The Paper Grail (38 page)

“What’s that for?” Sylvia asked suspiciously when he laid the stuff on the counter.

“Wearing apparel,” he said. Then, noticing the felt-hat woman standing behind him, he said, “Take the lady first, perhaps.” He backed away and nodded at the woman, who smiled and said he didn’t have to do that, that she could wait.

He bowed gallantly. “I anticipate trouble,” he said to her. “This could get nasty.” She shrugged and stepped in front of
him, chatting amiably with Sylvia and paying her thirty dollars for the hat before going out.

“What’s the story?” Sylvia asked. “What’s this?”

“Sweater, blouse, and scarf. Nice, aren’t they?”

“Very. What are they doing on the counter?” She narrowed her eyes at him. He thought she looked a little tired, not up to a contest of wills. He would walk all over her. She clearly knew very well what he was up to, though, and was going to try to humor him into submission.

“I did a spot of business this morning,” he said. “Not much, mind you, given that it took me nearly three hours, but for once I’m a little flush. Where, I asked myself, does a man go to spend a little mad money? And the answer jumped into my head like a trout—why, down at the boutique!”

“Will you put the stuff back, or will I? What money? Did you do something illegal?”

“Illegal! Of course not. Ring these up, Sylvia. Don’t argue with your old man. You can’t refuse to do business with me just because I’m a senior citizen. That’s pretty clearly ageist. There’s laws disallowing that.”

“
Ageist
? Where on earth did you hear that?”

“Program on the television. I’m insisting on my rights here. Just because I’m an old man and your father doesn’t mean …”

Sylvia smiled at him suddenly and shrugged. “How much money?” she asked. “I keep a strict accounting.”

“A heap of it. I’m spending it here to keep it in the family. Think about that. How do you think all these big-money families keep the coffers topped off? They buy and sell to themselves—keep the profits in the family and the goods, too. It’s simple capitalism.”

“Sounds like inbreeding. Eventually they’d end up with mutations.”

“Mutations! Have you
seen
some of those people? There’s not one of those Fortune 500 crowd that has a chin left. Fins, tails, spare toes—they keep the plastic surgeons hopping. The trick is that the surgeon is their second cousin. It’s all in the family. What with kickbacks and tax write-offs, the whole thing’s free. Money’s just electricity for that crowd.”

“I can’t argue with that kind of logic,” Sylvia said, having suddenly given up the fight. She put the clothes into a bag and took his money.

“I’m going to show your mother a night on the town,” he said.

“Not Cap’n England’s,” she said. “Not the fish restaurant.”

“What’s wrong with the Cap’n’s?”

‘There’s nothing wrong with it, if what you want is fried oysters and a slab of grilled swordfish. But if you want something more romantic … there’s that new place out over the water, by the bridge—the Silver Salmon. All glass. There’ll be a nice moon tonight. The woman who owns it comes in here a lot. I’ll give her a call and reserve a table along the window.”

“Your mother will flip. It’ll be hard enough to get her down to Cap’n England’s.”

“We’ll gang up on her.”

“That’s just what we’ll do,” Roy said happily. Together, he and Sylvia could accomplish about anything. He was tempted to tell her about his book idea, to lay the statistics out on the counter and watch her eyes shoot open. But he had learned long ago that you don’t whisper that sort of thing around prematurely unless you wanted to bleed the magic off. He pulled out his pocket knife, took the sweater out of the bag, and cut through the plastic string that held the tag on. Then he shook the sweater out and held it up. “This is for you,” he said. “For your birthday.”

“My birthday’s not till January.”

“I know. Today I’m rich. In January I’m a pauper. Or maybe not. The future’s full of … something. Go ahead, try it on.”

Slowly Sylvia took it from him and slipped it over her head, standing in front of the mirror and pulling it straight. She took her hair out from the back and shook it down over her shoulders.

“Just your color, isn’t it?”

She looked at him, saying nothing, her mouth set in an even line.

He waited for a moment and then realized that she wasn’t going to say anything, not for the moment, anyway. “What on earth are you crying for, daughter? What a little fool I’ve raised.”

She threw herself on him and hugged him, and then kissed him on the cheek and pushed him toward the door. “You’re impossible,” she said. “I love this sweater. I’ve tried it on a dozen times. I’ve wanted it for weeks. How did you know?”

