Giovanni's Gift (38 page)

Milland Daiches had the silliest look on his face. The eyes were bulging and a clownish smile spread on his lips, a dark smirk accentuated by that red grin of blood his toothy mouth had formed. I never knew blood could be so florid. But there it was, and coming forth in profusion, as the heavy jaws of the bear trap, rigid and unarguable, had clutched him about his lower belly, biting down on him below the waist and around there along his back. His hands had seized upon its uncompromising embrace, where they'd tried with no success to pry the thing apart and free himself from its iron teeth. I would have thought his coat and pants might have protected him some from the thing, but this was not what I saw before me. They'd been sharpened to a fine edge and had done their work.

Henry was kneeling, trying to force the spring bows—as Helen had taught me these jaws were called—away from their victim.

“Milland?” he was asking, oddly.

I got down beside him and grasped the opposite bow, and the two of us pulled against one another—I couldn't believe how strong the spring was—and managed to get the body out of the apparatus. My hands, wet with gore, caught him up by the sleeves, and it was some struggle to lift him into the studio, Milland at dead weight being surprisingly heavy.

“Get that light,” Henry said.

I wanted to speak, but even the word
Okay
wouldn't form itself.

In the light, lying on the plank floor of the studio, in this environment of books and paper and fresh clay maquettes, the corpse looked much less real than it had outside.

“Jesus God,” and Henry backed away from the body. We both did.

“What you want me to do?” I heard myself ask.

“I—well—”

“Maybe we better call down to Lewis's, see if Noah's there?” now finding my voice.

“He was trespassing,” Henry explained.

“Don't worry about that. You didn't ask him to come and do this to himself.”

“This is—Tate did this.”

“Uncle—”

Milland's dying here did seem to bring matters to full circle, though something I sensed was terribly wrong still. Here was our night visitor, yes, and that receipt Helen had discovered in Tate's files seemed to take on fresh meaning, but then we heard something beyond the studio walls—a quick cry, faint and extraneous—which was even less expected than Milland's last brutal utterances.

Abruptly, we stepped outside and listened under the stars and powerful moon, having extinguished the lights. Now we heard the sharp sound of a stick cracking, above where we stood, up toward the falls.

“Who's there?” Henry asked, confused, his voice vague.

Purest silence reigned; we saw no movement.

“Who's there?” he shouted aloud after clearing his throat.

The silence would have overwhelmed us, I think, if it hadn't been saturated by the continuous whispering of the creek and falls. I couldn't fathom how our night visitor lay dead on the floor, but some form of his degenerate ritual seemed now to carry on without him. Careful to step around the bloodied trap, and with every conceivable nuance of cheap triumph having been wiped out of our minds, Henry and I left Milland's body behind, as we glided along the brief gable of the studio and began to walk across the flat upper end of the meadow. We moved slowly, cautiously, each of us no doubt coming to fresh conclusions about what possibly was happening. Henry stopped, shushed me, and I stopped beside him, and listened. We must have stood dead still for half a minute before we heard the next sound.

A rattling, first, then it crunched and crunched again. The rhythm of it pulsed, supple in the resonate valley.

Someone was running. We could just make out the presence of the figure in the light of the moon.

We said nothing to one another but began to stride quickly out of the relative flatness of the meadow and up toward the mouth of the gorge. Henry stayed with me for a hundred yards or so, but then fell behind. I heard him breathing hard back there, and when I stopped long enough to allow him to catch up, we saw the figure in the silvery light again, climbing higher into the gorge, over on the other side of the creek.

Side by side we hesitated, and if the context hadn't been so bizarre, we might have marveled at the miraculous beauty of these moonlit woods in which we stood like two hapless mortals transported by magic into a wonderland. The moonbeams laced through innumerable branches in their passage to the floor of the forest. The world had converted to two colors, silver and black. But for the fresh vision of Milland impaled in the death trap, this might have been a moment Henry and I would cherish, standing together bewitched by what we saw and by how small we really were in this wild world. But our purpose came rushing in to take its rightful place. I asked Henry, “Why don't you go back and check on Edmé,” adding that I would chase this intruder all night if I had to: Like he'd said, this was it.

