The League of Night and Fog Read Online Free PDF

was never known for being sociable. But the group insisted.”
    “Despite our wishes? At the risk of endangering … ?”
    “With a proposition,” Kessler said. “If Icicle feels no nostalgia for his former friends, no sense of kinship in mutual adversity, then maybe he—or you—can be swayed by a different motive.”
    “I can’t imagine …”
    “Money. The group’s been financially successful. We have resources. You and your father—we know what you are, what youdo. We’re willing to pay you handsomely to find out what happened to our fathers. And if”—Kessler’s voice became hoarse—“God help me for thinking it let alone saying it, if they’re dead, we want you to be our revenge.”
    “That’s
what this is all about? You came all this way to
hire
me?”
    “We don’t know what else to do.”
    “No, it’s impossible. I can’t.”
    “The fee …”
    “You don’t understand. You could offer a fortune, it wouldn’t matter. It’s too risky.”
    “But under the circumstances … old friends …”
    “And lead the enemy to us, as you maybe have? I’m leaving.” Pendleton stood. “Tell them no.”
    “I’m at the Captain Cook Lodge! Think about it! Change your mind!”
    “I won’t.” Pendleton started to walk away.
    “Listen to me!” Kessler said. “There’s something else you should know!”
    Pendleton hesitated.
    “Cardinal Pavelic!” Kessler said.
    “What about him?”
    “He disappeared as well.”
14
    H is chest aching, Pendleton rushed down a sandy slope toward Bondi Beach. It was half past five. His jogging suit clung to him. He’d switched taxis several times to elude possible surveillance. When the final taxi had been caught in a traffic jam near the beach, he’d paid the driver and run ahead.
    He had much to fear. Not just the risk that Kessler’s arrival had posed. Or the disturbing information that the priest had disappeared. What truly bothered him was that his own father might vanish as the others had. Icicle had to be warned.
    But when he’d called from a phone booth near the gardens,he’d received no answer either at the dive shop or at the ocean-bluff home he shared with his father. He told himself that his assistant must have closed the shop early, though that had never happened before. He tried to convince himself that his father had not yet returned home from the beach, though his father never failed to get home in time to watch the five o’clock news. Closer to Bondi Beach, he’d phoned the shop again; this time his call had been interrupted by a recorded announcement telling him the line was out of order. His stomach felt as if it were crammed with jagged glass.
    He reached the bottom of the sandy slope and blinked through sweat-blurred vision toward a line of buildings that flanked the ocean. Normally, he’d have had no trouble identifying his dive shop among the quick-food, tank-top, and souvenir stores, but chaotic activity now obscured it. Police cars, a milling crowd, fire engines, swirling smoke.
    His pulse roaring behind his ears, he pushed through the crowd toward the charred ruin of his shop. Attendants wheeled a sheet-covered body toward an ambulance. Ducking past a policeman who shouted for him to stop, Pendleton yanked the sheet from the corpse’s face. The ravaged features were a grotesque combination of what looked like melted wax and scorched hamburger.
    A policeman tried to pull him away, but Pendleton twisted angrily free, groping for the corpse’s left hand. Though the fingers had been seared together, it was clear that the corpse was not wearing a ring. Pendleton’s assistant had not been married. But Pendleton’s father, though a widower, always wore his wedding ring.
    He no longer resisted the hands that tugged him from the stretcher. “I thought it was my father.”
    “You belong here?” a policeman asked.
    “I own the place. My
father
. Where’s—?”
    “We found only one victim. If he’s not your father—”
    Pendleton