Age of Heroes Page 8

  “Still are.”

  “Yes, but that sense of dissonance. It’s weird. Like the time I went to see Ariadne auf Naxos when it premiered Stateside back in 1928. Hopped a train to Philadelphia to catch the first night, and came back perplexed. I’m not even in it. I mean, Theseus isn’t. It’s about Ariadne after I allegedly abandoned her, and she’s pining for me, and then the whole thing degenerates into a broad comedy before she ends up in the arms of Dionysus, only he’s called Bacchus in the opera. Strauss clearly didn’t care if he mixed up Roman and Greek naming.”

  “You told me Ariadne was a grade-A ballbreaker. You only hooked up with her because she knew the way through Minos’s labyrinth.”

  “It’s not as if she didn’t get anything out of it,” Theo protested. “That’s the point Strauss seems to have missed, probably because Hesiod, Diodorus and Pausanias all missed it too. Ariadne hated her father. She hated Knossos. I was her ticket off Crete. What we had, her and me, it was mutual need. It wasn’t love, or even lust. Well, a little bit lust. She was a beauty, after all. She was...” He gripped the air with his hands, indicating both feminine shapeliness and the manly approach to handling it. “But when we were done, we were done. I didn’t dump her. I just had other business to take care of, and she’d got what she wanted, and so we went our separate ways. She was never the jilted fiancée she’s been painted as ever since.”

  “Didn’t help that you shacked up with her sister not long after,” Chase pointed out.

  “Phaedra? That was regrettable. A beauty too, like Ariadne, but at least she seemed more stable, less scheming.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  Theo lowered his gaze. Phaedra’s passion for his son Hippolytus – her stepson – had not been requited, but Theo had not realised it until it was almost too late. Believing Hippolytus to be guilty of semi-incest and of cuckolding his own father, he ordered the boy into exile. In Euripides’s play about these events, a terrifying bull emerged from the sea and Hippolytus’s chariot horses panicked and threw the boy to the ground, although the truth was rather more mundane: Hippolytus whipped the horses to a frenzy, took a corner too fast, and careered head-on into a cypress tree.

  Theo cradled the dying teenager in his arms, and there was a reconciliation of sorts, expressions of forgiveness on both sides, but for ages afterward he blamed himself. He held himself accountable for his son’s death and was a broken man, a shadow of the stalwart champion he was before. Phaedra hanged herself, overcome with remorse, and had it been possible for a demigod to commit suicide, Theo might well have done so too.

  Chase laid a hand on his arm. “Shit, man. Sorry. Didn’t mean to dredge that all up again. I’m an idiot.”

  “No. No. It’s all right. Water under the bridge. Way, way under. But it’s memories like that that remind me. Bring it right home, wham! We were who we were. The memories prove the reality. The fictions are just peripheral noise.”

  “Peripheral noise. Isn’t that a Pink Floyd track?”

  Theo half smiled. “You know my musical tastes don’t go much past the swing era.”

  “Oh, you’ve got some Taylor Swift on your playlist. I know you have.”

  “Didn’t she sing with the Glenn Miller Band?”

  “You’re thinking of Katy Perry.”

  “That’s right. She stepped in when one of the Andrews Sisters got laryngitis. How silly of me to get the two muddled up.”

  “It’s your age, cuz. Alzheimer’s setting in.”

  Theo shook his fist, mock indignant. “Why, you impertinent cur. I’ll try to forget you said that.”

  “You won’t have to try. You’ll –”

  Chase’s phone pinged. He glanced at the screen.

  “More about Anthony Peregrine?”

  “No...” Chase thumbed through the content of the email. “No, this one’s about Isaac Merrison.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “‘Who’s he?’ Only your brother.”

  “My...? You’ll have to narrow it down.”

  “Orion. I mean Orion.”

  “Half-brother at best. A whole generation after me. Hardly knew him.”

  The frown on Chase’s face deepened to a scowl. “Oh, no. Shit.”

