Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  “I am not. Though I have made my home in America for the past year. I like your—”

  “You see, we have in this country a very serious and tragic problem, of teenagers, some kids even younger, who find their homes, if you can call some of them homes, just completely unendurable. So the kids take off, hitchhiking or what have you, and quite a number of them, more than you’d think, wind up as murder victims. Nobody’s done a really good study yet to demonstrate how many.” Mary smiled eagerly, giving the impression she enjoyed either the lack of that crucial study or the prospect of reading what it would someday reveal. “The others, the relatively lucky ones, are sexually abused, robbed, molested. They wind up in jail, on dope, in prostitution.” Mary continued to smile. No doubt it was unconscious.

  Mr. Thorn said: “I see the problem. It is not a new one.” Several floors below his suite, a radio was softly playing a lament that concerned, if his old ears were to be trusted, the fate of a limestone cowboy. Very little surprised him any more.

  “There are official means of attempting to deal with the problem, of course. Courts, agencies, juvenile homes. They all can do some good but it’s not enough. I intended to sell that painting and use the money to show what can be done. I intended to set up a halfway house for runaways.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Thorn appeared to be giving the suggestion his most thoughtful consideration. Then he nodded. “That sounds like a most worthy plan.”

  Mary, who had perhaps not expected such quick and unqualified agreement, blinked at him and slowed down. “I really can’t think of anything that’s needed more.”

  “Amen,” said Robinson Miller.

  Thorn asked: “This plan of yours, I hope, has not been abandoned?”

  “No. Not at all. We’ve had to postpone things, of course, but—”

  “Then you would be willing to accept a contribution?”

  The sudden, innocent joy in Mary’s eyes realized some of the potential beauty that her habitual fierce smiling tended to obscure. She looked at Miller. “We could at least start an account, Robby … I’m very grateful, Mr. Thorn.”

  Only grateful. “I was wondering,” asked Mr. Thorn, meanwhile slowly drawing out a checkbook, “if you intended to return to the Seabright house for any reason? I assume you have moved out.”

  “I haven’t been back since that night. Except once for a police re-enactment. But I do still have a few things there, if Ellison hasn’t had them burned. They’ll have to be picked up sooner or later, I suppose.”

  “Might I come with you when you do that?”

  “Why?” asked Miller bluntly.

  Thorn opened the checkbook on his bony knee and drew a pen from his breast pocket. “I have been trying to arrange a meeting with Mr. Seabright, in his late brother’s house. I have phoned several times and have been told that he will see no one. He has not returned my calls. I hope to arrange, somehow, a simple invitation to cross the threshold of that dwelling. No more than that.”

  Miller opened his mouth, glanced at Mary, closed it again. His eyes came back to the open checkbook on Thorn’s knee, the pen poised over the blank check. At last he repeated Mary’s earlier question. “You’re his rival in the sense of— collecting?”

  “Yes. Precisely. I should like very much to get a look at his collection.”

  “He’s not very likely to give any friend of mine the grand tour, you know,” said Mary doubtfully. “In fact I don’t think he’d let either of us in the house. More likely he’d just have my things thrown out the front gate, and us with them.”

  “I ask only that you do what you can to help me cross the threshold. After that I shall manage for myself. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” She was still doubtful.

  “As for your projected charitable home—” Thorn wrote, tore out a check with a crisp noise, handed it across. “Something on account, shall we say? I hope to be able to continue my support of the project once it has begun.”

  Mary’s eyes widened, looking at the small piece of paper. “Thank you! Jeez, what can I say? Oh, Rob, this is a start, a real start.”

  Miller looked, made as if to whistle, then raised puzzled eyes to Thorn. “I’ll say. Thanks. You must have a real affinity for lost causes.”

  Chapter Four

  The Vicar of Christ lay dying in a tent on the lonely, rain-sogged beach at Ancona, where he had had himself brought that he might keep a personal watch for ships. Inside his fevered brain, phantasmagorical armies of Crusaders had been embarked, and he did not want to miss the first sight of their rendezvous here, at the place he had ordained—the hosts of the Emperor, the massed cavalry squadrons of Philip the Good.

