The Dog Said Bow-Wow (29 page)

Wiping tears from his eyes, Dr. Petri exclaims that this,
this
is why he went into teaching in the first place!

There is a light supper at a local restaurant alone with Professor Bloom, who insists he call her Djuna. Afterwards, she leads him across campus to Vanderbilt Hall, where the department holds a sherry reception. There are crackers and a wheel of blue cheese and they drink out of tiny little glasses from what the undergraduates jokingly call the Hereditary Bottle because no one can remember when it was first opened and it isn’t near empty yet.

The geek stands holding a glass, with his other hand in his pocket, perfectly at ease. The purpose of the party is to allow the students to interact with him informally. Most can’t. The teachers cluster about him so tightly that only the most aggressive students are able to worm their way into that tight knot of conversation and score an acknowledged remark off of him. Even the shyest undergrad, however, even Debbie Harcourt, who wears thick glasses and ugly dresses and walks about in a perpetual cringe, can feel the calm aura of authority that radiates from him. It’s simple charisma. Some people have it. The rest flock about those lucky few.

The presentation is an enormous success. Every seat in the auditorium is filled and in defiance of all fire regulations there are people sitting in the aisles and standing, arms folded, against the back wall. When the geek appears, his soft voice is picked up by the microphones and permeates the room.

“Good evening,” he says. “How y’all doing?”

They applaud warmly.

He begins with a little autobiography, talking about his impoverished rural childhood and how he ran away to join first a forty-miler, then a full-fledged tent show. When he explains how some of the games of chance are rigged so that nobody can win, mouths open into astonished circles throughout the audience. He is too much the gentleman to use the term “sucker,” but many of those present realize that that’s exactly what they’ve been.

He talks about traveling around the Old South by rail. His stories evoke a kinder, gentler era, a time without haste and worry, one filled with simpler pleasures and a hunger for wonder that a carnival could perfectly fulfill.

But then he turns to the question of racial prejudice. “Oh, it was awful,” he says. “You have no idea.” He tells of the time he witnessed a lynching. The audience listens in a silence so profound that when somebody coughs, half of them jump. It’s a harrowing story. It makes their hair stand on end.

“And they brought their children along to see,” he concludes. “Their children!” He shakes his head sadly. “For all the very real problems we have today, it’s a miracle that things aren’t worse.”

The hours fly by. He finishes up with an exploration of the deeper significance of his profession. He quotes Derrida. He quotes Barzun. He quotes Rousseau. The audience is in his hands.

Finally, the Dean of Admissions comes out from backstage carrying a live chicken. Grinning, the dean holds it out to the geek, who solemnly accepts it. He strokes the bird’s feathers, calming it, hypnotizing it. He holds the creature up before his eyes.

Then he bites off its head.

The audience roars. Their applause swells as he walks offstage with a modest little wave. The students are on their feet, clapping and stamping as if they were at a basketball game. The sound is thunderous. After only the slightest of pauses, the chancellor, deans, and dignitaries seated in the front row also stand, making the ovation universal.

Backstage, Djuna hands him an envelope with his honorarium check, which he places in an inside pocket of his jacket. Impetuously, she darts forward and plants a chaste peck on his cheek. The grad student, tears in eyes, seizes his hand and pumps it up and down.

Then it’s back to his hotel room, alone. In the morning, he’ll catch a plane for his next appearance. He is the last of his breed, as American as John Wayne or Buzz Aldrin, a solitary man perhaps, as all great men are, a living cultural treasure and an acknowledged national icon. But when the applause dies down, there’s nothing but the night, the road ahead and one more gig. He’s alone again with silence and his own thoughts.

ON A HILLTOP IN ARCADIA
, Darger sat talking with a satyr.

“Oh, the
sex
is good,” the satyr said. “Nobody could say it wasn’t. But is it the be-all and end-all of life? I don’t see that.” The satyr’s name was Demetrios Papatragos, and evenings he played the saxophone in a local jazz club.

“You’re a bit of a philosopher,” Darger observed.

