Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 14

  I gestured with the trowel. “I’ve never seen the garden so lovely.”

  She put her hand on the doorjamb, and gazed at me. Was there blood, I wondered, somewhere on me?

  “You look so different, Benjamin,” she breathed.

  I looked upward at the radiant sky. I wanted to stoop and grab a handful of the earth, and eat it. I laughed. “It’s just me,” I said.

  “No, you’ve changed. You’ve put on weight.”

  “I’m getting fat?”

  “No, weight in a good way. You’ve filled out. You look … strong. Not like a weightlifter. There’s something.…” She hesitated, wondering, it seemed, if she had made a mistake in leaving me. “I would almost not recognize you.” I could tell that she surprised herself by saying these words. And I sensed that what she was saying was true.

  I must look more vibrant. I was. I must look profoundly changed because, in truth, I was a different man now. Was she about to say that it was not too late for us?

  To plug the silence I said, “Has Carliss started seeing Beecher?”

  “Not yet. I’ve come to think that our relationship put a strain on Carliss. I think Carliss was jealous of you from the start.”

  “But he’s not jealous of Orr?”

  “It’s different.” But her voice had softened.

  “I want to see him. I miss him.”

  “That certainly surprises me.”

  I laughed. “Yes, it surprises me, too.”

  She turned, but did not leave. “I guess I should start on the rest of my clothes. They’re things I never wear. Winter clothes.…”

  I set the trowel on the back step. I was not finished with my garden. I wanted to dig and plant, and study the glittering, living creatures. “I had forgotten,” I said, “that you have a key.”

  “I’d nearly forgotten it, too—”

  “You’d better give it back,” I said.

  She put her hand to her breast. Her cheek dimpled in an attempt at a smile. “You don’t want me just dropping by.”

  “In the future it might not be wise.”

  “I didn’t come over here just to snoop. I really did leave something.”

  I put my hand over hers, and lifted her hand to my mouth, and kissed it. “You’re still a fascinating woman, Cherry. Orr is lucky beyond belief.”

  She almost could not speak. “You’re so different, Ben.”

  “But I need the key back. And don’t come around here anymore without calling. Please.”

  She looked at one of my eyes, and then the other, and then back again, as though she had never looked into my eyes before. “I want to be mad at you, but I can’t.”

  I smiled. “How could you be?”

  “You almost tempt me to check up on you. Peer into your windows at night—”

  I gripped her wrist perhaps just a bit too hard. “But you wouldn’t do it, would you?”

  She smiled, but said, “That hurts, Ben.”

  I released her. We both lingered in the kitchen. “It won’t take a minute to get the rest of the clothes,” she said, plainly stalling.

  “I’ll help.”

  “No, you don’t have to.” She was beginning to flirt with me. My own soon-to-be-ex-wife. There had been a tremendous change in me indeed. “Maybe if it hadn’t been for Carliss we would have been happier.” Then she relapsed, for a moment, into the old Cherry. “I’m so tired I can’t believe it. Practically nauseated with fatigue. Carliss wants to stay up and watch television in his room, and I never really get a chance to do anything—”

  “You didn’t really leave any clothes here, did you?”

  She laughed, expecting me to be joking.

  “I mean it. You just wanted to see me. You miss me. Maybe you still love me, in a way.”

  Cherry tilted her head and examined me, as though trying to decide whether a person on the street was an old friend or not. Cherry had her faults, but her devotion to Carliss, while not making her an enlightened parent, was authentic. She was a woman of strong feelings, and I still wished her well. But what I felt now could not be called love, any more than a sketch can be called a fresco.

  “We really do plan to start a new life—a new family.”

  “I wish you well.” I meant what I was saying, surprised—amazed—at the vibrant friendship I still felt for Cherry and Carliss, and the forgiveness I felt for Orr. Forgiveness! I had never understood the word before now. “As we forgive those who trespass against us” had always been an admirable wish, something to hope that one could do. I had never been vindictive, but I forgave slights largely because I eventually forgot about them, not because I could forgive the offense soon after it occurred. I remembered my recent bitterness toward Cherry, and it seemed like a childhood tantrum remembered many years later.

