Cities of the Red Night

William Burroughs

CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT

William S. Burroughs, the world-renowned author of Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands, Interzone, The Cat Inside, My Education: A Book of Dreams and The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959, is a member of the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, and a Commandeur de l'Orde des Arts et des Lettres of France. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

First published in Great Britain 1981 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.

to Brion Gysin

who painted this book before it was written

to James Grauerholz

who edited this book into present time

to Steven Lowe

for his valuable work on the manuscript

to Dick Seaver

my publisher

to Peter Matson

my agent

to all the characters and their real-life counterparts living and dead

Fore!

The liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions and later in the liberal revolutions of 1848 had already been codified and put into practice by pirate communes a hundred years earlier. Here is a quote from Under the Black Flag by Don C. Seitz:

Captain Mission was one of the forbears of the French Revolution. He was one hundred years in advance of his time, for his career was based upon an initial desire to better adjust the affairs of mankind, which ended as is quite usual in the more liberal adjustment of his own fortunes. It is related how Captain Mission, having led his ship to victory against an English man-of-war, called a meeting of the crew. Those who wished to follow him he would welcome and treat as brothers; those who did not would be safely put ashore. One and all embraced the New Freedom. Some were for hoisting the Black Flag at once but Mission demurred, saying that they were not pirates but liberty lovers, fighting for equal rights against all nations subject to the tyranny of government, and bespoke a white flag as the more fitting emblem. The ship's money was put in a chest to be used as common property. Clothes were now distributed to all in need and the republic of the sea was in full operation.

Mission bespoke them to live in strict harmony among themselves; that a misplaced society would adjudge them still as pirates. Self-preservation, therefore, and a cruel disposition, compelled them to declare war on all nations who should close their ports to them. "I declare such war and at the same time recommend to you a humane and generous behavior towards your prisoners, which will appear by so much more the effects of a noble soul and as we are satisfied we should not meet the same treatment should our ill fortune or want of courage give us up to their mercy...."

The Nieustadt of Amsterdam was made prize;, giving up two thousand pounds and gold dust and seventeen slaves. The slaves were added to the crew and clothed in the Dutchman's spare garments; Mission made an address denouncing slavery, holding that men who sold others like beasts proved their religion to be no more than a grimace as no man had power of liberty over another....

Mission explored the Madagascar coast and found a bay ten leagues north of Diégo-Saurez. It was resolved to establish here the shore quarters of the Republic—erect a town, build docks, and have a place they might call their own. The colony was called Libertatia and was placed under Articles drawn up by Captain Mission. The Articles state, among other things: all decisions with regard to the colony to be submitted to vote by the colonists; the abolition of the death penalty; and freedom to follow any religious beliefs or practices without sanction or molestation.

Captain Mission's colony, which numbered about three hundred, was wiped out by a surprise attack from the natives, and Captain Mission was killed shortly afterwards in a sea battle. There were other such colonies in the West Indies and in Central and South America, but they were not able to maintain themselves since they were not sufficiently populous to withstand attack. Had they been able to do so, the history of the world could have been altered. Imagine a number of such fortified positions all through South America and the West Indies, stretching from Africa to Madagascar and the East Indies, all offering refuge to fugitives from slavery and oppression: "Come to us and live under the Articles."

At once we have allies in all those who are enslaved and oppressed throughout the world, from the cotton plantations of the American South to the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and the whole Indian population of the American continent peonized and degraded by the Spanish into subhuman poverty and ignorance, exterminated by the Americans, infected with their vices and diseases, the natives of Africa and Asia—all these are potential allies. Fortified positions supported by and supporting guerilla hit-and-run bands; supplied with soldiers, weapons, medicines and information by the local populations ... such a combination would be unbeatable. If the whole American army couldn't beat the Viet Cong at a time when fortified positions were rendered obsolete by artillery and air strikes, certainly the armies of Europe, operating in unfamiliar territory and susceptible to all the disabling diseases of tropical countries, could not have beaten guerilla tactics plus fortified positions. Consider the difficulties which such an invading army would face: continual harassment from the guerillas, a totally hostile population always ready with poison, misdirection, snakes and spiders in the general's bed, armadillos carrying the deadly earth-eating disease rooting under the barracks and adopted as mascots by the regiment as dysentery and malaria take their toll. The sieges could not but present a series of military disasters. There is no stopping the Articulated. The white man is retroactively relieved of his burden. Whites will be welcomed as workers, settlers, teachers, and technicians, but not as colonists or masters. No man may violate the Articles.

Imagine such a movement on a world-wide scale. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words. The disastrous results of uncontrolled industrialization would also be curtailed, since factory workers and slum dwellers from the cities would seek refuge in Articulated areas. Any man would have the right to settle in any area of his choosing. The land would belong to those who used it. No white-man boss, no Pukka Sahib, no Patróns, no colonists. The escalation of mass production and concentration of population in urban areas would be halted, for who would work in their factories and buy their products when he could live from the fields and the sea and the lakes and the rivers in areas of unbelievable plenty? And living from the land, he would be motivated to preserve its resources.

I cite this example of retroactive Utopia since it actually could have happened in terms of the techniques and human resources available at the time. Had Captain Mission lived long enough to set an example for others to follow, mankind might have stepped free from the deadly impasse of insoluble problems in which we now find ourselves.

The chance was there. The chance was missed. The principles of the French and American revolutions became windy lies in the mouths of politicians. The liberal revolutions of 1848 created the so-called republics of Central and South America, with a dreary history of dictatorship, oppression, graft, and bureaucracy, thus closing this vast, underpopulated continent to any possibility of communes along the lines set forth by Captain Mission. In any case South America will soon be crisscrossed by highways and motels. In England, Western Europe, and America, the overpopulation made possible by the Industrial Revolution leaves scant room for communes, which are commonly subject to state and federal law and frequently harassed by the local inhabitants. There is simply no room left for "freedom from the tyranny of government" since city dwellers depond on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

Invocation

This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins.

To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested....

NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

Book One

The health officer

September 13, 1923.

Farnsworth, the District Health Officer, was a man so grudging in what he asked of life that every win was a loss; yet he was not without a certain plodding persistence of effort and effectiveness in his limited area. The current emergency posed by the floods and the attendant cholera epidemic, while it did not spur him to any unusual activity, left him unruffled.

Every morning at sunrise, he bundled his greasy maps—which he studied at breakfast while he licked butter off his fingers—into his battered Land-Rover and set out to inspect his district, stopping here and there to order more sandbags for the levees (knowing his orders would be disregarded, as they generally were unless the Commissioner happened to be with him). He ordered three bystanders, presumably relatives, to transport a cholera case to the district hospital at Waghdas and left three opium pills andinstructions for preparing rice water. They nodded, and he drove on, having done what he could.

The emergency hospital at Waghdas was installed in an empty army barracks left over from the war. It was understaffed and overcrowded, mostly by patients who lived near enough and were still strong enough to walk. The treatment for cholera was simple: each patient was assigned to a straw pallet on arrival and given a gallon of rice water and half a gram of opium. If he was still alive twelve hours later, the dose of opium was repeated. The survival rate was about twenty percent. Pallets of the dead were washed in carbolic solution and left in the sun to dry. The attendants were mostly Chinese who had taken the job because they were allowed to smoke opium and feed the ash to the patients. The smell of cooking rice, opium smoke, excrement and carbolic permeated the hospital and the area around it for several hundred yards.

At ten o'clock the Health Officer entered the hospital. He requisitioned more carbolic and opium, and sent off another request for a doctor, which he expected and hoped would be ignored. He felt that a doctor fussing around the hospital would only make matters worse; he might even object to the opium dosage as too high, or attempt to interfere with the opium smoking of the attendants. The Health Officer had very little use for doctors. They simply complicated things to make themselves important.

After spending half an hour in the hospital, he drove to Ghadis to see the Commissioner, who invited him to lunch. He accepted without enthusiasm, declining a gin before lunch and a beer with lunch. He picked at the rice and fish, and ate a small plate of stewed fruit. He was trying to persuade the Commissioner to assign some convicts to work on the levees.

"Sorry, old boy, not enough soldiers to guard them."

"Well, it's a serious situation."

"Daresay."

Farnsworth did not press the point. He simply did what he could and let it go at that. Newcomers to the district wondered what kept him going at all. Old-timers like the Commissioner knew. For the Health Officer had a sustaining vice. Every morning at sunrise, he brewed a pot of strong tea and washed down a gram of opium. When he returned from his rounds in the evening, he repeated the dose and gave it time to take effect before he prepared his evening meal of stewed fruit and wheat bread. He had no permanent houseboy, since he feared a boy might steal his opium. Twice a week he had a boy in to clean the bungalow, and then he locked his opium up in an old rusty safe where he kept his reports. He had been taking opium for five years and had stabilized his dosage after the first year and never increased it, nor gone on to injections of morphine. This was not due to strength of character, but simply to the fact that he felt he owed himself very little, and that was what he allotted himself.

Driving back to find the sandbags not there, the cholera patient dead, and his three relatives droopy-eyed from the opium pills he had left, he felt neither anger nor exasperation, only the slight lack that had increased in the last hour of his drive, so that he stepped harder on the accelerator. Arriving at his bungalow, he washed down an opium pill with bottled water and lit the kerosene stove for his tea. He carried the tea onto the porch and by the time he had finished the second cup, he was feeling the opium wash through the back of his neck and down his withered thighs. He could have passed for fifty; actually he was twenty-eight. He sat there for half an hour looking at the muddy river and the low hills covered with scrub. There was a mutter of thunder, and as he cooked his evening meal the first drops of rain fell on the rusty galvanized iron roof.

He awoke to the unaccustomed sound of lapping water. Hastily he pulled on his pants and stepped onto the porch. Rain was still falling, and the water had risen during the night to a level of twelve inches under the bungalow and a few inches below the hubcaps of his Land-Rover. He washed down an opium pill and put water on the stove for his tea. Then he dusted off an alligator-skin Gladstone bag and started packing, opening drawers and compartments in the safe. He packed clothes, reports, a compass, a sheath knife, a 45 Webley revolver and a box of shells, matches, and a mess kit. He filled his canteen with bottled water and wrapped a loaf of bread in paper. Pouring his tea, the water rising under his feet, he experienced a tension in the groin, a surge of adolescent lust that was stronger for being inexplicable and inappropriate. His medical supplies and opium he packed in a separate bag, and as an added precaution, a slab of opium the size of a cigarette package, wrapped in heavy tinfoil, went into his side coat pocket. By the time he had finished packing, his pants were sticking out at the fly. The opium would soon take care of that.

He stepped from the porch into the Land-Rover. The motor caught, and he headed for high ground above the flood. The route he took was seldom used and several times he had to cut trees out of the road with an ax. Towards sundown, he reached the medical mission of Father Dupré. This was out of his district, and he had met the priest only once before.

Father Dupré, a thin red -faced mad with a halo of white hair, greeted him politely but without enthusiasm. He brightened somewhat when Farnsworth brought out his supplies and went with him to the dispensary and hospital, which was simply a large hut screened-in at the sides. The Health Officer passed out opium pills to all the patients.

"No matter what is wrong with them, they will feel better shortly."

The priest nodded absently as he led the way back to the house. Farnsworth had swallowed his opium pill with water from his canteen, and it was beginning to take effect as he sat down on the porch. The priest was looking at him with a hostility he was trying hard to conceal. Farnsworth wondered what exactly was wrong. The priest fidgeted and cleared his throat. He said abruptly in a strained voice, "Would you care for a drink?"

"Thank you, no. I never touch it."

Relief flooded the priest's face with a beneficent glow. "Something else then?"

"I'd love some tea."

"Of course. I'll have the boy make it."

The priest came back with a bottle of whiskey, a glass, and a soda siphon. Farnsworth surmised that he kept his whiskey under lock and key somewhere out of the reach of his boys. The priest poured himself a generous four fingers and shot in a dash of soda. He took a long drink and beamed at his guest. Farnsworth decided that the moment was propitious to ask a favor, while the good father was still relieved at not having to share his dwindling supply of whiskey, and before he had overindulged.

"I want to get through to Ghadis if possible. I suppose it's hopeless by road, even if I had enough petrol?"

The priest got a map and spread it out on the table. "Absolutely out of the question. This whole area is flooded. Only possibility is by boat to here ... from there it's forty miles downriver to Ghadis. I could lend you a boat with a boy and outboard, but there's no petrol here...."

"I think I have enough petrol for that, considering it's all downstream."

"You'll run into logjams—may take hours to cut through ... figure how long it could take you at the longest, and then double it ... my boy knows the route as far as here. Now this stretch here is very dangerous ... the river narrows quite suddenly, no noise you understand, and no warning ... advise you tot ake the canoe out and carry it down to here ... take one extra day, but well worth it at this time of year. Of course you might get through—but if anything goes wrong ... the current, you understand ... even a strong swimmer ..."

The following day at dawn, Farnsworth's belongings and the supplies for the trip were loaded into the dugout canoe. The boy, Ali, was a smoky black with sharp features, clearly a mixture of Arab and Negro stock. He was about eighteen, with beautiful teeth and a quick shy smile. The priest waved from the jetty as the boat swung into midstream. Farsnworth sat back lazily, watching the water and the jungle slide past. There was not much sign of life. A few birds and monkeys. Once three alligators wallowing in a mudbank slid into the water, showing their teeth in depraved smiles. Several times logjams had to be cleared with an ax.

At sundown they made camp on a gravel bank. Farnsworth put water on for tea while Ali walked to the end of the band and dropped a hook baited with a worm into a deep clear pool. By the time the water was boiling, he was back with an eighteen-inch fish. As Ali cleaned the fish and cut it into sections, Farnsworth washed down his opium pill. He offered one to Ali, who examined it, sniffed at it, smiled, and shook his head.

"Chinese boy ..." He leaned over holding an imaginery opium pipe to a lamp. He drew the smoke in and let his eyes droop. "No get—" He put his hands on his stomach and rocked back and forth.

By the afternoon of the second day the stream had widened considerably. Towards sundown Farnsworth took an opium pill and dozed off. Suddenly he was wide awake with a start, and he reached for the map. This was the stretch that Father Dupré had warned him about. He turned towards Ali, but Ali knew already. He was steering for shore.

The silent rush of the current swept the boat broadside, and the rudder wire snapped like a bowstring. The boat twisted out of control, swept towards a logjam. A splintering crash, and Farnsworth was underwater, struggling desperately against the current. He felt a stab of pain as a branch ripped through his coat and along his side.

He came to on the bank. Ali was pushing water out of his lungs. He sat up breathing heavily and coughing. His coat was in tatters, ozzing blood. He felt for his pocket, and looked at his empty hand. The opium was gone. He had sustained a superficial scratch down the left hip and across the buttock. They had salvaged nothing except the short machete that Ali wore in a sheath at his belt, and Farnsworth's hunting knife.

Farnsworth drew a map in the sand to approximate their positing. He calculated the distance to one of the large tributaries to be about forty miles. Once there, they could fashion a raft and drift downstream to Ghadis, where of course ... the words of Father Dupré played back in his mind: "Figure the longest time it could take you and then double it...."

Darkness was falling, and they had to stay there for the night, even though he was losing precious travel time. He knew that in seventy-two hours at the outside he would be immobilized for lack of opium. At daybreak they set out heading north. Progress was slow; the undergrowth had to be cut step by step. There were swamps and streams in the way, and from time to time deep gorges that necessitated long detours. The unaccustomed exertion knocked the opium out of his system, and by nightfall he was already feverish and shivering.

By morning he was barely able to walk, but managed to stagger along for a few miles. The next day he was convulsed by stomach cramps and they barely covered a mile. The third day he could not move. Ali massaged his legs, which were knotted with cramps, and brought him water and fruit. He lay there unable to move for four days and four nights.

Occasionally he dozed off and woke up screaming from nightmares. These often took the form of attacks by centipedes and scorpions of strange sizes and shapes, moving with great speed, that would suddenly rush at him. Another recurrent nightmare was set in the market of a Near Eastern city. The place was at first unknown to him but more familiar with each step he took, as if some hideous jigsaw of memory were slowly falling into place: the stalls all empty of food and merchandise, the smell of hunger and death, the greenish glow and a strange smoky sun, sulfurous blazing hate in faces that turned to look at him as he passed. Now they were all pointing at him and shouting a word he could not understand.

On the eighth day he was able to walk again. He was still racked with stomach cramps and diarrhea, but the leg cramps were almost gone. On the tenth day he felt distinctly better and stronger, and was able to eat a fish. On the fourteenth day they reached a sandbank by a wide clear river. This was not the tributary they were looking for, but would certainly lead into it. Ali had saved a piece of carbolic soap in a tin box, and they stripped off their tattered clothes and waded into the cool water. Farnsworth washed off the dirt and sweat and smell of his sickness. Ali was rubbing soap on his back and Farnsworth felt a sudden rush of blood to the crotch. Trying to hide his erection, he waded ashore with his back to Ali, who followed laughing and splashing water to wash the soap off.

Farnsworth lay down on his shirt and pants and fell into a wordless vacuum, feeling the sun on his back and the faint ache of the healing scratch. He saw Ali sitting naked above him, Ali's hands massaging his back, moving down to the buttocks. Something was surfacing in his body, drifting up from remote depths of memory, and he saw as if projected on a screen a strange incident from his adolescence. He was in the British Museum at the age of fourteen, standing in front of a glass case. He was alone in the room. In the case was the figure, about two feet long, of a reclining man. The man was naked, the right knee flexed, holding the body a few inches off the grond, the penis exposed. The hands were extended in front of the man palms down, and the face was reptile or animal, something between an alligator and a jaguar.

The boy was looking at the thighs and buttocks and genitals, breathing through his teeth. He was getting stiff and lubricating, his pants sticking out at the fly. He was squeezing into the figure, a dream tension gathering in his crotch, squeezing and stretching, a strange smell unlike anything he had ever smelled before but familiar as smell itself, a naked man lying by a wide clear river—the twisted figure. Silver spots boiled in front of his eyes and he ejaculated.

Ali's hands parted his buttocks, he spit on his rectum—his body opening and the figure entering him in a silent rush, flexing his right knee, stretching his jaw forward into a snout, his head flattening, his brain squeezing out the smell from inside ... a hoarse hissing sound was forced from his lips and light popped in his eyes as his body boiled and twisted out scalding spurts.

Stage with a jungle backdrop. Frogs croak and birds call from

recorder. Farnsworth as an adolescent is lying facedown on sand. Ali is

fucking him and he squirms with a slow wallowing movement showing

his teeth in a depraved smile. The lights dim for a few seconds. When

the lights come up Farnsworth is wearing an alligator suit that leaves

his ass bare and Ali is still fucking him. As Ali and Farnsworth slide

offstage Farnsworth lifts one webbed finger to the audience while a

Marine band plays "Semper Fi." Offstage splash.

We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people

The scouting party stopped a few hundred yards from the village on the bank of a stream. Yen Lee studied the village through his field glasses while his men sat down and lit cigarettes. The village was built into the side of a mountain. The stream ran through the town, and water had been diverted into pools on a series of cultivated terraces that led up to the monastery. There was no sign of life in the steep winding street or by the pools. The valley was littered with large boulders which would serve as cover if necessary, but he did not expect resistance on a military level. He lowered his glasses, signaling for the men to follow.

