by Hal Johnson
“You know Lynch knows you have him,” from Benson.
“It was bound to happen.”
“Don’t be stupid, just hand him over. Lynch has a lot of contacts.”
“Tell him you’ve seen that I have contacts here, too. He’s welcome to come, you know, even if I didn’t get around to sending an invitation.”
“He knows about the conference next week. He must know about the little trick you can do by now, too.”
“Truth be told, I’ve been having a little trouble with that. It’s why I had to leave. But the boy’s safe here, tell him that. Oh, and, Benson”—melodramatically, over her shoulder, as she turned away. “I could always use more muscle.”
“Yeah, well. I could always use a good driver.” They nodded to each other, and Benson left. Myron’s heart returned to its usual location.
The next day another car with visitors came, which the murmuring of the mobilized grunts indicated was very unusual.
Oliver and Myron came running again, but they missed the introductions. Once again, Mignon Emanuel was standing in the doorway, the guests on the porch. Florence paced back and forth nervously.
“They’re all Indian,” whispered Oliver, hidden down the hall behind a late Roman reproduction of a Greek statue of Dionysus.
“And they’re not wearing hats,” Myron noted. “Very interesting.”
“You’re a little early,” Mignon Emanuel was saying.
One of the three Indians adjusted his tie awkwardly. “We actually aren’t going to be able to come to the conference. We just thought it needful to warn you—”
“Threats aren’t warnings,” Mignon Emanuel said. She had clearly lost all interest in the conversation.
“This is not a threat; make no mistake. It’s one of our own, Dantaghata, a very junior member, we fear he may be coming this way. This has none of our sanction—”
“Don’t play innocent. If he’s of such low rank, how would he even know to come here?”
“He’s been talking to Meridiana. You know no one can control what Meridiana tells one.”
“Meridiana,” Myron whispered to Oliver, “is their brazen head.”
“Know-it-all,” said Oliver.
Mignon Emanuel was looking off into the distance. “Yes, yes. Well, I can take care of myself. Now, if you’ll excuse—”
“Kindly listen, he even managed to steal from us the astra. The astra of the gods.”
“Take better care of your things. Good day.” And she slammed the door. Through a window, Myron watched the militia jeer and catcall as the three Unknown Men drove away. It was the most excitement they’d seen since Myron had shown up.
Later that day, Myron and Oliver were walking idly down one of the labyrinthine corridors. Myron was trying to gauge how much Oliver knew about his upcoming debut—the answer appeared to be nothing—when Myron felt something familiar and awful. His legs buckled, and he fell over. He thought he was going to die, so when Oliver nudged him with his toe, Myron said, “I just slipped.”
“I wouldn’t lie on the carpet, man. The soldiers are kind of halfhearted housecleaners.”
Myron struggled to his feet, and, his head still swimming, looked around. The impulse came from a door, a door like any other in the house. Myron staggered over to it and tried the handle, but of course it was locked. From the large keyhole came a kind of miasma.
“Can you smell that? I mean, can you feel that?” Myron said.
“Are you on drugs?”
The keyhole was keyhole-shaped, of course, but Myron had never seen, before coming to this house, a keyhole in that shape. With infinite care, he put his eye up to it, but the far side of the door was dark.
“That door’s always locked. Come on—let’s go.”
“Well, what’s on the other side?”
“I don’t know, I tried picking the lock with a mechanical pencil last night when you were whacking off, but it didn’t work. No one knows what’s past locked doors, and no one cares.”
“I have to go see Miss Emanuel,” Myron said.
“Are you crazy? You can’t just go and see her, you wait for her to summon you.” This was said with some bitterness, as Oliver was, frankly, rarely summoned.
“No, it’ll be fine, come with me.”
“You’re literally nuts, I’m not getting in trouble for that.” And after some more of this classic back-and-forth, Oliver left, and Myron staggered back to the office, the office with the double doors and the brass plaque. He had realized he didn’t know where else to look for her.
