Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

  Mr. Thomas was watching The Siren through his telescope. Finally, having received a signal that their sails were set, he gave the order to hoist sail on The Great White. Surprisingly enough we were able to carry out the order with no difficulty, the effect of hashish being such that one can shift easily from one activity to another. Kelley gave the same order in an unknown tongue to the dancing boys, who now acted in a seamanlike manner—some naked, some with scarfs twisted around their hips—as they went about their duties singing strange songs. So sails were speedily set and we got under way, for where I did not know.

  * * *

  Some of the boys have hammocks and sleep on deck, but we are often two to a bunk in the forecastle. Since we now have a double crew, there is much time with nothing to do, and I have been able to acquaint myself to some extent with the strange history of these transvestite boys.

  Some of them are dancing boys from Morocco, others from Tripoli, Madagascar, and Central Africa. There are a few from India and the East Indies who have served on pirate vessels in the Red Sea, where they preyed on merchant vessels and other pirates alike, the method of operation being this: some would join the crew of a ship, selling their favors and insinuating themselves into key positions. Then the crew sights an apparently unarmed vessel carrying a cargo of beautiful women all singing and dancing lewdly and promising the mariners their bodies. Once on board the “women” pull out hidden pistols and cutlasses, while their accomplices on shipboard do the same, and The Siren now uncovers its cannons—so that the ship would often be taken without the loss of a single life. Often the boys would sign on as cooks—at which trade they all excel—and then drug the entire crew. However, word of their operations spread rapidly and they are now fleeing from pirates and naval patrols alike, having as the French say, brûlé—burnt down—the Red Sea area.

  * * *

  Kelley told me his story. He started his career as a merchant seaman. In the course of an argument he killed the quartermaster, for which he was tried and sentenced to hang. His ship at that time was in the harbor of Tangier. The sentence was carried out in the marketplace, but some pirates who were present cut him down, carried him to their ship, and revived him. It was thought that a man who had been hanged and brought back to life would not only bring luck to their venture but also ensure protection against the fate from which he had been rescued. While he was still insensible the pirates rubbed red ink into the hemp marks, so that he seemed to have a red rope always around his neck.

  The pirate ship was commanded by Skipper Nordenholz, a renegade from the Dutch Navy who was still able to pass his ship as an honest merchant vessel flying the Dutch flag. Strobe was second in command. Barely had they left Tangier headed for the Red Sea via the Cape of Good Hope when a mutiny broke out. The crew was in disagreement as to the destination, being minded to head for the West Indies. They had also conceived a contempt for Strobe as an effeminate dandy. After he had killed five of the ringleaders they were forced to revise this opinion. The mutinous crew was then put ashore and a crew of acrobats and dancing boys taken on, since Nordenholz had already devised a way in which they could be put to use.

  Kelley claims to have learned the secrets of death on the gallows, which gives him invincible skill as a swordsman and such sexual prowess that no man or woman can resist him, with the exception of Captain Strobe, whom he regards as more than human. “Voici ma lettre de marque,” he says, running his fingers along the rope mark. (A letter of marque was issued to privateers by their government, authorizing them to prey on enemy vessels in the capacity of accredited combatants, and thus distinguishing them from common pirates. Such a letter often, but by no means always, saved the bearer from the gallows.) Kelley tells me that the mere sight of his hemp marks instills in adversaries a weakness and terror equal to the apparition of Death Himself.

  I asked Kelley what it feels like to be hanged.

  “At first I was sensible of very great pain due to the weight of my body and felt my spirits in a strange commotion violently pressed upwards. After they reached my head, I saw a bright blaze of light which seemed to go out at my eyes with a flash. Then I lost all sense of pain. But after I was cut down, I felt such intolerable pain from the prickings and shootings as my blood and spirits returned that I wished those who cut me down could have been hanged.”*

  * * *

  The reader may question how I find time to write this account on a sea voyage in a crowded forecastle. The answer is that I made very short notes each day, with the intent of expanding them later. I now have two hours of leisure each day to reconstruct a narrative from these notes, since Strobe has placed a desk and writing material at my disposal, being interested for some reason in printing my account.

