The Hunters — Wednesday, February 6, 1991, 5:10 PM

Kaspar & Sons (Pilsen) / Pilsen rooftop / Settebello (Taylor Street) / Lake Shore Drive

Chicago, Illinois

The skull was on the rooftop of a five-flat at 18th and Loomis. Staked through the temple to a tar-and-gravel roof with a length of iron rebar, fire-blackened front and back, jaw wired shut with copper. Two crossed lines drawn around it in chalk and chicken blood. A serpent. A cane. Asson, asson, asson. Darius didn’t recognize the marks but he recognized the work — a thing meant to be found, and meant to be understood as found.

He took the skull off the rebar with the cuff of his coat over his hand and brought it home in a grocery bag.

The basement at Kaspar & Sons smelled of formaldehyde and the old electric. Sable had cleared a space on the embalming table and put a folded sheet under the skull. Tomás had a desk lamp angled in. The three of them stood around it.

“Take it,” Darius said.

Sable peeled off one glove and laid her bare hand on the crown.

She closed her eyes. The room dropped. She didn’t move for what felt like a long minute. Then her shoulders pulled in, a small involuntary thing, and her face changed in degrees — disgust, then the look she got when she stopped curating disgust.

“Fire from inside.” Her voice was lower than her speaking voice. “Started in the throat and came out the eyes. Four of them. Maybe five. A woman giving orders. French — not French, Creole. The word cimetière. And before that, tunnels. A long walk underground. Coming up from the south. Gary.”

She lifted her hand. Wiped it on the sheet like it was wet. It wasn’t.

“There’s a bad leg,” she said. “A limp. He’d been limping for years before they found him.”

Darius did not say the name. He felt the Beast rise in his chest, an even pressure, a thing that wanted the room to know what he already knew. He set his palms flat on the table. Counted four heartbeats he didn’t have. The Director came up first, the way he always did when the Beast came up unsanctioned — a cold operator who looked at a corpse and saw inventory. Asset compromised. Territory violated. Plot the response.

Sable was watching him. “Darius.”

“Michael,” he said.

She nodded once. Didn’t say the rest. She had been there too, the first month in Gary, when Michael’s name was a joke and a warning. Telton Cemetery. The bad leg. Seven months of crossing him at the edges of Modius’s court.

Tomás had not been there. Tomás had a syringe and a sterile cup. He drew three milliliters of charred marrow from the cranial vault and set up a clean working space on the corner of the table.

“I’ll confirm,” he said. “Stand back from the chalk circle. The pigment is animal blood. There may be a passive working bound to it.”

Darius and Sable stepped back.

The Blood Walk took eleven minutes. Tomás worked without commentary, which was the Tremere way — a man writing in the margin of someone else’s book, neat and small, paying full attention. When he was done he capped the cup and set it in a ziplock and labeled it in pencil.

“Malkavian. Eighth generation. Confirmed.”

He looked at the veves. Then at Darius. Then at the skull.

“Serpent of the Light,” he said. “Setite antitribu within the Sabbat. Ritual trophy, not territorial graffiti. The chalk pattern is a route marker. The blood ties it to the dead. Four operatives, possibly five, working under a woman. The Creole inflection is consistent with New Orleans through Haiti. The Spirit’s Touch reading and the iconography agree on the count. A pack.”

He paused. Selected the next sentence carefully.

“This is not the same as your tunnel scout.”

Sable said, “Two threats.”

“Two threats.”

Darius looked at the skull. Past it. Past the wall. The Beast was quiet in his chest the way a dog is quiet when it has been told what to do. He thought: this is two cities catching up with us in one night. Gary’s dead pieces blown north on whatever wind the Sabbat rides. And below that, the slower thing the Nosferatu had been pointing at since Bordruff.

He picked up the phone.

Neally answered on the third ring. Office, this late. The man was meant to.

“Mr. Cole.”

“There’s a scorched Kindred skull in my haven. Malkavian, Gary, eighth generation. Killed by a Sabbat pack working out of Pilsen. Serpent of the Light markings. Four to five operatives. A woman in charge, speaking Haitian Creole. The body was moved here to be found.”