The farther he went, the more his head cleared until, standing again in front of the double doors, he found himself knocking, and then ringing the buzzer. No one answered, and Myron turned to go.
Suddenly he felt his neck prickle. Florence was coming down the corridor. “Come with me,” she said, and, removing a key from the snowflake pocket of her romper, on tiptoes opened the office door.
There sat Mignon Emanuel at the big desk. Myron was surprised to see that the office was, in fact, occupied, and he looked around for a door she might have come through.
“The bookshelf is on hinges,” Mignon Emanuel said, guessing his confusion, “and it is through this that I entered. Now, what can I help you with?”
“I found a locked door.”
“There are many locked doors. Behind the bookshelf is a locked door. I keep it locked because my bedroom suite is on the far side, and I do value my privacy. I believe Florence often locks her bedroom door as well.”
Florence nodded.
“You said there were no rules here,” Myron protested.
“Locking a door is hardly a rule. If I were to forbid you to try to pick the lock, that would be a rule, but not granting you access through a locked door is no more a rule than not letting you fly. It’s not my rule; it’s gravity’s.”
Myron wasn’t sure that made sense, but he let it slide. “I was curious what’s behind the door. It’s the one down the corridor on the kitchen side of the grand ballroom. Past the red room?”
They knew which door he was talking about. Suddenly the tenor of the conversation changed. Florence took a half step away from Myron. Mignon Emanuel’s eyes became cagey.
“Why are you curious about that room?” she asked.
Already Myron was saying, “It reminded me of—” And his guard was down enough that he was ready to talk about the doomsday device, and the way it had made him feel in Greenwich Village. But everyone was being so extraordinarily cautious that he instinctively stopped.
Of? Mignon Emanuel did not say. But her eyes said it.
In Myron’s head swam, whenever he was called upon to lie, his memories of heroes and their deceptions, of Huck Finn dressed as a girl, of David Balfour dressed as a Jacobite, of Sherlock Holmes or Raffles—masters of disguise, of Long John Silver, pathologically. This was how he thought, and how he lied, and he rather wished he could stop lying quite so much. But when he looked in Mignon Emanuel’s face, he found himself saying, “—of something Spenser once mentioned. About a door he’d seen, once, long ago.”
There was one of those awkward moments, then, when it became clear that Mignon Emanuel wanted Myron to leave, and Myron wanted to leave, but neither one could admit it, and so they stood. Mignon Emanuel made eye contact with Florence, and Florence, Myron noticed, raised her eyebrows inquiringly, but Mignon, after a moment’s hesitation, shook her head, a tiny, quick shake. It was probably meant to be imperceptible, but Mignon Emanuel never moved quickly, so it stood out by contrast. Finally, after a few false pleasantries, Myron all smiles stepped out of the room. And as soon as the door was shut, he ran. He ran down the long corridor to the study, practically slid through the secret passage, and in ten more steps he was at the base of the tower, at the base of the endless staircase. Up which he ran. His legs were perhaps still wobbly, but he had been recovering quickly; his winter in the woods had hardened him somewhat, and an upstairs run he never could have made six months ago he managed with
only a stitch in his side and the rising bile of nausea as he half fell up the last step into his room. There squatted Oliver, frozen in midrummage. He had been rummaging through the duffle bag.
His mouth, when he saw Myron, opened and closed lamely. Finally, “I lost my protractor,” he said. “Do you think maybe I left it in here?”
“Get out,” Myron said.
“I’m not fibbing,” Oliver said, but he left. Myron kicked the door shut, dived under the bed, and came up with—the cardboard tube was there, the doomsday device was safe. Wrapping it in a bathrobe for camouflage, he ran back down the endless staircase, his eyes cast back and forth for a sign of Oliver, or any others, and zigged down one hall, zagged up another, carefully to deposit the tube inside the vast maw of what was probably not but may have been an actual Ming vase.
