by Mark Cain
I had never met this particular prince of Hell. From what I’d been told, he didn’t get out of his palace very often. That’s why I was there, to confirm that fact. If Mammon had an alibi, some kind of witness who could vouch for the devil’s presence over the past day or two, I could eliminate at least one of my suspects.
A long line of supplicants, carrying weighty bags or chests on their backs or dragging them behind them, stood before the Palace of Mammon. BOOH dropped me at the end of the line, and I queued up and looked at everyone there. Yep, except for me, everyone was schlepping something: a burlap bag, full to bursting, or a strongbox, similar to what a pirate might bury his treasure in or a young maid might use as a hope chest. Most of the people in line were in ripped and tawdry clothing. There was the occasional finely-tailored three piece suit, but it was usually badly frayed.
In the air was the scent of menthol and tobacco. I looked up the line. A fog of cigarette smoke was rising from a lizard with bleached blonde hair, leopard print blouse and skirt. Attached to her ankle were a weighty chain and chest. In addition to this Jacob Marley fashion accessory, the old hag was lugging a Samsonite suitcase. I knew her. It was Dora, head of Parts, and a frequent associate. She of course wasn’t really a lizard. Dora just had dry and wrinkled skin, a result of a lifetime of smoking and a retirement under the blistering rays of the Floridian sun.
“Excuse me,” I said to the people between me and her, “do you mind if I cut in line? That’s a friend of mine.”
No one seemed to mind. If anything, they expressed relief to be delayed from whatever punishment awaited them inside. I sidled up to Dora. She was arguing vehemently with a short, round man in black suit and dented top hat, sporting a white, handlebar mustache, carrying a walking stick and dragging a footlocker behind him. He spoke with a pronounced English accent and reminded me of the real estate magnate on the Monopoly cards.
“Come here often?” I said to Dora.
Surprised at hearing a familiar voice, she stopped the verbal chewing out she was giving the man. “Steve? What are you doing here?” She looked at my clothes. “Stupid outfit.”
“I could say the same about yours,” was my mild reply. “So who’s the Brit?”
“He’s not British. He’s from Jersey, born and raised.”
“But that’s Briti … ”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Dora groused. “You’re as American as I am. I meant Joisey, as in New Jersey, not Old Jersey. Sheesh.”
I knew what she meant; I was just playing dumb. Dora often pulls my chain, but generally I have to be nice to her, since I’m so reliant on her parts, that is, her department, not her privates, which would be gross. Anyway, this seemed like a safe way to irritate her. “Come here often?” I repeated.
Dora sighed. “More often than I care to, but this is the center of Greed in Hell, and periodically I’m required to make the pilgrimage.”
“But what about Parts?”
“I have my ‘back in a minute’ sign hanging on my door.”
I just hoped Orson didn’t need anything from her. Her ‘minute’ was likely to take a couple of hours.
“You still haven’t answered my other question. Who is that guy?”
“That’s George, my fourth husband. You’ve heard me mention him. GEORGE!” she yelled, and the fellow turned around. “I’d like you to meet Steve Minion, Hell’s Super.”
I held out my hand to shake, but the old fellow looked as if I was offering him a dead mackerel. Dora elbowed him in the gut and reluctantly he shook with me. “Charmed,” he said then turned his back on the both of us. Obviously he wasn’t.
Dora grumbled. “I can’t stand that superior old bastard. He grew up in Atlantic City, but eventually became an investment banker for Lloyd’s of London. He developed that affected English accent. Even in death he won’t abandon it.”
“See him often?”
She shrugged. “Not if I can help it. It’s funny though. Almost every time I have to come up to see Mammon, I’m in line next to George.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “Funny. Hell’s like that.”
“No shit.”
“What were you two arguing about?”
“Anything and everything, just like back on Earth during our sucky marriage. If I never saw him again, it would be too soon. Fat chance, though,” she said, chewing on her lower lip. How she could do that and inhale cigarette smoke at the same time seemed like a magic trick to me.
“So what’s in your suitcase?”
“Cigarettes,” she grumbled, glowering at me. “The non-menthol kind.”
“I thought you couldn’t get regular cigarettes.”
“I can get them alright,” she said, popping open the latches to reveal a suitcase full of Camels and Lucky Strikes. “I just can’t smoke them.”
“But how do you get them?”
“I trade parts for them.”
“From the department inventory?” I gasped, scandalized. That helped explain why she was “fresh out” of so many things when I needed them. That and her hoarder sensibilities. Not to mention her dishonesty and general orneriness.
Dora looked longingly at her stash. “God, I’d walk a mile for a Camel. Remember that?”
“Yeah, I do.” I was old enough to remember the cigarette ads.
“And an LSMFT to you, too,” she added with a sigh.
“Pardon?”
“’Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.’”
“I’d forgotten that one.”
“Well, Luckies were my brand.”
“So, what are you doing with a suitcase full of cigarettes you aren’t allowed to smoke?”
Dora used a dying butt to light a new Kool. “You’ll see.” And then she said no more.
