The Last Coin (22 page)

He turned his head slowly, and the hand released his shoulder. There was Uncle Arthur, standing behind him, the hand with the ring on it just touching his lips. The old man shook his head and took his other hand away from Andrew’s mouth. Andrew relaxed. He’d been holding his breath, and he let it out now in a long whoosh. He started to speak, but Uncle Arthur cut him off with a gesture, then shook his head again and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the front door. Andrew nodded and set out alone, muffling the bell again and squinting at the bright sunlight when he opened the door.

It wasn’t until he was outside and walking back up Second Street toward his car that he began to wonder why in the world Uncle Arthur was messing around in Moneywort’s shop. He and Moneywort had been friends, but now Moneywort was dead, and Arthur had little interest in tropical fish—no real reason for visiting the shop. Andrew would have plenty of mysteries to lay at Pickett’s feet, although he wouldn’t, alas, have any shrimps to lay at the feet of the cats.

So what was Uncle Arthur doing there? That’s what Andrew wondered as he motored away up Second Street toward the post office. Coincidence wouldn’t answer. Over the past week Andrew had come to disbelieve in coincidence. There were only two answers that were any good: Uncle Arthur had come ‘round to Moneywort’s shop for the same reason Pennyman had—to buy an enormous carp—or else Arthur himself had been
following
Pennyman, a development that wouldn’t much surprise Pickett.

Pennyman had got home before him. He was going in through the front door when Andrew pulled in along the curb. And he wasn’t carrying the Styrofoam box, either. Andrew sat in the Metropolitan again, thinking. It was nearly four o’clock, and once again Andrew had managed to do nothing at all that day but avoid Rose. He’d gone out after seashells that morning but had collected mysteries instead, each of which was pretty enough, in its way.

But one wanted the mysteries to add up somehow. What Andrew had was a jumble of them, like shells rattling in a bag, and he had the growing suspicion that one day soon he’d reach into the bag to draw one out and he’d be pinched by it. He had to get them sorted, to see which of them contained hidden crabs, which of them stank of dead things, which of them he could hear the distant murmur of the ocean in. He turned on the car radio and then turned it off again. There was no excuse on earth for wasting the rest of the day. He reminded himself of what had happened yesterday, a day that had started out so promising and then declined into despair. The two
A.M.
Cheerios powwow around the kitchen table had fetched it all back together just a bit, had saved him. Now here he was idling away his time, losing the little tract of ground he’d got back with Rose and Naomi.

It was time to haul out the paint. He had painter’s coveralls in the garage. It wouldn’t take him six minutes to pull them on and get started. He had the sudden urge to announce his intentions to Rose, but he squashed it. Let her stumble upon him at work. He’d be whistling away, paintbrush in hand, cap pulled down over his eyes. He’d hang his paint scraper in the loop in the coveralls and shove a rag into his back pocket, next to his putty knife. People would drive by on the street, and, mistaking him for a professional painter, they’d stop and ask him for an estimate, appreciating his work, happy that these old houses were being sparkled up. He was working late in the afternoon, wasn’t he? Well, he’d say, nightfall was the only clock
he
paid any attention to—nightfall and sunrise, the two great motivators of mankind. He was a philosopher-painter. Which one of the Greeks had talked about that sort of thing? Plato, maybe.

He picked up his coffee cup, which had lain there on the floor of the car since that morning. There was a little dribble of coffee in it, dried on the inside in a sticky line. He wished suddenly that the cup were full, but he couldn’t risk going in to brew up a fresh one. He couldn’t risk going after a beer, either. He’d have to paint dry, which was a pity, really, painting being such a boring job. Having something to drink—whatever it might be—was an end in itself, a pastime. Hose water would have to do. He sat up abruptly, realizing that another ten minutes had passed. He’d been daydreaming again.

