Saint Peter’s Wolf (42 page)

The wait would never end. We would stay here against this wall for months. Zinser's voice rose and fell. A male voice responded, and then, after what seemed like half a day, a door shut.

There was quiet. It was not complete silence—a step creaked a floorboard, leather soles against carpet. A door opened. I recognized the sound of that door. I put my finger to my lips. There was no need to remind her. There was nothing to be done but exactly what we were doing. I sprang to a doorway, listened, and then lightly as a dancer I was down a hall.

He was looking right at both of us as we entered the room, his gaze so even that it surprised me.

“They told me you'd show up.”

He was exactly where I expected him to be. He was in his study, the private one with all the treasures. He was standing in the room with his hands on his hips, as though surveying a mess he would have to clean up. The room was as tidy as ever, and when he saw us he did not seem startled at all, and seemed to have been waiting for us.

“I hope we haven't startled you—” I began.

He waved away the suggestion. “Not after the night I've had. Nothing could startle me.” Then he smiled, and he shook our hands warmly. “I'm beyond surprise.”

I began to stammer something about letting ourselves in.

“I don't blame you. Housekeeper took one look, and needed to go home for her asthma pills. Can't stand stress.” He waved us into chairs. “It's great to see you. You should see what I have just in—Mayan gold. Absolutely amazing.”

But Mayan gold was not on his mind. Something had happened here, and I ached to ask. But I let Zinser continue. He was ecstatic with something else he had just remembered. The crossbow was now in the Tower of London. “It turns out they had been looking for it for years.”

The Mayan gold was, in truth, amazing, although I was attracted to a dung beetle of Nilotic clay, a heavy object of doubtful provenance. “Ten dollars,” said Zinser when he saw me handling it. “Just simple Egyptian mud. Take it with you.”

I remembered the last time I had accepted such an offer from him, and I put it down at once.

But the crossbow and the gold were attempts to cheer himself up. At last he said, “You know who was just here, don't you? You must have passed them on the walk.” He said the word carefully: “Detectives.” He shifted his shoulders. “The police. The truth is I am delaying. I'm delaying telling you something awful. I had a bad night here. Very bad. I hardly know how to tell you about it.”

I cleared my throat. “What is it? Is there.…” We all knew the words I left unsaid: something wrong.

He exhaled through his nostrils. “There is.”

I could not ask.

“The fangs,” he said, with an expression of distaste.

It would be better to hear no more. I closed my eyes for a moment. I feared what he was about to tell us. I hated the sound of my voice. “We wanted to make sure that you destroyed them,” I said.

Zinser took a deep breath. He put his hands on his knees, and gazed at both of us. “What a rotten day it was when I ever set eyes on those damned teeth.”

My voice creaked. “Are they—?”

“Stolen.”

I was ice.

“That's right.” He said the word with careful emphasis. “Thieves.” He pounded his knee with a fist. “I'm furious! With myself, with the criminals, whatever and whoever they were. With everything! Someone broke in here, some smart burglars, and stole them from where they were, right here on this desk. I say ‘smart.' It was stupid, really. Think of the gold they could have taken. I was just going to break them up and melt them down this morning.”

I could not speak.

“I was a fool!” He waved a hand, speechless with frustration for a moment. “That's all they took, because the security alarm went off and the cops were here so fast they had to cut out.” He leaned forward. “Can you imagine! I am disgusted to my heart. I left town for a few days, and didn't melt them down right away. I don't know why—a whim. What a fool I was! When I got ready to do it.… It makes me sick. Sick!”

He considered for a moment, and laughed. “I get furious with myself thinking about it. I'll tell you how crazy I am. I sometimes think the fangs made it all happen.” He laughed again, and added, “They wanted to escape, and so they did.”

I surprised myself with what I said next. “The government did it. Someone official, somewhere, has them. They think they can study them, in secret.”

Zinser shot a glance at me, a look of recognition. He tilted his head, examining me like a worried physician. “But you're all right, aren't you? They haven't caused you any harm, have they?”

