Alex Archer - The Mortality Principle

Annja stepped out into the street.

She felt the warmth on her face that had been missing inside the building.

She might not have found anything new relating to her story, but she might just have stumbled onto the obvious angle for the story she had. People’s macabre fascination with murder sold newspapers. And if it was good enough to sell newspapers, then it ought to be good enough for the network’s suits. But would it be good enough to save Chasing History’s Monsters ?

Only time would tell.

A quick visit to the newsstand confirmed which newspaper had been carrying the stories that connected the vagrant murders with Rabbi Loew’s golem.

Even though the words were incomprehensible, the front page of one of the papers in the newsstand’s racks carried Loew’s name and an etching in place of a photograph that detailed the golem’s nighttime wandering through these streets. Unable to read it, she decided she needed a different course of action. Thinking on her feet, Annja noted the name of the reporter whose byline appeared underneath the headline: Jan Turek.

A call to the newspaper resulted in her being passed from person to person until someone was found who spoke a language they had in common comfortably enough to answer a few questions. Then she discovered that Turek wasn’t on the staff at all, but was a freelancer, and the staff member was unwilling to pass on any contact details for him without knowing more about her and her credentials. She provided Doug Morrell’s contact information and told the staffer he could check in with him. She hoped that being on staff with a cable television corporation in the US would be enough to persuade them to put her in touch with Turek. She gave the staffer her number at the hotel and returned there to wait for Doug to confirm she was who she said she was.

When the phone rang she snatched it up and answered.

It wasn’t Jan Turek.

It was the staffer, who confirmed that Doug Morrell had vouched for her, though he hadn’t appreciated being woken up at six in the morning. Annja couldn’t help herself, she laughed at that, having completely forgotten about the time difference when she’d given the staffer Doug’s cell number. The woman promised to take a message and pass it on to Turek, but couldn’t promise when he’d get back to her.

“He’s not exactly the most reliable soul,” she explained. “Which is why he’s not on the staff here. But I’ll call him now and leave your message. He’s more of a night bird,” the woman said, which Annja immediately corrected to night owl in her mind. “I think he sleeps for most of the day, so don’t expect a call back from him for a while.”

“But he’s definitely the man I need to speak to about the stories you’ve been running about the killings?”

“Oh, yes. Can I ask, are you looking to buy the story from Jan?”

“It’s possible,” Annja said. She knew how papers worked. The reporter would have a lot of material that hadn’t made it into the finished copy. Was there anything in there that would be of interest to her? Maybe.

“I’ll make sure I tell him that. He’s more likely to give you a call if there’s a chance of money changing hands. You know how these freelancers are. If you don’t hear from him, you might want to check out some of the places where people sleep outside. He’s been talking to a lot of the homeless people late at night. I think he’s even slept on the streets himself a couple of nights this week in the hope that he might catch the killer himself. The police warned him off that, though, so hopefully he listened to them. To be honest, I don’t like the idea of him out there. It’s not safe.”

“Thanks,” Annja said.

If the man didn’t call her back, she was going to have to go looking for him, but she would have somewhere to start, which was more than she’d had an hour ago. How many Jan Tureks could there be in the city?

She was more than capable of looking after herself no matter who she found herself up against. But it was still seven or eight hours until it would start to get dark, and another six or seven until it was the right time to go hunting the killer, which made as much sense as hunting for the journalist who was writing about him.

That meant she was at a loose end.

She had time to kill.

She had exhausted the research she had brought with her three times over, but now she had another angle to chase. She decided to check the internet to see if there were better reports about the killings that had made it into the international press. Worst case, she could run Turek’s reports—assuming they were online—through a translation app and at least get some sort of idea what theories he was putting forward. It wouldn’t hurt to know just how much fear he was causing with his pieces, either. That was where the comments sections came in.

She headed back to the hotel, assuming Garin would still be occupying himself for a while yet.

From outside, the hotel was an unassuming building. It had been a Dominican monastery back in the golem’s day. Now it offered her space for quiet contemplation. Both the businessmen and the tourists had long since left, leaving the foyer empty. Annja walked toward the desk, which was between her and the single flight of stairs that led to the first floor where her room was. The receptionist looked up and smiled, returning to her work when Annja turned toward the stairs.

A middle-aged couple talking rapidly in German emerged from the stairway and walked straight to the reception desk without giving her a second glance.

Annja climbed the stairs two at a time, eager to get to work now that she had something to focus on.

She passed Garin’s room, hearing voices behind the door. No doubt he was charming the waitress with talk of his jet airplane and a trip to Paris for champagne and strawberries that evening. That was his usual technique when it came to sweeping women off their feet: leave them dizzy with the heady rush of a life barely even imagined. If not Paris, maybe it would be pizza in Rome or Venetian ice cream, gazing out over the Lido. How many times in the past few years had Garin tried to impress her the same way? More than enough was the answer, though in truth he’d never impressed her more than that very first time they’d come face-to-face as she hunted the Beast of Gévaudan. He’d saved her life that day. To Annja’s way of thinking that was more impressive than traveling half the world to dine at some fancy five-star restaurant, but as she’d quickly come to learn she was pretty much one of a kind.

She smiled to herself as she moved on to her own room.

Two hours sped by with Annja reading the various reports. It wasn’t easy, the language barrier present even online, but she managed to track down more and more articles on the internet—though, painfully, as the translation site had a habit of turning the original Czech articles into gibberish.

She could have taken them to a translation service, but that would take time and cost money and probably only serve to annoy her paymasters. Or she could have asked around for a person who was fluent in English—fluent enough to give her a real idea of just how emotive the language in the articles was.

Of course, she had an ace up her proverbial sleeve. Roux. The man knew so much and had seen so much more. Even if he didn’t have the answers, he would know someone who did. And in this case, he had no agenda, no wish to gain anything from her requests for help. That was the primary difference between the old man and Garin. Garin was like the song: he was his first, his last, his everything. He always put the interests of Garin Braden ahead of the interests of others. It wasn’t just about being selfish, it was about being himself. You didn’t live six hundred years of decadence without picking up some bad habits along the way. It was only inevitable that centuries of getting neck-deep in fecal matter and somehow emerging smelling of roses gave you a warped perspective on life. Roux was different. She didn’t know why—on a fundamental level—that should be so. But it was. The only thing she’d noticed, and it was through years of quiet observation as opposed to direct confrontation, was that Roux welcomed the idea that he might not live forever whereas Garin dreaded it.