In a fit of determination he climbed out of the car, closed the door softly, and stepped around into the backyard, hurrying into the garage. There on the bench was the sack full of smashed glass. The sight of it depressed him hugely, and he picked it up and flung it into the trash can in the corner. To hell with melting lead. He hadn’t the time to waste on it. There was no use trying to fiddle away old mistakes anyway; Rose wouldn’t be fooled. Not for a moment. All he would accomplish would be to look like an utter moron, and he couldn’t afford that sort of thing any more. He yanked on the coveralls, pried open his paint, and hurriedly stirred it with a piece of stick. In minutes he stood alongside the house, spreading out a canvas dropcloth. To hell with painting the garage, too. The house was bigger game.

He began to dust off the house with a horsehair brush, intending to clean a good-sized area before starting to paint. It was nothing, this painting business. He studied the edge of his paintbrush. It was a good one, a Purdy four inch—sharp and clean. He dipped it into the paint, slipped the back edge of it across the metal can rim, and cut in a two-foot section of one of the clapboards, catching a drip and smoothing it out nicely. He stepped back and looked at it happily. It seemed to him to be evidence of something—that he wasn’t entirely a worthless crud, perhaps. He dipped the brush again and then stopped and listened. There were voices murmuring, one of them angry.

He laid the paintbrush across the mouth of the can and rubbed his hands on the rag. It sounded like Rose; the angry voice did. He wouldn’t have that. He would put a quick stop to it. There was no one in the house who had the right to argue with her, except maybe himself. If it was Pennyman giving her trouble … A hot flush of anger surged through him and he stepped around toward the front door, nearly breaking into a run, his fists clenched. Then there came another voice; it
was
Pennyman, but he wasn’t arguing with Rose. The woman’s voice belonged to Mrs. Gummidge, and both voices were coming through the open window of Mrs. Gummidge’s ground-floor bedroom. She was the only one of them who occupied a room down below—a sort of maid’s quarters with its own bath and kitchenette. The window was open just a fraction.

Andrew braked and then skipped backward two steps, spinning around and lunging after the paintbrush and paint. He fetched them, then tiptoed back around until he stood just beside the open window, and then very quietly and haphazardly he began to paint the siding. He hadn’t brought the horsehair brush, and there wasn’t time to waste going back after it, so he splashed the paint on over ten years worth of grime. He barely breathed, listening to the rising and falling of voices.

“I should think I’d get more than that,” said Mrs. Gummidge tearfully.

There was a pause, then Pennyman’s voice: “I haven’t got more. You can appreciate that. It’s a tiresome, slow process, wringing it out like that and distilling it down and decanting it and aging it. It isn’t done in a day. And the fish themselves are fearsomely rare. When Adams killed them all out of stupidity, with his cheap thermostats, it was six months before the damage could be put right. If it hadn’t been for the quick trip up to San Francisco … Well … Thank heavens for Han Koi’s man up in Chinatown. It’s only in the last month that Adams has got it all going again, and that means a month or two more before there’s a surplus.”

“A surplus! I’m not asking for a surplus. I’m asking for a very little bit. A bit of yours is what I’m asking for. You can spare it. You’d think it was narcotics.”

“And it works that very way,” said Pennyman in a soft and fatherly voice. “You don’t need any more than I’ve given you. I
do
, though. Certainly you can see that. Don’t cut any capers now. We’re days away from it. You know that.
I
can’t sacrifice a drop. If my powers aren’t honed and strong, then we’re done for; we might as well not have bothered.”

There was silence for a moment as Andrew continued to slap paint on the wooden siding, paying no attention to the finer points of his work. He idly painted upwards and sideways and crossways, his head cocked, waiting for the conversation to continue. He could hear Mrs. Gummidge crying almost silently—stifling it, as if she didn’t want to be overheard by anyone chancing to pass by in the hallway. Andrew smiled. They had no earthly suspicion that the enemy stood right outside their window, got up in coveralls and a hat. He was killing two birds with one stone; that was the truth of it.

The conversation started up again. There was the sound of glass clinking against glass and of Pennyman muttering something about cups of tea. Andrew couldn’t make it out.

“Just a little at a time,” Mrs. Gummidge said.

“Why don’t you give that up? This has nothing to do with personal vendettas. We’re above that.”

“I don’t believe we are,” she said after a moment. “What about the books? Aren’t we above that, too?”

