The Wolf Gift (3 page)

That would be never, most likely.

Oh, hell, he couldn’t work out the fantasy right now, could he? Marchent was looking sadly into the fire, and he should be asking questions. “Let me get this straight,” Celeste would say, “I work seven days a week and you’re supposed to be a reporter now and you’re going to, what, drive four hours a day to get to work?”

This would be for Celeste the final disappointment, the first being that he didn’t know who he was. She’d gone through law school like a rocket and passed the bar at age twenty-two. He’d quit the English Ph.D. program over the foreign-language requirements, and really didn’t have a life plan at all. Wasn’t it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was? He’d asked that once, in just those words, and she’d laughed. They’d both laughed. “Nice work if you can get it, Sunshine Boy,” she said. “I’m due in court.”

Marchent was tasting the coffee. “Hot enough,” she said.

She filled a china cup with coffee for him and gestured to the silver cream pitcher, and the little pile of sugar cubes in the silver dish. All of it so pretty, so nice. And Celeste would think, How dreary, and his mother might not notice at all. Grace had an aversion to all matters domestic, except festive cooking. Celeste said kitchens were for storing Diet Coke. His father would like it—his father had a general fund of knowledge about all manner of things, including silver and china, the history of the fork, holiday customs the world over, the evolution of fashion, cuckoo clocks, whales, wines, and architectural styles. His private nickname for himself was “Miniver Cheevy.”

But the point was Reuben liked all this. Reuben loved it. Reuben was Reuben, and Reuben liked the great stone mantelpiece with its scroll supports very much as well.

“So what are you writing in your poetic head just now?” Marchent asked.

“Hmmm. The ceiling beams, they’re enormous, and just possibly the longest ceiling beams I’ve ever seen. The carpets are Persian, all floral designs, except for the little prayer rug there. And there are no evil spirits under this roof.”

“ ‘No bad vibrations’ is what you mean,” she said. “And I agree with you. But I’m sure you realize that I would never be able to stop grieving for Uncle Felix if I stayed on. He was a titan of a man. I’ll tell you, it’s all come back to me, Felix and his disappearing, I mean, I hadn’t brooded over it all for some time. I was eighteen when he walked out that door for the Middle East.”

“Why the Middle East?” he asked. “Where was he headed?”

“An archaeological dig, that was often the reason for his trips. That
last time it was in Iraq, something about a new city, as old as Mari or Uruk. I could never get any corroboration that sounded right. Anyway, he was unusually excited about where he was going, I remember that. He’d been talking on the phone long-distance to his friends all over the world. I didn’t think much of it. He was always going, and always coming back. If it wasn’t a dig, then he was off to some foreign library to look at a fragment of manuscript that had just been unearthed in some unpublished collection by one of his many students. He paid them by the dozens. They were always sending information. He lived in his own fully detached and lively world.”

“He must have left papers behind,” said Reuben, “a man engaged in all that.”

“Papers! Reuben, you have no idea. There are rooms upstairs that are filled with nothing but papers, manuscripts, binders, crumbling books. There is so much to be gone through, so many decisions to be made. But if the house sells tomorrow, I’m ready to ship it all to climate-controlled storage and work with it from there.”

“Was he searching for something, something in particular?”

“Well, if he was, he never said. One time he did say, ‘This world needs witnesses. Too much is lost.’ But I think it was a general complaint. He financed digs, I know that. And often met with archaeology students and history students who didn’t work for him. I recall them coming and going here. He would give out his own little private grants.”

“What a great thing,” Reuben said, “to live like that.”

“Well, he had the money, as I well know now. There was never any doubt he was rich, but I didn’t know how rich until everything came to me. Come, shall we have a look around?”

How he loved the library.

But it was one of those showplace rooms in which no one ever wrote a letter or read a book. Marchent confessed as much. The old French desk was exquisitely polished and its brass ormolu as bright as gold. It had a clean green blotter, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with the inevitable classics in leather binding that would have made them awkward to carry in a knapsack or read on a plane.

