“All too true.”
“You mean,” he said calmly, opening his blue eyes wide to show me that he was impressed, “that you really are some sort of detective, that you're looking for this maniac.” He slid the drawer closed with a nice, dramatic snick.
“What about the other fire religions?” I felt I was swimming backward.
“Well, really.” It was the verbal tic of a man who felt himself frequently imposed upon. He brought one of the hands to his mouth again and gnawed at a nail. A thick steel Rolex Oyster glinted on his wrist. “As I said, all religions are fire religions at heart. What are the candles for in a Catholic church? Don't all Christians believe in hellfire?”
“There are people in Los Angeles,” I said, “who are being burned to death.”
“I'm not ducking the question,” he said, blinking rapidly. “I'm only trying to give you an idea of how complex it is. If there's a common denominator among the world's religions, at least in their earlier and purer forms, it's fire. Fire cleans, it purifies. Gold is refined in fire. The Ten Commandments came to Moses from a burning bush. The Romans carried fire in front of the emperor. Every twenty years the American Plains Indians piled their possessions together in the prairie and set them on fire. Alchemists sought to reduce the universe to its elements through fire. Do you see what I mean?” He laid one long hand on top of the other and looked down at the ragged nail he had gnawed. Quickly, he put the other hand on top.
I looked elsewhere.
“Even during the Renaissance, Botticelli carried his obscene paintings to the Burnings of the Vanities in Florence. Fire equals light, and light is the opposite of darkness. Fire worship dates back to the ice age. The last one, I mean,” he added by way of clarification. “Look, we're discussing a major religious theme here. Every religion worth its salt has put faith into purification, and most of them have chosen fire as the purifier. Think about the level of technology available to these people.” He grimaced. “They sat around fires, for heaven's sake. Fire was an inescapable symbol.”
I sat back, waiting for something that made sense. “Go on,” I said.
“What do you mean, go on?” Dr. Blinkins looked at his Rolex with some irritation.
“No more than another ten minutes,” I said. “Just free-associate.”
“An unpleasantly Freudian term,” he said. Dr. Blinkins imagined that his loathing for Freud was legendary. “This is impossible.”
“Humor me.”
“Well, the Stoics,” he said. “They envisioned periodic world conflagrations, an intuitive guess at the expanding and contracting universe of modern physics, a world born out of an unimaginable fire and ultimately returning to it.” His eyes rolled again, this time out of sheer effort. “Heracleitus of Ephesus, around 500 b.c., said that the world is a never-ending fire, an eternal state of process. Fire is the 'agent of transmutation': All things derive from, and return to, fire.” He smiled apologetically. “As I'm sure you know, this was the concept seized upon by the alchemists, whom I've already cited, in their attempts to turn lead into gold through fire. Talk about wasted effort,” he said, in his regular-guy tone. I remembered that tone, and not pleasantly. “For Heracleitus, reason and consciousness were manifestations of the element of fire. By inference, brutishness, swinishness, drunkenness, and depravity are impurities and can be burned away only in fire. Fire is elemental; there's nothing personal in it.” He was listening to himself with pleasure. “That's interesting,” he said to himself, “most fire gods are impersonal.” He made a note on a little pad with his name printed on it. It said, NATHAN BLINKINS, PH.D.
“So is my lunatic,” I said. “He picks them at random as they sleep in doorways.”
“Surely, not at random,” Dr. Blinkins said. “Nothing in the universe happens at random.”
“I'll hold that thought,” I said. “You're certain that you don't recall this guy pursuing a fire religion.” Dr. Blinkins shook his spottily well-groomed head. “Okay,” I said, “Heracleitus. Let's stick with the Greeks. They're the common denominator, right?”
“As far as Western religions are concerned.”
“Good, well, let's focus on Western religion.”
“It all begins with Prometheus,” he said, after a moment's reflection.
“Well,” I said, searching my memory, “sure it does.”
He settled back in his chair and spread his shining fingers over the tiny paunch blooming beneath his turtleneck. It hadn't been there when I saw him last. “Prometheus is complicated,” he said.
