Saint Peter’s Wolf (6 page)

Her evident intelligence struck me, and I knelt on one knee on the lawn.

I made a mistake. I knew it even as I made it, but I could not help myself. I hesitated. I lifted my hand, and involuntarily my hand slowed and paused, offering itself for her inspection, but in a way that told her exactly what I expected.

She peeled the skin away from her teeth, and hunched away from me, the hair along her spine looking darker, a ridge of erect hair like iron filings lifted by a magnet. Her growl chilled something in me.

Back inside the house I could not sit down. My legs were weak. I had never seen such a display of threat from any animal, and Belinda was a large, powerfully built beast. But it was not the thought that she could have bitten me with her white teeth that shook me. I had hoped Belinda would like me, even forgive me. Still it was more than that—I liked Belinda, felt for her and the troubles she had endured so bravely. I surprised myself. I had never admired and wanted the friendship of an animal so much.

“She has been through such a trauma,” Johanna offered. She did not continue. Why remind me that I had been, however innocently, a part of the force which had injured the dog?

I told her that I understood entirely, that Belinda was a magnificent animal. “At least we know she's strong enough to defend herself. That's some consolation.”

Johanna smiled, the first real smile of our meeting.

“I was encouraged after we met to reread a little Baudelaire.” This was true, but it made me sound so much more scholarly than I wanted to seem that I fell silent. “My French is terrible,” I offered. Now I felt ignorant. Stop talking, I ordered myself.

“I don't really care for Baudelaire,” she said. “All that sinuous evil. It seems to me ultimately childish. Although he is a magnificent poet.”

“Perhaps evil is attractive to some people.”

“Undoubtedly. But I think people are really quite ignorant of the nature of evil. It doesn't attract me at all. I want to read the more.…”

“Uplifting writers?”

“Oh, you make them sound so lightweight. No, spare me the uplifting. But a poet like Rilke is so much more complete, it seems to me, than Baudelaire.” Then, at once, the current of the conversation switched. “I must confess something,” she said.

She looked down, then away, gazing at a stalk of iris in a vase. “Jacob Zinser did not, at first, even remember who I was. I did not really expect him to. He is a very busy man, and I was barely an acquaintance. I did help him with some translation, but I worked almost entirely with his secretary.”

I felt embarrassed for her. She had overextended herself.

“In the rush of feeling during the time of the accident I felt that I should give you something—some good news.”

“I don't have to meet Zinser. Honestly. We can forget about him.”

“No, it's entirely arranged.”

“I am honored enough to have met you, and to be able to speak to you about.…” About anything at all, I nearly said. Because I was blurting out the truth. I suddenly wanted to see no one in the world but her.

“Mr. Zinser is such a kind man,” she said. “So generous. And besides, he said he has heard of you as a collector, and he looks forward to meeting you.”

Was I wrong, or did she look at me with something of a smile in her eyes as I left? She did touch my hand, once, as she had on that first day. I sat in the car for a while, once again reluctant to leave her presence. I rested my other hand on the place she had touched, there, on my wrist.

That night I had the dream again, the dream I had not experienced since my childhood. This recurring dream had been so much a part of my life as a child that Dr. Ashby and I had studied it for hour after hour. “A dream full of the wealth of human fear,” he had called it. “After all, it is what we fear that makes us human, as well as what we desire.”

In the dream I was walking down a smooth, dirt path. The smoothness of the earth there was important. No one had walked there before.

The dream had always been the same. A beast was following me, tirelessly and without any hurry. I could not force my feet into a run. My bones were leaden. All I could do was keep glancing over my shoulder until at last I saw the moonlight glistening in its eyes, and on its teeth.

“A primal fear,” Dr. Ashby offered at last. “A fear of being helpless. A fear of death.”

This time, however, the dream was different. The same darkness, the same path. But this time I turned and waited for the beast, as though waiting for an old friend.

You have been gone so long, I thought into the forest. Too long.

You are about to find me at last.

