The Masters of Atlantis (24 page)

“No.”

“Some hysterical old maid in a shawl? Some old loudmouth red-headed barroom gal in tight britches?”

“I'm not going to discuss her with you. The subject is closed.”

“How old is this woman anyway?”

“I don't see that it's any of your business but Dolores is about forty.”

“About forty.” Popper's eyes rolled upward. “Around the waist maybe. Did you demand to see a birth certificate?”

“Of course not.”

“You couldn't sneak a look at her driver's license?”

“I'm not a sneak.”

“They might prove to be interesting documents. Let me tell you something, Shuttlecock. I know the world and you don't. You'd do better to stay away from these crazy and desperate women who hang around barrooms half the night.”

“Dolores doesn't even drink.”

“As far as you know. How far is that, I wonder.”

“I've known her for years.”

“And you see nothing odd in that? The delayed consummation? You don't see what's happening? One thing I can still do is grasp a situation and I've seen this one too many times. This old sister has got you on a tether while she waits around for something better to turn up. She's got you staked out as the Last Chance Liquor Store and you can't even see it. Why don't you wake up? Why don't you think of someone besides yourself for a change? You would deny the Master his historic opportunity just so you can continue to carry on with this roly-poly woman in some Cicero motel room whenever you feel like it. What if it gets in the papers? It means nothing to you to see the Society's good name dragged through the mud?”

“I have better things to do than listen to this. We'll see who has the standing around here.”

“Go on. Go to the kitchen where you belong. You're a pantryman if I ever saw one.”

IT WAS Popper who prevailed, and the appeal of the ocean bathing that swung the Master around, that and the promise that he could ride with Mr. Morehead Moaler atop the lead float in the Charro Days parade, the pair of them wearing oversize sombreros and waving to the crowd along with the dusky beauties of Brownsville. On Sunday morning they left for Texas in the camper van—Popper, Mr. Jimmerson, Maceo and Esteban—with Mr. Jimmerson lightly sedated and strapped to a bunk, and the
Codex Pappus
stowed safely in the icebox.

There was no known ceremony for this unprecedented event, the Master's withdrawal from his Temple, and so Popper, feeling the need for a formal gesture, had Ed go to the roof of the Temple and fire a small bottle rocket over the expressway. Popper watched the ascent and the dying fall from his seat in the van. He waited for the thread of smoke to break up, then said, “So be it. Let's go, Esteban.” Mr. Jimmerson was underway.

Babcock and Ed were to follow later. They were to pack whatever seemed worth packing and bring it along to La Coma in a rented truck. All was haste and confusion. Things were unraveling. Babcock was being swept along. His instructions were vague. Popper had given him some money for the truck and a Skelly credit card for gasoline, and said, “You wind up things here, Babcock, and come on when you can. Make sure you get all the books. The Master will very likely want to look something up as soon as he comes around. And don't forget his army stuff. He'll be asking about his puttees and his musette bag. No need to worry, we'll get him there in fine shape. He'll think he's in a Pullman. You come on when you can and we'll look for you when we see you.”

He spoke as though there had been a reconciliation. Babcock found himself listening in the same way, nodding and giving assent. But Popper was gone now and what was he, Babcock, to do about the Temple itself? How did one decommission the Temple? Who owned it? He consulted a real estate agent, who advised him to remove the walnut paneling, the giant bathtubs, the fireplace mantels, the oak doors and a few other pieces, and then burn the place for the insurance. There was adequate coverage? Babcock knew that the Master had several shoe boxes packed with insurance policies, all golden scrollwork and gray printed matter, hedges against every mishap that life might bring, but surely they were all expired, and anyway, arson was out of the question. That he had even considered it for a moment was due, he believed, to the corrupting influence of Austin Popper and to the presence of the firebug Ed. He sent the agent on his way.

All this activity had not escaped the tramps, alert to any vacuum in the making. They sensed that authority had fled. Winter was at hand. From their upstairs base they began to probe the downstairs area and to settle in those rooms where they met no resistance. They staked out claims with their dropped bags, mostly green plastic garbage bags.

