Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  There was a certain luxury in dealing with her. Between her eyes, cheeks, lips and shoulders there was always at least one betrayer. Now it was her eyes; they clouded over then hardened, as if from some inner Arctic winter.

  “Francine put you in touch.”

  “Well, yes, Francine mentioned him. I suppose I was the only scientist Francine knew well enough to ask such a favor. If you happen to be at Cambridge, that sort of thing.”

  “So you met him?”

  “Him? Well, yes I did, a few times.”

  She admitted to three meetings; the last the longest. He had dropped by her hotel; she was staying at Cambridge for a seminar. They’d had a drink at the bar before she met colleagues for dinner. As with the first two times, shorter at cafés, she found him overly negative, the decadence of the West one of his favorite topics. Another the lack of emphasis on science at schools. He was all math and physics; she neurology and molecular biology. She could offer him a place at her dinner, knowing he would turn it down. Five days later he was dead.

  “He died under suspicious circumstances. Cocaine?”

  “Yes.”

  “This would have been in 1972?”

  She nodded.

  “Francine returned from Moscow in 1973…” I was like a trial lawyer running her through questions which I already knew the answers to, setting a certain pace—the rhythm of truth.

  “Francine sees Russians behind every bush and hedgerow. She saw it as a botched Russian job.”

  “Sounds professional to me.”

  “Botched in the sense that they didn’t need to kill him. Then they did.”

  “So the long-ago Kolokov affair gave Francine the idea of this murder device. I guess it could have given you the same.”

  “Does it matter which? We talk.”

  “Thirty years between events, that’s tough to believe.”

  “It was ’95 when Francine first came to me. Kolokov was ‘72, so that’s twenty-three years. But your point is valid.” She shifted tone here to a more narrative one. “Francine did a lot of work on the Kolokov case. She went around the world searching for other cocaine-related deaths beneficial to the Soviets. Inevitably, she found a few. Not something she was likely to forget.”

  “With Kolokov there was no trace of methamphetamines. Was that because the testing was not as comprehensive back then, in ’72?”

  She shook her head; too vague to be obvious as a denial.

  “One drug in ’72; another independent one, copying the first?” I half-asked.

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Occam’s Razor. You knew Kolokov; you have proven that you know advanced pharmacology. The simplest answer is usually the right one. Two separate creations of this poison…‌one creator is simpler. Where Francine sees ‘botched,’ I see you.”

  Strangely she looked relieved here. Could this mean I was going down the wrong path?

  “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “How would I know?”

  She gave me a tight, rueful smile. I was on my own.

  “You want a wild theory? You thought Kolokov was Francine’s lover, the one who impregnated her, then abandoned her to a lonely abortion.” It was the only theory I could come up with in the heat of adrenalin-charged necessity.

  “I imagine most abortions are lonely. You are completely wrong about Francine and me. It wasn’t like that.”

  “I’m not saying it was.”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  “Let’s hold off on that. There’s another piece of the puzzle.”

  “Piece?” She tried to sound dismissive.

  I held off for a time, just to jack up the tension. “You have left someone out of the story. I think I know why.”

  I watched her hands tighten on the arms of that wooden chair as if anticipating a lethal shock.

  “Fey Shipley.”

  They loosened as if I had given her that jolt. A weight to her shoulders. Her normally heated cheeks pale.

  “Do you want to hear my theory?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Your poison was meant for Buchan. I’ve done some investigating: you knew Fey all right.” A pure bluff; all I had was the same Oxford College. I admit I was getting carried away at this point.

  She stood up abruptly. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  I waited, worried. What was she planning on doing? What if it was something drastic?

  She came back long minutes later carrying a tray. How can I describe the way she entered? It was like a Japanese serving ritual crossed with a decisive chess move. Like a geisha serving tea while the samurai readied their swords in the next room. The simple wooden tray held a bottle of Scotch, close to full, two glasses, a small pitcher of water. She placed the tray on the table between us and poured two generous measures. She signaled me to choose; did that with the knowing smirk of an accused poisoner.

