Saint Peter’s Wolf (25 page)

“I'm a father,” he continued, “and it skews my thinking. I want to protect my kids. Sometimes it's all I think about. My wife, my kids.”

I had tried to forget: I had bitten off his face.

“It all sounds so ghastly.” I uttered the lines I thought a normal man would say. “I can't believe all this. I really can't. I'm stunned.” The words sounded, in my ears, so terribly false.

I summoned all my powers, and delivered a perfect lie. “This news is so awful, I've decided to do something drastic.”

I did not give him time to ask. “I'm giving the fangs back to Zinser. All this bad news has me feeling so terrible. I just can't stand having them around. I'm getting rid of them.”

In truth, I had to do something with the fangs, but I did not know, yet, what I might do.

Stan sounded altogether too happy to hear this. “I've hated them ever since I first saw them.”

But I knew what he was thinking. If I were willing to part with the fangs, then that irrational fear he had regarding me could be banished from his mind.

The fangs, I reassured him, were on their way out of my life.

I set down the receiver very carefully, as though afraid it might break. I should, I thought, turn myself in. Give myself up to the police immediately. I had killed.

Even so, my remorse was not a man's remorse. There was horror at what I had done, but it was muted. My night self, the beast, had absorbed most of my thoughts and feelings, so that above all I had the simplest compulsion.

It was as though the command were stitched into me with a needle: see Johanna.

Before you do anything, I thought, see her. And when you see her, tell her everything.

I wanted to take the fangs to her and get her advice. If I fled and left the fangs here, I would be abandoning them. They were mine. I had to do what was right.

Even now, in the daylight, my night self was a part of me, coming back to me with each heartbeat. I felt the canniness fill me again. My hearing sharpened.

So I was not afraid or surprised when there was a step at my front door, and a hand tried the latch.

Tried the latch as though the visitor had a right to enter. An impatient hand, a large hand, giving up on the doorbell, and knocking.

Karl Gneiss did not look tired after his long night, but he did look like a man who had been working hard. One knee had a grass stain, and there was a wrinkle on his right shoulder, or perhaps I imagined it, left by the recoil of his rifle.

He was accompanied by Stowe, his shadow. This time Stowe looked drawn and pensive, and did not even try to smile. He wore dark glasses and resembled a Secret Service agent.

The two men declined tea, and even water. Stowe said, barely above a whisper, “No thank you,” perhaps the first words I had ever heard him utter. They sat in my study, on the edges of their chairs.

But Gneiss relaxed almost immediately. He sat back in his chair, and exclaimed on the difficulty of finding parking in San Francisco.

I agreed. Tough town for parking.

I struck first. I told them I knew about Orr. I told them with a tremor in my voice, and felt honest anguish as I explained our long working relationship together.

Gneiss listened, both compassionate and bored, as though he knew all there was to know about sorrow. Then he leaned forward and pointed a finger at me. “You have got a wonderful opportunity.”

I blinked at him.

He smiled in an avuncular way, cocking his head. “You've got a big chance to do something right. You're going to be a big help to us.”

The dark glasses stared back at me. I found my teeth grinding together. I watched Stowe, his hands, the position of his black shoes on the carpet, as though any move he might make would kill me.

And yet, with the poise my night self provided me, I managed to seem what they would expect to see: a shaken, harmless human being. “How can I help you?”

“You can tell me anything you know about Johanna Fisher.” His mouth was clumsy with her name, giving it a hard
J
.

“I know almost nothing.”

“You've been seeing her.” He said the word “seeing” as though it were the rankest obscenity.

I agreed.

“Tell me what you know.” Not “us.” Me. Stowe was forgotten, an apparition.

He wants you to betray her.

Kill him now—kill both of them. I felt my body stiffen, lean forward, my fingers digging into my thighs. Stowe watched me from behind his dark glasses. I could nearly smell the cold steel of the gun he carried under his jacket.

