The Man of Bronze by James Alan Gardner Page A

Croft?”
    “Yes.”
    “Reuben has been urging me for months to talk to you. I suppose he finally contacted you on his own.” Father Emil’s expression was sour. “I dislike people going behind my back.”
    “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Reuben intended to clear it with you first, but events got out of hand.”
    “So it would seem.”
    The woman who’d removed Reuben’s bandages walked to a chest-high cistern in one corner of the room. She reached over the cistern’s stone wall and dipped a metal pan inside. A moment later, she walked back to the examination table; the pan was now full of water. The water must have been cold, because when she began washing Reuben’s wound, he flinched.
    “You don’t have indoor plumbing?” I asked.
    Father Emil shook his head. “The monastery is built on solid rock. No one’s ever managed to drill through the stone down to the water table. There’s a good well outside on the flats; and in the old days, the monks used to carry up water in buckets . . . but they also built pipes to collect rain from the roof and channel it into that cistern. An infirmary needs plenty of water.”
    “The water can’t be clean,” I said.
    “We use chemical purifiers. The water becomes undrinkable, but quite good as a disinfectant.” He might have said more; but as the doctors washed away Reuben’s crusted blood, the nature of his injury became apparent. Father Emil said, “Is that a bullet wound?”
    “A clean in and out,” I replied. “Reuben got shot . . . and he barely escaped getting blown up at the airport.”
    “I heard about the explosion. We listen to the news on radio. I knew Reuben was flying in around the same time, and I was afraid—” Father Emil broke off. “But he’s here now, and alive. Praise God.” The monk gestured toward a corner of the room. “Let’s sit and talk.”
    We walked to a table with two metal chairs—the sort of place a doctor might take notes while patients described their symptoms. Father Emil held one chair for me, then sat in the other. He gave me a piercing look. “What happened, Ms. Croft? Tell me everything.”
    I was tempted to refuse, to explain nothing until I’d gotten answers to my own questions. What was the Order of Bronze? Why had it hired Reuben to investigate bronze statuary? What was in Reuben’s attaché case, and who wanted it so badly? But I decided not to be confrontational . . . at least not until Reuben had been patched up. Besides, if I humored Father Emil he might do me the same courtesy.
    “Reuben called me from Athens,” I said, “and asked me to meet him in Warsaw . . .”
    The story took ten minutes. I didn’t bother with details on the fight at Jacek’s, but I
did
mention the silver grenade that produced the frigid armor. I couldn’t help asking, “Have you heard of such a thing? A Silver Shield?”
    “No,” Father Emil answered, “but I can check—” He stopped himself. I wondered what he’d been going to say. Where does one go for information on shiny violations of nature? But Father Emil just said, “Please, continue your story” . . . and I proceeded to the end.
    When I finished, he sat back with a thoughtful expression. “You have no idea who the mercenaries were?”
    “No,” I said. “But the Warsaw police will find the bodies and identify them soon enough. Most mercs are ex-military, so their fingerprints will be on file somewhere. Interpol will put out a worldwide alert; they’ll have most of the dead men’s names by morning. Then hundreds of cops and operatives will start investigating the mercenaries’ backgrounds.” I shrugged. “By this time tomorrow, the wire services will publish the gunmen’s names, mug shots, military and criminal records, all that trivia . . . and none of it will matter, because it doesn’t address the real question.”
    “You mean who hired the mercenaries and why.”
    “Right. We can hope the employer was sloppy—maybe he left a trail. But