Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  “So,” Lamzaki said again. I knew what he meant. Here it is, reality. I have wondered for many years who my daughter would end up with, wondered even more whether that was even possible, and now, before me, the answer.

  Lamzaki lifted his brow, which brought the waiter running with the champagne. We were silent through the uncorking and pouring. “Well…” Lamzaki said. “To life.”

  We clinked glasses. Sula took a small sip. She was still incandescently angry with her father—angry for his paternal betrayal, doubly so for exposing me to it, triply so for almost dying on her. That left me to do the socializing, prove to Lamzaki I was worthy of his daughter. We found common purpose in Russia. I told him a little about my St. Petersburg adventure. Lamzaki told me about his father. He had been a senior member of the Greek Communist Party whose proudest moment, one he talked about at every chance, was the time he met Stalin. It felt like we had come around some full, sick circle—one of our fathers the victim, the other the celebrator, of that mustachioed monster.

  Lamzaki was surprisingly informed about my case. Asked cogent questions about Claudia, Mexico, the Vial, Kirk. From the perspective of this distant table in Athens, my recent life felt like a minor Greek myth, travel and quests, remarkable encounters, difficult tasks, one prize. It seemed like a hallucination—except that the prize was sitting next to me.

  ***

  I thought my case was over. In mid-June, London basked in sunshine. I started going for a swim at the men’s pond on Hampstead Heath. Swimming in the tree-surrounded water felt like being on vacation at a mountain lake. As I plowed through cool water chasing ducks, I was taken back to childhood, and lazy summers. The wintry, sleety details of my case were filed away and stored in the attic.

  I received a letter from Dr. Drysdale. She had obtained my address through Sula’s friend Lucia. She was going to be in London on Saturday. There was something she had decided she had better tell me.

  We met in the Rose Garden at Regent’s Park. It was only a five-minute walk north from Kirk’s Last Stand. That seemed appropriate. It had been a cold winter; the roses were just now starting to show color, little fists clenching vibrant silk. We sat on a bench in the sun, both wearing sunglasses, maybe to dim our view of each other.

  “I’ve come to you…‌because a few things were left unsaid. And a few others that were not quite true.”

  “You mean like lies?”

  She telegraphed a look that said “ouch.” There was a strong sense of picking up where we had left off.

  “Yes, I suppose you could call them that. I don’t know.” She paused for a long moment. “First, a confession. Those two lines I put before you were nothing more than pure synthetic stuff. If you think about it, I’d have to be superhuman to have that death compound around me day after day. It would suck me dry. But I wanted you to understand its power. Because in understanding, sometimes there is forgiveness.”

  Forgiveness was not in the cards, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Speaking of lies, you told me Alistair hanged himself. But he was the first to fall to your compound, wasn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like?”

  She sighed here. She had come to me determined to finish something, and that trumped any reluctance over private matters. “I was in love with him, crazy in love. I’d had nothing and then, almost too late, was given everything.” She stopped, worked at her lower lip, started again. “Alistair was…‌well, it doesn’t matter, and you don’t care. Curious? Capricious? Easily bored? For whatever reasons, he took drugs. I was good at lab work. I made synthetic cocaine for him. The pure stuff is so much safer. That was my only motivation.” She paused to let that vision settle. “Always, he wanted more. That was at first. Then I made the huge mistake of embellishing the experience. I was working in neurology at the time so it was close to my research, certain inhibitor and exciter chemicals. Now, he wanted better. If I didn’t deliver it he’d storm out. I tried to fight but in the end, I did what I had to do to get him back. Alistair called it my Eureka drug. It mimicked that feeling you get when you suddenly understand something you’ve been puzzling over for ages. And because it feels like you understand, I suppose you think you do…‌understand.” She paused again. “I will skip the long middle part and go to the end. Alistair took too much. He was in a coma for two days. When he came out, all he could talk about was how he had been knocking on a door that said god on it and how the doorknob was turning, and you just needed one more line and you’d be there. How it was all black, but that blackness contained everything so there was no need to leave; how that made sudden sense. He’d nearly killed himself, yet all he could talk about was his next visit. I couldn’t believe it. My God, he tried to talk me into joining him!

