by Mike Sager
Salem put her hand to her mouth, playing mock horror. “Oh my God, Jamal!”
Alarmed: “What?”
“That’s an indecent sexual proposition!” she giggled. “I could get in trouble for that.”
7
The Pope of Pot sat behind his desk in his storefront church, wearing his marijuana bonnet. He clapped his hands with childish glee. “Start the music! Serve the canapés! Do we have any of those lapel pins left? Hop to it, people. We have visitors!”
Waylon rolled his eyes heavenward. Canapés? “Pope, please,” he implored. “We have no money. We have no product. We have no food. Even if I represent us on all the charges, I still need to hire cocounsel and private investigators. There are filing fees, messenger fees, copy charges, transcripts … We need to come up with a plan.” He pointed toward the door. “What we don’t need right now are any more freeloaders.”
“As you well know,” the Pope declared zealously, “we turn no one away.”
“But Pope—”
“You’re becoming a real pooh-pooh, toots. Get a shot of him, Beta Max. Tight close-up: Waylon the Pooh.”
A new round of pounding at the door. The blacked-out windows rattled and shook. Everyone looked to the Pope. “Who wants to answer?” he asked.
Louie the albino rose from his chair and shambled across the scarred linoleum toward the door, his rabbit fur hat slightly askew. He slid open the service window, a foot-square panel cut into the reinforced steel.
A beefy face, florid, with a black pompadour and a monumental nose. “Police. Open up!”
Panicked, Louie slid the window shut, just missing the nose. He had a wild, frightened look in his eyes, like a dog that knows what’s coming next. The last bust had been Louie’s first. His first time in jail too. He was hungry the whole time. Scared. He felt like an animal in a cage. He still awoke some mornings in a panic sweat, thinking he was back inside. He didn’t want to go there again—ever. “What do we do?” he asked.
The Pope of Pot threw his hands up jubilantly. “Open the door,” he said. “The police have come at my request.”
Waylon stared at his leader, totally flummoxed. It had been two years since the Pope had rescued him from the Dumpster—the Pope liked to joke that if it wasn’t for five pounds of spoiled chicken he was desperate to discard, they never would have met. The Pope had paid Waylon’s medical bills, nursed him back to health, settled his six-figure gambling debt with the mob. By way of squaring the balance sheet, Waylon had taken upon himself the job of in-house counsel. Given the Pope’s brand of cockeyed idealism, it was a Sisyphean task. Like the time the Pope had conspired to collect two dozen used syringes from Lafayette Park and turn them in to the police. Waylon had warned him that possession of syringes was illegal, that he could be arrested. Couldn’t he have thrown them away somewhere quietly? Wouldn’t that have achieved the same purpose? Couldn’t he have called a news conference and just pointed out the syringes in situ? Or like Halloween, when the Pope had insisted on passing joints out at the parade in Georgetown—not really the greatest idea when your main source of income is an ongoing criminal enterprise. He’d also advised against the free matchbooks, with the Pope’s name and a big marijuana leaf on the cover, listing the name and phone number of the DC police chief, urging residents to report all instances of police misconduct in the city.
Walyon held one finger up to Louie, indicating that he should wait a moment before opening the door. He scanned the room, looking for any incriminating items. His attention settled upon a teenage girl sitting lotus style on one end of Al Haig’s credenza.
Her name was Sojourner Yeong Cohen-Lawrence—Sojii for short. She was sixteen years old, a runaway the Pope had met some months ago at the Greyhound bus terminal. An exquisite creature of indeterminate race—long chestnut hair, full lips, olive skin, emerald eyes—she was dressed in a fuzzy pink angora midriff sweater and antique bell-bottom jeans. As was the case with Waylon, Louie, Beta Max, and the others, Sojii subsisted solely by the Pope’s good graces—she slept in his storefront, ate his food, picked up spare cash delivering the sacrament across the city on a twenty-one-speed mountain bike provided by the church. No doubt her presence in the storefront opened the Pope to myriad charges.
“Sojii,” Waylon said in a stage whisper, “we’ve got to get you out of here.”
