But there was one thing he held back with selfishness, one thing his pride would not allow him to share. Never did he reveal the existence of the golden cryptograph to any of his fellow crypto-alchemists. Thus, none of them understood the precise nature of the knowledge he sought.
He toiled and studied in vain for years, until his body could no longer withstand the rigours of mortal life, and he died, never having solved the riddle of the golden cryptograph.
PART 2: THE EXPLOITS OF THE DETECTIVE OF DESIRE
The crypto-alchemist’s workshop was located in the basement of the home he shared with his spinster sister, a spacious house in the suburban Libida borough of Venera, on an island of the Veneran archipelago not far from mainland Europe. The house had once belonged to their parents, where he had lived for the whole span of his life, never having succeeded in finding gainful employment, so wrapped up had he been in the arcane and unremunerative pursuit of crypto-alchemy.
The crypto-alchemist’s sister grew apprehensive when he failed to emerge from the basement for more than two consecutive days. She steeled herself to make the unprecedented move of trespassing into her brother’s underground sanctum. Considering her brother’s advanced age and poor physical condition, she was not altogether surprised to find him dead. She felt neither relief nor grief; she was and had always been practical-minded. She made all the proper arrangements for the disposal of the body — the crypto-alchemist had donated his corpse to the Venera Hospital, so there was very little fuss, which suited her just fine.
She had no idea, however, what to make of all the strange apparatus and paraphernalia her brother had amassed in the sixty-odd years since he had claimed the basement as his own. She didn’t have the will or the energy to sort through it all. Consulting the local newspaper she spotted an ad for Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, a “vintage shop” (she wasn’t quite sure what that could be) that claimed to buy en masse and on site the possessions of the departed. She liked the idea of getting rid of everything in one swoop instead of having to dispose of her brother’s clutter piecemeal. She telephoned and made an appointment for a house call.
Patricia unloaded her van from the private parking lot behind her shop. She made a bit of extra money renting out the five extra parking spaces, reserving the one adjacent to the back door for herself. Although the streets of the island of Venera did not allow for automobiles, it was possible to drive in Libida, and many Venerans kept vehicles in the suburb to indulge in their driving vice, especially as there were no driving regulations whatsoever on Libida.
What a bizarre haul! Not even the books could help her figure out what all this stuff was. There were thirteen books in all — each of them hand-bound and -crafted, each of them hundreds of pages thick, each of them written in a cipher that combined familiar letters of the Roman alphabet, letters from the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, Arabic and Hebrew writing, numerals and other mathematical symbols, Chinese pictographs, hieroglyphs, runes, and other completely unrecognizable characters. Some of the pages contained graphs, tables, diagrams, and other illustrations, but nothing that made any sense to her.
Some of the paraphernalia was clearly lab equipment, but it had been oddly customized. The haul also included machinery that looked straight out of a steampunk photoshoot. Was it in some way functional, or purely decorative? Regardless — her clientele included a coterie of steampunk fashionistas and fashionisters; they would eagerly jump on some of this merchandise. Another subset of her clientele, which overlapped somewhat with the steampunks, were LARPers — live action role players — the most involved of whom would certainly buy some of the books for some elaborately staged mystery/adventure. And then there was Dovelander, the supernatural detective series that was shooting on location right here in Libida; that show had become her best customer, constantly scouting for weird props — and as the sign read below the shop name Tomorrow’s Yesterdays was “Where the Weird Is Always in Fashion.”
One item struck Patricia as particularly beautiful: a golden greeting card, gilded with intricate illuminations. On its cover were three words spelled out with odd characters — although noticeably different from the cipher used in the books. This text looked utterly alien, unlike anything Patricia had ever seen. The material of the card was smoother than a girl’s inner thigh, so thin it was almost immaterial. Yet, it was in perfect condition, unmarred by even the slightest nick, scratch, or tear — in such perfect condition that it seemed to emit a subtle glow.
A movement caught her eye: had the text on the cover shifted? It appeared stable now, but was it the same as it had been only minutes ago? She stared at it; the characters shimmered and danced. It was too elaborate to be merely an optical illusion, like those trick pictures that changed depending on the angle from which you viewed them.
She opened the card. There was more writing inside. The characters moved as she tried to read them. The card glowed brighter and brighter. The text settled into place, and Patricia read it — or, rather, it read itself to Patricia — and all at once she understood.
What the now-deceased crypto-alchemist had never grasped was that the key to unlocking the golden cryptograph was not knowledge: it was a person. In fact, there were, at any given time, several keys in existence, and each one of them, presented with the golden cryptograph, would unlock it in a way that was unique to that particular key, that particular person.
For Patricia, the owner and founder of Tomorrow’s Yesterdays: Where the Weird Is Always in Fashion, the golden cryptograph was a sacred formula that alchemically transformed her into the Detective of Desire.
