Years later, when he was well into young adulthood, Christopher Caperton wrote about it in the journal he had begun to keep when he turned twenty-one. The entry had everything to do with the incident, though he had totally forgotten it.
What he wrote was this: The great tragedy of my life is that in my search for the Holy Grail everyone calls True Love, I see myself as Zorro, a romantic and mysterious highwayman—and the women I desire see me as Porky Pig.
The incident lost to memory that informed his observation had taken place fourteen years earlier, in 1953 when he was thirteen years old.
During a Halloween party from which chaperoning adults had been banished, it was suggested that the boys and girls play a kissing game called “flashlight.” All the lights were turned off, everyone paired up, and one couple held a flashlight. If you were caught kissing when the flashlight was turned on you, then it became your turn to hold and flash while the others had free rein to neck and fondle in the dark.
Because he was shy, Christopher volunteered to be the first holder of the light. Because he was shy, and because he had, as usual, been paired with Jean Kettner, who adored him but whom he could not find it within himself even to like. Across the room, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, the improbably named Briony Catling, sat on the lap of Danny Shipley, who played baseball and had blond, wavy hair.
Chris Caperton ached for Briony Catling with an intensity that gave him cramps.
Another rule of the game was that if the wielder of the flashlight caught another couple “doing it,” he or she could demand a switch in partners.
Because he was shy, because he was paired with Jean Kettner, and because he knew exactly where he would shine the flashlight after allowing several minutes to pass (in which the couples could become too interested in kissing to prepare themselves), he caught Briony and Danny Shipley, and demanded a switch. Of the four involved in the transaction, only Christopher felt elation. Briony Catting had no interest in Christopher Caperton. She ached for Danny Shipley with an intensity that gave her cramps.
But they switched, and when the light went out Christopher hugged Briony frantically and shoved his face toward hers. The kiss splatted somewhere between her nose and her mouth.
She blew out air, made a yuchhing sound, swiped at the slaver on her upper lip, and jumped off his lap.
Fourteen years later the shame and the pain still lurked in his unconscious like pariahs.
Briony Catling had not been his first great love. That had been Miss O’Hara in the third grade, who had shone down on him at the age of eight like the field lights at a night baseball game. He had loved her purely and with all his heart; and the present he gave her at the Christmas party held by his home room had cost him all the money he’d made raking leaves through that Autumn. She had been embarrassed and had kissed his cheek lightly, never knowing it caused his first erection.
After Miss O’Hara, it had been the actress Helen Gahagan in the 1935 version of She, which he saw at the Utopia Theater on a re-release double-bill. When he belatedly went to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on one of its periodic reissues, he recognized at once that Disney had appropriated the garb and look of Helen Gahagan as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed for the character of the wicked Queen Grimhilde; and when he learned of the foul campaign Richard Nixon had waged against her in the 1950 Senatorial race, when she had become Helen Gahagan Douglas, he vowed a revenge that only manifested itself when he twice voted for Nixon’s presidential opponents.
The year before Briony Catling filled him with self-loathing, he fell desperately in love with the Swedish actress Marta Toren. He watched her vamping Dick Powell in Rogue’s Regiment on the Late Late Show and made a point of being in the audience the night Paris Express, with Claude Rains, opened. Miss O’Hara, Helen Gahagan, and even Briony Catling paled by comparison. She was precisely and exactly the embodiment of True Love in his eyes. Four years later, six months after Christopher had lost his virginity to a young woman who bore only a passing resemblance to Marta Toren, he read in the newspaper that she had died from a rare brain trauma called a subarachnoidal hemorrhage that struck like Jack the Ripper and killed her within forty-eight hours.
He closed himself in his room and tore at his clothes.
In February of 1968, attached to General William Westmoreland’s headquarters in Saigon, Capt. Christopher Caperton, age 28, stumbled upon the astonishing fact that True Love, in a physical form, existed. The Tet offensive had begun and Saigon was burning. Had he not had his own assigned jeep and driver, he would not have been able to get around: there was virtually no public transportation, and the cyclos and taxis had been commandeered for the wealthy trying to flee. The hospitals were so crowded that only emergency cases were being accepted; patients were sleeping on the floors, jamming the corridors. Coffins lay unburied for days: the grave diggers had gone south. Chris’s business was good.
Chris was in the business of helping GIs cope with the anguish of serving in a war they had come to despise.
In business with, and in love with, his lover and business partner, a thirty-nine-year-old Eurasian of French and Thai parentage, Capt. Chris was the main conduit for “Js,” “OJs,” Binoctal, and a luscious black opium from the Laotian poppy fields to America’s fighting men in Indochina.
Because their goods—marijuana joints; joints dipped in liquid opium; the French headache killer; and the most potent smoking opium—were superlative goods, Christopher Caperton and Sirilabh Doumic had established a flourishing trade in I and II Corps. And from this enterprise they had managed to bank over a million and a half dollars (converted to Swiss francs) in an unnumbered Zurich account, despite the crushing overhead and the payoffs to officials of Thieu’s provincial government.
And because he was in love in a terrible place, and because he and his love wanted nothing more than to survive, to win release from that terrible place, he felt no guilt about the traffic. There was no self-delusion that he was engaged in humanitarian activities, neither the war nor the drug traffic; what he did feel was a sense of keeping busy, of working at something that held light and hope at its conclusion, that without the dope some of his clients would either go mad or turn their rifles on the nearest 1st Lieutenant. But mostly he was in love.