The girl appeared to be in a trance. Her almond-shaped eyes were fixed upon the object in her lap—an uncannily lifelike representation of a human skull, rendered from a giant piece of crystal rock. The skull had been in the Pope’s possession for as long as anyone could remember, the official resting place for his papal miter. Sitting there in Sojii’s lap, it appeared to be giving off a greenish glow.
“Sojii,” Waylon repeated, louder this time, annoyed. He went quickly to the west side of the room, reached into the crevice beside the industrial refrigerator, flipped a latch. The massive appliance pivoted easily outward from the wall, exposing a passageway. A ladder led upward.
Blinking away the cobwebs, Sojii shoved the skull into her backpack and hustled across the room. She stepped into the passageway, looked back once at Waylon. Then she began to climb.
8
Thornton Desmond untied his apron and folded it away in a drawer. With a heavy sigh, he studied his reflection in the glass-doored cupboard—full head of snow-white hair, aristocratic cheekbones, patrician nose spiderwebbed with broken capillaries. In a few weeks, he would be turning sixty-eight, a time when most men should be resting on their laurels. Like a child on a motor holiday, he couldn’t help but wonder, Are we there yet?
He gripped the edge of the granite counter, crouched down painfully on arthritic knees, retrieving from the nether regions beneath the sink an expensive bottle of single malt scotch. Born in Swords, north of Dublin, Thornton was the last living descendant of an illustrious Anglo-Irish family that could be traced back ten centuries. His ancestor, Geoffrey Desmond, had been a close confidant of Uther Pendragon. Arnold Desmond had shared a fence line with Geoffrey Chaucer. Sir Ferdinand Desmond helped found the Plymouth Colony—the third man off the first longboat from the Mayflower. Samuel Desmond’s historical novel The Gateway to Rome, first published in 1788, has been read by English schoolboys for more than two centuries. And then there was Dickie Desmond, infamous for his bungled attempt at stealing the Scottish crown jewels at the turn of the twentieth century.
In his own salad days, Thornton Desmond had been one of the original jet set, part of the international fraternity of swells and bon vivants who made the fifties glamorous. A sometime freelance photographer and Hollywood PR man, he counted Sean Connery, Nigel Dempster, and the Earl of Lichfield among his closest confederates. When he was in his early forties, he stood by impotently as his mother sold off the ancestral estate—as it was, only the barn and several outbuildings remained; the manor house had been razed because of termites some years earlier. At the urging of her third husband, she used what remained of the Desmond family fortune to buy a hotel in Tangiers. Two years later, upon her death, her only child inherited her controlling interest in the place. Moroccan law made it impossible for Thornton to sell—or rather, impossible for him to take the proceeds of any sale out of the country. Thornton had no choice but to exile himself to the Tangiers Gibraltar Hotel, a clean but middling accommodation that catered, as the name would suggest, to British tourists from across the straits. That he lasted in Morocco for nearly twenty years was a miracle which could be attributed only to inertia—and, perhaps, to the ready availability of vice of every flavor in a city known for its so-called “sympathetic” system of law, which allowed all manner of victimless crime to flourish. Right about the time he could take it no longer, for reasons of both health and sanity, an old chum from Eaton turned up, another blue blood similarly dispossessed by time and modernity, hoping to cadge a free room at the hotel. One boozy night he shared with Thornton his idea of moving to America and hiring himself out as a butler, the latest rage among early-eighties
parvenus and Wall Street masters of the universe. “Your accent alone should fetch at least eighty K a year,” the friend suggested.
Now, in the roomy first floor kitchen of Bert Metcalfe’s Georgetown mansion, Thornton Desmond, gentleman’s gentleman, filled a Baccarat juice glass with three fingers of the rich, caramel-colored liquid and knocked it back. At least he was still living in the style to which he’d been born—Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, fresh cut flowers in every room, Egyptian cotton pillowcases, a case of Macallan 25 in the larder. Replacing the glass on the counter, he loosened his Turnbull & Asser tie, unfastened the top button of his hand-sewn shirt. On his right ring finger he wore his father’s signet, the Desmond family crest—a golden whirlpool on a platinum shield. He often wondered about the whirlpool, what it actually symbolized, how it had come to be. Ten centuries of recorded Desmond family history was strangely bereft of any mention of the origin of the very graphic by which it was identified. Throughout the years, as he’d felt himself being pulled farther from the comforts of his privileged upbringing, into the vortex of dark adventures and calamities that had characterized his life, he’d sometimes wondered what the arc of his story line would have looked like if his family had been represented symbolically by something a little more, well, awe inspiring—a lion perhaps, or maybe a hawk or an eagle. Had he believed in such things, he might have speculated that the Desmond family had long ago been cursed, that the whirlpool was a graphic harbinger of fortunes to come—everything down the loo.