“I have impeccable taste.” He gestured at his own clothes—the worn-out tweed coat, the baggy trousers, the penny loafers. “You’d do worse than to hire me as a fashion consultant.”

“Yes,” she said. “I could do worse than that. Dinner at seven, then, for you and Mom. I’m making the reservations. Leave Mother to me.”

“She’s yours until seven.” He went out into the afternoon sunlight whistling. There was Howard, coming along up the sidewalk, looking reasonably cheerful himself. Roy waited for him. “I’ve just now left her, my boy. I’ve softened her up. It’s not my fault if you can’t accomplish anything now. My advice is to compliment her new sweater.” He slapped Howard on the shoulder, climbed into the station wagon, and sped off, carrying his package home to Edith and working out in his mind how he would force her to take it. He loved a challenge, especially when it came to women. When he set his mind to it, he was irresistible.

I
T
was dark and the wind was blowing when Sylvia dropped him off that night in Mendocino, in front of the store. He would walk around the comer and up to Mrs. Lamey’s, while Sylvia went off to a New Age gathering up at the top of Pine Street. A Mrs. Moynihan was scheduled to channel the spirit of her dead companion—a traveler along the astral planes whom she called Chet, but whose true name was secret. She consulted him on important issues because he had a more spacious view of things. He spoke a Celtic tongue, but the words were filtered through Mrs. Moynihan’s cranium and were uttered as modern English.

Last week Howard would have made fun of the whole business, but he held his tongue tonight. Last week was worlds away now. And in the lonesome darkness of the north coast night nothing seemed very funny to him. He agreed to meet Sylvia back at the store at eleven, and he walked west down Main, carrying his cane, although aside from the occasional twinge, he could get along well enough without it. Wasn’t that typical? When he had it, he didn’t need it; when he didn’t have it, he limped around like Amos McCoy.

Mrs. Lamey’s house was lit up, and coarse, self-conscious laughter sounded inside, as if someone were laughing at his own vulgar joke. There was music in the air—some sort of electronically spawned, almost atonal melody that sounded as if it were being torn to pieces by the wind. Through the window, Howard could see three men sitting in the living room, and another man and woman holding champagne glasses in their hands and standing in what must have been the kitchen. Bennet’s house sat cold and dark across the street, and would probably stay that way, since Bennet was up in Fort Bragg working late on the haunted house. Howard wished that Bennet were home, and Uncle Roy
with him. It would have been nice to have an ally or two nearby. Things might very easily turn bad—maybe quickly.

There was a gust of sea wind, and the plywood Humpty Dumpty on Bennet’s roof waved solemnly at him, as if in reassurance. Howard waved back, then turned around and walked up the street, back toward Main, paying attention this time to the dark neighborhood. Forty yards down he stopped in the shadow of a cypress tree. There was only one house beyond Bennet’s, a wooden shack with a tiny front porch and patchwork roof. The place was dark.

On the other side of the shack lay the bluffs—hundreds of acres of grassy meadow that made up Mendocino Headlands. There were rocky islands offshore and dozens of little coves along the deserted shoreline. Howard wasn’t in the mood to do any more swimming, though, and there was something in him that didn’t like the idea of being pursued out onto the deserted bluffs, especially not with a game knee and with nothing to hide behind but dead, knee-high grass.

Somehow he was certain that it would come to something like that. He was full of the premonition that he wasn’t here to spend a pleasant, chatty evening. There was something in the cold air that made him edgy—a brittle atmosphere that was tensed and ready to break like a sheet of thin glass. He could feel it in the jerky music on the wind and see it in the moonlit face of the grimacing egg man on the roof. In fact, he had felt it all afternoon, but had worked hard to convince himself that it was merely his imagination, that he was still reacting to whatever it was that had caused him to hallucinate yesterday morning out in the woods.

There weren’t any houses right adjacent to Mrs. Lamey’s, only weedy lots that backed up onto an alley, which was half blocked by a partly torn-down Volkswagen bus settled onto a couple of four-by-fours. Its side door was missing and the old curtains around the windows were ragged and drooping. Fifty yards down lay a half dozen houses running down Kelly Street, which dead-ended into berry vines and grass. He heard laughter from Mrs. Lamey’s house again, followed by a woman’s curse.

There was nothing more to be gained by studying the street, so he stepped out of the shadows and strolled across to Mrs. Lamey’s door, past the discolored roses and the pot of fish blood. He rang the bell twice so as to be heard over the noise. No use being timid.

