The Light is the Darkness (5 page)

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.

II

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.

III

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.