“I'll follow you somehow,” I responded. He wasn't listening.
“Prometheus was a Titan and a trickster and a traitor, to begin with,” he said, enjoying the alliteration. He smiled and then sucked inward on the comers of his mouth, imagining that he had my full attention. Actually, I was trying to figure out why I'd just sat up straight. Most of what Blinkins had said had slid smoothly over me, but something had snagged and caught. For a moment I'd heard another voice. “In the war between the Titans and the gods for control of the universe,” Blinkins rolled on, “Prometheus advised guile rather than brute force. When his advice was rejected, when the Titans chose to use force and lost, he changed sides.” He gave me a glance that requested understanding, and I recognized a need for sympathy that had been born out of years of treacherous faculty battles, civilized back-stabbings, and learned betrayals. I nodded, one conspirator to another, and tried to look understanding. What had he said?
“Well,” Blinkins continued comfortably, “Hesiod and Aeschylus turned Prometheus into the creator and salvation of man; he supposedly made the first men from clay, and Athena breathed life into his models. He made the first woman, too, Pandora. And look what became of that.” Not for the first time, I wondered about Dr. Blinkins's private life. “And Zeus,” he added, with a hand gesture that might have been a way of winding a nonwinding wristwatch, “motivated either by jealousy at Prometheus' creation or by the desire to create a race of his own, decided to destroy humanity. Might not have been a bad idea, in retrospect. Zeus looked down from Olympus, and he saw a scattering of campfires in the dark. I think that's an eloquent image, don't you? A scattering,” he repeated, “of campfires in the dark.”
He didn't wait for me to reply, which was a good thing. “So Zeus began by depriving mankind of fire.” He passed a hand over his gleaming forehead, looked at his palm, reached into his drawer for a Kleenex, and thought better of it. With the linen handkerchief in his hand, he glanced across the desk at me, looking vaguely perplexed, like a man who has lost his place in a book. “We're talking about fire, right?”
“Fire and only fire,” I said, trying to back up my mental tape recorder.
Pleased with himself, he wiped his face with the handkerchief and studied it suspiciously, as if he expected to find ballpoint-pen ink smeared across it. “Well, then. Prometheus couldn't let that happen, not after all his work. So he tiptoed to Hephaestus' forge while Hephaestus was off shagging Aphrodite—now there was a match made in hell—and stole fire. He went to earth, carrying the fire in the stalk of a plant, and gave it back. As revenge, Zeus had him chained to the rock and sent the eagle to gnaw on his liver. Of course, you know all about that. Shelley and so forth.”
“Of course,” I said. “The stalk of a plant.” I reached into the pocket of my shirt and pulled out the sprig I'd found in my mailbox. I handed it across the desk to him.
Dr. Blinkins gave it a whiff. He seemed to like the smell, but he had the puzzled, faintly outraged expression of someone who's just had a card trick worked on him. “Why did you let me go on like that if you already knew?” he demanded.
“Fennel,” I said.
“Certainly,” he snapped. “Prometheus brought fire to earth in a stalk of fennel.” He closed the drawer again to indicate that the conversation was over.
That night, when I got home, the flag on the mail box was up again. Inside it was an envelope that said, DELIVER BY MESSENGER. Within the envelope was an o
ld-fashioned dance card from the late fifties, about Alice's vintage. It had a carnation embossed on the cover and parallel lines ruled inside, each with a time indicated next to it. On the left-hand side of the card, written in metallic gold, were all the things I had done that day, up until I left Blinkins's office, around four. Every single one of them. The times were all indicated precisely, in that infuriating straight-line lettering. At midnight it said SWEET DREAMS!!!
I got the prickles on the back of my neck again.
The right-hand side of the card had a slash drawn through it, dispensing with the first five dances. Under the slash was a double line, followed by the next day's date, and the time 8:00 P.M. Below that was the message SHALL WE DANCE?
A stalk of fennel had been folded into the card.