  * * *

  Each evening all the boys strip and wash in buckets of salt water, whereupon various sexual games and contests take place. In one such game each boy places a gold piece on the deck, and the first to ejaculate wins the gold. There are also contests for distance.

  Since there is plenty of powder and shot on board, there have been a few contests with pistols and muskets. I have won some gold, being careful not to best Kelley, though I am sure I could have done so. I feel that he could prove a most dangerous enemy. There is much here that I do not understand.

  ARE YOU IN SALT

  Back in New York I call the Greens from my loft. I’ve put $5,000 worth of security into this space. The windows are shatterproof glass with rolling bars. The door is two inches of solid steel from an old bank vault. It gives you a safe feeling, like being in Switzerland.

  Mr. Green can see me right away. He gives an address on Spring Street. Middle-class loft … big modern kitchen … Siamese cat … plants. Mrs. Green is a beautiful woman, red hair, green eyes, a faraway dreamy look. I notice Journeys out of the Body, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, the Castaneda books. Mr. Green mixes me a Chivas Regal.

  I clarify my position.… “Private investigator … no authority to make an arrest … I can only pass evidence along to the local police.… Frankly, in this case I can’t hold out much hope of obtaining an arrest, let alone a conviction.”

  “We still want to retain you.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  “We want to know the truth,” said Mrs. Green. “Whether the killers can be brought to trial or not.”

  I pull out the questionnaire with Jerry’s medical history. “It says here that Jerry had scarlet fever at the age of four.”

  “Yes. We were living in Saint Louis at the time,” said Mrs. Green.

  “Who was the doctor?”

  “Old Doctor Greenbaum. He lived next door.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, he died ten years ago.”

  “And he made the diagnosis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say that he was a competent diagnostician?”

  “Not really,” said Mr. Green. “But why is this important?”

  “Jerry apparently had an attack of scarlet fever or something similar shortly before he was killed.” I turned to Mrs. Green. “Do you remember the details? How the illness started?”

  “Why, yes. It was a Thursday and he had taken a ride with an English governess we had then. When he got back he was shivering and feverish and he had a rash. I thought it was measles and called Doctor Greenbaum. He said it wasn’t a measles rash, that it was probably a light case of scarlet fever. He prescribed Aureomycin and the fever went away in a few days.”

  “Was Jerry delirious at any time during this illness?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact he was. He seemed quite frightened and talked about ‘animals in the wall.’”

  “Do you remember what animals, Mrs. Green?”

  “He mentioned a giraffe and a kangaroo.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “… Yes,” she said after a pause. “There was a strange smell in the room … sort of a musky smell … like a zoo.”

  “Did Doctor Greenbaum
comment on this odor?”

  “No, I think he had a cold at the time.”

  “Did you notice it, Mr. Green?”

  “Well, yes, it was on the sheets and blankets when we sent them to the cleaners.… Exactly how was Jerry killed, Mr. Snide?”

  “A massive overdose of heroin.”

  “He wasn’t—”

  “No, he wasn’t an addict, and the Greek police are convinced the heroin was not self-administered.”

  “Do you have any idea why he would have been murdered?”

  “I’m not at all sure, Mr. Green. It could have been a case of mistaken identity.”

  * * *

  When I got to the office the next day my assistant, Jim Brady, was already there, having come straight from the airport. He is very slim, six feet, 135 pounds, black Irish. Actually he is twenty-eight but he looks eighteen, and often has to show his I.D. card to be served in a bar. He handed me a packet from Athens: a photograph, and a message from Dimitri typed on yellow paper in telegraph style:

  HAVE FOUND VILLA WHERE JERRY GREEN WAS KILLED STOP ON MAINLAND FORTY MILES FROM ATHENS STOP HEAD STILL MISSING STOP VILLA RENTED THROUGH LONDON TRAVEL AGENCY STOP FALSE NAMES STOP

  DIMITRI

  The photo showed a bare high-ceiling room with exposed beams. There was a heavy iron lantern-hook in one beam. Dimitri had circled this hook in white ink and had written under it: “Traces of rope fiber.”

