The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Even after having heard Keiko’s description of Czarny’s pledging, I felt too much shaken by this further glimpse of Greek ceremonial to speak for a moment. Cagey, however, took it with hardboiled calm, asking only:

  “How many cars had they taken out there?”

  “Two for the pledge committee and Tallpines, two more for Czarny and his recruits. Four in all.”

  “For how many warm bodies?”

  “Let me see ... The pledge committee was ten, including Czarny. When he dropped out, there would still have been ten in the first two cars, because they had Tallpines. Dr. Fairchild had played the Heap Big Chief, but he didn’t stay around long enough to go out to the hunting cabin. Czarny gathered six brothers, making his party seven including himself ... who could have made it in one car, but it was more comfortable with two.”

  “That a usual thing, for your housefather to take part in the horseplay?”

  “It is for Dr. Fairchild,” Mendoza answered—a little guardedly, I thought. “For the ‘official’ part of it, anyway. The beer bash was ‘unofficial.’ Time for the boys to enjoy themselves unrestrained.”

  “And then Czarny came back early. With all six of his vigilantes and both their cars?”

  “No, alone. The others stayed to help drink up the kegs.”

  “Making it sixteen bodies to fit in three cars. And then they let their new pledge take one car all to himself, drunk as he was, while fifteen squeezed into the two remaining cars?”

  “Czarny walked. Leaving sixteen bodies for four cars. Then four of his recruits and two of the pledge committee left earlier than the others, leaving a mere ten for three cars. And one of those remaining cars was Clearwater’s two-seat Bugsrabbit. That was the one Tallpines took alone, to die in.”

  “It must have been one of the ones Czarny’s group took out.”

  “It was. Clearwater was one of the brothers Czarny recruited. That struck me as notable because Clearwater is an extremely active member of the committee for most new pledges, but that time he had opted out on grounds that they were planning a mockery of Native American religion. As nearly as I could see, in that respect—making a mockery of some reverent tradition or other—it was no worse than most of the pledging ceremonies for the last five years. I might add that things were different when I pledged myself to the old Purple Rose, back in the days when M. Wandervogel was our faculty father.” Mendoza lifted his right arm to point at a tidy new brownstone on the edge of the campus proper. “Sudoshi House, the first university building erected here. Cornerstone laid September 15, 1999. Planned as a seminar house, and still serves that function even after more than forty years.”

  “Mmm,” said Cagey. “How long a walk did Czarny have from the hunting cabin back to the Pi Rho house in town?”

  “Eleven and a half kilometers by the road, but he’s a good walker, and he might have taken shortcuts through the woods. Being a ‘creature of the night’ and all that. He especially likes to walk by night when he has any mental turmoil to work through.”

  “About what time did he get back to the house?”

  “That, I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I assume it must have been sometime before dawn. Definitely before the accident was discovered—before Clearwater found that his car hadn’t been returned.”

  “How is it,” Cagey asked, “that you know so much about that night’s goings on?”

  “I was the second or third brother Czarny recruited. Possibly he came to me because I had big-brothered him through his pledge period the year before. And, yes, I was with the first batch to head home the night of the Tallpines tragedy, an hour after our dracula had washed his hands of the whole affair and left on his own. Mine had been the other car we took out, and it was the first to leave. I had chosen not to be the designated driver, so my head was not the clearest by the time we left. But it had been very clear up until the time I joined the beer bash, and it remained clear enough to know that the six of us who left were not the identical group that had arrived in my car.”

  “Can you name more names?” said Cagey. “Give us a complete attendance list?”

  I held my notecom ready, but didn’t get many names, as Mendoza replied,

  “Probably not, not after this lapse of time. A lot of them are no longer with us—graduated or otherwise moved on, I mean, except for Solly Goldfein. He would have been Czarny’s first recruit. I remember that Fletcher was on the pledge committee, and Spuds Struwwelpeter. Also Heikkenen and Slowaski—they came home with the group in my car. Slowaski was the driver. He graduated that following spring and moved on to…a job with Hilton-Maracott Hotels, I believe. All our local law enforcement databanks should still have the complete lists.”

