The Immortals

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Translating scientific Latin out of context was never easy, but he hazarded a guess. “The Longest Angry One?”

  “It’s just a European rat snake, Mr. Show-off. The herp guy said it’s pretty rare, but not that valuable or anything.”

  “Rat snake… Why does that sound familiar?”

  “I have no idea. I’d never heard of it before today.”

  “You’d think they would’ve stolen some one-of-a-kind prehistoric serpent with ten legs or something.” He stifled another yawn. “Who cares about a rat snake except—” He sat bolt upright.

  “What?”

  “Except classicists. I know why I’ve heard of the rat snake. A lecture that Martin Andersen gave a few years ago on animal species in Greek and Roman myth.” Throwing off the blanket and hiking up his pants, he moved to one of the tall bookshelves lining the walls of his apartment.

  “Andersen? Is that the preternaturally boring old guy in your department? The one who keeps trying to ask you out?”

  “Be nice, Gabi. It’s not his fault he has the personality of a black hole. And he’s not gay, just lonely.”

  “Sure.”

  “His wife died a few years ago.”

  “Okay, fine, sorry I’m so insensitive. Now get back to what you know about rat snakes.”

  “It was actually pretty fascinating.” Theo started pawing through the old notebooks on his shelf, checking dates and titles. “He talked about the real species that correspond to the animals mentioned in classic myth. For example, he theorized that the Nemean Lion defeated in the first labor of Hercules may be a reference to the ice age cave lions found in prehistoric cave paintings.”

  “Fascinating to you maybe. This is the problem with your life’s work, chico. You keep searching for the meaning behind myth. Why not just skip the fiction part entirely and go straight to the facts?”

  “Because the ancients didn’t differentiate as easily as you do between fact and fiction. Myths illuminate a society’s behavior and beliefs on multiple levels all at the same time. So you can learn more ‘truth’ from a fictional epic than you can from a bunch of bone shards. No offense.”

  “Some taken.”

  “Besides, you know how bored of digging I get after about a week at a site.”

  “You get bored of everything after about a week.”

  “Ouch.” He riffled through a legal pad of notes.

  “I didn’t mean Helen.” Theo wished she’d stop there, but Gabriela rarely felt constrained by tact. “Although that is sort of what happened, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t get bored of Helen,” he retorted.

  “You just decided that you were too scared to commit to her, so you went off to Greece and sabotaged your own relationship by forgetting about her, and then she dumped your ass and ran into the arms of hottie Everett Halloran instead? Is that how it happened?”

  “Well, I’m never going to forget about her now, am I?” he snapped.

  “Whoops. Too soon?”

  “You think?”

  “Sorry. I just wish you’d find some relationship that wasn’t so… I don’t know… fraught.”

  He didn’t bother replying. She didn’t know the half of it.

  He pulled a spiral-bound pad labeled “Conference Notes, 2013” off the shelf. He flipped through the scribbled pages. “European rat snake! Also known colloquially as the ‘Aesculapian snake,’” he read aloud, “and widely believed to be the serpent traditionally identified with Asclepius.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s a Greek god of medicine and healing. The Romans called him Aesculapius,” he said absently, his mind beginning to turn. “Carries around a staff with a snake twirled around it.”

  “You mean like the FTD guy in the florist windows?”

  “The FTD guy—Hermes? That’s a caduceus. With two snakes. You’re breaking my heart. Have you listened to anything I’ve said in the last ten years?”

  “Please. Like you know the difference between the Cheyenne and the—”

  Indeed, Theo wasn’t listening anymore. When he’d returned home the night before, he’d found nothing in Helen’s published research that related to human sacrifice. He’d begun to believe the woman in the park might have been leading him astray. But the theft of classically related artifacts at two museums couldn’t be mere coincidence.

  “I’ve gotta go, Gabi.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  “You’re just using me for my exemplary moral support skills.”

