Oil Forever

Oil Forever

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 3

Tom Bass

Poseidon’s world headquarters rear above the stinking river. A giant trident, its sharp, barbed points rise from shore and puncture the low-slung sky.

Wyatt laughs. It looks like a cactus and it dawns on him why Poseidon is so successful, an amphibian, swollen on a diet of oil from land and sea. With a sense of trepidation and pride, he squeezes between the bollards in front of the revolving doors.

A group of attractive receptionists sit at their stools behind a black bank of stone. They control the foyer, several stories high and carefully decorated with Poseidon’s mementos and lore—the cowboys and Argonauts who had been the foundation of its success, exploring across the world to secure the reserves for Poseidon to remain on top. A corporate film plays on a bank of Trinitons. He halfway expects to see himself victorious and smiling from the zooms of the desert cut between panoramas of the North Sea. A recruiter’s dream, it does look sexy working for Poseidon Oil and Gas.

“Slick,” he says.

 “Wyatt Pleasure?” asks one of the receptionists of the handsome man, dressed in a lavender pinstripe suit and lilac gingham shirt, with a tan anyone would die for.

A large mural of the world glitters on the overhead wall, Poseidon’s possessions flickering with lights.

“Middle East desk,” he says, startled musing over her look, her hair asymmetrical and spiky with auburn attitude. Does he know the pretty Scot beaming at his chest? He reassures himself that it’s Poseidon’s business to know who he is and why, one of their most valuable employees. After all, Poseidon took him before he ever worked for them—the man who’s rumored to have the petroleum nose.

“The sixty-seventh floor,” she replies. “The last floor.” She hands him a pass, beckoning to the turnstile and the company security men. “Congratulations too, sir,” she adds, the birth announcement highlighted in her files.

He bows a degree and skips on, his briefcase slapping his rosy brown coat.

An efficient man with a dead expression in his eye says, “Poseidon ID, Mr. Pleasure?”

Wyatt juggles for his wallet to confirm he is who he is, then strides to the banks of elevators wrapped in granite. He nods at the Scottish secretary from afar. Nice company for happy hour, he thinks, to celebrate his promotion, a slam dunk, measured with a quantity of treachery.

The chrome doors etched with the Poseidon logo pull apart like lips.

Wyatt whooshes past floors of petroleum experts straight to the preserve of Poseidon’s chief and board, all rewarded handsomely by the behemoth standing on the north bank of the Thames, piercing the sprawl and smog, a gluttonous weed sprouting from the historical docks of wind and steam, seducing its dependents with three sweeping razor-like brown beams of cyclopean light.

Wyatt ascends to the sixth-seventh floor, surrounded by his reflection, perfectly alone, rising to the top, his big black surprise holstered in his briefcase.

But why not put his contribution in perspective before he’s too overconfident. Shrimp, cog, nose, stoolie, whatever he might be, he could demand a promotion—he needed a better rank for his meeting with Colonel Candy—and a reward for his loyalty and luck. But Wyatt understands that he’s held hostage to his wage; he sees the sheer scale of the Poseidon’s monopoly and he wants to bat a home run against his own team, if that would make him free, that would show them. He’s no longer a poor settler boy scratching out a living on a dry patch of range.

Privilege to the right information and having the ability to interpret and the instinct to act, Wyatt Pleasure has his own plans for fossil fuels. He also accepts the risk of more nominal power while he incubates his plans.

A few days before the meeting Wyatt makes a diversion, a gamble, and he likes to fantasize about his secret project, his royal baby.

Wapping emits a cache of time like no other; the tar has preserved everything along the wharves. Lights, moods and figures rushed together for a moment so uncanny that Wyatt imagines himself lost in time. The light seems to dim and the peripheral edges square and gray, like he’s living in a photograph or when stronger, a film, flickering over the surface of his mind. He could see the masts above the rooftops, hear the gibbets swing.

