Tony started over from three, having lost his place, and this time got to seven before deciding screw it. Softly, slowly, he said, “About a minute ago. A real live little teenybopper. Blonde hair, yellow outfit. Got off a blue bike and came in here.”
The hippie opened his mouth.
“If you’re ready to die, right now, keep on bullshittin me.”
The hippie closed his mouth.
“Or keep me waitin five more seconds,” Tony suggested.
The hippie again opened his mouth, and of course Tony could see he was getting ready to lie, so Tony naturally got ready to hit him, and of course the hippie could see that so he started to duck behind the counter, where of course there would be some sort of lame weapon, so naturally Tony decided to pound him on the top of his head so hard he’d lose interest in weapons for a while, and he made his hand into a fist and his arm into a club and raised it high, but before he could bring it down a soft high voice behind him, back there in the space where Tony had just personally made certain there were no people and no ways for one to enter or leave, said, “Let it go. I’m afraid he’s not going to take no for an answer.”
Tony stopped and turned around and stared at the thirteen-year-old girl until even he realized that he looked like a parody of the Statue of Liberty and put his arm down at his side.
She wore what looked like the same sunsuit, a lemon yellow sleeveless one-piece affair that ended in shorts, only it looked a lot bigger on her today. The outfit had a belt—no, two belts, only one of which went through the belt loops—what was that about?
“Thank you for your loyalty, Willard,” she went on, “but I won’t have your blood spilled on my behalf. I fear I have far too much of that against my account already.”
“Your call, Ida,” said the hippie. “I think you’re making a mistake.”
“If so, it won’t be the first, will it? I’m tired, Willard. Tired of hiding and running and being afraid. Perhaps a…a really strong, brutal man is what I’ve needed all along.”
Tony was not a subtle man; nuance usually pissed him off. But it was dawning on him that, in some way he was not equipped to parse, this kid did not sound like a thirteen-year-old trying to sound like a grown-up. What she sounded like was a very old lady trying to sound like a kid. Physically she was perfect, looked just like a little kid on the verge of puberty. Verbally, though, she was completely unconvincing.
“You ain’t no little kid,” he accused.
“And you are no fool,” she said. Behind him, Willard the hippie smothered a sneeze and excused himself.
Tony ignored him. “How old are you? Really?”
She sighed, looked up to the ceiling—then squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye as she answered. “I was born in 1848.”
Tony knew how to solve arithmetic problems: frighten the nearest person into giving you the answer. He frowned ferociously, swelled his shoulders, and asked, “How old does that make you?”
“She’s a hundred and fifty-one,” Willard said behind him.
Tony turned and looked at him. He was pretty good at telling when people were bullshitting him—they tended to be pale and sweaty, and tremble noticeably—and this Willard seemed no more frightened than people usually were when confined in an enclosed space with Tony Donuts Junior. He didn’t even look as if he expected Tony to believe him—that more than anything else made Tony think that the old hippie was telling the truth.
He turned back to Miracle Girl, took a long second look at her eyes, and mentally promoted her to Miracle Woman. No, Miracle Hag.
Ambiguity and Tony were barely nodding acquaintances, but now he experienced a rare mixed reaction. This was certainly good news. The little bitch was even more valuable than he’d realized. Tony had a sudden mental image of one of the Five Old Men, just after Tony explained to him that he would soon be screwing like a teenager again, and picturing that smile made even Tony want to flinch just a bit—he was about to be richer than a CEO. Hell, richer than a CEO’s lawyer.
On the other hand, the only kinds of humans Tony had ever had the slightest difficulty in controlling had been hags and little girls. He could dimly sense that a combination of both was not going to be good for him.