  I arrived overland, to find the coastal town swarming with churchmen. But as I had expected, there was no sign of any military or naval force of consequence. A Swiss mercenary escorted me to the Pope’s tent, and waited by my side till word came out that His Holiness would see me. Inside, a pair of gray-robed monks was in absent-minded attendance upon the old man propped up with pillows.

  The Holy Father, looking clearheaded enough at the moment, beckoned me close to him. “You are welcome,” he murmured in Italian as I knelt to kiss his ring. “And your companions? Men at arms? How many have you brought?”

  I was sure he recognized my name, but it did not seem to have alarmed him. “I am alone, Holiness,” I answered, standing as he motioned for me to rise. Actually of course my presence had nothing to do with Pius’s call for swords about the cross. The trail of King Matthias’s wayward sister had led me to Venice, and in that city I had been told she had come here. According to my Venetian informant, she had embarked—in what capacity was uncertain—on one of the two galleys of Venetian volunteers that city had actually dispatched to take part in the Papal fiasco. The ships were now anchored in Ancona’s harbor, and my first move on arriving at the port had been to locate and question some of their sailors. These told me that no woman, high-born or low, who answered Helen’s description had been aboard either ship. Having offered the seamen gold for confirmation of her presence, I was compelled to believe their regretful denials.

  “Holy Father, I have come alone. But I bring you greetings from King Matthias. He regrets that vital affairs of state prevent his joining this most sacred enterprise, but he is praying most earnestly for its success.” That seemed a safe-enough message to put into the King’s mouth. Certainly Matthias would have welcomed a successful Papal foray against the Turk. But already the true Crusades were centuries in the past. Matthias fought the Turks because they were on his own doorstep, but no Christian prince in the late fifteenth century was going to spend years in a military campaign far from his own domain, exhausting his treasury and army in the process, while schemers at home worked to relieve him of his throne. Eleven years of relative stability had dulled the shock of terror sent across the continent by the fall of Constantinople. The Turk was for the time being more or less contained, even though the Ottoman Empire pressed up into Europe to the Danube and beyond.

  As I spoke, the Pope gradually let himself sink lower among his cushions. He was greatly disappointed by my words, and his lips moved in silent prayer. It was hard to tell, now, what this man had looked like in his youth; I had heard that he had spent it largely in debauchery and riotous living, that only in middle life had he turned to God. But what he had once been like no longer seemed to matter. The aged, wasted, dying tend to look all the same. I could see that he was holding one hand lightly clenched, in order that the Fisherman’s Ring might not slide off his diminished finger.

  His weary gaze moved out through the open doorway of the tent, vainly questioning the sea-horizon once again. Then it returned to me.

  “Yet you are here. It must have taken great courage for you to come alone, my son. I have heard of you.”

  And had written about me, too, the damned compulsive old scribbler, repeating for posterity all the vile gossip transmitted from Buda by his loquacious legate Nicholas. But at the time I did not know that Pius was
a writer, and I pitied him. I said: “You have probably heard little to my credit, Holiness.”

  He sighed. “Yet you are here, when Catholic kings have turned their backs. Your sins will be forgiven you. I would like to give you my blessing.”

  Lacking the heart to explain to that sad old man the truth about my presence, down I went on my knees again and bowed my head. He yearned to lead an army, to see the banners fly, to smite the unbeliever, to retake Constantinople. But he had trouble getting the attention of one of the monks to bring him a pan to piss in. That old man, though, bestowed a blessing on me which I remember still. I suppose it must have been the last he ever gave.

  Together we watched darkness slowly cover the horizon. Neither of us had the least idea how wide the oceans were, or that America lay undiscovered somewhere in their midst. Side by side in the harbor rode the two Venetian galleys, twin lanterns burning, their captains probably already in private conference deciding how soon they might be able to give up the farce and sail for home. The Pope’s breathing was growing louder and more labored. I remained in the tent, unchallenged and almost unnoticed, as physicians and prelates, recalled from God knows where in that small town, began to gather.

