After Conrad followed yet another dead end sighting of Imogene, he’d exhausted most of his cash and all his favors. His sister’s trail of bloody breadcrumbs vanished into a South American rainforest. Imogene, a crackerjack FBI special agent, had originally disappeared in Mexico several years beforehand while hunting Dr. Drake, the fellow who may or may not have murdered their older brother Ezra.
That most authorities took Drake’s decade long absence as proof of death (he’d been older than the oldest Nazi war criminals last anyone saw him in public), hadn’t dissuaded Imogene from her mission of vengeance. She’d believed the doctor possessed great and diabolical secrets, an unnatural lifespan being least among these.
Brother dead, suspect missing, sister missing too. Gears within gears, wheels within wheels, irony piled upon irony. Lately, Conrad wasn’t sure whether he was chasing Imogene or her ghost.
The only good thing to come from months spent chopping through the jungle between backwater villages was the discovery of yet another in a sequence of cached papers and films Imogene periodically dropped for him like clues in a bizarre game of cat and mouse. These latest papers were left tucked inside a firebombed bunker and revealed her recent contact with another family acquaintance he’d long thought dead or relocated beyond the reach of friend and foe alike: Pablo Souza, known internationally as the Brazilian, a chemist and surgeon of some infamy and a former henchman of Dr. Drake.
Rumor had it, and a hasty note among the top secret military documents she’d stolen confirmed, Imogene had sought Souza out to purchase a serum the old man perfected, an elixir that contained most wondrous and potentially lethal properties—One drop will grant you immortality unless it strikes you stone dead! The alleged properties were so wondrous they’d attained the stature of legend.
Imogene’s note read in part: I know where Drake is hiding. Problem is, you can’t get there from here. Souza gave us a way in, though. The kicker is, Souza’s little wonder drug isn’t what made Dr. D. an ageless villain. Turns out it’s the other way around. But, daylight is burning and I have to make tracks. So, this is it, brother of mine. I’m gonna eat the worm and shed this skin. Raul is coming with. Final showdown on eleven at eleven. Don’t try to follow us. Love you, kiddo. The Raul she mentioned was Raul Lorca, a decorated Mexican scientist and Imogene’s lover of several years. Her loyal sidekick. Mexican intelligence had a few questions for him too.
Unfortunately, Imogene was long, long gone and the Brazilian skipped the country just ahead of Conrad’s arrival, although as more than one law enforcement agency wanted Souza’s head on a pole for various crimes against humanity dating back to the Second Great War, his latest absence might’ve been a coincidence. The old boy tended to move frequently. As for Souza’s miracle elixir: those in the know scoffed and dismissed the existence of the drug as a fairytale, mythical as Ponce de Leone’s fountain. Conrad didn’t care about the skeptics. Good enough for Imogene was good enough for him, and either way, Souza was another link in the chain that would help him locate his sister for a homecoming or a funeral.
Conrad put out the word he was now looking for the Brazilian in addition to Imogene and her lover. Tracking the chemist would be expensive, if not impossible. Luckily, Conrad’s membership in the Pageant, while exceedingly hazardous, rewarded him well. He made the call to his patron, a reclusive industrialist named Cyrano Kosokian, and scheduled a ludus with a top ranked contender. They would fight that coming spring in a crater in the desert. The terms were particularly brutal—a blood match unto dismemberment or death—and thus the payout extravagant. Sufficiently lucrative, he hoped, to ameliorate the massive debts he was in the midst of accruing in search of Imogene. Then he chartered a flight to a remote Polynesian island resort and dropped off the map for a while.
He thought of it as returning to the nest.
The resort was contained within the shell of a ruined castle on a hill above a white beach. It loomed over a jetty, a handful of antiquated fishing boats, and farther out, at the mouth of the harbor, a reef. During the winter season the resort was deserted but for a skeleton staff and a handful of fellow eccentrics.
Conrad practically owned the place. The resort was scarcely upscale, being rather an ancient church converted to a fortification against buccaneers, and, during one of the government’s more prosperous and ambitious eras, remodeled as a hotel casino meant to attract the big fish: filthy rich Americans and Euro nobility seeking anonymous escape from the paparazzi. The dingy façade, weedy courtyard, two hundred year old clay tiles that let in the rain, the moss and the cracked plaster, yellow as decayed ivory, the sullen employees, and the occasional cockroach, combined and collaborated to lend the villa an aura of Third World charm.
The owners were proud of their erstwhile clientele. Dim photographs of decrepit Hollywood celebrities, Vegas singers, 1980s supermodels, and a famous Latin dictator, glinted in the lobby, the dining room and the lounge. The stars grinned and grimaced, were mainly ghosts, unknown to the bartenders and the boys who carefully swept the floors.
In the mornings while the sky was yet dark, Conrad dressed in the rubber suit with its leaden patches and weights at wrists, waist and ankles, and ran along the beach until he came to the mountain path and followed it up and up above the tree line, across the black shale slopes and gaspingly at last until he fell to his knees in the shadow of the caldera of a dead volcano.
Come the tourist season the mountainside would be strewn with panting men in flowery shirts and sunburned women in floppy-brim hats and starlet sunglasses the natives sold by the gross alongside key chains, pottery and bananas at the little thatch stands on every other corner. But this was winter and the mountain was peaceful as westerly light began to bleed across the ocean. Conrad sprawled among the small stones and powdered ash and when his air returned, lurched to his feet and plunged back down toward the trees and the beach that slashed like a white scar.
