The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (31 page)

“Free trade,
mon vieux
, free trade. I will ship it by the carload to the Far East, and, of course, bring back various controlled substances by the carload …”

“A regular businessman, I see.”

His smile became a scowl. He started toward me and stopped. “No,
Herr Directkor
, not a regular businessman. I will be a force to be reckoned with. I will wreak my vengeance.”

“On whom?”

A thin smile shaped his lips. “On history, my friend, on history.”

“I thought you said history comes and goes.” Though fearful I had botched everything, that Diantha and I were both doomed, I still had this compulsion to argue with him.

“Yes. And I will make it stop.”

“Make history stop? Of course, that is the essence of despotism, isn’t it?”

“I am not in the mood for dialectical diversions, old man. Now the tape. I paid good money for it. Give it here.”

“First —”

“No first!” he shouted. “You are not here to dictate terms. Perhaps if we started on Miss Lowe that would convince you.”

As he turned toward her, I reached into my coat and took out the Smith & Wesson.

Manfred Bannerhoff stopped and threw back his head in a laugh. He turned to the others. “Oh, my goodness, fellas, look, Mr. de Ratour has a weapon.”

“Listen … damn you,” I said, determined to get my points across.

Turning toward me, his face malignant, he snarled, “No, you listen, Gramps. Face it, you don’t have the balls to use that thing, so give it to me before you hurt yourself with it.”

He was right. I felt like some small beast transfixed by the eyes of a cobra. I could not move. A fatal paralysis froze my limbs, my hands, my fingers. But not my mind, not the urge to beat him with words. “You’re wrong,” I snapped, fierce with refutation. Referring to something entirely different, I began, “Hitler —”

When he laughed, interrupting me, dismissively shaking his head, I felt the gun jump in my hand. The sound came like an aural shock from afar. More than anything, I think now, I was trying to get his attention. I hadn’t even been aiming the thing, just pointing, but the bullet caught his left upper thigh. He went down on his knees, cursing and holding his leg. The other two started toward me and stopped when I swung the gun directly them. Fang uttered a cry and ran off behind the door I had come through, followed by the others.

“You son of bitch,” Mr. Bannerhoff cried. “You old …” He reached under his tunic and pulled out a Luger.

I fired again, catching him in the right shoulder, making him drop the gun, which clattered to the floor in front of him. He looked at me, his rage turning to amazement. “You, you …,” he muttered.

“I mean it,” I said, still wanting him to pay heed. “Adolf Hitler was no artist.”

He lunged for the Luger, screaming in German. I fired again, aiming at his heart. He went down with a thump and lay still. Blood began to pool around him on the polished wood of the floor, just like in the movies.

“And God is not a joker.”

I spoke loudly, with bravado, knowing I had won the argument. But I was far more certain of my first utterance than of my second. I also felt a strange vacuity. You cannot argue with the dead.

It turned into a blur after that. The three men had disappeared. I could hear a helicopter approaching. I took Diantha in my arms and held her. Then, the gun still in my hand, I led her out the way I had come in. We went out past the still Mitzi and up a way along the hillside. I gave her my parka, and we hid in a stand of thick hemlocks.

Presently a helicopter from the SPD hovered a hundred feet off the deck, its loudspeaker booming orders for everyone to throw down their weapons and come out with their hands up. Not long after that, several skimobiles rocketed out into the woods from a basement garage. We could hear gunfire, sirens, men shouting. Then, after what seemed an age, we were both in the back of a four-wheel-drive police vehicle. I was wrapped in a blanket. My teeth chattered, but not from the cold.

There’s more. But I can’t keep going right now. I’m dead, dead tired. I’m going to bed, to sleep.

The repercussions of the Love Potion Murders, as this curious tale has come to be called, are going to reverberate for some time for myself, for the museum, and for the larger Seaboard community. There has been considerable media hoopla. There were calls from some quarters for a full investigation of Freddie Bain’s death even after it became apparent that I had “taken out” a major drug lord.

Then, as more details came to light, I had to endure the fickle adulation of the media. At the same time, there remains some concern for the safety of both Diantha and myself in terms of possible mob revenge. Actually, I am more worried that some distant relative of Mr. Bannerhoff/Bain will show up with a lawyer in tow claiming wrongful death.

