Quests of Simon Ark Read online

When we got back to Manhattan I discovered I didn’t know Ash Gregory’s address, and there were too many A. Gregory listings in the phone book. I wasn’t even sure he lived in Manhattan. I tried phoning my secretary Irene but it was already Saturday evening and when she didn’t answer I figured she was out with her boyfriend and I tried Martha Scane from publicity.

  She was surprised to hear my voice and I told her as quickly as possible the tragic news about Ash Gregory. “I can’t believe it!” she said, her voice breaking. “Not Ash!”

  “I’m sorry I had to tell you like this, Martha. I know you were a friend of his and that’s why I called. I need to know his address.”

  “He lived down in Greenwich Village,” she replied, and gave me the address on Christopher Street. “Do the police have any idea who killed him?”

  “They think it might have been a hitchhiker. If I hear anything more I’ll let you know.”

  “He lived in the Village,” I told Simon. “Let’s get going.”

  “Do you plan on breaking and entering?” he asked with a slight smile.

  “I plan on finding that manuscript, if it’s there to be found.”

  We parked on the street about a block away from the address Martha had given me. It was eight o’clock, but not yet dark, as we mounted the steps and I rang the bell under A. Gregory’s name. When no one answered we entered the vestibule through the unlocked door and moved down the dim hallway to his apartment at the rear of the first floor. I don’t know how I intended to get in but that problem was solved when we saw that the lock had been forced and the wood around it splintered.

  “Hardly the sort of thing the police would do,” Simon whispered.

  I pushed the door open cautiously and at once we heard the muffled sounds of a search in progress. Drawers were being pulled open and papers were being rifled. We must have made some slight noise because suddenly the sounds ceased and a figure in black appeared in a doorway across the living room from us.

  As the figure moved, so did I, springing forward to grab one leg as it darted toward a window. We went down together with a thud and then I saw that my captive was a woman.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  She sat up, rubbing her shoulder where she’d hit the floor, and I had my first real look at her. She appeared to be in her thirties, and she had long black hair and brown eyes. The black slacks and sweater gave her the appearance of a sneak thief, but her face seemed open and almost innocent. “I might ask you the same thing,” she countered, shifting her gaze to Simon in the doorway. “Are you police?”

  “No. I worked with Ash. We found him today just before he died.”

  That didn’t surprise her. She’d known he was dead. “I came here to collect some things of mine,” she said. “My name’s Kate Talos. Ash was a friend.”

  “How’d you know he was dead?”

  “I heard it on the news.”

  It was possible, but I couldn’t immediately check it. While I questioned her, Simon peered at the paintings on the walls. “He had a great interest in mythology,” he observed.

  “He painted those himself,” Kate Talos said, getting to her feet and brushing herself off. I switched on the light in order to see them better.

  There were seven paintings in all, and I recognized Ash’s distinctive style from the jacket illustrations he’d done for some of our books. One showed a man of brass guarding an island, another a unicorn with a small naked girl at its side. There was a great bird, its wings spread wide, rising from smoldering ashes, and another winged creature with a lion’s body. One painting showed a beast that seemed to have a fire-breathing lion’s head, the body of a sheep or goat, and a serpent’s tail. There was a dragon too. And the final painting showed a winged horse with the face of a woman and a peacock’s tail. Studying them, I began to wonder how well I’d really known Ash Gregory.

  “We may not need Harvey Cross’s manuscript,” Simon said. “These may tell us what we want to know. What do you think, Miss Talos?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a manuscript.”

  “Where is the child, Miss Talos?”

  “What child?”

  “The unicorn’s daughter. The one in that painting.”

  “The painting was just his imagination.”

  “I don’t think so.” Simon took a step toward her. “Two of the seven are already dead, aren’t they? Do you want more to die? Do you want the child to die?”

  “No one would harm her,” she blurted out, and then tried to backtrack. “If this child you speak of even exists.”

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Miss Talos. Who sent you here to search for the manuscript?”

  “No one.” She was defiant once more. “I’m leaving now. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Only your conscience will stop you, and I pray that it does. Otherwise, the death of that child could be on your head.”

  She hurried out the door, running from Simon and me, and maybe from herself.

  “What was that all about?” I asked him.

  “Only she can tell us. I hope she will.”

  “And the manuscript?”

  “Is here in this apartment, most likely. If the killer had removed it from Gregory’s body Kate Talos wouldn’t have been here searching for it.”

  We took up the search where she had abandoned it, but found nothing. Two hours later I was about to give it up. “Simon, it’s only a matter of time before the Olympus police contact the New York police and ask them to check this place. If we’re here when they arrive they’ll think we broke in the door.”

  “Yes, it’s odd the police haven’t turned up before this.” He had that knowing look on his face that often infuriates me. “It’s almost as if they were being kept away until the apartment could be searched.”

  “Well, she searched it and we’ve searched it. There’s no manuscript here,” I said.

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “It was about an inch and a half thick, Simon—a good three hundred and fifty pages. There’s nowhere it could be hidden we haven’t looked.”

