The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  This caused the whole group to laugh, except for Ziparelli. “Give me that.” He grabbed for the box. “My friend does not need robbers!”

  The Georgian raised a mocking finger. “Why not?” he asked in broken English. “You get part of the profits. Remember, we are partners.”

  With conspiratorial smiles, the other Georgians crowded close. “You like this?” One of them held up a brass belt buckle. “From Afghanistan,” he said with a heavy accent. “From dead Russian. Cheap! Just one hundred dollars!” There was a sense of challenge in his offer. I backed away with a smile, reaching instinctively for my wallet and looking to Lancaster for support. But he had disappeared. “Where’s your friend?” I asked Ziparelli. “Where the hell did he go?”

  Lancaster had made an extraordinary exit. He was nowhere to be seen. “My friends!” Ziparelli cried, waving the buckle away. “Mr. Murphy and I have business. Arrivederci!”

  Ignoring their jibes, we walked off briskly across the square, agreed to have a drink at a new restaurant he’d found, and hailed a taxi on the Okhotny Riad. But as we settled into the cab, I had an inspiration. If Ryzhkov’s admonitions, the voice in his necromanteion, and Lancaster’s appearance comprised a set of coincidences that signaled a turn in my search for Shivas Irons, more signs might be catalyzed by the right intersection of spiritual forces. I knew such a meeting place—the apartment of Djuna Davitashvilli. Promising Ziparelli that Djuna would understand his theories about the fourth dimension and give him tips about his golf from her unique perspective, I redirected our taxi.

  Moscow’s Arbat, which was a marketplace before the Revolution, was restored to much of its original charm in the 1980s. Surfaced with cobblestones and lined with lampposts reminiscent of its early history, it runs for several blocks between two- and three-story buildings with their pre-Revolutionary facades intact. Closed to motor vehicles, it had become a principal Moscow arena of glasnost and capitalist entrepreneurship, filled with small vendors of kitsch, wandering entertainers, and orators supporting various social and political causes. It was so crowded on this balmy night, that I had trouble recognizing the side street that led to Djuna’s apartment. At about ten o’clock, we rang at her door.

  We were greeted by a tough-looking middle-aged woman with henna-reddened hair and a cigarette hanging from her lips. I introduced myself as Djuna’s writer friend from America and, after motioning Ziparelli to stand aside, whispered that he was very rich. The woman looked me up and down, drew deeply on her cigarette, and flicked its ashes onto the street. “How rich?” she whispered with a barely perceptible sneer, making sure he didn’t hear us. And why was it important that Djuna meet him?

  There were certain code words among Djuna’s entourage. I said that for several decades Ziparelli had been a friend of Salvador Dalí.

  “Hmm,” she answered, taking another drag on her cigarette. “Dalí? Wait.”

  Leaving the door ajar, she disappeared up the flight of stairs to the main floor of the apartment. While we waited in the street, I told Ziparelli about Djuna’s reported ministrations to Brezhnev in the early 1980s and to Yeltsin in recent months. Hearing this, he adjusted the cuffs of his black shirt, straightened his silver tie, and tugged at the collars of his stylish grey jacket. “The son of Yasser Arafat?” he asked as I listed some of the celebrities I’d seen here on previous visits. “You saw him in this place?”

  “A friend did. But I met the ambassador from Iraq.”

  The lady sauntered down the stairs. “Djuna is busy,” she said with affected casualness. “You will have to wait. Bring your friend up.”

  Inside, two men who appeared to be guards looked us over as we passed, and another inspected us at the top of the stairs. The woman ushered us into the apartment’s main room and suggested we get drinks at Djuna’s well-stocked bar. I poured Ziparelli a cognac, myself a glass of vodka straight, and we stood watching three men and two women gathered around the television set. They were Hungarians, I guessed, and were absorbed in a soccer game. None of them turned to see us.

  “That’s how people pay her.” I nodded toward a wall that was covered with icons. “A few of them were made in the fifteenth century.”

