The Malice Box Read online

  Robert crossed Church Street and leaned his forehead against the metal fencing overlooking the huge pit. There was a cross made of two girders from the site. Holy ground, land laden with hate, yet not heavy with it, not overwhelmingly charged with evil; there was something else, not in the tribal Christian sense of the Cross but still… there was something that felt like the opposite of fear, that felt like the Pentecostal winds that had swept Manhattan on the first anniversary of 9/11, a scouring wind that carried forgiveness. Could that be possible? He looked into his heart, deep into his memories of that day. No, it was not possible. He couldn’t.

  ‘What the hell, Terri? Am I in the right place?’ he said into the air. Nothing back.

  Now the Quad pointed him back towards the chapel. He’d gone too far west. He entered the churchyard through the gate facing Ground Zero and watched it count down: 184 feet, 181, pointing him east, 44 seconds to go, 43, 2.3 m.p.h., 150 feet, 147 feet, counting him down as he walked along the graveyard path parallel to Fulton, 96 feet… 2.5 m.p.h.… The words ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up on the screen at around 69 feet, and still it counted lower. Then, at 37 feet, the signal blinked out.

  Cursing, he got his notebook out and read Terri’s clue. Looking directly ahead of him due east was, most certainly, something Egyptian, and a kind of digit.

  A big old pink-grey stone obelisk.

  He tramped off the path across the grass to it and surveyed the thing.

  Very faintly, on the west face, he saw what looked like a mixture of digits and letters. On the east side, he could barely make out the name of Thomas Addis… something, over lines and lines of faded script.

  Standing back from the red and creamy white flowers around the base of the obelisk, he noticed, at the edge of the flowerbed, at foot height, a five-pointed metal star in a metal ring, the letters ‘US’ in the middle, that he had seen before at the graves of Revolutionary War veterans. By the star, you’ll go far, the riddle had said.

  Terri came back. ‘There’s a cache. Get it… the secret is in the ground.’

  ‘Just a minute. Sinking my fingers into the soil of someone’s grave is not doing it for me. When do we meet, Terri? You have to meet me.’

  ‘There’s no corpse underneath. Trust me. Get the cache.’

  ‘Explain to me what’s happening here. I’m going to meet you, and you’re going to tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Robert, you don’t have the initiative here. You need me to help protect Adam. To help stop this awful act from being carried out. If you think it’s all just a stupid game, hang up right now.’

  He stared out over the gravestones towards the great empty pit where the towers had stood. He’d been asked to help stop something even worse happening, in a city he’d adopted as his own. He’d been asked to help his friend. As crazy as it all sounded, good people said they needed him. And, deep down, he was recovering a part of himself that had been cut off, almost exterminated. If he lost Terri now, he might never discover what it was. And if it was all a twisted game of some kind, he wanted to find Adam to beat seven bells out of him.

  ‘I’m not hanging up.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would. If I cut the connection, you’ll never find me again. Robert, I swear I want to help you. But you have to do it by my rules. It’s the only way.’

  He barked: ‘How?’

  ‘You’ll see. And I’ll meet you. But first do what I say.’

  He knelt before the obelisk and feigned paying his respects in front of it, or possibly catching his breath and buckling his shoe, and, as he did so, sank his fingers into the earth to either side of the small metal star. Nothing. He dug further, sinking his left hand into the earth. Still nothing. And then, deep down in the flowerbed, his fingertips touched something smooth and hard and plastic.

  He fished it out and hid it up his sleeve as smoothly as he could. Then he made his way back along the footpath.

  He went into the chapel, his earth-covered hand hidden under his jacket, and found a pew. For some reason he felt safer inside. He sat at the Broadway end, facing the altar, and took up a discreet praying position in order to look at what was in the cache. He unplugged the container, which was a clear plastic cigar tube, and felt a hard metal item fall into his hand.