Siri was small and light. He could lift her with one arm to carry her to the bed. Her features were fine and delicate, yet they changed dramatically with each noticeable variation in the light. Monet would have had to do her portrait eighteen times, as he did the Rouen Cathedral, from dawn to sunset, to capture even one expression. She was the daughter of a French attache in the Bangkok consulate and a young temple dancer Doumic first saw at the Kathin ceremony marking the end of the Buddhist Lent. From her father she inherited a wiliness that kept her alive in street society, from her mother—who had come from Chumphon to the south—a speech filled with musical inflection. How she had come to Saigon ten years before was not something she cared to talk about. But Chris winced every time they made love and his hands brushed the thick scars on her inner thighs.
On that night in February of 1968, they were just sitting down to a dinner of beef satay Siri had made in their apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street when a 122mm shell came across the Saigon River and hit the face of the building opposite Caperton’s. The rocket round ripped the building out of the ground like a rotten tooth and threw shrapnel in every direction.
Not the biggest chunk, but big enough, it came straight through the window and tore into Siri’s back, taking off most of her left shoulder.
There was no use trying to move her; it was obvious she would never make it down the stairs, much less across the city to the American hospital that had been opened at Tan Son Nhut.
He tried to stanch the flow with a bedspread and all the white tennis socks in his drawer, and miraculously, she lived for almost an hour. In that hour they talked, and in that hour of farewell she gave him the only gift in the world he wanted, the only thing he could not get for himself. She told him how he could find True Love.
“We have talked of it so many times, and I always knew.”
He tried to smile. “In a business partnership like ours there shouldn’t be any secrets. How else can I trust you?”
Pain convulsed her and she gripped his hand till the bones ground. “We’ve no time for foolishness, my love. Very soon now you’ll be alone again, as you have been so often. I have this one thing I can give you in return for the love you gave me…and it will take some believing on your part.”
“Whatever you tell me I’ll believe.”
Then she instructed him to go to the kitchen and get an empty condiment bottle from the spice rack. When he brought back the bottle labeled chopped coriander leaves, which was empty because they had been unable to get fresh coriander since a Claymore mine had gone off in the central market, she told him he must not argue with her, that he must fill it with her blood. He argued, wasting precious minutes; but finally, filled with a vaguely familiar self-loathing, he did it.
“I have always sought perfection,” she said. “Always knowing that one must die to reach perfection, for life is imperfect.”
He tried to argue, but she stopped him. Sternly.
“Chris! You must listen to me.”
He nodded and was silent.
“For each woman there is a perfect man; and for each man there is a perfect woman. You were not perfect for me, but you were as close to what I sought as I ever found. But I never stopped searching…though my movement was very slow since we met. I should have been content. It’s easy to be smart, later.
“But knowing what I knew, that True Love is a real thing, that it can be picked up and turned in the hands, that it can be looked at and understood…that kept me always dissatisfied. As you have been.
“Because somehow, without possessing the knowledge I chanced upon ten years ago, you knew it was real. And now I will tell you how to go about finding it. And that, my dearest, is the best way I can apologize to you for not giving up the search when we met.”
Then with her voice fading off and coming back a little less strong each time, she told him of an artifact that had never been described, that had first been unearthed during Evans’s excavations of the Palace of Minos at Knossos in 1900.
It was taken from a walled-up niche behind an elaborate fresco painted on a wall of the Corridor of the Procession, and had been hidden there since 2000 b.c. Where it had come from before that time, not even the archaeologist who discovered it and smuggled it away from Crete could begin to guess.
He recognized it for what it was the instant the light of his torch fell on it. He disappeared that night and was presumed to have returned to England; but was never seen again. Record of his find was revealed in 1912 during the dying reminiscences of Bessie Chapman, one of the 711 survivors of the sinking of the Titanic picked up by the Carpathia.
Suffering from extreme exposure and seemingly delirious, the immigrant passenger babbled a story heard only by those few Carpathia deckhands and ministering survivors who tried to make her last hours easier. Apparently she had been a London doxy who, after an evening of sport with “a real elegant nob, a brick ‘e was,” actually saw the artifact. She spoke of it with such wonder that when she died it seemed she had passed over having known all there was to know of joy in this life.
One of the deckhands, an Irish stoker named Haggerty, it was later reported, hung about the dying woman and seemed to be paying close attention to her story.
Haggerty jumped ship on the return of the Cunard liner to New York.
Sgt. Michael James Haggerty was killed during the battle of Ypres, November 9th, 1914. His kit bag, scavenged by a German soldier when the French and British trenches were overrun (it was reported by a survivor who had played possum and been overlooked in the random bayoneting of corpses), disappeared. Others in Haggerty’s company said he slept with the kit bag under his pillow, that it seemed quite heavy, and that he once broke the arm of a messmate who playfully tried to see what the Irishman was carrying in it.
Between 1914 and 1932 the object—while never described—turned up three times: once in the possession of a White Russian nobleman in Sevastopol, twice in the possession of a Dutch aircraft designer, and finally in the possession of a Chicago mobster reputed to have been the man who gunned down Dion O’Banion in his flower shop at 738 North State Street.
