by Orrin Grey
“The ring on his finger,” a voice said in Jasper’s ear. He didn’t have to turn his head to look to know that it was no human voice. In the sound of the words, he could see the face of an enormous owl, a crown on its head. “He took it from a man who took it from one of us. Without it, he’ll have no command over us.”
Jasper remembered his mother’s stories about the Devil, he remembered the preacher’s talk of fire and brimstone, but he also knew that there were worse things than devils in this world, and more than one way to damn yourself. “The ring,” he said to the woman beside him and she raised the gun without questioning him. Solomon King laughed. She pulled the trigger and two of his fingers were suddenly gone from his hand. A silver ring struck the cave floor with the sound of a bell, bounced once, and rolled into the oily black pool at the back of the room.
There was no more preamble. From every dark line etched in the floor, from every fold of shadow, figures stepped as if from doorways. A winged thing with the head of a deer, a naked woman astride a camel, a hunter surrounded by horns. They enveloped Solomon King like a flock of crows descending on carrion and then the cave was empty.
CLOSING TIME
Stories don’t ever have endings, not really. They never come together in a way that ties up everything; they never resolve. No wedding, no kiss, not even death ever stops things in their tracks completely. There’s no iris out, as in the moving picture theaters. Things just go on and some things never make sense. Some questions are never answered.
Solomon King’s Mine burned down that night. Dozens of bodies were found in the wreckage. Some were identified; some never were. Nine police officers died in the blaze and no one ever knew how many patrons. In the aftermath, a special detachment explored the catacombs that were found beneath the building. There, they uncovered all manner of strange things that were never reported, including a room full of oblong cabinets, in which reposed the preserved bodies of various well-known and influential individuals, among them Magda Gilman. The county coroner determined that most of the bodies had been dead for years, in spite of the fact that many of the individuals had been seen in recent months, out and about, and that Magda Gilman had been heard to perform in Solomon King’s Mine the night before. All the bodies were cremated and the reports disappeared.
Caroline Bloom and Jasper deWitt wandered out of a cave entrance nearly three miles away at half-past-four the following afternoon. They were never connected in any official way with the events at Solomon King’s Mine and neither one of them ever spoke of it, not even to one another. They never revealed what they talked about during their walk through the caves, but it was obvious that some kind of deep connection had been forged in a very short time. They left Kansas City together that night, in Caroline Bloom’s sedan. When Caroline returned home, she waited the requisite amount of time and then had her brother declared dead in absentia. She hired Jasper as her personal valet, though it was known among those close to her that he rarely did much in the way of work and that he often advised her in matters of business. She provided him a house of his own near the Bloom estate. He lived there for the rest of this life.
At first, he spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying about Gerald Tyson’s wrath, but that wrath never came. What Jasper didn’t know was that, on the very night that Solomon King’s burned down, Gerald Tyson awoke from a dream in a cold sweat. He dismissed his bodyguards, then killed his mistress with a shotgun and slit his own wrists. He left no explanation behind.
Jasper deWitt’s life improved in Caroline Bloom’s employ, but he never slept well again. He married eventually, had children and grandchildren, and got to watch them all grow up. He lived to be a very old man. But sometimes at night, he would dream. In his dreams, he would rise from his bed and look out the window. On the hilltop outside, he would see the figure of a huge owl with legs like a stork, and on its head was perched a crown. It stared at him with familiar golden eyes. When he walked out to meet it, he heard its voice in his ear again, as he had that night in the cave. It told him things that he was pretty sure people weren’t meant to know and he profited by them, but at the end of each dream, it would always say the same words to him. Though his life was rich and long, those words would never leave him.
“You will never be rid of us now.”
* * *
POMPTINIA SUM
A. D. CAHILL
I remember stones cracking, a hiss of cool air, choking yellow dust, and a sliver of blue sky. I remember a young soldier, emaciated, bone-white from fear. Crusted blood under his twisted Farina helmet. His eyes, dark hollows. His sweat, a sickly, hospital sweat. A shadow from another enshrouded him.