He poured himself another shot and drank it off, rinsed the glass, placed it in the dish rack. After returning the bottle to its hiding place beneath the sink, he exited the kitchen, made his way down the dark hallway, the leather soles of his Gucci slipons clicking roundly against the marble floor. He took the elevator to the roof.
The doors opened onto a metal catwalk. On his first day of service at Metcalfe’s, unaccustomed to modern appliances after twenty years in North Africa, Thornton had neglected to properly shut off the gas in the Viking stove, causing a minor explosion. He was found unconscious on the kitchen floor by his new employer, who helped him to his feet. Ten guests were expected for dinner that night. “Will you be okay to cook the pullet?” Metcalfe inquired.
Gathering his wits, Thornton had risen from the floor and excused himself to his sumptuous basement apartment, where he changed his shirt and shaved off what remained of his mustache. Then he returned to the kitchen and cooked and served a lovely dinner, roundly complimented by all in attendance. Metcalfe had gone so far as to introduce him to the company. Of course he told the story of finding his new manservant on the floor. It got him a big laugh.
Later that evening, Thornton’s work in the kitchen at last complete—the dishes washed and put away, the leftovers wrapped as prescribed in the three-inch-thick loose-leaf binder that listed the preferences and procedures of the household—he had come up here to the roof, as he had tonight, summoned to bring coffee to Metcalfe in his gallery. Drawn by the view, by his feelings of hopelessness, he stood at the very edge of the slippery slate, four stories above the ground. To the southeast, he could see the majesty of the city’s lights—the phallic glory of the Washington Monument, the pleasing mammarian swell of the Capitol dome, crowned by the erect nipple of Persephone. He challenged himself: Name one last thing you have left to lose.
For several long minutes, very long minutes, Thornton Desmond wracked his brain for an answer, a reason to go on, a reason not to jump. He’d been struggling now for so long. He felt so tired. What was the use?
And then it came to him. One last thing he had to lose.
“My nerve,” he said out loud, the dulcet tones of his Etonian boyhood still evident in the creases of his ragged tenor. Deep into the third act, you never knew: a plot twist was always possible.
The catwalk led across the roof to another door, this one thick and armor-plated, like a bank vault. Thornton placed his palm on a light box. The door opened with an electric whoosh.
He stepped into a large circular room. The ceiling was retracted to reveal a girder-and-glass roof, through which could be seen the inky night sky, a sprinkling of stars.
Around the room, at each of the four cardinal directions, stood a granite pedestal, three feet high, four feet in diameter. On each of the pedestals sat a likeness of a human skull. Lit from beneath, the eye sockets glowed.
The skull at the north was made of amethyst. Dark purple in color, rich and translucent, it had been purchased from a Mayan priest near Oaxaca, Mexico. To the east was a skull of jade, excavated by Chinese archaeologists from beneath the site of an ancient Buddhist monastery on the Tibetan border. To the south was the Zulu Skull, made of lapis, used by African shamans for centuries as a weapon of war. The western skull was crafted of rose quartz. Purchased at great expense from a secret society based in London, it was known as the Templar Skull. Some scholars argued that the true objective of the Crusades was the liberation of the Templar Skull from its Moorish captors.
At the center of the room was a fifth round pedestal, identical to the others. Upon this one sat Bert Metcalfe, his tiny loafers swinging idly, heels knocking against the granite. Scattered around him on the floor were a dozen cardboard document boxes, all of them overflowing with old diaries, moth-eaten books, yellowed newspaper clippings, and musty letters.