In 1932 a man visiting New York for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall just after Christmas reported to the police who found him lying in an alley on West 51st Street just below Fifth Avenue that he had been mugged and robbed of “the most important and beautiful thing in the world.” He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but no matter how diligently he was interrogated, he would not describe the stolen article.
In 1934 it was reputed to be in the private art collection of the German architect Walter Gropius; after Gropius’s self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany it was reputed to have passed into the personal collection of Hermann Goering, 1937; in 1941 it was said to be housed with Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa; in 1946 it was found to be one of the few items not left by Henry Ford, at his death, to the Ford Foundation.
Its whereabouts were unknown between 1946 and February of 1968. But Siri told Chris, her final love, that there was one sure, dangerous way of finding it. The way she had used originally to learn the hand-to-hand passage of the artifact that was True Love from the Palace of Minos to its present unknown resting place.
Then she released his hand, realizing she had squeezed it so hard while telling her story that it was as white as unsmoked meerschaum; and she asked him very softly if he would bring her the little cloisonné minaudière he had bought her in Hong Kong.
He gave it to her and she clutched it far more tightly than she had his hand. Because it was a minute later, and the pain was much worse.
“Do you remember the flea market?”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes. “ And we were holding hands in the crowd; and then you let go and I was swept along; and I thought I’d lost you; and you were gone for fifteen minutes…”
“And you panicked.”
“And when I got back to the car, there you were.”
“You should have seen your face. What relief.”
“What love. That was the moment I slowed the never-ending search. And you smiled and held out this to me.” And she opened her hand where the exquisite blue and gold minaudière lay in her palm, now filmed with moisture.
But her story had worked its magic. He knelt beside her on the floor, lifted her head and the pillows, and cradled them in his lap. “What is this True Love? What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. It cost too much the first time, just to get the information. The actual search has to be done without…” and she hesitated as if picking the exact words, the words that would not frighten him, because he was beginning to look more frightened than anguished, “…without special assistance.”
“But how could you have learned all this?”
“I had an informant. You must seek him out. But go very carefully. It’s dangerous, it costs a great deal; care has to be taken…once I didn’t take care…” She paused. “You’ll need my blood.”
“An informant…your blood…? I don’t…”
“Adrammelech, Supreme Ruler of the Third Hour.”
He could not help her. She was dying, he felt the stiffness in his throat, he loved her so much, and she was raving.
“An Angel of the Night, Chris.”
Bewildered and suffering, nonetheless he went to the bedroom and fetched the brass-and-silver-bound chest she called a bahut. He brought it back to her and she said, “Look at it. Do you see how it opens?”
He studied it but could find no lock or clasp that would open the coffer. “It is made of agalloch, lign aloes, the wood of the aloe, according to the directions of Abramelin. The cross-spines are of almond-tree wood. Are you beginning to understand, do you believe me?”
“Siri…”
“You’ll need Surgat to open it. Look.”
And she touched a symbol, a character cut into the rounded top of the chest:
“He won’t harm you. He serves only one purpose: he opens all locks. Take a hair from my head…don’t argue with me, Chris, do it…please…” And because her voice was now barely a whisper, he did it. And she said, “He’ll demand a hair of your head. Don’t give it to him. Make him take mine. And this is what you say to invoke his presence…”
In her last minutes she went over it with him till he realized she was serious, that she was not delirious, that he ought to write it down. So he transcribed her words exactly.
“Once you get the bahut opened, all the rest will be clear. Just be careful, Chris. It’s all I have to give you, so make the best of it.” Her eyes were half-closed and now she opened them completely, with effort, and looked at him. “Why are you angry with me?”
He looked away.
“I can’t help it that I’m dying, dear. I’m sorry, but that’s what’s happening. You’ll just have to forgive me and do the best you can.”
Then she closed her eyes and her hand opened and the cloisonné herb container fell to the carpet; and he was alone.
He spoke to her, though he was alone. “I didn’t love you enough. If I’d loved you more, it wouldn’t have happened.”
It’s easy to be smart, later.
By the time he was twenty-five, Chris had read everything he could find on the arcane subject of love. He had read Virgil and Rabelais, Ovid and Liu Hsiao-Wei, Plato’s Symposium and all the Neoplatonists, Montaigne and Johannes Secundus; he had read everything by the English poets from the anonymous lyrics of the 13th to 15th centuries through Rolle, Lydgate, Wyatt, Sidney, Campion, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, Blake, Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Emily Brontë; he had read as many translations as existed of the Sanskrit Kama Sutra and the Anangaranga, which led him to the Persians; he read The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzawi, the Beharistan of Jami and the Gulistan of Sa-Di, the anonymously-written Ta’dib ul-Niszvan and the Zenan-Nahmeh of Fazil Bey, which led him to seven Arabic handbooks of sex, which he quickly put aside: sex was not the issue, he understood that as well as anyone need to. Understood it well enough to write in his journal:
I was making love to Connie Halban when her husband Paul came back unexpectedly from a business trip. When he saw us he began crying. It was the most awful thing I’d ever stood witness to. I was reminded of Ixion, tied to a turning wheel in Hades as punishment for making love to Zeus’s wife, Hera. I’ll never touch another married woman. It simply isn’t worth the torture and guilt.
And so he was able to avoid all the texts that dealt solely with physical love in its seemingly endless permutations. He made no value judgments; he understood early on that everyone sought True Love in often inarticulate ways they often did not, themselves, understand; but his was an idealized, traditional concept of what True Love was, and his search for the grail need not be sidetracked or slowed by excursions into those special places.