But this little Miracle Hag seemed, at least for the moment, to have surrendered. “Willard is correct,” she said. “I was born Ida Alice Shourds in 1848.” She waited, seeming to expect him to react to the name, then continued. “If you look me up in the public records, you’ll be told that I died nearly seventy years ago, at the age of eighty-two. I died in a little sanitarium in upstate New York, where I had been locked away for thirty-three years. Can you imagine, sir, what passed for a mental hospital in Central Valley, New York, in the early part of this century? What it was like to be confined in such a place?”
Tony felt his shoulders tighten. “My old man died in a hatch,” he said. “Federal prisoner. They had him on drugs so bad he was takin’ guff from janitors.”
Ida’s face showed empathy that even he knew should have been impossible for a thirteen-year-old. “Then perhaps you can appreciate that decades ago, before your father was born, they kept patients docile with methods that would one day make Thorazine seem an enlightened breakthrough.”
“Doctors,” said Tony.
“Indeed.”
“So you faked bein’ dead somehow an busted out.”
She nodded. “With Willard’s help. He was a janitor at the sanitarium, then.”
Tony glanced over his shoulder at the hippie. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Almost ninety,” Willard admitted.
“Ya don’t look a day over sixty.”
Willard thanked him solemnly. Tony returned his attention to Ida. “Okay. So you died seventy years ago. Continue the story.”
“My death may have been faked, but that most certainly did not make it painless,” she said. “You see, at the time of my death my name was Ida Alice Flagler, and I was worth thirteen million dollars.”
“That’s 1930 dollars,” Willard put in.
“Of which I never got to spend a penny,” she said bitterly.
An encyclopedia compiled by Tony Donuts Junior would have been a very slim paperback, but he had been in the state of Florida for several weeks now. If he’d spent as much time in Salt Lake City, the name Brigham Young would by now have begun to ring a bell. “Flagler, Flagler…guy that invented Florida?”
She grimaced. “In the same sense that Edison invented the lightbulb, that’s right. Pretty much everything from St. Augustine to Key West, Henry Flagler built from nothing. The day a little settlement called Fort Dallas incorporated and changed its name to Miami, a century ago, Henry owned six hundred acres of what is now downtown, and the railroad that was the only way to get there. Before he was done, he drove that railroad to the end of the state and a hundred miles out to sea, to this very pile of coral we’re standing on—boarded his personal car in St. Augustine and stepped down off it here in Key West.”
“He musta had dough.”
Behind him Willard began, “He was one—”
Tony interrupted him. “Getcher ass out here, Moonbeam. I’m gettin a stiff neck lookin’ atcha.” He allowed two seconds’ grace, then turned his whole body around. “I said—”
“Okay, okay.” Willard turned to his right, and in two strides reached the wall at the far end of the counter. He did something behind the counter, and the wall opened on concealed hinges, became a doorway. He stepped through it, closed it behind him—snick!—and in a few seconds a rack of video boxes against the back wall swung away to reveal another secret doorway, from which Willard emerged. He closed that behind him, too, and came over to stand beside little Ida Flagler. He did not quite touch her, but Tony read his body language and knew he would die for her if necessary. Tough shit for him.
Tony had gotten a good close look as the hippie squeezed past. “That’s a good rug,” he stated. “So’s the beard.”
“Not many people can tell,
” said Ida.
“So?” Willard said belligerently.
“So nuttin. Finish yah story.”
Willard glared but continued. “I was saying, Henry Flagler, Samuel Andrews and John D. Rockefeller were the three founders of Standard Oil, one of the greatest monopolies in history. The first antitrust laws were invented specifically to stop them. In today’s money, Flagler paid something like a billion dollars for his ticket to ride that train from St. Gus to Key West. Yeah, he had dough.”
“He warehoused me in a hellhole for thirty-three years,” Ida said, “and left me a thirteen million dollar estate, like a tip, so that none of my heirs would raise any inconvenient questions about my competence—the bastard.”
Tony admired his technique. “Well, you got your revenge. I heard he croaked a long time ago.”
