Death of a Cuckold Knight (Jake Reynolds Mysteries Book 2)

Book summary

In "Death of a Cuckold Knight," Jake Reynolds, a master art thief, finds himself entangled in a web of murder and intrigue during the chaos of World War I. After a mysterious death involving a Rembrandt painting, Jake's relentless pursuit of justice clashes with his criminal double life, raising the stakes in a thrilling tale of secrets, deception, and artistry.

Excerpt from Death of a Cuckold Knight (Jake Reynolds Mysteries Book 2)

The night was a frigid nightmare. A snow-covered frozen wonderland.

Blackness, filled with only the gentle hiss of winter’s frigid breath, stirred the copse of dark trees surrounding him with an ominous whisper. He sat on the hard seat of the motorcycle in the night of Arctic loneliness, his ears silently cataloguing all the ambient sounds surrounding him. Above him, the sky looked mean and sullen, filled with the promise of another winter’s blizzard. And cold. A vicious cold. All of Europe seemed to be gripped in an Arctic nightmare tonight.

It was cold enough to observe his breath turning to ice crystals. Cold enough to make the snow crack and snap in loud protest like broken glass every time he moved his feet. What little light there was, reflected off the blue-white crystalline surface in a surreal glow. The snow fell for most of the bitter night, carpeting the countryside in heavy silence. Every war had a way of making even the most commonplace appear like a psychotic nightmare. This war was no different.

The flash of a kid’s mischievous grin shot across his frozen blue lips. It was, he thought to himself, a night only the psychotic would consider venturing into. Or maybe a sociopath. Or the nefarious.

The grin widened into an impish smirk.

Which one was he? The Psychotic? The Sociopath? Or the nefarious?

There was only one reason why he was here.

Since he considered himself a sane man, there was only one option available. Why would a sane man hide in the darkest of shadows? Why would a sane man slink about in the night? Going out of his way to make sure no living creature would be aware of his presence. Why would a sane man stand for hours in the depths of a large copse of ancient Willows and wait for the night to slowly wander in its trek to the darkest point of the pre-dawn hours.

Why?

There was only one plausible answer.

He was here to steal something.

Something so rare and so valuable, he was compelled to endure the cold and the silence and wait for just the right moment to strike. Nevertheless, he felt quite comfortable sitting on the mud-splattered motorcycle. The long ride up from Paris on the Army Signals Corps machine was an arduous exercise in endurance and stamina. Melting ice dripped onto the still hot engine, and with each drip hitting the steaming exhaust manifold, the machine gave out a high-pitched hiss. The same kind of hissing sound an old dog might make after chasing rabbits through underbrush. He smiled to himself and fondly petted the old bike’s gas tank.

Only the red tip of his lit cigarette revealed his presence in the inky well of the night. Dressed in dark trousers and a black pullover sweater, he knew he would not be observed. No casual passerby would come whistling down this invisible country lane. The cold would keep most huddled close to their coal-burning stoves and brightly lit hearths. But there was another factor that guaranteed him his invisibility. In the distance, he could hear the constant rumble of German artillery fire and errant machine guns rattling angrily off in the night. A war was afoot. The War to End All Wars. It was early February 1915. All of Europe was shivering in the darkness tonight. People were too afraid to turn on a light and bask near warm fires, fearing the Boche would rain down artillery fire on them with biblical fury. The front was not more than seven kilometers away. Hostilities on a European scale had a remarkable way of dulling one’s desires to travel. Especially this close to the front.

In the darkness, he turned and stared at the deeper shadow off in the distance. His intended destination. A tall dark blackness vaguely shaped in the form of a large chateau, dark form with one bright yellow light gleaming its warm glow from out of a small window. Staring at the warmth of the light, he smiled again and pulled the cigarette dangling from his lips away between two fingers and exhaled softly.

Confident the cigarette’s tip would not be noticed by the two old cronies who were the caretakers of this 600-year-old country chateau, he smoked in a leisurely fashion as he waited for the old people to retire. The old man was well past seventy. Hard of hearing. With nothing better to do on these cold winter nights but to sit in the warmth of the chateau’s large kitchen and drink wine and eat cheese while his wife puttered around with various pots and pans. The wife was even older. She liked to bake bread and pastries, and while baking, incessantly droned on to her hard-of-hearing husband about the vagaries of life she had to endure. Even now, drifting through the barren winter trees he hid himself in, the lingering aroma of hot bread just pulled from an oven was strong enough to make his mouth water.

