The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  In five minutes he was out on the Coast Highway, driving northwest, into Long Beach, wishing he’d brought—what? A gun? A ball bat? He had his pocketknife, a multi-bladed little toad-sticker. He could picture himself pulling the knife out, menacing thugs. How was that sort of thing done, exactly? Pickett was in trouble; there could be no doubt about that now. What was the restaurant called? The Bamboo something.

  There was a fog bank out over the ocean. Andrew could see little trailing wisps of it stealing ashore as he sailed up Ocean Boulevard, the traffic lights still blinking yellow. Almost no one was out and about except him, which was moderately pleasing. He was a man with a mission. Maybe with a deadly mission. He recalled last night’s conversation with Pickett. He should have told Rose, informed her, very placidly but squinting with secret knowledge, that he’d become the most important man in the world, that the mystical weight of the millennia had fallen on his meager shoulders. By God, he was bent, but not broken. She would have sighed and shaken her head. Who’d have thought? Then when the phone rang at five o’clock in the morning it wouldn’t surprise her, although she’d react to the element of danger in it. “Do you have to go?” she’d say. “Stay with me another five minutes.”

  “It’s duty,” he’d tell her, his jaw set, his eyes focused on eternity. “They’ve called.” And out he’d go, brushing back his hair, to face the bastards down.

  There was an old green panel truck parked on Cherry, just around the corner, off Broadway. “Han Koi” it said on the side of it, and beneath the words was painted a stylized goldfish. Two Asian men, Chinese probably, stood beside it, eating doughnuts out of a Winchell’s box. That had to be it, although what exactly it was Andrew didn’t know. There was the restaurant, the Bamboo Paradise. Lights burned inside. Andrew drove on past, up Cherry, swinging around onto Appleton. He cut the motor and coasted to the curb.

  The neighborhood was neat and fresh—old bungalows and Mediterranean-style flat-roofed houses sitting atop banked front yards with clipped lawns. The sycamores along the curbs were just starting to leaf out. A dog barked a few doors down and then abruptly shut up, as if he were sorry for it. Andrew sat and thought for a moment, realizing that he had no idea on earth what he was doing there. He hadn’t been built for this kind of work, this saving-the-world business. Or had he? It seemed vaguely like fate to him, like destiny—his having ended up with the spoon—his being the last of the Caretakers. He wondered abruptly if that made him one of Them. It pretty clearly did. Maybe this was what he was built for. Maybe on this foggy morning the curtain had opened on the final act, and he was stepping out onto the stage to play out his destiny and the destiny of the world. He regarded himself momentarily in the rearview mirror in order to see whether he looked the part. His hair stuck up like flowerettes on a broccoli stalk. He worked for a moment winnowing them out with his fingers and smoothing them down but gave it up. They’d have to take him as he came.

  He sat for a moment and thought. Pickett had been in danger—clear enough. But what sort of danger? How could Andrew go wading in? They’d both be up to their necks in it if he weren’t careful. He had an edge, though. He’d been smart enough to check Pennyman’s room. He’d heard the phone ring. If the old man had already been out, then Andrew could assume he was here, at the Bamboo Paradise. But Pennyman hadn’t been out; he’d been home in bed, sleeping like a baby, at least until his phone had rung. Andrew had got the jump on him. What was Pennyman doing now? Styling his hair? Fetching out the blowfish? The laser scalpel? Until Pennyman arrived, Andrew could assume fairly safely that there was no one here who knew him, who would recognize him. But when Pennyman showed up …

  Han Koi. That was the name on the check stub in Pennyman’s book—the man on The Toledo! The carp truck fit. The way Andrew figured it, Pickett had gone meddling around down there late last night, trying to make sense of that corner of the puzzle. He’d run afoul of them, and now, for some unknown reason, they’d brought him around to this Chinese restaurant. There flashed through Andrew’s mind the picture of Pickett lying on a Formica table, held down by hired men, and Pennyman setting in to saw him in half. And it wasn’t a far-fetched notion at all.

