The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  No, not quite silent. There was a deep, almost hoarse irregular breathing and sniffing. Garbage shifted in the dumpster, as if Pennyman were stirring it with a stick, and the reek issuing from the rotted fish and vegetables and table leavings redoubled. Andrew nearly gagged, covering his mouth with his hand, still watching Pennyman’s feet. The old man groaned, sliding the toe of one shoe up along the back of his calf, as if caressing it. He stood suddenly on tiptoe, bending farther over into the dumpster, and uttered a low, moaning wail, breathing like an engine, quicker and quicker, the toes of his shoes twitching on the asphalt.

  Andrew was dumbstruck, and Pickett, given the look on his face, was nearly blind with disgust—not at the ghastly odor of decay and rot that had settled around them, but at Pennyman’s insane passion, which, from the look of his twitching feet and the sound of his dwindling, throat-rasping wheeze, was almost spent.

  Andrew suddenly stood up, slamming his open hand into the steel side of the dumpster, which thrummed like a bass drum. His vision had narrowed down into a tight little focus, as if he were looking down a tube. He couldn’t speak. But playing through his head like a looped tape was the loathsome knowledge that this monster, ecstatic now with rot and filth and decay, had kissed Rose’s hand, had been gallant, had been …

  He lashed out with his right fist, pulling himself up and across the rim of the dumpster, taking Pennyman utterly by surprise. The old man reeled back, safe by inches, his mouth working. He raised his stick and swung it at nothing, as if he were half-blind. Andrew leaped around toward him, picking up an empty bottle and hurling it wildly, past Pennyman’s shoulder. It smashed straight through the basement window where he’d torn off the screen. Glass shattered, crates toppled. Pennyman shouted, and there was the sound of running feet punctuated by a weird raucous chattering, coming, it seemed, from the sky.

  Pickett slammed into Andrew’s side, deflecting him away from Pennyman, who stood with his stick upraised, watching him rush in. “C’mon!” Pickett screamed, pulling at Andrew. “Leave him! Let’s go!”

  Andrew reeled after him, but turned back after half a step. Give up! Not now he wouldn’t give up. He would finish Pennyman off and damn the consequences he’d beat Pennyman with his own cane, by God! He’d …

  The two doughnut eaters rounded the corner of the building just then, one of them carrying a little wooden baseball bat, and both of them springing straight toward Andrew. Pickett waded in behind them, smashing one of them with a packing crate, the spindly wood cracking to splinters against the man’s head. He stumbled, mostly out of surprise, but he was up again in an instant.

  The air was a tumult of sounds: Pennyman’s cursing, Andrew’s shouted threats, feet running on pavement, the airborne shriek of suddenly-appearing parrots. Andrew turned to meet the two new attackers just as Pickett threw himself onto the back of the one who had stumbled. But two more men—two of the white-aproned waiters from the restaurant—burst out through the back door just then, and although Andrew landed one good punch on his man’s shoulder, half-spinning him around, the two reinforcements slammed Andrew against the stucco wall, pinioning his arms. Pickett lay on the parking lot, the man with the ball bat having shaken him off and standing over him now, the club poised in the air.

  “Stop!” commanded Pennyman, and the man with the bat lowered it, snatching Pickett to his feet. Pennyman smiled, raising his left hand to his mouth and nibbling on his finger. “I’ll attend to that,” he said. “Hold them.”

  Andrew was aware that he was breathing hard, but he felt calm, considering what he faced. He vowed not to lose control over himself the way he had that afternoon with Ken-or-Ed. Pennyman fed off that sort of chaos. “Your hair is mussed,” Andrew said matter-of-factly and squinting with disapproval. “I’d let you borrow my comb, but I don’t …”

  The tip of the cane whistled through the air, stopping a half inch from Andrew’s nose. Pennyman grinned when Andrew flinched and gasped. He paused to take out a pocket comb, which he pulled through his hair with a trembling hand. Andrew wouldn’t be put off. He was fired up and thinking. The morning was wearing on. Traffic had picked up. There was every reason in the world to waste time, to spend a few more minutes in the parking lot in order to attract the attention of neighbors or passing cars.

  “Why those five books?” Andrew asked.

