Necropolis (40 page)

“A Coke,” I said.

Her ire congealed, but the man laughed. “You heard him.”
 

He slid the stick off his shoulder blades and motioned me closer with it. When I approached he thrust his hand out at me, grinning like he was my new prowl car partner and not some impossible potentate who lived in an impossible citadel.
 

I took his hand, feeling like an idiot. He pumped it heartily.

“Izzy Struldbrug, how are ya,” he said.

“Izzy,” I said. “Short for Isodor. Adam and Nicole’s father,” I said. “You’re the Master?”
 

He gave me my hand back. “I’m a little excited, I have to admit. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”

The bartender laid my Coke on the rail with a neat little napkin beneath it. She faded back to her fruit.

“Did you know Coke had cocaine in it until 1903?” Struldbrug said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

“But did you know they still flavor it with coca leaves? There’s only one plant authorized to grow them, right here in Jersey for the Coca-Cola Company. They claim they’re ‘spent,’ of course. But in truth you can’t process out the alkaloids completely. To this day, Coke still has minute traces of cocaine in it.”

“No wonder it’s so refreshing.”

“It was originally sold as a patent medicine. They claimed it could cure morphine addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headaches, impotence…” He chuckled. “Back then, there was no FDA to make sure they couldn’t lie.”

“And no Department of Research Integrity,” I said.

He grinned like he hadn’t heard me. “Listen to me. Once a chemist, always a chemist. Just don’t spill your Coke.” He ran a reverential hand across the surface of the table. “It’d be hard to replace my billiard cloth out here.”

“What is it?” I said, playing his game. “Felt?”

He gave me the look of benevolent patience reserved by experts for amateurs. “Bar tables are usually covered in a wool and nylon blend called baize. This is worsted wool. It’s a napless weave. Gives the ball a little more speed. You a player, Mr. Donner?”

“I’ve dabbled. Mostly when drunk,” I replied.

“Oh my. An honest one.”

“Don’t give me any medals yet.”
 

“Get yourself a cue. We’ll see what you’re made of.”

“I was mostly a rats and mice man.”

“Sorry, no craps table. But I’ll go easy on you.”
 

I didn’t move. “Is this for my benefit? This bar?”

He smiled. “Why on earth would you think that?”

“Doesn’t match your castle.”

His smile broadened. “I’m eclectic—sue me.”
 

I went to the rack on the wall, stared at the cues.

“They’re all good, Mr. Donner. Hard rock maple. Just grab one that strikes your fancy.”

I did. He was at the other end of the table, racking the balls. “Eight-ball, American rules okay?” he said, sighting down the plastic triangle.

I’d reached my limit. “I didn’t come here to play pool.”

He carefully extricated the rack from around the balls. “I know that, Mr. Donner. You’ve waited a long time for answers. A few more minutes won’t kill you.” He straightened, twirling the rack on a finger. “And besides, if my banter gets too exasperating, you can always ‘stick your roscoe in my mug and threaten to squirt metal if I don’t spill.’”

I picked my cue back up. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Very good,” he said. “You may break.”

***

I had a nice solid break, sinking the nine in the right corner. I dispatched another couple stripes and was almost feeling confident when I used too much english and missed an easy bank with the fourteen.

“You’re better than you let on,” said Struldbrug, rousing from his stool to survey his options. “A relaxed stroke. And you know the physics. With practice, you’d be formidable.”

“The story of my life.”

He polished off the table with astonishing speed.
 

“Eight ball in left corner pocket, please,” he said. He sunk it, leaving the cue ball spinning calmly on the lip of the pocket, to show his finesse. He pulled a quarter from his pocket. “Another?”

I curled my lips. “If that’s what it takes.”

He rolled those large eyes of his and grabbed the rack. “Alright, Mr. Donner, fire away.”

I pulled a couple balls from the nearest pocket and rolled them at him. “You say you’re Nicole’s father, but you don’t look a day over thirty.”

“That’s right. And I never will.”

Okay, that stopped me dead.
 

Almost like it was orchestrated, the jukebox went silent. I looked back. The bartender had vanished. I swung back to Struldbrug. He smiled, waiting.

“You’re a reborn,” I said.

He shook his head.

I rotated the pool cue in my hands. Whatever this was, I didn’t want it. I really didn’t want it. “Then you’re taking the Retrozine.”

“C’mon, Mr. Donner,” he said.
 

I’d gotten good at knowing when I was about to get blindsided. It wasn’t exactly a premonition—more like when you’re a boxer on the canvas and you see your opponent’s shoulder drop and his weight shift, you know a right cross is coming.
 

I was about to get knocked out.

“The math’s simple,” he said. “You just won’t accept it.”

Connected, but not connected. An impossibly young father, an impossibly young daughter. Working on a fountain of youth drug, derived from mysterious DNA…
 

The jukebox lurched back into life, and Louie Armstrong started lying about what a wonderful world it was.
 

Connected, but not connected. Impossibly young,
before
there was Shift,
before
there was a drug to take. Before, and after.

Connected.

I watched the cue vibrate. An earthquake, out here?
 

But not connected.
 

It wasn’t an earthquake. It was my hands.

“Sure you don’t want something stronger?” he teased. “I’ve got some eighty-year old Scotch…”
 

“This place,” I croaked.

“Arg-é Bam? I was feeling homesick. Of course, Persopolis was nice, too. Back then, I went by Achaemenes. It means, ‘Friendly By Nature.’“

I sank onto the stool, my lungs shrink-wrapped in plastic.

“Do you know these revisionist historians are trying to say that Cyrus the Great, his son,
made up
Achaemenes? To legitimize his reign?”

