He wears gloves. Even though he was indoors, both hands were covered by a fine pearl-grey fabric buttoned at the sides, the kind an experienced driver would wear. (Indeed, there was an electric-blue vintage Hispano Suiza tucked between the late-model BMW and the hulking Longobardo Drayage truck in the garage down below.)
Grey binders were stacked atop the deal table at room center, its thick lion's paw legs squat and sturdy enough to hold up the whole filing cabinet full of binders. The small round Persian rug the paws clawed into was oddly incongruent against the batik underneath. Chairs were scattered about the room including twin velvet highbacks stationed against one of the longer walls; but the man was pacing like he always did when he was working. And he was working, his movements calm, and his concentration well in hand throughout.
He wore a suit and you could tell that he belonged to that class of men who dressed on the formal side at work. The suit was a bottle-green three-piece with no chain across the vest. His shoes still wore their weekly polish and were not scuffed: plain-toe black brogues on a navy last. Midnight blue lisle socks with clocks on the sides covered his legs from shoe to cuff.
He wore no jewelry and his bay rum was store bought at Rexall.
This is the first time he’d come downstairs since the enragement. It had taken him a week to get a grip, to regain some composure after the paroxysm that had boiled up from under his skin. And nearly ran away with him, Anton Phibes. He should be familiar to us by now and, except for the time distortion, he fits right in to modern-day New York City…except for the time distortion.
Some things cannot be explained but an attempt will be made…later. For now, his wife is missing. Someone has taken Victoria and he must get her back. There is work to be done.
PACING
Thus passed the first day, a steady foot beat that would go on for months. By the time he was done Phibes would take 100,000 steps – two marathons’ worth. Most of that time was spent in the small study. It had windows on two sides, north and west and he liked the light that they brought. He mostly walked around the deal table, occasionally picking up one of the binders and leafing through its contents.
The binders were the same color and size as the ones at the Klingenstein Clinic. How they got here is unknown but clearly this man who’d been left for dead on an Alpine two-lane and given odds of 99-to-1 against his survival by his nurses, has taken a keen interest in that survival.
He had to reclaim Victoria! That's what kept him going! Nothing else mattered, neither the fumbling nor tinkering by his caregivers nor the numbing redundancy of that darkened room, and certainly not the pain. He knew what the charts said and had dismissed them as mere white coat surmises.
In their Irgendein Unbekannte, the Clinic staff believed that they’d discovered the keys to the mint – and they would never let him go. Compared to them the outside consultants were petty thieves, but thieves nonetheless. Moneygrubbers all, they’d keep him alive as long as they could, repeating some procedures three or four times, it didn’t matter as long as the cash register kept ringing.
Victoria's Shrine Room at Gramercy Square was the same as her room at Maldine Square – it replicated her dressing room during the few scant months of their marriage down to the bleached ash wood closets hung with her wardrobe arranged by color, and a very theatrical make-up table, its mirror bordered with 150-watt spotlights. In both buildings, Victoria's Room was located at third floor center for maximum protection.
Ever since the accident, Anton Phibes has bet all his energies on Victoria – to revivify her right here in this room. Sophie was to be the key to this incredible enterprise. Now both of them were missing. It was almost too much to bear,
Vulnavia saw to his meals and urged him to get enough rest. Occasionally they took out the Hispano for a spin up the Taconic State Parkway. On warm days they put down the top the better to see – and smell – the Hudson River which had gathered the waters from as far away as Duluth and Chicago and Nova Scotia and was now rushing them to the Atlantic Ocean.
She always packed a picnic hamper and when they’d gone far enough, they stopped for lunch. Poughkeepsie's Quiet Cove Park was a favorite. Its thick matted fescue sloped all the way down to the river where, on those late days of autumn, the far shore was lost in the haze. She spread a red checkered tablecloth on the grass and laid out the sandwiches, egg salad with sweet gherkins plus a thermos of hot cocoa and gingerbread cookies for dessert.
