“You told Jason lies, about starting a small business. Your business is subterfuge.” He straightened his laptop and resumed typing; it seemed an automatic gesture, like our hitchhiker fingering her knife.
I said the first thing that came to my mind: “I had to see you.”
“He said the same thing.”
“Who?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Your desperate friend.” His smile was at war with his eyes.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Roberto said. “I’m not feeling well.”
It was evident that he was telling the truth; he’d gone white. The older woman fetched a big silk pillow from a pile of junk mail and placed it on the floor. Roberto sank down, cradling his head in his hands.
We’d had a difficult day, I told our hosts, exhausting, what with the heat then the steam bath, the cleansing with Loki. Shuddering inside, I remembered the sores where his testicles had been. “We’ve had nothing to eat since morning.”
“Of course,” the Master said, brightening. He disrupted a stack of chaotic papers on a filing cabinet next to his chair, revealing a speaker. Cupping his hand as if whispering to a child, he mumbled something into the speaker, and, in a matter of seconds, another young girl, the smallest I’d seen here, came in, bearing a tray of fresh cut fruit, strawberries and peaches and plums.
I’d been daring enough to eat the strawberry Roberto refused in the greenhouse, but this tray of fruit—cold, fragrant, gleaming—had appeared all too quickly. But before we could make a decision about its safety, the Master frowned, and, indicating Roberto, scolded the little girl: “He’s allergic to strawberries, he said so in the greenhouse.” She curtsied, holding her grubby dress like a countess dancing the minuet, but the gesture was pitiful, coming from someone so fearful and so young. She scurried away with the plate.
“What I’m talking about is evolution,” the Master said.
“Excuse me?” I said. I’d sat on the floor next to Roberto, who seemed a bit better. The subservience implied in our position bothered me, but I thought it flattered the Master and brought forth what passed for benevolence on his part.
“Have you heard of the brown tree snake?” he asked us, shifting so that new deities or demons flickered then vanished, temporary as mirages, in the folds of his robe. “The brown tree snake is native to southeast Asia, and to New Guinea and Australia. In its native habitat, predators keep it in check. But it fares quite well as a stowaway, slipping into packing crates, even winding around the wheels of jet aircraft, thus managing to cross oceans.”
He made a feminine gesture; he gathered a handful of his hair and began stroking it. Then, from a plastic box, he drew a paper towel moistened with alcohol and rubbed his plump hands, afraid, apparently, of contaminating himself with his own hair. I thought of Loki’s definition of being “clean”—castration—and of our “cleansing” with steam, oils, and herbs. Females here—abused women, neglected children—formed some sort of servant class, some of them. Was this Chloe’s fate? Was she here, in some greenhouse or cell? How terrified a little child—or anyone—would be. I kept thinking of Miriam’s crying, of how Chloe was afraid of the dark. We must find her, somehow, if she was here.
The Master resumed his zoology lesson. “This snake, the brown tree snake, has made its way to Guam, the tiny island of Guam in the South Pacific. There, it has no natural enemies. It is free to multiply rapturously.” He enjoyed pronouncing the last word, smiling to reveal miniature teeth, juvenile as the milk teeth of a young boy. “The brown tree snake has infested Guam, at densities as high as ten thousand snakes per acre. It has been known to exist in sewers and emerge from pipes and drains into people’s homes. It has bitten small babies in their cradles. It is immune to pesticides, and, because of its habitat and appetite for eggs, it has rendered the songbirds of Guam, the native songbirds, extinct in the wild. The songbirds of Guam exist only in captivity.”
“I would like to go now,” Roberto announced. “I’m sure that by now your very capable colleagues have fixed our flat tire, our puncture, the ‘no accident.’ Or are we in captivity, like the songbirds of Guam?”
Just then, the little girl returned, wheeling a rickety aluminum cart on which wobbled three steaming plates of something thick and vegetarian, turnip-colored. Again, the girl curtsied. Her legs were peppered with insect bites and scratches.