Shopkeeper by day, superhero by night. Within a week of adopting this new double life, Patricia’s relationship with her beau, an expat Texan named Charles, which she’d always been somewhat lackadaisical about anyway, not so much ended but petered out. Even before, they barely managed to have sex even once a month, but it had been an undemanding and companionable affair that allowed her to devote her passion to Tomorrow’s Yesterdays. Still, even Charles, who needed so very little from her, had his limits. When she failed to come home for five nights in a row, he simply moved out whatever personal items he kept at her house and returned to the apartment he shared with two other Americans. He’d wanted to give it up within a few weeks of when he and Patricia started seeing each other, as he was never there anymore, but she’d always insisted that he keep it. In Patricia’s mind, Charles had only ever been visiting.
Her daytime routine remained the same, but instead of working past her posted hours, as she had often done before unlocking the golden cryptograph, her late nights were taken up with her new calling as the Detective of Desire.
All she needed to do to effect the transformation from Patricia Alexandria to the Detective of Desire was to close her eyes, recall the sacred message encoded within the golden cryptograph, and let its ineffable meaning permeate her consciousness. No matter what she was wearing at the time, her mundane clothes — well, not that mundane, Patricia did pride herself on her eccentric yet timeless sense of style — altered themselves into the uniform of the Detective of Desire: knee-high dark grey leather boots with wide two-inch stacked heels; lilac wool hot pants with deep purple piping; a chain-link belt with a large buckle in the shape of the same crypto-alchemical symbol found on the back of the golden cryptograph; a gold necklace with an amulet also in the shape of the crypto-alchemical emblem; a loose white silk blouse cuffed at the elbow and with moderate cleavage; a black shawl/cape thing that fluttered like slow wings regardless of whether there was any wind; a black mask that covered her face, from her forehead to the tip of her nose, leaving only an oval opening for her to breathe and speak. Her lips were adorned with sparkly amethyst gloss, and her hair — normally brown and cut to have bangs and to fall just below her nape — became a rainbow of long strands of purple, blue, gold, and scarlet, reaching the middle of her back.
Every night, Patricia climbed onto the roof of her shop to transform into the Detective of Desire. She then flew of
f into the starry sky of the Mediterranean.
She patrolled the Veneran archipelago in search of lost or stolen objects. She didn’t actively seek them out, but she was drawn to them. Once she found whatever object it was that the amulet directed her to that evening — it could be a clay statuette or a Pop Art necktie or a pulp magazine or a vintage purse or Victorian pipe or a set of American baseball cards or a torn envelope with a rare postage stamp or a wooden toy or a 1950s evening gown in need of repair or antique jewellery, anything, really — she would see an ethereal thread that sprouted from it. She would collect the object and then follow the thread. Always, it led to a person. She would give the object to that person, in full knowledge that, in some way that might not yet be evident, the item in question, which may have belonged to them before or may have been hitherto unfamiliar, would transform their lives in profound and wondrous ways.
The stories of the people to whom she surrendered these objects sometimes made the news — never a lead article, but low-key character pieces about eccentric collectors, crackpot inventors, reunited family members, bizarre coincidences; all these stories had in common that the object recovered by the Detective of Desire played an essential role in the related events. Some articles even mentioned the Detective of Desire by her nom d’aventure. Once, Vermilion Times — the English-language monthly magazine on Veneran life sold to the international market — ran a feature on the legend of the Detective of Desire. The reporter tracked down more than a hundred of the people Patricia’s alter ego had bequeathed found objects to. The story made the cover, with an artist’s interpretation of the Detective of Desire — with (unsurprisingly) bigger breasts; the uniform was mostly accurate, although the shape of the amulet was simplified and the shawl wings were all wrong, looking more like a traditional superhero cape. Still, she pasted the cover of the issue onto the front of her scrapbook that collected the media reports of the Detective of Desire’s exploits.
The Detective of Desire was only incidentally a crimefighter, although Interpol, the French Police Nationale, and the Italian Polizia di Stato officially considered her simultaneously a myth and a wanted vigilante, refusing to take a clear stance. But she was safe: no-one knew that the Detective of Desire’s secret identity was Patricia Alexandria. Anyway, as she never stole anything from the innocent and never resorted to violence, she was considered a minor nuisance, and the mainland European authorities, in the odd instances when they didn’t dismiss the Detective of Desire as an urban legend, pursued her with a mix of bemusement and nonchalance.
Sometimes she recovered stolen objects from thieves (that’s where the crimefighter tag came in) — but only a fraction of those times would the thread lead back to the previous owner of the item. Most times it would lead to someone else in the Veneran archipelago, the French Riviera, Malta, or the coast of Italy (the amulet only occasionally led her as far as Morocco, Spain, or Turkey).
Sometimes the thieves would try to fight the Detective of Desire, but her amulet protected her from harm. No blows or weapons of any kind could penetrate its force field. Although lead bullets would be let through and delicately land in her hands, transmogrified into small trinkets of alchemical gold that she would later sell at Tomorrow’s Yesterdays.
Most often, though, the objects the amulet would lead her to would simply have been lost or discarded, with no-one to fight against to gain their possession.
Once, several weeks after the Vermilion Times article, the amulet led the Detective of Desire underground, into the labyrinth of ruins buried below the modern city of Venera. She was startled to discover that veins and rivulets of phosphorescent vermilion pulsed through the ancient walls and sediments of rocks and soil. Was this the source of the element that fed Venera’s vermilion plant, itself the source of the psychotropic vermilion spice? The closely guarded secret of the crop’s cultivation had never leaked past the borders of Venera.