Near Execution Dock, untroubled by the grisly legends of hanged men, Wyatt finds the map repository, well hidden, tucked under street level. He ducked under the low timber entrance. It smells like breeches, rust, salted beef and hammocks.

A gnome-like clerk unmade by scurvy and shingles greets him from the dark fusty shop, the low timbers abutting the nether regions of his green dome covered by a blue watch cap.

“Good day, sir.” Wyatt stoops uncomfortably, wheezes. “I’d like some maps of Africa.”

“What, master?” His desk is lit with a paraffin lamp.

“Maps!” Wyatt’s excited.

“No need to shout or be rude. This is the repository.” He’s very patient. His teeth are loose, his face pockmarked.

“Maps of Africa.” Wyatt moderates his tone.

“What kind, master? Ordnance Survey?”

“Geological.” The floor squeaks with his irritated movements. “Desert maps.”

“Sahara or Sahel, is that right? Or rather maritime?” The clerk tucked his long alabaster fingers under his shirt at his neck, no collar, no cuffs.

“Yes, quite. For minerals. That sort of thing.” He purposefully phrase his words like treacle, appealing to reason and politeness, but no matter, his voice sounds like American cardboard, brown and rigid.

“This vade mecum, Minerals of Africa with 40 plates. Very popular.”

The guide’s indeed useful. Wyatt doesn’t know it, written by a Hungarian refugee, published in Brussels, from only 1965. But he wants far older materials, rich in color and odor. “Yes, but do you have any proper maps?”

“Four hours, that’s all it’ll be,” the clerk says, turning the large hourglass on his desk, filled with red sand. “But don’t have too many expectations, master,” he says, stretching his arm out, tipping his chin and pointing with a final declaration. “Please take a pair of gloves. They’re priceless.”

Atlases are stacked on pallets, pages torn and scattered on tables. More charts are deposited in trays, rolled in tubes or tied with silk ribbon. Some are ragged pelts, others thin sheets of timber, curled like canoes, but the majority are dried gut inked with observations; a few are so delicate as to recall the precious, illuminated, medieval books he’d seen the Bedouins reading. Apparently, they have a nomad library on camelback.

Wyatt parses through the drawers. Dead reckoning blesses him: he skirts capes, passes inlets and avoids dangers unknown. The light’s sparse and it’s cold in the creaking bottom of the shop. He regrets not having a carbide lamp for company and a modern atlas to guide him through the boggling shapes of the unknown, the educated guesses and outright fabrications. Had they forgotten what was out there and from where they came? The pale shadows of stars and the silky silhouettes of mountains help him navigate.

Like a merchant, he scouts for rivers and beaches, the harbors where he could trade. If his hunch is about the maps is right—that oil’s prehistory perfumes the their pores and has worn in their creases, nearly wiped clean by carelessness, stained by weather, salt, blood and fortune—then he might be a billionaire. He’s motivated by Spindletop’s riches and the rags have convinced him: make it big.

It’s up to his nose to react over the grail, a hidden continent-sized reserve entirely made of light shimmering black gold. A flour of gunpowder, mites and dust already encourages his nostrils to mutiny, disciplined as they are. He stubbles across one Ortelian masterpiece, adds it to a frugal stack of likely candidates, arranging them on one large block hewn from a prehistoric oak beam. He could explore for anything in the gloryhole, once beyond the confusing musk, with his Drake, his Daupier attached to his mug, his windrose.

The clerk kindly serves him tea at one point, Wyatt kneeling on his briefcase on the rough planks, succinctly aware of the receding time. He scoots aside to drink the Oolong, not wanting to jeopardize the trove.

“Am I intruding overly?” he asks, but the clerk reassures him, no.

The shop sometimes utters a complaint at the approach of the tide. Iron bars cross the windows from where he peeps at his employer and enemy down the Thames. Wyatt’s hands wrap around the wet corroded metal and he pulls himself up, his nose suspended over the Thames splashing at his face, its muddy surface lit by the grim aspect of the city, the giant trident of the Poseidon building foreboding, cutting into the clouds, its watchful beams scanning the viscous air.

