Immortal Lycanthropes (7 page)

Finally, out of breath, and growing leery of the many glares that a deformed, careless, running boy will garner, he slowed down to a walk. He had found Gloria once before, he could find her again the same way, if he wanted to. But it was clear, he’d decided, that Gloria was unreliable, and he was probably better off contriving a new plan, without her. So of course, no sooner had he decided this than he rounded a corner and, his hackles suddenly tingling, he saw across the street Gloria, with her sack, bumping into a well-dressed man. A pair of glasses fell off her head and hit the sidewalk with a crunch.

That’s odd,
Myron doubtless thought.
I didn’t know she wore glasses.

“Sir! You’ve broken my spectacles!” Gloria, meanwhile, was shouting.

“Er, I’m sorry? But you bumped into me.”

“Impossible! I was standing still, and you walked right into me.” Gloria really chewed the scenery. She needed these glasses for her job as a bus driver for the orphanage. She could not afford another pair, and without the money bus driving brought in she would not be able to afford her dialysis. Also, the orphans would not be able to get to the clinic to be treated for their eczema.

“This is all very sad, but I did not bump into you. And how bad could their eczema be, anyway?”

At that moment Gloria turned around. She pointed right at Myron. “Johnny!” she called. “This man broke my glasses, and I can’t get you to the clinic!”

“Good Lord!” cried the man.

And, after the man had departed, Gloria sauntered over to Myron, counting the roll of bills. “Bourgeois idiot, he’s obviously not from around here,” she was muttering.

“Why did you leave?” Myron asked.

Gloria shrugged. “I figured I’d already told you everything you needed to know.”

“You stuck me with—”

“Okay, so I didn’t want to pay the check. I figured they wouldn’t make you, I figured the waiter’d be too busy looking at you to recognize me if I came back in. Once the idea got in my head, it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.”

“What about the help you’re supposed to give me? Why did Arthur want to bring me to you if this is all you can do for me?”

She secreted the bills somewhere under her neckline. “Mass, Myron, you don’t think Arthur was really bringing you to me?”

“He said he was heading for Gloria in Shoreditch. How else would I have found you?”

“He didn’t want to bring you to me, he just wanted his doomsday device back.”

“Doomsday device?” Myron shook his head. “This just gets stupider and stupider. Did you give him the doomsday device?”

“Of course not,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seem him in seven or eight years. And when I saw him last, that’s when he gave me the device.”

“You’re just telling me lies, aren’t you? How did he tell you all about me, like you’ve been claiming he did, if he didn’t come right here after he lost me?”

“Myron, you have to start thinking things through better. You could be in real danger if you act stupid like this. He phoned me, of course. He called me from the road. What year do you think this is?”

“Oh,” Myron said.

“Anyway, he’d know better than to bring that doxy around me.”

“Are you . . . Are you
jealous
of them?”

“Myron, come here.” Gloria pulled him over to a side street and began walking him along, at a fairly rapid clip considering the way she hobbled. She leaned in to whisper in his ear. “You have to understand this. There’s nothing to be jealous about. Arthur and Alice aren’t dating. Binturongs and lesser pandas don’t date. That would be bestiality—or double bestiality—or whatever it would be, animals don’t get turned on across species.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe that’s what you should do, to figure out what kind you are. Walk around the zoo until you feel something stirring.” She laughed and actually elbowed Myron in the ribs as they were walking, making him stagger several steps. “I told you to get smarter, Myron. You’re going to need it.” She suddenly stopped and, painfully bending over, began rummaging around in her sack, which she was still toting.

“Gloria, I don’t know what to do. A lion wants to kill me, and I can’t find my parents, and I’ve never been on a trip alone before.”

“Chin up, Myron. If you ever had parents, they died ten thousand years ago. Now, I can’t tell you what to do, because if I knew I wouldn’t be a drunk and a gambler and a thief.”

“You’re a thief?”

“Not really—really I’m an expropriator, and a propagandist. A propagandist by the deed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means where did you get those clothes?” She drew from the sack a cylinder about fifteen inches long and six inches in diameter, wrapped in black duct tape. “I can’t tell you what to do, but here’s something, maybe it’ll keep you busy. You can take this doomsday device and deliver it to Arthur.”

Myron took the cylinder gingerly. “What’s in here?”

They were walking again, Gloria pulling Myron along by the sleeve. “John Dillinger’s wang,” she said.

“What!”

“No, I mean, faith, I don’t know. I never open anything I’ve heard called a doomsday device.”

“I don’t know where Arthur is.”

“Well, he’s looking for you, too, so that should double your chances. And what you can do is ask the Nine Unknown Men, they always know this kind of thing.”

“I don’t know who they are, either.”

“You’re not supposed to, naturally; they’re unknown. They’re in New York City, at the corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. You should be writing this down.”

“I don’t have a pencil. Literally the only things I own in this world are these stolen clothes and a doomsday device.”

“You do have a mouth on you. Let’s hope you have a brain, too.”

“Corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue.”

“Good. Now the Nine Unknown Men will ask you a riddle, and if you get it right they’ll help you, but if you get it wrong—well, you don’t want to get it wrong. Are you good at riddles?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now listen closely, because this is the most important thing I’m going to tell you. Do you remember that print in the apartment you found me in? The one you said was a painting?”

“Sure.”

“There are certain classes of people who will buy original art but can’t bring themselves to own a reproduction. It’s ‘vulgar,’ or ‘common,’ to own a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa,
even though of course no one could possibly afford the original
Mona Lisa.
So what do you think they do, Myron?”

“A reproduction?”

“I mean a poster of the
Mona Lisa,
not the original.”

