, all right. These guys are real trouble, huh? I'm pretty sure those aren't squirt pistols they're wearing under their—”

He stopped midsentence, and all three raised their heads. At that moment, at the end of the warehouse, the garage door opened to the night with a metallic screech. A pair of headlamps blazed outside, igniting a thousand falling raindrops. An engine revved ominously.

Binny stood with his hands on his hips, bathed in the brilliance of the two beams. A dark green delivery truck rolled through the garage door and stopped just inside the warehouse. ST climbed down from the driver's seat.

“What took you so long?” asked Binny. “You oughta been back a while ago.”

“We made a little detour,” said ST. He walked back and pounded on the side of the truck. “I decided to pick up a few friends.”

The cargo door opened with a rattle, and a dozen men descended from the back of the truck with Tommy guns and sawed-down twelve-gauges, spreading out on either side of ST.

“Hey, those are Jimmy Doherty's boys!” snarled the doorman, reaching for his pistol.

Binny nodded. “Looks like I got a rotten apple in the bunch,” he said grimly. “Caesar had Brutus, and I got the White Rat.”

“You're old and fat, Binny,” called ST. “A flat tire. Somebody shoulda put you out to pasture a long time ago.”

But Binny was the picture of tranquility. His heavy lids were half closed, as if he were on the verge of sleep. “That day may be coming,” he replied with a nod. “I don't figure you'll be around to see it, though.”

“Get in the truck, Binny,” said ST. “We're going for a little ride.”

The gangster raised his head abruptly, and he was changed—his brass and swagger and broad New York diction were cast off, exposing a creature of cunning and violence.

“Do I look like a chump to you?” Binny said, his eyes igniting like an acetylene torch. “Do I look like a rube? Do you think I've survived all these years, outlasted all the two-bit upstarts in this town, only to be chased outta my own house with a rolled-up newspaper by a punk like you?”

He drew his revolver and leveled it at the traitor. “You're full of big ideas, kid, but it'll be a while before a piddling whelp can knock me off the hill. If you think you're ready, though, why then, go ahead and give it a shot.”

A whisper of uncertainty crossed the White Rat's face, but he mustered a sneer, and the shadow passed. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and raised his own pistol in answer.

Twenty paces separated the two men, nothing more. Neither of them looked for cover. They eyed each other steadily across the warehouse floor, their faces lit with a murderous fire.

Nura and Maxine had been watching the drama unfold from a distance, holding their breath along with everyone else in the warehouse, but suddenly they felt the baling wire drop from their numb wrists.

“Come on!” whispered William, tugging desperately at their sleeves. “Nobody's watching the front door. Now's our chance!”

The cousins turned and started for the door, but, looking back, they saw that Nura was not with them.

“Nura!” called Maxine in a low, urgent voice. “The exit's this way!”

“Yes, but the package is not,” said Nura. She shook her head and dashed off in the other direction.

William and Maxine hesitated for just an instant, then shrugged at each other and turned to follow.

The peeling black door where ST had disappeared earlier with the leather satchel was situated beneath the catwalk, at the end of a long row of canvas-draped crates. Nura crouched, hugging the wall, and William and Maxine followed close behind, keeping a wary eye on the situation brewing around the truck.

They reached their goal and tried the handle, but the black door was stuck. Nura put her shoulder into it—gently, so as not to make a sound—and the three children tumbled inside a dingy bathroom onto a grimy tile floor. A handful of white moths made drunken circles around a lightbulb on the ceiling above, and the stall door in front of them hung limply on buckled hinges. A filthy ashtray, overflowing with cigar butts, sat balanced on the corner of the sink.

Nura leapt to her feet and began rummaging about the room. She went through a dented waste bin and checked beneath the sink, but the leather bag was nowhere to be found. Her face lit up, though, as she glanced in the mirror above the dripping faucet. There in the streaked glass she saw the satchel hanging from a coat hook on the door behind them.

Whirling around, she sprang to the bag, opening it in a heartbeat and straining to make out the contents in the dim light.

“Is it in there?” asked Maxine, crowding close behind her.

Nura removed the old cigar box and breathed a great sigh of relief. “Yes,” she said. “It is safe.”

She slung the empty bag over her shoulder and was about to place the cigar box back inside, but Maxine stopped her.

“Wait a minute,” she said, snatching the satchel. “Maybe Binny and ST don't have to know we took the package.” She grabbed the ashtray from the corner of the sink and dumped the contents inside the leather bag, and then, for good measure, she dumped the ashtray in as well.

“At least this way they won't figure out anything is missing from the bag until they open it up,” she said. “It might give us a head start.” She returned the satchel to its hook, and Nura nodded approvingly.

William pressed his ear against the black door and grasped the handle, but at that instant a ringing concussion on the other side made him recoil as if the knob were red-hot. The trio froze for a moment, then backed away from the door. Out in the warehouse they heard a string of shots—ten, maybe twelve—all in the time it takes to blow out a match.

A great commotion followed. Curses and running feet and the caustic smell of spent shells. The truck engine coughed to life.

“We can't go out there,” William whispered in alarm.

“There must be some other way,” said Maxine. She glanced around the room, then down at the floor. At her feet a handful of shadows wove dizzy circles in a sallow puddle of light. She glanced up suspiciously at the moths that flitted around the bare bulb.

