INSIDIOUS ASSASSINS

by Jack Ketchum

  The booth fades to black.

  October 30th

  “He didn’t swallow this on purpose. The police report indicates the wife mentioned he’d been feeling ill at church the day before.”

  “Guilty conscience?” Eric snickers.

  “It would be funny, under other circumstances,” Randolph says. “He’s Catholic, right?”

  Officer North replies, “Yes. I believe his wife said they are members of Holy Trinity.”

  “Who is the priest?”

  “Father Peter Moore.” Officer North is reviewing the reports. “Yesterday was communion, in fact.”

  Randolph’s mind races, staring at the squishy Jesus in his hand. “Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s Jesus,” Eric says.

  “Not who. What.” Randolph’s eyes mirror his excitement, but his mouth is a grim line. “This is an ultra-absorbent polymer foam. Same material as those funny toy dinosaurs that grow from eggs. You submerge them in water, and a day later, the egg is a Tyrannosaurus Rex the size of your hand. It is a novelty toy.”

  “I don’t think you should be saying that Jesus Christ is a novelty toy, Doctor ...”

  “I bet this Jesus didn’t look like Jesus originally. Look at the color. Ivory white. You know what else is this color, don’t you?”

  Eric clears his throat, shifting uneasily. “Truth be told, I’m not much of a churchgoer.”

  Officer North, on the other hand, is. “Communion wafers.”

  The three men stare in horror at the toy Jesus in Randolph’s hand.

  “I think I’m going to visit Father Moore,” Officer North says. “Maybe he has a sin of his own to confess.”

  Father Moore is discovered by his secretary. The police arrived to question him concerning Mr. Richards’ death, but his secretary doesn’t understand why it would be the Father’s fault if a man chokes on a communion wafer. Seems to her, God metes out His own judgment on unrepentants who partake lightly in Holy Communion with sin on their souls.

  After all, the Body of Christ is nothing to toy around with.

  LABYRINTH

  BY JAMES S. DORR

  It was the Frenchwoman, Ariane, who taught him to know ghosts. He had been less than a week on Crete, still getting to know his way around the streets of Iraklion, when he came across a taverna off Odos 1866 that looked less a tourist trap than most, and decided to go in.

  Even though it was early for dinner, the place was crowded. He looked around, blinking his eyes to adjust to the dimness, and finally spotted an empty chair.

  “You mind if I join you?” he asked the woman who sat across from it drinking wine.

  She looked up and smiled, then put her finger to her lips.

  “Shhh,” she said, but at the same time gestured for him to sit down. She smiled again, blonde, with long braided hair, wearing a summer dress, possibly, like him, a college student on summer vacation. Then, after a moment, she took another sip of her wine.

  “You are an American?” she asked, her voice faintly accented.

  “Yes,” he said. “My name’s Carey.” She raised an eyebrow at that and he added, “My father was English. English-Welsh really, although he never lived in England. In fact, he grew up on the island here.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Then you are visiting on his account?”

  “Well, sort of,” he said. He really wasn’t, he wanted to tell himself, but his mother had insisted that, while he was here, he look up the places his father had told about. “He was an aeronautical engineer,” he said, “until he retired. He married late, after he came to the United States, so”—he smiled—”in spite of my British sounding first name, I’m American, born and bred.”

  “Ah,” she said again. “Have you eaten yet? You must try the kakavia—the seafood chowder—it’s the house specialty. They make it here with baby octopus.”

  “Really?” he asked. He started laughing.

  “Really,” she said. She started to laugh too. “I know it sounds awful, even for someone who grew up in France, but it is quite good.” She called the waiter and ordered for both of them, then introduced herself while they waited. “But you,” she added, “you say your family lived in Crete. Did your grandfather die here?”

  Carey nodded. “He was with British Intelligence in World War II, stationed on Crete when the Germans invaded. My grandmother and my father were with him.”

  “Have you seen his ghost yet?”

