The Last Coin (15 page)

“Did you tell him two hundred a month?”

“No, never got around to it. And if I
had
gotten around to it, I wouldn’t have told him any such thing. He had a beard. You should have seen it. He looked like Gabby Hayes and he was wearing a robe.”

“A bathrobe?”

“No, a sort of Oriental robe, I guess. He said he was a member of a ‘society.’ I don’t remember which. He was fascinated by the place, or so he said—particularly in your books. He said the house had ‘a feel’ to it. You should have seen his hat.”

“My books? You let him handle my books? What hat?”

“It was a sort of what-do-you-call-it hat, like an old-fashioned clown’s cap—a sort of cone with a round brim and coming to a rounded point on top.”

Andrew nodded, still not liking the part about the books, but happy now that Rose hadn’t rented him the room. That was just what they needed, a zealot of some weird stripe. Probably an Atlantean. Why were such people drawn to Southern California, to the coast, to the inn? “So you pitched him out?”

“No,
I
didn’t. Mr. Pennyman rather discouraged him, I think.”

“Pennyman again! And there goes two hundred a month. What filthy business does Pennyman …”

“His business isn’t filthy at all.
You
wouldn’t have rented a room to this man. Oh, wait. Yes you would have. Out of politeness, I suppose.”

Andrew fumed. “What
I
would have done isn’t … Pennyman can keep out of our business. We don’t need his filthy money and we don’t need the stench of rosewater and fish oil all over the place.”

Rose stood up and began clearing away the plates, saying nothing. After a long minute of silence, she asked, “Why are you so against Mr. Pennyman? Is it that he keeps his hair cut and combed?”

Andrew’s own hair was a mess. He’d admit that. It needed cutting badly and had taken on the appearance of a sort of wind-blown bush. He was above it, though. He had calculated once how many hours he’d spent in front of the mirror, arranging his hair, thinking, perhaps, that if he got it just so he’d be able to see someone else in there, the
real
Andrew Vanbergen, self-assured, rock-steady, able to walk on avenues of cobwebs without leaving an imprint. But his hair hadn’t ever cooperated. Little curls of it would spring out on the end of a straight shock while the rest of it would stay put, giving his head the appearance of a broken cartoon clock with a ruined spring nodding from the top. The hours he’d wasted dabbling at it added up to about a year and a quarter. Well, no more.

Rose clinked dishes in the sink. “You don’t have to be afraid of people just because they’re different,” she said, “just because you don’t understand them. Sometimes you seem to despise everything you don’t understand.”

“Me?”
said Andrew. “It was
you
who wouldn’t rent the room to this poor bearded man just because he wore a hat. Who cares about his hat?
I
wouldn’t have given a damn about his hat. I’d have envied the man his hat. God bless a hat.”

Mrs. Gummidge wandered through just then, small and gray and bent and humming to herself as she stopped to root in the junk drawer. “I’ll just be a sec,” she said apologetically. “Don’t pay a bit of attention to me.”

“Fine,” Andrew said agreeably. “What was I saying … ?”

“Don’t we have a little plastic case of tiny screwdrivers?” said Mrs. Gummidge, fluttering her eyelids at Andrew.

“We?” Andrew widened his eyes, as if the phrasing of the question had thrown him for a loop.

“In the back,” said Rose.

“Ah.” Mrs. Gummidge inclined her head at Andrew, almost sympathetically, seeming to say that she knew just how tough things were for him, and didn’t take offense. “I’m just repairing that lock on the bathroom door that you haven’t got around to yet, Mr. Vanbergen. I
like
a little job like that.”

He let it pass, smashing down the urge to hurl a chicken bone at her. When she left, insisting that she was sorry for the “intrusion,” he said to Rose,
“We? Our
screwdrivers? What damned lock? What business does she have with locks on the bathroom doors?”