He read Waley’s translation of The Chin P’ing Mei and everything even remotely pertinent by Freud; he sought out La Fleur Lascivie Orientale and the even rarer English translation of Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de l’Asie Mineure; he dipped into the memoirs of Clara Bow, Charles ii, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, Marie Duplessis, Lola Montez, and George Sand; he read novelists—Moravia, Gorky, Maupassant, Roth, Cheever, and Brossard—but found they knew even less than he.
He absorbed the thoughts of the aphorists, and believed every utterance; Balzac: “True Love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”; Molière: “Reason is not what directs love.”; Terence: “It is possible that a man can be so-changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.”; Voltaire: “Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”; La Rochefoucauld: “When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.”
Yet even nodding his agreement with every contradictory image and representation of love—seen as Nature, God, a bird on the wing, sex, vanity—he knew they had perceived only the barest edge of what True Love was. Not Kierkegaard or Bacon or Goethe or Nietzsche, for all their insight, for all their wisdom, had any better idea of what True Love looked like than the commonest day-laborer.
The Song of Solomon spurred him on, but did not indicate the proper route to discovery.
He found the main path on that night in February of 1968. But once found, he was too frightened to set foot upon it.
Surgat, a subordinate spirit to Sargatanas who, in the Descending Hierarchy from Lucifer to Lucifuge Rofacale, opens all locks, came when Chris Caperton summoned him. He was too insignificant a demon to refuse, no matter how ineptly couched the invocation. But he was less than cooperative.
Chris used Siri’s blood to draw the pentagram of Solomon on the floor. He didn’t think about what he was doing…that he was dipping his finger in the blood of the woman who lay covered with a sheet on the sofa…that he had to do it repeatedly because it was getting thick…that he had been warned all ten sides of the five-pointed star enclosed in a circle must be without break…he just did it. He did not cry. He just did it.
Then he set candles at the five points and lighted them. Every apartment in Saigon in those days had a supply of candles.
Then he stood in the exact center of the runes and lines and read from the dictation he had taken. Siri had assured him if he stayed within the pentagram he would be safe, that Surgat only opened locks and was not really powerful enough to cause him trouble…if he kept his wits about him.
The words were contained in the Grimorium Verum and Siri had said they need not be spoken precisely, nor need Chris worry about having done the special cleansing necessary when summoning the more powerful Field Marshals of Lucifer’s Infernal Legions.
He read the words. “I conjure thee, Surgat, by the great living God, the Sovereign Creator of all things, to appear under a comely human form, without noise and without terror, to answer truly unto all questions that I shall ask thee. Hereunto I conjure thee by the virtue of these Holy and Sacred Names. O Surmy ✠ Delmusan ✠ Atalsloym ✠ Charusihoa ✠ Melany ✠ Liamintho ✠ Colehon ✠ Paron ✠ Madoin ✠ Merloy ✠ Bulerator ✠ Donmeo ✠ Hone ✠ Peloym ✠ Ibasil ✠ Meon.” And on and on, eighteen more names, concluding with, “Come, therefore, quickly and peaceably, by the Names Adonai, Elohim, Tetragrammaton! Come!” From across the Saigon River he could hear the sound of the city’s rockets, flattening Charlie’s supposed emplacements. But in the little apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street everything began to shimmer and wash down like the aurora borealis.
It was an apartment no longer. He stood on the polished wood floor, inside the pentagram of Solomon, but the polished wood floor came to an end at the edges of Siri’s dried blood. Beyond lay a fallen temple. Great gray stones, enormous and bearing the marks of claws that had ripped them loose from mountains, tumbled and thrown carelessly, rose up around Chris. And out of the shadows something came toward him.
It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him.
Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall.
The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name.
“Open the lock of the casket,” Chris yelled. He had to yell: the sound of wind was overpowering, deafening, insane.
Surgat kicked the bahut. Chris had left it, as Siri had instructed, outside the pentagram. Surgat kicked it again. No mark was put on the coffer, but where the demon’s foot had rested in the dust of the fallen temple’s floor, a cloven footprint burned and smoked.
“Open the lock!”
Surgat leaned forward and shrieked. Words poured forth. They made no sense to Chris. They were from a throat that was not human. If a hyena had been given the ability to speak with the tongue of a man, it would have sounded less guttural, less deranged, less terrifying.
Siri had said the demon would be troublesome, but would finally do as bidden. It had no choice. It was not that important or powerful a spirit. When Chris remembered that assurance, and perceived just how staggering was the sight before him, he trembled at the thought of one of Surgat’s masters. “Open it, you goddam ugly sonofabitch! Open it right now!”
Surgat vomited maggots that hit an invisible plane at the edge of the pentagram. And babbled more words. And reached out a lobsterclaw that stopped just outside the invisible plane. It wanted something.
Then Chris remembered the hair from Siri’s head. It will want the hair of a fox, she had said. Forget that. It will try to get a hair from your head. Whatever you do, don’t let it have one. All of you is contained in each hair; you can be reconstructed from a hair; then it has you. Give it mine.
He extended her long, thick strand of hair.
