There had been dead sea gulls all over the lawn and sidewalk that morning. Andrew had kicked one, not seeing it in the fog. Then he’d kicked another, and when he had bent over to have a closer look, there was yet another, lying in the gutter. They were everywhere, fallen as if shot. Alone in the fog, he had collected sixteen of the creatures up and down the street, dropping them into a cardboard box and then lugging the box down the alley, pitching it into a dumpster. The whole business struck him as bizarre, and he wondered if there’d been a leak of some sort of poison gas in the night, maybe a screw-up at the Naval Weapons Station.
The news on the car radio had been odd too—reports of flooding back up the San Gabriel River, as if there’d been a monstrously high tide. Only there hadn’t been. It was almost as if the river had flowed backward all of a sudden, and brackish tidal water had spilled out into backyards and overflowed storm drains. Andrew wondered at it all: the odd phosphorescence in the ocean last night, the storm surf, the rain of birds, the river. It all had a biblical ring to it, as if something were “coming to pass.” The morning was peaceful now, though, and wearing on. He glanced at his watch.
It was past ten. He’d slept late—later than he’d slept in almost fifteen years. He sipped at a mug of coffee that had gone half-cold in the morning air. There was no sense in painting the garage, not in weather like this. It wasn’t at all a day for work; it was a day for thinking and reading and generally recovering from the previous day, which had been arguably the longest he could remember.
He was happy and satisfied sitting in his car, though. He had run the heater for a few minutes, taking the chance of being discovered, and now he was warm and almost sleepy. There was something in the smell of the interior of the car, something familiar and enclosing, which, when combined with the fog and the coffee and the sea air drifting through the narrow window gap, seemed altogether to conjure up a sort of feeling; he couldn’t quite describe it. It was as if he were aloft in a balloon, very comfortable and with a glass of something nice to drink and watching the crazy-quilt earth slip past below.
The fog seemed to weigh everything down gently, like a gray overcoat thrown across the shoulders of a huddled world. Water dripped from the curb tree onto the top of the car, slow enough so that until the next one came each drip seemed sure to be the last, and from somewhere, layered between the muffled noise of distant traffic and the occasional lonesome cries of wheeling gulls, came the slow rumble of waves collapsing along the shore not half a block away.
It would be a good morning for walking on the beach. The heavy surf of the past night would have tossed up seashells and polished stones, and what with the fog and cool weather, tourists wouldn’t yet have picked them over. Andrew finished his coffee and set the cup on the floor of the car. He had intended to wait for Pennyman, if for no other reason than to have something to report to Pickett when he returned from Vancouver with the Weetabix. Pennyman hadn’t come out, though, and it had begun to seem suspiciously like Andrew had missed him. Such were the risks of sleeping late.
He hunched out onto the street, shut the car door as silently as he could, and locked it. The fog was so thick that he wouldn’t be seen from the house, either by Rose or by Pennyman, and although he would have liked to wear his hat, he couldn’t risk going in after it. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked southwest toward the beach, angling down a narrow alley past where he’d given the bonita to the cats and wondering all of a sudden if they hadn’t been Aunt Naomi’s cats. That would be just like fate, wouldn’t it? Here he’d been working hard to rid the house of the fiends, unsuccessfully, and then very graciously feeding them whole fish in the alley. They’d think he was a lunatic. Everyone sooner or later would think he was a lunatic—the cats, Aunt Naomi, Rose, Pennyman—everyone except Beams Pickett, who wasn’t the sort of pot who called the kettle black. It was funny, actually, his having given the cats a treat. Even death row prisoners were given a top-notch meal before they were led away, or so the stories had it.
And the cats seemed to like him for it. Over the past couple of days it seemed as if they’d been hanging about him. One had even wandered into his bedroom early in the morning. Andrew had drowsed awake to see the beast standing there, looking as if it wanted to tell him something or as if it were standing watch while he slept.