The staff, a cadre of dark, pinch-mouthed men in secondhand tuxedos, lugged a buffet bar into the courtyard. There he collapsed beneath a faded parasol and gorged on slabs of boar and goat, bread and cheese, and gallons of goat’s milk while a servant in a dirty white jacket waited at his elbow to pour his coffee and light his cigarettes. The cigarettes were killing him, he knew. Gravity was killing him, and diffidence too, and someone, somewhere was waiting to kill him if these things failed. In contemplation, he’d have another smoke.
Conrad always slept for several hours. Later, in the early afternoon of even-numbered days, he went to a section of the beach where old rockslides had deposited boulders among the shade of the palms, and lifted the smallest of these rocks in his arms and lumbered to the surf and tossed them into the bay. He persisted mechanically until a trench gouged the sand and the skin on his arms glistened slick with blood and he could no longer grasp the boulders, could scarcely stand.
Odd days he swam from the jetty through the shallow harbor past the breakers until the water cooled and darkened beneath his threshing limbs. On the way home he pushed harder, harder, put the hammer down and drove balls out, held nothing in reserve. Occasionally, his body became lead and he sank in the greenish lagoon near the shore, plunged like a statue, trailing his life-breath in a streamer of oblong bubbles, sank toward the hermit crabs and the coral and algae scabbed rocks. Three of the more reliable natives, the ones he reckoned with the least hatred toward white men and Americans in particular, who were paid quite handsomely to sit and observe these solitary excursions, eventually set aside their shared flask of coconut rum, clamped hand-rolled cigarettes in their teeth and poled a skiff alongside and hooked Conrad’s limp bulk with gaffs. They towed him to the docks where two more fishermen waited to roll him onto his face until the water ran from his lungs and he coughed his way back among the living. Slowly, laboriously, as Conrad weighed something on the scale of a small walrus, they loaded him into a cart and pushed him up the hill and to his quarters for another long nap.
Upon emerging, torpid and semi-feral, he’d feast again and gulp prodigious quantities of local wine from earthen jugs. Strange, leering visages were carved into the jugs. Conrad had seen many of these in various forms stacked on the hotel’s storeroom shelves, the rude pantries of the shacks and shanties—always well hidden from the casual inspection of the rapacious tourists and their cameras and video recorders. The concierge, a smooth, walnut fellow named Ricardo, because his mother originally emigrated from Madrid where she’d been an actress of minor accomplishment, informed Conrad that an old family of master potters made the jugs. The jugs were good for trapping the power of spirits if one knew the proper incantations. The family was scattered across the islands and had faded into obscurity around the time most of the population converted to Christianity. Old ways never really died and the spirit jugs gradually reappeared during the empty winter months along with the traditional fertility charms and clay idols of elephantine creatures squatting upon thrones of skulls, and shark-headed humanoids whose faces were obliterated by the slow burn of centuries. Effigies of dark gods, the concierge said. Makers and destroyers according to their whims.
Conrad awakened occasionally to flickering orange shadows upon the ceiling; sing-song chants, the strident melody of reed pipes, the rhythmic kathud of drums. From his balcony he watched the sinuous roil and flare of bonfires among the monoliths embedded in the black line of foothills. After a time he returned to bed, sometimes dreaming of men in masks and headdresses assembled in the hotel lobby, their eyes turned upward and boring through the floor of his room. Spearheads sparked and glinted in the dimness; machetes clinked and scraped against wooden harnesses of war.
The weeks lay before and behind him, an endless white waste.
No matter the day, as dusk began to press the sun against the waves, Conrad dragged a wagon to a cane field behind the resort. He’d unload his weapons and get down to business. The light work first—he flung a brace of javelins into sacks of straw tied to rickety bamboo cross posts; first right-handed, then left, mostly at close range, but sometimes as distant as one hundred paces, which was too far to be considered effective as a general rule; and after the javelins came the sling and he hurled smooth, gray river stones and watched straw puff as from bullet holes and he continued until his shoulders ached.
By then, night fastened upon the land. Fortunately, there on the coast the starry sky hung within a hand-span of the earth it was never truly dark. He’d practice with the heavy weapons: chains, mauls, the Visigoth axes, the great iron mace from Mongolia with its iron head and flanges that shrieked as he swung at the bamboo thickets and splintered the smaller trees, made vees of them like a swath of broken toothpicks; and as he chopped, his feet moved in the katas of feudal samurai, side to side and diagonal; and older steps, the berserker rush of the Vikings and the Gauls. He ravaged through the copses in brief charges of the Roman cohorts and the implacable Spartans, until, at last it was done and the steam rolled from him in clouds.
After supper he broiled in the sauna and then off to his suite to brood over a collection of cryptic papers assembled from the dusty shelves and trunks of antiquarian bibliophiles from Alaska to Katmandu, or set up the antique projector and meditate upon the kaleidoscopic horror show spun from a film reel he’d found among his long lost sister’s effects, all the while repeating one of several mnemonic triggers that would alter his brainwaves and open a door to elsewhere, wherever that might be. From the glimpses of bloody bones and colloidal darkness, he wondered if it might not be Hell itself.