Seven

I stood in a study on Russian Hill, looking out at the bright green splash of a lawn. A mahogany desk seemed to encounter me, the stage set for the master of this place. I felt, to my surprise, very much the little boy about to meet a powerful, possibly unfriendly, uncle.

Then there was his step, and the press of his hand around mine. “So you are Benjamin Byrd, the man who bought the Babylonian scratch pads.”

He was short, with broad shoulders, dark eyebrows and a bright smile. It was the smile of a boy, full of delight, and despite his measuring eye, I could not feel threatened. He did not seem at all like a hermit. He seemed to be a man easy with himself and with life.

“I bought them,” I said, “and now I don't know what they mean.”

“They mean money. For you, because you can't lose money buying that sort of thing. And for the Babylonians. What else would they put in writing except something about money? A laundry ticket, or a check for coffee and a doughnut. Have a seat. I'll get you anything you want. Coffee, tea, any kind of drink.”

I agreed to tea, and he pushed a button twice. “The history of the world is money,” he said. “You study history and you realize that's all that matters.”

I would have disagreed if anyone else had made that statement. But something about Zinser made me realize that while he believed that what he said was true—he would not waste his time trying to strike a pose—he knew, at the same time, that money was only money.

“I understand,” I said, “that your collection is expanding into the area of the arcane.”

“Arcane? There's nothing arcane about a shrunken head. I've got twenty-one of them, three sets of siblings among them. You can see the family resemblance. Sure, I have all kinds of stuff. You name it.”

A silver tea service was brought in by a woman in black, but both of us ignored the tray.

This was such an opportunity that I nearly could not speak. “Could you describe for me some of the more unusual?”

“Describe? No. I won't describe. I'll show you. Come on.”

I could not move for a moment: I was about to see Zinser's famous collection in its own vault, and, further, I was about to see his collection of arcana, and I marveled at my good fortune.

The vault was a cold room at the end of a long corridor. An oak door had opened without a sound, but slowly, betraying the fact that this was only an oak veneer. The door was steel, and the room was lined with steel and concrete, I had heard, but, although it was windowless, it had the comfortable feel of a very quiet and quite empty men's club. There were trophies on shelves, and paintings on the walls, except that when you examined the shelves the trophies were medieval helmets and Ming vials, and the paintings were anatomies by da Vinci, sketches in charcoal by Renoir.

On one wall hung shields and swords, morning stars and gauntlets. One or two of the swords were badly corroded, the handles rusted away to a rough iron core. Roman, I guessed, probably from one of the more recent digs in England. Zinser had been active as a collector of ancient arms, too, and I knew this was only a fragment of his collection.

He noticed my interest in the weapons. “They appeal to the little boy in us. Before we knew what getting hurt is all about.” He gestured at the room around us. “We could stay in here for days,” he said. “Weeks. And never see it all.” He pressed a button beside a leather sofa and a panel slid, with a squeak, and steel drawers, not unlike safe deposit boxes, reflected the glow of the lights. “And I have double this amount on loan to museums all over the world.” He was not bragging. He sounded as though it were nearly a complaint.

He seemed to read my thoughts. He shrugged. “I have stuff all over. So much of it I have trouble keeping track of it. All of it priceless. What do you want to see?”

I was still amazed at his casual kindness, and his unpretentious—even happily blunt—manner. I stammered something about not knowing where to begin.

“You don't want to see manuscripts. Autographs aren't your field. Although I have a fragment of a Mozart concerto no one believed was authentic. The tune is too ugly. They do that with Shakespeare, too. If a passage in
Macbeth
is too stupid, a witch talking in a way that doesn't sound good, it's automatically by Fletcher.”

“They're probably right.”

“Not with this Mozart. It's real. But forget Mozart. You want to see something that'll frighten you.”

I actually had not, and yet the way he put it made me suddenly eager. I agreed—I wanted to see something that would frighten me.