  He slid out of the car, feeling helpless. Then, in a fit of inspiration, he tugged one of his shoelaces out and tossed it back into the car. He yanked half his shirt out and went around to the trunk after his fishing jacket, which was coffee-stained and smeared with ten years worth of tar and fish scales. He mussed up his hair, although it didn’t need it, and then kneeled in the muddy gutter, soiling his pants and smearing the wet dirt with his hands, wiping them off on his jacket. Three doors down, on a front lawn, was a thrown-away bag with an empty bottle in it—just the thing. Andrew retrieved it. He looked good—a custom-built hobo, the tongue protruding from his laceless shoe. No one would imagine who he really was, what he was—Andrew Vanbergen, restaurateur, Caretaker, last of the Legion of the Coin, a sort of twentieth-century Odin going out disguised into the foggy morning.

  He made sure both sides of the car were unlocked, and he left the key in the ignition. It was risky, but it was a good neighborhood and there might easily be no time to be fumbling after keys. This might be a matter of running for it. He slumped away down the sidewalk, around onto Cherry, heading downhill toward Broadway. Overhead there sounded the raucous cackle of wild parrots, dozens of them, jerking along toward the south, toward wherever they went.

  Andrew forced himself not to look up. He had to affect the indifference of a wino just having waked up on someone’s stoop. But he was happy to hear the parrots anyway, strangely so, as if he suspected without knowing why that, like Aunt Naomi’s cats and like Uncle Arthur’s turtles, the parrots were allies, were looking out for him, were part of an ordered plan.

  That was nonsense, though. He’d have to pay attention. This was no time for flights of fancy. The doughnut eaters were slouched against the side of the truck, sipping coffee now and talking. Andrew shuffled along silent as death in his crepe-soled shoes. If they looked up and saw him, he’d weave past and head south on Broadway, entirely unremarkable. If they didn’t he’d …

  Quick and quiet he angled across into the cramped parking lot behind the restaurant, forcing himself to walk slowly, straining to watch the two men out of the corner of his eye. They paid no attention to him. One of them laughed aloud and said something in Chinese. The other one laughed, too, and said something back. One more step, two … and they were gone, lost to sight behind the edge of the building. Andrew quickened his pace, ducking in past an open, foul-smelling dumpster, half full of garbage. He shoved the bag and bottle into the inside pocket of his coat.

  There wasn’t any time to wait. At any moment a taxi might pull up to the curb and spill Pennyman out; then he was lost, or at least the whole business would become frighteningly more complicated. A line of windows showed just above the pavement of the parking lot, dusty and covered with hardware cloth fixed with screws and strips of wood. They’d be basement windows. Pickett had claimed to be in a basement. The windows were large enough for a man the size of Pickett to squeeze through.

  Andrew made up his mind. This was no time for debate. He pulled his knife out of his pocket, prying out the screwdriver and kneeling in front of one of the windows.

  But he was in clear view of the street. Anyone cruising past would see him and suppose him a burglar. They’d sound the alarm and he’d be given away. He stood up and bent along toward a heap of cardboard cartons, pulling two big ones over to where he had been working, careful not to scrape them on the asphalt. Then he went back for two more, piling them up so as to hide him entirely when he crouched behind them. He went to work again.

  There was no use trying to alert Pickett. Not yet anyway. What could Pickett do to help? Andrew would take it on faith that Pickett was inside. If he weren’t, then Andrew would go in through the window anyway to have a look around. Either way, unscrewing the hardware cloth was a good idea. The screws turned easily in the weathered woo
d, but were too loose to back out. Andrew pried on them, shoving a big splinter of wood from a packing crate in under the blade to get some leverage. He peered around the boxes at the street. The seconds slipped by. The screws one by one popped out onto the pavement, and he brushed them away with his free hand. Finally two of the wood strips fell away and the corner of the hardware cloth was loose. He realized he was sweating in the cold, foggy air, but he was working silent and sure, surprising himself, thinking about Rose, thinking that if he tackled painting the house with this much attention and persistence …

  He yanked on the corner of the steel screen, gouging his palm against one of the jagged edges. The still-attached wood strips cracked, popping loose past the screws. He tugged again and tore the screen away entirely, pitching the hardware cloth into the weeds beyond the parking lot and then leaping up and sweeping the litter of screws and wood fragments away with his foot before hustling in behind the dumpster again to lie low.

