Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  That night I had the dream again, the dream I had not experienced since my childhood. This recurring dream had been so much a part of my life as a child that Dr. Ashby and I had studied it for hour after hour. “A dream full of the wealth of human fear,” he had called it. “After all, it is what we fear that makes us human, as well as what we desire.”

  In the dream I was walking down a smooth, dirt path. The smoothness of the earth there was important. No one had walked there before.

  The dream had always been the same. A beast was following me, tirelessly and without any hurry. I could not force my feet into a run. My bones were leaden. All I could do was keep glancing over my shoulder until at last I saw the moonlight glistening in its eyes, and on its teeth.

  “A primal fear,” Dr. Ashby offered at last. “A fear of being helpless. A fear of death.”

  This time, however, the dream was different. The same darkness, the same path. But this time I turned and waited for the beast, as though waiting for an old friend.

  You have been gone so long, I thought into the forest. Too long.

  You are about to find me at last.

  Seven

  I stood in a study on Russian Hill, looking out at the bright green splash of a lawn. A mahogany desk seemed to encounter me, the stage set for the master of this place. I felt, to my surprise, very much the little boy about to meet a powerful, possibly unfriendly, uncle.

  Then there was his step, and the press of his hand around mine. “So you are Benjamin Byrd, the man who bought the Babylonian scratch pads.”

  He was short, with broad shoulders, dark eyebrows and a bright smile. It was the smile of a boy, full of delight, and despite his measuring eye, I could not feel threatened. He did not seem at all like a hermit. He seemed to be a man easy with himself and with life.

  “I bought them,” I said, “and now I don’t know what they mean.”

  “They mean money. For you, because you can’t lose money buying that sort of thing. And for the Babylonians. What else would they put in writing except something about money? A laundry ticket, or a check for coffee and a doughnut. Have a seat. I’ll get you anything you want. Coffee, tea, any kind of drink.”

  I agreed to tea, and he pushed a button twice. “The history of the world is money,” he said. “You study history and you realize that’s all that matters.”

  I would have disagreed if anyone else had made that statement. But something about Zinser made me realize that while he believed that what he said was true—he would not waste his time trying to strike a pose—he knew, at the same time, that money was only money.

  “I understand,” I said, “that your collection is expanding into the area of the arcane.”

  “Arcane? There’s nothing arcane about a shrunken head. I’ve got twenty-one of them, three sets of siblings among them. You can see the family resemblance. Sure, I have all kinds of stuff. You name it.”

  A silver tea service was brought in by a woman in black, but both of us ignored the tray.

  This was such an opportunity that I nearly could not speak. “Could you describe for me some of the more unusual?”

  “Describe? No. I won’t describe. I’ll show you. Come on.”

  I could not move for a moment: I was about to see Zinser’s famous collection in its own vault, and, further, I was about to see his collection of arcana, and I marveled at my good fortune.

  The vault was a cold room at the end of a long corridor. An oak door had opened without a sound, but slowly, betraying the fact that this was only an oak veneer. The door was steel, and the room was lined with steel and concrete, I had heard, but, although it was windowless, it had the comfortable feel of a very quiet and quite empty men’s club. There were trophies on shelves, and paintings on the walls, except that when you examined the shelves the trophies were medieval helmets and Ming vials, and the paintings were anatomies by da Vinci, sketches in charcoal by Renoir.

  On one wall hung shields and swords, morning stars and gauntlets. One or two of the swords were badly corroded, the handles rusted away to a rough iron core. Roman, I guessed, probably from one of the more recent digs in England. Zinser had been active as a collector of ancient arms, too, and I knew this was only a fragment of his collection.

  He noticed my interest in the weapons. “They appeal to the little boy in us. Before we knew what getting hurt is all about.” He gestured at the room around us. “We could stay in here for days,” he said. “Weeks. And never see it all.” He pressed a button beside a leather sofa and a panel slid, with a squeak, and steel drawers, not unlike safe deposit boxes, reflected the glow of the lights. “And I have double this amount on loan to museums all over the world.” He was not bragging. He sounded as though it were nearly a complaint.