Surgat screamed, would not take it. Chris extended it through the invisible plane. Surgat pointed to Chris’s head and pulled long strips of bleeding flesh from its body and threw them against the fallen stones where they plopped with the sickening sound of meat against concrete. Chris did not move. The hair hung down outside the invisible plane.
Surgat screamed and capered and tore at itself.
“Take it, you disgusting sonofabitch!” Chris yelled. “Take it and be damned, she died to give it to you, you puking garbage dump! Take it or get nothing! Nothing’s worth this, not even that thing she looked for all her life! So take it, you crummy piece of shit! Take it or go back where you came from and let me alone!”
The words Surgat spoke became very clear, then. The voice modulated, became almost refined. It spoke in a language Chris had never heard. He could not have known that it was a tongue unspoken for a thousand years before the birth of Christ: Surgat spoke in Chaldean.
And having spoken, having acknowledged obedience at the threat of being dismissed without the proper license to depart, the threat of being trapped here in this halfway place of fallen stones, and the wrath of Asmoday or Beelzebuth, the lock-picking demon ran its tentacle forward and took Siri’s hair. The hair burst into flame, the flame shot up toward the shadowed ceiling of the fallen temple, Surgat turned the flame on the casket…and the flame washed over the wood…and the casket opened.
Quickly, Chris read the final words on the paper he held. “O Spirit Surgat, because thou hast diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license thee to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be thou willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured by the Sacred Rites of Magic. I conjure thee to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of God continue forever between me and thee. Amen.”
And Surgat looked across the pentagram’s protective plane and said, in perfectly understandable English, “I do not go empty-handed.”
Then the demon slouched away into the shadows, the aurora borealis effect began again, rippling and sliding and flowing down till he was in his own apartment again. Even then he waited an hour before leaving the charmed circle.
To discover that, as Siri had promised, everything had its price. Surgat had not gone empty-handed.
The body of his lover was gone. He could not look at what had been left in its place.
He began to cry, hoping it had been an exchange; hoping that what lay on the sofa was not Siri.
The bahut contained more items than its outside dimensions would have indicated. It held grimoires and many notebooks filled with Siri’s handwriting. It held talismans and runic symbols in stone and silver and wood. It held vials of powders and hair and bird-claws and bits of matter, each vial labeled clearly. It held conjurations and phials and philtres and maps and directions and exorcising spells. It held the key to finding True Love.
But it also held Siri’s observations of what had happened to her when she had summoned the entity she called “the supreme hideousness, the most evil of the ten Sephiroths, the vile Adrammelech.” He read the ledgers until his eyes burned, and when his fingers left the pages, the paper was smudged with his sweat. He began to tremble, there in the room where the smell of Surgat’s dining table lingered, and knew he could not summon the strength to summon this most powerful of dark beings.
He read every word on every page Siri had written; and he vowed silently that he would pick up her quest where she had fallen. But he could not go to her informant. His assistance had cost her too much, and she had been unable to go on. The price was too high.
But there were clues to the trail of the artifact that was True Love. And he took the bahut and left the apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street, and never returned. He had money to continue the search, and he would do it without help from things that dragged long, rubbery arms through the dust of fallen temples.
All he had to do was wait for the end of the war.
By 1975 Christopher Caperton had traced it to New Orleans. He was thirty-five years old; he had been married and divorced because, in a moment of weariness, he had thought she might suffice in place of True Love; and he wrote this in his journal: It is the vanity of searching for embodiments. Flèches d’amour. Incarnations which are never satisfactory, which never answer all longings and questions.
Once, when he had thought he might die of a jungle fever contracted while running down a false clue in Paramaribo, he heard himself cursing Siri’s memory. If she had not told him it actually existed, he might have settled for something less, never knowing for certain that there was more. But he did know, and in his tantrum of fever he cursed her to Hell.
When he recovered, he was more than ashamed of himself. Considering who she had been, where she had gone, and the owners of her spirit, he might have called down a sentence on her that she did not deserve. One never knew the total cost, nor at what point the obligation was considered voided.
After he had been rotated home in 1970 he spent a few months tying up all previous relationships—family, friends, business associates, acquaintances—and set out on the trail that had grown cold since 1946.
Without dipping into capital, he was able to underwrite his expenses handsomely. Even though the gnomes of Zurich had done away with numbered, secret accounts, he had made his money in a way that caused no concern among the assessors, customhouse officials, tithe-seekers, and running-dogs of the IRS desiring duty, levy, tribute, tallage, liver, and lights. He moved freely under a variety of passports and a number of names. He came to think of himself as a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Greene suspense novel.
There were clues, beginning with one of the appraisers who had worked on the Ford bequests. He was quite old by the time Chris located him in a retirement trailer camp in Sun City, but he remembered the item clearly. No, he had never seen it; it was crated with specific instructions that it should not, under even the most extreme circumstances, be opened. If he was lying, he did it well. Chris was paying a high enough premium for the information that it didn’t matter either way. But the trail picked up with the old appraiser’s recollection that, whatever the crate had contained, it had been bequeathed to a contemporary of Henry Ford’s, a man with whom he had been friends and then fallen out, fifty years before.
Chris managed to locate the bills of lading and traced the crate to Madison, Indiana. The recipient of the crate had been deceased for fifteen years. The contents of the crate had been sold at auction…
And so it went. From place to place. From clue to clue. And each clue indicated that having been in touch with the artifact, the owner had known great joy or great sorrow; but all were dead. The Holy Grail always lay just ahead, always just out of Chris’s reach. Yet he could never bring himself to take the easy way out: to summon up the horror Siri had called Adrammelech. He knew if he finally gave in, that even if he found True Love he would never be able to savor it.
