Olympus ssc, p.4
Olympus (SSC), page 4
“You tell me,” I replied.
He detached his watch fob from its chain and pressed it into my hands. “It happened in that piddling village I mentioned,” he said, much subdued. “The place where I picked up this very charm. Word had reached me in Athens of Gloria’s marriage and I was heartbroken. I had to get away, out of the city, and an associate told me there were some excellent ruins to be seen in those parts. Anything to distract my mind! The natives gave me directions, but they wouldn’t guide me to the site, for some reason. Just as well: Solitude was what I craved.”
“So off you went to mope among the columns.” I turned the pendant this way and that. There was a disturbing exuberance pent behind the silver features of that impish face, a malicious twinkle in the eyes not wholly attributable to reflections from the crystal shard below. “Go on.”
“That was where we met, he and I.” Eames looked up at me. “I don’t recall exactly how it happened. I had—I had taken one companion with me to the ruins, and—”
“I thought you said you craved solitude?”
“This companion came in a bottle. A rather large bottle. The village I mentioned wouldn’t attract the better class of bacteria, but for some reason the local wine was extraordinary. One moment I was by myself, simultaneously trying to pickle and shellac my liver in that resinous brew, and the next I was talking with this fellow.” He nodded toward the closed doors of the Oak Room.
“Dr. Sonoma?”
“That’s what he calls himself now. I never did get his given name. You know how it is when you’ve had a few: You gain a new cosmic perspective, you discover fresh priorities, you pass beyond the hollow social niceties—”
“You were blasted out of your mind, weren’t you,” I stated, returning the pendant to its owner.
“All the way to Albuquerque,” Eames averred. “We soon learned we shared a common woe, he and I. I told him of Gloria’s inconstancy, he bemoaned the fickle nature of humanity in general. ‘How soon they lose faith!’ he cried. ’Oh, once these woods rang with the wild, glad shout: Evoe! Evoe! But now the temple lies desolate, the rites forgotten, the maenads scattered. Even the raucous sileni have gone off, Zeus knows where, to seek a better life serving a more fortunate master.’” Eames sighed. “Well, right after he told me about those maenads and the lot, I began to suspect he wasn’t just another misdirected tourist. I felt sort of sorry for him. I expect it’s hard if you’re a—a satyr, I suppose he is—and you’re suddenly left out of work when the rest of your fellow employees desert the spiritual ship, as it were. It’s refreshing to find a man who really cares about religion, these days. Can’t say I’d fancy their idea of a church social, though. You do know what maenads do?”
“Get stewed to the eyeballs and run amok, ripping anything they catch into small, bloody gobbets.” I had done fairly well in the Classics myself.
“Well, they’re not the only ones,” Eames said. “They’re more like—like the cheering squad. Group participation’s the thing, with everyone attending the rite supposed to pitch in and do his bit, especially when you find out the goat’s a sight bigger than a handful of wine-soaked women can handle and—” He shrugged. “If you don’t tear off just a teensy chunk of living flesh, it’s a bit like letting the collection plate go by untouched during the Offertory.”
My mouth was dry. Suddenly I understood Eames’ cavalier use of the word bloodletting.
“At any rate, I proposed to him the advisability of a change of scene, with the added enticement of new territory where he might proselytize. At first he refused to believe that he would find any degree of popular avidity for getting drunk and subsequently tearing innocent passersby to gory pulp, but I took him to a video arcade as soon as he arrived in New York City and he confessed himself convinced.”
“You paid for his passage?”
“That was not necessary.” The crystal charm dangled from Eames’ bony fingers. “He gave this trinket to me as we parted company at the shrine and told me to give him a call when I got home. One brief evoe in the men’s room of the Harvard Club and there he was. However, I did buy him his first suit of clothes—can’t very well be seen socially in a leopardskin tunic these days or you’ll be all over red paint from those environmental ninnies.”
“So you were his ticket to fresher fields,” I mused. “And in exchange he was to be for you—?”