“In 1913,” Ida agreed. “But I’m afraid his death was no more real than my own. The only difference was, he did take it with him. Henry is still alive. He simply decided to duck out on the Great War—the First World War, they call it now—and he never found a reason to come back up from underground. He spent the first eighty years of his life piling up money, doing things…and he’s passed the last eighty spending it all, invisible to the world, accomplishing nothing whatsoever except to enjoy life.”
“That’s the way I’d do it,” said Tony. “Now tell the part about how come you guys don’t lie down an shut up when ya die.”
She hesitated, looked down at her feet. It was stupid, she’d come this far, there was no way she was gonna not tell him, all three of them knew that, and still she hesitated—that was how reluctant she was to say it. Finally Willard put a gentle hand on her shoulder. Somehow that enabled her to look up and answer. “The first time Henry came to Florida, in 1878, he hated it. His first wife Mary Harkness was dying of tuberculosis, and the doctors said she needed to be warm in winter, so he brought her to Jacksonville. He loathed it there so much that after a few weeks he went back to New York, even though he knew she wouldn’t stay without him. She died in New York in 1881.”
Tony made a growling noise. “I’m gettin bored.”
“I was one of her nurses. Henry and I were married in the summer of 1883. But by the time he could get away from business it was midwinter. So I persuaded him we should honeymoon in Florida—only this time we went to Saint Augustine. It was there that everything changed.”
“He liked it dis time,” Tony suggested, in a let’s-make-this-move voice.
“That’s what it says in the history books,” she agreed. “He’d looked at Jacksonville and seen a backwater; now he looked at Saint Augustine and saw infinite potential, saw an entire state waiting to be carved out of the swamp and sold to gullible northerners. They never explain what the difference was, why Saint Augustine was so much more inspiring.”
“But you will,” said Tony. “Very soon.”
Willard spoke up. “Columbus never saw America, spent all his time island-hopping around the Caribbean. Saint Augustine is the spot where the very first European stepped ashore onto the continent of North America, and because it was Palm Sunday, and the Spanish for that is Pascua Florida, the Feast of the Flowers, he named the place Florida. Same guy that discovered Puerto Rico, as it happens. Ask me his name.”
“Am I not makin it plain,” asked Tony, “that I’m gettin pissed off?”
“His name was Don Juan Ponce de León,” Ida said quickly, and waited.
For a couple of seconds Tony coasted in neutral, staring out the windshield, and then the fog lifted. He had read that name once, on a restaurant place mat. “Wait a minute—wait a minute, you mean Pounce Dee Lee-on?”
Willard had a brief coughing fit. When it was done, Ida said, “That’s right, Tony. Pounce Dee Lee On. When my rotten husband Henry brought me to Saint Augustine, three hundred and seventy years later, he rediscovered what Pounce had found there long before—”
“Holy shit,” murmured Tony. “Da Fount’n A Ute!”
8
BURYING THE HOOK
When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal.
No more medicine.
—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
“That is correct, the Fountain of Youth, Mr.—what is your name?”
Tony was so bemused he answered, truthfully. “Donnazzio, Tony Donnazzio.”
“He found the secret of Eternal Youth, Mr. Donnazzio, rediscovered what, uh, Pounce had found four centuries earlier. We stumbled on it together, on our belated honeymoon, while looking for a discreet place to…to be alone in Nature. I don’t think anyone else but Henry would ever even have thought to try such an unlikely, uninviting spot, much less persist as long as he did. He was a man of remarkable stubbornness. I was becoming quite put out with him. And then suddenly there it was. A natural spring, whose water happens to have passed through just the right rare mineral deposits in just the right amounts in just the right sequence while underground. The effect was immediate and unmistakable; we never did get around to…what we had come there for that day. We had to find ways to hide from the servants and staff for the next day or two, until we learned how to convincingly make ourselves look as old as we were supposed to be, again. Henry said we mustn’t let the secret of the spring slip out until we’d had time to think through how to handle it properly.
