Summer of the Dragon Read online

  “You were brave and noble and brilliant,” I said politely. “I’m not. I am a member of the spoiled, effete younger generation, and I need a summer job. I will wash pots if necessary, so long as they are old Indian pots, or old colonial pots, Summer of the Dragon / 13

  or anything distantly related to my so-called field, and so long as the washing of pots takes place at least six hundred miles from Cleveland, Ohio.”

  The figure caught his attention. He stopped in the middle of a snake design, flints overlapping like scales, and looked up interestedly.

  “Why six hundred?”

  “Because my father won’t drive, and he only takes planes when some convention of Hellenists is meeting.

  My mother will drive no farther from Cleveland than five hundred miles.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Bancroft said, finishing the snake.

  “Unfilial, too,” he added. “Why do you hate your parents?”

  “I don’t. I love them. But I can’t live with them.

  Look, it isn’t just Mother and Dad; I don’t mind spending the day cooking with Mother and the evening listening to Dad read aloud from the Journal of Hellenic Studies. But my brothers and sisters are too much. Do you have teenage children?”

  A shudder ran through Bancroft. His fingers trembled so that he almost dropped a Folsom point.

  “Then you know what I mean. I have four brothers and sisters, ranging from thirteen to nineteen. They each own a stereo. One of them is an early riser. He starts playing Kiss records at seven A.M. Another is a night owl. He plays Elton John records until four A.M.

  Dr. Bancroft, forget

  14 / Elizabeth Peters

  what I said before. I retract all my conditions except one. I will wash pots or scrub floors or do anything, so long as it is at least six hundred miles from Cleveland, Ohio.”

  I could see Bancroft was moved. He arranged the points into the shape of a heart, with one long lance blade piercing it.

  “I don’t know what you can do,” he mumbled.

  “Damn it, D. J., I seem to remember telling you last November…. Wait. Wait just a minute.”

  His fumbling at the litter had dislodged a sheet of paper. He picked it up and stared at it. You could almost hear the little wheels going around in his mind.

  Then he looked at me and there was a glint in his eyes that made me very, very suspicious.

  “You mean that?” he asked. “Anything?”

  “Well, almost anything,” I said.

  He started to speak, and changed his mind. Instead he handed me the piece of paper.

  As this narrative proceeds you will understand why the document made such a profound impression on me. I can’t reproduce it verbatim, but this is the gist.

  “Dear Phuddy-Duddy,” it began. “How are tricks?

  Terrible, I hope. I read your last article in The American Anthropologist. It was rotten. You’re still on the wrong track about everything.

  “Never mind, I know it’s useless to try to penetrate the fossilized skulls of scholars like you. I’m hoping you have a student who is not quite petri Summer of the Dragon / 15

  fied in the brain yet. I’ve found something, something sensational. No, I won’t tell you what it is, that would give you a chance to marshal all your stupid, ignorant, boneheaded prejudices. Send me a student. I’ll show him and let him convince you and all the other Phuds.

  Your old friend, H. H.”

  There was a P.S. that caught my attention. “I’ll pay all expenses, of course, and a thousand a month—if I approve your choice.”

  “A thousand a month!” I gasped. “I accept.”

  “That’s your trouble, Abbott,” Bancroft said. “You don’t think at all for weeks at a time, and then you jump to conclusions. Don’t you want to know who this person is, and what he wants you to do for a thousand a month?”

  “I don’t care what he wants me to do,” I said honestly. “And I don’t care who…. Wait a minute. No, it can’t be him.”

  There was a brief pause. Bancroft sat glowering at me from under his Neanderthal ridges, and I thought.

  “Actually,” I said, after a time, “there are only two things I can think of that I wouldn’t do for a thousand a month. And I might consider one of them if the working conditions were right. However, a nasty doubt has crept into my feeble brain. Why hasn’t this deal been snapped up?”