He doggedly awaited some sign of apprehended knowledge, a stirring of the atavistic consciousness. Occasionally, shadows and mist coalesced into nightmares of massive tendrils uncoiling from a vast and dreamless void, and visions of antlers and fiery destruction, but none of it made sense except that now, if he concentrated to the point of a violent migraine, he could cause a spoon to vibrate in a bowl by will alone and possibly once he had slightly levitated a few inches above the blanket while in lotus, but he had been drunk, so very drunk.
Such was the daily ritual.
The morning the neurologist landed for a series of scheduled tests, Conrad was on the lounge terrace, sipping the blackest of black coffee and smoking cigarettes. A radical chief of staff at a mainland university paid exorbitant fees for the privilege of monitoring Conrad’s unusual brainwaves.
Rains had begun the previous evening. Lightning stabbed at the horizon. A small man in an overcoat exited the plane and one of the attendants held an umbrella for him as they hurriedly made for the hotel. This was Dr. Enn, one of several persons Conrad had contacted to conduct periodic tests of his neurological activity. Soon came a number of trunks and cases, dutifully unloaded by hotel employees and wheeled up the dock on hand trucks.
Two more visitors, heavies in suits and glasses, trailed. The short, thick fellow with the bad 1970s haircut was Agent Marsh. The suave, dark gentleman who looked like he’d strolled off the cover of GQ was Agent Singh. Both worked for American intelligence—the National Security Agency. Conrad suspected he would have to kill them sooner or later. For now it meant he would have to relinquish the papers and film he’d retrieved in Brazil. Simply no time to stash everything. So be it: he’d hand over his curiosities like a good boy and maybe get the operatives to do some digging on his behalf in the bargain.
He finished his cigarette. The island and its routines were the nest. Now he’d crawl back into the egg.
He lay suspended beneath miles and miles of blue-black ice and dreamed.
This ice was the oldest kind that had come down from the great outer darkness and closed around the world eons past. Trapped in its glacial folds was a cornucopia of geological oddities: Cryptozoic bacteria writ large, fossilized palm fronds of ages when blood-warm oceans and perpetual fog wrapped hemisphere to hemisphere; insects, animals, men, and things that resembled men, but were not, and vast globular superstructures of primordial jelly and miles-long belts of ganglia, all caught fast in glacial webs, all preserved and on exhibit in the gelid recesses of his dreaming brain.
Conrad dreamed of waking, of thawing, which was a reliable indicator that control was shifting his way, that he had swum up from the Hadal depths to a semi-lucid state, and so he blinked away the ice and whispered the Second Word, which was leviathan, and was again a child in the backseat of Dad’s car. They were in Alaska, hauling ass along the Parks Highway, bound for Anchorage and the airport. A DC-10 waited to transport them to Spain and the clinic where miracles happened.
Mom and Imogene were somewhere ahead, cutting through arctic twilight in a Citroen with bald tires and a broken heater. Mom was reckless at the wheel, a damn the torpedoes, cry havoc! kind of lady and likely she was puffing a Pall Mall and lecturing hapless Imogene on the essential instability of subatomic matter. Or how the headhunters in Papua, New Guinea performed fertility rituals with the skulls of their victims.
The windows were frosted over, but when Conrad scratched a circle there was Denali rearing in the middle distance, a chunk of red-black rock wearing a frozen halo.
His head ached. It ached all the time those days; ached as if it were he and not brother Ezra being eaten alive by a melanoma the diameter of a mango. Ezra rode shotgun, the metal nub at the crown of his Seattle Mariners baseball hat chattering against the glass. Ezra was the elder; a little league all star shortstop, future hall-of-famer and devoted tormentor of younger siblings, currently under the weather and fading fast. Ezra wasn’t much for trapping groundballs or distributing Indian burns these days; he’d withered to skeletal dimensions that Conrad could tuck under one arm.
1980.
This was the year the famous Japanese mountaineer Kojima bought a one-way ticket to visit his ancestors. Kojima wasn’t dead yet either; he still had a few hours to watch his extremities freeze, to ponder whatever great men ponder as they wait for the curtain to drop. Kojima had been in the news all week. As they toiled past the shadow of his tomb, Conrad gazed at the storm clouds and tried to touch Kojima’s thoughts.
When he asked Dad his opinion, Dad grunted and said mountain climbers were responsible for polluting the wilderness with discarded oxygen bottles and food wrappers, that they were possibly the filthiest creatures alive.
Dad’s shoulders were roughly the span of a mattock handle under a plaid coat. He looked like a bison hunched at the wheel, not a lunatic physicist hell bent for leather to the airport. He was a second generation Swede. His own father got bayoneted on an atoll in the sunny South Pacific during WWII. Dad staunchly refused to drive Japanese imports. Wouldn’t touch sushi. He didn’t even glance out the window at the mountain.
Conrad realized he was not alone in the backseat. There was an old guy beside him, and he resembled Dad, but much older and dressed in weird clothes, a space suit or something, and he stared at Conrad in a way the boy would grow accustomed to over time. His eyes bled pity. There followed a psychedelic moment like Borges shaking hands with himself. And Conrad knew him because they’d met before. The old man said, Time is a ring, then fractured into motes of sparkling dust.
