Bad Blood: Latter-Day Olympians (7 page)

“I called because I need three things from you. First, an appointment to review Circe’s records—”

“Fine,” he cut in and rattled off a number. “That will get you to Circe’s administrative assistant. I’ll tell her to expect you.”

“Okay then. Next I need an introduction to Hiero Cholas.”

“Hiero—why?”

“Routine. He’s got ties to the nereids, having been raised by one if the myths have it right, and to the mermaid film via ILM. If either have any connection to Circe’s death, he’s a likely source of information.”

“I’m not—” he paused, and I could almost hear him changing gears. I wondered what he’d been about to say and why he’d stopped. “I’ll see what I can do. Third?”

“I’d like to talk with one of the oceanids or nereids myself if you can arrange it.”

“Alas,” —
Alas?—
“that I can’t do.”

“Why?” I asked when he failed to elaborate.

“It’s—delicate. Let’s just say that an introduction from me, even if I knew how to contact them right now, would do you more harm than good.”

Translation, I guessed, amounted to
yet another failed affair where the pursuee ended up transmogrified, pregnant or stranded.

A tart comment tickled the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back. Kicking a god when he was down, however much he might deserve it, didn’t seem the wisest course.
 

“I’ll find my own path then. Thanks for your help.”

“It is nothing. Please, call me any time. And I mean that.”

His voice had lowered to phone-sex level on that last, and I was suddenly shivery in some very intimate places. I had to swallow to lubricate my dry throat before I could respond. By the time I did, it was too late. Apollo had disconnected, leaving my body humming completely out of sync with the dial tone.

I deliberately forced my mind back along more fruitful pathways. Yiayia couldn’t be the only mortal who’d twigged to the whole “immortals walking the earth” concept. Maybe I could find someone on the web who was less discrete about giving away current info. I’d have to wade through a lot of crap probably, but if something big was churning up the rumor mill, as Yiayia had implied, there was a good chance I’d find something. The Internet was like one gigantic small town. The question was what in the world did I type in to find a needle in a haystack? I couldn’t very well just enter “trouble in godland” and expect all my problems to be solved.

Or maybe I could.

My fingers flew over the keys. No, no, I couldn’t. I tried about a dozen more searches in both English and Greek and followed hoards of completely useless links before finally lighting on a likely site.

I browsed for a while, learning fun facts like that Zeus was currently performing at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas as Zeus Stormbringer, his act a “dazzling pyrotechnic extravaganza”. So heartwarming to see the gods using their powers for good.

Then there were silly sections like the “Find Your Inner God(des)” personality quiz and the “Gotta Getta God” word search, but my favorite, the section I was searching for, was the rap sheet, a gossip-rag-styled list of hints, allegations and things left unsaid.
 

It was intriguing to speculate on who’d starred in a series of porn films in the early ’70s under the names Ray Long and Venus Wells, not that the latter took a great deal of imagination. Venus—Aphrodite—too easy. And Ray, hmm, a sun god maybe, like—no, it couldn’t be. A grin spread across my face. Our very own Apollo? Well, hey, he wouldn’t be the first to transition from, ahem,
adult film
into mainstream theatre. Tracy Lords was probably the best known, but there were plenty of never-squelched rumors about Sly Stalone and Marilyn Monroe. I tried really hard not to linger too long on any images that wanted to take my mind off legitimate research—like finding a copy of one of those films.

Lords knew how much time I’d wasted before finding a single hint of useful information halfway down the rap sheet: “Rumor has it that some pretty elemental forces are coming together to stage a comeback. So, what I’m wondering is, are we all about to be thrown together into one big melting pot, complete with scalding, or are we in for the mother of all clambakes? Only time will tell.”