Ed was no help in driving the squatters out, nor was he of any use in loading the rental truck. He did not mind driving the truck, he said, but the U.S. government had forbidden him to lift anything heavy or otherwise exert himself. He showed the note from the government doctor. Neither could the tramps be induced to work, and Babcock had to hire some boys off the street. He enticed them with signs in the yard that read: “Attention, Boys! Something New! Register Here for Free Toys!”

“Many hands make light work,” he said to them, as he organized them into a kind of bucket brigade. Their hands were small but willing. With a certain amount of horseplay and breakage, they moved the goods steadily along into the high-cube bay of the truck—housewares and books and strange Gnomon objects. Ed ate a candy bar and watched.

Down below in the boiler the rats were stirring. The busy patter upstairs had made them curious. The footfalls of the children, light and quick, made them pause and look at one another. They began to quiver and gibber. Then on a signal from their captain they poured forth from the boiler and came slithering up the cellar stairs in a column to see what was going on. In the kitchen they met a horde of cockroaches who had emerged from their dark runs, led by a big bull roach. They too had been disturbed by the new vibrations. Soon the floor was alive.

The boys threw grapefruit and books at these vermin and, caught up in the game, turned on the tramps and gave them a good pelting as well. Some of the tramps had found their way to the Red Room, where they were resting in the recliners and reading magazines before the fire when the attack came. The boys tipped them over. They went berserk. They dashed about screaming. They slid down the banisters and broke windows.

One ran into the street weeping. “That place full of rats and bums,” he sobbed out to a knot of loitering young men. They were whites and Negroes about equally mixed, members of a motorcycle gang who had no motorcycles but who foraged about on foot in a shambling troop, led by the oldest male. Their regalia was made of shiny black plastic instead of black leather. They had no bike chains, but only belts as weapons. The leader, a wiry Negro, glowered. He doubled up his plastic belt and whacked it against his leg. “These old stinking winos be making our sweet little chirrens cry,” he said. “I know me some bums need a good lesson.”

The gang charged up the Temple steps. Babcock, seeing the two-blade propeller emblem on their caps, thought at first they were members of an aero club, young pilots who rushed serum cross-country and who searched for downed chums on weekends, but he did not think that for long. They swept past him and laid into the tramps with their belts, while kicking at the rats with their black plastic boots.

“Watch out, they hiding!”

“Here's another one!”

“A day at the zoo!”

“They going out the windows!”

One tramp, an old man in an army fatigue cap and a long army overcoat, turned in his flight at the top of the stairs and said, “Two on one is nigger fun!”

“Listen to his old GI jive!”

“Burn his ass!”

Babcock saw that all was up with the Gnomon Temple. This was the end of the line. Some of the invaders were now running through the house gathering armloads of goods. Babcock grabbed the inert Ed, who was enjoying the show, and shook him. “Go start the truck. Roll up the windows and lock the doors and wait for me.” Then he went to the Inner Hall for one last check. The roaches crunched underfoot. It was like walking on the peanut hulls at Wrigley Field. A big gray tomcat was pacing about in the Hall with his tail high, giving the place yet one more Egyptian touch. The sight of so many rats appeared to make him uneasy. Babcock retrieved a yellow silk cloth and a silver bowl, whose ceremonial uses he did not know, and made his way back to the front door.

There he was intercepted by one of the gang members, who had left off bashing and seemed to be rehearsing a song. He was doing some intermediate thing between walking and dancing, to the beat of some intermediate thing between talking and singing.

“Can't do without,” he said, taking a measured step.

“Can't do without.” Another step.

“Can't do without.” One more. “Yo' precious love.”

Babcock said, “Excuse me.”

“Hey, my man, who stay in this old jive house anyhow?”

“Nobody. Excuse me. I must go now.”

“Naw, Slick, you got my bowl.”