There was the smallest pause on the other end. Not surprise. The pause Neally took when he was rearranging the night’s schedule.

“Tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock. Bring the relevant parties. I’ll prepare the room.”

“Understood.”

“Anything else?”

Darius thought about the fake IRS agent who had knocked at the Pilsen office an hour before sunset — Paula Magnus, business card too crisp, questions about Annabelle’s holdings, eyes that read the foyer for sightlines. He gave Neally the name and the description and the building she had visited.

“Not a hunter,” he said. “Investigator. Occult, maybe. Sniffing.”

“Noted. Call your patron. I’ll mention it upstairs.”

The line went dead.

Tomás was on the second extension by then. Nicolai had picked up before the first ring. He gave the full report in the cadence the chantry used for incident traffic — clean, complete, no embellishment. When he was done, Nicolai said thank you and continue and handle the dinner as planned. No counter-orders. The Pyramid logged it and kept walking.

Darius made one more call. Annabelle did not recognize the name Paula Magnus. She thanked him for the warning the way she thanked everyone for everything — like the courtesy was unexpected and slightly inconvenient. She would have someone walk the property line by midnight.

He hung up and stood at the basement window. The flurries had picked up. February at eighteen degrees, the kind of cold that came in through the seams of the building and pooled at the ankles. He fed in Pilsen an hour later. A hustler off 18th who owed money he could not pay. Choleric, the table said. The blood ran hot.

He came back full.

Settebello was on Taylor Street, two blocks east of Halsted, an old red-sauce room with a brass rail at the bar and tin ceilings someone had given up restoring in 1962. Tomás had walked the block twice in the Crown Vic before sunset and once on foot after — two exits, an alley behind the kitchen, a service stair to a basement that ran under the building next door. He’d parked the car nose-out on Aberdeen.

Sable brought Herdon at seven. Buick, heater up, the man in the passenger seat with his coat over his knees and the soft pliability of a man who had been Entranced four nights running and had stopped asking why he was so happy to do favors. He greeted the hostess by name. He had reserved the back room. He had told the kitchen the gentlemen prefer privacy.

The hostess put them at a round table in a windowless room with a heavy oak door and a single sconce. Red leather banquette, white tablecloth, breadbasket, a bottle of Chianti the waiter opened and left without pouring. Two place settings empty.

Tomba came first. Black wool coat, scarf, the heavy stillness of a man trained to walk slow into a room and watch the geometry before he sat. Forties. Olive complexion, a soft beard kept close to the jaw, the eyes of a man who did not blink when other people did.

Sayles came two minutes after. Tall, gaunt, the kind of pallor that did not come from a winter. Wool suit under a dark overcoat. He had a pair of leather gloves which he removed one finger at a time and folded into his coat pocket before he sat. He smiled at Herdon. He nodded at Darius and Sable and Tomás in sequence — head of household, lady of the house, the third one — and then he set his hands flat on the cloth in front of him and waited.

Sable opened the table. She put it on — not a performance, an atmosphere. The room warmed by a degree. Herdon laughed at a joke that was not funny. Tomba pulled his scarf away from his throat and let his shoulders drop. Sayles ordered the veal. He did not ask anyone else what they wanted. He spoke about Roman epigraphy for nine minutes without being asked, comfortable, expansive, a man who had decided the night belonged to him.

Darius and Tomás watched the auras the way you watch a barometer.

Sayles read cold and even, with a vein of grey grief running through the middle of him — old grief, settled, the kind a man builds his work around. Controlled. Glasswork. Tomba was hotter. Orange flickers at the edges, the impatience underneath the discipline, and a loyalty to Sayles that ran so deep it had no separate color of its own. He looked at Sayles before he answered any question. Even questions that weren’t directed at him.

The waiter came and went. Plates arrived. The Kindred ate nothing. Tomás held the wineglass at the stem and turned it a half-rotation between his fingers when he wanted to look like he was about to drink. Sable cut her veal into precise pieces and moved them around her plate. Darius did not pretend.