As the line shortened, I could read the inscription above the entrance to the Palace of Mammon. The letters, in the sharp strokes of the Latin you’d find on many an old building back on Earth, said, “Agrippa argentum vestrum.” It looked like Latin, and I was fluent in Latin, but I couldn’t quite make sense of the words.
“What does that mean?” I asked Dora.
She shrugged. “Nothing really. It’s a play on words. Agrippa built the original Pantheon.”
“That’s right,” I said, slapping myself on the forehead. “I used to know that.”
“Most of us translate it as ‘I grippa your money.’ That is what Mammon does, you know.”
“That’s an awful pun.”
“Yeah, I know. Devils seem to have no sense of humor.”
“Agreed. And that sounds more Sicilian than Latin.”
“You’re right about that.”
The line moved slowly. Dora, purposely ignoring George, whose very presence seemed to cause her pain, and I talked about little things. Close to the entrance, a devil, dressed like a Roman centurion, stood guard. He eyed the supplicants carefully, making each one stand next to a sign that said, “You have to be this tall to enter the ride.”
Being pretty good at estimating length - after all, I’m Hell’s Super, so it’s part of the job - I figured the height requirement to be a little less than five feet. Every once in a while, the centurion devil would cull a height-impaired individual from the herd and send him to another line off to one side, where a centuri-demon operated a rack. As he strapped the shorties into the torture device and proceeded to stretch them, he would mumble at them incessantly, doing a truly terrible Peter Lorre impression the whole time. It took very little time to do the stretching - ectoplasm is more malleable than the real thing - though the process looked pretty painful. Soon, much taller, though admittedly thinner, damned souls were unstrapped from the rack, where they staggered, dragging their burdens behind them, to the back of the line. I imagined that the stretch was only good this one time, and that whenever they returned, they’d have to endure the same ordeal.
As I stepped between the columns supporting the portico, I got stopped by the centurion devil at the entrance. “Where’s your stash?”
&n
bsp; “Sin of Pride,” I said, pointing at my chest.
He nodded. “Okay, that explains it, but what are you doing here, then?”
“Need to see Mammon.”
The devil frowned, and pulled his sword from its scabbard. It morphed into a pitchfork and he pointed it toward me. “I don’t know about that. He usually only sees the Greedy.”
“I understand of course,” I said, trying my best to be polite, always a good policy with devils, especially armed ones, though not that easy to do - they offend easily. “But I’m on a special assignment from Lord Satan, so I think he’ll make an exception.”
The devil looked at me from side to side, trying to size me up. “I don’t recognize you. Who are you?”
“Minion’s the name, Steve Minion.”
“Minion, huh?” said the devil, nodding again. “I know about you. Hell’s Super, right?”
“Right.”
“How come I’ve never seen you before?”
I gestured at the building behind him. “Well, Mammon’s palace is modeled after the original Pantheon back on Earth, right?”
“Right, so?”
“So the Pantheon’s been around for two thousand years. It’s pretty low maintenance.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Besides, I do get up here occasionally. Only last month I had to unclog one of your Roman baths.”
The centuri-devil nodded. “I remember that. The baths are a favorite of mine. That was a real mess.”
I thought back to my three broken plungers and the case of Drano I had to use to get the pipes clear. “You’re telling me.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“The drainpipe was clogged … with devil hair.”
“Well, I guess you’re legit then. Go on in.”
“Thanks.” The line shortened, and I stepped inside the building. “See ya.”
The inside of Mammon’s palace was even more opulent than the exterior. The gold walls and ceilings were inlaid with platinum and precious jewels. The high walls of the palace supported the massive dome. The only light entering the building came from the front door and a small hole at the top of the dome, yet the palace’s interior glowed so brightly, I had to shield my eyes. The gold and other precious metals were all buffed to a fine luster. You could see your own reflection in them, and the enormous diamonds protruding from many of the surfaces gleamed like spotlights.
In the center of the palace, atop a massive throne, sat Mammon, all twenty feet of him. At least, that’s what he looked like to me. I’m sure he could have been bigger, since as a prince of Hell he probably had powers similar to Beezy, whom I’d just recently seen in a five hundred foot high incarnation. Yet, I suspected Mammon picked his size deliberately to be impressive, almost overwhelmingly so, yet still small enough to interact with the supplicants who were lined up to see him.
Mammon was dressed in a Roman toga. He had white hair cut in a pageboy, and a laurel wreath on his head. He looked much like statues I’d seen of Caesar Augustus, though his horns marred the effect a bit.
Once inside the palace, the line of greedy damned souls lost a bit of its integrity. It splayed out, so we could fill the floor space before Mammon. I wanted to get closer to him, but the crowd pushed me back to a wall not far from the entrance. Above an alcove there I noticed a plaque saying, “Here Lies Raphael.” I remembered that the Italian Renaissance painter was buried in the original Pantheon, so I stepped closer to get a better look. In the alcove was a statue of a teenage mutant Ninja turtle.
As the Greedy had their turns before Mammon, they presented their bags or chests or suitcases to him. Inside each was whatever the individual supplicant deemed most valuable. Sometimes it was gold coins, sometimes greenbacks. When Dora reached Mammon, she popped the latches on the Samsonite and offered up her cigarettes. I’m sure it was agony for her to give them away. Each time one of the Greedy made an offering, the entire throng inside the building chanted, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.” Their voices echoed in the golden Pantheon to eerie effect.
