The Demons of King Solomon Read online

  The only bible involved, unfortunately, was the magnificent red number that he himself possessed. Copiously illustrated, including one image of the lord with eyes that just seemed to follow you. He’d won it off a real bible salesman in Alabama many years before.

  Money in pocket, he’d blow town. He’d generally toss his order book in a river, if there was a river. You didn’t need to pack evidence.

  He’d done this in thirty states and hundreds and hundreds of towns, but had only gotten caught in Nebraska. Sure enough, it had been the order book. He’d slipped up just that once, leaving it behind in a motel room.

  One would think that a con like his was pretty penny-ante, but he had saved those pennies.

  He’d met Terry in the usual way: sleeping with her after closing a deal.

  She slipped into the bed, opened herself to him, and he’d entered, expecting to get the hell of there as soon as he was finished.

  She had other ideas in the form of hot apple pie and drugged coffee.

  He woke up hogtied. She said, “You’re a conman and I want my cut.” It was while she was talking him down from his outrage, he always said, that he fell in love. “I mean, what a woman!”

  Terry was what investment assholes call a “quant,” that is to say, a person with natural insight into numbers. She had invested the money he made efficiently, in things like Tesla when it seemed idiotic to do so, and Apple when it was 50.

  Now they were millionaires—low-grade ones, it was true, but decidedly in the seven figures. Eight years of the bible fiddle followed by a six-month prison term and here they were in this “over there” with another sexually ambitious couple as friends and everybody was rich.

  Their belching grills sent smoke right across the community and into the windows of the old Franklin house on the hill, where Tom and Norma Franklin were living a life of poetry and hatred. Late at night, they would move through the streets that now scarred their front pasture, murmuring to each other like discontented ghosts. Right now, it was evening, so they watched at their windows with cold, eager eyes. They were hand in hand, their grins way too wide.

  This particular evening, the leaves fluttering—windmilling now, actually—Mike and Merry and Jake and Terry had gotten up and begun eating brisket and toking and listening to the Grateful Dead on Mike and Merry’s outdoor stereo. The pool, dark and filling with even more leaves, reflected the starlight and racing, deepening clouds.

  It was while Jake was in stir that Terry had met Mike and Merry. She was one of those people who needed more attention than most. She’d grown up being, as they call it now, abused by her father. At the time, it hadn’t bothered her. She’d found his machinery interesting. But when, having been murdered by her mother, he was gone from her life, she discovered that she missed being adored.

  If she wasn’t told she was wonderful and sexy every few days, she despaired. She needed to be breathed over and held, kissed by a man alert with desire, while she doled out affection only in thimblefuls. As a result of her elaborate psychological needs, she’d gone slightly insane after a week of waiting for Jake to get out and return to her bed. She didn’t want to seduce a temp, she’d done too much of that before capturing him. Jake was a marvelously persistent licker and kisser and sucker. In fact, in the other way a sucker, also. He had no idea that all the money was in her name. But why not? She’d bought ServiceNow at 14. All he’d ever done is steal mattress money.

  To pass what she called the “cold time,” she decided to become an escort. She’d answered an ad behind which had lurked the sleazy little company run by Mike and Merry. They worked out of a smoke-filled room in the old Fuller Brush Building in downtown LA. If you looked up in the right block of Sixth Street, you would think “Sam Spade,” but you would be looking at the twin arched windows of their office.

  Mike liked to wear suits and talk about odd things, like the time Nancy and Ronald Reagan had gotten abducted by aliens on Mulholland Drive on their way to a party in the Hollywood Hills. Ronnie had still been an actor then. He’d entered the flying saucer a liberal Democrat and come out a conservative Republican. Nancy had taken up astrology.

  How did Mike know that? Before he got into the escort business, he’d been a gigolo, courting waxed and lifted ladies with gelatinous caresses and breath-mint whispers.