  Pennyman looked sharp at him. “What?”

  “The five books you stole. Why those five? They aren’t worth anything, not really. I don’t get it. Those are the five I might have stolen.”

  Pennyman made no effort to act surprised, to pretend. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Pennyman liked to talk. He fancied himself a philosopher.

  Andrew knew that—all the wombing and tombing business had taught him as much. “I can’t figure it out, especially the Pogo.”

  Pennyman widened his eyes, as if to tell him to go on, that he would hear him out.

  “A month ago,” said Andrew, “I’d have said that any friend of Pogo was a friend of mine. Anyone who reads Walt Kelly has to have the right inclinations. Nitwits and pretenders wouldn’t understand it. I’d have taken you for the sort who nods over—who?—Sartre? Maybe Mann. Someone polished and full of … shit, I guess. But not Pogo. What does that mean, I ask myself. And it seems to mean that, well, you’re something in the way of a lost soul. There’s something in you yearning to be … might I say, good? Something that isn’t at all fond of … of … collecting cat waste, let’s say, or drooling over rotted garbage in a dumpster.” Andrew beamed at him curiously, but with the moony-eyed, meaningful smile of a self-help psychologist, a benevolent, compassionate look, guaranteed to drive Pennyman insane. He tensed, readying himself to duck the inevitable blow of the walking stick. But there was none. Pennyman stared at him, breathing shallowly. A heavy pall of embarrassment had descended.

  “Are you through?”

  Andrew shrugged, glancing sideways across the parking lot. The street was empty. Talking was useless.

  “Take them in.” Pennyman’s mouth was set, frozen in an expressionless line. “Into the kitchen,” he said, with such a ghastly intonation as to make it sound as if the kitchen weren’t a kitchen at all, but were a medieval chamber of horrors.

  Andrew screamed, simultaneously ducking away, carrying his captor with him. Taking Andrew’s lead, Pickett screamed, too, and Pennyman, caught by surprise, stepped backward, thinking that Andrew was lunging at him, and swung the stick wildly, thudding it off the back of the man that held Andrew’s arm. Andrew stamped his foot behind him, still shouting and screaming, trying to smash the man’s toe and swinging around so as to keep the man between himself and the cane.

  It was worthless. The man sprinted forward, driving Andrew into the wall of the restaurant. It was over, and all Andrew had managed was to drive Pennyman into a fury. He could hear the parrots circling above, and he stumbled as he was pushed toward the door.

  Then, without warning, the parking lot was chaotic with parrots, flapping and reeling and shrieking. There was a cloud of them, a green, clamoring, raucous cloud of heavy parrots, dropping in like dog-fighters and slamming around and around them, tearing at faces with pronged beaks and claws, screeching and gouging. Pennyman threw his hands over his head after taking a wild cut at them with his cane. One of the waiters ran for the street, pursued by three or four parrots that tore at his ears like demons.

  Pennyman hunkered lower, trying to keep the birds away from his neck, trying to curl up into a ball but terrified lest his white trousers touch the dirty asphalt of the parking lot. One of the parrots, a great, red-headed Amazon with an almost three-foot wingspan, clung to Pennyman’s back and burrowed into the collar of his coat as the old man let go of his head with one hand and flailed away at the bird uselessly, trying first to bat it away, then to get a grip on it.

  The parrots took no interest at all in Andrew and Pickett. It was as if the cavalry had arrived in the nick of time. For the long space of half a minute
Andrew watched amazed, wafering himself against the wall of the restaurant, as he was jerked back and forth by the doughnut thug, who still gripped his left arm but was weaving and dancing and waving his free arm to keep off the parrots. Seeing his chance, Andrew hit his man in the stomach with his elbow, twisting away at the same time and kicking him in the knee.

  Two parrots sailed in as if to help him, one of them clutching at the man’s cheek with its talons and biting his nose, wrenching it back and forth as if to tear it off. Howling, he grabbed the bird but couldn’t pull the parrot off without losing the end of his nose into the bargain, and so reeled away shrieking for help, blood spattering his shirtfront. Andrew ran for it, up Cherry, toward the Metropolitan, thanking heaven that the parrots were on his side, and that one hadn’t latched onto his nose by mistake. Pickett pounded along after him as the men back in the parking lot were slowly backed up against the wall, fighting just to keep the birds away from their eyes.