At the edge of the beach he took his shoes and socks off, stuffed the socks down into the shoes, tied the laces together, and hung the shoes around his neck. Then he rolled his pantslegs up to his knees. The sand was damp and cold and it scrunched under his feet. He couldn’t see the ocean, but he could hear it. Momentarily he was entirely adrift on the open beach, with nothing in the gray morning but a little circular patch of sand surrounding him, and not a sound of human manufacture to be heard. He was utterly alone, and the idea of it suddenly terrified him. He was struck with the notion that They were out there: Pickett’s bogeymen, contriving the fog itself, perhaps, with a machine bolted to the underside of the pier.
Just then a man loomed up out of the mists, extraordinarily fat and with a glittery sort of helmet on and a shirt with moons and stars on it. An alien, Andrew thought, and he very nearly leaped back to hide himself in the mist, but the man’s thrift-store trousers and down-at-heel shoes made it clear that he hadn’t flown in from the stars, and he seemed easily as surprised to see Andrew as Andrew was to see him. He was obviously a local eccentric—like the bearded man yesterday at the inn—some sort of mystic. He nodded and passed on mumbling, walking toward the pier. Immediately someone else appeared, and behind him another three or four, all of them dressed like maharajas and carrying little tambourines like you’d win at a penny carnival. Andrew hurried past, careful not to make eye contact with any of them.
In his haste he kicked an enormous seashell and it rolled away down the sloping sand toward where the edge of a wave licked the pebbly shore. He chased after it and picked it up—a black murex the size of his hand, which had been wrenched up out of deep water by storm surf. Near the water’s edge the sand was littered with seashells and jellyfish and tangles of kelp and pickleweed and eelgrass. There were moonsnails and owl limpets and brittle stars and leathery, purple nudibranchs and sea lemons and pipe fish. It was as if half of the denizens of the sea had stolen ashore in the night and decided to stay. Enormous codfish with bulbous eyes lay tangled in the weeds. Half-buried in the sand, the cold tide swirling around its whip-like tail, was a bat ray bigger than the hood of Andrew’s Metropolitan. Andrew wished he had a sack with him. There was enough wonderful flotsam on the beach to fill a sea chest with.
He could see, farther up, a man in a tweed coat and with an uncanny sort of Prince Valiant haircut poking at something with a bit of driftwood. Andrew pulled his collar up and headed that way. The beach, clearly, was as full of eccentrics as it was full of odd sea life. Maybe he’d find his Atlantean there, reading one of his stolen books. Maybe he’d find the remnants of Atlantis itself, tossed up onto the beach along with pop bottles and fishing line and cast-off shoes. It was impossible that it was all coincidence, all of these oddballs sifting through things and the rain of birds, all of the talk of backward-flowing rivers. The strange people on the beach were looking for something, perhaps, or else, just like Andrew, they suspected that there was something to look for but didn’t entirely know what it was and had come out to browse around on the chance that it would make itself known.
All in all, despite his haircut this fellow seemed safer than the maharajas or the man in the glittery helmet—less likely to run mad or to strike up a conversation with a ghost. And the thing he poked at appeared to be a body. Andrew strolled up and nodded a greeting. It wasn’t a body, not a human body anyway. It was an impossible squid, eighteen or twenty feet long, half-buried under the sand and with its doleful, sightless eyes staring at nothing. It smelled awful, too, and not as if it had rotted there on the beach. It smelled burnt, somehow, like a smouldering electrical outlet or like badly scorched meat in a hot steel pan.
“Big, eh?” said the man, smiling at Andrew and gesturing with his pipe at the squid.
Although he already knew what it was, Andrew said, “What is it, a squid?” in order to give the man a chance to show off. But as soon as the words were out, Andrew noticed the line drawn down the center of the man’s face, and his heart jumped like a spooked rabbit. He forced his own face to relax and glanced quickly around just in case Pennyman was somewhere nearby, watching them through the fog.
“That’s just what it is,” the man said, and he looked up at Andrew and shifted his pipe. “Genus Loligo, The French call them poulps.”
Andrew nodded, breathing through his mouth very slowly in an effort to calm down. There was no sign of Pennyman, who was probably farther up the beach now, playing the quarter trick on the rajas. “The French do?”