I hitched in a breath. I sounded tubercular.

“Of course, I was Cyrus, too. Now I couldn’t very well make myself up, could I?”
 

I dropped my head, worked on getting oxygen.

“I know,” he said, “You’re hung up by the Struldbrug thing. Your research said the family that founded Surazal were German Jews from Dresden. How could I be a Jew if I’m an Arab?” He leaned in to me, like he was being confidential. “Let me tell you something. It gets
boring
being one thing. Along the way, I’ve been Muslim, Jewish, Christian… even a Hindu for a while. That was fun. Their deities are so colorful.”

“Immortal,” I said. “You’re immortal.”

His eyebrows went up another notch.

“God,” I said. “Jesus God.”

“Take it easy,” he said. “Have another Coke. Dottie!”

The bartender appeared, and he pointed at me. She cracked another can, poured, and then messily dropped in some ice cubes.

This was worse even than that first awful day when I saw my gold eyes and my white hair and they told me what had happened to the world. Where was Walter Winchell and his adenoidal rap to help me through? “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all you ships at sea—let’s go to press! So you’re sitting next to someone who’ll never die. This reporter says: don’t be a pantywaist!”

“Immortal,” I said again.

“I prefer the term ‘ageless.’” he said.
 

He took the stool next to me, still all casualness. Just two buddies talking. Dottie put a fresh Coke under a fresh napkin and went back to her holding position.
 

“Actually, there’s no such thing. Accident, murder, suicide, severe physical trauma—poof. I’ve been very lucky. And very careful.”

I couldn’t get my mind around it. It was like looking up at the walls of the Grand Canyon after mule-riding to the bottom. All you got was all that looming oppressive rock. No big picture, just your vision crowded by immensity.
 

I said it again. “Immortal.”

His brow darkened. “What are you, a parrot? Yes, immortal—eternal, unceasing, perpetual, everlasting, imperishable, ceaseless, incorruptible, amaranthine—”

“Stop.”

He went to the table and finished racking the balls. His break was like a thunderclap. He bowed his head for a couple seconds, marshalling himself.

“I apologize,” he said. “For some reason, this always irritates me. The going into shock routine, the denial. Somehow it gets me more than outright disbelief. It’s easier when they just think you’re crazy.”

Louie Armstrong finished “Wonderful World”. They say when he came back, he refused to ever sing it again.

“How?” I said, trying to find the words. “I mean, this happened, uh, naturally?” I asked.
 

“If by natural, you mean without the aid of any outside force, yes. But I am the furthest thing from natural, Mr. Donner. I am a one-in-a-zillion freak. A creature so beyond the laws of probability, there has never been another like me.”

“Gavin… Gavin told me about aging…”

“Ah, yes. All the different processes and events that combine to make immortality impossible. Programmed cell death, apoptosis. The Hayflick limit. Telomeres. Environmental damage. Each one of which would have to be accounted for, and corrected, in an ageless being.”

I looked at his skin, his face, his hair. “And you—”

He shrugged. “Like I said, a fluke. A cosmic joke. The perfect collection of mutations, all at the same time, working together in perfect synchronicity. Infinite, faultless cell reproduction. Massive production of telomerase, which replenishes my telomeres. A unique internal antioxidant process. Blah blah blah. The result is a perfectly self-repairing organism.” He smiled. “Although I do try to stay out of the sun.”

“This is impossible, isn’t it?”

“Nothing is impossible, Donner, only improbable. I am living proof of that statistical truth. In actuality, given enough time and enough couplings, enough re-shufflings of our genes, enough random mutations, an ageless human would have eventually happened a couple billion years down the pike. The weird thing is that it occurred so early in the history of our race. But here I stand, having arrived at the party far too early.”
 

I must’ve started looking stunned again, because he said, “Oh no. Am I going to need to provide evidence to support my wild claim? Let’s see, what can I pony up? Hmm. A Gutenberg Bible, signed by Gutenberg?” He mimed opening a book. “To Izzy; thanks for the printing press idea.’” He laughed.
 

“No,” I said. “I believe you.”

He seemed impressed. “And why is that, Mr. Donner?”

“It explains Nicole, all those years ago. She’s like you.”

“You haven’t been listening. Another anomaly like me is as about likely as all the stars in the Universe going nova at the same time.”
 

I ran a hand down my face, looked at the Coke. “I could use a cigarette.”

A suede sports coat was slung over some chairs. He pulled a pack out from a pocket. “Menthol okay?”

A laugh burst out of me, too hard, the semi-hysterical kind. “You
smoke
?” I said.

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed
?
 

He shook out a pair, fired both from a match and handed me one. “Tobacco’s stale, sorry. I don’t get deliveries often enough.”

I blew a storm cloud over my head. “Nicole’s mother—?”

“Normal.”

“Then how—”

“Nicole inherited
some
of my traits, Mr. Donner. She’s what you would call a hybrid. She and her brother Adam are unusually long-lived. They age, but very slowly. They will die. Eventually.”

I flashed back to Crandall’s interrogation. “The tissue samples that Nicole gave Crandall’s team, back in the beginning—the ones with the strange DNA that they used to develop the Retrozine. Yours?”

“Hers.”

“But your DNA—passed down to her—it’s still the basis for Retrozine.”

“Yes.”

Something clicked in my head. The big question, finally answered. Now it seemed so obvious.
 

“Uh oh,” he said. “I just saw a light bulb go off.”

“We couldn’t figure out who would kill Nicole’s scientists to thwart her, yet would also kill Alvarez to protect her from me. Didn’t make sense.”