The Forest Bull (14 page)

While I was online, reading, the Baron called. He was wearing glasses perched on the end of his nose and a yellowed newspaper article lay on the desk, folded crisply.

“Ring, good evening. I hope I’m not interrupting,” He trailed off, mannerly to a fault. I was glad he had called, and told him.

“We’ve made progress in the past day. It seems that there is movement among certain immortals that we believe are tied to murders here in Florida. I’m not the analytical type, but I am curious. A killer from Morocco has crossed the Pond, so to speak, and is operating here. She’s different. She isn’t anything we’
ve seen before.”

“How so, may I ask?” The Baron raised a brow.

“She works near the coastlines. She’s a predator, no doubt, but she doesn’t feed on women. She has been altered, physically, in a way that is new to us. Her nickname ‘
al-Ribat
,’ along with her description, is unsettling. I can’t decide what she wants other than death.”

“The Archer?
A very specific nickname.” It did not surprise me that the Baron understood the term. He seemed to be a polyglot of the first order, despite his secluded home.

“This woman, she preys on men. Yet I have information that refutes your belief that she wants to kill
,” he said as he unfolded the old, ragged news cutout. “This is from a French newspaper. Printed in 1948--such a busy year for the world, don’t you think?” he asked, smiling.

It
had
been a chaotic year. The world had not taken a sober breath after the orgy of violence from the Second World War. Indochina was becoming a cauldron of hate. Greece, Eastern Europe, and the emergence of Israel had stoked the hot embers of war into another act of mass bloodshed. Mankind had not tired of the horrors of butchery, even after the most destructive event humanity had ever created.

“A woman was charged with assaulting a
gem trader over a disputed purchase. The victim was a known cheat, so it isn’t surprising that he would receive some form of comeuppance. “

“Was she prosecuted?” I was curious to see how an immortal would react to the banality of human law.

“No, sadly. She escaped after the victim died. He survived the initial assault but was unable to speak or move. He lingered in a Lisbon hospital, dying in silence after three days of agony.” Cazimir glanced at the clipping, refreshing his narrative.

“Does it mention a cause of death?” I had to know.

“It does, but obliquely. You see, there was only one visible wound on the victim, Senhor Lorea. His navel had been violated. And, when he died, as a man of questionable breeding and character, he had no family to claim him. So, an inquisitive physician named in the article cut him open.” Cazimir paused, his mouth a grim line.

“What was inside him?” I wasn’t certain I wanted to know. To be victimized so intrusively was disturbing to me
, even though it happened before my birth. This entire event felt personal.

“Three stones.
Unremarkable, gray in color. Of no value at all. They were coated by his body in a furious attempt to expel the alien objects, like an oyster crafting a pearl. They crumbled upon examination by the investigating doctor, a Senhor Coelho. He said that they were soft, more like dried leather mixed with dust.”

There was something about the doctor’s discovery that disturbed me at a visceral level.  I created and discarded lines of inquiry quickly, trying to glean a purpose for the attack. It was the idea that something had been intentionally
inserted
into the man and the victim further degraded by having objects left behind. Like he had been colonized. The disregard for his humanity was total.

While I had been ruminating on the crime, the Baron sat patiently. “Cazimir, is there anything else of note in the article?” I asked, hopeful.

“Most certainly, Ring. I am confident you will find one fact fascinating.  You see, she was charged, but she escaped after charming a youthful jailer into an unplanned release.” A mirthless smile curled his lips. “But bureaucracies can be useful at times, and the record of the allegations remains, despite her absence. I’ll email the newspaper, as well as the court documents, but you may begin with the most important fact of all--Sandrine DeStot. Her name.”

And with that, the search for Elizabeth narrowed in our favor.

Saturday night arrived, and the girls began their usual preparations for a special kind of evening out. Dressed in demure attire, they wore little makeup and jewelry. Their hairstyles were modest, and their heels were low.