  “But I’m still seething—”

  “You don’t understand.” He barely understood himself. But the kernel of an idea had begun to form. Asclepius had inspired one of the most dedicated and active cults in the ancient world. His acolytes presented the god with a clay model of their injured body part and asked for healing in return. The ruins of Aesculapian temples contained dozens of terracotta legs, arms, heads… and genitals. Theo thought of Helen’s mutilation. Could her killer have wanted her womb for a similar purpose? “Your Aesculapian snake,” he said, “I think it’s related to Helen’s murder.”

  “When did you become the next Sherlock Holmes? I don’t see how—” she began.

  “Trust me.” He looked up at his bookshelf, eager to start the research. Enough knowledge, Theo had always believed, could solve any problem, whether it be translating a choral paean or piecing together a shattered amphora. “I may need to call the cops.”

  “Hold on there, cowboy. You really think you know better than they do about how to investigate a murder?”

  “No, but I’m… a learned man,” he said, realizing belatedly how ridiculous Selene DiSilva’s words sounded coming out of his mouth.

  “A learn-ed man,” Gabriela mocked, drawing out the two syllables. “Okay, Mr. Fancypants. You sure this isn’t just another case of you being self-righteous and impulsive?” One thing about Gabriela, she never pulled her punches. “Or trying to distract yourself from grief? I’m worried about you. How are you doing? Really?”

  “I’m like a numb limb,” Theo said after a long pause. “Unfeeling one moment, then I move wrong and there’s searing pain, but I sort of want to keep beating on myself, hoping I’ll wake up and this’ll all be over.” Helen’s face swam before him unbidden: not as he’d known it, but as Selene DiSilva must have seen it in the park. Hair braided like a Roman virgin’s. Yellow chiton pinned across her breast. A bloody hole between her legs. “But it’s not a nightmare, is it? It’s real. Helen’s dead, and her murderer is still out there. How can I refuse to help find him?”

  He’d told Selene DiSilva he had no intention of letting Helen’s murder go unavenged. And though he had his faults—distractible, stubborn, and sanctimonious being just the first three of an undoubtedly interminable list—he’d never been a liar.

  “All right,” Gabriela said, a little more gently. “Go be a hero.”

  Chapter 7

  SHE WHO LEAVES NO TRACE

  Selene stood across the street from Theodore Schultz’s apartment building for nearly two hours before he appeared at the doorway just after ten in the morning, a large satchel slung over his shoulder. With his rumpled overcoat, tousled hair, and feverish eyes, he looked like he’d either just rolled out of bed or been up working for hours. A scowl of concentration made him seem sterner than she remembered. Selene stayed away until he’d barreled down the sidewalk and out of sight.

  She’d almost held an arrow to his jugular yesterday in the park and insisted he confess to killing Helen Emerson. And if he admitted to the crime, she could’ve pushed that same arrow through his windpipe with no compunction. But as they spoke, something about his grief, clearly deep despite his attempts at humor, had stopped her. She’d told him the details of Helen’s death to see his reaction, and he seemed genuinely horrified. She never shied from punishing men if the victim identified them, or if she herself saw the crime committed, but a long-ago tragedy had taught her not to rely solely on hearsay or circumstantial evidence. And with Schultz, tha
t’s all she had: friend of the victim, expert in Ancient Greek, loiterer at the crime scene. She needed to be patient if she wanted to find proof of his involvement. To stalk her prey a little longer before moving in for the kill.

  It took only a few minutes before another tenant left Schultz’s building; Selene held the door for her with the warmest smile she could muster, then slipped nonchalantly inside. She wished she could get into Helen Emerson’s building with such ease. When she’d swung by earlier that morning, cop cars lined the block and officers trooped in and out the front door. Selene had no choice but to let the police investigate the victim while she pursued the suspect.

  In her backpack, she’d stowed all the tools she might need for this little adventure. It felt good, using her old skills again. In her time in exile, she’d been a cop, a bodyguard, a naturalist, and briefly, an assassin. And that was just the beginning of the list.

