Conrad left his island bolt hole and flew to Crete to attend the last supper of his adopted uncle and manager, a dying billionaire named Cyrano Kosokian.
The plane touched down amid a heat wave. A dour chauffeur in a dark suit and rimless sunglasses waited outside customs. He held a homemade sign that read, Mr. Navarro. He introduced himself as Sergio, took the bags, and put Conrad in the back seat of an antique Packard.
“Welcome back,” Nikolai DeKoon said from the front passenger seat. This was Kosokian’s major domo of some twenty-five years. DeKoon, an expatriate British gentleman, was lean and pale and dressed as always in a white suit. He projected an aura of effete menace that frightened Conrad as a boy and merely disquieted him as a man.
“Came down from the castle to squire me yourself? I’m flattered.” Conrad didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Special occasion. Uncle is down to hours. Half the people in the airport are likely here for the festivities tonight.”
Conrad had noted the abundance of limousines on the curb and imagined the fleet of them winding along the desolate roads to Uncle K’s abode. He said, “Everybody loves a fucking parade.”
It was a long drive along the coastal foothills despite the fact Sergio kept the accelerator mashed to the floorboard while a tiny national flag on the radio antenna snapped in the breeze. Pavement ended at the city limits and the car was engulfed in a cloud of white dust. The air-conditioner was broken. Conrad had to keep the window cracked and the dust swirled into the compartment and formed a powdery layer upon his clothes.
Eventually, they approached the mountains and arrived in the courtyard of a mansion. A low stone wall crumbled on three sides; remnants of an orchard sprawled in an untended morass. Rocky hillside terraced down to a distant swath of shining water. The mansion itself was decayed into a state of grandiose ruination, slumping toward the stony earth of its foundation.
Conrad climbed out, dusting his hat. A pair of ancient men clad in sweat-blacked dungarees labored to draw a bucket from the well, which sat between the house and a newer timber garage. The pair stood so close to one another, for a moment he savored the illusion they were conjoined. They stared at him with dead-fish eyes, tongues wriggling inside toothless mouths. One wiped gnarled, greasy fingers on his sleeve and began to draw on the rope. Conrad’s flesh prickled at the sight of them, his instinct alerted to some threat it didn’t comprehend.
DeKoon snapped shut his cell phone and said, “Ta-ta for now, dear boy. Urgent matters press. I’ll see you at the banquet, of course.” He alighted from the car and strode quickly away toward a small villa some distance from the main house.
Sergio slammed the trunk. He mounted the cracked marble steps with the bags, beckoned for Conrad to follow. “Your Uncle asked me to bring you directly. He is weak.”
Cyrano Kosokian bore no relation to Conrad. He’d been a longtime friend of Dad’s, although he refused to disclose the details of how they’d met or why they’d stayed in touch. Uncle Kosokian relished his secrets. The joys of manipulation appealed to him almost as much as did the pleasures of brute force. When things went south at the Navarro home after Ezra’s death, Dad sent Conrad to live at this very estate for eleven years. Conrad sulked in rage and despair at being exiled from his sister and his home. Uncle Kosokian had chuckled and said, You are my apprentice. You are my little pet Kent Allard. The secrets of life and death, pain and suffering, shall be yours. Except, I shall not teach you to cloud the minds of men, but to rip their hearts from their breasts and split their brain pans and eat that jelly like caviar! To which Conrad had smartly responded, Hell with Allard, I want to be Cranston.
He received an opulent private education via tutors. Uncle Kosokian had also instructed young Conrad in the princely arts, including that of warfare and close combat, had groomed him for the clandestine spectacles of the Pageant and its gladiatorial exhibitions—a great and secret show that had played to the tune of obscenely rich patricians since ancient times. The man had participated in the secret arenas during his own sordid youth, had spilled his share of blood. He taught Conrad most everything there was to know about killing men and beasts for sport and profit.
Uncle Kosokian was the last of umpteen generations of olive plantation barons and shipping magnates. On the origins of his lineage he was customarily sly, saying only that an ancestor of his had almost done for Odysseus. He’d once confided to Conrad over a bowl of sweet red wine that he inherited everything by virtue of his elder siblings being killed during the wars. An accomplished prodigal son and all around ne’er-do-well, he’d not lifted a finger to advance the family fortune or secure a wife or sire offspring. He intended to wallow in luxury and squander the Kosokian riches down to the bitter dregs, pursuing whores, eating and drinking to excess, and losing vast sums while gambling on sports. Judging by the ramshackle appearance of the estate, the mission appeared to have been accomplished.
Cyrano Kosokian was a behemoth confined to a fancy pneumatic hospital bed. Perhaps seven feet tall, perhaps more, and hideous—his was the face of a somewhat melted Christmas gnome. An oxygen mask depended from the wattles of his brontosaurus neck. Kosokian’s private nurse, a haggard Armenian, had snatched a pack of Gauloises and cursed him on her way out as she lighted one.
Flies gathered.
The longer Conrad looked, the more of them swarmed, fat and torpid in the killing jar of the study. They buzzed around his mentor’s hands, played touch-and-go on stained bandages; trundled along his sleeves as if he were already a carcass. He muttered in bastard English, took long swallows of the Tiger’s Milk his servants mixed by the pitcher. His teeth were long and sharp and the shade of bloody ivory.
Conrad distracted himself with the décor during their frequent silences. All arches and plaster and undertones of medieval squalor. Too dark, too ripe, too many flies. And too many narrow stairs in the spiral case. Kosokian’s study occupied the top of a seaside-facing tower and was crammed to the gills with antiquarian treasures, much draped by dusty sheets in advance of his permanent vacation. A brass telescope pointed at the balcony where strips of light crept through the shutters.
The emaciated elders shuffled in from their duties and each took a post on either side of the bed. “These are the angels of my nature,” Uncle Kosokian said, forestalling Conrad’s question. “One better than the other. They are also my bodyguards.”
“Where did you get these two? A fire sale?” Conrad eyed them with a contemptuous smile to disguise his unease. He disliked their beady eyes and toothless grins, how they hunched like vultures and picked at their scabrous flesh, all the while listening with feigned disinterest. Neither amounted to much more than a bundle of twigs and rawhide, yet some quality of presence, a violent magnetism, radiated from them; a similar dark aura emanated from Uncle Kosokian and seemed to intensify with age and infirmity rather than diminish. Conrad would’ve been tempted to characterize the force as evil if he subscribed to such concepts.
“Be kind,” Uncle Kosokian said, his accent miraculously thinning. “You’ll inherit their services, if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, a final request.”
“No,” Conrad said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“No, I won’t stop looking for Genie.”
“Lad, I admire your pluck. Your nemesis, this Drake, he is powerful. Powerful and terrible. I beg you, desist before he takes notice and squashes you.”
“I would hate for that to happen. I will try to be clever.”
“You are cunning as a beast is cunning,” Uncle Kosokian said. “That’s not enough. Did your father ever explain why he split you and fair Imogene when you were children? Why he sent you to me?”
“Dad was vague on that point.”
“The fellow wasn’t fond of sharing his thoughts. Too many dark secrets. Too many enemies from his service with your government. Imogene was to be his weapon against them. That’s why he made certain she was groomed for law enforcement. She served him well. You, he wished to protect from his foes. Believe it or not, he loved you best, Conrad. That is why he sent you to me, why you were cloistered here in my demesne.” Kosokian sucked a tall glass of Tiger’s Milk and breathed heavily. “Your father had other plans for you. Alas, his breakdown and untimely demise derailed everything he’d worked to accomplish. He would not approve of your Quixotic pursuit of Imogene. She became embroiled in his vendetta with the forces of darkness, as it were. No sense following her into oblivion.”
Conrad said, “You talk a lot for a guy on oxygen.”
Kosokian’s immediate family and friends began arriving at sundown. These were a motley collection of down-at-the-heels aristocrats, dilettantes, and an ever-circling swarm of lamprey and pilot fish. Conrad remembered a handful of them from his youth, and he shook hands and kissed cheeks as the guests ascended the steps and passed through the front door in a cavalcade of morbid pageantry. Kosokian’s servants had shut off the electricity and lighted dozens of torches and lamps, hundreds of fat, gothic candles in chandeliers and candelabras. Smokey shadows hung thick in the narrow passages and the vaulted banquet hall alike. The walls were decorated with soot-stained tapestries, curtains, and a grand collection of archaic weaponry and armor.
The whole roasted boar arrived on a five-foot-long trencher, apple in mouth. From his position as guest of honor near the head of the main table, Conrad eyed the assembly in their cloaks and capes, their tall hats and taller hairdos, and thought this could be a banquet in the castle of a degenerate prince circa the latter middle ages. He could almost taste the metal of the long knives—those in their hands and the ones up their sleeves. The hall was indeed dim, but he sensed a deeper and more sinister darkness in the furtive glances, the sly, cold smiles. Upon Kosokian’s demise his kith and kin would divide his estate as they ferociously divided the boar.