“Oh, well, in a home-grown front porch sense, I suppose I am.” The satyr adjusted the small leather apron that was his only item of clothing. “But enough about me. What brings
you
here? We don’t get that many travelers these days. Other than the African scientists, of course.”

“Of course. What
are
the Africans here for, anyway?”

“They are building gods.”

“Gods! Surely not! Whatever for?”

“Who can fathom the ways of scientists? All the way from Greater Zimbabwe they came across the wine-dark Mediterranean and into these romance-haunted hills, and for what? To lock themselves up within the ruins of the Monastery of St. Vasilios, where they labor as diligently and joylessly as if they were indeed monks. They never come out, save to buy food and wine or to take the occasional blood sample or skin scraping. Once, one of them offered a nymph money to have sex with him, if you can believe such a thing.”

“Scandalous!” Nymphs, though they were female satyrs, had neither hoofs nor horns. They were, however, not cross-fertile with humans. It was the only way, other than a small tail at the base of their spines (and
that was
normally covered by their dresses), to determine their race.

Needless to say, they were as wildly popular with human men as their male counterparts were with women. “Sex is either freely given or it is nothing.”

“You’re a bit of a philosopher yourself,” Papatragos said. “Say—a few of our young ladies might be in heat. You want me to ask around?”

“My good friend Surplus, perhaps, would avail himself of their kind offers. But not I. Much though I’d enjoy the act, I’d only feel guilty afterwards. It is one of the drawbacks of having a depressive turn of mind.”

So Darger made his farewells, picked up his walking stick, and sauntered back to town. The conversation had given him much to think about.

“What word of the Evangelos bronzes?” Surplus asked. He was sitting at a table out back of their inn, nursing a small glass of retsina and admiring the sunset. The inn stood at the outskirts of town at the verge of a forest, where pine, fir, and chestnut gave way to orchards, olive trees, cultivated fields, and pastures for sheep and goats. The view from its garden could scarce be improved upon.

“None whatsoever. The locals are happy to recommend the ruins of this amphitheater or that nuclear power plant, but any mention of bronze lions or a metal man causes them only to look blank and shake their heads in confusion. I begin to suspect that scholar in Athens sold us a bill of goods.”

“The biters bit! Well, ’tis an occupational hazard in our line of business.”

“Sadly true. Still, if the bronzes will not serve us in one manner, they shall in another. Does it not strike you as odd that two such avid antiquarians as ourselves have yet to see the ruins of St. Vasilios? I propose that tomorrow we pay a courtesy visit upon the scientists there.”

Surplus grinned like a hound — which he was not, quite. He shook out his lace cuffs and, seizing his silver-knobbed cane, stood. “I look forward to making their acquaintance.”

“The locals say that they are building gods.”

“Are they really? Well, there’s a market for everything, I suppose.”

Their plans were to take a strange turn, however. For that evening Dionysus danced through the town.

Darger was writing a melancholy letter home when the first shouts sounded outside his room. He heard cries of “Pan! Great Pan!” and wild skirls of music. Going to the window, he saw an astonishing sight: The townsfolk were pouring into the street, shedding their clothes, dancing naked in the moonlight for all to see. At their head was a tall, dark figure who pranced and leaped, all the while playing the pipes.

He got only a glimpse, but its effect was riveting. He felt the god’s passage as a physical thing. Stiffening, he gripped the windowsill with both hands, and tried to control the wildness that made his heart pound and his body quiver.

But then two young women, one a nymph and the other Theodosia, the innkeeper’s daughter, burst into his room and began kissing his face and urging him toward the bed.

Under normal circumstances, he would have sent them packing — he hardly knew the ladies. But the innkeeper’s daughter and her goat-girl companion were both laughing and blushing so charmingly and were furthermore so eager to grapple that it seemed a pity to disappoint them. Then, too, the night was rapidly filling with the sighs and groans of human passion — no adult, apparently, was immune to the god’s influence — and it seemed to Darger perverse that he alone in all the world should refuse to give in to pleasure.

So, protesting insincerely, he allowed the women to crowd him back onto the bed, to remove his clothing, and to have their wicked way with him. Nor was he backwards with them. Having once set his mind to a task, he labored at it with a will.

