The Eternal Footman Page 28

  “For you this cross is a reason to give relapsers a second treatment,” said Lucido at last, his flesh aglow with hyperion. “For me it’s a reason to perfect Antidote X. A breakthrough is near. This is certain. You have your art, Gerard, and I have my science. If only I could convey to you the pure, primal thrill of basic metaphysical research.”

  “I’m sure its a kick. The relapsers are dying.”

  “Is my statue finished?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Let me propose a bargain. If you’ll return posthaste to El Dorado and complete my statue, I shall descend to my laboratory and submit Antidote X to a final round of clinical trials. Sound fair?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I assume you’ve made some progress,” said Lucido.

  “Once this new treatment is perfected,” said Gerard, “will you make it available to the relapsers?”

  “How could you imagine otherwise?” Completing his circumnavigation, Lucido paused before Gerard and pressed the cross into his hands. “Deal?”

  Gerard pursed his lips. Antidote X was axiomatically a better course than abandoning the relapsers altogether, but the doctor’s attitude still infuriated him. “Deal.”

  Lucido did an abrupt about-face and exited the hexagon, pausing briefly in the doorway. “Ever see any of these motion pictures? They’re astonishing anthropological artifacts.”

  “What’s the one with Anouk Aimée?”

  “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Despite the bargain he’d just struck, Gerard remained anchored to the spot, struggling to tease an intelligible thought from his brain. On the nearest monitor, a Hebrew farmer played by Edmund Purdom entered Lana Turner’s caravan tent, a space forbidden to infidels, and became instantly smitten upon observing her pay obeisance to Astarte.

  Spying, that was the right idea. To put his mind at ease, he must seclude himself in the wine cellar—locus of the Antidote X laboratory, according to Julius—and try to learn whether Lucido’s enthusiasm for the new medicine was justified.

  “Nahreeb, you said everything has its price,” declared Edmund Purdom, indicating Lana Turner as he addressed Louis Calhern in the role of Astarte’s high priest. “Name hers.”

  “She is not for a follower of Jehovah,” said Calhern.

  “I mean to have her,” said Purdom. “One way or another.”

  Slithering along corridors and skulking down stairwells, Gerard made his way to the wine cellar. The door stood ajar. Firming his grip on Malvina’s cross, he glanced inside. Although Lucido hadn’t yet arrived, the former Olmec temple was luminous with oil lamps and Coleman mantles. Everything appeared as usual: the calendar disk, the giant head, the racked bottles, the stone altar strewn with jiggers, swizzle sticks, and wineglasses. He noticed only one novel feature. Hidden by a green tarpaulin, a rectangular object the size of an elevator car loomed over the altar: scientific equipment, he guessed, the technological nexus of Antidote X.

  Footsteps resounded in the hallway. Gerard rushed into the cellar and ducked behind the basalt calendar, cloaking his body in shadows.

  Lucido entered the laboratory accompanied by two El Agujero functionaries, the angrily phlegmatic Simon Bork and the annoyingly pert Mordecai Blassingame, both wearing shoulder holsters stuffed with handguns. The psychoanalyst’s first action was to grab a comer of the tarpaulin and yank it. Instantly the mysterious object stood revealed, an iron-barred cubicle resembling an immense birdcage, its door secured by a padlock. Gerard stifled a gasp. The cage held two prisoners: Hannah Alport—bound with leather thongs, mouth sealed with duct tape—and an unconscious child, probably her son.

  “This past month, I’ve administered Antidote X to thirty-four abulics, none of whom were ever acolytes,” Lucido told his assistants. “Twenty-eight enjoyed complete remissions. Presumably we’ll have even greater success with backsliders like young Joshua, but we won’t know for certain until we perform the crucial test.” Moving his forearm like a windshield wiper, he cleared the altar of bar paraphernalia, then produced a small brass key from his caftan and handed it to Blassingame. “Bring me the patient.”

  The functionary obeyed; he unlocked the cage, removed Joshua from his mother’s side, and dragged him to the altar.

  “Position the patient,” Lucido commanded.

  Bork grabbed Joshua’s wrists, Blassingame seized the boy’s ankles, and together they lifted him onto the altar and arranged him like a cadaver destined for dissection.