  “Tell me. Come on, what is it?” Theo didn’t mean to bark the words, but he couldn’t help it.

  “Dude, cool your jets. Just need to read it through to the end... Okay. Yeah. Well. It’s from the Vanuatu Daily Post’s site. Not exactly the BBC, but not Fox News either. It’s saying a local dive tour operator – one Isaac Merrison – is missing, presumed dead. Hasn’t been seen or heard from in three days. Not answering his phone. Not at home at his beachfront bungalow. And a piece of a wetsuit washed up ashore in Mele Bay last night, which may or may not be his. It was the brand he used, and it was bloody and shredded, in a way that suggests the wearer was the victim of a shark attack. Vanuatu police are keen to question the group of foreign divers that Merrison took out on an expedition shortly before his disappearance. ‘Detectives wish to stress that these people are in no way under suspicion, but may have information regarding Mr Merrison’s state of mind in the run-up to what appears to have been a tragic mishap.’ Direct quote.”

  Theo took the phone from Chase and read the short article for himself.

  “‘State of mind,’” he said. “The implication being, he might have been drinking heavily or something, and went out diving somewhere he shouldn’t have?”

  “Somewhere shark-infested that got him shark-ingested. It says he was an ‘experienced scuba aquanaut’ and had been running dive tours in the area for over a decade. I guess the cops think he’d have had to have some sort of mental breakdown and got reckless?”

  “Is Orion ever reckless?”

  “You tell me. He’s your brother.”

  “Half-brother.”

  “Guess I hung around with him more than you did. As far as I recall...” Chase thought about it. “He was always kind of an asshole, if we’re being honest. At least, to begin with, way back when. Serial rapist, and so far up himself, he’d need a flashlight if he wanted to brush his teeth. But time mellowed him, like it does all of us. I don’t know when he and I last ran into each other. Has to have been over a century ago. Nantucket or something, an Atlantic port. Orion had been crewing on whaling ships for years, but had had a kind of epiphany. Seeing so many whales slaughtered voyage after voyage, he’d got sick of it. He told me – I remember this quite clearly – he was going to dedicate himself to preserving his father’s realm, not plundering it any more. Later, in the ’sixties, the ’seventies, he became this eco-activist. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club. Protesting toxic dumping in the oceans, deep-sea oil exploration, overfishing, bottom trawling, longline bycatch. Then I guess he got tired of all that and set up as a dive tour guide.”

  “Seems a logical progression. If you can’t save the marine world by campaigning, do it by showing people how to treat it respectfully.”

  “Shame the marine world didn’t return the courtesy.”

  “That’s if he was killed by a shark,” Theo said.

  “You think not?”

  “I don’t think a shark could kill Orion. Do you?”

  “Well, no. Of course not,” said Chase. “Any more than it could kill any of us. But maybe he came up against the same thing Aeneas did. Maybe extreme old age caught up with him. He lost his, for want of a better word, powers. The shark was simply the innocent agent of his death, like the avalanche was for Aeneas. His time as an immortal had expired. It was just a question of how, where and when.”

  “It’s a hell of a coincidence, still. Him and Aeneas dying within a week of each other.”

  “I grant you that. But we don’t even know for sure that Orion is dead. All we’ve got is a scrap of torn, bloodied wetsuit which didn’t necessarily belong to him. And if it did, well then, who’s to say he hasn’t just pulled a switcheroo? His Isaac Merrison identity has been jettisoned and he’s off somewhere far away from Vanuatu, e
asing into a new life.”

  “Could be,” Theo said, nodding. “Could be we’re making connections where there aren’t any.”

  “You think not?”

  “Cousin Perseus,” said Theo, “at this precise moment I have no idea what to think. But it would be a mistake, I believe, not to be that tiniest bit alarmed.”

  EIGHT

  Buckinghamshire, England

  DEL KARNO LAY on an inflatable in his swimming pool on one of those rare days of a British summer when it was genuinely hot and the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Thunderstorms were forecast for the evening, because naturally you couldn’t have a properly good day’s weather in the British Isles without it coming to an abrupt, soggy end. For now, though, there was stillness and brilliance and unstinting warmth, and you relished it all the more knowing that it wasn’t going to last.