“Yes, I know what a reproduction is,” Myron sniffed. “I just don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“What they do is they buy a poster of the
Mona Lisa,
but one that has at the bottom a notation that says what exhibit it’s from. This way they can pretend that it’s not a poster of the
Mona Lisa,
which is too vulgar for words, but a promotional item, like a movie poster or a concert poster. A souvenir of their trip to the Louvre. It’s a kind of trick. The people who adopted you, Myron—”

“My parents.”

“The people who adopted you. They’re upper middle class, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. My father’s a doctor.”

“All the art in their house, I’m betting, was either an actual painting or a poster that said ‘Philadelphia Museum of Art,’ with the date, on the bottom.”

“Maybe.”

“You’ve got to understand, not everyone is like that. Not everyone refuses to hang posters up. Some people are petit bourgeois and not haut bourgeois. Not everyone is going to be from the same world you know.
You’re
not from the same world you know. Remember that. Ah. Up you go now.”

Myron found that Gloria was muscling him onto a bus. She slipped him a roll of twenties bound with a rubber band.

“This goes to New York,” she said. “I’ll take care of your ticket. The Nine Unknown Men, don’t forget them, either.”

“Wait, why am I giving Arthur this doomsday device? What should I do about the lion?”

“You’ve got plenty of options. Maybe you can use the doomsday device to get revenge, like Hugh Jass.”

“Hugh Glass.”

Gloria nodded appreciatively. “Well, that’s a little better.”

No one sat next to Myron. One person tried, but he threw up and had to change seats. After an hour on the bus, Myron thought to look closer at the roll of twenties. He found that only the top bill was a twenty; the other eight were singles. When he got to New York he learned that Gloria had not paid for the ticket; she had somehow persuaded the driver that some guardian of Myron’s would pay double on arrival. While the driver called the station police, Myron ran away into the cold and shadowy night.

New men and new methods might do for other people: let those who would, worship the rising star; he at least would be faithful to the sun which had set.

Thomas Hughes,
Tom Brown’s School Days

I have written under a great host of pseudonyms in my day. Plentygood van Dutchhook, “Fortitude,” A. Frederick Smith, G. A. Henty, Lawrence Christopher Niffen, Frank Richards, Vivian Bloodmark, and, briefly, Wen Piao, are just a few of my more popular noms de plume; but I hit my greatest circulation ghostwriting for the Stratameyer syndicate. There I, or rather we, for I was one of a stable of anonymous ghostwriters, churned out a great many stories of young men and women solving mysteries, sometimes inventing things, and always, always triumphing over mild to severe adversity. For Stratameyer alone I must have written a dozen scenes of urchins forced to spend the night on the forbidding pavements of New York. But frankly, I was whitewashing the experience.

Myron, who may have read a dozen such scenes, had no way of knowing that. He had of late spent many nights sleeping outside, and had thought he had become inured to its hardships. But that night in New York, huddled amid the steam oozing through a grating, was the longest, the coldest, and the most terrible night of his life. Gripping tightly the garbage bag he’d stashed the doomsday device in, he waited for doomsday. “I cannot die, I cannot die,” he muttered to himself, as he rocked back and forth. And then people came out of the dark and tried to prove him wrong.

But the streetlight turned around and shone itself dead on Myron’s face. And so the people, their attempts were desultory.

There is an old Islamic folktale about a man who, having burned in hell for what feels like a thousand years, is given a chance to speak to the living. “How many thousand years have I been dead?” he asks them; and they answer, “A day, and part of a day.” That was Myron’s night, it was a day and part of a day.

The first thing he did when he woke up was eat three hot dogs, courtesy of Gloria’s money and a nearby street vendor, and the second thing was ask a dozen people for increasingly circuitous directions to the public library. There he looked up and read through several books of riddles. He wanted to take them out, but he didn’t think his tattered Pennsylvania library card would work. He wanted to stop and maybe read an adventure novel, but he knew he didn’t have time. He had work to do. He tried looking up, on the computer catalog, the Nine Unknown Men. Nothing came up, but Myron wasn’t sure he was doing it right—was
nine
spelled out or should it be a numeral? Finally he gave up and headed over to the dusty, disrepaired card catalog, kept in ancient wooden drawers in a strange corner of the third floor. He opened up the
N
drawer and flipped through. Sure enough,
Nine Unknown Men
had its own card, and when he touched it, he heard a tinkling sound. A tiny bell had been threaded through a hole punched in the card, and it sounded when the card moved.

Suddenly an old man in a plaid suit and a porkpie hat appeared behind Myron. “You probably don’t want to mess around with those reprobates,” he said.

Myron stared at him. His hackles were still. The man was not one of them, not a lycanthrope.

“Here’s a card,” the man said, flipping one out from inside his plaid sleeve. The card read
A. WEISHAUPT & CO., ILLUMINATIONS.
“These guys are pretty swell. Would you like a bowl of soup?”

Myron said he would not.

“So anyway, if you don’t mind my asking, why were you interested in the Nine Unknown Men?”

“I wasn’t,” Myron lied. “I was just flipping around. I’m really looking for information on John Dillinger.”

“Ah,” said the man, nodding his head. His tie was very wide, and a hula girl was painted on it. Myron looked closely to make certain, as he didn’t want to make a mistake after Gloria’s lecture, but he could see the streaks of paint. The tie had been hand painted. “Dillinger,” the man continued, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, “is quite the berries.”

“Quite the berries?”

“I merely mean that he is a fascinating subject. Some say he killed JFK, but I think we can agree that’s an exaggeration, eh?” He chuckled, and looked expectantly at Myron. He looked him right in the face, which most people, on the first day, cannot do.