Then, worrying he might have left something else behind, he turned and ran back, back to the staircase that loomed again in its infinite spiral. He was gasping like a drowning man by the time he reached the top of the tower, and as he stepped up to the threshold his neck prickled, and he saw something scurrying in the bull’s-eye window. It looked like a monkey, with a cat’s face marked distinctively in black and white like a radiation symbol. Its long monkey tail was zebra striped, and it was holding a large piece of red silk. There was something around its neck. Myron was breathing too hard to say anything, but he had the presence of mind to drop the bathrobe he was still carrying, stealthily on the step behind him, just out of sight from the room. His first thought, truth be told, was that it was a raccoon horribly deformed by platypus venom. His second thought was that P. leo, king of beasts, had strange beasts at his command. But his third thought was correct. And the creature leapt down, behind the bed, and came up in a swirl of red. It was Florence, belting a loose kimono around her.
“Emanuel was worried about you, you left in such a hurry,” she said.
“It took you that long to get up here, and you’re a monkey?”
“A lemur. And I got up here fast enough, but—well, you might as well know, the kid was in here, going through your things.”
“And you couldn’t come in, because he doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know unless you told him. I thought you would, Emanuel thought you wouldn’t.” She shrugged. “So I went looking for you. Frankly, I thought you would have gotten here faster, I took so long trying to find you before I returned.”
Myron realized that she didn’t know, somehow she didn’t know he’d been there and back. Maybe she’d gone all the way back to consult with Mignon Emanuel about what Oliver was doing. Or maybe, Myron thought for a moment, maybe she was telling the truth, and nothing but simple concern had brought her up here.
But then, “Do you think Oliver might have taken anything? Maybe we should take stock of all your things,” Florence suggested, and Myron knew that something strange was going on.
“By all means,” said Myron, trying not to sound canny. “Just let me catch my breath.” And together they went through the duffle bag, Myron’s clothes, his toothbrush, his polished soda can, the borrowed Verne and Haggard volumes, the compound bow . . .
“Are you missing anything? Is this all?”
“I had a cardboard tube with some waterlogged comic books and pinups and things in it, but it had gotten all wet in the snow, so I threw it out days ago.” Myron had resolved to play it close to the vest.
Florence took a quick peep under the bed.
“So what are you again? A lemur?” Myron said. He vaguely remembered learning about lemurs in school.
“Ring-tailed lemur. From Madagascar.”
“From Madagascar?” Myron awkwardly tried to remember if pygmies lived in Madagascar. He wished suddenly he’d been paying more attention in social studies class.
But Florence explained briefly that she was not of the same people as the current inhabitants of Madagascar. Her people, the Vazimba, had flourished in Madagascar for thousands of years before the outriggers came from the east. They brought death to her people, who were very short, and not very good at fighting the long war clubs. Florence stole an outrigger canoe and set off to the east with a handful of Vazimba to find the homeland of the invaders, but only made it to the Agalega Islands where, over the agonizing years, one by one, everyone died but her. After some centuries she returned, on a piece of driftwood to Madagascar, and found that all the Vazimba were gone with scarcely a trace, except in legend.
The story was too sad for Myron to know how to respond. He was used to the despair of Spenser’s stories, of course, but that was all philosophical despair. It was hardly personal, it was just the way of the world. Florence told the story in a flat and unaffected tone, but it was so clearly personal nonetheless.
“Did you ever go back to the Agalega Islands?” Myron asked.
“Oh yeah. I was a pirate queen there a hundred and fifty years ago. That was a good time to be a pirate.”
“Maybe,” Myron suggested tentatively, “maybe you have a story about pirates, too?”
And she did! They had a grand old time there, talking pirate talk, which Myron had picked up from Robert Louis Stevenson and R. M. Ballantyne and Jack London. After a while, when they were both feeling a little giddy, Myron asked if he could see the shape. Florence removed it from around her neck and handed it to him. It was heavier than he had thought.
