Hellenic Immortal (13 page)

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Peter was one of the lucky ones in this life, insofar as he was fortunate enough to have a mother who attracted rich men on a semi-regular basis. She’d been married four times to four men who’d each made at least one appearance on the Fortune 500 list in their lifetime.

Although it wasn’t clearly stated in any of Mike’s documents, Peter had obviously fallen into the trap of the uncommonly privileged and became very bored with himself. I’ve seen this a lot, as you can probably imagine. Bored wealthy people can be fairly dangerous, like when they decide to start a war just because it’s something to do. In Peter’s case, he reached a certain level of ennui sometime in college—UCLA—and decided to take a year off to hike through the rainforest with his roommate, a kid named Lonnie Wicks.

That was a mistake. I’ve been to my fair share of tropical rainforests. They tend to be the sort of thing one tries very hard to get the hell out of, not actively hike into. Especially now. Back in the early days, we understood that damn near everything on the planet wanted to kill us for one reason or another and we were prepared for that, because it was the only way we knew. But in the twenty-first century, one can walk for weeks without coming across something that wants to eat you and has the means to do so. A city kid like Peter Arnheit should have known better. (As an aside, this is why I don’t understand most anybody involved in the environmental movement. These people probably think we used to pet panthers and sing to rhinos or something. It’s all Walt Disney’s fault.)

Peter and Lonnie were both well trained in survival techniques, as apparently it was a hobby of theirs. They also had access to the best gear money could buy, including a couple of satellite phones, something called a GPS, plenty of cash, and their health, which is always important. And then they disappeared into a South American rainforest.

Four months later, nobody had heard from them, and their families were worried. Peter’s mother had died of leukemia during his freshman year in college, but his biological father, a former senator from the state of New Mexico, was still very much alive. Lonnie’s parents were the owners of the largest retail chain of women’s footwear in the Western United States. With that kind of clout, it’s not surprising that the government was soon politely requesting assistance from four different South American countries in locating them. Unfortunately—and I could have told them this—political pressure doesn’t make a huge difference if someone is lost in a rainforest. Just about the only thing they could confirm was that the kids hadn’t been kidnapped. Or if they had, it was by some incredibly stupid kidnappers who didn’t understand that demanding a ransom is kind of important.

So everyone in the Arnheit and Wick households sort of just freaked out for a little while, up until one afternoon when, seven months after he’d last been heard from, Peter called home.

“I made it, Dad,” he had told the stunned Senator Arnheit, “but it got Lonnie.”

What followed was something of a minor scandal. The Wicks family had lost their only child, and the one person who knew exactly how and why, wasn’t making any sense at all.

Peter was half-starved and badly dehydrated when he emerged from the woods, and the last lucid thing he did for a good three months was place that call to his father. Hospitalized first in Colombia, before being flown
gratis
by the American government to a more up-to-date medical facility in Los Angeles, he was never conscious for more than a half hour at a time, and had to be resuscitated twice when his heart decided to give up and stop beating.

The problem was a severe infection. He had over a dozen unexplained wounds on his body, the two deepest and oldest of which had not healed well at all. The locations of the cuts—Mike had pictures—implied that he’d been attacked by a wild animal, and on more than one occasion. But the wounds themselves weren’t consistent with any indigenous animal, so the consensus was they were knife wounds caused by another person. The possibility that person had been Lonnie Wicks was floated.

Looking at the photos, I couldn’t think of any animal that might have made the wounds, and I’m pulling from a much wider data pool than your average zoologist. A dragon, maybe, but dragon wounds were usually wider and more definitively lethal. And dragons are extinct.

When the infection was fought back, and Peter’s fever finally abated, the police were called in to ask him what had happened to his friend. His official response was short and not terribly illuminating, essentially saying they would never believe him if he told them. Beyond that, he wouldn’t utter a word until after the arraignment.

By the time Peter was released from the hospital, the L.A. County District Attorney had put together what he thought was enough of a case to try for a murder conviction, and the grand jury agreed.

But the case had a few weaknesses. Even I could see that, and the closest I ever got to a defense attorney was turning on the television. For starters, there was no body, and the only proof that Lonnie had met a tragic end was Peter’s own statement to his father that something had gotten Lonnie (which Senator Arnheit would probably deny). There was also no discernible motive. On the other hand, Lonnie Wicks had still not emerged from the Amazon, and the day Peter walked out, he was carrying with him several of Lonnie’s possessions: his bedroll, his tinderbox, and most damningly, Peter was wearing one of Lonnie’s shirts.

And there were the wounds on Peter. Lonnie owned a large Bowie knife he was rather proud of, and the district attorney had an expert who was prepared to testify that the wounds were consistent with the knife. They weren’t, because knife attacks don’t generally result in parallel wounds, but hey, I’m not an expert.

Peter made bail. His passport was confiscated and he still wasn’t very healthy, so his high-priced attorneys had no trouble convincing the judge to hand him over to his family.

And then he disappeared. That was five months ago.

I couldn’t imagine why any of this mattered to Ariadne, but obviously it did. What I did understand, finally, was why Mike was so interested in finding Ariadne. It wasn’t really her he was after. It was Peter.

There were dozens of photos in the Arnheit file. The very last one was a photo of Lonnie Wicks, dated about a year before his apparent death. It looked like someone had snapped it at a cookout somewhere. Captured in the shot were Lonnie, his parents, an older man I didn’t recognize, and agent Mike Lycos with a big smile and a Frisbee in his mouth as a joke and one arm around young Lonnie.

