Saint Peter’s Wolf (20 page)

I would try to arrange my life to protect my secret, and I would also try to find some way to understand what was happening. I believed that my intellect, my rational mind, could grapple with it and keep me alive and, at the same time, spare others from the harm that I now knew I could cause.

Mrs. Meridian was coiling the tube of the vacuum cleaner. “Just finishing up,” she beamed.

Her schedule had been to arrive whenever she felt the house might need cleaning, and clean it well. She was a dangerous person, with her all-seeing eyes.

“I was thinking,” I began, “that I might not need you anymore.”

Her hands were on her hips. “You told me I could be on flexible schedule, Dr. Byrd.”

“You've done excellent work, really superb. I'll write the best recommendation imaginable for you. But I'll be spending so much time away from this house.…”

It amounted to a lie. I had no idea what my future would be like, and she sensed subterfuge. Orgies, she seemed to think, or drugs. “This will be a disappointment, Dr. Byrd.”

“I'll give you all I owe you, and a little extra, with my thanks.”

I scribbled such an ample check that she smiled as she tucked it into her apron. “It's such a lovely home, sir,” she said, so politely she was nearly mocking me. She must have believed that she had, with her improvised cleaning schedule, offended me. I should have explained more clearly what I expected of her.

The truth was, I had always enjoyed seeing Mrs. Meridian, and she was a formidable worker. She was simply the sort of person who saw and remembered too well. “This is your key, then,” she said, and I took it, perhaps too eagerly.

Work in the garden, I told myself. Calm yourself. You'll think of something.

I was a cartoon character who had walked off a cliff. As long as I did not look down I would not fall. I raked, forked over the earth, stabbing the tines hard into the dirt, trying to pretend that there was hope.

Sweating, denying the nausea that snaked inside me. I would come up with a plan. Some sort of plan. I had faith in myself.

Late that afternoon, plunging a spade into the ground, I cut an earthworm in two. It spasmed, and I was looking on, aghast, when the distant doorbell chimed. I knocked some of the soil from my hands and hurried to the door only to peer through the peephole.

There in the fisheye lens was Stan Houseman. I closed my eyes. Here was one of those men whom I most valued, and most of all did not want to see. Don't open the door, I told myself. Stay still. He'll go away.

But surely he had heard me. I opened the door, and stood back, gesturing as though I welcomed him into my house. Stan had an expression I had never, in years, seen on his face before. Perhaps once, when one of his children had measles.

He was pale, his freckles like brown stars. He did not even want to look me in the eye.

He was afraid.

Twenty-Two

He carried a manila envelope, flicking it nervously in his hand.

“You wanted them back.”

They were Stan's photographs of the fangs.

“That's right.” I smiled. “And you included the negatives, too. I appreciate it.”

For a moment we were both happy to be distracted with spoons of tea, cups and saucers, cubes of sugar, and the silver tongs with eagle claws I have always found both elegant and funny. Stan asked if I had a beer.

He took five great swallows, and then said, “I called Zinser, just this afternoon.”

I stared at him. “I wish you hadn't.” I recovered. “I was just there this afternoon. I must have missed you by a matter of minutes.” I adjusted the red kettle on its burner.

He followed me into the living room, where I lit a match to the manila envelope, and flung it flaming into the fireplace. The chimney drew the tangle of smoke, and the photographs burned quickly, as though they had been intended, all along, for easy destruction.

“He told me some of the relatively recent history of the fangs.” He said the word “fangs” as though it tasted bad on his tongue.

I told him that I knew all about it. Yes, Brittany, yes, the Loire, yes Zurich. I poured hot water into the teapot, and carried the entire tray into my study, with another beer for Stan.

We sat, as though at ease. Stan was the poorer actor. He interlocked his fingers, ran his hand through his hair, cleared his throat all the while I described the crossbow Zinser had demonstrated for me.

Stan was one of those people who simply know things—they don't doubt, they don't overlook. It isn't simple intuition. They are simply so strongly connected to life that they make few mistakes. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked at last.

