Saint Peter’s Wolf (11 page)

“But you wanted to warn me.”

“I'm a normal man. I have a conscience. I don't want to feel terrible if something happens to you.”

I felt that I was hiding something from this honorable man. Hiding my dream. Hiding my love for the fangs. But hiding something else, too, as though I did not deserve to be in his presence.

So that when I left I felt that I was lying when I said, “I'm sure everything will be fine.”

It was late afternoon when I reached my home. I put the key into the lock of the front door, and there was a step behind me.

The very rasp of the step froze me. “Dr. Byrd,” said a deep voice. “I need very much to speak with you.”

I nearly laughed at the strength of my reaction to the sound of this voice. It was a gentle, solemn voice, not at all unpleasant. But I could think only: don't turn around. Don't talk to him.

Don't let him in.

Thirteen

Karl Gneiss was large, broad-shouldered, and bald in the way that makes certain men look powerful. He was an older man, but his age was hard to guess. He was dressed in a cream linen suit, with a raincoat over one arm. He tossed the raincoat onto a chair in my study, and gazed around with his hands on his hips.

There was a companion with him, a man so like a shadow he was easy to overlook. This other man was younger, a thin figure with blond hair. He said nothing, a man willing himself invisible. His dark blue suit completed the impression: this man could follow me for weeks and go unnoticed. Gneiss himself seemed to forget his companion, and introduced him without looking his way. “Stowe,” Gneiss said. “With an
e
.”

Stowe's hand was dry, his face pale, his smile handsome except that it wasn't really a smile. One corner of his mouth lifted showing white teeth.

“Stowe sees what I miss,” said Gneiss.

“How convenient for you.” I said.

Stowe himself said nothing, and faded into the furniture.

Gneiss gave a quiet whistle at the sight of a Degas pencil-and-cardboard. He declined a drink, and an offer of tea or coffee. He sat with every sign of affable curiosity at the art, at the kilim carpet on the opposite wall, asking friendly questions about this charcoal, about that ceramic, until he at last leaned forward and said, “I startled you.”

I had settled in my chair, and found myself wanting to turn away from his gray eyes.

He continued, “Just then on the front porch. You were startled.”

“I was, a little. I knew you would pay me a visit, but I supposed you'd make an appointment and.…”

I was hoping he would finish my thought for me, but he smiled and said, “There's a good deal of crime around. I shouldn't have frightened you.”

“How can I help you?”

“I heard you had a good sense of things. I imagined you to be a canny individual. The police rave about you. I was simply going to ask you to keep your ear to the ground over the next few months.”

“A psychologist has a duty to his clients before he has one to any.…” I searched briefly for the word, and when I found it did not like saying it. “Police.”

He lifted a hand. He knew all that. “I am harmless. I investigate unusual crimes, and unusual phenomena generally. I am out of the FBI, but there's a high deniability factor here. They won't admit it if anything happens to me, but on the other hand if there is some astounding success, they will naturally want the credit.”

We shared a smile at bureaucratic deceit, but I clasped my hands and thought: this man is very smart. And for some reason I wanted him to leave at once. But I smiled, and asked, “Could you be more specific?”

“Sick killings. Where blood is drunk, or human flesh consumed. That sort of thing.”

I cleared my throat, and felt the presence of the fangs in the room, secret, unseen. “Vampires,” I suggested.

He smiled. “Things like that.”

“There are psychotics who believe themselves to be vampires.”

“Yes, there are.”

“How did you, if I may ask, find yourself in this particular line of investigation?”

“It's an ugly story. Ugly and short. My wife was killed, some ten years ago, by a man who thought he was a wolf. He wasn't; he was a psychotic, deranged man who should have been in a padded cell. I tracked him across Pennsylvania into West Virginia and shot him through the head. And then I retired from regular duty, and went into what we call Special Service. I made up my mind that sick people would not be allowed to infest this country. I track them down.”

I could not decide what expression to wear on my face. This man, I thought, is very dangerous.