As I dropped into the kind of sleep even Macbeth would have scorned, I heard Blinkins and Schultz say one word in unison. The word was “trickster.”
10
The Doopermart
“It's a phone booth at the corner of Los Angeles Street and Sixth,” I said to the second button on my shirt. I turned right through the heavy downtown traffic, feeling all the muscles in my back bunch and jump independently. They made me think of the frog's leg through which we'd passed electricity in high school biology. It had bunched and jumped, too. And it had probably wanted to be on that ceramic tray about as much as I wanted to be driving through downtown L. A. at 8:25 on a Saturday night, on my way to a waltz with the Incinerator.
The wire tucked into the back of my jeans was about the size of an audiocassette. It bulged against the base of my spine, feeling bigger than a Cadillac Eldorado. Something no thicker than sewing thread connected it to the second button in my shirt.
“I'm slowing,” I said, trying not to move my lips and feeling like a fifth-rate ventriloquist. “Traffic. I may be late to the phone booth.”
No one answered, but, of course, no one could. I had to take it on faith that someone was on the other end. I might be able to meet the Incinerator wearing a concealed microphone, but I certainly couldn't do it with a plug in my ear.
“It's construction,” I said. “I'm going to be late.” I heard the unsteadiness in my voice. I went on, nevertheless. “Are the ground rules straight?” I asked no one who could answer. “Remember that it could be a trick,” I added, thinking about Prometheus. “It could be that he just wants to see if I've got cops with me. You don't move unless I tell you to.” Trying not to move my lips, I sounded to myself like Humphrey Bogart. “Anybody moves, Al, I'm in Des Moines. This is the last pass, as far as I'm concerned.”
The traffic started to roll. I pressed Alice's accelerator in the direction of fate.
We'd started the preparations on the previous evening, three minutes after I got the dance card. I'd called Hammond at home—with certain misgivings—to tell him about it. He'd been awake and morose and drunk, but he sobered up in seconds.
“You'll need a wire,” was the first productive thing he said.
“And how are you going to get it to me? Al, I'm being watched, remember?”
“A girl. Have I got a girl for you. Got a great little wire, too, real hi-fi.”
“Al,” I said, backing up one giant step, “why do you assume that I'm going?”
“You want this geek preserved in amber,” Hammond said. “Same as me.”
“Well, I'm not going,” I said. “Not unless I make the rules.”
“Your rules,” he said instantly.
“I need to talk to Finch,” I said, although I knew it would piss Hammond off. “And Schultz. Why isn't Schultz sleeping in the guest room?”
“You should write for TV,” Hammond said. He despised TV. “On the phone at ten, okay?”
“And Schultz,” I'd added unwisely.
“I heard you the first time,” Hammond said, banging the phone down.
The ten o'clock conference call with Finch, Hammond, and Schultz had been punctual, short, and unsatisfying.
“Goes without saying,” Finch said gruffly. “You call the shots.”
“No shots,” I said. “That's the point. Nobody pulls a gun, nobody moves, nobody shows himself, unless you hear me ask for it.”
“Don't worry,” Finch said. “You're the boss.”
“Al?” I said.
“Yo,” Hammond said.
“You're my guarantee.”
“Hell,” Hammond said, in spite of his injured feelings, “I'm your friend.” There, his tone told me, I've said it.
I looked at my bare feet. They would, I thought, catch fire easily. “Okay,” I said. “I'll go, and I'll wear the wire. But nobody moves unless I give the word.”
And the wire had arrived at eleven the next morning, carried in the purse of a female police officer who looked no older than sixteen, dressed in a T-shirt and strategically slashed jeans, and the Incinerator had called at seven-fifteen and had said nothing more than “Dumpster at the Fernwood Market.” He'd hung up, leaving me looking at the phone. If I'd ever heard the voice before, I couldn't place it.