There was the
Oxford English Dictionary
in twenty volumes, an old
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, massive art tomes, atlases, and thick old volumes whose gilded titles had been worn away.

An awe-inspiring room. He saw his father at the desk watching as
the light faded from the leaded windows, or sitting in the velvet-padded window seat with a book. The eastern windows of the house along that wall must have been thirty feet wide.

Too dark now to see the trees. In the morning, he’d come into this room early. And if he bought this house, he’d give this room to Phil. In fact, he could bait his father with a description of all this. He noted the oak parquet with its huge intricate inlaid squares, and the ancient railroad clock on the wall.

Red velvet draperies hung from brass rods, and a great large photograph hung over the mantel, of a group of six men, all in safari khaki, gathered together against a backdrop of banana and tropical trees.

It had to have been taken with sheet film. The detail was superb. Only now in the digital age could you blow up a photo to that size without degrading it hopelessly. But this had never been retouched. Even the banana leaves looked engraved. You could see the finest wrinkles in the men’s jackets, and the dust on their boots.

Two of the men had rifles, and several stood quite casually and free with nothing in their hands at all.

“I had that made,” Marchent said. “Quite expensive. I didn’t want a painting, only an accurate enlargement. It’s four by six feet. You see the figure in the middle? That’s Uncle Felix. That is the only really current picture I had of him before he disappeared.”

Reuben drew closer to look at it.

The names of the men were inscribed in black ink across the mat border just inside the frame. He could barely read them.

Marchent turned on the chandelier for him and now he could see plainly the figure of Felix, the dark-skinned and dark-haired man who stood near the middle of the group, a very agreeable-looking figure really, with a fine tall physique, and the same lean graceful hands he admired so in Marchent, and even something of the same very gentle smile. A likable man surely, an approachable man, with a near-childlike expression: curious, enthusiastic perhaps. He looked to be anywhere from twenty to about thirty-five.

The other men were undeniably interesting, all with rather abstracted and serious expressions, and one in particular stood out, to the far left. He was tall like the others and he wore his dark hair shoulder length. If it hadn’t been for the safari jacket and the khaki pants, he might have looked like an Old West buffalo hunter with that long hair. There was
positive radiance to his face—rather like one of those dreamy figures in a Rembrandt painting who seems touched at a particular mystical moment by a key light from God.

“Oh, yes, him,” said Marchent rather dramatically. “Isn’t he something? Well, that was Felix’s closest friend and mentor. Margon Sperver. But Uncle Felix always called him just Margon and sometimes Margon the Godless, though why in the world he called him that I don’t know. It always made Margon laugh. Margon was the teacher, said Felix. If Uncle Felix couldn’t answer a question, he’d say, ‘Well, maybe the teacher knows,’ and off he would go to find Margon the Godless by phone wherever he was in the world. There are thousands of photographs of these gentlemen in the rooms upstairs—Sergei, Margon, Frank Vandover—all of them. They were his closest associates.”

“And you couldn’t reach any of them after he disappeared?”

“Not a single one. But understand. We didn’t start trying for about a year. We expected to hear from him any day. His trips could be very short, but then he’d vanish, you know, just drop off the charts. He’d go off into Ethiopia or India beyond anyone’s reach. One time he called from an island in the South Pacific after a full year and a half. My father sent a plane to get him. And no, I never found a single one of them, including Margon the Teacher, and that was the saddest part of all.”

She sighed. She seemed very tired now. In a small voice, she added: “At first my father didn’t try very hard. He came into a lot of money right after Felix disappeared. He was happy for the first time. I don’t think he wanted to be reminded about Felix. ‘Felix, always Felix,’ he would say whenever I asked questions. He and my mother wanted to enjoy the new legacy—something from an aunt, I believe.” This was costing her, this painful confession.

He reached out slowly, giving her full warning, and then put his arm around her and kissed her cheek just the polite way that she had kissed him earlier that afternoon.

She turned and melted against him for a moment, kissing him on the lips quickly and then said again that he was the most charming boy.

