Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  “I got some more information on the recent history of those fangs,” he said.

  I thrust my hands into my pockets.

  “The latest information came from a source I don’t usually use—Interpol.”

  My mind raced. Run run you have no friends here.

  I ordered myself: stop trembling.

  He slipped the quarrel into its slot, and the mechanism clicked. He lowered himself carefully to the grass and worked with the crank for a moment. He was a strongly built man, despite his age, one of those men who seem durable and fit for whatever might happen, but he had some trouble with the crank, which was the cocking mechanism and would, if it failed, disable the weapon.

  He put his feet on the crosspiece, and gritted his teeth. How like beasts we look, I thought, when we make a grimace of effort.

  He relaxed for a moment, looking up at me as though he were planning a putt in a cheerful game of golf. And that’s all it was, I consoled myself. Sport in a sunny garden. A whimsical experiment with an antique. Two men acting like boys.

  But at the same time I thought: don’t work. Please don’t work. “If you have to force a device,” I said, “you’re probably doing something wrong.”

  “Usually, but these crossbows were notoriously tough to use. Notoriously. Ben, this is Flemish. A Flemish crossbow. Stop worrying. Those guys were craftsmen.”

  He tried again, and the crank turned, perhaps for the first time in centuries. The old tool worked as a man long ago at a workbench had intended it to work. The lock clicked, the bow string caught, and the weapon was primed. And potent, death caught and held.

  I helped Zinser to his feet, and he was careful to aim the weapon at the ground. He was flushed, and very much the little boy with a new, dangerous toy. “Imagine this, Ben. Hundreds of years in my hand. Think of all the history I have right here, cocked and ready to fire.”

  And for Zinser’s sake, reluctantly, I wanted it to fire. He would be disappointed if it snapped, and the quarrel flopped. My chest was constricted, and I felt that the weapon was a contrivance designed against me. Still, for the sake of this lively man, I hoped it would work.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  I nodded, trying to smile.

  “I’m going to shoot that tree. Right in the heart.”

  He aimed. Then he lowered the weapon. “It’s a good thing that tree isn’t moving around. I don’t know how I’m going to hit it as it is.”

  He raised the crossbow to his shoulder again, steadied himself, and then his finger squeezed the trigger, a black iron thorn that slid, and slid farther. And nothing happened. Nothing happened at all. Man and weapon stood like a work of art, a hunter’s pose. There was silence.

  Zinser cried out, and shook a fist in the air.

  A black dart jutted from the center of a birch eye. It looked as though it had always been there, as though it had always been intended to be there, the tree, the garden incomplete without it.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll never get it out.”

  It was stuck. No sap oozed around the shaft. The tree and the quarrel were now one. I tugged, but nothing happened. Zinser laughed. “I’ll tell the gardener to dig it out,” he said. “It sank it all the way in there—this thing could kill a bear.”

  Or, I thought, any large, dangerous beast.

  He looked at the crossbow with new eyes. “This thing would knock a man down dead just like that. Even in armor it would damn near kill him. What a piece of work!”

  But he laughed as he said it, and I joined him, although the strongest part of me hated it.

  Inside we had tea in the collection room. The crossbow returned to a proud place on the wall, Zinser turned to me and said, “You know what I’ve had to read about lately? On computer printouts from Europe? He shook his head and mouthed a distasteful word. “Each thing I read is crazier than the last.” He held out a hand as if to say: how else can I put it?

  “Lycanthropy,” I announced in what I hoped was a bored voice.

  He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “You’re the psychologist. Tell me about that particular mental condition.”

  “People can think they’re anything. Cats. Horses. Or they can think they’re nothing, empty space. They can simply sit like statues. People are like wet clay—the psyche can take any shape.”

  “I’m asking about the shape that thinks it’s a wolf.”

  “It’s very rare. Of course, people have been raised by wolves. At least, there is some historical evidence of this. So those people are really pursuaded that they are part of the pack, and really never adjust to being human, even when they are captured as children.”

