The Godwulf Manuscript

by Robert B. Parker

  Chapter 2

  The bell rang and the teacher stopped—apparently in midsentence—put her corncob pipe in her mouth, folded up her notes, and started out. The kids followed. Terry Orchard was one of the first out the door. I fell in beside her.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “Miss Orchard?”

  “Yes?” No hostility, but very little warmth either.

  “My name is Spenser and I’d like to buy you lunch.”

  “Why?”

  “How about, I’m a Hollywood producer casting for a new movie?”

  “Get lost,” she said without looking at me.

  “How about, if you don’t come to lunch with me I’ll break both your thumbs and you’ll never play pool again?”

  She stopped and looked at me. “Look,” she said, “what the hell do you want anyway? Why don’t you go hang around down at the convent school with a bag of candy bars?”

  We were down one flight of stairs now and turning toward the next flight. I took a card out of the breast pocket of my jacket and handed it to her. She read it.

  “Oh, for crissake,” she said. “A private eye? Jesus. Is that corny! Are you going to pull a gat on me? Did my old man send you?”

  “Miss Orchard, look at it this way, you get a free lunch and half a million laughs afterward talking to the gang back at the malt shop. I get a chance to ask some questions, and if you answer them I’ll let you play with my handcuffs. If you don’t answer them, you still get the lunch. Who else has been out with a private eye lately?”

  “A pig is a pig,” she said. “Whether he’s public or private, he works for the same people.”

  “Next time you’re in trouble,” I said, “call a hippie.”

  “Oh, crap, you know damn well …”

  I stopped her. “I know damn well that it would be easier to argue over lunch. My fingernails are clean and I promise to use silverware. I’m paying with establishment expense money. It’s a chance to exploit them.”

  She almost smiled. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll go to the Pub. They’ll let me in dressed this way. And this is the only way I dress.”

  We had reached the ground level and headed out into the quadrangle. We then turned left out onto the avenue. The buildings around the university were old red brick. Many of the windows were boarded, and few of the rest had curtains. Along the avenue was some of the detritus that gathers at the exterior edge of a big university: used-book shops, cut-rate clothing stores featuring this year’s freaky fashions, a porno shop, a school of astrology-reading in a store-front, a term-paper mill, three sub joints, hamburger, pizza, fried chicken joints, and a place selling soft ice cream. The porno shop was bigger than the bookstore.

  The Pub was probably once a gas station. It had been painted entirely antique green, glass windows and all. The word Pub was gold-leafed on the door. Inside were a juke box, a color TV, dark wooden tables and high-backed booths, a bar along one side. The ceiling was low and most of the light came from a big Budweiser sign in the rear. The bar was mostly empty in midafternoon; a group in one booth was playing cards. In the back a boy and girl were talking very softly to one another. Terry Orchard and I took the second booth from the door. The table top was covered with initials scratched with penknife and pencil point over a long period of time. The upholstery of the booth was torn in places and cracked in others.

  “Do you recommend anything?” I asked.

  “The corned beef is okay,” she said.

  A fat, tough, tired-looking waitress wearing sneakers came for our order. I ordered us both a corned beef sandwich and a beer. Terry Orchard lit a cigarette and blew smoke through her nostrils.

  “If I drink that beer you’re an accomplice. I’m under twenty-one,” she said.

  “That’s okay, it gives me a chance to show contempt for the establishment.”

  The waitress set down two large schooners of draft beer. “Your sandwiches will be out in a minute,” she said, and shuffled off. Terry took a sip.

  I said, “You’re under arrest.” Her eyes flared open, and then she smiled, grudgingly, over the glass.

  “You’re nowhere near as funny as you think you are, Mr. Spenser, but you’re a hell of a lot better than I figured. What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for the Godwulf Manuscript. The university president himself called me in, showed me his profile, dazzled me with his elocution, and assigned me to get it back. Tower, the campus cop, suggested you might help me.”

  “What is a Godwulf Manuscript?”

  “It’s an illuminated manuscript from the fourteenth century. It was in the rare book room at your library; now it isn’t. It’s being held for ransom by an unidentified campus group.”

  “Why did Super Swine think I could help?”

  “Super Swine—you must be an English major—he thought you could help because he thinks SCACE took it, and you are the secretary of that organization.”

  “Why does he think SCACE took it?”

  “Because he has an instinct for it, and maybe because he knows something. He’s not just a storefront clotheshorse. When he’s not getting his nails manicured and his hair styled with a razor, he is probably a pretty shrewd cop. He didn’t tell me everything he knows.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sweetie, no one ever tells me everything he knows; it is the nature of the beast.”

  “You must get a swell view of life looking at it through a keyhole half the time.”

  “I see what’s there.”

  The waitress brought our sandwiches, large, on dark bread, with pickles and chips. They were sweet pickles, though. I ordered two more beers.

  “What about the manuscript?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, “tell me about SCACE then.”

  Her face was less friendly now. “Why do you want to know about SCACE?”