They crossed a stone bridge two at a time, covered by the men behind them. If any defenders were going to open fire, now would be the time and place to do it. Beyond the bridge the street twisted up the mountainside. On both sides there were stone huts, many of them fallen into ruin and obviously deserted. As they moved up the stone street, keeping to the sides and taking cover behind the ruined huts, Yen Lee became increasingly aware of a hideous unknown odor. He motioned the patrol to halt and stood there sniffing.

Unlike his counterparts in western countries, he had been carefully selected for a high level of intuitive adjustment, and trained accordingly to imagine and explore seemingly fantastic potentials in any situation, while at the same time giving equal consideration to prosaic and practical aspects. He had developed an attitude at once probing and impersonal, remote and alert. He did not know when the training had begun, since in Academy 23 it was carried out in a context of reality. He did not see his teachers, whose instructions were conveyed through a series of real situations.

He had been born in Hong Kong and had lived there until the age of twelve, so that English was a second language. Then his family had moved to Shanghai. In his early teens he had read the American Beat writers. The volumes had been brought through Hong Kong and sold under the counter in a bookshop that seemed to enjoy freedom from official interference, although the proprietor was also engaged in currency deals.

At the age of sixteen he was sent to a military academy, where he received intensive training in the use of weapons. After six months he was summoned to the Colonel's office and told that he would be leaving the military school and returning to Shanghai. Since he had applied himself to the training and made an excellent showing, he asked the Colonel if this was because his work had not been satisfactory. The Colonel was looking not at him but around him, as if drawing a figure in the air. He indicated obliquely that while a desire to please one's superiors was laudable, other considerations were in certain cases even more highly emphasized.

The smell hit him like an invisible wall. He stopped and leaned against a house. It was like rotten metal or metal excrement, he decided. The patrol was still in the ruined outskirts of the village. One man was vomiting violently, his face beaded with sweat. He straightened up and started towards the stream. Yen Lee stopped him: "Don't drink the water or splash it on your face. The stream runs through the town."

Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses. There were still no villagers in sight. He put his glasses down and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village—what westerners call "astral travel." He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready. The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands. He kicked open a door.

One glance told him that interrogation was useless. He would get no information on a verbal level. A man and a woman were in the terminal stages of some disease, their faces eaten to the bone by phosphorescent sores. An older woman was dead. The next hut contained five corpses, all elderly.

In another hut a youth lay on a pallet, the lower half of his body covered by a blanket. Bright red nipples of flesh about an inch in height, growing in clusters, covered his chest and stomach and sprouted from his face and neck. The growths looked like exotic plants. He noticed that they were oozing a pearly juice that ate into the flesh, leaving luminescent sores. Sensing Yen Lee's presence the youth turned towards him with a slow idiot smile, arching his body and caressing the flesh clusters with one hand while the other hand slid under the blanket and moved to his crotch. In another hut, Yen Lee glimpsed a scene that he quickly erased from memory.

Yen Lee advanced towards the monastery. Then he stopped. The gun went heavy and solid in his hands as energy left it. His training had not quite prepared him for the feeling of death that fell in a steady silent rain from the monastery above him. The monastery must contain a deadly force, probably some form of radioactivity, perhaps psychic fission. He surmised further that the illness afflicting the villagers was a radioactive virus strain. He knew that top-secret research in the West was moving in this direction: as early as World War II, England had developed a radioactive virus known as the Doomsday Bug.

Returning to his body Yen Lee weighed his observations and surmises. What had he glimpsed and hastily looked away from? Tiny creatures like translucent shrimp feeding at the flesh nipples ... and something else.... He did not push himself, knowing that a biologic protective reaction was shielding him from knowledge he was unable to assimilate and handle. The monastery probably contained a laboratory and the village had been used as a testing ground. How did the technicians protect themselves from the radiation? Could the laboratory be operated by remote control? Or had the technicians been immunized by gradient exposure? Did the laboratory contain a sophisticated DOR installation?

He picked up a walkie-talkie. "Pre-Talk calling Dead Line...."

"Well?" The Colonel's voice was cool, edged with abstract impatience. Cadets were expected to use their own initiative on patrol and only call in the case of emergency. Yen Lee recounted what he had seen in the village and described the feeling of death that emanated from the monastery. "It's like a wall. I can't get through it. Certainly my men can't...."

"Withdraw from the village and make camp. A sanitary squad and a health officer are on the way."

The doctor is on the market

Doctor Pierson was a discreet addict who kept himself down to three shots a day, half a grain in each shot—he could always cover for that. Towards the end of an eight-hour shift he tended to be perfunctory, so when he got the call from emergency he hoped it wouldn't take long or keep him overtime. Of course he could always slip a half-grain under his tongue, but that was wasteful and he liked to be in bed when he took his shot, and feel it hit the back of his neck and move down the backs of his thighs while he blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. As he reached for his bag he noticed that he had barked his knuckles. He couldn't remember where or when—that happens, when you are feeling no pain.

"It looks like measles, Doctor."

The doctor looked a the boy's face with distaste. He disliked children, adolescents, and animals. The word cute did not exist in his emotional vocabulary. There were red blotches on the boy's face but they seemed rather large for measles....

"Well, get it in here, Nurse, whatever it is ... away from the other patients. Not that I care what they catch; it's just hospital procedure."

The boy was wheeled into a cubicle. His finger cold with reluctance, the doctor folded the sheet down to the boy's waist and noticed that he was wearing no shorts.

"Why is he naked?" he snapped at the attendants.

"He was like that when they picked him up, Doctor."

"Well, they might have put something on him...." He turned back to the attendants. "What are you standing there for? Get out! And you, Nurse, what are you gawking at? Order a bed in isolation."

His temper was always evil when he ran over like this, but right after a shot he could be nice in a dead, fishy way. The doctor turned back to the boy on the bed. His duty as a physician was clear—Hippocrates pointing sternly to the sheet. "Well, I suppose I have to look at the little naked beast." He folded the sheet down to the boy's knees. The boy had an erection. The genitals and areas adjacent were bright red like a red bikini.

The doctor leaped back as he would from a striking snake, but he was too late. A gob of semen hit the back of his hand right on the skinned knuckles. He wiped it off with an exclamation of disgust. He recalled later that he felt a slight tingling sensation which he didn't notice at the time, being that disgusted with the human body—he wondered why he had chosen the medical profession. And this dirty child was delaying his fix. "You filthy little beast!" he snapped. The boy sniggered. The doctor pulled the sheet up to the boy's chin.

He was washing his hands when the nurse came in with a stretcher table and an orderly to take the boy to isolation. The doctor sniffed. "My God, what's that smell? ... I don't know what this is, Nurse, but it's rather disgusting. He seems to be in some state of sexual delirium. He also seems to be giving off a horrible odor. Order the broad spectrum ... cortisone, of course—it may be an allergic condition red-haired animals are especially liable to—and the usual antibiotics....If the sexual condition continues, do not hesitate to administer morphine." The doctor gasped and clasped a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose. "Get it out of here!" (He always referred to a patient as "the disease.") "Do you have a typhoid bed in isolation?" he asked.

"Not now we don't."

"Well it can't stay here."

He had barely settled in bed after his fix when the phone rang. It was the super. "Seems we have an epidemic on our hands, Pierson. All staff report back to the hospital immediately."

Could it be that dirty little boy? he thought as he dressed and picked up his satchel and walked to the hospital. He saw there was a police line around the entrance.

"Oh, yes, Doctor, Right over there for your mask."

"I'll help you put it on, Doctor." A brisk young girl in some sort of uniform rubber her tits against him in a most offensive manner. And before she got the mask on, he smelled it and he knew: it was that dirty little boy.

Inside was a scene from Dante: stretchers side by side in the corridors, sperm all over the sheets, the walls and the floor.

"Be careful, Doctor." A garrulous old nurse caught his arm in time. "Just put one foot solidly in front of the other, Doctor, that's right....It's terrible, Doctor, the older patients are dying like flies."

"I don't want to hear any generalities, Nurse ... take me to my ward."

"Well, Doctor, you can take the northeast wing if you want—right here."

Every sort of copulation was going on in front of him, every disgusting thing they could think of. Some of them had pillow-cases and towels wrapped around each other's necks in some kind of awful contest. As these crazed patients seemed in danger of strangulation (and here the doctor almost slipped in shit), he ordered attendants to restrain them, but no attendants were available. "We'll start with morphine and a curare derivative, Nurse."

"Sorry, Doctor, the morphine stocks are exhausted on the older patients. They go into the most awful spasms at the end, Doctor."

The doctor turned pale as death at this terrible pronouncement. He slumped to the floor in a faint, his face covered with red blotches. By the time they got his clothes off, his body was also affected, and spontaneous orgasms were observed.

Doctor Pierson subsequently recovered, because of his addiction, and went to work for the pickle factory on a sensitive biological project.

Politics here is death

Muted remote boardroom. Doctor Pierson sits at the head of the table with notes in front of him. He speaks in a dry flat academic voice.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the Board, I am here to give a report on preliminary experiments with Virus B-23.... Consider the origins of this virus in the Cities of the Red Night. The red glow that covered the northern sky at night was a form of radiation that gave rise to a plague known to be the etiological agent.

"Virus B-23 has been called, among other things, the virus of biological mutation, since this agent occasioned biologic alterations in those affected—fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in the survivors, who became carriers of the strain. The original inhabitants of these cities were black, but soon a wide spectrum of albino variations appeared, and this condition was passed on to their descendants by techniques of artificial insemination which were, to the say the least, highly developed. In fact, how some of these mutant pregnancies were contracted is unknown to modern science. Immaculate or at least viral conception was pandemic and may have given rise to legends of demon lovers, the succubi and incubi of medieval folklore."

Doctor Pierson continues: "The virus, acting directly on neural centers, brought about sexual frenzies that facilitated its communication, just as rabid dogs are driven to spread the virus of rabies by biting. Various forms of sexual sacrifice were practiced ... sexual hangings and strangulations, and drugs that caused death in erotic convulsions. Death during intercourse was a frequent occurrence and was considered an especially favorable circumstance for conveying the viral alterations.

"We are speaking of more or less virgin genetic material of high quality. At this time the newly conceived white race was fighting for its biological continuity, so the virus served a most useful purpose. However, I question the wisdom of introducing Virus-23 into contemporary America and Europe. Even though it might quiet the uh silent majority, who are admittedly becoming uh awkward, we must consider the biologic consequences of exposing genetic material already damaged beyond repair to such an agent, leaving a wake of unimaginably unfavorable mutations all ravenously perpetrating their kind....

"There have been other proposals. I cite the work of Doctor Unruh von Steinplatz on radioactive virus strains. Working with such established viruses as rabies, hepatitis, and smallpox, he exposed generations of virus to atomic radiation to produce airborne strains of unbelievable virulence capable of wiping out whole populations within days. However, this blueprint contains a flaw: the disposal problem posed by billions of radioactive corpses unfit even for fertilizer.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to remove the temporal limits, shifting our experimental theater into past time in order to circumvent the whole tedious problem of overpopulation. You may well ask if we can be certain of uh containing the virus in past time. The answer is: we do not have sufficient data to speak with certainty. We propose; the virus may dispose...."

A thin man in his early thirties with sandy hair and pale blue eyes had been taking notes while Doctor Pierson was speaking. He looked up and spoke in a clear, rather high-pitched voice with a faint trace of Germanic accent. "Doctor Pierson, I have a few questions."

"Certainly," said Pierson with cold displeasure. He knew exactly who this man was, and wished that he had not been invited to attend the meeting. This was Jon Alistair Peterson, born in Denmark, now working on a secret government project in England. He was a virologist and mathematician who had devised a computer to process qualitative data.

Peterson leaned back in his chair, one ankle crossed over his knee. He extracted a joint from his shirt pocket. It was a loud Carnaby Street shirt. Pierson thought it vulgar. Peterson lit the joint and blew smoke towards the ceiling, seemingly oblivious of disapproving looks from the board members. He glanced down at his notes. "My first question is a matter of uh nomenclature." Pierson was annoyed to realize that Peterson was mimicking his own academic tones.

"Professor Steinplatz's experiments, as you must know, consisted of inoculating animals with various viruses and then exposing the animals to radiation. This exposure produced virus mutations tending towards increased virulence and ..." He took a long drag and blew smoke across his notes. "... uh increased communication potential. In plain English, the mutated viruses were much more infectious."

"I would say that is a more or less accurate paraphrase of what I have just said."

"Not precisely. The mutated virus strains were produced by radiation and the test animals, having been exposed to radiation, were of course radioactive to a point but not dangerously so....The viruses were produced by radiation, but it does not necessarily follow that the viruses were themselves radioactive. Is not your use of the term radioactive virus and your uh evocation of billions of radioactive corpses uh misleading?"

Doctor Pierson found it difficult to conceal his annoyance. "I have pointed out that, owing to the grave dangers inherent in large-scale experimentation which could among other things severely damage our public image, our data is incomplete...."

"Ah yes, to be sure. And now if you will bear with me, Doctor, I have some additional questions.... You have said that Virus B-23 resulted from radiation?" asked Peterson.

"I did."

"In what way does it differ from the strains developed by Doctor Steinplatz?"

"I thought I made that point quite clear: the form of radiation emanating from the red light is unknown at the present time."

"You are then ignorant of the nature of this wondrous radiation, or as to how it could be produced in the laboratory?"

"Yes."

"Has it occurred to you that it might be similar to Reich's DOR, or Deadly Orgone Radiation, which is produced by placing radioactive material in an organic container lined with iron?"

"Preposterous! Reich was a charlatan! A lunatic!"

"Perhaps ... but such a simple and inexpensive experiment ... we could start with herpes simplex."

"I fail to see that any useful purpose ..." Pierson glanced around the table. Stony faces looked back at him. He was concealing something and they knew it.

Doctor Pierson looked at his watch. "I'm afraid I must cut this short. I have a plane to catch."

Peterson held up his hand. "I'm not quite finished, Doctor....I am sure that a slight delay in takeoff could be arranged for a person of your importance.... Now, the virus strains developed by Doctor Steinplatz were, to be sure, more contagious and more virulent than the mother strains from which they were derived, but still quite recognizable. For example, for example, the good doctor's airborne rabies would still be clinically recognizable as rabies. Even if the viruses were mixed into a cocktail, the individual ingredients would still be comparatively easy to identify. You would agree, Doctor Pierson?"

"In theory, yes. However, we do not know, in the absence of large-scale exposure, whether the virus might not undergo further mutations that rend identification difficult."

"To be sure. The point I am making is simply that Doctor Steinplatz started his experiments with certain known viruses.... Doctor Pierson, you have stated that Virus B-23 resulted from unknown radiation. Do you imply that this virus was so produced out of thin air? Let me put it this way: What virus or viruses known to unknown mutated as a result of this radiation?

"At the risk of repeating myself, I will say again that both the radiation and the virus or viruses are unknown at this time," said Pierson archly.

"The symptoms of a virus are the attempts of the body to deal with a virus attack By their symptoms you shall know them, and even a totally unknown virus would yield considerable data by its symptoms. On the other hand, if a virus produces no symptoms, then we have no way of knowing that it exists ... no way of knowing that it is a virus."

"So?"

"So the virus in question may have been latent or it may have been living in benign symbiosis with the host."

"That is, of course, possible," admitted Pierson.

"Now let us consider the symptoms of Virus B-23: fever, rash, a characteristic odor, sexual frenzies, obsession with sex and death.... Is this so totally strange and alien?"

"I don't follow you."

"I will make myself clearer. We know that a consuming passion can produce physical symptoms...fever...loss of appetite...even allergic reactions...and few conditions are more obsessional and potentially self-destructive than love. Are not the symptoms of Virus B-23 simply the symptoms of what we are pleased to call 'love'? Eve, we are told, was made from Adam's rib ... so a hepatitis virus was once a healthy liver cell. If you will excuse me, ladies, nothing personal... we are all tainted with viral origins. The whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism. I suggest that this virus, known as 'the other half,' turned malignant as a result of the radiation to which the Cities of the Red Night were exposed."

"You lost me there."

Did I indeed.... And I would suggest further that any attempts to contain Virus B-23 will turn out to be ineffectual because we carry this virus with us," said Peterson.

"Really, Doctor, aren't you letting fantasy run away with you? After all, other viruses have been brought under control. Why should this virus be an exception?"

"Because it is the human virus. After many thousands of years of more or less benign coexistence, it is now once again on the verge of malignant mutation ... what Doctor Steinplatz calls a virgin soil epidemic. This could result from the radiation already released in atomic testing...."

"What's your point, Doctor?" Pierson snapped.

"My point is very simple. The whole human position is no longer tenable. And one last consideration ...as you know, a vast crater in what is now Siberia is thought to have resulted from a meteor. It is further theorized that this meteor brought with it the radiation in question. Others have surmised that it may not have been a meteor but a black hole, a hole in the fabric of reality, through which the inhabitants of these ancient cities traveled in time to a final impasse."

The rescue

A sepia etching onscreen. Written at the bottom in gold lettering: "The Hanging of Captain Strobe the Gentleman Pirate. Panama City, May 13, 1702." In the center of the square in front of a courthouse Captain Strobe stands on a gallows platform with a noose around his neck. He is a slender handsome youth of twenty-five in eighteenth-century costume, his blond hair tied in a knot at the back of his head. He looks disdainfully down at the crowd. A line of soldiers stands in front of the gallows.

The etching slowly comes alive, giving off a damp heat, a smell of weeds and mud flats and sewage. Vultures roost on the old courthouse of flaking yellow stucco. The gypsy hangman—thin, effeminate-looking, with greasy crinkled hair and glistening eyes—stands by the gallows with a twisted smirk on his face. The crowd is silent, mouths open, waiting.

At a signal from an officer, a soldier steps forward with an ax and knocks the support from under the platform. Strobe falls and hangs there, his feet a few inches above the limestone paving which is cracked here and there, weeds and vines growing through. Five minutes pass in silence. Vultures wheel overhead. On Strobe's face is a strange smile. A yellow-green aura surrounds his body.

The silence is shattered by an explosion. Chunks of masonry rain down on the square. The blast swings Strobe's body in a long arc, his feet brushing the weeds. The soldiers rush offstage, leaving only six men to guard the gallows. The crowd surges forward, pulling out knives, cutlasses, and pistols. The soldiers are disarmed. A lithe boy who looks like a Malay shows white teeth and bright red gums as he throws a knife. The knife catches the hangman in the throat just above the collarbone. He falls squawking and spitting blood like a stricken bird. Captain Strobe is cut down and borne to a waiting carriage.

The carriage careens into a side street. Inside the cart the boy loosens the noose and presses air in and out of Strobe's lungs. Strobe opens his eyes and writhes in agony from the pricklings and shootings as his circulation returns. The boy gives him a vial of black liquid.

"Drink this Captain."

In a few minutes the laudanum takes effect and Strobe is able to walk as they leave the cart. The boy leads the way along a jungle path to a fishing boat moored at a pier on the outskirts of the city. Two younger boys are in the boat. The boat is cast off and the sail set. Captain Strobe collapses on a pallet in the cabin. The boy helps him undress and covers him with a cotton blanket.

Strobe lay back with closed eyes. He had not slept since his capture three days ago. The opium and movement of the boat spread a pleasant languor through his body. Pictures drifted in front of his eyes.

