ESOTERIC CITY

by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling’s most recent novel, The Caryatids, was published earlier this year. His addictive blog (at blog.wired.com/sterling) includes recent posts about telepathy, e-book readers, psychological warfare, and an effort to turn “spam” into wallpaper. And his most recent story, which we are pleased to present herewith, takes us to the city where Vermouth was born.

Was that the anguished howl of a dying dog? Or just his belly rumbling?

Cold dread nosed at the soul of Achille Occhietti. He rose and jabbed his blue-veined feet into his calfskin slippers.

In the sumptuous hall beyond his bedroom, the ghost-light of midnight television flickered beneath his wife’s door. Ofelia was snoring.

Occhietti’s eyes shrank in the radiant glare of his yawning fridge. During the evening’s game, elated by the home team’s victory over the hated Florentines, he’d glutted himself on baked walnuts, peppery breadsticks, and Alpine ricotta. Yes, there it lurked, that sleep-disturbing cheese: glabrous and skinless, richer than sin.

The fridge thumped shut and the dimly shining metal showed Occhietti his own surprised reflection: groggy, jowly, balding. The hands that gripped the crystal cheese-plate were as heavy as a thief’s.

A blur rose behind Occhietti, echoing his own distorted image. He turned, plate in hand.

A mystical smoke gushed straight up through Occhietti’s floor. Rising, roiling, reeling, the cloud gathered earthly substance; it blackly stained the grout between his kitchen tiles.

Occhietti’s vaporous guest stank powerfully of frankincense, petroleum, and myrrh.

Resignedly, Ochietti set the cheese plate on the sideboard. He flicked on the kitchen’s halogen lights.

In the shock of sudden illumination, Occhietti’s mystic visitor took on a definitive substance. He was Djoser, an ancient Egyptian priest and engineer. Djoser had been dead for three thousand years.

Flaking, brittle, and browned by the passing millennia, the mummy loomed at Ochietti’s kitchen table, grasping at the checkered cloth with ancient fingers thin as macaroni. He opened his hollow-cheeked maw, and silently wagged the blackened tongue behind his time-stained ivories.

Occhietti edged across the ranks of cabinets and retrieved a Venetian shot glass.

Using a sharp little fruit knife, Ochietti opened the smaller vein in his left wrist. Then he dribbled a generous dram of his life’s blood into the glass.

The mummy gulped his crimson aperitif. Dust puffed from his cracked flesh as his withered limbs plumped. His wily, flattened eyeballs rolled in their sockets. He was breathing.

Occhietti pressed a snowy wad of kitchen towels against his tiny wound. It really hurt to open a vein. His head was spinning.

With a grisly croak, Djoser found his voice. “Tonight you are going to Hell!”

“So soon?” said Occhietti.

Djoser licked the bloodstained dregs of his shot glass. “Yes!”

Occhietti studied his spirit guide with sorrow. He regretted that their long relationship had finally come to this point.

Once, the mummy Djoser had been lying entirely dead, as harmless and inert as dried papyrus, in the mortuary halls of Turin’s Museo Egizio—the largest Egyptian museum in Europe. Then Occhietti, as a burningly ambitious young businessman, had occultly penetrated the Turinese museum. He had performed the rites of necromancy necessary to rouse the dead Egyptian. An exceedingly dark business, that; the blackest of black magic; a lesser wizard would have quailed at it, especially at all the fresh blood.

Yet a shining lifetime of success had followed Occhietti’s dark misdeed. The occult services of an undead adviser were a major advantage in Turinese business circles.

The world’s three great capitals of black magic (as every adept knew) were Lyon, the City of Heretics; Prague, the City of Alchemists; and Turin. The world also held three great centers of white magic: London, the City of the Golden Dawn; San Francisco, the City of Love;—and Turin.

Turin, the Esoteric City, was saturated with magic both black and white. Every brick and baroque cornice in the city was shot through with the supernatural.

He’d led a career most car executives would envy, but Achille Occhietti did not flatter himself that he ranked with the greatest wizards ever in Turin. Nobody would rank him with Leonardo da Vinci ... or even Prince Eugene of Savoy. No, Occhietti was merely the head of a multinational company’s venture capital division, a top technocratic magus at a colossal corporation that had inundated Europe with a honking fleet of affordable compacts and roaring, sleekly gorgeous sports cars, a firm that commanded 16.5 percent of the entire industrial R&D budget of Italy. So, not much magic to marvel at there. Not compared to the concrete achievements of, say, Nostradamus.

Having bound up his wounded wrist, Occhietti offered the mummy a Cuban cigar from his fridge’s capacious freezer.

Smoke percolated through cracks in the mummy’s wrinkled neck. The treat visibly improved the mummy’s mood. Tobacco was the only modern vice that Djoser took seriously.

“Your Grand Master the Signore, he whom you so loyally served,” Djoser puffed bluely, “has been dead and in Hell for two thousand days.”

Occhietti wondered. “Where does the time go?”

“You should have closely watched the calendar.” This was a very ancient-Egyptian thing to say. “Your Master calls you from his awful lair. I will guide you to Hell, for guidance of that kind has been my role with you.”

“Could I write a little note to my wife first?”

Djoser scowled. A master of occult hieroglyphics, Djoser had never believed that women should read.

With a sudden swift disjuncture straight from nightmare, Occhietti and Djoser were afloat in midair. Occhietti drifted through the trickling fountains of his wife’s much-manicured garden, and past his favorite guard dog. The occult arrival of the undead Djoser had killed the dog in an agony of foaming canine terror.

The two of them magically progressed downhill. The mummy scarcely moved his rigidly hieratic limbs. His sandal-shod feet left no prints, and his desiccated hands did not disturb the lightest dust. As they neared Hell, his speed increased relentlessly.

They skidded, weightless as two dandelion puffs, down the silent, curving streets of Turin’s residential hills. They crossed the cleansing waters of the sacred Po on the enchanted bridge built by Napoleon.

Napoleon Bonaparte had drunk from the Holy Grail in Turin. This stark fact explained why an obscure Corsican artillery lieutenant had bid so fair to conquer the world.

The Holy Grail, like the True Cross and the Shroud of Turin, was an occult relic of Jesus Christ Himself. Since the checkered Grail was both a white cup and a black cup, the Holy Grail belonged in esoteric Turin. The Holy Grail had been at the Last Supper: it was the cup that held the wine that Jesus Christ transformed into His blood. The Holy Grail had also been at Golgotha: where it caught the gushing blood from Christ’s pierced heart.

The Shroud of Turin was a time-browned winding cloth soaked in the literal blood of God, but the blood that brewed within the Holy Grail rose ever-fresh. So that magical vessel was certainly the most powerful relic in Turin (if one discounted Turin’s hidden piece of the True Cross, which never seemed to interest wizards half so much as the Shroud and the Grail).

The Emperor Constantine had drunk blood from the Grail. Also Charlemagne ... Frederick the Second ... Cesare Borgia ... Christoforo Columbo ... Giuseppe Garibaldi ... Benito Mussolini, too, to his woe and the whole world’s distress.

