Stairway to Forever (5 page)

On the following morning, Fitz missed the biweekly sales meeting and pep rally for the first time since he had secured the job. He just phoned in that he was sick, pinching his nostrils shut to impart a nasal quality to his voice and forcing a few coughs for emphasis.

That part of his scheme accomplished, Fitz carefully dressed in his shiny-suited "best," coaxed the elderly clunker he now called his car into life, then drove to have the tank filled at the overpriced filling station of Bates' Shopping Center, which offered thirty-day credit accounts to area residents.

Two hours later, in the business section of the city he once had called his home, Fitz opened his old briefcase and laid out upon the counter of a coin dealer he knew from the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars a bit over a pound of his find in the sand world. Along with it, he spun a deliberately vague tale of a deceased, distant relative and a modest inheritance.

A short, paunchy, balding man, Gus Tolliver was about the age of letter carrier Bartlett, some five or six years Fitz's senior, with thirty years of enlisted army service and three wars behind him. He cursorily examined a brace of the coins picked out at random. All at once he whistled softly, glanced up enigmatically at Fitz, then pulled a thick book from a shelf behind him and began to riffle through it.

When he at last had found the page and article for which he had been looking, he opened a drawer beneath the display case counter and lifted out a jewellers scale and its bronze weights, a loupe and a steel micrometer, along with a long, wide, thick pad of dense velvet. Thus supplied, he spread out the coins and, without a spoken word, commenced weighing and measuring and scrutinizing each of them

with an exceeding care, referring often to the first big book, as well as to others he selected from the same shelf.

The process took some hour or more of time, while Fitz just waited and tried to not fidget and also tried to think up some more plausible tale to spin should Tolliver demand more and more detailed information concerning the genesis of the pieces of gold and his, Fitz's, acquisition of them.

At length, Tolliver shoved the loupe up onto his hairless forehead and slumped back on his high, padded stool, regarding Fitz with a narrow, very guarded expression.

"You got an asking price on these, Fitz? Understand up front, though: I couldn't buy them or sell them, not around here, not in a month of Sundays. No demand, see. But I can be your agent. I got lots of contacts through ANA, see. We can work out a commissions scale."

Fitz shrugged. "Hell, I don't know a price to ask, Gus. I never collected anything like this. What do you think they're worth?"

The bald man cleared his throat noisily. "Weill . . . and this is purely a ballpark figure, mind you: at least fifty thousand dollars, maybe a bit more—maybe even twice that. Hell, I don't really know, Fitz. A Byzantine expert would have to see them before anybody could say for sure. Yes, they're all in damn fine shape . . . maybe too fine a shape for their age. Your uncle or whatever just may've got stuck with a passel of forgeries whenever he bought them, but I don't think so, somehow.

"Now I know a man who could tell us—you and me—for certain sure, both the value and whether or not they're forgeries. We'd have to pay to fly him in and pay his expenses while he's here and . . . maybe

even have to cut him in for a little piece of the action, too. But it just might be worth the cost, if you got what I think you got here, Fitz.

"But before we go that far, Fitz, didn't your uncle ever have these appraised, at least for insurance purposes?"

Fitz couldn't answer; he could breathe only with concentrated effort. He was glad that he was seated, for he was suddenly become as weak as the proverbial kitten. For the pound or so of old, crudely minted gold coins, he had expected and hoped to net as much as fifteen hundred dollars, though he would have settled for less ... for much less. He tried several times to speak, to answer Tolliver, but though his numb lips and tongue moved, not a sound came from his constricted throat.

All that he could think was: Fifty to a hundred thousand dollars? Yes, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars for this paltry handful of the coins he had found in that strange world of sand and hot sun. And that leather casket back there in the cabin of that wrecked ship lying among the dunes, then, must still hold the worth of four or five million dollars!

Tolliver hopped from his stool and rapidly rounded the counter, a look of deep concern on his wrinkle-creased face. "Fitz? Fitz, boy, you aright? Fitz, you want some water or somethin?"