“—the instrument of Bradley’s destruction.” Eames spoke diffidently. He was not a man given to second thoughts in matters of revenge. “Once he was here, we initiated my plan. It was all my idea, you know: The publication of his book, his infiltration of the Club, his courtship of Amanda. Charming girl, but extremely susceptible to suggestion, particularly when there is a good-looking man in the case. I saw to it that she received an autographed copy of Dr. Sonoma’s opus. As soon as she saw his photograph on the dust jacket, I knew she would seek him out. The rest is hormones.” He looked inordinately proud of himself. “I have played the spider, tugging lightly at the filaments of my web to make the poor flies dance.”
“You have also managed to wrap said filaments nicely around your own neck in the form of a hangman’s noose,” I reminded him. “Your sole intended victim was Bradley. By having your—creature woo Amanda from him, you have dealt him a grievous wound, but if I know you, that will not suffice.”
“Naturally not.” Eames adjusted the Windsor knot securing his regimental stripe tie. “As a mythical being, Dr. Sonoma stands in possession of certain…powers. He told me he would use them this very day to destroy the man responsible for my unhappiness. At the same time, he promised to provide me with the opportunity to burst back into my darling Gloria’s affections.”
“What manner of opportunity is this?”
Eames pursed his lips. “He said I would have to leap to the fore and carry her off the moment the bloodshed begins. To her eyes, I would be the hero who saved her life. I think that should more than make up for my enforced two-year absence. She need never know that she was in no peril, nor was anyone else save Bradley.”
“Bloodshed,” I repeated. “Have you the veriest inkling of how your Dr. Sonoma intends to initiate this one-man massacre?”
“Well…no. Perhaps he’ll pounce on Bradley and rip him apart with his bare hands at a good stopping point in his lecture. I think it’s a sort of religious obligation with these people.”
“Won’t that look nice,” I said with understandable bitterness. “So a brutal murder will take place on the Club premises, in front of countless witnesses, and at the hands of a seeming madman. Do you imagine there will be no investigation in the wake of such a debacle? Do you dream that no one will discover the person responsible for bringing the murderer into our midst?”
“You wouldn’t—you wouldn’t expose me?” Eames grasped at my lapels in a most piteous manner.
“My silence will avail you little. Eames, I am neither the Club fool nor our Brightest Member, but I managed to figure it out. Others will trace Dr. Sonoma’s provenance back to you.”
Eames’ lips moved silently over Gloria’s name. Like a knight of old taking courage from the thought of his lady, he found backbone enough to say, “Perhaps public slaughter won’t be his method. I told Dr. Sonoma my wishes in strictly general terms. He might yet prove discreet as well as lethal. ‘Leave everything to me,’ he said. ‘Soon we shall have all that we could possibly desire.’”
I disliked the sound of that ‘we.’
“And how did you phrase your wishes?” I inquired, feigning a calm I did not truly feel.
A sliver of the old surgical steel slipped back into Eames’ smile. “I told him I wanted Bradley’s liver on a plate. With onions.”
“Eames, you idiot, creatures of myth are notoriously literal-minded. Ask for a man’s liver and you very well might get it. And to avoid offending the procurer thereof, you will just as likely have to eat it.”
“Good Lord, no!” Eames went all pasty in the face. “I didn’t mean his actual liv—He mustn’t—I couldn’t—I would never—My word, which wine does one serve with—?”
“There, I suspect, you have brought along a higher authority than even Ashtoft,” I said, and dragged him back into the room.
At the podium, Dr. Sonoma was discoursing upon the Freedom of the Spirit. “Every ill of modem life may be traced to our inability to truly let ourselves go,” he said. (I saw several of our senior members wince as a helpless infinitive was split like an innocent babe upon the blade of one of Herod’s Finest.) “All of our physical afflictions, from stress to sour stomach, are the result of our real selves yearning to tear themselves free from the encumbering body, to rip aside the burden of the flesh, to shred our inhibitions—!”
Eames and I sidled our way forward. We had an excellent view of the podium. It was a most disquieting one. Dr. Sonoma was working himself up into what my dear, departed grandmama generally called “a swivet.” His eyes glowed the bright crimson of a fine old radioactive claret, his hands curled into the eager claws of the spotted pard, and his nostrils flared like a foxhound’s scenting wounded prey.