A vast ruined stone building with square marble columns in a green underwater light ... a luminous green haze, thicker and darker at ground level, shading up to light greens and yellows ... deep blue canals and red brick buildings ... sunlight on water ... a boy standing on a beach naked with dusky rose genitals ... red night sky over a desert city ... clusters of violet light raining down on sandstone steps and bursting with a musky smell of ozone ... strange words in his throat, a taste of blood and metal ... a white ship sailing across a gleaming empty sky dusted with stars ... singing fish in a ruined garden ... a strange pistol in his hand that shoots blue sparks ... beautiful diseased faces in red light, all looking at something he cannot see....

He awoke with a throbbing erection and a sore throat, his brain curiously blank and factual. He accepted his rescue as he had been prepared to accept his death. He knew exactly where he was: some forty miles south of Panama City. He could see the low outline of mangrove swamps laced with inlets, the shark fins, the stagnant seawater.

Harbor Point

Early morning mist...birdcalls...howler monkeys like wind in the trees. Fifty armed partisans are moving north over Panama jungle trails. Unshaven faces at once alert and drawn with fatigue, and a rapid gait that is almost a jog indicate a long forced march without sleep. The rising sun picks out their faces.

Noah Blake: twenty, a tall red-haired youth with brown eyes, his face dusted with freckles. Bert Hansen: a Swede with light blue eyes. Clinch Todd: a powerful youth with long arms and something sleepy and quiescent in his brown eyes flecked with points of light. Paco: a Portuguese with Indian and Negro blood. Sean Brady: black Irish with curly hair and a quick wide smile.

Young Noah Blake is screwing the pan onto a flintlock pistol, testing the spring, oiling the barrel and stock. He holds the pistol up to his father, who examines it critically. Finally he nods....

"Aye, son, that can go with the Blake mark on it...."

"Old Lady Norton stuck her head in the shop and said I shouldn't be working on the Lord's Day."

"And she shouldn't be sniffing her long snot-dripping nose into my shop on the Lord's Day or any other. The Nortons have never bought so much as a ha'penny measure of nails off me." His father looks around the shop, his fingers hooked in his wide belt. Lean and red-haired, he has the face of a mechanic: detached, factual, a face that minds its own business and expects others to do the same. "We'll be moving to the city, son, where nobody cares if you go to church or not...."

"Chicago, Father?"

"No, son, Boston. On the sea. We have relations there."

Father and son put on coats and gloves. They lock the shop and step out into the muted streets of the little snowbound village on Lake Michigan. As they walk through the snow, villagers pass. Some of the greetings are quick and cold with averted faces.

"Is it all right if my friends come to dinner, Father? They'll be bringing fish and bread...."

"All right with me, son. But they aren't well seen here....There's talk in the village, son. Bad talk about all of you. If it wasn't for Bert Hansen's father being a shipowner and one of the richest men in town there'd be more than talk.... Quicker we move the better."

"Could the others come too?"

"Well, son, I could use some more hands in the shop. No limit to how many guns we can sell in a seaport like Boston ... and I'm thinking maybe Mr. Hansen would pay to get his son out of here...."

Spring morning, doves call from the woods. Noah Blake and his father, Bert Hansen, Clinch Todd, Paco, and Sean Brady board a boat with their liggage stacked on deck. The villagers watch from the pier.

Mrs. Norton sniffs and says in her penetrating voice, "Good riddance to the lot of them." She glances sideways at her husband.

"I share the same views," he says hastily.

Boston: two years later. Mr. Blake has prospered. He works now on contracts from shipowners, and his guns are standard issue. He has remarried. His wife is a quiet refined girl from New York. Her family are well-to-do importers and merchants with political connections. Mr. Blake plans to open a New York branch, and there is talk of army and navy contracts. Noah Blake is studying navigation. He wants to be a ship's captain, and all five of the boys want to ship out.

"Wait till you find the right ship," Mr. Blake tells them.

One winter day, Noah is walking on the waterfront with Bert, Clinch, Sean and Paco. They notice a ship called The Great White. Rather small by very clean and trim. A man leans over the rail. He has a beefy red smiling face and cold blue eyes.

"You boys looking for a ship?"

"Maybe," says Noah cautiously.

"Well, come aboard."

He meets them at the gangplank. "I'm Mr. Thomas, First Mate." He extends a hand like callused beef and shakes hands with each boy in turn. He leads the way to the master's cabin. "This is Captain Jones—master of The Great White. These boys are looking for a ship ... maybe ..."

The boys nod politely. Captain Jones looks at them in silence. He is a man of indeterminate age with a gray-green pallor. He speaks at length, in a flat voice, his lips barely moving.

"Well, I could use five deckhands.... You boys had any experience?"

"Yes. On the Great Lakes." Noah indicates Bert Hansen. "His father owned fishing boats."

"Aye," says Captain Jones, "freshwater sailing. The sea's another kettle of fish."

"I've studied navigation," Noah puts in.

"Have you now? And what would be your name, lad?"

"Noah Blake."

An almost imperceptible glance passes between the Captain and the first mate.

"And your trade, lad?"

"Gunsmith."

"Well, now, you wouldn't be Noah Blake's son would you?"

"Yes, sir, I would."

Once again the glance flickers between the two men. Then Captain Jones leans back in his chair and looks at the boys with his dead, fishy eyes.

"We'll be sailing in three days' time ... New York, Charleston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz. Two months down, more or less, and two months back.... I pay ten pounds a month for deckhands."

Noah Blake tries to look unimpressed. This is twice as much as any other captain has offered.

"Well, sir, I'll have to discuss it with my father."

"To be sure, lad. You can sign the Articles tomorrow if you're so minded ... all five of you."

Noah can hardly wait to tell his father. "I mean that's good, isn't it?"

"Aye, son. Perhaps a little too good. Captain Jones's name is not so white as his ship. He's known as Opium Jones in the trade. He'll be carrying opium, guns, powder, shot, and tools. And he's not too particular who he trades with...."

"Anything wrong with that, Father?"

"No. He's no better and no worse than most of the others. Only thing I can't figure out is why he's paying double wages for deckhands."

"Maybe he'd rather have five good hands than ten waterfront drunks."

"Maybe.... Well, go if you like. But keep your eyes open."

The private asshole

The name is Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.

As a private investigator I run into more death than the law allows. I mean the law of averages. There I am outside the hotel room waiting for the corespondent to reach a crescendo of amorous noises. I always find that if you walk in just as he goes off he won't have time to disengage himself and take a swing at you. When me and the house dick open the door with a passkey, the smell of shit and bitter almonds blows us back into the hall. Seems they both took a cyanide capsule and fucked until the capsules dissolved. A real messy love death.

Another time I am working on a routine case of industrial sabotage when the factory burns down killing twenty-three people. These things happen. I am a man of the world. Going to and fro and walking up and down in it.

Death smells. I mean it has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, carrion, blood, cordite or burnt flesh. It's like opium. Once you smell it you never forget. I can walk down a street and get a whiff of opium smoke and I know someone is kicking the gong around.

I got a whiff of death as soon as Mr. Green walked into my office. You can't always tell whose death it is. Could be Green, his wife, or the missing son he wants me to find. Last letter from the island of Spetsai two months ago. After a month with no word the family made inquiries by long-distance phone.

"The embassy wasn't at all helpful," said Mr. Green.

I nodded. I knew just how unhelpful they could be.

"They referred us to the Greek police. Fortunately, we found a man there who speaks English."

"That would be Colonel Dimitri."

"Yes. You know him?"

I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

"He checked and could find no record that Jerry had left the country, and no hotel records after Spetsai."

"He could be visiting someone."

"I'm sure he would write."

"You feel then that this is not just an instance of neglect on his part, or perhaps a lost letter? ... That happens in the Greek islands...."

"Both Mrs. Green and I are convinced that something is wrong."

"Very well, Mr. Green, there is the question of my fee: a hundred dollars a day plus expenses and a thousand-dollar retainer. If I work on a case two days and spend two hundred dollars, I refund six hundred to the client. If I have to leave the country, the retainer is two thousand. Are these terms satisfactory?"

"Yes."

"Very good. I'll start right here in New York. Sometimes I have been able to provide the client with the missing person's address after a few hours' work. He may have written to a friend."

"That's easy. He left his address book. Asked me to mail it to him care of American Express in Athens." He passed me the book.

"Excellent."

Now, on a missing-person case I want to know everything the client can tell me about the missing person, no matter how seemingly unimportant and irrelevant. I want to know preferences in food, clothing, colors, reading, entertainment, use of drugs and alcohol, what cigarette brand he smokes, medical history. I have a questionnaire printed with five pages of questions. I got it out of the filing cabinet and passed it to him.

"Will you please fill out this questionnaire and bring it back here day after tomorrow. That will give me time to check out the local addresses."

"I've called most of them," he said curtly, expecting me to take the next plane for Athens.

"Of course. But friends of an M.P. —missing person—are not always honest with the family. Besides, I daresay some of them have moved or had their phones disconnected. Right?" He nodded. I put my hands on the questionnaire. "Some of these questions may seem irrelevant but they all add up. I found a missing person once from knowing that he could wriggle his ears. I've noticed that you are left-handed. Is your son also left-handed?"

"Yes, he is."

"You can skip that question. Do you have a picture of him with you?"

He handed me a photo. Jerry was a beautiful kid. Slender, red hair, green eyes far apart, a wide mouth. Sexy and kinky-looking.

"Mr. Green, I want all the photos of him you can find. If I use any I'll have copies made and return the originals. If he did any painting, sketching, or writing I'd like to see that too. If he sang or played an instrument, I want recordings. In fact, any recordings of his voice. And please bring if possible some article of clothing that hasn't been dry-cleaned since he wore it."

"It's true then that you use uh psychic methods?"

"I use any methods that help me to find the missing person. If I can locate him in my own mind that makes it easier to locate him outside it."

"My wife is into psychic things. That's why I came to you. She has an intuition that something has happened to him and she says only a psychic can find him."

That makes two of us, I thought. He wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. We shook hands.

I went right to work. Jim, my assistant, was out of town on an industrial-espionage case—he specializes in electronics. So I was on my own. Ordinarily I don't carry iron on an M.P. case, but this one smelled of danger. I put on my snub-nosed 38, in a shoulder holster. Then I unlocked a drawer and put three joints of the best Colombian, laced with hash, into my pocket. Nothing like a joint to break the ice and stir the memory. I also took a deck of heroin. It buys more than money sometimes.

Most of the addresses were in the SoHo area. That meant lofts, and that often means the front door is locked. So I started with an address on Sixth Street.

She opened the door right away, but she kept the chain on. Her pupils were dilated, her eyes running, and she was snuffling, waiting for the Man. She looked at me with hatred.

I smiled. "Expecting someone else?"

"You a cop?"

"No. I'm a private investigator hired by the family to find Jerry Green. You knew him."

"Look, I don't have to talk to you."

"No, you don't have to. But you might want to." I showed her the deck of heroin. She undid the chain.

The place was filthy—dishes stacked in a sink, cockroaches running over them. The bathtub was in the kitchen and hadn't been used for a long time. I sat down gingerly in a chair with the springs showing. I held the deck in my hand where she could see it. "You got any pictures of him?"

She looked at me and she looked at the heroin. She rummaged in a drawer, and tossed two pictures onto a coffee table that wobbled. "Those should be worth something."

They were. One showed Jerry in drag, and he made a beautiful girl. The other showed him standing up naked with a hard-on. "Was he gay?"

"Sure. He liked getting fucked by Puerto Ricans and having his picture took."

"He pay you?"

"Sure, twenty bucks. He kept most of the pictures."

"Where'd he get the money?"

"I don't know."

She was lying. I went into my regular spiel. "Now look, I'm not a cop. I'm a private investigator paid by his family. I'm paid to find him, that's all. He's been missing for two months." I started to put the heroin back into my pocket and that did it.

"He was pushing C."

I tossed the deck onto the coffee table. She locked the door behind me.

Later that evening, over a joint, I interviewed a nice young gay couple, who simply adored Jerry.

"Such a sweet boy ..."

"So understanding ..."

"Understanding?"

"About gay people. He even marched with us...."

"And look at the postcard he sent us from Athens." It was a museum postcard showing the statue of a nude youth found at Kouros. "Wasn't that cute of him?"

Very cute, I thought.

I interviewed his steady girl friend, who told me he was all mixed up.

"He had to get away from his mother's influence and find himself. We talked it over."

I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy ... polite ... poised ... a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and a homosexual transvestite. I see I am going to need some more heroin on this one. That's easy. I know some narco boys who me a favor. It takes an ounce and a ticket to San Francisco to buy some names from the junky chick.

Seek and you shall find. I nearly found an ice pick in my stomach. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Often it wasn't opened unto me. But I finally found the somebody who: a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican kid named Kiki, very handsome and quite fond of Jerry in his way. Psychic too, and into Macambo magic. He told me Jerry had the mark of death on him.

"What was his source for the coke?"

His face closed over. "I don't know."

"Can't blame you for not knowing. May I suggest to you that his source was a federal narc?"

His deadpan went deader. "I didn't tell you anything."

"Did he hear voices? Voices giving him orders?"

"I guess he did. He was controlled by something."

I gave him my card. "If you ever need anything let me know."

Mr. Green showed up the next morning with a stack of photos. The questionnaire I had given him had been neatly filled out on a typewriter. He also brought a folio of sketches and a green knitted scarf. The scarf reeked of death.

I glanced at the questionnaire. Born April 18, 1951, in Little America, Wyoming. "Admiral Byrd welcomes you aboard the Deep Freeze Special." I looked through the photos: Jerry as a baby ... Jerry on a horse ... Jerry with a wide sunlit grin holding up a string of trout ... graduation pictures ... Jerry as the Toff in the high school play A Night at the Inn. They all looked exactly as they should look. Like he was playing the part expected of him. There were about fifty recent photos, all looking like Jerry.

Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had one. Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn't a person. He is a person impersonator.

I looked at Jerry's sketches. Good drawing, no talent. Empty and banal as sunlight. There were also a few poems, so bad I couldn't read them. Needless to say, I didn't tell Mr. Green what I had found out about Jerry's sex and drug habits. I just told him that no one I had talked to had heard from Jerry since his disappearance, and that I was ready to leave for Athens at once if he still wanted to retain me. Money changed hands.

At the Athens Hilton I got Dimitri on the phone and told him I was looking for the Green boy.

"Ah yes ... we have so many of these cases ... our time and resources are limited."

"I understand. But I've got a bad feeling about this one. He had some kinky habits."

"S-M?"

"Sort of ... and underworld connections...." I didn't want to mention C over the phone.

"If I find anything out I'll let you know."

"Thanks. I'm going out to Spetsai tomorrow to have a look around. Be back on Thursday...."

I called Skouras in Spetsai. He's the tourist agent there. He owns or leases villas and rents out apartments during the season. He organizes tours. He owns the discotheque. He is the first man any traveler to Spetsai sees, and the last, since he is also the agent for transport.

"Yes, I know about it. Had a call from Dimitri. Glad to help ay way I can. You need a room?"

"If possible I'd like the room he had."

"You can have any room you want ... the season is over."

For once the hovercraft was working. I was in luck. The hovercraft takes an hour and the boat takes six.

Yes, Skouras remembered Jerry. Jerry arrived with some young people he'd met on the boat—two Germans with rucksacks and a Swedish girl with English boyfriend. They stayed at one of Skouras's villas on the beach—the end villa, where the road curves out along the sea wall. I knew the place. I'd stayed there once three years earlier in 1970.

"Anything special about the others?"

"Nothing. Looked like thousands of other young people who swarm over the islands every summer. They stayed for a week. The others went on to Lesbos. Jerry went back to Athens alone."

Where did they eat? Where did they take coffee? Skouras knew. He knows everything that goes on in Spetsai.

"Go to the discotheque?"

"Every night. The boy Jerry was a good dancer."

"Anybody in the villa now?"

"Just the caretaker and his wife."

He gave me the keys. I noticed a worn copy of The Magus by John Fowles. As soon as anyone walks into his office, Skouras knows whether he should lend him the book. He has his orders. Last time I was there he lent me the book and I read it. Even rode out on a horse to look at the house of the Magus and fell off the horse on the way back. I pointed to the book. "By any chance ..."

He smiled. "Yes. I lent him the book and he returned it when he left. Said he found it most interesting."

"Could I borrow it again?"

"Of course."

The villa stood a hundred feet from the beach. The apartment was on the second floor—three bedrooms off a hall, kitchen and bathroom at the end of the hall, balcony along one side of the building. There was a musty smell, dank and chilly, blinds down. I pulled up the blinds in all three bedrooms and selected the middle one, where I had stayed before. Two beds, two chairs, coat hangers on nails in the wall.

I switched on an electric heater and took my recorder out of its case. This is a very special recorder designed and assembled by my assistant, Jim, and what it won't pick up isn't there. It is also specially designed for cut-ins and overlays, and you can switch from Record to Playback without stopping the machine.

I recorded a few minutes in all three rooms. I recorded the toilet flushing and the shower running. I recorded the water running in the kitchen sink, the rattle of dishes, and the opening and closing and hum of the refrigerator. I recorded on the balcony. Now I lay down on the bed and read some selections from The Magus into the recorder.

I will explain exactly how these recordings are made. I want an hour of Spetsai: an hour of places where my M.P. has been and the sounds he has head. But not in sequence. I don't start at the beginning of the tape and record to the end. I spin the tape back and forth, cutting in at random so that The Magus may be cut off in the middle of a word by a flushing toilet, or The Magus may cut into sea sounds. It's a sort of I Ching or table-tapping procedure. How random is it actually? Don Juan says that nothing is random to a man of knowledge: everything he sees or hears is there just at that time waiting to be seen and heard.

I get out my camera and take pictures of the three rooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen. I take pictures from the balcony. I put the machine back in the case and go outside, recording around the villa and taking pictures at the same time: pictures of the villa; a picture of the black cat that belongs to the caretaker; pictures of the beach, which is empty now except for a party of hardy Swedes.

I have lunch in a little restaurant on the beach where Jerry and his friends used to eat. Mineral water and a salad. The proprietor remembers me and we shake hands. Coffee at the waterfront café where Jerry and his friends took coffee. Record. Take pictures. I cover the post office, the two kiosks that sell imported cigarettes and newspapers. The one place I don't record is in Skouras's office. He wouldn't like that. I can hear him loud and clear: "I'm a landlord and not a detective. I don't want your M.P. in my office. He's bad news."

I go back to the villa by a different route, covering the bicycle rental agency. It is now three o'clock. A time when Jerry would most likely be in his room reading. I read some more of The Magus into the recorder with flushing toilets, running water, my footsteps in the hall, blinds being raised and lowered. I listen to what I have on tape, with special attention to the cut-ins. I take a walk along the sea wall and play the tape back to the sea and the wind.

Dinner in a restaurant where Jerry and his friends ate the night they arrived. The restaurant is recommended by Skouras. I take my time with several ouzos before a dinner of red snapper and Greek salad, washed down with retsina. After dinner I go out to the discotheque to record some of the music Jerry danced to. The scene is really dead. A German countess is dancing with some local youths.

Next day there was a wind and the hovercraft was grounded. I took the noon boat and after six hours was back in my room at the Hilton.