  As a boy, he’d robbed a little Roma kid and gotten a hand-written pickpocket’s bible for his trouble. He’d learned every move in the meticulously illustrated notebook, then worked his way to Europe on a freighter where he made an excellent living lifting tourists. He’d traveled the world, lifting and living and having a wonderful time. Until two things happened. First, other Roma, seeing his techniques, realized that he was the now legendary Book Thief and set out to fill him full of whatever sorts of holes they could manage. Knife wounds, preferably.

  He was lifting the Trafalgar Square tourists when they succeeded. He hardly felt the knife going in, it was so sharp. Afterward, he called it the Magical Knife. That was probably an accurate description. Roma do not enjoy great wealth, but they do possess great knowledge.

  Anyway, the young tourist he had just marked was the one who raised the alarm when he collapsed. Out of the goodness of her sweet, Corn Belt heart, she accompanied him to the hospital and fought with the determinedly indifferent staff until they stopped him from bleeding to death. She always said they would have let him die because he was a foreigner and they didn’t want to deal with the mountain of National Health Service paperwork involved in treating one.

  So Merry had saved his life. That was the second thing that happened. She was living in London at the time as a secretary in the American embassy, and had visited him daily for the entire month of his recovery. He did lose his spleen.

  Merry was an affable soul. Sympathetic. But afflicted, to a degree, with a lust for adventure. When she found out that Mike was a professional pickpocket marked for death by every Roma in the world, she became more interested in him than ever.

  He wasn’t handsome. His nose looked like a feedbag. His arms were so thin they might have belonged to a cartoon character. He had a wide, flaccid mouth. It wasn’t pretty but it was useful in ways that served Merry’s more intimate needs.

  By contrast, Merry herself was blonde and svelte, aggressively perfumed, pretty in sunlight but angular to the point of concern in candlelight, which she detested. She wore her hair in a ponytail. Her wide green eyes seemed at first inviting, but if you caught her gaze, they became, unfortunately, so careful that people immediately began to feel uneasy. Actually, though, she was a kind person and a good listener and not very critical at all unless money was involved, somebody holding back tips, that sort of thing. She was good with her fists, which the girls, once they learned this, did not forget.

  All told, she was an ideal sort of a woman to be the mother confessor of an escort service, and when Mike got out of the hospital and they returned to the States, that’s what they started. Only dissatisfied, unhappy beauties work for these services, and they need talking to, so she really ran the thing.

  Her office was a little room full of couches, and it was there that she had gotten to know Terry.

  The escort service was, of course, actually an outcall service for prostitutes. Because Hollywood is chock-a-block with guilt-ridden executives, most of them were dominatrixes. These women, who dress in leather and act tough, reveal, in their off hours, all the vulnerability they have been concealing while binding, whipping, spanking and otherwise torturing their executives.

  Each girl was assigned a territory, which was usually a studio. One girl had Warner Bros’s, another Sony, a third Lion’s Gate and so on. Disney had four girls assigned to it, to prevent lines forming. NBC Universal had three, and Terry was one of these.

  She did her work efficiently and without complaint, except she had signed on for intimate, pleasant evenings, not the sort of brouhaha that was actually involved.

  She was an excellent worker and popular with the johns, so when
she confided her disappointment to Merry, she immediately invited her to an evening out with her and Mike. “It’ll be just like what you signed up for.”

  Which it was. They had such a convivial time that Terry took them the next Saturday to meet Jake in prison. They were eager to go, and flew up to Nebraska in one of those commuter planes that require you to duck-walk in the aisle and are flown by what look like giggling boy scouts. There had to be some sort of opportunity associated with a man who was going to be out of stir in a few months. He’d be desperate, five dollars in his pocket or whatever and a bus ticket to some city Nebraskans disliked. LA, probably, which turned out to be the case.

  By the time he was out, they were already a foursome. They consummated the marriage in Lincoln, in the Holiday Inn Express downtown, then went out and drank wine and toasted the future.

  Between Mike and Merry’s very profitable business and Jake and Terry’s fruitful retirement, they could afford homes in the two-million-dollar range, which in Southern California means modest but not all that modest.