He spreads out the territories carefully with little beanbags. He rolls up his sleeves and clips them back. Is it under a Patagonian or a Carib? He pushes his face down and his bottom up and sniffs and sorts, a blood compass. One smell of socks and a pork sandwich. One of pests and bilge water. Another of yokes and chains. Then a mixture of pepper and tortoises mixed with crystals of gold and precious stones. Everything grows in pungency. Reeds and ferns. Sloths and gingko. He passes deeper and deeper across the paper manifold, through reptilian time, until he’s swimming in banks of Tethys mollusks in the most unexpected places; it’s a black Eden, the digested detritus and kills of the supercontinent, Pangaea and Pangloss, an enormous crescent suspended between the poles, that need more precise exploring. He has to spread the jigsaw of maps across the floor, the table insufficient in size and scope. A tectonic charge runs through him and the maps crackle in place, a universe.

His hours up, the hourglass empty, Wyatt presents his collection of documents: worn tincture, torn edges, filigreed with navigational notes and elaborate characters, shapes of the distant eye. Everything has to be rendered an opaque inky blue in facsimili, a reproductive drum flashing occasionally as he waits.

“Had a lad who wanted just those last week,” the clerk says. “A lad like you, licking maps.”

Broadsided, he shrugs. Who could possibly be hunting for the same thing? No one knew about his project. He’s philosophical about the incident; it isn’t first time in his career that a cutthroat has followed the same hunch and pounced.

Wyatt pays the man, who tucks the money into the fold of his cap, and salutes him with a refrain, “Guineas are for gentleman, and pounds are for prols.”

A low light grips the Thames. Lighters move on the water, ferrying crates of tea and barrels of whale oil from the clippers to the docks. Bells and shouts issue from the Poole. Cabs sway through the streets drowning in human rain.

He’ll stitch together the evidence once he returns to Momma Empire’s residence. Fantastic oily blood drips from the tube of reproductions, dashed under his arm like a sword. Sitting on the upper deck of the Routemaster, gliding with its red sails to Hampstead through the kaleidoscope of rush hour, he becomes very thirsty. He could guzzle rivers, the great greasy predecessors straddling the globe: Orinoco, Euphrates, Niger, Yangtze, Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, Congo ad nauseum. It’s a phenomenal trend of black blood quilted in land and sea. He makes a sequence of annotations to stop any quibbling.

Wyatt’s ready to perform. Let the calumny begin.

Wyatt adjusts the knot of his tie as he passes upward, the cubicles of experts, the laboratories of geophysics and seismology, the library of cores and specimens, the ledgers of finance and law, the chemists reinvigorating recovery and inventing new products. While his colleagues doggedly analyze the difficult data and project plans far into the future, all he has to do is sniff with his trusty probe. He kicks back his head and laughs, shaking his head.

“Oil forever,” he thinks, his motto in tune with corporate cheer.

Then he’s spit out.

The top floor is cleared of any walls. Poseidon did not support an elaborate corporate boardroom. The trident’s engraved in the floor. Tiles of fluorescent light irradiate overhead. Poseidon doesn’t need to overstate its power.

“The tribunal’s waiting you, sir,” says the executive secretary dressed in Poseidon livery, dyed with a palate of greens that associated its business with peace and harmony. Quite the opposite, oil’s the enemy and in order to be a good enemy, it’s very clever in how and when it appears. Poseidon loves rules because rules are to be eclipsed.

“Tribunal?” Wyatt asks, flabbergasted. What demerits does he deserve? A reprimand?

A pair of helicopters patrol around the tips of the trident. From the windows he can see the English coast, so massive is this sculpture of oil and gas. Poseidon’s refineries flare at the mouth of the Thames, a belching conurbation of fire and fumes. He can smell the ambergris of money extracted across the world. Everything’s done to assure no hiccups in the process. How very assuring.