  “Then it was investigated at the time.”

  “Of course. As an accident, not as suspected murder.”

  “When did Solly Goldfein come back that night?”

  “With the group in my car,” Mendoza replied.

  “So you have no idea at all what happened at the beer bash after you left?”

  “Nothing reliable. There was some rumor, so nebulous I hardly like mentioning it, that Tallpines might have decided he’d had enough, and threatened, before he left, to depledge.”

  “An unverifiable rumor, I gather,” Cagey commented.

  “I can’t verify it, and any of the brothers who might have been able to, never did. That’s why I consider it most likely to have been started by someone who wasn’t there, who could only theorize. Notice that from here we have an excellent scenic view of the venerable Dunheim Stadium. Recognizing that the main stadium is the heart of university life, our planners had the sense to put it down in the exact center of campus.”

  “Very impressive,” said Cagey. “We understand that Tallpines was burned almost beyond recognition.”

  “So was the car. In view of the human tragedy, Clearwater let his insurance absorb the personal property loss and made no claim on the victim’s estate.”

  “Big-hearted of him,” Cagey observed. “Of course, the burning made it hard to verify what kind of minor injuries he may have sustained during the pledge ceremony.”

  Mendoza stopped walking and half turned to look at her. “No matter what rumors you may hear, or from whom, it still remains safer to pledge to the Purple Rose than to play on the football team. Or were you thinking about the inevitable rumors that crop up when a dracula is anywhere near a burned corpse? Let me assure you, Czarny has a moderately sized stomach. Draining an entire human body at one feeding would be well beyond his capacity. I very much doubt that he could drink enough to be noticed if there had been any blood loss from other causes, as there usually is in fatal car crashes.”

  “Did he wear his jewelry immediately afterwards? Czarny, I mean.”

  “Not for the rest of that week,” Mendoza acknowledged. “Not until after his next regular Saturday afternoon Sacrament of Reconciliation. He didn’t go running to the priest immediately, however. He waited until the regular time. I’m sure that if he thought he had sinned ‘mortally,’ he would have run to his confessor at once, maybe even awakened the madre out of her sleep in his hurry to be reconciled. In that case, he would have been wearing his jewelry again next day.”

  “If you say so.” Cagey started strolling forward once more, setting the pace for our group. “I seem to remember somebody remarking that Czarny only took to wearing that jewelry of his after he joined the Rose. Would that have been right after pledging, or not until he was a full brother?”

  “Naturally, he didn’t get his fraternity ring until full initiation. I can’t say for sure about the earring and neck charm. I know he wore them as a pledge, but I can’t swear that he hadn’t been wearing them before that. I couldn’t have been the one who made that remark. I believe the neck charm was a gift from his cousin Donna Gambol, who was one of our Sigh sisters during her time here. She graduated last year and w
ent to Eau Claire, I believe. She was the one who initially recommended him for the Pies, though we didn’t act on it until the following semester.”

  Cagey said, “What can you tell us about his pledging?”

  Without any hesitation or protests about fraternity secrecy, he told us a good deal. It agreed with Keiko’s information, but Mendoza had something to add: “They questioned him about the family name of a certain young woman for whom he nursed and continues to nurse a ... let’s call it a special fondness. I had not known they were going to do that. When they did, I opted out of the ceremony. Not to such an extent as Czarny himself was to do when they pledged Tallpines. I simply stepped back, folded my arms, and kept watch on the proceedings. When I saw that Pater Fairchild was also watching, and obviously approving, I left. I disapproved of what they did, but I never said so until afterward, in a private meeting with the committee. Where I got nowhere. It seems that Pater Fairchild had initiated the question as well as taking a masked and veiled part in the ceremony, not unlike his later Heap Big Chief role. M. Wandervogel had never done any such thing, but all our rituals were much tamer under M. Wandervogel’s patronage. Anyway, I understood Czarny’s later revolt and frustration in the Tallpines case. It seems they used the same question, about the same young woman, on Tallpines, who was her steady date at the time. Until then, Czarny had assumed they’d only used it on himself as the traditional token question to give the mock torture a mock raison d’etre. More often they use some such riddle as the Chicken or the Egg, or the secret ingredient of the original cola, or even ‘What’s your favorite color?’ Czarny has never actually ‘dated’ this young woman in the romantic sense, and I believe he must have made a careful decision to assume the Purple Rose meant no harm in interrogating him about her, no matter how questionable their taste. When they repeated it with Tallpines ... Well, I think Czarny would have revolted in any case when they started doing things he hadn’t helped plan, but that question, about that particular young woman, must have been the final straw.”

