The Immortals

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “I understand your anger,” Selene said, a little alarmed by his rambling. She needed him lucid. “I’ve wanted to strangle more than a few cops myself over the years, but it only ever gets you deeper in trouble. How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” she asked. That sounded like the sort of thing mortals asked when trying to calm each other.

  He stopped cursing. “I think I had some toast at like six last night.”

  “Well, I know it’s still early, but I’m getting hungry for lunch.” That was an understatement. For the last hour, she’d been positively famished. The aching hunger reminded her of the first few centuries after the Diaspora when, deprived of the gods’ usual nectar, ambrosia, and burnt offerings, she’d needed ten thousand calories a day to sustain her. “We’re out of sight of the reporters, and I know a good place around here. Why don’t you come?”

  “Really?” He looked suspicious. With the day he’d been having, she couldn’t blame him.

  “Why not?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant. She could actually think of a million reasons why not. In most of her interactions with men, they ended up dead.

  “You’re not afraid to be seen with the notorious Pervy Professor? Seems the hashtag’s going viral.”

  Selene, as usual, wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but she got the gist. “Hippolyta will bite the testicles off any man who looks at me wrong, so I think I’m good.”

  A moment later, Schultz gave her a grateful, dimpled grin, obviously deciding she’d been joking. He was wrong.

  Theo spent the first part of the meal eyeing the tower of pork dumplings, moo shu pork, pork fried rice, and Chinese spareribs on their table with something akin to awe.

  Selene caught his eye. “Do you have a problem with women with big appetites?” she asked as she tore the last strip of meat off the bone with her perfect white teeth.

  “Big? I think this qualifies as more like Colossus of Rhodes meets Coney Island hotdog champ.” He looked down at his modest portion of beef with broccoli. “I’m feeling inadequate.”

  She shrugged as if to say he was probably right—and it wasn’t her problem. Then she pulled off her baseball cap. She ran a long-fingered hand through her hair, then let it fall back against her pale cheek in a wave as smooth as a raven’s wing.

  Theo had never seen her without her hat shadowing her face. Only the waitress’s arrival could drag his attention from the perfect symmetry of Selene’s features. The young Chinese woman balanced another plateful of steamed roast pork buns on the overcrowded table. “Does she always order this much?” he asked with a smile.

  The waitress shook her head emphatically. “She comes in once a week. Always pork. But never like this.” She looked at Selene. “You pregnant?”

  Selene dropped the bone to her plate with a clatter, spots of red flaring on each pale cheek. “How dare you,” she hissed. She grabbed the edge of the table as if she might rise.

  “Ha! She’s just training for an Iron Woman triathlon,” Theo said quickly. He was surprised by his instinctive need to smooth Selene’s way in the world. Social skills were clearly not her strong suit. “Needs all the calories she can get.” Besides, a triathlon seemed perfectly reasonable: When Selene had removed her leather jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her flannel, he’d had to tear his gaze away from the lean muscles in her arms.

  “Okay.” The waitress laughed and winked at Theo. “But if this happens next week, we’ll need to order more pork just to keep up.”

  “Does she always give you such a hard time?” Theo asked Selene when the waitress left.

  “I’ve never spoken to her before—except to order.”

  “She seemed to know you.”

  Selene’s brows lowered. “You think because someone teases you and you laugh and she winks… you think they know you?”

  “Well—”

  “They don’t. No one really knows anyone.” Before Theo could respond, she continued, “Now tell me what else you know about Helen’s murder.”

  He started a little at the abrupt transition, but then found himself smiling, glad someone finally wanted to listen. “Well, first off, if we’re right about this whole cult thing, we’re not just looking for one killer. But I don’t know if the cops found any concrete evidence to back me up.”

  Selene paused with a dumpling halfway to her mouth. “They may not have. But I did. There’re multiple men involved.”

  “Really? How did you—”

  “I snuck inside the hospital after the police left.” A tiny, self-satisfied smile pulled at the corner of her lips.

  “I know I wanted you to look at the crime scene, but isn’t that illegal?”