  “Ah, I was wondering if that question would occur to you,” Bancroft said. “I do like to see traces of rudimentary intelligence in my stu 16 / Elizabeth Peters

  dents…. The reason why it has not been snapped up is that H. H. is Hank Hunnicutt.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Bancroft slammed his fist down on the desk. Flints bounced and he grabbed at them, crooning apologies—to the flints, not to me.

  “I don’t know why the hell I gave you an A minus in that course last semester,” he snarled. “Did you hire someone to write the paper for you? You’ve never heard of Hunnicutt? Have you heard of Velikovsky?

  Have you heard of Donnelly and Heyerdahl, Lost Atlantis, and Lemuria, and little green men from outer space, and UFOs, and—”

  “Oh,” I said. “That Hunnicutt.”

  Some of the names on Bancroft’s list may be familiar to you, some probably are not. The list was a list of crackpots who called themselves scientists, and whose books, expounding their weird theories, inevitably hit the bestseller lists. The screwballs claim that’s one of the reasons why scientists hate them, because they are so successful. And it is true, if perhaps irrelevant, that Dr. Bancroft’s book, which has the enticing title The Ethnoarchaeology of Central America, had sold a grand total of 657 copies.

  Despite their sneers, scholars read these books. Some of them do it out of sheer masochism. Others do it because they feel obliged to combat error; they write long, learned refutations which never get published.

  Then there are the professors Summer of the Dragon / 17

  who force their students to read the stuff and pick out the errors. That was why I was familiar with some of the authors Bancroft had mentioned. He made us read parts of Velikovsky, though he used to get so red in the face when he discussed the book I honestly worried about him having a stroke right there at the blackboard.

  I had read another little gem, something about Ancient Mysteries, or the Golden Gods, or some such title, out of idle curiosity. It was all over the bookstands at the local drugstore.

  Hank Hunnicutt came to my notice in another way.

  He was always in the newspapers. One month he had seen a UFO, big as a barn, with red and green lights on it spelling out BAN THE ATOM BOMB OR WE WILL

  DESTROY EARTH. Another month he got into print by giving six million dollars to the Brothers of the Golden Circle of Reincarnation. He was not a millionaire, he was a multi-multi-billionaire, one of the richest men in the whole world, and he was crazy. He believed in every far-out theory that had ever been proposed. I hadn’t connected him with the letter because I couldn’t imagine a man like that offering money to a regular university.

  I looked at the letter again.

  “Phuddy-duddy?” I said questioningly.

  “From Ph.D.,” Bancroft said coldly. “It’s a term of abuse coined by an early crackpot and applied to any scholar who ventures to question any insane theory.”

  Then his face relaxed, just a little.

  18 / Elizabeth Peters

  “Hank isn’t a bad guy,” he admitted reluctantly. “He is totally uncritical, of course…but he’s damned good company. That ranch of his, in northern Arizona….

  You’d be staying there, I presume, since his great discovery is located nearby. He wrote me again last week, giving me that much information, but I seem to have lost the letter. Anyhow, you can imagine what room and board at that establishment are like. You’ll get fat, Abbott.”

  “I certainly will not,” I said coolly. I do not like references to my weight. “It sounds like a good deal. I’ll take it.”

  If Bancroft had been a nice fatherly type, he would have patted me on the head and told me to go home and think about it for a few days. Instead he grinned nastily.

  “Okay. I’ll write Hank and give him your credentials.

  He may not approve them, though I doubt if you will be that lucky. You know, of course, that this summer could put the kiss of death on your scholarly ambitions, if any. Hunnicutt’s reputation is so bad that being associated with him damns a researcher.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at him askance.

  “Come off it, Spike,” I said.

  He hates being called Spike, but he couldn’t do anything about it because he is one of those fake liber-als who likes to pretend he is a buddy to his Summer of the Dragon / 19

  students. Also, the man does have a rudimentary sense of humor. He managed a sickly smile.

  “You’re right. We talk high and mighty, but we’ll take money from any source whatever. The truth is I’ve sent him several names. He turned them all down.”

