Authors: Robert Sheckley
11
“I told you I had something really big going for me,” Annabelle said. The mask had smeared her makeup, but she still looked fine.
“I had no idea you meant this,” Hob replied. He was still smiling, but not feeling quite as good as he had before. In fact, he was starting to feel a little weird.
“I’m sorry it has to be you,” Annabelle said. “But objectively, as a friend, maybe you can feel good for me. Being high priestess of the newest cult in the world is something, isn’t it?”
“Your parents would be proud of you,” Hob said. And then he heard someone’s voice from the audience, saying, loud and clear, “This isn’t fair! I won’t stand for it!”
And then a woman came marching out of the audience and up to the stage beside Hob and Annabelle. She looked familiar, too.
It was Devi, wearing a long white robe, her face set and furious. Peter, looking unhappy and embarrassed, was just getting to the stage beside her.
“Devi, please,” Peter said.
“You son of a bitch,” Devi said to him. “You promised me I could be the high priestess. What’s this English bitch doing here?”
“Now, wait a minute, sister,” Annabelle said. “I was promised this by the top man, Señor Arranque. I made all this possible.”
“You didn’t do diddly squat,” Devi said, revealing a grasp of English made complete through Stephen King novels. “And who is this Arranque? Just a common criminal! I am the daughter of Selim, the head of the cult, and I am married to the creator of soma!”
“Now just everybody hold on just a moment!” Hob said in his best Jimmy Stewart imitation. “I think I’ve got something to say about this!”
There were cries from the audience: “Let the sacrifice speak!
“Let’s hear what the
Pharmakos
has to say!”
And just a moment after that, all hell broke loose as a door in the back opened, and in walked a tall Englishman and a taller black man.
12
A murmur of discontent and disapprobation passed through the ranks of the attendees. Those on the left side of the auditorium were representatives of the original Kali Cult. There were about seventy of them, and they all came from the Indian subcontinent. For many of them, it was their first time away from Mother India. Europe seemed to them a strange and godless place, and Ibiza, heart of the sybaritic Mediterranean culture, was most godless of all. They were serious men, for the most part ultrareligious Brahmins, Hindustan patriots unsatisfied with India’s relatively insignifant showing on the international scene and particularly disturbed by the domination of Indian crime by powerful groups from other countries. They had let Selim lead them into this new enterprise, one that would be Indian dominated, the first Hindustan mafia since the beginning of the world.
Selim had made this possible by producing, through Peter, a singular product: Soma, the epitome of drugs. But he had also had to compromise. To get soma onto the international scene and not leave it a merely local product—as qat was in Yemen or unprocessed coca leaves in Peru and Bolivia—he had had to form a partnership with foreign criminal elements.
It was members of this other criminal element, sitting on the right side of the auditorium, who were in equal attendance here at the rites of Kali.
There were some fifty-seven of them, criminals from all over Europe, the Americas, and Asia, sick of their subordination to the established drug cartels of their own countries, ready to form an alliance with the Indians, with their new product, ready to supply and sell the new drug wherever it might be wanted.
There was no love lost between these two groups.
The Indians considered the Europeans scum of the earth, riffraff who hadn’t succeeded in their native lands.
The Europeans considered the Indians tradition-bound fuddy-duddies who had lucked onto a product and expected to use the enterprise and expertise of others to bring them wealth.
The animosity between the two groups was already high. It was brought to the point of explosion by the sight of two women—one European, one Asiatic—struggling on a stage for a black-handled knife.
The final element in the impending explosion of the spark came when the two men suddenly entered the auditorium, the tall, ruddy Englishman with tawny hair and a leonine face and the tall black warrior from Brazil.
And to make it all the more enigmatic, the Englishman was singing. It was a song that none in that audience knew. The only man present who seemed to know it was Hob Draconian, the sacrifice, and it galvanized him into belated action.
Hob’s mind had cleared sufficiently for him to recognize that the bearded Englishman was Nigel, and the tall, thin black man accompanying him was Etienne. But why was Nigel singing, and, more important, what was the song?
He could just make out the words above the increasing hubbub of the assembly—even the two battling women parted a moment to listen—something about an Englishman’s home being his castle …
A song whose melody was hauntingly familiar, bringing up, as it did, images of khaki-clad heroism against loinclothed and turbaned hordes of fanatics in an underground place lit only by flaring torches ...
Of course! It was Cary Grant’s song, “An Englishman’s Home is His Castle,” that he had sung in the movie
Gunga Din
, in the part where, trapped in the underground chambers of the Kali cult’s headquarters, he had distracted the hordes of Kali worshipers long enough for Gunga Din to escape and warn the colonel and have him bring the regiment. …
But why was Nigel acting so crazy? And Etienne, too! It didn’t occur to Hob that they might also have been sampling the soma.
“Nigel!” Hob called.
“Hang on, old boy!” Nigel called back. “Help is on its way.”
“The colonel? The regiment?”
“Lieutenant Navarro and his trusty Guardia Civil. They’ll have to do.”
Now Arranque sprang to his feet from his seat among the Europeans. “Kill that man!” he cried, pointing to Hob.
“But he is the sacrifice,” Selim said, also standing up from his seat among the Hindus. “No one must touch him except the high priestess.”
“I’m the high priestess!” cried Devi, snatching the knife from Annabelle’s hand.
“The hell you say, bitch!” Annabelle screamed, snatching back the knife.
“My daughter is supposed to be the high priestess!” Selim thundered.
“No, my people put up the money, and that job is for my girlfriend!” Arranque thundered back.
