Page 22 of Dead Beat

Prince Henry

Good Ol’ Hec

Nick Zanca

The photograph had been taken in front of the doors to the newly constructed Sterling Memorial Library. The two young men on the left were easy to identify. Darlington knew Rudolph Kittscher’s studious face from his Lethe portrait and Lionel Reiter from the picture he’d taken with his Skull and Bones delegation. But the two on the right were unknowns. They could have come from any of the societies that existed at that time, or even from one of the graduate schools.

Alex looked thoughtful as she touched her fingers briefly to the photo. “Which one of them do you think was the soldier?”

“He looks like he’d be good in a fight,” Turner said, noting the shorter, thicker-necked of the two anonymous men.

“What’s the point of using fake names?” Dawes asked. “Everyone involved must have known who they were.”

But it made sense to Darlington. Every new delegate to a society was given a name that had been held by the person who had tapped them, a kind of society lineage. Egyptian or Roman gods. Knights of the Round Table. Even Lethe had kept to this tradition with its Dante and Virgil. Maybe they believed they were special. Maybe they were just having fun.

“They really did it,” Alex said. “They walked the Gauntlet before us.”

“Why them?” Dawes wondered aloud. “Sterling was completed in 1931. Why did they wait until 1933?”

Turner shrugged. “Maybe they couldn’t find four people stupid enough to risk it.”

“Only took us a couple of weeks,” Alex said with the flash of a grin.

“Your friends are stupider,” Turner said.

“Aw, Turner,” Alex crooned. “Are we friends?”

He rolled his eyes then leaned across the seat and flicked the corner of the photo. “You’re telling me all these Yale men logged kills? I don’t buy it. And none of them were old enough to have served in World War I.”

“It’s possible they visited a gentler corner of hell?” Dawes asked hopefully.

Alex raised a brow. “Or that they chose a few worthy sacrifices.”

“Do we really think that happened?” Turner probed.

They all turned to Darlington as if he had some greater insight into the minds of these eager young men. And maybe he did. What might he have done, whom might he have hurt to see to the other side? Lethe had been created to keep the societies from preying on their fellow undergraduates and New Haven residents. But maybe that had been a lie from the start.

“I don’t have an answer,” he said. “The Gauntlet wasn’t built for pickpockets and tax cheats. The descent demands blood.” That was the truth of it. The motive didn’t matter: mercy, survival, justice, revenge. A ticket to hell through the Gauntlet required murder. No free passes.

“Victimas,” Alex said, referencing the name given to subjects used for the Skull and Bones prognostication rituals, men and women laid out on tables, their organs used to predict the movements of the stock market, then sewn up again and sent home—if they were lucky and if they had a home to go to. Mental patients, men who slept rough, people without families or friends to notice if they suddenly went missing or to object if they came out of the hospital with a new scar. “When the societies need bodies, they find bodies.”

But there was a big difference between a ritual gone wrong and targeting four people for death.

“Kittscher was a skeptic, an atheist,” Darlington mused. “That might mean he’s Doubting Thomas.”

Turner frowned. “And Reiter is Prince Henry why? Because he’s rich? Seems thin.”

“We’ll put the names and the year through the Albemarle Book,” Dawes said. “There has to be a connection.”

Alex’s eyes roved over the old pages from Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary. “He doesn’t sound scared at all. The entries leading up to the descent are happy, almost giddy. He’s excited.”

Darlington spread his hands as if in apology. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a man on a great adventure. He has no idea what’s waiting for him.”

None of them had. The silly nicknames, the cocky pose in front of Sterling. Whether it was real fearlessness or a veneer of cheap bravado, these pilgrims hadn’t approached the Gauntlet with caution. They’d leapt right into the abyss.

“Listen to this,” said Turner. “It’s all Manifest Destiny and it’s not our right; it’s our duty until November 1. Then he says, I am without energy or will to record what has happened. I know only despair. There is but one word I need write that may encompass our sins: hubris.”

Darlington almost laughed. “He can be taught.”