Gagging. “Holy Mother, the stench. How long?”
Couldn’t he see? But no, not length. He meant how much time. Fool. Meaningless question.
The other’s voice, deep, rustic, a voice with calluses. “Tell it we found it in the war. Call it a him. Give it wants. Give it desires. Wrap them around its emptiness.”
Whispers in my ear. “Battle of Cerna Bend.”
Thoughts. Buried under a forgotten farmhouse blasted to nothing in no-man’s land.
Hands on me.
Whispers. “Empty One. You are Leiano. Take what is yours. Grow. Blackshirts follow.”
Now there is dust again. Dust and a sliver of blue sky.
Diario Di Leiano
It is that time again, to don a new guise and move to the next feast. Mussolini spoils my exploits. There was a time when I could toss a few lire to some street urchins and have the prime minister himself followed, learn his schedule, gain entry to his apartment, and avail myself of his wife’s jewelry. Or, if I already had sufficient wealth, I could use it to avail myself of his wife. Every wife is someone else’s mistress. It’s the only way for the math to work. Yet, there are no more urchins. There are no more homeless, on the streets, anyway. The church is now a country unto itself. A deplorable state for a man such as myself, who makes a living off a wealthy man’s scraps. And where have all the wealthy gone? Young Blackshirts clubbed them into submission. The life is sucked from the country and replaced with the hard machinery of timetables, correctness, an all-must-be-thus and just-so-ness, which destroys everything succulent. I thought I might try England for a change, or France. What a time to be in Paris. But there are rumors of wondrous islands in the south. Places where old money lies in heaps guarded by wine-besotted sheep. The ocean is not the bulwark it once was. So, without coin, I’ll go south to the island, Pomptinia.
***
The ferry left from Naples. Naples, a glorious storm of chaos. A knife glint in a crooked alley. A maze of colorful laundry crisscrossing the air between sooty tenements. Dogs howling, people singing, dancing, drinking, fighting, fucking. But the jackboots marched there, too. No room for a man like me. But beyond the bay in the Tyrrhenian Sea—Pomptinia, a haven from poverty and Mussolini alike. The place called to me like no other.
A quick drubbing of bald head behind the taxi stand and according to my ticket and the contents of my new valise, I am one Professor Francesco di Milano. How easy to slough off the sobriquet Leiano and wriggle into the new skin. I am, after all, a chancer and I have never held fast to anything so ephemeral as a name. Aside from clothes, the valise contained a guidebook on local flora, a magnifying glass, and several works from classical antiquity. I now have a reservation at the Typhon, a fine sea-side hotel in the island’s largest town. I wiped the blood from my cane with a monogrammed handkerchief, then tossed the silk cloth off the pier. A pity to lose such a fine thing, but then again, you can’t miss what was never yours. Now let us see what kind of professor I shall be.
WE DO NOT TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY AT THE CASTLE
The ferry plowed the waters, slow and steady like oxen tilling the soil. It would be almost evening when they would arrive. The chancer hoped he wouldn’t miss dinner. He bought an espresso and the day’s Giornale del Sud at the bar, where he had a panoramic view of the deck a
nd the metallic sea beyond. Heavy clouds rolled in from the Mediterranean. There would be rain. An inauspicious beginning: Non annuit coeptis. But of course, he made his own luck just as he made himself. God doesn’t concern himself with us. The proof lay in Cerna Bend. The usual headlines; saber rattling to the east, union unrest settled with fist and club, and any woman with thirteen or more children would win a Magna Mater award. The award didn’t come with any remuneration—presumably, thirteen children were their own reward. There was a little blurb about Pomptinia entitled: CARNIVAL, WHERE THE TEMPEST HOLDS NO SWAY.
The chancer was skimming the article when three deck hands in crisp blue uniforms came up from the lower deck. The first lifted a thin red rope blocking the crew staircase from the passengers. The other two struggled past with a water bucket and mops, slopping suds as they jostled each other. The first left the others behind, leaned back against the bar, and lighted a cigarette. He wrapped his knuckles on the bar and the bartender poured him a jigger of gin. He took a deep drag before downing the gin.