  He seemed to read my thoughts. He shrugged. “I have stuff all over. So much of it I have trouble keeping track of it. All of it priceless. What do you want to see?”

  I was still amazed at his casual kindness, and his unpretentious—even happily blunt—manner. I stammered something about not knowing where to begin.

  “You don’t want to see manuscripts. Autographs aren’t your field. Although I have a fragment of a Mozart concerto no one believed was authentic. The tune is too ugly. They do that with Shakespeare, too. If a passage in Macbeth is too stupid, a witch talking in a way that doesn’t sound good, it’s automatically by Fletcher.”

  “They’re probably right.”

  “Not with this Mozart. It’s real. But forget Mozart. You want to see something that’ll frighten you.”

  I actually had not, and yet the way he put it made me suddenly eager. I agreed—I wanted to see something that would frighten me.

  He tugged a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and snapped them on, an aura of talcum around his hands for an instant. He unlocked a drawer, and tugged out a black, snaking harness. “Used to keep a witch quiet. Called a brank. Fits over the head. She sits with this probe in her mouth and can’t talk while the judge passes sentence on her. So she won’t put a curse on the judge.”

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “But what?”

  He had read my thoughts. “But it’s not scary,” I said.

  “You expect me to start with the best first? No, it’s not scary. Except in a way. All those witches were just innocent women tortured into confessing. That scares me—real torture.”

  Another drawer opened. He held up a gnarled, ebony knot. “The hand of Saint Catherine. Authenticated last week. The other hand is in a church in Ely, in England. It’s authentic that it’s her real hand, not that she deserves to be a saint or is in heaven or anything like that.”

  I was already disappointed. He could tell. He offered me a shrunken head. “Twentieth century. One of the last ones made. I hope. A white man.” It looked dark, with blond hair like a girl’s doll. Its eyelashes were thick and yet delicate, too, its lips sewn together in a meditative pout. Its skin was thick, like the skin of a well-broken boot.

  “Not impressed. You’re a hard man.”

  I had to smile. “Maybe arcana just isn’t arcane enough for me. As a boy I would have been awe-struck.”

  He shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t know. I hate the stuff. Pathetic and creepy. I’m going to sell it off and stick to art and music and things of beauty. But here,” he said, handing me a typed catalog. “See if there’s anything else you wanted to see. I don’t have the head of Zapata or anything like that. But if you see anything you might like—”

  There were no prices on this list that he kept for his own reference, but I understood that he would be willing to sell me anything that might interest me. I ran my eyes down a list of antique Tarot decks and alchemist’s alembics. Arcane was a good word for the assortment of preserved snakes and infant sharks from the brujos of Mexico, and the first edition of James the First’s treatise on witchcraft. All of it curious but somehow not exactly arresting.

  Until I saw a single word, with no date or country of origin. A naked word: f
angs.

  There was a splash of light, somewhere deep within me. A forest, a path. Moonlight glittering.

  “What’s this?” I asked, unable to guess why I had trouble speaking for a moment.

  “You tell me. I have no idea what it is or where it came from. You want to see it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You sure?”

  Why, I wondered, the hesitation? “Please.”

  He shrugged. “It came with a trunk of silver goods boxes an agent bought for me in Zurich. It was supposedly a part of an estate. I’m still trying to find out whose estate it was, how many different deceased people it may have belonged to, because the trunk was full of a good many items of interest, salt cellars, sugar tongs, charming things like that. And then, to my surprise, this. An object that hardly fits the rest of the bourgeois knick-knacks.”

  His rubber-gloved hands had taken a small black box from a steel-faced drawer. He offered the box to me, and I took it. My hands, though, were reluctant to open it. I studied the box, its brass hinges turned slightly green, its surface highly polished. The box was surprisingly heavy for its size. Perhaps because it was, like Zinser’s desk, mahogany. Perhaps because the contents were heavy, as though the box, which fit easily into one hand, contained a weapon of some unimaginable sort.

