“He said ‘I see?’ ”
“Do you know what this might mean?” The messenger looked eager, as I’m sure he’d spent the last three days puzzling it over.
“It is private,” I replied, and his face fell with disappointment. So I decided to throw him something. “Gilgamesh the mighty wished to become immortal, as I am. I told him he should spend less time worrying about death and more time living his life. His final words tell me he understood this lesson.”
He nodded slowly and bowed deeply. “I thank you, great Ut-Naphishtim.”
Since my words to the messenger appear more or less exactly as I spoke them in The Epic of Gilgamesh, I imagine he repeated it a few dozen times when he got back.
SILENUS:
YOU HAVE HANDED OUT PIECES OF YOUR LIFE TO ME, AND I AM THEIR KEEPER.
BUT THE ANSWER YOU SEEK IS NOT AMONG THEM.
From the Tragedy of Silenus, text corrected and translated by Ariadne
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked Mike as we watched the sunrise from a truck stop somewhere along Interstate 58. We’d driven straight through the evening in a non-direct path that had us leaving the highway several times to meander along random tributaries that appeared to serve no purpose other than to confuse me as to our eventual destination. Mike claimed these side jaunts were to make sure we weren’t being followed, which seemed a mildly paranoid thing for an FBI agent to worry about, except that this agent was transporting a fugitive. Now we were somewhere in Northern California enjoying the Northern California sunrise.
Mike sipped his coffee and failed to respond, or at least not to the question I asked. “So where’d your money come from?” he asked instead.
“Smart investing.” I drank my own cup of coffee with earnest. I’ve had worse coffee, about three hundred years ago. But it served the minimum requirement of being black in color and caffeinated in substance, and that’s all I really ask of my coffee.
Mike gave me the evil eye. “You’re what? Thirty-two? C’mon. I put money away in my 401K every month and net fifteen percent in a really good year, and I’ll be lucky if I can buy a decent condo when I retire. You bought an island. What’s the real story, hombre?”
“Maybe I’m older than I look,” I offered. Neither of us was feeling particularly chipper. Morning conversations should be between very close friends or lovers, and otherwise avoided entirely, I’ve learned.
He leaned back and stole a glance at the waitress, who was busy smoking a Pall Mall all the way down to the filter and most definitely not bringing us our food. “You’re a tough nut,” Mike commented.
“Is that a compliment?”
“Take it however you want to.” Mike grunted as he lit up his own cigarette and went back to staring at me.
I wasn’t about to confide in him about anything. I’d learned the hard way somewhat recently that it was no longer safe to tell anybody about my curiously long life, and that meant anybody. Plus there was the whole problem of him having ulterior motives in this extracurricular trip of ours.
“All right.” I sighed. “Take your best shot. I’ll tell you if you get close.”
He took a couple of puffs of the cigarette and then started spit-balling. “You’re American by birth. You were an athlete when you were younger and you still keep in shape. You . . . jog. Maybe yoga, or some other Vedic shit. I know you’re not a vegetarian.”
“I ordered bacon,” I confirmed.
“You like the outdoors. You’d probably be pretty good in a fight.”
“Did you want to fight me?”
“I’m just saying what comes to mind. You may be an alcoholic.”
“That’s a little judgmental.”
He continued, “There are people who like to drink and people who have to drink. You’ve been slipping scotch into your coffee since we sat down.”
“It’s your bottle.”
“Yeah, it’s been under the seat of my car for a year or two. And it was left there by a friend who has bad taste in scotch.”
“I’ve had better,” I agreed.
“Yet you’re still drinking it.”
“I’m still on vacation.”
He grabbed my hand and flipped it palm-up. “Soft hands; you don’t do a lot of hard labor.” He sniffed. “And you washed them when you went to the john a few minutes back.”
“Good sense of smell,” I noted.
“I have an above-average nose. All your clothing is new, right? But you never changed your socks.”
“A surprising observation.”
“Am I right?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s pretty good; you could do parties with that nose.”
“It’s not helping me much now.” He leaned back, as if getting a view of me from a distance would improve the analysis. “You’re pretty sharp, I know that.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, that was a hell of a stunt you pulled with the money.” He thought about it for a second. “You don’t care all that much about money, even though you have a ton of it.”
“This is true,” I agreed.
“But not always true,” he suggested. “Everyone cares about money.”
I smiled. “No comment.”
He tamped out his cigarette and lit another one. I really thought smoking wasn’t allowed in public places anymore, but that did not appear to be the case unless Mike’s car also took us back to the mid-90’s.
“Tell me about the girl,” he said.
“Ariadne?”
“Clara Wasserman.”
“Nothing to talk about there.” It was an unconvincing response.
“I disagree; there’s plenty to talk about. Like, she got paid $5 million by a guy named Robert Grindel, a guy that’s conveniently dead now, the same guy who also used to own that island you bought.”
“Well,” I began, “I wouldn’t say anything about Bob Grindel was convenient.”
“But you knew he was dead.”