“Damn the books. What books?”

“Don’t think I don’t see anything. Don’t think it’s not me that does a bit of dusting and vacuuming around this house.” Her voice rose. In a moment she’d be hysterical.

“Shh!” Pennyman hushed her up, cutting her off before she had revealed anything at all.

Andrew was baffled. The whole conversation was baffling. Now there was another baffling silence during which he heard the back door shut. That could only be Rose, coming outside. She’d see that the garage door was open and she’d go in to have a look. Then she’d find the lid to the paint can and his jacket hanging over the bench vise, and she’d come around to the front to see if her wondering eyes had deceived her.

There was a grunt of loathing, as if Mrs. Gummidge had swallowed a toad, and then an ungodly sort of fishy smell wafted out through the window, so putrid and overpowering that Andrew reeled back, turning his face away. There was Rose, standing on the sidewalk. He might have predicted it. He
had
predicted it. He smiled at her and waved his paintbrush. At least he hadn’t been crushing water glasses or experimenting with cups full of cold coffee.

He moved away from the window before he said anything, hauling his paint can back around to where his dropcloth lay and setting it down. “Thought I’d take advantage of the sunlight and get in a bit of painting.”

Rose nodded—not happily, it seemed to him. He stepped back and looked at the house. There were two short strips of clapboard painted very neatly on the corner where he’d started in. Then there was a sort of mess of fresh paint near Mrs. Gummidge’s window. It looked something like a psychological test. He waved his brush at it, as if in explanation, thinking hard for something to say. He’d been caught out again. But at least he’d been caught by Rose and not by Pennyman. It would have gone hard on him if Pennyman had discovered him listening at the window. And of course he
would
discover it, too, as soon as he saw the weirdly painted patch of siding. Pennyman wasn’t an idiot.

“I’m amazed,” said Rose, seeming suddenly to be happy with Andrew’s antics, as if she’d taken the long view and come to the conclusion that
any
work was good work, any painting good painting. “What’s the point of being so wild with it, though?”

“Bad grain in the wood. The redwood seems to be delaminating there. Probably a matter of too much afternoon sun. When that sort of thing happens you have to scrub it on, to get it in under the grain lines where the wood is coming apart. It acts as a sort of adhesive. Looks bizarre now, I’ll admit, but once the whole thing is painted …”

Rose nodded. “Why don’t you stick to one side at a time. That way if you don’t get it all done, it won’t look quite so peculiar.”

“Absolutely,” said Andrew. “I got carried away, I guess. I saw what the problem would be with the wood and all and decided to have a go at it. I couldn’t resist. You know how I am when it comes to tackling little problems like that.”

Rose nodded. “Shouldn’t you clean it first? All that dirt …”

“Bonding agent,” said Andrew, hating himself. “It’ll look good freshened up, won’t it?”

“
I’ll
be pretty happy with it,” said Rose. “But why don’t you clean up? You don’t have much of the afternoon left anyway.”

Andrew picked up his paint can and moved across toward the open window again, talking loudly to alert Mrs. Gummidge and Pennyman, if they were still in the room, that he was out on the lawn. His spying was pretty much at an end. If he were smart, he’d haul out a floodlight and an extension cord and try to get the mess of paint smoothed out and cleaned up before he quit for the evening. Rose would admire his sticking to it, and Pennyman wouldn’t wander out in the morning and find anything suspicious.

“Bring my dinner out on a plate, will you?”

“If you want,” said Rose, heading back up the sidewalk toward the garage. “Don’t wear yourself out, though.”

That was just like Rose, worrying about him. He dipped his brush into the paint, straightened up, and looked square into the face of Pennyman, which was regarding him out the window, grinning slyly. “Good evening,” rasped Andrew, startled.

Pennyman nodded, giggling just a little bit, then laughing harder, then bursting into such a paroxysm of laughter that for a moment Andrew thought he’d choke. And for as long as Pennyman laughed, Andrew couldn’t step a foot nearer the house, and he began to hope very fervently that Pennyman
would
choke, that the laughter would simply explode him like an overfilled balloon.