The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Puzzled, Andrew hopped away down the stairs and was back in a moment carrying the spoon.

  “I want to give this to you,” Naomi said.

  “To Rose?” asked Andrew.

  “No, to you. Despite our differences, I’m pretty sure you’re a man of honor. Listen closely. This spoon is yours now. It’s been mine for a long time, but I’m quit of it now. It belongs to you. Do you want it?”

  Andrew blinked at her. In truth, he didn’t much want the spoon. It had a curious history and was a moderately interesting relic, but it couldn’t be worth anything. It was simply a dust collector. He tilted it into the light and stared at the delicate scoring on the concave surface. It seemed to be pulled down into the handle, so that the markings were proportionate at the top of the spoon and then stretched away below. It was thin enough so that he could have bent it in half between his thumb and forefinger. The silver of it was warm, almost hot, but that came from his holding it in his hand, he supposed. It was an interesting piece. He’d always been fascinated by it. It felt almost like some sort of magic wand in his hand. Suddenly he didn’t want to give it up. He wanted to keep it. And almost as suddenly he felt vastly tired. Of course he did. He’d been up half the night and then awakened at dawn. His back was stiff, too. A hot shower would be nice. It would pick him right up. “I’d love to have it,” he said. “I’ll just put it back into the hutch.”

  “God bless you,” said Aunt Naomi, smiling one of her very rare smiles. It was genuine, too. Andrew felt a sudden liking for her, and he wondered at the tinge of sadness that flavored her smile. That came from age, he guessed. There was always some sadness flavoring your smiles when you stood in the shadow of the gravestone. It was regret, is what it was, for the passing of time. She had fond memories of that spoon. It was all she had left of her husband—aside from his money, of course. It was the last link to the Iowa farm. She lowered her voice suddenly and said, “But I wouldn’t put it back into the hutch if I were you. I’d find a safer place. It’s really far more valuable than you suppose—very old, actually. In a sense, it will make its value known to you. You’ll see. Put it somewhere safe for now.”

  Andrew smiled back at her. She’d gone mystical on him, obviously. “I’ll keep it safe as a lamb,” he said. And then, hearing Rose calling from downstairs, he tipped a non-existent hat to Aunt Naomi and stepped out onto the landing, tucking the spoon into his pocket, muddled with mysteries. Halfway down, it occurred to him that Naomi might easily have overheard his conversation with Pennyman, down on the porch. Both of them had exclaimed over the silver quarter. Of course she had. She wasn’t filled with arcane knowledge after all; she just wanted to seem so.

  Rose stood in the living room holding the telephone. It was a long distance call—from Vancouver. Puzzled, Andrew took the phone, half-expecting, impossibly, to hear Pickett’s voice on the other end.

  But it wasn’t Pickett. It was a man who claimed to be named August Pfennig—a dealer in coins and books and curiosities, calling from his shop on the waterfront. He asked whether Andrew was of the Iowa Vanbergens and whether he wasn’t related by marriage to the Iowa Zwollenveters, and when Andrew said that he was, Pfennig sighed, as if happy at last. The man’s name was vaguely familiar to Andrew, as if he’d run across it in a magazine article, perhaps, and remembered it because of its curious sound. He thought hard while the man rambled on, but he couldn’t fit the name with a face.

  Pfennig’s voice was slow and careful, as if he were half-old and half-calculating. There was a false joviality to it, too, that Andrew recognized at once to be the empty, pretended interest of a salesman. He couldn’t stand salesmen, especially salesmen who muttered about mutual friends, since that was always a lie right on the face of it. It was interesting, though, that one had called all the way from Canada. At least it wouldn’t be insurance that the man was peddling. Maybe it was light bulbs. Andrew had got a rash of calls about light bulbs—a charity of some sort selling them for fifteen dollars a bulb, guaranteed to outlast everything, still to be glowing after you were dead and living with the worms.

  The man wasn’t selling light bulbs. He was buying—not selling anything at all. He dealt in estate jewelry and libraries. Andrew had been a hard man to “track down.” Since the death of his brother-in-law, said Pfennig, he’d rather lost track of what went on in Southern California, and he said this in such a way that it sounded as if Andrew ought to know who this brother-in-law was.

  “Well,” said Pfennig, carrying on, “I do like to renew old acquaintances. Things seem to go to bits these days, don’t they? The years sail past so.”