  “The box is nothing,” said Zinser. “Open it.”

  It opened suddenly, and silently, and I nearly dropped it.

  On red velvet was a set of teeth. They were not human teeth. They were a set of fangs, like the teeth of a very large dog, set into a base of silver, untarnished and gleaming in the light. The fangs themselves were like the finest ivory, bright cream-white, set into what amounted to a gumline of silver alloy.

  “A pair of dentures,” I said, a pale joke.

  He grunted. I had hoped he would say something funny, have some salty remark to make about how foolish people were, but he simply stared suspiciously at the teeth in my hand.

  “You know nothing about them?”

  “Only that they don’t fit the rest of the inventory in the trunk. Except for the fact that they are silver, in some alloy I don’t recall ever seeing, and that they are some kind of teeth.”

  “What sort of teeth, I wonder. They’re very large.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like them. Don’t like the looks, don’t like anything about them.”

  “Actually, they’re beautiful.” For some reason I felt that I had to hide my pleasure at seeing them. I added, “In a peculiar way.”

  “Yeah,” he said, as though he could not disagree more strongly. “Beautiful.”

  “They are made,” I suggested, feeling breathless, nearly afraid to utter what I had begun to say, “to be worn.”

  He reached over and shut the box, leaving it in my hand.

  “Over one’s teeth,” I continued. “Like—” I caught my breath, and then added, in a near whisper, “a disguise.”

  “You want them?”

  I must have gaped.

  “You want them, they’re yours. I’m glad to get them out of the house. Hate everything about them.”

  “What are they valued at?”

  “An indefinite loan. One collector to another.”

  I was embarrassed, and not simply at his generosity. I wanted to buy them, and keep them, and I wanted Zinser to have no further claim upon them. I was more than interested in owning them. They were unquestionably unique, but I felt as I had not felt before, never so strongly: that this was one object in the world which I simply had to possess.

  Finally Zinser agreed. He would loan me the teeth for examination until his researchers discovered the origin and possible value of such an artifact. “I’m glad to get them out of here. Keep them until you’re sick of them in the meantime. When we have some more information we’ll work out a price.”

  This was the civilized arrangement often worked out between collectors who knew each other well, but it was extremely generous of Zinser to make it with me. He refused to hear my thanks. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s a pleasure. I’m glad to get rid of them.”

  I drove with the dark box on the passenger’s seat. I kept putting my hand out to touch it. Was I afraid that it would vanish? Did I expect it to be warm, or to change its shape? Or did I want to reassure myself that it and its contents were in my possession, that they were in truth mine?

  Eight

  With the box in my jacket pocket I hurried to my study. I pulled open a drawer at once, and slammed it shut afterward, not sure why I wanted to keep the fangs especially safe. I did not question my feelings, although, of all that was soon to happen, this should have made me wonder most.

  Introspection had always been a mental discipline, and self-questioning had long been a way of life with me. Even in my excitement I found a brief moment to wonder at myself. These fangs were certainly not more precious or unusual than any of the dozens of other prizes in my collection.

  I even found my hand about to lock the drawer that hid them, before I stopped myself. This was ridiculous. These were amazing curiosities, and nothing more. So I fought the desire—the drive, the hunger—to keep them secret, and opened the drawer again, and placed the box on my desk.

  I could not bring myself to touch it now that it was there. The interplay of feelings within me confused me for a moment. I wanted to open the box, I wanted to hide it. I wanted to touch the fangs, I wanted to lock them in the deepest shelf of the safe.

  I stepped to the door of the study and could hear the distant twitter and blast of a computer game upstairs. Yes, Carliss, I nearly called. I have something for you. Something amazing. Something really frightening. Not a picture on a wall.