  None of the parrots followed Andrew and Pickett, and as they topped the hill and sprinted across a lawn, angling toward where the car was parked, they looked back to see Pennyman lurching through the door into the rear of the restaurant, his pants tattered, his hair wild. He tore at his coat, which still sagged under the weight of the determined parrot.

  Andrew fired the engine and sped away, Pickett pulling himself into the weaving car and slamming the door on the run, the Metropolitan barreling through two stop signs and sliding around the corner onto Wisconsin Street, bound for home. It was when they’d got to Ximeno that the flock of parrots passed squacking overhead again, heading out over the ocean. Mystified, Andrew and Pickett watched them through the windshield until they disappeared beyond the rooftops.

  It was early yet, too early to go home. Heaven knows there was enough to do at home, but there was no way on earth that Andrew could claim to have done any serious fishing yet, and, at least for the moment, there was no way they could simply walk in and confess. Not yet anyway. They talked about it as they sat in a booth at the Potholder, eating breakfast.

  What profit would there be in generally revealing things? Rose would become involved; that was bad. It would be expected that they’d call the police, now that kidnapping had entered the list of villainies. But what, the authorities would want to know, had Pickett been doing breaking into a house on The Toledo?

  That’s what he’d done, it turned out, just as Andrew had suspected. Pickett had driven off late last night with Andrew’s Toledo address in his pocket, and just for sport he’d parked in Naples and walked to the right. It fronted the water and backed up onto an alley. There’d been an unlocked door, as if it were an invitation. Pickett had sneaked in, crept downstairs and into a basement, knowing he was an idiot for doing it, but fired up with his successes at the library. The basement was a laboratory, full of books and what seemed almost to be alchemical apparatus. A great carp lay flayed upon a table, laid open with a scalpel, but with its heart still beating, weirdly, as if Pickett had just that moment interrupted some half-finished experiment.

  Which, of course, he had. They’d stepped out of the shadows and cut off his retreat, almost as if they’d been waiting for him. He’d sat tied to a chair for hours, waiting almost until dawn, unable to sleep. The man wielding the scalpel—an old Chinese who looked like Fu Manchu with goldfish earrings—had been friendly, although not out of compassion, but out of the certainty, it seemed, that Pickett was a dead man and so posed no threat and could be talked to with impunity.

  Three hundred years old; that had been the man’s age, or so he said. Pickett believed him. Why not? He looked it, certainly, in some vague and undefinable way—as if he’d seen at least three hundred years worth of tumult and mystery and wonder. He excised a little gland from the carp, a gland from which, he said, he generated the elixir that Pennyman guarded so jealously. It was a longevity serum, a way to circumvent the ruinous effects of possessing the coins. “Mr. Pennyman needs the elixir very badly,” the old man had said, shaking his head as if it made him sad. “Very badly. He came to me in a sedan chair, a mummy, unable to walk, barely able to swallow. And now …” He shrugged, as if Pickett could see for himself. “He is a good customer. A very good customer.”

  Grinning, Han Koi had offered Pickett an ounce of the elixir, mixed in orange juice, thinking, maybe, that it was funny to offer a man something in the way of immortality one moment, knowing that the man’s life would be snatched away the next.

  One thing that Pickett became sure of before they hauled him away to the Bamboo Paradise was that Pennyman was merely a customer of Han Koi, an old and treasured customer, but not a partner. Pennyman paid well for the elixir—as the check stub testified—well enough so that Han Koi was happy to do Pennyman the favor of holding on to the snooping Pickett for a few hours, until dawn, until Pennyman had finished his sleep and would want to ask a few delicate questions.

  Pickett sipped his coffee and shook his head, remembering. It had been a long night. They had driven him to the restaurant and led him inside, untied—very sure of themselves. They’d dead-bolted the street door and pocketed the key, going into the kitchen to brew tea. Pickett had lunged for the pay phone, dialing Andrew’s number, barely able to get a sentence out before they were onto him. They locked him in the bathroom then, and there he’d sat, thinking that the first person he’d see when the door opened would be Pennyman. But there was Andrew …

  “It was a pretty spectacular escape, wasn’t it?”