  “A Mr. Everson called,” said Jim. “His son is missing. I made an appointment.”

  “Where is he missing?”

  “In Mexico. A Mayan archaeologist. Missing six weeks. I sent Mr. Everson the questionnaire and asked him for pictures of the boy.”

  “Good.” I had no special feeling about this case, but it was taking me in the direction I wanted to go.

  * * *

  Back at the loft we decide to try some sex magic. According to psychic dogma, sex itself is incidental and should be subordinated to the intent of the ritual. But I don’t believe in rules. What happens, happens.

  The altar is set up for an Egyptian rite timed for sunset, which is in ten minutes. It is a slab of white marble about three feet square. We mark out the cardinal points. A hyacinth in a pot for earth: North. A red candle for fire: South. An alabaster bowl of water for water: East. A glyph in gold on white parchment for air: West. We then put up the glyphs for the rite, in gold on white parchment, on the west wall, since this is the sundown rite and we are facing west. Also we place on the altar a bowl of water, a bowl of milk, an incense burner, some rose essence, and a sprig of mint.

  All set, we strip down to sky clothes and we are both stiff before we can get our clothes off. I pick up an ivory wand and draw a circle around our bodies while we both intone translations of the rite, reading from the glyphs on the wall.

  “Let the Shining Ones not have power over me.” Jim reads it like the Catholic litany and we are both laughing.

  “I have purified myself.”

  We dip water from the bowl and touch our foreheads.

  “I have anointed myself with unguents.”

  We dip the special ointment out of an alabaster jar, touching foreheads, insides of the wrists, and the base of the spine, since the rite will have a sexual climax.

  “I bring to you perfume and incense.”

  We add more incense, a few drops of rose oil, and a pinch of benzoin to the burner.

  We pay homage to the four cardinal points as we invoke Set instead of Khentamentiu, since this is in some sense a black ritual. It is now exactly the hour of sunset, and we pay homage to Tem, since Ra, in his setting, takes that name. We make lustrations with water and milk to the cardinal points, dipping a mint sprig into the bowls as we invoke the shining elementals. It is time now for the ritual climax, in which the gods possess our bodies and the magical intention is projected in the moment of orgasm and visualized as an outpouring of liquid gold.

  “My phallus is that of Amsu.”

  I bend over and Jim rubs the ointment up my ass and slides his cock in. A roaring sound in my ears as pictures and tapes swirl in my brain. Shadowy figures rise beyond the candlelight: the goddess Ix Tab, patroness of those who hang themselves … a vista of gallows and burning cities from Bosch … Set … Osiris … smell of the sea … Jerry hanging naked from the beam. A sweet rotten red musky metal smell swirls round our bodies palpable as a haze, and as I start to ejaculate, the room gets lighter. At first I think the candles have flared up and then I see Jerry standing there naked, his body radiating light. There is a skeleton grin on his face, which fades to the enigmatic smile on the statues of archaic Greek youths and then he changes into Dimitri, with a quizzical amused expression.

  So we send the Shining Ones home and go to bed.

  * * *

  “Why do you think the head was cut off?” asks Jim.

  “Obvious reason: to obscure the cause of death in case the body was found. But they didn’t figure on the body being found. There was some special purpose they had in mind, to use both the head and the body.” Drawings of transplanted monkey heads flash in front of my eyes.

  “Where do you think the head is now?”

  “In New York.”

  HORSE HATTOCK TO RIDE TO RIDE

  Next day when we got to the office there was a telegram from Dimitri:

  HAVE SUSPECT IN CUSTODY WHO WITNESSED DEATH OF JERRY GREEN STOP WIRE IF WISH TO INTERVIEW SUSPECT

  We took the next plane to Athens and checked into the Hilton. Dimitri sent a car for us.

  Jim was a bit stiff when they shook hands in Dimitri’s air-conditioned office … wall-to-wall blue carpet, a desk, leather-covered chairs, a picture of the Parthenon on the wall, everything neat and impersonal as a room in the Hilton.

