The Masters of Atlantis (19 page)

At the rear of the big room a boy in a short red jacket was sliding a wooden beam across the doors to the dining room. He was locking up. Luncheon was done.

Popper said, “It looks like a fellowship hour.”

“Where is the waterfall, Austin? Did we pass it?”

“It's down there in the woods somewhere. This is just what I was counting on, sir. We can meet with these fellows on an informal basis before you give your address.”

“Is that the falls I hear? I expected a different kind of noise. I never dreamed that Rainbow Falls would whir.”

“That's just some mixing machine at the bar, sir, a little cocktail engine of some kind. Here, let's make the most of our opportunity. Let's wake some of these old bozos up.”

Popper took the Master in tow and they went forth to mingle and ingratiate themselves. The first man they disturbed said, “Go back where you came from, fatty.” The next two were a bit more friendly, mistaking Mr. Jimmerson for the stage magician who was to perform at the banquet that night. Another one asked to know the name and address of his hatter.

Soon, however, his identity became known. This was the mystical old bird from Burnette who, not even a member of the bar, dared to run for public office. This was the turbulent old fellow from the north who wanted to shut down all the nursing homes and quarter all the old folks with their sons and daughters. The word spread and the lawyers began to mutter.

“What is he doing here?”

“Who invited him anyway?”

“I like his nerve!”

“The gall of some people!”

“What a crust!”

“What a getup!”

“He comes here in his nightgown and tarboosh!”

“The very idea!”

“Of all the nerve!”

“Take a look at the other guy!”

“I thought I had seen everything!”

“This is the limit!”

“This takes the ever-loving cake!”

They began to close in on Mr. Jimmerson and put questions to him in a legal tautolog that he could not follow. The questions became accusations and before long the courtroom gobblers were baiting him from all sides, with no one to gavel them down. The Busy Bees were swarming. Young ones darted in to poke the Master's belly and tug at his gown. Popper tried to answer them and fend them off. Mr. Jimmerson's head swam. He stood there scratching the backs of his hands and saying nothing.

The cross-flow of words became a torrent. It was a talking frenzy. The lawyers were seized, possessed, with a kind of glossolalia. Their speech was no longer voluntary or even addressed to anyone. They jabbered mindlessly into the air, their eyes half closed in a transport, and one man was so driven that he had stopped uttering words altogether and had taken to mooing and lowing and moving his feet up and down in the slow clog dance of a zombie.

Then there came the peal of a little silver bell from above and the hubbub subsided, trailing off through a low ululation to, finally, silence. The strange delirium was broken. A man in a dark suit and with receding waves of gray hair was standing at the rail of the mezzanine gallery. He struck his little bell again with a silver mallet. The lawyers looked up at him, their chief.

“Order,” he said. “Pray silence. Busy Bees, your attention, please. Thank you. Tipstaff? Will you wake those delegates on the couches? Will you clear the couches and make a thorough room check? Thank you. A clean sweep-down fore and aft, if you please. Turn them out, Tipstaff, prod their bottoms with your staff, and don't forget to check the canteen and the steam room for skulkers. While you're at it you might check the windows for peepers and sneaks who would learn our tricks. I hate to break up your naps, gentlemen, and your romp, but we have a full docket this afternoon and we really must turn to. It's time to put our brandies and panatelas aside and proceed to business. First, an announcement. A little surprise, or rather a big one. An unexpected guest. I have here at my side a distinguished U.S. Attorney. It is my privilege to know him personally. All of you know him by reputation. So, without further cackle, I give you, gentlemen, the prosecutor's prosecutor, that celebrated pit bull of the Justice Department—”

A pudgy little man stepped forward to the rail. He wore a seersucker suit. His hair was cut in a flat brush.

The lawyers gasped.

“White!”

“Those full cheeks! It's Bulldog White!”

“He's got White!”

“Order,” said the chief. “Yes, I have indeed got Pharris ‘Bulldog' White, and what is more, my brave advocates, I have persuaded him to read us his full trial notes and citations from
United States
v.
Omega Gypsum Co
.”

