I had not even wanted to meet with him. But Stan, in a pleasant way, had insisted. It was always cheering to see him, and so I had agreed.
My visit with Dr. Ashby, and the accident just three hours before, had shaken me, but I put on a smile. This was not going to be a delightful conversation. I could tell that Stan had something he thought would be unpleasant for me to hear. He toyed with a match he had torn from the book.
We chatted about his children and his business, which was thriving, until the waiter brought our drinks on a silver-plated tray.
At last Stan said, “Well, I found out everything I could about those … things,” he said. “Those teeth.”
This much he had told me already over the phone. “They’re real, right?” I pretended to be slightly bored.
“It depends on what you mean by real. They aren’t an illusion. They exist.”
“What is this, Philosophy 1A? Are they actual teeth from an actual animal or what?”
“They’re actual teeth. I knew that before you left the office because spectographically they match up with the material from other teeth. And I’ve used the photographs to do some further digging. They aren’t leopard teeth. Or baboon. I was hoping baboon, or gorilla, actually.”
My feigned boredom did not prevent me from asking, too quickly, “Why were you hoping for a primate?”
He said nothing for a moment. “I was really hoping for gorilla, but a glance at an anthropoid molar chart canceled that idea. They are the teeth of a very, very large beast.”
“What sort of beast?”
He did not meet my eyes. “I don’t even like to try to guess. Something incredible.”
I shivered. A thrill like nothing I had ever felt.
He continued, “I say incredible. Because I think this is some sort of hoax. I don’t know why you in particular would play a joke of this sort on me. So maybe someone is deceiving you, or having some fun with you.”
“It’s not impossible,” I said.
“I don’t know what the metal is. Some sort of silver alloy, but it’s not a blend of nickel or copper or zinc. I could do extremely deep tests, but that would run into several weeks.”
“You hate them, don’t you?”
“They aren’t a Fabergé egg, face it.”
“But you deeply dislike them.”
“I don’t have to like them.”
“What sort of teeth are they, specifically?”
Stan saw how interested I really was. The fact that I had pretended a lack of interest made him lean forward and speak in a low, tense voice. “I’ve been working from photographs. I can’t be completely conclusive.”
The thrill again. I knew what they were, and so did he. I clasped my hands together in front of me so he wouldn’t see how they were shaking. “This isn’t much of a report.”
But he had seen how I felt. He smiled, an attempt at courage, perhaps, and to remind me that he was still my friend. “A few years ago a scholar brought back a group of silver objects from Mexico. He left them at the lab to be dated and cleaned. They had been discovered in Guadalajara when a brujo was arrested for kidnapping and dismembering a few fellow citizens, eating their brains, tearing out their hearts—a hideous crime. A few of the objects, a knife, a few saint’s charms, looked old. I could hardly work with these objects. I was puzzled—I’m not superstitious. But I like sun, children, games. I prefer light to dark. Some objects seem steeped in evil, by which I mean the desire to cause harm. To cause pain. To do real hurt to people. And that’s what I thought when I first saw the fangs. That these were a witch’s doing, an object created to do evil.”
He looked away for a moment, and then met my eyes again. “And I think you’re way too caught up with these things.” He said “things” like an epithet.
I was not surprised by what he was telling me. I was surprised at my own anger, a fury that made the room fade, and made me grip the tablecloth, bunching it in my fist. What had he said to make me so angry?
They were trying to take away the teeth. Zinser, and now Stan—they were in league with each other. I saw it clearly now. They wanted this treasure for themselves!
But I recognized in myself an irrational surge of feeling, and I released the tablecloth, although it remained bunched and wrinkled where I had gripped it. I made myself think the word: irrational. My attachment to the fangs was irrational. There was, indeed, something wrong.
Stan dabbed at the tablecloth with his forefinger. “I said as much when I first saw them. They resemble the teeth of a wolf. A very large wolf.” He waited for me to respond, and then continued, “But when I say that they are the teeth of a wolf I need to be a little more accurate. The teeth are lupine; there’s no question about that. But the configuration of the silver jaws are not at all like a wolf’s.”
He paused, hoping that I would conclude the thought for him. “A man’s jaws and a wolf’s are quite unlike each other. We don’t really have the snout that a wolf has.”
“These are teeth from a wolf, made to be worn by a man.”
“That’s right.”
“But we’re leaving something out—you hesitated.”
He laughed unhappily. “It’s nothing. Just something I couldn’t help thinking.”
“Tell me.”
He toyed with the matches and put them down. He tried to make it sound like a sour joke. “They might be from a human with teeth like a wolf.”
“Might be?”
He leaned back in his chair for a moment. I was forcing him to say things he didn’t like to talk about. “Possibly.”
Not only that, I thought. They were precious beyond imagining. And they were mine.
He asked, “What has Zinser told you about them?”
“Hardly anything,” I lied. “Why should he tell me anything?”
“I’ve done some work for Zinser in the past. I think I’ll give him a call. Just to satisfy my own curiosity.”
