Colleen McCullough - Sins of the Flesh

Though the darkness was too stygian to permit his having any idea of the size of the place he was in, Abe Goldberg, sensitive in such matters, knew that it was immense. He was sitting in one of a row of what felt like theater seats, thrust there by the willowy young man who had met him at the front door; said willowy young man had led him through an incredible house, down a ramp, opened a door onto this night, and whispered “Wait!”

A voice spoke, weary and resigned. “Light it.”

Part of the blackness became a purple pool that illuminated a huge gold throne occupied by a naked, sexless dummy, and spread far enough to reveal the inner edge of a couch to one side.

Silence reigned. Someone heaved a melodramatic sigh, then the weary voice spoke again.

“This may come as a shock, Peter, but the truth is that you couldn’t light your own farts.”

A different set of vocal cords screeched, the noise overridden by His Weariness, who went on as if uninterrupted.

“I know this is a musical comedy, Peter, but this song-to-be is curtain down on Act One. It’s the hit of the show—or so the authors insist.” The voice gathered power. “King Cophetua is smitten, Peter darling, smitten. Smitten! Servilia the slave girl has just told him to fuck off, danced away warbling for her shepherd-boy with no notion in her empty little head that he’s really an Assyrian wolf using her to descend on King Cophetua’s fold. Are you following me? Have you gotten the general gist? King Cophetua is blue, blue, blue! That doesn’t mean you have to light him blue, but why in Ishtar’s name have you lit him purple? What you’ve created looks like Beelzebub’s boudoir drenched in sicked-up grape juice! Mood, Peter darling, mood! This isn’t lighting, it’s blighting! And I am vomit-green!”

The screeches had dwindled to sobs of distress, the dominant voice seeming to feed off them until it lost all its weariness. Suddenly it shouted, “Lights up!” and the entire space in which Abe was marooned sprang into glaring relief.

Abe stared at what he presumed was an entire stage in nude disarray, a full forty feet high; its upper half was a grid of rods, rails, booms, rows of lights on thin steel beams, gangways, and walls solid with boxes, machinery, rods. The wings, he was fascinated to discover, communicated as one space with the back of the stage. His mechanical eye discerned hydraulic rams—expensive! No amateur playhouse, this, but the real thing, and constructed with a disregard for cost that put it ahead even of some major Broadway playhouses. Though it wasn’t a theater; audience room was limited to perhaps fifty stall seats.

The owner of the voice was approaching him, the willowy man at his side, no doubt to fill him in. Abe gazed in awe.

Easily six and a half feet tall, he was clad in a black-and-white Japanese kimono of water birds in a lily pond, and wore backless slippers on his feet; gaping open as his legs scissored stiffly, the kimono revealed close-fitting black trousers beneath. His physique was too straight up and down to be called splendid, yet he wasn’t at all obese. What my Nanna would have called “solid” thought Abe: a basketballer, not a footballer. Feet the size of dinghies. Tightly curly corn-gold hair, close-cropped, gave Abe a pang of envy; Betty had finally managed to push him into growing his fair, thinning hair long enough to cover his ears and neck, and he hated this modern look. Now here was an internationally famous guy sporting short-back-and-sides! This guy had no wife, so much seemed sure. His facial features were regular and were set in an expression suggesting a kind nature, though looks were treacherous; Abe reserved judgement. The eyes were fine and large, an innocent sky-blue.

How, wondered Abe, am I to reconcile his aura of kindness with his waspish tongue? Except, of course, that the rules of conduct in the theater world were rather different from others, he suspected. The artistic temperament and all that.

Mr. Willowy was now moving toward the weeping form of Peter the lighting blighter, clucking and shushing as he went.

On his feet, Abe stuck out his right hand. “Lieutenant Abe Goldberg, Holloman PD,” he said.

One huge hand engulfed his in a warm shake, then the Voice sat down opposite Abe by pulling a fused section of seats around. Something flashed as he moved; Abe blinked, dazzled. He wore a two-carat first water diamond in his right ear lobe, but no other jewelry, not even a class ring.

“Rha Tanais,” he said.

“Forgive a detective’s curiosity, sir, but is Rha Tanais your original name?”

“What an original way to put it! No, Lieutenant, it’s my professional name. I was christened Herbert Ramsbottom.”

“Christened?”

“Russian rites. Ramsbottom was probably Raskolnikov before Ellis Island, who knows? I ask you, Herbert Ramsbottom? High school was a succession of nicknames, but the one everybody liked best was Herbie Sheep’s Ass. Luckily I wasn’t one of those poor, despised outsiders picked sometimes to literal death.” The blue eyes gleamed impishly. “I had wit, height, good humor—and Rufus. Even the worst of the brute brigade had enough brain to understand I could make him a laughing-stock. I racked my own brain for a new monicker, but none sounded like me until, as I browsed in the library one day, I chanced upon an atlas of the ancient world. And there it was!”

“What was?” Abe asked after a minute’s silence, appreciating the fact that (a rare treat in a detective’s working life) he was in the presence of a true raconteur with considerable erudition.

“Family tradition has it that we originated in Cossack country around the Volga and the Don, so I looked at the lands of the ancient barbarians to find that the Volga was called the Rha, and the Don was called the Tanais. Rha Tanais—perfect! And that really is how I found my new name,” said Rha Tanais.

“You’d have to be a professor of classics to guess, sir.”

“Yes, it’s a mystery to the world,” Rha Tanais agreed.

Abe glanced across to where Mr. Willowy was concluding his ministrations to Peter the lighting blighter, and looking as if he was about to join them. This remorseless glare gave the lie to Abe’s impression of youth; Mr. Willowy was an extremely well preserved fortyish. At six feet he seemed short only when he stood next to Rha Tanais, but no other word than “willowy” could describe his body or the way he moved it. Coppery red hair, swamp-colored eyes, and wearing discreet but effective eye makeup. Beautiful hands that he used like a ballet dancer. Such he had probably been.

“Come and meet Lieutenant Abe Goldberg!” Tanais hollered, muting his tones as Mr. Willowy arrived. “Lieutenant, this is my irreplaceable other half, Rufus Ingham.” Suddenly he burst into bass-baritone song, with Rufus Ingham singing a pure descant.

“We’ve been together now for forty years, and it don’t seem a daaay too long!”

A bewildered Abe laughed dutifully.

“Rufus didn’t come into the world so euphoniously named either,” Tanais said, “but his real name is a secret.”

Rufus cut him short, not angrily, but quite firmly—which one was the boss? “No, Rha, we’re not talking to Walter Winchell, we’re talking to a police lieutenant. Honestly! My name was Antonio Carantonio.”

“Why try to hide that, Mr. Tanais?”

“Rha, my name is Rha! You mean you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“This is The House! Carantonio is The Name! Abe—I may call you Abe?—the story has passed into Busquash mythology by now, they even tell it on the tour buses. I’m sure the Holloman police department must have files in the plural on it. In 1925, before Rufus and I were ever thought of, the owner of this house and a two million dollar fortune vanished from the face of the earth,” said Rha Tanais in creepy tones. “After seven years she was declared dead, and Rufus’s mother inherited. The original owner was Dr. Nell Carantonio, and Rufus’s mother was yet another Nell Carantonio.”