In a distant corner of his mind, he heard Surplus in the room down the hall raise his voice in an ecstatic howl.

Darger slept late the next morning. When he went down to breakfast, Theodosia was all blushes and shy smiles. She brought him a platter piled high with food, gave him a fleet peck on the cheek, and then fled happily back into the kitchen.

Women never ceased to amaze Darger. One might make free of their bodies in the most intimate manner possible, handling them not only lustfully but self-indulgently, and denying oneself not a single pleasure…

yet it only made them like you the better afterwards. Darger was a staunch atheist. He did not believe in the existence of a benevolent and loving God who manipulated the world in order to maximize the happiness of His creations. Still, on a morning like this, he had to admit that all the evidence was against him.

Through an open doorway, he saw the landlord make a playful grab at his fat wife’s rump. She pushed him away and, with a giggle, fled into the interior of the inn. The landlord followed.

Darger scowled. He gathered his hat and walking stick, and went outside. Surplus was waiting in the garden. “Your thoughts trend the same way as mine?” Darger asked.

“Where else could they go?” Surplus asked grimly. “We must have a word with the Africans.”

The monastery was less than a mile distant, but the stroll up and down dusty country roads gave them both time enough to recover their
savoir-faire
. St. Vasilios, when they came to it, was dominated by a translucent green bubble-roof, fresh-grown to render the ruins habitable. The grounds were surrounded by an ancient stone wall. A wooden gate, latched but not locked, filled the lower half of a stone arch. Above it was a bell.

They rang.

Several orange-robed men were in the yard, unloading crated laboratory equipment from a wagon. They had the appearance and the formidable height of that handsomest of the world’s peoples, the Masai. But whether they were of Masai descent or had merely incorporated Masai features into their genes, Darger could not say. The stocky, sweating wagoner looked like a gnome beside them. He cursed and tugged at his horses’ harness to keep the skittish beasts from bolting.

At the sound of the bell, one of the scientists separated himself from the others and strode briskly to the gate. “Yes?” he said in a dubious tone.

“We wish to speak with the god Pan.” Darger said. “We are from the government.”

“You do not look Greek.”

“Not the local government, sir. The
British
government.” Darger smiled into the man’s baffled expression. “May we come in?”

They were not brought to see Dionysus immediately, of course, but to the Chief Researcher. The scientist-monk led them to an office that was almost Spartan in its appointments: a chair, a desk, a lamp, and nothing more. Behind the desk sat a girl who looked to be at most ten years old, reading a report by the lamp’s gentle biofluorescence. She was a scrawny thing with a large and tightly cornrowed head. “Tell her you love her,” she said curtly.

“I beg your pardon?” Surplus said.

“Tell her that, and then kiss her. That’ll work better than any aphrodisiac I could give you. I presume that’s what you came to this den of scientists for — that or poison. In which case, I recommend a stout cudgel at midnight and dumping the body in a marsh before daybreak. Poisons are notoriously uncertain. In either case, there is no need to involve my people in your personal affairs.”

Taken aback, Darger said, “Ah, actually, we are here on official business.”

The girl raised her head.

Her eyes were as dark and motionless as a snake’s. They were not the eyes of a child but more like those of the legendary artificial intellects of the Utopian era — cold, timeless, calculating. A shudder ran through Darger’s body. Her gaze was electrifying. Almost, it was terrifying.

Recovering himself, Darger said, “I am Inspector Darger, and this is my colleague, Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Précieux. By birth an American, it goes without saying.”

She did not blink. “What brings two representatives of Her Majesty’s government here?”

“We have been despatched to search out and recover the Evangelos bronzes. Doubtless you know of them.”

“Vaguely. They were liberated from London, were they not?”

“Looted, rather! Wrenched from Britain’s loving arms by that dastard Konstantin Evangelos in an age when she was weak and Greece powerful, and upon the shoddiest of excuses — something about some ancient marbles that had supposedly…well, that hardly matters.”

“Our mission is to find and recover them,” Surplus elucidated.

“They must be valuable.”