Occasionally, someone didn’t present an acceptable offering to Mammon. When that happened, the devil would merely gesture, and from the side a demon would come forward with a cat o’ nine tails. After a severe thrashing that would leave the damned soul a bloodied mess, he or she was chained to the interior wall of the building. The chained bodies went entirely around the structure.
Imprisoned on a portion of the wall near me was an old fat dude. He was dressed in opulent manner, though as with most of the damned, his clothes were threadbare. The man was bald, except for a ring of white hair, a bit like Mammon’s wreath I idly thought, and a dark handlebar mustache. I recognized him from a picture in one of my graduate school textbooks. It was John Pierpont Morgan.
I’d never met J.P. before, though I knew some of his contemporaries, like Carnegie and Rockefeller. I’d always been impressed by the man’s accomplishments. He was the only individual ever to make a loan to the U.S. federal government, keeping it from default. Morgan had arranged the financing for the Panama Canal too. Pretty big stuff.
I also knew he was one of the most ruthless businessmen of all time. In the AC/DC wars, he threatened George Westinghouse with suing him into bankruptcy if he didn’t sign over the rights to AC power. Morgan had lost big, because he’d backed the wrong horse, that is, Edison instead of Tesla. He didn’t care. He bullied his way to success and in the process helped form General Electric. He also founded U.S. Steel and, of course, the banking empire that bore his name.
“Hey,” I said to him. “Aren’t you J.P. Morgan?”
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,” Morgan chanted along with everyone else. “Yes, I am. What’s it to you?”
“I was just wondering how long you’ve been hanging there.”
“I don’t really have any idea, but since shortly after I died.”
“Really?” I was impressed. That would have been almost a hundred and fifty years. “Why?”
“I tried to swindle Mammon.”
“Ooh. Bad move.”
I stood there for a minute, watching the people give up their treasures to Mammon. Then I had an idea. “So, can I ask you something?”
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's … what?” Morgan said with a sigh.
“Does Mammon get out much?”
“Out?” Morgan spit out a less-than sincere laugh. “I’ve never even seen him leave that chair.”
“So,” I said, stating the obvious, “he didn’t leave for a while anytime in the past few days.”
“What are you, an idiot? I just said he never leaves.”
“Good enough for me,” and I turned to go.
“Say,” said Morgan behind me.
“What?”
“Why are you wearing that idiotic outfit?”
I shrugged. “My eternal damnation?” I left him hanging there.
Chapter 15
My feet made a soft thump as I landed on the concrete in front of the trailer. I had a little more than an hour before the cocktail party, just enough time to check in before changing my clothes. I arranged for BOOH to pick me up at my apartment then climbed the steps to my office.
Neither Orson, Edison nor Bik was around. Some piles had been moved around and the stack of high priority work orders had grown slightly, but otherwise, everything looked about the same as before. Orson was doing a good job of keeping things under control. On the corner of my desk was another memo from him. With a soft groan, I picked it up and began to read.
Plant Department
MEMORANDUM
TO: Steve Minion, Hell’s Super
FROM: Orson Welles, Hell’s Super Pro Tempore
DATE: Whenever
RE: HOTI Form ∞3971PDYFF 666-327?///WOE # ∞8911874123
This is a report on the successful resolution of WOE # ∞8911874123, i.e., aka, viz.: “Fix Mussolini’s sewing machine.”
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BP and I found Il Duce, the Great One, in the sweat shops down on Seven. You might recall that the shops are located in Tae Bayan, aka “Shit Town,” a tawdry city on the western edge of that very same ocean that on the east fronts Pinkerton’s Hellish version of Glasgow. I think of the bit of land on which Tae Bayan lies like a stinking cow paddy to be the Underworld’s Pacific Rim.
But I digress. I have never been able to figure out how to get to Tae Bayan via the Escalator, so we took the Elevator, which as you know is capable of moving sideways as well as up and down. Still, it took me and my assistant three attempts before landing in the garment district of what surely must be one of Hell’s largest and least pleasant metropolises. I cannot recall if you’ve ever been to the garment district, but here the buildings are assembled in slapdash manner, adding new floors whenever needed, resulting in such architecturally tenuous structures that I’m frequently reluctant to enter. Each factory in the district, though, is yardarm to yardarm with two more, that is, the buildings here are crammed together in such close proximity that if one started to collapse the other two would likely hold it up.
In any event, BP and I identified the factory in which the Great One was employed. The Pyongyang Pantyhose Factory turned out to be Hell’s largest producer of women’s sheer stockings. Apparently, Mussolini is a star stitcher, and the former dictator sews all of the pantyhose used by Hell’s fleet of succubi.
Mussolini’s workstation was on the fourth floor, but we found it empty. Since the Great One was unable to operate his equipment, his demon supervisor had decided to keep the former dictator occupied by shooting him in the chest a couple of times and hanging him out a window on a meat hook.