  “What?” he said. He opened his mouth again, not knowing quite what else to say, when their chowder arrived in two huge, steaming bowls. Glad to be off the hook for the moment, he stared down at the thick, rich liquid set before him, stirring it tentatively with his spoon. He saw the octopus—it was whole! Its tentacles radiated outward.

  Ariane laughed. “It’s thick enough to use a knife and fork,” she said. “It’s really more like a stew than a soup.”

  He nodded. He followed her lead and sawed off a small piece of tentacle. Cooked in a wine and tomato broth, with celery and onions, it really was good, he found. Then, when the waiter came back with a bottle, he filled both their glasses.

  They ate in silence, drinking the wine, he gazing again from time to time at the bowl’s swirling liquid, the tentacles spiraling almost hypnotically—almost beautifully—toward the bowl’s center. And then he would look at her, beautiful too. Her hair swirling, also, around her face where her thick braid had loosened.

  She ordered another bottle of wine later, when they had finished. “Have you seen the ruin yet?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve seen the model at the museum, but ...”

  “Shhh,” she said suddenly, putting her finger to her lips the way she had before. He listened with her, thinking he heard what sounded like gunshots, far in the distance.

  “Earlier,” she whispered, “I asked you about seeing ghosts. Oh, I saw they way you looked at me. But Crete is haunted. Do you know its history?”

  “You mean like the Greek myths?”

  She frowned when he said that. “Not Greek myths. Cretan myths. Yes, those too, but I mean more recent. The street outside, for instance, named for the 1866 Revolution against the Turks. And then the reprisals that followed after. Other streets, like Martyron 25 Avgoustou, named for the people massacred that day in 1898, also by the Turks. And, before them, there were the Venetians. Before that, the Saracens.”

  Carey nodded. “Before them, the Romans. Yes,” he said. “But afterward too, with Crete a part of Greece, there were the Germans.”

  “And now,” Ariane said, “there are those who see Greek rule as an occupation too. But the thing is, throughout her history, Crete has known bloodshed. So much blood that the land is soaked with it. You heard the gunshots?”

  Carey nodded.

  “You hear them at night, if you know how to listen. Those who die stay here—as well as the ones who follow after. Perhaps those were Germans.”

  Carey laughed. He felt uncomfortable. “Maybe,” he said. “But also they might have just been a taxicab backfiring. I’ve never seen a city with cars so dilapidated.”

  To his relief, she started to laugh too. “Maybe,” she said. “One doesn’t know, does one? But anyway, you say you haven’t been to Knossos. Maybe tomorrow we could take the bus there.”

  Carey didn’t see ghosts that night, but he dreamed of his grandfather. His father’s stories, about the German paratroopers drifting down like a whirlwind of feathers. Like flakes of snow. Even his father, a ten-year-old boy then, armed with a rifle, trying to stop them. But there were too many.

  His mother had insisted he come here, in part a reward for finishing college and agreeing to graduate school, to follow in his father’s footsteps. To be an engineer. But now he wondered, now that he’d come here. The sun, the beaches, the baking heat seemed to turn his thoughts inward.

  What was it he wanted?

  And now, too, Ariane, dressed in jeans and a front-tied blouse when he met her at the taverna that morning. As
he approached, he saw she was arguing, first with a young man, blond-headed, tall and thin, who looked much like her—her boyfriend? he wondered—then with the owner of the taverna. From the first she had taken a package, the second a basket.

  “Hello,” he shouted. The blond had already left.

  “Hello,” she called back. “I was just getting some things for our lunch. Do you want the wine aretsino—without resin, like we had it last night—or do you want to drink as the Cretans do?”

  Carey shrugged. “I’ll leave the choice to you.”

  Ariane nodded. “Demestica then,” she said. “You’ll be surprised, Carey. It’s very good here.” She paid for it and added it to her basket. “And now for the bus. The ruin is only five kilometers—three miles—from here, but it’s through a working class section of town.”