I would like to have it generally known that I do not feel smug in the least about killing Freddie Bain, however richly he deserved to die. Though under duress at the time, though fearful for my life and Diantha’s, I question my motives. Mostly, I fear that I shot him in the heat of an argument. And that is the way despots win arguments — by imposing the ultimate silence. I take some small comfort in the more likely possibility that I killed him because of Diantha; that it was, ultimately, a crime of passion. Who will ever know? In life, unlike in art, loose ends seldom get tidily tied up.

What happened to Celeste Tangent, for instance? Well, she simply disappeared. Perhaps she had divined earlier than most that her erstwhile colleague, Manfred aka Freddie, was going
off the tracks. When the Seaboard police, armed with a warrant, searched her apartment, they found evidence that she was long gone. I trust that, given her wiles and other endowments, she will survive quite well.

Lieutenant Tracy tells me that the SPD, now pretty much under the thumb of the FBI in this investigation, has a good idea of how Mr. Bain conducted his business. For some time various federal agencies had been suspicious about the shipping coming and going at Clipper Wharf. The theory, promulgated by the FBI, was that he was using the import and export of highly aromatic spices to mask a far more lucrative drug trade. Apparently not. Instead the wharf, the restaurant, and the spice trade were merely a distraction. Most of his contraband came in on one of the larger trawlers using another dock. This oceangoing vessel “fished” specially wrapped and buoyed bundles of narcotics dropped off by tramp freighters far out to sea. Those little GPS devices come in handy for ill as well as for good.

Indeed, it turns out that Mr. Bain’s castle in the woods contained only his private supply of controlled substances. This was found, cleverly hidden, in a chamber quarried out of the mountain’s granite core, where he maintained a shrine to the memory of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Along with bits and pieces of Wehrmacht memorabilia, the usual flags and rags, there was a fountain pen supposedly used by the
Führer
and an ornamental dagger with a handle of early plastic, remarkably like ivory, adorned at the top with a swastika inside a circle.

It’s quite clear from the evidence gathered so far that Mr. Bannerhoff/Bain planned, as he told me on that fateful day, to export the powerful aphrodisiac being developed covertly at the lab in exchange for illegal drugs. What he intended to do with the enormous sums generated by such commerce remains a secret he took with him to his grave.

Dr. Penrood, I regret to say, has been deeply implicated in this matter. Among his papers in the Genetics Lab, investigators found a detailed account of how things transpired. It appears that Professor Ossmann, in his work on the hangover drug ReLease, came across a compound — first noted in the research of Dr. Woodley and Professor Tromstromer — which he dubbed JJA-48. It reportedly triggers the vascular dilation needed for an erection far faster and more aggressively than anything in Viagra, for instance. He combined this with other compounds and with a cocktail of psychoactive drugs that act directly on those parts of the brain involved with sexual urges.

Dr. Penrood found out about the experiments through a routine inquiry into the disappearance of the small mammals Professor Ossmann was working on. When Penrood confronted Ossmann with his suspicions and threatened a thorough review by a committee of his peers, the latter decided to include the Director in his scheme. Basically, they were to repeat some of the experiments openly and proceed through the usual channels in developing and testing the aphrodisiac.

Freddie Bain found out about the experiments through Celeste Tangent. She, in her role as a provider of escort services, had “escorted” Dr. Penrood on one of his trips to a research conference in Atlanta. Penrood, smitten with her, not only told her what was afoot, but took her on as a laboratory assistant. She, Bain’s sex and drug slave, in turn made Penrood her sex and drug slave. I certainly cannot excuse Dr. Penrood’s behavior, but I think I understand it.

There remain other details yet to be cleared up. Mr. Fang, who is very well lawyered, has said little to date as he maneuvers for some plea bargaining. It is not clear, for instance, how he knew Ossmann and Woodley would be in the lab together that fateful night. It’s not clear how he inveigled both of them to eat the
food from the Garden of Delights that he or someone unknown had doctored with the fatal potion.