  Zinser grunted, perhaps caught by my use of the word “captured.” Was it desirable for a child to continue to live among wolves? But what he really saw was my defensiveness on the subject. I wanted to skirt the subject, touch on catalepsy, feral children.

  He looked at me as though he truly saw me. He had a gaze like no one I had ever seen. “I’m talking about madness. Serious madness.”

  I waited.

  “Virtually every person who has owned those teeth has gone mad. Wolf-mad. Police records, coroner’s reports—in French and German, but I plugged my way through them. The last hundred years of those teeth have been a scorched trail of misery, Ben. People ending up in mental hospitals, prisons, shot. A typical owner was shot in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, thirty years ago. He was carrying the arm of someone he had slaughtered, torn from its socket. Imagine that—ripped out of its socket, Ben. The deranged man wouldn’t surrender. The gendarmes had to pepper him with small arms fire. They killed him.

  “And you want more? The owner before that was killed in Redon, in Brittany. Responsible for a dozen murders in Brittany and Normandy, killed in the woods. You want more? The owner before that drowned in the Loire out-swimming a brace of hounds with five bullets in him. One after another, back until you can’t get the records and you have to use the archives. Unsolved crimes, misery, cannibalism. This is a disgusting trail and it’s all true, and it all hinges on the fact that someone in every deceased person’s family falls in love with the fangs, thinks they must be valuable, goes mad. Until at last someone with a scrap of common sense can’t stand to have them around, but they sell them or have them auctioned off so the new owner, unwitting, ignorant, can have fun with the teeth all over again.

  “The teeth vanished about twenty years ago. I think the last wolfloony’s relatives stuck the teeth out somewhere on a curb or in the woods somewhere, and they got discovered, and sold to a dealer, and found their way into this lot of flatware and salt cellars. You know how some works inspire peace? Like the Pietà. I’m not religious—I don’t think about such things. I’m a man of common sense. But you look at that Madonna with her dead son and feel peace. Godly peace. Well, these teeth are just the opposite. Way, deeply the opposite. These teeth inspire evil.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Zinser waved my words away. “Belief has nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t have believed it. So what? It’s true.”

  “It can’t be. It’s impossible.”

  “I want the teeth back, Ben. Right away. I’ll give you something else in my collection in trade. I thought you might want the cross bow. You like that, right? A working crossbow? I’ll get the dart out of the tree—”

  “I’m keeping the fangs.”

  “It’s a mistake. It’s a very bad mistake. You like wolves? Look over there. I’ve got a sixteenth-century Paduan she-wolf. Look at all those nice little teats. Bronze. One just like it in the Frick. I’ll trade you. No rational man would turn down this trade.”

  It was so much like Dr. Ashby’s small bronze that I could not speak for a moment. Her teats were full, hard, and they hurt.

  When I could speak, I said, “What will you do with the fangs when you get them back?”

  “Destroy them. They have no aesthetic or scholarly use. They’re evil.”

  “Why not trust me to destroy the
m?”

  “What’s the matter with you? I offer you a rare crossbow, a real treasure, and you turn it down. You are turning down a fine piece of art, a bronze she-wolf, a dignified, rare work so you can keep these old wolf teeth. Explain to me, Ben—what’s going on?”

  “You don’t have any record of them within, say, the last fifteen years?”

  He smiled, as though a sign of curiosity was nearly as promising as a sign of common sense. “Not really. It’s all mixed up. We did a computer search of wolflike killings, sick people with wolf fixations, all that sort of thing. We found some in Zurich, but the records are confused, as though someone had gotten into the computers and the files and erased things, threw things away. A family, maybe, destroying painful evidence. I wouldn’t blame them. The next thing we know the fangs are in this mixed lot of combined silver—you know the rest. No one knows how they got there.”

