The Secret Keepers Read online

The Smoke laughed his raspy laugh. “You seem to believe that you are controlling the situation, but you are not. So let me be clear, young man. In a few moments my men will escort you to my limousine. You will tell the driver the exact location of the rendezvous point, and we’ll all ride there together.”

  “No disrespect, Mr. Faug, but you’re crazy if you think I’d actually do that.”

  “And you are a fool,” The Smoke snarled, “if you think you have a choice. Gentlemen!”

  There was a sudden rush of movement. The Directions had converged on Jack’s chair.

  “Wait!” Jack cried. “Okay, okay! I’ll do it. I’ll take you there. But you have to let me drive my car—that’s how he knows I’ve been there. He looks for my car. If he doesn’t see it, he’s not going to show up. I’m telling you the truth here. We can still work this out so everyone’s happy!”

  After a pause, The Smoke said, “Perhaps he’s telling the truth. Morrison and Clark, you will accompany me in this man’s car. Edwards, you and Quigley will follow us at a distance in the limousine.”

  “We have to ride separate?” one of the men said.

  “You’ll survive, Quigley,” said The Smoke.

  “I know, sir. I’m just not used to it, is all.”

  “This is great,” Jack said. “Really great. I’m glad we’re getting this worked out. The one problem is that if my contact sees someone in the car with me—”

  “Your vehicle’s windows are quite dark,” The Smoke interrupted.

  “Well, that’s true,” Jack admitted. “I hadn’t thought of that. Funny, I didn’t realize that you’d even seen my car.”

  “There are a great many things you don’t realize. Now tell me, what is your rendezvous point?”

  “Burlington Plaza,” said Jack without hesitation. He must have been anticipating the question. “In the little park just to the side of it. I don’t know if you know that neighborhood, but—”

  “I know it,” The Smoke said. “It’s all the way across the city.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of why I was in a hurry. I hope you don’t mind if I drive fast.”

  “Take him outside and wait,” The Smoke said. “Do not let him near his car until I’ve joined you.”

  “Easy, easy,” Jack said as the men hustled him out. “I’m fragile, boys. Don’t forget the money, Mr. Faug!” The door closed behind them.

  The Smoke picked up the phone. “I want every group to proceed at once to the neighborhood of Burlington. Yes, every group. Form a perimeter. Be prepared to act quickly upon further instructions.” He slammed the phone down.

  “Oh my goodness!” The Smoke said, and let out a ridiculous, childlike giggle. “Oh my dear!”

  The opposite door of the office opened with its telltale squeak, and a moment later Reuben heard a similar squeak from another door somewhere beyond it. He pushed in on the winding key and reappeared.

  The opposite door had been left open. Reuben crawled out from beneath the cabinet and went over to peer through the narrow crack on the door’s hinged side. Beyond it was a simple parlor with four chairs and a coffee table. Across the parlor another door had been left wide open, revealing a long, dim hallway with wooden floors and candle sconces arrayed along the walls. A side table ran half the length of the hallway, bearing only a single decorative vase. At the near end of the table, The Smoke was kneeling with his back to Reuben, tying his shoe.

  As Reuben watched, the man sprang up and, bizarrely, climbed onto the table. He moved silently along it, skirting the vase in the middle, briefly grabbing a candle sconce for balance. He made not a sound. His shoes must be specially padded, Reuben thought. At the end of the table The Smoke jumped down and opened an antique cabinet. He took out a briefcase—presumably full of money—and then something that looked like a tiny black baseball bat, which he slipped up the sleeve of his suit jacket. Closing the cabinet, he climbed back up onto the table.

  Reuben vanished, retreating into the corner by the fireplace. He heard the first parlor door close, then the door into the office. The Smoke crossed the room, breathing heavily, and went out into the entranceway. Reuben listened. The front door of the mansion banged shut. Not long after, he heard the distant, familiar sound of Jack’s souped-up engine roaring to life. A second car engine started up, less dramatically.