Attendant’s wheeled the great man into the hall aboard a mahogany chair oversized as a throne and carved in the likeness of a dragon. Kosokian had dispensed with the oxygen mask and donned resplendent silk robes of crimson trimmed in gold, and jeweled rings on every finger. He laid an obsidian rod across his knees. A golden pendant set with an obscenely large ruby reinforced his image as the moribund potentate, a sorcerer-king who’d stepped from tarot card to hold a final debauched court.
Servants in crimson livery arrived with platters and decanters while a sextet of troubadours decked in medieval garb mounted a dais and started in with their flutes, harps, and recorders. Incense bubbled and spat within strategically placed braziers, cloying odors of lotus and dragons’-blood overwhelming the rot of Kosokian’s bandages, the reek of his decayed flesh.
Conrad escaped as soon as humanly possible, seizing his opportunity when plates were finally cleared and the assembly broke down into pairs for dancing. He sneaked to the balcony and stood in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and watching moonlight glint from the waves.
His escape was short-lived—several guests emerged from the hall, led by a servant who lighted a torch in a sconce and revealed Conrad’s hiding place. A curvaceous blonde in a bright green summer dress introduced herself. She was a cousin of their host, several places removed. Her father hailed from York and served the British consulate. Her mother worked for the queen as a dining consultant. Her brother flew warplanes in the Royal Air Force. So far as Conrad could determine after listening for ten minutes, the girl herself did nothing except drink and spend her parents’ money. Her cheeks were rosy from heat and booze.
“So, why are you lurking?” she said. Her diamond earrings blazed in the torchlight. “Aren’t you the guest of honor?”
“I was looking for the cask of Amontillado,” he said. His shirt stuck to the small of his back.
She laughed. Perspiration beaded in the hollow of her throat, gleamed across the swell of her breasts. “For the love of God, Montresor,” she said, and moved her hip so that it locked with his.
“Yes, for the love of God.”
He went with her to the garden and lifted her dress and pressed her against a shattered colonnade and they coupled in the dull red light that spilled from the terrace. The stars flickered with the beat of his rising blood and began to turn.
She nipped his ear and said, “I don’t like that mean old uncle of yours. He’s a fraud. Not as sick as he lets on, for damn sure.”
Conrad looked into her eyes, but that didn’t help. He gripped her haunches and worked harder.
She said, “We were here for Christmas. After everyone went to bed, the old man rolled out on the balcony in his creepy throne-mobile. I was down here in the bushes smoking a joint. He stepped off the balcony and zipped into the darkness like one of those wire-fu action heroes. I didn’t see where he went. Heard him cackling, though.”
He pondered a response. There were so many questions. His next thrust did the trick and she screamed and wrapped herself around him like a boa constrictor and he forgot what he’d intended to ask.
Uncle Kosokian passed away later that evening. Three days later his body, wrapped head to toe in a silk shroud, was placed on a pyre at sunset and burned. He did not leave Conrad a penny.
When Conrad arrived in the States he bought a Cadillac, a 1948 Sixty Special Fleetwood, at a used car lot in Santa Fe. The salesman claimed it was originally the property of a small-time cartel boss who got himself whacked by a jealous mistress. There were bullet holes, somewhere. Conrad wondered how many cars rolling around once belonged to dead people. We drive their cars, sleep in their beds, wear their clothes. Wear their faces.
He called a friendly private investigator named Tony Kite and doubled down on the finder’s fee for the Brazilian. Finder’s and catcher’s fee. Tony promised to assign more guys, he was closing in, etc., etc. Conrad wished he could’ve consolidated his efforts, put the Two Stooges, Marsh and Singh, on the case, but the Stooges weren’t his friends. They answered to higher powers. If they realized he wanted to talk with a wanted criminal such as Souza, their evil faces would light up like kids at Christmas. Then there’d be hell to pay, and more. That the nation’s number one intelligence agency hadn’t put two and two together was both alarming and amusing.
Money was a problem. Money was always a problem no matter how many bones he crushed or how much blood he let or dues he paid. The fucking rent was always due.
One night he was waiting out the small hours in a saloon in the badlands by nursing a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black when a rowdy group piled in from the desert darkness and started tearing up the joint. He’d situated in a dark corner facing the door, a woman tight against his hip. Him and the girl had been on the road for forty-eight hours since he found her at a booth in a diner looking shrewdly forlorn. A peroxide blonde with tepid eyes and a livid keloid on her neck in the shape of a stylized jellyfish that elongated and distorted as she breathed.
The mark electrified the hairs on his body, ignited the primitive fuse at his core, cranked the rotor in his brain, churned primordial muck. But he didn’t protest, didn’t turn on his heel and fly. Flight hadn’t worked before, anyway. They, whoever they were, the Honorable Opposition, as he thought of them, had had their hooks deep in him for a year now, a year that he’d noticed, just before the expedition to South America. His hunch was all the work with the transcendental meditation and autohypnosis, the hours of gawping at psychedelic films and weird Rorschach blot patterns Imogene cadged from god knew where, had gotten the gears turning, had really and truly cracked the door. Maybe he was entering an altered state as Dad prophesied, as that devilish eminence Dr. Drake had allegedly attained. Conrad might be on his way to achieving godhead and wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?
Or, more likely, exhaustion and brain damage were doing the talking.
Her name was Yolanda, or Wanda, he couldn’t remember, and she was too drunk to see straight. She rested her head on the table between the ashtray and a handful of quarters. A cigarette smoldered in the corner of her mouth. He pulled it free, frowned at the lipstick ring, and smoked the remainder while the newcomers chuckled and hooted like hyenas and glass shattered.
The group was eclectic: three men in polo shirts and golf slacks, their big-haired girls in sequined cocktail dresses; a squad of hurly-burly bikers in full-on leather regalia, bodyguards of the Rodeo Drive refugees; and a tall, rangy man in faded Army fatigues. His hair was black and sleek, his eyes pale as ice water. His nose was flat. He wore a spiked collar, spiked bracelets, and a fistful of shiny, expensive rings. His boots were the steel toe kind. A nasty bruise on his sculpted cheekbone was fading to yellow.
They’d grabbed a bunch of tables and commenced drinking. The girls played pool with a couple of the drunker, braver locals. The bikers slammed tequila and took turns hurling shot glasses at the mirror above the bar and the bartender himself, who eventually retreated to the kitchen and hid. The pretty boys in the polo shirts guffawed and sipped beer.
The tall, black-haired man stared at Conrad. Conrad stared back, highlighting him with a golden shaft of light from nowhere. I can do that AND bend spoons with my mind power. Holy shit. He blinked and the shaft of light, which no else seemed to notice, winked out. The black-haired guy was Rauno-something or other. Members of the Pageant knew him as the Finn, an unranked fighter on the periphery and rising fast. Young and mean. If he lived a few more years he might land a patron, might become somebody. Conrad thought the guy didn’t have a few more years.
The Finn unfolded from his chair and strolled over to where the party girls were flirting with the hapless locals. The local boys were stout, blue collar types, probably construction workers; corduroy jackets, greasy ball-caps on backward, half-blitzed and irritable as bulls. Neither was too happy when the Finn told them in an exaggerated accent to get their filthy Yankee paws off his women. There was a long moment where nothing happened, then one of the men smashed the Finn’s jaw with a bottle and his partner broke a pool cue across the Finn’s spine. The Finn shrugged and laughed and wiped a trickle of blood from his lip. He turned and stuck his thumb in the eye of the guy who’d hit him with the pool cue. The other man threw a haymaker punch, but the Finn absorbed it and caught his arm and twisted it until it crunched. He ground the jagged base of the bottle into the man’s nose. Blood rushed over his knuckles. Then he leaned over and caught the man who was shrieking and crawling away by the testicles and the scruff of the neck, hoisted him shoulder-high and pitched him through the big picture window in a shower of neon. The bikers cheered and the polo shirt boys gave the Finn a round of golf claps.
The Finn wasn’t breathing hard. He looked at Conrad, hand on hip.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Conrad said. He poured another glass of booze and drank it all in one steady pull.
The bikers stirred, but the Finn waved and they settled. “Are you afraid of me?” His accent was completely invisible now.
“He’s a tub of shit. Smash him, Ronnie,” one of the girls said. She popped her gum.
Conrad frowned and poured again and drank again. His short hair was combed. He wore a casual navy blue suit, nice shoes, everything.
“Be quiet,” the Finn said to the girl and she shut up.