  A final time Pius beckoned me to his side. “You will be going far, my son. To a strange, long life, in distant lands. You will be going farther than…”

  I bent over him, trying to hear more. But the rest was lost in the struggle of his old lungs to breathe, in a chanted dirge the monks chose that moment to begin. Pius died near midnight, and the ranking churchmen on his staff scrambled away in an excited effort to be first back to Rome.

  Chapter Five

  Travel by automobile was not something that Mr. Thorn enjoyed. In fact—except for flying machines of all types, which he liked immensely—complex machinery of any kind had always impressed him as perverse and unreliable. He detested, for example, firearms. But he could get along in an uneasy coexistence with mechanism when he had to; and recently he had been brought to the reluctant conclusion that the advantages of being able to drive oneself about in one’s own automobile outweighed the attendant irritations. Thus it was that two evenings after Mary Rogers had splashed her Hollywood blood on Ellison Seabright, and one evening after her visit to Thorn’s hotel, Thorn was alone in a rented vehicle, on his way to see the Magdalen again. Or so he hoped.

  Persistence on the telephone had finally paid off, and he had wangled for himself an invitation to the Seabright mansion. Persistence, and a ploy of passing along for Mr. Seabright’s ears some hints of information that Thorn guessed the most recent purchaser of the supposed Verrocchio would be unable to resist. The guess was evidently right.

  The house lay in what was probably the wealthiest suburb of the metropolis. The high wall enclosing its several hectares of grounds was constructed in large part of real adobe; looking at this wall, Mr. Thorn thought that some segments of it, near the house, were possibly old enough to have seen forays by hostile Indians. He knew little of the history of this part of the world, but meant someday to study it, an effort he suspected would not be easy. History, unlike machinery, he always found interesting; but he had seen too much of history to have any faith in the official account of anything.

  As soon as the drive leading to the house parted company with the curving public road, it passed under an iron gate, now closed, in the old wall. Just outside the gate, Thorn stopped his Blazer—having seen what a high proportion of the natives elected to use four-wheel-drive vehicles, he suspected they had some good reason and had followed their example. A gatekeeper, a Spanish-looking man, appeared now inside the ironwork, which opened itself on electric tracks as soon as Thorn rolled down his window and announced his name.

  Inside the gates the graveled drive curved to and fro through spacious lawns now enjoying their evening sprinkling from an automatic system. Citrus blossoms blessed the air. From behind a mass of greenery the house came into view—for its time and place, quite an impressive villa, though it was not like some that Mr. Thorn had visited. Like its surrounding wall it was eclectic, with some good old sections that looked especially venerable. Additions over a number of decades, some quite recent, had made it very large.

  As Mr. Thorn parked his Blazer and approached the sizable front portico, there sounded from somewhere on the other side of the building the thrum of a diving board, followed by the trim splash of a lithe body entering a pool. It was, somehow, a definitely female splash; and Thorn, with no more than that to go on, immediately visualized the dark and slender woman who had been with Seabright two evenings ago. Stephanie Seabright, bereft of her only child just two months past. Stephanie who did not seem to mourn, but yearned. And swam, too, evidently; though Thorn could not really be sure from a mere splash that it was she.

  At the front door Thorn was met by a butler, who resembled physically the bodyguard who had attended Seabright at the auction room. This man was a little slimmer and younger, though, and therefore presumably a little faster on his feet.

  “Come in, sir, you’re expected. Right this way, please.”

  “Thank you.” To Mr. Thorn, the simple crossing of any house’s threshold for the first time was always something of an event; and in this house he had a special interest. Once inside, enveloped by air conditioning, he was led across a wide entry floored with Mexican tile into a sort of manorial hall that made the house seem even larger than it had looked from outside. The ceiling of this hall, at about third story level, was supported by wooden beams so gigantic that the whole effect reminded Thorn of nothing so much as the passenger concourse of the Albuquerque airport, where not long ago he had spent part of a long bright afternoon between planes, besieged by sunlight, squinting through sunglasses and changing his place in search of deeper shadow. He had in his time been inside private homes that had rooms bigger than this hall. But not many such homes, and not much bigger.