  “I imagine my development of the Eureka drug had crossed an imaginary line, because the appetite for more became insatiable. In fact, the only reason Ally didn’t die was he ran out of the stuff. After he was discharged from hospital I refused to be his dealer. He begged and pleaded. It was obvious, even to a woman in love: he didn’t want me, just what I could bring to him. It had to end.” She left it at that for a long, slow time. “So, in the end, yes, he did hang himself. That part is true.”

  “As a favor to Francine I met Nikolai Kolokov, not long after Ally’s funeral. I was not in great shape, as you can imagine. I told Nikolai everything. I rather imagine I was a burden to him. We talked about why people like us, scientists, work long hours day in day out trying to figure out one small corner of our discipline. Is it really to expand human knowledge? Or was it for that ‘aha’ moment? You only get that by being first. Or by taking the Eureka drug. Nikolai wondered whether the fake inspiration could provoke the real kind. At any rate, my point is that this compound is not about expanding your consciousness or any of that sixties rot. It’s about knowledge, like a private hour with Einstein. You’re not quite smart enough, but you’re close. The drug gives you that freezing jolt of a moment when it all clicks into place. What it doesn’t give you is the inspiration that causes it.

  “Nikolai was…‌well, he was not an optimistic person. He said, ‘No, this is not possible. You work hard at your equations and the “aha” comes once in your life; maybe never. But life doesn’t permit shortcuts’.

  “I agreed with him. That was that.”

  I looked around, just to rise above the narrow and intense focus such a confession created. The bulbs nearest us were leaking a burnt orange color, more developed than the hint of yellow from the bushes to our left. Drysdale was wearing a tweed skirt, cream polo neck, and brown blazer. So English. It did not seem possible that I was the object of her heated confession.

  “As I said, I was a mess back then.” Drysdale paused. “I got a call from Nikolai five days later. One something in the morning. He was the opposite of his usual rational and disdainful self, babbling on about The Light. The quality of The Light. Didn’t I understand how important it was, The Light? Why was he calling at this hour? He needed more Light. He’d woken me up, so I was a trifle slow. ‘What Light?’ I asked. ‘More of the stuff that was in your handbag. Please, I beg you. I am so close. Drive to me, it’s only an hour. Bring me more! If the Light starts to fade, that would be unbearable. Please! Hurry!’

  “I had to decide; should I call an ambulance? What could I say? What was his health problem? Maybe he was mentally ill. So in the end I followed his advice and drove to his flat. I must have arrived around three in the morning. He didn’t answer the door. It was a ground-floor flat; I couldn’t see in the windows.

  “I thought about calling the police, an ambulance. I didn’t. I’m fairly confident that would not have saved him.

  “I have had many years to mull over how much each of those deaths was my fault. I’m fairly accomplished at rationalizing. Clearly, in both cases the bad decisions were theirs, and not mine. Still, there was one question that convicted me, no matter how I twisted and turned. If Ally hadn�
�t known me, if Nikolai hadn’t, wouldn’t they still be alive?”

  We sat there in the sun for a time. It was disorienting, this highly intelligent Oxford professor, almost old enough to be my mother, trying to explain herself to me, struggling for a passing grade from her amateur antagonist.

  “Most of what I told you about Fey, about my mental state at that time, is true. It’s the worst episode in this catalogue of calamities. After Fey, Francine worked back to Nikolai, connected the two to me. This was in 1987. I told her everything. It was a terrible time for me. Then eight years later, Francine came to me with her perfect murder idea. And yes, it was based on the previous deaths. But you must understand; we—both of us—had no desire to talk about this murky business, this fictional, but probably more than fictional, perfect murder concoction Francine was working on. We didn’t talk about it very much in 1995, and last year Francine simply reactivated her 1995 treatment.” Drysdale paused here, parceling out her narrative.

