The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Pickett stepped across to the street window and rubbed off a little circle of glass wax so that he could peer out better. “I’ve been having a look at Pennyman’s books. At several of them.”

  Andrew nodded. “Anything telling?”

  “I think he bears watching.”

  “In what way? Has an eye for the silver, does he? Waiting to rob us blind and go out through the window?”

  “Hardly. I don’t think he needs to rob anyone. I’ve got a hunch that your Uncle Arthur would know something about him—though he’d never let on. It’s more than just his name.”

  “Names, names, names. Remember what you said about old Moneywort. If anyone was less likely than Moneywort to be involved in that sort of thing, I can’t think who it might be. Poor devil, crippled by some wasting disease. What was wrong with him, anyway?”

  Pickett frowned. “I’m not sure, exactly. Age, maybe. A bone disease. He couldn’t get up from his chair there in the end.”

  “And then cut to bits in his shop by a dope-addled thief! My God that was grisly.” Andrew shuddered, remembering the account in the newspaper. “I’ll say this, though, if Moneywort was up to some sort of peculiar shenanigans, that wouldn’t be the way he’d die. You know that. It would be something exotic. Something out of Fu Manchu.”

  “That’s exactly what it wouldn’t be. Not necessarily. That’s where you’ve got to get ‘round them. Sometimes it’s the slightest clues that give them away, rather than anything broad. You won’t see them driving up and down in limousines. Have you gotten a glimpse of Pennyman’s walking stick?”

  “Of course I have.”

  Pickett squinted at him, nodding slowly. “Remember Moneywort’s hat—the one that was all over fishing lures?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well I remember it. There were things hanging from that hat that no sane man would try to entice a fish with. Most of them were smokescreens, if you follow me. But there was one that signified—a sea serpent, curling around on itself and swallowing its own tail. What did he hope to catch with that? A blind cave fish? That wasn’t any lure, and you can quote me on it. And the devil who sliced him up wasn’t some down-and-out dope addict looking for a twenty. Do you know that the murderer died before coming to trial?”

  Andrew looked up at Pickett, widening his eyes. “Did he?”

  “For a fact. Poisoned. Fed the liver of a blowfish, scrambled up in his eggs. Pitched over nose-first into his plate. I got it out of the police report.”

  “Just like—what was his name? The man with the eyeglasses. Or with the name that sounded like eyeglasses—impossible name. Must have been a fake. Remember? Sea captain. Died in Long Beach back in ’65. You told me about it. Didn’t they find blowfish poison in his whisky glass?”

  Pickett shrugged, but it was the shrug of a man who saw things very clearly. “That was one of the explanations that turned up later. Hastings made an issue of it, but the man was dead and buried, and ninety-odd years old to boot. Nobody cared what killed him. He could have been carried away by a pterodactyl and it wouldn’t have interrupted anyone’s lunch. There goes Pennyman,” Pickett said, watching through the window again. “Where in the devil does he go every morning? Why haven’t we followed him?”

  Andrew shook his head. “Haven’t time. Rose is all over me with her list. It’s long enough to paper the hallway with. She doesn’t understand the fine points of setting up a bar—of setting up the whole damned restaurant, for heaven’s sake. She has doubts about my chefing. She doesn’t say so straight out, but I can sense it. I’ll be damned if I’ll back down now. There’s got to be something around this place that I can do right. Rose got the upstairs coming along, though. I’ll give her that.”

  “Well,” said Pickett, sitting back down, “for my money, your fellow with the walking stick there amounts to more than we can guess. I bet he could tell you a little bit about poisoning a man with the guts of a fish, except that you couldn’t get anyplace close to the subject in a conversation with him. “You’d suddenly find some damned half-eaten thing in your sandwich and him grinning at you across the table. That’s the last thing you’d see this side of heaven.

  “Look at this.“ Pickett reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping—a photograph. He glanced around the room before opening it up. In the clipping was a picture of a man on a hospital bed—apparently dead. Three other men stood by the bedside: a doctor; a trim, no-nonsense looking man in a suit; and a man who looked for all the world like Jules Pennyman. It was a fuzzy shot, though, and the third man, really, could have been anyone.

  “Who is it?” asked Andrew.