  Carey nodded. He saw what she meant as they walked to the waterfront, then rode the bus out on a highway lined with factories, both within and outside the city. The ugliness passed, though, as they approached the site, dominating the hill it was built on.

  “Jesus,” he whispered as they got off the bus. Tiers of partially reconstructed ruins rose above them, layer on layer. They went through the main gate to the site proper, then up the ramped path to the palace’s West Court.

  “Much older than Jesus,” she whispered back. “Most of what’s here dates back to at least 1700 B.C.—what’s called the New Palace—but it, in turn, was built on the foundations of the Old Palace. We’ll see parts of that too. But even before that”—she gestured with her head to the left, to three circular pits in the courtyard below them—”they found even more ancient ruins at the bottoms of those cisterns.”

  “Jesus,” he said again. Then he laughed. “Perhaps I should say Zeus?”

  “Closer,” she said. “He’s buried, you know, on the mountain peak south of here. Mount Iouktas. The palace was built on this hill, in fact, so that the mountain would overlook it. But here is where my namesake grew up, Ariadne. The one who gave the thread to Theseus to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. You know the legend—how he and the other youths from Athens were going to be sacrificed, except Ariadne saw him when they arrived and she fell in love with him?”

  “I can believe it,” Carey said. By now they had entered through the West Porch and threaded their own way down the Corridor of the Procession, turning left to the South Propylaeum, then left again up the twelve stone steps to the upper level marked on the map Ariane had brought as the Piano Nobile. “That blond man I saw you with this morning, though. At the taverna. Is he your Theseus?”

  Ariane laughed. She kissed him, suddenly, on the lips. “You mean my lover?”

  Carey blushed. “I ... uh ... I guess it’s none of my business. I ...”

  Ariane laughed again. “His name is Georges. And he’s my brother. We have a villa outside of Amnissos—you know, where the beach is. And anyway this Ariadne had many lovers. One of the legends says she even seduced Daedelus, the one who built the labyrinth—not this palace, but the first one, even older than the ruins beneath the pits we saw—even though he was a very old man. He gave her the thread that she then gave to Theseus, and, when the king found out, he got so angry he threw Daedelus and his son, Icarus, into the labyrinth and had it sealed up.”

  Carey nodded. “I think I remember. That’s when Daedelus built wings so they could escape too?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Out of feathers and wax, except Icarus died flying too near the sun. But Ariadne didn’t have a good time of it either, because the first chance Theseus got, he dumped her on the island of Naxos.”

  Carey laughed too now. “Talk about ‘labyrinthian’ stories. Plots within plots—and everyone loses. And so—remember what you said last night? Are their ghosts in this palace?”

  “Shhh,” Ariane said. “Can’t you feel them? Look.” She took him by the hand and led him down a long, narrow corridor, then to the right to a descending staircase. “Underneath us, just to our left, is what the restorers think was the throne room. And ahead of us, the Central Courtyard. Squint your eyes—like this.”

  He looked down the stairs to a huge, open area, gleaming beneath the late morning sun. Squinting his eyes he thought he saw ... figures? Drifting in long, stiff robes, the women with their breasts bared and their hair curled in tight rolls. He blinked. He saw—tourists. A small knot of people he recognized now from the ride on the bus.

  “You did for a moment, didn’t you see them?” Ariane said. “My namesake—she was a princess, you know. Her handmaids around her?”

  “I ...” Carey laughed again. He had seen them. Or thought he had seen them. A trick of the light ...

  Ariane kissed him, this time on the cheek. “Come on,” she said, leading him down the staircase. “I think they’re afraid of you. Anyway they’re avoiding us now. And, in the meantime”—she found a shaded spot in the courtyard and put her basket down, showing him, inside, bread and cheese and cold, steamed mussels, stuffed with rice pilaf. She took out the wine bottle, wrapped in a damp cloth to keep it cool, and handed it to him along with two glasses.

  “And in the meantime,” he finished for her, “this exploring of the past makes a person hungry.”