  Pushing open a massive door of carven wood, his guide stood deferentially aside. Halfway down the length of the booklined study thus revealed, Rodrigo Borgia rose up from behind a desk, all red smears cleaned away, and dressed as for a leisurely safari.

  “Mr. Thorn, glad to see you again,” Ellison Seabright boomed. “That’s all, Brandreth,” he added in an aside to the butler, and then came forward as to some old friend, extending one great arm for a handshake. “Too bad we didn’t have more of a chance to talk the other night.” In fact they had never talked at all. “That damned woman … you’d like a look at the collection, right? Of course you would. So let’s go downstairs and do our talking there.” Seabright had a light, homey, completely American voice. Mr. Thorn could easily imagine him reading the ten o’clock news, getting high ratings on the job.

  Thorn murmured something in the way of a response. The easy voice of his host chatted on, while a massive hand on Mr. Thorn’s bony shoulder guided him out of the study again and back across the baronial hall. At the far end of the hall a small elevator opened its bronze door and without a groan accepted the combined weight of the two men.

  Of the several levels indicated on the elevator’s control panel, two appeared to be below ground, and Seabright pressed the button for the lowest. During the brief descent he chatted with Thorn about the Arizona climate, and the importance of always maintaining the proper atmospheric conditions in rooms housing a collection. As he talked Mr. Seabright kept eyeing his guest steadily. It was a gaze not quite offensive, but still it would have been found intimidating by almost any visitor. The elevator eased itself to a stop meanwhile, surrounded by deep silence. Scream down here, thought Mr. Thorn, amusing himself privately, and no one will hear you.

  “Ah, Stephanie!” Seabright exclaimed, taken by surprise as the door opened. The lift had delivered them to a perfectly cooled lounge or game room, of a size and elaborateness appropriate to the house. At one end of the room was a bar, and on one of the bar’s six chrome stools perched the dark lady of the auction room, the lately bereaved mother. In a few more years she would have
to give up brief bikinis such as she was wearing now—but not for a few more years, and she was making the most of the time left. Over the shreds of cloth she wore as symbolic cover-up a translucent short cape, some hybrid perhaps of cloth and plastic. Behind the bar, Thorn noticed at once, there was no mirror, but a mural of youths and maidens, pseudo-Greek and semi-porn, and Stephanie had to turn her head to see the men. Her dark hair as she looked round at Thorn was almost wet enough to drip, and her face bore the practiced smile that he remembered from the auction room. At Stephanie’s fingertips on the bar, a tall glass held a little dark liquid and some ice.

  “Mr. Thorn, my wife. Steff, you probably remember seeing Mr. Thorn, of Chicago, at the auction room night before last? That damned woman.”

  Thorn took the lady’s tanned hand when it was offered as if he meant to bow and kiss it, but did not go that far. Stephanie’s eyes rested perturbedly on his. On the skin her hand was cool, but there was a faint, heated trembling underneath. “My heartfelt sympathy, madam, on your dear daughter’s passing.”

  “Thank you. Everyone who knew Helen says what a remarkable girl she was.” It sounded like a rehearsed line. Probably it had been used very often in the past weeks and months. Stephanie’s eyes would not hold Thorn’s directly for very long. Common enough. But he knew she was still wishing that she was somewhere else. Somewhere, perhaps, that did not exist outside of her own imagination.

  “Anything to drink, Thorn? Then let’s go take a look at a few things. Right through here.”

  Just as he was leaving the lounge, Thorn was granted a last unexpected glimpse of the swim-damp lady, in a mirror that had been almost concealed, for some reason, in a niche. She was still on her stool, eyes gazing back with vague puzzlement at the same area of reflective glass. Perhaps she noticed that the mirror bore no image of the lean man who had just pressed her fingers in a way that could be taken to mean something if she wanted to think about it.