  “So’s assaulting a police officer,” she said dryly, dunking the dumpling in soy sauce.

  Despite his penchant for pissing off authority figures, Theo had never been the type to engage in deliberate criminality. Until this morning, his brushes with the law had either been misunderstandings or, like the eminent domain sit-in, done in the service of a higher purpose. Once, when he’d absentmindedly walked out of a grocery store without paying for his six-pack of beer, he’d run six blocks back to the store when he realized his mistake, arriving so flushed and sweaty and full of mortified contrition that the cashier wound up apologizing to him rather than the other way around. Yet here he was, aiding and abetting a woman who clearly made a habit of subverting the police. The idea shivered uneasily down his spine. Then he thought of Brandman’s sarcastic grimace and decided that maybe a little more of Selene DiSilva was exactly what he needed.

  He took a ruminative bite of broccoli, then asked, “So you’re sure there were signs of Asclepius at the crime scene?”

  “There were probably thirty or forty snakes hanging from the ceiling and scales from some larger serpent on the floor. That evidence enough for you?”

  Theo nearly coughed up his food. He’d predicted the snakes, but never so many.

  “And I saw the body. A girl. A virgin this time, not just a woman dressed up as one.”

  Theo put down his chopsticks, his appetite gone. “We have to get these guys.”

  Selene’s silver eyes burned into him. “That’s why I’m here, Professor. You tell me what you know, and I’ll find them.”

  “What else was in the room?”

  “The remains of a fire. And a tooth. A tusk maybe.”

  He smacked the table, rattling the teapot. “Burnt offering of a piglet to Demeter, the Goddess of Grain. I was right.”

  “Piglets don’t have tusks, Professor.”

  “Technicalities,” he replied, unfazed. “This is definitely a re-creation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Let me start from the beginning, so you understand. The ritual is based on the story of Demeter and her daughter Persephone—”

  “I know that part,” she interrupted.

  “You sure?” He crooked a skeptical eyebrow in her direction. “It’s essential that you—”

  With an angry scowl, she cut him off. “It begins when the Goddess of Spring and Flowers—and other mild and useless realms—was wandering in a meadow, making wreaths with her equally vapid maidens.”

  He laughed at the image of Persephone as an idiot teenager with her clique of best-friend mean girls. “That’s not how it’s usually told.”

  “Then listen closely. The Lord of the Dead, not known for his taste in women, looked up from the Underworld and found his dewy niece irresistible,” Selene continued. “A wide chasm opened in the earth and four black stallions bore the Hidden One’s chariot into the light of day.” Her voice had lost its brisk cockiness. She spoke slowly, almost formally, and her gaze turned inward as if watching an old memory unspool before her eyes. “He seized the girl by her hair, dragging her to his side. The earth closed above their heads, but her screams could still be heard, very faint and growing ever fainter as he took her deeper into his realm. The Goddess of Grain searched in vain for her daughter, nine long days of bewildered grief, until Helios the Sun, who sees all, took pity and to
ld her what had happened.”

  Her cadences reminded Theo of the Homeric Ode to Demeter. He stared in awe as Selene continued. Who was this woman?

  “The goddess refused to enter Olympus until her daughter returned. She wandered the earth until she came to rest in Eleusis. There she stayed, and mourned, and withheld her bounty from the land. Famine spread and mankind starved. Finally, even the gods suffered when men lacked the food to make burnt offerings. Only then did the mighty King of the Gods send his son, the Conductor of Souls, to fetch the girl back. But it was too late.” Selene’s voice grew quiet and anger furrowed her face. “The girl sat on her throne of black marble, her golden skin ashen, her face turned to the ground. All those long months, while mankind starved beneath her mother’s wrath, she’d suffered in her uncle’s bed. Every night, he took her, and every night she felt as if the great chasm had opened beneath her once more. No one ever heard her screams.” Selene paused in the telling, as if listening for Persephone’s echoing cries.

  Theo took a long swallow of tea to fill the silence. “I’ve always told my students these myths are malleable,” he ventured finally, “but I’ve never quite heard it like that.”