“He’s afraid okay,” one of the polo shirt boys said. “Lookit him. Jill’s right. Chubs is a round mound of ground. Givin’ you the hairy eyeball. Kick his ass, man. Fuck, lemme.” And everybody but the Finn laughed.
“I apologize for the idiots,” the Finn said. “I know who you are. Fight me.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” Conrad said. But he did want to, very, very much. The more he watched the Finn’s entourage, the more he yearned to taste blood. “I don’t do unsanctioned matches. My people aren’t comfortable with it.”
“Please do not be disrespectful.”
“You’re disrespectful and you’re unranked. Don’t bow up to me, son. It’s unseemly. Look at my scars.”
“I apologize. We would have a good match. You’ve seen my films. You know I can fight.”
“Pick on some other guy, some other night. Sit down, have a drink.”
“Name the terms.”
“Go away, son.”
The Finn gestured at one of the polo shirt boys and they held a whispered conference. The Finn said to Conrad, “Tomorrow night. There’s a place not far from here. You call your support people, whatever. I’m bringing my own staff and a film crew. So, full panoply.”
“Full panoply.” Conrad favored the simplicity of shoes and a t-shirt for something off the cuff like this, but the Finn obviously needed film, and film stock sold far better to the collectors if the contestants dressed in their peacock finest. “Seventy-five, winner take all.”
The Finn didn’t blink. “Done. Weapons? Hands and feet?”
“What do you prefer?”
The Finn smiled and made a fist.
He found the town in a dried up basin valley, dropped his film at a one-hour-photo-mat. The pictures were sequences of him and Wanda in various poses against the landscape and others of just the empty land itself shot from the moving car. Photography didn’t particularly interest him. He snapped the photos because on occasion he’d spotted ghostly figures and orbs floating in the background of the developed film; hints of the unseen forces that surrounded him.
Wanda skipped off to have nails done at a salon. Conrad checked his battered and mutilated roadmap. His vision doubled; he wiped tears away with his sleeve. The sky contracted rhythmically, an origami nautilus.
The town was gritty, the kind of town one might expect from a macho man cigarette advertisement. High country, wind-blasted and strange in the provincial sense that such places have ever been strange to outsiders. Every structure creaked, every skinned surface ate the anemic light or gave it back too harshly.
Conrad squinted, clutched his head to keep it from cracking like a plate. His fingers were going numb, and that was odd; such a thing had never happened before unless he was blind drunk or succumbing to the sweet balm of unconsciousness from repeated blows to the head. The sensation came and went, tiny surges of disquiet.
He dialed Marsh from a payphone in the arcade between a tattoo parlor and a gun shop. It was a lengthy number printed inside a matchbook from the Egyptian Casino in Atlantic City. Conrad had no need to dig up the matchbook. His memory wasn’t perfect, not like Dad’s, or Imogene’s, or even Ezra’s had been; even so, he possessed a mnemonic knack with patterns and sequences. Number strings were cake. No, he used the green and gold matchbook because he enjoyed the gilt lettering, its cured scent, the suggestion of great mysteries unfolding in the dark.
The line hummed.
A pit bull wandered the street, snuffling garbage. People gave it a berth without seeming to notice the object of their apprehension.
The line stuttered and snapped like a fire.
A kid in a biker jacket a couple of sizes too large stopped at Conrad’s car, peered into the dirty windows.
“Hah,” Marsh said, far away. Chamber music droned, water rushed over rocks. Woodwinds, violins, recorders, river stones rubbed smooth as glass. No opera today. Marsh had once confided that he preferred opera when his mood was savage.
“Marsh,” Conrad said.
“What… Goddamn it.” Marsh disconnected.
Conrad waited.
The kid in the biker jacket whistled to the pit bull. They walked across the deserted lot, went through a break in the cyclone fencing, soon became specks in the outlying fields. The white gulf was penetrated by water towers, train tracks, abandoned box cars, a million miles of scrub. Someday alien probes might descend, drill core samples and speculate whether life could’ve possibly existed here in aeons gone by.
The payphone rang. Marsh said, “It’s okay now. How’d you get that number? That’s my private number.” The chamber music was gone.
“You gave it to me.”
“Hell I did. When? When did I give you that number?”
“I don’t remember. Perhaps Singh...”
“Call the other number, next time.”
“The recording.” A heavily-accented voice would answer, say Conrad had reached Kow’s Mandarin Grill, please wait.
“Uh-huh. That one.” Marsh did something away from the receiver, came close again. He coughed. His voice was raspy; it thickened when he was upset. According to Singh, Marsh suffered from a rare bronchial disease, a souvenir from the Dark Continent. “Y’know we clandestine types wallow in the traditions of argot and subterfuge. It’s genetic.”
“Ah.”
“You know, Conrad, I was kinda worried you weren’t going to call in. Thought maybe you’d forgotten.”
“No worries, Rob. I’ll have your money.”
“Oh, don’t I know that. Where you headed, bud?”
“West.”
“Uh-huh. Where to?”
“There are sites in Washington. I might visit those.” Conrad smiled and his lips split, dribbled blood down his chin into the receiver. Marsh had him pigeonholed as a wannabe naturalist. That was fine, that was convenient, it kept them off his back. The Mima Mounds. The Juniper Dunes. The Horse Cliffs. A dozen others, most of them nameless and unmapped. He’d trod the ground of those places; camped in their primordial circumferences and watched star-fields blaze like iron in a crucible; burned innumerable rolls of film and waited for epiphanies that yet eluded him. Going back to those hallowed sites wasn’t likely to make a difference; the key to the whole mess was surely elsewhere in an exotic region, upon a darksome shore. However, he had to give Marsh something. Otherwise, Marsh would take what he wanted.
“Shouldn’t you be training?”
“I’m always training.”
“And that’s it. Huh.”
“I’m just driving.” Conrad wasn’t an artful liar; bluntness was his weapon of choice. However, when dealing with the likes of Marsh he’d gradually learned to adopt cursory camouflage, to blend in with his current habitat, an ant trundling in the shadow of aardvarks. Huh, I’m becoming proficient. Should’ve gone into law.
“Uh-huh. Say, bud. People came by your house yesterday. The New England house.”
“Who?” Conrad had almost forgotten about that place—monumentally gothic, surrounded by overgrown gardens and fieldstone walls; he hadn’t been there in several years. An industrialist fan had given it to him as a present. Conrad had owned several homes before liquidating them to fuel his search for Imogene. Gifts from patrons and admirers. Cars too; and planes. All of it gone now, except for the New England house, a cabin in Washington State.
“People. We called in an eye in the sky and ran the pics—nada. They weren’t ours and they weren’t Company guys; probably foreign. Got any foreign friends?”
“I don’t know them.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh. Stranger things, I guess.”
“I’m just driving.”
“Sure, sure. Could be a coincidence. Maybe whoever owned that house before had some heat. That could be the deal.”
“I don’t know them.” The conversation compounded Conrad’s headache; his brow was slick and feverish. He feared the tension would prompt him to do something ill-advised. Occasionally, nerves caused him to burst into maniacal laughter. He had to get off the phone.
“Uh-huh, could be a coincidence. That’s how a pal of mine got cashiered. I ever tell you that story? No? Sullivan ran an LP in Lima. Boring stuff, I promise you that. Not much of a health risk. Except Sully went into the wrong nightclub to get drunk and came out at exactly the wrong time; somebody thought he looked like somebody else who was also there, it was dark, and blah, blah, blah. Piece of piano wire will fit around anybody’s neck if you cut it long enough.”
“I don’t know them.”
“You’re just driving, right?”
“Right.”
“Uh-huh. Singh can meet you. He’s got business in the area. If you don’t hear from him in a few hours—”
“I’ll call back.”
“At the other number.”
“Okay.”
Marsh disconnected.
Conrad stared into the receiver. The concave oval of miniature black holes radiated waves of soft static like heat shimmering from desert highway.
He made another call, this one to some medical technicians affiliated with the Pageant and told them when and where the ludus would be, then hung up and slouched into a dollar store, bought a bag of aspirin packets and three bottles of generic seltzer water. The clerk at the register was excruciatingly polite. She seemed pleased to inform him that yes, the Happy Raven Hotel was about seventy miles up the highway, Bon voyage, sucker. He thanked her, went outside and chewed a fistful of aspirin, gulped the water.
Packs of urban cowboys trolled in pickups, spat tobacco at the gutters in well-rehearsed arcs. Some gave Conrad the evil eye, muttered to their partners, if they had any, to themselves if they didn’t. Country & Western tunes slithered from tin sheathes, coiled into his eardrum, tweaked the knob of his adrenal drip, caused a surge of testosterone that threatened to wake the prehistoric lizard. Opera for Marsh, Hank Williams for Conrad.