In January of 1975 Christopher Caperton followed a clue from Trinidad to New Orleans. His source had assured him that the artifact had passed into the hands of a houngan, a priest of the conjur, a disciple of the voodun of Doctor Cat, a pioneer of Mail Order Voodoo in 1914.
On Perdido Street, in a back room lit only by votive candles in ruby-glass jars, Chris met “Prince Basile Thibodeux,” whose title at birth had been merely Willie Link Dunbar. Prince Basile swore he had known and loved the real and true Marie Laveau. As the old black man looked no more than sixty—though he claimed to be ninety-two—such a claim was, either way, highly dubious. Absolute proof exists that Marie Laveau, the first of the many Marie Laveaus, died on June 24th, 1881, at the approximate age of eighty-five. Two years before Willie Link “Thibodeux” had been born, if he was ninety-two; and thirty-four, if he was lying.
Christopher Caperton did not care what lies Prince Basile told to sell his worthless hoodoo goods in the drugstore of Love Oils, Goofer Dust, Devil’s Shoe Strings, and War Water, as long as he told him a straight story about the artifact.
When he walked into the little back room, washed in bloody shadows from the candles, he was prepared to pay a premium price for the information he sought, or to assure Prince Basile that there were two men living on Prytania Street who would, for only a fraction of that premium price, inflict great bodily sorrow on a sixty- or ninety-two-year-old black man, and he would worry about the black goat dancing on his grave at a later time. But Prince Basile took one look at him and fear filled the withered face. “Doan put dat gris-gris on me, mistuh,” he pleaded. “Jus’ whatever you want, that’s be what you gone get. Ah’m at y’service.”
And Chris walked out of the little back room on Perdido Street with the information—that he knew to be absolutely reliable because no one that terrified could lie without dying in the act—that Willie Link Dunbar had worked on a smuggling operation from the Islands to the Keys in 1971 and he had seen the artifact. He swore before Damballa that he could not remember what it looked like…but it had been as lovely as anything he knew. His face, when he said it, was a strange mix of terror at the sight of Chris and joy at the last scintilla of memory of what he had seen.
And he told Chris the name of the smuggler who had taken the item from the boat.
And when Chris asked him why he was so frightened of just another white man, Prince Basile said, “You been kissin’ the Old Ones. I kilt a hunnerd crows and cocks I couldn’t save mah soul if you was t’touch me, mistuh. I be jus’ playin’ at whut I does, but you…you knows the fire.”
Chris shuddered. And that was only from a minor, weak servant of Adrammelech. He left hurriedly.
He stood in the darkness of the alley off Perdido Street and thought about it, about True Love, whatever it was. He had wanted it for so long, had sought it in so many women, had glimpsed hints of its totality so many times, that he only now paused to examine what he had become. Even if he got it, would he be worthy of it? Wasn’t the one who found the Holy Grail supposed to be pure in every way, perfect in every way, without flaw or blemish or self-doubt? Knights on white chargers, saints, defenders of the faith: those were the candidates for the honor. Prince Charming always won Snow White, not Porky Pig.
Without flaw. No, not without flaw. He had come too far for perfection. He had had to experience too much.
Yet he knew he was closer to True Love than anyone had ever been. Not even those who had possessed it had known what to do with it. He knew he had it within himself to become one with True Love, as no one before him ever could. No one. Not one of the perhaps thousand owners of it before and since it found its way to the Palace of Minos, no matter how fine or great or deserving they had been.
Christopher Caperton knew his destiny was to hold True Love in his hands. Known to demons, casting no shadow, he walked away from the fear in Perdido Street.
The final clue was so mundane he could not even breathe a sigh of relief. True Love had been sold in blind bid auction at Sotheby’s in April of 1979. It now belonged to a man who lived high above the rest of the human race, in a tower overlooking New York, where almost eight million people gave a portion of each day to wondering where True Love resided.
From Siri’s notebooks Chris recognized the name of the man. In 1932 he had visited New York City for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall. The artifact had been stolen from him. He had spent forty-seven years trying to regain his lost property. In the process, somehow, he had become enormously powerful, enormously wealthy, enormously secretive.
Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.
Christopher Caperton took one final look at the cover of the December 1980 issue of Esquire. It showed a woman in a seductive bridal gown. The cover illustrated an article called “Looking for a Wife” and the slug-line read, “With all the beautiful, intelligent women out there, why is she so hard to find?”
He smiled, thinking they might have done the reverse on Ms. magazine, with a photograph of an equally unreachable male.
The model they had selected for the shot was achingly innocent, yet seductive; poised in a timeless moment of utter perfection. Had he been anyone else, this might well have been the physical manifestation of True Love for him.
But it was only the most recent in a congeries of photos, motion pictures, billboards, and women glimpsed in cars going past on city streets who were idealized manifestations of what he sought.
Tonight he would hold the real thing. Tonight he would obtain True Love.
He put the last of the vials from Siri’s bahut he might need in the capacious pockets of his London Fog topcoat, and left the hotel. It was thirty degrees in the Manhattan streets, and the wind was blowing in off the East River. By tomorrow, perhaps before two am, there would be snow. It was the sort of evening he had always imagined for this final leg of the journey.