In 1968, an obscure group of students in Turin had occupied the corporate headquarters of Occhietti’s car company, demanding love, peace, and environmental responsibility. There the wretches had discovered the hidden Grail. The next decade was spent chasing down terrorists who kidnapped car executives.

Occhietti and the mummy floated through the moony shadow of a star-tipped Kabbalist spire, which loomed over Turin’s silent core. This occult structure was the tallest Jewish spire in Europe. Even with a Golem, Prague had nothing to compare to it.

The mummy drew a wide berth around the Piazza Castello, in respect for the Pharaoh who reigned there. This stony monarch, wielding a flail and an ankh, guarded Turin’s Fortress of Isis.

At length the flying mummy alit, dry and light as an autumn leaf, in the black market of the Piazza Statuto: for this ill-omened square, the former site of city executions, held Turin’s Gate to Hell.

Hell’s Gateway lurked under a ragged tower of blasted boulders, strewn with dramatic statues in sadistic Dantean anguish. This rocky tower was decorously topped by a winged bronze archetype, alternately known as the Spirit of Knowledge or the Rebel Angel Lucifer. He was a tender, limpid angel, very learned, delicate and epicene.

As Djoser sniffed around the stony tower, seeking Turin’s occult hole to Hell, Occhietti found the courage to speak. “Djoser, is Hell very different, these days?”

Djoser looked up. “Is Hell different from what?”

“I had to read Dante in school, of course....”

“You are afraid, mortal,” Djoser realized. “There is nothing worse than Hell, for Hell is Hell! But I served the royal court of Egypt. I’m far older than your Hell, and Dante’s Hell as well.” The mummy groped for Occhietti’s pierced and aching wrist. “Lo, see here: below we must go!”

Clearly, modern Italian engineers had been hard at work here in Hell. The casings of Hell’s rugged tunnel, which closely resembled the Frejus tunnel drilled through the Alps to France, had been furnished with a tastefully minimal spiral staircase made of glass, blond hardwood, and aircraft aluminum.

A delicate Italian techno-muzak was playing. It dimmed the rhythmic slaps of Occhietti’s bedroom slippers on the stairway.

Light and shadow chased each other on the tunnel’s walls. The walls held a delirious surge of spray-bombed gang graffiti, diabolically exulting drugs, violence, and general strikes against the System—but much of that rubbish had been scrubbed away, and Turin’s new, improved path to Hell was keenly tourist-friendly. Glossy signs urged the abandonment of all hope in fourteen official European Union languages.

“Someone took a lot of trouble to upgrade this,” Occhietti realized.

“The Olympics were in Turin,” Djoser grunted.

“Oh yes, of course.”

Turin was an esoteric city of black and white, so its Hell was a strobing, flickering flux, under a chilly haze of Alpine fog. Being Hell, it was funereal; the afterlife was an all-consuming realm of grief, loss, penitence, and distorted, sentimentalized remembrance.

The Hell of Turin was clearly divided—not in concentric layers of crime, as Dante had alleged—but into layers of time. The dead of the 1990s were still feigning everyday business ... they were shopping, suffering, cursing the traffic and the lying newspaper headlines ... but the dead of the 1980s were blurrier and less antic, while the dead of the 1970s were foggy and obscured. The Hell that represented the 1960s was a fading jangle of guitars and a smoky whiff of patchouli.... The 1950s were red-hot smokestacks as distant as the Apennines, while the 1940s, at the limit of Occhietti’s ken, were an ominous wrangle of sirens and burning and bombs.

Smog gushed over glum workers’ tenements, clanking factories, bloodily gleaming rivers and endless tides of jammed cars. The cars looked sharp and clear to Occhietti, for he knew their every make, year, and model; but their sinful inhabitants, the doomed and the damned, were hazy blurs behind the wheels.

As an auto executive, Occhietti had always surmised that his company’s employees would go to Hell. They were Communists from some of Europe’s most radical and militant labor unions. Where else could they possibly go?

And here, indeed, they were. Those zealots from the Workers’ Councils, self-righteous hell-raisers passionately devoted to Marxism, had all transmigrated down here. Their afterlife was one massive labor strike. The working dead were clad in greasy flannel, denim, and corduroy, cacophonous, boozing, shouting in immigrants’ dialects, a hydra-headed horde of grimy egalitarians ... packed like stinging hornets into their worker’s-housing projects. They passed their eternal torment watching bad Italian TV variety shows.

“Dante’s Hell was so solemn, medieval, and majestic,” Occhietti lamented. “There’s nothing down here but one huge Italian mess!”

“This is your Hell,” his spirit guide pointed out. “Dante’s Hell was all about Dante, while your Hell is all about you.”

“They claimed that the afterlife would be about justice for everybody,” said Occhietti.

“This is an Italian Hell. Did you ever see Italian justice?” The mummy was being reasonable. “I can assure you that all the most famous and accomplished Turinese are here.” He pointed with a time-shrunken finger at a busy literary café, a local mise en scène that boiled with diabolical energies. “See those flying vulture-monsters there, shrieking and clawing both their victims, and one another?”

“With all that noise, they’re hard to miss.”

“Those are dead Italian journalists and literary critics.”

This certainly made sense. “Who’s that they’re eating?”

“That’s the local novelist who killed himself over that actress.”

“Fantastic! Yes, that’s really him! The only writer who truly understood this town! Can I get his autograph?”

The Egyptian raised his hierophantic hand in stern denial. “Humanity,” he pronounced, “is steeped in sin. Especially the human sins that are also human virtues. That manic-depressive novelist boozing over there, who understood too many such things, despaired of his own existence and ended it. But to kill oneself while lost in life’s dark woods is the worst of human errors. So he stinks of his own decay; and that is why his vultures eagerly feast on him.”

They tramped Hell’s stony flooring to a space that was garish and spangled. The smartly hellish boulevards were crowded with famous faces. All manner of local celebrities: film stars, countesses, financiers, art collectors, generals.

These celebrities shared their Hell with the grimy underdogs of the Workers’ Turin. Yet, since this was Hell, the Great and the Good were no longer bothering to keep up their public pretenses. Human experience had ceased for the dead; their hazy flesh cast no shadows. Indifferent to futurity, with the post-existential freedom of nothing left to gain or lose, these ghosts were haplessly angry, gluttonous, slothful, and lustful. They were embezzlers, wife-beaters, brawling scoffers. Sullen depressives who’d gone to Hell for being insufficiently cheerful; moral fence sitters who’d gone to Hell for minding their own business.

Gay and lesbian Sodomites whose awful lusts were presumably enough to have their whole city incinerated; cops in Hell for the inherent crime of being cops, lawyers for the utter vileness of being lawyers, firemen for having goofed off on some day when a child burned to death, doctors in Hell for malpractice and misdiagnosis....

Italian women in Hell for flaunting busty decolletage that tempted men to lust, and women who had tragically failed to tempt men to lust and had therefore ended up lonely and sad and crabby and cruel to small children.

“Can you tell me who’s missing from Hell?” said Occhietti at last. He was jostled by the crowds.

