Stalking the Nightmare Read Online Free PDF Page B

attention to her story.
    Haggerty jumped ship on the return of the Cunard liner to New York.
    Sgt. Michael James Haggerty was killed during the Battle of Ypres, November 9th, 1914. His kit bag, scavenged by a German soldier when the French and British trenches were overrun (it was reported by a survivor who had played possum and been overlooked in the random bayoneting of corpses), disappeared. Others in Haggerty’s company said he slept with the kit bag under his pillow, that it seemed quite heavy, and that he once broke the arm of a messmate who playfully tried to see what the Irishman was carrying in it.
    Between 1914 and 1932 the object—while never described-turned up three times: once in the possession of a White Russian nobleman in Sevastopol, twice in the possession of a Dutch aircraft designer, and finally in the possession of a Chicago mobster reputed to have been the man who gunned down Dion O’Banion in his flower shop at 738 North State Street.
    In 1932 a man visiting New York for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall just after Christmas, reported to the police who found him lying in an alley on West 51st Street just below Fifth Avenue, that he had been mugged and robbed of “the most important and beautiful thing in the world.” He was taken to Belle-vue Hospital but no matter how diligently he was interrogated, he would not describe the stolen article.
    In 1934 it was reputed to be in the private art collection of the German architect Walter Gropius; after Gropius’s self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany it was reputed to have passed into the personal collection of Hermann Goering, 1937; in 1941 it was said to be housed with Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa; in 1946 it was found to be one of the few items not left by Henry Ford at his death to the Ford Foundation.
    Its whereabouts were unknown between 1946 and February of 1968. But Siri told Chris, her final love, that there was one sure, dangerous way of finding it. The way she had used originally to learn the hand-to-hand passage of the artifact that was True Love from the Palace of Minos to its present unknown resting place.
    Then she released his hand, realizing she had squeezed it so hard while telling her story that it was as white as unsmoked meerschaum; and she asked him very softly if he would bring her the little cloisonne minaudiere he had bought her in Hong Kong.
    He gave it to her and she clutched it far more tightly than she had his hand. Because it was a minute later, and the pain was much worse.
    “Do you remember the flea market?”
    “Yes,” she said, closing her eyes. “And we were holding hands in the crowd; and then you let go and I was swept along; and I thought I’d lost you; and you were gone for fifteen minutes…
    “And you panicked.”
    “And when I got back to the car there you were.”
    “You should have seen your face. What relief.”
    “What love. That was the moment I slowed the never-ending search. And you smiled and held out this to me.” And she opened her hand where the exquisite blue and gold minaudiere lay in her palm, now filmed with moisture.
    But her story had worked its magic. He knelt beside her on the floor, lifted her head and the pillows, and cradled them in his lap. “What is this True Love? What does it look like?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. It cost too much the first time, just to get the information. The actual search has to be done without…” and she hesitated as if picking the exact words, the words that would not frighten him, because he was beginning to look more frightened than anguished, “…without special assistance.”
    “But how could you have learned all this?”
    “I had an informant. You must seek him out. But go very carefully. It’s dangerous, it costs a great deal; care has to be taken … once I didn’t take care …” She paused. “You’ll need my blood.”
    “An informant … your blood … ? I don’t…”
    “Adrammelech, Supreme Ruler