Mark Terry
The Serpent's Kiss
For my sister Beth.
The extended Terry family's rock.
Love ya, sis.
1
The Serpent was coiled to strike. That was how he thought of it; how he thought of himself.
He stood on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, leaning against the bus stop shelter in front of Henry Ford Hospital. Behind him the hospital towered seventeen floors of red brick, Henry Ford Hospital written in giant white script across the top of the building. It was a complex, actually, with at least half a dozen buildings and a couple parking garages, right there on the corner of the John Lodge and the Boulevard dominating an entire city block plus more if you counted the parking lots. It was a brisk autumn day, a hint of fall in the air, gray clouds scudding across the lid of the sky as if they had someplace important to go.
The Serpent wondered about the wind. He wondered if the wind would cause problems. It was a technical problem and he was pleased with technical problems. The whole idea had started out as a technical problem. The wind, though, was a part of the technical problem that he hadn’t given much thought to.
He wondered if he should study on it some more, but decided it was too late. There came a time in every experiment — every project — in which you just had to jump in and… strike!
He liked that. Liked the melodrama of it. It didn’t bother him that it sounded like something out of a bad movie. He thought it sounded cool. The Serpent.
He fingered the cell phone in his hand. It was a Nokia flip phone with the usual kitchen sink of additional nonsense built in — calendar, video games, calculator, voice recorder. The Serpent glanced at the tiny one inch by two inch screen of the phone and typed in the number. All he would have to do now was push the green call button. He was coiled to strike.
It was time to remind the world of the power of Aleph. It was time for Aleph to rise again.
The Boulevard was busy. Just down from the hospital was the Fisher Building, a gorgeous Kahn architectural jewel, forty-some stories tall of tan marble and sandstone with a green verdegris’ed copper peak, the very end of which was gold. He could hear the roar of cars on the Lodge, a highway sunk into a massive concrete canyon with forty-foot vertical concrete walls that split the city in two. In the Motor City, everybody drove. On the Lodge, 70 miles per hour was just getting started. Above on the surface roads was a different story. Cars jammed the Boulevard, going nowhere fast. Somewhere close a car had broken down. People were impatient. He could see it in their faces, the way they craned their necks. He heard the honk of horns.
A street person walked by, eyed him, heading for the corner in tattered black pants and an army jacket. He looked old, thin, with a scruffy white beard. Under one arm was a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY AND HOMELESS. The Serpent thought the guy was going to his day job, there on the corner, spend eight, nine hours holding the sign as hundreds of cars went by, every twelfth car giving him a buck or a five maybe. How much did the guy take in each day? Fifty bucks? A hundred? More?
The Serpent shrugged his shoulders against a strong blast of cold wind and looked across the street at the Boulevard Café. They were all there, he thought.
The Serpent — he smiled at the thought — prepared to strike, his finger on the green call button.
2
John Simmons ordered his last meal. If he had known it was going to be his last meal it’s unlikely he would have ordered a farmer’s omelet, hash browns and wheat toast with a large orange juice and coffee. But that’s what he always ordered at the Boulevard Café across the street from Henry Ford Hospital. In fact, if he had known it was his last meal, the Boulevard Café would not have been on his list of restaurants at all.
Once a week ten friends, all faculty at Wayne State University or at Henry Ford Hospital, got together for a casual breakfast. For reasons known to no one, they met at the hole-in-the-wall Boulevard Café, a restaurant none of them liked that much, and some of them loathed. It had become a peculiar tradition, and Simmons, if he bothered to think about it, suspected that the low-class aspect of the place was part of the charm. A better reason was probably that the tradition had started with the hospital people, who could just walk across the street. He glanced out the plate-glass window at the early-morning traffic clogging up the Boulevard. The hospital valet entrance had a huge, almost disproportionate triangular-shaped eave over it. It reminded him of the brim of a baseball hat built out of red brick and concrete.
Melanie Tolliver, a researcher at the hospital, sitting next to Simmons, said, “Where’s Rebecca?” Tolliver’s green eyes sparkled with barely concealed nosiness.
Simmons shrugged, taking a sip of his coffee. “Called and told me she’d be late. Didn’t say why.”
Melanie brushed frosted brown hair off her forehead and cocked an eyebrow. “Everything okay? I mean—”
”Yeah. Fine.” Simmons shrugged again and looked around the restaurant, which was crowded. There were nine of them, one short of their usual ten. The Boulevard Café’s non-smoking section was about the size of a phone booth, so they ended up in the smoking section, which was blue with cigarette smoke. None of them smoked. “Christ, can’t we—”
”Don’t start,” Brad Beales said from across the Formica table, which wobbled whenever anybody leaned on it. Brad was a linguist and stood six-six in his stockinged feet. He looked like a Q-tip. Tall and skinny with a shock of fluffy white hair halo-ing his long, thin head. In a falsetto voice Beales said, “We like Margie.”
Simmons and Beale laughed, but Melanie shot them a disapproving frown. “It’s convenient.”
“It’s a dive,” complained Simmons.
Beales shrugged, a half-grin on his face. “Food’s cheap.”
“Well, we’ve avoided food poisoning so far, anyway,” Simmons said. He was going to go on, but bit back his complaint. He glanced at his watch, wondering where Rebecca was. She’d sounded a little stressed when she called this morning. She’d called to tell him she’d be late. When he asked why she just said, “I’ll be late. That’s all,” and hung up. It wasn’t like her. Of course, three or four nights a week she spent the night at his place or he spent the night at hers. He knew Melanie was wondering if they’d had a fight. He wondered, too. But no. Everything had been okay. Everything was okay.
There was a popping sound from somewhere nearby. Not a large pop, like gunfire. More like the pop of a champagne cork. Like that.
It registered for just a moment. Simmons looked up, a quizzical look on his face, then dived back into his coffee. Margie, their regular waitress, arrived with a couple plates. She could have been on the Russian weight-lifting team in the ‘60s. She was round-faced and round-bodied, but looked like she could heft a bus. She wore her steel-gray hair pulled back in a blood-restricting bun and generally looked as if she was driving in second-gear in a third-gear world. She delivered Simmons’s omelet and hash browns, no toast. The woman was incapable of delivering a whole order. It had to arrive in sections, like a seven-course meal. Toast, apparently, was the second course.
Beales had chocolate chip pancakes covered with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Melanie said, “Are you ever going to grow up?” Her bowl of steaming oatmeal was placed in front of her. Her toast was also missing in action.
“As the great Mr. Buffet said, ‘Mah umer draz ho raha hoon, laykin dunia dar nahien.’”
Melanie sighed. “I give up. Turkish?”