Metcalfe looked up from the fragile pages of an old leather-bound journal. The cover was embossed with his name: Bertram Hedgewick Metcalfe. “They found my grandfather’s diary!” he exclaimed.
9
Exhausted and bereft after another unrequited day of an eventful but generally unsatisfying life, I was sitting on the pristine, sandy beach—or rather, at a table on the beach at the hotel bar. Like the chair, the table was fashioned entirely from the wood and woven fronds of a coconut tree, another example of the ingenuity of the native population. The hotel was called La Casita del Mar. For the past six months it had been our base of operations: inexpensive but clean, it was set within a palm forest at the western end of the island of Guanaja, one of a chain of tiny islands off the northern coast of British Honduras.
The date, I shall never forget, was April 21, 1911. I was fifty years old. Time had weathered my face as it had the sheer limestone cliff rising from the mangrove swamp to the south. As I watched the orange wrath of the Caribbean sun melt into the silent and reproachful sea, I was at a low point. After years of searching, years of hoping, years of belief against all odds, I had begun to lose faith. Where was all of this getting me? What good was it to think against the grain? Perhaps I was wrong about my beliefs—maybe all of the others were correct. I poured another glass of rum. The tide of my personal fortitude was fast approaching its ebb.
Just then, from the direction of the shoreline, I heard a shout. It was Bobbie, my ward. She was thirteen years old at the time, just beginning to blossom into her estimable womanhood. She ran toward me at an exaggerated pace, her firm, muscular, suntanned legs at full gallop; her mane of dark hair flying like a prize filly’s. Standing knee-deep in the surf behind her was a grizzled islander. He appeared to be wearing nothing but a loincloth. From the distance, given my lifelong myopia, I could not discern his intentions. I figured they couldn’t be well—the haste with which Bobbie was moving toward me caused my blood to run cold.
I rose quickly from the table and took off in her direction—mine was a hobbled gait, an old warhorse still in the race; the splinter of a Winchester bullet, a remnant of my days with Pancho Villa, was still embedded in my hip bone. As we drew close, as Bobbie’s countenance entered my field of focus, I could see that it was not alarm that was registered on her face, but rather the utmost delight. She smiled largely—her teeth were as white and brilliant as coral. “Look, Father! Look what the man gave me!”
I reached out and carefully took the object from her hand. It appeared to be a human jaw, constructed from a wondrous, glasslike substance—instinctively, I knew it was crystal quartz. It was an exquisite piece, clearly
ancient, perfectly preserved, without so much as a dent or scratch—obviously it had been broken away from a larger piece, presumably a skull of crystal. From the moment I set my eyes upon it, I knew it was like nothing ever seen before by modern man. As I believed that day, without question or doubt, I believe still, twenty-one years later, despite the widespread condemnation by my many and vocal critics: I was holding in my hand an important relic from the long lost continent of Atlantis.
Immediately, I looked down to the shoreline for the Carib in the loincloth.
But he was gone without a trace.
In that instant, my path became clear; my life’s purpose was finally revealed. Guided by unknown forces, lured down through the years and across thousands of miles, I was, I now saw, a mere pawn in a greater plan—how could it be otherwise? Surely everything had happened for a reason. Why else would the son of a banker give up the secure and comfortable life of his kin and class to go live with the Canadian Eskimos. Had I not lived with the Eskimos, I would never have suffered from frostbite. Had I not suffered from frostbite, I would never have gone to the Sonoran Desert to bathe in the healing waters of the Jamacha Spa. Had I not gone to Jamacha, I would never have met Pancho and his gang. Had I not met Pancho, I would never have been able to afford the expeditions—first to Guanaja, and later to the treacherous interior of British Honduras. Had I not pushed on, past the point of reasonable personal endurance, Tumbaatum would have remained buried in the overgrown jungle. For that matter, had I not taken upon myself the added burden, despite my peripatetic bachelor lifestyle, of caring for a female orphan in the first place (one, I might add, with a stubborn fondness for following her own wiles despite my wishes), I would never have found the object of which we now must speak—a relic so powerful that it defies all of the so-called Wisdom of the Ages.