The Masters of Atlantis (14 page)

“What do you want? Who are you?”

“My name is Pletho Pappus. I come to speak of clotted bulls' blood and of a white heifer that has never known the yoke.”

“How very interesting.”

“My card.”

“Pletho Pappus is long dead.”

“Presumed dead. It suited me to lie low for a season.”

“How very interesting.”

“It is near the time when I shall make many things clear. Would you like to know why our Gnomon Society is not prospering? Let me tell you, sir. It's because there are too many backbiters, cankerworms and cheesehoppers in positions of authority. These people must go.”

“I think you're talking absolute bloody nonsense.”

“My card.”

Kinlow took the card and read it. There was an address in a lower corner, and in the center these words:

“This says T. Pappas. It's not even spelled the same way.”

“A ruse. Theodore.”

“So? A printed card. Your name is Pappas. London is full of Greeks and I daresay many of them are named Pappas. If you truly are from Greece. I rather suspect Dublin. By way of Hyde Park.”

“Will you be good enough to present my card to Sir Sydney?”

“Sir Sydney is out. He's engaged elsewhere. He's not buying any rugs just now.”

“When will he be free?”

“I don't know. His calendar is quite full.”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Perhaps I should wait here.”

“No, that won't do.”

“No trouble at all, I assure you.”

“It's not on, my friend.”

“Quite all right, I don't mind waiting.”

“Very well. Look here. Sir Sydney is lunching at his club tomorrow. Be there on the pavement at one sharp and he will give you three minutes to state your business.”

“Wonderful. One, you say? That will suit my convenience too. Now as to the etiquette. Even as a child I was a stickler for form. What's the drill? Are there some things I should know? May one, for example, contradict Sir Sydney on small matters?”

“No, one may not. You may not dispute his lightest remark. Remove your hat as you approach him and keep your eyes well cast down. No handshaking and no sudden movements in his presence. Speak only when spoken to and then briefly and to the point. And no need to bring along any of your Eastern titbits. Now off you go, chopchop, there's a good fellow.”

But the old man stood his ground and placed his hand over the doorknob when Kinlow reached for it. His mustaches began to undulate with what seemed to be a life of their own. Neither dark nor bushy, there was nothing of the Aegean about them. The two growths were set far apart and twisted into thin strands, so that the effect was of insect feelers or catfish barbels. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his woolen necktie. “Here, would you care to look through my spectacles while I do out my eyes? Would you like to see how the world appears to Pletho Pappus?”

“No.”

“It's not the phantasmagoria you might expect. It's not at all what you might expect. Won't you have a go?”

“No.”

“The offer is not an idle one. I think you will be pleased.”

“Get out of my way, you brute.”

“Well, I mustn't keep you. Until tomorrow then, at one. Yes, the November Club, an excellent idea.” He rubbed his belly with the flat of his hand and rotated his jaw about in ponderous chewing movements. “A bite of lunch and then some talk. Nothing fancy for me, thanks, a cold bird will do, with a bit of cabbage and some green onions. I can't remember when I last had green onions. With a drop of something along the way.” He threw his head back and raised his fist to his mouth in a drinking arc, with thumb and little finger extended. “Then some serious talk. Blazing words, in such combinations as Sydney Hen has not heard before. Until tomorrow, then. A very good day to you, sir.”

The next day at one Sir Sydney was a long way from his club. He was at sea having his lunch on board a Mexican sugar boat called
La Gitana
, the only transatlantic vessel on which passage for three could be found at such short notice. It was a comfortable ship. The weather was good. Babette, like most wives, handled adversity better than her husband, and she was determined to make a pleasant voyage of it, despite the lack of such amenities as a swimming pool, deck chairs and midmorning bouillon. The
Gitana
had a jolly master, Captain Goma y Goma, and a jolly crew. Each night after supper the off-watch gathered in the lounge under the bridge to hear Babette perform at the upright piano. Her milk-white fingers flashed over the yellow keys, true ivory, and she sang famous arias, after which there was a less formal session, a sing-along, with free beer, courtesy of the Señora. The party went on far into the night, with the men singing the ballads and dancing the dances of their native lands.

