The Masters of Atlantis (12 page)

“Bagweed is bagweed. You cannot question the integrity of the plant.”

“My big mistake was to trust you.”

“I snap my fingers at you.”

“You were never a team player, Cezar.”

“May I say you look like an eel, Popper?”

“You and your planet of Mu. I should have known better.”

“Mu is not a planet, you ignorant man. Please, take your gold and go. It is good that we go our different ways. I am on the way up and you are on the way down. Me to big things, you to the gutter.”

“I won't soon forget your slights and snubs of Squanto. Not once have you ever spoken to him, or even nodded to him in passing.”

“It is true what you say there. I don't talk to birds.”

“I was right to keep you out of the Society. Oh, yes, you're still a P.S. and don't you forget it. Did you think a Neophyte was a true Gnomon? You made a fool of yourself, Cezar, running around the house out there with those two windblown runnels of frozen snot curling across your cheeks.”

Golescu was shaken. He sipped at the red wine to cover his confusion, then tossed his head and said, “Ha. I laugh at your Cone of Fate. To me it was all such a funny joke.”

“I'll tell you something else. I have watched you eating.”

“What?”

“Through my spyhole. I watched you in your room.”

“You spy on my privacy?”

“A bit of quiet fun.”

“This is a shameful thing you confess to.”

“I watched you eating your macaroons. Not the straightforward bites of an honest man, just ratlike nibbling around the edges. A kind of savoring, I suppose. Making it last too. I watched you leaning over your table lost in thought. The Führer at his map table. I saw you writing drivel in your diary. The bagweed of journals—one part gold per trillion. And late at night—often I waited up for this show—I watched you punching up your pillow for minutes on end, and then lining up your little shoes beside the bed, always in the same place, ready to be jumped into like firemen's boots. I've seen that picture of your king on the wall too.”

“My king?”

“Over your bed. King Zog.”

“Zog? Are you mad? What do I care for Zog of Albania? That picture is a hand-tinted photograph of my mother.”

“Yes, no doubt that's what you told our immigration people. You had your story ready. You knew you were on thin ice, bringing a picture of your king into our republic, where we bend the knee to no man. When they found it and confronted you with it, you went into a Babylonian flutter and said, “No, no, it's just Mom Golescu!”

June brought a bowl of peanuts to the table. “My two handsome beaus,” she said. “Listen, Austin, I remembered what it was I wanted to tell you. A man came by the house this morning looking for you. It was an FBI man named Pharris White in a real long overcoat. He said he knew you.”

“FBI” registered clearly enough but for a moment Popper could not place the name. Then he remembered. But Pharris White a federal dick? Could it be the same person? P. White of the long telegrams? What next? The winter was frittered away, his sweetheart beguiled by a Turk and now jail.

“Yes, an old lodge brother. Overcoat White. Thank you, June.”

Golescu caught her hand and kissed her fingers as she was leaving. He smirked at Popper.

But Popper was thinking about Letter Plan. This was an escape maneuver prepared in anticipation of such news. He would thread his way west on a series of local buses to San Francisco and there take refuge in Chinatown with an old Gnomon friend, James Wing. The plan was named for Poe's tale “The Purloined Letter,” whose point Popper had misunderstood to be this, that the best hiding place is that place where a search has already been made. Poe was only one of many well-known authors with whom Popper professed familiarity, and of whose works he had read not a single world. He came by his information on such matters indirectly, through magazines, radio programs and hearsay.

For an instant, in his panic, he thought of leaving Squanto behind.

“What are you doing?” said Golescu.

Popper was pushing the table away from him. He pushed it against Golescu's midriff and pinned him to the back of the booth. With a puff of breath he blew away the heap of gold. Golescu struggled but could not raise his arms. Popper took a rubber stamp from an inside pocket and stamped VOID across each of the professor's membership cards, still spread on the table, eight or nine of them, Rosicrucian, Brothers of Luxor, every last one of them. Golescu kicked and threw his head about and squealed and snarled but there was nothing he could do. Popper tipped the table over and left the Blue Hole at a run.