  He slept with her that night, playing Theseus to her Ariadne. Or was it Daedelus? He wasn’t old, though, he thought when he woke up in his hotel room with her beside him, her hair in swirled tangles across both their pillows.

  He thought of the afternoon after their picnic. Crossing the Courtyard to the Grand Staircase, then descending flight after flight to the Hall of Colonnades, deep in the hillside, the King’s and Queen’s Quarters, the Queen’s Bath, the Shrine of the Double Axes, the mazes of workshops. Finally they had gone out through the north, crossing the Theatral Area to the northwest, then back to the east to explore other ruins that surrounded the palace. It was there, to the east, that they found a shaded grove of trees to finish their picnic.

  That was when she had brought out the packet that Georges had given her at the taverna. She handed him a hand-rolled cigarette.

  “Only a little,” she said when she lit it, then lit her own. “Georges and I had a fight about this—the penalties for having hashish can be very strict—but I said we could trust you. I hope I was right, Carey.”

  “Yes,” he said. He breathed in the harsh smoke. “That is, I mean I don’t use this stuff much. But, back in college ...”

  “I know,” she said. She kissed him—the sweetest kiss he could remember ever receiving. “But only a little bit for now. It’s high quality.”

  “And will we see ghosts?” He started to giggle.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But there really are ghosts here. And ghosts within us, too. We’re part of the past, you know, whether we wish it to be so or not.”

  “The past within us.” He giggled again and kissed her back, then helped her clean up and put their picnic things back in her basket.

  And then they’d ridden the bus together, not yet lovers, she planning to transfer to another bus back to Amnissos, when they heard gunshots. The driver had hit the brakes—these weren’t ghost gunshots—and started cursing.

  “What the hell?” Carey said.

  Ariane clutched his arm. “The Free Crete Movement,” she whispered. “Last night, remember, I cautioned you to distinguish between Cretan myths and Greek ones? Because who knows who might have been listening. And then I said there are some who see being part of Greece as a foreign occupation as well? These are mostly idealists—intellectuals who only talk about revolution. But there are others, young, angry people. And with the heat we’re having this summer ...”

  He put his arm gently around her as the bus finally continued its way. “It’s okay, Ariane,” he murmured, not knowing what else to tell her.

  “I-I’m frightened,” she said. “Those shots last night. I thought they were ghosts, but ...”

  And then, when they got off, they both thought it best she not take a second bus that evening. They found
a restaurant near the Plateia Eleftherios—a brightly lit, tourist kind of restaurant—then went together back to his hotel where they had more hashish, then made love together.

  But now, when she woke too, her spirits were higher. “I must take you with me tonight to our villa,” she said as they got dressed. “And have you meet Georges. But first, you say you’ve already been to the Archaeological Museum and seen the model of Knossos there? I think, this afternoon, we should see it again together.”

  She smiled and kissed him, then added softly. “To review our journey.”

  That evening she found a little waterfront cafe where they had a light supper, no longer concerned about here-and-now gunshots, then took him out on the breakwater to the Venetian fort that guarded the harbor. “Look,” she said as they watched the sky turn gold in the sunset. “Can you see the galleys coming in, fresh from a pirate expedition? These are ghosts too, the sailors and merchants who ruled Crete until 1669, when the Turks took over. They called the island Candia then.”

  “Oh?” he said. He squinted the way she had shown him at Knossos—he almost could see the Venetian galleys, their sails a deep purple, could hear the creak of their long, sweeping oars. “I know, in England, they once called Crete ‘Candy.’ My father told me that, but now I know why.” He kissed her gently. “Because it’s sweet, like you.”

  “Look,” she said, her arms around him. “There, in the harbor!”

  “Another ghost?”

  “No. Right below us. Remember our supper the night before last? Our first meal together?”

  He looked down at the harbor’s swirling waters and then he saw it, its arms radiating out in a spiral. A half-grown octopus.