1980, 1980. For Conrad, 1980 was the magic number, albeit in the cursed, black magic sense. Ten years old and on the road to Hell.
The Navarro family shipped off to the Pyrenees and sought a miracle from Dr. Drake in his converted Thirteenth Century Abbey that locals referred to as The Cloister. Over the final months of Ezra’s decline, Mom, Dad, Imogene, and Conrad camped in the hostel of Blanco Village a few miles from the base of the mountain retreat and awaited a miracle.
That was a muddy spring and brutal summer. A summer of goats, flies and sluggish, crawling heat fended off with mosquito nets and pails of shaved ice. Sullen locals and ugly foreigners—Americans and Brits, mainly—clumped in the hostel taproom, or loitered near the well house in the village square, pecking each other like pullets in a too-small cage, squabbling over the news casts on the Armed Services Radio Network, the papers that came in the weekly mail run. It was a uniformly mournful time. The Cold War was colder than ever and an American embassy was in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Nobody in the village of Blanco seemed overjoyed about anything from the muddy roads that ate corduroy for breakfast, to the great louse infestation among the hens, to the low supply of drinkable whiskey in the hostel cellars. One of the Germans even complained publicly and bitterly that the farm girls weren’t as free with their charms as peasants in “more civilized” provinces. Tempers ran hot and led to several ungainly, drunken brawls in the damnable mud, although everything was usually patched up with a handshake and a few rounds of cheap booze.
Every day, the family mounted the bus, a relic from WWII, and endured the kidney-crushing trip up the switchback trail. Mom and dad usually sat near the shipping tycoon from Essex, or, if they were in the mood, exchanged pleasantries with another American couple, vociferous college professors from Madison Wisconsin. Imogene hung around with the youngest daughter of an Austrian diplomat and the pair traded earrings, braided each other’s hair and nattered incomprehensibly. Conrad remained apart, stoically regarding the sheer cliffs and smoky ravines beneath the bus wheels, his ears ringing with the girls’ false laughter.
In the beginning, the bus was overloaded with patrician families eager to make the daily pilgrimage. As days blurred into weeks and months, more empty seats appeared. New, fresh faces arrived on occasion, cowed into abject timidity by the shopworn expressions of those who remained from the spring. Come the glowering days of late August, Conrad was once more pressed to the edges of a boisterous, sweaty crowd composed of mostly strangers.
Ezra got a little worse each visit and everybody cried and sleepwalked around with red eyes and broken veins in their noses. Mom was the one who kept them together for the most part, diluted the incipient hysteria into a persistent mood of shrill grief, although she was a bag of bones and raw nerves before it was through. She’d taken to arguing with Dad. Not little arguments, either, but real bruisers and they went out into road for the worst of them, stood in the rain and shouted down the thunder.
Mom hated what Dr. Drake and his cronies were doing to Ezra. She wasn’t sure precisely what they were doing as no one was allowed to see behind the curtain. Drake interacted with the families via intermediaries, a duo of ancient, hook-nosed men who might’ve been twins with their identically thick Greek accents and dusty suits, their matching expressions of reptilian dispassion. The Greeks didn’t give away anything, ever. All anyone really knew about Drake’s technique was that it involved hypnotic regression via multiple mediums, and routine injections of an experimental medicine. There were side effects, of course. Pain and suffering. Nightmares and night sweats; exploding neuroses. None of it would’ve passed muster back in the States, but this was the refuge of last resort.
Mom begged Dad to call it off, to take Ezzy home and let him spend his remaining days in familiar surroundings. He missed his dog, his friends, his roomful of trophies.
Then, one day between summer and autumn, it was time to go.
Mom and Dad lovingly dressed Ezra in his Sunday best, packed his remains in a wooden box and shipped him overseas on a gigantic cargo plane flown by pock-cheeked men in parkas and goggles.
Conrad slept most of the way home across the Atlantic, drugged by growling turbines, the clink and jostle of nets and straps. There had been a funeral, although Conrad didn’t recall much, and after the dirt was shoveled on and the adults drowned themselves in alcohol and misery at the reception, nothing else was said. The coffin lid, the book of Ezra, was closed. Well, mom sailed her Supercub into a mountainside the next summer and dad went to pieces, lost his job at Drome Corp. and took a permanent vacation at Grable, the swankiest funny farm west of the Mississippi, and eventually died on the toilet, just like Elvis—then the incident was finished.
…The dream skipped forward…
Years later, when they’d grown and shuffled off to their respective colleges, long after Conrad was well on his way to cult fame and ruin and Imogene was a superstar graduate from the university of J.E. Hoover, and they’d reconciled themselves to Dad never getting out of the loony bin, his little sister summoned him for dinner at the Monarch Grill, a hole in the wall they haunted as teenagers. She’d materialized from the midnight blue, smiled that hard, sharp smile of hers and kissed him. Little sister was bittersweet, like gourmet European chocolate. She didn’t understand him, didn’t respect his choices, considered his shadow-career as a latter-day gladiator a colossal waste of superior genetic material. Her points were well taken—a Navarro was capable of almost anything, even Conrad whose talents ran to the brutish end of the spectrum. Daddy, a physicist cum Olympic caliber power lifter; Mom, a PhD poet and ace pilot; Ezra, the teen baseball star and internationally published essayist.