  “Who is the young woman?” said Cagey.

  Mendoza replied, “I don’t mind telling you the so-called mystic secrets of a fraternity I’m no longer particularly proud to be part of, but I’d prefer to keep a secret that touches someone else.”

  “Would it be M. April Baxter Greenhill?”

  He blinked, then smiled. “That’s right. You came to the house in company with her.”

  “We have it from her that the Purple Rose was taking her name in vain, and she had it from Solomon Barghoothi Goldfein.”

  “Who can no longer be hurt if it goes any farther that he broke fraternity secrecy.” Mendoza nodded. “Yes, she is the young woman in question.”

  “Thanks for confirming it. Now, what can you tell us about Goldfein’s death?”

  “Next to nothing. His body was found in the smoking wreckage of his own car. Burned, like Tallpines, beyond immediate physical recognition. Other than that, I don’t see much parallel. Solly had already been a brother for two years, and his car was an antique gasoline burner, whereas the one Tallpines had driven was borrowed and one of those hydrogen burners they’re sensibly trying to outlaw.”

  “I can see at least two more common denominators,” Cagey counted. “One: Goldfein was also on the way back from some kind of pledge party out at the hunting cabin, wasn’t he?”

  “The new man’s. Saladin’s—Abernathy’s, as Pater Fairchild would insist on saying. Yes, but his pledging had gone very smoothly. A French Foreign Legion scenario, I understand. He was mock-interrogated about the color of Marilyn Monroe’s eyes. As far as I know, in Val Saladin’s case, M. Greenhill’s name was never mentioned.”

  “All the same, that brings up the other thing Goldfein’s case has in common with that of Tallpines. Both of them had a romantic interest in April Greenhill.”

  Mendoza pointed out, “The first man who had those things in common with Tallpines and Goldfein—membership or would-be membership in the Purple Rose as well as a romantic interest in M. Greenhill—is still alive and unharmed.”

  “Did they take Czarny out to the hunting cabin for a beer bash after his pledging?”

  “No, they gave him one in the basement. And yes, I came back down for it. In fact, I brought down the drink to refresh him with.”

  “Beer?” said Cagey.

  Mendoza gave her a strange look, as if trying to judge whether or not she was joking. “No. Raw beef blood, with three drops of human mixed in. From my own thumb, as a matter of fact. A lot of the brothers were eager to see if he’d really drink it. He did. It’s his regular nourishment, at least in his own perception. Right there, to the north of the stadium, you can see our Great Totem Pole. Traditionally, every graduate with a drop of Native American blood—”

  “Please,” I said, still trying not to retch, “could we stop talking about blood for just a minute?” It was almost the only time during the investigative process that I lost my objectivity on the subject; but somehow, tuning in a mental image of all those young men standing around in a shadowy basement eagerly watching another young man swallowing raw blood—even beef blood—coming as it did on top of talking about two terrible deaths, and all those other details of the pledgings ...

  “Sorry,” said Mendoza. “Every graduate with a single Native American gene, then, gets to leave something carved on the Great Totem Pole. If you’d like, I could point out the kachina figure I left on one of the beaver’s teeth.”

  “You’re part Indian, too?” said Cagey.

  “On a great-grandmother’s side. Southwestern stock.”

  As we headed for the totem pole, Cagey stated, “You encourage pledge raids and all that stuff in the Purple Rose?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Did Czarny participate?”

