Skin of the Wolf

by Sam Cabot

  For a moment Michael appeared to have no reaction at all. Then he reached across the table and touched Spencer’s hand. Just briefly, just lightly; but Spencer wondered when the sun had learned to come bursting through his north-facing kitchen window. You’ll be hearing bluebirds next, you silly man! he told himself, and listened for them.

  Michael sat back and waited. Spencer exhaled. “After—there is no other way to say this—feeding, a Noantri in those times would have moved on. Staying in one place would have been sure to bring suspicion. Also, it’s possible to feed without causing the Change. Thus for most Noantri, either another of their nature was not created, or one was, but they never knew.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “These times I’m describing were not years I lived through. By the time of my Change the agreement Father Kelly told you about had been in effect for a century. Noantri had begun to gather, to live in communities; in a larger sense, in Community.

  “Imagine, Michael, if you came upon a community of Shifters. People who shared your knowledge, your fears, your outlook on the world. The odd quirks, the amusing moments, the difficulties that come about not because you’re Michael Bonnard, but because Michael Bonnard is a Shifter. Would you not feel immediately . . . at home?”

  “God. I can’t even think what that might be like.”

  “For us, it’s that, and much more. The alteration in our DNA causes our bodies to respond to the bodies of other Noantri in a way that’s similar—few Noantri like it when I say this, but it’s true—similar to the reactions of pack animals to each other. Dogs will gather into packs. As, I imagine, will wolves.”

  Michael nodded.

  “Camels will form herds, and sheep, flocks. These animals are miserable if kept isolated. Cats, on the other hand, try to avoid groups of other cats. Throughout the animal kingdom you find examples of both kinds of behavior. Noantri, it turns out, need one another.”

  “But you said you were a recluse.”

  “Yes—but in Rome. The center of Noantri life. My home was in Trastevere, where perhaps three percent of the population is Noantri. For years I interacted with very few people, but I was comfortably surrounded by my own.”

  “Three percent of the population of Trastevere? Spencer, seriously?”

  “Indeed. We can discuss that, and many other facts which will interest you, I’m sure, at a later date. Let me answer your original question, though, to which all this is relevant. You asked how infractions are punished and how dangerous Noantri are dealt with. From what I’ve said, you can understand, perhaps, what exile would mean to us.”

  “Exile.”

  “In a practice similar to the Amish ‘shunning,’ violators of the Law are sent away. Those whose infractions are relatively minor but who are thought to require discipline nevertheless, are ordered from their homelands to some distant place. They may dwell among other Noantri but may not return home until their sentences are lifted. Serious lawbreakers are required to dwell at a distance from other Noantri. They are supplied with the blood they require for nourishment but forbidden other interaction for a prescribed period.”

  “What if someone violates his exile?”

  “At first, it is reimposed to a farther place and a longer time. If that fails, there are two further steps. Our leadership operates a prison. Small, but effective. And I imagine, quite boring. You can understand how tedious being locked in a cell might be, when your life is eternal. Very few exiled Noantri commit the additional transgression of violating that sentence for fear of what comes next.”

  “And after that?”

  “There is only one step possible, after that.”

  Again, Michael didn’t speak.

  “Some Noantri are deemed so dangerous to the Community that they cannot be allowed to continue. When one’s life is eternal, even a prison must be seen as temporary. An earthquake, the failing of a bolt: nothing built lasts as long as we do. Rarely—very, very rarely—a death sentence is imposed.”

  “But you don’t die.”

  “There are two causes from which we do.”

  “I’d guess one would be lack of a blood supply.”

  “In fact, no. A long-term deprivation would cause what you might call suspended animation. Such a state might last for centuries, but Noantri in this state can be revived.”

  “Then what? Silver bullets? Stakes through the heart?”

  Spencer rolled his eyes. “Certainly not. Those are fictions useful for misdirection, but they have nothing to do with us. The facts are these: once a Noantri has made another, the two become reciprocally lethal. It has to do with an autoimmune response of the blood. Should either attempt to feed on the other it will be a fatal mistake for the one fed upon. An execution is rarely carried out in this fashion, however, as it forces another Noantri, who may be innocent of the crime, to become the executioner. The other cause is fire.”

  “Fire? That seems so mundane.”

  “Perhaps not mundane as much as elemental. Another of the effects of the microbe is an increased vulnerability to fire. We’re, shall we say, more flammable than you. Our longevity depends upon cellular regeneration. Fire destroys soft tissue. There’s nothing left to regenerate.”

  “And this is a sentence your leadership would impose?”

  “You look horrified, and quite rightly. Yes, they would, and yes, it’s horrifying. Our lives are precious to us. Our enhanced senses and literally all the time in the world to explore their uses—ending a fellow Noantri’s experience of that is a decision never taken without long and somber deliberation. But it has been done, and the knowledge that it has is usually enough to cause even the most apostate among us to reconsider his or her path.”

  Michael rubbed his eyes and looked away, out the kitchen window. Spencer didn’t know what Michael was seeing, but he thought it was not the brick wall of the building behind Spencer’s home.