Conrad could’ve been an artist, a space shuttle pilot, a decathlon champion, except with advanced degrees in theology and quantum mechanics. Like the rest, he’d excelled at everything he’d attempted. He was stronger than Dad and smarter than Ezra, a million magnifications more artistically gifted than either of them and maybe a bit superior in that department to Imogene. Imogene was the rapier wit, the pop psychologist and crack shot with any light caliber sidearm, the deductive genius with metaphorical balls of steel.
Imogene had always been the mean one of the bunch, too. She opened up the old wounds with a casual swipe of her claws.
Kill anything interesting lately, bro?
An attack-trained orangutan.
With your bare hands, Tarzan style?
Hell no! Ka-Bar.
Wimp. Why do you pick on poor beasts, huh?
It was gonzo. Spent its whole life in a cage being pumped full of growth hormones and zapped with a cattle prod. The thing wanted to eat my liver.
Good for it!
Hey, it’s almost never animals now. I’m in the major leagues. I get to slaughter big, sweaty Turks and axe-wielding Slavs.
Oh my. Clubs and knives, oh, oh—and tridents?
And whips and nets. I crash chariots; the ones with spiked hubs like Kirk Douglas drove. Circus Maximus, sis.
Lucky you. You guys prance around in costumes like Mexican wrestlers, except you try to murder or maim each other.
Yeah.
Who pays for this spectacle? Ever really ponder that one, Connie? Ever think about what sort of people arrange this secret world you star in?
Rich folks.
Guess they’d have to be to recreate Caesar’s favorite pastime. That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?
These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.
Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.
It’s a living.
Over steak and wine, she played with her knife, which was an unsettling bookend to her smile, and said Ezzy didn’t die of cancer. Ezzy was murdered. Drake murdered him, murdered a bunch of people, probably. Why? Because Drake was a devil. Quite possibly, the good doctor was Old Poger himself, horns and tail.
Conrad was unsure how to assimilate this new information. Seeing Sissy was cool, but he had a lot on his plate, what with the strict schedule of arena events and the jet-setting debaucheries accorded a celebrity of his stature; command performances. He nodded and composed a semi-credulous reply that didn’t fool either of them.
Imogene was always the smart one of the kids. When it came to Conrad she was practically telepathic. Fuck it. Forget I said anything. How’s your goddamn steak tare tare? You eat like an animal. Dress you in some skins, you’d fit right into a cave man exhibit. Fucking troglodyte.
Genie—
Fuck it, I said. Got any toot? You rich bitches have snow falling out of your pockets, don’t you?
Sure. I know a guy, fix us right up.
Conrad lost his appetite. Not much later, he lost his sister too…
Mr. Navarro?”
And the dream ended like a soap bubble bursting.
Light—too much, too red—came through the water; then the wavering oval of an elongated face, a blotch of tapestry, the pulsing glow of a slide projector. He sat upright in the great marble tub and gasped. Water streamed from his face and goggles. The goggles had ceased transmitting, but their after-images crackled behind his eyelids, asynchronous to the rapidly shuttering patterns on the white-lit square of wall.
Dr. Enn rose from the table with the complicated recording equipment and brought him a towel and gently retrieved the goggles. Dr. Enn returned to his table, careful not to trip over the loops of wires and plastic cords. Agents Marsh and Singh lounged across the room, sipping scotch from glasses, the bottle on a small table between them.
The temperature in the room was a balmy eighty degrees, and yet Conrad shivered and his hands were blue. He wiped his face and staggered from the tub to a patio chair and pulled on his flip flops. Conrad was not a tall man, but immense through shoulders and hips, and his legs were grotesquely thick such that he walked with an odd, shuffling gait. His skin was burned and dark and terribly scarred as if a shark had taken bites out of him then dragged him face down across the coral. He said, “Time.” His was a rusty voice, a drinker’s voice, the voice of a man who’d survived a hanging.
Dr. Enn consulted his watch. He was much lovelier and infinitely fragile compared to his subject. His hair was tight and black and he might’ve been a runway model. His pretty face bore the elastic expression of a man knuckling under to sea-sickness; sweat oozed from him. He said, “Seventeen minutes, forty-three seconds. I’m impressed…although it’s hardly a record.”
“How is Esogi? Bangkok, right?” Dr. Esogi was Dr. Enn’s colleague at the institute researching Conrad’s ‘compellingly bizarre’ physiological and neurological activity.
“There’s a symposium. Very prestigious.”
“Old Burt’s golfing and whoring it up between panels, I bet.”
“Yes—I was hoping to accompany him.” Enn managed a smile.
Conrad laughed and found his cigarettes and matches on the coffee table and lighted one. He studied Enn as Enn’s face gathered the unwholesome light from the projection beam. “Are you ok, Doc?”
“Oh, ha-ha, don’t mind me.” Worms crawled across Enn’s cheek. A butterfly sloughed its chrysalis and fluttered against his forehead. The sun was a black disc rising from his left eye. “Do you mind if I kill this—?”
“Please.” Conrad gestured indulgently. His hands had steadied, his pulse rate begun to drop into the high-normal range.
Dr. Enn shuddered and clicked off the projector and the room was flush with soft blues and blacks. After a significant pause, he said, “Dr. Esogi mentioned your unorthodox modalities, but I must confess...” He referred, of course, to the dull gray tube on the table, its tightly rolled sheets of waterproof paper with their diagrams and formulas; micro-slides of photography that ranged from disquieting to monstrous, and the monstrously incomprehensible. “We’ll resume the battery when you’ve rested.”