I took out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label duty-free scotch and ordered a soda siphon and ice from Hilton room service. I put Jerry's graduation picture in a silver frame on the desk, assembled the questionnaire, and put the tape recorder with an hour of Spetsai beside it. The waiter came in with the ice and soda siphon.

"Is that your son, sir?"

I said yes because it was the easy thing to say. I poured myself a small drink and lit a Senior Service. I started thinking out loud, cutting into the tape....

"Suspected to be involved in some capacity: Marty Blum, a small-time operator with big-time connections. Was in Athens at or about the time young Jerry disappeared.

"Helen and Van—also in Athens at the time. Van was trying to get a permit to run a disintoxication clinic on one of the islands. He didn't get it. Left Athens for Tangier. Left Tangier for New York. Trouble at immigration. Thought to be in Toronto." What did I know about these two birds? Plenty. "Doctor Van: age, fifty-seven; nationality, Canadian. Dope-pushing and abortions sidelines and front for his real specialty, which is transplant operations. Helen, his assistant: age, sixty; nationality, Australian. Masseuse, abortionist, suspected jewel thief and murderess."

The Countess Minsky Stalinhof de Gulpa, known as Minny to her friends and sycophants: a heavy woman like a cold fish under tons of gray shale. "White Russian and Italian descent. Stratospherically wealthy, near the billion mark. The source of her wealth: manipulation of commodity prices. She moves into a poor country like Morocco and buys up basic commodities like sugar, kerosene, and cooking oil, holds them off the market in her warehouses, then puts them back on the market at a higher price. The Countess has squeezed her vast wealth out of the poorest people. She has other interests than money. She is a very big operator indeed. She owns immense estates in Chile and Peru and has some secret laboratories there. She has employed biochemists and virologists. Indication: genetic experiments and biologic weapons."

And what of the Countess de Vile? "De Vile: very wealthy but not Gulpa's strata. A depraved, passionate and capricious woman, evil as Circe. Extensive underworld and police contacts. On close terms with Mafia dons and police chiefs in Italy, New York, Morocco, and South America. A frequent visitor at the Countess de Gulpa's South American retreat. Several unsolved missing-person cases, involving boys of Jerry's age, point to the South American laboratories as terminal."

I glanced through the questionnaire. "Medical history: scarlet fever at the age of four." Now, scarlet fever is a rarity since the introduction of antibiotics. "Could there have been a misdiagnosis?"

All this I was feeding into the recorder in pieces, and a lot more. An article I had just finished reading when Mr. Green came into my office. This was an article on head transplants performed on monkeys, the Sunday Times, December 9, 1973. I now took it out of a file and read parts of it into the recorder. "Monkeys heads transplanted onto monkey bodies can now survive for about a week. The drawing above portrays controversial operation. "Technically a human head transplant is possible,' Dr. White says, 'but scientifically there would be no point.'"

My first meeting with Mr. Green: the smell of death, and something shifty about him. From talking to Jerry's friends, I found out that this was a family trait. They all described him as hard to figure or hard to pin down. Finally I turned on the TV. I played the tape back at low volume while I watched an Italian western with Greek subtitles, keeping my attention on the screen so I was subconsciously hearing the tape. They were hanging a rustler from horseback when the phone rang.

It was Dimitri. "Well, Snide, I think we have found your missing person ... unfortunately."

"You mean dead?"

"Yes. Embalmed, in fact." He paused. "And without his head."

"What?"

"Yes. Head severed at the shoulders."

"Fingerprints check?"

"Yes."

I waited for the rest of it.

"Cause of death is uncertain. Some congestion in the lungs. May have been strangulation. The body was found in a trunk."

"Who found it?"

"I did. I happened to be down at the port double-checking the possibility that the boy may have left by freighter, and I saw a trunk being carried aboard a ship with Panamanian registry. Well, something about the way they were carrying it ... the disposition of the weight, you understand. I had the trunk returned to customs and opened. The uh method of embalming ... unusual to say the least. The body was perfectly preserved but no embalming fluid had been used. It was also completely nude."

"Can I have a look?"

"Of course...."

The Greek doctor had studied at Harvard and he spoke perfect English. Various internal organs were laid out on a white shelf. The body, or what was left of it, was in a fetal position.

"Considering that this boy has been dead at least a month, the internal organs are in a remarkable state of preservation," said the doctor.

I looked at the body. Pubic, rectal and leg hairs were bright red. However, he was redder than he should have been. I pointed to some red blotches around the nipples, crotch, thighs and buttocks. "What's that? Looks like some kind of rash."

"I was wondering about that.... Of course it could have been an allergy. Redheads are particularly liable to allergic reactions, but—" He paused. "It looks like scarlet fever."

"We are checking all hospitals and private clinics for scarlet fever admissions," Dimitri put in, "... or any other condition that could produce such a rash."

I turned to the doctor. "Doctor, would you say that the amputation was a professional job?"

"Definitely."

"All questionable doctors and clinics will be checked," said Dimitri.

The preservative seemed to be wearing off, and the body gave off a sweet musky smell that turned me quite sick. I could see Dimitri was feeling it too, and so was the doctor.

"Can I see the trunk?"

The trunk was built like an icebox: a layer of cork, and the inside lined with thin steel.

"The steel is magnetized," Dimitri told me. "Look." he took out his car keys and they stuck to the side of the trunk.

"Could this have had any preservative effect?"

"The doctor says no."

Dimitri drove me back to the Hilton. "Well, it looks like your case is closed, Mr. Snide."

"I guess so ... any chance of keeping this out of the papers?"

"Yes. This is not America. Besides, a thing like this, you understand ..."

"Bad for the tourist business."

"Well, yes."

I had a call to make to the next of kin. "Afraid I have some bad news for you, Mr. Green."

"Yes?"

"Well, the boy has been found."

"Dead, you mean?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Green...."

"Was he murdered?"

"What makes you say that?"

"It's my wife. She's sort of, well, psychic. She had a dream."

"I see. Well, yes, it looks like murder. We're keeping it out of the papers, because publicity would impede the investigation at this point."

"I want to retain you again, Mr. Snide. To find the murderer of my son."

"Everything is being done, Mr. Green. The Greek police are quite efficient."

"We have more confidence in you."

"I'm returning to New York in a few days. I'll contact you as soon as I arrive."

The trail was a month old at least. I was fairly sure the murderer or murderers were no longer in Greece. No point in staying on. But there was something else to check out on the way back.

Fever spoor

I stop over in London. There is somebody I want to see there, if I can find him without too much trouble. Could save me a side trip to Tangier.

I find him in a gay bar called the Amigo. He is nattily dressed, with a well-kept beard and shifty eyes. The Arabs say he has the eyes of a thief. But he has a rich wife and doesn't need to steal.

"Well," he says. "The private eye.... Business or pleasure?"

I look around. "Only business would bring me here." I show him Jerry's picture. "He was in Tangier last summer, I believe."

He looks at the picture. "Sure, I remember him. A cock-teaser."

"Missing-person case. Remember who he was with?"

"Some hippie kids."

The description sounds like the kids Jerry was with in Spetsai. Props. "Did he go anywhere else?"

"Marrakesh, I think."

I am about to finish my drink and leave.

"Oh, you remember Peter Winkler who used to run the English Pub? Did you know he was dead?"

I haven't heard, but I am not much interested. "So? Who or what killed him?"

"Scarlet fever."

I nearly spill my drink. "Look, people don't die of scarlet fever now. In fact,t hey rarely get it."

"He was living out on the mountain ... the Hamilton summer house. It's quite isolated, you know. Seems he was alone and the phone was out of order. He tried to walk to the next house down the road and collapsed. They took him to the English hospital."

"That would finish anyone off. And I suppose Doc Peterson was in attendance? Made the diagnosis and signed the death certificate?"

"Who else? He's the only doctor there. But what are you so stirred up about? I never thought you and Winkler were very close."

I cool it. "We weren't. It's just that I started out to be a doctor and I don't like to see a case botched."

"I wouldn't say he botched it. Shot him full of pen strep. Seems he was too far gone to respond."

"Yeah. Pen strep is right for scarlet fever. He must have been practically dead on arrival."

"Oh, not quite. He was in the hospital about twenty-four hours."

I don't say any more. I've said too much already. Looks like I'll have to make that side trip to Tangier.

I checked into the Rembrandt and took a taxi to the Marshan. It was 3:00 P.M. when I rang the doctor's bell. He was a long time coming to the door, and was not pleased to see me.

"I'm sorry to disturb you during the siesta hour, Doctor, but I'm only in town for a short stay and it's rather important...."

He was not altogether mollified but he led me into his office.

"Doctor Peterson, I have been retained by the heirs of Peter Winkler to investigate the circumstances of his death. The fact that he was found unconscious by the side of a road has led them to speculate that there might be some question of accidental death. That would mean double indemnity on the insurance."

"No question whatsoever. There wasn't a mark on him—except for the rash, that is. Well, his pockets were turned inside out, but what do you expect in a place like this?"

"You're quite sure that he died of scarlet fever?"

"Quite sure. A classical case. I think that the fever may have caused brain damage and that is why he didn't respond to antibiotics. Cerebral hemorrhage may have been a contributory case...."

"There was bleeding?"

"Yes ... from the nose and mouth."

"And this couldn't have been a concussion?"

"Absolutely no sign of concussion."

"Was he delirious at any time?"

"Yes. For some hours."

"Did he say anything? Anything that might indicate he had been attacked?"

"It was gibberish in some foreign language. I administered morphine to quiet him."

"I'm sure you did the right thing, Doctor, and I will report to his heirs that there is nothing to support a claim of accidental death. That is your considered opinion?"

"It is. He died of scarlet fever and/or complications attendant on scarlet fever."

I thanked him and left. I had some more questions, but I was sure he couldn't or wouldn't answer them. I went back to the hotel and did some work on the recorder.

At seven o'clock I walked over to the English Pub. There was a young Arab behind the bar whom I recognized as one of Peter's boyfriends. Evidently he had inherited the business. I showed him Jerry's picture.

"Oh yes. Mister Jerry. Peter like him very much. Give him free drinks. He never make out though. Boy just lead him on."

I asked about Peter's death.

"Very sad. Peter alone in house. Tell me he want to rest few days."

"Did he seem sick?"

"Not sick. He just look tired. Mister Jerry gone to Marrakesh and I think Peter a little sad."

I could have checked hospitals in Marrakesh for scarlet fever cases, but I knew already what I needed to know. I knew why Peter hadn't responded to antibiotics. He didn't have scarlet fever. He had a virus infection.

The stranger

The next ay the five boys signed on with The Great White and moved into the forecastle. Three youths were already there. They introduced themselves as Bill, Guy, and Adam. Noah noticed that they all had the same pale faces and fish-eyes as Captain Jones. The forecastle was clean and newly painted, with a faint hospital smell of carbolic.

An impish red-haired boy of about fifteen brings mugs of tea on a tray. "I'm Jerry, the cabin boy. Anything you want, just let me know. It's a pleasure to serve you, gentlemen."

Bill, Guy, and Adam wash down black pellets with the tea.

"What's that?" Brady asks.

"Oh, just something to keep out the cold."

The boys are kept busy loading cargo supplies. Mr. Thomas gives instructions in a quiet voice. He seems easygoing and good-natured. But his eyes make Noah uneasy—they are cold as winter ice.

Pages from Noah Blake's diary:

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 1702: Today we sailed. Despite Captain Jones's slighting remarks about freshwater sailing, our experience on the lakes stands us in good stead. I notice that Guy, Bill, and Adam, though they are very thin and pale and sick-looking, are good seamen and seem immune to cold and fatigue.

An hour before sailing, a carriage pulled up at the wharf and two people got out and came on board. I could not see them clearly, for they were wearing furs with hoods, but I could tell that they were young and looked much alike. When the ship was clear of the harbor and on course, the cabin boy brought tea.

"Two passengers on board," he told us.

"Have you seen them?"

"Aye, I carried their luggage to the cabin."

"And what are they like?"

"More like leprechauns than humans. Green they are, green as shamrock."

"Green?"

"Aye, with smooth greenish faces. Twins, one a boy and one a girl. And rich too. You can smell the money off them...."

Feb. 6, 1702: Neither the two passengers nor the captain has appeared on deck. Bert Hansen and myself have been given turns at the wheel. The food is good and plentiful and I have talked with the cook. His name is Charlie Lee. He is about twenty years old, half-black and half-Chinese. I'm thinking there is something between him and the cabin boy. We will dock in New York tomorrow.

Feb. 7, 1702: Too late to dock. We are riding at anchor. There is naught to be done, and after the evening meal we had a talk with Guy, Adam, and Bill. I have found out what it is that they take with their tea night and morning: opium. They have enough to last them the voyage.

"And should we need more, we have but to ask the Captain," said Guy.

"Sure and he should be made of the stuff," Sean Brady put in. "Seeing his name is Opium Jones."

It seems they have shipped with Captain Jones before. "He pays double because he only wants certain type people on his ship."

"And what type would that be?"

"Them as do the work, mind their own business, and keep their mouths shut to outsiders."

Feb. 8, 1702: Today we docked in New York. Captain Jones appeared on deck and guided the ship into the harbor. I will say for him he knows his business when he chooses to mind it. A carriage was waiting at the pier and the two passengers got in and were driven away.

We were kept busy most of the day loading and unloading cargo under the supervision of Mr. Thomas. Captain Jones went ashore on business of some kind. In the late afternoon we were allowed ashore. There is more bustle here than in Boston and more ships, of course. We were immediately set upon by panderers extolling the beauty and sound condition of their whores. When we told them to be off and fuck their wares they showered us with insults from a safe distance.

I have a letter to the Pembertons, the parents of my step-mother, and father impressed on me the importance of paying my respects and instructed me in how to conduct myself. It seems that the Pemberton family is well known here, and I had no trouble finding the house, which is of red brick and very imposing, with four stories.

I rang the bell and a servant came to the door and asked my business in somewhat peremptory tones. I presented him with the letter. He told me to wait and went inside. When he returned a few minutes later, his manner was quite respectful. He told me that Mr. Pemberton would be happy to entertain me for dinner the following night at eight o'clock.

Feb. 9, 1702: This night I had dinner with the Pembertons. Arriving a few minutes early I walked up and down until the chimes sounded eight. My father had admonished me always to be punctual for appointments and never under any circumstances to be early. The servant showed me into an ornately furnished room with portraits and a marble fireplace.

Mr. Pemberton greeted me most politely. He is a trim smallish man with white hair and twinkling blue eyes. He then presented me to his wife, who extended a hand without getting up, smiling as though it hurt her to do so. I took an immediate dislike to her, which I am sure was reciprocated.

The other people present, I soon realized, were none other than the passengers on board The Great White: two of the strangest and most beautiful people I have ever seen. They are twins—one a boy, the other a girl—about twenty years old. They have greenish complexions, straight black hair, and jet-black eyes. Both possess such ease and grace of manner that I was quite dazzled. The names I believe are Juan and Maria Cocuera de Fuentes. When I shook hands with the boy a tremor passed through me and I was glad of the diversion when Mr. Pemberton offered me a glass of sherry. While we were having the sherry, a Mr. Vermer was announced. He is as portly as Mr. Pemberton is trim, and gives a great impression of wealth and power.

Shortly thereafter dinner was served. Mr. Pemberton took the head of the table, with Mr. Vermer on his right and Maria de Fuentes on his left. I was seated opposite Juan de Fuentes, with Mrs. Pemberton on my right—though I would gladly have been as far away from her as possible. The de Fuentes twins had come from Mexico and were on their way to Vera Cruz. The talk was mostly about business, trade, mining, and the produce of Mexico.

Maria spoke in her cool clear voice.... "Crops now grown only in the Middle and Far East could be introduced, since the soil and climate is suitable."

I noted that the Permbertons and Mr. Vermer defer to the twins and listen respectfully to their opinions. Several times Mr. Pemberton addressed a question to me, and I answered briefly and politely, as my father had instructed me. When I told him I planned to be a sea captain he looked a little vague and distracted and said that the sea was good thing for a young man ... to be sure, a master's certificate would do no harm. However, the opportunities in the family business were not to be overlooked.

Mr. Vermer expressed concern with regard to the political instability of Mexico. Maria de Fuentes replied that the introduction of suitable crops would undoubtedly produce a tranquilizing and stabilizing effect. She has a way of underscoring certain words with special import. Mr. Vermer nodded and said, "Ah yes, sound economy brings sound politics."

I had a feeling that the talk would have been more open if I had not been present. Why then, I asked myself, had I been invited? The words of my father came back to me: "In the course of any meeting, try to discover what it is that is wanted from you." While I could not decide what it was, I knew that something very definite was wanted and expected from me. I surmised further that Mrs. Pemberton was less convinced of my potential usefulness than her husband, and that she considered my presence at the dinner table a hindrance and a waste of time.

At one point Juan de Fuentes looked straight into my eyes and once again I felt a tremor run through me and for a second had a most curious impression the we were alone at the table.

After dinner, I excused myself to return to the ship since we will be sailing before noon.

Feb. 10, 1702: The twins arrived shortly before sailing. Captain Jones took the wheel on leaving the harbor. We are heading south with a good wind. Weather very damp and cold.

Feb. 11, 1702: This morning I awoke with a sore throat, my head throbbing and feverish, and a congestion in my lungs—feeling barely able to rise from my bunk. Adam smiled and told me that the remedy was to hand. He carefully measured out six drops of opium tincture and I downed it with hot tea. In a few minutes a feeling of warmth and comfort spread from the back of my neck through my body. The soreness in my throat and the aching in my head disappeared as if by magic. I have been able to take my watch without difficulty. When I came in to sleep, the dose was repeated. There is an extraordinary clarity in my thoughts. I am unable to sleep. Writing this by candle.

I am asking myself where I came from, how I got here, and who I am. From earliest memory I have felt myself a stranger in the village of Harbor Point where I was born. Who was I? I remember mourning doves calling from the woods in summer dawn, and the long cold shut-in winters. Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

And who are the others—Brady, Hansen, Paco, Todd? Strangers like myself. I think that we came from another world and have been stranded here like mariners on some barren and hostile shore. I never felt that what we did together was wrong, but I fully understood the necessity and wisdom of concealing it from the villagers. Now that there is no need for concealment, I feel as if this ship is the home I had left and thought never to find again. But the voyage will end of course, and what then?

I know that my father will shortly be a wealthy man and that I could become, in course of time, wealthy myself. The prospect holds little appeal. Of what use is wealth if I must conform to customs that are as meaningless to me as they are obstructive of my true inclination and desires? I am minded to seek my fortunes in the Red Sea or in South America. Perhaps I could find employment with the de Fuentes family.

Now the face of Juan drifts before my eyes, and divorced by the effects of opium from the urgings and pricklings of lust I can examine the vision dispassionately. I feel not only attraction but kinship. He too is a stranger, but he moves with ease and confidence among the terrestrials.

Shore leave

Feb. 12, 1702: For some reason we will not dock at Charleston as planned. The weather is milder each day.

The de Fuentes twins now walk about the deck familiarizing themselves with all the workings and parts of the ship. Everything they do or say seems to have some hidden purpose. Juan has asked me many questions relative to my trade as a gunsmith. Would it be possible to shoot arrows from a gun? I replied that it would and suddenly saw a picture of Indians attacking a settlement with arrows tipped with burning pitch. I cannot recall where I saw this picture before, probably in Boston. As the picture flashed through my mind Juan nodded and smiled and walked away. His twin sister has the manner and directness of a man, with none of the coy enticing ways usually found in her sex. In any case female blandishments would here fall on barren soil. Yet I must confess myself more attracted to her than to any woman I have yet seen.

