The Eighth Circle
A man with slack facial skin, a paunch, blond hair, blue eyes, a square jaw and a ski-jump nose stood smiling and rubbing his hands together next to a row of hang gliders perched on top of a cliff. A reptile tail protruded from the seat of his pants.
‘What the fuck’, the Founder said. ‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s Geryon. He’s a metonym for fraud.’
‘I have never heard of him.’
‘Neither has his mother.’
‘How do we get down there?’
‘You rent a kite from him. Just don’t mention Liverpool.’
‘Liverpool, England?’
‘Liverpool, New York. He grew up there and he is sensitive about it. The last tourist told him something like, ‘You can take the metonym out of Liverpool, but you can’t take the Liverpool out of the metonym.’ He ripped his intestines out and ate them for chitlins.’
Geryon rubbed his hands together and smiled ingratiatingly at the prospective customers. The Founder looked at Vergil. ‘I don’t think I can do business with him’, he said. ‘I don’t do smarm.’
‘It’s hire a kite or jump. Your choice.’
‘Can I help you’, Geryon asked. When he spoke, the Founder noticed he had a Syracuse accent and smelled of salt potatoes. The Founder thought of the phrase Kiss up, shit down. ‘Rent me the damn kite’, the Founder said. ‘And don’t come any closer.’
.
As they soared, the Founder said, ‘You should put motors in these things. Make them ultralights.’
‘We have a guy who does that. He also does Judo, rides horses shirtless and plays hockey.’
‘Talented guy.’
‘I wouldn’t say so.’
Below the cliff, the Founder saw a series of ten parallel concentric trenches dug into a round terrace that sloped downward. All but one of the trenches was spanned by a bridge.
‘What’s with the ditches’, the Founder asked. He had to shout to make himself heard by Vergil, who was three wing-spans in front of him. The wind was loud and, at times, turbulent. He had to struggle to keep his glider level. He thought that maybe Geryon had given him the shittiest glider in the fleet. He should have tipped him better.
‘We call them bolgias’, Vergil shouted back.
‘It’s like each ditch is a separate level’, the Founder said. ‘Why don’t you call them that? Treat each ditch like a separate level?’
‘The cojones on this guy’, Vergil shouted back. ‘He comes here for a day visit and he wants to re-engineer the facility.’
‘Are we going to go to each bolgia’, the Founder asked. ‘That’s a lot.’
‘Nah. We’re going straight for Swindlers, and then we are going to take a shortcut to Level Nine.’
‘In Mandarin, swindlers are called pianzi.
‘All signs and official communications in the swindlers’ bolgia are in English and Mandarin.’
.
On the ground, Vergil said, ‘This level is devoted to crimes of dishonesty. Each bolgia is a subset. The Fraudulent and the Malicious, the Seducers, the Fortune Tellers and Diviners, the Thieves. You get the idea.’
‘I see.’
‘Since these crimes share certain features, they belong together. That’s why we put them all on one level.
‘OK.’
‘So, don’t try to reinvent something that people older and wiser than you have put a lot of thought into.’
‘Like, don’t reinvent the wheel?’
‘We don’t use wheels here.’
‘Really?’
‘It is a wheel-free facility. Never saw the need for them.’
‘You learn that from the Incas?’
‘They learned it from us.’
.
The swindlers’ bolgia was full of a tacky white substance in which people lay submerged, like spa clients in a mud-bath. The banks were lined with robotic arms that held grappling irons that looked like large fish hooks. Whenever a person tried to stand up, the arm closest to her would send a hook into her flesh and pull.
‘We used to use tar here’, Vergil said. ‘The section manager called it Bear Shit, but it wasn’t real bear shit. The idea was that swindlers’ fingers stuck to money, so they should bathe in a substance that sticks to their skin.’
‘What do you use now’, the founder asked.
‘Gaco. It is an elastomeric roofing compound.’
‘We use Gaco to patch roofs’, the Founder said. ‘It is very good, but it’s nasty stuff. You don’t want to get it on your hands.’
‘And they used to have demons manning the grappling hooks, but they got rid of them. The robotic arms don’t demand pay hikes, they don’t get tired, and they don’t have to take days off when their daughters get sick.’
‘Like the centaurs and the jet skis?’
‘Don’t talk to me about fucking centaurs.’
A man stood up and tried to wipe the Gaco off his face. A robotic arm swung a grappling hook into his back with a thup and set it the way a fly fisherman sets a hook after a trout has struck. The man was briefly lifted into the air. Then, the flesh was torn and he fell back into the Gaco. ‘Hey’, the Founder said. ‘I know that guy.’
‘Personally’, Vergil asked.
‘I emailed with him a few years back. He lived out west but he owned a park in the North Country. He tried to sell it to me at an exorbitant price. He ended up selling it to someone else at my asking price. By the time he sold it, he had run it into the ground with absentee ownership and cost cutting. Last I heard, he was trying to get a bridge loan from hard money lenders and offering equity in a partnership to limited investors.’
‘Do you know anyone else here’, Vergil asked.
‘Holy crap, yeah’, the Founder said. ‘It’s like old home week. You see that woman over there?’ A mass of Gaco to Vergil’s eleven o’clock bubbled and moved. ‘There’s a person under that’, the Founder said. ‘She was barely out of college when she started buying parks. She didn’t have any money and she had never owned anything bigger than a toothbrush, but she and a partner raised twenty million in syndications. They were offering eight percent preferred and a seventy-thirty profit split. Last I heard, they bought a bunch of shithole properties all over the country. God only knows how they managed them. I looked at one they owned in Fort Wayne and passed on it because it was too far gone. Turning it around would be too heavy a lift. And that guy? He’s bought up a whole region of the country with other people’s money. He has four thousand lots under management in six states and maybe five staff members.’
‘Did you think of the phrase Other Peoples’ Money just now?’
‘No.’
A figure stood up and was caught on the hook of one of the robotic arms. The arm lifted him out of the Gaco and passed him to the arm next to it. That arm passed him on to the next and so on for several iterations. At the end of the line, the arm tossed him up and caught him, the way a meathead will toss a shotput. Another arm picked up another swindler and a third, and the two arms juggled the three people. Arms next to the two juggling arms fished more swindlers out of the ditch and tossed them to the juggling arms, which inserted them into the juggling rotation. After fifteen minutes, the arms passed the original swindler back to where he had initially been picked up and dropped him back into the ditch. Beneath the Gaco, his flesh was hanging in strips. The Founder had trouble hearing himself over the swindler’s shouts and moans.
‘You ever worry that they are smarter than us’, he asked Vergil. ‘I mean, the robots?’
‘It hasn’t been a problem yet’, Vergil said. ‘The people in charge are taking care of it. What could go wrong?’
‘Have you considered putting centaurs in charge here, just for redundancy?’
‘Fuck you, and fuck your centaurs.’