The Anubis Gates

The guard was six feet tall and taking long strides, and the shorter Doyle, having to jog occasionally to keep up, was soon puffing and wheezing. What’s the goddamn hurry, he wondered angrily; though at the same time he promised himself that he’d start doing sit-ups and push-ups in the mornings again. A battered old aluminum trailer stood at the periphery of the glare, moored to the activity by cables and telephone lines, and this proved to be their destination. The guard hopped up the three steps to the door and knocked, and when someone inside shouted, “Come in!” he stepped down and waved Doyle ahead. “Mr. Darrow will speak to you inside.”

Doyle walked up the steps, opened the door and went in. The inside of the trailer was littered with books and charts, some looking old enough to belong in a museum and others obviously brand new; all were clearly in use, the charts covered with penciled notes and colored pins, and the books, even the oldest and most fragile, propped carelessly open and marked up with felt-pen ink. An old man stood up from behind one of the taller book stacks, and Doyle was impressed in spite of himself to recognize, from a hundred pictures in magazines and newspapers over the years, J. Cochran Darrow. Doyle had been prepared to humor a wealthy but sick and almost certainly senile old man, but all such thoughts evaporated before the man’s piercing and frostily humorous gaze.

Though the hair was whiter and scantier than recent photographs had shown, the cheeks a little hollower, Doyle had no difficulty in believing that this was the man who had pioneered more fields of scientific research than Doyle could probably even spell, and, out of a small-town sheet-metal factory, built a financial empire that made J. Pierpont Morgan look merely successful.

“You’re Doyle, I hope,” he said, and the famous deep voice had not deteriorated at all.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Darrow stretched and yawned. “‘Scuse.me, long hours. Sit down, any space you can find. Brandy?”

“Sounds fine to me.” Doyle sat down on the floor beside a knee-high stack of books on which Darrow a moment later set two paper cups and a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessey. The old man sat down cross-legged on the other side of the stack, and Doyle was mortified to note that Darrow didn’t have to suppress a grunt in lowering himself to the floor. Lots of push-ups and sit-ups, he vowed.

“I imagine you’ve speculated on the nature of this job,”

Darrow said, pouring the cognac, “and I want you to ditch whatever conclusions you’ve come up with. It’s got nothing to do with any of them. Here.” He handed Doyle a cup. “You know about Coleridge, do you?”

“Yes,” Doyle answered cautiously.

“And you know about his times? What was going on in London, in England, in the world?”

“Reasonably well, I think.”

“And by know, son, I don’t mean do you have books at home on these things or would you know where to look ‘em up in the UCLA library. I mean know ‘em in your head, which is more portable. Answers still yes?”

Doyle nodded.

“Tell me about Mary Wollstonecraft. The mother, not the one who wrote Frankenstein.”

“Well, she was an early feminist, wrote a book called, let’s see, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, I think, and—”

“Who’d she marry?”

“Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law. She died in childb—”

“Did Coleridge really plagiarize Schlegel?”

Doyle blinked. “Uh, yes. Obviously. But I think Walter Jackson Bate is right in blaming it more on—”

“When did he start up on the opium?”

“When he was at Cambridge, I think, early 1790s.”

“Who was the—” Darrow began, but was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. The old man swore, got up and went over to the phone and, lifting the receiver, resumed what was obviously an argument in progress about particles and lead sheathing.

Both from politeness and lack of interest, Doyle made a show of being curious about a nearby book stack—and a moment later his interest became wide-eyed genuine, and very carefully he lifted the top volume.