The cost of the crumbling rental house set Fitz back little more than the depressed value of the land on which it sat, moldering. During the next eight weeks, however, a top-flight general contractor and his horde of subcontractors and laborers converted the ramshackle cottage into a small luxury home, complete with every conceivable convenience. The ancient Ford clunker had been retired to a junkyard

and the new garage housed a Mercedes 280, a Jeep Wagoneer and a powerful trail bike.

The pantry and the big new deep-freeze now both were well-stocked and Fitz was beginning to gain back some of the weight he had lost in the course of the last few hellish years of suffering and privation. He had quit his job with the vacuum cleaner company; for one reason, he no longer needed the money, for since he had paid off the credit union of his former employer in full, he now was receiving his full pension, not to even mention the thousands of dollars that kept rolling in from the sales of gold coins. But the other reason he had quit was that the time necessary had been cutting deeply into the time he felt that he needed to spend in and further explore the world beyond that underground wall below his backyard. Besides, he was getting not a few odd looks from employers, fellow salesmen and customers alike, as he had gone about selling vacuum cleaners, door to door, while driving a brand-spanking-new Mercedes sedan and dressed in expensive, custom-tailored clothing, all his visible skin surfaces deeply and evenly tanned amid his winter-pale fellow humans.

As for Gus Tolliver, he had to all intents and purposes closed down his shop to the general public, now receiving customers therein only by way of preset appointments. The bulk of his time and energy now was going toward representing Fitz as sole agent in the sales of exceedingly rare, early medieval coins to an ever-widening sphere of avid and generally well-heeled collectors.

As Anno Domini 1974 became Anno Domini 1975, and the word spread, mail, wires and telephone calls from all over the world poured into the small shop— bids, want-lists and simple inquiries. The twenty-percent commission on all sales to which Fitz had

agreed was making a wealthy man of Gus Tolliver, while merely the fact that he now was noted, world wide, as a factor in the sale of a collection of rare coins had guaranteed him a bright future in the field of numismatics.

Because Fitz had been leaving his home less and less frequently, of late, Gus had begun driving out from the city on each Friday night to settle the past week's accounts, have a few drinks and just talk. He and his client had quickly become fast friends during the still-short course of their most-lucrative mutual enterprise. So close were they two now become that Gus and Fitz now held one each of the only three keys to the gate of the twelve-foot-high cyclone fence that now circumscribed the entire property.

Fitz had had the barrier erected—complete with three strands of barbed wire at the top, rigged with tripwires and pressure points and electric eyes which activated bright lights and banshee-loud alarms—after the third time he had returned from the sand world to find that his home had been entered. On the first occasion, he had called the sheriff and it had been that dignitary who had first suggested a good fence and some sophisticated locks.

"Look, Mistuh Fitzgilbert," Gomer Vaughan had said, "you got you a damn fine house in a damn crummy neighborhood. Most the folks 'round here don't even own the crackerboxes they lives in, they just rents, longs they can pay the rent, then my boys has to put them out, like as not. And the way the kind of scum 'round here thinks, they're just natcherly going to resent you and this house and all. They don't none of them have the kind of minds that might stop and think you might of worked your ass off to get whatall you got. Naw, they'll just be as jealous as old Hell 'cause you got it and they don't

and prob'ly never will, neither, the most of these deadbeats.

"Folks like you got 'round here is too fuckin' lazy to work for a good life, but they sure ain't none of them f s met yet too lazy for to steal anything what ain't redhot or nailed down solid. So, I tell you, the best thing you can do—aside from setting here twenny-four hours a day with a scattergun on your lap, that is—is to get you a good locksmith or security service comp'ny and get this place hardened up good. Might not be a bad idear to get a tall, strong fence put around the house if not the whole lot, too."

The lanky man had extracted a card from his shirt pocket and given it to Fitz, adding, "Once you gets a written plan and estimate from whoever you get, you call me, there, and I'll come by and tell you whether it's worth a shit, hear? And you have any other break-ins, you call me right away, too."