He revisited the photo shop and picked up his film. He sat on the bumper of the Cadillac and reviewed the stack flashcard style. Then he burned the pictures in a sodden pile, kicked the ashes to pieces as an afterthought. The ashes drifted across white and yellow parking stripes and were lost in the boundless fields.
The ludus went down at a mostly defunct strip mall just off the highway a few minutes after midnight. There was a film crew, a couple of equipment vans, the assorted handlers and hangers on attendant to these ludi. A small crowd, even for this. He’d placed a call to one of Uncle K’s former liaisons and arranged for a surgeon, a couple of emergency techs, and three security guys. The security guys dressed in suits and carried Uzis slung under their coats. Their leader, a short, mean looking guy with false teeth shook Conrad’s hand and said it was an honor to meet him.
Conrad strapped on a glorious plumed helm, a harness, greaves and boots. He wrapped his left fist in a cestus. The for-show-minimum. Across the lot the Finn was a terror with his oiled body and spiked-everything. The Finn opened his mouth and arched his back, sucking in oxygen. Conrad smiled without emotion and stared at the ground and waited for it to begin.
The Finn had killed his share of men, but they were lesser men, not first class talents. The last victim was a second-tier brute in Gibraltar; a real bloodbath, that one. Nothing for Conrad to scoff at, but nothing to worry about either. He’d watched the tapes, studied the taller man’s movements, his favored techniques. The Finn was a striker, a pugilist enamored of cestus and cleats, knees and elbows. Conrad wasn’t concerned with strikers; he was built to absorb that kind of punishment. A primer, a tune up for the real battles down the line. Easy money.
The Finn had killed many, many men, but lesser men. The Finn was killing Conrad.
The Finn’s fists were too fast, too heavy and they were everywhere. Conrad was strong, but strong couldn’t do much against fast this night and he was on his knees on the sticky asphalt in the crushed glass and gravel and it was all but over.
The grand, stony moon wobbled, lopsided and estranged. Its edges whickered against a whetstone of dark matter and coagulated fire, counterpoint to cosmic symphonies of gamma bombardment and imploding quantum particles. The moon shrieked below the threshold of human perception, reverberated in vast stygian chambers of rock and bone. Its light slopped as from a butcher’s pail overflowed; a lantern bloated on reeking whale fat, the ribs and spleen of every woodsman who had gazed upon it and trembled before the shutter shut and the bar dropped across the cottage door.
Conrad didn’t see the moon or moths as large as silver dollars fluttering their dance in its milky radiation. His head was bowed. He saw worm holes; he saw his hand, wrapped in iron-studded rawhide, as a dismembered starfish welded to concrete; he saw the dim hulk of a windowless cement façade, the flank of a mall, a forgotten mausoleum commemorated by graffiti and posters bleached to zero resolution.
Then the Finn kicked him in the face with the ball of a reinforced hoplite sandal, hard as horn and laced below the crook of the knee, the boot of legions which had trod ancient slaughter fields black, and the sodium lamps leaned like palm trees in a hurricane, beamed their bright-hot lights into Conrad’s eyes. Angels instantly retreated to wavering pinpricks. Devils made long, sinuous ribbons of themselves and hissed. Conrad’s chin strap came apart and his helmet arced out in a cinematic parabola of gleaming metal and crimson bristles, bounced once into darkness and disappeared.
Cymbals clashed.
Conrad’s blood jumped from him, hurled itself from him, declared him the headwaters of a river, a broken vessel, the Grail smashed upon rocks.
The Picts howled—
The painted devils, the fearful angels—
An x-ray of his skull in the doctor’s hand—
A red infant, yarded from the womb trailing its umbilical cord—
A hog squealing in the stirrups, rising to meet the knife—
And the next dropkick slammed home into Conrad’s ribcage with the weight of a derrick behind it, digging into the meat of him, the bones and the sinews of him bending around the leather and the steel and the Finn’s calf, a granite oblong piston.
Conrad clasped that pillar in a death clinch. Thank you, he thought in that jigsaw moment when all moments converged, when all possibilities revolved upon the point of a tooth. Thank you for that. And he squeezed—
The planet hurtled through dusty space.
—a crocodile with a deer in its maw turning and turning over in the river, whipping the muddy water like a thresher takes wheat and covers the camera lens.
The Finn’s thighbone snapped, then his spine; a sharp, pulpy report as of a pickaxe hacking into moist subject matter and then Conrad had the Finn’s neck levered between elbow and sternum and he twisted with a convulsive scissoring of his hips, making a corkscrew. Paralysis, strangulation, death; quietly desperate as any pincer-to pincer mortal combat waged by arthropods in the soft grass of nature’s killing floor.
After, no applause. The buzzing lamps, cold. A couple of guys in green smocks hustled Conrad into the back of a drywall van and switched on the fluorescents, began stitching him up.
Like Satan appearing in a puff of black smoke, DeKoon squatted in the opening that breached the cab. His sallow features shifted and flowed in the sickly light. “Should’ve gone the whole hoplite route—pila and knives. Rauno had too much faith in his hands. Rubbish with weapons. Bloody awful. At least you put him down. Thank god.”
None of the fighters had names, barring fanciful nom de plumes, or popular crowd attributions. It was always the Finn, the Turk, the Russian. Conrad was the American, and that sufficed. At the moment he was the It boy representing what DeKoon referred to as ‘the Colonies.’
Conrad couldn’t speak because his lungs were deflated sacks of shocked flesh straining to expand and get some oxygen cycling before the lights went out. So he bled. He suspected DeKoon was a figment summoned by head trauma. What a backwater stage this was for a man of DeKoon’s caliber. The man’s presence here in the outpost of pillaged American heartland, the Fair Lady of Liberty and Plenty sans makeup, was supremely incongruous; so far removed from his customary haunts of European pleasure salons and Hong Kong opium dens. Conrad hoped the well-heeled ghoul would dissolve at any moment, sink into the quagmire of his id.
DeKoon grinned as if he tasted the very wish in Conrad’s mind. “I am unhappy with your exhibition. You don’t take unsanctioned fights. That’s a no-no.”
“Maybe we need to renegotiate my contract.” A medic ran a needle into Conrad’s shoulder and laced the heavy sutures in the manner of sealing a pigskin. Conrad’s mouth crimped tighter.
“Don’t be stupid, Conrad.” DeKoon picked lint from the breast pocket of his suit. His long, exquisite fingers would’ve brought tears to the eyes of world class pianists and state-sponsored torturers everywhere. “Do you think you’re the only attraction on Uncle’s string? My string, now. Disabuse yourself of that conceit. Your prior performances were excellent, but… After tonight’s debacle I am extremely nonplussed. Something’s different about you. Are you losing your edge, Conrad? Wine, women and song got you down? You looked slow. Slow and old.”
Conrad raised his head and flashed DeKoon a vicious grin.
“Ahh, good. That’s the temper we love.”
Conrad bled.
DeKoon made steeples of his horribly beautiful fingers. He appraised Conrad through the gaps. “Sweet, sweet, malevolent Conrad. What can I do for you? The answer is, ‘Anything.’ Tell me what you need and I’ll oblige. You’ve been saving your pennies. Do you want a tropical island? A flotilla of harem girls? A new car? Say the word, my boy. Because, something’s amiss. Indeed, you seem melancholy and reckless. Don’t be reckless with Uncle K’s investment.”
Conrad spoke thickly. “You don’t own me.”
“Oh. I was under the impression that I do…”
“Don’t push.”
“Imogene, Imogene, the prettiest girl I ever done seen? We can’t raise the dead, O friend of mine. We won’t take on the entire Mexican army. Bad business.”
“Wasn’t the Mexicans.”
“We know who it was. We don’t care to attract his attention, either. Nothing personal. Uncle tried to tell you this before.”
Conrad grunted and hung his head.
“Ah, well.” DeKoon made a sad face. “Goodbye for now, Conrad. We’ll be in touch. The main stage next, hmm?”
Conrad bled.
“Yes, I think so. I beg of you, keep your eye on the prize. No more shenanigans. Kay?”
“Conrad!” A woman called from outside the panel truck. Her voice was breathless and Midwest-nasal, tentative and unutterably drunk; the exact pitch to raise one’s hackles.
That was…what was her name? Yvonne, Luann? Wanda. Wanda, right. They had begun to run together, to become interchangeable, these Wanda’s.
“Your woman beckons,” DeKoon said. “I shan’t keep you apart. We’ll be in touch.”
Conrad?” Wanda came into focus again.
The motel room was a swamp.
They’d been drinking vodka, because Conrad happened to have a half case stashed in the trunk of his Cadillac, and chain-smoking cloves as that’s what the girl carried in her transparent plastic purse with the Wonder Woman decal. She’d grown fond of cloves in college when she prowled coffee houses, dating the musicians, the painters, and the nihilistic poetry majors, whatever cliché with a pulse was handy. Clove was the watchword of cool people.