A strong swimmer, Phibes took to testing the river on these outings, going further and further out but always maintaining a straight course against the strong current. One hot July afternoon, he reached the far shore.
Vulnavia, who’d been playing her violin, lost sight of him momentarily. She stopped playing and peered out across the shimmering Hudson, overhung in the distance by the haze which now fell like curtains, turning the river into an ocean, boundless and unknowable in the summer heat.
Suddenly a white splash broke through and came churning across the surface, the swimmer's powerful butterfly cutting the water like a powerboat's hull, leaving a pure ‘V’ in its wake.
As soon as Phibes hit the shore, they packed up and headed back to the city. Traffic was light and he handled the Hispano effortlessly, his gloved hands in hair-trigger control of the wheel. Watching Phibes, you knew that he felt every compression of the engine's six cylinders, the translation of their power output down the driveshaft to the axels and that inevitable acceleration where the rubber met the road.
This was motoring, not driving.
Phibes went right to his study as soon as they got back to Gramercy Square. Pacing with the fresh energy that the swim had given him, he began spending more minutes there every day, adding to the household disequilibrium.
One late rainy night toward summer's end the cycle was broken. The Wizards, formally dressed in their fish-and-tails, were playing a hot jazz number from the 30's when they suddenly segued into a tour of every musical style from that era to now.
It was a virtuoso performance that drew Phibes and Vulnavia into the ballroom. Throughout the session the spot remained on the stand-up mike at stage center. Untended. Forlorn. Empty!
Seen up close, these diminutive players projected the herky-jerky movements of robots, albeit quite human and beguiling in appearance. They were in fact ‘androbots’, capable of love and fear and jealousy – just like us.
The saxophonist seemed especially pained by this vacancy. And when Phibes and Vulnavia saw his distress they went over to have a word with him.
Their androbotic affection for one another allows Sad Sax and Sophie to communicate in ways humans can’t. And now it seems that the thieves who carried off Victoria took Sophie along for insurance.
Soon, as Sad Sax is drawn ever closer to Sophie, Phibes is drawn closer to his beloved, which is why he and Vulnavia are seen mingling with the crowd at PDL's black tie affair. Vulnavia must keep a restraining hand on Phibes’ arm lest he give vent to the furies that roil up in him as he witnesses his wife's defilement. But if ever a man is driven by revenge it is Dr. Phibes, who composes himself long enough to note and to fully identify the Directors of the now infamous Ponce de Leon Society. And to mark them for retribution at a time and place of his own choosing.
These seven – two women and five men – now energize Phibes’ townhome with an inventiveness never seen before in New York (or for that matter in any other city save London, but that was a long time ago). These high-profile victims ripple the media and the police, led by Inspector (Acting) Pretorius, are soon drawn in. Their murders are remarkably similar in their medieval references and Pretorius, a bit of a history buff, wants to know why.
WHERE TO SHINE
THE LIGHT OF JUSTICE?
Police work can’t be contemplative especially when the media has grabbed onto a high-profile case. And Roddy Ambrose is very high profile indeed. Why, the press is asking, did the popular man-about-town have a police escort? And why didn’t the cops intervene. Not a sho
t was fired in Roddy's defense, despite the tremendous firepower disposed by his escorts on that fatal evening.
Gambling debt was Valor's early conclusion. But after the forensic accountants determined that he was solvent, with a portfolio valued in the mid-eights, the Inspector sought greener fields.
In the meantime, the Timothy Thrilby death at the Renaissance Faire in Central Park was beginning to look more like a homicide – thanks to the persistent question as to who was that other knight who threw down the gauntlet just as Thrilby was about to claim his Fair Lady?
Thanks to his Uncle Jakob, Pretorius had developed a more than passing interest in history, in its intrigues and its many lingering question marks.
A rogue Masonic order? Urban Minute Men? Or the Daughters of the Adytum?
The Inspector was wrong in his choices but he was right in his theory. Everyone missed the connection except that canny high school student, Willow Weeps, who enterprisingly has patched the story together. SALIGIA, she reports in her column in the Spuyten Duyvil Intelligencer, is the medieval mnemonic for the Seven Deadly Sins. A love story is playing out here…badly.
