Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Bullock came out of the trees in full uniform and crossed the morning grass to the jogging path that bordered the canal. A thick, unseasonable fog lay across the water where a small, purposeful group of middle-aged people waited, men of the failed salesmen persuasion, suits worn but pressed, shoes buffed but down-at-the-heels, women with the harried air of Tupperware-party organizers. Athanatos’s preparation certainly hadn’t enriched them. Standing off from the group was a smartly dressed young woman whose skin seemed to glow from youth and the weather. When she smiled at him, he knew he’d found Miss Bright’s niece Stella.

When Bullock told her the bad news about her aunt, sudden tears stood in her large blue eyes. While she recovered herself, they paced together along the edge of the canal. “I blame Athanatos for this,” said Stella. “And for all the misery he’s causing, poultry virus or not.”

“Say again?”

“Peacocks,” she answered. “It’s all in the promotional literature. Athanatos’s formula is mostly peacock giblet broth, okay? Thousands of years ago, this Tarshishman with a cargo of apes, peacocks, and ivory-handled mirrors shipwrecked in the Mediterranean. The crew perished. The apes escaped on a raft and reached Gibraltar. As for the peacocks, when Athanatos found them they’d been strutting around this island for generations, admiring themselves in the mirrors and multiplying. Boil them down and you get a broth so thick with vanity that one sip makes your flesh get too damn proud to age. But now they say a virus has decimated the flock and Athanatos is watering the stuff. So people like Aunt Sybil are going ‘poof all over the place.”

“But what about turtle glands?” said Bullock.

Stella shook her head. “Turtle glands slow things down, all right. You kind of smolder to death over a week. No, Aunt Sybil was right. What we need is a Mountie to scare the hell out of Athanatos.”

Bullock said nothing. He was there for a different, a higher purpose. Buzz Haycock always drew a moral in his books. As the flying daredevil watched the bubbling oil slick on the Arctic water, the final grave of The Sea Monoceros, he had, as he often did, addressed his young readers directly. “Chaps,” he had observed, “who knows but that behind Dr. Athanatos’s cynical mask of merciless greed and lust for absolute power over his fellow men there lurked a spark of decency and fair play which someone, had he but found the right words; might have fanned into a flame of passionate humanity.” It was Bullock’s earnest dream to be that man and find those words.

“Strange, that localized fog,” he said.

“Aunt Sybil and the others have a saying that The Sea Monoceros brings its own fog.”

Bullock gave her a melancholy smile and started to tell her about the tragic end of The Sea Monoceros, when it occurred to him that if Athanatos had escaped the Ice Worm Queen, why not his submarine?

“Did you bring the money?” asked Stella as the sound of oarlocks came to them across the water.

“Hold on there,” protested Bullock. “You don’t mean you’re still going to make the buy.”

“I promised to take care of Aunt Sybil’s clients if anything ever happened to her. Somebody has to.”

Bullock had forgotten about all those old men and women faced with imminent death by spontaneous combustion. Still, it was hard to give up the money a second time.

“Don’t worry,” said Stella. “I know about your deal with my aunt. You’ll more than double your money by noon.”

Bullock handed over the envelope, explaining that profit was the farthest thing from his mind. But just then a ship’s longboat emerged from the fog. The middle-aged, balding, and paunchy crew wore crisp white uniforms and red pompoms on their caps. Shipping oars, they jumped ashore as smartly as old bones would allow and set up a folding table and chair. A sailor with a stripe on his sleeve sat down behind a large strongbox, flanked by mates whose palsied old hands caressed modern automatic weapons. The crowd knew the drill and lined up in front of him. He counted their money, placed it in the strongbox, and gave them small packages done up in brown paper and string.

The last in line, Stella handed over the envelope with good old Mavis’s nest egg in it and received her portion of the Blue Bread of Happiness. Then the armed sailors hoisted the strongbox and headed back to the boat.

“I want to see Athanatos,” Bullock told the man with the stripe.

The sailor eyed him up and down. “The doctor doesn’t see people,” he said.

“He sees Mounties,” growled Bullock, in his best cut-the-guff manner. The sailor chewed on his lip. Unslinging a walkie-talkie, he whispered into it, listening for a moment, and gestured Bullock into the boat.