Even as rumblings went, it was pretty sketchy. I tried to puzzle it out. Was the rumormonger trying to be cutesy or was there a method to his madness? The former would be no help at all, so I focused on the latter. Elemental forces. Okay: earth, air, fire, water. Melting pot—water to fill it, fire to heat it, earth for the pot? Or maybe the people within represented clay or salt of the earth. Clambake—again maybe water from which the seafood came with fire for baking. Even if I was on the right track, I couldn’t see how that put me very far ahead. The list of water divinities stretched as long as my arm, from the great Oceanus through Poseidon down to the lowliest nereid. And fire? There was Apollo, of course; Circe’s own sire, Helios; Hephaestus of the forge; even Zeus with his firebolts…

I could think of only one kind of comeback and it involved worship, tribute and debasement for us mortal saps. At least I could probably rule out Apollo. If he were staging a coup I couldn’t see the sense of hiring me to poke around. Unless—unless Circe’s death put a hitch in his plans. But then why choose me if he figured I’d be too dense to shed light on his own closeted skeletons? On the other hand, what harm could little ol’ me do? It wasn’t as if I could make the midnight ride waving my lantern and yelling, “The Olympians are coming!”

I was getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even know that Apollo was involved or that the rumors were true. Even if they were, these gods had been quiescent for thousands of years. Who was to say that they held the power to change things now? Wouldn’t they have risen up years ago if that was the case? It was probable that even gods had delusions of grandeur.

Somehow, my logic didn’t entirely put me at ease. As Mel Brooks once wrote, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” In serious deconstructionist mode, I took that to mean that the reason terrible things happen is that moral, rational people just couldn’t grasp the enormity of the horror in time to stop the juggernaut. Plus, the bad guys cheat.
      

Chapter Seven

“Tori fears to go where angels tread, but doesn’t seem to mind digging in the dirt and turning up grubs. She must get that from your side of the family.”

—Gus Karacis, second third of the Karacrobats

It was hard to think of Hiero Cholas, a.k.a. Hephaestus, a.k.a. Vulcan, as otherly abled or physically challenged or whichever moniker was currently in vogue. He had swoon-worthy shoulders that glistened with sweat where they were exposed by his Atlas Gym T-shirt, as if he really had just come from the forge rather than an airy loft, his
pied a terre
in L.A. He did walk a bit stiffly, though not for very long before he seated himself behind a drafting table covered end to end with disassembled electronics, some still twitching like remote-control cars when someone in the vicinity was playing on their frequency.

It was his face more than anything that made you think of the lameness that had gotten him cast out of Olympus by his own mother, Hera, simply for being imperfect. Not that there was anything wrong with the face, especially if you liked the brooding Heathcliff-type—it had fine, pale, tequila-colored eyes, strong squared-off lines, a powerful mouth. The problem was that Hiero looked like he was just waiting, daring you even, to mention his legs, at which point he would pounce like a wounded tiger. I felt that I could easily forget there was any vulnerability at all if only he’d let me. There was so much else to notice. But I didn’t get the impression he gave anyone that chance. Being cast out at birth probably had that effect on a person.

The apartment was nearly as fascinating as the man, crawling as it was with movie monsters and disembodied parts. Hanging over the drafting table was a vampire bat with bloodied jaws, wings fully extended as if to launch another attack. Leering down from a bookshelf was a huge toxic-waste-green insect with sinister red eyes I recognized from the direct-to-video cover of
Mantis II
. A creature from
Death Strike
, which looked like someone had turned a manta ray inside out, was mounted on the adjoining wall.
 

“You like it?” Hiero asked, following my gaze. “The exoskeleton glows in the dark. Not the cheesy black-light effect, but luminous like a deep-water fish.”

“Neat,” I answered dutifully. “Your work?”

“Early stuff,” he admitted. “That’s why it’s tucked away here. Sentimental value, but not my best work.” The more relaxed look of memory lane vanished in an instant as he turned from his creations to me. And
wow
was that focus intense, even hostile. “You’re not here to talk about my design work. Apollo says you want to discuss the old ones. For him you have five minutes.”

I met his glare, thinking of how I’d like to deliver Hera a good smack-down for setting her son against the world right from the get-go. Of course, he’d had centuries to
get over it already
.

“Yes, I’d like to ask you about Circe and the filming of
Making Waves
.”

“What do you want to know?” Something leapt forward on the table and Hiero reached for it.

“What do you think is most relevant for me to know?”