Rose looked at him blank-faced. “Settle down,” she said. “Who cares? Don’t be petty. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

They both fell silent. Andrew hated to be told to settle down. But you almost
had
to do it when you were told to, because if you didn’t it was further evidence that you should have. You wanted to run wild, to scream and break things, but you couldn’t. You had to see reason. He tried to force himself to see reason, realizing that because of Mrs. Gummidge he had utterly lost track of the conversation he’d been having with Rose. In the silence he could hear the toad chirruping on the back porch, talking, maybe, to one of the cats.

“And I’m
not
afraid of Pennyman,” he said, lowering his voice. “But I can spot slime easy enough. I’m going to pitch him out; that’s what. He’s cost us two hundred a month, and that rather negates the two hundred he’s paying us, doesn’t it? We pitch him out and we’re dead even.”

Rose washed the dishes, hosing off bubbles and stacking the clean dishes on the sink. “Add it up again,” she said simply.

“Add nothing. This isn’t mathematics, it’s—what?—morality. That’s what it is. Hanging about with something diabolic. Pretty soon all sorts of rottenness starts to seem normal to you. Let a man like Pennyman get a toehold and all of a sudden he’s running the place. He acts like he does already. Chasing this bearded man off! Talk about offensive beards.”

“Done with your plate?”

“What?” asked Andrew. “Oh, yes. I guess so. What did this man want with my books?”

“He didn’t want
anything
with your books. He simply peered at them for a moment. In the library. And anyway, it was Mr. Pennyman’s books he liked, not yours at all. The foreign ones on the middle shelves. He pulled one out and started to thumb through it, and Mr. Pennyman rather discouraged it. I can’t say just how. He simply made it clear that the man was taking liberties of a sort. The two of them didn’t like each other a bit. I could see that right away. The man said that he’d decided he didn’t need a room after all, but I think he was just mad about the books. He went out looking haughty anyway. But then he stopped for a moment on the front porch to chat some more with Mr. Pennyman, who was really quite nice about it all.”

“Nice!” said Andrew. “How does he get off being nice? What does
nice
have to do with anything?”

“You wouldn’t know, perhaps, but I rather like it. Cheap as dirt, niceness.”

Andrew kept silent. She had him there.

“Anyway, the man hung around on the porch talking to Mr. Pennyman about coin tricks. It was easy as that. I don’t believe he was ever serious. He just wanted to poke around, like people looking through houses for sale. Nosiness is what it was.”

“Well,” said Andrew “why in the world did Pennyman loan us the books in the first place if he didn’t want the public meddling with them? They’re nothing but trash anyway. And coin tricks, you say?”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t know about his books. I’ve got a few things to do yet. Can you find time to bring down Aunt Naomi’s plate?”

“Yes, I can find time.” Andrew shrugged out of the kitchen, feeling like a wreck. Somehow the evening had gone to smash. The pain in his back was murdering him. It must be his sciatic nerve … That’s how the day had gone: He had come home rich and jubilant and then, through no fault at all of his own, had run into no end of treachery from Pennyman and Mrs. Gummidge. Well, he’d do something about it. A man’s home, after all, was supposed to be his castle. He’d throw the knaves into the moat. His conversation with Pfennig still bothered him. Half of him wanted to think that the whole thing was a case of mistaken identity; the other half of him muttered that he ought to know the name, that no mistake had been made.

He pushed into the bedroom, thinking to change into looser clothes and to idle away a few minutes before having to confront Aunt Naomi again. Heaven knew what she’d be up to—sitting in a trance again, probably, watching the foggy night through the open window.

His books—his good books—lined two walls. There was Burroughs and H. G. Wells. There was Wodehouse and Dickens. None of the volumes were worth much. He was a book-owner rather than a collector. He was a hoarder. That was the truth of the matter. He thought about it as he sat on the edge of the bed, leaning back against his elbows. His books added something to his existence—a sort of atmosphere. No, it was more than that. They were a barrier of sorts. They were like a concrete foundation on a house; they kept the structure of his life up out of the dirt. They kept the termites out of the sill and kept the whole place from shaking to bits when the earth quaked. Looking at them was satisfactory, even when he was in a foul mood. Pennyman! There was one insect that had crept in, disguised, to gnaw on the floor joists. He was a bug, and no mistaking it, even if Rose didn’t see it.