  “I won’t know till I’ve learned. That’s my line of work. I ask about things. And people don’t tell me anything, so I ask about more things, and so on. Now and then things fall into place.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to fall into place here. We’re a revolutionary organization. We are trying to develop a new consciousness; we’re committed to social change, to redistribution of wealth, to real liberty for everyone, not just for the bosses and the rip-off artists.”

  Her voice had become almost mechanical, like the people who do telephone canvassing for dance studios. I wondered how long it had been since she’d actually thought about all those words and what they really meant.

  “How you go about getting these things instituted?”

  “By continuous social pressure. By pamphleteering, by marching, by demonstrating our support for all causes that crack the establishment’s united front. By refusing to accede to anything that benefits the establishment. By opposing injustice whenever we find it.”

  “Making much progress?” I asked.

  “You bet your life. We’re growing every day. There were only three or four of us at first. Now there are five times that many.”

  “No, I meant injustice.”

  She was silent, looking at me.

  “I haven’t made much progress that way either,” I said.

  A tall, big-boned blond kid wearing a plaid shirt and Levi’s came into the Pub and looked around. He was clean-shaven and wild-haired, and when his eyes got used to the dimness he headed over to us and slid in beside Terry Orchard. He picked up her half-filled glass, drained it, set it down, and said to her, “Who’s this creep?”

  “Dennis,” she said, “be nice.”

  He squeezed her arm hard with one hand and repeated the question. I answered for her.

  “My name’s Spenser.”

  He turned his head toward me and looked very hard at me. “I’m talking to her, not you, Jack. Shut up.”

  “Dennis!” She said it with more emphasis this time. “Who the hell do you think you are? Let go of my arm.”

  I reached over and to
ok hold of his wrist. “Listen, Goldilocks,” I said, “I bought her a beer and you drank it. On my block that entitles you to get your upper lip fattened.”

  He yanked his hand away from me. “You think maybe the long hair makes me soft?”

  “Dennis,” Terry said, “he’s a private detective.”

  “Freaking pig,” he said, and swung at me. I pulled my head out of the way and slipped out of the booth. The punch rammed against the back of the booth; the kid swore and turned toward me. He was not planning to quit, so I figured it best end swiftly. I feinted toward his stomach with my left hand, then hooked it over his lowered guard and turned my whole shoulder into it as it connected on the side of his face. He sat down hard on the floor.

  Terry Orchard went down on her knees beside him, her arms around his shoulders.

  “Don’t get up, Dennis. Stay there. He’ll hurt you.”

  “She’s right, kid,” I said. “You’re an amateur. I do this kind of thing for a living.”

  The big old tough waitress came around and said, “What the hell is going on? You want the cops in here? You want to fight, go outside.”

  “No more trouble,” I said. “I’m a movie stunt man and I was just showing my friend how to slip a punch.”

  “And I’m Wonder Woman and if you do it again, I’m calling the blues.” She stomped off.

  “The beer offer still holds,” I said. The kid got up, his jaw already beginning to puff. He wouldn’t want to chew much tomorrow. He sat down in the booth beside Terry, who still held his arm protectively.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Spenser,” she said. “He isn’t really like that.”

  “What’s he really like?” I asked.

  His eyes, which had been a little out of focus, were sharpening. “I’m like I am,” he said. “And I don’t like to see Terry sitting around boozing with some nosy goddamn gumshoe. What are you doing around here anyway?”

  The left hook had taken some of the starch out of him. His voice was less assertive, more petulant. But it hadn’t made him any sweeter.

  “I’m a private detective looking for a stolen rare book, the Godwulf Manuscript. Ever hear of it?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you know I was a private cop?”

  “I didn’t till Terry said so, but you got the look. If your hair were much shorter it would be a crew cut. In the movement you learn to be suspicious. Besides, Terry’s my woman.”

  “I’m not anybody’s woman, Dennis. That’s a sexist statement. I’m not a possession.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said. “Could we cut the polemics a minute. If you know of the manuscript, know this also. It has to be kept in a climate-controlled atmosphere. Otherwise it will disintegrate. And then it will be worthless both to scholars and to you, or whoever the book-nappers may be. The university hasn’t got the money to ransom it.”

  “They got the money to buy football players and build a hockey rink and pay goddamn professors to teach three hours a week and write books the rest of the time.”

  “I’m not into educational reform this week. Do you have any thoughts on where the missing manuscript might be?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t tell you. If I didn’t I could find out, and when I found out I wouldn’t tell you then either. You aren’t peeking over the transom in some flophouse now, snoopy. You’re on a college campus and you stick out like a sore thumb. You will find out nothing at all because no one will tell you. You and the other dinosaurs can rut around all you want—we’re not buying it.”

  “Buying what?”

  “Whatever you’re selling. You are the other side, man.”

  “We aren’t getting anywhere,” I said. “I’ll see you.”

  I left a five on the table to cover the lunch and left. It was getting dark now and the commuter traffic was starting. I felt the beer a little, and I felt the sadness of kids like that who weren’t buying it and weren’t quite sure what it was. I got my car from where I’d parked it by a hydrant. It had a parking ticket tied to the windshield wiper. Eternal vigilance, I thought, is the price of liberty. I tore the ticket up and drove home.