  “The science of human sacrifice has a long and venerable history,” said Lucido. “My research persuades me that the Olmecs conducted many of their classic experiments on this very altar. Without their pioneering work in cardiac ablation, of course, the great blood rites of the Aztec empire might never have evolved, and consequently none of us would be here now, giving birth to Antidote X.” Reaching behind the altar, he drew forth a steel hunting knife, its blade serrated like a shark’s tooth. “Watch carefully. The day may come when you must provide this treatment without my aid.”

  Methodically Lucido slashed an X into the comatose child’s chest and, using the ragged grooves as a template, buried the knife to the hilt and sawed apart Joshua’s rib cage. This isn’t happening, Gerard told himself. It simply isn’t. His muscles froze. His joints congealed. Decency demanded that he jump out and try to stop the crime, but decency lay helpless before his certainty that, if he acted, Bork and Blassingame would gun him down. Blood geysered forth. Hannah’s moans, loud despite the duct tape, echoed through the wine cellar. Gerard gripped the basalt calendar to keep from fainting. Though visibly shaken, Bork and Blassingame stayed at their posts, holding the convulsing patient tight against the stone.

  Within ninety seconds Lucido had exposed Joshua’s beating heart. “The patient’s loved ones typically fail to comprehend the scientifico-spiritual theory behind the treatment,” he said, pointing the bloody blade toward Joshua’s mother, “even after I’ve carefully explained it.”

  Pupils flashing, eyeballs expanding, Hannah flopped around on the cage floor like a beached mackerel. Her attempts at screaming produced only muffled gasps.

  “The response you’re witnessing is not uncommon. In some cases it becomes necessary to quell the relatives’ skepticism by shooting them. With me so far?”

  “With you,” said Bork.

  “Witness the miracle of Antidote X,” said Lucido, thrusting his hands into the crimson cavity. “For a few precious seconds we can observe a child’s soul poised between our own reality and the adjacent echelon, whereupon this imperishable spark”—he severed the blood vessels binding heart to chest—“begins its journey to the Olmec afterlife.”

  Like a naturalist extracting an exotic egg from a mountaintop rookery, Lucido removed the boy’s quivering heart and placed it in an obsidian receptacle the size of a pasta bowl. A pathetic bleating emerged from the red excavation, followed by the resident fetch himself. Arms outstretched, legs splayed, the rising wraith hovered briefly above his host’s remains, released a despairing gasp, and vaporized like a snowman cast into a furnace.

  “The patient—can we doubt it?—is cured: completely defetched and bound for immortality,” said Lucido. “What more could a young man want? Another success story for Antidote X, number twenty-nine, in fact. It’s the synergy that does it. By amalgamating science and spirituality, the secular and the sacred, we can excise our patients’ hearts with the full blessing of the cosmos.”

  “The mother remains unsympathetic,” noted Blassingame.

  Hannah Alport was banging her head against the iron bars as if attempting to debrain herself.

  “Apply your guns to this situation,” Lucido told his assistants.

  Gerard never found out whether the two functionaries murdered Hannah that night or not, although he was fairly sure they did. By the time Bork and Blassingame opened the cage door, Gerard had abandoned his hiding place and ascended the stairs. Acid jetted up his esophagus, searing his throat, as he entered the ve
stibule, rushed outside, and stumbled across the plaza.

  It had happened. All of it. Every drop of blood.

  The acid settled back into his stomach. The Cranium Dei laughed gleefully. Gerard climbed into his pony cart, set Malvina’s cross beside him, and started away, certain of nothing under sun or skull except one white-hot fact. Upon reaching El Dorado, he would take his sledgehammer and smash Lucido’s emerging statue into a thousand meaningless shards.