  Something real. Why were my fingers trembling? I shut the door to the study and locked it. I turned to the dark box, that cube I could heft easily in one hand, and yet I put my hands behind my back to keep from touching it.

  I wanted to hide them, and yet at the same time I wanted to hold them in my hand. I felt myself smile. I had never felt this before, this uneasy joy, like falling down a great depth believing that it would all be safe, that the parachute would open, or the net stretch out to catch my weight, and yet quaking, unable to calm my heart.

  I pulled the curtains and switched on the desk lamp. I was being foolish. This was merely the joy at adding such an unusual curiosity to my collection. There would be no harm in opening the box, just once more, before putting it away.

  There is a mirror on my study wall, near the door, an Edwardian piece, lightly flecked with blemishes as old looking glasses become. I combed my hair in it from time to time, always admiring the rosewood frame. I stepped to this mirror now, and ran my fingers through my hair. Composing myself, I thought. Straightening my tie.

  But I turned as though purposefully and felt something in me break, a dike overrun by flood, an embankment collapsed by tide. I let my hand fall on the box and open it.

  Like an acolyte before an altar I put both hands to my breast and could only gaze upon what I saw. The fangs were more beautiful than I had remembered. My memory would never be able to retain the image of this luster. But why I did what I was about to do never troubled me. I never doubted that I was doing something that was right, necessary, even logical.

  Once, in an antique store, I had opened a cigarette case and plucked out an ancient Chesterfield and, although I do not even smoke, accepted the joking light of a friend before I snatched the cigarette from my mouth, repulsed not so much by the taste of the smoke as by the idea of smoking such desiccated, years-dead leaf.

  This memory did not occur to me now. I thought only: if I had bought a fedora from an antique clothes store, would I not try it on? If, on a whim, I had purchased a monocle, would I not tuck it into place, just to see how it looked? Would I not try on any purchase or any find, however strange or ancient, if it seemed meant to be worn?

  My hand did the work. It lifted the fangs carefully from their red velvet and the gleam of the silver caught the light of the de
sk lamp. Like an act I had rehearsed every day of my life, like an actor so accustomed to a role he applies his costume unthinkingly, I carried the fangs to my mouth, and they slipped into my mouth and over my teeth as though designed before my birth for my sole use.

  They had a wonderful flavor, like cloves, and like cloves the flavor was faintly numbing, and glowing, a living flavor. As I stepped to the mirror I savored a spice both ancient and seductive. I stood before the mirror, squaring myself well before it before I opened my mouth, my eyes glittering. And then I smiled.

  I thrust the fangs back into the box, and in one quick, continuous movement, snapped the box shut, shoved them into a drawer, and plunged the key into the keyhole, shaking, leaning on the desk.

  Suddenly I needed human companionship. I locked the study and leaped up the stairs to Carliss’s room. He sat on the end of the bed with the game controls in his hand, trying to send a running figure through a maze of what looked like crashing spaceships.

  He ignored me as I sat on the bed, but it was an accepting, neutral acknowledgment that I was there and that he did not mind. I watched the game, the exploding spaceships, the expanding stars of color, and my ears took in the electronic explosions and the jittery tunes that accompanied Carliss’s triumphs without registering what I saw or heard.

  I put my hands over my eyes, and my fingers were icy. What had I done, I wondered? And why on earth had I done it?

  I had smiled, and my smile had not been the grin of a man. I could not stop shivering, and there was a taste in my mouth now not of cloves or any such magic, but salt water. I touched my forefinger to my gum, and there was just the slightest amount of blood.

  For some reason, at that time Carliss turned to look me in the eye. I smiled, and then I began to laugh. I put my arm around him, and I laughed, a great, unstoppable laughter that I struggled against but which I could not control. I wept, laughing, my mouth agape, feeling myself twisted like a caricature of myself. And then I glanced through my tears back at Carliss, who had crept away from me, all the way to the wall. For some reason the look in his eye made me laugh even harder, although there was no reason why I should. The look in his eye was unmistakable.