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So I had the Arnheit case, a dead mystery cult, a woman who was obsessed with both (and with me), a non-human FBI agent, possibly with vengeance on his mind, and an unknown gunman. None of it was coming close to adding up, which was downright annoying as I am generally pretty good at this sort of puzzle.

I sipped on the stale coffee that was now eating a large hole through the lower portion of my stomach, and tried flipping through the pages one more time to see if an inspirational thunderbolt was hiding in there anywhere. I ended up on a scratch page. Ariadne had kept a blank sheet of paper on her desk for jotting down random notes, the occasional phone number, and doodles that all looked a bit like the creature from the Black Lagoon.

None of the notes made much sense out of context, and I was ready to move on to the next page when I realized I was looking at a name, and that I recognized the name.

“More coffee, dearie?” Linda asked, as I jumped several inches off the bench. I didn’t realize she was there.

“Actually, no. Do you have a payphone?”

“Near the john,” she said, pointing with the half empty urn.

“Thanks.” I scooped up the pages and shoved them back into the bag in case Linda was the curious sort. There wasn’t anything in there that was particularly damning, but still, they were confidential files. Not that I had any more clearance than Linda did.

I reached the phone and dialed up the operator, which naturally didn’t work. Back when phones were just becoming regular things, you could actually pick one up and get connected to someone, and you could ask that someone to connect you to another someone, and then they went and did it. It was an amazing thing. Now you have to pay to get the phone company on the line, pay again to get the number, and pay a third time so they can dial it for you. You would think I’d be used to this sort of thing by now.

“City and state,” asked a very congested woman after I’d successfully pumped some change into the phone.

“Um, Berkeley, California,” I said haltingly. I at first thought she meant what city and state I was calling from, and I couldn’t imagine why it would matter. Again, technologically speaking, I’m still a caveman.

“Number for?” she asked.

“Cassandra Jones,” I answered. And if Cassandra had moved from the Berkeley area this was going to take a very long time.

The pause on the other end of the line was quite dramatic. “Hold please for your number.” And then a computer read the number to me. Because apparently it’s too much work to have the operator read off ten digits.

I jotted the number down on my hand, hung up, and then dialed it. The machine on the other end of the line—a different machine than the one that had given me the number in the first place—listed an exorbitant sum necessary to complete a call of this magnitude. You would think they were laying the phone wires one call at a time. I pumped in the change, nearly handing over that drachma Ariadne had given out as a tip to Chester the bartender, which I can’t imagine the phone would have taken kindly to.

The phone rang, and a familiar voice answered.

“Cass, it’s an old friend,” I said.

“Spencer!” she exclaimed. I figured she’d remember me. “I knew I’d be hearing from you soon.”

“Did you?”

“Of course, darling. It’s what I do. When can you be here?”

ORACLE:

WHEN SERVING ONE TO FIND THE OTHER,

LIES WILL TRAP YOU ‘TWIXT THE TWO.

FOR THE OTHER WILL NOT GREET THE ONE YOU SERVE

AND ALL WILL BE LOST E’ER THE SHADOWS DANCE.

SILENUS:

WHAT? YOUR SPEECH IS WOEFULLY UNCLEAR.

ORACLE:

SUCH IS THE WAY OF PROPHECY.

From The Tragedy of Silenus, text corrected and translated by Ariadne

This was not my first time in California, although aside from the occasional connecting flight, I hadn’t spent any real time in the state since 1967, and that time was spent on the campus of UC Berkeley.

   
As I may have mentioned before, there are two kinds of people who are great to be around if you feel like confessing your immortality, and not get a lot of blank stares in return—bar drunks and college students. In the case of the former, that’s sort of easy to understand because many bar drunks are also semi-crazy people, and semi-crazy people are having their sense of reality mucked up on such a regular basis that one more muck-up isn’t really that much of a big deal for them. With college students, it’s hard to say exactly what it is.

In the sixties, it helped immensely that so many of the very best—or at least the most entertaining—students were also stoned a great deal of the time. Same with the seventies, but the drugs of choice—and the overall philosophy of the students—had changed a lot by then, so it was more difficult to find an entertaining student population that wasn’t also seriously considering taking hostages for some cause or another. And the eighties and nineties were the absolute worst, up until the latter stages of the nineties, when cultural relativism and deconstructionism started to become vogue. This worked for me because to a cultural relativist, it makes perfect sense that in My Culture immortality was a fact, and they felt compelled to accept that at face value, which led to some mind-blowing discussions. At least for them. Inevitably, the deconstructionists brought up their ongoing problems with certain dead white men, which got sort of uncomfortable given how many of those dead white men I happened to know. But they were still pretty fun.

Amazingly, deconstructionists and cultural relativists were almost never stoned, which meant the crap they were spouting came to them when they were in a non-altered state, so they were invariably fairly stupid, or at least not nearly as smart as they thought they were. They also never passed out, which was unfortunate. The upside was that I never felt left out of the fun, insofar as I can’t get stoned.

I don’t know why this is, but I’ll wager it has a lot to do with why I can’t be poisoned or get sick, so it’s not a bad tradeoff. Still, it looks like fun.

Anyway, I met Cassandra Jones on the UC Berkeley campus at a party. Well, no, a party implies a cause for celebration of some kind, and we weren’t celebrating something. Really, from a definition standpoint, nobody can fairly describe an event that occurs nightly a party at all.

I digress.

Cassandra was a student, and a part of the counter-cultural flower child phenomenon that seemed so much fun back then but nowadays looks silly. For my part, I always thought it was silly, but as I was a raging drunk at the time, I didn’t do much complaining about it.