The Egyptian shrugged irritably in the push and shove. “Do you see any Jews down here?”

“The Jews went to Heaven?”

“I never said that! I just said the Jews aren’t in this Turinese Italian Catholic Hell!” The mummy fought the crowd for elbow room. “There were no Jews in my afterlife, either. And believe me, compared to this raucous mess, my afterlife was splendid. My nice quiet tomb had fine clothes, paintings, a sarcophagus, all kinds of wooden puppets to keep me company.... You’d think the Jews would have changed in three thousand years, but ... yes, fine, the Jews changed, but not so you’d notice.”

They clawed their way free from the pedestrian crowds of dead. The mummy was abstracted now, seeking some waymark through the dense and honking urban traffic. “I must usher you into the presence of your dead overlord. This ordeal is going to upset you.”

Occhietti was already upset. “I was always loyal to him! I even loved him.”

“That’s why you will be upset.”

Occhietti knew better than to argue with Djoser. The mummy’s stringent insights, drawn from his long historical perspective, had been proven again and again. For instance: when he’d first asked Djoser about marrying Ofelia, the mummy had soberly prophesied. “This rich girl from a fine family is a cold and narrow creature who feels no passion for you. She will never understand you. She will make your home respectable, conventional, and dignified, and cramped with a petty propriety.” Occhietti, considering that an overly harsh assessment, had married Ofelia anyway.

Yet Djoser’s prophecies about Ofelia had been entirely true. In fact, these qualities were the best things about Ofelia. She was the mother of his children and had been his anchor for thirty-eight years.

Occhietti’s Signore was one of a major trio of the damned, three bronze male giants, stationed in the center of a busy traffic ring. These mighty titans loomed over Hell like office buildings; the cars whizzing past their ankles were like rubber-tired rats.

The heroic flesh of the titans was riddled through and through by writhing, hellish serpents. These serpents were wriggling exhaust pipes that cruelly pierced the sufferers from neck to kidneys, chaining them in place. Being necromancers, the auto executives had always derived their power from the flesh of the dead: from fossil fuels. In Hell, this hideous truth was made manifest.

A hundred thousand people in Turin, weeping unashamedly, hats in hand, had filed their way past gorgeous heaps of flowers to pay the Signore their last respects. Yet, even down here in Hell, the brazen fact of death had not relieved this giant of his business worries.

Here the Signore stood, gathered to his ancestors, who looked scarcely happier than he. The Signore’s father blinked silently, forlorn. Bloody sludge dripped from his aquiline, titanic nose. The Signore’s father had quaffed from the Grail with the Duce. He had died in his bed with a gentleman’s timing—for his death had saved his company from the wrath of the vengeful Allies.

The Signore’s grandfather, the company’s founder, was an even more impressive figure; great entrepreneur, primal industrial genius, his colossal flesh was caked all over with the blackened wreck of bucolic Italy: pretty vineyards paved over with cement, sweet little piping birds gone toes-up from the brazen gust of furnace blasts.... He was a Midas whose grip turned everything to asphalt.

As for the Signore himself, he was the uncrowned Prince of Italy, a Senator-for-Life, a shining column of NATO’s military-industrial complex. The Signore was dead and in Hell, and yet still grand—after his death, he was grander, even.

“Eftsoons he will speak unto you,” warned the mummy formally; “stand ye behind me, and do not fear so.”

“This pallor on my face,” said Occhietti, “is my pity for him.”

In truth, Occhietti was terrified of the Signore. It was always wise to fear a wizard whose lips had touched the Holy Grail.

The Signore opened his mighty jaws. Out came a great sooty gush of carbon monoxide, lung-wrecking particulates, brain-damaging lead, and the occult offgassings of industrial plastics. Earth-wracking fumes fit to blister Roman marble and tear the fine facades right off cathedrals.

The Signore found his giant, truck-horn voice.

“Hail friend, unto this dreadful day still true,
Who harkens to your master’s final geas!
Most woeful this of many deeds performed
In service to the checkered Lord of Turin.”

Ochietti felt a purer terror yet. “He’s speaking in iambic pentameter!”

“This is Hell,” the mummy pointed out. “And he’s a Titan.”

“But I’m an engineer! I always hated poetry!”

The mummy spread his hands. “Well, he was a lawyer, before he became like this: dead, historic, gigantic, and in the worst of all possible circumstances.”

The Signore awaited an answer, with eyes as huge and glassy as an eighteen-wheeler’s headlamps.

Occhietti drew himself up, as best he could within his scanty night-robe and flat bedroom slippers. “Hail unto thee, ye uncrowned Kings, masters of the many smokestacks, ye who coaxed Italians from their creaking, lousy haywains and into some serious high-performance vehicles.... Listen, ye, I can’t possibly talk in this manner! Let’s speak in the vernacular, capisce?”

Occhietti stared up, pleading, into the mighty face that solemnly glared above him.

“Listen to me, boss: Juventus! Your favorite football team: the Turin black-and-whites! They kicked the asses of the Florentines tonight! Wiped them flat out, three-zero!”

This was welcome news to the giant. The titan unbent somewhat, his huge bronze limbs creaking like badly lined brakes.

“‘Wizard’ they call thee, counselor and fixer;
Trusted with our sums that breed futurity;
Loyal thou wert, but now the very Tempter
Lurks a serpent in your homely Garden!”

“Does he really have to speak like that?” Occhietti demanded of the mummy. “I can’t understand a single damned thing he says!”

Nobly, the mummy rose to the occasion. “He must speak in that poetic, divinatory fashion, for he is a dead giant. You are still alive and capable of moral action, so it is up to you to resolve his ghostly riddles for him.” The mummy straightened. “Luckily for you, I always loved the riddles of the afterlife. I was superb at those.”

“You were?”

“Indeed I was! The Egyptian Book of the Dead: it’s like one huge series of technical aptitude tests! At the end, they weigh your human heart against a feather. And if your guilty heart is any heavier than that feather, then they feed your entrails straight to the demonic hippopotamus.”

Occhietti considered this. “How did that trial work out for you, Djoser?”

“Well, I failed,” said Djoser glumly. “Because I was guilty. Of course I was guilty. Do you think we built the Pyramids without any fixes and crooked backroom deals? It was all about the lazy priests ... the union gangs ... and the Pharaoh! Oh my God!” The mummy put his flaking head into his withered hands.

Occhietti gazed from the three damned and towering industrial giants, slowly writhing in their smoky chains, and back to Djoser again. “Djoser: your Pharaoh was your God, am I right? He was your divine God-King.”

“Look, Achille, since we’re both standing here stuck in Hell, we should at least be frank: my God-King was a scandal. Like all the Pharaohs, he was in bed with his sister. All right? He was an inbred, cross-eyed royal runt! You could have broken both his shins with a papyrus reed.”

The mummy gazed upward at the damned industrialists. “This gentleman’s dynasty came to a sudden end after one mere century ... But at least he was in bed with some busty actresses, and was driving hot sports cars. As a leader of your civilization, he wasn’t all that bad, especially considering your degraded, hectic, vilely commercial Iron Age!”