  He looked around. No one was paying attention to him. His eyes fell on the altar: the gleaming golden rays representing the glory of the divine presence were above it, the name of God in Hebrew at their centre. Right to left, Y… H… V… H. Yah veh. The greatest puzzle of all.

  The altar, he’d heard from Horace, had been designed by the same man who’d gone on to lay out the core streets of Washington, DC: Pierre L’Enfant. Some people thought he’d tried to make the city into a giant sundial, or something similar.

  He looked down again. In the palm of his hand he held a spent bullet cartridge.

  ‘I have it,’ he whispered to Terri.

  ‘Praise heaven. Keep it safe.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Get out. Need your thoughts. Find a place to write. Then report what you’ve done. Post a picture of what you found and what you think about it. Then you’ll need to carry out an action.’

  ‘What kind of action? We’re going to meet, remember? Terri?’

  No answer.

  Robert walked out of the churchyard on to Broadway. He looked about him and crossed the street to John, heading for the closest bar he knew, a place called Les Halles.

  It was a classic dark-wood mirrored bar with a kaleidoscopic array of bottles and mirrors behind the bartender, and an elaborate display of hard-boiled eggs in a wire holder on the bar in front of him, like a model of the solar system. There was almost no one there. Looking into the restaurant away from the street, he thought the light was almost amber. Yellow-gold lighting fixtures stood out against a dark brown, almost black wooden background. Something stirred in his memory. He couldn’t place it at first. He realized he had been in Les Halles before. Drinks with colleagues after an awards ceremony of some kind, Katherine dressed to the nines, and they’d gone off to the bathrooms at the back, up the stairs, pursued by a waiter saying no, no, ladies only, and she’d lifted her dress, and they’d thought about making love right there in the bathroom but chickened out. They had been the first awards after 9/11, and after drinks they’d walked out and gone down to Ground Zero and wept.

  Robert went to the bathroom to wash the dirt from his hands. Then he ordered a beer, trying to gather his thoughts.

  After a while, the Quad buzzed. ‘Terri?’

  ‘Yes. Just listen. Don’t speak. This is where we begin. We are at the foot of Jacob’s Ladder. We build the ladder by climbing it, from darkness to light, from fear to love. Each rung is a trial. Hold that in your mind. Then write what you’re thinking. Post it.’

  ‘This is not sane or helpful.’

  ‘Do it. Please.’

  ‘Meet me.’

  ‘After you do it.’ Then she was gone.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. Should he walk away? He had to meet her. ‘Fuck it,’ he said under his breath.

  He took the bullet casing off to the bathroom and photographed it with the Quad, not wanting to do so in a public place.

  Then, back at the bar, he tried to look at himself in the mirror panels. Not rational. Oddly emotional, panicked, feelings all over the place, nothing purely digested. But he realized: part of him wanted to be doing this.

  He unfolded the portable keyboard contraption he’d found at Adam’s pied-a-terre. He wrote and posted some lines to the website at Bookmark 1.

  Proof of Good Faith

  I am writing this in accordance with your instructions. I can demonstrate that I’ve done the following things:

  – I went to the first location you gave me. The coordinates correspond to a churchyard overlooking Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

  – I recovered the cached item. I am posting a photograph of it, as requested. A spent bullet casing, hidden in a clear plastic cigar t
ube. I don’t know what it means. Should I guess? I have brought it with me.

  – Terri, I wish to help you. Are you all right? You sounded as though you were in pain. Who else is looking at this blog? Who set up this website?

  He put up the picture of the bullet casing. He stayed online. Within two minutes she had replied, in the comments section.

  Robert, please realize what you will be doing. You will receive a series of clues, or provocations, or challenges, and in each case you will have to look within yourself to find your response. It is a scavenger hunt of the soul. It is the only way for you to help. For each inner state there is an outer state. Link the site of the cache to its contents. Write your impressions. Show that you are evolving. It is the only way. I am fine. This is hard. Adam set up the website to help the Watchman, right before he vanished. Write more.

