The Fury and the Terror (19 page)

"I've never seen anything like this."

"Moby Bay is a special place. Protected."

"Like a wildlife refuge?"

"That's a good one. It's a refuge, all right. But the wildest thing in Moby Bay is Wardella's poker night. All of this"—Chauncey made a showy flourish with one hand, like a magician fanning cards—"is just the Caul, that we draw around ourselves at night. When we take back Moby Bay for ourselves, for meditation or renewal. You don't know how glad I am to come back here, after a hundred days on the road."

"I'll bet. What did you mean, take back Moby Bay. From what?"

"The tourists, for one thing. Nothing against tourists, that's how most of the people here make a living. We turn the place over to them in the daytime. We've got the quaint nineteenth-century main street, the old Victorian houses and gardens, the microbrewery, the lighthouse on the headland: But there are no accommodations, no typical northern California bed and breakfasts. Everything closes at dusk. The tourists leave. After dark, there's no way to get to Moby Bay. Unless you were born here, or you're invited by someone who was."

They took a path away from the beach and up a hill. The sky seemed very close, dense with stars, meteors, glowing nebulae. The tall cypresses dripped moisture. Eden felt light-headed but exhilarated, as if some of the tiny meteors were shooting through her mind. Physically she was strong, surefooted behind Chauncey, who occasionally reached down to help her along the steep defile.

"If you can drive here during the day—"

"We're ten miles from the highway. It's a good road to Moby Bay but the road branches a lot. Runs close to the sea, with a lot of switchbacks in the coves. Most nights there's fog. If you're driving back after dark because you think you may have left your video camera at the Gray Whale while you were having lunch, nothing looks familiar. In fact, it's kind of forbidding. The lonely road, no lights, no one to ask for directions. Easy to take the wrong fork in the road. So you drive in circles for an hour or so, eventually find yourself back on 101. By then your wife is tired, the kids are whining, so you decide the hell with it, bill the insurance company for the camcorder."

"Why is Moby bay hard to find at night?"

They rested for a few moments at the top of the hill. There were a couple of one-story houses on the cliff fifty yards away. Redwood siding, shake-shingle roofs, patios. The odors from an outdoor grill were in the air. A dog was barking. The luminosity had faded from their faces and hands. Nothing out of the ordinary here. From this height the sea was bright and calm.

"It's all a matter of perception," Chauncey said. "Actually our hypothetical tourist found Moby Bay okay. Maybe he drove down Main Street a couple of times. He just didn't see it. He was like the guy from the audience the hypnotist puts to sleep onstage. The hypnotist tells his subject he's never been married, even though his wife is sitting right there in the second row getting the giggles. Then the hypnotist tells the guy he's madly in love and wants to propose to a best-of-show poodle in dog language.
Bow-wow
. Down on all fours.
Woof-woof
. The audience cracks up. Our tourist drives down Main Street looking for Moby Bay. We could be hanging out in front of the ice cream parlor mooning him, he wouldn't see us. That's the effect of the Caul. The bad thing about the Caul is, it screws up TV reception. Cell phones, forget it until the sun comes up. The energy has always been here—a certain resonance, frequency of vibrations, whatever. If you've got even a pinch of extrasensory perception you recognize and use what the earth gives to you. Most people let ninety percent of their gray matter go to waste. The active part of their brains is usually just something to hang their egos on."

"Chauncey—"

"I'm sorry. I run off at the mouth. And you know so much more than I do."

"That's just it. I
don't
. I don't know why you,
everyone
I meet says I'm what I am. I don't know what I'm supposed to do! I'm that dumb tourist you were talking about. Going around and around in my head. I have bad dreams that come true. That's all. And Wardella tells me—she won't be there anymore when I need her!"

After a few moments Chauncey put an arm around Eden's shoulders, drew her close.

