The Last Coin (35 page)

When Pickett knocked on the street door at eleven, Andrew was three-fourths done. Aunt Naomi’s cats had been in and out all night, looking around, winking at the shrimps, generally making themselves at home. At first Andrew had half a mind to throw them out, but he didn’t. He had to admit that he’d developed a kind of regard for them, solitary creatures that they were. He wouldn’t half-mind being a cat; they seemed so well informed. He was vaguely puzzled by his having come to like them. He could remember having been wild to pitch them out not two weeks past, and now here he was, feeding them the odd shrimp. It was what he’d felt on the stairs when he’d first gone into Pennyman’s room—the strange notion that the cats were looking out for him, that they were players in the same game, on the same team. He wouldn’t be surprised to find that Uncle Arthur fraternized with cats.

“Sit down,” said Pickett, looking as if he were wild with discoveries. “They had to throw me out at ten. I would have spent the night there if I could have. This is monumental. I’ve been talking to Robb, the reference librarian. Do you remember him?” Andrew drained the oil off the sausages and ham fat he’d been simmering, pouring the fat through a heap of cheesecloth into a measuring cup. “Slow up,” he said. “You’re about to explode.
I’ve
been taking it slow and easy—machine-like, that’s my way tonight. Everything done just so. Measure twice, cut once; that’s my motto. Rob who?”

“Randall Robb. At the literary society. He threatened Johnson that one night over Johnson’s misquoting a phrase from Leviticus.”

“Steely-eyed fellow with bushy eyebrows? Fierce?”

“That’s the man! He’s been running me all over the basement of the library. You wouldn’t believe the stuff he’s got stored down there: secret society stuff, apocryphal Masonic texts, suppressed Illuminatus tracts, hollow-Earth literature. It’s astonishing. And just between the two of us, the authorities think that the recent library fire wasn’t just a case of simple pyromania. There’s stuff in that basement collection that someone wanted destroyed.”

“Whoa,” said Andrew. “I thought this man Robb worked up in one of the branch libraries. Up in Glendale.”

“Eagle Rock. That was years ago. They transferred him uptown. A branch library wasn’t big enough to hold him. He’s one of the old-school librarians—wild hair, spectacles, arcane knowledge. They get that way. Nickel-and-dime information isn’t worth anything to them. They run into an odd bit here, an unlikely coincidence there, and suddenly they’re following a trail of hints and clues and allegations back into the murky depths of
real
history—the stuff that’s glossed over and rearranged; the stuff they don’t want us to know.”

“They again?”

“That’s right. Depend on it. But listen. He knows Pennyman. Tell me this, where did Pennyman say he came from? Back east, wasn’t it? Just blew into town like Billy Bones, right? Looking for a berth where he could watch the sea? Well it was lies. Robb knew him from the library. He’d been hanging around for six months, looking to find something but too sly to reveal what it was. He said he represented the British Museum in some sideline way. His research had to do with coins, though, and with biblical arcana. That much was sure. You and I know which coins he was after. But why? We ask ourselves that, don’t we?”

Andrew nodded and turned the flame on under his cast iron kettle, arranging a big whisk and a long-handled spoon on the range top next to it. “Just this afternoon,” he said. “But there’s the ‘what’ element, too. I’ve seen a picture of this coin, and I seem to own one that’s been beaten into a spoon and carried around Iowa in the mouth of a pig, but I don’t have the earthliest idea what that means.”

“Well hang on to your hat. Robb’s looked over my Vancouver book. The coin is definitely one of the thirty.” Pickett uttered this last phrase slow and meaningfully.

“Ah,” said Andrew, noting that the oil in his kettle was starting to smoke, and distracted by the process of gumbo-making.

“Thirty pieces of silver.”

“Ah. Thirty of them. Here goes nothing.” He poured three cups of flour into the smoking oil and began flailing at it with the whisk, knocking out lumps. Flames shot around the blackened sides of the kettle, scorching the hairs on his arm. “Pot holder!” he shouted.

“
Thirty
pieces of silver,” said Pickett again, looking at him fixedly.