The girl attached herself to him like a barnacle to the hull of a ship. There were two kinds of women in his universe—the kind who screamed when he peeled off his shirt and revealed the scar-tissue narrative of his life; and the kind who wanted to fuck on the spot. Wanda was firmly in the second camp. After motoring through miles of white alkaline and rusted lake bottoms, they left their fingerprints and smudges on the drapes, the savaged sheets, each other. Here was morning—overcast, stark and cold as stars.
But now the sea change was in effect.
What had she said to him during the night? What had she whispered in the voice of the Other? Something guttural and foreign. Germanic, Gallic…Imogene spoke German, I mean she did before she died; she could’ve been a translator instead of… Must be the burnt carpet, the chemicals in the epoxy confusing my dreams.
What was it Wanda said?
(they want in)
He didn’t want to remember, so stopped poking the dead animal with a stick. Wanda was just Wanda again, anyway.
Wanda’s eyes glazed and she began the inevitable recoil into flight. Even the fearless ones had their limits. Ancient history was sexy; current news was less appealing. She was getting sober fast. The grisly cavalcade of memories from last night in the strip mall parking lot had doubtless begun to trickle, trickle, had begun to rearrange the landscape of her preconceptions.
Conrad wasn’t surprised. Bearing witness to the spectacle left the Wanda’s of his life cotton-mouthed and remorseful come sunrise when reality sifted through the frame, reshaped his pagan fugue into the sterile thrum of a modern world full of telephone poles and bellied wires, cracked highways and naked skulls withered to nutshells along the endless maze of ditches. He dressed in plumed helmet and cape and killed men and beasts for the pleasure of hideously rich beings who were only too glad to pay him a yeoman’s wage. His would-be girlfriends had difficulty reconciling the reality of his avocation with the nature of their desires. Consequences returned full force with the cockcrow.
Daylight bleached his moonscape of a face. Black and blue on deadly nightshade, red meat bulged like an intestine in the corner of his right eye. The left eye was a glistening purple bud, clenched as a toddler’s fist, its roots sunk deep in a hidden fracture that yawned with each hoarse exhalation. Blood drained steadily from crushed cartilage and ruined sinuses, yolked in the back of his throat, and he frequently hawked into the wastebasket.
Conrad knew he looked bad, had seen the Finn’s handiwork as he leaned to spit phlegm in the sink. The face could’ve been his father’s, and he cursed himself because it was the same morbid thought that pricked him after every bout when he was morose and more than half drunk from the adrenaline of kill or be killed. Self loathing was a purer addiction than any combination of alcohol and cocaine, than any adrenal rush.
He’d weighed the damage as he slowly pulled on his grey and blue leisure suit, loose-fitting for the purpose of gliding over the lacerations of his rectangular torso, the welted minefields of his pylon thighs. None of it was truly serious, no important bones were broken, he was on top and a custom leather briefcase stuffed with sixty-five grand lay under the bed. Money to pay the tax men.
The phone barked; a lime-green rotary job. Wanda moved to answer it, stopped when Conrad gave her a look. Ten rings, then silence. That would be Marsh, Singh, or DeKoon. He wasn’t in the mood for any of them, their accusations, interrogations, threats. Earlier, someone at the front desk had slipped a note under the door. The note gave an address and a date and was signed by his good friend Tony Kite. Tony was ready and waiting for the next step.
The room brightened by sluggish degrees. Big rigs loaded with produce and lumber rumbled past, shook the windows. The television snowed. Numbers shuttled on the clock.
Finally, she lighted a cigarette, smoked it while she watched him with heavy-lidded wariness. “Are you retarded?”
He stared at his swollen hand, limned on the table between a clogged ashtray and a bottle. The hand could’ve been the subject of a Bacon study, a rudely carved chunk of marble; it didn’t seem attached at all, just lying there, mute and bruised. He said, “Cerebral hemorrhage.”
“What.”
“Brain damage. It’s distinct from mental retardation.”
“Oh.” She sucked her cigarette. Her face was much older now, wasted. “Doesn’t seem all that different to me. When it comes down to it.”
Sometimes, when he lacked the will to concentrate, the needle jumped tracks. He said, “Goodbye, Wanda,” instead of, Let’s get breakfast.
“Huh?”
“Let’s get breakfast.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Conrad got the disposable camera from his jacket. He held the camera at arm’s length, stared into the lens.
They ate pancakes and drank coffee at the truck stop.
Wanda said, “He wants to know what you’re doing.”
“How’s that again?” Conrad sipped his coffee stoically. His arms prickled. An antiquated paper spread before him on the table, recently plucked from his wallet where it was kept safely tucked behind Imogene’s washed out graduation photo. Imogene had stolen the abstract from a government archive, although it was doubtful anyone missed it; the design was a relic of the Cold War, back when the KGB had teeth and CIA operatives smoked Lucky Strikes and knew how to kill with the mysterious techniques of Judo. He unconsciously covered the ink blot splotches with his hand.
The muscles in Wanda’s face twitched. “I wonder, is all. Where are you headed, really?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“I think I feel sorry for them.”
“Me too.”
While Wanda was in the restroom Conrad paid the tab and left a tip for the burly rancher’s daughter who’d cleared the dishes and pretended not to notice the apocalypse of his features. He couldn’t decipher the waitress’s name tag. His eyes watered and stung.
Conrad finished the dregs of his coffee. Wanda’s pack of cloves was tucked under the rim of her plate. He lighted a cigarette, indifferent to the NO SMOKING sign above the door. He held the sweet tang for a while, trying to burn the taste of bile and Wanda from his mouth.
Wanda did not return from the bathroom.
Conrad glanced at his watch. Tony Kite would be waiting. He stubbed the butt on the edge of the saucer, walked out, started his car and drove west. Today was Imogene’s birthday; her third since she’d run away with Raul Lorca.
Dust hissed against the tin walls of the fireworks shack. Here, somewhere in the Nevada hinterlands, the anatomy of the world was baked prairie and emaciated scrub; sulfur pits and the petrified bones of gangsters. Mountains stabbed the horizon. Beyond, were rivers and green valleys and farms. Or maybe nothing but a maw, an esophageal tube and a hell of acid and darkness.
Conrad wasn’t betting either way. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and paused, head cocked, to appreciate the ghostly intonations of the wind, its slithering veil of grit.
“Yo, amigo,” Tony Kite said. He was shorter and lighter than Conrad and his arms were carved up with prison tattoos. No business suit today, no power tie or gold cufflinks; today he wore a chambray shirt with burn holes in the breast pocket and ingrained dirt at the collar, jeans bleached grey, threadbare moccasins. Tony Kite, in his heyday, had been the wunderkind of a premier contractor with offices across North America and Britain. His success, as he often elaborated when exceptionally stoned, relied upon having friends in the gutter and lower—namely Quentin, Huntsville and Folsom, to hit the marquee attractions. Right then, gazing at the gathering storm, he sounded less than placid, which was as close to high emotion as he usually got. Here was a man who’d survived prison riots, looked down the drain pipe of a Mafioso’s .45 and escaped from the trunk of a moving car during a botched kidnapping in Bogotá. Not much fazed him. “Who’s the girl?”
“What girl.” Conrad knew, though.
Kite shut the batwing doors and jerked down the stainless steel skirt. He peeked through the slats. “The one in your car.”
“Damn.” Conrad lighted his cigarette; the corona of his Zippo’s flame illuminated boxes and bundles and stacks of firecrackers, cherry bombs and M-80s. He sat and smoked, impassive as a Gila monster. He hadn’t told Kite about the women, wouldn’t have known where to begin.
“She your squeeze?”
“No.”
“She followin’ you, man?”
“Apparently.”
“She a pig? Oh, shit, man. She a Fed? A spook?”
“No. I don’t know. That’s the other pair I told you about. Well, they aren’t Company. NSA. Same difference.”
“The pretty boy and the goon.”
“Yes.”
“Spooks are the worst. My grand pappy was Army intel in WWII. Creepy bastards.”
“Didn’t your company deal with intelligence people.”
“Course we did. More you get to know them, more you hate them.”
The shack rocked and clattered in the throes of a powerful gust. A miniature cyclone skittered across a patch of ochre light, collapsed into itself after a dozen or so torpid revolutions.
Kite said, “God, you look like you been through a wood chipper. Givin’ the crowd a show?”
“It’s nothing.”
“A flesh wound, huh.”
“Is she still there?”
“Uh, yah. She’s still there.”
Conrad smoked. Each inhalation made him aware of his battered ribs, the bloated mass of his spleen.
“Maybe you better reschedule this meet.”
“Why?”
“Never mind, never mind.” Kite stared out the crack at the blowing dust, and presumably, the woman in the Cadillac. “I wonder who that bitch is, man.”