  Del grunted at one of the half-dozen young women sprawling in skimpy swimwear on the poolside loungers. “Drink. Now.” The girl sprang to her feet, lithe and lissome, skin agleam with sun lotion, and went indoors, returning a few minutes later with a freshly mixed margarita. She descended the semicircle of steps at the shallow end and waded out to Del, handing him the cocktail in its salt-rimmed glass without spilling a drop. Her reward for her labours was a pat on the cheek and a benevolent smile, and how she preened! Striding out to retake her place beside the other women, she aimed an imperious, smug look at them all. He touched me, that look said. He favoured me. And her rivals answered with glares of pure envy and spite. A couple of them adopted provocative poses, legs apart, breasts jutting out, in a blatant bid to catch Del’s attention. He could almost smell the musk coming off them, the desire to have him, to be had by him. A click of his fingers, and they’d be paddling out to give him a two-girl blowjob right there in the pool, in full view of the rest.

  But it was too hot for that. Too hot even to think about sex. Later, when it was cooler, he would indulge, selecting whichever woman took his fancy – maybe all of them. And he would sing to them first, to get them really in the mood. One of his hits from the ’eighties, or perhaps something older, much older, something that would have sounded better accompanied by a cithara or a pandura than by a twelve-string acoustic but still entrancing, ripe with a melodic magic of its own. Something which would stoke a fire of passion in the listener that only an orgy of rampant fucking could put out.

  SELF-RESTRAINT HAD NEVER been Del Karno’s strong suit. To read any of the biographies about him was to trawl through a delirious catalogue of debauchery and excess. In his early-1980s pop star heyday it was limos, groupies, groupies in limos, backstage parties, hotel-suite revels that went on all night – an endless, globe-spanning shag frenzy fuelled by cocaine and funded by the proceeds from a spate of internationally chart-topping mega-hit singles and albums.

  The fun lasted four years – four wild, exhilarating, dick-sore, nosebleed years – and Del loved every minute of it. Then, inevitably, it all came to a screeching halt. There was the drugs bust. The accusations, never conclusively proven, of underage sex. Worse still, the riots at gigs, audiences pressing themselves against the front of the stage in an almost hysterical desperation to get close to their idol, to be within touching distance of him, even just to be looked at by him. These crushes led to the deaths of at least ten fans and left another three crippled for life.

  And that was it for his career. All at once, Del Karno was music biz poison. Packs of paparazzi bayed outside his London flat. Tabloids bought exclusives from his conquests, of whom there were so many that the market for their confessions swiftly became saturated and the sums being offered for them derisory. It was over. No one bought his records any more. Our Price and Tower stopped stocking them. MTV stopped playing his videos. He was just another washed-up New Romantic has-been, albeit one who had crashed and burned more spectacularly than most.

  He retreated to his 19th-century Buckinghamshire mansion, shielded from press intrusion by security gates and a hundred acres of landscaped grounds. Here, he continued his hedonism, away from prying eyes. Women came. Women went. It was never difficult to attract them. All he had to do was drive to any nearby town, visit a nightclub or a bar, get chatting, sing a few phrases of a song in their ears, and they would follow him home – follow him anywhere. He let them stay at the house, bought them clothes, fed them, looked after them, and bedded them as and when the whim took him. If they were into narcotics, he had a reliable dealer and gave them as much as they could want. Sometimes he indulged, sometimes not. He didn’t need coke to make him feel all-powerful or dope to make him feel at ease, but it was a sociable thing to do, and the girls seemed to prefer it if he joined in. It humanised him in their eyes.