  Her gaze snapped to him, her eyes narrowed. “What do you imagine happens when a man abducts a virgin for his own pleasure? That they sit and chat about puppies?”

  He felt himself backpedaling. “I just mean this went from ABC Family to HBO really fast. Pretty dark.”

  “How else should it be? The Hidden One forced the food of the dead—three pomegranate seeds—down her throat so that even once she left the Underworld with the Conductor of Souls, the Goddess of Spring would still be forced to return to her husband for a portion of every year. Three months of torture, repeated for eternity, because of three lousy seeds. If that’s not dark, what is?”

  Theo wasn’t sure what to say. He couldn’t help being impressed with her knowledge—and a little unnerved by her passion.

  She speared a dumpling with a chopstick. “Now tell me what you know about the Mysteries.”

  “You seem to know plenty on your own.”

  “I know the story. That doesn’t mean I know what men did with it when they turned it into a ritual. That’s where you come in.”

  “Ah. Glad I can be of some use.” He took a pen from his coat pocket and spread a paper napkin across the table. He regretted handing Brandman his careful calendar, but decided to make do. Drawing a rough outline as he spoke, he explained the first five days of the Eleusis ritual. First, the procession of the sacred objects from Eleusis to Athens. Day Two: the Agyrmos gathering, complete with singing and dancing to announce the beginning of the ritual. Next, the purification in seawater. On the fourth day, the sacrifice of grain or piglets to Demeter. Then, the Asklepia. As a healing god known for bringing the dead back to life, Asclepius fit in with the Mysteries’ overall theme of rebirth.

  Unlike the detective, Selene listened with rapt attention. “So far it seems pretty mild,” she said when Theo finished explaining how the hospital basement room had served as a stand-in for the traditional cave used in Aesculapian rites.

  “It gets rowdier,” he assured her. “Day Six is the Pompe. It begins, again, with sacrifices to the goddesses. Then, a procession from the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens back to the temple in Eleusis. Now I know this sounds like a lot of walking in circles: Take the hiera from Eleusis to Athens on Day One, then back again during the Pompe. But you have to remember that every part of the ritual is symbolic, every myth contains many truths. The procession likely represents approaching death by walking through the graveyard and then returning to life by reentering Eleusis. While the initiates walk across the Bridge of Jests, the head priest—the hierophant—yells obscene jokes. Supposedly, he’s honoring the memory of the foul-mouthed crone who was the only one to make Demeter laugh during her long search for her daughter.

  “At this point, the hierophant also invokes Dionysus, the God of Wine. He probably wasn’t connected to the Eleusinian Mysteries originally, but later incarnations of the ritual definitely involved him. Not surprising, since he’s also a fertility and harvest god. Besides, every good party needs a little social lubrication, right?” He flashed Selene a grin, which she ignored.

  He took another fortifying drink of tea, then returned his attention to the napkin. “The initiates—mystai, that’s the correct term—gather in a field for nightlong revels called the Pannychis on Day Seven. Dancing, sacrifices, the works. But it’s the next two days,” he continued, fiercely underlining “Days 8 & 9” on the napkin, “that get really interesting. The mystai go to the Telesterion—the Hall of Completion—for the two Nights of the Mysteries, the Nychtes Mysteriotides. That’s where the ritual reaches its climax with the ‘Unspeakables.’”

  “Which are…”

  He raised his hands in futility. “Who knows. Unspeakable meant unspeakable, so the Greeks kept the secret tighter than pants on a hipster. But,” he went on before Selene could protest, “that hasn’t stopped classicists from speculating for centuries. Supposedly, there were three stages. First, the Legomena: ‘Things Said.’ Possibly, this involved the retelling of Demeter and Persephone’s story. Next, Dromena: ‘Things Done.’ Maybe they actually reenact the story here—the abduction, the rape, the return. Last, Deiknumena: ‘Things Shown.’ This is the important part, the real climax. The initiates learn the answers to life’s greatest questions, communicated through epiphanic visions given to them by the gods.” He laughed shortly. “Not really, of course, that’s just what they claimed. Probably they were just reacting to drinking kykeon, the ‘specialty cocktail’ of the Mysteries.” He scrawled “kykeon” on the paper napkin. “We don’t know the exact ingredients, but it probably incorporated barley water, so it may have contained a grain fungus that mimics the chemicals in LSD. I suspect the whole ‘communing with the gods’ thing was just one big acid trip.