Hen took no part in it. He sulked and took to sighing again. He kept mostly to his cabin, but now and again appeared on deck, making his way forward to the prow, where he would strike a pose with his cape streaming behind him. He stood there at the very apex with his hands braced against the converging sides and his head thrust forward and cleaving the wind like a figurehead. He mused on the throne of Atlantis, and the crowned skulls of the ten princes, utterly lost in the mud many fathoms beneath his feet. He felt his isolation. He felt the great weight of being a living monument of Atlantis, indeed its only monument. Jimmerson and his crowd hardly counted.

The ship was three or four days out when Kinlow remembered to tell Hen about the old man with thick glasses. Hen, who was not very attentive to the spoken word, didn't take in the account the first time around. Listening closely to other people, he found, and particularly to Kinlow, hardly ever repaid the effort. The name Pletho did, however, register with him at some level, and later in the day he asked to hear again about the old man.

Kinlow made an amusing anecdote of it, only slightly distorting the facts. He told how he had been accosted by this false Pletho with a dwarf's wedgelike head and holes in his socks, and of how the man had been impertinent in seeking an audience. The old fellow made outrageous claims and obscure remarks, whereupon Kinlow cut short the blather and sent him packing, end of story.

Hen thought it over. He had a sleepless night. At breakfast in the morning he demanded a more detailed report. He wanted a full description of the man and he wanted to know his exact words. After this was given, he questioned Kinlow closely.

“I want to see that man's business card. Where is it?”

“I threw it away.”

“What was the address on it?”

“I don't remember.”

“What amulet or ring did he wear?”

“None, that I could see.”

“Did he have—great personal charm?”

“He had no charm.”

“What did you make of his eyes? What impression did you get from his eyes?”

“An impression of pinkness and of welling moisture.”

“What evidence did he give in support of his charge that the Gnomon Society was infested with cheesehoppers?”

“He gave no evidence at all.”

“Just the bald accusation?”

“Nothing more.”

“Did you inspect his boots?”

“I inspected his socks.”

“Was he wearing a surgical boot on one foot? A heavily built-up shoe on either of his feet?”

“I didn't inspect his boots. I can only say that they must have been dark and shabby, in keeping with the rest of his togs.”

“It did not occur to you that the man may very well have been who he said he was? Pletho, in his sly mode?”

“Frankly it did not, no, sir.”

“Or very possibly the Lame One?”

“No, sir.”

“He may well have a younger brother, Teddy Pappus, for all we know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you refused, repeatedly, to look through his glasses?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hen dismissed Kinlow. All day long he paced the forward deck in thought. He walked back and forth in the rain, with a point of light, a bit of St. Elmo's fire, playing about on the brass button atop his Poma. That night he summoned Kinlow to his cabin and had him relate yet again the account of the old man in the doorway. Kinlow appeared in his dancing pumps. He had grown tired of this grilling and was annoyed at being called away from the party in the lounge. Babette's opera selections were so much yowling to him, but that business was over now and the real fun had started. He put his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes in exasperation and rattled off the story again in a singsong manner. Then he whirled about to go.

Hen stopped him with a clap of his hands. “None of your pirouettes in here, sir! Don't turn your back on me! Be seated! This instant!”

Kinlow did as he was told.

Hen said, “You take far too much on yourself, Noel. Do you have any idea of what you've done to me? No, of course not. Thanks to you, I am a forgotten man. I am all but ruined, thanks to your Pyramid of Silence. And now in your brash ignorance you have turned away from my door the one man who—”

“Really, sir.”

“Don't interrupt me. The one out of all others—”

“That sod? You can't be serious. I mean to say, really now.”

“Not another word. Listen to me. Did the bulls' blood mean nothing to you? Think, man. The burnt bullocks of Poseidon. That was the sign. A child would have seen it. Pletho Pappus, I tell you, was at my very doorstep and you send him away like a beggar.”