White held a fat book aloft and the lawyers cheered.

“And that's not all,” said the chief. “Bulldog has also very kindly consented to give us a report on loophole closing. Every year we are closing more and more, but, as we all know, there are still far too many human activities that can be carried on without the intercession of lawyers. Bulldog will give us the current rundown on that from Washington. Ludlow? Is Ludlow on the floor? Ah, Ludlow. It's short notice, I know, Ludlow, but I wonder if you would form up our glee club and give Bulldog a proper welcome.”

The man called Ludlow began to shout commands. Thirty or so of the lawyers scrambled about and arranged themselves into three curving ranks. Ludlow stood before them. He rotated a fist high above his head and the men burst forth with a greeting. “Glad to have you, Bulldog! So pleased that you could come!” Then Ludlow sounded a note on his pitchpipe and the men hummed, some of them leaning well into the note. Ludlow raised his arms and the men sang.

Go, go, go, go,

Go where e'er you please,

We're the bow'tied boys of the bar O!

And aren't we busy bees!

Hail then the

On they sang. Mr. Jimmerson was hungry, not to say weary, and things were moving too fast for him. His strength was failing. Where was the roast beef? Since breakfast at the break of day he had not seen so much as a celery stick. And how explain the behavior of these men? First they rail at him and now they seemed to be serenading him. This was what it was to leave home. These were the shocks to be met with outside the Temple. Would this music never cease?

The song had a good many stanzas. Pharris White stood at the rail, taking the tribute with a frozen smile. His gaze ranged over the scene below, then stopped and lingered on the fat man in the gown.
The Master of Gnomons!
That black man carrying boxes was his servant! And that fellow going for the door was—
Popper
!

“You there! Popper!”

Popper glanced back over his shoulder in the way of one who has heard a great rushing of wings, and for an instant the two men looked each other in the face. Even across that gulf and through the hairy clutter of disguise Pharris White knew his man.

“Stop him!”

“My file is no longer active, White!” shouted Popper.

“Your file will be active as long as I can draw a breath! Stop that man! That's not his natural hair! That's Austin Popper! I have a warrant for his arrest!”

But Popper was already through the doorway before anyone responded. He made for the woods and was crashing through the wet underbrush when the lawyers came storming out onto the veranda. There they stopped short, drawing back from the rain, and milled about, uncertain, awaiting guidance, while precious seconds were lost.

Pharris White appeared and they gathered about him expectantly, with most of them giving ready assent to the authority of this cherubic figure in seersucker.

The fleeing man, White explained to them, was one Austin Popper, a federal fugitive of many years' standing, once thought to be dead. He was an elusive fellow. He was not believed to be armed nor was he considered dangerous in the usual sense of that word. At the same time he was desperate and might well resist arrest with his fists, or, if one lay handy, a stick, or even by butting with his head. But they could be assured he was no bruiser. He was out there somewhere in a crouch but they need not fear his spring. As a runner he was probably no better than average for his age and weight. There was nothing in his record to suggest that either his speed or his endurance was in any way remarkable, and yet here again as a desperate man he might draw on hitherto untapped reserves. This man, the aforesaid Popper, affected an air of boldness. He was clever, though not a man of genuine learning. He lived by his wits. He sometimes traveled with a bird. For many years now he had been using writing paper taken from the Hotel Rollo in Rollo, Colorado. No one could say how much of that paper he had carried off. Of his women and his hobbies nothing was known. He held, or did hold at one time, a high position in the Gnomon Society, an ancient and secret order of global reach, with all that that implied, namely, unstinting aid from his brothers, curious winks and hand signs, a code of blood vengeance, access to great wealth, access to dark knowledge, knowledge that was not always fairly shared with deserving Neophytes of the order. These were a few things to keep in mind.