There was a frozen moment, a bit of stop action that Hob, though he was coming down from his high, was nevertheless able to appreciate.
In that big auditorium room, with the overhead lights flickering like witches’ fires; with Annabelle and Devi at each other’s throats; with Nigel and Etienne, frozen snarls on their faces, facing the multitude; with Hob ripping off his mask and returning to a mood of self-preservation; with Arranque and Slim glaring at each other like caged jaguars in a jungle setting with a huge yellow moon rising and tribal drums beating in the background; with the guests, both Indian-traditional and international-modern, reaching for the guns concealed in their inner jacket pockets—at that moment, with the whole shooting works poised to go off like a keg of gunpowder falling into a volcano, it required only one thing to set it all off.
Silverio Vargas, perhaps inadvertently, supplied that one thing. Rising from his chair, with Vana beside him, he shouted, “Etienne! Come to me! I will get you out of this!”
The fact that he spoke in Portuguese made no difference at all. Everyone, at that superheated moment, knew very well what he meant.
It was every man for himself time, and the devil or Kali or whatever infernal diety that was presiding take the hindermost.
And suddenly the air was full of bullets.
They were bullets of all calibers, from deadly little .22s zinging around like steel-winged hummingbirds, to the middle calibers—stern, businesslike .32s and .38s, winging on their errands of destruction with precision and even a certain dignity—while the big fellows, the stately 9mms and the big-shouldered .357s, as well as the almost legendary .44s and the .45s, crashed around that room like castanets of death played by Red Murder and his Gunpowder Band. These bullets, large and small, ricocheted off wall and floor, took out lighting fixtures and vases full of imported flowers, and smashed into the flesh of many a cowering man-thing with attendant gushes of blood. And they were no respecter of race or creed, these bullets, as they blundered around the auditorium on their impersonal mission of death. Bullets smashed into chairs behind which many of the combatants, like the Mexican bandits in the climatic scene of Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
, crouched down to groan and curse and reload and fire again.
And just as this scene was reaching its unimaginable climax, there came a sound louder than all the rest, catching the attention of all those frenzied fighters and causing them to look around to see where it was coming from. This at a moment when bodies were falling like flies after the mother of all fulminations, and curses—some guttural, some sibilant—could be heard in half the languages of the world.
The sound came from behind the locked double doors of that ill-omened auditorium room.
Somebody was trying to break in.
There was a fascinated silence while all watched as the doors bulged under repeated heavy blows. Hob, for his part, in the first stages of his come-down, thought it was very like the final scene in Lord Dunsany’s “The Idol’s Eye,” when the great barbaric stone statue from whom the thieves have plucked its jewel of an eye is returning, insensate animation bent on destruction.
Literary allusions were lost on the others, however. They watched, panting, some of them bleeding, as the doors shook and finally burst open.
And in marched Lieutenant Ramon Navarro with a half dozen of his trusty Guardias, just as Nigel had predicted.
There was a sudden, tomblike silence. Then Navarro said, in a loud voice that was hard as iron, “As representative of the Spanish government and its self-defense forces, and the highest ranking Guardia Civil officer on this island, Colonel Sanchez having gone off to Madrid for urgent consultations, I hereby declare that the Spanish government takes no official position at this time on the doings of foreign nationals on property owned by said nationals. However, we are extending to any Spanish nationals or Ibiza residents the right to leave this property immediately while the owners settle their own affairs.”
There was a scramble as five or six Spanish waiters, who had been caught in the crossfire, moved over to the Guardia’s side. Nigel moved there, too, and, after a moment, so did Hob, who had sobered up enough to opt for survival. Etienne wavered for a moment, then crossed the room to the Guardias, calling out, “Father, please join us!”
“No!” Vargas grated. “I will see this thing out!”
Peter came over and joined the Guardia ranks. “Devi?” he called out.
“I’m staying,” Devi said in a voice of iron. “I’m the real priestess.”
Annabelle looked defiant for a moment, then crossed over and joined the group around Navarro. “Well, if you’re the priestess, I guess I’m not.”
“Baby!” Arranque called. “Where are you going?”
“Sorry, Ernesto,” Annabelle said. “I thought this was my big shot, but it turns out to be just one more fiasco. Just my luck, huh?”
“I will make you high priestess!” Arranque raved.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I can’t afford to get killed here. I got a kid in private school in Switzerland.”
The group backed out of the assembly hall under the watchful submachine guns of the Guardia. They went through the hotel lobby, which was now silent and deserted, and out through the big glass doors. As they came to the outside drive and reached the Guardia’s Land Rover, Nigel stopped, frowned, turned, and began to walk back in. Hob grabbed him by the sleeve and restrained him.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I have to go back in there,” Nigel said. “I left something.”
“What did you leave?”
“My mother’s birthday present. A very nice silver service. It’s in the main cloakroom.”
Just then the crash of gunfire sounded up again.
Nigel listened for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, it was valuable—but not, I suppose, irreplacable.”
13
There was an aimless moment after the relatively good guys were out of the hotel. Hob asked Navarro, “What now?”
Navarro shrugged. “I have exceeded my authority. But not, I think, the proprieties of the situation.”
“You mean we’re free to go?” Hob asked.
“To the devil, if you wish,” Navarro said. “This is what comes of letting foreigners own property in the motherland.”
“In that case,” Nigel said, “what about we all get a drink?”
“Not for me,” Navarro said. “I have much paperwork to fill out. But perhaps lunch tomorrow?”