Feb. 13, 1702: Good winds and fair weather continue. We no longer need our greatcoats.

Feb. 14, 1702: We are now off the coast of Florida and seldom out of sight of land since there are many islands. Dolphins leap about the prow and flying fish scatter before us in silver showers. We are now able to work without shirts but Mr. Thomas has cautioned us to be careful of sunburn and to expose ourselves only for minutes at a time. Captain Jones appears on deck, scanning the horizon through his telescope. I think he plans to put in at one of the islands for fresh water and provisions.

Feb. 15, 1702: Mr. Thomas's warning, both Bert and myself have painful sunburns from the waist up, owing to our fair complexions, whereas Clinch, Sean, and Paco are unaffected. Bill, Guy, and Adam never take their shirts off. Charlie Lee, the cook, has some skill as physician though without formal training. He has given us an ointment to rub on our bodies, which has afforded considerable relief, and we have both taken some drops of opium tincture. Adam has given me a small bottle and showed me how to measure out the correct dose. He tells me the amount he takes would make us deathly sick and could be lethal.

Feb. 16, 1702: I am now recovered from the sunburn and my body is beginning to acquire a protective tan. This morning we all gathered at the rail to witness a great commotion in the water a few hundred yards ahead, occasioned by mackerel leaping to escape larger fish. Mr. Thomas gave the order to lower sail and issued fishing poles with spoons and triple hooks.

In a short time a number of great fish were flapping on the deck. These fish are known as yellowtails and are highly esteemed for the table. We were kept busy cleaning the fish, at which of course we are adept from our experience on the Great Lakes. Some were reserved for immediate use and the others salted and laid away. After the blood was washed from the decks we hoisted sail and proceeded on our way. The fresh fish has provided a most welcome change from a diet of salt cod and cornmeal, although the flavour is not as delicate as fish from fresh water.

Feb. 18, 1702: Dreamed this morning I was in a large workshop with tools, a forge, and gun parts scattered on a bench. I was examining a gun with a number of barrels welded together. I was trying to arrive at a method of firing the barrels in sequence. Juan was standing to one side and behind me. He pointed to an iron wheel with a handle and said something I did not catch because at this moment Clinch Todd came off his watch and awakened me, grumbling that we had ejaculated all over his blankets.

The wind has fallen and we are moving now at a few knots an hour.

*

Feb. 19, 20, 21, 1702: We are almost becalmed and take advantage of the slow movement to fish from the deck. I hooked a shark and the pole was torn from my hands and lost.

We seem to float on a sea of glass, like a painted ship. Tempers are short. Brady and Mr. Thomas got into an altercation and I thought they would come to blows.

Feb. 22, 1702: Today we put ashore on an uninhabited island to take on water and what provisions we could find. Captain Jones had spotted a stream through his telescope. We anchored in a bay between two points of land about two hundred yards from a beach with coconut palms behind it. The water here is so clear that you can see fish at a considerable depth. We are sure at least to find abundant coconuts.

Mr. Thomas, Bert Hansen, Clinch Todd, Paco, Jerry the cabin boy and myself put ashore in a boat loaded with water kegs. We filled the kegs with fresh water and loaded them into the boat. Todd and Paco rowed back to the ship and returned with empty kegs. When sufficient water had been collected, we filled the boat a number of times with coconuts. It was now after noon. Mr. Thomas then gave us the rest of the day off to explore the island, admonishing us to be back on the beach before sundown. Before returning to the ship he issued to each of us a cutlass for the unlikely event we should encounter dangerous animals or hidden natives.

Following the stream we climbed to the summit of the island, a distance of about six hundred feet. From the summit we had a fine view of the whole island. The Great White appeared at that distance like a toy. On the far side of the island are a number of small bays and inlets, and we made our way down to a little beach surrounded on both sides by overhanging rocks. Here we stripped off our clothes and swam in the bay for half an hour, being careful not to venture too far out for fear of sharks. The water is wonderfully warm and buoyant, quite unlike the swimming in freshwater lakes.

Feeling hunger after our swim, we put out lines which we had brought and soon took a number of the fish known as red snapper, each one two or three pounds in weight. Five fish we fried in a pan, leaving the others on a string through the gills in the water. This most delectable fish we ate with our fingers, washing the meat down with coconut milk.

Feeling a great drowsiness after eating, we all lay down naked in the shade of a rock, Jerry with his head on my stomach and I in turn resting my head on Bert Hansen's stomach. Clinch and Paco lay on their backs, side by side, with an arm around the other's shoulders. The heat, our full stomachs, and the sound of gently lapping waves put us into a light sleep which lasted for about an hour.

I woke with a strong erection and found my companions in the same condition. We stood up stretching and comparing.

The breeze was rising and it was getting towards sundown. We put out our lines and caught enough fish to make a good string, and made our way back to the beach as speedily as possible. Jerry kept us all laughing, slashing with his cutlass at trees and branches with fierce snarls and pirate cries. Adam and Bill rowed ashore and took us back to the ship. Sail was raised and we got under way.

While we were gone a number of different fish had been taken from the ship, and for supper we had a spicy fish stew with grated coconut.

A shout from Jerry while were eating brought us all to the rail, where we witnessed a wondrous sight known as the green flash, which occurs a moment after sunset. The whole western sky lit up a brilliant luminous green.

Lettre de marque

Feb. 28, 1702: Today we were captured by pirates. At five o'clock in the afternoon a heavily armed ship came abreast of us flying the Dutch flag, which was then lowered and the black pirate flag raised. We were carrying no cannon, so resistance was out of the question and Captain Jones immediately gave the order to raise the flag of truce. We all gathered on deck, including the de Fuentes twins, who were impassive as always, scanning the pirate ship critically as if to assess its worth.

Shortly thereafter a boat was lowered and it rowed towards us. Standing in the stern was a slim blond youth, his gold-braided coat glittering in the sun. Beside him was a youth in short gray pants and shirt with a red scarf around his neck. The boat was rowed by what appeared to be a crew of women, singing as they rowed and turning towards us to leer and wink with their painted faces.

The companionway was lowered and the "women" scrambled aboard with the agility of monkeys and posted themselves about the deck with muskets and cutlasses. I perceived that they were, in fact, handsome youths in women's garb, their costumes being Oriental, of colored silks and brocade. The two youths then stepped on board, the one with his gold-braided coat open at the waist to show his slender brown chest and stomach, a brace of pistols inlaid with silver, and a cutlass at his belt. He was a striking figure: blond hair tied in a knot at the back of his head, aristocratic and well-formed features, possessing a most lordly bearing and grace of manner.

Captain Jones stepped forward. "I am Captain Jones, master of The Great White."

"And I am Captain Strobe, second in command on The Siren," said the youth.

They shook hands most amiably and if I am any judge are not strangers to each other. I was immediately convinced that the "capture" had been prearranged between them. Strobe then received the keys to the armory. Turning to us, he assured us that we had nothing to fear for our lives. He would take over the conduct of he ship and set its course, his men acting under the orders of Mr. Kelley, the quartermaster. He indicated the youth in gray shorts, who was leaning against the rail immobile as a statue, his face without expression, his pale gray eyes turned up towards the rigging. We would continue to act under the orders of Mr. Thomas.

Several of the boys descended to the boat and began passing up seabags containing apparently the personal effects of the boarding crew. When the boat was cleared, Strobe conducted Captain Jones and the de Fuentes twins to the companionway and two boys rowed them back to The Siren. Captain Strobe then opened a small keg of rum and the boys produced tankards from their bags. Approaching us in a purposeful and insinuating manner, wriggling their buttocks, they passed around little clay pipes.

"Hashish. Very good."

When it came to my turn to smoke it caused me to cough greatly but soon I felt a lifting of my spirits and a vividness of pictures in my mind—together with a prickling in my groin and buttocks. Drums and flutes appeared and the boys began to dance and as they danced stripped off their clothes until they were dancing stark naked on the brightly colored silk scarves and dresses strewn about the deck. Captain Strobe stood on the poop deck playing a silver flute, the notes seeming to fall from a distant star. Only Mr. Thomas, at Strobe's side, seemed totally unconcerned, and for a second his bulky form was transparent before my eyes—probably an illusion produced by the drug.

Mr. Thomas was watching The Siren through his telescope. Finally, having received a signal that their sails were set, he gave the order to hoist sail on The Great White. Surprisingly enough we were able to carry out the order with no difficulty, the effect of hashish being such that one can shift easily from one activity to another. Kelley gave the same order in an unknown tongue to the dancing boys, who now acted in a seamanlike manner—some naked, some with scarfs twisted around their hips—as they went about their duties singing strange songs. So sails were speedily set and we got under way, for where I did not know.

Some of the boys have hammocks and sleep on deck, but we are often two to a bunk in the forecastle. Since we now have a double crew, there is much time with nothing to do, and I have been able to acquaint myself to some extent with the strange history of these transvestite boys.

Some of them are dancing boys from Morocco, others from Tripoli, Madagascar, and Central Africa. There are a few from India and the East Indies who have served on pirate vessels in the Red Sea, where they preyed on merchant vessels and other pirates alike, the method of operation being this: some would join the crew of a ship, selling their favors and insinuating themselves into key positions. Then the crew sights an apparently unarmed vessel carrying a cargo of beautiful women all singing and dancing lewdly and promising the mariners their bodies. Once on board the "women" pull out hidden pistols and cutlasses, while their accomplices on shipboard do the same, and The Siren now uncovers its cannons—so that the ship would often be taken without the loss of a single life. Often the boys would sign on as cooks—at which trade they all excel—and then drug the entire crew. However, word of their operations spread rapidly and they are now fleeing from pirates and naval patrols alike, having as the French say, brûlé—burnt down—the Red Sea area.

Kelley told me his story. He started his career as a merchant seaman. In the course of an argument he killed the quartermaster, for which he was tried and sentenced to hang. His ship at that time was in the harbor of Tangier. The sentence was carried out in the marketplace, but some pirates who were present cut him down, carried him to their ship, and revived him. It was thought that a man who had been hanged and brought back to life would not only bring luck to their venture but also ensure protection against the fate from which he had been rescued. While he was still insensible the pirates rubbed red ink into the hemp marks, so that he seemed to have a red rope always around his neck.

The pirate ship was commanded by Skipper Nordenholz, a renegade from the Dutch Navy who was still able to pass his ship as an honest merchant vessel flying the Dutch flag. Strobe was second in command. Barely had they left Tangier headed for the Red Sea via the Cape of Good Hope when a mutiny broke out. The crew was in disagreement as to the destination, being minded to head for the West Indies. They had also conceived a contempt for Strobe as an effeminate dandy. After he had killed five of the ringleaders they were forced to revise this opinion. The mutinous crew was then put ashore and a crew of acrobats and dancing boys taken on, since Nordenholz had already devised a way in which they could be put to use.

Kelley claims to have learned the secrets of death on the gallows, which gives him invincible skill as a swordsman and such sexual prowess that no man or woman can resist him, with the exception of Captain Strobe, whom he regards as more than human. "Voici ma lettre de marque," he says, running his fingers along the rope mark. (A letter of marque was issued to privateers by their government, authorizing them to prey on enemy vessels in the capacity of accredited combatants, and thus distinguishing them from common pirates. Such a letter often, but by no means always, saved the bearer from the gallows.) Kelley tells me that the mere sight of his hemp marks instills in adversaries a weakness and terror equal to the apparition of Death Himself.

I asked Kelley what it feels like to be hanged.

"At first I was sensible of very great pain due to the weight of my body and felt my spirits in a strange commotion violently pressed upwards. After they reached my head, I saw a bright blaze of light which seemed to go out at my eyes with a flash. Then I lost all sense of pain. But after I was cut down, I felt such intolerable pain from the prickings and shootings as my blood and spirits returned that I wished those who cut me down could have been hanged."*

* Daniel P. Mannix, The History of Torture (New York, Dell, 1964).

The reader may question how I find time to write this account on a sea voyage in a crowded forecastle. The answer is that I made very short notes each day, with the intent of expanding them later. I now have two hours of leisure each day to reconstruct a narrative from these notes, since Strobe has placed a desk and writing material at my disposal, being interested for some reason in printing my account.

Each evening all the boys strip and wash in buckets of salt water, whereupon various sexual games and contests take place. In one such game each boy places a gold piece on the deck, and the first to ejaculate wins the gold. There are also contests for distance.

Since there is plenty of powder and shot on board, there have been a few contests with pistols and muskets. I have won some gold, being careful not to best Kelley, though I am sure I could have done so. I feel that he could prove a most dangerous enemy. There is much here that I do not understand.

Are you in salt

Back in New York I call the Greens from my loft. I've put $5,000 worth of security into this space, The windows are shatterproof glass with rolling bars. The door is two inches of solid steel from an old bank vault. It gives you a safe feeling, like being in Switzerland.

Mr. Green can see me right away. He gives an address on Spring Street. Middle-class loft ... big modern kitchen ... Siamese cat ... plants. Mrs. Green is a beautiful woman, red hair, green eyes, a faraway dreamy look. I notice Journeys out of the Body, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, the Castaneda books. Mr. Green mixes me a Chivas Regal.

I clarify my position...."Private investigator...no authority to make an arrest ... I can only pass evidence along to the local police....Frankly, in this case I can't hold out much hope of obtaining an arrest, let alone a conviction."

"We still want to retain you."

"Why, exactly?"

"We want to know the truth," said Mrs. Green. "Whether the killers can be brought to trial or not."

I pull out the questionnaire with Jerry's medical history. "It says here that Jerry had scarlet fever at the age of four."

"Yes. We were living in Saint Louis at the time," said Mrs. Green.

"Who was the doctor?"

"Old Doctor Greenbaum. He lived next door."

"Is he still alive?"

"No, he died ten years ago."

"And he made the diagnosis?"

"Yes."

"Would you say that he was a competent diagnostician?"

"Not really," said Mr. Green. "But why is this important?"

"Jerry apparently had an attack of scarlet fever or something similar shortly before he was killed." I turned to Mrs. Green. "Do you remember the details? How the illness started?"

Why, yes. It was a Thursday and he had taken a ride with an English governess we had them. When he got back he was shivering and feverish and he had a rash. I thought it was measles and called Doctor Greenbaum. He said it wasn't a measles rash, that it was probably a light case of scarlet fever. He prescribed Aureomycin and the fever went away in a few days."

"Was Jerry delirious at any time during this illness?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact he was. He seemed quite frightened and talked about 'animals in the wall.'"

"Do you remember what animals, Mrs. Green?"

"He mentioned a giraffe and a kangaroo."

"Do you remember anything else?"

"... Yes," she said after a pause. "There was a strange smell in the room ... sort of a musky smell ... like a zoo."

"Did Doctor Greenbaum comment on this odor?"

"No, I think he had a cold at the time."

"Did you notice it, Mr. Green?"

"Well, yes, it was on the sheets and blankets when we sent them to the cleaners.... Exactly how was Jerry killed, Mr. Snide?"

"A massive overdose of heroin."

"He wasn't—"

"No, he wasn't an addict, and the Greek police are convinced the heroin was not self-administered."

"Do you have any idea why he would have been murdered?"

"I'm not at all sure, Mr. Green. It could have been a case of mistaken identity."

When I got to the office the next day my assistant, Jim Brady, was already there, having come straight from the airport. He is very slim, six feet, 135 pounds, black Irish. Actually he is twenty-eight but he looks eighteen, and often has to show his I.D. card to be served in a bar. He handed me a packet from Athens: a photograph, and a message from Dimitri typed on yellow paper in telegraph style:

HAVE FOUND VILLA WHERE JERRY GREEN WAS KILLED STOP ON MAINLAND FORTY MILES FROM ATHENS STOP HEAD STILL MISSING STOP VILLA RENTED THROUGH LONDON TRAVEL AGENCY STOP FALSE NAMES STOP

DIMITRI

The photo showed a bare high-ceiling room with exposed beams. There was a heavy iron lantern-hook in one beam. Dimitri had circled this hook in white ink and had written under it: "Traces of rope fiber."

"A Mr. Everson called," said Jim. "His son is missing. I made an appointment."

"Where is he missing?"

"In Mexico. A Mayan archeologist. Missing six weeks. I sent Mr. Everson the questionnaire and asked him for pictures of the boy."

"Good." I had no special feeling about this case, but it was taking me in the direction I wanted to go.

Back at the loft we decided to try some sex magic. According to psychic dogma, sex itself is incidental and should be subordinated to the intent of the ritual. But I don't believe in rules. What happens, happens.

The altar is set up for an Egyptian rite timed for sunset, which is in ten minutes. It is a slab of white marble about three feet square. We mark out the cardinal points. A hyacinth in a pot for earth: North. A red candle for fire: South. An alabaster bowl of water for water: East. A glyph in gold on white parchment for air: West. We then put up the glyphs for the rite, in gold on white parchment, on the west wall, since this is the sundown rite and we are facing west. Also we place on the altar a bowl of water, a bowl of milk, an incense burner, some rose essence, and a sprig of mint.

All set, we strip down to sky clothes and we are both stiff before we can get our clothes off. I pick up an ivory wand and draw a circle around our bodies while we both intone translations of the rite, reading from the glyphs on the wall.

"Let the Shining Ones not have power over me." Jim reads it like the Catholic litany and we are both laughing.

"I have purified myself."

We dip water from the bowl and touch our foreheads.

"I have anointed myself with the unguents."

We dip the special ointment out of an alabaster jar, touching foreheads, insides of the wrists, and the base of the spine, since the rite will have a sexual climax.

"I bring to you perfume and incense."

We add more incense, a few drops of rose oil, and a pinch of benzoin to the burner.

We pay homage to the four cardinal points as we invoke Set instead of Khentamentiu, since this is in some sense a black ritual. It is now exactly the hour of sunset, and we pay homage to Tem, since, Ra, in his setting, takes that name. We make lustrations with water and milk to the cardinal points, dipping a mint sprig into the bowls as we invoke the shining elementals. It is time now for the ritual climax, in which the gods possess our bodies and the magical incantation is projected in the moment of orgasm and visualized as an outpouring of liquid gold.

"My phallus is that of Amsu."

I bend over and Jim rubs the ointment up my ass and slides his cock in. A roaring sound in my ears as pictures and tapes swirl in my brain. Shadowy figures rise beyond the candlelight: the goddess Ix Tab, patroness of those who hang themselves ... a vista of gallows and burning cities from Bosch ... Set ... Osiris ... smell of the sea ... Jerry hanging naked from the beam. A sweet rotten red musky metal smell swirls round our bodies palpable as a haze, and as I start to ejaculate, the room gets lighter. At first I think the candles have flared up and then I see Jerry standing there naked, his body radiating light. There is a skeleton grin on his face, which fades to the enigmatic smile on the statues of archaic Greek youths and then he changes into Dimitri, with a quizzical amused expression.

So we send the Shining Ones home and go to bed.

"Why do you thing the head was cut off?" asks Jim.

"Obvious reason: to obscure the cause of death in case the body was found. But they didn't figure on the body being found. There was some special purpose they had in mind, to use both the head and the body." Drawings of transplanted monkey heads flash in front of my eyes.