“I assume we’re green light.”
“Sure, man. Green light. It was expensive...”
“Okay. How does fifteen percent above duty sound?”
“Sounds like me and my old lady are going to Costa Rica for the winter. Although, why take sand to the beach, eh?” Kite turned from his post to wink.
“Give me the news.”
“Right. I got the Brazilian; he’s a fuckin’ butcher. My people, that’s what they say—he’s a butcher. He did some illegal plastic surgery in Beverly Hills, blinded some producer. The cops want him bad.” Kite went to the register and brought back a photograph.
Conrad took the photo. It matched the surveillance shots baby sister Imogene had snapped back when she was spying on Dad at the booby hatch, although she hadn’t truly grasped the implications, she’d simply been following woman’s intuition, bless her dark, little peach-pit of a heart. Nonetheless, this was the Brazilian, alright. They’d met several times at the Cloister. Dr. Souza was old as dirt then and nothing seemed to have changed during the intervening decades.
“Well, the Brazilian’s a menace. Did freelance work for Lockheed-Martin, DynCorp, plus some Podunk outfits. He got drummed outta all of them. Had an international rap sheet long as my arm, before this Beverly Hills action. Guy likes psychotropic and designer poisons. Don’t know why the hell he switched to surgery—he ain’t much good at it, ha-ha.”
Pain, suffering, cruelty. “They have this thing about transformation,” Conrad said.
“They?”
“There’s a conspiracy.”
“There’s always a conspiracy. I gave him the quiz, like you said. Did the Twenty Questions bit. Told me to tell you, ‘Drake is the Prince of Darkness’. Said he’ll deal for the codex.”
Conrad thought of the manuscript safely hidden in the wheel well of his Cadillac. A bundle of desiccated vellum sheaves bound in catgut, throbbing like a chunk of plutonium or a piece of concentrated darkness. Imogene’s gift to him and the one piece of intelligence he’d withheld from the Stooges. “Blood of Old, Opens the Eye. Flesh of Flesh, Opens the Mouth to Drink the Stars.” Oh, this is definitely the real McCoy. His palms sweated. He was done with it; question was, was it done with him?
“Man, you’d tell me if you had cancer, or somethin’.”
“I don’t have cancer.”
“Then what?”
“Revenge.” Conrad knew that Kite knew—his friend was trying to keep his feet warm by making small talk. Conrad was bad at small talk.
“Hey, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby. I loved Genie, too,” Kite said. “Whatever you gotta do to get inside, that’s fine as far as it goes. But, come on, man. Are you really gonna let this lunatic stick you? What if it’s not authentic? Or, what if it is?”
“I’m reasonably certain it’s authentic.”
“You’re reasonably certain.”
“My father knew him when I was a boy. They were colleagues.”
“Yeah, but that’s a long time gone. Man it ain’t cool to take rides from strangers. You don’t know where it’ll end.”
“We all end up in the same place, T-dog.”
“Well, shit. Don’t make me sorry for mixing up in this deal.”
“Think about Costa Rica and you’ll feel better.” Conrad couldn’t tell Kite what he thought the serum did without sounding like a bigger lunatic than the Brazilian. “When and where?”
“Souza’s waiting in Rattlesnake. Eagle and his brother brought the dude in and got the building and everything. Not too far, man. Gotta do it soon; the dude won’t hang around forever. He’s got itchy feet on account of the pigs, you know. I get the idea we can’t really hold him. He’s got this sort of…presence. A real heavy presence.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, man. Why, you scared or somethin’?”
“Oh, not really. I’m wondering why you’re grinning. What’s so funny.”
“It’s a veterinarian clinic, man. Like for dogs and shit. But it got shut down a while ago. Still got the notice on the door.” Kite laughed and stomped his foot on the rickety planking. “You goin’ to the vet. I hope he don’t neuter you on accident, man!”
“Hell, K, I hope he doesn’t neuter me on purpose. Let’s roll over to the motel and see the man. We’ll take my ride.”
Kite made some calls. His people had lodged the Brazilian at a no star motel in Rattlesnake; left him with a quart of tequila, a couple of strippers from the casino and an Shoshone strong arm with a twelve gauge dozing outside the door. Eagle and some of his homeys from the reservation would swing by and have the doc at the clinic in time for the main event.
Kite stuffed a cheap automatic pistol in his waistband, covered it with his shirt. Then he rolled a joint and smoked it. Conrad didn’t join him; he was worried dope might contaminate the procedure.
They ventured into the congealing gloom. Kite padlocked the stand as Conrad warily approached his car. He didn’t quite trust it in the creepy, blustery light, its passenger door hanging ajar, creaking with each buffet. The familiar metal gleamed dull and somehow alien, suggestive of passive complicity in this sinister turn of events. Already, dust gathered on the seats.
The girl was long gone, as usual.
Kite dropped him at the motel, said he’d be back in a few minutes. Conrad got the idea that his friend not only disliked the Brazilian, but was frightened of him as well. He thought it a reasonable reaction.
Conrad told the man guarding the door to take a walk. He sent the whores away too, the older of the pair comforting her sobbing comrade. Their faces were gray with revulsion and shock, although both were thankfully unmarked—Conrad was familiar with the Brazilian’s tastes. Now it was only him and the old chemist. He placed the cloth wrapped manuscript on the table, straddled a creaky chair and folded his arms across the backrest and studied Souza.
Souza resembled a petrified corpse that had been stripped of its cerements; Tutankhamen’s vile grandfather, the high priest of a blood-black god. He was entirely naked. Brown as rotted vellum and desiccated and short of breath, he stood near the window, basking in the sunset. His tiny eyes shone in the gloom. “My boy! So good to see you again!” He spoke with the perfect enunciation of an educated foreigner. “When was the last time...you were very small. But my, goodness aren’t you a behemoth. Destroying God’s creatures to amuse the idle rich, I hear. A drink?”
Conrad shook his head. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Souza.”
“What else could I do? Perhaps I should not have, I think. This thing you do for your sister—it is unwise. Very, very unwise. Are you certain you don’t want a drink? Have a drink or I’ll be nervous.” Souza went to a cabinet. He was extremely limber and graceful for a man who appeared a millennia dead. He handed Conrad a paper cup of vodka. “I should not have come. No, I see that now. You are mad, my boy. Utterly mad. The scent of madness oozes from your pores. And your eyes are like flames.” He repaired to the bed where he sat cross-legged amid a wallow of sheets and thin, stained hotel pillows. “If Imogene is dead, God rest her, there is nothing to be gained.”
“Vengeance.”
“Perhaps you are a fool then.”
“Genie left a trail. All I can do is follow it. Go to the places she did. Collect the things she did. Speak with the people she did.” Conrad met the old man’s gaze at this last statement.
Souza nodded. “Yes, she visited me. Several years ago.”
“Did you give her the serum?”
“Your sister is a persuasive woman. Of course I gave her what she asked. Do you possess the triggers?”
“I have two. Do you know them?”
“No, I’m but a humble chemist. Even with the serum you’ll need the third.”
“Then stick me. I’ve got names. I’ll track down another trigger.”
“Ms. Imogene already had them when she came to me. She was prepared and primed for the next step.”
“She’s the fucking Boy Scout of the family,” Conrad said. “How did Tony find you, by the way? Disappearing from the cop radar is a talent I’d like to cultivate.”
“Your amigos found me because I wished it so. I don’t worry about the authorities, or men such as yourself. I take pains to conceal myself from Dr. Drake. It is at terrible risk to myself that I emerge to deal with you in this place.”
“You’re hiding from Drake.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Why?”
“Do you not understand the way of this world you’ve entered? The strong eat the weak. Me, you, your lovely sister. The good doctor would be happy to devour us, one by one. He’s already begun.” The old man sighed and snapped his fingers. “To business. I am pleased you brought the manuscript. I’ve sought it for…well, forever and a day, more or less. Ms. Imogene never let on that she’d acquired it when we were negotiating. I believed all she had to offer was a pound of flesh. So clever, that one.”
“Yeah. Makes me wonder what she traded instead.” Conrad hefted the cloth bundle, weighed it in a final calculation. He rose and handed the manuscript to Souza. He smiled a loose, friendly smile, having decided to kill the chemist at his next opportunity.
Souza grinned and fondled his prize. “Perhaps you’ll have the opportunity to ask her. I think this would be an unhappy outcome. I think you would be better served to slink away into the night and forget her, forget Dr. Drake.”