  He stood in the center of the room, gazing around. “Your mistake, my friend, is in regarding it as a complete unit, like a book. Think of it as three hundred fifty separate pages.”

  “What?”

  He strode to the closest of the seven paintings and lifted it from the wall. There, taped to the back of the painting, was a thickness of typewritten sheets. “You see? Divide it into seven parts, tape it to the backs of these paintings, and each part becomes less than a quarter-inch thick—hardly noticeable with the thickness of these frames.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because the paintings are the key to everything. They became the logical hiding place when the rest of the apartment turned up nothing.”

  We quickly assembled the manuscript and Simon sat down at the kitchen table to read it. “What about the police?” I asked.

  “They won’t be coming. We’re safe here.”

  “How do you know?”

  But he didn’t answer. He was already engrossed in the book. I joined him and tried reading some of it, but my eyelids soon grew heavy. Harvey Cross had not been a great prose stylist, and the world of literature, at least, had lost nothing by his untimely death.

  Simon read through the night while I dozed on the couch. When he roused me it was near dawn, but he seemed as fresh as if he’d just awakened. “How was it, Simon?” I asked. “As bad as the first twenty pages?”

  “It had a story to tell.”

  “The girl living in the forest has already been done,” I reminded him, “in Green Mansions.”

  “But this girl is only a child of seven, and a flashback later in the manuscript tells how she came to be there.”

  “I know. She’s the unicorn’s daughter.”

  He started to speak, but a noise at the door distracted him. Moving quickly across the room, he yanked it open and Kate Talos a
ll but fell in. She took a deep breath and said, “I came back.”

  “At five in the morning?” Simon said. “For another look for the manuscript?”

  “No. I was hoping you might still be here. I want to take you to her.”

  “The child?”

  She nodded. “If it’s not too late.”

  “Do you think it might be?”

  “As you pointed out, two people have died already. I’ve been awake all night thinking about that.”

  I had to interrupt. “Will one of you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “There will be time for that on the road,” Simon said. “We’re driving back to Olympus.”

  The Sunday-morning traffic along the Hudson seemed surprisingly light until I remembered it was not yet seven o’clock. As I drove, Simon and Kate Talos talked.

  “How did you know there were seven?” she asked Simon.

  “Because Gregory had done seven paintings. I recognized several of the names, of course, and it was not difficult to connect each name with its painting. It was reasonable to assume there were seven of you in all.”

  “And the child?”

  “It was painted realistically in the portrait of the unicorn, not symbolized as the rest of you were. That told me there was a real child, and it also told me the subject of Harvey Cross’s manuscript was more truth than fiction.”

  I saw her nod in the rearview mirror. “Ash loved the child. He had to portray her as she really was.”

  “Would somebody please tell me what this is all about?” I asked.

  “The story begins a long time ago,” Simon replied, “More than ten years ago, in that era of war protests and alternate lifestyles and the heavy use of drugs by the counterculture. Harvey Cross’s manuscript tells all about it. Seven people—four men and three women—went to live in a commune in the Catskills. They adopted the names of mythical creatures, perhaps because the commune was located near the village of Olympus and somehow they imagined themselves to be like those ancient Greek gods. But over the years there was a falling-out. One man left the commune completely and was cursed by some who remained. A woman bore a child by one of the other men and decided it should run wild in the woods and grow up as a free creature. The commune members fed the little girl, but there was no thought of sending her to school or allowing her to mingle with other children.”

  “The unicorn’s daughter,” I said.

  “Exactly. Harvey Cross was the one who left the commune, but he kept his ties with at least one member. You, Miss Talos?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I did see Harvey after he left. We all did, really, except for Unicorn. Occasionally Harvey even went back and stayed at the house with Phoenix, but never when Griffin was there on weekends. He was afraid of Griffin, because of the child.”

  “Griffin was the child’s father?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that in the manuscript?”

  “Not in so many words, but it seemed likely.”

  “Would you mind telling me who this Griffin is?” I asked.

  “That should be obvious, my friend. The name on the mailbox in Olympus was A. Griffin, just as the name on that apartment was A. Gregory. And the portrait of the little girl was so lovingly detailed it seemed more likely to be the painter’s daughter than someone else’s daughter. Griffin and Gregory were the same person. That’s why he appeared in Olympus only on weekends—because he was employed at Neptune Books during the week. The identification shouldn’t surprise you, since Mr. Buraq at the store told us Griffin had passed by in his blue Ford—the car Gregory was driving.”

  The girl seemed surprised. “So you know Buraq too.”

  “Oh, yes. We know almost all of them.” And he said to me, “Some of the seven adopted their mythical names for permanent use. Others, like Unicorn and Griffin and Dragon, found the names more suitable within the confines of the commune. Back in the city they kept their own names.”

  “What are the names?” I’d been so interested in the conversation that I hadn’t realized we’d almost reached our destination. It was not yet eight o’clock.