That infectious grin spread across his lips again as he waited for the single light to wink out. When it eventually did, he bent down and picked up a black canvas valise strapped to the back of the cycle and quickly slipped the long canvas grips over his head. Like a big jungle cat, he slipped out of the thick stand of willows and strolled with a confident gait across the snow-packed lawn. Coming to a halt at the base of a corner of the chateau, he quietly looked to the left and then to the right. Each breath he took brought out an explosion of steam lancing out into the brittle night air. Flipping the remains of the cigarette to one side, he readjusted the weight of the bag riding on his back before glancing up into the night.

Two floors above him was a stone balcony. Pausing in the almost claustrophobic darkness, he took in the night’s sounds. Hearing nothing amiss, he reached for a handhold on the thick carpet of twisted vegetation which covered almost the entire southern wall of the old chateau. Taking a deep breath, he looked up and began climbing swiftly. Moving with effortless ease, the compact, athletic figure went vertically up the exterior wall of the mansion and slipped over the cold stone balcony railing without making the slightest of sound. Automatically he slid into the blackest of shadows and paused again to listen intently.

It was amazing how far sound could carry in the cold. Standing on the balcony, he could distinctly hear the whining strain of a truck making its way over the road leading to Soissons. Barely eight months earlier, and just a few kilometers back toward the southeast, that very same road had hundreds of Parisian taxis grinding along bumper to bumper at a snail’s pace, bringing a large contingent of the French Army up from Paris and toward a bloodbath called the First Marne. The first terrible battle of the war. A battle where British, French, and German armies, all dog-tired from the opening weeks of what at first appeared to be a very mobile war, literally staggered into each other like drunken sailors in a barroom brawl and began pommeling each other viciously. The costly inconclusiveness of that horrible bloodbath had two profoundly lethal effects for the combatants.

Firstly, it permanently ended the headlong dash of German forces who, in the previous four weeks, had been driving like a pack of howling wolves straight toward Paris. Seemingly an unstoppable force intent on swallowing up all of France and ending the war in one daring act of bravado. But the First Marne ended that gambit. Dramatically.

Secondly, and most telling of all, it forced each of the exhausted actors in this funeral dirge to dig into the blood-soaked soil of France and entrench themselves deep into the bowels of the earth. From the English Channel to the borders of Switzerland, a distance as the crow flies of eight hundred kilometers, a labyrinth of multiple trenches in depth converted the war into a static and motionless debacle of mindless killing. Killing which would last for four horrible, murderously gruesome years.

War was a bloody goddess. A jealous whore who demands human sacrifice. And in this war Shiva would have her fill.

Farther away, high up in the hills which bordered the wide and slow-moving Aisne river running past Soissons, he could hear the unmistakable rat-tat-tat of a Frenchman’s Hotchkiss machine gun stuttering angrily into the unfathomable dark night. He smiled in the darkness, thinking to himself as he glanced for a second time around his immediate environs, how odd it felt to be still among the living on this cold night of 1915. Jake paused for a moment and meditated over his incredible luck.

Acknowledging he still lived was a simple statement with profound implications. Almost eight months into the First World War, serving as a captain and pilot in the Royal Flying Corps was, frankly, no mean feat. Hundreds of thousands had already paid the ultimate price.

The first winter of the war found the armies of both Allies and the Triple Entente sitting in their trenches enjoying the semi-lull winter brought on. All the armies were licking their wounds and digging in for the duration. In the midst of this momentary pause, the dark American found himself with the opportunity to take stock of his situation. To his amazement, he realized he was still alive. But not just alive. Alive and only moments away from stealthily entering the third-floor study of the Marquis de Sauveterre’s ancestral residence with the intent of stealing one of the marquis’ family heirlooms. He was going to replace it with a fake so cunningly rendered, so painstakingly recreated in exact detail, no one would suspect anything amiss.

And what an heirloom!

The small portrait, set in a garish gilded frame barely sixteen inches by twenty inches in size, was one of the marquis’ ancestors dressed in the dark red robes of a cardinal. A rather plain-looking portrait of a petite fat man, with extremely dark almond-colored eyes, with a right hand draped across his robes with a huge silver ring on his index finger. It was an old canvas of such uninspired blandness even the marquis dismissed it with a casual wave of the hand. Yet, to Jake, it was an art collector’s find of unparalleled import! For unbeknown to the young nobleman who currently occupied the chateau, this uninteresting canvas hanging on the wall beside his Louis XIV writing desk was nothing less than a genuine Rembrandt. An unknown Rembrandt the art world had no idea existed.

For Jake, who was a facilitator for collectors wishing to own works of the masters, the discovery of such a masterpiece meant a sizable monetary transaction if he could get his hands on it in a discreet manner. He knew a collector in Switzerland who carried a passion for collecting Rembrandts. This man’s zealotry for collecting the Dutch master’s oils, along with the man’s almost unlimited bank account, made him one of Jake’s more treasured customers. For an art thief of his caliber, the big American preferred to keep only a few active but well-heeled clients on hand.