“Poseidon knows everything,” the clerk says. “Welcome to the inquiry.”

The panel of judges sit on three sides of a square. Wyatt’s the fourth.

Everything follows a perfect, predetermined order.

Wyatt panicks at the sight of the executives, the men in black gowns, wearing powdered black wigs and black top hats, their mouths painted with brilliant lipstick, their faces dusted with talc. This isn’t turning out like he expects. Who in Libya has sniffed out his plan? Or is Momma Empire a rat?

The judges drub their tables before the first question of the court.

“You do intend to meet the Colonel, Mr. Pleasure,” asks the first judge with a lisp in his voice.

“I do,” he says. Miming submission, body limp, head bowed, Wyatt studies his whereabouts. He notices the sharp contrast between the London and Benghazi offices where he shared a collective desk with another geologist and not much more in the way of amenities of symbolic power.

A membrane divides their backs from the windows rubbing the sky.

“Good,” they say in a chorus ringing with menace, the floor beginning to glow threateningly. The world blinks and flickers underfoot, Poseidon’s resources flagged with green diodes on the continents, tridents posted in some of the most strategic resources on earth.

Wyatt’s standing on Baku, no better place to inculcate himself than in the waterborne fires of the Zoroastrians.

“Too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” he thinks. The majority wear cowboy boots but some moccasins and others fins. A constricted bubbling is muted in the background. Potted ficus trees sit on both sides, a mixture of figs and rubber. Sometimes there are three judges. Then fifteen. Or a remainder or a square root as if the judges were not people at all but spirits of plunder and pestilence, dynasties of the oververse, capable of multiple forms, molds and manikins for the woes and troubles of the world. But Poseidon’s very astute at amity. He never actually appears from the logarithm of entities that he is, camouflaged and sprawled across the floor under Wyatt’s feet, wrapping around his ankles and pulling him down into the porous floor.

“You’ll communicate that we’re concerned, Mr. Pleasure, and we’ll do something about it,” says another judge, bowing to his colleagues. “Candy’s a fool. And all the Arabs who love the Soviet Union.”

Wyatt stutters over what could be his defense. He doesn’t want to antagonize them. They should have their say and it comes like fire.

“What are you doing with those maps, Wyatt? Must you be reminded that any—any—discoveries you make while an employee of Poseidon Oil and Gas become its property?

Wyatt’s aghast. He trembles in front of these strange mineral men blackmailing him in the name of company policy. “Am I not a man and a brother?” Wyatt asks, maker of money for conflagrations and wars.

He’s taunted for his naiveté.

Do you not suppose our interests are everywhere?

Do you not suppose you’re our interest?

How couldn’t we know that you were plotting against us, Wyatt Pleasure, replaceable liar that you are?

The truculent judges fidget in their chairs. Jets of water squirt from their black robes. They pound their gavels belligerently. He thinks it a very elaborate disguise for Poseidon’s board members, recognizable despite the makeup and prosthetic props: Ganeesh, Captain Ahab, Chen Hu, Leopold II, Onassis, the Shah, Kali, Stanley and Gordon, Columbus and Cortez, Kissinger and Kennedy, all his adversaries. Yet the founder, Poseidon, excused on business apparently, is absent.

“So what you got, Wyatt?” they ask in unison.

He’s sabotaged himself with the kangaroo court. But he wants to be caught. Of course, he has brought the maps in order to prove he’s guilty. That’s part of the game. Wyatt smiles grimly. With a great amount of reticence, he unlatches his briefcase and unfolds his deposit of knowledge.

“Deepwater,” he said humbly. “It’s deepwater.”

“Young man, but we already own the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico.”

“This is something else. You haven’t the science for a royal baby.”

“Is there something we can’t do?”

“No,” he says. “You make wars if need be.”

“Oh bosh!”

He walks from Baku and migrates to the dark heart.

“Ah, sugar and spice, is it? Please stay abreast of our current activities, Mr. Pleasure.”