“Of course I did. That’s why people have estate sales. Listen, Clara isn’t anybody. She’s a girl I got to know, that’s all.”
“What did she do to earn $5 million?”
I smiled. “You’d have to ask her.”
“Which you suggest I not do, because she isn’t anybody.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
“Left you, huh?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“It was the age thing, right? I mean I know you look thirty-something, but you’ve gotta be older. And she’s, what, in her twenties?”
Part of me wanted to tell him that yes, that was exactly the problem, that although Clara and I are both going to live a very long time, her childhood memories included music television, the Internet, and rock music from Seattle while mine involved goring a wild animal and wearing its lower intestines as a trophy. Instead, I changed the subject. “So what’s your verdict? Have you figured me out?”
“I figure you stole your money and killed the guy who had it last.”
“Like Bob Grindel?”
“Like him. Course you have more money than he did. And I wouldn’t wanna jump to any premature conclusions here. Am I close?”
“No, but points for creativity.”
“Yeah . . . it’s too much money anyway.” He fixed me with another one of his stares. “Mug a guy, get his wallet that’s one thing. But this is royalty money. People notice when royalty get mugged.”
I smiled as he continued.
“Just the same, I think killing someone is well within the scope of your abilities.”
“Isn’t that true for everybody?”
“No. Only certain people.” He sniffed the air. “The food’s ready.”
* * *
I haven’t spent much of my life in cars, as you can imagine. Being in one is still something I have to consciously accustom myself to. It’s not the same as with airplanes, which are totally divorced from any prior experience. But cars go on the ground just like horses an
d carriages, and the only real difference is the traveling speed. Well, that and the comparative comforts of a pair of shock absorbers and wheels covered in vulcanized rubber, which is a nice step up from wooden wagon wheels on an unpaved road.
It’s the velocity that gives me trouble. I spend most short car trips feeling anxious, and long car trips—especially at highway speeds—can reduce me to a puddle of nervous twitches. This does not make me the best traveling companion in the world.
“Oh my God, will you lie down in the back again or something?” Mike complained. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and my knee was bouncing up and down at a rate that may have equaled the car’s pistons.
“That won’t help,” I said. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going so at least I can look forward to an upcoming exit?”
“You’re like a child, I swear. Just outside of Sacramento, okay?”
“See, that’s helpful. Now what’s just outside of Sacramento?”
“Something I want you to see.”
“Useful.”
“It isn’t meant to be.”
We were going eighty-seven miles per hour. I was thoroughly amazed, both that anything could go that fast and not crumble to dust for violating some basic physical laws, and that we hadn’t been pulled over by anybody. Mike had said we were off the grid, but I bet we’d pop right back up on the grid—and damned if I knew what the grid was—if he were stopped for speeding.
Mike kept his eyes on the road. “I’m not trying to be cryptic. I just don’t want to bias your impression by telling you too much beforehand.”
“And does this thing have to do with Ariadne Papos?” I asked.
“It does,” he said reluctantly. “And that’s all I’m saying.”
That didn’t help me at all because I already knew it, but we had struck a deal. In exchange for helping me get out of Vegas, I’d look at his thing, whatever it was. I am not exactly legendary when it comes to keeping my word, but in this case I was planning to; it was entirely possible I wasn’t done needing Mike’s help.
When you find out the government of a particular nation is actively searching for you, it’s almost always in your best interest to get out of that nation as quickly as possible; anything less than an immediate departure just increases the chances that you never get to leave. So I probably should have headed for the airport. On the other hand, that’s undoubtedly what they expected me to do, and did I want to be somewhere over the Midwest when they figured out I was on a particular flight? I did not. It isn’t like I could get off in the middle somewhere.
There were too many variables. How fast was their response time? Was I “wanted” in the sense of my face being plastered all over the place, or did they still have laws in this country that required them to actually pin a crime on me first? And was what I did in the casino a big enough crime to qualify? A guy could go crazy thinking about it. I much preferred going crazy watching the speedometer.
“Do you have to use the bathroom or something?” Mike asked.
My knee must have been quite the distraction. “I don’t travel by car much.” I could have said I preferred stagecoach, but that might initiate further questions.
“You spent too much time on that island,” he said.
I think Mike took it personally, like I was criticizing his driving. I wasn’t; just the speed at which he was accomplishing it. But then our exit was coming up and Mike slowed down, as did my knee. A few minutes later we were taking an off-ramp to a place called Rancho Cordova.
A wave of relief flooded through me. “Is this it?”
“Almost. Jesus, a pretty day like this, and you spend it watching the car gauges.”
“One of us has to,” I muttered. “Besides, the day was moving past me too quickly to enjoy.”
He rolled us into a nice suburban neighborhood, and after a few more twists and turns, we came to a stop in front of a modest one story ranch home. It had yellow siding, red shingles, and a covered patio, small in the sense that the garage was nearly as large as the living space portion. It was such a mundane terminus I didn’t know what to think.
