"This man who offered you the quarter-ounce of H. You'd seen him before?" I asked.
"Yeah. When I first came here he steered me to a score. I figure he is creaming off a percentage."
"What did he look like?"
"Gray face, pockmarks, stocky medium build, fancy purple vest and watch chain. Like he stepped out of the 1890s. Didn't seem to feel the heat."
"Anything else?"
"Funny smell about him, like something rotten in a refrigerator."
"Please describe the ritual you witnessed," I said.
"Allow me," interrupted Dimitri. He looked at the boy and said, "Ganymede" and snapped his fingers. The boy shivered and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. When he spoke, his voice was altered beyond recognition. I had the impression he was translating the words from another tongue, a language of giggles and turkey gobbles and coos and purrs and whimpers and trills.
"Ganymede Hotel ... shutters closed ... naked on the bed ... Jerry's picture ... it's coming alive ... gets me hot to look at it ... I know he's in a room just like this ... waiting ... there's a smell in the room, his smell ... I can smell what's going to happen ... naked with animal masks ... demon masks ... I'm naked but I don't have a mask. We are standing on a stage ... translucent noose ... it's squirming like a snake ... Jerry is led in naked by a twin sister ... can't hardly tell them apart. There's a red haze over everything, and the smell—" The kid whimpered and squirmed and rubbed his crotch. "She's tying his hands behind him with a red scarf ... she's got the noose around his neck ... It's growing into him ... his cock is coming up and he gets red all over right down to his toenails—we call it a red-on...." Adam giggled. "The platform falls out from under him and he's hanging there kicking. He goes off three times in a row. His twin sister is catching the seed in a bottle. It's going to grow...." The boy opened his eyes and looked uncertainly at Dimitri, who shook his head in mild reproof.
"You still think all this happened, Adam?"
"Well, sure, Doctor, I remember it."
"You remember dreams too. Your story has been checked and found to be without factual foundation. This was hardly necessary since you have been under constant surveillance since your arrival in Athens. The heroin you were taking has been analyzed. It contains certain impurities which can cause a temporary psychosis with just such bizarre hallucinations as you describe. We were looking for the wholesalers who were distributing this poisonous heroin. We have them now. The case is closed. I advise you to forget all about it. You will be released tomorrow. The consulate has arranged for you to work your way home on a freighter."
The boy was led away by a white-coated attendant.
"What about the other witnesses, who wore masks?" I asked Dimitri.
"I surmised that they would be eligible for immediate disposal. A charter plane for London leaving Athens the day after the ritual murder crashed in Yugoslavia. There were no survivors. I checked the passenger list with my police contacts in England. Seven of the passengers belonged to a Druid cult suspected of robbing graves and performing black-magic rituals with animal sacrifices. One of the animals allegedly sacrificed was a horse. Such an act is considerably more shocking to the British sensibility than human sacrifice."
"They sacrificed a horse?"
"It's an old Scythian practice. A naked youth mounts the horse, slits its throat and rides it to the ground. Dangerous, I'm told. Rather like your American rodeos."
"What about the twin sister who hanged him?" Jim demanded.
Dimitri opened a file. "'She' is a transvestite, Arn West, born Arnold Atkins at Newcastle upon Tyne. A topflight ultra-expensive assassin specializing in sexual techniques and poisons. His consultation fee to listen to a proposition is a hundred thousand dollars, nonrefundable. Known as the Popper, the Blue Octopus, the Siren Cloak.
"And now, would you gentlemen care to join me for dinner? I would like to hear from you, Mr. Snide, the complete story and a version edited for the so limited police mentality."
Dimitri's house was near the American embassy. It was not the sort of house you would expect a police official on a modest salary to own. It took up almost half a block. The grounds were surrounded by high walls, with six feet of barbed wire on top. The door looked like a bank vault.
Dimitri led the way down a hall with red-tiled floor into a book-lined room. French doors opened onto a patio about seventy feet long and forty feet wide. I could see a pool, trees and flowers. Jim and I sat down and Dimitri mixed drinks. I glanced at the books: magic, demonology, a number of medical books, a shelf of Egyptology and books on the Mayans and Aztecs.
I told Dimitri what I knew and what I suspected. It took about half an hour. After I had finished, he sat for some time in silence, looking down into his drink.
"Well, Mr. Snide," he said at last. "It would seem that your case is closed. The killers are dead."
"But they were only—"
"Exactly: Servants. Dupes. Hired killers, paid off with a special form of death. You will recognize the rite as the Egyptian sunset rite dedicated to Set. A sacrifice involving both sex and death is the most potent projection of magical intention. The participants did not know that one of the intentions they were projecting was their own death in a plane crash."
"Any evidence of sabotage?"
"No. But there was not much left of the plane. The crash occurred outside Zagreb. Pilot was off course and flying low. It looks like pilot error. There are, of course, techniques for producing such errors.... You are still intending to continue on this case? To find the higher-ups? And why exactly?"
"Look, Colonel, this didn't start with the Green case. These people are old enemies."
"Do not be in a hurry to dispose of old enemies. What would you do without them? Look at it this way: You are retained to find a killer. You turn up a hired assassin. You are not satisfied. You want to find the man who hired him. You find another servant. You are not satisfied. You find another servant, and another, right up to Mr. or Mrs. Big—who turns out to be yet another servant ... a servant of forces and powers you cannot reach. Where do you stop? Where do you draw the line?"
He had a point.
He went on: "Let us consider what has happened here. A boy has been hanged for ritual and magical purposes. Is this so startling? ... You have read The Bog People?"
I nodded.
"Well, a modest consumption of one nude hanging a year during the spring festivals ... such festivals, within reason, could serve as a safety valve.... After all, worse things happen every day. Certainly this is a minor matter compared with Hiroshima, Vietnam, mass pollution, droughts, famines ... you have to take a broad general view of things."
"It might not be within reason at all. It might become pandemic."
"Yes ... the Aztecs got rather out of hand. But you are referring to your virus theory. Shall we call it 'Virus B-23'? The 'Hanging Fever'? And you are extrapolating from two cases which may not be connected. Peter Winkler may have died from something altogether different. I know you do not want to entertain such a possibility, but suppose that such an epidemic does occur?" He paused. "How old was Winkler?"
"In his early fifties."
"So. Jerry was a carrier of the illness. He did not die of it directly. Winkler, who was thirty years older, died in a few days. Well ... there are those who think a selective pestilence is the most humane solution to overpopulation and the attendant impasses of pollution, inflation, and exhaustion of natural resources. A plague that kills the old and leaves the young, minus a reasonable percentage ... one might be tempted to let such an epidemic run its course even if one had the power to stop it."