The Gold Diggers (42 page)

All the way to the ranch, his head was nicely crowded with children playing in the sand, with easy lovers arm in arm and capering dogs and prizefighter types keeping watch in phosphorescent orange trunks. He didn't seem to realize that he hadn't
seen
any of that. Like Rita with her hollow-paneled doors and the winding drive through the deer park, he had such a highly developed sense of place in Venice that he'd lost his grip on the real thing. The beach had assumed the proportions of a benign morality tale, where the seven ages of man sat squinting in the sun and everyone had enough room. It was the perfect setting for the consideration of big investments, certainly, proof of the imminence of milk and honey. In much the same way, Crook House was the right place for Rita's Gothic fantasies. They got her into the secret room, while Nick, whenever he was gentled by Pacific airs, tended to go home and do the thing that would make him rich. But now there was this difference between them. The events of one awful afternoon, because they took place in the room itself, had cured Rita of confusing the books she read with the houses she lived in. Nick was the same as ever. He wanted from Venice a whiff of a rose-colored world, and now he was sure it would be all right at the ranch, just because he understood what Sam was about. He had too much faith as usual in the reasonable flow of events. In that way, the curious detour to Venice was something like a snort of cocaine at the door to a party. Something he didn't do.

He didn't even know where the mine was. He stopped at the crest of the first hill and looked down at the bunkhouse. Nobody there. Sam was being absolutely literal about underground. Nick wasn't altogether sure there
was
a mine. For all he knew, it was part of the realtor's hype that sold him. An actual mine, he'd said, from the 1850s. A band of Spanish priests trying to cash in on the stories that filtered down from the gold rush. Either they were greedy like everybody else, or they wanted ore for the hardware and graven images in their church—the story didn't say which. Cheap Indian labor always available from the mission. Nick had taken it in at all only because of his grandparents' Sunday jaunts in the hills with pick and shovel. They were as dumb as the Spanish fathers, imagining gold so close to the ocean, in such a desert place. And Nick had only mentioned it to Sam because—he couldn't remember why.

He drove downhill past the turn to the bunkhouse. As he came into the floor of the valley, the road filled up with rocks and holes, and even when he only crept along, the car still bucked and quivered like a stagecoach. What little exploring Nick had done was on the uphill slopes, in the opposite direction, partly to take in the view, partly because it was the one good road. He'd turned back from here every time. He figured there couldn't be much to see at the end, since it was obvious nobody'd been this way in years. And the going was so slow, he didn't believe Sam could make it in the MG. The Mercedes, at least, had the soul of a Jeep, but even so, the road was going sandy and losing its grip. At the same time, he'd come in abruptly under the great cold shadow of the west ridge. He couldn't make out the shapes of the stones he hit, and they ripped at his tires and threw him to the side. The dust swirled up around the windshield. He was suddenly scared he wouldn't be able to turn around. So he stopped. And when he got out to get his bearings, he found it was wilderness wherever he looked. The road, except for the hover of dust that smoked in his wake, was hardly distinguishable from all the surrounding waste.

A couple of hundred feet further on, it petered out entirely, and the ridge went steeply up. There was no sign of an entrance to a mine, he could already tell, and if it was off the road and had to be reached by foot, he knew he'd never find it. He wondered if Sam had come to the same dead end. Had he been thoughtless enough not to check it out first? And how mad was he now, with Peter and a Rembrandt crammed in his car and no hideout to go to? Only because he'd come this far, Nick walked on forward to the base of the ridge. It would be dark by the time he got back to Bel-Air. Then he'd get the call. Then go out again. The sense of order and certainty Venice had just given him began to evaporate, and with no warning the anger came. Not so much at Sam as at the layers and layers of complication. Nothing he could do could make it all work. The only virtue he applauded in himself was organization, the keeping of things in their places, and he'd come to a day when it did no good. He couldn't even name the thing he was angry at.