Christopher Caperton was forty years old.
Every bribe had been well-placed. The boiler room door was unlocked. The key to the private service elevator had been properly copied. No one stopped him.
He walked through the palatial tower suite in darkness. He heard a door closing away off in the rear of the apartment. The floor-plan he had been given was precise and he touched nothing as he walked quickly to the door of the master bedroom.
The old man was lying in the exact center of the huge bed. As reported, he was dying.
Chris closed the door behind him. Only one light near the bed illuminated the room. The old man opened his eyes and looked at Chris. His eyes were very blue.
“There’s never enough money to buy silence, boy. You can buy entrance, but not silence. There’s always some mouth that’s hungrier.”
Chris smiled and walked to the bed. “I would have tried to bargain with you if I’d thought it would do any good. I’m not a thief by profession.”
The old man snorted softly. He didn’t seem to be in pain. “No price.”
“Yes, I rather thought that might be the case. But look on the bright side: you can’t take it with you, it won’t do you any good on the other side; and I’ve been looking for it for a long time.”
The old man laughed gently, no more strenuously than he had snorted. “What the hell do I care how long you looked for it, boy? Not as long as I looked for it.”
“Since Christmas, 1932.”
“Well, well. You did your homework, did you?”
“I’ve paid as much as you, in all kinds of coin.”
“Not my concern, boy. You’ll never find it.”
“It’s here. In this room. In the safe.”
The old man’s eyes widened. “Smarter than I thought. Didn’t stop any of that cash you were doling out; got good people working for me; didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t pick up a few extra dollars; they’ve got families to take care of. Didn’t expect you’d know about the safe.”
“I know about it.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll look forever and never find it. Even if you do, you’ll never get it open.” He coughed shallowly, smiled at the ceiling, and recited: “Hidden where you can’t find it; but if you do you’ll be looking at six-foot-thick walls of concrete reinforced with molybdenum-steel alloy cords, backed by a foot of tempered high-carbon high-chromium steel, another foot of unseamed silico-manganese shock-resisting steel and six inches of eighteen-tungsten, four-chrome, one-vanadium high-speed industrial tool steel. The vault door is stainless steel faced, an inch and a half of cast steel, another twelve inches of burn-resisting steel, another inch and a half of open-hearth steel, and the pneumatic hinges are inside the sandwich. The vault door has twenty bolts, each an inch in diameter: eight on one side, eight on the other, two top and two bottom. This holds the door into a sixteen-inch jamb of moly-tungsten high-speed steel, set into eighteen inches of concrete crosshatched by burn-resisting steel bars running horizontally and vertically.” He coughed once more, pleased with himself, and added as a fillip, “The door’s precision-made so you can’t pour nitro in between the seam of the door and the vault.”
Chris let a beaten look cross his face. “And I suppose that isn’t even all of it. I suppose there are thermostats that trip some kind of trap if the temperature rises…if I used a torch.”
“You got some smarts, boy. Tear gas. And the floor gets electrified.” He was grinning widely now, but what little color had been in his face was gone. His eyes were closing.
“You beat me,” Chris said. “I guess it’s yours to keep.”
But the old man only heard the first part. By the end, Chris was talking to himself. The old man was gone.
“On the other hand,” Chris said softly, “there’s no lock that can’t be opened.”
He stood by the bed for a while, staring down at the previous owner of True Love. He didn’t seem to have died happier or sadder for having passed on with it in his possession.
Then Christopher Caperton got down on his knees in the center of the great bedroom and took out the vial Siri had labeled Blood of Helomi and he unstoppered the vial and began sprinkling out the dusty contents in lines that formed the pentagram of Solomon. He placed the candles and lit them; and he stood in the center of the design. And he read from a smudged piece of paper twelve years old.
And Surgat came again.
This time it came to the tower suite; this time it did not take Chris to the fallen temple. And this time it spoke in the soft, refined voice it had used when taking Siri’s body.
“So soon?” Surgat said. “You need me again so soon?”
Chris felt nausea rising in his throat. The demon had not been dining this time. It had been indulging in whatever passed for fornication among demons. Its love-partner was still attached. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. (A momentary thought shrieked through Chris’s skull. Might it ever have been human; and might it have been…? He slammed the lid on the thought.)
“Twelve years…it’s been twelve years…” Chris said, with difficulty.
Surgat let a human face appear in its stomach and the human face smiled offhandedly. “How time flies when one is enjoying oneself.” The love-partner moaned and gave a spastic twitch.
Chris would not think of it.
“Open the safe,” he ordered the demon.
“I’ll need you out here to assist me. In one of my very difficult rituals.” The voice was a snake’s hiss, from the moth’s head.
“Go fuck yourself. Open the safe.”
“But I need you,” the demon said, wheedling disingenuously. Chris fished in his topcoat pocket for a scrap of parchment from the bahut. He began to read. “By the powerful Principality of the infernal abysses, I conjure thee with power and with exorcism; I warn thee hearken forthwith and immediately to my words; observe them inviolably, as sentences of the last dreadful day of judgment, which thou must obey inviolably…”
As he began to speak, a sweat of pus and blood began to break out on the demon’s armored flesh. Soft purple bruises appeared, as if Surgat were being struck from within.
“I hear. I obey!”