The mighty specter seemed obscurely pleased by the mummy’s outspoken assessment; at least, he thunderously resumed his awesome recitation.

“He comes to ruin everything we built!
The empire that we schemed, we planned, we made,
In toil, sweat, tears, and lost integrity,
Imperiled stands in your new century,
When Turin’s Black and White turns serpent Green!
If ever you would call yourself ‘apostle’
Your footsteps stay, and keep your heart steadfast!
The Devil’s blandishments are subtle,
Reject them without pause all down the line!”

“He’s warning you that you will encounter Satan,” the mummy interpreted. “I take it that he means Lucifer, the Shining Prince of Darkness.”

“Meeting Lucifer is not in my job assignment,” said Occhietti.

“Well, it is now. You will have to return to your mortal life to confront the Devil in person. That’s clearly what this hellish summons is all about.”

Occhietti could no longer face the writhing torment of the doomed giants, so he turned on the mummy. “I admit that I’m a necromancer,” he said. “I draw my magic power from the dead—but Satan? I can’t face Satan! Satan is the Black Angel! He’s the second-ranked among the Great Seraphic Powers! I can’t possibly defeat Satan! With what, my rosary?”

“Your Lord of Turin can’t speak any more plainly,” Djoser said. “Look how he folds his mighty arms and falls so silent now! As your spiritual guide and adviser, I would strongly suggest that you arm yourself against the Great Tempter.”

All three giants had gone as rigid and remote as public statuary. Occhietti was speechless at the desperate fate that confronted him.

“Come now,” coaxed the mummy, “you must have some merits for a battle like this. Not every necromancer visits Hell while living.”

“I’m completely doomed! I might as well just stay here in Hell, properly damned.” Occhietti’s shoulders slumped within his scanty robe. “Everyone who matters is here already anyway. There’s no one up there in Heaven except children and nice old ladies.”

“Don’t be smug about your own damnation,” counseled the mummy, taking his arm and leading him away through acrid lines of whizzing traffic. “That is the sin of pride.”

It brought profound relief to flee the dire presence of the three agonized giants. The mummy and Occhietti flagged down a taxi. Suddenly they were roaming Turin’s vast and anonymous mobilized suburbs, which were all tower blocks, freeways, assembly plants, and consumer box stores.

“My employer just tasked me to face Satan.... Him, the finest man I ever knew....” Occhietti leaned his reeling head against the taxi’s grime-stained window. “Why is he down here in Hell? He was truly the Great and the Good! All the ladies loved him! He even had a sense of humor.”

“It’s because of simony,” pronounced the mummy. “He—and his father, and his grandfather—they are all in Hell for the mortal sin of simony.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that one.”

“For ‘simony,’ Achille. That’s the mortal sin named after the great necromancer, Simon Magus. Simon Magus sought to work divine miracles by paying money for them.”

“But I do that myself.”

“Indeed you do.”

“Because I’m in venture capital, I’m in research-and-development! I have to commit that so-called sin of ‘simony’ every damn day!”

“You might consult your Scripture on that subject. Nice letters of black and white, very easy to read.” Djoser was something of a snob about his hieroglyphics.

Occhietti banged his fist against the rattling taxi door.

“Everybody in the modern world is an industrial capitalist! We all raise cash to work our technical miracles! That’s our very way of life!”

“You won’t find any words of praise for that in your Bible.”

Occhietti knew this was true. As a wizard, he had the Bible, that most occult of publications, poised always at his bedside.

There was scarcely one word inside the Bible that you’d find in any modern Masters of Business Administration course. Not much comfort there for the money-changers in the temple. Plagues, curses, merciless wars of annihilation—the sky splitting open apocalyptically: the Bible brimmed over with that.

Occhietti lowered his voice. “Djoser, my entire modern world is beyond salvation, isn’t it? The truth is, we’re comprehensively damned! For our mortal sins against man and nature, we’re going to collapse! That apocalypse could happen to us any day now, plagues of frogs, rivers of blood....”

All alert sympathy, the ancient mummy nodded his dry, flaking head. “Yes, they’re very harsh on us ancient Egyptians inside that Bible of yours. The press coverage that our regime got in there, I wouldn’t give that to a dog.”

Occhietti blinked. “Did you read the Bible, Djoser?”

“I don’t have to read it, stupid! I was there! I was alive back then! We were the Good People and the Jews were our working class! You should have seen their cheap, lousy bricks!”

Occhietti was numb with despair. Then he read a passing sign and was galvanized into frenetic action. “Driver, pull over!”

Occhietti and the mummy entered a men’s suburban clothing store. The damned soul manning the cheap plastic counter was a genuine Italian tailor. As a punishment for his sins, which must have been many, he was being forced to retail prêt-à-porter off-the-rack.

Occhietti examined the goods with a swift and practiced eye. This being Hell, this store-of-the-damned featured only the clothing that his wife Ofelia wanted him to wear. Thrifty, respectable suits that lacked male flair of any kind. Suits that were rigidly conventional and baggily cut, thirty years out of date. Suits that were shrouds for his burial.

Given the circumstances, though, this sepulchral gear was perfect, and far better than his nigh -robe. “Don’t stand there,” he told the mummy. “Get yourself dressed. We have to attend a garden party.”

The mummy was startled. “What, now?”

“I don’t always forget to watch the calendar,” Occhietti told him. “Today is my wife’s birthday.”

The mummy pawed with reluctance through a rack of white linen suits. “How exactly do you plan to pay for this?”

With a wizardly flick of the fingers, Occhietti produced a platinum American Express card. It belonged to the company, so it never appeared on his taxes.

Their exit from Hell was sudden and muddled: one harsh, aching lurch, a tumbling, nightmarish segue, and suddenly the two of them were riding inside a taxi, in downtown Turin, alive and in broad daylight.

They might have been two businessmen in bad new suits who’d spent their night carousing. Shaken survivors of tenebrous hours involving whores, and casinos, and mafia secrets, and sulfurous reeking cigars. But they were alive.

Djoser wiped sentimentally at his dry, red-rimmed eyes. “Shall I tell you the sweetest thing about being raised from the dead? It’s the sunlight.” Clothed in modern machine-made linens, the undead mummy closely resembled an aging Libyan terrorist. “The beautiful, simple, honest sunlight! Blue skies with golden sun: that is the greatest privilege that the living have.”

Released from the morbid, ever-clutching shadows of guilt, remorse, and death—for the time being, anyway—Occhietti felt keenly what a privilege it was to live, and to live in Turin. A native, he had never left his beloved Esoteric City, because there was no other town half so fit for him. This Turin so beloved by Nietzsche, this cool, logical, organized city, brilliantly formal and rational, beyond Good or Evil.... How splendid it was, and how dear to him. One living day strolling under glorious Turinese porticos was worth a post-mortem eternity.

The taxi’s driver was a semi-literate Somali refugee, so Occhietti felt quite free in talking openly. “We’ll make one small detour on our way to my wife’s garden party. For I must seize the Holy Grail.”