You heard it first in this column. Stay tuned!
Of course no one does; and the deaths keep coming. Bizarre, inventive, and with no apparent reason.
THE DEFENSE
The Ponce de Leon Society does not take its losses lying down. Security is beefed up and bodyguards are assigned to the remaining Directors 24/7. More sensors are installed in the safe room housing Lady Phibes. She is more secure, chirps Ms. Bramwell, than the gold at Fort Knox.
Not quite for it is Sophie who occupies the room next door and who supplies the conduit to the outside world. Or more specifically, to Sad Sax and to her inventor, Dr. Phibes.
Today's rapidly expanding field of bioengineering has yielded an all-silicon-chip eye that is available to patients who would otherwise be blind. Level Six of the cerebral cortex – the site of the brain's cognitive function – will be on the market within the next decade.
Ahead of the curve as always, Anton Phibes has linked together his diminutive players into eternity and made them The Band That Plays Forever. Sophie is the most human-like of them all which is why Phibes intended her to be the prototype for a revivified Lady Phibes.
But now this monstrous double theft has thrown his plans awry. He must get his wife back and Sophie too – and soon – for at this moment preparations are underway to perform an autopsy on Lady Phibes. Ms. Bramwell outlines her work plan to staff with all the verve and drive of a post-doc fellow. The specimen – Lady Phibes – will be removed from her sarcophagus and dissected in a cold nitrogen environment. DNA will be extracted from her various body parts and stockpiled for later distribution to the membership, as needed. The other specimen, Sophie, will be time-locked to Lady Phibes throughout this process, ‘as an added security measure’ Ms. Bramwell intones.
Sophie sings this news to her beloved saxophonist. Phibes’ white-hot reaction induces what many will think to be his first mistake – from a man who never errs.
He decides to storm the building and snatch his beloved out of harm's way. This must be done quickly before the Society can carry out its nefarious plans. The Wizards, who are small and agile enough to scale the exterior walls and break in through the rooftop ventilator, will collect Lady Phibes and Sophie, and will lift them to the safety of Phibes’ hovering Velicopter with that aircraft's skyhook.
Training begins immediately. The ballroom is cleared and, with Stix the Drummer leading the exercises, the Wizards are soon rivaling Chinese gymnasts in sheer athleticism and stoic excellence.
As the days go by, the thrumming coming from the fifth floor Velocity Room grows ever deeper. Phibes can be found there gazing intently at a large wheel that rotates on the horizontal before him. This embossed brass instrument is an exact replica of Hieronymus Bosch's depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins. Famed, feared and paid homage to, the SALIGIA WHEEL exerted a potent moral force in the medieval world.
Phibes places a metallic miniature of his latest victim on the ‘Wrath’ segment of the wheel and watches it drift away along with the three other figures, each in his own segment. He is murmuring something out of his neck vent and is that a look of satisfaction on his face? Turning ever more slowly the wheel finally comes to rest. The vacant segment now before Phibes displays ‘Sloth”.
He smiles as if in anticipation.
YOU CAN NEVER HAVE
ENOUGH MONEY
Duncan Karp is the oldest PDL Director. And the richest. Karp's patent portfolio would put any Silicon Valley mogul to shame. But more than his love for invention, he loves the money it has brought him even more.
Karp is a miser. Lives alone (2 divorces) in his modest Astoria 2bdr, 2ba detached sfr where he likes to roam about touching and smelling his fortune and letting his imagination wander.
MORE…MORE…MORE!!!
His patents notwithstanding, Karp deploys a low-tech security arrangement to guard his hoard: a brickwork maze worthy of the Minotaur that he surreptitiously built beneath his house. Confounding this array of dead-ends, fake exits and sudden elevation shifts are the impromptus that Karp inserts every time he squirrels away a new treasure.
