Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

Mr. Savant left the room. Festus sat in a corner chair.

“Ja, Doktor. I am a varrior deity. Ein Aesir gott. My people…haff no Apollo, no Sos,” she said, I believe meaning Thoth; both were deities of science and medicine. “Unt Festus’s human doktors, for all zeir learnink, cannot heal vun uff us. So I am now facink my own personal Götterdämmerung. My own private tvilight uff ze gotts.

“Unt I haff been sinkink…about our sessions. About your qvestioning uff my, my relationships…viss my children. Unt now zat apparently…zere is no more time… I vant you to broker—”

Hnossi snapped forward and back, exploding her coughs like a car backfiring repeatedly. Festus leapt from his chair, yelled into his wrist comm for the doctor, then grabbed Hnossi’s hand and roughly rubbed her neck and back to loosen her potentially lethal congestion. A doctor and nurse appeared, swept us out, and drew back the curtain.

Festus and I stood in the hallway not looking at each other.

Silence sandpapered a minute off the clock.

With his gaze nailed to his toes, the battle-hardened billionaire stooped before me, his six-foot-four frame fragile, faltering.

“She beat every villain on the planet,” he whispered, then captured and released a long, hissing breath. “She’s gonna beat this.”

I stifled my professional duty to ask him And what if she doesn’t? long enough for Festus to say, “And then, then, then that bastard…Warmaster Set…he’ll pay for this.”

“You’re sure he’s the one responsible?”

He glared at me. “Everyone responsible will pay.”

The withered Mr. Savant appeared once more.

“Your…other guest…has arrived, Lord Piltdown.”

“My what? I wasn’t scheduled for any—”

“Master Festus,” said the old man, his watery eyes trembling with sympathy, “it’s Master Tran.”

Festus straightened up. His spine crackled audibly. He swiveled his face to level his blast-furnace gaze upon me.

“Now why in God’s good hell, Eva,” he growled, “would I be visited this morning…for the first time in fifteen years by my ungrateful…insubordinate…backstabbing…renegade of an ex-protégé, Chip Monk?”

Sidekicked: Prodigal Punishment

Beneath the grandiose high ceiling of the Allen Dulles room, Tran stood by the mantel examining a framed sepia photograph of a little boy wearing a suit and fire helmet and wiping away his tears. He turned his forty-five-caliber eyes on Festus as we entered.

“Hard to believe you were ever this young,” said Tran to his former alpha-hero, putting the photo back on the mantel. “Or that you ever cried. For anyone.”

“So,” said Festus, his colossal frame regaining its lethal rigidity. His arms crossed his chest like battering rams. “You’ve returned after all these years just to abuse me, then? My, how your imagination has failed during your supplicant service to that Marxist menace.”

Tran, although elegant in a cream-colored suit, was more obviously his fifty years in the full light of the drawing room than he’d appeared in the shadows of the Stun-Glas restaurant Dark Star. Wince-lines crinkled the amber skin around his eyes; while he still had a swimmer’s build, his movements were deliberate, as if he were consciously confronting arthritic agony. Given Festus’s unusually youthful appearance, Tran appeared even older than his former mentor.

“I’m not here to abuse anyone,” said Tran at last. “I’ll leave the abuse to experts like you.”

“This is pointless, Miss Brain! What possible good did you think would be produced by this pathetic pup’s point-blank petulance?”

“I’d hoped, Festus, to see you finally able to aim the extinguisher of healing upon the kitchen grease fire of your relationship with Tran. And you can only do that when the sous-chef of your most important recipes—”

“I get it, all right?”

“All right, then. Let’s begin.”

I took a seat, gestured for both men to sit facing each other. Neither did.

“Both of you men are clearly suffering,” I said anyway. “You were once the most celebrated superhero partnership on the planet. For the entire 1960s, no duo got more magazine covers than you two. You were the model. You took down Pauli the Living Mafia, Black Mamba, the Iron Eunuch, the Monitor Lizard, Standing Buffalo…The list goes on.

“And then the 1970s came, and slowly news dimmed of your brave biumvirate; before long all your busts were solo efforts. And then 1980 came and you were finished. Kaput. No more. The media—”

“The media!” snapped Festus. “Lying, distemperous pack dogs! Rabid, mangy curs who spend more hours tongue-bathing their own scrota than investigating the truth!”

“Spoken like the true media mogul of PNN et al. that you are.”

“You haven’t lost a nanogram of your snide superciliousness, boy.”

“And you haven’t gained an iota of introspection, milord.”

“Gentlemen, please. As I was saying, the media implied that you two—”

“I don’t need to hear from you what those filthy—”

“—were lovers.”

Silence. And glaring.

“And,” I continued, “that after Tran’s four-year disappearance and resurfacing to work at Human Citizen, your falling-out was the result of Festus’s having discovered that Tran was having an affair with Jack Zenith.”

More silence. And more glaring.

“Well?” I finally prodded my way into their staring match. “To what degree were those claims true?”

Further silence.

I leaned toward the younger of the two men. “Tran?”

“Jack Zenith is a brilliant, dedicated man,” said Tran, sculpting the air with his balletic hands, hands so deceptively delicate-looking one expected to see a cigarillo dangling smolderingly between their slender fingers. “And he is beyond question the finest American of this century—”

“Bah!” said Festus, making him the first human being I’d ever heard use that interjection. But Tran batted not so much as an eyelid.

“—but Jack isn’t gay, Doctor. Not that he’s straight, either. He’s just…he’s just. In a decade of working with him, I haven’t seen him so much as smirk a randy thought toward man, woman, animal, or alien. All he does is write, organize, eat tabbouleh, and sue.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Tran. Why did you two split up?”

“I was ten years old when…when Lord Piltdown ‘adopted’ me from a South Vietnamese orphanage. Took me into his home. And trained me in his cult—”

“ ‘Cult!’ ”

“—his cult of hero-worship. Him worshipping Hawk King, and me expected to worship