Alas, he shared his swivet. I cast a glance over the audience and beheld a chilling sight: Every female, regardless of age or social standing, wore a look of absolute entrancement. Rapt, they leaned forward in their chairs, their bosoms rising and falling in perfect cadence, their lips parted, the color mounting to their cheeks. A fine dew of perspiration spangled each lily-white brow. Many of the more mature ladies were using their programs fanwise, but they only fluttered at the inevitable. Just looking at them, I felt an uncomfortable warmth welling up within me. I was about to commit the unthinkable—to loosen the knot of my necktie in public—when I made a supreme effort and snapped myself free of the spell.
“We are too late,” I hissed. “He has cast his power over them. You were right, Eames: He will not soil his own hands with Bradley’s blood. You have been so wrapped up in the fruition of your own desires that you gave no thought to where his might lie.”
“His…desires?” Eames repeated the word as if he had just heard it for the first time. “Well, I assume a satyr would like—”
“This is no mere satyr you have brought into our midst,” I said. “Satyrs are his followers, his minions, his lackeys! Have underlings such power to command?” I waved my hand toward the podium. My gesture caught the speaker’s foxy eye. He paused in mid-sentence. None of the entranced audience seemed to notice, prisoners of his spell. Amid the tangled glory of his curls I glimpsed the gloss of twining ivy and knew my theory to be true. “This is the deity of the vine himself,” I breathed. “This is Zeus’ child, foolish Semele’s own son, the twice-born lord of wine, Dionysus!”
“Ah?” Eames remarked. “Oh. You’re right, I suppose. Not very imaginative when it came to supplying himself with an alias, then, is he? Disappointing. Him being the patron of the old Athenian drama festival and all.”
“We can report him for first degree transparency afterward,” I gritted. “Look at him! He does not care how loudly I speak; none but you can hear me now. Our fellow members are in his thrall. He has them all in his pocket—if leopardskin tunics have pockets. He can do with them as he pleases, and mark me well…he will.”
“He oughtn’t,” Eames said, a trifle tardily. “I’ll just have a word with him.” He started for the podium.
Benjamin Winthrop rose from his seat and placed himself between Eames and Dr. Sonoma. “Stay back,” he intoned in the accents of the better class of tomb. His suit had inexplicably assumed an airier cut and a wreath of vine leaves embraced his steel-gray temples.
“Yes, sir,” Eames quavered, and shrank back.
“Man, are you mad?” I demanded, shaking him by the shoulder. “You must do something!”
“But—but that’s Benjamin Winthrop up there,” Eames protested helplessly. He needed say no more. It would take a backbone of adamant to face down our Richest Member before the assembled Club.
Yet I persisted. One cannot stand by in idleness when so much is at stake. “Eames, get a grip on yourself. Within moments, the distaff membership will be transformed into a troupe of sanguinary maenads, bacchantes flown with wine, deadly in their ecstasy! And in this room, of all places. My God, that’s white woodwork.”
“It will take a supplementary assessment of each member to cover the cleaning costs,” Eames mouthed, trembling. “Heaven help me, I’ll never be able to afford it without dipping into my capital.” His hand closed around my wrist in desperation. “In mercy’s name, what’s to do?”
“We must intervene,” I said. The words came out as scraped over sandpaper. “At best, we must prevent.”
“I fear it’s too late for that.” Eames nodded toward the podium.
Our Richest Member no longer stood guard alone. Now he was flanked by Purcell and Keats-Smythe. The former was a gentleman much given to the seductions of the grape, and was often able to write the word oenophile by the light of his nose. His Brooks Brothers suit had gone the way of Winthrop’s garb and was currently little more than a drape of undyed wool girt about his loins. He brandished a knotted club culled from the woody root of some ancient grapevine and made distinctly threatening gestures with same in our direction.
As for Keats-Smythe, his trousers had vanished entirely, but he no longer needed them. A fine crop of coarse goat’s hair covered his body from naked waist to cloven hooves. For his sake, I hoped it was at least cashmere. He leered at us and tooted the opening bars of “The Whiffenpoof Song” on his reed pipes.
“Do not attempt to interfere,” Dr. Sonoma drawled. “I would hate to have you become my first sacrifice.”