"Where do you think the head is now?"

"In New York."

Horse hattock

to ride to ride

Next day when we got to the office there was a telegram from Dimitri:

HAVE SUSPECT IN CUSTODY WHO WITNESSED DEATH OF JERRY GREEN STOP WIRE IF WISH TO INTERVIEW SUSPECT

We took the next plane to Athens and checked into the Hilton. Dimitri sent a car for us.

Jim was a bit stiff when they shook hands in Dimitri's air-conditioned office ... wall-to-wall blue carpet, a desk, leather-covered chairs, a picture of the Parthenon on the wall, everything neat and impersonal as a room in the Hilton.

Dimitri raised one eyebrow. "I infer you disapprove of our politics, Mr. Brady. For myself I disapprove of any politics. Please understand that I stand to gain nothing from this investigation. My political superiors want the whole thing dropped ... a few degenerate foreigners ... it's bad for the tourist business."

Jim blushed sulkily and looked at his shoes and turned one foot sideways.

"What about this witness you got?" I asked.

Dimitri leaned back in his chair behind the desk and put the tips of his fingers together. "Ah yes—Adam North, the perfect witness. Survived his perfection because he was in custody. On the morning that the Green boy was killed, September eighteenth, young North was arrested with a quarter-ounce of heroin in his possession. When I saw the laboratory report I ordered him placed in isolation. The heroin he had been buying from street pushers was about ten percent. This was almost one hundred percent. It would have killed him in a matter of seconds."

"Well, if they would kill him to shut him up about something, why let him know about it in the first place?" Jim asked.

"A searching question. You see, he was a sort of camera from which a film could be withdrawn and developed. But first the bare bones, later the meat. Adam North had been approached by someone fitting"—Dimitri glanced at me—"your description of Marty Blum, and offered a quarter-ounce of heroin plus a thousand-dollar bonus to be paid in two installments to witness a magical ritual involving a simulated execution. He was suspicious."

Dimitri turned on a tape recorder. "Why me?" said a stupid surly young voice. It went on.

"Sot his character from a comic strip says I am a perfect. 'A perfect what?' I ask him. 'A perfect witness,' he tells me. He has five C-notes in his hand , 'Well, all right,' I say. 'But there is a condition,' he says. 'You must promise to refrain from heroin or any other drug for three days prior to the ceremony. You have to be in a pure condition.' 'Promise on my scout's honor,' I told him and he lays the bread on me. 'But one more thing,' he says. He gives me a color picture of a kid with red hair who looks sorta like me. 'This is the subject. You will concentrate on this picture for the next three days.' So I tell him 'Sure' and split. And would you believe it, with five hundred cools in my pocket I can't score for shit nowhere no way. So when the chauffeur comes to pick me up in a Daimler I am sick as a dog."

Dimitri shuts off the tape recorder. "He was driven to a villa outside Athens where he witnessed a bizarre ceremony culminating in the hanging of the Green boy. Back in Athens he was given the quarter-ounce of heroin. He was on his way back to his girl friend's apartment when the arrest was made."

"It still doesn't make any sense," Jim said. "They drag him in as a witness, God knows why, then knock him to shut him up."

"They did not intend to shut him up. They intended to open him and extract the film. Adam North was a perfect witness. He is Jerry's age, born on the same day, and resembles him enough to be a twin brother. You are acquainted with the symptoms of heroin withdrawal ... the painful intensity of impressions, light fever, spontaneous orgasms ... a sensitized film. And a heroin overdose is the easiest of deaths, so the pictures registered on the sensitized withdrawal film come off without distortion in a heroin O.D."

"I see," said Jim.

"It's all here on the tape, but I think you would like to see this boy. He is, I should tell you, retarded."

As we are going down in the elevator, Dimitri continued. "There is reason to suspect a latent psychosis, masked by his addiction."

"Is he receiving any medication?" I asked.

"Yes—methadone, orally. I don't want his disorder to surface here."

"You mean that he could become a public charge?" I asked.

"More than that—he could become a sanitary hazard."

We saw Adam North in one of the interrogation rooms, under fluorescent lights. A table, a tape recorder, four chairs. He was a handsome blond kid with green eyes. The resemblance to Jerry was remarkable. However, while Jerry was described as very bright and quick, this boy had a slack, vacuous, stupid look about him, sleepy and sullen like a lizard resentfully aroused from hibernation. Dimitri explained that we were investigators hired by Jerry's family, and we had a few questions. The boy looked down at the table in front of him and said nothing.

"This man who offered you the quarter-ounce of H. You'd seen him before?" I asked.

"Yeah. When I first came here he steered me to a score. I figure he is creaming off a percentage."

"What did he look like?"

"Gray face, pockmarks, stocky medium build, fancy purple vest and watch chain. Like he stepped out of the 1890s. Didn't seem to feel the heat."

"Anything else?"

"Funny smell about him, like something rotten in a refrigerator."

"Please describe the ritual you witnessed," I said.

"Allow me," interrupted Dimitri. He looked at the boy and said, "Ganymede" and snapped his fingers. The boy shivered and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. When he spoke, his voice was altered beyond recognition. I had the impression he was translating the words from another tongue, a language of giggles and turkey gobbles and coos and purrs and whimpers and trills.

"Ganymede Hotel ... shutters closed ... naked on the bed ... Jerry's picture ... it's coming alive ... gets me hot to look at it ... I know he's in a room just like this ... waiting ... there's a smell in the room, his smell ... I can smell what's going to happen ... naked with animal masks ... demon masks ... I'm naked but I don't have a mask. We are standing on a stage ... translucent noose ... it's squirming like a snake ... Jerry is led in naked by a twin sister ... can't hardly tell them apart. There's a red haze over everything, and the smell—" The kid whimpered and squirmed and rubbed his crotch. "She's tying his hands behind him with a red scarf ... she's got the noose around his neck ... It's growing into him ... his cock is coming up and he gets red all over right down to his toenails—we call it a red-on...." Adam giggled. "The platform falls out from under him and he's hanging there kicking. He goes off three times in a row. His twin sister is catching the seed in a bottle. It's going to grow...." The boy opened his eyes and looked uncertainly at Dimitri, who shook his head in mild reproof.

"You still think all this happened, Adam?"

"Well, sure, Doctor, I remember it."

"You remember dreams too. Your story has been checked and found to be without factual foundation. This was hardly necessary since you have been under constant surveillance since your arrival in Athens. The heroin you were taking has been analyzed. It contains certain impurities which can cause a temporary psychosis with just such bizarre hallucinations as you describe. We were looking for the wholesalers who were distributing this poisonous heroin. We have them now. The case is closed. I advise you to forget all about it. You will be released tomorrow. The consulate has arranged for you to work your way home on a freighter."

The boy was led away by a white-coated attendant.

"What about the other witnesses, who wore masks?" I asked Dimitri.

"I surmised that they would be eligible for immediate disposal. A charter plane for London leaving Athens the day after the ritual murder crashed in Yugoslavia. There were no survivors. I checked the passenger list with my police contacts in England. Seven of the passengers belonged to a Druid cult suspected of robbing graves and performing black-magic rituals with animal sacrifices. One of the animals allegedly sacrificed was a horse. Such an act is considerably more shocking to the British sensibility than human sacrifice."

"They sacrificed a horse?"

"It's an old Scythian practice. A naked youth mounts the horse, slits its throat and rides it to the ground. Dangerous, I'm told. Rather like your American rodeos."

"What about the twin sister who hanged him?" Jim demanded.

Dimitri opened a file. "'She' is a transvestite, Arn West, born Arnold Atkins at Newcastle upon Tyne. A topflight ultra-expensive assassin specializing in sexual techniques and poisons. His consultation fee to listen to a proposition is a hundred thousand dollars, nonrefundable. Known as the Popper, the Blue Octopus, the Siren Cloak.

"And now, would you gentlemen care to join me for dinner? I would like to hear from you, Mr. Snide, the complete story and a version edited for the so limited police mentality."

Dimitri's house was near the American embassy. It was not the sort of house you would expect a police official on a modest salary to own. It took up almost half a block. The grounds were surrounded by high walls, with six feet of barbed wire on top. The door looked like a bank vault.

Dimitri led the way down a hall with red-tiled floor into a book-lined room. French doors opened onto a patio about seventy feet long and forty feet wide. I could see a pool, trees and flowers. Jim and I sat down and Dimitri mixed drinks. I glanced at the books: magic, demonology, a number of medical books, a shelf of Egyptology and books on the Mayans and Aztecs.

I told Dimitri what I knew and what I suspected. It took about half an hour. After I had finished, he sat for some time in silence, looking down into his drink.

"Well, Mr. Snide," he said at last. "It would seem that your case is closed. The killers are dead."

"But they were only—"

"Exactly: Servants. Dupes. Hired killers, paid off with a special form of death. You will recognize the rite as the Egyptian sunset rite dedicated to Set. A sacrifice involving both sex and death is the most potent projection of magical intention. The participants did not know that one of the intentions they were projecting was their own death in a plane crash."

"Any evidence of sabotage?"

"No. But there was not much left of the plane. The crash occurred outside Zagreb. Pilot was off course and flying low. It looks like pilot error. There are, of course, techniques for producing such errors.... You are still intending to continue on this case? To find the higher-ups? And why exactly?"

"Look, Colonel, this didn't start with the Green case. These people are old enemies."

"Do not be in a hurry to dispose of old enemies. What would you do without them? Look at it this way: You are retained to find a killer. You turn up a hired assassin. You are not satisfied. You want to find the man who hired him. You find another servant. You are not satisfied. You find another servant, and another, right up to Mr. or Mrs. Big—who turns out to be yet another servant ... a servant of forces and powers you cannot reach. Where do you stop? Where do you draw the line?"

He had a point.

He went on: "Let us consider what has happened here. A boy has been hanged for ritual and magical purposes. Is this so startling? ... You have read The Bog People?"

I nodded.

"Well, a modest consumption of one nude hanging a year during the spring festivals ... such festivals, within reason, could serve as a safety valve.... After all, worse things happen every day. Certainly this is a minor matter compared with Hiroshima, Vietnam, mass pollution, droughts, famines ... you have to take a broad general view of things."

"It might not be within reason at all. It might become pandemic."

"Yes ... the Aztecs got rather out of hand. But you are referring to your virus theory. Shall we call it 'Virus B-23'? The 'Hanging Fever'? And you are extrapolating from two cases which may not be connected. Peter Winkler may have died from something altogether different. I know you do not want to entertain such a possibility, but suppose that such an epidemic does occur?" He paused. "How old was Winkler?"

"In his early fifties."

"So. Jerry was a carrier of the illness. He did not die of it directly. Winkler, who was thirty years older, died in a few days. Well ... there are those who think a selective pestilence is the most humane solution to overpopulation and the attendant impasses of pollution, inflation, and exhaustion of natural resources. A plague that kills the old and leaves the young, minus a reasonable percentage ... one might be tempted to let such an epidemic run its course even if one had the power to stop it."

"Colonel I have a hunch that what we might find in the South American laboratories would make the story we heard from Adam North sound like a mild Gothic romance for old ladies and children."

"Exactly what I am getting at, Mr. Snide. There are risks not worth taking. There are things better left unseen and unknown."

"But somebody has to see and know them eventually. Otherwise there is no protection."

"That somebody who has to see and know may not be you. Think of your own life, and that of your assistant. You may not be called upon to act in this matter."

"You have a point."

"He sure does," said Jim.

"Mr. Snide, do you consider Hiroshima a crime?"

"Yes."

"Were you ever tempted to go after the higher-ups?"

"No. It wasn't my business."

"The same considerations may apply here. There is, however, one thing you can do: find the head and exorcise it. I have already done this with the body. Mr. Green agreed to burial here in the American cemetery."

He walked across the room to a locked cabinet and returned with an amulet: runic lettering on what looked like parchment in an iron locket. "Not parchment—human skin ..." he told me. "The ceremony is quite simple: the head is placed in a magic circle on which you have marked the cardinal points. You repeat three times: 'Back to water. Back to fire. Back to air. Back to earth.' You then touch the crown of the head, the forehead, and the spot behind the right ear, in this case—he was left-handed—with the amulet."

There was a knock at the door, and a middle-aged Greek woman with a mustache wheeled in the dinner of red mullet and Greek salad. After dinner and brandy we got up to take our leave.

"I have said you may not be called upon to act. On the other hand, you may be called upon. You will know if this happens, and you will need help. I can give you a contact in Mexico City ... 18 Callejón de la Esperanze."

"Got it," said Jim.

"My driver will take you back to the Hilton."

"Nightcap?"

"No," Jim said. "I've got a headache. I'm going up to the room."

"I'll check the bar. See you very shortly." I had seen someone I knew from the American Embassy. Probably CIA. I could feel that he wanted to talk to me.

He looked up when I walked in, nodded and asked me to join him. He was young, thin, sandy-haired, glasses ... refined and rather academic-looking. He signaled the waiter and I ordered a beer.

After the waiter had brought the beer and gone back to the bar, the man leaned forward, speaking in a low precise voice.

"Shocking thing about the Green boy," He tried to look concerned and sympathetic but his eyes were cold and probing. I would have to be very careful not to tell him anything he didn't already know.

"Yes, isn't it."

"I understood it was uh well, a sex murder." He looked about as embarrassed and salacious as a shark. He was cold and fishy like the Countess de Gulpa. I remembered that he was rich.

"Something like that."

"It must have been terrible for the family. You didn't tell them the truth?"

Watch yourself, Clem.... "I'm not sure I know the truth. The story I actually told them is of course a confidential matter...."

"Of course. Profession ethics." Without a trace of overt irony, he managed to convey a vast icy contempt for me and my profession. I just nodded. He went on. "Strange chap, Dimitri."

"He seems very efficient."

"Very. It doesn't always pay to be too efficient."

"The Chinese say it is well to make a mistake now and then."

"Did you know that Dimitri has resigned?"

"He didn't say so...."

"He was the object of professional jealousy. Career men resent someone with independent means who doesn't really need the job. I should know." He smiled ruefully, trying to look boyish.

"Well, perhaps you can avoid the error of overefficiency."

He let that roll of him. "I suppose these hippies go in for all sorts of strange far-out sex cults...."

"I have found their se practices to be on the whole rather boringly ordinary...."

"You've read Future Shock, haven't you?"

"Skipped through it."

"It's worth look at carefully."

"I found The Biological Time Bomb more interesting."

He ignored this . "Dimitri's dabbling in magic hasn't done him any good either ... career-wise, I mean."

I could tell he knew I had just been to Dimitri's house for dinner. He was hoping I would tell him something about the house: books, decorations.... Which meant he had never been there. A slight spasm of exasperation passed over his face like a seismic tremor. His face went dead and smooth as a mask, and he said slowly: "Isn't your assistant awfully young for the kind of work you're doing?"

"Aren't you a bit young for the kind of work you're doing?"

He decided to laugh. "Well, youth at the helm. Have another beer?"

"No thanks. Got an early plane to catch." I stood up. "Well, good night, Skipper."

He decided not to laugh. He just nodded silently. As I walked out of the bar I knew that he deliberately was not looking after me.

No doubt about it. I had been warned in no uncertain terms to lay off and stay out, and I didn't like it—especially coming at a time when I had about decided to lay off and stay out. And I didn't like having Jim threatened by a snot-nosed CIA punk. The Mafia couldn't have been much cruder.

"Your assistant very young man. You looka the book called Future Shock maybe?"

When I got to the room I found the door open. As I stepped in I caught a whiff of the fever smell—the rank animal smell of Jerry's naked headless body. Jim was lying on the bed covered by a sheet up to his waist. As I looked at him I felt a prickling up the back of my neck. I was looking at Jerry's face, which wore a wolfish grin, his eyes sputtering green fire.

Port Roger

Page from Strobe's notebook:

The essence of sleight of hand is distraction and misdirection. If someone can be convinced that he has, through his own perspicacity, divined your hidden purposes, he will not look further.

How much does he know or suspect? He knows that the capture was prearranged. He surmises an alliance between the pirates and the Pembertons, involving trade in the western hemisphere, the planting of opium in Mexico, and the cultivation of other crops and products now imported from the Near and Far East. He suspects, or soon will, that this alliance may extend to political and military revolution, and secession from England and Spain.

What does he this is expected from him? The role of gunsmith and inventor, which is partially true. I must not underestimate him. He has already quite literally seen through Mr. Thomas. How long before he will see through the others? Must be careful of Kelley. The most necessary servants are always the most dangerous. He is a cunning and devious little beast.

Noah writes that I am interested in publishing his diaries "for some reason." Does he have any inkling what reason? He must be kept very busy as a gunsmith lest he realize his primary role.

How long will it take him to find out that Captain Jones and Captain Nordenholz are interchangeable? To grasp for the matter the full significance of his own name? To see that I am the de Fuentes twins? Finally, to know that I am also—?

Scarf around his neck immediately arranged between

them turning to leer and wink at the armory. I am Captain

Strobe, a slim siren. Coat glittering in the sun flute

from a distant star in their buttocks. Now I was smoke called

Kelly pale in my mind together with a Yes. Sandy hairs,

member erect marching around was cleared. Dancing boys to the

music played their bags wriggling pale groin toes

twisted. We now have a double crew down the Red Sea area. Story

started with an argument sentences to hang. The sentence

preyed on merchant vessels carrying the cargo beautiful

hanged back to life women dancing lewdly and ensuring

protection against their bodies once one had been rescued. He

claimed to have learned the gallows smile. Gasping his lips back

surged erect he ejaculated noose and knot feet

across the floor. Spirits around his neck. Spurting six.

Today we reached Port Roger on the coast of Panama. This was formerly Fort Pheasant and had been used as a base by English pirates sixty years ago. The coast here is highly dangerous for the navigation of large vessels, owing to shallows and reefs. Port Roger is one of the few deepwater harbors. It is, however, so difficult to reach that only a navigator with exact knowledge of the passage can hope to do so.

The coastline is a distant green smudge on our starboard side. Strobe and Thomas scan the skyline with telescopes.

"Guarda costa..." the boys mutter uneasily.

Capture by the Spanish means torture or, at best, slavery. If overtaken by a Spanish ship we will abandon ship in the lifeboats, leaving The Great White to the Spanish. The boarding party will receive a surprise, for I have arranged a device which will explode the entire cargo of powder as soon as the doors to the hold are opened.

Now the ship rounds and heads towards land. Strobe, stripped to the waist, has taken the wheel, his thin body infused with alertness. Two boys are taking soundings on both sides, and the escort ship is a hundred yards beyond us. We are sailing through a narrow channel in a reef, Mr. Thomas and Kelley calling out orders as the ship slips like a snake through a strip of blue water. The coastline is ever clearer, trees slowly appearing and low hills in a shimmer of heat. An inaudible twang like a loosed bowstring as the ship glides into a deep blue harbor a few hundred yards from the shore, where waves break on a crescent of sand.

We drop anchor a bare hundred yards from the beach, The Siren a like distance behind us. From the harbor the town is difficult to discern, being sheltered by a thick growth of bamboo and set among trees and vines. I had the curious impression of looking at a painting in a gold frame: the two ships riding at anchor in the still blue harbor, a cool morning breeze, and written on the bottom of the frame: "Port Roger—April 1, 1702."