  He wrote more. Drank more beer first. He was starving. He ordered a sandwich, dug into himself and wrote again. He put up photos of the grave-marker obelisk and the view of Ground Zero that she’d wanted him to see. He even put up a shot of the view from his bar stool.

  What the first cache said to me

  Terri

  I don’t know how you want me to do this. Connect the cached items and the site, you say. The inner world and the outer.

  So: I am getting lots of death, naturally. You sent me to two graveyards, venerated places, one to crack a code about death, one to dig in the grounds of one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, you sent me back to the beginnings of this city among flowers and stones and grass to gaze upon the great gaping hole at Ground Zero… the church that was somehow spared when the spars and beams of the Twin Towers came hurtling down towards the ground. You had me gaze upon the place that fills me with anger at the primitive emotions it arouses in me, and you had me root around like someone not entirely sane or presentable among the gravestones till I found your cache and, in it, a bullet casing. So, yes, death. Death and survival, and the willingness to lash out and hurt in order to survive. Primal things. Are you going to send me all across the city sinking my fingers into graves? Is this enough? Help me. I don’t understand.

  George Washington had his own pew at St Paul’s; you can still see it. He prayed there after being sworn in down the street at Federal Hall as the nation’s first President. Birth of a nation, from war. Now another war. Destruction, survival. Is this where you want me to go?

  I had a friend who was downtown when the towers fell, in fact I sent her there. She said those clouds of dust you see on the videos of that morning were full of flying fragments of metal. I drank with her at this bar. It was an act designed to provoke a tribal response. We are all reasonable, civilized people, until someone touches our tribal core. Then we change, or maybe we remember. We will kill and more for our tribe. We are all potential torturers. Some things are impossible to forgive.

  Terri, what more do you want of me?

  Again she replied:

  Robert, you have made a good beginning. Dig deeper along the same lines. Learn to look within, and you’ll learn to see without. This is our first step on an arduous road. You are being prayed for. Start to pay closer attention to your surroundings. If something draws your attention, pay heed to it. Photograph it. Post it.

  He had to get moving again. He got up and left the bar.

  He tried to call Terri back on the Quad, impatiently jabbing the buttons, but the number was masked. He couldn’t get her.

  Directly outside Les Halles was a beautiful brown terracotta building, housing both a Christian Science reading room and a Manhattan Muffin store. It was 11 John Street, and in the ornamentation was a kind of half-formed version of that medical symbol he’d seen sometimes, snakes climbing a staff, except they were kind of twisted little lizards snaking up a column. He had never noticed it before. In the same ornamentation were several fierce, bearded heads with vegetation springing forth from their faces. He found them unsettling.

  He walked back to Broadway. At the Stocking Exchange across the street, in black-and-gold accents, under the shop window displays of semi-risqué lingerie, strode a line – into the store, naturally – of single gold barefoot female legs. He took a picture, then retraced his steps and snapped the terracotta birds and the foliage heads.

  He headed further south, again passing the giant red cube on its miraculous angle at Liberty. This time he noticed a round hole that pierced it through. He looked at it more closely. It was an illusion of a cube. The sides were of different lengths. A true cube wouldn’t look like one, presumably.

  Terri was silent.

  He walked two more blocks south. Trinity Church was again on his right. He came to the scalloped corner of 1 Wall Street that he’d seen from the graveyard earlier, the Bank of New York Building: glorious Art Deco, white stone and blazing gold, like a cathedral made of draped fabric. As he stood at the main entrance on Wall Street, the sun caught the red-and-gold lobby interior – the fabled Red Room, closed to the public since 9/11 – and made it glow like a brazier. He stood transfixed. Crimson, white, gold.

  This was where the wooden wall had once stood at the northernmost end of New York to keep out invaders. The northernmost end, barely a mile from the southern tip. On the Broadway side of the Bank of New York Building, the bronzed windows reflected the spire of Trinity against a deep blue sky, and again the crimson flame of the interior leaped out.