  But I also meant: you can go now.

  “You’ve always been an understanding person,” said Cherry. “But something has happened to you. You must be in love.” She said this almost sadly.

  I said nothing. I was in love with Johanna. And yet there was another love, just as great, and I could not recall the object of that love for a moment—that figure of power, my future.

  I laughed. Something about my laugh made Cherry take a step back. “It must be wonderful,” she said, “to feel as you do.”

  She did not love Orr, I saw, not really. Orr was attractive, and he was enjoyable, and smart, but all of that is not love, as mere movement of sun on leaves is not life. I was life.

  I parted her clothes like a man parting curtains, fabric of so little substance it was nearly nothing. Her lips were parted, and she needed me as she needed oxygen, hungry for me like a woman who had starved too long.

  She did not speak, but she could not have uttered a word if she wanted to. I mounted her, and there was no separation between us, her body was mine, and my bones were her bones. The morning, and the city around us, seemed to fall away.

  I had, I saw as I dressed later, torn her clothes. She was flushed, and could not keep her gaze from me. “What happened to you, Ben?”

  I smiled.

  “You’re hardly even the same person.”

  I laughed again, and again she stepped back, gazing at me as though she had never seen me before.

  The key was warm when she pressed it into my palm. There was no question now. She wanted to come back.

  And there was no question in my mind: she never would.

  It was my last trip to my old, shared office with Orr. Tina was perched at the computer surveying rows of numbers, accounts payable, money in the pipeline into Orr’s bank account.

  There were two clients in the waiting room, leafing through magazines, waiting like airplanes at a thriving airport. Both looked up and both, to my surprise, were pleased to see me. They seemed surprised at their own pleasure at seeing me, and greeted me by name. The older man shook my hand, and I felt, as never before in my life, like a celebrity, a star, a famous athlete they had wanted to meet for years.

  Tina looked up at me almost suspiciously. “I have the files ready for you,” she said. “Over there, in a box.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Have you been on vacation?”

  “Why?”

  “You look like someone who’s been playing tennis in the sun for two weeks.”

  “Not me. I’m terrible at tennis. Haven’t been anywhere. Well, a couple of days at Tahoe.”

  “You’ve been lifting weights.”

  “I’m getting bulky, is that it? Too much jam on my toast in the morning. I’ll have to watch it.” The truth was, however, that I had not had much of an appetite for typical meals lately. And I was not putting on weight, at least not so it made my belt tight.

  Orr bid a reassuring farewell, complete with his two-hundred-dollar smile, to a client in the hallway, and then smiled too much when he saw me. “Ben, back for the last of his archives. We’ll miss you around here, Ben. I mean that.”

  He let a look of manly sincerity replace hi
s smile. I supposed he did mean it, to the extent that he could mean anything. Like a cat, Orr probably thought of very few people in their absence, but when he saw them his feelings of affection were, as far as they went, genuine. But I saw that stiffness in his smile. He was wary of me. He had not won Cherry completely. He must have guessed how much she still wanted me.

  “Archives” had been a dig, a reminder that my recent past would require neither manila folders nor demanding bookkeeping. Orr looked tired. I had never seen him with wrinkles around his eyes like this, except once or twice after an all-night from London.

  He glanced at Tina and something passed between them. There was an expression I had never seen before on his face, one so foreign to his features I could nearly not name it.

  Bitterness. Orr, the man of gold, was bitter about something. “The fact is,” he said, turning to me with a confidential tone, and glancing over my shoulder at the waiting room, “I’m swamped.”

  “Too much success.”

  “I need to get some rest. Look at you—you haven’t been working too hard at all.”

  There was a bite to his words, so I tried to joke about his clients piling up in the waiting room like circling jumbo jets. “You could see two at once. Or have whole banks of them and go from person to person, like a chess tournament.”