The flat part ended. Just as he thought, there wasn't the trace of an opening. It must have caved in long ago, like a wound closing up, and everything was so far back to normal that no one would ever know. And then if Nick forgot to pass on the bits of the story to the next buyer, the ending would be complete. It would start to be as if it had never happened. And because that was too much like life itself, he threw back his head to defy the indifferent sky before he turned back, to hate it hard, even if it always won. But the cry broke in his throat. Way, way above him, seventy-five or a hundred feet, he made out a light. Not shining like a lantern on a cliff. Glowing, sort of, as if a clump of fireflies were resting in a bush. Or as if the light were coming from a distance, deep inside.

He started scrambling right away. He didn't take the time to look for a donkey path or a set of steps cut in the side of the hill. He'd had enough of roads and plotted courses, anyway. Straight up was the only route he had any use for now. The ground kept sliding away when he stepped, so to keep his speed, he had to grab hold of plants and do it on all fours. He didn't even mind the noise he made. There was such a rustle and scurry of creatures in the bushes around him, trying to get out of his way, that he needed to feel he was clearing the way ahead as he went. He didn't want to face down any wild animals, even if here it was only rats. Or snakes. He flinched in spite of himself, remembering what the ranch had done to Peter. But he figured what the hell, it
couldn't
happen twice, and pushed ahead and didn't listen anymore. After so much wandering, in fact, he liked this part. He dug in with the toes of his Bally shoes and felt the sweat work up on his chest and forehead. His breath came faster. He wouldn't have cared if he'd had to climb all the way up and over. With every foot he gained, he seemed to get closer and closer to what they'd all gone through. His rage and emptiness
went
somewhere. He didn't suffer Rita's swing from mood to mood because his own complaint was typically no mood at all. But now all the blanks were filling up. The business of fate disappeared. When he was alive like this, he scorned it as a game for cowards.

He stood up to see where he'd got to. The light was more to the left than he'd figured, but he was almost level with it already and saw the top of an opening wide as a double door. The dark was falling fast, and the pale yellow light was more distinct. He wondered whether he would have spotted it right away from the top of the hill if he'd come at night. Probably. Why didn't Sam screen it, he wondered, and then he understood. Sam wasn't
hiding
yet. He'd banked on it that they wouldn't send out the police till Nick had talked to him, and he wanted Nick to find his way when he told him on the phone where to come. Nick didn't think he was expected yet. He and Hey had made a lucky guess. “Underground” was a clue, all right, but to Nick on the slope of the empty hill, it didn't seem as if Sam had dropped it consciously after all. And if the MG wasn't there at the end of the road, Sam might be away making the call to Crook House. Which meant, Nick concluded shrewdly, that Peter was all alone in the place where the light was coming from.

There seemed to be a level space in front of the mine entrance, and then it dropped off sheerly ten or twelve feet. Nick was able to move laterally with ease until he was directly below it. The climb up the face of the rock was a little more tricky. How in God's name, he wondered, had they ever expected to get the gold down? A chute of some kind, maybe. His right foot slipped out of a crevice, and he dangled a bit. There was a wrenching in the muscle of one thigh. He kicked off the shoe, and then, regaining the crevice, held out the other shoe and shook it till it fell. How did they get the
miners
up here? He slung one knee over the top and tried to pull himself up until he thought his head would explode. He couldn't do it. He was going to fall. And then it was over, and he was lying on his stomach on the edge of a wide bare ledge.

His face was in the dirt. He coughed and gagged, but in a way he wasn't sorry to begin by kissing the ground. And when he lifted his head and looked across at the opening, he was startled at how far he could see. There was a ghostly corridor, lined at intervals with candles, and it went in a long way and slightly down before it seemed to turn. Even at best, he'd expected little more than a space to huddle in amid a tangle of broken beams. He'd assumed the rest of what there used to be was all caved in. But it was so intact that it looked as if a troop of miners might come marching out, four abreast. The scale of the operation cowed him, and he suddenly felt dwarfed and exposed. He leapt to his feet and rushed to take cover. Flattened himself on the wall to the left of the entrance. Then he had to crouch and massage the soles of his stockinged feet, teeth clamped against the stinging from the rocks he'd run across. He cursed the loss of his shoes. Whatever he did from here on in, he wouldn't be doing fast.

