Dagger Key and Other Stories

The burning came to me as a faint windy sound. I was too far off to discern what the translucent shapes were, but when I stepped out onto the Via Poseidone, I realized they were heroic figures, none of them complete, yet all the more heroic for their lack of completion. Had they been finished figures, correct in every detail, they would have looked cartoonish; unfinished, mired in webs of glass, leaping out of glass waves, trying to shrug off glassy shrouds, charged with moonlight, like silver blood flowing through their limbs, they seemed more what Lucan would have had in mind: ancient warriors, both succumbing to and struggling to break free of the moonstruck glass that gave them substance. How long, I wondered, must he have trained himself in order to produce so complex a result at the moment of release? Decades, I reckoned. And I had no doubt that he had achieved his intent—the imagery and its incompleteness spoke to his obsession with the old days, to his belief that we had repressed our warrior instincts, restrained them beneath a decadent veneer. Confronted with the visible expression of those beliefs, I was moved a ways toward agreement with them.

I walked toward that barbaric sculpture garden, to the crumbling verge of the Via Poseidone, and examined a figure with a half-formed face and flowing hair, the muscular torso straining, with a two-handed grip on a club. As I inspected it from various angles, light glided back and forth inside it like the shiftings of a spirit level, bringing up bits of detail. Hulking just beyond, one of the larger figures appeared to be effortfully rising from a crouch, its head lowered, using a spear to push itself up, weighed down by a glass robe. I was about to call Elaine, thinking to modify my previous orders, when I spotted Jenay off along the street, standing beneath the immense figure of a woman depicted in the act of slashing at an invisible enemy with a knife. She was approximately a hundred feet away, anonymous at that distance, but it could only be Jenay. I hailed her and, as I approached, I saw that she had changed into jeans and a short jacket. Her hair was loose about her shoulders; she wore no make-up. She might have been the sister of the sculpted woman, who was also buxom, her wide hips flowing up from a glassy wave. They shared the same calm expression.

“Did you see it?” she asked as I came up. “The light he made?”

I told her I had been otherwise occupied.

“It was magnificent,” she said. “He ruled the sky for nearly a minute.”

Her poised demeanor and admiring tone aroused my suspicions. “You knew,” I said.

“A few years back, he told me he wanted to die with Rappy. He only had about fifty years left, he thought, but he was emotionally spent. He said he was contemplating a release.”

“And you knew he would do it tonight.”

“I didn’t know. Perhaps I suspected. He didn’t seem himself.”

I tried to turn her, wanting to search her face for signs of a lie, but she knocked my hand aside.

“You watched for the light,” I said. “You must have known.”

“I wasn’t watching, I happened to be looking out the window,” she said defiantly; then she put a hand to her forehead and blew out a breath, as if trying to steady herself. “Perhaps I knew.”

“You should have told me, even if it were only a suspicion.” Agitatedly, I opened and closed my cell phone several times. “He’s left us a hell of mess.”

“Is that all you take from it?” She shot me a hard look.

“I don’t have time to appreciate Lucan’s artistry now that I’m in command.”

“Are you…in command? We’ll see.”

“You’re challenging my authority?”

“If I’m challenging anything, it’s your willingness to exercise authority.”

“So you are challenging me. Do you want to formalize the challenge?”

“Not at this point,” she said.

She glanced up at the sculpture and I, too, glanced up—the flame of the burning island brightened, and the fall of the woman’s hair glowed redly. Jenay strolled off a couple of paces, her attention gathered by a smaller figure, a bearded, transparent, ax-wielding barbarian. The cell phone made a chilly noise in the empty street. I switched on and, keeping an eye on Jenay, said, “Yes.”

“I can’t reach Skyler,” said Elaine.

“Try him in New York.”

“I’ve tried all his numbers. Everybody’s tried. The whole network is down. We haven’t been able to reach any of our people on the east coast. It’s Rome’s opinion we’ve been compromised.”

“That’s obvious.” I came a step toward Jenay. “What action do they recommend?”

“They recommend we go to a war level,” said Elaine.

“Not yet.” I closed to within arm’s length of Jenay. “Go to Bronze…but tell them to go to Iron if they don’t hear from me every half-hour. And tell the helicopters to fucking clean-up and get us out of here. If the Americans are going to react locally, it’ll take a while, but there’s no point running a risk. Jenay and I are down by the water, about seventy-five yards north of where the causeway used to stand.”

“This is no coincidence,” said Elaine. “Lucan and Skyler, both the same night.”