Taped to the side of the dumpster facing away from the street, I'd found a tightly folded square of paper, no more than an inch on any side. It said SIMEON on the side facing me, in shiny gold lettering. It gave me precise directions to a pepper tree in Reseda Park, in the Valley. On the trunk of the tree in Reseda Park, a monstrous pepper that was methodically killing the grass beneath it, was another note, riven to the bark with a hatpin. It said, YOU'RE A GOOOOD DRIVER, SIMEON. CAREFUL AND COURTEOUS. PHONE BOOTH, CORNER OF THIRD AND LOS ANGELES, downtown. Downtown. At the periphery of Little Tokyo. On his territory.
I'd driven quite a way before I called those directions in. I was having second thoughts about virtually every aspect of my life, and not least about my decision to involve the cops in this meet. I knew no one had me in visual surveillance—Finch had promised that the cars would use parallel streets and remain out of sight until and unless I yelled for help. I could, I reasoned, just stop calling in and meet the Incinerator alone, assuming that he'd actually be there, which I didn't think he would be. I was pretty sure that he'd be positioned very carefully somewhere where he could see me, but I couldn't imagine someone who preyed on the immobile having the recklessness to risk it all on a guess about my character. He just wanted to know whether I was friend or fuel. He would materialize in the flesh at the next contact, or the one after that.
On the other hand, what if I were wrong? So I called in when I was most of the way downtown and felt briefly grateful that I wasn't wearing an earpiece and didn't have to listen to the cops swear and scramble for position across the broad L.A. Basin.
The phone booth where I was supposed to wait for a ring and then do anything the Incinerator told me to do was one of those stingy little waist-high spatter shields, standing bravely on a corner that the homeless had claimed for their own. I leaned against it, wishing my legs were steadier, and it rang.
“Hello?” I said, forcing my voice downward from the tenor pitch it seemed determined to assume.
“Hello, Simeon,” the Incinerator said. “Remember me?”
“No,” I said.
“Aaahh,” he said. “That's not polite. Not considering how well I remember you.”
“Memory,” I said. “It's so selective. In what context should I remember you?”
I heard a chuckle. “Not very flattering,” the Incinerator said.
“When I see you,” I heard myself saying in the earpiece.
“Well, of course,” he said. “That's what this is all about, isn't it? A couple of guys, getting together. Hashing over old times.” He laughed.
“So,” I said, “where?”
“Let's not rush into this, no matter how eager you are to see me. You're not being followed, are you?” The voice was somehow both light and heavy, insubstantial and menacing at the same time.
“You know I'm not.”
“And no wire?”
I leaned my head against the plastic and smelled my own sweat. “N
o wire,” I said.
“Peachy,” he said. “Just a couple of guys. Go to the park. Los Angeles and Second. Sit on a bench.”
“Los Angeles and Second. A bench,” I said into my second button.
“You were quicker in the old days,” the Incinerator said forgivingly. “A bench, you know? Something you sit on.”
“And do what?” I asked.
“And sit,” the Incinerator said. “Sit until the gods call for you.” He hung up.
The park at Los Angeles and Second was an open-air motel, a local branch of the Motel Zeroes that have opened all over America, patronized by those who can't afford a bed with a roof over it. Most of the benches were full. Some of them were occupied by people who could still sit upright. Alice was parked half a block away.
For credentials, I'd visited the local brown-bag store and bought a gallon jug of Thunderbird. When I swung my bottom aggressively against the woman at the left-hand end of the bench closest to the curb, she said, “Hey.” I handed her the jug, which I'd already opened, and said, “Shhhhh.”
“You bet,” she said, taking the wrinkled bag and its contents. “How you doing, brother?”
“After you, sweetheart,” I said. “After you. Then I'll be doing just fine.”
She opened the bag and swallowed many times. “Thunderbird,” she said appreciatively. “Sweet and awful. What do you want?” She handed the bag back to me.
“Just sitting,” I said, looking for cops. “What do you want?”
“A bath,” she said promptly. “I'd sell my soul for a bathtub with no drain in it.”
“Why no drain?” I said, pretending to drink from the bottle in the bag and then deciding what the hell and drinking quite a lot of it.
“Because I could get clean and die at the same time,” she said.
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