  Deus Absconditus

  THREE TIMES A WEEK, while Kevin performed his oblations, Nora enacted a ritual of her own, driving the donkey cart down to El Agujero in hopes of learning Stevie Van Home’s fate. She never got past the foyer. Giving his clipboard a cursory glance, Assistant Deacon Jackendorf would glibly assert that Anthony Van Home and his family had attained “level seven” or “station nine” or some equally impressive-sounding milestone. This was bullshit, and they both knew it, though Jackendorf persisted in the pretense. Lacking a gift commensurate with Gauguins or glory grease, her friends had clearly been condemned to a bureaucratic treadmill, fated to march in place until Richter’s functionaries decided on a whim to make Stevie an acolyte. Whenever she demanded to see Richter himself, Jackendorf would reply that the chief deacon’s schedule precluded contact with anyone not seeking admittance to Tamoanchan. Every tactic failed. Screams, tears, entreaties—even her threat to involve “Gerard Korty himself” in the situation. Nora’s fellow Natchez Queen passengers were locked away in the detention center as tightly as Boris Lampini’s suspendees had been sealed in Dewar vessels.

  On days not consumed by yelling at bureaucrats, bartering in Coatzacoalcos, or helping to run the cantina, Nora normally took Kevin to visit Gerard Korty. Crock no longer allowed her to use the Queen as her private vehicle, but she didn’t mind: the overland journey by donkey cart proved easier than she imagined, and it was always rewarded by some astonishing new exhibit. Both the Gallery of Decency and the Garden of Scientific Knowledge were now complete, and the Hall of Artistic Passion already had three of the fourteen projected dioramas. How had the man done it? By what sorcery had he charged these chambers with so much light and heat? From whence sprang all this radical beatitude, this intellectual radiance, this aesthetic energy, this erotic wattage?

  What most endeared the sculptor to Nora, however, was not his genius but his avuncular fondness for her son. Gerard Korty was the first real father figure in Kevin’s life since Ben Sawyer. While she couldn’t swear that the boy’s interest was genuine, Kevin always seemed eager to absorb yet another lecture on the vast quantities of cultural history embedded in the Stone Gospel.

  “Ever been to Rome?” Gerard asked Kevin.

  “No, but I do a trick called ‘The Roman Oracle,’” said Kevin. “I pretend to sacrifice a cat, and then I read its entrails, plastic Easter eggs with predictions inside.”

  “Oh, you must go to Rome,” said Gerard. “I see the Stone Gospel sitting smack in the middle of Saint Peter’s Square, displacing that boring Egyptian obelisk.”

  While Kevin’s bond with Gerard delighted Nora, it was clear that some secret pain had taken root within the sculptor. She could read it in his face—his face, posture, gait, voice. If Kevin hung around Oswald’s Rock much longer, she feared, he would witness his friend having a nervous breakdown. Gerard’s agony was wholly different from the conventional artistic madness forecast by the bowels. Something ghastly was eating him, a private demon that made the average fetch a mere caricature of the uncanny, like a Vieux Carré voodoo queen or a horror host on Chiller Theatre.

  Given the sculptor’s torment, she hesitated to impose her own problems on him, but who else could conceivably help her fight the El Agujero bureaucracy? “I’m worried about my friends,” she said. “The Van Horne boy, Stevie—it’s been two months now. Could you ask Richter about his case? Could you go to Lucido?”

  “Lucido no longer includes me in his circle,” said Gerard. “He lets me stay at El Dorado because he thinks I’m carving his statue.”

  “But surely he feels an obligation to you. Without your vision, there’d be no Somatocism.”

  “No, without my vision, there’d merely be somebody else’s vision. I’ll tell you a secret, Nora. Lucido’s church has taken an ugly turn. Young Stevie would do well to avoid it.”

  “Avoid it?”

  “I know far more than Lucido suspects.”

  He seemed about to elaborate on this cryptic remark, but instead he changed the subject, outlining his plans for giving the Hall of Artistic Passion an auditory dimension. So far, only one such tableau existed, a music box shaped like a harpsichord. He removed the fragile wonder, wound the motor, and returned it to the niche, whereupon Bach’s Prelude and Fugue XXIV in B Minor wafted into the air. Whether by accident or design, the right cerebral hemisphere functioned as an amplifier, causing each delicate note to transcend the toy from which it sprang. Nora hadn’t been so moved by a concert since age nine, when her father took her to hear the Boston Symphony perform Peter and the Wolf.

