Saint Peter’s Wolf (19 page)

But surely, I considered, this could not possibly be Zinser's reasoning. He was a sturdy, no-nonsense man, and surely he was not thinking of killing a creature of the night, or demonstrating to me that this was how it had been done, and how it could be done again. I was projecting onto this collector a range of motives he could not possibly possess. He was not doing all this to warn me.

I admired Zinser for a quality I had always lacked. He was connected to the earth, solid in his feel for the things he touched. Even as I envied him, I sensed a stirring of this sense in me. A gnat, a tiny fleck of creature, paused in the air before me. The sound of my own breath was like the surging of a great tide. I wondered if, to people like Zinser and Stan Houseman, the world had always been alive like this.

If I was alive to the sunlight, I was also alive to the cruelty of this weapon. I made myself smile. “It won't work,” I said, wanting it not to work, hoping that it was seasoned far beyond any power to fire a missile. “It's too old. I wouldn't even try it.”

Because something in me hated this crossbow. Something in me bristled at its sight. My lip curled, and I had to turn away so that Zinser would not see my involuntary snarl. This was the enemy, this man with the ancient weapon in his hands. Granted, a crossbow would not be the easiest weapon to use against a large wolf. The range would not be long enough for open-field hunting. But at a close range—

“Let's go find out,” he said. He reached into a drawer and brought out a short black quarrel, an iron dart.

I did not want to see the weapon fired. “It won't work,” I said. “You'll break it.” My voice was hoarse.

“Worth the risk,” he said, and handed me the quarrel.

It was cold and heavy. I felt it sink into me, as though in a previous, faraway life a dart like this had brought me down. The cold, iron missile was unblemished with rust, and the tapered head was sharp under the ball of my thumb. It was not sharp enough to cut, but then it was not designed to be. I had the feeling I sometimes have when seeing a gun: how much harm their very existence implies, and how easy it would be to die.

I tried to smile again. “Don't even try,” I croaked.

“I know what you mean. A valuable antique. But I'm going to gamble. Come on.”

His garden was a lake of sunlight, and we waded into the warmth as though into water. Birch trees were naked with winter. The chalk-white bark was scored with black dapples like the drawings of eyes. Zinser sighted down the crossbow, several paces from one of the trees.

“I got some more information on the recent history of those fangs,” he said.

I thrust my hands into my pockets.

“The latest information came from a source I don't usually use—Interpol.”

My mind raced. Run run you have no friends here.

I ordered myself: stop trembling.

He slipped the quarrel into its slot, and the mechanism clicked. He lowered himself carefully to the grass and worked with the crank for a moment. He was a strongly built man, despite his age, one of those men who seem durable and fit for whatever might happen, but he had some trouble with the crank, which was the cocking mechanism and would, if it failed, disable the weapon.

He put his feet on the crosspiece, and gritted his teeth. How like beasts we look, I thought, when we make a grimace of effort.

He relaxed for a moment, looking up at me as though he were planning a putt in a cheerful game of golf. And that's all it was, I consoled myself. Sport in a sunny garden. A whimsical experiment with an antique. Two men acting like boys.

But at the same time I thought: don't work. Please don't work. “If you have to force a device,” I said, “you're probably doing something wrong.”

“Usually, but these crossbows were notoriously tough to use. Notoriously. Ben, this is Flemish. A Flemish crossbow. Stop worrying. Those guys were craftsmen.”

He tried again, and the crank turned, perhaps for the first time in centuries. The old tool worked as a man long ago at a workbench had intended it to work. The lock clicked, the bow string caught, and the weapon was primed. And potent, death caught and held.

I helped Zinser to his feet, and he was careful to aim the weapon at the ground. He was flushed, and very much the little boy with a new, dangerous toy. “Imagine this, Ben. Hundreds of years in my hand. Think of all the history I have right here, cocked and ready to fire.”

And for Zinser's sake, reluctantly, I wanted it to fire. He would be disappointed if it snapped, and the quarrel flopped. My chest was constricted, and I felt that the weapon was a contrivance designed against me. Still, for the sake of this lively man, I hoped it would work.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I nodded, trying to smile.