  “Pennyman,” said Pickett, plonking out the answer without hesitation.

  “Does it say so?”

  “No, it doesn’t say so. It refers to an ‘unidentified third party.’ But look closer.”

  Andrew squinted at the picture. The Pennyman figure held something in his open palm—two coins, it seemed, as if he were handing them over or had just had them handed to him or as if he were getting ready to do something else with them, like lay them on the dead man’s eyes. “Good God,” Andrew said, mystified. “Is he going to put coins on the corpse’s eyes? I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

  “That depends upon who ‘they’ are, doesn’t it?”

  Andrew looked at him. “They?” he asked.

  “The ubiquitous ‘they,’ “ said Pickett. “Who do you suppose we mean by using the term?”

  Andrew shook his head again. “I don’t know. It’s just idiom, I guess. Just a convenience. Like ‘it,’ you know. Like ‘it,’ won’t rain this afternoon.’ Nothing more to it than that. If you try to put a face on it you go mad, don’t you? That’s schizophrenia.”

  “Not if it’s true it isn’t. Not if it actually has a face. And in this case I’m afraid it has. Any number of them, known in fact as ‘Caretakers.’ ”

  “Pardon me,” said Andrew, smiling. “Who are? I lost you, I’m afraid.”

  “They are. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This reference to ‘they’ isn’t idiom, not in any local sense. It comes down out of antiquity, and it has specific application—deadly specific.” Pickett let his voice fall, casting another glance at the door to the kitchen. “You’ve read of legends of the Wandering Jews?”

  “Was there more than one of them? I thought it was singular.”

  “There might have been a heap of them, over the years. Throughout Europe. The peasantry used to leave crossed harrows in fallow fields for them to sleep under. It was a magical totem of some sort, meant to protect them. Animals brought them food. There was a central character, though, a magician, an immortal. The rest of them were disciples, who extended their lives by secret means. I’m piecing it together bit by bit, and it involves fish and coins and who knows what sorts of talismans and symbols. What I’m telling you is that this is not fable. This is the real McCoy, and like it or not, I think we’ve been pitched into the middle of it.”

  “So you’re telling me that there’s—what?—a whole company of ‘them’? What do they want with you?”

  Pickett shrugged. “I don’t know enough about it, mind you. And any ignorance here is deadly dangerous. But it could be that they control everything. All of it. You, me, the gatepost, the spin of the planet for all I know.”

  Andrew snapped his fingers. He had it suddenly. He’d read about it in a novel. “Like in Balzac! What was it?—The Thirteen. Was that ‘them’?”

  Pickett looked tired. He shook his head. “What Balzac knew about it you could put in your hat. Some few of them might have been assembled in Paris, of course. Or anywhere at all. Here, even.”

  “Here, at the inn?”

  “That’s what I mean. One of them’s here already, not at the inn necessarily. Here in Seal Beach.”

  “So Pennyman, you’re telling me …”

  “I’m not telling you anything. Some of it I know; some of it’s speculation. Go easy with the man, though, or
you’ll find yourself looking at the wrong end of a blowfish.”

  Andrew wondered which end was the right end of a blowfish. He poked idly at the newspaper clipping, still lying in front of him. “Who’s the dead man, then?”

  “Jack Ruby,” said Pickett.

  Andrew suddenly seemed to go cold. He looked again at the picture. It could, certainly, be Pennyman. But coins on a dead man’s eyes … The idea was too morbid. And it didn’t amount to anything either. What did it mean? “Why coins on his eyes?” Andrew asked, folding the clipping in half and handing it back to Pickett. Somehow, he’d seen enough of it. It hinted at things he really didn’t want to learn more about.

  “I didn’t say anything about coins on his eyes; you did. I don’t believe it’s that at all. It’s payment, is what I think. Somebody’s dead, and somebody else has killed him. The coins are payment for services rendered. Payment for a long series of betrayals.”

  “Comes cheap, doesn’t he?” said Andrew, referring to Pennyman, or whoever it was.

  “We haven’t seen the coins, have we?”

  “Why did They do it?”