  Chapter 3

  I was living that year on Marlborough Street, two blocks up from the Public Garden. I made myself hash and eggs for supper and read the morning’s New York Times while I ate. I took my coffee with me into the living room and tried looking at television. It was awful, so I shut it off and got out my carving. I’d been working on a block of hard pine for about six months now, trying to reproduce in wood the bronze statue of an Indian on horseback that stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. The wood was so hard that I had to sharpen the knives every time I worked. And I spent about half an hour this night with whetstone and file before I began on the pine. At eleven I turned on the news, watched it as I undressed, shut it off, and went to bed.

  At some much later time, in the dark, the phone rang. I spiraled slowly upward from sleep and answered it after it had rung for what seemed a long time. The girl’s voice at the other end was thick and very slow, almost like a 45 record played at 33.

  “Spenser?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Terry … help me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Eighty Hemenway Street, apartment three.”

  “Ten minutes,” I said, and rolled out of bed.

  It was 3:05 in the morning when I got into my car and headed for Hemenway Street. It wasn’t till 3:15 when I got there. Three A.M. traffic in Boston is rarely a serious problem.

  Hemenway Street, on the other hand, often is. It is a short street of shabby apartment buildings, near the university, and for no better reason than Haight-Ashbury had, or the East Village, it had become the place for street people. On the walls of the building Maoist slogans were scrawled in red paint. On a pillar at the entrance to the street was a proclamation of Gay Liberation. There were various recommendations about pigs being offed scrawled on the sidewalk. I left my car double-parked outside 80 Hemenway and tried the front door. It was locked. There were no doorbells to push. I took my gun out, reversed it, and broke the glass with the handle. Then I reached around and turned the dead lock and opened the door from the inside.

  Number three was down the hall, right rear. There were bicycles with tire locks lining both walls, and some indeterminate litter behind them. Terry’s door was locked. I knocked; no answer. I knocked again and heard something faint, like the noise of a kitten. The corridor was narrow. I braced my back against the wall opposite the door and drove my heel, with 195 pounds behind it, against the door next to the knob. The inside jamb splintered, and the door tore open and banged violently against the wall as it opened.

  Inside all the lights were on. The first thing I saw was Dennis Goldilocks lying on his back with his mouth open, his arms outspread, and a thick patch of tacky and blackening blood covering much of his chest. Near him on her hands and knees was Terry Orchard. Her hair was loose and falling forward as though she were trying to dry it in the sun. But it wasn’t sunny in there. She wore only a pajama top with designs of Snoopy and the Red Baron on it, and it was from her that the faint kitten sounds were coming. She swayed almost rhythmically back and forth making no progress, moving in no direction, just swaying and mewing. Between her and Dennis on the floor was a small white-handled gun. It or something had been fired in the room; I could smell it.

  I knelt beside the blond boy and felt for the big pulse in his neck. The minute I touched his skin I knew I’d never feel the pulse. He was cool already and getting colder. I turned to Terry. She still swayed, head down and sick. I could smell something vaguely medicinal on her breath. Her breath was heaving and her eyes were slits. I pulled her to her feet, and held her, one arm around her back. She was almost all the way under. I couldn’t tell from what, but whatever it was, it was an o.d.

  I walked her into the bathroom, got her pajama shirt off, and got her under the shower. I turned the water on warm and then slowly to full cold and held her under. She quivered and st
ruggled faintly. The sleeves of my jacket were wet up past the elbows and my shirtfront was soaked through. She pushed one hand weakly at my face and began to cry instead of mew. I held her there some more. As I held her I kept listening for footsteps behind me. The door had made a hell of a lot of noise when I kicked it open, and the gunshot must have been a loud one long before that. But the neighborhood was not, apparently, that kind of neighborhood. Not the kind to look into gunshots and doors splintering and such. The kind to pull the covers up over the head and burrow the face in the pillow and say screw it. Better him than me.

  I got a hand up to her neck and felt her pulse. It was quicker—I guessed about sixty. I got her out of the shower and across to the bedroom. I didn’t see a robe, so I pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her. Then we waltzed to the kitchen. I got water boiling and found some instant coffee and a cup. She was babbling now, nothing coherent, but the words were intelligible. I made coffee with her balanced half over one hip, my arm around her and the blanket caught in my fist to keep her warm. Then back to the living room to the day bed—there were no chairs in the kitchen—and sat her down.

  She pushed aside the coffee and spilled some on herself and cried out at the pain, but I got her to drink some. And again some. And one more time. Her eyes were open now and her breath was much less shallow. I could see her rib cage swell and settle regularly beneath the blanket. She finished the coffee.

  I stood her up and we began to walk back and forth across the apartment, which wasn’t much of a walk. There was the living room, a small bedroom, a bath, and a kitchenette, barely big enough to stand in. The living room, in which the quick and dead were joined, held only a card table, a steamer trunk with a lamp on it, and the studio couch on whose bare mattress Terry Orchard had drunk her coffee. The blanket I had pulled off the bed had been its only adornment, and as I looked into the bedroom I could see a cheap deal bureau beside the bed. On it was a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle beneath a bare light bulb hanging from a ceiling.