My throat constricted. I wouldn’t let them take the fangs away. I was icy, and then, in an instant, flushed with heat. “I wish you wouldn’t,” I said. “He’s trying to settle on a price. If he knows you’re interested he might jack up the value.” This was a miserable lie, and Stan knew it. I could afford almost any conceivable price for such a curiosity. And Zinser was widely regarded as an honest man.
What worried me was that Stan pretended to agree with me. “All right, I’ll forget about it.”
“I mean it, Stan. Don’t mention them to Zinser.”
“I said I wouldn’t.”
“If you do, I don’t know what might happen.”
“I said I wouldn’t,” he said. He eyed me as though discovering something new and very irritating about me.
He stood, and to my surprise he was leaving. I insisted that he sit down, but Stan tried to make light of his desire to leave. “I have a million things to do, Ben. But listen. I mean this: I would not keep those fangs in my house.”
“Don’t talk to anyone about them.”
“Don’t worry—”
I took his wrist and gripped it, without being aware of what I was doing until it was too late. Stan flushed and tried to pull away. “Tell no one,” I said, in a dry, hard voice that was scarcely my own.
I squeezed, so hard his wrist cracked and Stan tried to pull away. The group at a table near ours fell silent. A waiter appeared and fluttered about us.
“And I want the photographs. I don’t want you to tell me you destroyed them. I want the photos and the negatives, immediately.”
When I released Stan he fled, and did not even look back, leaving me gazing after him, and then looking back at my own hand. I closed my fist, and at last answered the waiter’s question. No, there would not be anything else. I attempted a laugh, apologetically. A quarrel between friends. Something that happens even between civilized men.
But I did not leave at once. I could not do anything but stare at the wrinkled tablecloth. Stan was my friend, my good friend, and I had hurt him.
The first thing
I did when I reached home was hurry into my study, shutting the door behind me and locking it. I knelt before the safe and spun the dial. The fine dry purr of the dial delighted me, and the nearly silent opening of the door. I nudged aside a cloth sack of Spanish royals, and brought the box into the light, reverently.
And what was wrong with that? They were valuable, weren’t they? Perhaps they were the rarest object of art in the world. Certainly the Vatican collection would contain nothing like this.
I opened the box.
Light sang off the silver, off the pure ivory of the fangs. I could hear the light, actually hear it as I held them in my hands, clasped close to my heart. This was a treasure.
Even then I had just the slightest wrinkle of doubt. Wasn’t I, perhaps, just a little overenthralled with these fangs? But everyone else was, too. Zinser and Stan both had strong feelings about them. I was right to feel as I did.
Lieutenant Solano was glad to hear from me, until I mentioned Gneiss. Then his voice dropped just a bit, and I could sense him picking up pencils or paper clips and putting them down at once, only to pick them up again.
He knew what I was about to ask. “What, exactly, is Gneiss doing in San Francisco?”
“I don’t even like to talk about it.”
“Have there been mysterious crimes of some sort?”
Now I could sense him glancing around to see if someone was listening, like a man calling his girlfriend or a bookie. “I don’t believe in this kind of thing,” he said.
“I don’t either, really,” I said, mystified.
“There have been some kind of rumors about him. Some say he’s tracking down a vampire, but some people say he’s after some other kind of supernatural creature.” He said this carefully so I would know he did not take such things seriously.
“What sort of creature?”
“I hate to even begin to say it.”
“Try.”
“It’s too crazy, Dr. Byrd. They say he’s here looking for a werewolf.”
Fifteen
That night I had the dream again.
I waited on the path, the moonlight on a beast who trotted through the darkness. And then he saw me. I parted my lips to call to him, and he did not need to be beckoned.
He bounded toward me, ever closer, and then he was on me. His jaws were around my throat, but it was not pain that I felt, unable to cry out.
It was pleasure. He drank my blood, lapping it as it flooded from my veins.
And then the dream changed completely.
I was running. I had never run so fast before. It was not running as I had ever known it. I loped, a strong, even lope I knew I could continue all night. I plunged through the dark and the sea of scents.
I was the beast. My four paws landed lightly in the leaf loam and on the lawns, and each time I touched the ground new magic scents were released into the air. Wet leaves lashed me, and the freedom was like nothing I had ever felt.
I slowed, my paw/hands making a soft pat-pat on the lawn. There were warm-blooded bodies here. The bodies of women.
I could go anywhere, a fast shadow between buildings, past the silent hulks of cars. I followed the scents in the air, some of the smells so alluring my penis unsheathed, the staff aching and nodding as I ran.
Hurry, I snarled deep within my lungs.
Must hurry.
At last I saw the figure of a woman, stepping toward a car in the streetlight. Keys glittered. There was a scent of animal about her, and the chemical tang of new clothing. The key bit loudly into the lock. She was no one I had ever seen before, a woman, and she was what I wanted.
Her lips were parted, her eyes bright, gleaming bright, then fear-wide. I seized her, carried her like so much drapery, a flimsy creature, bounding with her through a stand of eucalyptus. When she saw me plain, mounting above her, working into her and spending the hardest lust I had ever experienced, I knew that I had possessed more than her spread body. Her fear had broken her. She had lost her soul to me—I had destroyed her mind and she would never think a coherent thought again.
I stroked her with something like a hand. She was, I saw, beautiful.