He circled about through alleys for a time and then ducked into a pool hall with painted windows. He drank bottled beer and waited there in the smoky room. When night came he hired a taxicab to take him to Hogandale. It was an old car, high and square, with oval rear window, just an evolutionary step or two beyond the kind with bicycle wheels and tiller. The going was slow. The driver was an old man who said he hoped to keep the car running until 1950. By that time, according to the newspapers, the war would be over and everyone would be flying around in autogyros.

He was a sporting old man and gave no difficulty when Popper asked him to stop at the top of the hill in Hogandale and turn off his lights. Popper went forward on foot to see how things lay. He saw a Ford sedan parked in front of Dad's Place. He made the connection. Yes, it was the one with the twin spotlights he had seen in front of the courthouse. The man with the deputy must have been Pharris White. They were in Dad's Place now, trying to get some sense out of Dad and the coots, a hopeless business.

Popper thought at first to wait them out, then wondered if audacity might not be the better card. A lightning sortie. Quickly in and out to get Squanto.

He went back to the cab and asked the old man to coast down the hill with no lights and glide to a stop at the old Taggert house. “A child custody case,” he explained. “I'm picking up Baby Bill for his mother.” Even so, the descent was noisy. The unpowered car made more racket than Popper would have believed possible. The old man stood on the brakes, worn-out mechanical brakes, and the car slewed about in a great screech of metal on metal. But no one emerged from the saloon.

The ground fog had lifted from lower Hogandale. The old Taggert house stood clearly revealed in the moonlight. Popper wondered if the time would ever come when he would miss the place and its white vapors, as he missed the Temple. Probably not, he decided.

“Honk your horn if anyone comes along.”

“It don't work.”

“I won't be a minute.”

He was a little drunk. He fumbled with the keys and the ice-cold locks and chains. His feet became tangled in the bagweed and he kicked at the stuff. He had trouble finding a lamp and getting it lighted. “I'm back,” he called out to Squanto. “It's me. We're going bye-bye. We're off again but not on the choo-choo this time. It's Letter Plan and James Wing. We'll have our own little upstairs room on Grant Avenue.”

When he entered the kitchen he found Squanto dead in the crown of the old hat. His toes were curled and his beak agape. Popper dropped the lamp. The burning kerosene spread across the floor. He reached for the stiff little body, the plumage all purple, blue, black, gray and white. Would it never end, this evil day that had begun with such promise? Now here was Squanto dead and the house afire. He wrapped the bird in a handkerchief. “You were a good friend, Squanto,” he said. “You couldn't sing and you weren't much of a flier but I know in your heart you soared.” He put the shrouded body in a coat pocket and stamped ineffectually at the fire.

Headlights raked across the window. There came the sound of car doors slamming. Popper went to the window and wiped at the frost with his coat sleeve.

There in the yard was the Ford, lights ablaze, and Pharris White standing beside the taxicab. He was holding a flashlight on the old man. But could that be White? The fellow must have shed a hundred pounds. The Justice Department had certainly trimmed him down. At his former weight he would not have had the agility expected of a special agent, and there would be the risk too of his getting stuck in doorways and bathtubs, further cramping his efficiency, not to mention Mr. Hoover's chagrin at having to call out the fire department repeatedly to dislodge one of his men with hacksaws, wrecking bars, acetylene torches and grease.

Would the old man talk? He could hardly be expected to perjure himself for a stranger. Did it matter? It would be no feat for a man like Pharris White, with his legal training, to see a taxicab parked at a house and from it deduce or infer a passenger. Now the deputy sheriff was moving away from the Ford. No doubt he had been chosen for his knowledge of the terrain and for the blinding speed with which he could pinion a man's arms behind him. He was pointing and shouting. He had seen the fire, and Popper's face in the window. More shouts. White sprinted for the front porch, moving well, Popper noted, at the new weight. The deputy was circling around to the back.

