The Last Coin (2 page)

The rearview mirror spontaneously cracked to bits just then, showering the front seat with tiny fragments. The driver glanced sideways at Pennyman. He had a look of frightened incomprehension on his face now. The taxi swerved toward the shoulder, then back again, and then started to slow down. Pennyman had seen that look before. He pulled out his wallet, withdrew a wad of shekels, and waved it at the man. The taxi drove on. In ten minutes they’d be in Tel Aviv.

It was true that Pennyman didn’t yet have all of the coins. There were still two in the earth, and the one that had been thrown into the sea. Pfennig, it seemed certain, possessed another one—or rather the coin possessed him. And then there was the coin in California. That one was veiled by mystery. He would have them all, though, in the very end; for the more he possessed, the more certain he became of the whereabouts of the rest, as if the coins sought each other out.

“Skirt the city,” Pennyman said, not wanting to get caught in the downtown press of people. The road had flattened, and the air was sticky and warm. The muddy rain had given out, but the sky over the Mediterranean was black with approaching clouds.

Something was happening to the weather. The pressure was dropping and the atmosphere seemed to be bending and warping—tensing like a coiled spring. When the taxi lurched to a halt amid honking traffic and Pennyman stepped out onto the curb, the ground shook, just a little, just enough to make the hurrying masses of people put down their luggage and stop, waiting.

Pennyman paid the taxi driver and strode toward the airport doors—casually, nodding at an old woman with a dog, and pausing for one precious moment to hold back the milling crowd so that she could drag her bags and her dog in through the door. He didn’t want to seem to be in a hurry to get to the locker, to be a man possessed, although in truth there wasn’t a man in the world at that moment more thoroughly possessed than he was.

He peered up at what he could see of the sky and grimaced as lightning arced across it. An immediate blast of thunder rattled the windows, followed by a wash of wind-driven rain. The air suddenly was full of the smell of ozone and sulphur, and the ground shook again, as if it were waking up.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Prince Otto

A
NDREW
V
ANBERGEN USED
a pruning ladder to get to the attic window—the sort with flared legs and a single pole for support. The pole clacked against the copper rain gutter and then hung uselessly, the top rung of the ladder seesawing back and forth across it. He looked over his shoulder at the silent midnight street and wiggled the ladder, worried that it might slide down along the gutter and pitch him into the branches of the camphor tree that grew along the side of the house. But there was nothing he could do about it now; it was the only ladder he had.

He could hear Aunt Naomi snoring through the open window. The whole street could hear it. That’s what would give him away—not any noise he’d make, not the scraping of the ladder against the gutter, but the sudden stopping of the snoring if she woke up and saw him there outside the window, peering in. Neighbors would lurch awake in their beds, wondering. Had they heard something? It would be like in an earthquake, when you’re not aware of the rumbling and the groaning and creaking until it stops.

An hour ago he had lain in bed beside his sleeping wife in their second-story bedroom, listening to Aunt Naomi snoring through the floor. It drove him nearly crazy, the snoring and the mewling of her cats. He couldn’t sleep because of it. He had pitched and tossed and plumped up his pillow, watching the slow luminous hands on the clock edge toward morning. He swore that if he saw the coming of twelve o’clock, he’d act. Midnight had come and gone.

He had lain there knowing that the old woman would sleep the night through, like a baby. She’d awaken in the morning, about five, proud of herself for rising early but complaining about it anyway. She couldn’t sleep: her poor nerves, her “sciatica,” her sinuses, her this, her that. She’d demand tea with milk in it. Her bed would be covered with cats, and the air in the room would reek of mentholated vapor rub and litter boxes and old clothes. Taken altogether it would smell like—what? Words couldn’t express it. They
wouldn’t
express it; they’d mutiny first and become babble.

It was the hottest April he could remember. Even at nearly one in the morning it was seventy-seven degrees and not a whisper of wind. The ocean sighed through the pier pilings half a block away, just over the rooftops. Now and then the light of headlamps would swing around the curve from Sunset Beach, and a car full of sleepy night owls would go gunning up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Belmont Shore and Long Beach. They were too far off to see him though, hidden as the house was down the little dead-end street that it shared with half a dozen other houses. Lights shone in one; the others were dark.

