drawer, pulled out a round shaving mirror, and examined his face. “Now how did that happen?” he asked himself.
“This isn’t academic,” I said.
Ignoring the comment, he tugged a Kleenex from a box and scrubbed at the lint. It left more lint. “Aha,” he said. If he hadn’t had both hands full, he might have snapped his fingers. Holding the mirror in his left, he used his right to unfold a linen handkerchief with a large B embroidered into one of its corners, and wiped his face clean. He studied the results, fluffed one of his sideburns, and dropped both the mirror and the handkerchief into the drawer. Then he winced and quickly picked up the mirror and checked that he hadn’t broken it. “I’ve heard something about you, too,” he added, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t remembered my name.
“All too true.”
“You mean,” he said calmly, opening his blue eyes wide to show me that he was impressed, “that you really are some sort of detective, that you’re looking for this maniac.” He slid the drawer closed with a nice, dramatic snick.
“What about the other fire religions?” I felt I was swimming backward.
“Well, really.” It was the verbal tic of a man who felt himself frequently imposed upon. He brought one of the hands to his mouth again and gnawed at a nail. A thick steel Rolex Oyster glinted on his wrist. “As I said, all religions are fire religions at heart. What are the candles for in a Catholic church? Don’t all Christians believe in hellfire?”
“There are people in Los Angeles,” I said, “who are being burned to death.”
“I’m not ducking the question,” he said, blinking rapidly. “I’m only trying to give you an idea of how complex it is. If there’s a common denominator among the world’s religions, at least in their earlier and purer forms, it’s fire. Fire cleans, it purifies. Gold is refined in fire. The Ten Commandments came to Moses from a burning bush. The Romans carried fire in front of the emperor. Every twenty years the American Plains Indians piled their possessions together in the prairie and set them on fire. Alchemists sought to reduce the universe to its elements through fire. Do you see what I mean?” He laid one long hand on top of the other and looked down at the ragged nail he had gnawed. Quickly, he put the other hand on top.
I looked elsewhere.
“Even during the Renaissance, Botticelli carried his obscene paintings to the Burnings of the Vanities in Florence. Fire equals light, and light is the opposite of darkness. Fire worship dates back to the ice age. The last one, I mean,” he added by way of clarification. “Look, we’re discussing a major religious theme here. Every religion worth its salt has put faith into purification, and most of them have chosen fire as the purifier. Think about the level of technology available to these people.” He grimaced. “They sat around fires, for heaven’s sake. Fire was an inescapable symbol.”
I sat back, waiting for something that made sense. “Go on,” I said.
“What do you mean, go on?” Dr. Blinkins looked at his Rolex with some irritation.
“No more than another ten minutes,” I said. “Just free-associate.”
“An unpleasantly Freudian term,” he said. Dr. Blinkins imagined that his loathing for Freud was legendary. “This is impossible.”
“Humor me.”
“Well, the Stoics,” he said. “They envisioned periodic world conflagrations, an intuitive guess at the expanding and contracting universe of modern physics, a world born out of an unimaginable fire and ultimately returning to it.” His eyes rolled again, this time out of sheer effort. “Heracleitus of Ephesus, around 500 b.c., said that the world is a never-ending fire, an eternal state of process. Fire is the ‘agent of transmutation’: All things derive from, and return to, fire.” He smiled apologetically. “As I’m sure you know, this was the concept seized upon by the alchemists, whom I’ve already cited, in their attempts to turn lead into gold through fire. Talk about wasted effort,” he said, in his regular-guy tone. I remembered that tone, and not pleasantly. “For Heracleitus, reason and consciousness were manifestations of the element of fire. By inference, brutishness, swinishness, drunkenness, and depravity are impurities and can be burned away only in fire. Fire is elemental; there’s nothing personal in it.” He was listening to himself with pleasure. “That’s interesting,” he said to himself, “most fire gods are impersonal.” He made a note on a little pad with his name
printed on it. It said, NATHAN BLINKINS, PH.D.