That first break-in had netted the perpetrator or perpetrators, as close as Fitz could figure: something less than a hundred dollars in bills and change that had been lying around, his fishing rods and tackle and the old, worn .22 caliber revolver that had been his snake gun, some odds and ends of men's jewelry— cuff links, tie bars and tacks, some studs and an old key chain from the 1939 World's Fair, two half gallon containers of ice cream from the deep-freeze, a fifth of John Jameson Irish Whiskey from off the sideboard, two six-packs of German beer and an equal amount of bottled ginger ale.

Upon reading the list, Sheriff Vaughan had nodded. "Most likely kids, Jay Dees. Enybody older wouldn't of took that ice cream and pop and prob'ly not a bunch of cheap jewelry, neither. And I tell you, Mister Fitzgilbert, I bet I knows just which ones 'round here did it, too, not that I could prove

it, prob'ly. But them two boys, they both comes by it natcherl. Their pa is a damn hillbilly from up in the mountains. He's a boozing, brawling, hell-raising bastard from the word go and he's woke up more than one time in my jail with a hangover and a new lump or two on his damn hard head. Some damn night, he's gonna either kill somebody or get kilt his own self and then his pore, long-suffrin wife's gonna be a whole lot better off. But I'm mighty feared that he's already done bent them two boys so bad they ain't never gonna be nothing but trouble all they lives."

But before he could get the fence up or the other security measures installed, there had been a second break-in, this one a much more professional job, according to Sheriff Vaughan. The only thing that had turned up missing, however, although the entire house showed clear evidences of a painstakingly thorough search, had been the big, rusty knife Fitz had found on the wrecked ship during his very first visit to the sand world. Fitz told the sympathetic lawman that, although he had not had it appraised, the knife had been an antique worth roughly a couple of thousand dollars.

The third burglary had occurred, again, while he was in the sand world, on the very night before the wire netting was due to be installed on the already erect and concrete-based steel posts. And since all of the doors and windows had already been rendered as secure as money and expertise could make them, just how the intruders had gotten in was a question no one could seem to answer. This time, the thorough search had been repeated, but the only object missing was the small cup of incised copper that Fitz had picked up on the same day he had acquired the stolen knife.

But after that third search and theft, with the new

locks and the towering fence in place, the trespassers seemed to have been effectively barred from within his home. However, he considered the fence to be not so much a protection of the house and its contents as a way to bar any would-be interlopers from the sand world, wherein he had yet to see as much as one other human being, or even any recent trace of one. He liked it that way and he meant to keep it just so by any legal means he could employ, buy or utilize.

After two near-accidents on the slippery steps leading down to the crypt, Fitz had bought and erected over the pivoting stone slab an eight-foot by ten-foot wall-tent to keep out the rain; ground water, he knew he could not do much about. Also, the tent gave him above-ground storage and a private place to change into clothing suited to the more rigorous weather after his sojourns in the salubrious climate of the sand world. Not that his immediate neighbors were all that nosy; most of them seemed to be too busy scratching to make ends meet to pay close attention to the private affairs of others.

The wrecked warship—for such he was now certain it had been, since shifting sands had uncovered a massive, bronze-sheathed ram affixed to the prow at just about the waterline—was become a second home to Fitz, one in which he had spent so much time over the past months that he was become as brown as a Polynesian from head to foot. Nor was the ship or the beach nearby any longer the scope of his new-found world.

The trail bike in his new garage was the mate of a pair he had bought. The other he had manhandled down the steep, sharp-angled stairs and, thence, into the sand world. On it, he had travelled far up and down the seemingly endless beach.

He also had journeyed inland to discover that the dunes marched on for miles, to finally peter out onto a rolling plain of sandy soil on which grew coarse grasses, shrubs of various sorts and a few small trees. Beyond this plain, bluish with the haze of distance, lay what looked through the binoculars to be wooded hills.

But nowhere in all his travels had he spied any other sign of man than the long-wrecked ship, unless the small herds of big-headed ponies that grazed the sandy, inland plain were feral rather than just wild. Although obviously frightened of his noisy, smelly bike, he had found that they were not in any way chary of a human and that he could get pretty close to them, if afoot, the herd stallions making threat-displays whenever he overstepped his bounds, but never really attacking him ... so far.