“You didn't see this man, sir. You didn't see his ears. You didn't smell him.”

“What then, do you expect Pletho to appear before us in a cloud of fragrance? We know nothing of his current situation, what access he may have, if any, to a lavatory. His standards of personal hygiene may not be ours. He's an extraordinary man, I grant you, but he's only a man and this is just the sort of playful approach he would take. His little effects. The genuine Pletho touch. His pungent mode. He would hardly feel obliged to sponge down for the likes of you. I should have known him at once, fresh or foul. Oh, you make me sick. I can't bear the sight of you. Get out. Go to your cabin and remain there. No more fandangos for you, sir. Hand over those castanets!”

Kinlow brazenly defied the order and continued to move freely about the ship and to carouse nightly in the lounge. Hen went to Captain Gomay Goma and demanded that Kinlow be shut away under guard for the rest of the voyage. The captain temporized, not being clear on just what the offense was, and in the end he had Kinlow take his meals in the galley with the cook so that Hen would not have to look at him across the table.

Hen set off another stir late one night. He woke suddenly from a vivid dream and sounded the fire alarm, turning out the crew. It had come to him in the dream that Pletho, who could lower his respiration rate to that of a toad, had stowed away in the baggage. Nothing would do but an immediate search. All nine trunks had to be brought to his room and emptied, the clothing heaped on the floor. When this was done, with no result, Hen went about rapping on the panels, in the way of a conscientious volunteer examining a magician's trunk. But no hidden compartment was found and no dormant Pletho.

By the time the
Gitana
docked at Veracruz neither Kinlow nor Babette was speaking to Hen. Babette had made the mistake of trying to cheer up her husband. She went to him one afternoon, at the bow, with a surprise gift she had been holding back until the proper moment. It was an English rose cutting in a can of English earth—just the thing, she thought, to lift his spirits. But he saw the gesture as a taunt and he took the can and flung it into the ocean. Babette slapped his face and got rouge on her hand. He pushed her away.

Such bitter feeling led to a separation, with Babette stopping over in Veracruz for an indefinite stay. The accommodating Captain Goma y Goma made the necessary arrangements and personally saw to her comfort. Kinlow stayed too, in a small room adjoining Babette's refrigerated suite atop the Hotel Fénix. In the early morning he could hear the scrape of her coat hangers on a pipe as she selected her outfit for the day. They shared a balcony, where they took their breakfast together, with the harbor panorama all before them, and the marching naval cadets, and from which height Kinlow dropped orange peelings and worthless coins onto the heads of the sidewalk people some eighty feet below.

“Please yourself,” said Hen to his two bedfellows, and he traveled on by train and bus to Cuernavaca, alone with his thoughts. He wondered if the gardener had cut back the oleander and the bougainvillea. He wondered if the maids had strangled his little dog. Of all the mysteries of Gnomonism, and there were many, none was so baffling to him as the mystery of how Pletho Pappus had gone about choosing Lamar Jimmerson and Noel Kinlow as the two men on the planet to whom he would show himself.

MAPES HAD made no measurable gains for the Society. The Veterans Administration, having looked over his prospectus and the
Codex Pappus
and the various works of Mr. Jimmerson, rejected without comment the Society's application to have Gnomonism accredited as a course of study for veterans—which meant no government money by way of the GI Bill. Diplomacy too proved to be a blind alley. Mapes's delicately composed letters to Sir Sydney Hen went unanswered, thereby stalling the Jimmerson-Hen understanding.

It all came to nothing, then, three years of hard work, or rather less than nothing, as the Society in Mapes's hands had actually lost ground. At the close of his stewardship there remained only two dues-paying Pillars left in the country, outside Burnette. One was in Naples, Florida, under the direction of a baker named Scales, and the other was Mr. Morehead Moaler's group in La Coma, Texas, just outside Brownsville.