“Are we meeting your mom?”
“No,” he said, shutting the car’s engine down.
“You’re a realtor on the side?”
“No. Shut up.”
“Okay.”
I stepped out of the car. Mike was right; it was a beautiful day. And I’d stepped right into an episode of Leave It To Beaver. I could hear neighborhood kids playing in the not-too-great distance and closer, the sound of somebody mowing their lawn. A few houses down, an elderly couple was drinking—I swear—lemonade on their front porch. Under the circumstances (rogue FBI agent and all that) this was surreal.
Mike led us up to the front door, which I discovered was crossed with yellow police tape reading DO NOT CROSS.
“That’s more like it.”
Mike peered through the window beside the door, looking for goodness-knows-what.
“Do police really expect the yellow tape to keep people out?” I asked, just trying to make conversation.
“Yeah. It’s a psychological deterrent.”
“But does it work?”
“Who knows? Anyway, she’s not coming back here. They yanked my surveillance team almost a week ago, after a month. The tape is new.”
“This is Ariadne’s place?”
“Yeah.” He pulled a key out of his pocket and opened the front door.
We were greeted by a central air-conditioning system that had clearly been working much too hard, perhaps out of boredom. The front entrance gave way to a moderately appointed living room with matching couch and chair, a couple of end tables, and a TV. Certainly, nothing to warrant the yellow tape warning like severed human heads or body parts, which would certainly explain the cold air.
“It’s this way.” He led me past the living room and to a corridor on the right.
I peeked through the first doorway I came to. “Oh, a bedroom.” Again, no severed human heads there. Next came a bathroom, and then a third door, which was closed. Mike stopped at it.
“This is it,” he said. “You ready?”
“I guess.”
He turned the knob and pushed open the door.
I stepped into a darkened room, and until Mike hit the light switch behind me, I was wondering if I was about to get jumped. But then, I saw what the room looked like, and finally I understood why Mike had gone through so much trouble to get me to this place.
To call it a shrine would be a gross over-simplification. Is was more like a series of small, interconnected shrines devoted to a variety of arcana, the most prominent of which appeared to be dedicated to me personally. In fact, I took up one whole wall, right over the computer. “I thought you said she just had me on her computer.”
“That was her work console,” he explained. “We didn’t find this until later. Actually—and I feel stupid even mentioning this—while I was here looking at this wall wondering who the fuck you were, someone else was looking at the photo in your FBI file. It was a good week before we put the two pieces together.”
“Efficient.”
“That’s why I like to work alone. We’re usually fifty left hands not knowing what the fifty right hands are doing.”
I stepped up to the wall and took a closer look at myself. Most of the photos were current.
“She’s been following you around for a while,” he commented, noting my interest specifically in a photograph taken outside of Central Park in New York City. It was over two years old. I knew that both because I was sporting the bald look at the time, and because I more or less commissioned the photo.
“No,” I said. “She got these from the Internet.”
“Really?”
“It’s a long story. Thing is, I know for a fact the site is shut down.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s gone. A lot of sites are archived on the server level.”
“No kidding?” I actually had no idea what he had just sa
id, but it didn’t sound like something I needed more details on. I know enough about computers to use the Internet competently, but that’s about it.
“Yeah. Wanna know how I know that?”
“Ariadne,” I offered.
“Accessing non-public archived web pages was one of her functions.”
“For my FBI file?”
“For terrorist activity,” he clarified. “My point is, if these pictures were once in the public domain, she knew how to find them. But why did she?”
I didn’t answer that, because I didn’t know. My eyes drifted to the bottom of the pictures, where there were a variety of words tacked on the wall. None of them were in English.
“We know what most of those say, but there are still a couple we’re not sure of.”
“This one is Lazarus,” I informed him. “It’s in Greek. This here . . . it’s Aramaic. It means Wandering Jew.”
“Very good,” he admitted. Mike sounded impressed. “How about that one on the side there?”
“That’s Sumerian. Not surprised you’re having trouble finding someone who can identify that.”
“What’s it say?”
“Ut-Naphishtim. It’s a name, just like the others.”
“Okay, so how’d you know that?”
“I’m something of a collector of dead languages.”
I pulled myself away from the Giant Wall of Me and moved to the wall opposite the door and next to the only window in the room, which was shuttered closed. The wall was papered with pages of highlighted text of all shapes and sizes, along with a small poster of what looked to me like a comic book character of some kind. I based that on the nature of the artwork, not because the man depicted had a big S on his chest or anything similarly archetypal. It was of a thin, pale man with spiky black hair and black eyes and a long, flowing robe. He actually looked like a vampire I knew once. Especially the eyes. Vampires all have black eyes.
I pointed at a picture. “This I’m clueless about.”
“That’s a comic book character called Sandman,” Mike answered. “In the stories, he’s one of the Eternals, a living incarnation of Dream. Or something. Got a comic book geek in the Sacramento office who identified it for me.”
“And the text?” I asked.
Hellenic Immortal Page 8