Andrew climbed the ladder slowly, his faced blacked out with ash from the disused fireplace. He wore a black shirt and slacks and black burlap shoes with crepe soles. A long fiberglass pole with a loop on the end lay tilted against the ladder. On the shingled gable in front of him was an empty flour sack and a bit of rope with a loop already tied in one end. Lying there awake in bed an hour earlier, hot and tired and unable to sleep through the mewling and the snoring, he’d committed himself to the idea of tackling the cat problem that very night. Sleeplessness was maddening. There was nothing else on earth like it when it came to sheer, teeth-grinding irritation.

The idea now was to snatch up a cat, hoist it into the flour sack, and tie the sack off with a slipknot, then go in after another cat. One of them stared at him through the open attic window. It seemed to find his sudden appearance boring and tiresome. He smiled at it and touched two fingers to his forehead, as if tipping his hat. Civility in all things, he muttered, peering in at the window, past the cat. Thank God there wasn’t a window screen to remove.

He listened—to the snoring, to the sounds of distant, muted traffic, to the faint music coming from a tavern somewhere down the Pacific Coast Highway, probably the Glide ’er Inn. It drifted past him on the warm night, reminding him of the world, stealing away his nerve, his resolve. The moon was just rising over the rooftops. He’d have to hurry.

“Nice kitty,” he whispered, making smacking noises at the cat. They liked that, or seemed to. He’d decided that he wouldn’t throw the cats into the salt marsh after all. A half hour ago, when he was crazy with being kept awake, it had seemed like the only prudent course. Now that he was up and about, though, and had put things in perspective, he realized that he had nothing against cats, not really, as long as they lived somewhere else. He couldn’t bear even to take them to the pound. He knew that. Cruelty wasn’t in him.

He hadn’t, in fact, entirely worked out what he
would
do with them. Give them away in front of the supermarket, perhaps. He could claim that they’d belonged to a celebrity—the grandmother of a movie star, maybe; that would fetch it. People would clamor for them. Or else he could give them to the neighborhood children and offer them a dollar-fifty reward for every cat they took away and didn’t come back with, and another dollar apiece if the kids hadn’t ratted on him by the end of the month. That would be dangerous, though; children were a mysterious, unpredictable race—almost as bad as cats. Pulling a smelt out of his shirt pocket, he dangled it in front of the open flour sack. The cat inside the window wrinkled up its nose.

He smiled at it and nodded, winking good-naturedly. “Good kitty-pup. Here’s a fishy.”

The cat turned away and licked itself. He edged up a rung on the ladder and laid the fish on a shingle, but the cat didn’t care about it; it might as well have been an old shoe. Andrew’s shadow bent away across the shingles, long and angular in the moonlight, looking almost like a caricature of Don Quixote. He turned his head to catch his profile, liking that better, and thinking that as he got older he looked just a little bit more like Basil Rathbone every year, if only he could stay thin enough. He squinted just a little, as if something had been revealed to him, something that was hidden to the rest of mortal men. But the shadow, of course, didn’t reveal the knowing squint, and his nose needed more hook to it, and the cat on the sill sat as ever, seeming to know far more than he did about hidden things.

He reached for the pole, jumping it up through his right hand until he could tilt it in through the open window. The pole wasn’t any good for close work. The cat in the window would have to wait. He peered into the darkened room, waiting for his eyes to adjust, listening to the snoring. It was frightful. There was nothing else like it on earth: snorts and groans and noises that reminded him of an octopus.

He had been tempted at first, when he was seething, to poke the pole against her ear and shout into the other end. But such a thing would finish her. She’d been ill for ten years—or so she’d let on—and an invalid for most of them. A voice shouting into her ear at midnight through a fifteen-foot pole would simply kill her. The autopsy would reveal that she’d turned into a human pudding. They’d jail him for it. His shouting would awaken the house. They’d haul him down from the ladder and gape into his ash-smeared face. Why had he shouted at Aunt Naomi through a tube? She owned cats? She’d been snoring, had she? And he’d—what?—got himself up in jewel-thief clothes and crept up a pruning ladder to the attic window, hoping to undo her by shouting down a fiberglass tube?