  The smell was god-awful—old rotted fish and coffee grounds and cigarette butts. He crouched there, catching his breath, half-waiting for the sound of the doughnut eaters coming to investigate the noise. There was nothing. He counted to ten, giving them time. Still nothing. He peered beneath the dumpster, past its little wheels. The parking lot was empty and silent. Back to the window he went, folding the screwdriver back into the pocketknife and drawing out the long blade.

  Clearly, he was born to be a burglar. This was going as neatly as had the dead ‘possum job. The transom window had a spring latch at the top. That was it. Over the years the building had slumped, the windows had worked their way out of square, and there was no end of gaps where gaps weren’t intended to be. He slid his blade in, pressed the half-rounded point against the angled side of the spring-set metal triangle that formed the moveable half of the catch, and pushed it in, simultaneously pushing on the window.

  He nearly tumbled against the wall as the window fell open, and at once there was the smell of garlic and fish and the sound of distant voices. The basement was almost dark. Clearly, Pickett wasn’t in there. He’d have heard and seen Andrew breaking in. He’d be at the window, pulling himself through. There was nothing for it but to go in—head first, on his back.

  It was easy. Inside, above the window, was a concrete ledge—the top of the foundation most likely. Andrew grabbed onto it, scrabbling for a hold on the rough wooden mudsill running along the top of it, and held on as he slid through and dropped to the floor, landing in a crouch and waiting again—this time for the talk to stop, for the hue and cry. There was nothing—just more hushed voices, a laugh, the sound of glasses clinking.

  What if Pickett weren’t there? What if, thought Andrew suddenly, he hadn’t even been in trouble? What if he’d only been zealous, thinking that Andrew was equally so and wouldn’t mind being awakened by a five o’clock phone call? What if he’d simply been cut off? Those were grim thoughts. It would mean that Andrew had broken into an innocent Chinese restaurant, that when frightened cooks took him apart with meat cleavers, there’d be nothing to do but grin and bear it.

  That couldn’t be the case though, not with the truck parked out at the curb. What had Pickett said about not believing in coincidence? Andrew crept forward. Despite the deepening fog, there was plenty of light outside, now that his eyes adjusted, to illuminate the basement. It was smaller than it appeared to be from the street, only a half basement, really, with almost a quarter of it taken up by a single restroom. Boxes of canned goods and crates of vegetables were stacked everywhere. A bare, unlit incandescent bulb hung from the ceiling by its cord. The scrape of table and chair legs sounded from above.

  Andrew crept across the concrete floor and up the stairs, pausing with each step to listen. All he wanted was a peek. If Pickett weren’t there, out in the restaurant itself, then Andrew would go back out through the window, weaving bum-like up the road, waving a groggy hello at everyone he saw. But if he were confronted now, on the stairs …

  He’d act drunk, pretend to have broken into the basement in order to sleep. He wished to God that he had liquor on his breath instead of toothpaste, but he was glad he hadn’t stopped to shave that morning. He paused long enough to pull the bag out of his coat pocket and unscrew the lid on the bottle. There were a few drops left inside. “Night Train,” the label on the bottle read. He dribbled them onto his coat, surprising himself at the sudden, winy reek. He put the bottle away. It was a good prop.

  Feet shuffled past above. There was clanking in the kitchen—off to the right he supposed, although he couldn’t see the door. He crept up the last six treads on his hands and knees, ready to drop down and feign sleep. He was shaking wildly, as if he had a chill, and he knew if he were caught he’d never be able to convince anyone of anything. They’d have him. At best he’d find himself downtown, in a cell.

  He could just see over the top tread, through the table legs. Three Chinese men in aprons, one of them a head taller than the other two and with oddly wavy hair, scurried around, setting tables, wheeling carts full of water glasses and plates. They were garden variety waiters, clearly, putting things right. An old man, very old, white-haired and thin and with a goldfish earring in one ear, sat a table sipping tea. There was no Beams Pickett. It looked suspiciously as if there was no Beams Pickett in the entire building. Pickett was probably sitting at the counter at the Potholder eating steak and eggs. By God if he was … What if Pickett had simply been cut off, and had called home again and talked to Rose, asking after Andrew … ?