“Thanks, doc. This’ll be the last session for a while, so be thorough.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Sorry, doc. My public demands an appearance.”
“I think I’ll detour to the bar and have a drink. Gentlemen.” Dr. Enn nodded to the agents, grabbed his coat and left in a reasonably dignified hurry.
“The fuck is this operation you got going?” Marsh said. “I told you, Leo, we dig through a few phone records, make a few calls, follow that fruity little doc around, we find out where our boy disappears to.”
“Yes, what is this operation?” Singh nodded at the machinery, the tangle of leads.
“Sensory stim,” Conrad said without a hint of irony. “Big match coming up in a few weeks. I use all kinds of techniques to get my head in the game. Hypnotherapy, regression. Whatever.”
“But…if that little fellow is correct, you just held your breath for over fifteen minutes. That isn’t humanly possible.”
Marsh said, “Where did you get that collage?” He was still staring at the projector and what had beamed from its eye. “That’s vintage Cold War eyes-only shit. Some kind of mind-conditioning protocol. What the hell you want with a military grade brainwashing protocol.”
“I don’t want it. Imogene left it behind.”
“Doesn’t explain why you’re enacting the procedure. This isn’t the kind of shit you play with, Connie.”
“Trying to get into my sister’s head,” Conrad said. As always he told most of the truth. It was the only way to stay half a step ahead of the bastards. You told ninety-nine percent of the truth and saved the lies for emergencies. “She’s after something, I don’t know what. Maybe she’s trying to shed some light on a moldy old government conspiracy. Maybe she wants to prove my dad was locked away because he knew too much. She didn’t bother to tell me.”
“We’ll be taking these materials off your hands,” Singh said.
Conrad smiled. “Easy come, easy go. She found them lying around somewhere.” Somewhere included abandoned bunkers and secret stashes and lost government installations around the world, a few decommissioned black ops facilities. “The stuff you’re looking at belongs to a file under MK Ultra. Way before we were born to this veil of tears. Project TALLHAT, I think.” He waited for a flicker of recognition, of fear or surprise, but the agents just stared like fish. “And on the subject of Genie—”
“Haven’t heard anything since the South America rumor,” Marsh said. “Which, as you discovered, was a wild goose chase.”
“She’s dead, Jim,” Singh said and gazed sadly into his empty glass.
“Dead or burrowed in like a tick,” Marsh said. He refilled both their glasses. The men sipped and kept staring at Conrad with those fish-eyed expressions. “We can’t figure out what she was up to.”
“We haven’t quite decided what you’re up to.” Singh lighted a cigarette.
“Me? Fighting. Looking for my sister. She was obsessed with finding some guys. Cold War guys. Guys associated with this TALLHAT program. I need another name. Maybe two. Figure you boys can help me. These papers gotta be hooked into a database somewhere.”
“No shit,” Marsh said. “Want us digging up bones in an the Old Spooks Graveyard? Could be dangerous. Gonna be costly, for sure.”
“How do you plan to compensate us?” Singh breathed smoke. “Planning to sell a house? One of your bolt holes? Is that wise? You seem to worry about death from above more than anybody I’ve met.”
“I worry about death from every direction. There’s a payday coming. What do you say?”
“Yeah? Who are you up against?” Marsh appeared intrigued.
“The Greek.”
“He’s the number three contender,” Singh said. “I’m impressed.”
“They must be betting on him to murder you,” Marsh said. He glanced at the ashtray full of cigarette butts and smirked. “The Greek carves you then gets his own shot at the title. You’re a tune up match.”
“Something like that. He won’t carve me, though. He’s a grappler. He’ll pull off my arms.” Conrad smiled and lighted another cigarette. He’d watched several dozen videos of the Greek, a hulking brute who favored exotic helms of savage beasts. The Greek had once snatched a full grown lion from the ground and broken its neck with a quick twist. Some whispered he dwelt in a cave in the mountains like old Polyphemus. “It’s a mortality ludus, so the money is good. When I get it.”
“Uh-uh, sweetheart. Cash up front. We’ve got operating expenses…wives, girlfriends, bookies.” Marsh made a face and drained another glass.
“Okay, Connie,” Singh said with a sharp glance at his partner. “Robert and I didn’t fly all the way out here to break your balls, as the kids say. We’ll see what we can find about TALLHAT. Cash on delivery.” He stood and stretched, then walked to the projector and gathered the film and the photographic plates piled there on a tray.
“Thanks, boys,” Conrad said.
The three remained a while longer, smoking cigarettes and polishing off the scotch. And when his self-appointed watchdogs had gone, Conrad made reservations for a flight to the United States, set the machinery in motion for the next phase, perhaps the final phase of his quest.
Dr. Drake, that urbane devourer of children, wasn’t the Devil, but he wanted the title. That, according to the book of Imogene.
In the weeks before Conrad’s father suffered a massive coronary in his cell at Grable and sailed off to join Mom in the Happy Hunting Grounds, he spilled the beans about Drake and their work together to Imogene, and thus deflected her rising star unto madness and death.