  “I told you, his only fault as a pledge was overeagerness.”

  “How did he square raiding with his jewelry?”

  “The same way, I suppose, that he tried at first to square participation in ceremonializing and schooling new pledges. Even as his big brother, I never tried to tune in a perfect picture of the kinds of things that lay between him and his confessor; but my guess would be that the excuse has to do with the idea that items taken and damage done with the blessings—in a sense—of the rightful possessors, and with every intention of eventually returning or repairing, don’t count as theft and vandalism. But let me give you a couple of specific examples of what he was like as a pledge. Nothing to outrage your sensitivities, I hope, Sergeant Tomlinson. These involve ceremonies that every Pi Rho pledge has gone through since M. Wandervogel’s time, if not before. The Sighs have their own versions.

  “The first is the Sacrifice to the Sun God, held on the first weather-permitting morning of Greek Week. It’s really quite simple and harmless. The pledges build an outdoor fire just before sunrise, repeat a prayer in unison to the rising sun, and then drop a live insect into the fire. They have been told ahead of time to bring themselves and the live bug, but nothing about what lies ahead. Quite a few pledges protest about being tricked into performing a ‘pagan’ rite. Going by Czarny’s church record, you might have expected that to be his problem, but it wasn’t. He later confided to me that he got through the prayer very easily by thinking ‘Son’ with an ‘o’ instead of ‘Sun’ with a ‘u.’ The actual prayer is completely generic. No, my little brother made fraternity history by rebelling at the command to drop his sacrificial bug into the fire.

  “He had brought a common house spider, but he argued that it was wrong to purposely inflict needless suffering on any creature in the name of mere ceremony, no matter how hallowed. ‘Frivolous’ would have been my own modifier for the rite, but he stuck with the more respectful word. He finally had them appeal to me as a court of last resort. I wasn’t overjoyed about being roused out of bed at sunrise, but I came down, heard the story first-hand, and asked him how he would have handled th
e problem if he’d been told ahead of time what he’d be asked to do with the bug. He answered that either he’d have insisted on being allowed to bring one that was already dead, or he’d have brought a fly in his matchcase and shaken it out well above the fire, trusting it to fly away instead of down.”

  “A spider isn’t technically an insect,” Cagey remarked as Mendoza paused.

  “No, but it might loosely be called a ‘bug,’ and pledges going through in March are given a little more leeway than the October classes about their choice of sacrifice.”

  I asked, “But how did you solve the problem?”

  “I finally ruled that the next time he killed a mosquito or any other kind of bug in self-defense, he should use a match or candle flame to burn its little body, and meanwhile say a few words offering all the spider’s future meals to the ‘Sun God.’ I was hailed a Wise Judge, and went around grumpy for the rest of the day due to lack of sleep. The other incident I’d like to tell you is what happened at the paddle burning ceremony, the night before Full Initiation.”

  “It sounds bad already,” I observed.

  Cagey said, “Maybe you’d better explain to my partner that the paddles usually aren’t functional.”

  “Oh?” he said, as if surprised that anyone might think they were. “No, Sergeant, they may have been a functional part of hazing at one time, back in the nineteenth century or thereabout, but for as far back as living memory goes, they have been simple little craft items about so long—” He held his forefingers approximately fifteen centimeters apart—”made by each new pledge and presented to his big brother, or her big sister, as an eternal keepsake and memento. At the climax of our paddle burning ceremony, each pledge is made to crawl alone into the living room, where he finds a real fire burning in the fireplace, a paddle lying in front of it, and at least twenty brothers sitting around watching. In the Rose, we don’t actually use any of the pledges’ own paddles. We keep a stock of fakes fashioned specifically for the burning ceremony, and as craftwork, they are as spectacularly ghastly as we can make them. But the pledge is told that the one before him was made by another member of his own pledge class. He should have no way of knowing that it isn’t the truth, because the paddles are made and presented in privacy, little brother to big brother. All the brothers present point out what an ugly creation this paddle is, and order the pledge to lay it on the flames.”