He peered around the corner into the light, and there wasn't a sound or a sign of life except for the candles. He walked in a few paces and looked one over. New. Burnt down to five or six inches and set in a holder cut out of a protruding tooth of rock. But he began to see that everything about this place was finished and sculpted and worked. Between the first and second candle, a niche was carved out, though the saint who'd filled it had vanished. The wall of the corridor was amazingly smooth, almost as if they'd gone to the trouble to sand it down and buff it. It was once painted as well, Nick could tell from the patches and flakes of blue. Even the timbers that braced it were carved in a simple scroll, with here and there a more fully modeled figure, something like a smiling fish. Wouldn't Rita love it here? he thought. But he couldn't pause to imagine how fine it must have been. He had to dart along and get to the end and rescue Peter. Still, he didn't miss much from the corners of his eyes, and a picture grew in his head that it was more like a church than a mine shaft. He might have been walking toward a ruined altar in a country overrun by pagans.

Nick was a real civilian in church, and he hardly ever was in one, so he didn't feel the slightest tingle in the knees. But he had to admit it was superhuman and vaguely threatening. It made him wonder, as he came to the end and glanced back along the empty niches, how many places there were like this. Rita, given her taste in books, in some real way wasn't fazed by there being a secret room in Crook House. The way she saw it, in the sky-high price range, every house of a certain character and size was bound to have one. But Nick expected money to be spent entirely on the surface. If it turned out people were forever digging holes and hollowing out little mission churches and one-man museums, then the very earth under his feet wasn't solid. He couldn't get over how small it made him feel, even as he rushed on through and tried not to notice. And he felt big, for instance, in all the cavernous homes of Beverly Hills. He didn't mean small in the sense of man and God. His soul was a harder nut to crack than that. But where did people come by these lifetime projects? Where did they find the time?

The wall at the end had once been inlaid with mosaic, but most of it had fallen off. Only an arm and an angel's wing were visible still. And at either side of this wall were the openings into tunnels, into what must be the mine proper. The one on the right was impassable, clogged with rubble and dark. The one on the left was candle-lit. Nick ducked to enter it, and immediately had to climb down stairs in the stone. When he got to the passage at the bottom, it was almost as narrow as he was, and the air was hot and smoky. He hated it so much he couldn't move for a bit. But then up ahead he heard music, and he made himself go forward. Not the music of the spheres or the waters in the earth. Disco. AM radio.

The floor of the big chamber, as smooth as if they'd paved it, had gone easy on his feet, but here it was like walking on knifeblades again. He had to brace his hands against the wall, just so he could hobble along. Please, he thought, let Peter be able to leave under his own steam. Because Nick, though he'd brought Hey out from under the hill, couldn't carry a man ten feet like this. The tunnel he was in kept turning so much that he lost the feel of how far he was going or where he was now with relation to where it began. Deeper and deeper was all he was sure of. And he knew they'd have to get all the way out to get away. If they met Sam coming in the other direction, they were both sunk. Just now he wanted more than anything to shout Peter's name, but he waited. He couldn't stand to wait, and yet he was too scared of what it would mean if Peter didn't answer. In all this time he hadn't lost control. Since the moment Rita threw him over into the sand, he hadn't messed it up getting visions of worse coming to worst. But now he was going to see for real. Let him just be all right, he'd said to himself all along, but now he was saying it over and over so fast it slurred, and he felt like screaming. Please, please, please, he begged of no one in particular, as if the way were far too complicated now for anything to be all right.

He nearly tumbled head over heels into the cavern. The last turn was so sharp, the light so raw with smoke, that he found himself hanging again on an edge before he saw a thing. It was his hands gripping the walls that held him up. He was looking down into a deep basin, thirty or forty feet across, the floor ten feet below him. Here the light was from kerosene lamps, and the glow from the walls was steadier and clearer than candles. He could even breathe again, anchoring himself in a wide open space that didn't threaten to swallow him whole. In its way, this room was as lovely and strange as the chapel back at the surface. Rich with gravity and uncut matter, it was serious like the center of the earth. All content and no form.