Saint Peter’s Wolf (7 page)

“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 desk 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.

He was afraid.

That night I had the dream again.

The path was empty, and I turned at the sound of steps padding in the darkness behind me.

When I turned the moonlight glittered off eyes, off fangs. And I was not afraid of the beast. I waited as though for an old friend.

I held out my hand and called to it, called with the voice of a man, my own adult voice. Come. Come soon. I have waited so long.

When I woke I stared into the dark. Cherry had moved to one of the guest bedrooms and so I was entirely alone. I sat up and gathered the blankets around me.

The dream had changed since my childhood. It was no longer a nightmare.

Now, the beast was nearly here, and I was glad.

Part Two

Nine

Stan Houseman could not hide or disguise a feeling. His freckled complexion turned deep red with any emotion whatsoever, and his red hair seemed to expand around his head with happiness, anger, or any of the emotional notes and quarter notes in between.

When he saw me step into his office with a book in a plastic ziplock bag he went pale.

“What happened now?” he groaned.

“A little damage to one of my books.”

“Jesus, Ben, I don't even know if I can stand to see it.” It was as though he were about to have a wound stitched without anesthesia. “I can't even bear to look. The Rubens was bad enough.…”

I unfastened the bag, and coaxed the leather volume onto the work table.

He groaned. “Oh no. What a crime. What a terrible crime.”

“Can you fix it?”

“It's blood. You don't have to tell me. I can tell. It hurts my gut to see this. What a mess.”

“But you can fix it?”

“Sooner or later you're going to come in with a bucket of ashes and charred goop and expect me to turn it into a da Vinci. This I can fix, barely.”

“You're sure?”

“We'll do a dry mechanical cleaning. Some of it will come off then—it's still new. Then we'll give it an ammoniacal cleaning, reduce the stain with a little C-ten. And look here—someone used an acid paper bookmark and left in there for ten or twenty years. See how it burned the page? I'll use a magnesium solution to deacidify the page, dry it between blotters. It'll look good. Better than before, actually.”

“It's a relief to hear you say it. And I think Carliss'll be relieved, too.”

“I had a feeling this was his work. I recognized his brushstroke.”

“You'll never guess what he did.”

“You sound almost proud.”

“Hardly.”

Stan bent to the page. I offered him my jeweler's loupe, the small, powerful magnifying glass I often carried. Stan reached to adjust a lamp. “Some sort of animal. Not Grendel's mother—the blood's not green. Don't laugh. I'll start real general first. A hairy animal. I see a hair. A gray hair. A rat. A small rat. One of the Pacific Heights rats. Not the superheavyweights we have down in the Mission.”

“It took you about ten seconds. I'll buy you lunch.”

“I have a million things to do,” said Stan, but he came with me. His fourth-floor lab, among the galleries of Sutter Street, was established as the best art-restoration center on the west coast. Stan's lab could also establish the provenance of an unfamiliar item, anything from a fossil shark's tooth to a Singapore opium pipe. They were careful and shrewd, but most important, for me, they cared deeply about what they did, as though the works of paper and linen were living, injured creatures.

Stan was full of life, and I don't mean that in the sense that he was lively. He was. But he was a giver and maintainer of energy, like a flourishing tree that sustained not only branches and apricots but also jays and sparrows, mice and even ants, all without losing a leaf.

He had three children with his wife, Lana, who was finishing up a law degree. They also had an adopted child, and were buying land in Mendocino where they could all, as he put it, “play in the dirt.” They owned a large ugly rambling house in the Mission which was always sprouting a new skylight or an extra workroom. Photos of his children spilled onto the table as we talked. A smiling preteenager with red hair, a dark-haired boy in glasses, Lana, grinning, a good-sized woman with a pair of gardening shears. His days creaked healthily with a bumper crop of life, as though Stan and Lana were in the process of peopling the world with a brighter, more energetic sort of human.

He had spent all day the day before looking for paper to match a hole in a drawing by an obscure New England artist, a wealthy amateur who had upon his death become famous, leading many art owners to regret their neglect of his work. “This one not only had foxing all over it, so it had more freckles than I do, it also had a nice hole about the size of a navel right underneath the three fishing boats. It looked suspiciously like a bullet hole, but I was afraid to ask.

“So I needed a span of paper about the diameter of an olive. I looked at hundreds of books from fine presses, and turned thousands of pages of fine paper. At last, in that rare books place on Franklin, I found a three-hundred-dollar book of poems printed on laid paper. I bought the book, and made a paring of one page, and now we have an only very slightly wounded book, and a graft for my “Harbor with Three Boats.”

Stan, like many craftsmen, liked to brag about his work, in a subtle way, with a light touch. He wanted to be appreciated. In the early years of our relationship I had misunderstood, thinking he wanted to show how difficult his job was, or to justify his fees. But I knew better now. He worked largely alone, with a handful of assistants laboring in workrooms and answering his phone. It was quiet work, in solitude, and he wanted a little applause now and then.

I was about to say something admiring, but Stan bent over his cup of coffee and said, “What's the matter?”

“Is it so obvious?”

“There's something wrong. I can tell.”

“I can't keep a secret from you.”

“Domestic problems,” he said. “Because little Carliss has been revising your collection.”