Of course Andrew couldn’t just throw him out. It was too much money, after all. Rose would hand him the hedge trimmers and the vaccuum and tell him to fix the place up himself. She’d quit, and then there’d be no inn, no nothing. He pictured himself happy, ten years older, maybe, a little bit stouter, sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, a cheery fire in the grate, a pint glass of Bass Ale in his hand, things upstairs being seen to, the chef going about his business in the kitchen, the money rolling in. It was a pleasant enough dream, all in all—a comfortable dream. And it was true that it wouldn’t come to pass if he was all the time throwing the guests out.

He sighed, tugging on his slippers. Squinting at the bookshelves, he stood up and cocked his head sideways, reading titles. There was a book gone, missing. He was certain of it. He looked closer, studying the titles, remembering how the books had been arranged. There were two books gone … three. He’d been robbed.

John Ruskin
Lectures on Architecture and Painting

“W
HAT THE HELL?”
he muttered, thinking at first that he must recently have been looking at the missing books and then forgotten to put them back. Or maybe he hadn’t unboxed them yet. Maybe they were in the garage. They weren’t, though, and he knew it. It was impossible; they were gone. That was the long and short of it. Someone had taken them, and it was fairly clear who that someone was. Angry, he plucked up a pen from the dresser and looked about for a bit of paper. Finding nothing, he wrenched his handkerchief out of his pocket, and, stretching it tight across the top of the dresser, he wrote down titles on it:
I Go Pogo
was gone, and it had been signed, too, to Morton Jonwolly from Walt Kelly. There were two Don Blandings gone—
Hula Moons
and
Vagabond’s House
—both signed, although the signatures were almost worthless. What else? Not much of value. An unsigned copy of Witherspoon’s
Liverpool Jarge
and a copy of Gerhardi’s
Pending Heaven
. That was it, at least from a hasty glance. It had been a weirdly selective thief—either a lunatic or someone who had taken the time to study things out.

Andrew shoved the pen into his pocket. There was the spoon, still in there. He plucked it out, looked around for some place to put it, and when nothing better suggested itself he slid it onto a bookshelf, in behind Charles Dickens.

“Rose!” he shouted, striding toward the door. Thievery in the house—that was the last straw. “Rose!”

Rose stepped out of the den, a swatch of fabric in her hand. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“Thievery, that’s what. My books, stolen.”

“All
of them?”

“No, just selected volumes. He knew what he was after. It was your man in the hat. It had to be. I thought you said he only fingered the books in the library.”

“Well he did,” said Rose. “At least while I was there. He might have sneaked in, I guess, while I assumed he was on the porch with Mr. Pennyman.”

“I dare say he did. Let
me
interview these people from now on, will you? We’ll be robbed blind at this rate.”

Rose turned back toward the den. “Gladly,” she said. “Interview anyone you please.”

“And I
will
, too,” shouted Andrew, thinking immediately that the retort sounded weak and foolish. He wasn’t sure
he
knew what he meant by it. By golly he wouldn’t be robbed though, not in his own house. And by a fat man in an Oriental robe, too, and wearing a clown hat. What was the world coming to? Was it rotting away under his nose? He slammed upstairs and into Aunt Naomi’s room, ready to give hell to the cats if they asked for it. But they’d gone out the window, apparently, and Aunt Naomi was asleep in the chair. He picked up her half-empty plate and went back out, muttering his way down the stairs.

He laid the plate on the kitchen counter and stepped outside into the backyard where he opened the lid to the trash can, thinking that he’d been hasty to throw out the bag of poison, though he had no clear idea why at that moment he wanted to keep it—who or what he wanted to poison. The thief, certainly, was long gone by now.