  Franklin Ranch featured six-bedroom establishments, some raised ranches, some mini-mansions with lawyer lobbies. They bought side-by-side raised ranches. Mike and Merry moved the escort service offices from downtown to a nearby strip mall, and the four of them began to look with pleasure toward the unfolding of a good life together. Their sex life was intricate and acrobatic, so they also joined a gym and worked out, too. Terry had bought a volume of French pornographic prints of Ancien Régime vintage where couples played at games like “Hot Cockles,” which involved the men disappearing under the ladies’ vast clouds of skirts. So they played “Hot Cockles” and “Bottoms Up” and so forth. But they didn’t bother with clouds of skirts. They were Americans. Naked worked for them.

  They would drink expensive wine, eat fine foods and then have wildly inventive, complicated and athletic sex. This was part of the reason that Mike could now only look to the right. The other part was that he’d been clubbed in prison for coughing too near a guard.

  The four of them were sitting on Mike and Merry’s patio enjoying the exquisite, lingering evening, eating their brisket and drinking their pinot when the wind became noticeable.

  At first, though, they observed something else.

  “What’re those?” Merry said. She was staring toward the dark end of the backyard.

  “Blowing leaves. There’s a Santa Ana coming up.” That’s a wind familiar to Southern Californians, that sometimes comes howling in from the desert in spring and fall.

  “No, those humps. The moving humps.”

  Mike and Jake and Terry peered into the dark. “I’ll get the flashlight,” Mike said. His tone said, I don’t like the look of that.

  Armed with the dim old flashlight he’d dug out of their earthquake kit, they all walked down off the deck and into the yard—and Terry proceeded to step right on one of the humps, which squealed horribly and went scuttling off.

  “Rats! Oh, god the yard’s full of them!”

  “They might have rabies,” Jake said. “Get back up on the deck.”

  The wind was rising fast now, and the rats were no longer creeping, they were running—in fact, dashing wildly.

  “There’s hundreds of them!”

  What with the gusting wind and now these rats, it was obvious to them that something was up. You never saw rats in Franklin Ranch, not because they weren’t there, of course, as rats are everywhere, but because they kept to the shadows and the crannies. Normally.

  The wind sighed and the trees swayed like hula dancers, gracefully and intimately. The rats humped along.

  What was up had to do with the Franklins, yes, but even more with a twelve-year-old girl called Annie James, who had been an orphan but, to everybody’s astonishment at the Catholic Home in Olander, was adopted by the Franklins, who now stood silently in the windows of their grand old house looking down on the subdivision that had ruined their lives. Tom and Norma were both grinning that drum-tight grin. The trees swayed far over, then struggled back against the gushing wind. Their own house was rattling and jumping on its foundation, itself threatening to ascend.

  Where Annie was neither of them knew. In fact, they thought it better that they not know. If, for example, there were times—as they suspected—when Annie was nowhere at all, that was something that they certainly did not want to know. People who are tempting fate always prefer to believe that there is no such thing as soul.

  She would go out at all hours. Odd lights would be seen. When she returned, she would sit in her room smoking, which they very much disliked, the more so because of her young age. If she was young. That, also, seemed debatable. Sometimes she appeared as dry as the desert, as if she was made of sand. Then a doe-eyed girl, then a jewel-eyed serpent.

  She had brought them strange thoughts, which they appreciated a good deal, as it was improving their poetry. Lines like “Where did the serpent come from, the heart of man?” kept occurring to them, and “the Ouroboros is captive to itself.”

  Not exactly good poetry, but they thought otherwise. Obliviously, they had the Paris Review in their sights.

  Who could stop Annie from smoking or doing anything she pleased? She’d already seduced all the nuns, one by one, even old Mother Star of Heaven who used to slap. Annie she had slapped only once. She’d slapped back, a blow so stunning that Mother SH had almost been upended, but at the same time so soft that it made her heart ache for her own violent habit.