He tugged a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and snapped them on, an aura of talcum around his hands for an instant. He unlocked a drawer, and tugged out a black, snaking harness. “Used to keep a witch quiet. Called a brank. Fits over the head. She sits with this probe in her mouth and can't talk while the judge passes sentence on her. So she won't put a curse on the judge.”

“Fascinating,” I said.

“But what?”

He had read my thoughts. “But it's not scary,” I said.

“You expect me to start with the best first? No, it's not scary. Except in a way. All those witches were just innocent women tortured into confessing. That scares me—real torture.”

Another drawer opened. He held up a gnarled, ebony knot. “The hand of Saint Catherine. Authenticated last week. The other hand is in a church in Ely, in England. It's authentic that it's her real hand, not that she deserves to be a saint or is in heaven or anything like that.”

I was already disappointed. He could tell. He offered me a shrunken head. “Twentieth century. One of the last ones made. I hope. A white man.” It looked dark, with blond hair like a girl's doll. Its eyelashes were thick and yet delicate, too, its lips sewn together in a meditative pout. Its skin was thick, like the skin of a well-broken boot.

“Not impressed. You're a hard man.”

I had to smile. “Maybe arcana just isn't arcane enough for me. As a boy I would have been awe-struck.”

He shrugged. “I guess so. I don't know. I hate the stuff. Pathetic and creepy. I'm going to sell it off and stick to art and music and things of beauty. But here,” he said, handing me a typed catalog. “See if there's anything else you wanted to see. I don't have the head of Zapata or anything like that. But if you see anything you might like—”

There were no prices on this list that he kept for his own reference, but I understood that he would be willing to sell me anything that might interest me. I ran my eyes down a list of antique Tarot decks and alchemist's alembics. Arcane was a good word for the assortment of preserved snakes and infant sharks from the
brujos
of Mexico, and the first edition of James the First's treatise on witchcraft. All of it curious but somehow not exactly arresting.

Until I saw a single word, with no date or country of origin. A naked word: fangs.

There was a splash of light, somewhere deep within me. A forest, a path. Moonlight glittering.

“What's this?” I asked, unable to guess why I had trouble speaking for a moment.

“You tell me. I have no idea what it is or where it came from. You want to see it?”

“Yes, please.”

“You sure?”

Why, I wondered, the hesitation? “Please.”

He shrugged. “It came with a trunk of silver goods boxes an agent bought for me in Zurich. It was supposedly a part of an estate. I'm still trying to find out whose estate it was, how many different deceased people it may have belonged to, because the trunk was full of a good many items of interest, salt cellars, sugar tongs, charming things like that. And then, to my surprise, this. An object that hardly fits the rest of the bourgeois knick-knacks.”

His rubber-gloved hands had taken a small black box from a steel-faced drawer. He offered the box to me, and I took it. My hands, though, were reluctant to open it. I studied the box, its brass hinges turned slightly green, its surface highly polished. The box was surprisingly heavy for its size. Perhaps because it was, like Zinser's desk, mahogany. Perhaps because the contents were heavy, as though the box, which fit easily into one hand, contained a weapon of some unimaginable sort.

“The box is nothing,” said Zinser. “Open it.”

It opened suddenly, and silently, and I nearly dropped it.

On red velvet was a set of teeth. They were not human teeth. They were a set of fangs, like the teeth of a very large dog, set into a base of silver, untarnished and gleaming in the light. The fangs themselves were like the finest ivory, bright cream-white, set into what amounted to a gumline of silver alloy.

“A pair of dentures,” I said, a pale joke.

He grunted. I had hoped he would say something funny, have some salty remark to make about how foolish people were, but he simply stared suspiciously at the teeth in my hand.

“You know nothing about them?”

“Only that they don't fit the rest of the inventory in the trunk. Except for the fact that they are silver, in some alloy I don't recall ever seeing, and that they are some kind of teeth.”

“What sort of teeth, I wonder. They're very large.”

He shook his head. “I don't like them. Don't like the looks, don't like anything about them.”