  I nearly wanted to tell Zinser that it was too late, that the fangs had done their work. I liked the man so much, however, that I told a lie. “I’ll think about returning the fangs. They don’t mean that much to me. You don’t have to trade anything for them. They are, really, still yours. Can I think about it a few more weeks? Who knows? Maybe you’ll change your mind and decide to name a price.”

  Zinser gave me a combination smile and frown. “I wish you’d make it a few hours, not weeks. But I’ll give you credit. You’re showing the first stirrings of common sense.”

  We were almost to the front door when he said, “Someone must be monitoring the microwave traffic between here and Europe. I got a call from a man named Gneiss. Gneiss like the rock.”

  Don’t stay here you’ll die.

  “He’s bothering everyone in town,” I managed to say. “Trying to solve all the bizarre crimes for the last fifty years or something like that.”

  “They picked up my description of the fangs off an Interpol backup file. Apparently the word ‘wolf’ set off an alarm and practically shut down the system.”

  I wanted to ask: Will you see him? What did you tell him? How long do I have before they come to take the fangs away?

  How long do I have before they gun me down?

  “I told him I’d see him when I felt like it. You can’t let these government men push you around. They will, you know. I bet it has something to do with taxes. Some sort of customs flap. Or maybe they’re doing the same background work on the teeth I am, only I’m about two laps ahead of them.”

  As I drove I had a thought so shocking that I pulled over to the curb on upper Broadway, not far from where I had first hit Belinda. The thought was so bad, so repugnant, that I was trembling.

  I should find Karl Gneiss now, today, and kill him.

  Killing while Out There, culling the weak for a feast, was something I understood and could, uneasily, forgive. But to consider killing as I drove, in daylight—this was evil.

  The teeth were eroding me. Like a drinker who wakes one morning to see veins on his nose ruptured, or like a smoker who finds to his surprise that he cannot walk up three steps without coughing, I saw that the fangs were not leaving my daylight self alone. Far from it. I was losing my day self to that other, stronger creature of the night.

  In psychotherapy, the goal is to be aware of the problem, knowing that if we are aware of the source of a fear, we will still be afraid, from time to time, but our enslavement to our fear will begin to end. Awareness is the beginning of freedom. I reminded myself of this as I glanced into the rearview mirror, and eased my car toward my home.

  I would try to arrange my life to protect my secret, and I would also try to find some way to understand what was happening. I believed that my intellect, my rational mind, could grapple with it and keep me alive and, at the same time, spare others from the harm that I now knew I could cause.

  Mrs. Meridian was coiling the tube of the vacuum cleaner. “Just finishing up,” she beamed.

  Her schedule had been to arrive whenever she felt the house might need cleaning, and clean it well. She was a dangerous person, with her all-seeing eyes.

  “I was thinking,” I began, “that I might not need you anymore.”

  Her hands were on her hips. “You told me I could be on flexible schedule, Dr. Byrd.”

  “You’ve done excellent work, really superb. I’ll write the best recommendation imaginable for you. But I’ll be spending so much time away from this house.…”

  It amounted to a lie. I had no idea what my future would be like, and she sensed subterfuge. Orgies, she seemed to think, or drugs. “This will be a disappointment, Dr. Byrd.”

  “I’ll give you all I owe you, and a little extra, with my thanks.”

  I scribbled such an ample check that she smiled as she tucked it into her apron. “It’s such a lovely home, sir,” she said, so politely she was nearly mocking me. She must have believed that she had, with her improvised cleaning schedule, offended me. I should have explained more clearly what I expected of her.

  The truth was, I had always enjoyed seeing Mrs. Meridian, and she was a formidable worker. She was simply the sort of person who saw and remembered too well. “This is your key, then,” she said, and I took it, perhaps too eagerly.

  Work in the garden, I told myself. Calm yourself. You’ll think of something.

  I was a cartoon character who had walked off a cliff. As long as I did not look down I would not fall. I raked, forked over the earth, stabbing the tines hard into the dirt, trying to pretend that there was hope.