“Choose whichever plate you wish,” the Master commanded. “I shall take the third.”
He was giving us this choice to challenge us to trust him; everything couldn’t be poisoned if he was to eat it too. “Shall,” he had said, like a character from Masterpiece Theatre, yet the overall impression he conveyed, despite his robe and sandals and long golden hair, was of power and an alien masculinity, like the mountain of power that is a sumo wrestler.
Roberto chose first, then I did. The Master took the remaining plate. He was the first to eat, attacking the food with a golden spoon which he cleaned with paper towels before using. The food was very hot; it singed the roof of my mouth, but it tasted good, like yam with a barrage of spices, as if all the herbs in Scents of Being had been included in this one particular recipe. The Master was a noisy eater, smacking his enlightened lips, noisy as an adopted puppy at its first meal out of the pound.
The young girl remained in the room, along with the older woman, kneeling on the chill terrazzo. They kept their attention fixed on the Master as the three of us ate. The room, like the building where I’d been grilled by Jason, was air-conditioned bitingly cold. The little girl, in particular, seemed to be minding it, and she was so thin, so I said, “If you like, have some of my food.”
“NO!” The Master’s word filled the room, as the little girl recoiled in terror.
“It was delicious, but I’ve had plenty.”
“She is not the right level!” the Master bellowed. “She has not evolved, she is not suitable!” He dabbed his mouth with a moistened towel. I’d angered him; his robe rose and fell unevenly while he caught his breath. For a moment, something akin to fear disturbed his expression as he said, “How did you first meet Ian Drummond?”
Chapter Thirty-eight
It startled me, his suddenly saying my half-brother’s name, his bringing murder into our meal, into this engineered Valhalla. But wasn’t that exactly where it belonged, where all of the events of this year originated—from Ian’s death to the museum assaults to Chloe’s kidnapping? So, when he asked the question, I felt a strange sense of relief verging on hope.
The little girl, in her dress bright with grease, took away our plates on her rickety cart. How could someone so fastidious tolerate someone so dirty serving him food? There was no logic to it. But expecting logic here was illogical. She was not the right “level,” so perhaps her presence didn’t count; Roman matrons went naked in front of their slaves, whose stares were no more embarrassing than those of the pet monkeys they’d imported from Africa.
His question was direct; so was my answer. “I knew Ian all my life.”
“And all his too? Right up to the end?” Smiling, he exposed his stunted teeth.
“I didn’t kill Ian,” I said.
“Somebody did.” He resumed typing on his laptop.
“How did you know Ian?” I boldly asked.
He set his laptop computer aside, on the tray with the paint-by-numbers roses and calabash of poi. “Ian came to me for nourishment,” he said, this most well-nourished of men. “Ian came to me for spiritual nourishment, he was a seeker.” The priest had used that word, “seeker,” at Ian’s funeral. “At least that was his initial guise.”
“He was a lawyer too,” I said.
The Master’s voice, once small, became large enough to fit his frame. “Ian was a swindler, a thief!” he bellowed.
“Master, are you all right?” the middle-aged woman asked him.
He ignored her. “Your Ian, your wretched Ian, knew the end was near.”
Loki had mentioned “the Fall,” while the Master spoke o
f “the end.”
“He negotiated the sale of your miserable school. He insinuated his way into the trustees’ confidence just as St. Harold’s was going bankrupt. Then he handled the sale to us, mishandled the sale, I should say. He cheated us blind—he sold land he’d promised us to a developer—and the land we bought by Lake Chiccataubett was useless! Useless—protected by the Endangered Species Act. Because some plant, some useless plant, the Berkshire bog orchid, was already growing there!”
I didn’t argue with his hypocrisy about biodiversity, why the Berkshire bog orchid didn’t merit preservation while the songbirds of Guam certainly did.
“I didn’t kill your friend Ian Drummond, but whoever performed that deed, whoever stabbed him through the heart, did a great service for a small multitude.”
