The Eye of Midnight (15 page)

“Yes,” he snarled. “Receive your reward.” His hand dropped to the jeweled hilt at his waist. “The wages of a fool.”

Through the weave of the linen tablecloth they saw a silver flash as the Rafiq's clenched fist passed across the White Rat's throat. He stepped back, and ST swayed gently on his feet, his expression puzzled and glassy, and now the front of his white suit was streaked with a scarlet stain. He looked down and daubed at it clumsily as if it were a soiled necktie. Then he crumpled in a heap, like a marionette whose strings had all been cut in a single pass.

Maxine clapped her hand to her mouth in horror, stifling a gasp, and William and Nura trembled beside her. The Rafiq crouched and wiped his blade clean on the dingy white suit, then rose and withdrew through the door by which he'd come, to the inner recesses of the lair.

William and the girls scrambled out from beneath the table, averting their eyes from the limp form on the far side of the room.

“We must not stay here,” said Nura, adjusting her haversack across her shoulder. “Someone will come to carry away the body.”

She glanced at the dark passage where the
fida'i
had taken Binny, then crept inside. A moment later she returned, shaking her head.

“There is a locked door within,” she said. “The way is blocked.”

She took one of the brass lamps from its niche in the wall and made a slow circuit of the room, peeking into the other arched doorways. Choosing the opening beneath the sphinx, she disappeared from view.

“In here,” she said, emerging partially and waving them in.

The cousins obeyed, stumbling after her into a gloomy storeroom stacked with basins and crockery. William steadied himself against a heavy butcher's block and reached for a damp rag slung across a nearby water tap. He pressed it to his forehead and passed it to the girls. Feeling somewhat restored, they turned slowly and glanced about their dim surroundings.

The room was full to bursting with provisions: tall urns and bulging sacks, quarters of smoked meat, long shelves sagging with olives and dates and spices, and countless baskets full of nuts and cheeses and eggs and every other thing.

Nura fell on the food ravenously, pushing bread and raisins into her mouth with both hands. She passed the baskets to William and Maxine, and for a few minutes there were no words, only gulping and chewing with barely a space for breath.

At length William swallowed down the last of a bowl of greasy fritters and licked his fingers.

“Did you hear what he said? About locking Binny up with the colonel?”

“I heard,” replied Maxine. “Grandpa is here somewhere.”

William nodded. “I wish we could get our hands on those keys.”

Maxine thought of the lifeless body sprawled on the floor in the next room. “He'll kill us if he catches us, won't he?” she murmured.

“The Rafiq?” said Nura. “Yes. He is
bir canavar
—an ogre.”

“He wants the Eye of Midnight pretty bad, though,” said William. “Maybe he'll make a trade—Grandpa for the mirror.”

“He doesn't seem much like the bargaining type,” Maxine replied.

“At least now we know why the gangsters had the mirror, though,” said William. “ST was working for the Rafiq.”

“It still doesn't make any sense,” Maxine said. “Why did the Rafiq need ST in the first place? Why didn't he just send the
fida'i
to the harbor to steal the mirror themselves?”

“The White Rat was a clumsy, ignorant servant,” said Nura in agreement.

“It's almost as if the Rafiq was trying to get his hands on the Eye of Midnight without the
fida'i
knowing about it,” said Maxine. “He made sure the room was empty before he mentioned it to ST.”

William tugged meditatively at a rope of linked sausages. “Maybe we should leave the Rafiq a note,” he said. “Tell him we have the Old Man's precious mirror and that we'll hand it over when he lets Grandpa go free.”

Nura lowered her head dejectedly and murmured something under her breath.

“What's wrong?” asked William. “Wasn't that the plan? To use the mirror to ransom Grandpa?”

“The mirror might buy his freedom, yes,” said Nura. “Though I doubt the Rafiq would honor any promise that he made. But Colonel Battersea is not the Old Man of the Mountain's only prisoner.”

“What do you mean?”

Nura hesitated. “I have not told you everything,” she said at last, and her cheeks flushed. “You asked me before why my parents had sent me all alone to find Colonel Battersea—why they didn't come themselves. The truth is, they could not. It was impossible.”

Her face was hard, and she looked steadily at the cousins. “My parents both lie captive in the desert fortress of Alamut.”

“They're prisoners of the Old Man, too?” asked William in surprise. “How? Why?”

“The Hashashin fell on us in the night,” said Nura slowly, and the cousins could see in her eyes that she was there now, reliving the terrible moment in her mind. “My parents sacrificed themselves so that I could escape. They had warned me that the Old Man might find us one day, and I knew what I was to do. I saddled our horse and fled for the coast with the Eye of Midnight, not certain if my parents were alive or dead. Only when I reached the household of Yusuf in Alexandretta did I learn that they had been carried away to Alamut.”