The Oarsmen

Thin copper-red bodies leaning against the oars as boats glide forward in a silver spray of surf and flying fish against a background of beach and palm trees.

Unloading the Cargo

Bright red gums, sharp white teeth, buttocks exposed as the cargo is passed over the side with much singing and laughter. The boys make up songs about the cargo as it is passed along to the rafts and relayed to the beach. These songs, translated by Kelley, who has sidled up to me in his pushy ghost way, seem flatly idiotic.

The boys are unloading powder kegs. We offer to help but the Indians sing. "White man's hands slippery like rotten bananas." Now they pass up the powder kegs.... "This go boom boom up question's ass."

I ask Kelley what is this "question"?

"Short for Inquisition."

Boy holds up keg of opium.... "Spanish no get this, shit come in pants, very dirty muy sucio."

"And Kiki is getting a hard-on because he knows I look at his asshole when he bends over for opio."

"I was thinking of Maria."

"Take off the cloth and show us Maria."

Kiki blushes, but he must obey the rules of this game. He takes off his loincloth, smiling shyly to reveal lush purple-pink genitals, nuts tight, cock straining up, the flower smell of it fills the hold.

"Maria his asshole. I fuck him her spurt six feet...." He looks around, challenging the boys who sit on the opium kegs.

Some of the boys extract gold nuggets from little pouches at their belts cunningly contrived from Spanish testicles.

"He love this so much I keep it in his nuts. Soon get rich like him."

"That should be easy for a bastard like you."

"Put your yellow shit where your mouth is, sister fucker. I see you do it with my own eyes."

An area is cleared and carefully measured off and the bets placed. Kiki bends over, hands on knees. The other boy, who looks like Kiki's twin brother, uncorks a little-phallus-shaped vessel of pink coral, and a powerful odor fills the hold, already heavy with the smells of opium, hashish, and salt water drying on young bodies. The reek from the pink coral container is a heavy sweet rotten musky smell like a perfumed corpse, or like the smell you catch after lightning strikes.

The unguent glistens in the dim light of the hold, where red limbs stir lazily like fish in black water. Now the boy rubs the glowing unguent up Kiki's ass and Kiki writhes and bares his teeth as the other boy slides it in and they both light up and glow—for a moment the hold is bright as day with every face and body clearly outlined.

Radiant Boys

"Bucking for Radiant Bars," Kelley mutters sourly.

"Radiant Bars?" I ask.

"Yeah. It's the old army game from here to eternity. Now you may know Radiant Boys is a special type ghost, when you see one you die soon after. Of course you can get used to anything and bright boys is all in the day's work to me. Now a good strong Radiant Boy can light up a room with a twenty-foot ceiling. One of the best lived in an Irish castle and was the ghost of a ten-year-old boy strangled by his insane mother. That one killed three cabinet ministers and the vicar.

"So the dirty-trick boys get wind of this good thing and set up Project RB to take care of key enemy personnel. They don't even know what buttons to push. Project RB is dumped into the lap of us tech sergeants. We get half-hanged, half-drowned, half-strangled, the medics pawing us over.... 'How did it feel? Did you get radiant?'

"Put your shit where the bys were. Radiant Boys is a special strike of death The ghost lacks water. And a powerful odor filled the RB project. Half-hanged half-bodies, the smell is pawing us over. Sweet rotten musky smell like. Then some smart-pants-come-lately pulls the radiant ass out from under you and makes shavetail out of it. Facts of like in the army. Uncorks the old army game screwing tech sergeant like me."

Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories—as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.

Captain Nordenholz Disembarks at Port Roger

There he is standing on a ruined pier left over from the English in some uniform of his own devising. He is flanked by Opium Jones, the de Fuentes twins and Captain Strobe, all looking like a troupe of traveling players a bit down on their luck but united in determination to play out their assigned roles. Boys trail behind them, carrying an assortment of bags, cases, and chests. They walk across the beach and disappear one after another into a wall of leaves.

I don't know what gave me such an impression of shabbiness about this procession, since they all must have chests of gold and precious stones, but for a moment they appeared to my eyes as seedy players with grand roles but no money to pay the rent. The jewels and the gold are false, the curtains patched and shredded and torn, the theater long closed. I was smitten by a feeling of sadness and desolation, as the words of the Immortal Bard came to my mind:

There our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air....

We have landed. Captain Strobe meets us on the beach emerging from a picture puzzle, his shirt and pants splotched with green and brown, stirring slightly in the afternoon breeze. We follow him as he walks towards a seemingly unbroken line of undergrowth. He pushes aside branches to reveal a winding path through a tangle of bamboo and thorn.

We walk for perhaps a quarter-mile as the path winds upward and ends in a screen of bamboo. We are quite close before I realize that the bamboo trees are painted on a green door that swings open like the magic door in a book I have seen somewhere long ago. We step through into the town of Port Roger.

We are standing in a walled enclosure like a vast garden, with trees and flowers, paths and pools. I can see buildings along the sides of the square, all painted to blend with the surroundings so that the buildings seem but a reflection of the trees and vines and flowers stirring in a slight breeze that seems to shake the walls, the whole scene insubstantial as a mirage.

This first glimpse of Port Roger occurred just as some hashish candy I had ingested on the boat started to take effect, producing a hiatus in my mind and the interruption of verbal thought, followed by a sharp jolt as if something had entered my body. I caught a whiff of perfume and a sound of distant flutes.

A long cool room with a counter, behind which are three generations of Chinese. A smell of spices and dried fish. An Indian youth, naked except for a leather pouch that cups his genitals, is leaning forward on the counter examining a flintlock rifle, his smooth red buttocks protruding. He turns and smiles at us, showing white teeth and bright red gums. He has a gardenia behind his ear and his body gives off a sweet flower smell. Hammocks, blankets, machetes, cutlasses and flintlocks are on the counter.

Outside in the square, Strobe introduces me to a man with a strong square face, light blue eyes, and curly iron-gray hair. "This is Waring. He painted the town."

Waring gives me a smile and a handshake. He makes no secret of his dislike for Captain Strobe. Dislike is perhaps too strong a word since there is no hatred involved on either side. They meet as emissaries of two countries whose interests do no coincide at any point. I do not yet know what countries they represent.

Up to this moment I have been so completely charmed by Strobe's nonchalance that I have never stopped to ask myself: What is the source of his poise? Where did he buy it, and what did he pay? I see now that Strobe is an official and so is Waring, but they don't work for the same company. Perhaps they are both actors who never appear onstage together, their relationship limited to curt offstage nods.

"I'll show you to your digs," says Strobe.

We go through a massive studded door into a patio, cool and shady with trees, flowering shrubs, and a pool. The patio is a miniature version of the town square. My attention is immediately arrested by a youth who is standing about thirty feet from the entrance executing a dance step, one hand on his hip and the other above his head. He has his back towards us and as we enter the courtyard he freezes in midstep, turning his head to point towards us. At this moment, everyone in the patio looks at us.

The youth pivots and advances to meet us. He is wearing a purple silk vest which is open in front, and his arms are bare from the shoulders. His arms and torso are dark brown, lean and powerful, and he moves with the grace of a dancer. His complexion is dark, his hair black and kinky; one eye is gray-green, the other brown. A long scar runs down the left cheekbone to the chin. He makes a mock obeisance in front of Captain Strobe, who acknowledges it with his cool enigmatic smile. Then the youth turns to Bert Hansen: "Ah, the son of family ..." he sniffs. "The smell of gold is always welcome."

I notice that he can be warm and friendly from one eye and at the same time cold and mocking from the other. The effect is most disturbing. Bert Hansen, not knowing how to respond, smiles uncomfortably, and his smile is immediately mimicked by the youth with such precision that it seems for a moment they have switched places.

He ruffles the cabin boy's hair. "An Irish leprechaun." To Paco he says something in Portuguese. I recognize him as the regimental or shipboard joker and Master of Ceremonies, and Paco tells me his name is Juanito. I have no doubt that Juanito can, if necessary, back his sharp tongue with knife or cutlass.

Now it is my turn. I extend my hand, but instead of shaking it he turns it over and pretends to read the palm. "You are going to meet a handsome stranger." He beckons over his shoulder and calls out: "Hans." A boy who is standing by the pool throwing bits of bread to the fish turns and walks towards me. Wearing only blue trousers, he is shirtless and barefoot, with yellow hair and blue eyes. His tanned torso is smooth and hairless.

"Noah, the gunsmith, meet Hans, the gunsmith."

Hans brings his heels together and bows from the waist as we shake hands. He invites me to move into his room.

The patio is completely surrounded by a two-story wooden building. The second-floor rooms open onto a porch which runs all around the upper story and overhangs the ground floor. The rooms have no doors but at the top of the entrance there is a roll of mosquito netting which is lowered at twilight. The rooms are bare whitewashed cubicles with hooks for slinging hammocks and in the walls wooden pegs for clothes.

I take my gear to a room on the second floor and Hans introduces me to an American boy from Middletown who also shares the room. His name is Dink Rivers. His extraordinarily clear and direct gray eyes convey a shock of surprise and recognition as if we had known one another from somewhere else, and for a second I am in a dry streambed and he says: "If you still want me you'd better take me up soon." Next second I am back in the room at Port Roger, and we are shaking hands and he is saying:

"Nice to see you."

When I inquire as to his trade, he says that he is in physical education. Hans explains that he is a student and instructor in body control.

"He can stop his pulse, jump from twenty feet, stay under water five minutes and"—Hans grins—"go off no hands."

When I asked the boy to make a demonstration, he looked at me very earnestly without smiling and said that he would so when the time came.

There are four latrines: two for the ground floor and two for the upper floor, with toilets that can be flushed from a water tank which fills with rainwater drained off the roof. The patio contains a number of fig, orange, mango, and avocado trees and a menagerie of cats, iguanas, monkeys, and strange gentle animals with long snouts. On the ground floor there is a communal dining room, a kitchen, and a large bath where hot water is drawn into buckets. This is an Arab-style bath known as a haman.

The dancing boy are spreading mats under the portico, lighting their hashish pipes and brewing the sweet mint tea they drink constantly. Chinese youths are smoking opium. The entire crew of The Siren is housed here, and it is a mixed company: English, Irish, American, Dutch, German, Spanish, Arabs, Malay, Chinese, and Japanese. We stroll about, talking and introducing ourselves among the murmur of many tongues.

Old acquaintances are renewed and bonds of language and common places of origin discovered. There are some boy from New York who had been river pirates, and it turns out that they know Guy, Bill, and Adam. Five huge Nubians, liberated by Nordenholz from a slave ship, speak a language known only to themselves. Now word is passed along through Kelley and Juanito the Joker that Nordenholz will entertain us all for dinner at his house.

Hans looks at me with a knowing smile. "Fräuleins." He punches his finger in and out of his fist. The word echoes through the patio in many languages. Hans explains that there will be a number of women at the party who have come for the purpose of becoming impregnated.

Mother is the best bet

At twilight we make our way towards the house of Skipper Nordenholz, which is outside the town on higher ground overlooking the bay. He receives us in a large courtyard covered with lattice and mosquito netting. He has a thin aristocratic face, green eyes, a continual ironic smile, and an oblique way of talking and glancing down his nose at the same time....

"Most glad to welcome you to Port Roger. Hope that your quarters are convenient...." His English is almost perfect except for a slight inflection. "And now"—he glances down his nose and smiles as he gestures towards a table twenty feet long, laden with food: fish, oysters, shrimp, turkey, venison, wild pig, heaping bowls of rice, yams, corn, mangoes, oranges, and kegs of wine and beer—"chacun pour soi."

Everyone helps himself as Skipper Nordenholz indicates the seating arrangements. I am to sit at his table with Captain Strobe, the de Fuentes or Iguana twins as they are called, Opium Jones, Bert Hansen, Clinch Todd, Hans, and Kelley, and a Doctor Benway.

I will attempts to report as accurately as my memory permits the conversation at the dinner table. It was all concerned with weaponry and tactics but on a level I had never thought possible outside my lonely adolescent literary endeavors—for I have always been a scribbler and during the long shut-in winters filled notebook after notebook with lurid tales involving pirates from other planets, copulations with alien beings, and attacks of the Radiant Boys on the Citadel of the Inquisition. These notebooks with illustrations by Bert Hansen are in my possession, locked in a small chest. The conversation at the dinner table gave me the feeling that my notebooks were coming alive.

"For the benefit of you Great White boys"—Skipper Nordenholz looked down at the table and his eyes glinted with irony—"I would like to say that our enemy in this area is Spain, and our most powerful weapon is the freedom hopes of captive peoples now enslaved and peonized under the Spanish. But this weapon alone is not enough. First we must develop more efficient firearms and artillery. For this task we are depending on our able gunsmiths. We must also bear in mind that there are many different types of weapons. Opium Jones, we would be interested to hear your report."

Opium Jones got up and pulled down a map about six feet square on a roller, speaking in his dead opium voice.

"As you know, we have imported a quantity of poppy seed. We already have fields in these areas. Many other areas are suitable for cultivation. We are sending out opium advisers. Missionary work, we call it."

"And what do you see as the long-range effects of this brotherly project?" asked Nordenholz.

"In commercial terms, we can undersell eastern opium and take over the opium trade for the Americas, Canada, and the West Indies. Of course, we can expect a percentage of addicts in the areas of cultivation...."

What advantages and disadvantages do addicts present from the military point of view?"

"We can insure loyalty by impounding the opium crop. Addicts are more tolerant than non-addicts of cold, fatigue, and discomfort. They have a strong resistance amounting to virtual immunity to rheums, coughs, consumption, and other respiratory complaints. On the other hand, they are incapacitated if the opium supply is cut off."

"You also distribute hashish?"

"Certainly. A measure of seed with any purchase at our trading posts. Unlike opium it grows anywhere." Jones made a sweeping gesture. "The whole area is full of it."

Doctor Benway got up.

"Sickness has killed more soldiers than all the wars of history. We can turn illness to account. If your enemy is sick and you are well, the victory is yours. Healthy vultures can kill a sick lion. For example, my learned colleague Opium Jones has pointed out the immunity of addicts to respiratory afflictions. And I may add that periodic users who need not become addicted are equally immune. Consider the advantages conferred in an epidemic of the deadly Spanish influenza."

"Is there any way in which such an epidemic could be induced?"

"There are no problems. All respiratory complaints are transmitted by spitting, sneezing, and coughing. We need only collect these exudations and convey them into the enemy area. Consider other potential allies...." He pointed to areas on the map. "Malaria and yellow fever ... both imported from the Old World and flourishing in the New. My researches have convinced me that these illnesses are conveyed by mosquitoes. Mosquito netting, pine incense, oil of citronella rubbed on exposed skin areas ... these simple precautions—not, of course, infallible—will give us an advantage of fifty enemy cases to one. Dysentery, jaundice, typhoid fever ... these even more reliable allies are conveyed by the ingestion of infected excrement, which can be collected and introduced into the enemy water supply. Boiling all drinking water and abstaining from uncooked foods or unpeeled fruits yields one-hundred-percent immunity. We must, of course, always be careful not to encourage an illness for which we do not have a remedy or means of avoidance."

"Magical weapons?"

The Iguana girl spoke in her cool remote voice: "All religions are magical systems competing with other systems. The Church has driven magic into covens where practitioners are bound to each other by a common fear. We can unite the Americas into a vast coven of those who live under the Articles, united against the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant. It is our policy to encourage the practice of magic and to introduce alternative religious beliefs to break the Christian monopoly. We will set up an alternative calendar with non-Christian holidays. Christianity will then take its place as one of many religions protected from persecution by the Articles."

"Economic weapons?"

Strobe glanced through some notes. "We can, of course, undersell Eastern opium...and no doubt various other products such as tea, silk, and spices. But our most powerful monopoly is sugar and rum. Europe will pay our price for sugar."

My appetite was sharpened by hashish and I was the better able to savor the excellent repast: clams and oysters baked on hot coals with a dry white wine, wild turkey, pigeons, venison with a vintage Bordeaux, yams, corn, squash, and beans, avocadoes, mangoes, oranges and coconuts.

After the company had eaten their fill, Skipper Nordenholz tapped a glass for silence. He stood up in front of the map, speaking in a self-effacing manner with pauses and unfinished sentences as he gestured from time to time to the map with his long beautifully kept gambler's fingers.

"For the benefit of newcomers ... old hands may also profit ... a few indications and guidelines. We have already established fortified settlements ... as you see, practically unlimited. We need artisans, soldiers, sailors and farmers to man the settlements already founded and to establish new centers from the Bering Strait to the Cape. Breeding is encouraged ... is in fact a duty, I hope not too unpleasant. We expect that some of you will raise families. In any case, mothers and children ... well cared for, you understand. We need families to operate as intelligence agents in areas controlled by the enemy. We solicit those of you who are skilled as cooks, hotel keepers, doctors and pharmacists ... strategic occupations. One of our aims is to addict the Spanish to opium, thereby making them dependent on supplies which we can, at a crucial moment, cut off.... And now there are some uh young ladies who have been waiting to meet you."

He sprinkled some powder onto a brazier and a dense cloud of smoke arose with a sound of thunder. Skipper Nordenholz, Captain Strobe, Opium Jones, Doctor Benway, and the Iguana twins disappeared.

Now a wind sweeps through the courtyard of Skipper Nordenholz's house at Port Roger, extinguishing the candles. When they are relit, fifty girls and women are standing along the south wall of the courtyard. The men and boys range themselves along the north wall, facing the women.

Juanito, the joker and Master of Ceremonies, prances out to the middle of the courtyard and holds up his hands for silence.

"And now we will separate los maridos, the husbands, from los hombres conejos, the rabbit men, who fuck"—he does a speed-up bump and grind—"and run"—he does a pantomime of running, swinging his arms and pumping his legs. "All rabbit men will move to the east wall."

Hans grins and puts his hands to the sides of his head making rabbit ears and trots to the east wall followed by four German friends. A Berber boy with yellow hair, blue eyes and pointed ears plays the flute as he walks to the east wall. Jerry and the dancing boys hop along behind him chewing carrots. Bert Hansen pulls a rabbit out of a hat, bows and runs for the east wall to a chorus of boos from the women and applause from the east-wall boys. I wriggle my ears and twitch my nose and show my teeth and scamper for the east wall followed by Brady, Paco, Clinch Todd, Guy and Adam.... It's a landslide for the east wall.... Juanito looks around as if bewildered....

"Esperan esperan.... Wait wait...." He dances behind a screen and pops out naked except for a rabbit mask. He looks at the women. His ears quiver and point east....

"Y yo el más conejo de los conejos ... the rabbitest of the rabbits." He screeches and leaps for the east wall in great hops.

He doffs his rabbit mask and advances again to the center of the courtyard and places an hourglass on a little table. He turns to the prospective husbands who still stand by the north wall....

"You have two minutes to think."

He goes back to stand by the east wall. As the sand trickles I study these faces. If we are the fish, they are the water in which we will swim. They will hide us, provide us with weapons, guides, and information. They will carry out missions of sabotage behind enemy lines. Some of them will run inns catering to officials, priests, and generals. Others will become doctors and druggists. They are skilled in the use of subtle drugs and poisons. They will implement Benway's program of germ warfare. A few last-minute rabbits as the sand runs out. Then wives and husbands pair off and retire to private rooms.