I shook my head.

“In Golden Gate Park.”

“I saw the headlines. Wolves.”

He touched the head on his beer, like a boy who had never tasted beer before, and stared at the dollop of foam on his finger. “The wolves escaped from the zoo. Someone with a power tool of some sort ripped out the fence, and at first they thought the wolves killed the man and the woman.” Stan did not continue for a moment. “They found the wolves at Lake Merced. They were chasing ducks.”

A vivid splash of memory: running beside the water.

“They used tranquilizer darts. It was quite a big story—on the radio all day.”

I shrugged, a man who did not trouble himself with news. “So,” I said, “they caught them.”

“And it looks like they really didn't have time to cover the distance between the park and Lake Merced. They didn't kill that man and woman.”

“People are always blaming wolves unjustly,” I said, as though it were a matter of only passing philosophical interest. I had learned: I kept my barely trembling hands busy with the sugar tongs.

“But some sort of creature like a wolf did the job. It nearly decapitated the woman, and disemboweled the man. Then it reached the zoo and freed the wolves.”

“An animal used a power tool?”

“I didn't say the news made sense.”

“You say ‘freed.' Are they in prison?”

“Don't be cute with me, Ben. You know why I'm here.”

“For some reason you seem to think I've been eating people for dinner.”

He flushed. “I never suggested that. Christ, I would never even think such a thing.”

“But you're nervous. Uneasy. You are thinking precisely such a thing, but you won't admit it.”

“No, Ben—”

“You really believe all that rubbish about the fangs. I thought of you as a scientist—”

“It's impossible. I know that. They are only some old teeth.”

“So what's the matter, Stan. Why are you so upset?”

Stan put his hands over his face, and shook his head, a picture so distraught I went to his side and put my hand on his shoulder. “I just am. I don't know. I'm worried. Maybe I'm a fool.”

“Maybe foolish. Never a fool.” I recognized that Stan was a good man, who sensed things that would never occur to a duller-witted person. I wondered if I would be able to do what he was doing, confront a friend with a monstrous doubt about the friend himself. Stan was not a coward.

“I'm taking the whole family back to Chicago for the holidays,” he said. “I need a rest.”

“You've been working too hard,” I suggested.

He nodded.

“Good! What a great idea,” I said, too heartily.

Stan shook his head again. “It was some kind of animal. The thing that killed the couple. There are puncture wounds that can only be teeth.”

“No wonder it's been on the news.”

“The media hasn't gotten that bit of information yet. I've done a little work for the coroner's office, identifying snapped-off knife blades, unusual threads found on strangulation victims, any number of antique, curious instruments of death. I once identified a screwless bolt from a captain's chair. It had found its way into an insurance salesman's cerebellum. A friend beat him to death with the chair, and burned the chair.”

“Some friends are like that.”

“I've heard most murder victims are killed by someone who knows them.”

“Maybe the couple in the park knew a bear.”

Stan smiled, grateful to hear even a thin joke. “Anyway, I called a friend at the coroner's and they say it was without a doubt a gigantic animal of some kind, and the prints match up with others they've found in various locations in the City.”

“Various locations?” My mouth was dry.

“Yes, there was another incident. I'm vague on the details, but you might get a phone call.”

Stan, I thought, why do you have to be right so often? Why couldn't you be wrong once in a while? This man was alive to every possibility, kept fresh by his love for his wife and his children, his ever growing house, his love for the Mendocino hills. He was health itself, I thought; such men are dangerous. I could not lift my teacup. Tea would have splashed everywhere.

“A woman was raped by something horrendous. The lab doesn't know what to make of any of it.”

I managed the cup to my lips and sipped.

“They need some extra psychological advice. She's at UC Medical Center, out of her mind completely. You've done work like that in the past.”

“Often.” Eager to distract him, I continued, “Once, I hypnotized a kidnapping victim for a description of her abductor.”