These thoughts made it very difficult for me to speak. I coughed politely. “She works as a translator,” I offered. I knew it was a harmless, and useless, bit of information. “Why are you after her?”

“We need to talk to Miss Fisher.”

“So—go talk to her.”

He smiled. “These latest outbreaks of violence.” He spoke the phrase as though putting quotation marks around it. “These acts of brutal slaughter.” He let this phrase sink in. “These acts culminate what I believe to have been the presence here in San Francisco of what I would have to call something uncanny. A presence which has been here for months.”

I made myself appear to be patiently listening. I was watching the pulse in his neck.

“Until very recently there have been only random sightings here in this fine city. A footprint. A figure in headlights. It took my sitting at a computer scanning police logs from all over the country to detect what was taking place.”

Perhaps he expected me to ask questions. I said nothing.

For the first time he looked tired. “The police here have no use for us whatsoever.” He chuckled. “Even Washington barely tolerates me in the best of circumstances.”

He stopped smiling. “You will know how to cooperate with us.”

I smiled as he had smiled, my eyes hard.

He was abrupt. “Johanna Fisher has vanished.”

He stood, and his shadow stood with him. Gneiss gazed down at me. “I want you to understand us. We will never be the sort of people who get warrants.”

I was no longer the sort of man who would be cowed by any sort of bluster. And yet I warned myself to stay calm. Johanna was missing. I had to help her.

He nodded and Stowe vanished into the hall. A light step whispered on the stair. This automaton with his secret eyes, this gunslinging android, was searching my house.

Karl Gneiss listened to the house around him, the nearly silent passing of his shadow from room to room. “We offer understanding, not harm,” he said. “We offer loving arms.”

Then I knew that he did not suspect me, not yet. He had no idea that he had nearly gunned me down, just a few hours before. I could see, as well, that his investigation was faltering. The local police had evidently followed his instructions as far as readying hounds and guard dogs, but they would continue to believe their quarry to be a large, quite natural beast of some sort. They would have no patience with airy theories when they had real blood on kitchen floors. And in that would lie even further impatience with Gneiss. A nightlong search had resulted in nothing. A killer, of whatever sort, was at large.

There were plainly phenomena that Gneiss was straining to explain, if only to himself. A woman had been raped, lovers half eaten. After months of vague reports, there were bloody deaths.

But I, too, was seeing how little I had guessed. Or, if I had touched on it, had cringed back from it. It was beginning to all make sense now. I could not deny it any longer.

Stowe returned. He touched the rim of his dark glasses, to make sure he revealed no expression. For a moment I could imagine that he had no eyes, no nervous system. He was the dead force of law. He shrugged, as though to say: nothing so far.

“We'll go now,” Gneiss announced to Stowe, to me, and even to the house, as he gazed upward at the ceiling. “We'll be watching, Dr. Byrd,” he said with a smile.

“We'll be watching. You can't hide her.”

Twenty-Eight

I was about to run, and the fangs were going with me.

I had no plan, only a beast's faith in the power of flight. A peek out the living room window showed a shadow ostentatiously lounging in an unmarked car. They wanted to watch me, and they wanted to be seen watching.

I wondered if my phone was tapped. Johanna's phone rang unanswered. Perhaps Gneiss had, uncharacteristically, told the truth. Perhaps she really was gone.

I tried to reach Lieutenant Solano, but he was away from his desk. There was a hubbub in the room around Solano's abandoned desk. It was not an easy day to be a cop.

It was wrong for me to even attempt to find Johanna. I would only bring trouble her way. I would have to escape alone, and I was taking the only precious object that still mattered to me.

I wanted to ask her what to do with them. I could not carry them with me forever. And I wanted to see her once more to say farewell. I had to put it that way. Farewell. The thought of never seeing her again was a wound. She was life to me.

But I told myself that I was bringing suspicion upon her. I would have to leave, and never see her again. Never. The thought was nearly poisonous.