  “Then, on Day Ten, they wrap things up with the Plemochoai, the offering of libations to the ancestors. Sort of anticlimactic, if you ask me, but a chance to slowly acclimate back to the real world.” He passed her the napkin, crowded and wet with bleeding ink.

  “This is all about grain, fertility, wine,” she said, scanning the paper. “Approaching death, yes, but coming back to life. Why would someone use it as a basis for a murder cult? No one worships agriculture in New York City anymore or cares about the rape of a virgin. Why not bring back the worship of some more interesting deities?” she asked with a hint of ferocity. Theo wondered whom Selene would consider worthy of homage—probably Ares and Athena, the war gods.

  “Maybe because what they were doing in Eleusis was somehow more powerful and more meaningful than any other religious cult in ancient Greece. If you’re going to bring back a cult, you might as well bring back the best.”

  “Maybe.” Selene didn’t look convinced. “And you told all this to the police?”

  “I tried, but it seems my relationship with Helen compromises my theories. I don’t think they’ll be consulting with me any longer. Also, I may have accused the lead detective of criminal negligence in not following up my lead sooner.”

  “Not the best move.”

  Theo cleared his throat. “Well, no. It seems Brandman’s now deliberately devastating my professional and personal life.” He laughed shortly.

  “You think he leaked your name to the press? That’s not standard procedure. Did you tell anyone about getting arrested?”

  “I wasn’t really arrested. And the only person I called was the chair of the department—I had to warn him I was going to miss my translation seminar today.” Theo had been relieved to just leave a message on Bill Webb’s voice mail. He couldn’t have borne hearing the sanctimonious chair’s reaction. Once again, you’ve brought scrutiny and shame on this department, Schultz. The only option for you is honor killing.

  “Maybe the police are playing politics,” said Selene. “Trying to convince the public that they’re making progress on the case before the
commissioner winds up with his head on a platter for not keeping the women of New York safe.”

  “Great. I’m just a pawn, huh? Sounds a lot like university politics.”

  “Look, Schultz—”

  “Theo—please.”

  “I think I’ve got enough to go on.” Selene put the lecture-soaked napkin in her pocket and stood up. “You can stop worrying about all this.”

  Theo stared at her. “I don’t want to stop worrying about this.” She hadn’t understood at all. “I’m going to catch whoever killed Helen.”

  Selene sighed, the way Theo did when his crosstown bus was stuck in motionless traffic. Like there could be nothing more frustrating. She reached behind her chair for her black leather jacket. “I know you cared about her, but—”

  “I owe her this.”

  “Things are going to get very hairy. I can take it from here.”

  “Not without me. You wouldn’t have known about the Eleusinian connection without me, and I’m the one with access to photos of the Met robberies.”

  “What Met robberies?” She dropped back down into the seat.

  Theo mustered a smile, glad to see her calm façade crack. “On Monday night, two ancient containers were stolen from the Greek and Roman Collection. A colleague from the museum is sending me the photos—they should be waiting at my office up at Columbia by now.” At least, Theo hoped they were waiting for him.

  “Anything else you haven’t told me?” She leaned forward across the table.

  She might have been trying to intimidate him, but all Theo could think was, I wouldn’t mind telling you how beautiful you are. The sort of strong nose and square jaw that most women couldn’t pull off. But you look like you were fashioned from white marble by Pygmalion himself. Her skin didn’t even have pores.

  “Well?” she pressed, her flashing eyes drawing his attention back to the situation at hand.

  “There was actually a rash of robberies,” he admitted, refilling his teacup and dumping in another packet of sugar. “A snake was stolen from the Natural History Museum two nights ago. That’s how I knew to expect the Asklepia.”