The Reincarnationist (22 page)

New York City—Monday, 7:15 a.m.

T
he sky was gray and menacing—matching Josh's mood. Leaving his apartment on West Fifty-Third Street, he walked four blocks uptown, and entered Central Park through Merchants' Gate at Columbus Circle and continued north, waiting for some of his anxiety to lessen. For the past four months, before his trip to Rome, this morning walk to the Phoenix Foundation had been one of the few things that calmed him. A few hundred yards in, he stopped and breathed in deeply, smelling the freshly cut grass and the heavy humidity, but his sense of unrest didn't lessen.

What had happened in Rome had put him in danger—danger that might have followed him home and had raised too many questions. Where were the stones? What were they capable of? Why had the thief been killed? By whom? What had happened to Gabriella?

While he was still in Rome, he'd tried to reach her but could only get the number for her office at Yale, and although he'd left messages there, he hadn't heard back. He'd tried several more times since returning home but still hadn't made contact, which had exacerbated his anxiety.

Josh hurried past a row of weeping pine trees that stood like ominous sentinels along the paths. He was rushing, but didn't have to. The foundation was only a mile's walk, at this rate he'd reach it before eight, which was still too early to start making phone calls and locate her.

At West Drive near Strawberry Fields, Josh turned right toward the bridle path, a rarely used area of the park with little pedestrian traffic since so few people went horseback riding, especially on a weekday morning. If he had the time, Josh always took this detour so he could walk by the Riftstone Arch.

In the mid-1800s, when Fredrick Law Olmstead had sculpted the park out of rampant woodlands, he'd brought in several architects to work on the project. One of them, Calvert Vaux, had built Riftstone in 1862 using Manhattan schist stone and created one of the park's few bridges that appeared to be a natural arch. Big outcroppings of boulders, tall trees and overgrown shrubs concealed the brick supports that held it up, and the sloping hillside on either side obscured its elevations.

When he was a kid, Josh had visited every area of the park, including this one, but rediscovering the arch on one
of his first walks to the foundation, he'd discovered it was now a trigger. Walking here in the past few months, he'd had several lurches that threw him back to the late nineteenth century and into encounters with a young man named Percy Talmage who'd often come here with his sister, Esme. First, as children, to play and later, as young adults, to get away from the untenable atmosphere in their home. Unlike Josh, they didn't walk through the park to find the arch. The Talmages reached the Riftstone Arch by way of a hidden passage built into the rocks that led to a tunnel connecting the park to their home: the building that now housed the Phoenix Foundation.

At their first meeting, Malachai had been taken aback when Josh told him he knew about Percy and Esme. Beryl less so. When it came to past life experiences and present-life incidents there were no coincidences. But then, when Josh had described the tunnel, even she had been astounded. There was nothing on record or in the architectural drawings of either the mansion or the park that included the secret underground thoroughfare that had collapsed on itself sometime in the early 1920s and had been closed up.

Several times, Josh had tried but failed to locate the entrance to the tunnel somewhere near the arch.

Percy's memories of being there with Esme, though, were not as difficult to find.

* * *

Malachai was on the phone when Josh stuck his head in his office doorway, but he motioned for Josh to come in and sit down.

While he waited for the call to end, Josh noticed an antiquarian book lying on the large partners desk, light from the green glass lamp illuminating the gilt lettering on the cover:
Breakthroughs in Translife Detection
.

Opening it, he almost thought he could hear sighs escaping. How long had it been since these pages had been exposed to the air?

 

Breakthroughs in Translife Detection By Christopher Drew First Edition 1867 Ackitson and Kidd Publishers New York City

 

The first page had extensive water damage, but Josh had no trouble reading from the introduction.

In the history of mankind, never before has there been a less spiritual age. Never before have we paid so little attention to the soul. Never have we been more obsessed with the material world and less connected to the metaphysical one. The result is a generation of unhappy men who disguise their melancholy with the quest for power and material wealth.

The questions of who we are cannot be asked without first asking who we were. Not to do so is to walk away from the past knowledge that has future implications. What this book aims to do is help the reader to discover his past so that he can—

“I'm sorry that took so long,” Malachai said as he hung up. “How was your trip back?”

Josh filled him in and then asked him the same question.

“I took a sleeping pill and dreamed about gladiators.” Malachai smiled, and without asking poured Josh a cup of coffee. “You look like you could use this.”

Josh sipped at the steaming liquid, not caring if he burned his mouth. Malachai was right. He did need it.
“We shouldn't have left Rome,” he said in a tense, strained voice. “If we'd stayed we might have been able to get a lead on who orchestrated the robbery and where the stones are, and find out from the detective where—”

Malachai interrupted, “We were strangers in a strange land, Josh. Two men were dead. You were in jail for twenty-four hours. You were the only witness to two homicides. Your life was in danger there. We're damn lucky we got out as fast as we did and they didn't keep us there—or you there—as a material witness.”

“We gave up too fast.”

“Didn't you hear anything I just said? Someone killed the professor and stole the stones, and you saw him.”

“I saw a shadow and then I saw that shadow killed.”

“But who killed him? And why? The danger is still out there, Josh.”

“A possible threat isn't as disturbing as the idea that we've lost the stones. I need to know who I am, who I was…and I thought I was going to finally find out. God, I'd kill to get those stones.”

“I'm glad you didn't say that in front of Inspector Tatti. We never would have gotten out of the country.” Malachai stared at him.

“You don't think I had anything to do with the robbery, do you?” Josh was astonished.

“Of course not. But knowing how tortured you've been, if you believed that the stones would free you from your nightmares, I could imagine stealing them might be a solution.”

“Well, I had nothing to do with it.”

“How
did
you know where the tomb was that morning?”