  Because the girls invariably sensed that he was not quite normal. Even when the aura of stardom was no longer radiating off him like nuclear energy, they knew deep down in their souls that Del Karno was more than just a man. He was rake-thin, raven-haired, elegant, devilishly handsome, with the piercing gaze of a messiah, and when he sang... no one had a voice like that, no one of this world. It was a preternatural voice; a voice that seemed to reach inside you and caress and arouse parts of you which you never knew existed. It was like a cool spring shower, like motes of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight, like snowfall, like a clear night sky.

  As aesthetically – and sexually – gratifying as it was, having hordes of young women swanning around his house was proof, to Del, that he had conquered his fear of women, specifically women in groups. He had pushed past a stumbling block that had been repeatedly tripping him up for more years than he cared to remember. There’d been a time when even the sight of a few women together, whatever the context, would bring him out in a hyperventilating panic and he would have to flee. Hence the many sojourns he had had in all-male environments: monasteries mainly, but also merchant ships, boys-only boarding schools, gentlemen’s clubs, and workplaces such as academia and the military back in the days when they were exclusive redoubts of masculinity.

  Women, together, could be dangerous. He had learned that in Thrace, at the hands of the Maenads. Women, rebuffed, enraged, could tear and rend and rip. There was madness lurking beneath smooth skin, behind lustrous-lashed eyes, in soft mouths. You provoked it at your peril.

  Only after he had adopted the stage name and persona of Del Karno and become a bona fide pop icon did he realise that he had no reason to be afraid of women any more. Even when they were in crowds, he could bend them to his will. Their minds and bodies were his for the asking. He had watched the Beatles do it, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie. All those teenybopper bands, too. The Osmonds, the Bay City Rollers. They drove girls wild. They had them eating out of the palms of their hands. All it took was music, and music was his forte.

  No wonder he titled his second album Breakthrough. In fairly short order, Del went from committed gynophobe to studly sex god. There were centuries of lost time to make up for, and he did so with priapic glee.

  Even now, thirty years on from his brief but phenomenal spell of chart success, he marvelled at the way he could casually beckon and his resident fuck-bunnies would come racing to his boudoir. Balls-deep inside them, approaching climax, he would almost roar with delight. The release was as much psychological as physical, a blinding moment of accomplishment.

  That take, Maenads.

  Screw you and your wine-intoxicated rites and your ivy-wreathed hair and your ululating chants and your flesh-sundering fingernails and teeth.

  Screw you; all you bitches.

  Screw. You!

  AS THE SUMMER’S day grew shadier and the first distant rumbles of thunder sounded to the west, Del and his retinue went inside. When the rain finally came, hitting the mansion’s Gothic windows hard as hail, Del was busy watching two of the girls pleasure each other while being fellated by a third. Some very niche German porn played on a widescreen TV mounted above the fireplace. Candles flickered and joss-sticks smouldered.

  Later still, after the househo
ld had retired to their rooms, Del was restless. He felt thoroughly drained, purged of desire, but somehow not sleepy. He stalked the corridors like a ghost. Lightning flared and thunder pounded. On nights like this, in weather like this, he could not help but think of his wife and of the dark, stormy place he had pursued her to and failed to rescue her from. There weren’t many able to say that they had gone to hell and back for a loved one and be telling the absolute, literal truth. Del Karno could.

  With his singing he had charmed Cerberus the three-headed watchdog and Charon the ferryman. With his singing he had briefly brought a pause to the torments of the damned – Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus – gifting them a few moments of blissful respite. With his singing he had won over Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the dead.

  And then, at the very threshold, he had lost his wife again. Not to a snake bite, but to his own insecurity. He had looked back.

  And before his eyes, beyond the reach of his outstretched arms, his beloved wife had been whisked away by unseen forces, her cry of despair echoing through measureless caverns and resounding in his ears for years afterwards.

  In the slough of grief that followed, it was hardly surprising that he had rejected the Maenads when they invited him to take part in one of their naked, writhing ceremonies of worship to Dionysius.

  His subsequent violent disembowelling and amputation was entirely undeserved, and it was a good decade before he fully recovered from it. At least, physically; mentally he was scarred for much, much longer.