“Not so, sir, I’m very much abreast.”

“So nothing of promise?” they ask, displeased. “Are you not the nose?”

He unscrolls his own maps and pushes away the tissues between the blue facsimiles, opens the flutes and unfurls the exhibits.

“Who made them?”

“The invisible man,” he says. “Me.”

What’s there to lose? He can’t be sold because he’s already been sold. Like everyone. With few conditions and little compensation, Wyatt Pleasure is for hire. But he’s afraid he’s going to blow it. Is his idea pure bluff? It’s a crucial moment.

The floor blinks under his feet and follows his footsteps. Pipelines of lights pulsed across the continents, nodes of refineries glittered alluringly and capillaries of shipping carved from port to port. Poseidon is the brain and the men of the court tap their feet waiting for Wyatt to speak about the maps.

The court of executives rustle their black papers and scratch their black wigs.

The hush is his chance and he takes a deep breath. He steels himself for what to say.

An overhead projector is placed in the center of the floor by an audiovisual technician, dressed too much like a bailiff. The light shines through the blue paper and casts a aquatic aura over the room once the lights are dimmed. He’s given a light pen for a pointer.

“First, understand that what you want is incognito, buried by water and rock, the river deltas of our prehistoric home,” he says in one gulp, having successfully mounted the first map. He taps his nose, already reading their objections.

Ribbons wrap around the shelves of the continents, marked up with zones of pink, blue and purple dots, many coastlines unrecognizable, some familiar, made with astrolabe and compass, without full knowledge of the breadth and barriers of the seas.

“You’ll need a fleet of seismic ships to pinpoint the areas.” First is Bahia. Then Congo. He makes a diversion to the Caspian. “Then you must pay for huge concessions of real estate and wait for the technology.”

The room is illuminated with caravels, monsters and compass bearings that would let a man know if he’s doomed or saved, the remnants of the great explorers, their most intimate, wildest crumbs. It bodes well for the future of Poseidon, colonies of men struggling madly to milk the undersea wells of their black mead, their quarters lashed by the hot turbulent seas.

 “You will need to build drill ships and floating platforms that will be positioned by satellite, lay new underwater pipelines. These are where the next discoveries will be, offshore, in deepwater, sometimes in oceans two, three miles deep or more.”

The marsh gas rises through the paper waters to his nose. He dips forward, nods then regains his stature, temporarily overpowered by the intoxicating, sweet scent of risks.

“How did you find them, Wyatt?”

“The nose,” he says. It’s always a gamble. The nose, his great detector, mostly right, sometimes wrong, often such a prankster that a whole area could appear to be dry when he should backpedal, accommodate for wind and other meteorological conditions, and then re-sniff for the critical particles leaking from the ground. No fraud, the sweet heavy smell rose right out of the paper and he’s on point, a wise ancient sea hound with stories of discoveries to jabber at the moon, dowsing for liquid gold, pissing on the spits of land that are to be his.

He’s indispensable. A well-timed visit to the drill site helps pinpoint the zones. It’s a remarkable day on one of many such field trips, when Wyatt suggests an innovation: drill the well sideways and hit the pockets laterally to save time and increase their chances. He would stand out in the pristine rocks of the desert with a surveyor’s mirror extended to its full length, giving bearings to the driller, who would chart the course underground with the face of the yawning bit. Soon thereafter, he realizes they could drill right under their competitors, a trick worth repeating.

Wyatt imagines Poseidon must believe in magic. His prodigious punk-like head, seething with remora, eels and anemones, would be kept in a giant electric cage tuned to the magnetic pole and the grounded tone of G sharp. His arteries and veins dangle like sparks through electric bars into a pool of cryogenic syrup and protean chemical soup. Surely, a body is just a shape and Poseidon is no more than a logo, the fearful sausage-fingered spear with which he punctures the earth.

“You try to mislead us, Wyatt.”

“The record’s a bit tarnished but I serve everyone very well.”