“Do it right this time, Marco. By God, if you leave a spot again, I swear I’ll ram that mop so far up your ass, the Roman whores will be able to see your shriveled, goat-shit balls dangling all the way from St. Peter’s.”
He took another puff. “The captain’s been gnawing at my sack like Satan’s own crabs since that Latium cow tourist broke her ankle.”
He wrapped the bar again and a second gin appeared. He watched while they scrubbed, drinking and idly twisting a gold ring on his finger. When they were finished, he inspected their work. He cuffed one in the back of the head.
“Dry it now, you bastards of bastards.”
He gave the chancer a wink. “You have to keep a tight rein on these idiots or they’ll run roughshod over you every time.”
In a few minutes, the tyrant and his hapless minions were done and gone, leaving in their wake fading curses and the bucket’s metallic clatter.
The chancer smoothed his hair and took stock. A few thousand lire left. Di Milano hadn’t been carrying enough on his person for an extended stay. For the valise, he thought he might get enough for one, perhaps two nights at the Typhon. If Professor di Milano had more baggage, it was either somewhere on the docks, soon to be in the hands of the port authority, or it was already on board.
He bought a bottle of icebox-chilled limoncello and tucked it in the deep pocket of his jacket. He creased the newspaper and tore strips from it, folding them into a thick rectangle. After wrapping a thousand note around the rectangle, he clipped the entire wad in his money clip. Two hours before arrival, he stepped over the rope, descended the stairs, and wandered through the ship looking for the prey with the golden ring.
In the smoky breakroom, the chancer found a low-stakes crap game—five men all laughing and, more importantly, drinking heavily. All were lean with wiry muscles, calloused hands, and, except for the shooter, wearing sweat-stained undershirts. Boiler men or some other functionaries of the ship’s underbelly. The shooter wore deckhand blues. Crouching, he rolled dice onto the floor from an empty peach tin. And—ah, yes—he was indeed the petty tyrant from the bar. A pile of cash and coins lay at his knees, but the chancer’s eyes were drawn to the golden glint on the shooter’s finger.
He watched the ebb and flow for a few minutes. Four to one, but the one always won, didn’t he? When the tyrant focused on the dice, the others rolled their eyes or made gagging gestures with their fingers in their mouths. One with a bit missing from his left earlobe feigned shooting himself in the head when the tyrant rolled yet another seven. Jealousy stokes anger’s flames in the brow-beaten. The chancer knocked on the metal bulkhead.
“Hey, I thought there was a real party somewhere.”
The five looked up from their game. The tyrant paused, the dice rattling in the tin. He unconsciously scooped the mound of wrinkled bills closer to his feet. “Passengers upstairs, Signore.”
“Professor, actually, but let it pass.”
He hyper-articulated his words, hamming up a northern accent. He crouched and clapped the tyrant’s back. “This is a new world, amico. Aren’t we all Italians here?”
“Your accent stinks of Florence, Professor.”
Ah, you speak and give yourself away. “Well, we can’t all be as articulate as Calabrian pig-fuckers.”
The others laughed. The tyrant pushed the chancer’s arm away, rose, and grabbed at his lapels, sending the dice skittering across the floor. “I’m from Pomptinia, you saint-sodomizing, whore-pounding—”
The chancer stepped back. “Peace.”
He pulled the limoncello from his coat, grinning his best I’m-just-shitting-you grin. “It would be a shame to waste this on only myself.”
Shot glasses appeared as if God had answered a prayer. He poured glass after glass, filling the cabin with the fragrance of the sweet lemon liqueur. He always poured to the four first, shorting the tyrant, just enough for him to notice. When the bottle was down to its last few yellow drops, and the smiles warm and soft all around, the chancer hitched a thumb at the tyrant.
“Is your man here always so lucky?”