  When their sounds began to fade, Reuben reappeared. He ran across the huge entranceway and peered through the dusty windows that flanked the front doors. Jack’s car was already disappearing in the distance, followed by the limousine. The mansion gates were closed. There were no Directions in sight.

  He was alone.

  Reuben sank to his knees. He ran a hand through his hair, which was slick with sweat, and wiped his palm dry on his pants. He took a long, deep breath, released it slowly. After a minute he took from his pocket a large hunk of cheese wrapped in a napkin—it had been the quietest snack he could think of—and with still-trembling fingers, he began to eat. He was trying hard to think. So much had happened so quickly that his mind hadn’t been able to keep up.

  Jack, though, had definitely been thinking fast. The plan had been for him to leave on his own. He’d done his best under the circumstances—driving his own car, he might at least have some control, some way of escaping. And he was tricky, for sure, much trickier than Reuben would have guessed. But Jack didn’t know about that little black club hidden up The Smoke’s sleeve, and Reuben had no way to warn him.

  Be careful, Jack.

  Still, The Smoke was being careful, too, Reuben reminded himself. He didn’t want to lose his best chance of getting the other watch. For the moment, Jack represented that chance, and this would be true as long as The Smoke continued to believe in the nonexistent contact. Jack just needed to play his cards right. What was it Penny had said? The Meyers would be incomparable poker players, if only they gambled. Well, Jack was gambling, all right. Reuben could only hope he was good enough.

  He stood up again. His heartbeat had returned almost to normal. He was much calmer now. He wasn’t nervous to be alone in The Smoke’s big, empty mansion. It actually felt familiar. How many hours had he whiled away exploring abandoned buildings in the Lower Downs? More than he could count. And now he had the strange feeling that what he’d been doing—all those hours, in all those buildings—was practicing.

  The more he thought about it, the more Reuben began to feel excited. He’d come here hoping to find some clue that would lead them to The Smoke. And what had happened? He’d figured out The Smoke’s ruse! The most powerful, feared person in New Umbra was, after all, only a man with some secrets, a man playing tricks no one knew about. No one except Reuben. And Reuben, of all people, knew how to stop him.

  The giant fireplace had been swept perfectly clean. Not even the faintest crackle of grit sounded beneath his shoe as Reuben stepped over the fender onto its stone floor. He looked back out into the office with a certain grim appreciation. The doors squeaked, the chairs groaned, the cuckoo clock ticked. But the floor of the fireplace was pristine, and the floor of the office was carpeted. All so that The Smoke could better observe the movements of his unsuspecting visitors without being detected himself.

  “Tricky,” Reuben whispered. He moved into the shadowy recesses of the deep fireplace. In the back right corner he found a dark opening, tall and wide enough for a man turned sideways to pass through. Yet it had been impossible to see from beyond the fireplace fender; the darkness and the angle of the wall prevented it.

  “Very tricky,” Reuben muttered, and slipped through the opening into the narrow passage beyond.

  A half-dozen steps took him to a heavy velvet curtain. In the darkness behind it he found a closed door. He thought a moment. Yes. The curtain was there to muffle the sound and to keep any possible light from entering the passageway when the door was opened. Reuben opened it now—in contrast to the others, its hinges were well oiled, and it swung open soundlessly—and stepped into the room beyond. This proved to be a small study, dimly lit b
y a high, dusty window with moth-eaten curtains.

  Reuben’s gaze passed quickly over the cluttered desk, the upholstered chair, the filing cabinet, the bookcase. It was the walls that his eyes were drawn to. They were covered from floor to ceiling with maps—and the maps themselves were marked, every square inch of them, with penciled notes. There was enough tiny writing on them to fill a book, maybe more than one. Reuben took a close look at the nearest one. It was a map of Westmont, this very neighborhood. The other maps turned out to be of neighborhoods, too.

  It was the walls that his eyes were drawn to.

  When Reuben realized what it all meant, he found himself averting his gaze, unwilling to look at the maps anymore. It was staggering. The work of more years than Reuben had been alive. Every scribbled no or Check the roof or Return by moonlight, every heavily scrawled X, every Try again in fair weather, every penciled date and time, was the result of countless hours spent searching the streets and alleys of New Umbra. Hours that became days, which became weeks, then months, then years. Then decades.