The fire, still more or less local, was gathering itself for a general eruption. When the officers opened the two doors, front and rear, a draft of air swept through the house and the flames swirled up as in a turbine. Popper protected his face with the crook of one arm while using the other to flail away at the crumbling floor with his stick. He cleared a sizable hole, grabbed his bag and dropped through to the ground. In the ensuing confusion he crawled away from Hogandale, frantically brushing coals off his high-pile overcoat.

He made his way across the frozen surface of the Nasty River, here little more than a creek, its corruption locked up for the winter, and then up the slope of Puerco Mountain, the talus giving way under his feet. When he rested he lay spread-eagled on the earth like a man holding on for dear life to a flying ball. He could feel no Telluric Currents flowing into his body. The mountain was dead. Near the peak was the main shaft of the mine called Old Woman No. 2. Inside he found a cranny he liked. He scooped out a little grave for Squanto with a sharp rock. One day they would put him away like this, with dirt in his mouth. He ended the day on his knees, gasping for breath and smelling of burnt wool.

KUGGINS AND EPPS did not return from the war. Bates, Mapes and Maceo came back to the Temple to find the Master in his chair in the Red Room, much as they had left him. He looked much the same, except for his Poma. Corrosive fumes from the steel mills had eaten small holes in it and left it all but hairless.

Mr. Jimmerson had settled deeper into a life of contemplation. In the morning he read a page or two of Pletho and attended to the administrative duties of the Gnomon Society, a half hour's work at most, there being only four active Pillars left in the country. During the afternoon he dozed and dipped into old books. At night he revised his list of pallbearers again and again, and, with his love for fine print, reviewed his many insurance policies with the aid of a magnifying glass.

The Temple itself was in disarray. Maceo was shocked by the mess. The problem was that Mr. Jimmerson was now living alone in the big stone house.

Fanny had left him and taken little Jerome with her to Chicago. She was now following a career of her own in door-to-door sales of cosmetics. That is, she had started at that level, but in just two years had risen to become an executive vice-president of the company, and as such, commander of all the salesladies in the Great Lakes District. There was no divorce. Indeed, she was still fond of Lamar and she paid his property taxes and his utility bills, but she had her own work now and no longer wished to share his sessile life by the fireside.

Mr. Jimmerson looked on the separation as a temporary one, he having read in a newspaper article that women in mid-life often pulled such stunts as this. They became unbalanced from some female condition called “menopause” and took up such things as painting, spelling reform and politics. The condition soon passed and they came around. But Fanny didn't come around and she didn't come back, except for brief visits. In a short time the household staff was gone too. Mr. Jimmerson couldn't remember to pay them and they drifted off one by one.

Mapes and Maceo set about to put things right again. Mr. Bates, who was ailing, was not of much help. Maceo cleaned up the Temple and the grounds. He soon had the house back in efficient working order, with regular changes of towels and bed linen, and regular meals. His specialty was gravy. The four bachelors grew fat on it. They ate gravy on potatoes, gravy on rice, gravy on toast, gravy on biscuits, until their foreheads shone with grease. The big biscuits were broken into steaming halves with the fingers, then laid flat and slathered with gravy, then further divided into quadrants with a furious clacking of cutlery on the Temple china. And there was always plenty of dessert, for Maceo had been a cook on a submarine, where the men were plied with pies and ice cream as a bit of extra compensation for their hazardous duty.

Mapes had the harder task of reviving the Society. It seemed shameful that he and the Master should be as fat as pigs while the brotherhood languished. But what to do? Some strong restorative was needed. Was he the man for the job? He had doubts. Wasn't he more the faithful custodian of the flame than the great captain? Much as he disliked Popper, he knew that Popper would not hesitate to act—no, he would be pounding on the victim's chest with his fists and shouting to the nurses for more voltage and ever more powerful injections.

But that was Popper's way. His, Mapes's, way would be more in keeping with the dignity of the order. Slow, perhaps, and not very dramatic, but leading in the end to a healthy growth, as opposed to the pathological growth of the Popper years.