“All right,” Andrew shouted, grabbing the whisk with his left hand and waving his right hand out away from the pot to cool it. “I’ll pay. Just give me the damned pot holder, will you, and then turn down the flame here. God almighty this is hot!”

Pickett blinked at him, then got up to fetch the pot holder,

which Andrew had carelessly left lying out of reach on the counter.

Andrew transferred the whisk to his right hand and slipped his left into the pot holder. Pickett turned the flame down by half and peered hesitantly into the pot. “What the hell?” he said.

“Black roux. Or at least it will be. Touchy process. Watch, you can almost see it turn color. If you quit whisking for a moment, it’s burnt like a cinder. Nothing to do then but pitch it out. Back away there.” With that he picked up the bowl full of heaped vegetables and poured them into the bubbling oil and flour. A great reek of steam poured up out of the kettle, and Andrew dragged it off the flame, still whisking. The worst was past. The whole business was a success. He whisked away until the mixture quit bubbling.

“Looks like the devil, doesn’t it?” said Pickett. “What do you do with it? You’re not still thinking of trying to poison the cats, are you?”

“I was
never
going to poison the damned cats! You eat it,” said Andrew. “After you’ve mixed it into three or four gallons of broth and tossed in all this meat and shrimp and such and a little cayenne.’’

“All that oil? What is this, oil soup?”

“It’s God’s reward for our meager virtues,” said Andrew, rinsing off the whisk. He shut down the stove and closed the cookbook that had been lying on the counter.

Pickett, looking cross, picked the book up and took a look at the cover, on which was a picture of a startlingly fat man with a pudding face, grinning out across an appalling lot of sausages and crustaceans. “You’re cooking out of this man’s book?”

“Look at him,” Andrew said. “The man knows how to eat. He’s eaten more than the rest of us put together. What that man hasn’t eaten you could put in your hat. What cookbook would you suggest, the
Hindu Diet Book
?”

Pickett shook his head. “Oil soup with shrimp heads.
Burnt
oil soup with shrimp heads.” He sat down pettishly, took out his pocketknife, and pretended to scrape his fingernails, saying nothing.

“Well, where were we?” asked Andrew, smiling pleasantly. Tomorrow’s cooking would be a piece of cake. The yeoman’s work was done, and at barely eleven o’clock, too. Rose would be proud of him. She was upstairs gluing up the chef’s hats. She had protested mildly about the dimensions of the hats, about them being sewn up out of an expanse of rubberized nylon roughly the size of a bedsheet. Andrew had prevailed though, explaining to her his theory of the virtue of excess. In the morning Andrew would run down for a canister of helium. The camera crew from KNEX was due at four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour before the doors would open. It was a miracle, them calling and offering to do the story. They’d heard of the cafe, they said. They wanted to do a human interest story—local citizens make good, that sort of thing. The chef’s hats were a natural, just the sort of comic slant the public would like. Things were certainly falling together.

Andrew became aware suddenly that Pickett was in a state. He’d been almost crazy with the idea of the coins, and Andrew had lost interest because of cooking up the roux. It was time to get back on track. “Oh, yes. That’s right. That was it. Thirty pieces of silver. Just like out of the Testaments. Judas Iscariot and all.”

“Not
just like
,” said Pickett, folding up his knife. “The
same damned coins!
That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve suspected it for days, but what I’ve found in L.A. cinches it.”

Andrew whistled. “They must be worth a heap. How can anyone tell though? It would be just like any religious relic. Sell a man an old sea gull bone and tell him it’s what’s left of St. Peter’s ring finger.”

“Nope. Not this time. There were always only thirty of these coins.”

“What do you mean, ‘always’?”

“I mean as far back as anyone can discover. I mean thirty
magical
coins minted in antiquity.”

“If you plant them, will they grow?” Andrew was giddy with the success of his gumbo, with the satisfaction of something going right. He grinned at Pickett, thinking to cheer him up.

“If you collect them all together,” said Pickett evenly and deadly serious, “you can … Lord knows what you can do. But the point is that Pennyman’s been after these coins, and it looks as if he’s got them.”