I could not bear to lie to this lively man. Yes, I told him. We were fine.

And then I laughed. I couldn't help it. I laughed until I had to wipe tears, because the fangs had won, in a way. They had outsmarted us.

Perhaps Zinser was right. They had wanted to escape.

“I'm not worried about you, really,” he was saying. “You two look … different. You look really terrific. I mean, you both always looked fine, but now you look beautiful. Exercise, I suppose. You go out running. Take vitamins, stuff like that.”

Yes, I allowed. We go out running.

“I'm not worried about you,” he repeated.

“Why ever should you be?” Johanna asked.

He did not answer at once. “You know what else the cops told me?” He shook his head. “They predicted that you'd pay me a visit. They knew it. I'm supposed to call them the moment you show up.”

“You should then,” said Johanna softly. “Perhaps they want to interview us about the fangs.”

“You're daring me to call them.” He said this with a smile, but he was challenging Johanna, both of us.

“Why shouldn't you?” Johanna said, but her meaning was clear: don't call.

He studied her, and then took a long look at me, and I saw us as he must have—two healthy, athletic people, full of life. He smiled, and I wondered at that moment what he knew, or what he believed. His eyes were thoughtful and alive, and he knew that there was something we were not telling. But he could not sense any danger in us, or any harm.

“You two,” he said. “You two would tell me, wouldn't you, if I should be worried?”

“Of course we would,” said Johanna, and her voice was so soothing that I saw it clearly: worry was useless.

He stretched a hand to the telephone on his desk, and for a moment the hand nearly picked up the receiver. Zinser trusted us, but his fingers were not so sure.

No, I thought to him. Don't call them. Everything is fine, and the day is peaceful, and we are as full of life as we seem to be.

“I hate talking to cops,” he said. “It's not that they're stupid, exactly. It's just that they are so interested in property damage and procedure that they
seem
stupid.”

He gave the phone a pat and withdrew his hand. “I'll call them,” he said. “Don't worry about that. I'll call them later, when I feel like it.”

Forty-Seven

The centaur was not a man joined to the body of a horse. He was a man made entire, complete, mingled with the part of himself that gave him his power, his beast part, the part that was of the earth. No wonder they were such teachers, and no wonder the storied angels arrive winged. They tell the truth because they hover halfway between human speech and something uncanny—the ever-present power in the air.

We had to go. The streets and the buildings were dissolving around us. We had to run.

But there was one more thing I had to do, one more place I had to be. We were almost there, the intersections and side streets passing easily under our feet.

With every step was the thought: be quick. Be quick. Hurry, we're running out of time. And a similar, shadow thought, the knowledge that the story that told our lives was beyond our control. The pages were turning. If we were to step into the lance of a bullet, that cartridge and that sniper's eye were already prepared for us.

She strode beside me, and told me something like a fable, a story which I let captivate me and yet which I knew was, perhaps, entirely make-believe. She told me the new chapters, the invisible ones that were yet to take place. She had a car in another rented garage, she said. She had money, and bank accounts in other cities, under other names. All we had to do was survive.

She took my arm as we waited for a stream of traffic to pass, and her grip was strong. “All it takes, Benjamin,” she said, “is a little faith.”

I knew what she was not saying: and even then we might not make it. The world in its grinding labor cared nothing for faith. That was, in a way, the beauty of our lives. This could be our last morning.

We could not live forever. I could almost believe that we would survive for a few more days, a few more weeks, or even longer, perhaps much longer. I let the story take me in, the old story of the wolves running in the night, unhurt and free under the stars.

An old dog, a dog so white and stiff he was tight with pain, coughed down steps to reach me. He snouted my hand, and as I knelt I looked into his eyes. One eye was milky. He touched his snout to my nose.

He could tell. He pushed himself deeper into my hands. My touch made him tremble, and then frisk away, wanting me to chase him—wanting to play.

My heart beat with the steadiness of a winged creature, spreading and gathering. I was not a man, now, and I was not a wolf. I was one of those other creatures, the beings of legend, who arrive with the amazing, miraculous news, and vanish.