  He studied me, his eyes quick and unloving. He was a weak, furtive weasel of a man. He had stolen my clients, and then my wife, and yet he found it within himself to dislike me. It was nearly amusing. And then it was amusing; it was quite funny, and I laughed.

  Orr’s eyes narrowed. “By the way, do you know anything about a man named Gneiss? Some sort of investigation out of Washington?”

  “He’s going around talking to psychologists, doctors, and, for all I know, priests and pharmacists about psychotic clients. A minor nuisance.”

  “Yes, that’s what he said. Slowly talking to everybody in town, apparently. But he didn’t ask me that much about psychotic clients. He spent most of his time asking about you.”

  He marched past me. His professionally soothing tones invited the next client into his office, the older man who had shaken my hand, and who stopped to wish me a good day on the way past, while Orr jingled the coins in his pocket in the doorway.

  “He’s having a fit of pique,” said Tina.

  “In the midst of his success.”

  “I gave him thirty days’ notice.”

  For a moment I could not speak. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. You’ll probably be running an airline next.”

  She smiled ironically. “Hardly. I don’t have a new job lined up at all.”

  I gazed at the door Orr had shut behind him, and then back at Tina. There was an unmistakable simper of lust on her face for the briefest moment. Tina had never looked at me this way before.

  “He’s losing someone invaluable,” I said.

  Then I understood. She was afraid that I had already hired someone, and was afraid even to ask.

  “You’ll be bored,” I said. “I don’t have a tenth the number of clients. But if you want to give it a try, I’d be happy to have you.”

  She gazed up at me with a smile I hardly recognized. “I won’t be bored.”

  I had been avoiding newspapers, and whenever my hand reached toward the car radio I had forced it to return to the steering wheel. But I could not keep myself from seeing the headlines of the Chronicle as I passed it.

  I put my hands in my pockets, feeling cold, even in the sunlight. Shoppers bustled around me, everyone smiling, carrying packages, admiring window displays.

  I found a seat in the redwood garden near the Trans-America Pyramid and huddled in the noon chill as people around me nibbled pizza slices and sipped coffee. For the first time the simple, human way of looking at what I had done struck me.

  A man in a dark suit was reading a newspaper across from me, beside someone eating a spring roll. I did not want to look, but I kept glancing back, time and again.

  MUTILATION DEATHS, the headline thundered, IN GG PARK.

  Twenty-One

  If you read the story, which I did while huddling under a nearly naked poplar, you read of various theories to explain the deaths. There was the theory of a sick killer, but there was a quote from my old friend Lieutenant Solano. “It’s possible that the wolves did it, and we can’t rule out that possibility until—”

  I balled up the paper, hard, the entire newspaper, sports, the holiday food supplement, all of it, into a dense gray wad.

  Throw it away, I ordered myself. Don’t think about it.

  I told myself to avoid the news. I told myself that everything would be all right. I could not imagine how, but the very source of my condition also seemed to endow me with a giddy confidence. All would be well.

  At the same time, there was a contradictory but equally powerful command to flee. To run, to find sanctuary.

  I was desperate to do it at once, to burst like a flock of birds in every direction. Something told me that I could not call on Dr. Ashby for help now, and something about Johanna warned me that this was not the time to trouble her with my struggles.

  When Zinser called me and asked me to come over to see him, I was glad to hear his voice, and thankful for the distraction. At the same time, I was somewhat wary. Zinser was a man with an active mind. What new information did he have about the fangs? What had he guessed about me?

  “I thought you’d be interested in this,” he said. “I thought of you first thing I got it.”