  Sweating, denying the nausea that snaked inside me. I would come up with a plan. Some sort of plan. I had faith in myself.

  Late that afternoon, plunging a spade into the ground, I cut an earthworm in two. It spasmed, and I was looking on, aghast, when the distant doorbell chimed. I knocked some of the soil from my hands and hurried to the door only to peer through the peephole.

  There in the fisheye lens was Stan Houseman. I closed my eyes. Here was one of those men whom I most valued, and most of all did not want to see. Don’t open the door, I told myself. Stay still. He’ll go away.

  But surely he had heard me. I opened the door, and stood back, gesturing as though I welcomed him into my house. Stan had an expression I had never, in years, seen on his face before. Perhaps once, when one of his children had measles.

  He was pale, his freckles like brown stars. He did not even want to look me in the eye.

  He was afraid.

  Twenty-Two

  He carried a manila envelope, flicking it nervously in his hand.

  “You wanted them back.”

  They were Stan’s photographs of the fangs.

  “That’s right.” I smiled. “And you included the negatives, too. I appreciate it.”

  For a moment we were both happy to be distracted with spoons of tea, cups and saucers, cubes of sugar, and the silver tongs with eagle claws I have always found both elegant and funny. Stan asked if I had a beer.

  He took five great swallows, and then said, “I called Zinser, just this afternoon.”

  I stared at him. “I wish you hadn’t.” I recovered. “I was just there this afternoon. I must have missed you by a matter of minutes.” I adjusted the red kettle on its burner.

  He followed me into the living room, where I lit a match to the manila envelope, and flung it flaming into the fireplace. The chimney drew the tangle of smoke, and the photographs burned quickly, as though they had been intended, all along, for easy destruction.

  “He told me some of the relatively recent history of the fangs.” He said the word “fangs” as though it tasted bad on his tongue.

  I told him that I knew all about it. Yes, Brittany, yes, the Loire, yes Zurich. I poured hot water into the teapot, and carried the entire tray into my study, with another beer for Stan.

  We sat, as though at ease. Stan was the poorer actor. He interlocked his fingers, ran his hand through his hair, cleared his throat all the while I described the crossbow Zinser had demonstrated for me.

  Stan was one of those people
who simply know things—they don’t doubt, they don’t overlook. It isn’t simple intuition. They are simply so strongly connected to life that they make few mistakes. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked at last.

  I shook my head.

  “In Golden Gate Park.”

  “I saw the headlines. Wolves.”

  He touched the head on his beer, like a boy who had never tasted beer before, and stared at the dollop of foam on his finger. “The wolves escaped from the zoo. Someone with a power tool of some sort ripped out the fence, and at first they thought the wolves killed the man and the woman.” Stan did not continue for a moment. “They found the wolves at Lake Merced. They were chasing ducks.”

  A vivid splash of memory: running beside the water.

  “They used tranquilizer darts. It was quite a big story—on the radio all day.”

  I shrugged, a man who did not trouble himself with news. “So,” I said, “they caught them.”

  “And it looks like they really didn’t have time to cover the distance between the park and Lake Merced. They didn’t kill that man and woman.”

  “People are always blaming wolves unjustly,” I said, as though it were a matter of only passing philosophical interest. I had learned: I kept my barely trembling hands busy with the sugar tongs.

  “But some sort of creature like a wolf did the job. It nearly decapitated the woman, and disemboweled the man. Then it reached the zoo and freed the wolves.”

  “An animal used a power tool?”

  “I didn’t say the news made sense.”

  “You say ‘freed.’ Are they in prison?”

  “Don’t be cute with me, Ben. You know why I’m here.”

  “For some reason you seem to think I’ve been eating people for dinner.”

  He flushed. “I never suggested that. Christ, I would never even think such a thing.”

  “But you’re nervous. Uneasy. You are thinking precisely such a thing, but you won’t admit it.”

  “No, Ben—”