“He dit not suffer long—” she said, only to pitch forward in a hacking fit, grating out a sound like someone repeatedly hitting the ignition on a running car. Finally she slowed, cleared her throat, and finished her sentence: “…vizzout his torso.”
I approached her, gingerly touched her wrist. It felt like phyllo pastry. I told her Festus had passed on her wish to see me.
Mr. Savant left the room. Festus sat in a corner chair.
“Ja, Doktor. I am a varrior deity. Ein Aesir gott. My people…haff no Apollo, no Sos,” she said, I believe meaning Thoth; both were deities of science and medicine. “Unt Festus’s human doktors, for all zeir learnink, cannot heal vun uff us. So I am now facink my own personal Götterdämmerung. My own private tvilight uff ze gotts.
“Unt I haff been sinkink…about our sessions. About your qvestioning uff my, my relationships…viss my children. Unt now zat apparently…zere is no more time… I vant you to broker—”
Hnossi snapped forward and back, exploding her coughs like a car backfiring repeatedly. Festus leapt from his chair, yelled into his wrist comm for the doctor, then grabbed Hnossi’s hand and roughly rubbed her neck and back to loosen her potentially lethal congestion. A doctor and nurse appeared, swept us out, and drew back the curtain.
Festus and I stood in the hallway not looking at each other.
Silence sandpapered a minute off the clock.
With his gaze nailed to his toes, the battle-hardened billionaire stooped before me, his six-foot-four frame fragile, faltering.
“She beat every villain on the planet,” he whispered, then captured and released a long, hissing breath. “She’s gonna beat this.”
I stifled my professional duty to ask him And what if she doesn’t? long enough for Festus to say, “And then, then, then that bastard…Warmaster Set…he’ll pay for this.”
“You’re sure he’s the one responsible?”
He glared at me. “Everyone responsible will pay.”
The withered Mr. Savant appeared once more.
“Your…other guest…has arrived, Lord Piltdown.”
“My what? I wasn’t scheduled for any—”
“Master Festus,” said the old man, his watery eyes trembling with sympathy, “it’s Master Tran.”
Festus straightened up. His spine crackled audibly. He swiveled his face to level his blast-furnace gaze upon me.
“Now why in God’s good hell, Eva,” he growled, “would I be visited this morning…for the first time in fifteen years by my ungrateful…insubordinate…backstabbing…renegade of an ex-protégé, Chip Monk?”
Sidekicked: Prodigal Punishment
Beneath the grandiose high ceiling of the Allen Dulles room, Tran stood by the mantel examining a framed sepia photograph of a little boy wearing a suit and fire helmet and wiping away his tears. He turned his forty-five-caliber eyes on Festus as we entered.
“Hard to believe you were ever this young,” said Tran to his former alpha-hero, putting the photo back on the mantel. “Or that you ever cried. For anyone.”
“So,” said Festus, his colossal frame regaining its lethal rigidity. His arms crossed his chest like battering rams. “You’ve returned after all these years just to abuse me, then? My, how your imagination has failed during your supplicant service to that Marxist menace.”
Tran, although elegant in a cream-colored suit, was more obviously his fifty years in the full light of the drawing room than he’d appeared in the shadows of the Stun-Glas restaurant Dark Star. Wince-lines crinkled the amber skin around his eyes; while he still had a swimmer’s build, his movements were deliberate, as if he were consciously confronting arthritic agony. Given Festus’s unusually youthful appearance, Tran appeared even older than his former mentor.
“I’m not here to abuse anyone,” said Tran at last. “I’ll leave the abuse to experts like you.”
“This is pointless, Miss Brain! What possible good did you think would be produced by this pathetic pup’s point-blank petulance?”
“I’d hoped, Festus, to see you finally able to aim the extinguisher of healing upon the kitchen grease fire of your relationship with Tran. And you can only do that when the sous-chef of your most important recipes—”
“I get it, all right?”
“All right, then. Let’s begin.”
I took a seat, gestured for both men to sit facing each other. Neither did.