“That’s daring, Achille.”

“I must make the attempt. The Grail has baffled Satan before. Salvation was its purpose. That’s right, isn’t it? I mean ... I may be right or wrong, but I’m taking action, I will get results.”

The mummy accepted this reasoning. “So—do you know where it is?”

“I do. It must be where the Signore’s son-and-heir abandoned it—before he jumped off the bridge and drowned himself in the River Po.”

The mummy nodded knowingly. “He wouldn’t drink.”

“No. He was much too good to drink. He was a hippie kid. A big mystic. He didn’t want any innocent blood on his conscience. Whitest necromancer I ever met, that boy. Very noble and pure of heart.” Occhietti sighed. “He was insufferable.”

The taxi backfired as it rattled across Napoleon’s stone bridge. Occhietti ordered a stop at the swelling dome of the Church of the Great Mother. He paid the doubtful cabbie with his AmEx card, then climbed out into sunlight.

The mummy stared and scowled. “Don’t tell me the Holy Grail is hidden in that place.”

The Grail was inside Turin’s ancient Temple of Isis. “I know it’s somewhat ecumenical.... We Turinese do tend to dissolve our oppositions into ambiguities ... that’s how we are here, we can’t help that.”

This news visibly hurt the mummy’s feelings. The mummy had once worshipped Isis. Furthermore, it clearly offended him that the Grail’s hiding place was so obvious.

The ancient Temple of Isis—currently known as the Church of the Great Mother of God—featured a paganized statue in classical robes. She casually brandished a Holy Grail in her left hand, as she sat on the Temple’s stoop and faced the sacred River Po. A neon sign couldn’t have been more blatant.

However, the crypt below her Church was a death trap for the carelessly ambitious. The basement of the Great Mother was Turin’s mortuary for the Bones of the Fallen. The men interred within had sacrificed their lives in the Sacred Cause of Italy. It was they—the bony, the fleshless, the bloodless—who surrounded and guarded the bleeding Grail.

“I can’t go in there with you,” said the mummy, tapping his hollow ribcage, “for my body has risen through an act of black necromancy, and that is a hallowed ground.”

Occhietti sensed the implied reproach in this remark, but he overlooked it. To seek the Grail was a quest best taken alone.

A veteran necromancer, Occhietti had once boldly ransacked the Egyptian Museum—(which was itself a makeshift tomb, and already made from ransacked tombs). Still, Occhetti would never have perturbed the holy shades of the Italian fallen. His respect for them was great. Furthermore, they were notoriously violent.

Yet, in this great crisis, he deliberately made that choice.

Occhietti enchanted his way through the sacred portal that guarded the slumbering dead. As a willful, impious intrusion, he forced himself among their company.

As furious as trampled ants, the ghosts of the battlefield dead rose and came at him, a battalion’s charging wave.

Bones: the soldierly dead were a torrent of clattering bones. Bones heaped over centuries of Italian struggle. Their living flesh was long gone, but the skeletons themselves were cruelly hacked and splintered: with the slashing of cavalry sabers, careening cast-iron cannonballs, point-blank musketry blasts. These were fighting men who’d bled and perished for Italy, combating the Austrians, the French, the Germans, Hungarian hussars, elite Swiss mercenary guards, and, especially and always, fiercely combating other Italians.

With a snare-drum clashing of the teeth in their naked skulls, the noisome skeletons clawed at his civilian clothes and mocked his manhood. A lesser magician would have been torn to shreds. Occhietti stoutly persisted in his quest. If Hell itself couldn’t hold him, it could not be his fate to fall here.

At length, pale, sweating, stumbling, with fresh stains on his soul, Occhietti emerged under the blue Italian sky, a sky which, just as Djoser had said, was truly a blessing, a privilege, and a precious thing.

Occhietti clutched a humble string-tied bundle wrapped in crumbling, yellowed newspapers.

The mummy cringed away at once.

“This hurts, eh?” said Occhietti with satisfaction. He brushed bone-dust from his trousers. Despite the horror of his necrotic crime—or even because of it—he was proud.

“Your mere modern Christian magic can’t hurt an Egyptian priest, but....” The mummy lunged backward, stumbling. “All right, yes, it hurts me! It hurts, don’t do that.”

The string-tied package was unwieldy, but it weighed no more than a beer-mug. The old newspaper ink darkly stained Occhietti’s hands.

Together, they trudged uphill. Justly wary of the packet, the mummy trailed a few respectful paces behind. “You plan to use that to confound the Great Tempter?”

“That is my plan, if I have one,” said Occhietti, “although I might be better-advised to put this back and jump into that nice clean river.”

“I have no further guidance for you,” the mummy realized. “I don’t know what to tell you about this situation. It’s entirely beyond me.”

Occhietti tramped on. “That’s all right, Djoser. We’re both beyond that now.”

Embarrassed, the mummy caught up with him, then stuck one dry finger through his unaccustomed collar. “You see, Achille, I was born in the youth of the world. We never lived as you people do. Your world is much older than my world.”

“You’ve come along this far,” said Occhietti kindly. “Why not tag along to see how things turn out?”

“My own life ended so long ago,” the mummy confessed. “Like all us Egyptians, I longed to hold on to my life, to remain the mortal man I once was.... But the passage of time.... Even in the afterlife, the passage of time erased my being, bit by bit.”

Occhietti had nothing to say.

“When time passed, the first things to leave me,” said the mummy thoughtfully, “were the things I always thought were most important to me, such as ... my cunning use of right-angled triangles in constructing master blueprints. Every technical skill that I had grasped with such effort? That all went like the dew!

“Then I remembered the things that had touched my heart, yet often seemed so small or accidental, like ... the sunrise. One beautiful sunrise after a night with three dancing girls.”

“There were three?” said Occhietti, pausing for a breath. It was a rather steep climb to his mansion. He generally took a chauffeured company car.

“I’m sure that I cherished all three of those girls, but all I remember is my regret when I refused the fourth one.”

“Yes,” said Occhietti, who was a man of the world, “I can understand that.”

“As my afterlife stretched on inside my quiet, well-engineered tomb,” intoned the mummy, “I rehearsed all my hates and resentments. But those dark feelings had no power to bind me. Then I gloated over certain bad things I did, that I had gotten away with. But that seemed so feeble and childish.... Finally I was reduced to pondering the good things I had done in my life. Because those were much fewer, and easy to catalog.

“The last things I recalled from my lifespan, the final core of my human experience on Earth, were the kind, good, decent things I’d done, that I was punished for. Not good things I was rewarded and praised for doing. Not even good things I’d done without any thought of reward. Finally, at my last, I recalled the good things I’d done, things that I knew were right to do, and which brought me torment. When I was punished as a sinner for my acts that were righteous. Those were the moral gestures of my life that truly seemed to matter.”

As if conjured by the mummy’s dark meditations, a sphinx arrived on the scene. This sphinx, restless, agitated, was padding rapidly up the narrow, hilly street, lurking behind the two of them, as big as a minibus. She was stalking them: silent as death on her hooked and padded paws.