“When I finally understood he meant us to keep the secret forever, so that forever we could be not merely immortal but the only immortals, I realized what a monster I had married. I resolved to break with him, and reveal the secret to the world. But I had underestimated Henry’s power and ruthlessness. Like a fool I allowed him to guess my intentions. The next thing I knew I was officially a hopeless lunatic, and Henry had forced the Florida legislature to make lunacy grounds for divorce just long enough to end our marriage, and he was remarried to Mary Kenan, a tramp who’d been his mistress for the past decade. My only consolation is that he never breathed a word about the Fount to Mary, never let her suspect his own aging was only cosmetic, and skipped out on her when he was ready to fake his own death. Three years later, she married a fellow named Bingham, and I think he may have murdered her; in any case she died mysteriously within a year.”
Tony had seen people wrinkle their foreheads when they thought; he tried it now, and it didn’t seem to help any. But the little thinking he did get done made him wrinkle up his forehead even more. “Where’s he now, this Henry?”
The teenybopper hag shrugged, and gestured toward the door. “Out there, somewhere. Invisible. Transparent to most radar. He’s had more than a century in which to insulate himself from the official world. He has no address, no phone number, no e-mail address. He has no legal identity, and as many phony ones as he likes. He pays no taxes. His fingerprints aren’t on file anywhere. He probably doesn’t have a reflection in the mirror anymore, or show up on satellite photos. And he has more money than the Fortune 500, nearly as much as the United States of America, all of it off the books.”
The fundamental absurdities and contradictions of the story troubled Tony not at all. He admired this Fagola’s technique. That was the way Tony woulda done it, in his shoes. The guy was as mean as Tony, as tough as Tony, richer than Tony had ever fantasized being—richer than the Five Old Men put together!—and he’d had something like a century and a half to get himself dug in, to erase his tracks from anywhere cops could see. He was way too dangerous to live, and one day would have to be hunted—carefully—and exterminated. The sole flaw in his program, so far as Tony could see, had been sentimentally allowing his wife to remain alive as a mental patient. Well, correcting other people’s mistakes was one of Tony’s best things. Just as soon as little Mrs. Ida Alice Shourds Flagler had told him the only useful thing she seemed to know, admittedly a very useful thing—
“Where’s it at, this Fount’n A Ute? Exackly.”
She squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye. She had obviously been expecting this. “I will—�
�
“Ida, no,” Willard groaned.
She shrugged him off. “I will sell you that information for ten million dollars. Cash. No more than half of it in hundreds.”
Tony stared at her.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “It is worth incalculably more than that. The sum is ludicrously small. But my back is to the wall. I will settle for ten million—with one condition.”
“Yeah?”
“You agree that once you have taken possession of the Fount, you will supply Willard and myself with five gallons apiece of its water. We will take that and the money and go away, and that’ll be the last you’ll see or hear of either of us for at least a thousand years. We’re quiet people, Mr. Donnazzio; there should be plenty of room on the planet for all of us.”
Tony chose not to debate the point at that time. “Ten mil is a big piece of money.”
“It is the absolute minimum I will consider, for two reasons.”
“Gimme the first one first.”
“You travel in different circles than Willard and I, Mr. Donnazzio. Just from what I’ve seen of you in the last few days, I’m sure you have a quite considerable reputation locally, and perhaps in more distant quarters as well. But we have no way to evaluate that—and we must be absolutely sure you’re the right man for this job. The Fount is so hard to stumble across by accident that only one man seems to manage it every four or five hundred years. If you come for the Fount, Henry will know someone must have told you about it. There is no one but me who could have told you. So he will know that I’m alive.”
This was getting complicated for Tony. “So?”
“Mr. Donaz—”
“Call me Tony.”
“Tony, my former husband is probably the richest, most powerful, most dangerous man alive. First he will try to destroy you. If he succeeds, eventually he will come for me, and Willard. If I’m to send you up against Henry, I must be confident that you have a reasonable chance of defeating him. You understand?”
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