  Dr. Drysdale added water to her drink with a practiced flourish, then took a long. therapeutic sip. See? Harmless.

  I said, “My guess is Fey didn’t have much luck with Lord Buchan.”

  She gave out a loud, snorting guffaw. “That’s nicely put. Very delicate indeed.” Her cheeks reddened, her shoulders relaxed. “Luck!” She shook her head. “Luck!” More head shaking. “Rape! There’s your luck!”

  Still she shook her head, on and on. I didn’t think she was going to stop. “Oh, she had been naive. Fey had known that ogre all her life. Trusted him when he doled out the drugs. Look, you know the story. A little naivety, more trust, a wrong turn that’s down to your own stupidity…‌so that when the hammer comes down it’s all too easy to see it as your own fault, at least partly. You have sinned, so greater ones will be visited upon you. Still and all, rape. The girl was fifteen.”

  I forced myself quiet. I watched her eyes play over me. Her words, that ‘you know the story’ put me squarely in the Buchan camp. Careful, I told myself, the only important thing here is your case.

  “She never was my student.” Drysdale stopped here, fiddled with a top button of her blouse, accessible in the open triangle of her V-neck sweater, dove gray. “I made the mistake of telling Francine about Fey, her history. I didn’t know then what was going to happen. How could I?”

  “So Francine was able to connect the two? She figured out you were the common thread?”

  Catherine Drysdale dug her upper teeth into her lower lip, shaking her head “no.” The question was: no to what?

  “Two people with no history of hard drugs dying of them,” I added, perhaps unnecessarily. “You knew both of them.”

  “Don’t you see? What kind of, of savage wants to marry a girl he’s raped?”

  “He described it as a ‘brilliant match’.” (According to one article.)

  “Oh, just fuck!” She had shocked herself, her face reddening with anger, shoulders tensing this time. She tried for a neutral, narrative tone. “It would have been, of course, in a Burke’s sense.” Burke’s Peerage charts English class pedigree, soul by privileged soul. “Fey’s problem was her mother. She too thought of the match as ‘brilliant.’ That’s why Fey was at his house. Dear Mater forced her there as Fey knew she would do.”

  “You certainly know a lot about her.”

  “I was her mentor—I suppose one would call it that. Not official. As you Yanks would say, she had issues. I was someone, someone older she could talk to. She…‌did that. We first met over photography: we share that passion.”

  “So you plotted this perfect murder together?”

  “Not at all. When Fey first told me her story I was so impotently, outrageously furious I could barely think straight. It was so depressing, so familiar.” Here a hitch and a quick eye movement halfway to me. “Yes, I dreamed of doing away with that bastard, but it was only a dream.” She sighed here.

  “I don’t know how this is going to sound. You…‌I imagine you’ve earned something.” She didn’t look at me as she reached for
her Scotch, kept it for comfort. “I have not been to confession in ages. Be patient. It’s all mixed up. Rage at this man was part of it, a large part. But only in a dream-like way. Yes, I dreamt of bad things happening to Buchan. My dreams were rather vicious because they always get away with it. That fact, another rape, another life ruined, another criminal free to drool lasciviously and skip over the lesson he should have learned the hard way…‌well, all that made the world seem such a tired place. The same bad things happening over and over again. Call it a spiritual nausea. The essence of survival is fight or flight. I fought down my murderous thoughts; I chose not to fight. That left flight. Suicide. But, please! You must understand I wasn’t serious, not all-the-way serious. It was like this rage and nausea, fight and flight, combined into a black negation of both, into nothing.”

  I looked at my Scotch. No, I didn’t trust her. I left it.

  “This dream of suicide—it sounds so overdramatic, pathetic, to say it aloud like this, in front of…. Well, even though it was pretend, it had to be believable. It’s rather complicated to pretend and believe at the same time. To be believable, it had to be a death I was capable of, of achieving. Not a gun, or a rope, not even…‌if I had dreamt of, of sitting in the middle of Trafalgar Square and setting myself alight, say…‌that would be too remote from any ‘me’ I’m familiar with. It just wouldn’t be credible. Do you see?”