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t say why. Maybe he’s just hassling me.

  We were undergraduates together, and there were a few incidents….” Bancroft coughed and looked coy.

  I knew now why Frank had been late in applying for his grant. Hunnicutt must have turned him down.

  I filed the information away in case Frank ever got snotty with me.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  I meant chances with my reputation. I didn’t mean chances with my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  The stewardess asked me if I’d like a little more champagne. I managed to nod casually, though my first impulse was to grab the bottle, in case she changed her mind.

  I was flying first class on a great
big superjet. First class! Not only had I never flown first class, I had never known anybody who had. It’s nice up there in the front cabin. More space, free booze, and that indefinable feeling of being superior to the hoi polloi.

  When Hank Hunnicutt said “expenses,” he meant it.

  He had apologized for not sending his private plane to pick me up.

  The second glass of champagne made me feel very mellow about good old Hank, and that was just as well, because I had begun to wonder whether I was making a serious mistake. Hunnicutt had accepted my credentials with flattering promptness. At least it would have been flattering if I hadn’t been fairly sure he was getting desperate. Then came the first-class ticket, with an

  20

  Summer of the Dragon / 21

  advance on my “salary,” in case I needed to buy anything for the trip…. All that was fine. I’d have had only kindly thoughts about my benefactor if I had not spent some time reading up on the crazy theories he had endorsed.

  After the acceptance letter arrived I went straight to the library. Not the university library; I knew they wouldn’t carry the kind of trashy books I wanted. The public library in town had most of the ones on my list.

  I found a copy of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in a secondhand bookstore and discovered, with aston-ishment, that some paperback company had recently seen fit to reprint Churchward’s illiterate essays on the lost continent of Mu. Then I went back to my one-room apartment and baked a double batch of chocolate-chip cookies, and I took them and the eight-pack of Coke I had picked up on the way home and settled down for an orgy—of research, that is.

  At first I enjoyed it. I started with the skeptics, like Martin Gardner and Sprague de Camp—men who knew how to write and who did their debunking with humor and devastating sarcasm. They gave good summaries of the crazier cults, from Symmes’ Hollow Earth theory to Velikovsky’s naive belief that the miracles of the Old Testament were caused by comets whizzing back and forth around the earth at convenient intervals. Some of the ideas were so wild they were funny. I loved Le Plongeon, one of the nineteenth-22 / Elizabeth Peters century explorers of Yucatan, who believed that the Mayans had carried civilization to Egypt, Summer, and elsewhere eleven thousand years ago. I particularly adored Queen Moo (pronounced “moo,” as in cow) a prehistoric (and purely fictitious) Mayan queen whose brother Aac murdered her husband Coh, so Moo fled to Atlantis (Le Plongeon believed in Atlantis too), and then sailed on to Egypt. She had another brother named Cay. Aac, Moo, Coh and Cay…. It suggests a nice vulgar limerick, doesn’t it?

  One of Le Plongeon’s “proofs” that Near Eastern culture and language were derived from the Mayas was his translation of the words Christ said on the cross.

  I bet you didn’t know that Eli, eli, lama sabachthani doesn’t really mean “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” No, what He really said was—in Mayan—“Now, now, sinking, black ink over nose.”

  I’m serious. At least Le Plongeon was, poor man.

  Le Plongeon was fun. So was George F. Riffert, who wrote a book called The Great Pyramid, Proof of God.

  He and some other Pyramid Mystics thought that one of the bumps on the Great Pyramid of Giza represented the vital date of September 16, 1936. The only trouble was, forty years later he still hadn’t figured out what had happened that day, unless it was that the King of England told the Prime Minister he was going to Summer of the Dragon / 23

  marry Mrs. Simpson. Those ancient Egyptians really did have insight into world history.

  Charles Russell, the founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, also believed that the cracks and bumps in the Great Pyramid foretold what was going to happen in history.

  According to his calculations, the Second Coming of Christ had taken place in 1874—invisibly. He and a few other selected saints were the only ones who had noticed.