“Both of you men are clearly suffering,” I said anyway. “You were once the most celebrated superhero partnership on the planet. For the entire 1960s, no duo got more magazine covers than you two. You were the model. You took down Pauli the Living Mafia, Black Mamba, the Iron Eunuch, the Monitor Lizard, Standing Buffalo…The list goes on.
“And then the 1970s came, and slowly news dimmed of your brave biumvirate; before long all your busts were solo efforts. And then 1980 came and you were finished. Kaput. No more. The media—”
“The media!” snapped Festus. “Lying, distemperous pack dogs! Rabid, mangy curs who spend more hours tongue-bathing their own scrota than investigating the truth!”
“Spoken like the true media mogul of PNN et al. that you are.”
“You haven’t lost a nanogram of your snide superciliousness, boy.”
“And you haven’t gained an iota of introspection, milord.”
“Gentlemen, please. As I was saying, the media implied that you two—”
“I don’t need to hear from you what those filthy—”
“—were lovers.”
Silence. And glaring.
“And,” I continued, “that after Tran’s four-year disappearance and resurfacing to work at Human Citizen, your falling-out was the result of Festus’s having discovered that Tran was having an affair with Jack Zenith.”
More silence. And more glaring.
“Well?” I finally prodded my way into their staring match. “To what degree were those claims true?”
Further silence.
I leaned toward the younger of the two men. “Tran?”
“Jack Zenith is a brilliant, dedicated man,” said Tran, sculpting the air with his balletic hands, hands so deceptively delicate-looking one expected to see a cigarillo dangling smolderingly between their slender fingers. “And he is beyond question the finest American of this century—”
“Bah!” said Festus, making him the first human being I’d ever heard use that interjection. But Tran batted not so much as an eyelid.
“—but Jack isn’t gay, Doctor. Not that he’s straight, either. He’s just…he’s just. In a decade of working with him, I haven’t seen him so much as smirk a randy thought toward man, woman, animal, or alien. All he does is write, organize, eat tabbouleh, and sue.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Tran. Why did you two split up?”
“I was ten years old when…when Lord Piltdown ‘adopted’ me from a South Vietnamese orphanage. Took me into his home. And trained me in his cult—”
“ ‘Cult!’ ”
“—his cult of hero-worship. Him worshipping Hawk King, and me expected to worship him. And, God help me…
“I did, Doctor. If that isn’t the most sickening truth I could ever divulge. Everything about him. I identified with my master more than my master identified with himself. Even used his Squirrel Erasing Spray to try to whiten my skin, if you can believe it. It just rotted off all my body hair and left me with first-degree burns from brows to balls. I was fourteen when I did that. And all to become like this man. Did he ever tell you his secret origin?”
“No. But I’m familiar with the story.”
“The official story, I’m sure. I only heard it, what, a thousand times…a month? How about the real story?”
Tran produced the very cigarillo I’d imagined he would smoke, made a show of lighting it, and blew decorative smoke trails and twirls in between holding his cigarillo upward as if balancing an invisible plate upon its tip. He seemed to be waiting for Festus to fight back.
“Yes, the real story,” he finally said
, lacking any verbalization from Festus. He began pacing and smoking. “How in 1942, when he was only eighteen, his blue-blood bee-baron father, Fountroy Prescott Piltdown V, sicced Hinkleton leg-breakers on the Okie, Mexican, and black migrant laborers trying to organize on his bee fields? How a young public interest lawyer led a class-action lawsuit against Fountroy to get redress for these men, some of whom were stung into hospitalization after the Hinkletons fed poppies and coca blossoms to the bees? How this same public interest attorney investigated Fountroy and discovered he was selling honey by the megaton to the Nazis?”
“This attorney was Jack Zenith?”
“Yes, Jack Zenith. By the time Fountroy’s collaboration made the cover story of The Wall Street Journal he was so mortified he played a round of PGA roulette.”
“What’s that?”
“Golf in a minefield. Grenades instead of balls. Daddy Piltdown didn’t make it to the first green.”
I looked over to Festus, half expecting to see steam shooting from his ears, but he was as silent as his heroic namesake, perched and waiting for the precise moment to strike with deadly, nut-gnawing accuracy.