  The Smoke truly had spent his entire life looking for the other watch. Reuben could hardly bear to think about it.

  He stepped to the desk, upon which were scattered several loose stacks of envelopes. The envelopes all bore postmarks from other cities. Several had been opened, their letters unfolded and spread out on the desk. Reuben bent over them, squinting in the meager light. He didn’t turn on the desk lamp. He didn’t want to touch anything if he could help it.

  Skimming to the body of the first letter, he read:

  As usual, Mr. Faug, I write to report that no watch of your description has appeared this season, nor even any rumor of such a watch among our city’s dealers and collectors. As always, however, I will remain alert and vigilant, not to mention grateful for your generous compensations.

  The other letters were all the same. Reuben wondered how much money The Smoke had spent over the years in search of the other watch. Vast sums, no doubt. What a waste. The Smoke had guessed correctly that the watch had never left the city, and it was here that he had concentrated most of his efforts. But not all of them. The man was nothing if not thorough.

  Yet he had failed to find the watch, and Reuben had found it instead. With a small smile, he reached into his sweatshirt pocket and gave the watch a gentle squeeze.

  “Come on,” he whispered, surprising himself, for he realized that he was speaking to the watch. As if it were a tiny pet in his pocket. Or a friend. It was a strange thing to have done, and yet Reuben felt he understood it. He and the watch shared a secret. They worked together. Was it any wonder that Reuben thought of it as a sort of partner?

  “Well, maybe,” he admitted, and then he had to admit that talking to himself wasn’t much better. He resolved to stop doing both.

  The study’s other door opened onto the parlor that Reuben had glimpsed earlier. He recognized the four chairs and the coffee table. An antique lamp stood in the corner, its bulb still burning. To his left was the door that opened onto the hallway with the long table, to his right the office door through which he had spied on The Smoke. In the opposite wall was the half-open door of a little bathroom—which reminded Reuben, instantly and urgently, that he needed to go.

  He went as fast as he could, then washed his hands and drank thirstily from the tap. He used a dingy hand towel to dry the sink, which had been dry to begin with, and hung the towel back exactly as it had been. He left the door half-open.

  There wasn’t much to see in the parlor. It was just a place where the Directions had to wait while their employer, unbeknownst to them, was slipping out the back door of his study, sneaking invisibly into the fireplace to begin his spying. Reuben glanced at the magazines on the table and wondered if the Directions got bored, or if working directly for The Smoke’s eccentric representative kept them too nervous to feel anything else. Either way, it seemed like a bad job.

  Reuben opened the door to the hallway and stood uncertainly on the threshold. Weak light flickered in the candle sconces, which held not actual wax candles but artificial ones with flame-shaped bulbs. He took a step into the hallway and stopped again. Why had The Smoke gotten up on the table? He studied the dark wooden floor. It looked sturdy enough, not rotted out anywhere, as far as he could tell.

  Reuben climbed up onto the table. It didn’t budge or sway as he would have expected it to, not even a little bit. He had climbed onto enough tables to find this odd. It must be secured to the floor or the wall, he thought. But why? He walked carefully, watching his feet. The wood beneath them was worn and scuffed, in distinct contrast with the table’s dark outer edges. When he came to the vase, he saw that the worn wood veered around it, just as The Smoke had done.

  That’s when he understood. He was following a path, the result of hundreds, even thousands, of crossings. The Smoke always walked down the hallway on this table. That was why he’d made it so secure.

  Reuben was instantly anxious about losing his balance. He might have been walking along that ledge high above the alley rather than on a waist-high table in a hallway. What was wrong with the floor? Did The Smoke just have some sort of phobia? Or would something truly bad happen if Reuben fell off the table?