  “All right,” Michael said. “I don’t know how to think about this, Spencer. I want to know more. I want to know everything. At the same time I wish I’d never heard any of it. My own secret, Edward’s . . . Now this . . . It’s enough, it’s too much. But I can’t deal with it now, no matter what. Right now, I’ve got to find my brother.” He stood.

  Spencer remained seated. “I do understand,” he said. “I’ve had centuries to get used to my own Changed existence. I shan’t impose myself. Last night I insisted on accompanying you out of concern for your weakened physical state. You do seem to have recovered admirably. Perhaps at a later date we can discuss the particularities of your . . . situation. I continue to believe I have gifts I might be able to put at your service, but if you’d prefer to carry on alone at this point, I can appreciate why.”

  Michael regarded Spencer with an unwavering gaze, which Spencer met. “No,” Michael said. “No, if you’re willing, I think I’d rather you came.”

  31

  A starched, unsmiling woman led Livia and Thomas through a series of oddly bare rooms and down four stairs into the blossom-scented air of a greenhouse. “Please sit.” The “please” notwithstanding, this was less an invitation than an order. “Leave that chair free for Mr. Lane. He’ll be along soon.” She turned and trotted briskly up the stairs with the air of the stepmother abandoning Hansel and Gretel in the forest.

  Livia and Thomas found places to sit that did not include the chair for Mr. Lane. The damp jungle aroma and lush shades of green contrasted sharply with the gray, icy morning visible through the foggy glass.

  Livia lay her coat beside her on the love seat and smoothed her hair. She no longer wore yesterday evening’s black cashmere skirt and heeled boots; now it was heavy wool tweed and sensible shoes, and a down parka. She had, after all, spent the night in a tree.

  “You’re sure no one—um, nothing—came near?” Thomas had asked when he arrived, handing her a paper cup of steaming coffee.

  “I’m not sure, no.
” She’d sipped, unimpressed with the thin and bitter coffee but grateful for the warmth. Cold, like every other natural phenomenon with the exception of fire, was harmless to a Noantri. Some of Livia’s people—those from, say, Scandinavia, or the high plateaus of Peru—enjoyed icy winds and blade-sharp air. Livia, however, was Italian. She skied in the Alps, she skated on frozen lakes, but those were lively events of short duration. Cold as a long-term encompassing environment was not to her liking, at all. “But,” she said, “I didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary. No sounds or smells I wouldn’t have expected in a wooded residential area like this.”

  “Can you detect a wolf?”

  “I’m not sure I could. I don’t have experience with their scent, the sound of their breathing, anything like that. But the birds and animals would have noticed, for sure, and I’d have felt that. And I can tell you no one, and nothing, entered the house.”

  “You’d have sensed that?”

  Livia grinned. “They have an alarm.” She finished the coffee. “I didn’t detect anything worrisome when I got here, no panic, no blood. He hadn’t come before I arrived and he didn’t come during the night. We’re ahead of him, if he’s coming here at all.”

  Now soft footfalls alerted Livia to the approach of their host. She stood, and Thomas, following her lead, did the same. A white-haired man, slightly stooped, wearing a suit, a tie, and very thick dark glasses, stopped momentarily in the doorway, then grasped the handrail and slowly took the stairs down into the sunroom. “Bradford Lane.” He extended a hand in their general direction, shook sharply once with each of them, and said, “Please sit down,” employing the same “please” they’d heard earlier. He strode creakily but with determination to the empty chair.

  “Thank you for seeing us this early, Mr. Lane,” Livia began.

  “I’m an old man, Dr. Pietro. The old don’t sleep well. Calcification of the pineal gland. You’ll find out. So I don’t care how early it is. That explains why I’m seeing you but not why you want to see me. You say you’re here for the Indigenous Arts conference, yet you were ten minutes from my house at eight in the morning. You can’t be staying near here because there’s nowhere to stay, so you must have come up to see me without knowing whether I’d even let you in. So whatever your business, you think it’s important. You mentioned my Ohtahyohnee but not your interest in it nor how you know it’s mine. Very cagey. Calculated to make me curious. Congratulations, it worked. Though I hope it doesn’t mean Estelle’s breaking my trust after so many years. I’d hate to have to start doing business with Christie’s. Enlighten me, please.”

  Well, all right then, thought Livia. “Sotheby’s hasn’t called you?”

  “My pieces aren’t going to auction until tomorrow. Why would they call me?”

  “They will, later in the day. They’re just being polite. I’m afraid the police may be calling, too. A woman was killed in Sotheby’s last night, Mr. Lane. Estelle Warner’s assistant. There’s some indication the killer was interested in some of the Native items, including your Ohtahyohnee.” Quickly, to be reassuring, she added, “Nothing was taken and nothing was damaged.”

  Lane stiffened. “I— Killed? What do you mean, killed? Interested in the items, what does that mean? What happened?”

  Astonishing, Livia thought, how it’s always the same. None of us, Unchanged or Noantri, can absorb the idea of unexpected death on first hearing. “What do you mean?” What could she mean? His mind was just playing for time. Such a human reaction.