Mrs. Lamey answered the door, dressed in her red kimono and a necklace made, apparently, of dried flowers tied together with thinly braided hair. Her face was almost hideous in the light of the porch lamp, which betrayed a crust of ghostly powder and rouge and penciled-in eyebrows. Under her kimono she wore a turtleneck sweater that covered her wattle but didn’t, somehow, mask her resemblance to some species of exotic turkey. “Well!” she cried, clapping her hands. “It’s our Howard!”

Talk died in the living room, and the man and woman in the kitchen looked out toward the door. Even at that distance Howard could see the woman roll her eyes at the man beside her. She might have been a year or two over thirty and she had the face of a lean divorcée who smoked too much and whose life had become a running complaint. The man had a pale sort of dog’s face with a sparse, adolescent mustache, although he must have been in his mid-thirties. He grinned back at her and raised his eyebrows, too, and they both walked out into the living room with the pretend expressions of people who wanted nothing more than to make Howard’s acquaintance. Howard stepped in through the door and waited for Mrs. Lamey to undertake introductions.

Stoat stood up from where he sat on the couch. He had the pale-looking skin of a person from an icy climate with more night than day, and he smiled at Howard with perfect teeth. “You two have met,” Mrs. Lamey stated, waving her hand back and forth between Howard and Stoat, who nodded very pleasantly and sat back down, resuming his conversation in a low voice. Howard thought that there was something nervous in him, though. He looked like a man who expected a fire alarm to go off at any second but was pretending to act perfectly naturally.

Mr. Jimmers’ burglar, the man in the wig, wasn’t there, thank God. That would have made for a bad moment. Probably he was still in jail. Either that or Mrs. Lamey couldn’t afford to have him around, given his new reputation. The other two men in the room were strangers to him. One had a shock of wild gray hair and a black businessman’s suit and wore a red patent-leather belt and shoes. Everything about him was gaudy and vulgar.

The other—the one who was talking to Stoat—was a thin, ascetic-looking man in his twenties, maybe, who didn’t look up when Howard was introduced. He wore a sweater tied casually over his shoulders and smoked a cigarette in a silver holder, his pinky finger waving in front of his face as if he were thumbing his nose at the wall.

So this is a “salon,” Howard thought, shifting his cane from one hand to the other and shaking hands very heartily with the man in the suit.

“This is Reverend White,” Mrs. Lamey said. “The Reverend is on television in the Bay Area. Quite a ministry. Started out fifteen years ago preaching on a street corner in the Market District, and now he owns half the renovated mansions along Haight Street.”

“Glad to meet you,” Howard lied, wanting to wipe his hands on his pants and trying to work out the broken-backed logic of the introduction, to make the jump from street-corner preacher to landlord.

“His is the Ministry of the Profiting Christian,” Mrs. Lamey said. “And I’ll warn you that he’s a powerful debater. He’ll win you over, Mr. Barton, just like he’s won me over.”

The man looked Howard up and down, clearly taking his measure. “Gimp leg, Mr. Barton?”

“Football injury. Nothing much. It acts up in a cold climate.”

“Carry a cane, though. Are you a Christian?”

“I’m more often a sinner,” Howard said evasively.

“Wrong answer. You’ll have to work on that. Don’t bother with the truth
all
the time. You’ll develop a low opinion of yourself. Say ‘Yes, I am!’ and you’ll feel better about yourself. I can do something about that leg of yours if you want, but it’ll mean a real commitment on your part. No more of this half-ass crap you’re used to. I’m a man who says what he means and gets things done. That’s quite a cane.” He bent over just a little bit, studying Graham’s cane, then looked hard at Howard.

Mrs. Lamey put her hand on the Reverend White’s elbow and said, “Be a dear, Lawrence, and pour Mr. Barton a glass of champagne, will you? That’s what needs to be done first. You can lay your hands on him later.” She favored the minister with a quick smile meant to dismiss him, and the man with the cigarette holder giggled. Mrs. Lamey turned to the two who’d been dallying in the kitchen, introducing the man as a literary critic and reviewer named Glenwood Touchey, also from the Bay Area, who favored deconstruction and didn’t hold with frivolous views about books. Howard knew only vaguely what that meant. The woman turned out to be a writer with an unmeasurably high IQ.