“Of all the nerve!” Eames huffed. “Is this how you honor your sworn word?”
“To what did I swear?” the deity asked with a lift of one dark brow. His hand dropped to his side and a purring panther was suddenly there to have its ears scratched.
“Hmph! I wasn’t all that drunk. I remember it precisely: You were so grateful to find a sympathetic ear after all those centuries that you promised to grant me my dearest wish. I can assure you, being tom to pieces by the ladies of the Club is not my dearest wish.”
The panther’s purr changed to an ominous growl. “You have a remarkable memory, my friend,” said the god.
“I never forget a debt,” Eames replied grimly. “What’s more, you swore by—by—by some river or other—Sounds like Monongahela, I think—”
“The Styx,” I supplied.
“That’s the one!” Eames brightened. “I knew it couldn’t have been the Hudson. And that was the exact moment when you gave me this!” He held up the crystal pendant for all to see. He was not to blame if no one present (except myself) was able to see anything save what Dionysus allowed.
The god scowled. “You speak the truth. I vowed by the awful name of Styx—which oath binds even the Olympians—and I will keep my word. But nothing in my oath prevents me from likewise achieving my own dearest desire.”
“Oh, pshaw,” said Eames. “What could a god desire?”
Dionysus’ lips curved up like the business end of a tiger’s claw. “A congregation. We shall accomplish our wishes together, my friend—you the destruction of your enemy, I the renewal of my worship.”
“Too late,” said Eames.
Dionysus’ brows met. “I beg your pardon?”
“If that’s all you wanted, you’re there already. Years ago. Good grief, have you been walking about with your eyes shut all the time since I introduced you to the Club? Just look about you!” Eames’ sweeping gesture encompassed the room. “The cocktail parties, the wine tastings, the before-and-after-dinner drinks that are de rigeur, the traditional potations of the nineteenth hole, the stirrup cup when we don’t even have a stable, the deadly scorn that greets the Club guest unwise enough to request a Perrier after his twenty-first birthday—In the name of any decent Pinot Noir, if that’s not worship enough for you, what is?”
“Truly?” The god’s face was transfigured with a childlike awe. He gazed out over the glassy-eyed faces before him as if seeing them for the first time. He left his panther to warm the podium and descended to walk among his people, pausing here to sniff a breath, there to palpate a liver. His expression was radiance itself when at last he turned back to Eames and exclaimed, “They worship me! They really worship me!” “So they do.” Eames was pleased with himself. (There is no better way to defuse a demand than by granting it—except when one is forced to deal with trade unions.) “But they do so discreetly. The common ruck tears around the countryside hurling beer cans at stop signs, yet for all their unseemly brouhaha they never manage to consume a quarter as much of your sacred tipple as our frailest member once the sun tops the yardarm. And at any given hour the sun is above the yardarm somewhere on the globe.” He gave Dionysus a conspiratorial wink.
“Beer is Demeter’s department, strictly speaking,” the god remarked.
“Do you want to quibble, or do you want to be adored by a better class of people?” Eames asked, a trifle peevishly.
Dionysus strode right up to him and gave him a hearty bearhug. I shuddered at this unseemly display of emotion and was quietly thankful that no one else was in any state to witness it. “You were right, my friend!” the vine-lord cried. “This is indeed the land of opportunity. You have given me what I have longed for these many years: a people willing to embrace my worship and all it entails. The joy! The ecstasy! The cirrhosis!”
“Well…maybe not the part about the goats,” Eames said quickly.
The god did not appear to be listening. “I, too, can be generous,” he said. “I know what it is you wish—the destruction of that man.” He jabbed a finger at Bradley. “I will give it to you at once!” He raised his hands and the ladies slowly came to their feet. Some of them—I blush to recount it—were drooling. The panther let out a whimper of fear and bolted.
‘Wo/” Eames dragged the deity’s arms back down to his sides and held them there. “I think perhaps you might have…misinterpreted my wishes.” In response to Dionysus’ quizzical look he added, “His physical destruction will not be necessary after all. Certainly not here and now, at any rate. Why don’t you just go ahead and marry Amanda. That ought to do him in just enough to suit me.”