  “It’s not clear what happened. She was killed violently, in the storeroom where they keep items not on display yet. The police think it was a jilted lover, a stalker, something like that. Some of the boxes were open, including your Ohtahyohnee’s. They think that was accidental, that it happened in the struggle. I don’t agree, though.”

  Bradford Lane sat silent a long time. “Don’t you?” he finally said. “And who are you to agree or disagree? Why are you delivering this news, and not Estelle? Dr. Pietro, you’d better tell me what’s really going on.”

  “I’m an art historian and a friend of Estelle’s. I think that what happened at Sotheby’s has to do with your Ohtahyohnee. What the connection is,” she forestalled the question, “I don’t know. But I have to tell you, there’s been some talk around the conference about the mask’s authenticity.”

  “Of course there has. No one’s ever seen anything like it.”

  “That doesn’t make it real.”

  “Its provenance does, though. I’m sure Estelle will show you that if she hasn’t already, which she may have done since she was willing to give you my name.”

  “No, she wasn’t. That was something else I picked up at the conference. Deductive reasoning with some of my colleagues. It’s been quite a guessing game.”

  “That’s ridiculous and I don’t believe you. It would be interesting to know why you’re lying, though.”

  Livia said nothing.

  “You got my name from someone, not from a guessing game.” Lane tapped the arm of his chair. “But as long as it wasn’t Estelle—and I’ll ask her later—I really don’t care.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Fine. The mask is real.”

  “I have colleagues who don’t think so.”

  “Then they won’t bid. But if rumors start in an effort to drive the price down, I can promise you I have lawyers who know their way around a slander suit.”

  “You mistake me, Mr. Lane. I’d like the mask to be real and in fact I think it is.” Thomas had started to stir uneasily as Livia strayed progressively further from the truth. “So would Father Kelly,” she said. “He’s also a historian, of the Church.”

  “Are you?” Bradford Lane turned in Thomas’s direction. “And what’s your interest?”

  “My interest,” Thomas echoed. He swallowed, and said, “Well, sir, I haven’t seen the provenance, either, but I understand it begins with a Jesuit.”

  Oh, not bad, thought Livia.

  Lane barked a laugh. “And so you want to grab the Ohtahyohnee for the Church? That’s a damn odd idea of repatriating. You priests, what an audacious crowd.”

  “No, no,” said Thomas. “I mean, if it’s repatriated anywhere, shouldn’t it be to one of the Iroquois nations?” He radiated such an air of sincerity that Livia had to suppress a smile. “I’m only interested in Father Ravenelle.”

  “Ravenelle? I don’t know anything about him. Too bad, dead end. All I know is that he gave the mask to a friend named Liam Hammill, whose family listed it in their household inventory forty years later and kept it, generation to generation, for the next two hundred and fifty years. Until I bought it in 1965. That’s three hundred unbroken years, which is usually provenance enough in this field. If the Iroquois want it, let them sue me.”

  “Mr. Lane,” said Livia, “how can you be sure the mask you bought was authentic? Hadn’t been substituted?”

  “In 1965? Are you really asking? I thought you were an expert. Here for the conference.”

  “From Italy. My field’s tangentially related but there’s a lot I don’t know.”

  “Ha!” Lane slapped the arm of his chair. “I knew it! I never heard of you and I’ve read pretty much everyone. What’s your real field?”

  “Early representations of the Americas in European art.”

  “Oh, God, such crap. It’s mostly awful, you have to admit.”

  “Interesting to study, though. But the mask . . . ?”

  “You don’t agree. You like those silly here-be-monsters paintings. Well, it’s your funeral. Indians weren’t a hot commodity in ’65, especially the Eastern tribes. Navajo silver, Seminole beadwork, maybe a little, but woodlands baskets, carvings, forget it. No one was collecting, just a few cranks like me. Before that—in the two hundred and fifty years before that—there was even less interest. I bought that Ohtahyohnee from a Hammill
who was clearing old family junk out of the attic. That was my collecting secret, in case anyone wants to know. Yard sales, fire sales, pawnshops, Goodwill. Why the hell the Hammills had even kept the mask, no one seems to know, except that the Irish never bury their dead and great-great-great-great-whatever-grandfather Liam had made it a point in his will that the thing was important. But the depreciated third-rate Hammill I came across no longer gave a damn. I hope Liam’s haunting him. Dr. Pietro, a lot of what I acquired over the years—and curated and preserved and saved from the landfill—were the kinds of things burned as primitive garbage by Europeans so they could substitute their own primitive garbage. Which is the long way of saying, for what I paid for that mask, it wouldn’t have been worth a forger’s time.”

  “It is now. I’ve been told it’s estimated at seven million dollars.”

  “Talk to Vincent van Gogh’s brother. There was no serious market for Indian art until about twenty years ago. I promise you, for the last twenty years I’ve known where that mask has been every minute of every day. Now suddenly the market’s booming and I’m selling. Aren’t I a lucky man? And if you’re suggesting I could have had it forged myself, which of course I could have, I’ll throw you out.”