tall pale woman with striking red hair.
We landed on Capri, where I remained for another two years. (It was six months before I stopped coughing up ash.) Win stayed with me up until her death, which came about a year after the Vesuvius eruption. An unfortunate fact about pixies is that their life span is only about twenty years, so it was not a big surprise for either of us. I buried her in an olive grove.
Many hundreds of years later, I got a chance to see a museum exhibit showing some of the artifacts uncovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was, to put it mildly, a strange experience, especially since I recognized several of the preserved dead. I also saw my broom on display. I considered reclaiming it but decided it would take more effort than it was worth.
Historians had long speculated that Herculaneum got off easy by being wiped out by a large mud flow, and for a while I thought maybe I’d been wrong about the lava. But I was vindicated by the recent discovery of skeletal remains and half-preserved bodies when the beach houses on the shore along which I ran so long ago were excavated. It looked like half the village opted to wait it out rather than flee, and died when lava engulfed their refuge.
I still feel kind of bad about this.
Chapter 9
Waiting for Iza to return, I sat in a coffee shop two blocks from the police station reading the morning paper and enjoying—if one could call it that—a bitter latte sweetened by a splash of schnapps.
My relationship with alcohol is complicated. Give or take a few days here and there, I hadn’t been dry since the speakeasy fire in 1922. By all normal human standards that would make me a raging alcoholic, except that by those same human standards I would also be dead by now, if not from old age then from cirrhosis of the liver. But eighty years for me is like a glass of wine with dinner for anybody else.
Many times over my long history, I have allowed myself to become entirely dependent upon alcohol to the point where I now make advance plans in anticipation of being drunk for a decade or two. The unspoken understanding is that I will eventually either grow tired of being drunk or something interesting will happen that will demand my undivided attention for a while.
You might think this is terribly naive, and perhaps I should just admit that I’m being stupid, as I am clearly already an alcoholic, but I don’t think it’s altogether fair to apply that term to me. More to the point, I think if you gave any drunkard immortality he would eventually pull himself together with a century or two to work on it. And trust me, alcohol is just about the only way to get through the duller periods of history. For instance, I spent most of the tenth century in Spain when there was simply nothing to do except drink wine. Everybody else did anyway.
Not that I’m lumping twenty-first century America in with tenth century Spain. On the contrary, the last hundred years had been very interesting, and despite being sauced most of the time, I’ve kept up-to-date on the big stuff. But I’ve also been in mourning pretty much since that 1922 fire, which upset me perhaps more than I realized.
One thing that hadn’t improved with time was the coffee. I’m not sure when bitter coffee became cool, but I don’t like the trend. Still, I drank away, because that’s what one does when one wants to fit in with the upscale crowd these days.
The update on the murders in the morning paper (reading the paper two days in a row had to be some kind of record for me) wasn’t any more enlightening than the initial story had been. It was mostly a lot of puff about Gary and Nate and how everybody loved them and so on. Attaching presumptive sainthood to murder victims is a time-honored tradition, so I can’t say I was surprised by any of it. Can’t say I knew them well enough to contradict anything either, and they were nice enough for me to want to go through the trouble of finding out who killed them, but still… You’d think there was someone, somewhere—other than Jerry—who didn’t like them.
On the hard news front, the papers were a day earlier than predicted with the artistic rendition of my face. It was a pretty good likeness.
It was a bit unsettling seeing my own face in the newspaper. Historically, I’ve gone to great lengths to keep myself in the background, just in the interest of survival. I’ve lived through one Inquisition already, you know? I moved on.
Paging through to the crossword puzzle, a full-page ad caught my eye, mainly because it was addressed to me. Also, it was in classical Latin.
The Latin was pretty rough, penned no doubt by a modern scholar who didn’t appreciate the subtleties of the spoken language. And since nobody spoke Latin outside of the Vatican, I guess this was understandable. But I understood it all right.
Translated, the message read:
For the Eternal Man
We are trying to find you. You do not have any reason to fear us. You do not have to run. We want to help you and we believe you can help us. We have the answers to many questions. Stay where you are and we will find you. Do not make this any harder than it has to be.
The message was unattributed and the paper did not note who purchased the ad.
I didn’t know what to make of it. On the one hand, it sounded like a friendly attempt to establish a dialogue. On the other, it made it clear “they” were after me in some capacity, possibly the same capacity that resulted in two dead college students. It was an offer of knowledge and a threat all wrapped up into one cryptic passage— don’t run, don’t be afraid, don’t move and don’t make this any harder than it has to be. Very convincing. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that the minute someone feels obligated to tell you not to be afraid of them, that’s the time to start being afraid of them. I wondered how long these little letters had been getting printed. Maybe I should have started reading the newspapers sooner.
As I sat there at my little, two-persons-max table, contemplating the passage and deciding whether I should wait until I’d heard from Iza before hopping aboard a transatlantic flight to someplace remote, someone sat down opposite me.