Nice going, Pop. In bitter moments, Conrad always thought Genie should’ve known better about gawking into the abyss and so on. Their father wasn’t a nice man, probably not even a decent one.
Imogene laughed and said Conrad was right on that count. Dad allegedly killed a fellow technician at a laboratory, back in the 1970s—some poor schmuck named Enrique Valdez. Imogene told Conrad all about it late at night when they’d gotten stoned off their asses and drunk a quart of wine. As a kid, she’d eavesdropped on Dad and Mom arguing, pieced together a cryptic phone conversation, and had gotten her sticky mitts on one of Dad’s journals that allegedly made oblique reference to the event. Supposedly there was some kind of top secret bio-weapons program and Valdez tried to steal one of Dad’s formulas, maybe to claim it for his own and get a promotion, maybe to invent something and get rich in the private sector—there was no telling.
All she knew for certain was Dad caught the sneak and killed him. Crushed Valdez’s head with a hotplate; cooked the guy’s face in the process. Conrad didn’t believe it because Dad would’ve gotten locked up for that kind of stunt, and probably forever. Imogene said Dad was too valuable and had too many powerful friends, so the government waved its wand and the killing got swept under the carpet. They filed it as a tragic accident. One could only wonder how many other “tragic accidents” there’d been.
Conrad was even leerier of Dad after that little campfire tale. Then, Dad had his epic breakdown and got hauled away by guys with butterfly nets and they never spoke again.
Imogene was the one who’d visited Dad at that posh Pacific Northwest asylum called Grable, smuggled in whiskey and cigars, patiently endured his episodes of mania and delusion. Frequently, she brought books he’d requested; the musty, esoteric kinds of tomes hoarded in the trunks of Far Eastern antiquarians, many of them poorly typeset or delivered to moldering parchment in the native scripts of their authors (many of these the very same Imogene would inherit one day, then pass along to Conrad). Dad was enamored of ancient astrological theory, most particularly the research of Chinese scholars during the Zhou Dynasty. He spent hundreds of hours meticulously documenting references to astronomical phenomena, with special emphasis on platelet-like bodies and gigantic cellular structures. These he cross indexed with modern accounts of similar unexplained anomalies, a significant portion recorded by NASA shuttle cameras and the International Space Station. Cosmic dust and gas, luminous clouds, sunspots, or evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence—who could say? The universe was a black forest, after all. It added up to something piscine in Dad’s estimation, even if the rest of the experts weren’t overly galvanized about the prospects so obliquely suggested.
Imogene became curious; curiosity was the definition of her career. Dad was in his cups, straddling the border of utter psychosis, thus when he explained the nature of his research, his hypotheses regarding Dr. Drake’s Technique, its profound generative connotations, and the doctor’s affiliation with some ominous and nameless religious cult whose leaders sought transcendent power, perhaps godhood, she was intrigued, but skeptical.
The skepticism didn’t linger.
Imogene had been the anal-retentive, type A personality, a woman in control, just like Mom. Normally, her comport was smooth and cool as polished steel. She’d taken a leave of absence from her job and was often in the company of a Mexican national, a scientist named Raul Lorca who was in turn a younger colleague of Dad’s. Dad had originally introduced Imogene and Lorca and things between her and the dashing young Mexican took off like fireworks.
Conrad met the guy half a dozen times—the scientist was in his late thirties and excruciatingly handsome. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor and seemed genuinely humble for a celebrated genius. Mostly, though, Conrad knew him from Imogene’s rants about Dr. Drake and the need to assemble allies against that worthy’s schemes. Lorca was a mysterious figure, fast-tracked for the Nobel until a fall from grace, of unspecified nature, led to expatriate status. His research for the Mexican government had been tangentially related to Drake’s own. Like Imogene, he believed Dr. Drake and Dad were on to something, that the Drake Technique might be bigger than atomic theory.
The last time Conrad saw Imogene alive, it was a few months after their impromptu rendezvous at the Monarch Grill. On this occasion she was frazzled, febrile, chain-smoking and pacing the confines of her apartment in San Francisco, the one Conrad loved because it was an oasis in the alcove of a warehouse converted to art galleries and a discotheque.
The apartment was dark and stifling as an untended aquarium. It reeked of musk and alcohol. The drapes were drawn tight and the door resembled a bank vault with its locks and bars and bolts. Her plants were dead, the sink was jammed with dishes and broken wine glasses. More glasses and bottles cluttered every room. Her tabby, the redoubtable Jeeves, had run away to his people.
She dwelt among heaps of paper—reams of hastily jotted personal observations, international newspaper clippings of UFO reports and king-sized envelopes of surveillance photographs of former Drake clients and underlings that would’ve done the likes of Singh and Marsh proud. Astoundingly, she’d acquired a slightly water-damaged ledger from Drake’s defunct research center in Spain—the Cloister had been largely destroyed in an earthquake and the resulting fire three or four years after Ezra died there. Allegedly, Drake perished in the destruction. Certainly there’d been no official sightings of him since then.
The file contained a list of patients and next of kin contacts, research notes and so forth. However, the pièce de résistance was a dossier on Dr. Ambrose Drake cobbled from the archival records of the FBI, CIA and INTERPOL. The mother lode, she called it.