“So orphan, heir, and Republican Festus, suckled in the pouch of luxury, swears unholy goddamned vengeance against Zenith and the wretched of the Earth he represents. I must’ve heard him ten million times on the poor: Parasites, leeches, tapeworms, foreskin-fleas… as if the poor had killed his father, rather than his own greed and Nazi-trading treason.”
Once again, I looked toward Festus expecting an explosion. Yet he offered nothing but his cold blue eyes glinting like sapphire ice picks.
“So what does he do with his daddy gone and the war on, you ask?” said Tran, pacing, smoking, and gesticulating. “He retreats to his family’s Floridian properties in the swamps, a southern manor on a not-so-former plantation. All by himself in the spooky bayou, except for an army of butlers, maids, and indentured lick-spittles.
“So during a moonless midnight of the autumn equinox, while he was reading Nietzsche or Blumenbach or de Molay, a Glaucomys sabrinus—a northern hemispheric flying squirrel—plowed right through the twenty-foot-high bay window and showered him with glass, bloody fur, and squirrel musk. Making the young Master Festus soil his silks, I’m sure.”
“Your mawkish, mocking attempts to provoke me, Tran,” whispered Festus, “will be fruitless. But after you’re finished ripping into me with your Zenith-certified rib-spreader, I’d suggest you reread Lear, Act One, Scene Four, for some self-description.”
“And I’d suggest you remember, Lord Piltdown,” said Tran, “that even while ranting about serpent’s teeth, Lear was not only a foolish, bad, and stupid king—he was loopier than a snake in a garden hose.”
Neither man spoke until I asked Tran about the squirrel collision with the window.
“Yes,” said Tran, “that, apparently, is when the light goes on over young F.P.’s noggin regarding the power of the flying squirrel to instill terror in the reptilian brain, the ‘dominant portion,’ he said, of ‘your typical urban phrenological reprobate.’
“And he also told me, as I recall, that he identified with squirrels because they’re ‘so productive…they collect nuts and store them while lazy animals freeze to death, as befits their miserable existences.’
“Somehow he never bothered to notice the obvious: that the trees are the ones making the nuts and all the squirrel does is take them. Parasitic, not productive. Like his family.”
The Truth About Squirrels and Chip Monks
Tran’s tirade, unsolicited, uninterrupted, and unanswered, proceeded for several minutes. And whereas I’d assumed Festus had been lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to destroy his former apprentice, I soon lost that certainty. The elder man, who’d finally sat down, looked less like the poised hunter than the felled hunted, like an aged hound dog on its side, breathing shallowly and awaiting the ripping teeth of rats.
Then Tran shifted to a new topic: hypocrisy. Tran said that Festus had spent years of their time together exhaustively denouncing Wally W. Watchtower’s argonium addiction. But the seventy-year-old Festus had the body and looks of an athletic forty-five-year-old for a reason no one was ever intended to know.
“He’s,” said Tran, shaking his cigarillo at his ex-mentor, “been riding on his argonium high horse like English royalty on a foxhunt, when he’s a goddamned junkie himse-e-e-elf!” He elongated the word as if he were kissing it. “Addicted to GI Juice, Doctor. Ever heard of it?”
“That’s…Hyper-regenerative Growth Hormone?”
“HGH, the one and only. The steroid of the long-underwear world. And ten thousand times more expensive.” Tran blew an O, then shredded it with a spear of smoke. “The army stopped using HGH after Lance Lanternman was the only living GI to survive the trials—”
“That was Captain Manifest Destiny?”
“Yes, yes, Cap. Another addict, thanks to the army. Took HGH until his death in ’56, when, according to the newspapers of the time and the history books of today, the Iron Kross killed him. But you can thank Piltdown Propaganda News for that. Why don’t you tell her, Lord Piltdown? Tell her!”
After ten seconds burned away, Tran answered for him.
“The Iron Kross,” he said, tracing the air with his figure-skating hands and jerking agitated strides across what must be the largest Persian rug anywhere in the world, “had already been dead a year when he supposedly assassinated Captain Manifest Destiny! He’d died in Argentina, on the F*O*O*J’s secret-ops payroll!