“Yusuf?” broke in William. “The same Yusuf who sent Grandpa the telegram?”

Nura nodded. “Yusuf is a man my father knew from long ago and trusted. A man he said was a friend of Colonel Battersea's who would be of help if trouble ever found us.”

“But why were your parents in trouble in the first place?” asked Maxine. “What did they do to make an enemy of the Old Man of the Mountain?”

“They possessed the Eye of Midnight,” said Nura. “That in itself was enough. And when the Old Man had torn apart our home and discovered that the mirror was nowhere to be found, he took my parents as security for its return. Word came to Yusuf of their fate. They lie now in the Dungeons of Paradise, beneath the desert fortress of Alamut. If we give up the mirror to rescue Colonel Battersea…”

She paused and shook her head hopelessly.

“If we give up the mirror to rescue Grandpa,” said William, “then your last chance of seeing your parents again goes with it.”

Nura nodded.

William found an apple in a barrel at his elbow and polished it thoughtfully on his sleeve.

“Well then,” he said, “I guess we'll just have to get our hands on those keys.”

“Come on,” said William at length, rising and brushing the crumbs from his jacket. “Let's see what else is back here.”

They wandered deeper in, foraging among the piles of supplies, until they reached the back of the storeroom and the foot of what they first believed to be a set of staggered shelves.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a rickety wooden staircase—so heavily burdened with jars and sacks and tins that their first conclusion was entirely understandable. Nudging aside a few casks and boxes, they picked their way to the top and bobbed their heads through a dark, rectangular opening in the ceiling above.

They were looking out across an old attic with rough planked floors, and if the quantity of dust and cobwebs was any indication, the Hashashin rarely ventured here. They clambered up, and Nura raised her lamp to dispel the dark. All at once they perceived that the space was much bigger than they had first thought, opening out into a vast enclosure.

Maxine stooped to grasp a soiled paper label that lay at her feet.

THE DEVOITTE CO.

“ADAMANT” Celebrated Spar Varnish

“We must be in the old factory we saw from the graveyard,” she said.

They were, in point of fact, standing amid the rack and ruin of the Devoitte Paint and Varnish Works—a dense jungle of wooden scaffolding and presses, decaying machinery and rusting pipes. The wheels of progress, grinding ever on, had reduced the factory to a dilapidated hulk.

They prowled the creaking floors beneath a skeletal tracery of beams and swagged ropes. Stepping around the end of a long row of battered copper tanks, William happened to glance down at the floor and saw that there, beneath his feet, the rough wooden planks were edged with flickering light.

He lay flat on his stomach and put his eye to a gap between the planks. “It's the round room,” he said with surprise. “I can see the purple flame.”

Maxine stretched out beside him. “Such an awful, nasty secret,” she murmured. “Upstairs the factory looks cold and empty, but it's all a lie. The basement's crawling with killers. The Hashashin can come and go through the graveyard, and the city never knows they're here.”

“How many of them are there, do you figure?”

“Who knows? The place seems quiet now, though.”

William crawled forward, keeping his eye just above the crack between the planks. “This could be our ticket.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean we might be able to find Grandpa without having to go down there and risk our necks.”

Nura's eyes swept the darkened attic. “It is huge,” she said. “It must cover the entire building below. We will have to look through many cracks.”

They fanned out across the littered floor, treading softly.

“I can't see a thing over here,” Maxine whispered. “The ceilings on this side have all been plastered over.”

“Hey, M,” said William. “Come have a look at this.”

She trotted over, but as she reached the spot where William was standing, he caught her by the arm.

“Careful,” he said, “that first step's a doozy.”

Maxine looked down at her toes. The floor ended in an abrupt edge that stretched away to either side of the factory. A black chasm lay below.

Nura joined them at the brink. “What lies down there in the darkness, do you suppose?” she asked.

“Beats me,” William said uneasily.

“I guess we'll know when the sun comes up,” said Maxine.

“Right. In the meantime, we might as well get some shut-eye.”

“Honestly, Will. How can you even
think
about sleep at a time like this?”

“Sleep is pretty much all I can think about right now,” said William, rummaging through an aisle of scattered trays and broken carts. He found a pile of discarded burlap sacks behind a sagging trough and flopped down with a groan. “We can figure out a plan in the morning, when it's light enough to see.”

Maxine started to protest, then realized that she was bone-tired herself. “Well, maybe just a short nap,” she said.

Nura joined them, and they settled themselves as best they could on the lumpy pile of sacks. A huddled dole of doves warbled softly in the rafters above, and through a broken bank of mullioned windows and a ragged hole in the roof, a thin gust of wind rustled in.