Each window glistened with reflected light. Each cough, each human sibilant made me sense how easy it would be to kill us, and without knowing what I was doing I found myself sensing the wind, and attempting to read the warnings it brought.

This was danger as animals know it: not an emergency that flares, and fades, but the way life is, each heartbeat, each breath. Each tree could hide a figure, a man who could take one half step and kill us. The sunlight made us easy targets. Our shadows were black as they spilled over the roots of trees, and across the sidewalk. This was not danger. This was the truth.

Johanna never questioned me. She followed, running beside me, and I felt that she had expected this, as she had expected the fangs to vanish. She knew, and I was still learning.

Now, despite my desire to be where I was, I felt my lungs tighten. Each passing car seemed to slow, its interior dark with too many figures. Engines made a brazen chuckle. Too many machines. Too many faraway male voices, radios and delivery men, and those other men, the ones we would never see, the ones with rifles, snipers closing one eye to draw a bead. We were without cover, exposed on the sidewalk in the wind.

Yet what continued to amaze me was not my fear, but how little fear there really was. Perhaps I had as much faith as I needed, as much faith as a seed needs, fallen upon dirt.

“I'll wait here,” she said.

It was a bottlebrush plant. It shielded her from the street, and the plant carried a few meager remains of its blossoms. I had, though, the worst feeling, standing there, that I would never speak to her again.

The plant was not enough cover. Surely the police, the government agents, whoever they were, would stake out this school, thinking that Carliss was one of several people I would want to see.

Come with me, I thought to her. We can both see Carliss.

“Go on, Benjamin.”

We both knew. This was something I needed to do alone, a farewell I had to make to this child who had been, for a time, my son.

Guard her, stems and leaves. Protect her, empty air, I prayed. Keep her safe.

Even the sparrows paused in my shadow, as though that dark, spilled figure gave them shelter, and gave them warmth. I stood with one hand on a chain-link fence. Beyond this steel netting, children played on a green field. They kicked a black and white ball, a ball spinning so rapidly as they thumped into it that the black spots were blurs.

If they were watching, where would they be hiding, I asked myself. The answer was easy. They could be anywhere. Far off, across the playing field, was a street empty of traffic. At the edge of the field to my right was a tangle of eucalyptus, and to my left, far away enough to look half-submerged, were the stucco buildings of the academy.

I glanced back, and Johanna was waiting, and for a moment I forgot to register her as human, or wolf, but simply: there she was.

She smiled. Go on. Go on, and don't worry about me, don't worry about anything.

The wet grass squeaked under my shoes. There was no feeling of being constricted by my human form, and no sense of being a diminished, daylight cipher. The smell of the grass was so rich it was like food, the ferment of the old grass in the earth, the freshness of the new. It was good to be what I was. It was good to be a man.

The children who saw me fell silent. There was something about me that stunned them. Their mouths fell open, and they did not move.

He was the last to see me. I called to him, and he turned. Time ceased for him, and for both of us. He stayed as he was, with one hand on his shirt front. He blinked, and took a step forward.

“I had to see you,” I said, panting up to where he stood.

When he could move, he took my hand. He had never done such an easy, innocent thing with me before. He sought me to steady himself, and to make sure that I was real.

For a moment I was unable to speak.

“We're moving soon,” Carliss said, his voice strange and small.

“I know,” I responded. Talk was difficult, and futile, but what else did we have? “Your mother told me.”

We did not have to tell each other how heavy this news felt.

“I didn't know if it was you.” He eyed me, tilting his head to one side. “You look so different.”

I tried to make a joke of it. “Who else could I be?”

“You have strange clothes,” he said.

But that wasn't what he meant. He meant that I was at once a stranger, and someone he would never forget. I was not the sort of human being he had once known. He had missed me, and now that we were together he did not want to continue his life without me. I had intended to ask after his therapy, and ask how Cherry was doing. But all conversation seemed fake, artificial and unnecessary. I was impatient with this empty talk.