He refused, saying Edmé was armed and Milland wasn't going anywhere. “Come on,” he finished, in a low, hoarse voice.

We hurried forward into the mercurial dark, snaking our way between clumps of shadowy bushes and jagged upheavals of rock. To our left the water spilled and pooled and moved forward to the next rough lip of stone, where it plunged again. This close to the falls, we lost track of the running figure, but assumed whoever it was we were chasing intended to continue climbing on up through the narrowing gorge and escape into the high forest. We crossed at a place several hundred yards from the studio. The creek narrowed to a point where you could leap from a jutting boulder over onto a flat patch of ground.

Water surged, gushed, rose, flooded along beside us. I was angry, and afraid, and committed this time to not losing. After all, I was closing in on my reason for having come here in the first place. I began to lose all sense of time, but was committed only to the chase. My lungs began to burn. My throat was raw from sucking in this thin cold wet air. The muscles in my legs and back were scorched and deadening. Henry was no longer right behind me. I stopped for a moment to get my bearings and catch my breath, knelt down on both knees with my hands still clutching the rifle on the earth before me, as if bent in prayer before some false idol, and listened for him. I thought maybe he had given up, gone back down to the house to attend to the business of telephoning Noah for help—though
that
would be no easy task, telling a man that his brother had died such a death as Milland's. Or maybe he knew some other path up here. Either way, I was on my own now. I looked behind and was startled to see how high I'd climbed. Far in the distance were the faint hazy lights of the town, and here and there, like enchanted jewels spread across the black carpet of the broad valley, other lights glimmered. Wind breathed in the boughs of conifers and made the dry deciduous leaves in the aspens and scrub oaks clatter. I stood again, and began to plod on, not altogether certain of what I was doing. It was quite clear to me that no matter how determined to catch the intruder I might have been, if he chose to slip me, he probably could. But then, just as I'd begun to despair, I saw him again. I felt as if my mind were being read.

The race became considerably more arduous now, the walls of the gorge began to close upon each other, and as they did the sheerness of the ascent increased and the creek path became treacherous. I worked my way up through a rocky passage, so narrow and unstable, where stones clattered out from beneath my feet, and emerged into the primordial forest of stubble pines. It was, I knew, somewhere in this tract of woods that Giovanni met his fate, and for the first time since my pursuit had begun, a stab of panic flashed through me. You could die here, I reflected.
He
did, and unlike yourself, he knew his way around.

Again the morbid image of Milland's grimacing face arose with galling clarity before me. I heard some rocks unloosened above—or was it just in my imagination now?—and I walked on, but not with the same confidence and desire that had got me this far. Bent at the waist, once more bowing as a penitent might, I carried the rifle with barrel forward and finger on the trigger—a savage penitent, less prepared for reverence than for violence.

He was close by. It wasn't as if I could
see
him as such; I rather felt his presence. He couldn't have been more than a hundred paces away—I could swear I heard his breathing, no more calm than my own—and I took those steps like one who was sentenced but bound to continue, locked into an irrevocable journey. Even if the occasional scutter of tumbling scree didn't smack the air, even if I hadn't caught sight of him, oddly spidery in the tangle of boughs and stone architecture, I would have known he was there in the silvery darkness, waiting. I sensed how alert he was, and tried my best not to make any noise that would betray my advance. By moving slowly I hoped to be more invisible. He was within yards, I sensed. Why couldn't I see him? With heart pounding crazily, I moved sideways in the direction of the fountainhead that rustled steadily just to the east. As the creek provided me with neither shelter nor safety, my movement toward it had no purpose other than that it felt like some kind of lifeline connecting me with the ranch below and the world beyond.