  Ziparelli gave a low whistle. “It is good she has guards,” he whispered. “That is a dangerous collection to have. It is priceless.” One of the women, about forty years old and dressed in a white sheath that showed off her broad-shouldered, full-breasted figure, appraised us coolly, then turned back to the soccer game. “Zsa Zsa Gabor,” said Ziparelli, rolling his eyes in mock admiration.

  Then I heard a commotion, and Djuna’s commanding low voice. Accompanied by one of the guards from downstairs, she stood motionless as everyone turned to greet her. A white blouse accentuated her dark complexion, tight black pants dramatized her well-formed rear end, and golden, high-heeled sandals gave her a height to match every man in the room. Her black hair was drawn back, and her dark, slightly upturned eyes shone brightly. After glancing at Ziparelli and me, she greeted the others. Every one of them seemed flattered—especially the woman in the white sheath, who seemed barely able to contain herself. But Djuna didn’t turn toward us. Was she irritated by my coming without invitation, or simply intent to show us that she wasn’t excited at all by Ziparelli’s wealth and friendship with Salvador Dalí? With a shrug, Ziparelli led me back to the bar, and both of us refilled our glasses.

  Five minutes later, she finally approached us, summoning the woman with tinted red hair. “She is glad to see you,” said the woman, who would be our interpreter. “But she wants to apologize. She is too tired tonight to speak English.”

  I introduced Ziparelli, who took Djuna’s hand with a flourish and kissed it. “And you are a painter?” asked the interpreter. “A cousin of Salvador Dalí?”

  “Yes, I paint!” he said without hesitation. “I paint with my inner eye, and with my heart, especially after I meet someone so beautiful.”

  Djuna gave Ziparelli a seductive look. “And that is your work?” asked the interpreter.

  “My inner work,” said Ziparelli, eliciting a smile of appreciation from Djuna.

  “And what is your outer work?” the interpreter asked.

  “Golf!” he said, with not the least sign of discomposure. “It pays me no money, but is my art, my science, my religion.”

  Djuna took this to be a wonderful joke and seemed to be instantly charmed. But Ziparelli wasn’t finished. “Djuna,” he said exuberantly, “you are an adept of the inner life. I want to bring you to my summer home in Capri, and introduce you to the sages and mystics of Rome. I have wanted to do this from the moment I heard about you many years ago. May we talk privately about it? Michael Murphy will not mind.”

  As the interpreter relayed these remarks to Djuna, Ziparelli glanced my way. Startled, I shrugged and asked if he wanted me to leave the room.

  “No!” he said. “Djuna and I will leave.”

  And indeed they would. With a smile of apology for me, Djuna led him and the interpreter into an adjoining room. Through its half-open door I could watch them.

  At first they conversed in whispers, all three of them huddled close. Then Djuna gave him a chaste embrace, made several passes down his back, and watched with apparent fascination as he showed her his six-piece golf swing. This lasted for several minutes, and I sensed from the interpreter’s growing frustration that he was describing the swing’s basic components. Wondering what Djuna would make of “power-package delivery path” and “lag loading,” I poured another vodka and sat where I could watch them. Again all three were huddled close. When they finally emerged from the room, the woman with the hennaed hair looked exhausted, but Djuna and Ziparelli had the rosy glow of a couple who’d made wonderful love.

  “She is coming to Capri,” he confided as she joined her other visitors. “She understands the game like an angel, and gave me some unbelievable tips. Unbelievable! Murphy, thank you! Have you heard her talk about physical movement and the aura? She works with Olympic w
restlers and gymnasts, and with horses!”

  “Has she ever been on a golf course?”

  “At the Moscow Club.” He leaned close. “With the head of the new KGB.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Did you meet the ambassador from Iraq? She says she will introduce me.” He paused. “But without Georgi. The guy has his own protection. One of his bodyguards brings a machine gun and another a rocket launcher!”

  “Just like Clinton,” I said. “When he plays, the course is protected with ground-to-air missiles in case of airborne terrorist attack. A friend who played with him told me.”

  Djuna went to another room with the woman in the white sheath, and our interpreter said that she wouldn’t rejoin us. Taking this as a hint that we should leave, I led Ziparelli outside. “I will go,” he said. “Will you share a taxi?”

