Jack Du Brul: Vulcan's forge

Mercer dropped his bags near the front door and walked across the little used formal living room toward the back of the house. Passing an oak-paneled billiard room and the kitchen, he went into his home office and slid his slim briefcase across the wide leather-topped desk.

He used the back stairs to climb to the second floor and on the landing he swore under his breath. The television in the rec room was on, the volume barely a mutter. The lights around the mahogany bar had been muted to an amber glow. Snores rose from a blanketed lump on the couch. Mercer walked behind the bar and placed a Clapton disc into the player. With a wicked smile, he pressed play and turned the stereo to maximum volume.

The Carver speakers rattled the bottles and glasses behind the bar. Harry White woke with a sudden jerk.

Mercer turned off the stereo and laughed.

“I said you could use my house when I was away, you bastard, not move in.”

Harry looked at Mercer with owl eyes, his withered face still scrunched up with sleep. He peered around at the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table, the plates of congealed food, and the two empty Jack Daniel’s bottles.

“Welcome back, Mercer. I didn’t expect you till tomorrow.” Harry’s voice sounded like a rock crusher with a thrown gear.

“Obviously not.” Mercer smirked. “Nice party?”

Harry ran his fingers through his gray crew cut. “I don’t really remember.”

Mercer laughed again, an infectious laugh that, despite what must have been a powerful hangover, made Harry smile.

Mercer pulled two Heinekens from the circa-1950 lock-levered refrigerator next to the stereo rack and opened them with the brass puller tucked under the ornately carved backbar. He drained one in four long gulps and started to sip the second.

“How was the trip?” Harry asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Good, but exhausting. I did seven lectures in six days all over South Africa, plus met with a couple of top engineers from one of the Rand mining firms.” Rain rattled the darkened windows.

Philip Mercer was a mine engineer and consultant. According to those in the industry, he was the best in the world. His ideas and advice were sought by nearly every corporation in the business. The fees he charged were astronomical, but the companies never balked at the bills because their return on his input always paid off.

Over the years, dozens of firms had tried to hire Mercer exclusively, but he respectfully declined, always replying the same way: “My answer is also my reason, no thank you.” He liked the freedom to say “no” whenever he wished. His abilities and independent status gave him latitude to live his life by his own eccentric standards and to tell the occasional executive to shove it when the need arose.

Of course that freedom had been hard won. He had started out working for the United States Geological Survey just after receiving his Ph.D. For two years, he did mostly routine inspections of mining facilities which were cooperating with the USGS as seismic centers. The work was dull, repetitive and pointless. Mercer began to feel that his sharp intellect was being blunted by the ponderous weight of the federal bureaucracy. Fearing some kind of brain atrophy, he quit.

Recognizing that the independent streak which more or less dominated his personality would never allow him to work for any one organization for an extended period, Mercer decided to go into business for himself. He saw himself as a hired gun to help out in difficult situations but many others in the industry saw him as an unwanted interloper. It took seven months and countless phone calls to former instructors at Penn State and the Colorado School of Mines before he landed his first consulting job, confirming assay reports on a sizable Alaskan gold strike for a Swiss investment consortium. The three-month job paid twice what his annual government salary had been, and he never looked back from that point. The next job had been in Namibia and the mine had been for uranium. Within a few years he had built up the reputation he now enjoyed and commanded the fees to which he had grown accustomed.

Ironically, he had just accepted a temporary position at the USGS as a private sector consultant to liaise with major American mining concerns for the smooth implementation of the President’s new environmental bill and discuss this plan for possible adoption by some foreign companies. His career was coming full circle in a way, but this time through the government’s grist mill, he’d be walking away in two months with no strings attached.

“You look like shit,” Harry observed.

Mercer glanced down at his wrinkled Hugo Boss suit and clammy-feeling shirt. Two days of dark beard shadowed the decisive line of his jaw. “You spend twenty hours on an airliner and see how you look.”

Harry swung his leg off the couch and grabbed a flesh-colored piece of plastic from the floor. With three deft movements that his nearly eighty-year-old hands didn’t seem capable of, he strapped the prosthetic leg on just below his knee and flexed the articulating ankle.

“Much better.” He tugged down the cuff of his pants, stood and walked casually over to the bar without the slightest trace of a limp.

Mercer poured him a whiskey. “I’ve seen you do that a hundred times and it still gives me the creeps.”

“You have no respect for the ‘physically challenged’ — I think that is the new politically correct term.”

“You’re a decrepit old man who probably had his leg shot off by a jealous husband as you leapt from his wife’s boudoir.”

The two men had met the night Mercer moved into the area. Harry was a fixture at the neighborhood bar, Tiny’s, a place Mercer discovered to be a sublime distraction from unpacking ten years of eclectic junk collected from all over the world. The unlikely pair became best friends that night. In the five subsequent years, Harry, no matter how drunk, had never told Mercer how he’d lost the leg and Mercer had enough respect to never pry.

“You’re just jealous that your body doesn’t make a good conversation piece in bed.”

“Harry, I don’t pick up women at the exit to circus freak tents,” Mercer retorted.

Harry conceded the point and asked for another drink.

If anyone had been listening, the next hour’s conversation would have seemed as if it were between bitter enemies. The sarcastic remarks and biting jokes sometimes got downright vicious, but both men enjoyed this verbal jousting, which was often the main source of entertainment at Tiny’s.

A little after midnight, age and whiskey forced Harry to a tactful retreat to the couch, where he promptly fell asleep. Mercer, despite the jet lag and beer, still felt refreshed and knew any attempt to sleep would be futile. He decided to get some office work done.

His home office was all rich leather and oiled woods, forest green carpet and polished brass. Other than the bar it was the only truly finished room in the brownstone. He knew that the decor was somewhat cliche, but he liked it just the same. The numerous prints on the walls were of heavy mining equipment: walking drag-lines, huge dump trucks, and skeletal drilling derricks that towered eight stories. Each print was signed with a thanks from the president or owner of some company that Mercer had helped. On the credenza, discreetly lighted from below, was a large chunk of opaque blue stone. Mercer’s hand caressed it as he walked to his desk.

He had phoned his secretary at the USGS from Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and had asked her to fax all of his memos and messages to his house, knowing that insomnia always followed an international flight. There were at least fifty sheets of paper in the tray of the fax machine.

The majority could be ignored for at least a few days; only a couple had any urgency at all. Working through the pile quickly, he almost missed the significance of one sheet, from the deputy director of operations at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It was an invitation, dated six days earlier, to work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ocean Seeker in an investigation of an unknown geologic phenomenon off the coast of Hawaii. The deputy director had requested Mercer’s presence because of the paper he had written two years earlier on the use of geothermic vents as possible energy sources and rich mining areas.