They were going to evening Mass at St. Maurice’s on
Stirling Road, as they did on occasion. The reasons for attending were varied, but, in Wally’s estimation, legitimate. An inveterate sinner, Wally’s Germanic and Latin heritage demanded that she atone for her foul language while driving. Risa, a caring friend, chose to support this decision by attending a Catholic Mass, despite not having a gentile bone in her body. This tradition served a multitude of purposes. Wally was able to experience a religious catharsis fewer than three miles from home, which was both convenient and beneficial to her soul. It was also an opportunity for her, and, by default, Risa, to gain the high ground on me and my unrepentant Protestant spirit. Wally appreciated the fact that Saint Maurice led a Roman legion to honor. Risa found the protection of Saint Maurice given to swordsmiths a fascinating and noble attribute. The fact that the priest was a dashing forty-year-old ex-professional volleyball player from California had little to do with their interest in hearing Father Kevin call the catechism in his robust baritone. Of course, I chose to ignore their base reasoning for such a shameful dalliance with the Holy Spirit, but only to promote harmony in our home.

I also got the house to myself for two hours each week, which I used to the fullest by sleeping on the couch, eating
pizza, and other constructive activities. On this night, though, my restlessness got the better of me, and I decided that research was in order. An idea had been percolating in my mind, so nascent that I had not shared it at all, but the quiet house gave me an opportunity to do some internet searching. I knew that vanity was a hallmark of many immortals. Pride and vanity were two sides of the same coin, an Achilles heel to be exploited when dealing with immortals. Surely, I reasoned, Sandrine had left her mark elsewhere. Given her earliest mention, it would most likely be in print. Her career had been decades long when I was born. That type of trail was difficult to mask in full, especially as the digital age brought dim history to the fingertips of the curious.

And my curiosity was intense.

I scrolled through newspaper databases until my eyes were bleary and the screen pulsed with haze. Microfiche news items had been transferred into a grainy torrent of forgotten scandal and crime. The process was cumbersome, as I translated passages from French, Portuguese and Spanish newspapers into small vignettes. The resulting syntax was broken English that I followed to a gradual conclusion.

Sandrine was a French citizen of unknown origin.
  She presented herself in court as a demure woman of the middle class who was surprised to have been charged with a crime but was too mannerly to ridicule the notion of her guilt, preferring to let the court see the absurdity of her presence in the hall populated by the brutal side of mankind. Marseilles. Lisbon. Earlier, Morocco. All sites of her curious bloodlust and places where she had slipped the leash of justice through murder, wile, and bribery. It seemed that Sandrine was a humanist, free of conscience.  I couldn’t wait to meet her. I felt like I needed Risa’s logic or Wally’s intuition, paging through newspaper columns that breathlessly urged public awareness and vigilance in the hunt for a killer. All, of course, in the name of safety. And, incidentally, advertising sales.  I thought of Wally and how she would be mooning at the handsome priest, elbowing Risa as he moved through the Mass. It took a joyful soul to treat a religious ceremony as a source of sexual playfulness. It was congruent with Wally’s sunny disposition to find romance in the austere grasp of a celibate priesthood. Finding such pearls was her gift.

And in flash, I knew where to fi
nd Sandrine. Why would a woman who harbored a century of arrogant disregard for men go among the chattel to be judged worthy? Nightclubs, bars, the stale air of bookstores and cloistered pretentious shops, these were beneath her. I began to warm to Sandrine’s thoughts, her need to prequalify men as lonely. Free of families. Devoid of serious relationships. Out of their normal element, or uncomfortable in their stations. Perhaps, a bit desperate and willing to be put in a vulnerable position to get something that they needed in order to feel like a man. There was only one type of woman who granted a man the satisfaction of a virile identity far beyond his charms.

I sat back down at the keyboard and typed
Escorts. South Florida. French.
A single ad came up. With a picture. Her eyes were stone flat above a perfunctory smile. “Hello, Sandrine” I said to the air.

Gotcha
.

I
pinged the Baron with the news and found myself inordinately pleased with his reaction when he signed on and we began speaking.

“Impressive, Ring.
You’ve made a logic leap that I would not have contrived in any amount of time. How will you proceed? She is quite dangerous, despite your abilities.” He was understating the case. She was terrifying. There was something deeply offensive about her method of killing. I knew that murder in and of itself should be the supreme violation of a person, but Sandrine brought new elements of fear and disgust with her crimes.

“I’ll have to approach her as a customer. A public meeting is too uncertain. I don’t know how cagey she is, but I’m betting that
, after a century or so of predation, she’s hard to corner. So it has to be me, alone, and I have to take her alive, at first.” I needed interrogation rather than instant elimination. It was new territory for me.