  Thanking him, I said that I wanted to walk in the Arbat. But I couldn’t resist asking whether he would follow through on his invitation to Djuna.

  “I have to.” He popped his cuffs with style. “She said she likes my bio-plasma, and wants to increase it greatly with a special massage. I think we will have a good time in Rome and on the beaches of Capri. Thank you, my friend, for the favor.”

  He walked away with his long, fluid stride, and I turned onto the Arbat. More people were begging than an hour before, and many more were drunk. The place looked run-down and tawdry. Passing little tables with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Brezhnev dolls, and babushkas selling wilted flowers, and tired artists waiting for someone to sketch, I felt far away from the power of Red Square or the well-dressed people at Djuna’s or the quiet refinement of Ryzhkov’s retreat. Russia’s sad, dark side was vividly present now, making my search for synchronicities seem a frivolous exercise. Suddenly dejected, I headed toward Smolenskaya Square, where I could hail a taxi.

  Then I stopped. On the far side of the Arbat, about forty feet away, Wilson Lancaster was walking in the same direction. He moved slowly, surveying the street as if he were looking for someone.

  There is a state of mind, which is hard to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced it, in which events are suddenly charged with supernatural significance. In one of his most provocative essays, Freud described the condition: “One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things within the boundaries of what is ‘fearful.’…[it] is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”*

  These words capture what I felt seeing Lancaster. My skin was a gauge of this. It crawled because his appearance seemed exceedingly strange but at the same time deeply familiar. I’d expected more signs that Shivas Irons—whoever, whatever, or wherever he might be—is real in a way I knew secretly. That Lancaster might be an undercover intelligence agent lent irony to this recognition, and suggested the whimsical, even hilarious creativity involved in our rediscovery of things long known to us.

  Beyond the Arbat stood the tall towers of the Foreign Ministry, built in the 1930s by Stalin as a symbol of Soviet might. My skin crawled again as I saw it, at another unexpected recognition. Something in me knew that Lancaster was headed there, knew it with a certainty as strong as my sense that his appearance was connected to the other strange turns of this night. But I would have to watch him closely. He had disappeared in Red Square like a ghost, and might use his spycraft again to shake off potential observers.

  He paused to look at a shop window, and I approached to within thirty feet. As if lost in reverie, he looked through the glass for a minute or two, then casually entered the store. Keeping its entrance in sight, I found a place where he couldn’t see me. But he didn’t come out. After several minutes had passed, I guessed that he’d left through another door.

  Alternately walking and jogging, I left the Arbat and turned left toward the Foreign Ministry. The thirty-story tower loomed above me, a huge and forbidding but dingy presence with too many entrances to check. It would be impossible to find him now. Evidently he’d spotted me in reflections of the street he’d seen in the shop window. A taxi pulled up in front of the ministry to let off a passenger. Before it could pull away, I got its driver’s attention and directed him to the Savoy Hotel, where I had a room.

  Lancaster’s double appearance and striking elusiveness would be noteworthy on any occasion, but partook of the uncanny now. He seemed a figure from an edge of the world, like the voice in Ryzhkov’s necromanteion, like the possible sightings of Shivas Irons, reflecting something real but just out of sight. As the cab hurtled through crowded streets, I let the recognition deepen. The messages of this night cohered. They were pointing me toward a new kind of intelligence gathering, a new turn of my search. Following their lead, I would go back to MacDuff’s old property. As Ryzhkov had suggested, it could be my Well of Light, and a place from which to approach Shivas Irons more directly.

  * Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” Volume 17, in Complete Psychological Works: Standard Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IN RECENT MONTHS, Hannigan had been increasingly dismayed and frustrated by Nadia’s chastity. When it started half a year before, he had taken it to be a temporary condition prompted by a surplus of contemplative ardor. She had a peculiar estrous cycle, he’d complained, that included a month of sexual renunciation every April or May. “It has nothing to do with you, Bach,” she reassured him constantly. “You are more beautiful than ever, my best friend, the greatest lover in Scotland! But something is calling me from the dark. Something I never knew. Be patient, Bach. Still laahve me.”