  Andrew would kill him—and to hell with saving the world. He backed away down the stairs, half-sliding. He had to get out of there. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He was hyperventilating. He felt faint. If he tumbled back down the stairs … He sat down hard, fighting vertigo, shoving his head between his knees and forcing himself to breathe regularly. He would just take a second—it was better than passing out.

  There was a shifting noise, like someone moving—below him. He listened sharp. It was impossible, unless someone had come in through the window after him, in which case he was trapped, fore and aft. He started down again, looking sharp, and there was the shifting and scraping, followed by a sigh. It was coming from the bathroom, which had, weirdly, a bolt on the outside of the door. The bolt was pushed in. Someone was locked in the bathroom. Andrew grinned. He knew who it was. This would be good—dangerous, but good.

  He glanced backward up the stairs, turned the knob at the same time that he slipped the bolt, and swung the door open, dropping down into a sort of James Bond crouch, as if he were ready to tear to pieces whoever was on the other side. It was Pickett, wild-eyed, backed against the sink, expecting Lord knows what—Pennyman, no doubt, carrying some loathsome instrument of death and torture.

  Pickett sagged like a stuffed doll, steadying himself against the sink. He opened his mouth to speak, but Andrew shook his head, gesturing, looking again up the stairs, and then nodded him out of the restroom, shutting the door and throwing the bolt. He pointed toward the rear of the basement and winked, then set out with Pickett at his heels. He helped his friend through first, and then Pickett half-dragged him out onto the asphalt of the parking lot. Andrew reached back in and pulled the window shut just as the basement light clicked on. Both of them sprang for the dumpster.

  The seconds ticked by. They could just see someone moving around within, shifting crates, juggling vegetables. There was an airy little snatch of song, and then the light shut out again and all was silent. Andrew nudged Pickett in the ribs and grinned at him. His friend looked awful—rumpled and baggy-eyed—but he clearly hadn’t been beaten. They were saving him for Pennyman, no doubt. There’d be time to discuss it in the car.

  Andrew felt very satisfied with himself, and nearly laughed out loud. Quickly, he formulated a new plan, whispering it to Pickett, warning him about the thugs on the street, about the manifold dangers. Andrew would slouch out, bum-wise, toward the sidewalk, and if the doughnut eaters were gone, he’d give Pickett the high sign a
nd Pickett would follow, the two of them beating it up to the Metropolitan and away. It was easy as that. He’d get Pickett out of there yet, and Pennyman could go hang.

  Steeling himself, Andrew started out, peering past the edge of the dumpster and shoving his foot forward just as a yellow cab whipped around the corner onto Cherry and bumped to a stop at the curb. The rear door swung open and Pennyman himself hunched out, shoving his arm back in through the window to pay the driver.

  Andrew ducked back, whispering “Pennyman!” and hauling Pickett down onto the asphalt, the two of them huddled and listening. A car door slammed and the taxi motored away. They’d wait for Pennyman to go in, and then they’d run for it. To hell with anyone at the curb. Once Pennyman unbolted the bathroom door and found that the prey had disappeared, there’d be half a dozen men at the curb.

  But Pennyman didn’t go inside. He walked straight in their direction, whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” as if he were in tip-top shape and the morning was a good one.

  Andrew and Pickett crouched amid the rubble of broken crates and cardboard boxes, watching beneath the dumpster as Pennyman’s white bucks strode along toward them, the tip of his walking stick tapping along beside. There was no time to pull a carton over their heads; no time for elaborate plans. Andrew gave Pickett a look that he hoped suggested toughing it out. Between the two of them they could throttle Pennyman despite his canes and blowfish. If he carried a gun though …

  Pennyman stopped when he got to the dumpster, close enough to it that he must have been gripping the edge, with his face nearly in the garbage. There was no way on earth that he could see Pickett and Andrew unless he walked around to the other side. What was he looking for? Some sort of vile fish guts to grind into poison? He stood just so. Andrew and Pickett held their breath. The morning was deadly silent.