  Dimitri raised one eyebrow. “I infer you disapprove of our politics, Mr. Brady. For myself I disapprove of any politics. Please understand that I stand to gain nothing from this investigation. My political superiors want the whole thing dropped … a few degenerate foreigners … it’s bad for the tourist business.”

  Jim blushed sulkily and looked at his shoes and turned one foot sideways.

  “What about this witness you got?” I asked.

  Dimitri leaned back in his chair behind the desk and put the tips of his fingers together. “Ah yes—Adam North, the perfect witness. Survived his perfection because he was in custody. On the morning that the Green boy was killed, September eighteenth, young North was arrested with a quarter-ounce of heroin in his possession. When I saw the laboratory report I ordered him placed in isolation. The heroin he had been buying from street pushers was about ten percent. This was almost one hundred percent. It would have killed him in a matter of seconds.”

  “Well, if they would kill him to shut him up about something, why let him know about it in the first place?” Jim asked.

  “A searching question. You see, he was a sort of camera from which a film could be withdrawn and developed. But first the bare bones, later the meat. Adam North had been approached by someone fitting”—Dimitri glanced at me—“your description of Marty Blum, and offered a quarter-ounce of heroin plus a thousand-dollar bonus to be paid in two installments to witness a magical ritual involving a simulated execution. He was suspicious.”

  Dimitri turned on a tape recorder. “Why me?” said a stupid, surly young voice. It went on.

  “So this character from a comic strip says I am a perfect. ‘A perfect what?’ I ask him. ‘A perfect witness,’ he tells me. He has five C-notes in his hand. ‘Well, all right,’ I say. ‘But there is a condition,’ he says. ‘You must promise to refrain from heroin or any other drug for three days prior to the ceremony. You have to be in a pure condition.’ ‘Promise on my scout’s honor,’ I told him and he lays the bread on me. ‘But one more thing,’ he says. He gives me a color picture of a kid with red hair who looks sorta like me. ‘This is the subject. You will concentrate on this picture for the next three days.’ So I tell him ‘Sure’ and split. And would you believe it, with
five hundred cools in my pocket I can’t score for shit nowhere no way. So when the chauffeur comes to pick me up in a Daimler I am sick as a dog.”

  Dimitri shut off the tape recorder. “He was driven to a villa outside of Athens where he witnessed a bizarre ceremony culminating in the hanging of the Green boy. Back in Athens he was given the quarter-ounce of heroin. He was on his way back to his girl friend’s apartment when the arrest was made.”

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” Jim said. “They drag him in as a witness, God knows why, then knock him off to shut him up.”

  “They did not intend to shut him up. They intended to open him and extract the film. Adam North was a perfect witness. He is Jerry’s age, born on the same day, and resembles him enough to be a twin brother. You are acquainted with the symptoms of heroin withdrawal … the painful intensity of impressions, light fever, spontaneous orgasms … a sensitized film. And a heroin overdose is the easiest of deaths, so the pictures registered on the sensitized withdrawal film come off without distortion in a heroin O.D.”

  “I see,” said Jim.

  “It’s all here on the tape, but I think you would like to see this boy. He is, I should tell you, retarded.”

  * * *

  As we were going down in the elevator, Dimitri continued. “There is reason to suspect a latent psychosis, masked by his addiction.”

  “Is he receiving any medication?” I asked.

  “Yes—methadone, orally. I don’t want his disorder to surface here.”

  “You mean he could become a public charge?” I asked.

  “More than that—he could become a sanitary hazard.”

  We saw Adam North in one of the interrogation rooms, under fluorescent lights. A table, a tape recorder, four chairs. He was a handsome blond kid with green eyes. The resemblance to Jerry was remarkable. However, while Jerry was described as very bright and quick, this boy had a slack, vacuous, stupid look about him, sleepy and sullen like a lizard resentfully aroused from hibernation. Dimitri explained that we were investigators hired by Jerry’s family, and we had a few questions. The boy looked down at the table in front of him and said nothing.