So much for the man himself. Now to the pursuit plan. It seemed to him, Pharris White, that a long line of beaters sweeping across the park would best meet the situation. They would drive Popper. Feints and stalking maneuvers and circling ploys all had their place, of course, but there came a time when you must engage your enemy directly and whip him in the field, and this, or so it seemed to him, was just such a time. He only regretted that they could not hunt him down with torches and dogs. Their sweep would converge on the rock dome known as the Devil's Pincushion, and there Popper would be taken. Then at last this man could be put away and given plenty of time in solitary confinement to gnaw on his knuckles, to think over his crimes and expiate them in cold darkness. Were there any questions? Suggestions? Had they understood his presentation and could he take it that they were in substantial agreement on all the main points?

It was a fairly long speech, given the urgent nature of the occasion, and there was further delay as the lawyers bustled about looking for sticks. Some of the men, a sizable minority, refused to take part in the manhunt, giving as their reasons advanced age, bad weather, compromised dignity, allergies, dependent children, obesity, fear of biting insects, potential mental anguish, pain and suffering and loss of consortium, unsuitable shoes, low-back pain, weak eyes, hammer toes and religious scruples, but there remained many willing hands and Pharris White soon had them deployed in a long skirmish line.

He stood at the center and a bit forward, facing them, the captain of a kickoff team. “Guide on me!” he shouted, to the left and then to the right. “Guide on my baton! Keep your dress and watch your interval! Now! Let's beat! Let's drive!”

He lowered his stick and the men moved out, flailing away at the spring greenery. Their blood was up again.

But there are many holes in the earth, not all of them scrabbled out with claws or tools of iron, and Popper had found himself a burrow long before that drive began. He sat dripping and panting in the dark hollow place behind Rainbow Falls. Far into the night he sat there in that spherical chamber behind a curtain of falling water. He considered leaving his hat floating suggestively in the pool below, then decided that Pharris White would not be so easily taken in. From time to time he dabbed at his hands with a handkerchief. Wet mud wasn't so bad, but dried mud, cracking with the flex of his hand, and tiny clods dangling from his finger hairs, that was not to be endured.

THERE FOLLOWED another long Gnomonic stasis. Twelve years passed before Mr. Jimmerson made another excursion. He was a pallbearer at the graveside service for Mr. Bates and he went to the doctor now and then but it was a rare day when he set foot outside his limestone sanctuary on Bulmer Avenue. He shunned the light of day and did not leave town again for some twelve years.

No other private residence was left on the street, now cast in cold shadow by the expressway that ran overhead. Standing forsaken, the Gnomon Temple rose up between two parts of the divided highway, within the acute angle of an important interchange, and it sometimes happened that a startled motorist made eye contact with Maceo as he stood before one of the broken windows upstairs, just a few feet away from the streaming traffic.

Directly behind the Temple there was now located a maintenance yard for the city's dump trucks and garbage trucks. This was not the nuisance it might have been because the hammering and clanging that went on inside the yard could not be heard over the traffic roar on the freeway, which was constant, except during the period between 3 and 4 a.m., when there was a slight falling off. Still, in the summer, there was a problem with dust from the yard.

Things had changed out front too. Bulmer Avenue lay in eternal gloom amid a colonnade of pilings, and had become a loitering place for vagrants, petty criminals and youth gangs. When the boys burned tires in the street, the smoke rolled down the corridors of the Temple and stung Mr. Jimmerson's eyes and blackened his nostrils. Tramps came to the door and asked about supper, taking the big house for a rescue mission. There were younger, daring tramps who in winter would lay a plank from one of the freeway pillars to an upstairs dormer window of the Temple, then crawl across it and bed down inside with the pigeons. They left behind them their names written on the walls, their poems, curses and drawings. On the floor they left a mess of wine bottles and newspaper bedding and foul droppings for Maceo and Ed to clean up.

At that, they were less trouble than the paying guests, now long gone, to Mr. Jimmerson's great delight, along with Miss Hine, her innovations and her endless complaints about the sour air in the house. What a time that had been. The vexations! The interruptions! The questions! His answers!
Yes. Yes. What? No
. What a trial for a man engaged in the fine labor of speculative thought. Ed was still here but all the others were gone now, and, with two or three haunting exceptions, their faces forgotten.