“Yes, he hadn’t even lived long enough to finish crushing the Arbenz Avengers in Guatemala, the very project the F*O*O*J had commissioned him to do! But thank heaven the Iron Kross’s body could be journalistically exhumed and resuscitated long enough to frame him for an assassination…so that nobody would ever know the Captain had died a needle-plunger. Nobody except for the World’s Greatest Detective, of course, who found the corpse.
“Don’t believe me, Doctor? I read the sealed medical report in the Squirrel files myself—oh, trust me, he’s got secret files on everyone, including you, I’m sure, better than the FBI, SWORD, and the Church of Spyontology all rolled together. But the pathologist, yes, the pathologist at Fort Detrick who autopsied Cap said he was so deformed by tumors he looked more like a potato patch than a man. His wife’d had nothing but miscarriages—something else you’d never read in any newspaper.
“Now, the human reaction to this is to want to expose the government for what they did to the man and get compensation for his wife. That’s what a real man, a man like Jack Zenith, would do. And it’s also what a self-proclaimed enemy of Big Government should want to do.
“But not the delightful ‘Lord’ Piltdown, no! He took one look at the scene, found the drugs, figured out what they were for, arranged the cover-up, and he’s been injecting ever since that night! Go ahead, Doctor—swab his mouth. Get a blood sample. Hell, take his cappuccino cup to a lab! That was his little joke, you know—he called it GI Joe when he put it in his coffee! This man—”
“Tran, I’d like to ask Festus—”
“Look at him sitting there! He doesn’t even deny it!”
“Tran, just a moment, please!” I said. The ex-apprentice stopped rigidly in midstep and half-gesture, like a live shrimp flash-fried.
“Festus, I have to ask you—I’ve seen you emit devastating verbal attacks against anyone who even so much as raised an eyebrow in a manner you considered challenging. But you’ve just allowed Tran to upbraid you almost without interruption for ten minutes. Please…share with me what you’re processing right now—verbally integrate it. Own your feelings!”
Festus let out a long, low sigh, like a zeppelin deflating from a penknife’s puncture wound.
“He,” said Festus, “was an orphan.”
I wait. Finally I said, “Go on.”
“Like me.”
“Yes.”
“I took him in. Gave him a home. Treated him like a son—”
“
Like a son?” spat Tran before shutting up again. I initially assumed he had because of my cautioning glance.
But then I saw the look on Festus’s face.
“I never…never—” He swallowed heavily. “Do you know what it feels like to have people write appalling, sickening lies about you, Eva? I’ve endured such filth being sprayed on my family’s name ever since I was a child. I knew what it was like to be alone, vulnerable, despised. My own mother died when I was a boy, and my father never remarried. I found this child, afraid and alone, a refugee from a traveling Vietnamese circus. I took care of him. Trained him. Taught him everything I knew.
“Loved him.”
Tran’s eyes opened so wide they looked as if they’d fall out.
“Tran,” I asked, “you look…as if you’ve never heard Festus say those words.”
The former sidekick was frozen. He’d trapped his flapping, fluttering hands inside their opposite armpits. His cigarillo dangled limply from his lips. Not a word slithered between them.
Festus continued, “And so when those scandalmongering filth-rags accused me of, of ‘touching him’ because of some antiacademic ‘repressed memory’ idiocy in that ‘abuse-recovery’ necronomicon called The Courage to Fly—mythology packaged as science!—I sued every one of those libeling lycanthropes into an early grave.
“But it was too late, Eva. To this day, go ahead—look in any book, any article, any ‘Web page’ on my career or on the F*O*O*J. All of them cite that toxic spew, even though there’s not a syllable of supporting evidence. Because the controversy itself became news. Save a country, save a world, save a child—it doesn’t matter. You don’t need proof or even evidence to burn down a man’s soul. All you need is accusation.
“So to answer your question at last, Eva, to answer the world’s question at last, my…association with this young man didn’t end because I made homosexual advances upon him.”
Tran was turned to face out the window. His eyes were closed. He sniffed continually as if trying to read the flowers on the Piltdown estates with his nose.
“So, Festus…you’re saying—”
Minister Faust Page 22