"Somebody will," she said.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA • MAY 28 • 9:54 P.M. PDT

A
fter they checked into the Lambourne, Tom Sherard yielded to Bertie Nkambe's suggestion that they walk up Nob Hill to Washington, then over to the Alleys of Chinatown, where her favorite Shanghaiese restaurant was located. Not advertised but well known to locals. One of the owners was a nephew of a man Bertie's father had been in business with in Nairobi and Mombasa. "
Guanxi
," Bertie said, with that wink of hers. Meaning connections. Alberta's sweet insistence was hard to say no to, and after being on a plane for nearly five hours, Sherard needed to exercise. The more he walked, the less dependent he was on the lion's-head cane. And San Francisco had been blessed with a wonderful spring night. Shortly before ten o'clock on a Saturday the little shops, markets, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants of the Alleys were still busy places.

Bertie never went unnoticed, but in red leather and gold chains she drew attention like firecrackers in the street. Unlike a lot of models who had her elevation, looking over the heads of lesser mortals with waxen stares; Bertie had a smile for every stranger. She liked to browse and haggle. Before they reached the Ya Lin restaurant she stopped half a dozen times, admiring some eighteenth-century porcelains and lacquered screens in a couple of stores, watercolors displayed at curbside by a young student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bertie conversed with the older Chinese in lilting Mandarin. She was, among her other talents, a natural polyglot. She had soaked up Chinese, English, and Swahili in her own home before coming to New York at the age of twelve to live with Sherard and Gillian and attend the Chapin school. But her real purpose for being in the States was to work with Gillian while she learned to deal with the yin and yang of her Gift.

The Gift had emerged early in Alberta Nkambe's life, when she was little more than a toddler. A black mamba, perhaps driven from its habitat by thick smoke from a brushfire, had invaded the Nkambes' house on their coffee estate by the Thika River. The snake had found a bamboo basket chair on the roofed veranda to its liking. Joseph Nkambe's favorite chair, when he had a few minutes to relax before dinner and watch rugby matches from England. It was his habit to plump up the chintz-covered dark green cushions before settling down. The family mongoose, their household snakehunter, was being treated at the vet's for an infected paw. Pleasantly distracted by his daughter babbling at play with two older brothers, Joseph didn't see the snake behind the cushion as he reached down.

The mamba struck him on the back of his hand, in the meat above the loose webbed skin between thumb and index finger. Joseph jerked his hand away in shock, and screamed when he saw the shapely head of death in his chair, the grayish punctures in his flesh. Only a few victims have survived the bite of the mamba. Even with prompt antivenin treatment the bite would have meant days of agony and delirium, leaving him with a mutilated hand and arm.

Joseph fell to his knees crying out to God in fear. The screams of his sons echoed through the house, bringing servants on the run.

Bertie didn't scream. She put down the toy truck she'd been playing with and walked over to her father. He was lying on his side, holding the bitten hand. Because the mamba's venom was a muscle toxin, the muscles of his arm as far as his shoulder were twitching out of control.

"Get away," he whispered to her. "
Mamba!
"

She saw the snake a few feet from them, gliding down to the terra-cotta floor of the veranda. It wasn't the first snake she'd seen, but it was probably the biggest. Alberta may have been too young to know fear. Mambas were blindingly fast in their habitat, but an impulse of caution or the unfamiliar tiles of the floor could have slowed this one. The girl made a move that was preternaturally quick for a three-year-old and seized the mamba behind its hideous tapered head. Stood firm as the snake squirmed in her grasp, its open mouth dense with scalded hate.

Then, staring at the mamba, she stroked it with her other hand, and as she did so the five-foot-long snake lost its will to fight and went slack in her chubby grip.
Pumbavu
, she said, meaning it was a stupid thing unworthy of further attention. After a few moments she tossed the mamba on the floor where it lay motionless. She turned to her father.