  He was treading carefully, with no need to grab a candle sconce for balance as The Smoke had done. The Smoke had been trotting along, in a hurry, yes, but also with the ease of long habit. Reuben peered at the candle sconce above the vase. It was made of dark iron and firmly screwed into the wall. He gave it a tug. Solid as a rock, like the table.

  He moved on to the end of the table and got down exactly where The Smoke had. He knelt, facing back the way he’d come, and studied the floor closely. It seemed normal enough, with regularly spaced nails and dusty seams between the floorboards. He noticed that he had the watch out, holding it before him like a candle, as if it would give better light. In his nervousness he’d brought it out without thinking. He inched forward and pushed down on the floor with his left hand. It made a creaking sound, but nothing more.

  He shuffled forward on his knees and tried again, pressing down with his left hand, gently at first, then with more pressure. Again nothing. Reuben felt the stirrings of relief. Maybe The Smoke really did have a phobia. Something about long stretches of floor, or of tables falling over on him as he walked past. Reuben reached out a little farther and pressed down again.

  The floor shot away so easily beneath his hand, offering no resistance at all, it was as if he’d tried to balance himself on the surface of water. He plunged forward, his elbows scraping on the edge of where solid floor met nothingness. His belly and chest struck the floor, and with a cry of terror Reuben writhed backward, getting his elbows back up onto the floorboards beneath him just as he sensed something coming down from above.

  Later he would understand that the trapdoor was a rectangular section of floor that revolved around a central point, like a waterwheel. But in that moment all he knew was that something a few feet ahead of him had reared up and was bearing down on him. He wormed backward fast enough to avoid getting clubbed on the head by the spinning planks. But his hands—his hands were still out in front of him, suspended over blackness, and the descending floorboards struck them both, hard, at the back of the wrists.

  Reuben cried out again, this time in pain, and felt himself let go of the watch. He heard it strike metal and skitter downward with a scraping sound, passing along a chute of some kind into the depths below the floor. The sound quickly faded, then stopped.

  Wincing, Reuben got up onto his knees again. The section of planking had rebounded off his wrists and was drifting slowly upward before him like the near end of a seesaw. He grabbed its edge, holding it steady, and peered into the blackness beneath it. He could see absolutely nothing.

  He sat back on his heels, letting go of the wood. The section of floor swung down a little below the edge of the gap, then up a little, then down again, stopping level with the rest of the floor—a horizontal swinging door, flapping to a c
lose. All was still again. Everything looked exactly as it had before.

  Reuben held his throbbing hands against him, staring at the floor and trying not to scream. The Smoke’s home had bitten him. That’s what he was thinking. The Smoke’s home had bitten him, and swallowed his watch.

  Reuben set out at once in search of a staircase. Beyond the cabinet, the hallway led to a pair of great oak doors, then stretched away to the right. He flipped a light switch, less cautious now in his desperation, and another range of fake candles flickered to life. He moved down the second length of hallway, testing the floor ahead of him with each step, pushing down tentatively with his toes as if gauging the temperature of bathwater.

  He was concentrating hard, keeping his bearings. He remembered the once-grand staircase back in the entranceway. Its banisters had been draped with cobwebs like gauze curtains. He was somewhere behind it, he reckoned, when he found the cramped set of servants’ stairs leading down. He located the light switch and, clinging to a dusty rail, made his way down dusty steps.

  There had been no sound of impact at the end of the watch’s scraping descent. Reuben kept imagining it plummeting into a pile of old laundry, perhaps because the only chutes he’d ever heard of in houses were laundry chutes. He so badly wanted to believe that the watch had landed on something soft. What if it was broken? Or what if it was lost for good?

  “Don’t think that way!” he whispered, then remembered that he’d resolved to stop talking to himself. He thought about The Smoke giggling and saying, “Oh my goodness! Oh my dear!” It would have seemed silly if it hadn’t seemed so creepy.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a closed door. Reuben braced himself. It is always a nervous business opening closed doors. But this one swung open to reveal nothing more frightening than a furnace, a hot-water tank, and an electrical panel crowded into a dark room that stank of mildew. He reached up and pulled a lightbulb chain.