  I knew better than to say anything.

  “I am a lapsed Catholic. My mother is the opposite. My suicide would destroy her. You must understand how this was all a game. I didn’t intend to go through with it, only I needed a sufficient level of believability in order to pretend. It has to be possible. That way I can pretend to believe, or believe I am only pretending. God.”

  She got up, went over to the side table, came back with my photography book and placed it on the table between us. The cover was of a naked woman, one of its more coy poses, skin porcelain-white, both in hue and in ceramic-like texture. It was a torso, cut off at neck and pubis, the latter with the first few delicate hairs, like those imperfections that crawl on a movie. Small white breasts, areolae faint, through make-up or finishing. The torso thin, slight, possibly Japanese.

  What was she doing? It took all of my concentration not to betray my bewilderment. Possibly I succeeded.

  Now she pulled her sweater over her head, underhanded it onto the far corner of the coffee table, then resettled her gray hair on her shoulders. Her look was serious, intent on her scheme, whatever that was.

  She took a sip of Scotch, returning her glass to the table with a sense of finality. The narrative of her actions had me in her power; she knew that. Now she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, a white, satiny affair with small golden leaves scattered in a few random places.

  “Do you plan to turn me in?” she asked, not looking at me, a child wanting to know about punishment. She fingered the shiny fabric of her blouse.

  I checked to see if my mouth was hanging open. She wouldn’t have noticed; she was intent on this new scheme, whatever it was.

  “James.” I watched her reach into her blouse. She came out with a thin leather strap, played with it familiarly, then slowly drew it out, revealing a suede pouch. She uncinched the pouch and brought out a plastic bag. She leaned over my photographer’s book, shook two thin white lines onto it, reached behind her head and slowly came back with a hair clip. She used that to even out those twin lines, vertically-aligned across each blanked-out breast. White on white. She moved the book exactly between us, sat back, gave a heavy “so here we are” smile, like laying down a winning hand, the final one, the one that will bankrupt her opponent.

  “That black pull—can you feel it?”

  I was shocked. I hadn’t for a moment expected this, to come face-to-face with the smirk of the reaper. Why would Catherine Drysdale concoct more of this black death? And had she? Could she be bluffing? Certainly the consistency and color looked right (although difficult to make out against that white body). It could have been straight cocaine, no catalyst. I transferred my attention to the consistency of her look. Just now she had the grim, downturned yet composed look of a funeral-goer.

  “This is the exact mistake I made with Fey.” Her eyes took me to that book. “I was trying to show her how her life had worth. That charge of adrenalin, that survival instinct. That sudden pre-retrospective thrill of how good your life is. Well, it has certainly had that effect on me.” She looked up; our eyes met.

  “Afterwards, I told her it was pretend poison. I thought of myself as a good enough liar back then.” She shook her downward-angled head.

  “I don’t know how she found it. Didn’t know she had done it until I got the news. Perhaps it was for self-defense, like Claudia. Or perhaps she had planned to kill herself from the start.”

  “Like Alistair?” Her boyfriend from decades ago.

  “You! You stay away from him!” She shouted this, jolted that I had remembered her confession of her early love and how her boyfriend had hung himself.

  I flicked my eyes to those twin lines. They reminded me of St. Petersburg, the tufted mass graves at Piskariovskoye, a half-million citizens sleeping under light blankets of snow.

  “Can you feel that magnetic allure?” she asked.

  I wanted to spring away. Yet I wanted to creep closer, too. My senses were heightened; everything about my life just then felt so vivid, rich, promising. Drysdale’s pre-retrospective thrill. I forced myself to risk sitting there. I stared at those twin rows of white ash, finer, whiter than Molly’s before we scattered them. Death swirled around me like black crows to a gunshot. Molly, yes. Kirk, of course. The others. Now my father, the Leningrad saga that made my bones ache to think about it. The brave way Little Kolya had cheated death on sheer willpower and belief. Finally his time came, a wasting-away in a hospital bed, alone. A man needs plenty of confidence; you have to hope it stops short of the misguided, the fatal. My favorite short story is To Light a Fire, how life can start out as an adventure then slowly, ineluctably, slide out of control until it’s all down to one throw of the dice. Shalabon, I told myself, this is one time you rein in your confidence. You are high up on Everest, the death zone, where altitude tears at reason.