  After a while, though, I stopped laughing and started to feel a little sick. (No, it wasn’t the cookies. I can eat incredible amounts of chocolate-chip cookies.) The crackpots varied in intelligence, from the plausibly pseudoscientific to the out-and-out moronic, but they had several disturbing qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these was an immense persecution complex. Each and every one of them believed he was a genius, and that everybody else in the whole world was wrong. They were martyrs, everybody hated them and despised them and refused to listen to them. They were all also incredibly dull. I remembered what a hard time I had had plowing through Velikovsky; he was far more boring than any of my textbooks, and they weren’t Gone With the Wind.

  As I read on—and on, and on—I realized that all these people shared a humorless, frightening paranoia.

  Buried somewhere in most of the books was a need to justify some fundamentalist religious code. Velikovsky started with the assump

  24 / Elizabeth Peters

  tion that the books of the Old Testament describe events that actually happened. God knows—at least I hope He does—that I don’t want to poke fun at anybody’s religious beliefs, but if you start with the idea of proving Holy Writ, it’s hard to know where to stop.

  And biblical fundamentalists—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or other—tend to be equally dogmatic about other issues, such, as the superiority of the descendants of one or the other of Noah’s sons.

  Racism kept rearing its ugly head among the luxuriant vegetation of these imaginary worlds. The superior-civilization-bearing citizens of lost Atlantis were almost always tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryans. The Spanish monks who were the first ones to push the idea that the American Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel pointed out that the Indians, like the Jews, were ungrateful for the many blessings God had be-stowed upon them—such as slavery and the Inquisition, I suppose. And Heyerdahl, three hundred years later, concluded that only Indians showing Caucas-oid—i.e., “white”—traits were intelligent enough to make the trek across the Pacific to Polynesia. The Negroid types there had been brought as slaves.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why so many of these people were fascists, open or covert. They were arrogant snobs who thought they were superior to everybody else. They couldn’t endure Summer of the Dragon / 25

  the slightest criticism of their ideas. Racists are arrogant people too.

  It left a very bad taste in my mouth, and by the time I was through reading I was prepared to dislike Hank Hunnicutt very much. Not that I decided to give up the grant. Oh, no. I am noble, but I am not that noble.

  Besides, I figured I could get in some missionary work.

  Hank seemed to be susceptible to any crazy idea; why not to mine?

  Full of champagne and other munchies, I was feeling no pain by the time the plane began its descent over the tortured bare rocks of the northern plateau of Arizona. I knew I might be in for some trouble, though.

  I could sit and smile and nod while Hank explained to me about colonists from Lemuria, and Martians digging the Grand Canyon; a man is entitled to his fantasies. But if he started spouting any of the Anglo-Saxon superiority stuff, I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet. It’s not a matter of conviction, it’s pure reflex.

  I can’t stand that garbage. Oh, well, I thought; if we fight, he can fire me. At least I’ve had a nice trip.

  Since my mother will not drive more than five hundred miles from home, and since classical scholars do not make enough money for expensive vacations, I had never been west of the Mississippi before. I gawked out the window with unashamed appreciation and curiosity as the plane came in to Phoenix. The terrain was utterly different from anything I had seen. Phoenix is a

  26 / Elizabeth Peters

  big, sprawling city; there are a few modest skyscrapers downtown, but most of it is low and spread out and surrounded by isolated local mountains. The stewardess pointed out Camel-back which, I guess, is a well-known landmark. It didn’t look like a camel from where I was sitting, but it was an excellent mountain.

  It was so bare. All the mountains I had ever seen had trees on them, all the way to the top.

  I have forgotten whether I mentioned that the month was June. (Most colleges get out earlier than that, but mine ran on the trimester system; we get a long vacation from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, and run longer in the summer.) June isn’t the height of the summer in Arizona. It gets a lot hotter in August. The temperature was a mere ninety-eight in the shade when I emerged from the terminal.