Moonlight slanted past him through the tree branches, suddenly illuminating the room. There was another cat, curled up on the bed. He would never get the noose over its head. There was another, atop the bureau. It stood there staring into the moonlight, its eyes glowing red. The room was full of cats. It stank like a kennel, the room did, the floorboards gritty with spilled kitty litter. An acre of ocean winds blowing through two-dozen open windows wouldn’t scour out the reek. He grimaced and played out line, waving the loop across the top of the bed toward the dresser. The cat stood there defiantly, staring him down. He felt almost ashamed. He’d have to be quick—jerk it off the dresser without slamming the pole down onto the bed and awakening Aunt Naomi, if that were possible. A
little
noise wouldn’t hurt; her snoring would mask it.

He had practiced in the backyard when the family was gone. His friend Beams Pickett had helped him, playing the part of a surprised cat. Then they’d pieced up a false cat out of a pillow, a jar, and a gunnysack and snatched it off tree limbs and out of bushes and off fences until Andrew had it refined down to one swift thrust and yank. The trick now was to balance the pole atop the windowsill in order to take up some of the weight. Another arm would help, of course, if only to hold open the sack. He’d asked Pickett to come along, but Pickett wouldn’t. He was an “idea man” he had said, not a man of action.

Andrew let the pole rest on the sill for a moment, watching the strangely unmoving cat out of one eye, the cat inside the window out of the other eye. He picked up the flour sack, shoving the hem of the open end into his mouth and letting it dangle there against the shingles. He was ready. Aunt Naomi snorted and rolled over. He froze, his heart pounding, a chill running through him despite the heat. Moments passed. He worked the pole forward, wondering at the foolish cat that stood there as still as ever. It was a sitting duck. He giggled, suppressing laughter. What would Darwin say? It served the beast right to be snatched away like this. Natural selection is what it was. He’d get the cats, then pluck up the corners of Aunt Naomi’s bed sheet and tie them off, too. It would be a simple thing to lock her into the trunk of the Metropolitan and fling her, still trussed up in the sheet, into the marsh in Gum Grove Park.

It was easy to believe, when you looked at the wash of stars in the heavens, that something was happening in the night sky and in the darkened city stretched along the coast. The whole random shape of things—the people roundabout, their seemingly petty business, the day-to-day machinations of governments and empires—all of it spun slowly, like the stars, into patterns invisible to the man on the street, but, especially late at night, clear as bottle glass to him. Or at least they all would become so. Clearing the house of cats would be the first step toward clearing his mind of murk, toward ordering the mess that his life seemed sometimes to be spiraling into. He and Pickett had set up Pickett’s telescope in the unplastered attic cubbyhole adjacent to Aunt Naomi’s bedroom, but the smell of the cats had pretty much kept them out of it—a pity, really. There was something—a cosmic order, maybe—in the starry heavens that relaxed him, that made things all right after all. He couldn’t get enough of them and stayed up late sometimes just to get a midnight glimpse of the sky after the lights of the city had dimmed.

All this talk of unusual weather and earthquakes on the news over the past weeks was unsettling, although it seemed to be evidence of something; it seemed to bear out his suspicions that something was afoot. The business of the Jordan River flowing backward out of the Dead Sea was the corker. It sounded overmuch like an Old Testament miracle, although as far as the newspapers knew, there hadn’t been any Moses orchestrating the phenomenon. It would no doubt have excited less comment if it weren’t for the dying birds and the rain of mud. The newspapers in their euphemistic way spoke of solar disturbances and tidal deviations, but that was pretty obvious hogwash. Andrew wondered whether anyone knew for sure, whether there were some few chosen people out there who understood, who nodded at such occurrences and winked at each other.