Juanito leaps up and does a flamenco dance as we move back to the north wall facing the women, of whom thirty remain. They present a wide variety of physical types: blondes, redheads, Indian, Chinese, Negro, Portuguese, Spanish, Malay, Japanese, and some mixed blood. Preparations are under way. The dancing boys whisk away plates and lay down pallets. Incense burners are lit, musical instruments appear, props and costumes are laid out: goatskins of Boujeloud, skeleton suits, wings, animal and god masks. Two hangman's nooses dangle from a beam, the rope passing through two pulleys to facilitate suspension. I note that the ropes are elastic, and the nooses covered in soft leather.

Juanito announces: "Rabbit men and rabbit women, prepare to meet your makers." He leads the way into a locker room opening off the east wall. The boys strip off their clothes, giggling and comparing erections, and they dance out into the courtyard in a naked snake-line. The women are also naked now. What follows is not an unconstrained orgy but rather a series of theatrical performances.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will now witness the mating of the God pan and Goddess Aisha."

A backdrop of Moroccan hills with a full moon lit from behind by a lamp casting a golden glow over our naked bodies as the music of Pan fills the courtyard. Six dancing boys with whips put on goatskin leggings and caps and dance opposite six girls clad in swirling robes of thin blue silk. The faces of the boys are remote and impersonal, yet their bodies quiver and shake as if possessed by wild spirits. The boys rip the robes from Aisha, who tries to flee. They whip her buttocks and she falls on all fours as they fuck her in a crescendo of drums and pipes and a strange perfume fills the air.

"And now we present for your entertainment: Half-Hanged Kelley and Half-Hanged Kate in the Gallows Fling."

Backdrop of a leering crowd. Kate has red hair down to her waist, blazing green eyes, and the raw red hemp marks around her neck. The story is that she was being hanged for witchcraft and other crimes against nature when the officials and spectators were dispersed by banshee wails, whereupon she was cut down and revived by leprechauns.

Kate and Kelley take a bow. A sandy-haired boy I have seen on the boat plays the bagpipes as they go into a wild jig, her hair twisting around her like flames from Hell, dancing under the waiting nooses which they adjust around each other's necks with idiot grins. He squirms it into her, kicking out spasms in the air, as they are hauled off the ground by smirking hangmen. Now their eyes light up in the gallows flash and the two bodies are encased in a blazing egg of blue-white light. They are lowered to the mat and little boys covered with green paint revive them. They stand up and take a bow.

A backdrop of sea and palm trees. Idiot Hawaiian music as Hans does a hula fuck with a lithe Malay girls while his four friends, on their backs, legs in the air, applaud with their feet. Now the palm trees, with boys inside them, go into the hula. The effect is irresistibly comic and there is much laughter. Finally all the actors, including the palm trees, take a bow.

Thirteen dancing boys fuck to Gnaoua drums and clappers. Gnaoua music drives out evil spirits who try to enter the womb. You can see the future child in a rush of liquid gold as the spirit of Hassan i Sabbah, Master of the Djinns, Master of the Assassins, guides the writhing bodies and rapt empty faces riding the drums like a bucking horse of flame. All the boys come at once as the wolfish face of Pan blazes in the young faces like a shooting star.

"The Rape of the Valkyrie," announces Juanito.

A Swedish girl with long blonde hair is against a backdrop of Northern Lights. She is riding a horse which suddenly collapses under her and two blond youths with Viking helmets wriggle out, tying her hands with a gold rope. One fucks her as the other caresses her nipples. The boys grin at each other showing all their teeth.

I am trying to figure what sort of act I could put on that would have the necessary concentration of purpose to make a child. Clinch Todd helps me out of my quandary. His father was a veterinarian and he found that sperm collected from a prize pig, horse, bull, dog, or cat could be injected into the vagina resulting in a pregnancy for which the bride must pay a handsome dowry. Furthermore, one milking could provide enough sperm for many little happenings and he had jars of this much stored in the icehouse. I made the rounds with him once for kicks. There he is jacking-off prize pigs and squirting it into the sow—impersonal as if he were trimming a hedge. He had the touch: the animal was randy as soon as he got his hands on it. But he got to using opium and his touch failed him. He was kicked in the head and killed by a stallion.

This is the answer. Clinch lines up five girls of different racial stock—black, Chinese, Malay, Indian, Berber—who will be indirectly impregnated, thus sparing me contacts for which I have little inclination. I will play the young Corn God with a corn headdress. A boy from Yucatán with black skin, straight hair, and classical Mayan features will stand in as Black Captain, one of the Mayan war gods, and fuck me standing up, as Jerry, cast as Ganymede the cupbearer, gathers the seed in an alabaster goblet.

The girls will proceed to the remote inland communes to await delivery. They will all receive a handsome dowry should they wish to marry and the children will be trained from childhood in the use of weapons and fitted to take their part in the task of liberation.

Pages from the diary of Hirondelle de Mer:

I am a sorceress and a warrior. I do not relish being treated as a breeding animal. Would this occur to Captain Nordenholz? No force, he says, has been applied—but I am forced by my circumstances, cast up here with a peso, and by my Indian blood which compels me to side with all enemies of Spain. The child will be brought up a sorcerer or sorceress.

Now, a short rundown on these shabby adventurers plotting to appropriate a continent and remake it to their taste. They all puto queer maricones. Look at that Juanito—el más maricón de los maricones. El más puto de los putos. Nordenholz was selling his ass in Hamburg twenty years ago. Old story: sea captain takes a liking to him, signs him on as fourth mate.

And Strobe with his well-rehearsed Eton accent. Circus people. Mother and father were aerialists and they did this high-wire hanging act with angel wings: he takes off the noose, extends his wings, and goes into a dazzling aerial act with his angel wife. It attracted a lot of attentions and the Strobes were taken up by the best people but not for long. Soon the lordliness of their manners, talking to royalty as if they were being nice to the servants, rendered them absolutely insufferable. Their American origins were discovered and they were sent to the colonies, where they decided the angel act was too exotic for American tastes and booked as the Singing Aerialists. Soon they added other instruments, throwing them from one to another on tightropes—a high-wire musical juggling act it was. Young John learned his poise on the high wire and his swordsmanship as well. But show biz wasn't for him, and he shipped out with Nordenholz.

The Iguana twins have some claim to aristocratic birth. They came from an old landed family, impoverished and dispossessed. They were brought up to act rich at all times—"act like you've got it and you'll get it," Mother always said. You can't lay it on too thick in Mexico. With preposterous forged titles and pistoleros on credit they seized an estate in northern Mexico and hit a silver vein.

Nordeholz is a good organizer. He saw at once that a single settlement would inevitably be discovered and wiped out. His plan called for a series of settlements, so that if one were taken they could retreat to another fortified position while bands of thirty men or so cut supply lines, contaminated the enemy water supply, conducted hit-and-run raids, and eventually forced the enemy to fight on two fronts when they laid siege to the next position. Sound strategy. With every victory, more people flocked to the Articles.

Suppose the Spanish have been driven out or brought under the Articles? Suppose, too, similar uprisings in North America and Canada have shattered English and French rule. What now? Can this vast territory be held without the usual machinery of government, ambassadors, standing army and navy? They can only plan to hold the area by sorcery. This is a sorcerers' revolution. I must find my part as a sorceress.

Quién es?

We flew back with a three-hour stopover at Orly. I had decided what I was going to do. I was going to refund Mr. Green's retainer, minus travel expenses, and tell him the actual killers were dead in a plane crash. The Greek police consider the case closed. Nothing further I can do.

Back in my New York loft I called the Greens. "This is Clem Snide calling. I'd like to speak to Mr. Green, please."

A woman's voice sounded guarded: "What is it in reference to, please?"

"I am a private investigator retained by Mr. Green."

"Well, I'm afraid you can't speak to him. You see, Mr. and Mrs. Green are dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes. They were killed last night in a car crash. This is Mrs. Green's sister." She sounded pretty cool about it.

"I'm terribly sorry...." I was thinking about what Dimitri had said. The "Adepts" who had hanged Jerry did not know what magical intentions they were projecting. They did not know to whom they were aspeak ... plane crash ... car crash ...

I didn't want to think about the Green case anymore, but it stuck to me like the fever smell. What had Dimitri called it? B-23, the Hanging Fever.

Death is enforced separation from the body. Orgasm is identification with the body. So death in the moment of orgasm literally embodies death. It would also yield an earth-bound spirit—an incubus dedicated to reproducing that particular form of death.

I took a Nembutal and finally slept.

Someone was murdered in this room a long time ago. How long ago ... the empty safe .. the bloody pipe threader? His partner must have done it. They never caught him. Easy to disappear in those days, when a silver dollar bought a good meal and piece of ass. Smell of dust and old fear in the room. Someone is at the back door. Quién es? The hall is dark.

It's Marty come to call ... gaslight now on the yellow pock-marked face, the cold gray eyes, the brilliantined black hair, the coat with fur trimming at the collar, the purple waistcoat beneath....

"We had a hard time finding you." His drunken driver there can hardly stand up. "Wore himself out getting here, he did."

"He made a few stops along the way."

"Come along to the Metropole and have some bubbly. It's my treat."

Now Broadway's full of guys who think they're mighty wise, just because they know a thing or two

"No, thanks."

"What do you mean, no thanks? We had a long way to find you."

You can see them every day, strolling up and down Broadway, boasting of the wonders they can do

"I'm expecting someone from the Palace."

"Your old pals aren't good enough anymore? Is that it?"

"I don't remember we were exactly pals, Marty."

There are con men and drifters, Murphy men and grifters, and they all hang around the Metropole

"Let me in, Dalford. I've come a long way."

"All right, but ..."

But their names would be mud, like a chump playing stud, if they lost that old ace down in the hole

"Nice place you got here. Plenty of room. You could put the Metropole in here if it came to that...." He is sitting on the bed now.

They'll tell you of trip that they're going to take, from Florida up to the old North Pole

"Look, Marty ..."

I wake up. Jim is covered with white foam. I can't wake him. "Jamie! ... Jamie! ..." Cold white foam.

I wake up. Jim is standing with a pipe threader in his hand, looking towards the back door.... "I thought someone was in the room."

I got up and dressed and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. It tasted disgusting. The Everson questionnaire and picture had arrived, and I looked through them as I drank coffee. The pictures were quite ordinary. The Everson boy looked like the clean-cut American Boy. I wondered why he had taken up such an esoteric subject as Mayan archeology.

Jim came in and asked if he could take the day off. He does that occasionally, has an apartment of his own in the East Village. After he left, I sat down and went carefully through the Everson case: the boy had been in Mexico City doing some research in the library preparatory to a dig in Yucatán. In his last letter he said he was leaving for Progreso in a few days and would write from there.

After two weeks, his family was worried. They waited another week then called the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. A man checked his address, and the landlady said he had packed and left almost three weeks ago. A police check of hotel registration in Progreso turned up nothing. It had now been about six weeks with no word.

Several possibilities had occurred to me: He may have gone on some alternate dig. Postal service in rural Mexico is practically nonexistent. Probably there was no more involved than two or three lost letters. I was inclined to favor some such simply explanation. I had no special feelings about this case and felt sure I could locate young Everson without much difficulty. I decided to knock off and take in a porn flick.

It was good, as porn flicks go—beautiful kids on screen—but I couldn't understand why they had so much trouble coming. And all the shots were stylized. Every time a kid came all over a stomach or an ass, he rubbed the jism around like tapioca.

I left in the middle of a protracted fuck, and walked down Third Avenue to the Tin Palace for a drink.

There was a hippie with a ratty black beard at one end of the bar and I could smell Marty on him—that cold gray smell of the time traveler. I'd seen him around before. The name is Howard Benson. Small-time publisher, pot and C and occasional O. Lives somewhere in the neighborhood. He caught my eye, drank up and hurried out.

I gave him a few seconds' start and tailed him to a loft building on Greene Street. I waited outside until his light went on, picked the front-door lock and went in. I had an Identikit picture of Marty with me that Jim drew. It looks like a photo. I was going to show it to this Howard and say it was a picture of a murder suspect, and see what I could surprise or bluff out of him.

His loft was on the third floor. I knocked loud and long. No answer. I could feel somebody inside. "Police!" I shouted. "Open the door or we'll break it down!" Still no answer. Well, that would keep the neighbors out of the hall.

It took me about two minutes to get the door open. I walked in. There was somebody there, all right. Howard Benson was lying on his face in a pool of blood. The murder weapon was there too: a bloody pipe threader that had smashed in the back of his head.

I took a quick look around. There was a filthy pile of bedding in one corner and a phone beside it, some tools, dusty windows, a splintery floor. Benson was lying in front of an old-fashioned safe which was open. A dead gray smell hung in that loft like a fog. Marty was there.

The whole scene was like something out of the 1890s. I bent down and sniffed at the open safe. Faint but unmistakable, the fever smell. I got a nail. It stuck to the sides of the safe. The walls were magnetized. Jerry's head had been in that safe.

Quickly I drew a circle around the safe, seeing the head as clearly as I could inside. I repeated the words and touched the absent head three times with the amulet that Dimitri had given me. A tingle ran up my arm.

Half an hour later, I was sitting in O'Brien's office. His boss, Captain Graywood, was also there. Graywood was a tall blond man with thick glasses and a blank expression.

"You want the whole story, then?"

"That's the general idea."

I told them most of it, what I knew about Marty, and showed them the picture. I told them about Dimitri finding the body and about Adam North's story. Captain Graywood never changed his expression. Once or twice O'Brien turned into his brother, the priest. When I had finished he took a deep breath.

"Quite a story, Clem. We've had cases like that ... and worse things too: torture, castration ... cases that don't get into the papers or into the courts."

Captain Graywood said, "So it is your theory that the head was brought here as a potent magical object?"

"Yes."

"And you are convinced that the head was in that safe?"

"Yes."

"And why do you think the body was addressed to South America?"

"I don't know the answer to that."

"Ecuador is headhunter country, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"It is logical to assume then that someone planned to reunite the head and the body in South America."

"I think so."

"You haven't told us everything."

"I've told you what I know."

"This Marty ... Dimitri's men never saw him?"

"No."

"But you could see him?"

"Yes."

"We can't arrest a ghost," said O'Brien.

"Well, if he can make himself solid enough to beat someone's brains out with a pipe wrench, you might be able to.... Question of being there at the right time."

Even the cockroaches

Una cosa me da risa Something makes me laugh

Pancho Villa sin camisa Pancho Villa takes his shirt off

The Cucaracha, where Kiki worked as a waiter, had "La Cucaracha" on the jukebox. It's a basement restaurant, with a small bar and a few tables. It was 11:00 P.M. and the place was empty. I hadn't seen Kiki since I interviewed him on the Green case. Looking very handsome in a worn dinner jacket, he was leaning against the bar, talking to a bargirl. She does a strip-tease act uptown on weekends which is a thing to see.

Because old Pancho shakes the dirt out

I shook hands with Kiki, ordered a margarita, and sat down, and right on cue a cockroach crawled across the table. When Kiki brought the margarita I pointed to the cockroach and said, "He's getting his marijuana and getting it steady."

"Sí," said Kiki absently, and brushed the cockroach away with his towel.

I looked around and saw there was one other diner by the door. I hadn't noticed him when I came in. He was sitting alone and reading a book called Thin Air about a top-secret navy project to make a battleship and all the sailors on it disappear. It was supposed to confuse the enemy; however, all the test sailors went crazy. But CIA men were made of sterner stuff and found it modern and convenient to "go zero" as they call it in a tight spot.

Porque no tiene Because he doesn't have

Porque le falta Because he lacks

Marijuana por fumar Marijuana to smoke

On the wall were bullfight posters and The Death of Manolete. The poisonous colors made me thing of arsenic green and the flaking green paint in the WC. It's a big picture and must be worth a lot of money, like a wooden Indian or Custer's Last Stand, which the Anheuser-Busch Company used to give out to their customers. I remember as an adolescent being excited by the green naked bodies sprawled about ass-up, getting scalped by the Indians, and especially a story about one man who played dead while he was being scalped and so escaped.

I drank the margaritas and ordered a combination plate and went to the green room. When I came back, "Thin Air" was gone. Kiki came and sat with me and had a Carta Blanca. I told him Jerry was dead.

La cucaracha la cucaracha

"Cómo?" "How?"

"Ahorcado." "Hanged."

Ya no quiere caminar Doesn't want to run round anymore

"Nudo?" "Naked?"

"Sí." "Yes."

Kiki nodded philosophically and a face leered out, the face of a middle-aged man with a cast in the right eye. This must be Kiki's macambo magic master, I decided.

"It was his destiny," Kiki said. "Look at these." He spread some postcards circa 1913 on the table. The photos showed soldiers hanged from trees and telephone poles with their pants down around their ankles. The pictures were taken from behind. "Pictures get him very hot. He want me pull scarf tight around his neck when he come." Kiki made a motion of pulling something around his neck.

"Jerry's spirit had got into my assistant. Only you can call him out."

"Why me?'

"Jerry's spirit has to obey you because you fuck him the best."

Kiki's eyes narrowed with calculation and he drummed on the table with his fingertips. I was thinking I could use an interpreter on this trip ... after all, expense account. My Spanish is half-assed and in any case he could find out more than two nosy gringos.

"Like to come along with to Mexico and South America?"

I named a figure. He smiled and nodded. I wrote the address of my loft on a card and handed it to him. "Be there at eleven in the morning. We make magic."

When I got back to the loft Jim was there, and I explained that we were going to perform this ritual to get Jerry's spirit out.

He nodded. "Yeah, he's half in and half out and it hurts."

Next day Kiki showed up with a bundle of herbs and a head of Elleggua in a hatbox. As he was setting up his altar, lighting candles and anointing the head, I explained that he would fuck Jim and evoke Jerry to bring Jerry all the way in—and then I had good strong magic to exorcise the spirit. Kiki watched with approval, one magic man to another, as I set up the altar for the noon ritual and lit the incense. It was ten minutes before noon.

"Todos nudos ahora."

Kiki was wearing red shiny boxer shorts, and when he slipped them off he was half-hard. Jim was stiff and lubricating. I drew a circle around our bodies. We were facing south for the noon ritual and I had set up a red candle for fire, which was Jerry's element. The amulet was on the altar and there was a tube of KY by the unguent jar.

"When I say ahora, fuck him."

Kiki picked up the KY and moved behind Jim, who leaned forward over the altar, hands braced on knees. Kiki rubbed KY up Jim's ass and hitched his hand around Jim's hips, contracting his body as his cock slid in. Jim gasped and bared his teeth. His head and neck turned bright red and the cartilage behind his right ear swelled into a pulsing knot.

Holding the amulet, I took a position on the other side of the altar. Jerry's face was in front of me now, as the red color spread down Jim's chest and his nipples pulsed erect. His stomach, crotch and thighs were bright red now, and the rash spread down his calves to his toes and the fever smell reeked out of him. His head twisted to the right as I touched the amulet to the crown of his head, to the forehead between the eyes, and to the cartilage behind both ears.

"Back to earth. Back to air. Back to fire. Back to water."

For a split second Jerry's face hung there, eyes blazing green light. A reek of decay filled the room. Someone said "Shit" in a loud voice. We carried Jim to a couch. Kiki got a wet towel and rubbed his chest, face, and neck. He opened his eyes, sat up, and smiled. The decay smell was gone. So was the fever smell.