Speaking of which, and perhaps not all that surprisingly, the Ponce Institute has already come up with the trade names Priaptin — the version being developed for men — and Lubricitin for women. Another team has taken over the project, and the Acting Director at the lab tells me it shows enormous commercial potential.

A thorough search of that monstrosity in the woods turned up the cellar room where Korky had been kept on a starvation diet. Korky appears, by the way, to have landed on his feet. With the cooperation of many of the
haute cuisine
restaurants in and around Seaboard, he has opened up a soup kitchen for the homeless dubbed “the Best Leftovers.” It uses surplus food from the sponsoring eateries and aims at “personal redemption through fine dining.” It’s been so successful that he has reserved a part of the establishment for paying customers.

Other matters are resolving themselves in one way or another. Production of
A Taste of the Real
, Raul Brauer’s self-aggrandizing film project, has come to a shuddering halt. It turns out that Freddie Bain was the principal backer. The government has seized all of his ill-gained assets, and I doubt it will feel compelled to honor Mr. Bain’s obligations in that regard … although it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that lawyers are working on it right now.

On quite another topic, my book about the MOM,
The Past Redeemed: The History of the Museum of Man
, has received some very positive advance notices. Indeed, on the strength of this reception, I have been asked by a well-known university publishing house to edit the considerable correspondence between Mason Twitchell and Lady Miriam Rothschild, the eccentric English aristocrat who kept a large collection of
trained fleas. To date I haven’t said yes, but I haven’t said no, either.

In the interest of promoting the museum and my new book, I have made several guest appearances on national television talk shows. Elsbeth could watch them for hours and knew extraordinary amounts about the people interviewed and talked about. To me the shows all seemed the same — a ritual in which the host and the guest try to be funny or profound. And I have always found it annoying when the host or hostess lowers his or her voice, mimicking sincerity and signaling to everyone they were asking a searching question. But I must say they all treated me with respect and consideration. One fellow, in suspenders, reminded me of a sideshow barker, and the alpha female on one of the morning shows had very nice legs.

Which brings me to my own situation. Two days after the denouement in the castle, late in the evening, Diantha came into my room where, restless, I was trying to read myself to sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed and, in essence, confessed that she had returned to the Bain place “on an impulse.” She said she was going to try to convince him to leave me alone. “I knew it was a mistake the minute I got there. At first he was amused. Then he turned freaky. I mean really freaky. He wouldn’t let me go. He kept asking me where Celeste was. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t know.”

“Were you still in love with him?” I asked.

“Maybe. Until I got there and saw him again. Then …” She sighed and looked at me with her marvelous eyes. “I kept thinking about you.”

Thus in quick succession she came into my arms, into my bed, and into my life.

Diantha, it turns out, is pregnant. A week ago she informed me she was late with her period and that an off-the-shelf test
from the pharmacy proved positive. I didn’t know quite how to respond, to tell the truth.

“It’s yours, you know,” she said as we moved around the kitchen, making dinner together.

“How can you be sure?” I asked as the realization sank in through layer on layer of denials, no, no, no, culminating in a large, smiling yes.

“Freddie was shooting blanks. He had a vasectomy years ago.”

“Just like a nihilist would,” I said, stopping to take her in my arms. “You’re sure you’re pregnant?”

“I am. I’m seeing the doctor, but I know I am. If it’s a girl I want to call her Elsbeth.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

At the same time, I knew I would peruse the autopsy report of Mr. Bain, where the fact of his vasectomy might be listed. What strange beings we be.

It hasn’t been all roses between Diantha and me, but the thorns have been few and predictable. It would seem that I am playing Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. But cultural transmission, so to speak, goes two ways. It’s not simply a matter of, say, music. Like her mother, Diantha cannot abide Brahms. She can also be casual about meals. She doesn’t like to cook, and I am still leery about ordering prepared food that comes in those white containers.

It also turns out that my nubile Galatea has certain preferences of an intimate nature that test both my capacity for stimulation and the limits of my taste. And while a few eyebrows have been raised regarding our arrangements, I couldn’t care less. Not that I haven’t tried to get Diantha to refrain from referring to me, in public, as “Stud.”