“What do you mean, ‘looks as if? He certainly hasn’t got them all, and won’t, either.”

“It’s a damned long story, let me tell you. I haven’t been sitting idle. But listen. All of a sudden ten million things fit. That’s what struck me—even little things. Have you ever thought about the business of kicking over the money changers tables in the temple? I mean really
thought
about it?”

“Because He didn’t go for money-changing in the temple.”

“Half that story,” said Pickett, “has never been told. The coins were being gathered. That’s what I think. Right there, by the priests. A conspiracy so massive and far-reaching that it set the course of modern history. It was the collected coins that brought about the inevitable betrayal—the fall, if you want to put it that way, of heaven on earth. They’re a physical incarnation of evil, and they’ve been purposefully scattered these two thousand years since, and …”

“And now Pennyman’s got them together again. The two coins in the photo of him and the dead Jack Ruby …”

“Betrayal upon betrayal, evil stacked on top of evil.”

“But he hasn’t got
all
of them, because we’ve got …”

Pickett sprang at him, waving his hands and shaking his head. “Don’t say it. Wink twice when you want to refer to it. Where is he, anyway?”

“Out, as usual. Or he was an hour ago.”

“Is it hidden?”

Andrew nodded. “Brilliantly. But what is he going to do, anyway, when he gathers all the coins?”

“Save that,” said Pickett. “I don’t know. I don’t want to find out, though. There’s more to it. I haven’t scratched the surface here. Look what Robb turned up. It’s part of a dozen legends in the farthest-flung reaches of Europe and the Middle East. Latch on to something, though. It’s going to throw you.”

Pickett held up a Xerox and read: “ ‘When the moon is old, he is very, very old, but when the moon is young he turns young again.’ And now this: ‘ … and he can only rest beneath two crossed harrows or
ploughshares
.’ ” Pickett put the Xerox down and sat silently.

“Who says?” asked Andrew.

“One Chrystostum Dudulaeus Westphalus. Seventeenth century.”

“Westphalus?”

“Assumed name. And the name doesn’t matter anyway. The legend is everywhere, dating back to at least the second century. This man Westphalus just wrote it down. And here, listen to this from something called
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages:
‘We hear of the Wandering Jew again at the royal palace in Bohemia, in 1505, where he is assisting the prince to find certain coins which had been secreted by the great-grandfather of the prince, sixty years before. The coins were found in a leathern bag, beneath a boundary stone cut into the shape of a sow and her litter. On the advice of the Jew, the coins were dispersed, all but one, which the ill-fated prince hid beneath his tongue and later paid to a stranger for the murder and betrayal of the king, his own father. The prince’s tongue clove then to the roof of his mouth, and during the course of his two-year reign, which ended when he hanged himself, he was known as Walter the Mute.”

“Pigs again,” said Andrew.

“Pigs is right. Here’s another; this one translated from the French. It’s an account—get this—of the legendary
Isaac Laquedem
. What do you think about that? The name is corrupted from the Hebrew and means Isaac the Old or Isaac of the East. He was believed to be the Wandering Jew, and had a sort of Francis of Assisi affinity to
farm animals
, for God’s sake, especially pigs. Listen: ‘When the truffle pigs were driven into the forests of Fontainebleau, a great fat sow escaped into a stand of birch, from which it emerged with a spoon in its teeth and a beggar at its heels, escaping withal from master and beggar both, and never seen again in the region. Six years later, its master identified it as one of a trio of swine driven along the roadway outside Chateau Landon by a man in monk’s robes, who was identified by a passing peasant as Isaac Laquedem, the Wandering Jew, who had been alive at the time of the Passion of Christ.’ ”

“So who is he?”

“Wait, one more. Here’s the
Britannica
, tenth edition: ‘As Cain was a prototype of Judas, so was Judas of such doomed wanderers as Malchus in Italy and Ahasuerus in Germany, who along with a score of similar wanderers, were known variously as the Legion of the Coins or the Legion of Iscariot.’ ”

“Iscariot? A sort of general then, of a band of wanderers? And you’re telling me that they’ve been hightailing it across the western hemisphere keeping an eye on these thirty coins?”