“Seeing that royal baby has so much potential, you may be excused for lying.”

Poseidon isn’t so unlike Momma Empire’s salon of exaggerated claims. Like religion, Poseidon pays no taxes and always needs money.

Corporate serf, enticed by his paycheck, Wyatt is not to have a choice and he conveniently doesn’t want a choice either. Choices are his enemy. He sways in one direction and vacillates in the next, almost making choices but Wyatt is better off without them. Except for the nose that keeps him strong and true. Didn’t it quake at the exquisite smell of Noemi Empire?

He backtracks over that idea, the perfume of turpentine rising from her thighs that quell him so.

Wyatt blinks at the offices of Poseidon Oil and Gas. He’s high with coarse emotion and collapsed in his chair. Wyatt has stood his ground at the company court. Cigar and Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand, his gums sore from the stress, the detritus of his presentation litters the walls, the floor map flashing intelligently, digesting and purchasing along his trends.

He’s agreed to drill more in Libya despite the risk of being away from the action. They have an evacuation plan prepared for the penultimate moment, when Poseidon will be dissolved by Colonel Candy and their taps turned off.

Wyatt has to stand up and his shirt is stained with kelp. The executives thank him. He’s congratulated on his foresight. He’s winked at, backslapped, rubbed and shaken. They would plan accordingly and groom him for a new space at the horseshoe-shaped table.

“You’re in charge in Libya, pollywog” they say. “Be good to the Colonel in Candyland.”

They have gotten what they want and the tribunal breaks up, these strange creatures, draped in black robes with black wigs and black ties, holding black papers in their porcelain hands. They move in a throng, dragging their black chains behind them, and vanish to the helipad, set like a nest on the side of the great prong jutting over London. The white coffin-like birds zoom away into the lateral sky, green with clouds, rippling over the canopy of London.

Wyatt doesn’t take the elevator from the sixty-seventh floor of Poseidon Oil and Gas. Both crushed and elated, he scrambles away and takes the stairwell, its top open, blowing like a spume hole, wet with condensation, singing like a pipe. Hesitant, he first takes one step at a time, then he takes them in twos, until he has built his confidence in the drier reaches, lured by the ellipse of steps, and is heaving from landing to landing, bouncing down the inside of the company, past Poseidon’s watery departments of chemistry, finance and law, past a huddle of smoking geologists startled by his deep guttural cries. Showing off for the Scot secretary in the foyer, he twists through the revolving doors, jumping from bollard to railing of the corporate steps into the parking garage stuffed with cars evocative of lubricant and sex, then wiggles under its sewerage into the subterranean docks and chalky foundations of Poseidon Oil and Gas ornamented with a sharp tang of minerals and money. It grows smoky and dark and he waves to Grandpa Pleasure sitting on the steps. Still he vaults down into the bottomless inky earth, tangling like a cougar, compelled into the boiling darkness, never hoving to, on the voyage of his master’s bidding, he, Wyatt, cat and raft, lighting his cargo of oils across the Styx.

The earth retreats from his feet. Where is he falling? Having defied everything else, could it now be gravity?

Wyatt lunges out of bed, his legs cramped, his head afire with fear, for a moment his fantasy a horrible reality varnishing his dreams. The Poseidon meeting has gone very well from what he remembers. He’s got the maps like they ask. He moans and cradles the muscles sewn into knots. Between him and Noemi, the cold water bottle. England’s winter dawn breaks through the windows.

The stairs creak. Momma Empire pulling on her first cigarette as she slips downstairs to rekindle the broad hearth of her home, her cauldron of disillusioned spells and broth shivering over the last of the embers of the Empire fire.

Wyatt pauses. Could the previous night’s homespun entertainment be the cause? He fuzzily seeks an answer as he sorts through the porcelain chippings of his awful dreams.

They hold the séance in the kitchen. Momma Empire has invited over Equiano and he’s brought a tribute, a sheep, and a white powder that he makes people paint on their faces. Momma Empire is wearing a crown of sparkly thorns. Momma Empire can put on quite a show.