His blunt tone faded, and his smile returned. “Or at least, I try. The work has begun to be complicated, and I have young men working for me now. We work outside the public notice, quietly. Well-funded, but silent. And perhaps I should not have used the word ‘infest.' I know how much compassion these sick people deserve.”

“I can't say that I have heard of any vampires, or—or of anything like what you have mentioned.”

“No. Probably not. That would be making my task all too easy. But you know what I mean. A man confesses, a man says he's about to shoot the president, or rape his neighbor's daughter, a psychologist is likely to share this problem with a colleague. The kind of sick individual I am talking about often does seek professional help. And if the problem is a crime that is imminent, I am the authority to be contacted. I will not harm the individual concerned. I will not shoot the individual through the head. Those days are gone. I have the means to help and to cure. I offer loving arms.”

“Why have you come here, to San Francisco?”

He smiled. “A hunch, really. Nothing more.”

“A hunch?”

He stood. “I wasn't so bad, was I? Just a quick word, and I'm off. I can tell you're a busy man. But I wanted to meet you. You're not like what I expected.”

“In what way?”

Gneiss did not answer for a moment. Stowe joined him in the doorway of the study, a lock of blond hair falling over his forehead.

“You're an interesting man, Dr. Byrd,” said Gneiss at last. “I'm glad we met.”

It was that night, at Ocean Beach.

Johanna and I took off our shoes, and tugged off our socks, alternately leaning on each other and hopping on one foot, laughing. Johanna's stockings were diaphanous, nearly invisible oriflammes in the wind, mine black orlon flags the wind nearly tore from my hand. I was aware of our undressing, even in this undramatic, incomplete way. Her feet were slender in the light from the surf and from the stars, and I felt my own feet to be square, taking one lumbering step after another.

I was becoming a master at forgetting what I did not want to consider. My conversation with Zinser that afternoon was forgotten. My interview with Gneiss was behind me. I was the most fortunate man in the world. And it was, in truth, fortune that I thanked, I who had never really believed in fate. It was Johanna who made it possible for me to forget. We had dined on ribs at Bull's, but once again I did not have much of an appetite, and the merry crowd, beery tourists, well-tailored businessmen and politicians, had been too loud. Johanna and I had eyed each other happily, two people who felt they did not need the world.

We carried our socks in our shoes, and this detail—that we carried our shoes in one hand, holding hands with the other—was important, as though we had unburdened ourselves of our lives and yet had to carry them with us. And when the surf broke around us we fled. Until at last it caught us. Or at least it caught me. At first only a sudsy burst, but then the foam soaked in, through my pants, and it was cold. A wave broke again, and there was the hiss and fizz of the foam around us, and that salt-and-iodine tang.

I had brought Cherry here to Ocean Beach when we were dating, nearly three years past. I had even despised the word “dating,” but when I began to seriously court her I did not like the idea of myself as a “suitor” any better. It all sounded so outdated, so trite, so much what other men did, in other times. And yet here I was courting yet another woman, walking beside her, the surf shivering the air.

When I kissed Johanna her lips were cold and salty. She had been that one woman whom I knew I would never hold in my arms, and yet we were lovers now. I felt cured of every bad thing that had ever happened.

“It's cold,” I said, holding her away from the wind. I did not mean to talk about the wind, but only to refer to the world. It was a way of saying: see how cold it is and how little we care?

“It's not so cold,” she said, because she understood me. It was windy, a chill, wet wind that soaked through us so that we would be wet simply by standing here much longer. But that was nothing.

And then, I could not understand why, I said, “They are always finding bodies on the beach, washed up by the tide. Fishermen who got swept away near the Cliff House. People who fell in, or jumped, at Land's End.” I imagined that she might think this the sort of creepy tale a man might tell a woman to make her snuggle closer. But my motive was more serious than that. I meant that we were on the very edge of a thrashing, thundering storm of water that took lives. And I meant that life was precious, and that we should not waste a single night.

Again, she understood me. “Terrible things happen,” she said. “In my house,” she added, “we will build a fire.”