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘Terri? Where have you been?’

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘What’s –’

  ‘Head west. Find an angel. Quickly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t explain. Not now. Do you remember what I’ve been saying?’

  ‘Terri, I won’t be forgetting any of this for a long time.’

  ‘Go west.’

  ‘I am. I’m crossing Broadway, heading along Rector, along the south side of Trinity Church.’

  On the railings outside the church he found what she’d told him to look for: a plaque marking the original site, across the street, of Columbia University, when it was still King’s College. It held two oval seals. On the left a sunburst, like the one above the altar at St Paul’s Chapel, shone at the top of the seal, the name of God in Hebrew nestled within it.

  ‘Yod, heh, vav, heh.’

  ‘Terri?’

  ‘Unutterable name… Unknowable… Robert, find the Man of Light.’

  On the right of the plaque, in what he took to be the Trinity Church seal, was the most remarkable image. He said out loud: ‘Swirly Man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Terri.

  One foot in the sea, the other on land, the sun ringing his face: in the centre of the seal stood a figure like a man composed of spinning wheels, or whorls; or it could have been a man wearing a garment of spirals that ascended up his body from groin to head. A line of vortices ran up the centre of his body, while others were off to either side of his spine.

  ‘Mighty angel, wrapped in cloud… Robert, when you look into yourself, as far and as deeply as you dare, and then further, hold the image of this figure in your mind. This is what you will see. It is what you truly look like, your body of light. You are protected… we are… believe me. Now go west. Further west.’

  He photographed the figure of light with the Quad and walked on, along Rector, under the arcades where a Berlitz Language School was, back towards the subway stop, ending up again right opposite the Pussycat Lounge.

  ‘Robert: go home now.’

  ‘WHAT? No, no, no, no. I’m going to meet you, right now.’

  ‘I think the danger is past. You’ve done enough for today. We’ve done enough. Trust…’

  Her voice trailed off and the connection died. He stood at the subway entrance, fumbling for something to do, wanting at that exact moment, more than anything else, to hit someone very hard. Anyone.

  Was she safe? Had she exhausted herself? She hadn’t sounded at all sure the danger had passed.

  The Quad buzzed. It was a text message, saying simply: ‘T
ake the 1 train north. Meet in the last car.’

  He replied: ‘Terri?’

  ‘If you want to see Terri again, take the 1 train.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  No reply.

  Robert stood at the mouth of the subway, feeling it pull him in and down. What would happen if he didn’t take the train?

  He had no choice. He strode down the steps.

  A cramped ticket area led through low turnstiles down on to the platform. The R of Rector Street was picked out in pleasing purple, blue and green mosaic tile. He hadn’t noticed it before. Everything seemed brighter, sharper.

  He walked to the far end of the platform, where the last car would be. He heard distant shrieking and clattering as the train came towards Rector from South Ferry, the first and last stop on the 1 line. The last car was empty.

  Robert got on and waited, sitting as far towards the rear as possible.

  As soon as the train began to move, the sliding door connecting the car to the rest of the train slammed open. A figure dressed entirely in black, face masked by a balaclava, ran towards Robert so quickly that he barely had time to stand before it was on him. Instinctively Robert lowered a shoulder and leaned into his assailant, trying to hold his ground. With a crunch of bone against bone, he felt himself lifted into the air and slammed against the metal door at the end of the train.

  As soon as he hit the floor, Robert felt a knife at his throat, a hand gripping the top of his head. He gasped with pain and fear as the cold metal pressed into his flesh, his ribs and spine screaming. An acrid smell filled his nostrils. Desperation. His assailant might be more afraid than he was. But of what?

  ‘Give it to me.’

  He tried to get a reading on the voice. It was hoarse, dangerous. He knew it. Did he? Brisk, confident, but distorted somehow.

  ‘You want my wallet?’

  ‘The cache.’