  In general, the Sisters of the Holy Sepulcher were sweet women. There were seven of them at the Catholic Home, and an average of forty or fifty orphan girls. The usual tales of woe applied. Yolanda Quinn’s mother was a druggie who had died of an overdose in her daughter’s arms. The father of Rosa Brewster Gonzalez, her only relative, had blown himself up in his taco stand. Others had come in as foundlings or “drop-offs,” left by parents who could not afford them.

  Annie had arrived like a foundling, discovered one morning sitting on the stoop. But she was twelve or thirteen and smoking a black opera cigar.

  The seduction of the nuns had commenced as soon as she was given a bed. This was a properly run institution, no hanky-panky, so they had not expected one of the girls to appear in their cells in the night, especially not one who had expert fingers and wore a plastic Annie! mask left over from the days of the old musical.

  One after another, the sisters had experienced la petite mort, and one after another they were devastated by the difference between what Annie could do for them and what they could do for themselves.

  Sister Angelica and Sister Heaven’s Song both fell in love with Annie. They provided her cigarettes, liquor and hashish, even laboriously discovering a dealer deep in Chinatown who sold opium peas, which were her preferred pleasure.

  By the time Annie was there a year, Sister Miracle of Heaven was going out weekly in the station wagon to buy drugs. Annie was getting high nightly with the sisters and servicing their needs. Only Annie didn’t get high. She just appeared to.

  It was for the nuns a time of self-discovery and self-realization. Sister Heaven’s Song started a fad of sequined cigarette holders and soon they were all parading around with them. To the confusion of the orphans, most of whom were very sincere students and happy to be out of state care, they smoked in class, pranced along the halls rather than gliding, and often wore dark glasses. They had become hungry for life. The orphanage began to resound with the music of groups like Nine Inch Nails and Megadeth. Gone were the afternoon tea-dances where half the girls slicked their hair back and talked in gravelly voices while the other half flounced and Pat Boone records were played. The sisters, who had never seen anybody dance to rock and roll, swooped around like great condors with their glittering cigarette holders between their teeth, snapping their fingers and yawping. The girls huddled together.

  Annie also woke them up, but not to sex. She was no pederast. She used to take them up on the roof at night and speculate with them about hidden worlds. They saw, in t
heir mind’s eyes, things like eagles soaring amid pale clouds as quick as they were slow, and homey houses far below with window boxes full of flowers and sweet swing sets in the backyards, and places now buried in time, such as the Lost City of El Dorado, shimmering mirages touched with gold.

  Once or twice, with certain girls who had a bit of what Annie called “inner talent,” she went to other worlds. She took Yolanda, who dreamed of dancing ballet, to a planet peopled only by ballet dancers, with Swan Lake unfolding in one street and Giselle in another, while Hershy Kay’s Hoedown rollicked in a third.

  Was it a dream or a world, or a dream-world?

  After their return, Yolanda sank into a terrible depression and Annie held her and let her cry. “But you will, you know,” she said, “you will.”

  But you balletomanes know that, for she is none other than Maria Santander.

  Among the many things that were singular about Annie was her alertness not just to the sexual needs of others, but also to their most secret dreams. For example, she could smell the secret desire of the Franklins to somehow restore their lost paradise. Their longing smelled to her like drugstore aftershave. Also, she could smell other, deeper secrets from long ago. These smelled like the spring grass of childhood, but they were not happy scents. They were poignant and full of regret.

  She stalked the night seeking the source of the aftershave, sending little winds out to find its origin for her, then angrily dispelling them when they came back odorless.

  Until one night, those who had been lost were found. On that night she had crept up to the Franklin house and listened to them spouting their poetry at each other and weeping with awe. “Go and catch the falling moon, get with child a man…”

  She understood that they had hit on the idea of improving the masters, or at least using their sonorities.

  “We are dying, Syria, dying…” “Life, be not proud…”

  As she listened, she also saw. She saw deep into their hearts and also into their past, all the way back to the first day that the Franklin Ranch had existed. And there she saw—ah—why she had been sent here.