  Pickett nodded.

  “And how about the parrots? If it hadn’t been for the parrots …”

  Pickett drew a finger across his throat, illustrating what would have become of them if it hadn’t been for the parrots.

  They ate in silence, both of them nervously watching the door. “What do we do about Pennyman?” asked Andrew.

  “Nothing,” said Pickett.

  “Nothing? We let him get away with this? How about that garbage business. You don’t think that he was …”

  “I think that explains the filth in the drawer, doesn’t it? Some men clip out pornographic pictures, some …”

  “Good God,” gasped Andrew. “He’s twice the monster I had him pegged for. I can’t allow him to stay in the house. He won’t, I bet. For my money we won’t see him again. He’ll send for his things.”

  “Nope,” said Pickett. “He’ll be back looking sleek and happy and full of flattery. And you’ll have to let him stay. The treasure hunt is two days away. The pot is on the burner, and we’ve got to let it boil. This isn’t something that can be stopped; it’s something that will come to pass, like it or not. And for your sake and Rose’s sake and the sake of the inn, we better let it play itself out with as little mess as possible. If Pennyman tries to brass it out, we’ll outbrass him, that’s all.”

  Saying nothing, Andrew sopped up the last of his egg yolks with a piece of toast. Maybe what Pickett said was true. The sails were furled, the ship slanting through the growing swell. There was nothing to do but ride out the storm. Someone, Andrew was sure, was at the tiller—maybe it was Uncle Arthur, maybe an unseen hand. This was no time to start throwing over ballast, to try to shift course.

  After breakfast they drove to the fish market on Ocean Boulevard, watching through the rear window for a tail. Then, with two rock cod and a sheepshead in the gunnysack, they drove to Naples, where Pickett’s car was parked. Pickett drove off. He intended to be at the cafe later that afternoon, to do his part. It promised to be a curious evening.

  When Andrew got home it was barely nine o’clock. He walked through the back door carrying his fish. He looked like hell, still wearing his jacket, although he’d tucked his shirt in and replaced his shoelace. Rose gave him a look.

  “Catch anything much?”

  “Didn’t do too bad.”

  “Out on the pier?”

  “Off the end.” He held up the gunnysack.

  “Cold out there?”

  “Not bad,” said Andrew, beginning to wonder. Ro
se was distant, clearly not chipper. He grinned to cheer her up.

  “I wouldn’t think that old jacket would be worth much. The wind must cut right through it.”

  Andrew nodded. “It was cold out there. But when you’re fishing …”

  “KNEX called early this morning and changed the time.”

  “What? To when?”

  “This evening, while you’re cooking.”

  Andrew grimaced. “That’s no good. I can’t actually wear one of these hats, not while I’m cooking. My idea was to get them in and out of here. Clear the decks, you know, before we opened up.”

  Rose shrugged.

  “You should have told them I was out, that you couldn’t change it. You should have told me first.”

  “In fact,” said Rose, wiping the countertop with a rag, “I did more than that. I went out onto the pier looking for you, about seven.”

  “Damn,” Andrew lied. “That’s when we were down at the Potholder, eating breakfast.”

  “No you weren’t,” said Rose. “I looked for you there, too. The waitress said she knew the two of you and that you hadn’t been in yet. When I couldn’t find you anywhere I figured there was nothing to do but call them back and okay the time change. It seems to me that if this inn or the cafe made the least bit of difference to you …”

  “Of course it does!” It looked as if she were going to cry, just out of tired desperation, sick of his sneaking around, his weird behavior. Andrew stepped toward her, thinking to take her by the shoulders, to give her a bit of a hug. Maybe he would explain things to her. Maybe she should know. But she wrinkled her nose and stepped aside.

  “What in the world …”

  “What?” said Andrew. “Nothing. Alcohol from the kelp worms we use as bait. They pickle them.” He spread his arms in a gesture of assurance, a gesture that revealed the bag and bottle in his inside pocket. The sight of it horrified him. Why hadn’t he … ? He pulled it out, gesturing more wildly now, almost frantic at what this must look like. He was innocent. He was more than innocent. He …