“She won’t be held. She cannot be domesticated for the purposes of turning on her own kind. That means you must act quickly, decisively, and with a maximum vi
olence in order to subdue her.” Cazimir’s tone was instructive but urgent. He knew that paralysis of any kind would mean my death, and it could happen at her leisure.

“My last name, Byk?
You know the meaning?” he continued. “It is the word for a bull, an animal never known for subtlety.” He smiled at me and put his hands up in an imitation of horns. “Bulls are always charging, they do not submit lightly. They are capable of enormous destruction in a short amount of time, crushing and using bunched muscles to drive them ever forward until they win. Or die. There is little middle ground in the mind of the bull. But, in spite of our name, my family has chosen to live through avoidance, some would even say deception. We had to, in order to survive a vicious political landscape through these centuries. Europe has been at war, Ring. War of unending variety and violence. There have been countless local skirmishes due to petty feudal grievances about succession, lands, money, religion, divorce. The reasons are as varied as the dates that blood was shed in the name of some forgotten lord, born of a cause lost to the depths of time. Only the bones remain, Ring, and they pave the continent with the residue of sorrow, each death piling on the last in a tower of loss that would scratch at the heavens if it were made real. Do you know who pays the price of royal vanity? The rustics. Stoop-backed laborers enslaved to their land, their pittances worried away by men they never see who give them nothing. My family took only from the forest; we would not bear the shame of a parasitic existence on the shoulders of the poor. So we have hidden our herd, and our family, and our wealth in this life, by folding ourselves fully into the green depths around us. Do you know of the KGB?” he asked.

I said
, yes, of course. Who didn’t?

“The KGB is timeless. If
one goes far enough back in Soviet history, their name changes, but their sinister purpose and brutality remains unchanged. Before the KGB, there was the NKVD, the OGPU, oh, so many names, Ring, but always called by their original name: the Cheka. How they were feared. We took in ragged refugees often; their flight from the organization in power at the time was that of a terrified animal. The Slavic fetish for paranoia did not begin with the Bolsheviks, though. Even as far in the past as the reign of Tsar Nicholas, there were secret police that walked amidst the populace, ever vigilant for enemies of the state. Real or imagined, Ring, there were always bodies for the hangman. The Cheka used to drive cars know as Black Crows. To see one park in front of a neighbor’s house was a death sentence for the unfortunate subject of their gaze. There are several Black Crows rusting into the moss near my home, along with many other cars, long rows of decrepit boxes rusting through the somber colored paint from the Soviet years. ”

“Who owned the other cars, Cazimir? Surely not all of them were serious threats to your home.
Your family. Or your secrets, for that matter.” I was dubious about the guilt of so many; doubtless, their bones were forgotten under the leaves of decades, a secret garden of missing souls under the towering canopy.

“Not all were secret police, true. Many were commonplace thieves masquerading as local officials, their greed too powerful for their fading common
sense. Hunters visited our land, too, to be turned away peacefully whenever possible. Unintentional interlopers trod the Bialowicza for all manner of reasons, many coming due to richness of the land in a starved time. Oh, the Soviets and their execrable Five Year Plans. So many victims of the State during those years, just as the Tsars had done to the serfs. A different flag, but the same hunger and pain.”

“We
were not unknown, you may surmise. Myths surrounded our private enclave, and we fed them whenever possible. Is it not better to avoid confrontation altogether, even if that means embracing a false, supernatural identity? I think so, although I wish our attempts had been more fruitful.  The automobiles dissolving into the earth are a testament to my own personal failures to be less visible. So many, like dying poplars along a rutted track.” His gaze was distant, loaded with the burden of time.

“Do
you see why I must stay here, in this lonely, verdant prison? Why I wish Elizabeth to come home? I am no coward, Ring, but I am chilled to the bone by the thought of losing her. That is why it is so bitter for me to have you do vile murder on my behalf, regardless of the greater service you are giving to mankind. “

I knew a great deal more about the man after his call. I wondered if children ever really knew how much their parents loved them.
Was that even possible? My resolve hardened after hearing a history that made the forest seem ever more desirable. When the girls got home, I would tell them that time was now of the essence, and I would be making plans with Sandrine as soon as possible.

Tomorrow, if all went well, it would be a brief but memorable date
and the last of Sandrine’s poisonous career.

A lover is coming, Sandrine.
And I will be most attentive.