"So nice to see you again, Nat," she said, but she was looking at the lacquered box, not me. "Would you like to come in and have a drink? Auntie H says you have a weakness for rye whiskey."
"Well, she's right about that. But just now I'd be more fond of an explanation."
"How odd," she said, glancing up at me, still smiling. "Auntie said one thing she liked about you was how you didn't ask a lot of questions. Said you were real good at minding your own business."
"Sometimes I make exceptions."
"Let me get you that drink," she said, and I followed her the short distance from the elevator to the door of her apartment. Turns out, she had the whole floor to herself, each level of the Colosseum being a single apartment. Pretty ritzy accommodations, I thought, for someone who was mostly from out of town. But then I've spent the last few years living in that one-bedroom cracker box above the Yellow Dragon, hot and cold running cockroaches and so forth. She locked the door behind us, then led me through the foyer to a parlor. The whole place was done up gaudy period French, Louis Quinze and the like, all floral brocade and Orientalia. The walls were decorated with damask hangings, mostly of ample-bosomed women reclining in pastoral scenes, dogs and sheep and what have you lying at their feet. Ellen told me to have a seat, so I parked myself on a récamier near a window.
"Harpootlian spring for this place?" I asked.
"No," she replied. "It belonged to my mother."
"So you come from money."
"Did I mention how you ask an awful lot of questions?"
"You might have," I said, and she inquired as to whether I liked my whiskey neat or on the rocks. I told her neat, and set the red box down on the sofa next to me.
"If you're not too thirsty, would you mind if I take a peek at that first?" she said, pointing at the box.
"Be my guest," I said, and Ellen smiled again. She picked up the red lacquered box, then sat next to me. She cradled it in her lap, and there was this goofy expression on her face, a mix of awe, dread, and eager expectation.
"Must be something extra damn special," I said, and she laughed. It was a nervous kind of a laugh.
I've already mentioned how I couldn't discern any evidence the box had a lid, and I supposed there was some secret to getting it open, a gentle squeeze or nudge in just the right spot. Turns out, all it needed was someone to say the magic words.
"Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower," she said, speaking slowly and all but whispering the words. There was a sharp click and the top of the box suddenly slid back with enough force that it tumbled over her knees and fell to the carpet.
"Keats," I said.
"Keats," she echoed, but added nothing more. She was too busy gazing at what lay inside the box, nestled in a bed of velvet the color of poppies. She started to touch it, then hesitated, her fingertips hovering an inch or so above the object.
"You're fucking kidding me," I said, once I saw what was inside.
"Don't go jumping to conclusions, Nat."
"It's a dildo," I said, probably sounding as incredulous as I felt. "Exactly which conclusions am I not supposed to jump to? Sure, I enjoy a good rub-off as much as the next girl, but . . . you're telling me Harpootlian killed Fong over a dildo?"
"I never said Auntie H killed Fong."
"Then I suppose he stuck that knife there himself."
And that's when she told me to shut the hell up for five minutes, if I knew how. She reached into the box and lifted out the phallus, handling it as gingerly as somebody might handle a stick of dynamite. But whatever made the thing special, it wasn't anything I could see.
"Le godemiché maudit," she murmured, her voice so filled with reverence you'd have thought she was holding the devil's own wang. Near as I could tell, it was cast from some sort of hard black ceramic. It glistened faintly in the light getting in through the drapes. "I'll tell you about it," she said, "if you really want to know. I don't see the harm."
"Just so long as you get to the part where it makes sense that Harpootlian bumped the Chinaman for this dingus of yours, then sure."
She took her eyes off the thing long enough to scowl at me. "Auntie H didn't kill Fong. One of Szabó's goons did that, then panicked and ran before he figured out where the box was hidden."
(Now, as for Madam Magdalena Szabó, the biggest boil on Auntie H's fanny, we'll get back to her by and by.)
"Ellen, how can you possibly fucking know that? Better yet, how could you've known Szabó's man would have given up and cleared out by the time I arrived?"