  “I don’t think They did. I think one of Them did, working at cross purposes to the others. There’s something in those coins …”

  Andrew tried to study Grossman’s Guide again; all of a sudden Grossman’s talk about appropriate gins and bitters had begun to sound wholesome and comfortable. When it got around to particulars, this talk about conspiracies gave him the willies. Something was pending. He’d felt it last night when he was in the tree. He wasn’t sure he was ready for it. Pickett and his mysteries! The truth of it was that if you didn’t go looking for them you’d never see them. Let well enough alone; that was what Rose would advise. And it would be good advice, too. “Why do you suppose he recommends stainless steel fruit knives?”

  “Who? Pennyman?”

  “No, Grossman. What’s wrong with a carbon steel knife? It holds an edge better.”

  “Turns the fruit dark. Stainless steel doesn’t. It’s chemistry is what it is. I can’t explain it better than that. A glass knife is what I’d advise. That’s what they use somewhere.”

  “They?” asked Andrew, picturing Pennyman stepping out of the fog with a glass knife in one hand and a frightful looking fish in the other.

  “No, not Them. I forget where. Hotel in Singapore, I think.”

  Andrew nodded, relieved. “How about one of those Ginzu knives? I saw them on television. Apparently you can beat them with hammers if you want to.”

  Pickett gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you want to do that?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” said Andrew, shaking his head. “Just on general principles, I should think. I’ll stick to Grossman here, though. Distrust anything modern, that’s my motto. Stainless steel fruit knives it is—three of them.”

  His list looked pretty healthy, all in all, but it would cost him a fortune to buy the whole lot of it. He couldn’t bear the idea of a half-equipped bar, though. He was an all-or-nothing man at heart. “The Balzac book,” he said to Pickett, “have you read it?”

  “Years ago.”

  “What was the old man’s name? Ferragus. That was it. Remember? ‘A whole drama lay in the droop of the withered eyelids.’ Fancy such a thing as ‘withered eyelids.’ I love the notion of all that sort of thing—of the Thirteen, the Devorants.”

  “You’ll love it a lot less when they come in through the door.”

  “So you think this is Them, then?”

  “No,” said Pickett. “This is not the same crowd. That was the wrong Them. This isn’t the Thirteen nor ever has been. This isn’t a fiction. Mr. Pennyman is who it is, and I’m telling you that you’d better be careful of him.”

  “But is there thirteen of Them, of our Them?”

  “How on earth do I know? There might be ten; there might be a dozen.”

  “A baker’s dozen, for my money. That’s what we’ll call the inn.”

  “What, The Baker’s Dozen?”

  “Sounds foody enough, doesn’t it? And with all this Thirteen business, it seems to fit. It’ll be our joke.”

  “Sounds cheap to me. Like a chain restaurant, a coffee shop.”

  “Then we’ll call it The Thirteen. Just like that. And it’ll work, too. That’s our address, isn’t it? Number 13 Edith Circle. Destiny shoves its oar in again. That’s just the sort of thing that appeals to me—the mysterious double meaning. To the common man it’s merely an address; to the man who squints into the fog, though, it signifies. You like that notion, too. Admit it. The number is full of portent.”

  Pickett shrugged. “It has a ring,” he said. “But …”

  “But nothing,” said Andrew. “It has an inevitability, is what it has.” He looked up at Pickett suddenly and then stepped across to peer through the half-open door that led down the hallway to the kitchen. Apparently satisfied, he said in a whisper, “Speaking of poisons and conspiracies, what’s the name of your man at Rodent Control? The guy you interviewed for the newspaper?”

  “Biff Chateau.”

  “That’s the one. Fancy my having forgotten a name like that. What’s he got in the way of poisons?”

  “Mostly anticoagulants.”

  “Work quick, do they? Feed a ‘possum a dose of one of them and—what?—he’s dead in an hour?”

  Pickett shook his head. “I don’t think so. Most of them are cumulative. Rat nibbles a little bit on Monday, Snacks on it on Tuesday, still feels in top form on Thursday. A week later, though, he’s under the weather. Then, as I understand it, all his blood turns to vapor or something and just leaks out through every available pore. Grisly sort of thing, but effective.”

  “Do they ever murder a dog by mistake?”

  “In fact, yes. It’s rare, though. A dog has to eat a heap of the stuff. They could kill an elephant with it, I suppose, if they took the time to do it right.”