  At first—at least in his letters and faxes to me—he’d accepted, even enjoyed, this exhibition of her mysterious “Russian soul.” But as her abstinence continued for two, then three, then six months, he had gradually lost his tolerance. His affection for her unpredictable ways, and his covert admiration for her contemplative gifts, were strained more and more by his deprivation and jealousy. This had been evident in our recent phone conversations. Her estrous had reversed, he said. She was hot for spirits instead of men. In her necromanteion, she’d mated with an incubus.

  So it was a surprise when he greeted me at his studio by announcing, with no sign of ambivalence at all, his excitment at the results of her six-month sequestration. In the last week, something had happened that would interest me greatly. But first, he said, I would have to read this passage from Mortimer Crail’s book:

  As science has discriminated universal qualities of material objects such as mass and density, it has advanced our knowledge of the physical world. In analogous fashion, we can identify the fundamental attributes of spirit-bodies by turning to different accounts of them given by mystics, seers, and shamans. By way of example, the Islamic teacher Ahmad Ahsa’i has proposed a “physiology of the Resurrection Body,” or “spiritual flesh,” which after the death of our physical body resides in the “Earth of Hurqalya,” a world with objective existence beyond the directions and dimensions of ordinary space, from which it will rise to join its eternal individual soul.

  Among the qualities and features of “spiritual flesh” explicitly noted or indirectly referred to in the Shaikh’s sometimes obscure writings, there are volume, boundaries, surface, texture, density, radiance, heat, impassability, telekinetic power, auditory projectability, vitality, refractoriness, resilience, mutability, “curvature,” and what for lack of better terms I will call “interdimensionality” or “psychic mobility,” the capacity to move from one realm of existence to another with great agility. These are referred to, either briefly or at length, with a wide variety of words drawn from Greek, Persian, and Arabic writers, and are described with reference to a vast lore of ecstatic mysticism.

  “This is curious,” I said. “Ryzhkov gave me a book with references to this Shaikh, Ahmad Ahsa’i. But what’s this got to do with Nadia?”

  Hannigan gestured to a chair by his desk. “Sit down,” he said. “I want to hear about Ryz
hkov, but first ye’ve got to listen. Our adventure has taken a turn, and that passage ties into it.” He sat across from me, switched on his desk lamp to counter the gloom of this autumn morning, then paused as if searching for a way to start. “Something’s happened to Nadia,” he said. “Ye’ll see when she gets here. But I don’t want ye to be alarmed. She doesn’t look good, but she’s fine.”

  “What’s happened!”

  “It’s all right.” He held up a hand to reassure me. “She’s lost some weight. She’s gotten quieter. She doesn’t want to wear makeup. But she’s not sick. Ye might think so, but she isn’t, I promise ye. She’s seen a doctor, a good one at the university here, and he examined her from head to toe. There’s no disease, no organic disorder.”

  Holding back my alarm, I watched him fiddle with a pencil. “Murphy,” he said, “I used to think MacDuff’s inscription on that photograph, ‘August 6 again, but 1950’ was simply his way to say they’d found a better way to release the energy contained in matter, but now I think he meant more than that. He was also sayin’ these transformations can be dangerous. Nadia might’ve been close to death last Wednesday night.” He paused to study my face. “What were ye doin’ then, say about nine o’clock Russian time?”

  “Last Wednesday? I was with Ryzhkov. He showed me his necromanteion.”

  “Was there anything unusual?”

  “I heard a voice.”

  “A voice?”

  “And saw a face that looked like Shivas Irons.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake! What did the voice say?”

  “To keep looking for him, that he’s not far away.”

  “That’s all?” He leaned forward, his eyes narrowing behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “That’s all it said?”

  “There’s more, but I’m still trying to sort it out. It was pitch-black. It didn’t last long. I was disoriented. And Ryzhkov had incense burning that might’ve been hallucinogenic. But what’s all this about? What are you driving at?”