“That’s a fact. The Spanish eat them in sandwiches. The Italians fry them in olive oil or stuff them with herbs and cheese. The Japanese eat them raw on little moulded rectangles of rice. And in the South Seas the natives make a sort of jelly out of the eyeballs, which they eat on toast.”
“You don’t happen to be a chef, do you?” asked Andrew, thinking for a moment to solve the current Aunt Naomi problem. The man could certainly pass for a Frenchman, with his hair and all. But he wasn’t a chef. He shook his head. Andrew squinted at his face, which was honest enough, but was pale and almost transparent, as if the man got out into the sun about once a year, early in the morning. There was no mistaking it; down his face was drawn the same line that Johnson and Andrew had been afflicted with.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” said Andrew. “That is, your face … Seems to be something smeared on it. Pipe ash, perhaps. Sorry to stare.”
The man produced a handkerchief and scoured away, the line rubbing off easily in the foggy air. Andrew inadvertently touched his own forehead. “Haven’t seen a man out and about this morning, have you? A man in a white suit, beard? Carries a cane?”
“Yes, indeed. I saw just such a man. Had a nice long talk with him, too. He was an amateur stage magician; showed me some of the most amazing coin tricks, and card tricks, too.”
Andrew nodded. “Had you roll a quarter down your face, didn’t he?”
“By golly,” said the man, “how did you know?”
“He’s always up to that sort of thing. Out walking, was he?”
“He was fascinated by the squid. Said he’d been an ichthyologist from Scripps, down south. Interested in the glandular functions of carp, he said. If you live long enough you’ll meet people who specialize in any damn thing; do you know what I mean? Apparently squids were a sort of sideline with him, carp glands being his heart’s desire. Look here.”
Andrew looked. The squid had been sliced open lengthwise, the cut so clean and straight that Andrew had taken it simply for a natural flap of skin. What the slice meant, though, Andrew was at a loss to say. Had Pennyman been out on the beach dissecting sea creatures? Grimacing just a little, Andrew pulled the skin back to expose an enormous cuttlebone and organ cavity. The inside of the beast was burned black, as if someone had kindled a fire in it. Andrew stood up and stepped back, turning toward the ocean and gasping in a lungful of sea air.
“Damndest thing, isn’t it? Stinks like anything,” said the man, staring into the bowl of his pipe. “Your friend seemed to expect it though, the burned organs. Put his nose nearly in ‘em, as if they were cut flowers. He had a pair of gloves to put on and a sort of apron. Didn’t want his white trousers soiled, I guess. Do you know what he did?”
Andrew shook his head, half-expecting to hear that Pennyman had made a sandwich out of the squid’s heart and eaten it.
“He rummaged around in there and came up with a silver coin tangled in a bit of fishing line. He nipped it free with a nail clippers, and then he washed it in ocean water, dried it on his apron, put it in his pocket, and walked away. Just like that. He had me going, too, for a moment. I didn’t know what to think, until I remembered the magician business. It was a gag, is what it was, and I was taken right in. There was a stage magician in Las Vegas who did that—with a gold ring and a loaf of bread out of the oven. He’d get a ring from someone in the audience, you see, very valuable, and make it disappear, and then ten minutes later he’d holler at a random waiter to bring over a hot bun, and …”
But Andrew wasn’t listening any longer. The story of the ring and the bun didn’t signify. The story of the coin in the squid did—somehow. Had Pennyman been fishing for squid last night from the end of the pier? It certainly seemed so. He’d caught one, at least—and a big one, too. It must have broken his line, of course, and he’d come out that morning looking for it—which was odd, unless he was certain that the lure, whatever it was, would kill it and that the heavy surf would wash it ashore. That scenario worked, given what Andrew knew. What it meant, though, was hidden from him as he trudged back up the beach, idly rubbing sand off the murex shell.
He stood looking out over the ocean. The fog had thinned suddenly, and he could see the glassy green humps of smaller waves breaking inside on the sandy, suddenly shallow seabottom. Pennyman seemed to be fishing for more than just the idle squid. Andrew and Pickett and maybe Rose, too, were schooling around his lure. One day soon, if they didn’t look sharp, he’d give it a bit of a jerk and they’d jump for it. He’d reel them in, just like that, and stuff them into an old gunnysack.