The Master referenced only Ian’s chest wound, ignoring his throat, cut ear-to-ear. Like the media. Was it possible he didn’t know? Was it possible he was telling the truth?
“Whoever stabbed him only completed the work nature had begun. Nature, in her infinite wisdom.”
“About the tax matter, Master,” the middle-aged woman said.
“’Completed the work nature had begun’—what do you mean?” I asked as the woman approached him using a series of small bows, quick like spasms, then placed her bundle of binders and folders onto the metal tray, next to the calabash of poi.
“Ian sought my help because he was dying. He’d developed lymphoma due to a history of steroid usage.”
Lymphoma—was that possible?
“I met him through my mother’s business. His father visited my mother’s place of business. Ian had been using steroids for years. In larger and larger amounts. The result was a cancer, a lymphoma. So whoever killed Ian wasted their energy. Nature had already taken that assignment.”
Ian had certainly become muscular, very abruptly, and there was something unnatural about his body—it was swollen like the produce cultivated here. He’d changed during his time away from Boston. Yet he smoked and drank like someone from film noir. He’d littered his P-town bedroom with exercise equipment, which suggested an interest in bodybuilding, but whether that interest manifested itself through workouts or steroids, that was difficult to tell. No one had spoken of cancer—not his family and not the police—but the police had kept his throat wounds secret, so they might have kept his lymphoma secret too.
The Master drank from a pitcher of water with crescent moons of lemon floating through it. He seemed exhausted, spent by his anger or outburst, and his soft, wide face was covered in droplets of sweat. He clutched the pitcher with both of his hands, as if for comfort. “So we have met at last. And you have learned something, even you. About your insufferable classmate and the agricultural breakthroughs we’ve made here.”
Then the Master and the woman exchanged nods—all but simultaneously. I couldn’t tell who’d nodded first.
“I’ll show our visitors out,” the woman said.
This woman might have been encountered bringing bread to a bake sale or sons to a soccer match. Her normalcy was putting us at ease. Ushering us outside the bunker-like building, she said, “There’s so much to see before you’re gone.”
The crowd on the grass had dispersed, Jason with them. It was a humid afternoon, the air thick and warm like felt. The woman introduced herself as Freya, so she’d earned her Nordic name—without falling out of favor, like the castrated Loki and battered Helga. “Your automobile is fixed,” Freya said. How she knew this, it was hard to tell. She had been with us the entire time during our audience with the Master or the Golden One, whatever that creature was called.
We were standing outside the bunker-like building, on a lawn so perfect it had no more weeds than the cellophane grass of Easter baskets.
“We can start with the history of this place,” Freya said. “Cape Cod has been occupied since Paleoindian times.”
Then, in the stillness, something shrieked—shrill and desperate. The sound stamped Roberto’s face with fear, and mine as well, I’m sure. Overlapping, we both asked, “What was that?”
Freya’s smile remained intact. “It must have been a bird.”
It had come from something larger than a bird.
“It sounded like a child,” Roberto said.
I thought of Chloe, of course, and of the frightened girl who’d served us food.
“It must’ve been an animal in the woods,” Freya said.
It was hard to tell where the scream had originated, back of the bunker-like building or elsewhere. Freya expanded her account, with a digression about the Native American diet and its archaeological evidence on their property: shell middens, the scorched bones of deer…The cry we had heard was human, I was certain—the girl who’d brought us fruit by mistake, being punished.
“…The Native Americans roasted lobsters, smoked them or put them in stews,” Freya was saying, taking us away from the Master’s bunker and any further disturbance. “But you’re interested in Royall, in his little experiment. At least you mentioned that on your first excursion.”
They knew everything, remembered everything, my exchange with the Giant in the road, for example, but at least Royall was a relatively benign subject, a means of diverting the discussion from my past probing—as we sought to talk our way out of this Hades.
She led us downhill. We did nothing more about the cry we had heard; fear kept us furious but silent. We went through woods with foliage dulled by dust.