Come on, bro! Do you think pop read about Drake in Scientific American? The guy doesn’t exist, really. Nobody knows about Drake except people he wants to meet. Drake contacted Dad, sent him a letter. I saw the goddamned thing; oh yeah, the doctor was so very sorry about young master Ezra, would that he could help, condolences, condolences, etc. At the end he gets to the point, does the soft sell routine, invites the family to his clinic in Spain. Crap! Coincidence? Did he pick Ezra’s name out of a hat? Or maybe it had something to do with pop’s research—the research he was doing on the side, the unfunded stuff. Uh-huh, I bet Drake was extremely intrigued by Dad’s thesis on quantum physics and the theoretical application of micro technology. I mean, hell, that was before nanotech was even a term. Nope, Drake knew what Dad wanted and how badly he wanted it. Ezra was a tiny sacrifice in the scheme of things, if you look at it from Dad’s perspective. He’s a pure philanthropist and they’re the individualist’s worst nightmare. The ol’, ‘if you could end world suffering by killing one innocent’ choice.
Care to guess what Drake’s success rate was with his miracle procedure? Low. The rate was so low I bet the placebo effect covers most of those spontaneous remissions. That center was a roach motel. Drake was peddling poison to the bugs. Or maybe it was worse than that, more diabolical. Maybe those poor little fuckers were sacrifices. Ritual sacrifices on the altar of pseudo science.
Then there’s Dad in his loony bin. You never talked to him after he got committed, you don’t know what he was up to at Grable. A bloody Lovecraft asylum with a fresh coat of paint and cable TV in all the rooms. I guess he received some odd visitors—spooks, government shrinks, scientists of every persuasion. I bribed one of the orderlies to be my fly on the wall. The orderly said our patriarch was in constant contact with foreign nationals. A gaggle of chemists, some of them on the lam, incidentally. All picking his brain about the Drake Technique. Word gets around, y’know. Since nobody’d seen hide nor hair of Drake in years, Dad became the de facto guru. I mean, Drake was older than some of those Nazi scientists living out their golden years in South America. He has to be dead, right? Course he does.
Another weird thing—Dad’s name is flagged at the Bureau. The whole family’s flagged. You too, bucko. It’s a low key watch list. I stumbled across it by pure chance. Makes me wonder why I was ever hired. I mean, picture the Feds hiring someone on a suspected Red list back in the ’50s and you’ll get the idea. Somebody big pulled strings to clear my admission. Doesn’t make sense…or maybe it makes all the sense in the world. Better not touch that right now.
Dad wrote a thesis. It’s called “Imago Effect,” supposedly based on an ancient Greek collection of epistles, some occult tome he got as a door prize from our vacation in the Pyrenees. Dad’s thesis is all about how Dr. D. and friends plan to become gods. Creepy isn’t the word, brother mine.
Dad made a pact with Drake. Dad wanted the answers. He got ’em; see, that’s why the worms ate his brains. Forbidden knowledge, brother dear. Sure as shit wasn’t grief. Know what his part of the bargain was? Know what he did to pay his debt? Mom figured it out, maybe not completely. But enough to make like a banzai pilot. Drake took those children. He ate Ezra and in return gave Dad the keys to Hell. I’m gonna figure out where he dropped ’em and raise a little myself.
Conrad had accepted each proffered scrap of “evidence” with polite interest, infinitely more concerned about his sister’s erratic demeanor, her non-sequiturs and paranoid monologues. She refused to answer the phone; even as they chatted, her supervisor at the bureau office left a brusque message on the answering machine. Conrad got the distinct impression that Imogene was looking into the barrel of a suspension, or worse.
He smiled and nodded, but couldn’t fool his sister.
Imogene’s expression smoothed into that of a statue, a marble queen. She whip-cracked the back of her hand across his mouth, slashed him with her class ring, chipped his teeth with the force of it. He stood mute and stolid and watched the tears make diamonds of her eyes, watched the knot form between her knuckles, a thundercloud of ruptured veins. He said nothing, waiting, because this was as it had ever been; she was irresistible as gravity and boar tides, as a train wreck. His most tenable option, the brotherly option, was to endure the storm.
I was going to kill him. Had it planned out for his birthday. He let that monster eat our brother to advance some goddamned occult hypothesis. But I was too chickenshit to pull it off; convinced myself he wasn’t the one that needed a bullet in the head. Course, he goes and springs a leak in the old ticker. Maybe God sent an angel of death to even the score.
She was falling apart, but what could he do? The family wasn’t much for interventions, historically speaking. He didn’t do anything, in the end; impotent and weak in the presence of her towering rage, her maniacal obsession. She wiped her eyes, sighed, and let him wrap her hand with a towel full of ice cubes. She ordered Chinese; they ate from the cartons because that was safest, considering the sanitation problem with her sink, and come the fortune cookies, her normal acerbic personality had reasserted itself.
Me and Raul are on this case. Drake is listed as deceased in official government records, but Raul thinks the shithead is still out there somewhere, that his cabal of black magic-loving, eugenics-worshipping lunatics is gathering power. I want payback for what happened to our brother. Raul’s gonna help me get it. We may go underground for a while. I’ll call when I can. If something happens to me… She intoned the cliché with a dramatic wink and proceeded to sketch a course of action. The melodrama smacked of grotesquery because both of them knew something was going to happen. It was in the stars.
During a lull in the conversation, he cracked his cookie. His fortune said: imago, imago, imago.