Toby is balanced in Noemi’s lap, his head held in her arms, both dashed with white powder and he’s baffled by the medium who lights a shrine of candles and begins her act, her devoted audience collected in the kitchen from the arms of London.

It’s meeting night and the front door is open to the bereaved souls wandering the streets and drawn by the firelight in the windows.

Clean and set, everyone places their hands on the table, its polished edge pulled right to their hearts. Everything is presented there on its surface but many more emotions are pushed just under its tense surface. They are a family for better or worse, joined by their fingers.

Momma Empire leads the spiritualist proceedings with everyone starting with a stretch, pushing away their breath, exhaling. As a way to gain their trust, she asks them to visualize colors and numbers. “It’s time to take control,” she says.

The table levitates in a practiced way, painfully balanced on Momma Empire’s gout-prone toe. She winces and commences the knocking of the spirit world. The wood in the fire cracks suddenly and nearly everyone jumps.

They’ve done the same thing, linked up with the spirit world, as kids on the prairie.

A hare hangs from the pantry door. A pie of partridges and wood snipe cools in the oven. A bowl of pears and walnuts, a spray of chrysanthemum and parsley, a gibbet of dried sausages from the Pyrenees, and several Sheffield knives litter the sidetable, covered with a velvet baize. Candles burn somberly.

Calvados, soaked with Momma Empire’s collection of barks and herbs, has led Wyatt, by now poisonously drunk, to request Buffalo Bill.

He can’t name a dead relative he wants to talk to anyway.

But Momma Empire has her own ideas, disconnects and finds Black Elk, who long ago gained Momma Empire’s favor for his bravery and thirst.

Wyatt has no idea who’s Black Elk, but he promises to brush up on noteworthy redskins.

She’s a hoot, brimming with obscure or obscene studies of the peoples that made treaties. She follows up with dividing and conquering.

Noemi interrupts with a plea for Elisabeth Taylor. She’d like to know how Lizzie’s managing America, and Momma Empire copies her demure accent for a line or two.

Then in a burst of stupidity Noemi asks to speak to Daddy Empire.

Momma scolds her. “Child, Daddy Empire’s not dead! You know he’s in Wales.”

“Well, if Daddy’s in Wales, it can’t be that bad, can it?” She’s intrigued. So Daddy’s still on the kipper-like island of Albion.

Equiano, usually very diplomatic, rebukes Momma Empire. “Have some respect for your ex-husband, Momma Empire. He’s not entertainment. If you’re feeling so insubordinate, why not call down Mother Earth?”

Momma Empire deflates at the notion. She couldn’t summon her gargantuan sister. Plus, her toe.

Equiano intrinsically understands the ways of Momma Empire, what she was really about and what she needed to hear, that she was good, not just benign, really as good as Mother Earth.

“You’re the sun, Momma,” he says to make the point.

Equiano could be a bit of sycophant but the strategy worked well, leaving him space to rewrite history.

The séance collapses into the kitchen, a gold, perforated frame around its tattered edges, a portrait and a stamp, with Momma Empire standing among it, making coffee that very next morning.

Wyatt notices the hot little package congealed around his mother and some strange impulse nearly forces him to reach out to smother the sleeping baby that would usurp him, he’s sure, as all sons eat their fathers.

He recoils. He’s being overwhelmed. Momma Empire’s house is having a serious effect on his temple. He laughs to himself thinking of his nightmare, incredibly convincing. Anyway, Poseidon’s a fool and Wyatt hasn’t been a complete nincompoop. The oil wasn’t in the water; it was in the desert where the old rivers had dried up. He’s kept his nerve not to divulge the secret of royal baby.

Wyatt chuckles again at his accomplishment.

Poseidon would be off the scent for years, allowing him time to ferret out the real bonanza. And if he didn’t succeed alone, there's always Toby Pleasure.

Up next: Colonel Candy