“Most of the buildings from Royall’s time are intact. After his experiment failed so swiftly, so pathetically, the grounds became a series of summer camps, but Royall’s buildings were preserved.”
She was admitting they’d lied to me earlier; the Giant had claimed Royall’s buildings were destroyed.
Roberto, I sensed, was about to erupt. I prevented him by saying groups of artists had always intrigued me with the way they collaborated and cross-fertilized. “I worked with a group of actors in our comedy troupe.”
“Yes, Jason mentioned that,” she said.
I had more than enough material to approach the police—their link to Ian, the Master’s anger over Ian selling the property at St. Harold’s, and the sinister culture of this place. Yet the story of Ian’s cancer had jolted me. Those malignant cells were a wild card I hadn’t imagined.
“It strikes me as odd,” I said, “since you mentioned Jason, it’s odd that he’s African-American—”
“It strikes you odd that he’s African-American?” Freya said. “You are quite the Eurocentric.” With her gold and silver hair and her dress embroidered with acorns in metallic threads, she actually laughed, then, with seriousness, said, “Are you a racist?”
“It’s just that your emphasis here is on Norse culture, Norse names, these buildings inspired by the Viking age…And many of your people, like Jason, dye their hair.”
“Women in pre-contact Hawaii bleached their hair. Aboriginals in Australia have naturally blond hair, and they’re much darker than Jason. Dark skin and light hair are quite culturally compatible. Are you a racist?”
“Of course not.”
Her actions of putting us at ease had thinned, just as the woods had thinned out into a huge sunlit meadow containing four squat stone buildings resembling the hall with the sun disk we’d seen earlier. Beyond these—gray and flat, like an elephant shot on safari—was a glacial boulder. Shading this was a tree, a beech so ancient cables connected its branches to brace them. A pond glittered back of these, its surface rippled like chain mail.
“Jason was in a great deal of trouble when he came to us,” Freya volunteered. “In trouble with the law, in trouble with drugs. The Master saved his life. We’re not concerned with race per se, we’re concerned with preserving quality, the best of all life, animal and botanical, from the coming climactic disasters.”
She detailed the evidence that things already were awry: alien species crowding out native life, tropical diseases like dengue fever creeping north. Glaciers were melti
ng like unplugged freezers, the ozone layer was rupturing. Why these verified concerns should excuse child abuse and a Hitlerian fringe of eugenics, she didn’t specify. She ran her fingers through her hair, so that her head moved and her sea glass earrings tinkled like wind chimes on a country porch. “Our hair is an expression of unity—and respect for our Master’s heritage.”
Freya unlocked the door to one of the low buildings. As she turned the iron key, rust crunched in the lock. Inside, the room smelled of decay, of wood rotting and metal corroding. There were windows in the room, but any light they might have shed was censored by heavy shutters.
Beds lined the long room. They were without mattresses; ropes sagged where cushions or mattresses once belonged. What were their lives like, the men who’d used these beds, these sons of Civil War veterans, who’d worn condoms made from animals’ skins, who’d ridden so many horses and never heard of a virus? What was it like sleeping in these stone dormitories on these beds Leif Ericsson would have found familiar? And what charisma, what force, made artists from the Appalachians to the Cascades forsake their known lives for Thomas Royall’s regimen? Mikkonen too possessed this power, the ability to inspire, to compel others to heed his wishes. Shamans and inventors had this too; they could expunge doubt from their personalities, squeeze it out like splinters.
The starkness of the artists’ beds contrasted with the majesty of one chair, carved with gods and gnomes in never-ending battle.
“The beds were used by the artists. This throne was used by Royall when he paid them a visit. Royall was very hierarchical,” she said, as if their community was as democratic as a New England town meeting.
“The metal-workers slept in this dormitory.” On a table, through the murk, I could see an array of swords, axes, a pike, even an iron bird, all vulnerable with rust.
The Fisher Boy Page 27