“I don’t get this,” Myron said.
“You’re not supposed to get it.”
“Why do you have to be the one who has to carry it?”
“It makes sense. I can get away easily if Oliver decided to really go after it.”
“That’s what I don’t get. Why would he want to?”
“He doesn’t have a choice. He’s another experiment from another daycare center; an experiment to get children addicted to various objects, and in that way make them utterly loyal to whoever could provide them. I don’t know all the details, or if they put electrodes in his brain or what, but he ended up addicted to a certain shape: that one. It’s a hard shape to copy, although sometimes you’ll see him try to cut it out of cardboard.”
He handed it back. “There are others like him, then?”
“No, I think all the others went insane.”
“Insane?”
“Or died, or something, I don’t really know. He’s the only one it worked on.” And since Florence was, for the reason stated above, usually the one to carry the shape around, this explained, she said, Oliver’s unnatural (unnatural because lemurs and humans should not mix) attraction to her.
“This all sounds horrible.”
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as I’m making it sound. Most of this happened when I was still operating in Guatemala. I didn’t hook up with Emanuel till later.”
“Is it just coincidence, then, that you and Miss Emanuel are both ringtails?”
“Ringtail? What tail are you talking about there?”
“Her raccoon tail, of course. Raccoons have ringed tails, don’t they?”
“Oh! Oh, I was thinking of something else. Yes, of course she has a ringtail too, but that’s just a coincidence. And speaking of Emanuel, I’d better go tell her you’re doing swell.” And at that, the lemur was back, sitting in the voluminous folds of the red kimono. She wadded the silk up in one tiny hand and leapt to the window, and then scrabbled down the brown, dead ivy along the tower. She had clearly been lying about something.
Myron lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling and wondered whom to trust.
VII. The Conference in the Fortress of the Id
This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
1.
It is an open question, how much impact one has on one’s own fate. Reasonable philosophers seem to argue for some. Certainly Myron Horowitz may often appear as a pawn, buffeted will-I nill-I by the hand of an unseen player, or by a cat that leaps on the board. But his was a restless soul, happy only on the mo
ve, that could never be satisfied with life at the top of Rapunzel’s tower, however pleasant the palace itself. So I ask you: to what extent did he orchestrate his own expulsion from paradise, or, if not paradise, from a warm bed, fine food, and a tastefully selected library? The chain of events that climaxed in him fleeing alone into the dark forests at night—did he wind it around himself?
I was relaxing over a cup of tea in my Boston brownstone. Alice would not get off the phone, demanding to know what I had learned so far. Somewhere in the inaudible distance a lion must have been roaring ominously, plotting how to get to his prey. At the fortress, in the backyard, the snow was melting away, with odd piles lingering around the fringes, by the woods. It was still cold out, but Myron had a new winter coat and a long, soft scarf; when the militiamen were at mess, he and Oliver would play around on the obstacle course. There were guards posted, and the guards had guns, and harpoon guns, inexplicably, too, but they turned a blind eye as Myron and Oliver swung on ropes and climbed on tires and failed to scale the wall they were too short to jump up to.
One morning the obstacle course was unexpectedly empty, and the boys had it to themselves for a long time. They had brought Myron’s compound bow out and were practicing firing sticks from it, as they had no arrows. After a while, Florence came out and joined them. She was, as always, a battery of nervous energy, and climbed up and down some knotted ropes to show the world how it was done.
“That’s what we need,” said Oliver. “We need special training. Flossie, you should be making us punch bags of rice or stand under a waterfall.”
Florence waved the suggestion away, and climbed up and down some more things, but Oliver pressed. He wanted to have a contest between him and Myron, and he wanted Florence to judge. Whoever won the contest would get a prize. “We could run the obstacle course, and then we could have a race, and then we could get in the boxing ring.”