He snatched at the silver bowl and Babcock broke away and ran for the truck. He jumped on the running board, yelling at Ed through the glass. Ed pulled away with a jerk. They were off. The two cargo doors at the rear of the truck were swinging open and books dribbled out all down Bulmer Avenue. Babcock, holding to the mirror bracket, looked back and saw people running into the street to claim the falling prizes. When they saw that the free stuff was only books and that they had been taken in and made to look like fools, they kicked at the copies of
Hoosier Wizard
and
Why I Am a Gnomon
and shouted angry words at the receding white truck with the flapping doors.

ON THE long ride to La Coma, Babcock came more and more to doubt that Ed was really Nandor. Did they work in concert, these Three Secret Teachers, or independently? Did they even know one another? In what circumstances did they declare themselves? The answers to these and many more questions were not to be found in Ed's face.

Ed drove and Babcock sat beside him, hatless, with the Gnomon bowl in his lap. He missed his hat. His hat was his banner. He had left his pills behind too and his stomach was a blazing pool. Cold rain fell. The windshield wipers juddered back and forth. The road was a straight corridor between bleak fields of corn stubble. Babcock told Ed that if he drove carefully and obeyed orders, then Mr. Jimmerson would buy him the biggest, blackest, most earsplitting Harley-Davidson ever made.

Ed honked at female drivers. He said “woo woo” to them and made kissing noises at them. He said he enjoyed doing security work for Mr. Jimmerson, keeping nuts and gangsters out of grenade range of the Master, but that one day he hoped to marry a woman who owned a Jeep with raised white letters on the tires. He would take her home and ride around town some. “Look,” the people would say, “there goes Ed in four-wheel drive, with his pretty little wife at his side.” The way to get women, he said, was with a camera. Chloroform was no good, at best a makeshift. But all the girls liked to pose for the camera and became immediately submissive to anyone carrying a great tangle of photographic equipment from his shoulders. You didn't even need film. He said he had once killed a man when he was in the Great Berets by ramming a pencil up his nose and into his brain.

Babcock said, “It's the Green Berets.”

“What did I say?”

“You said the Great Berets. But you weren't in the Great Berets or the Green Berets either one, Ed. I don't know why you want to say things like that. I've seen your records.”

“I was in a ward with a guy named Danny who was a Green Beret.”

“Yes, but that's not the same thing.”

“Danny always had his nose in a book. He had a lot of books about this guy called the Undertaker who goes all over the world rubbing out hamsters and kidnappers.”

“Hamsters?”

“Gangsters, I mean, and kidnappers and dope bosses. Big crooks. Danny read those books over and over again and he wouldn't loan them out to anyone else in the ward.”

“I suppose you called Danny the Professor.”

“We just called him Danny. You didn't want to bother him when he was off his medication. Or even when he was on it. Or when he was reading or eating or sleeping or watching TV. He didn't like for you to rap on the door when he was in the bathroom either. Are we in Texas yet?”

“No, we're still in Illinois.”

“We're not even in Texas yet and I already miss the Red Room.”

“I do too.”

“Do you know what's going on?”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“No.”

“Will our heads clear when we get to Texas?”

“It's hard to say, Ed. We probably shouldn't count on it.”

“The road—to honor.”

“What?”

“I heard somebody say that once. ‘The road—to honor.' Or maybe it was the name of a TV show I saw somewhere. ‘The road—to honor.' Did you ever see it?”

“I don't think so.”

The truck had a governor on the engine and there was a power fade at about sixty. Babcock kept putting off the call to Dolores. Would she trip over things in her dash to the telephone? No. He felt himself caught in the Jimmerson Bog, or rather Lag. Now and then out of a silence Ed would utter in a defiant way some paradoxical truth he had once heard, or arrived at himself, one that he seemed to think was too little known or appreciated. “Fat guys are strong,” he said, and “You can brush your teeth too much.” He said his mother was living with a retired gangster who had some stolen red rubies hidden behind a wall socket.