Her woman’s nostrils flared. She had smelled that humble package Occhietti carried. The all-pervading reek of bloodshed.

Occhietti turned. “Shoo! Go on, scat!”

The sphinx opened her fanged mouth to ask her lethal riddle, but Occhietti hastily tucked the Grail under one suited armpit and clamped both his hands over his ears. Frustrated, the sphinx skulked away.

They trudged on toward Occhietti’s morbid rendezvous with destiny. “I know what the Sphinx was going to ask you,” the mummy offered. “Because I know her question.”

Occhietti nodded. “Mmmph.”

“Her riddle sounds simple. This is it: ‘How can Mut be Sekhmet?’”

“What was that, Djoser? Is that really the riddle of the Sphinx? I don’t know anything about that.”

“Yes, and that’s why the Sphinx would have eaten you, if you had hearkened unto her.”

Occhietti walked on stoically. He would be home in just a few moments, and confronting the horrid, hair-raising climax of his life. Could it possibly matter what some mere Sphinx had said? He was about to confront Satan himself!

Still, Occhietti was an engineer, so curiosity naturally gnawed at him.

“All right, Djoser, tell me: how can Mut be Sekhmet?”

“That’s the part I myself never understood,” said the Egyptian. “Not while I lived, anyway. Because Mut, as every decent man knows, is the serene Consort of Amun and the merciful Queen of Heaven. Whereas Sekhmet is the lion-headed Goddess of Vengeance whose wanton mouth drips blood.

“Day and night, black and white, were less different than Mut and Sekhmet! Yet, year by year, I saw the goddesses blending their aspects! The priests were sneaky about that work: they kept eliding and conflating the most basic theological issues.... Until one day, exhausted by my work of building Pyramids ... I went into the temple of Mut to beg divine forgiveness for a crime ... you know the kind of crime I mean, some practical sin that was necessary on the job ... and behold: Mut really was Sekhmet.”

“I’m sorry to hear about all that,” Occhietti told him. And he was sincere in his sympathy, for the mummy’s ancient voice had broken with emotion.

“So: the proper answer to the Sphinx, when she asks you, ‘How can Mut be Sekhmet?’ is: ‘Time has passed, and that doesn’t matter anymore.’ Then she would flee from you. Or: if you wanted to be truly cruel to her, you could say to the poor Sphinx, ‘Oh, your Sekhmet and Mut, your Mut or Sekhmet, they never mattered in the first place, and neither do you.’ Then she would explode into dust.”

The mummy stopped in his tracks. His seamed face was wrinkled in pain. “Look at me, look, I’m weeping! These are human tears, as only the living can weep!”

“You took that ancient pagan quibble pretty badly, Djoser.”

“I did! It broke my heart! I’d committed evil while intending only the best! I died soon after that. I died, and I knew that I must be food for that demon hippopotamus. So, I went through my afterlife’s trials—I knew all about them, of course, because the briefing in the Book of the Dead was thorough—and they tossed my broken, sinner’s heart onto that balance beam of divine justice, and that beam fell over like a stone.”

“That is truly a dirty shame,” said Occhietti. “There is no question that life is unfair. And it seems, by my recent experiences, that death is even more unfair than life. I should have guessed that.” He sighed.

“Then they brought in a different feather of justice,” said the mummy. “Some ‘feather’ that was! That feather was carved from black basalt and it was big as a crocodile. It seemed that we engineers, we royal servants of the God-King, didn’t have to put up with literal moral feathers. Oh no! If that cross-eyed imbecile whose knees were knocking was a sacred God-King, well—then we were all off the hook! The fix was in all the time! Even the Gods were on the take!”

There was no time left for Djoser’s further confidences, for they had reached the ornate double gates of Occhietti’s mansion.

Normally his faithful dog was there to greet him, baring Doberman fangs fit to scare Cerberus, but alas, the dog was mortal, and the dog was dead.

However, Occhietti’s bride was still among the living, and so were her numerous relatives. Ofelia’s birthday was her signal chance to break all her relations out of mothballs.

They were all there, clustered in his wife’s garden in the cheery living sunshine, her true-blue Turinese Savoyard Piedmontese Old Money Rich, chastely sipping fizzy mineral water—Cesare and Luisa, Emanuele and Francesca, Great-Aunt Lucia, Raffaela, his sister-in-law Ottavia ... a storm of cheek-kisses now: Eusabia, Prospero, Carla and Allesandra, Mauro, Cinzia, their little Agostino looking miserable, as befitted an eight-year-old stuffed into proper clothes.... Some company wives had also taken the trouble to drop by, which was kind of them, as Ofelia had never understood his work.

His work was Ofelia’s greatest rival. She had serenely overlooked the models, the secretaries, the weekend jaunts to summits on small Adriatic islands, even the occasional misplaced scrap of incendiary lingerie—but Ofelia hated his work. Because she knew that his work mattered to him far more than she had ever mattered.

Ofelia swanned up to him. She had surely been worried about his absence on her birthday, and might have hissed some little wifely scolding, but instead she stared in delight at his ugly and graceless new suit. “Oh Achille, bel figa! How handsome you look!”

“Happy birthday, my treasure.”

“I was afraid you were working!”

“I had to put a few urgent matters into order, yes.” He nodded his head at the suit-clad mummy. “But I’m here for your celebration. Look, what lovely weather, for my consort’s special day.”

No one would have called Ofelia Occhietti a witch, although she was a necromancer’s wife. The two of them never spoke one word about the supernatural. Still, when Ofelia stood close by, in the cloud of Chanel #5 she had deployed for decades, Occhietti could feel the mighty power of her Turinese respectability closing over him in a dense, protective spell.

Occhietti had spent the night in Hell, and was doomed to confront Satan himself in broad daylight, and yet, for Ofelia, these matters were irrelevant.

So they did not exist. Therefore, it had just been a bad night for him, bad dreams, with indigestion. He had not fed any blood to the undead; that deep cut in his wrist was a mere accidental nick, not even an attempt at suicide. He had not received any commission from the undead Lord of Turin to combat Satan. Decent people never did such things.

He was attending his wife’s birthday party. Everyone here was polite and well brought up.

Maybe his dog was not even dead. No, his beloved dog was dead, all right. A necromancer had to work hard to raise the dead; death never went away when politely overlooked.

“Amore,” Ofelia said to him—she never called him that, except when she needed something—”there’s such a nice young man here, Giulia’s boy ... You do remember my Giulia.”

“Of course I do,” said Occhietti, who remembered about a thousand Giulias.

“He is just graduated, he’s so well-bred, and has such bright ideas.... He’s one of ours, the Good People. I think he needs a little help, Achille.... Maybe a word of career advice, the company, you know....”

“Yes! Fine! We’re always on the lookout for fresh talent. Point him out to me.”

Ofelia, who would never commit an act so vulgar as pointing, gave one meaningful flicker of her eyes. Occhietti knew the worst instantly.

There he was. Satan was standing there, under the roses of a whitewashed pergola, sipping spumante.

Satan was a young and handsome Turinese in a modishly cut suit. Magic was boiling off of him in sizzling waves, like the summer sunlight off molten tar.