  “Last October Francine came to me, showed up at my door just like you have. She was in a right state. Your friend had just died. I didn’t know who he was, just her ‘guest.’ She had told him about the Eureka drug, its intellectual, seductive capacity. She said she mentioned the danger. He asked a lot of questions; he was intrigued about the inspiration part. He wanted to try a tiny bit, just a peek behind the curtain, so to speak. I’m not at all certain why it is that Francine agreed to this; her story is not all that consistent. But I think we can safely conclude that he was forceful, and that she was equally insistent that it was only a little.”

  Drysdale went quiet, her way of paragraphing her story.

  “As I said, Francine was in a state. He had kept to the bargain. One small sample. He had been disappointed; there was little to cause him to want more. Then he began to feel strange. Francine offered to drive him to his hotel, thinking she could divert to a hospital, if necessary. Except he jumped out and was gone.”

  I didn’t want any more. But I took a deep breath to receive just that.

  “Of course Francine’s desperate question was, what went wrong?” She paused again; we were close, except now she proceeded to back away. “I don’t know if you can call the Eureka drug lethal. It made you want to take more, but that could be interrupted; you may run out, like Alistair.”

  She stopped here. Narratively, it was like she was approaching a cliff—the steps smaller, more hesitant. Now she was at the ledge, inviting me up for the view. She wanted me to look so she didn’t have to talk anymore.

  “So, if the Eureka drug isn’t necessarily lethal…‌you’re saying the perfect murder drug was a different concoction?”

  “Exactly. You see, for a perfect murder of a cuckolded husband or a threatening monster, one doesn’t want to rely on sustained ingestion over a period. One wants something sharp, short and lethal.”

  “You’re saying Francine thought it was one drug, but really it was something else?”

  “It was a horrendous misunderstanding. It goes back six years, to the first time Francine came up with her perfect murder idea. Back then, all she did was ask me for a description of what she called the Vial, just in case her publishers wanted to know if it was real. Could it really be concocted by her heroine? Then last August, she wanted the actual compound. I knew there was more to it than fiction. But I trusted Francine; she had been a spy, of sorts. Even so, it was a dirty business. We didn’t talk about it.”

  “Why are you telling me this now? You knew I was looking for answers about Kirk.”

  “I’m not certain I have a good answer for that. Obviously he meant a lot to you. It just seemed better for it to be a mystery than…‌what? A completely avoidable misunderstanding? It’s taken me too long to decide you should know everything.”

  If I said good-bye to Dr. Drysdale, I don’t remember it. I sat there by myself. The sun had some sizzle to it. My bench faced it, as it did Kirk’s Last Stand.

  I thought of visiting Kirk’s Last Stand. However, it wanted the weather of my previous visit; sleet, and not blazing sunshine. Anyway, Sula wanted to take me out to lunch. She had been worried about the Drysdale meeting, having seen what previous ones had done to my mood. I resolved to tell her my case was all over. I had just about enough time to practice making that sound believable.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was now a Saturday in late June, the day before Sula and I were to fly off to Los Angeles. Sula had accepted a one-year postdoc at Cal Tech. It was nearly noon when Sula called: she was slightly delayed, could I look after Natalie for a few minutes? The two were going to have a farewell lunch.

  Then Natalie arrived. She took Sula’s favorite armchair, the one by the window overlooking the tree tops, now green with leaves, wet in a light, bright drizzle.

  “So you’ll visit us in LA?” Sula had already invited her out for Christmas.

  “I’ve never been off this island.” She didn’t sound all that excited. “It’s so close to, well, you know…‌where Mum is.”

  “It about the same distance as Athens—from here. Does Athens feel close?”

  “It’s how I feel. Feelings are…‌like, feelings, you know?” She was serious, a bit down. “What do you think happened?” Natalie asked, turning her head to me and meeting my eyes, her will overruling her reluctance. “Out there.”