An inveterate bricklayer like Churchill, Karp can construct an arch in less than an hour and seamlessly seal off any space, large or small, with journeyman finesse. He's working late this evening at the far end of a dimly-lit hallway, where several brown cardboard storage boxes are stacked along both walls.
The boxes contain old bonds and other commercial paper that he bought at an estate auction. Karp knows that they're worth more than what he paid for them. This thought of unexpected riches, as it always does, makes his fingers fly about the bricks and puts a steely gleam in his eye.
Duncan finishes walling in this latest treasure sooner than expected and after stepping back to admire his workmanship (and giving himself the usual pat on the back for excellence), he moves down the hallway toward the exit.
The maze occupies three stories beneath the main house with a fourth under construction. Each level has three gateways randomly spaced around the perimeter. The brickwork proper rests atop a metal lattice. Mechanically activated pulleys can shuffle and reshuffle its various corridors in an infinity of combinations. From his library console, Duncan can reach every piece of treasure hidden in his maze at will.
What he wants now is to get upstairs to his dining room for supper. Mrs. Hough has left him a pot of beef burgundy on top of the stove. With miss-meal cramps twisting his belly, Duncan hurries. Five, ten minutes go by but the exit he is rushing toward remains just beyond the next bend. An hour passes and then two. Duncan is certain that he's faithfully retraced his steps to his entry point – only to run into a brick wall every time.
Nighttime! Tired and footsore, Duncan slogs along. The hunger pangs are curling into his toes but at least the lights are on. He’d hate to be stranded down here in the dark no matter how big the booty.
He breaks into a little dance, heel-and-toeing it down the aisle until he finally collapses onto a ledge and drifts off to sleep.
It's morning when he awakens, although this brickwork has never been kissed by sunbeams. With the hunger clawing at him like a tiger, he juts his jaw and plunges into the corridor. He's gotten into the maze without a fuss, and where there's an entrance, there's an exit!
Stepping smartly he rounds a corner into a sort of plaza. There's a large crèche in one corner but why and how it got there, he can’t recall. A low growling sound lifts from the floor as he races past but he pays it no attention.
And now a real GROWL. He glances about the brickwork. Everything looks the same. But wait, something has changed. He blinks to clear his vision and now he sees it: the landscape has shifted ever so slightly…seems to be changing before his eyes.
Another blink. Yes! The corridor is tightening. The walls are inching closer together. It must be some trick but no, the corridor is vanishing.
&nbs
p; Somebody's broken into his house, is in his library right now working the console. Howling that desiccated lethal roar of the miser wronged, Karp races to catch a thief, impervious to the growling, to the ever-tightening walls that are closing in all around him.
CRISIS
At that moment, Phibes’ townhome is rocking with the Wizards while Phibes and Vulnavia quickstep across the ballroom floor. Sad Sax’ solo summons up thoughts of when he and Sophie did their quickstep in this very same ballroom.
Dazzling, diamond-like in her brilliance, Sophie seized and spurned a million hearts. Or could have. Her voice invents the possible. Her movements invoke Toledo steel. Her image sublimes Modigliani. All these Sophie's frame the question: where does a woman like her come from?
The question turns the Sax Man's heart but for now, his raptures evaporate. And he abruptly loses sight of her. The connection is dead. And just as abruptly, the Wizards stop playing!
Something very wrong is about to happen. Indeed Missy Bramwell has ordered her staff to begin the dissection process. Lady Phibes is being moved into the surgical amphitheatre when Inspector Pretorius comes calling.
He's here to warn the director of her immediate danger and to impose an immediate lock-down on the facility. When she balks, he threatens her with a grave-robbing investigation. Within the hour, NYPD technicians are swarming the Ponce de Leon facilities, installing laser and other cutting-edge securities. Their work ethic overpowers.
Director Bramwell herself is whisked to safety in a mountain aerie near New Hampshire's Franconia Notch. It is New England's famed Foliage Season and the glowing greens and reds and golds have drawn the tourist throngs.
Dr. Phibes in The Beginning Page 14