Digging deep within himself, Occhietti found the courage to speak to his wife in a normal tone. “I’ll be sure to have a word with that young man.”

“That would be so helpful! I’m sure he’s meant to go far. And one other thing. Amore—that ugly Libyan banker! Did you have to bring that nasty man to my birthday party? You know I never trusted him, Achille.”

Occhietti glanced across the garden at the seam-faced, impassive mummy, who was pretending to circulate among the guests. The mummy could pass for a living human being when he put his mind to it, but his heart clearly wasn’t in the effort today.

In point of fact Djoser’s heart was in Turin’s distant Egyptian Museum, inside a canopic jar.

“My treasure, I know that foreign financier is not a welcome guest under your roof. I apologize for that—I had to bring him here. We’ve just settled some important business matters. They’re done! I’m through with him! After this day, you’ll never see him again!”

Ochietti knew he was doomed: the awful sight of Satan, standing there, brimming with infernal glee, was proof of that. But he was still alive, a mortal man, and therefore capable of moral action.

He clung to that. He could do his wife a kindness. It was her birthday. He could do one good thing, a fine thing, at whatever cost to himself. “My darling, I work too much, and I know that. I’ve neglected you, and I overlooked you. But ... after this beautiful day, with this sunshine, life will be different for us.”

“‘Different,’ Achille? Whatever do you mean?”

Occhietti stared at Satan, who had conjured a cloud of flying vermin from the nooks and crannies of Ofelia’s garden. Bluebottle flies, little moths, lacewings, aphids.... Lucifer smiled brightly. The Tempter crooked a finger.

“I meant this as my big birthday surprise for you,” Occhietti improvised, for the certainty of imminent damnation had loosened his tongue. “But, I promise ... that I’ll put all my business behind me.”

“You mean—you leave your work? You never leave Turin.”

“But I will! We will! We have the daughter in London, the daughter in San Francisco.... Two beautiful cities, beautiful girls who made fine marriages.... You and I, we should spend time with the grandchildren! Even the daughter who keeps moving from Lyon to Prague.... It’s time we helped her settle down. She was just sowing wild oats! There’s nothing so wrong with our little black sheep, when life’s all said and done!”

Tears of startled joy brightened his wife’s eyes. “Do you mean that, Achille? You truly mean that?”

“Of course I mean it!” he lied cheerfully. “We’ll rent out the house here! We’ll pick out a fine new travel wardrobe for you.... A woman only gets so many golden years! Starting from tomorrow, you’ll enjoy every day!”

“You’re not joking? You know I don’t understand your silly jokes, sometimes.”

“Would I joke with you on your birthday, precious? Tomorrow morning! Try me! Come to my room and wake me!”

He accepted an overjoyed hug. Then he fled.

After a frantic search, he found Djoser lurking in his bedroom, alone and somberly watching the television.

“A fantastic thing, television,” said Djoser, staring at a soap ad. “I just can’t get over this. What a miracle this is!”

“You fled from Satan, like I did?”

“Oh, your Tempter is here to destroy all you built,” shrugged the mummy. “But I built the Pyramids—I’d like to see him break those.” Djoser reached to the bedroom floor and picked up a discarded garment. “Do you see this thing?”

“Yes, that is my night robe. So?”

“Your robe is black. This morning, when you were wearing this night-robe in Hell, it was white. Your robe was the purest, snowy white Egyptian cotton.”

Occhietti said nothing.

“Your robe has magically appeared here, from where you abandoned it, there in Hell. As you can see, your robe is black. It is black, and the Prince of Darkness has entered your garden. You are beyond my help.” The mummy sighed. “So I am leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes. I’m beyond all use, I’m done.”

“Where will you go, Djoser?”

“Back into my glass case inside the Egyptian museum. That’s where I was, before you saw fit to invoke me. And before you say anything—no, it’s not that bad, being in there. Sure, the tourists gawk at me, but was I any better off in my sarcophagus? Mortality has its benefits, Achille. I can promise you, it does.”

The mummy stared at the flickering television, then gazed out the window at the sky. “It is of some interest to be among the living ... but after a few millennia, time has to tire a man. All those consequences, all those weighty moral decisions! Suns rising and setting, days flying off the calendar—that fever of life, it’s so hectic! It annoys me. It’s beneath me! I want my death back. I want the dignity of being dead, Achille. I want to be one with God! Because, as Nietzsche pointed out here in Turin, God is Dead. And so am I.”

This was the longest outburst Occhietti had ever heard from the mummy. Occhietti did not argue. What Djoser said was logical and rational. It also had the strength of conviction.

“That’s a long journey to the Other Side,” he told the mummy. “I hope you can find some use for this.”

He handed over his company’s platinum credit card.

The mummy stared at the potent card in wonderment. “You’ll get into trouble for giving me this.”

“I’m sure that it’s trouble for me,” Occhietti told him, “yet it’s also the right thing to do.”

“That’s the gesture of a real Italian gentleman,” said the mummy thoughtfully. “That truly showed some sprezzatura dash.” Without further fuss, he began to vaporize.

Occhietti left his bedroom for the garden, where Satan was charming the guests.

Satan looked very Turinese, for he was the androgynous angel who topped that hellish pile of boulders in the Piazza Statuto. Satan looked like a Belle Arte knockoff of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s epicene studio models. He was disgusting.

Furthermore, to judge by the way he was busily indoctrinating the guests, Satan was a technology wonk, a tiresome geek who never shut up.

“The triple bottom line!” declared Satan, waving his hands. “The inconvenient truth is, as a civilization, we have to tick off every box on the sustainability to-do list. I wouldn’t call myself an expert—but any modern post-industrialist surely needs to memorize the Three Main Components and the Four System Conditions of the Natural Step. And, of course, the Ten Guiding Principles to One-Planet Living. I trust you’ve read the World Wildlife Fund’s Three Forms of Solidarity?”

None of the guests responded—they were more than a little bewildered—but this reaction encouraged Lucifer. “If you expect our Alpine bioregion to escape a massive systemic overhang and a catastrophic eco-crash,” he chanted, “so that you can still name and properly number the birds and beasts in this garden.... Then you had better get a handle on the Copenhagen Agenda’s Ten Principles for Sustainable City Governance! And for those of you in education—education is the key to the future, as we all know!—I would strongly recommend the Sustainable Schools Network with its Framework of Eight Doorways. That analysis is the result of deep thought by some smart, dedicated activists! Although it can’t compare in systemic comprehensibility with the Ten Hannover Principles.”

Seeing no further use in avoiding the inevitable, Occhietti steeled himself. He confronted the Tempter. “What did you do with your wings?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your feathery angel wings, or your leathery bat wings. They’re gone.”

Satan was taken aback, but he was young and quick to recover. “Our host has heard that I’ve sworn off air travel,” he said. “Because of the carbon emissions! I take public transportation.”

“No cars for you?” said Occhietti.