And it reached for the hair. Chris took the vial of fox hairs from his pocket, withdrew one, and handed it across the invisible plane. The hair burst into flame as before, and Surgat turned, aiming the flame at the ceiling. The fire washed the ceiling of the tower suite bedroom and the ceiling opened and the central section of the floor on which Chris stood rose up on hydraulic lifts into a chamber above the penthouse.
Then Surgat turned the flame on the stainless steel door of the vault that formed the wall of the chamber above, and the door swung open ponderously. And the vault within was revealed.
Then Chris intoned the license to depart, but before Surgat vanished it said, “Master, powerful Master, may I leave you with a gift?”
“No. I don’t want anything more from you, not ever again.”
“But Master, you will need this gift. I swear by my Lord Adrammelech.”
Chris felt terror swirl through him. “What is it?”
“Then you willingly accept my gift, without condition or let?”
Chris heard Siri’s voice in his memory: He won’t harm you. He serves only one purpose: he opens all locks. Just be careful. “Yes, I accept the gift.”
Surgat caused a pool of stagnant water to appear just beyond the protective design. Then the human face appeared again in the thorax of the insect Surgat had become, and the human face smiled invitingly and said, “Look,” and Surgat sucked in within itself and grew smaller and smaller and then vanished.
Leaving the pool of foul water in which Chris saw—
A scene from a motion picture. He recognized it. A scene from Citizen Kane. A day in 1940. The interior of the skyscraper office of the old man, Bernstein. He is being interviewed by the newsreel researcher, Thompson, who asks him what Charles Foster Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” meant.
Bernstein thinks, then says, “Maybe some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days and—”
Thompson is amused. He says, “It’s hardly likely, Mr. Bernstein, that Mr. Kane could have met some girl casually and then, fifty years later, on his deathbed—”
Bernstein cuts in. “You’re pretty young, Mr.—” he remembers the name, “—Mr. Thompson. A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in.” Everett Sloane, as the aged Bernstein, looks wistful, speaks slowly. “And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on…and she was carrying a white parasol…and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all…but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” He smiles triumphantly. “See what I mean?”
And the scene faded, and the water boiled away, and Chris was alone in the dimly lit vault room above the tower suite. Alone with the dawning fear that he had learned too much.
He saw himself suddenly as a human puppet, controlled from above by a nameless force that held every man and woman on the ends of strings, making them dance the dance, manipulating them to seek the unobtainable, denying them peace or contentment because of the promise of a Holy Grail out there somewhere.
Even if the strings were broken, and puny mortals wandered the blasted landscape of their lives on their own, they would finally, inevitably, tragically return to the great puppeteer; to try and retie the strings. Better to dance the hopeless dance that lied about True Love than to admit they were all alone, that they might never, never find that perfect image to become one with. He stood in the center of the pentagram of Solomon and thought of the achingly beautiful girl on the cover of Esquire. The girl who was not real. True Love. Snare and delusion? He felt tears on his cheeks, and shook his head. No, it was here. It was just inside the threshold of the vault. It existed. It had a form and a reality. The truth was only a few footsteps from him. Siri could not have died for it if it weren’t real.
He stepped out of the magic design and walked to the door of the vault. He kept his eyes down. He stepped over the raised jamb and heard his footsteps on the steel floor.
The vault was lit by hidden tubing at the juncture of walls and ceiling. A soft off-white glow that filled the vault.
He looked up slowly.
It sat on a pedestal of silver and lucite.
He looked at True Love.
It was an enormous loving cup. It was as gaudy as a bowling trophy. Exactly a foot and a half high, with handles. Engraved on the face were the words True Love in flowing script, embellished with curlicues. It shone with a light of its own, and the glow was the brassy color of an intramural award.
Christopher Caperton stood with his arms hanging at his sides. It was in him, at that moment, to laugh. But he had the certain knowledge that if he laughed, he would never stop; and they would come in to get the old man’s body this morning and find him still standing there, crying piteously and laughing.
He had come through a time and a distance to get this real artifact, and he would take it. He stepped to the pedestal and reached for it. Remembering at the last moment the demon’s gift.
Surgat could not touch him; but Surgat could reach him.
He looked down into the loving cup that was True Love and in the silver liquid swirling there he saw the face of True Love. For an instant it was his mother, then it was Miss O’Hara, then it was poor Jean Kettner, then it was Briony Catling, then it was Helen Gahagan, then it was Marta Toren, then it was the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, then it was one woman after another he had known, then it was Siri—but was Siri no longer than any of the others—then it was his wife, then it was the face of the achingly beautiful bride on the cover of Esquire, and then it resolved finally into the most unforgettable face he had ever seen. And it stayed.
It was no face he recognized.
Years later, when he was near death, Christopher Caperton wrote the answer to the search for True Love in his journal. He wrote it simply, as a quotation from the Japanese poet Tanaka Katsumi.
What he wrote was this:
“I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”
In that instant when he saw the face of True Love, Christopher Caperton knew the awful gift the demon had given him. To reach the finest moment of one’s life, and to know it was the finest moment, that there would never be a more golden, more perfect, nobler or loftier or thrilling moment…and to continue to have to live a life that was all on the downhill side.
That was the curse and the blessing.
He knew, at last, that he was worthy of such a thing. In torment and sadness he knew he was just that worthy, and no more.
But it’s easy to be smart…later.