Night had fallen. The lamp clicked off and they sat silently in the perfect darkness of the motel room. A tongue of red and black flame rolled from Souza’s long fingernail and made his expression wicked in the shadow play. He said, “Boy, I could walk into the dark and you’d never see me again. I could reach across the small space between us and take your heart from your chest, devour it like an apple while you stared in amazement. The strong devour the weak and grow stronger. Your Quixotic impulse amuses me, however. Also, Dr. Drake would be mightily offended were I to gobble his special provender. So, I restrain myself. I simply wanted you to know I could. I really could.” He closed his hand and the fire went out. “Shall we go, boy? Shall we go and introduce you to the Great Dark?”
The Rattlesnake Animal Clinic was a dead black rectangle off an unpaved street. A solitary lamp illuminated the service entrance, the merciless grilles of several parked cars. The night wind smelled of radiator fluid and cooked insects. Occasionally dust spattered the lamp while deformed tumbleweeds careened by on their migratory paths to oblivion.
Inside the blistered stucco and cement, the lair of knocking pipes and quiescent wires, at the very heart of the squalid box, was Operating Room #2. Brutal, fluorescent light seeped beneath the rumpled seal of the double doors. A radio played dim, unintelligible music, distorted the ebb and flow of whispered conversation.
The light snuffed. A man began to shriek.
Time is a ring,” Imogene said. “Bye, bye.”
Conrad missed her already.
They want in. They want in. They love you, Connie.
“Super collage. Supercollider. The Drake Technique in action. There is no center and the edges are telescopic.”
The walls were dirty. How could a clinic be so dirty. Flies circled a bulb, crawled on the dangling chain. Somebody was shrieking to the accompaniment of an opera diva.
“Daddy, I’m scared,” Ezra said.
“Me too,” Dad said. The coffin lowered, then the dirt.
Conrad was scared also, but he couldn’t speak. His mouth was full of blood.
“Please look at these cards. What do you see? Quickly.”
Thumb whorls. Faces. Hell. A light bulb attended by flies. “Daddy?”
“Oh, you’ve been practicing the meditations. The Occultus Tyrranis suffers from mistranslation. It is often a bald forgery and to follow the instructions of such a tract leads to abiding misery and most gruesome consequences. Your copy is not a forgery, but you will dwell in abiding misery all the same, I think.”
“Hold his head, amigos. This will turn our friend inside out.”
The injection was delivered by an eighteen gauge needle, the kind of needle vets stick in horses, and it slid directly into Conrad’s spine.
“Hold still, my friend,” the Brazilian said. “This is going to hurt.”
It hurt.
Funny thing how most of them didn’t possess names. The Brazilian; the Slovakian; the Russian. Conrad was the American now that the former American was pushing daisies.
“Time is a ring, the muscle that moves the eye. Time is the sun, a ring, a mouth, a white howl in a black mouth. Time feeds on itself.”
Faces, opened. Flowers, flies. A light bulb spat and went dark. Its filament glowed like tines of the Devil’s trident.
The elk-horned man laughed and laughed through an unhinged jaw. His face was milk. He loomed above the fig trees, slapped aside their wooly branches as he came cackling. And his phallus was a medieval pike striking sparks.
“The whole shebang is utterly theoretical,” Mom said as she notched up the engine full throttle. “Go Mariners!” Her canvas-topped Supercub slowly nosed into the cliffs, folded itself to an orange ball of confetti.
Bang. The universe collapsed into a particle.
“Time runs in all directions. Time is a droplet of blood crashing into a linoleum tile. Time is a nosebleed.”
“So, Conrad. I must warn you that there are certain risks associated with this procedure. Basically, a sequence of chemical alterations will occur. A fundamental reordering of your essential components. Also, conceivably, worms could eat your brain. Shall we proceed, yes?”
“If you’re screaming, you’re alive.”
Conrad was screaming. The crowd was screaming.
The Slovakian with the devil tattoos, the replica Bronze Age helmet with spikes and horns and the replica Bronze Age bow, shot him in the leg with a barbed arrow. Felt as if a Clydesdale had kicked him in the quivering meat six inches north of the knee. The crowd loved it. Its thunder buried him and the chariot came on, a chrome-plated pile driver astride a golden cloud of dust. Cameras whirred and popped.
“They say God dwells outside of Time. He wants to eat us because He is love.”
That horsefucker of a needle rammed into his spine and kept going. It squirted a pure grade-A Cenozoic microbe comet into his blood, and tick, tick, tick.
Supernova. Light bulbs everywhere snuffed as one.
“Please examine the cards. You will be allotted five seconds for each card. Tell me what you see.”
Why were the cards covered in bloody fingerprints? Why did they make him so sick in his stomach? Sinking into the deep, deep black.
“I see. I see. Moths. Holes in the faces.”
“Time feeds itself. Time is a muscle, a mouth. Opening.”
“Stop looking at the cards. Stop.”
“But I can’t stop.”
Every shaking shudder of every hollow-eyed mountain; every slosh and slip of every bottomless cup of sea. Dust and grit filtered down from cracks, unshuttered skylights that looked into abysses.
The universe is colder than Absolute Night, yet is exploding like the blood droplet in its impact. It has begun to bubble.
Siamese twins shook hands and boarded separate cabs.
The Slovakian got a final howl as Conrad’s spear tore him from the chariot and pinned him to the blotted Coliseum sand, before the angry hyenas ate his hands, his feet, before they yanked his manhood into saltwater taffy and the crowd repaired to the bars for cocktails and appetizers, to pay its debts and celebrate with drugs, sex and rock music. Thumbs down.
“Please look into the light. Look only at the light. Now, I am going to say a word. When I say this word, the world as you know it will cease to exist. It will become something new. Are you prepared to become a superhuman, my boy?”
The cathode dilated and spewed ichor of the gods into his veins.
“Listen carefully.”
Funny story about the first time Conrad met Marsh and Singh.
The trio collided in Mexico shortly after Imogene originally went missing along with her lover, the esteemed Dr. Raul Lorca. Conrad flew from the Aegean when he received a late night message that she was in deep trouble and needed him to get his ass to Mexico. Genie couldn’t talk, someone watched her every move. Come quick, bro. I’m in it now. The line went dead before she gave him her exact location.
He was a mess. The contest had been a team event, a gory recreation of some epic Peloponnesian slaughter. It got ugly, as the big-draw battle royales inevitably did—and he was one of the fortunate few to crawl away with all his original parts. He’d been stabbed and slashed, punctured with an arrow; he had cracked ribs, a bruised larynx and kidneys and was down a few pints of blood despite a transfusion. His body was a purple-black mosaic of stitches and staples. He didn’t closely resemble the smiling face in his passport photo. Other than that he was mint.
Uncle Kosokian had sequestered him in a private hospital with round the clock nurses and a team of nervous physicians. They doped him to the gills on painkillers, gave him a button to push whenever he wanted another shot of morphine and it wasn’t enough, so he downed all the tequila he could lay hands on, which was a supply limited only by his capacity to swallow.
Imogene had terrible timing, but he rolled with it, unhooked himself from the needles and tubes, lined his pockets with pill-bottles, and went hunting.
The next two weeks were a blur, a chain of blackouts. Amid the nightmarish smog of pain, Jose Cuervo, and Demerol, he managed to trace his sister to a villa on the outskirts of a poor, off season resort town near the U.S. border. Imogene had rented a seedy hacienda with a view of a gulch that served as a dry moat. Past the gulch, spread a sloping panorama of sage, cacti and distant, heat-shimmered mesas. What had she and Lorca been doing? Nobody had an answer, not even the Bureau. Evidently she’d taken a leave of absence and zoomed off to pursue some top-secret agenda and probably get herself fired once and for all.
Conrad had a sneaking idea what she was after. What to do about it was another matter.
None of the townies knew anything helpful. Folks remembered the dark-haired gringa. She talked like a man and broke the eye of a farmer who’d pinched her ass while they shot pool at the cantina. She carried a pistola and drank from the bottle and the regulars figured right away she was a Fed, probably a customs agent, or a narc. They didn’t give a damn; obviously she had bigger fish to fry than hassling any of the locals. When she stopped coming in, it wasn’t a surprise. She’d paid down another month on the hacienda and the maid reported that some of her personal items were still inside. The only thing missing was her, and her car, which turned out to be a rental from the airport in Mexico City. The authorities eventually discovered the car at the bottom of a quarry, demolished by a crash and the ensuing fire. None of the charred bones inside the wreckage belonged to Imogene or her biologist companion Lorca, however.