  She donned a pair of gloves and used her picks to jimmy his door open. Schultz hadn’t bothered with high-security locks; maybe he was naïve enough to think he’d never get robbed. Selene had three different locks on her own door. It wouldn’t do to have a burglar discover the god-forged golden bow in her closet.

  The door swung open with a creak, revealing a large studio apartment with a living and dining area separated from the bedroom by a folding screen. The room was clean, but far from neat. Books and papers littered every surface, like an ancient library pillaged by Visigoths.

  Selene moved to a small dining table completely covered by tall stacks of papers. She picked up the first, a student’s essay on the Odyssey, and thumbed through. The professor’s red ink emendations lay between the printed lines, streamed down the bottom of the page, curled into the side margins, and continued onto the back. Finally, a scrawled C+, accompanied by yet another comment: Impressively meta: You’ve taken a tortuous journey of Odyssean proportions before arriving at your point. But next time, don’t bury your thesis statement on page ten. Selene checked the other papers. All similar palimpsests of black text and red ink. It must have taken the professor an hour to grade each one.

  Next to the papers lay a stack of lecture notes. She skimmed the first few pages with a raised eyebrow. Someone who actually thinks the gods have something to contribute to the modern world, she thought, impressed. But as she kept reading, she grew disheartened. I see. Myths are manmade creations, not to be taken literally, but to be torn apart and dissected and put back together. They’re all about human civilization, because of course humans are the center of everything. Such arrogance. She looked at the anthologies of myths lining the bookshelves. Within their pages lay the history, the loves and losses, the deepest secrets of beings far removed from mere mortals, if only the professor knew to look.

  But, she had to admit, Schultz was right about one thing: The line between fiction and reality was never clear—not even for her. Like all the gods, she had little control over her pre-Diaspora memories. Artemis had existed more as a metaphor than as a maiden, her very reality shaped by the tales poets told of her. Thus, her recollections of the first two thousand years of her life were like scenes viewed through a forest pool—twisted and warped, sometimes so cloudy she could remember nothing, sometimes so bright that she was equally blind. How could the mind of an omnipresent being—a goddess presiding over her temple at Delos, hunting through the forests outside Rome, riding the moon across the sky—be contained within a mind that grew more mortal with every passing day? Only certain memories remained sharp—mostly those described by the poets and retold over the centuries. She knew that those stories—the transformation of Acteon, her father’s bestowal of her divine attributes, the punishment of Calisto, and many others—had actually happened, but her memories were like sand dunes in the wind, carved by poets who both augmented and eroded the past in equal measure. Most maddening of all, Selene could never be sure how much her memories had changed; she could only trust that some kernel of truth remained within them.

  The books and notes in Schultz’s apartment spilled off the shelves, then lay like a trail of breadcrumbs across the living area before joining another pile of research lying on, around, and under a large desk. She scanned the titles briefly—cult practice, mainly.

  She hadn’t considered the murder could be the work of multiple people in an organized group. She flipped through one of the professor’s books, her heart sinking. I might have more than one Greek-inspired killer to deal with, she thought. Just what I need. For the last thousand years, she’d barely thought about Greek cults. Holy Roman Emperor Theodosius had banned cult worship in the fourth century, and it had died off quickly after that, taking most of the Athanatoi’s supernatural powers along with it. As their godhood waned, her father Zeus summoned his divine family to a Great Gathering on Mount Olympus. The golden roofs of their palaces had grown dull, the marble colonnades cracked and listing. There, Zeus declared that the Diaspora was at hand. Since the people of Greece and Rome had abandoned the Olympians, the Olympians would abandon them in return. No longer would they provide protection in return for homage. In fact, Zeus swore a great oath upon the River Styx that the Olympians would not step foot in their ancient homeland again. Instead, each Athanatos gathered what sacred objects he still possessed and walked forth into the world to make his way among the thanatoi. Some traveled to Africa, others to the farther reaches of Europe, and eventually, many made their way to the New World, lured by the promise of a land not yet dominated by Christianity. Never, in all that time, had the gods believed that mankind would revive the old cult practices.