  Andrew admitted that they did, thinking that somehow the conversation was at an end, that Pfennig, whoever he was, had called all the way from Vancouver to chat. Perhaps he was one of Rose’s old school friends, a casual acquaintance from Orange City. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered the name to Rose, who stood waiting, curious. Rose shrugged and shook her head. Andrew shrugged back. The man’s voice trailed off into nothing.

  “Pardon me?” asked Andrew politely. “I’m afraid I missed that last part. Bad connection.”

  There was heavy breathing on the other end, like someone hyperventilating. “I’m not well,” the man said suddenly. “I’m … ill. Bedridden. If you could speak up …”

  Irritated, Andrew spoke directly into the mouthpiece, talking roundly, “I said, ‘What?’ “

  There was more breathing, and for a moment Andrew thought the conversation had gone entirely to bits, but then the man Pfennig continued. “I was led to believe,” he said, “that you were a collector, and I hoped that we could trade this for that, in the spirit of collecting, of course. I’m not in this for the money.”

  Andrew nodded. Here it was. He wasn’t in it for the money, wasn’t he? He was in it for sport. He was calling from Vancouver for the jolly spirit of collecting. Pfennig droned on, asking about family Bibles, hymnals, Dutch translations, perhaps, of old prayer books. He worked his way into cookbooks and volumes of medical arcana and books describing home remedies. Andrew didn’t have any of them. He had a falling-apart copy of The Whitehouse Cookbook, but Pfennig wasn’t interested in it. “Not in my line,” he said, and then went on to arts and crafts pottery and hammered copper.

  “I’ve got a Roseville vase,” said Andrew helpfully. “Fuchsia pattern—green and pink. Fairly rare, actually. But I don’t want to sell it.”

  “Too bad,” said Pfennig, clucking his tongue. “My brother-in-law led me to believe you might put me in the way of some rare coins. What do you have along those lines?”

  Andrew paused, thinking. He had the remnants of an old childhood penny collection and a half-dozen oval dimes flattened on a railroad track, but beyond that …”Are you sure it’s me?” he asked. “Maybe … My wife’s cousin collects coins. He’s always regretting that he can’t put his hands on a curly quarter. Too expensive by half. It would cost him the value of the rest of his collection.”

  “This is an old coin, that I’m talking about,” said Pfennig, and he went on to describe the thing—the hawk-nosed face on the one side, a curious rune on the other. A silver coin, but not as worn as you’d guess, given the thing’s great age. They didn’t have much silver of this quality any more, not very much at all.

  “I’m really very sorry,” said Andrew. “Someone’s mistaken. I’m just not much of a coin man, actually. I’m afraid that I don’t go in much for the kind of collecting …”

  “You’re telling me you don’t own this coin, then?”

  “That’s correct, Mr …”

  “Have you owned it? Sold it, maybe?”

  “No, really I …”

  “Think about it. I’m prepared to offer a substantial sum. More than the man you’re dealing with now. On no account let him have it. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I don’t have any coin!” Andrew began. “What man?” But Pfennig hung up. In a moment there was a dial tone.

  “Who was it?” asked Rose.

 
; Andrew shrugged. “I don’t know. Man from Vancouver buying and selling things.”

  “You shouldn’t let them waste your time like that. Tell them very firmly that you won’t talk to them and then hang up. You’re too polite for your own good, letting people like that waste your time away.”

  “What do you mean ‘people like that’? What kind of person was he? He was an old acquaintance of some sort. How did I know? ‘People like that’! I go in for politeness. That’s my way. Cheap as dirt, politeness.”

  Rose shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen, not seeming to want to argue about how cheap politeness was. Andrew took a step toward the kitchen, thinking to press the issue. What, he would ask, did Rose have against politeness? And how on earth, not having listened in to the conversation, did she know that … But thinking about the conversation with Pfennig muddled things up. What was it all about? A wrong number, likely. Or rather a case of mistaken identity. Surely no one would have recommended Andrew as a collector of rare coins.

  “Food’s getting cold,” Rose said from the kitchen. She looked tired, Andrew thought as he stabbed away at his chicken. This business of opening an inn was wearing her out. She’d run an ad in the Herald already, and she was working doubly hard just in case it paid off early. It was premature, certainly, but she was right when she said that it might take time to draw customers. “Anything come from the ad?” Andrew asked, deciding to let the politeness issue drop.

  Rose nodded. “One man. A nut from the look of him. Reminded me of Moses. He came around this afternoon and had a chat with Mr. Pennyman on the porch. I thought he was a friend of Mr. Pennyman, but it turned out he wanted a ‘semi-permanent’ room. Those were his words. I don’t know exactly what he meant.”

  “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 rea
lly 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.