I felt, as I put my arm around her, that I had known her a long time. She was like that woman men dream of sometimes, the woman they have never seen before, that nameless figure whom they love desperately. Upon waking they marvel that they have so much feeling for a person their dream life tricked into being for a few moments. I was set to guard myself, and her, against such an ill-considered infatuation, and yet with each step through the fine, cold sand I felt that it was hopeless. I was a man who had swallowed a drug and realized too late that it might kill him, or make him mad. I felt that strongly about her.

I stopped her at the steps, just beyond the range of the streetlight. “Do you know how I feel?” I asked her.

I thought, of course she could not know. And yet she looked up into my eyes and said, “Of course I do.”

And I believe she did. I had lived long enough to learn doubt. People were difficult to trust. But I trusted her, and speaking in a broken voice as though making a confession, I said, “I'm not interested in eternity.” And added, “But there are little forevers—little, human-sized forevers.” I pictured them like baby clothes. We couldn't wear the big clothes that the universe wore. We had to settle for something human, small, short-lived, like the tiny red overalls Stan bought for his children.

“You think we could have a small forever.”

“Like a child's shoe.”

We both laughed. But later, watching bubbles trail upward in a glass of champagne beside her fire, I nearly told her about my dream. When I parted my lips to tell her I could not speak. I sipped champagne, and did not bother to ask myself why it was so difficult to talk about a mere dream. I was not even puzzled by the flashing insistence in my mind that she must not, under any circumstances, know about the fangs.

I wanted to tell her everything, every foolish thing about myself. And so I chattered. My life, though, seemed insipid to me, and I wanted her to tell me about her past, but as we talked I realized that Johanna's reticence was more than simple reluctance to talk about herself. She was uncomfortable with something in her past.

There were things I did not know about her.

Belinda whined and yammered at the sliding door, and at last began to howl the way I had never heard a dog howl before. The sound broke upon me like sudden light, and I knocked over my champagne, the fizzy spill of it blotting into the carpet.

“You silly dog,” said Johanna, letting her into the house. Belinda squirmed with pleasure, falling upon me, laving my face with her hot tongue.

“Heavens!” said Johanna. “I've never seen her so happy!”

At Butterfield's the next afternoon, wandering the showroom, looking for something interesting in the auctioneer's displays, I saw only chandeliers and the sort of sofa one's mother never let one sit on while wearing tennis shoes. I was about to wander out again when I ran into an old psychiatrist friend, Dr. Page, and we chatted for a moment about the quantity of expensive junk glittering around us, and then he stepped forward to say in a low voice, “You have heard about Hewlett.”

I knew at once that something bad had happened. No, I said, I had not heard.

“A stroke. He's still alive—” He stopped himself when he saw how hard the news had struck me. “He's not in a hospital. He's at home, in fact, looked after by his sister, but.…”

Dr. Ashby! He had been my mentor, my teacher, my therapist—and he had nearly died, and was still near death. I could see it in Page's eyes. He had that expression even psychiatrists reserve for discussing serious illness, a way of delivering the sad news and at the same time indicating that one is personally quite healthy.

I was nearly too stunned to speak. “Can he see visitors?” I asked. The terra cotta floors, the showroom of prints, the elegant young men and women brushing by us with the sort of pleasant expressions assistants wear around the rich, all seemed suddenly vulgar.

“Strokes are so hard to predict,” said Page, implying a world of mystery and also reminding me that he was, himself, a medical doctor.

But, he added, he did think that Ashby was conscious.

“Conscious! The wisest man I've ever met, and he's left with—what? Does he know where he is? Can he talk?” I meant, perhaps selfishly, could he listen?

The next morning I shifted and steered my way through the most grinding traffic, crossed the Bay Bridge, and when at last I reached Dr. Ashby's house in Berkeley I ran to his front step. I should have bought flowers, but then Ashby had never entertained sentiment. Perhaps, though, this was a time for sentiment. I had simply called and his sister had said that I would be quite welcome, in a way that indicated that I would be barely welcome at all, and only for a few minutes.