“It’s a heartbreaking story,” he said.

“You are such a strange boy, so young yet so old at the same time.”

“I hope so,” he said.

“And there’s that smile. Why do you hide that smile?”

“Do I?” he asked. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you’re right, you certainly are. It’s a heartbreaking story.” She looked again at the photograph. “That’s Sergei,” she said, pointing to a tall blond-haired man, a man with pale eyes who seemed to be dreaming or lost in his thoughts. “I suppose I knew him the best. I didn’t really know the others that well at all. At first, I thought sure I’d find Margon. But the numbers I found were for hotels in Asia and the Middle East. And they knew him, of course, but they had no idea where he was. I called every hotel in Cairo and Alexandria looking for Margon. As I recall, we tried every place in Damascus too. They’d spent a lot of time in Damascus, Margon and Uncle Felix. Something to do with an ancient monastery, newly unearthed manuscripts. In fact, all those finds are still upstairs. I know where they are.”

“Ancient manuscripts? Here? They could be priceless,” said Reuben.

“Oh, they probably are, but not to me. To me they’re a huge responsibility. What do I do with them to see they’re preserved? What would he want done with them? He was so critical of museums and libraries. Where would he want all this to go? Of course his old students would love to see these things, they’ve never stopped calling and asking, but such affairs have to be carefully managed. The treasures should be archived and under supervision.”

“Oh, yes, I know, I’ve spent my time in the libraries of Berkeley and Stanford,” he said. “Did he publish? I mean did he publish his finds?”

“Never to my knowledge,” she said.

“You think Margon and Felix were together on this last trip?”

She nodded.

“Whatever happened,” she said, “it happened to them together. My worst fear is that it happened to them all.”

“All six of them?”

“Yes. Because none of them ever called here looking for Felix. At least not that I ever knew. No more letters from any of them ever came. Before there had often been letters. I had a devil of a time finding the letters, and when I did, well, I couldn’t make out the addresses and all turned out to be dead ends. The point is none of them ever contacted anyone here, looking for Uncle Felix, ever. And that’s why I’m afraid whatever it was it happened to them all.”

“So you couldn’t find any of them, and they never wrote again to him?”

“That’s it exactly,” she said.

“Felix left no itinerary, no written plans?”

“Oh, yes, probably he did, but you see, no one could read his personal writing. He had a language all his own. Well, actually they all used that language, or so it seems from some of the notes and letters I later found. They didn’t always use it. But apparently they all could. Wasn’t in the English alphabet. I’ll show you some of it later. I even hired a computer genius to crack it a few years ago. Couldn’t get to first base.”

“Extraordinary. You know all this will fascinate my readers. Marchent, this could become a tourist attraction.”

“But you saw the old articles about Uncle Felix. It’s been written about before.”

“But the old articles talk only about Felix, not his friends. They don’t really have all these details. I see this as a three-part story already.”

“Sounds marvelous,” she said. “You do exactly as you please with it. And who knows? Maybe someone out there might know something about what became of them. One never really knows.”

Now that was an exciting thought, but he knew not to push it. She’d been living with this tragedy for twenty years.

She led him slowly out of the room.

Reuben glanced back at the agreeable gathering of gentlemen who stared back so placidly from the framed photo. And if I buy this place, he thought, I’ll never take that picture down. That is, if she lets me keep it or make a copy of it. I mean shouldn’t Felix Nideck remain in some form in this house?

“You wouldn’t share that picture with whoever bought the place, would you?”

“Oh, very likely,” she said. “I do have smaller copies, after all. You know all this furniture is included.” She gestured as they moved across the great room. “Did I say that already? Come, I want to show you the conservatory. It’s almost time for dinner. Felice is deaf and nearly blind but she does everything by a clock in her head.”

“I can smell it,” he said as they crossed the big room. “Delicious.”

“There’s a girl up from the town helping her. Seems these kids will work for almost nothing just to have a little experience here in this house. I’m starving myself.”