The word “
Henry
” was whispered, in a voice I recognized as coming not from the rushing water, which had such a knack for deceiving me into believing it could speak, but from someone right behind me. “
Who am I?
” it breathed.

“I don't know,” slowly turning.

“
Stop.
”

I froze.

“
Say who Helen Trentas is. Tell the truth.
”

“I don't understand.”

The shotgun blast stung both my ears and for an instant lit the immediate landscape with a yellowish burst. I dropped to my knees, and was surprised to find I'd not been shot. The detonation echoed, and then the forest was quiet again. Terrified, I didn't move.

The voice was still there and spoke once more, empathetic but weirdly calm. “
Say Helen Trentas is your daughter.
”

Surely I recognized this voice, distorted though it was by fear and the whispering. “She's—”

“
Henry?
”

“But—no, it's Grant.”

Now the burst of sound just behind me was different. Not the coercive explosion of a shotgun but a cry of disappointment and the footfalls of someone running headlong away from this site of our confrontation. I'd dropped my rifle and, in the rush to catch this whisperer, I left it where it lay among pine needles and broken branches, and ran hard after, heedless of the boughs that scratched at my eyes and the capricious terrain beneath my feet. I could see the figure in the thicket ahead, shouted, “Stop,” as it dashed out over the glistening flat rock formations which cradled the headwaters of Ash Creek. It disappeared into the flow, and emerged on the far bank, and in I plunged, surprised by how heavily the current shoved against my thighs. I grabbed down at the surface of the flood, as if it were something to hold on to for balance. Then came a great surge, and a flicker of icy water that scorched my face, and the shock of feeling myself toppled and being swept several yards, maybe, and once more thrown upright. My hand caught something firm, and I was steady again although I couldn't see. I felt myself being pulled in another direction, by the hand that held my own, wrenched toward the bank of stones.

I was out of the current and lay on rocks, and then, as if some other spirit that lived inside me came to life, I found myself on my feet and had my arms wrapped with the last of their strength around this person who had eluded me, threatened me, and now pulled me from the water, too. We went down hard, Helen Fulton and I. Both of us were too exhausted to give much more to the struggle.

Rome is most beautiful on a rainy day. The venerable statuary is shrouded in mist, and mystery. The Baroque palaces along the Corso, once residences of privileged aristocracy but now given up to banks and boutiques, wrap themselves in the melodrama of drizzle and for a moment, despite the shop windows with their displays, seem again restored to their original grandeur. The Rococo stairway ascending to the Trinita dei Monti glistens with its puddles of water, which reflect the pale scowls of kids in ponchos who've come from around the world to idle, to
hang.
Every piazza is taken over by pigeons, and the face of the Tiber is delicately pocked by falling droplets. Back in this city of possibilities, I inhale the gentle northern wind, hoping it will revive me after another insomniac night alone in the hotel. Already it's been a morning of wandering, one of my last before giving myself the chance at a different life, and now I ramble past the Pantheon, down the Corso, vaguely toward the Palatine, with Hawthorne in my pocket and nothing before me today but a cafe where I might sit for an hour with the book. I promised Edmé I would send it back to her after I'd read this last story, one about the Chimera, and then signed my name on the endsheet, thereby completing finally an endeavor I'd begun as a boy. Edmé'd said, “Keep the book,” but I see no reason to break her set. Indeed, of all the people I have ever known, Edmé might be the one who deserves wholeness, completeness, unbrokenness, because as I understand things now, she had, through her capacity for forgiveness, tried to keep so many lives unbroken. This is nothing I could ever communicate to her in so many words, of course. She would look at me with wondering eyes. But, as I say, while I have no desire to part with
The Wonder Book,
I haven't it in me to want what's not rightly mine. No more breakage.

Someone at the hotel said that yesterday was Veterans Day back in the States, a Saturday in early November. While I don't have a calendar and don't really care what day it was yesterday, I feel that though I've come home wounded—veteran of a war not of my making—I have some chance at healing, too. Maybe even of finding some health I never knew before.