Talk drifted from Roman tombstones to the antiquities trade to the difficulty of moving devotional objects through customs. Sayles got there himself, in the unhurried way a man gets to the subject he came to discuss. He described an organization. He did not name it. A consortium, he said. Old. Predominantly Catholic. Distributed network. North American chapter modest in size but well-resourced. He used the words field and research and logistics the way the Company used them. He said headquarters without saying where. He named a man in Gary — a former colleague, no longer in standing, but useful for atmospherics — and the muscle in Tomba’s jaw moved one half-inch when the name came out.

Sable picked it up.

She talked about a man she had heard of, out in Indiana. A loud man. A man who made scenes. The kind of operator who burned a region for everyone working it. She did not say Dane. She said that sort of person. Tomba leaned forward without meaning to. He said the word liability before he heard himself say it. Sayles did not stop him. Sayles watched his hands.

Sable let the moment turn. Reversed the wind. Reframed Sayles and Tomba as the careful ones, the disciplined ones, the men whose work would outlast the loud man’s tantrum in some Gary parish house. Tomba’s color settled. Sayles smiled, small, the smile of a man who knew he was being flattered and did not mind. By the time the espresso came neither of them was watching the door.

Darius took Sayles to the kitchen alley under the pretext of a phone call.

Out in the cold, the man’s eyes caught Darius’s. Held. Stayed.

It went in clean. Not pressure — direction. Names came out one at a time, neat as filing. The Chicago cell: four operatives confirmed, possibly an associate. Sayles ran field. Tomba ran field and forgery. A Jesuit at Loyola named Koenig sat in a basement and read. A woman named Margaret Weil moved paper through the Archdiocese. Headquarters in Washington, off North Michigan Avenue, with a back fence onto Catholic University property. Georgetown was consecrated ground and the Society used it. Distribution ran through Chicago, New Orleans, and a shop on Newbury Street in Boston.

Dane sent his reports to a post office box in D.C. He still received the quarterly bulletins. October 1990 he had logged Gary as low-density, no action recommended. January 1991 the bulletin had retained him at low priority. Next bulletin: April.

Three Chicago targets had been identified by physical description and not by name. A woman who worked a North Side nightclub. A man at the Civic Opera House. A figure attached to the university near Hyde Park.

Darius did not ask any question he didn’t already mostly know the answer to. He folded the post-hypnotic in over the rest. File the complaint against Dane. Request the recall. The man is a liability. The man is the obstacle to the Chicago work. He sealed it. He walked Sayles back inside.

He did Tomba in the bathroom. Same script. He added one line for Tomba alone: if recall is not granted, handle Dane yourself. Tomba’s pulse came up a beat at the word handle. He nodded slowly and forgot he had nodded.

The Forgetful Mind closed both of them like books. Pleasant evening. Payment negotiated. Book sale discussed. Good food.

Sayles stood up at nine-fifty and put his gloves back on one finger at a time. Tomba paid the check in cash. They shook hands with Herdon and nodded again to the table and walked out into the snow.

Darius watched them through the leaded glass at the front. They did not look back.

He paid Settebello in cash. He drove Herdon home and parked the Buick a block from the bookshop and waited until the man was inside with the lights on before he pulled away. Sable rode with him. Tomás took the Crown Vic to the Astor chantry to write the cable.

Darius called Neally from the carphone at ten-thirty. Gave him the whole thing — names, addresses, the cell, the network, the three Kindred descriptions. Asked the Prince’s office to issue warnings through the appropriate channels. Neally said good work in the flat way he said everything and ended the call without saying goodbye.

The snow was heavier by then. Lake Shore Drive northbound, the city lit up to the right of the windshield, the Hancock Building blinking red at the top.

Sable was looking out the side window. After a long minute she said, “Michael.”

“I know,” Darius said.

“He didn’t have anyone. He had us, in the sense that anyone in Gary had anyone. And then he had nothing, and he was alone, and they came up out of the tunnels and they burned him from the inside.”

Darius drove. The wipers on intermittent. The radio off.

“We’ll keep his skull until we know what to do with it,” he said. “Don’t bury it yet. Bordruff might want to look at it.”

Sable nodded without turning her head.

They drove the rest of the way to Pilsen in the quiet of two people who had each lost the same friend in two different ways, and who had both already started spending the loss.