“So is my lunatic,” I said. “He picks them at random as they sleep in doorways.”
“Surely, not at random,” Dr. Blinkins said. “Nothing in the universe happens at random.”
“I’ll hold that thought,” I said. “You’re certain that you don’t recall this guy pursuing a fire religion.” Dr. Blinkins shook his spottily well-groomed head. “Okay,” I said, “Heracleitus. Let’s stick with the Greeks. They’re the common denominator, right?”
“As far as Western religions are concerned.”
“Good, well, let’s focus on Western religion.”
“It all begins with Prometheus,” he said, after a moment’s reflection.
“Well,” I said, searching my memory, “sure it does.”
He settled back in his chair and spread his shining fingers over the tiny paunch blooming beneath his turtleneck. It hadn’t been there when I saw him last. “Prometheus is complicated,” he said.
“I’ll follow you somehow,” I responded. He wasn’t listening.
“Prometheus was a Titan and a trickster and a traitor, to begin with,” he said, enjoying the alliteration. He smiled and then sucked inward on the comers of his mouth, imagining that he had my full attention. Actually, I was trying to figure out why I’d just sat up straight. Most of what Blinkins had said had slid smoothly over me, but something had snagged and caught. For a moment I’d heard another voice. “In the war between the Titans and the gods for control of the universe,” Blinkins rolled on, “Prometheus advised guile rather than brute force. When his advice was rejected, when the Titans chose to use force and lost, he changed sides.” He gave me a glance that requested understanding, and I recognized a need for sympathy that had been born out of years of treacherous faculty battles, civilized back-stabbings, and learned betrayals. I nodded, one conspirator to another, and tried to look understanding. What had he said?
“Well,” Blinkins continued comfortably, “Hesiod and Aeschylus turned Prometheus into the creator and salvation of man; he supposedly made the first men from clay, and Athena breathed life into his models. He made the first woman, too, Pandora. And look what became of that.” Not for the first time, I wondered about Dr. Blinkins’s private life. “And Zeus,” he added, with a hand gesture that might have been a way of winding a nonwinding wristwatch, “motivated either by jealousy at Prometheus’ creation or by the desire to create a race of his own, decided to destroy humanity. Might not have been a bad idea, in retrospect. Zeus looked down from Olympus, and he saw a scattering of campfires in the dark. I think that’s an eloquent image, don’t you? A scattering,” he repeated, “of campfires in the dark.”
He didn’t wait for me to reply, which was a good thing. “So Zeus began by depriving mankind of fire.” He passed a hand over his gleaming forehead, looked at his palm, reached into his drawer for a Kleenex, and thought better of it. With the linen handkerchief in his hand, he glanced across the desk at me, looking vaguely perplexed, like a man who has lost his place in a book. “We’re talking about fire, right?”
“Fire and only fire,” I said, trying to back up my mental tape recorder.
Pleased with himself, he wiped his face with the handkerchief and studied it suspiciously, as if he expected to find ballpoint-pen ink smeared across it. “Well, then. Prometheus couldn’t let that happen, not after all his work. So he tiptoed to Hephaestus’ forge while Hephaestus was off shagging Aphrodite-now there was a match made in hell-and stole fire. He went to earth, carrying the fire in the stalk of a plant, and gave it back. As revenge, Zeus had him chained to the rock and sent the eagle to gnaw on his liver. Of course, you know all about that. Shelley and so forth.”
“Of course,” I said. “The stalk of a plant.” I reached into the pocket of my shirt and pulled out the sprig I’d found in my mailbox. I handed it across the desk to him.
Dr. Blinkins gave it a whiff. He seemed to like the smell, but he had the puzzled, faintly outraged expression of someone who’s just had a card trick worked on him. “Why did you let me go on like that if you already knew?” he demanded.
“Fennel,” I said.
“Certainly,” he snapped. “Prometheus brought fire to earth in a stalk of fennel.” He closed the drawer again to indicate that the conversation was over.