The amulet led her downward through a maze of antiquity, of past iterations of the fabulous city-state, until finally its beam of light settled on a statuette adorned with vermilion jewels. Approximately twenty centimetres high, carved in ebony, the piece depicted a black woman with huge breasts, hips, and buttocks, one arm pointing upward, the other downward. Patricia guessed it to be an ancient fertility goddess, or perhaps an early depiction of the Goddess Venera herself. Were she to sell this, Patricia would make a fortune. The rare vermilion gems alone were priceless!
This was the first and only time that thoughts of personal gain crossed Patricia’s mind in the course of her duties as the Detective of Desire. The instant this hint of greed entered her mind, the Detective of Desire transformed back into her mundane identity of Patricia Alexandria. Patricia immediately recognized her error. Had her moment of weakness forever taken away the Detective of Desire? Would she ever be able to find her way out of subterranean Venera without the abilities of the Detective of Desire?
Patricia fought her mounting panic. She calmed herself by thinking of all the happiness the Detective of Desire had brought to the world. She recalled the secret message of the golden cryptograph and contemplated its beauty.
… And the Detective of Desire returned.
Holding the vermilion-adorned statuette, the Detective of Desire followed the pull of her amulet. She flew out of the underground maze and into the sky of Venera. That night’s journey took her to a notorious house: the Velvet Bronzemine. Its front doors opened, heeding the amulet. The Detective of Dreams floated inside. Throughout the mansion, naked people of all ages danced and fucked and painted and played music and sculpted and sang. They ignored her passage — not because they would not have been curious had they seen her but because the amulet made her invisible to all but her target for this mission.
She floated up the stairs and through another doorway that opened before the glow of the amulet. It was the house’s master bedroom, and Patricia recognized the principal occupant of the bed: Tito Bronze himself — filmmaker, pornographer, and Venera’s premier patron of the arts. With him were a half-dozen sycophants — male, female, and ambiguously gendered — each of them his junior by at least twenty years. All were asleep, their limbs entwined in a sensual lattice.
The Detective of Desire whispered, “Tito Bronze …” and the man woke up. He leered at the Detective of Desire with undisguised lust, but a beam of light from the amulet diverted his gaze to the statuette. Bronze shook his bedmates awake and gestured them out of the room. They complied submissively. He closed the door and turned back toward the Detective of Desire.
He took the statuette from her and fondled it with a charming combination of childlike glee, reverent awe, and perverse lust. He clutched it to his chest and looked at the Detective of Desire. He mouthed more than uttered: “Thank you.”
At that moment Patricia became aware of the notorious filmmaker’s tremendous erection. It was both fascinating and alarming. Then, she noticed that he had noticed her noticing. He smiled predatorily and cocked his head toward the bed.
Patricia laughed and started flying away toward the open window. But the filmmaker cried out: “Wait!” She turned back and he said: “Stay. I will make a film of your exploits. With you as the star! Stay, Detective of Desire, and I will make you the object of everyone’s desires!” Patricia laughed again and flew out the window as Bronze shouted after her.
The following year, Tito Bronze’s La Détective du Désir premiered at Cannes. When she heard about the film, Patricia did not know whether she should be irked or flattered. She settled on feeling both and travelled to Cannes to see the film. She had never before attended the famous film festival, and this seemed like a good incentive to finally experience it. La Détective du Désir featured an all-French cast, with the protagonist’s centre of operations changed from the Veneran Archipelago to the French Riviera. A pornographic romp mingled with pulp adventure, La Détective du Désir was altogether silly and wonderful and had nothing to do whatsoever with the real Detective of Desire, her abilities, or her a
ctivities. Patricia loved every second of it. The lead actress even resembled Patricia a little bit. When the video came out the following year, Patricia was proud to purchase a copy.
Patricia kept the golden cryptograph in her office safe at Tomorrow’s Yesterdays. One morning, she came to work to find her shop had been burglarized, the merchandise ransacked, the safe broken into, left open and empty.
Immediately, she closed her eyes and brought to mind the secret message of the golden cryptograph. To her surprise and relief, the transformation succeeded. She tried to focus the power of her amulet on the golden cryptograph, but now, as before, she had no control over which object the amulet directed her toward. Every night for the next month, she mustered all of her willpower, but the amulet resisted her efforts to locate the golden cryptograph. In time, her attempts grew less frequent and then petered out altogether. Her enthusiasm for her life as the Detective of Desire also waned.
Still, she soldiered on, but the exploits of the Detective of Desire had lost the sheen of glamour and adventure that had so thrilled her while the golden cryptograph was still in her possession. What did she care if a pair of vintage Italian heels found the perfect drag-queen feet? If a hand-carved backgammon set led a lonely man to the person who would become the most steadfast and caring friend of his life? If an outof-print guide to nonexistent birds, with nearly half of its pages torn out or damaged, fuelled an in elderly woman a newfound passion for cryptid ornithology that filled the rest of her years with wonder?
Venera Dreams Page 20