He shook his head, not even sparing me a glance now from the gadgetry he’d begun to tinker with.

“I don’t have time for a fishing expedition. Ask what you want and be done with it.”

“Funny you should mention fishing. It seems that Circe was killed by one of the water divinities. Her attacker was green-scaled and webbed but walked like a man. Any idea who he might have been, who had a reason to kill Circe?”

“Yeah, Apollo gave me the description. I can’t figure it. Thing is, most of the water spirits aren’t amphibious. Aside from Poseidon, they’re either built for the water or no different than you and me—or at least you—with an affinity for the water. And Poseidon wouldn’t need to get his hands dirty to get rid of a little nothing like Circe. He doesn’t even much concern himself with the land-dwellers anymore.”

“Any particular reason?”

Hiero spared a second to glower at me. “His business.”

I smiled to show I wasn’t intimidated. “There can’t be any harm in a little speculation.”

“Fine, I’d
speculate
that things like the Exxon Valdez, garbage barges, PCPs and other dumping haven’t really endeared mankind. Go figure.” With a shrug, he turned back to his project, an eerily life-like robotic arm, now flexing and relaxing at the twist of a screw.
 

“Fair enough. What about Circe?”

“What about her?” he echoed. “You list the first hundred people who come to mind and I’ll give you the whys and wherefores.”
 

“How about the top ten?”

He snorted. “Yeah, like I’ve got a ranking system. You got a Bulfinches Guide? Start there.”

I struggled not to grind my teeth. “How about the filming of
Making Waves
? Anything happen there that might have set someone off?”

He looked up and speared my gaze. I felt like a fish flailing at the end of a hook. “Lady, do I seem like the social type? I create my effects back at the workshop. I only get out as required to set things up and then it’s straight back home. Circe repped the talent, but she didn’t play handler, so I’d guess she never even appeared on-site. I can’t see the connection. If that’s all you’ve got, I think Apollo’s wasting his money.”

Such
a charmer. He went back to tinkering.

“Well, hey, thanks so much for all your cooperation. Could you at least pinpoint for me the locations of the shoot? I’d like to see if any of the oceanids or nereids are still around to interview.”

His brows rose, though his eyes didn’t. Grudgingly, he hefted his bulk out of his chair, walked stiff-legged to his single filing cabinet and yanked on a drawer that whined in protest. I didn’t see any tabs, just a mess of papers—glossy, blueprint, velum—all with ragged edges and seemingly tucked in any which way. He flipped through them quickly, flying past two or three pages at a time, clearly uncaring whether he found what he was looking for or not. Finally, though, he stopped, pulled out a map of coastline and thrust it at me.

I had to rise to accept it.

“Do you need these back?”

“The masters are on file somewhere. No need for you to come back.”

In other words,
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But I’d never let a little thing like social graces get in the way of my curiosity.

“What kind of effects did you do for the film?”

I hadn’t noticed before, but his brow ridge was
really
pronounced when he scowled.

“Functional mermaid tails, kelp hair, that kind of thing,” he answered, beginning to crowd me toward the door.

“Did you notice any of the nereids or oceanids hanging around?”

“Sure, the sirens and I had a little tea party, dined on barnacle stew.” He reached around behind me for the door. “If there’s nothing else—” a push that was more of a shove and the door shut in my face.

Wow, the charm was simply staggering. Finally, a man I’d want to bring home to mother. For a cage match.

Early spring was probably my favorite time to visit Venice Beach. Fall and winter were too tarted up for my taste with all the overblown seasonal displays. Summer was gorgeous, of course, especially if you considered it a perk to be cheek by surgically altered jowl with the bronze and the beautiful. Thongs as far as the eye could see. Speedos on men who could almost pull off the look. In the whole history of the world, the part I’d been around for anyway, there’d been maybe three men who could make the bikini bathing suit work—Greg Louganis, Mark Spitz and…okay, two men. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the natural male physique. It was more the weight machine bulging-in-odd-places look that gave me trouble. I much preferred the taut, streamlined, natural approach. You didn’t see much of that in L.A. But I digress.