Joseph's body was vibrating as if he were being electrocuted. There was bloody froth on his lips and graying beard. The bitten hand had turned carmine around the wound and was swelling rapidly. Bertie grasped his hand. Joseph, fearful that the minutest part of the poison might get on her skin and be absorbed, tried to push her away. And then (Joseph said, telling it to Sherard years afterward) he felt a calming warmth that rushed the length of his arm toward his fibrillating heart, from there spreading swiftly through the rest of his body. It was like a brilliant tide sweeping him to the light-struck center of the universe. The seizure stopped almost immediately. Dazed, with the sensation that he had dreamed the mamba and its bite, he watched Alberta place her lips against the punctures. Then something struck him powerfully but painlessly, like a knockout punch to the chin.

The next thing Joseph knew he was being helped to his feet by his wife and one of the servants, while another servant carried the dead snake from the veranda, draped around the head of a broom. He felt as if he were struggling to wake up from the longest, deepest sleep of his life. There were no punctures on the dark brown skin of his hand, only a couple of insignificant healing scratches. His daughter looked up at him wordlessly, a cloudlike something in her usually clear and untroubled eyes. When Joseph reached for her, sobbing, she shook her head, evading him, and went back to her play, newly solemn. Three days passed before she spoke again.

Bertie hit Sherard for a hundred in cash to buy a watercolor she liked. Bertie's net worth at a comparatively tender age was several million dollars, but she was scarcely aware of it. Her income was invested for her by a conservative international bank owned by the Bellaver financial conglomerate. She was comfortable making her way around the world with a Visa card that had no spending limit and a few subway tokens. She had friends in twenty countries who willingly spoiled her. Thus she traveled light, a carry-on bag, only one or two changes of clothes, preferring to buy what she wasn't given by the many designers eager for her presence in their shows. Bertie sold trendy fashion, even the most outrageously whimsical crap, with a flair all her own, high exuberance and a wink to the audience that said
you are all
pumbavu
if you don't buy this
.

With her wrapped watercolor under one arm, she linked her other arm with Sherard's and more or less propelled him the remaining distance to the red-bordered door of the Elegant Forest, where they were expected. She never asked if his leg bothered him. She knew it was hurting, and neither of them wanted to be reminded of what the injury represented in their lives.

"By the way," Bertie said as they entered the tiny vestibule, "I think I should mention I got peeped."

She didn't have time to explain. The proprietor of Ya Lin, a middle-aged man who stood about as high as Bertie's elbow, swept through a beaded curtain with an ecstatic gold-capped smile and escorted them to one of six tables in the restaurant, beneath a little balcony of carved ebony. The balcony enclosed a polished stone Buddha, yellow stone with veins of ocher. There were fresh red poppies in a jade vase on the table. Bertie laughed and winked and chatted with the proprietor, who frequently turned, beaming, to pump Sherard's hand.

When they were seated and alone for a few moments, Sherard said, "What was that all about?"

"You may have noticed that this is the only table in the room with a Buddha above it."

"Rather a heavyset Buddha," Sherard said, glancing up. "I hope it's a stout balcony. What's the significance?"

"This table is reserved by Gao for occasions that require a special blessing from Buddha." Pause. "It's especially popular with newlyweds who want to ensure the health and prosperity of their future children."

"You didn't tell him that we were—"

"My Mandarin's a little rusty. I
could
have given Gao the wrong impression. But who knows where we'll be when we
do
get married, so I thought, here we are in San Francisco, and I'm sure Buddha won't mind—"

"Alberta."

"Well, I've always coveted this table. And obviously we both want our children to be—"

"Al
ber
ta."

Bertie lowered her eyes. "You growled at me."

"Shouldn't wonder."

"You're not angry, though." She looked at him, narrowing her eyes slightly. "You don't have those white spots on your cheeks that you get when you're really furious. Know what I think? It's the whole idea of being a father."

"At my age—"

"You're only forty-three. My father was fifty when I was born. You have loads of time, if you don't let it slip away. Let me slip away."