  Andrew nodded and stroked his chin. “Can this man Chateau get me a dead ‘possum?”

  “More than one, I should think. They’re always turning up dead in someone’s backyard and being taken for enormous rats. They probably have a half dozen in the dumpster right now.”

  “I only need one,” said Andrew. He stepped across to the window and looked out, as if he were suddenly in a hurry. The street was in shadow, since the sun was behind the house, but the rooftops blazed with sunlight, and Pacific Coast Highway, a block away, was thronged with barefoot beach-goers, taking advantage of the hot spring weather. Andrew peered back down the hallway, listening.

  A vacuum cleaner rumbled somewhere on the second floor. Rose was working away. God bless her, thought Andrew, as he and Pickett slipped out through the back door and headed toward Andrew’s Metropolitan, parked at the curb. Knowing that Rose was at work wrestling the bungalow into submission was like knowing there was coffee brewing in the morning. It gave a man hope. It made things solid.

  There were days when it seemed to him that the walls and the floor and the chairs he sat on were becoming transparent, were about to wink out of existence like snuffed candle flames, leaving only a smoky shadow lingering in the air. But then there was Rose, looming into view with a dust rag or a hammer or a pair of hedge clippers, and the chairs and walls and floors precipitated out of the air again and smiled at him. He’d be a jellyfish without her, a ghost. He knew that and reminded himself of it daily.

  So what if she was short-sighted when it came to beer scrapers or imported breakfast cereals or just the right bottle of gin or scotch? She had him, didn’t she? He had a genius for those sorts of things. She didn’t have to bother with them.

  The Metropolitan grumbled away toward the highway, blowing out a plume of dark exhaust. If he was lucky, Rose wouldn’t have heard them go, and he could slip back in later, undetected. Pickett would want to stop at Leisure World and look in on old Uncle Arthur, but there wouldn’t be any time for that. This was business. He’d have to settle the score with Aunt Naomi that afternoon, or there’d
be trouble.

  Good old Aunt Naomi. In the light of day—when she wasn’t snoring, when her cats were out stalking across the rooftops—it was easy to take the long view. The idea of Rose pulling things together made it even easier. Sometimes. In truth, sometimes it just made it easier to feel guilty. He sighed, unable to keep it all straight. Well, he’d look to the delicate work. It was the best he could do. No one could ask more of him than that. What had his father said on the subject? If it was easy, his father had been fond of saying, they would have gotten somebody else to do it. Or something like that. It seemed to apply here, in some nebulous way that didn’t bear scrupulous study. He realized suddenly that Pickett was talking—asking him something.

  “What? Sorry.”

  “I said, what do you want with poison?”

  Andrew stayed up late that night reading in the library. Mrs. Gummidge and Aunt Naomi played Scrabble upstairs until nearly eleven; then they went to bed. Rose had been asleep for hours. Pennyman had turned in at ten. By midnight the house was quiet and dark; only the pole lamp in the library burned. Andrew felt like a conspirator, but in fact he wasn’t conspiring with anyone. This was his plot, from end to end. He hadn’t even discussed it with Pickett, although his friend had agreed to come round early in the morning, pretending to be on his way to the pier to fish. At six A.M., Andrew thought, smiling, the tale would be told.

  He waited for the stroke of midnight, just for the romance of it. Then, feeling as if his chest were empty, he tiptoed up the attic stairs carrying the dead ‘possum in a bag. It was starting to ripen, having been found yesterday in Garden Grove, already dead and torn up by something—cats, probably. That would be a stroke of luck if he played his cards right. It was dark on the stairs, but he couldn’t use even a flashlight. Being discovered now would mean … He couldn’t say. They’d take him away. Men in lab coats would ask him deceptive questions. They’d whirl his brain in a centrifuge and come to conclusions.

  He let himself into the little, gabled cubbyhole, so that he could climb out the window onto the roof. The ladder had been a wash-out the night before; he wouldn’t chance it again. He could see the shadow of Pickett’s telescope in front of the casement. Slowly, carefully, he hauled it aside, eased open the window, and stepped out. Thank goodness there wasn’t much of a slope. He pulled the bag out after him, left it lying on the roof, and edged down the asphalt shingles toward where the pole lay tilted against the house, hidden by the foliage of the camphor tree. There it was.