  The third Sunday in February found her lounging in the prow of the Queen, alternately swallowing beer and browsing through Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. Time passed dreamily. Her thoughts drifted—from Kevin convalescing in his stateroom, to the river lapping at the dock, to Gerard Korty’s odd opinion that Stevie might be better off without the Church of Earthly Affirmation. Hummingbirds hovered along the foggy shore, gorging on orchids. Cockatoos squawked in the trees. God ruled the sky. Nothing seemed particularly right with the world, but just then nothing seemed terribly wrong with it either.

  Heavy leather boots creaked across the foredeck. A shadow obscured Ockham’s book. Nora looked up.

  “This river is full of pig shit.” Despite the wretched beat, Hubbard Richter wore a beige gabardine suit. Semicircles of perspiration fanned outward from his armpits.

  “What brings you here?” she asked.

  “You know.”

  She knew. Glory grease. Damn.

  “I’ll give you another jar,” she said, snapping the book shut and setting it on the deck, “but first I need to hear about Stevie Van Home.”

  “Who?”

  “A stage-four abulic. He and his parents have vanished into El Agujero.”

  “The case has not yet come to my attention.”

  “Make it come to your attention.”

  Richter lifted the hem of his jacket and slipped his hand into his pants pocket, swollen with an emphatic bulge. “A Colt .45 revolver,” he explained. “Loaded.”

  Her scalp prickled. The last time she’d been threatened with a gun, Rachel Sorkin had swooped to her rescue. Who would deliver her now? Her sleeping son? A drunken nautical engineer? God in His orbit?

  “Stand up.”

  She obeyed. “We cut a deal once,” she said. “Let’s cut another. Return to El Agujero and get the Van Home boy into treatment. When you come back, I’ll hand over my other jars.”

  “How many have you got?”

  “Four.”

  “That’s all? Four? Four? Where?”

  “Afterdeck hold.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Nora took a step. If she told Richter the truth—no more jars—he would probably shoot her…but at least her life would end on a positive note, with Kevin alive and healthy. She turned to the deacon and said, “Let me make a confession.”

  “I’m not going to like it.”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  Salvation arrived from an unexpected source. With a sound somewhere between a gurgle and a screech, a naked woman shot out of the river like an aquatic harpy, hurled herself over the transom, and thumped onto the deck. Richter screamed, frightening a toucan from a papaya tree. Water streaming from her arms and hair, Nora’s fetch approached the quivering deacon, whose terror traced not to the wraith per se but to the five writhing cottonmouths coiled around her head. She came to within a meter of Richter, arranged her limbs in a demented rendition of Botticelli’s Venus, and wit
h icy nonchalance plucked a snake from her hair.

  “His bite is worse than his bark,” the fetch said, dangling the cottonmouth before Richter’s widening eyes. “If I were you, I’d drop that gun.”

  The deacon did as instructed.

  “She’s mine, Richter,” said the fetch. “Is that clear?”

  He answered through chattering teeth: “C-clear.”

  “It’s not her job to splint your dick. I can’t kill you directly, but my pets have no such restrictions. Understand?”

  Richter nodded.

  The fetch restored the cottonmouth and said, “Get off the boat.”

  After the chief deacon had turned and run madly down the gangway, the leveler, grinning, pointed to her hair.

  “I hope you appreciate the allusion,” she told Nora.

  “Not very subtle, Goneril.”

  “You know my name.”

  “The divine bowels told me.” As Nora looked at her doppelgänger, an essential truth about mirrors hit home. A looking glass reversed you; it flipped you left to right. For the first time, she saw herself as others did. The distinction was subtle but real. “I suppose I should thank you.”

  “I suppose you should.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Death can perform many functions,” said Goneril, “something you should have learned by now. Bearing you to oblivion is not among my immediate obligations.”

  “God said you’re the one who put the magnifying glass in Kevin’s cereal.”

  “True enough.” Reaching up, Goneril patted her largest snake. “We need to have a serious talk, Sister. I’ll meet you in the cantina tomorrow, stroke of midnight, and we’ll go for a stroll. The jungle is full of marvels.”

  “A walk with death through a dark forest,” said Nora.

  Goneril climbed over the transom and started down the ladder, the river enveloping her pale body. “You may have enemies, Sister, but at the moment your fetch isn’t one of them.”

  For ten minutes the Nietzsche-positive English teacher watched herself doing the Australian crawl toward the city, until mist and distance removed the apparition from view.