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

the air with his figure-skating hands and jerking agitated strides across what must be the largest Persian rug anywhere in the world, “had already been dead a year when he supposedly assassinated Captain Manifest Destiny! He’d died in Argentina, on the F*O*O*J’s secret-ops payroll!

“Yes, he hadn’t even lived long enough to finish crushing the Arbenz Avengers in Guatemala, the very project the F*O*O*J had commissioned him to do! But thank heaven the Iron Kross’s body could be journalistically exhumed and resuscitated long enough to frame him for an assassination…so that nobody would ever know the Captain had died a needle-plunger. Nobody except for the World’s Greatest Detective, of course, who found the corpse.

“Don’t believe me, Doctor? I read the sealed medical report in the Squirrel files myself—oh, trust me, he’s got secret files on everyone, including you, I’m sure, better than the FBI, SWORD, and the Church of Spyontology all rolled together. But the pathologist, yes, the pathologist at Fort Detrick who autopsied Cap said he was so deformed by tumors he looked more like a potato patch than a man. His wife’d had nothing but miscarriages—something else you’d never read in any newspaper.

“Now, the human reaction to this is to want to expose the government for what they did to the man and get compensation for his wife. That’s what a real man, a man like Jack Zenith, would do. And it’s also what a self-proclaimed enemy of Big Government should want to do.

“But not the delightful ‘Lord’ Piltdown, no! He took one look at the scene, found the drugs, figured out what they were for, arranged the cover-up, and he’s been injecting ever since that night! Go ahead, Doctor—swab his mouth. Get a blood sample. Hell, take his cappuccino cup to a lab! That was his little joke, you know—he called it GI Joe when he put it in his coffee! This man—”

“Tran, I’d like to ask Festus—”

“Look at him sitting there! He doesn’t even deny it!”

“Tran, just a moment, please!” I said. The ex-apprentice stopped rigidly in midstep and half-gesture, like a live shrimp flash-fried.

“Festus, I have to ask you—I’ve seen you emit devastating verbal attacks against anyone who even so much as raised an eyebrow in a manner you considered challenging. But you’ve just allowed Tran to upbraid you almost without interruption for ten minutes. Please…share with me what you’re processing right now—verbally integrate it. Own your feelings!”

Festus let out a long, low sigh, like a zeppelin deflating from a penknife’s puncture wound.

“He,” said Festus, “was an orphan.”

I wait. Finally I said, “Go on.”

“Like me.”

“Yes.”

“I took him in. Gave him a home. Treated him like a son—”

“Like a son?” spat Tran before shutting up again. I initially assumed he had because of my cautioning glance.

But then I saw the look on Festus’s face.

“I never…never—” He swallowed heavily. “Do you know what it feels like to have people write appalling, sickening lies about you, Eva? I’ve endured such filth being sprayed on my family’s name ever since I was a child. I knew what it was like to be alone, vulnerable, despised. My own mother died when I was a boy, and my father never remarried. I found this child, afraid and alone, a refugee from a traveling Vietnamese circus. I took care of him. Trained him. Taught him everything I knew.

“Loved him.”

Tran’s eyes opened so wide they looked as if they’d fall out.

“Tran,” I asked, “you look…as if you’ve never heard Festus say those words.”

The former sidekick was frozen. He’d trapped his flapping, fluttering hands inside their opposite armpits. His cigarillo dangled limply from his lips. Not a word slithered between them.

Festus continued, “And so when those scandalmongering filth-rags accused me of, of ‘touching him’ because of some antiacademic ‘repressed memory’ idiocy in that ‘abuse-recovery’ necronomicon called The Courage to Fly—mythology packaged as science!—I sued every one of those libeling lycanthropes into an early grave.

“But it was too late, Eva. To this day, go ahead—look in any book, any article, any ‘Web page’ on my career or on the F*O*O*J. All of them cite that toxic spew, even though there’s not a syllable of supporting evidence. Because the controversy itself became news. Save a country, save a world, save a child—it doesn’t matter. You don’t need proof or even evidence to burn down a man’s soul. All you need is accusation.

“So to answer your question at last, Eva, to answer the world’s question at last, my…association with this young man didn’t end because I made homosexual advances upon him.”

Tran was turned to face out the window. His eyes were closed. He sniffed continually as if trying to read the flowers on the Piltdown estates with his nose.

“So, Festus…you’re saying—”

“I’m saying, Eva, that as much as I tried to help this boy…there were things he wanted that I couldn’t give him. And maybe if I’d…if I’d done a better job…he wouldn’t’ve wanted them—”

“Stop it, Festus,” choked Tran.

“I’m trying to tell you that it’s not your—”

“Stop it! Just don’t—”

“Lord Piltdown,” wheezed Mr. Savant, shuffling his way inside the vast room. With obvious agitation he said, “Ever so sorry for the interruption, sir, but a third guest has arrived—”

“Another one? Eva! What baffle-gambit are you trying to pull?”

“Festus, I didn’t—”

“No, sir, it’s a Mr. Zenith, sir—”

A lanky, soil-and-ash-haired septuagenarian marched in behind Festus’s centegenarian butler. Opening his jacket, he revealed a chest strapped full with explosives, like a smokehouse wall of dynamite. And it wasn’t bad dentures distending his mouth, but a detonator clamped between his teeth. I noted with a certain detachment two things: my second brush with explosives in forty-eight hours, and the complete relaxation of my sphincter.

“Jack!” yelled Tran. “My God, what are you doing?”

“Zenith!” yelled Festus. “Have you completely fallen off your bean?”

“Gmph-KWUH!” shout-mumbled Zenith. “Wruh-NNMMR!”

With deadly acrobatic fluidity, seventy-year-old Festus vaulted from his chair, reached inside his jacket, and hurled something at Jack Zenith before he landed and rolled toward the wall to smack a hidden panel. Whatever he’d thrown at Zenith erupted into