She had vanished. Strangely enough, I had so much faith in her that I never really worried. She was visiting one of her friends. She had left the city, the state. She had that gift I had long since recognized of being, quite suddenly, somewhere else. It was only right that she worked as a translator. She easily slipped from one place to another, from thought to thought.

Never.

Maybe some day I would call her. Only—what sort of future did I have, if I really considered it? She would have the life of a beautiful gifted woman. It would be better for her if she never thought of me again.

The carbon steel door was cold to my touch, and the dial would not turn easily. The low hiss it usually made when spun was now a stubborn series of clicks. I could not even remember the combination for a moment.

At last, the safe was open. I closed my hand around the box, and as before I was amazed at its weight, and its presence, the sensation of a cube containing a gyroscope. It even seemed to hum in my hand.

This box. This secret that had ended my human life.

I sat with them, holding the unopened box, and everything that had happened seemed to fold around me, all the joy and all the anguish.

I called Solano again, and this time he answered. His voice brightened when he recognized my voice.

“Yes, it's a mess around here.”

“I got a visit from Karl Gneiss,” I began. I wanted to find out whether or not the police considered me a suspect, or if only Gneiss and his shadows were after me so far.

“Yeah, I have a meeting with him in five minutes. He's supposed to have a big break in the case. What did he say to you?”

“He seems to think I know something.”

“About what?”

“About the—what are we calling it?”

“The Night Beast? Hey, Dr. Byrd, I hope you do, because we need all the help we can get.”

“I don't, really—”

“Look, Gneiss is just doing his job, okay. And you want to cooperate with him because you have to. But between you and me we don't have time for any of that science fiction right now. We have a body count.”

By which he meant that he didn't have time for me right now, either, and so I thanked him.

But I was eager to be off the phone, because I heard something. There was a sound in a distant part of the house. A creak, a distant pat of foot on floor.

I held my breath. There could be no mistake.

There was someone in the house. My new self could not be wrong.

It must be Stowe, I thought. It was Stowe searching once again, perhaps here to put a tap oh my phone. I found myself baring my teeth.

Certainly it was someone very light on his feet, someone quiet, even furtive. My keen hearing brought the soft footsteps to me. A normal human would have probably heard nothing. What I did not understand was why the footsteps seemed to be approaching.

I tucked the box under my desk. I wanted my hands to be free. Someone was approaching me, up the hall, hesitating just outside the door. My previous self would have been afraid, but I crouched and waited.

Let them come to me.

There was a touch at the door, and the door swung slowly open.

And at first I could not see who it was. The figure, shrinking back, seemed like a flicker of light, something that wasn't there at all.

Then she spoke. “Benjamin, I'm so thankful you are here!”

I could not move. Despite my keen hearing, I had never imagined that she had arrived, and was in my very house.

I held her. So I was able to see her once again, once more before I fled. It was a feeling like joy, but sharp, painful.

She was ashen, her eyes wild. She could not say any more, but simply held me. When I tried to speak she put her fingers to my lips. Then she pulled me into the back garden.

“It's something terrible, Benjamin. Something very sad.”

I knew that I did not want to see what the morning sun illuminated, but I stood there on the wet grass and gazed down upon it.

I fell to my knees. She fell beside me, and took my hand. When she could speak, she said, “She is so still.”

“But how. How could this—”

“You know what happened last night.”

I could not respond.

“It was on television, interrupting all the shows.”

Television. Alerting everyone, keeping the city awake all night.

“A large animal,” she continued. “They said it was like a wolf.” She waited as though she expected me to clarify the nature of the animal. “And Belinda was frantic, because she seemed to know. She seemed to want to help the animal, wherever he was.”

I clutched my hair in my hands. She had wanted to help me!

“She broke out,” said Johanna. “Through a window.”

Belinda's eyes were half open. Her feet still. She lay, looking exhausted to the point of coma, but the single black-red wound in her side made her not a dog any longer.