  “The seven creatures portrayed in Gregory’s paintings. The bird rising from the ashes signified Hazel Phoenix. The man of brass guarding the island of Crete was Miss Talos here. Ash Gregory was Griffin, the winged creature with the lion’s body. Sam Buraq, at the store where we stopped, was an Islamic beast, the winged horse with the face of a woman and a peacock’s tail. I think by process of elimination we can conclude that Harvey Cross was Dragon before he deserted the commune and started writing his book. As for the remaining two—”

  “There are cars at the house,” Kate Talos said, pointing ahead of us.

  “That is good,” Simon Ark decided. “The commune is assembled for the last act.”

  “They won’t let you take the child,” Kate warned.

  “We’ll see.”

  Simon led the way to the door of the gingerbread house while Kate Talos and I trailed along. They must have seen our approach, because Hazel Phoenix greeted us and said, “Well, Kate—another traitor in our midst?”

  “He found the manuscript, Hazel. He knows all about it. I didn’t have to tell him a thing.”

  We stepped into the living room and I saw Sam Buraq sitting in a chair. The curtains blocking the adjoining room stirred and another man stepped in, holding a revolver in his hand. I recognized Toby Chimera, the sheriff’s deputy we’d met the previous day.

  “Thank God, you’re here, Sheriff,” I began. “These people are—”

  “My friend,” said Simon, “Mr. Chimera knows who these people are. Mr. Chimera is one of them.”

  “What?”

  “Chimera—the fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Don’t you remember my asking him about those creatures yesterday? The New York police never came to Gregory’s apartment last night because Chimera delayed notifying them of the murder until Miss Talos had time to search for the manuscript.”

  “You know a great deal,” Chimera said. “Too much.”

  “We came for the child,” Simon told him. “You can’t leave her to grow up in the woods like some sort of animal.”

  “That’s none of your business,” Hazel Phoenix told him.

  “It’s everyone’s business. It’s the law’s business when two people are killed.”

  “Cross committed suicide,” Sam Buraq reminded us.

  “But Ash Gregory didn’t. He was murdered because he’d finally seen the light and decided to rescue his daughter.”

  I was standing near the window looking out on the backyard that ran down to the woods and thought I saw a movement at their edge. “The law will deal with Gregory’s murder,” Chimera was saying.

  “As a man of the law you must make a choice, Mr. Chimera,” Simon told him. “You must serve your friends or uphold the law—you cannot do both. You can no longer cover up what goes on here. None of you are gods and you never were. Perhaps in truth you are more like the beasts whose names you bear.” He turned to Phoenix. “The war is over now and the revolution never happened. It’s time to come home with the rest of us.”

  Her face hardened as she stared at Simon. “Shoot him, Toby,” she said.

  “Simon! There’s a child in the woods!” My shout brought them running to the window in time to see a little girl in raggedy clothing vanish into the underbrush.

  “We must hurry,” Simon Ark urged, “before she gets away.”

  I didn’t know if a bullet might stop us, but they let us go.

  Simon didn’t move fast and by the time we reached the edge of the woods the child was gone from sight. We went further in, searching for her. “We’ll never find her,” I said after a few minutes.

  “Yes, we will. She’s not afraid of people. Cross’s manuscript said she liked strangers.”

  We hurried on into the deepest part of the forest until at last we came to a little clearing by a brook. And then we saw her, playing down by the wat
er. The unicorn’s daughter.

  “Six of them, Simon. The four in the house and the two that are dead. We never got to the seventh. We never got to Unicorn.”

  The little girl turned at the sound of my voice and smiled up at us. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you the wise Wufniks from the desert lands?”

  “We are your new friends,” Simon told her, kneeling in the grass by her side. “We have come to take you away with us.”

  “No, you won’t!” a voice behind us said.

  We turned and I saw the woman who stood at the edge of the woods, clad in jeans and a shirt. Though I’d never seen her in anything but her office dresses, I recognized Martha Scane at once.

  Her head was down, sighting along the barrel of the shotgun pointed at us. At that angle it might almost have been a unicorn’s horn protruding from her forehead.

  “Get away from them, Lilith!” she shouted to the child, and the little girl obeyed instantly, running for cover in the woods.

  “Martha—” I started to say.

  She fired once, and the blast from the shotgun thudded into the ground near Simon. I saw little specks of blood appear on his hand.

  Her second shot came like an echo of the first, almost drowning out the simultaneous crack of a revolver. But this shot was wide to the left, and then I saw the blood on Martha Scane’s shirt.

  She fell on her face in the soft grass, still clutching the shotgun.

  Toby Chimera came out of the woods holding his service revolver. I saw that he was crying as he walked to her body, but I knew he had made his choice at last.

  It was much later that day when Simon and I finally drove back to New York. The little girl, Lilith, would find foster parents to care for her and the four we’d left at the house would go their own ways when the investigation was completed.

  “She did it all for the child,” Simon explained as we drove. “In some misguided way she thought she was protecting Lilith from the world. She’d threatened to destroy Harvey Cross many times before, and when he heard her voice come over that intercom in your office he must have thought she was a true demon. He’d never known where she or Ash worked, you see, and he’d unwittingly brought his manuscript to the very publisher who employed her. It must have been an overwhelming rush of sheer despair that made him leap through your window to his death.”