“I'm going to shoot that tree. Right in the heart.”

He aimed. Then he lowered the weapon. “It's a good thing that tree isn't moving around. I don't know how I'm going to hit it as it is.”

He raised the crossbow to his shoulder again, steadied himself, and then his finger squeezed the trigger, a black iron thorn that slid, and slid farther. And nothing happened. Nothing happened at all. Man and weapon stood like a work of art, a hunter's pose. There was silence.

Zinser cried out, and shook a fist in the air.

A black dart jutted from the center of a birch eye. It looked as though it had always been there, as though it had always been intended to be there, the tree, the garden incomplete without it.

“Now,” he said, “we'll never get it out.”

It was stuck. No sap oozed around the shaft. The tree and the quarrel were now one. I tugged, but nothing happened. Zinser laughed. “I'll tell the gardener to dig it out,” he said. “It sank it all the way in there—this thing could kill a bear.”

Or, I thought, any large, dangerous beast.

He looked at the crossbow with new eyes. “This thing would knock a man down dead just like that. Even in armor it would damn near kill him. What a piece of work!”

But he laughed as he said it, and I joined him, although the strongest part of me hated it.

Inside we had tea in the collection room. The crossbow returned to a proud place on the wall, Zinser turned to me and said, “You know what I've had to read about lately? On computer printouts from Europe? He shook his head and mouthed a distasteful word. “Each thing I read is crazier than the last.” He held out a hand as if to say: how else can I put it?

“Lycanthropy,” I announced in what I hoped was a bored voice.

He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “You're the psychologist. Tell me about that particular mental condition.”

“People can think they're anything. Cats. Horses. Or they can think they're nothing, empty space. They can simply sit like statues. People are like wet clay—the psyche can take any shape.”

“I'm asking about the shape that thinks it's a wolf.”

“It's very rare. Of course, people have been raised by wolves. At least, there is some historical evidence of this. So those people are really pursuaded that they are part of the pack, and really never adjust to being human, even when they are captured as children.”

Zinser grunted, perhaps caught by my use of the word “captured.” Was it desirable for a child to continue to live among wolves? But what he really saw was my defensiveness on the subject. I wanted to skirt the subject, touch on catalepsy, feral children.

He looked at me as though he truly saw me. He had a gaze like no one I had ever seen. “I'm talking about madness. Serious madness.”

I waited.

“Virtually every person who has owned those teeth has gone mad. Wolf-mad. Police records, coroner's reports—in French and German, but I plugged my way through them. The last hundred years of those teeth have been a scorched trail of misery, Ben. People ending up in mental hospitals, prisons, shot. A typical owner was shot in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, thirty years ago. He was carrying the arm of someone he had slaughtered, torn from its socket. Imagine that—ripped out of its socket, Ben. The deranged man wouldn't surrender. The gendarmes had to pepper him with small arms fire. They killed him.

“And you want more? The owner before that was killed in Redon, in Brittany. Responsible for a dozen murders in Brittany and Normandy, killed in the woods. You want more? The owner before that drowned in the Loire out-swimming a brace of hounds with five bullets in him. One after another, back until you can't get the records and you have to use the archives. Unsolved crimes, misery, cannibalism. This is a disgusting trail and it's all true, and it all hinges on the fact that someone in every deceased person's family falls in love with the fangs, thinks they must be valuable, goes mad. Until at last someone with a scrap of common sense can't stand to have them around, but they sell them or have them auctioned off so the new owner, unwitting, ignorant, can have fun with the teeth all over again.

“The teeth vanished about twenty years ago. I think the last wolfloony's relatives stuck the teeth out somewhere on a curb or in the woods somewhere, and they got discovered, and sold to a dealer, and found their way into this lot of flatware and salt cellars. You know how some works inspire peace? Like the Pietà. I'm not religious—I don't think about such things. I'm a man of common sense. But you look at that Madonna with her dead son and feel peace. Godly peace. Well, these teeth are just the opposite. Way, deeply the opposite. These teeth inspire evil.”