  It was larger than I had expected, and looked like the skeleton of a model airplane. And, when I hefted it in my hands, it was heavy. It was made of a close-grained wood, perhaps ash, which had been stained and waxed and restained so many times it glowed. The stock was chased with brass, a stylized leaf work that both prevented wear on the wood and made the weapon a pleasure to the eye. The mechanism was iron, black icy iron, so well-preserved it was glistening. There was the scent of beeswax from the wood, and a subtle machine oil from the workings. This was no ordinary arm. Even when new, when crossbows competed successfully with firearms, men would have turned to admire this piece of work. That was why it had endured so well. Men had prized it, and it had been rarely used.

  He had called to ask me to “see something you’ll really like.” I knew that this was not the only reason he wanted to see me, but I had arrived eager to visit, and to hear what he had to say.

  “Late seventeenth century,” he said. “It’s been in an armory in Brussels, and it’s been pampered.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, becoming aware that, although this was a valuable piece, it was also stern, even threatening. Not generally threatening, like a cannon on the courthouse lawn. It meant harm. Specific, personal harm.

  “And my question is: will it still work?”

  “I doubt it. I’d be afraid to try. It might break.”

  He smiled knowingly, holding the crossbow to his shoulder as if to sight a distant target. “It’s about the same age as our fangs,” he said, and lowered the weapon.

  I had been wondering when he would mention them. The use of “our” was calculated. I did not meet his eyes. Only the day before I had spotted the headline. The word “mutilation” kept recurring to me.

  Last night I had slept quietly, and had not stirred from my bed, as far as I could tell.

  Zinser continued, “The fangs are in excellent condition, you have to admit. And so is this.”

  In a way I hardly understood, it was appropriate that he should speak of the fangs while cradling the crossbow. This, he seemed to say, is the sort of weapon that would bring down a wolf. Any wolf at all. And it was important, suddenly, that both of us discover whether the crossbow still worked. As though, if the weapon were still potent, in Zinser’s view, so were the fangs.

  But surely, I considered, this could not possibly be Zinser’s reasoning. He was a sturdy, no-nonsense man, and surely he was not thinking of killing a creature of the night, or demonstrating to me that thi
s was how it had been done, and how it could be done again. I was projecting onto this collector a range of motives he could not possibly possess. He was not doing all this to warn me.

  I admired Zinser for a quality I had always lacked. He was connected to the earth, solid in his feel for the things he touched. Even as I envied him, I sensed a stirring of this sense in me. A gnat, a tiny fleck of creature, paused in the air before me. The sound of my own breath was like the surging of a great tide. I wondered if, to people like Zinser and Stan Houseman, the world had always been alive like this.

  If I was alive to the sunlight, I was also alive to the cruelty of this weapon. I made myself smile. “It won’t work,” I said, wanting it not to work, hoping that it was seasoned far beyond any power to fire a missile. “It’s too old. I wouldn’t even try it.”

  Because something in me hated this crossbow. Something in me bristled at its sight. My lip curled, and I had to turn away so that Zinser would not see my involuntary snarl. This was the enemy, this man with the ancient weapon in his hands. Granted, a crossbow would not be the easiest weapon to use against a large wolf. The range would not be long enough for open-field hunting. But at a close range—

  “Let’s go find out,” he said. He reached into a drawer and brought out a short black quarrel, an iron dart.

  I did not want to see the weapon fired. “It won’t work,” I said. “You’ll break it.” My voice was hoarse.

  “Worth the risk,” he said, and handed me the quarrel.

  It was cold and heavy. I felt it sink into me, as though in a previous, faraway life a dart like this had brought me down. The cold, iron missile was unblemished with rust, and the tapered head was sharp under the ball of my thumb. It was not sharp enough to cut, but then it was not designed to be. I had the feeling I sometimes have when seeing a gun: how much harm their very existence implies, and how easy it would be to die.

  I tried to smile again. “Don’t even try,” I croaked.

  “I know what you mean. A valuable antique. But I’m going to gamble. Come on.”

  His garden was a lake of sunlight, and we waded into the warmth as though into water. Birch trees were naked with winter. The chalk-white bark was scored with black dapples like the drawings of eyes. Zinser sighted down the crossbow, several paces from one of the trees.