But not as beautiful as Johanna. I finished my pleasure with the woman’s body, and then bounded through the darkness again. I would find Johanna!
And then I lost the dream.
It was the purest sleep, and when I woke I felt the nap of carpet under my cheek.
I did not move for a while. I did not open my eyes. A dream like that was almost too vivid, I found myself thinking. Such joy, and such freedom, had nearly been painful.
When I was fully awake I realized that there was something very wrong. What I felt under my cheek was not a carpet at all. I was lying on the lawn of my back garden, in the wet grass. A leaf tumbled toward me and lightly scratched my shoulder as it passed in the wind. I was naked.
I huddled into the house, and stood under the hottest water of the shower, washing the mud from my feet and from my hands. The rest of the dream began to come back to me. Although I could not call it a dream. I could not deceive myself.
But how could it be? What was happening? I had been sheltered from strong feelings by my ability to deny what was evident. But I could not deny it now. There was no question about it. I had to face what I knew to be true.
I expected to feel horror, dismay, fear about what might happen next. But I felt merely a haze of lingering disbelief, and a glowing feeling of promise. If it were true, then it was like a new and healthy diet, a surge of life.
The same fragmentary voice that had cautioned me about the fangs squeaked in me now: was I sure that this was all right? If it were true, wasn’t it something I should fear?
Besides, what if I had found Johanna? What if I had hurt her?
My hands trembled as I chose one of my favorite ties, a scarlet Roman silk. How peculiar it was to wear clothes, and to sheathe my feet in leather. I laughed, and took a deep breath of sweet air.
I sensed that I had not found Johanna. That all was well. I had hurt no one. Even that sole, anonymous woman had probably not been badly shaken. I looked at myself in the mirror and laughed and laughed. Delight, and the deepest joy, filled me, and also a sense of complete triumph. I was the master of a new and wonderful power.
In this burst of glorious spirits I called Johanna, and was at once disturbed by the sound of her voice. “I’m so glad you called,” she said. “Belinda got out again last night. She just got back. She’s worn out and dirty—exhausted.”
I was sorry to hear that, I said. But I was also made uneasy at the thought that my dream—or discovery, if it was in truth not a dream at all—could have done anything to trouble Johanna.
“But that isn’t the problem,” she said. “Someone broke into my house last night.”
I sat down, gripping the phone hard. “What happened?” I asked, hoarse, stitched with the fear that I really had no idea what I had done last night. It was possible that I might have hurt this lovely woman.
“One of the back windows is shattered. Not an ordinary window, Benjamin, a wire-mesh window. It’s smashed to pieces.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She sounded reluctant to continue. “I wasn’t here when it happened.”
“Oh.” That one syllable sounded pained, and perhaps I did feel jealousy for a moment.
“It’s not that. A friend in the East Bay has pneumonia. It got late; I stayed over. A woman, Ben. And quite a lovely person.”
Now I wanted it to be a dream. I had been playing a game with myself, of course. It was like the time I took mescaline at Tahoe. There had been a lingering saturation of color, the sky stinging with its cold blue for days after the drug faded. But I had known it was only the drug, and now I knew that the dream was so powerful that it had tricked me into believing it. What a fool I was!
Such things could not happen.
“But the neighbors were frightened,” she said with something like regret. “They heard something that f
rightened them, and they called the police.”
When I pulled up to the curb outside her house I did not get out of the car. I could not. What I saw made it hard to move. And then I forced myself to move, and tried to laugh at myself. I was taking this all too seriously.
Surely none of it was possible.
Two police cars were parked outside her house. Static jarred the hush of the neighborhood, and a police radio singsonged the news of some desultory crime somewhere in the distance.
“I couldn’t see the need for police,” Johanna was saying.
The policeman looked at me without interest, even somewhat contemptuously. His stance said: I have power, and you don’t. Perhaps he did not want his interview with this comely woman interrupted by another man, or perhaps—and I had to think this—he suspected someone so eager to be here of being somehow criminal.
He returned to his clipboard. “A big dog couldn’t have done anything like that, Miss Fisher. Someone with a hammer would have trouble with that window.”
“I wasn’t here, so I have no way of saying what might have happened.”
“And nothing was missing?”
“I have told you this. Nothing at all.”
I had a sharp thought that it took me a moment to shake: she is afraid of the police.
“Well, there was a definite breaking and entering.”
“Perhaps he had a dog with him, this burglar,” she suggested. Perhaps she was actually afraid of this dark uniform, and this badge. But she definitely did not want him here.
The policeman studied Johanna, and he studied me. “He might have had a big dog with him,” he surprised me by admitting. “It would be very unusual for an intruder to bring, say, a Great Dane out prowling with him.” He sighed then, and I saw a tired man at the end of his shift, wondering how he would describe the last fifteen minutes on paper. He even smiled. “But you see all kinds of things,” he said.
Two other cops emerged from the back garden into the living room, one of them carrying, oddly, despite the fact that it was morning, a very large black flashlight.
“They head on downhill, and we lose them,” said one of the new policemen. They both looked at me, not in an unfriendly way, but as though they wanted to share something that was curious to the point of being troubling.
Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 10