Naturally, enterprising locals had stripped the hacienda of everything that wasn’t nailed down. It didn’t matter. Conrad spotted her subtle knife blaze on a living room post—an inverted arrow bisecting a heart containing: CONNIE & GENIE FOREVER. She’d hidden the important stuff in a garbage bag in the crawl space. It was exactly as she’d promised to do if something like this occurred—articles of clothing; travel brochures; sundry papers and receipts; traveler’s checks; a plastic bag of Humboldt County Thunderfuck and loose .38 slugs; and a scorched envelope containing the partially exposed glossy of a man in a robe wearing a crown of antlers. Great, pointy antlers; a twelve-point buck for sure, or the world’s biggest stag beetle. The man’s face was in shadow, except for the rim of a widened, protuberant eye, all black, and the corner of a too-large mouth skinned back to reveal a pit. Imogene had printed Drake in the bottom corner. Not much of a likeness, not to Conrad’s recollection of the smarmy old salt who’d tended Ezra. Then a couple of film canisters and a thick packet of dossier-style photographs of various old men, their names and occupations and last known addresses meticulously typed on the reverse—none of whom seemed familiar; and a smaller collection of satellite plates of the Cloister in the Pyrenees.
There was also a book, a medieval pamphlet made of crinkly animal skin that smelled of must and dried blood. Untitled. The shell of some kind of large arthropod had been embedded in the wooden cover. The tract’s leathery pages were covered border to border in ancient Greek text, except for periodic diagrams of esoteric anatomical surgeries, and more embedded exoskeletons of predatory insects.
Imogene left a note on a scrap of soiled stationary with flowers and rabbits. It said, in jagged script, They want in.
Conrad was far too addled to analyze the particulars of the clues, or whether any clues truly existed beyond the miasma and warp of his beleaguered perceptions. He wandered around the town, dropped ominous and inflammatory comments and set up shop at the hacienda. Maybe she would return, or if she couldn’t return, she’d realize where he’d be and send a message; or, perhaps, when he’d recovered his wits, he’d discover some new scrap that she’d left behind. Mostly he stayed because he didn’t know where else to go or what to do if he went there. As a precaution, he rented a deposit box at the bank and stashed Imogene’s clues for safekeeping.
He hibernated, rousing occasionally for more tequila and pills. He listened to cockroaches and mice as they scuttled around his stinking, sodden bulk, and fat moths battening the dust-caked windows, thirsty for his salt and iron, his deadly sweat. Sometimes, through the grubby window notch, the sky flushed red as the skin of a balloon stretched to bursting. Titanic shadows moved behind the sun, the gaping moon. Dark shapes dimpled the red sky as fingertips denting cellophane. When Conrad dozed, Drake materialized in a bell of smoky, volcanic light, shook his mighty antlers and beckoned from the yawning archway of a cathedral. A giant in foul, sooty robes.
Conrad never fully slept as the fever licked at him with the urgency of a selfish lover.
Later, a vehicle with the headlights off rolled up during the wee hours. He was reclined in the bathtub, where he’d tumbled several hours before while looking for a spot to relieve himself, naked except for a pair of horridly stained boxers. He hazily glimpsed silhouettes reversed upon the plaster ceiling. The strangers circled the house. Their shoes crunched in the gravel beneath the bathroom window; mutters and whispers carried to his ears, pierced his delirium.
They entered through the unlocked front door and began moving from room to room. Someone shined a flashlight into the bathroom, flicked the dead light switch a couple times, and moved on without spotting Conrad’s foot and ankle hanging over the rim of the filthy tub.
Stuff was getting knocked around. Glass was breaking. The men spoke Spanish and there were at least four of them. Government men? Cops? Mobsters? Conrad decided to ask.
He eventually levered himself from the tub and limped into the hall. The world rushed him in 3D; he braced himself with one hand to keep from pitching onto his face. It was dark but for bits of moonlight coming in here and there, and bobbing flashlight beams poking around. Conrad bumped into a man in a suit. The man was small and wiry, like a bird, and reeked of nervousness and aftershave.
Conrad opened his mouth to utter a greeting, and the guy jumped back, cursed, and shot him with a taser. Whap, prongs stuck in his shoulder and here came the juice. It must’ve been a supercharged model, because Conrad had been tasered before, and usually they didn’t pack enough of a punch to faze him, but this one clicked his teeth together, rolled his eyes backwards and caused foam to slather from his lips.
The slow waltz in Hell began without music.
Conrad collapsed against the wall. The man released the trigger and when he did that he was fucked. Within an instant of the current’s cessation, Conrad tore out the prongs and swung his arm like a baseball bat and chopped the man’s throat with the edge of his hand, made jelly of the windpipe. The man fell, thrashing. Conrad stomped on his chest until it caved, and again on his groin and the man stopped moving.
It was all instinct. His rational thoughts melted into a pulsing, crimson mass. He had left a brace of pila in the corner of the hall, intending to practice in the high desert air once he recovered. He grabbed three of the javelins and crabbed through a doorway toward a moving flashlight beam; slung a spear underhanded at the shadow behind the light and got lucky. Someone grunted and someone else opened up with the heavy armament, probably a submachine gun, and the hacienda was briefly lit by strobes of yellow-blue fire. The stench of burning copper rode a blizzard of plaster fragments and sawdust.
Conrad bored into the maelstrom, collided with a body and immediately plunged three feet of steel and ash through the man’s belly, then the wall, and the machine gun whirled away in a fizz of Roman candle sparks.
The last guy ran from the house and for the car, got it rolling backwards as Conrad burst onto the porch and threw his remaining pilum, overhand this time. His aim was bad because his night vision was mostly ruined by the muzzle flashes. The windshield imploded, a mass of fractured safety glass that wrapped around the driver’s head and torso like a net. The car yawed, flew off the road and toppled into the ravine.
The driver crawled from the wreck and clambered up the opposite bank. He’d lost his suit coat and his white shirt fluttered among the clumps of sage, the flowing shadows of low clouds. The cadaverous moon grinned as it peeked between the pleats of glinting star fields.
The man cried out when he saw Conrad loping after him with the hitching, drunken gait of a trained javelin thrower; fired several wild shots over his shoulder as he fled. The reports came soft and ineffectual as a child’s cap gun, counterpoint to the slap-slap-slap-slap of Conrad’s bare feet against pebbles and dirt.
Conrad overtook him, a cat cutting down a wildebeest, a large shadow swallowing a smaller, and they tumbled together among the rocks and the bushes. It was a short, pathetic struggle.
When the soldiers came, they found him slumped over the kitchen table, clutching a pile of bloody wallets. According to various pieces of identification, the dead men belonged to the Mexico City police department. No one knew why they had been sent into the country. There was no record that the excursion was authorized.
The Mexican Army took Conrad into custody. He was hauled to a basement and tied to a chair. Someone gagged him and then sprayed soda water foam up his nose to simulate drowning. Many, many hard questions were asked. After a while, the military interrogator figured out his subject was just another dumbass gringo, albeit with a hotter temper than most, who’d gotten crosswise with somebody powerful. The intelligence officer had actually cocked the hammer on a revolver and stuck the barrel in Conrad’s ear when Marsh and Singh strolled in to save the day. Money changed hands and Conrad was blindfolded and taken from the torture scene.
The agents drove him across the border and the three had dinner at a nice Tex-Mex joint, then a long conversation over several platters of beer and tequila.
You’re one lucky bastard, Mr. Navarro, Marsh had said. Those off-duty cops you dusted were freelancing. Nobody seems to give a shit about them.
Conrad explained what he did and how his sister had disappeared investigating he wasn’t sure what and that the goons had probably come for her.
How did you wind up in this line of work? Singh said.
A family friend knew a guy who knew a guy. I was recruited and trained. Conrad didn’t go into specifics—how he’d been tested, the nature of the training or where it occurred; didn’t speak of those early years in the modern day slave pits of the underworld, how he’d probably killed two of every species, including men, that might’ve walked, hopped, or slithered up the gangplank of Noah’s Ark. He didn’t mention how Uncle K had scooped him from the mean and bloody amateur ranks and become his patron, his master.
Marsh and Singh drank excessively and hung on his every word, although they didn’t press, not then. In those early days of Conrad’s burgeoning stardom as a blood sport personality, The American, he’d paid taxes to an NSA slob named Furillo. The NSA kept tabs on the underground fighting rings, most especially those as elaborate and lucrative as the ones Conrad belonged to. The power of those exorbitantly wealthy organizers of the Pageant sufficed to keep the intelligence community at least nominally neutral, but graft was the order of the day and payoffs were necessary at every level of operation. So many palms to grease, so little time.
After what Singh referred to as “The Mexican Incident,” Conrad’s management situation underwent a radical alteration, precipitated by Furillo’s timely coronary conclusion due to the ingestion of multiple prescription medications and the able ministrations of a Vegas call-girl who conveniently vanished without hanging around to clarify the circumstances of “Big Joe’s” demise.
The operatives stepped in without skipping a beat. They took a cut of Conrad’s exhibition paydays, ran interference for him with local authorities when necessary, and promised to look into his sister’s case.
It was the start of a beautiful, horribly dysfunctional relationship. Basically the same as every other relationship Conrad had known.