“I don't believe it.”

Zinser waved my words away. “Belief has nothing to do with it. I wouldn't have believed it. So what? It's true.”

“It can't be. It's impossible.”

“I want the teeth back, Ben. Right away. I'll give you something else in my collection in trade. I thought you might want the cross bow. You like that, right? A working crossbow? I'll get the dart out of the tree—”

“I'm keeping the fangs.”

“It's a mistake. It's a very bad mistake. You like wolves? Look over there. I've got a sixteenth-century Paduan she-wolf. Look at all those nice little teats. Bronze. One just like it in the Frick. I'll trade you. No rational man would turn down this trade.”

It was so much like Dr. Ashby's small bronze that I could not speak for a moment. Her teats were full, hard, and they hurt.

When I could speak, I said, “What will you do with the fangs when you get them back?”

“Destroy them. They have no aesthetic or scholarly use. They're evil.”

“Why not trust me to destroy them?”

“What's the matter with you? I offer you a rare crossbow, a real treasure, and you turn it down. You are turning down a fine piece of art, a bronze she-wolf, a dignified, rare work so you can keep these old wolf teeth. Explain to me, Ben—what's going on?”

“You don't have any record of them within, say, the last fifteen years?”

He smiled, as though a sign of curiosity was nearly as promising as a sign of common sense. “Not really. It's all mixed up. We did a computer search of wolflike killings, sick people with wolf fixations, all that sort of thing. We found some in Zurich, but the records are confused, as though someone had gotten into the computers and the files and erased things, threw things away. A family, maybe, destroying painful evidence. I wouldn't blame them. The next thing we know the fangs are in this mixed lot of combined silver—you know the rest. No one knows how they got there.”

I nearly wanted to tell Zinser that it was too late, that the fangs had done their work. I liked the man so much, however, that I told a lie. “I'll think about returning the fangs. They don't mean that much to me. You don't have to trade anything for them. They are, really, still yours. Can I think about it a few more weeks? Who knows? Maybe you'll change your mind and decide to name a price.”

Zinser gave me a combination smile and frown. “I wish you'd make it a few hours, not weeks. But I'll give you credit. You're showing the first stirrings of common sense.”

We were almost to the front door when he said, “Someone must be monitoring the microwave traffic between here and Europe. I got a call from a man named Gneiss. Gneiss like the rock.”

Don't stay here you'll die.

“He's bothering everyone in town,” I managed to say. “Trying to solve all the bizarre crimes for the last fifty years or something like that.”

“They picked up my description of the fangs off an Interpol backup file. Apparently the word ‘wolf' set off an alarm and practically shut down the system.”

I wanted to ask: Will you see him? What did you tell him? How long do I have before they come to take the fangs away?

How long do I have before they gun me down?

“I told him I'd see him when I felt like it. You can't let these government men push you around. They will, you know. I bet it has something to do with taxes. Some sort of customs flap. Or maybe they're doing the same background work on the teeth I am, only I'm about two laps ahead of them.”

As I drove I had a thought so shocking that I pulled over to the curb on upper Broadway, not far from where I had first hit Belinda. The thought was so bad, so repugnant, that I was trembling.

I should find Karl Gneiss now, today, and kill him.

Killing while Out There, culling the weak for a feast, was something I understood and could, uneasily, forgive. But to consider killing as I drove, in daylight—this was evil.

The teeth were eroding me. Like a drinker who wakes one morning to see veins on his nose ruptured, or like a smoker who finds to his surprise that he cannot walk up three steps without coughing, I saw that the fangs were not leaving my daylight self alone. Far from it. I was losing my day self to that other, stronger creature of the night.

In psychotherapy, the goal is to be aware of the problem, knowing that if we are aware of the source of a fear, we will still be afraid, from time to time, but our enslavement to our fear will begin to end. Awareness is the beginning of freedom. I reminded myself of this as I glanced into the rearview mirror, and eased my car toward my home.