  But maybe the books strewn across Schultz’s apartment proved that the professor himself had decided to do just that. Or perhaps he was just following her advice to look into sacrificial rites. She couldn’t be sure.

  Selene scanned the rest of the room, looking for the sort of mementos that ritual mutilators kept of their kills. If you looked hard enough, especially if they lived alone, you were bound to find some proof of their hobby. But so far, Schultz seemed more eccentric than truly crazed. Photos hung on most of the walls and stood propped on the mantle of his small fireplace. She recognized the professor’s teenage self in many—gangly, acne plagued, but grinning hugely—always surrounded by people. The same faces showed up in later photos, when Schultz’s skin had cleared and his frame filled out—even once his temples had gone gray. This was a man with strong personal bonds: not exactly the profile of a serial killer. Women featured prominently in many of the photos. A player? wondered Selene. But something about the laughter in their faces made her think not. The backgrounds—the Coliseum, the Louvre, the Palace at Knossos, and a series of archeological digs on dusty hillsides—indicated they might be fellow academics.

  She picked up a beach photo of Schultz and a short, curly-haired Latina woman who appeared in multiple photos. The woman filled out her red bikini in a way Selene’s boyish figure never would, all breasts and hips, with a slightly rounded stomach. Schultz, wearing shorts and a T-shirt reading Vivant Linguae Mortuae! (“Long Live Dead Languages!”), stood with his arm around her, his lean frame bent nearly horizontal so he could rest his fair head against her dark one.

  Selene put down the photo and walked to the coffee table in front of the couch, curious about the mess of cardboard scraps littering its surface. Only when she got close did she realize they were jigsaw pieces, all turned upside down. The puzzle was half-done, a beige expanse fitted together with a watchmaker’s skill.

  Behind the folded screen stood a rumpled queen-sized bed. Beside it teetered three piles of well-thumbed books—everything from Star Trek novels to presidential biographies to the works of Cicero and Ovid. She crouched to peer beneath the metal bedframe. If you really wanted to find a man’s secret vices, this was the place to look. Sure enough, she spotted a battered shoebox. As she lifted the lid, she winced in preparation for the inevitable trove of porn. Instead, she found a pile of letters and a few photographs.

  She wasn’t just your colleague after all, Prof
essor Schultz, she thought, pulling out a picture of a short, pretty woman with a fall of long blond hair and a guileless grin—a woman who had appeared nowhere in the other photos littering the room. Helen Emerson wore a strapless blue sundress and held a plastic cup of wine, toasting the camera. The Hudson River glinted in the background, with New Jersey apartment complexes visible beyond its shores. The Boat Basin Café in Riverside Park, Selene realized. Less than a mile downriver from the scene of Helen’s death.

  One other photo from the same day. The light golden as the sun set, flaming orange and violet over the water. Helen and Schultz. His arm outstretched as if taking the photo with one hand while his other arm lay protectively around her shoulders. His lips pressed against her cheek. Her face scrunched with delight.

  Selene put the photo back where she found it and pulled out the stack of letters. An envelope addressed to the professor, care of the University of Athens in Greece. Beneath the torn flap lay a letter on thick stationery, a Greek key embossed in gold around its border. The handwriting was barely legible: a miniature garden of curlicues, some words too small to read, others obscured by long, trailing flourishes. It took Selene, who’d never been much of a reader in the first place, nearly a minute to decipher each sentence.

  Dearest Theo, Helen had written. You’ve been gone for two weeks, and it feels like an eternity.

  Selene checked the date at the top of the page. September. Almost exactly a year ago.

  This last year with you has been the happiest of my life, and now I feel it’s all slipping away. I know you’re coming back, but January feels so far away. How can I bear it?

  Every time I pass the Met, I think of our first kiss. Every time I walk by your apartment, I think of our first night together.

  Selene shifted uncomfortably, but forced herself to keep reading. In her job as a private investigator, she was used to watching people exhibit their lustful perversions—love, on the other hand, always discomfited her.