Did Malachai doubt him, too? The police had. But they couldn't find any evidence that tied him to the crime. That's what Tatti had been looking for while Josh had
been in jail. One shred of proof. For an insane second Josh wondered if, during those early morning hours when he'd wandered around Rome in a trance, he'd gone into a psychotic state and arranged for the robbery—or, worse, gotten hold of a gun and committed the crime himself. Maybe he only imagined being in the tunnel, imagined watching the guard shooting the professor. If he could hallucinate the sequences in ancient Rome down to tasting the water and smelling the air, could he go into a fugue state and commit a heinous crime? Had his mind twisted on itself? Had his desperate desire to find answers pushed him over the thread-thin line that separated the psychopath from the sane?

He wanted to go back to his office and start making phone calls and find Gabriella. He barely knew her; the urge to talk to her and check on her wasn't reasonable, but it was authentic.

As he stood up he knocked his shin on the bronze ormolu dragon-shape foot of Malachai's desk's leg.

“Damn that beast,” he said as the pain momentarily discomforted him.

“What did you say?” Malachai asked pointedly.

“I hit my shin on the corner of the desk. It's nothing.”

“No, you said something when you hit your foot, would you mind repeating it?”

“I don't know what…” Josh thought for a second. “Oh, yeah. Odd phrase. God knows where I picked it up.
Damn that beast
.”

While Malachai's face remained unruffled, his voice belied his astonishment. “The dragon ornamentation on the left lower leg of the desk sticks out an inch farther than the one on the right and lines up precisely with most people's shinbone. In the past century it was a family tradition of sorts to say
Damn that beast
if you got whacked.”

“Great. Another bizarre coincidence. My life is just full of them.”

“No, Josh. You know by now there aren't any coincidences in reincarnation. Everything is part of a greater plan.”

“I'm trying to remember that.”

“This hasn't been easy for either of us, has it? We both want the stones so very badly. I wonder which of us wants them more—you, because you think they will help you figure out a past you can't understand, or me, because I believe they'll help me prove a present I'm the only one who understands.”

Malachai never discussed himself except cryptically. While Josh had learned some of the man's past from being around him and Beryl for four months, he still only knew the most basic things. His parents had a child before him who had died at a young age. Malachai was born two years after the little boy's death. From what Josh had gleaned, his father had never gotten over the death of his elder son.

Growing up in Manhattan, Malachai had gone to the Horace Mann School until the tenth grade, when he moved to London with his socialite mother after his parents divorced. He returned to America years later in 1980 with a degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology from the University of Oxford and went to work with his aunt at the Phoenix Foundation. Never married, he was often linked to different women in the gossip columns—usually wealthy daughters or second wives of successful businessmen. Malachai's mother had died; his father was still alive and healthy at eighty-seven, but he was estranged from his son.

Everyone had ghosts.

“I need to get back to my office and find Gabriella. I need to know what happened to her and if she's all right.”

“I know what happened.”

“You do? Is she all right?”

“Yes. She's back in New Haven. She left Rome of her own accord, just as we guessed.”

Josh sat back down. “So Detective Tatti was playing with us when he suggested she was missing. What a little bastard. Have you talked to her? Do you know why she took off so suddenly?”

“Right after you left on Thursday night, she got a call that the professor's condition had worsened. While she was at the hospital, her apartment was burgled. That's what all those policemen were doing there the next morning. Frightened, she decided it wasn't safe to stay in Rome and decided to come home, but it appears the trouble followed her back. Her office at Yale was burgled Saturday.”

“Was she hurt?”

“No, she's fine. At least physically. She's frightened, though. I think we should go up there and talk to her. Gabriella knows more than anyone alive about those stones. Her scholarship might help us find them.”

“Do you know who she or the professor discussed them with besides you and Beryl?”

Malachai shook his head. “Very few people. All of them trustworthy. A curator at the Metropolitan Museum. One at the British Museum. The heads of the archeology departments at both their universities. Neither she nor Rudolfo wanted to go public until they knew what they really had. Neither of them wanted a media circus. They were right.”

“But that doesn't mean that there aren't other people who found out. Workers at the site could have overheard conversations, or caught a glimpse of what was in the box and guessed. Gabriella's or the professor's cars or apartments could have been bugged. There are
a hundred ways that the information could have leaked, despite their being careful.”

“You're right, of course.” Malachai twisted the gold cuff links he always wore. They were ovals engraved with the same design as in the bas-relief on the front door—phoenix birds, each with a sword in its right talon.

“How much money do you think the stones are worth?” Josh asked.

Malachai picked up a deck of cards and shuffled them. Shuffled them again. They made a smacking sound like water hitting the shore.

“It might not have anything to do with money. Not if someone inside the Catholic Church is behind the robbery.”

“And do you think that's possible?”

“You saw the nuns and priests protesting at the site,” Malachai said as he shuffled the deck again. “Wicca, witchcraft, pagan religions, reincarnation. Each one chips away at the omnipotence of the Church at a time when they can't afford it. No, they wouldn't want the stones to surface—not to mention do their magic. If it was the Church, we'll never find them and they'll never be for sale.”

“Do you think that's what happened?”

“I don't know, but I'm determined to find out. You think I'd admit defeat this easily? After all these years? When we were so close? Absolutely not. We've simply moved arenas. The stones were stolen—either for someone in the Church, or for a specific collector, or to sell on the black market. I've already put the word out that we're willing to pay for any information that leads to an answer. Rest assured, if the stones are for sale, I'll pay the price. Give up? Not yet. Not ever if I can help it. I want those stones.”

He shuffled the deck yet again. “That's why we need to see Gabriella. She can help us. Can you call her and find
out when she's free? We can take a drive up to Yale tonight or tomorrow. Just get on her calendar. Make it clear that we can help each other a tremendous amount….”