Well, Andrew would be ready for him. Pennyman foolishly underestimated him and Pickett. That was his error. It was high time that Andrew struck back—subtly, of course. It was enough at first merely to make Pennyman wonder, merely to make him peer over his shoulder a little more often and be a little less carefree and smug. Andrew nodded at the ocean and squinted into the fog, thinking that for Rose’s own protection he’d keep this whole unsettling business away from her. Let Rose think anything about Pennyman that she’d like to think. When the time was right, Andrew would unmask him; he’d splash mud onto Pennyman’s trousers; he’d muss up his hair; he’d clip the point off the bottom of his beard; he’d play the nailed nickel trick on him; he’d …
“Hey!” shouted Andrew, leaping and waving his hand in the air. “What!” He pitched the giant murex onto the wet sand and shook his right hand. A drop of blood oozed out from the soft skin between his fingers. He’d been pinched, and it hurt like hell. He rubbed it and bent over the shell. A hermit crab leaned out, enormous and hairy and menacing him with a single pincer. Its eyes stood on stalks, like the eyes of a moon creature, and it seemed to be looking at him from about sixty different directions at once. It hiked up its seashell and walked away into the ocean. For a moment Andrew could see it beneath the clear water—a dark shadow making for the open sea, going home to a pleasant, weedy grotto, where it had an easy chair, maybe, set up in the shade of a sea fan.
The sun broke through the mists just then, in shafts of piercing white light, and Andrew saw that he wasn’t fifty yards from the pier. The beach was dotted with people now, sitting in folding chairs and setting up umbrellas. Suddenly there were children laughing and running. A trio of smart-aleck-looking surfers ran past, sliding their surfboards into the morning swell and leaping onto them in one smooth motion, letting a glassy little wavelet slap across the nose of their boards and full into their faces.
On an impulse, Andrew waded out into the shallows, thinking that the saltwater might brace him. It had been years since he’d swum in the ocean. He remembered how good it had been just to get wet. The water was stingingly cold, though, and when a wave washed through, splashing across his rolled-up pants, he turned around and fled, his feet already numb. Youth, thought Andrew, shaking his head. Go figure it. He waved two fingers back over his shoulder at the departing hermit crab to show it that there were no hard feelings. He understood well enough. A man’s home … after all. He’d said as much himself, just last night. It was time to reach out of the shadows and give Pennyman a pinch. He grinned. There were a thousand ways to do it.
>
SEVEN
“… but when the truffle pigs were driven into the forests of Fontainbleau 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.”
Louis Vinteuil
Ahasuer: Le Juif-Errant
C. K. Dexter Haven, trans.
THE TRICK WAS to befuddle them. That’s what would strike terror into their shabby hearts. You could send a man an anonymous letter that would paralyze him without his half-understanding it. Tom Sawyer had been a genius at it after all, but he hadn’t known why. Andrew sat in the bar, doodling on a scrap of paper. It wasn’t enough to write “You’ll die at midnight” or “Beware the singing corpse” or something like that. Theatrical notes weren’t worth a penny when it came to literate men like Pennyman. Nor was it worth anything to be straightforward, like “Quit meddling in our affairs” or “Cross me once more and you’ll suffer for it.” That sort of thing was childish. There could be no hint of the Marquis of Queensberry about it.
The message had to be cryptic, almost nonsensical. There could be no sane explanation for it on earth. “Give me back my sister’s chewing gum” wouldn’t be bad, but it might be misconceived to be humorous, which wouldn’t at all do. Andrew scratched his head. It had to be something short, and it had to seem to be complete, although it couldn’t really be, not in any recognizable sense. He had the envelope addressed and stamped. He’d purposely misspelled “Pennyman,” making it “Pengleman” instead, just to frost the cake, to raise Pennyman’s eyebrows before he’d even torn the letter open. And Andrew had perfumed the envelope, too, and picked out a stamp from the post office’s fish collection—a Japanese koi, appropriately enough. Pennyman would be steamrollered by it.
The Last Coin Page 15