“Did they catch the kidnapper?”

“It was a hoax. The mother talked the daughter into it, so they could get publicity and get the estranged dad to up his child support when the kid was found safe.” I added another cube of sugar. “So maybe this is a hoax, too.”

Stan tried to smile. “Maybe, but I don't know. I don't know who would eat someone's intestines as a hoax.”

Mr. Porterman told me of a dream. In this dream a figure followed him through a parking lot which, while it was full of cars, was devoid of people. What followed him was a wolf, but it was a wolf with the eyes of his father.

“It was one of the worst nightmares I've ever had as an adult. I was looking forward to what you might say about it.”

The dream was uncannily like my own dream. Here I was, trying to deny that my life was crumbling by going about my routine, and bland Mr. Porterman had dumped a shovelful of his steamiest subconscious into my lap.

I struggled to do my usual dance: what do you think it means?

“I really want to hear what you have to say. Please, Dr. Byrd.”

I adjusted my tie. “Hasn't there been some talk of wolves in the news?”

“Wolves! Good Lord—more than that. Some sort of monster wolf ate two people in Golden Gate Park, and raped a woman. That's all people are talking about. The most recent news is something really amazing. The woman who was raped, attacked, or whatever you can call it in a case like this. They did semen tests, and it turns out the semen wasn't human at all. Lupine. She was raped by a wolf.”

The world was transparent for a moment, the carpet, Mr. Porterman's pale face, my desk, all nearly invisible. Behind and within every object I could see the real world: night. “I try to avoid the news.”

“I don't blame you. You know what I think the dream means?”

I encouraged him to tell me.

“It's a primal fear—fear of my father, and, more particularly, fear that my father might eat me. I think all this wolf news stirred up some fear left over from my infancy.” He opened his hands as if to say: how did I do? “A fear from the past,” he added.

“I think that some day before long you won't need to see me any more, Mr. Porterman. You are developing some real insight into yourself, a sort of psychological acuity that I admire.”

“You're getting bored with me,” said Mr. Porterman, suspicious for a moment.

I smiled, my most reassuring, nonverbal clue that what a client had just said was beyond, or beneath, comment. I had, though, become very fond of Mr. Porterman.

“Why, if you think about it, was the parking lot full of cars but had no people at all?” mused Mr. Porterman.

“That's a striking detail. It certainly makes the dream more troubling.”

“I think because no one sees this creature. He's there, in our daily, and nightly, lives. But the cops don't catch him. Nobody really gets a look at him. He doesn't live in the same world as human beings.”

“But this part of the dream would seem to be—”

“Not about my father trying to eat me. I know. It's directly about that monster wolf.”

I shifted in my chair. It occurred to me that the time would soon come when I would be unable to sit here like this, listening to people. My voice betrayed none of my feeling. “Do you really suppose there is such a creature?”

“I'm a skeptic. But something happened to those people. I suppose you think”—he smiled, hopefully—“that it's some sort of collective delusion.”

“A subatomic flash from the collective psyche?”

“I don't think so. I live near Golden Gate Park, off Nineteenth. I walked up there the other day, and they had yellow chalked outlines around the place where the bodies had been, and yellow outlines around the black patches of blood, and there was a lot of it.”

Tina stayed late that evening, “setting up the files,” she said. Indeed, I had several new clients, one or two of them clients who had left Orr during recent months. But she kept glancing my way, and when she came into my office to hand me the mail she let her left hand rest lightly, just briefly, on my wrist.

I had several fears. I could take each one out, like a bright jewel, and balance it in my mind. There was the fear that I would be gunned down. I knew how that dog must have felt, crawling with two lead stones in its hindquarters, its bowels swelling with blood.

Another fear was that I would hurt someone I loved or someone I once loved. This would cause me sharp remorse, and yet I felt that I would always know what I was doing during the nights Out There. I was relieved that Stan was leaving town for a few days, because I had mixed feelings about Stan. But I was fairly confident that I would harm no one I considered a friend.