  Now I realized the whole setup; Sula’s delay so Natalie and I could talk.

  “We don’t have a lot to go on.”

  “You solved your case. You found that out so you’re okay.” She tried to say this levelly and failed. Her mouth quivered, her blue-gray eyes now far away, refusing to connect.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “A Scotch would be nice.” She shook her head, slowly, absently. This was hard for her. I needed to help her get it over with. I had a story. It felt right, if only privately. I had played my guitar and ad-libbed songs. The Claudia angle; the Lyubanov one. I had plucked lines out of my subconscious, out of the air, both. I had put my conclusions on the shelf, come back to them from time to time. It all distilled into one thing that made sense. Sense to me. Private sense.

  “I don’t know what happened. How can I?”

  “Please.” It was like she was saying, Here is the scourge, whip me.

  “It’s not going to help.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” she said. That was too forceful, so she went about moderating that severity. “It’s like when I go to the flat and sit there. Does that make me feel better? No way. It’s not about feeling better.” She was heating up again. She forced herself calm. She folded her legs under her, the full Sula now. “It’s about being connected. Staying connected. Trying to.” She started crying.

  There are few things worse than being a man watching a woman cry. Somehow it always finds a way to connect to your guilt. Even if you’ve never met her before.

  “We are in an apartment in Mexico City. Your mother is prisoner there, held by her abductor Constantine Lyubanov. Your mother has the Vial, given to her by her client/friend Francine McLain. She has no way to use it. Lyubanov is simply too smart: he does not make mistakes. He seems to be able to read any scheme she thinks up. Time is running out. Soon he will use her to get the offshore money. After that she will no longer be needed.” I stopped there to assess how Natalie was taking it. Now her arms were folded across her chest.

  “So a room with your mother and Lyubanov. Now there are two other men, drug men with guns.”

  “Your guitar?”

  “Yes, it came from a song. Then it wouldn’t go away.” I got up for this part of the narrative. “Lyubanov’s money-laundering had a Miami branch.” So my Internet research revealed. “Why did he choose Mexico City? It’s not an obvious place to run off to. So drug connections are certainly a possibility. He’s been away for six years, so his connections would be old, maybe tenuous.

  “Lyubanov does not make mistakes. There’s only one thing that could force him into one
, a gun. So, two sides now, the gun-toting drugistas and Lyubanov. It is your mother’s big chance. She knows it. She crosses to the other side, is able to openly betray Lyubanov under the protection of the Colt semis. Smiles nicely at the gunmen. She is a woman, attractive, knows how to use that. Somehow she puts the compound into play. Gives each drugista a smile that holds much promise. What Mexican doesn’t fantasize about the company of a gringa? First to business. Get that out of the way.”

  I looked to Natalie. Was that enough? No, she wanted it all. Every crack of that scourge. Her arms were still folded; she sat more slumped. Behind her patches of blue sky just now.

  “A gun points Claudia to the bedroom. Now the men can do business. First, to ease the discussion, a little instant confidence. The gun tells Lyubanov to get down to it. He is difficult, resists. In the end the guns prevail. The Mexicans take turns. Now to business. Except that their business turns out to be with the reaper. In ten minutes they’re all dead. Your mother is out the door, walking fast.”

  “There was no one with him.” Natalie swallowed here. “You know, with the Russian, when they found his body?”

  “No, you’re right. However, in Mexico the police version can be influenced. The death of the drug men could be kept out of it, bought off by the local drug lord. It’s a private drugista affair and not a public one. That’s why Lyubanov’s body was not connected until much later. In fact, only because they had a new coroner by then.”

  “So, Mum?”

  “The only thing I’m reasonably confident about is the gun. It’s the only thing that could handle a Lyubanov and force him to partake. Maybe only one drugista ingested the poison, the other is then alone with your mother. With Lyubanov out of the way we’re past the Kho point. That means it’s all unpredictable. If it was drug guys, they could be holding her somewhere. One of their compounds. Or…” I didn’t need to elaborate on the alternative.