"Why did you answer that phone, Nat?" she asked, and that shut me up, good and proper. "As for our prize here," she continued, "it's a long story, a long story with a lot of missing pieces. The dingus, as you put it, is usually called le Godemichet maudit. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's actually cursed, mind you. Not literally. You do speak French, I assume?"
"Yeah," I told her. "I do speak French."
"That's ducky, Nat. Now, here's about as much as anyone could tell you. Though, frankly, I'd have thought a scholarly type like yourself would know all about it."
"Never said I was a scholar," I interrupted.
"But you went to college. Radcliffe, Class of 1923, right? Graduated with honors."
"Lots of people go to college. Doesn't necessarily make them scholars. I just sell books."
"My mistake," she said, carefully returning the black dildo to its velvet case. "It won't happen again." Then she told me her tale, and I sat there on the récamier and listened to what she had to say. Yeah, it was long. There were certainly a whole lot of missing pieces. And as a wise man once said, this might not be schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells' history, but, near as I've been able to discover since that evening at her apartment, it's history, nevertheless. She asked me whether or not I'd ever heard of a fourteenth-century Persian alchemist named al-Jaldaki, Izz al-Din Aydamir al-Jaldaki, and I had, naturally.
"He's sort of a hobby of mine, she said. "Came across his grimoire a few years back. Anyway, he's not where it begins, but that's where the written record starts. While studying in Anatolia, al-Jaldaki heard tales of a fabulous artifact that had been crafted from the horn of a unicorn at the behest of King Solomon."
"From a unicorn," I cut in. "So we believe in those now, do we?"
"Why not, Nat? I think it's safe to assume you've seen some peculiar shit in your time, that you've pierced the veil, so to speak. Surely a unicorn must be small potatoes for a worldly woman like yourself."
"So you'd think," I said.
"Anyhow," she went on, "the ivory horn was carved into the shape of a penis by the king's most skilled artisans. Supposedly, the result was so revered it was even placed in Solomon's temple, alongside the Ark of the Covenant and a slew of other sacred Hebrew relics. Records al-Jaldaki found in a mosque in the Taurus Mountains indicated that the horn had been removed from Solomon's temple when it was sacked in 587 BC by the Babylonians, and that eventually it had gone to Medina. But it was taken from Medina during, or shortly after, the siege of 627, when the Meccans invaded. And it's at this point that the horn is believed to have been given its ebony coating of porcelain enamel, possibly in an attempt to disguise it."
"Or," I said, "because someone in Medina preferred swarthy cock. You mind if I smoke?" I asked her, and she shook her head and pointed at an ashtray.
"A Medinan rabbi of the Banu Nadir tribe was entrusted with the horn's safety. He escaped, making his way west across the desert to Yanbu' al Bahr, then north along the al-Hejaz all the way to Jerusalem. But two years later, when the Sassanid army lost control of the city to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, the horn was taken to a monastery in Malta, where it remained for centuries."
"That's quite a saga for a dildo. But you still haven't answered my question. What makes it so special? What the hell's it do?"
"Maybe you've heard enough," she said, and this whole time she hadn't taken her eyes off the thing in the box.
"Yeah, and maybe I haven't," I told her, tapping ash from my Pall Mall into the ashtray. "So, al-Jaldaki goes to Malta and finds the big black dingus."
She scowled again. No, it was more than a scowl; she glowered, and she looked away from the box just long enough to glower at me. "Yes," Ellen Andrews said. "At least, that's what he wrote. Al-Jaldaki found it buried in the ruins of a monastery in Malta, and then carried the horn with him to Cairo. It seems to have been in his possession until his death in 1342. After that it disappeared, and there's no word of it again until 1891."
I did the math in my head. "Five hundred and forty-nine years," I said. "So it must have gone to a good home. Must have lucked out and found itself a long-lived and appreciative keeper."
"The Freemasons might have had it," she went on, ignoring or oblivious of my sarcasm. "Maybe the Vatican. Doesn't make much difference."