“Denying cars is not, in fact, part of my Green gospel,” said Satan primly. “We have never schemed to deprive consumers of their beloved private cars; electric cars, hybrid-electric cars, cellulosic ethanol cars, shareable cars connected by cellphone, wind-powered nickel-hydride cars, plastic-composite hydrogen three-wheelers powered by backyard vats of anaerobic bacteria; we offer a vast, radiant, polymorphic, multi-headed, pagan panoply of cars! All of them radical improvements over today’s backward cars, which have led to the ongoing collapse of our global civilization.”

Occhietti cleared his throat. “It’s a fine thing to find a young man with such an interest in my industry! Let’s go inside and have a cigar.”

Beaming with delight, the Devil tripped along willingly, but once inside he refused tobacco. “A menace to public health! With today’s aging European population, we can’t risk the demographic hit to our lifespans. Not to mention the medical costs to our fragile social-safety net.”

Deliberately, Occhietti trimmed and fired a cigar. “All right, Lucifer—or whatever you call yourself nowadays—now that we’re out of my dear wife’s little garden, you can drop your pretenses. Go ahead, brandish your horns at me, your barbed tail—you’re not scaring me! I have been to Hell, I’ve seen the worst you have to offer. So put your cards on the table! Say your piece! What is it you want?”

Satan brightened. “I’m glad to have this excellent chance for a frank exchange of issues with a veteran auto executive. Though I must correct you on one important point—I’m not Satan. You are Satan.”

“I’m not Satan. I’m an engineer.”

“I’m an engineer, too—though certainly not of your brutish, old-school variety. I have a doctorate in renewable energy. With a specialty in cradle-to-cradle recycling issues.”

“From what school?”

“The Turin Polytechnic.”

“That’s my school!”

“Have you been there lately?”

Occhietti had no time to teach engineering school. The local faculty were always asking him, but.... “Look, then you can’t be Satan! You’re some crazy kid who’s possessed by Satan. You are a wizard, right?”

“Of course I’m a wizard! This is Turin.”

“Well, what kind of necromancer are you, black or white?”

“Those are yesterday’s outdated divisions! I’m not a ‘necromancer,’ for I don’t draw any power from the dead! I’m a ‘biomancer.’ I’m Green.”

“You can’t be Green. That is not metaphysically possible. You can only be Black or White.”

“Well, despite your aging, Cold War-style metaphysics, I am a Green wizard. I am Green, and you, sir, are Brown. You don’t have to take my word for that. Go to Brussels and ask around about the Kyoto Accords! Any modern Eurocrat can tell you: left, right, black, white—that’s all deader than Nineveh! In a climate crisis, you’re Global Green or you’re crisp brown toast in a hellish wasteland!”

Occhietti blinked. “A ‘hellish wasteland.’”

“Yes,” said the Green wizard soberly, “all of Earth will become Hell, all of it; if we continue in our current lives of sin, that’s just a matter of time.”

Occhietti said nothing.

“So,” said the Green wizard cheerfully, “now that we have those scientific facts firmly established, let’s get down to policy particulars! How much are you willing to give me?”

“What?”

“How many millions? How many hundreds of millions? I have to reinvent your transportation company. On tomorrow’s Green principles! Every energy company must also be reinvented. In order to become Green, like futurity, like me, me, me—you have to cannibalize all your present profit centers. You must seek out radically disruptive, transformed, Green business practices. All the smart operators already know there’s no choice in that matter—even the Chinese, Saudis, and Indians get that by now, so I can’t believe a modish Italian company like yours would be backward and stodgy about it! So, Signore Occhietti, how much? Pony up!”

Occhietti scratched at his head. He discovered two numb patches on his scalp. Hard, numb patches.

He had grown horns.

Occhietti buffed the talons of his fingertips against the ugly lapel of his suit. “From me,” he said, “you will get nothing.”

“How much?”

“I told you: nothing. Not ten Euro cents. Not one dollar, yen, ruble, rupee, or yuan.” Occhietti put the paper-wrapped bundle onto the kitchen table. “I still control my corporation’s venture capital. As a loyal employee: I refuse you. I refuse to underwrite my company’s destruction at your hands. I don’t care if it’s white, black, brown, green, or paisley: nothing for you. I have too much pride.”

Using a small but very sharp fruit knife, Occhietti cut the strings and peeled the paper away.

The Green wizard stared. “Is that what I think it is?”

Occhietto plucked the barbed tail from the loosening seat of his pants. He sat at the kitchen table. He crossed his hooves. He nodded.

“But the Grail is just some cheap clay cup!”

“He was never a Pope, you know. He was a Jewish carpenter.”

Occhietti’s kitchen filled with the butcher’s scent of fresh blood.

“I suppose that you expect me to drink from that primitive thing! It’s made by hand! Look how blurry those black and white lines are.”

“No, you won’t drink from the Grail,” said Occhietti serenely. “Because you’ve never had the guts. I’ve heard fools like you trying to destroy my industry for the past fifty years! While the rest of us were changing this world—transforming it, for good or ill—you never achieved one single, useful, practical thing! I was at the side of the Lord of Turin, breaking laws and rules like breadsticks, while you were lost in some drug-addled haze, about peace, or love, or whales, or any other useless fad that struck your fancy.”

Occhietti grinned. “But to ‘save the world’—you would have to rip across this miserable planet like Napoleon. A savior, a conqueror, a redeemer, and a champion might do that—but never the likes of you. Because you’re feeble, you’re squeamish, and you lack all conviction. You’re a limp-wristed, multi-culti weak sister who does nothing but lobby nonexistent world governments.”

“Actually, there’s a great deal of truth in that indictment, sir! Our efforts to raise consciousness have often fallen sadly short!”

“And that’s another thing: being neither black nor white, you’re always pitifully eager to agree with your own worst enemies.”

“That’s because I’m a secular rationalist with an excellent record in human rights, sir. Grant me this much: I am innocent! I’m not eager to submerge our world in a tide of blood, building my New Order on a heap of corpses.”

Occhietti smiled. “And you call yourself European?”

“That remark is truly diabolical! Why are you tempting me? I represent tomorrow—as you know!—and I’m as capable of evil as you. You know well that, once I taste the blood in that cup, there will be hell to pay! You should never have offered me that. Why do that? Why?”

What did he gain by offering the Grail? Necessity.

The Grail was a necessity: beyond good and evil. The Grail was an instrument. An instrument was not a moral actor, it did nothing of its own accord. Some engineer had to make instruments.

The Grail was the cup of the sacramental feast, and also the cup of judicial murder. Those two cups, the blackly good and whitely evil, were the very same checkered cup.

That cup had been carried hot-foot from the table of the Final Supper, and straight to Golgotha.

So who built the Holy Grail? Some fixer. Only one man, one necessary man, could have known the time and place of both events. That man was a trusted Apostle; the most esoteric Apostle. Judas; the two-faced Judas, the wizardly magus Judas, he of the bag of cash.

It was thanks to Judas that the fix was in.

“You are only playing for time, and the time is up,” said Occhietti. “The calendar never stops, and treason is a matter of dates.” He shoved the ancient cup across the table. “Do you drink, or don’t you?”