  I knew this was it. The real drug. Its power coruscated before me. Your small life so vital, everything in it so infinitely desirable; the dark so unfathomably attractive. The tiny and the immense, like our own blue dot in the black universe. Concentrate! I told myself. One slip now was off the cliff face. Except, you couldn’t help taking a small step, another, to that edge to look down into that black chasm. You back away, heart racing, and all you want to do is look again. A distant alarm now: careful! A louder one: this is the toxin that conquered Kirk.

  I forced myself back, and kept moving away. I could hear the blood in my ears. I cast an oblique look at Dr. Drysdale. What was her purpose? What did she want to happen? She was looking at me with a vague smile, understanding perfectly the wild heat in my face, cooling now, heart slowing. Such a personal moment to have shared. To listen together to that first rattle.

  “He took it from you, didn’t he? Kolokov, from there.” I nodded to the book. As it was with me, with Fey, so too Kolokov.

  Our eyes met. Hers were sharp, unrepentant. Her money was still on the powder. Plenty of time yet for me to lose.

  “You were despondent back then. Alistair had just hung himself. All was black.”

  That one hit home, her long, painful torment out in the open, pried open by this annoying, persistent outsider. A man, a plan, a violation. I did not intend to lose. I met her eyes. Mine direct, hers angled; both connecting. I picked up the whiskey bottle, slowly poured its contents over those twin lines. I kept pouring and pouring, watching the powder run off the book, trail off the table onto the stained wood planks, and through the cracks to the cold earth beneath them. End of the line. I looked over to Drysdale’s loosely pursed lips, a release of sorts, like feeling better aft
er being sick.

  I stood now. “It’s over,” I said, unnecessarily.

  She nodded hollowly.

  We stood, waiting for some micro-alignment that would enable us to move.

  “The power of that.” She nodded at the puddle on the floor—the whiskey fumes were overpowering now. “It wasn’t until Francine’s death that I understood that it’s all pull—your black vortex. Much less about any push of mine.”

  She followed me to the door. So much of this had been in the febrile dark world of our own imaginings, one on one, that it was surprising there was a busy world out here. Still light at 7:30 p.m. Cars going by. A boy on his BMX doing wheelies up the street. An airplane overhead. I should say something pithy by way of leave-taking, but my mind was on overload. Dr. Catherine Drysdale stood there, fingering an unbuttoned button, a penitent Pandora as I walked away.

  CHAPTER 3

  In early June I finally met Mr. Panos Lamzaki. Sula and I flew to Athens, an overnight trip. At Heathrow, Sula had to show the scanner people a doctor’s letter about all the metal in her. The titanium in her arm, more in her skull. She didn’t like flying, held my hand the whole time with a wince-like squeeze on takeoff. I was happy to sit there looking at her, beyond that to the clouds out the window.

  We stayed at a moderately priced hotel in Athens. A statement of sorts. We met Mr. Lamzaki at his local restaurant, genuine, not fancy. If he didn’t own it, he may as well have. He looked different from his pictures. His hair darker. Dyed? He was average height, trim on a medium frame. His face showed his brush with mortality; the eyes a bit spooked still, a grayish tinge to his cheeks. The knowledge that in the cold, cold cubicle that is the reaper’s waiting room, your every dollar bill ablaze is a small fire too far away to see.

  “Thanks for the house,” I said.

  He nodded with a slow, slight smile. I wondered all over again how genuinely string-free that gift was. He looked at Sula; he looked at me. “So,” he said. He patted his daughter’s shoulder. She stiffened to that.

  Sula was different around him, less confident, more circumspect. She kept me separate. We were individuals who would meld back together at the hotel.