The man with the missing earlobe said, “Madonna, Giovanni never loses. We check the dice now before we play. They’re always fine. For us—crappy.”
“You just don’t have the knack,” Giovanni said.
“Bah, we haven’t sold our souls.”
Giovanni’s slack gaze turned steely for a moment. The others stiffened. “What are you doing here, anyway, Professor?”
“Now that is a most profound question. To answer, I must first know who I am, where I am, and exactly why, given all the information there is to know in the universe, this being, this ‘me,’ is here. But, the banal reason is that I intended to win that cash for myself.”
He gestured at Giovanni’s winnings with an empty glass.
“Why not let him shoot?” Earlobe scooped the dice into the tin. “It’s a hundred to—”
“I mean to make a wager.”
The chancer waved the cup away, then pointed at Giovanni. “With you.”
“Oh, ho, ho,” Earlobe said. “He’s got it in for you, Giovanni. Can you handle it?”
Bless alcohol and this man. He does my work for me. A trickle of sweat ran down Giovanni’s forehead, past his eye, down his cheek. “What’s the bet?”
“The entire sum of money in front of you. If I lose, I’ll pay you an equal amount. You can double your winnings in a stroke.”
He pulled the money clip from his pocket, flashed it, and returned it. One of the men whistled. “Those were thousands, Giovanni.”
“What’s the game?”
“No game. If I can answer one question about you, you pay. I can tell you exactly where you got that ring.”
Giovanni held up his right hand.
“This ring?”
“That ring.”
“It’s one of a kind.”
“Is it, indeed? May I see it?”
“A Florentine fool and his money ....”
Giovanni gave him the ring—a golden millipede swallowing itself like Ouroboros. Along its spine ran the inscription: OMNIA QUAE CALCO SUM EGOMET. I am all I tread upon. The translation came effortlessly. Now where had he learned Latin?
“So, you accept?”
He tossed the ring back to Giovanni, who slipped it on his finger.
“By all the saints screwing in Heaven, I do.”
Everything now depended on that golden, lemon nectar and the resentment Giovanni garnered with every petty insult and cruel blow. The chancer closed his eyes, mimicking the parlor room channelers so popular among the credulous bourgeoisie. Then he let a smile spread across his face, warm as butter. “You got that ring on the ring finger of your right hand.”
Pause. Breath. Four heartbeats of silence followed, then the crew erupted in laughter. The chancer scooped the money from the floor as the other the crew clapped him on the back. “Ha. He got you there, Giovanni.”
Giovanni gr
abbed the chancer’s wrist. “That was bullshit.”
“Come on, Giovanni. He answered the question,” Earlobe said. “He outsmarted you, is all.”
Giovanni let go of the chancer’s wrist. He leaned over, bringing his lips to the chancer’s ear. “Easy now, Giovanni,” Earlobe said.
Spittle flecks flew from Giovanni’s mouth hitting the chancer’s ear. “We don’t take things lightly at the castle.”
The chancer daubed his ear with a handkerchief. “I don’t expect that you do. Good day, gentlemen.”
As he left, he dropped a 500 hundred note just where Earlobe could see it.
***
I remember the priest, a spider in his lair, a lure, a broken man. Layers of the onion. Peel them back. What do you find at the core?
ARE YOU HERE FOR CARNIVAL?
Diario Di Leiano
What a fool thing to say: We don’t take things lightly at the castle. And so, another petty tyrant falls and I have means to stay on the island for quite some time. Long enough, at least, to find another meal. What a place! Where one can make a living from the deckhands, think of the feast forthcoming. I salivate.
We disembarked and I saw Oz: a crescent bay where blue waters lapped the sand, three and four-story buildings painted in peach and soft yellows captured the setting sun, while up the mountain where sheep dotted terraced farms, brick walls of Roman ruins protruded from the ground, the broken bones of a splendid corpse. I strode through narrow streets and triangular piazzas, catching snatches of music from gramophones and street musicians, breathing in the heavy ocean air.