“How do you figure
they
got in here?” she asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she pushed open the crippled stall door. Just above the water tank behind the toilet was a small, dusty window, open a crack. Outside, the lights of the city winked in the distance.

Another volley of angry shouts erupted in the warehouse, and Nura hugged the cigar box close to her chest. “They know we are missing,” she said.

Maxine motioned toward the open window. William nodded, pushing Nura through the stall door and boosting her unceremoniously onto the tank above the toilet.

“Time to go,” he said.

An eight-foot drop later, William and the girls stood in a shining-wet alley behind the warehouse. Nura wiped the grit from a bloodied knee, and the three of them bolted off into the night.

The skies were clearing; the Hare Moon glinted through the breaks in the skidding clouds. In the distance, the sunburst of the unfinished Chrysler Building rose high above Midtown like an eternal flame, a beacon of true north. They galloped on, away from the deserted backstreets toward the living city, with only the sound of their own pounding footsteps for company.

Two blocks up a familiar green delivery truck passed through the intersection, driving slowly. The children ducked behind a sidewalk newsstand as it vanished from sight; then they sprinted off once more, past shuttered jewelry shops and empty delicatessens and a darkened church that regarded their coming and going with monastic indifference.

Maxine halted finally, beside the steps of a corner barbershop. “I have to stop,” she gasped. “Just for a minute.”

They leaned heavily on their knees and gulped for air. Somewhere far behind them a dog barked belligerently, touching off a chorus of yaps and howls that swelled above the city.

Nura slumped down on the wet steps and clutched the parcel to her chest.

“We did it, didn't we, Nura?” whispered Maxine, covering her mouth in a kind of elated disbelief. “We got the package! We got the package, and we're still in one piece!”

Nura laid her palms on the cigar box and stared at it for a long while.

“So when do we get to see what's in there?” asked William. He elbowed Nura in the ribs, but she only blinked vacantly, and her hands never moved.

“Come on, Nura,” begged Maxine. “I think I'll positively have kittens if you don't open it!”

Nura gave her a weak smile, and then, slowly and deliberately, she untied the string around the package.

They peered at it in the sickly light of the corner streetlamp.

“You didn't travel six thousand miles just to deliver a box of cigars, I hope,” said William.

Nura ignored him and lifted the lid with trembling fingers, and the cousins gazed at last upon the strange object for which they had risked their lives. Until this moment they had known it only by its influence and aura—the violent greed it had stirred in Binny and ST, the longing and dread it held for Nura, the urgency it had spurred in Grandpa. Now that it was unveiled before their own eyes, they found themselves strangely unsettled in its presence.

A shining object glinted inside the box, nestled atop a folded length of black silk. Nura tugged at the end of the wide silk ribbon, piling several feet of it in her lap, then lifted the flashing silver article to which the black ribbon was attached, dangling it in front of them.

It was a mirror, slightly larger than a tea saucer and dusky, its lustrous surface polished to a flawless reflection. The metal disk had been cast in one piece, without frame or handle, and an image of the crescent moon was engraved upon it, embracing the silvered face within its pointed horns. Nura turned the disk over to reveal a swirling confusion of Arabic calligraphy that licked flamelike across the opposite side, interrupted by five staring eyes carved amid the chaos. A series of irregular slits were fashioned along the outer edge, and through one of these the long black sash was tied.

It was an extraordinary object—a worthy addition to Grandpa's basement collection—but looking at her dark reflection in its polished surface, Maxine shrank back inexplicably. The thing was not pleasant to her sight.

“What is it?” William asked.

“The Eye of Midnight,” replied Nura. “The Key to Paradise.”

“We saw a strange telegram back at Battersea Manor that mentioned an Eye,” whispered Maxine. “ 
‘Seek the Needle, find the Eye,'
that's what it said. We thought maybe it meant your necklace.”

“No,” said Nura. “This is the Eye of which the telegram spoke.”

“Is it magic?” asked William. “Grandpa told us a story about a magic mirror that belonged to an old jinni.”

“Magic?” said Nura. “Who knows for certain? But it is not belonging to any jinni. It is his—the Old Man of the Mountain. He wears the mirror next to his heart, bound to his bosom with the black silk sash. In its darkened glass, the Hashashin believe the Old Man sees all things past, present, and future. It is the holiest of objects to him and to his servants—the Key to the Garden of Paradise and the symbol of his power over the
fida'i.
”

“The who?” asked William.

“The
fida'i
—the Old Man's destroying angels. They are the faithful, the living daggers of the desert fortress of Alamut. Within the ranks of the Hashashin, it is the
fida'i
who carry out the master's bloody bidding. For him, willingly and unquestioningly, they will give their lives, and with their curving daggers they will kill.”

Nura paused and polished the mirror with her sleeve.

“Put it back,” said Maxine with a shudder.

“What does Grandpa want with it, I wonder?” asked William, watching as Nura swaddled it with the black silk sash. “And why did the Old Man ever give it away?”

“He is not giving it to anyone,” she answered. “It was stolen from him.”

“Stolen? By who? And how did you end up with it?”

Nura looked at the cousins with a level stare. She replaced the black bundle in the cigar box, tied it shut carefully, and would say no more.