Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  Then Johanna turned to me, and to my delight took my hand. “I’m so glad you came,” she said. “I really hate these.”

  “Why? You should feel wonderful!” I meant: you speak so well, and look so wonderful, you should realize how you ruled over every moment of the evening.

  She mentioned then, as though casually, that she had not eaten since breakfast, and I sensed that this was a speech she had rehearsed. She was shy even around me—I who could barely speak in her presence.

  Only it wasn’t shyness, exactly, because in the cab she told me how much my calls had meant to her. I recall candlelight, and veal I scarcely touched, and red wine I barely sipped. Over dinner she spoke of her love of mountains, her Jungian therapy (“like being a goddess studying mythology”), and how she had always dreamed of being a horse. A stallion in some dreams, a powerful silver mare in others. “It’s a commonplace, and you’ll think it trite. But I wanted to be a horse so badly it obsessed me. I still dream of it. Of running up a mountain with my mane flowing behind me. I would not confess this foolishness to any other man. Perhaps I think a psychologist who collects art must be like a priest who studies music—something like a wise person.”

  “Something like a wise person, but not quite wise?”

  “Is anyone wise, really? I think understanding life is hopeless. It can’t be done. Maybe we were wise when we were children, and pretended to be animals.”

  She smiled, and I saw how little I knew her. She had the gift of saying the most philosophical statements easily, gracefully, so that any other conversation I had ever had until now seemed like the dullest prose.

  That night, to my amazement, she took me to her bed. It was something I had, naturally, dreamed of, but when it came to the moment of disrobing it was like an act of supreme innocence, like players discarding their costumes after a masque. When we were naked I held her, and when I took her she said my name as though it were a password she had kept secret for years and gasped out, now that a long journey home was over.

  That night I was so at peace I could not sleep, lying beside her staring into the darkness around me. When I finally slept I had the recurring dream I had experienced nearly every night recently. Not a dream so much as a sensation, a deep, cold sensation of running, the ground cold and the wet grass lashing my feet. My four feet, I realized as I woke. To my amazement I was out of the bed, sprawled on the floor, in the doorway to the bedroom.

  Johanna had not awakened. I dressed myself, shivering although it was not cold, and then I heard the scratching sound at the glass door. I knew what it was, of course, this repeated clicking on the glass, but I was surprised that I had not thought of her earlier, and I was aware, at the same time, how afraid I was of her.

  The memory was bright, and returned to me like a slap: the snap of her teeth, her hot breath at my ear. I was certain that Belinda would think me an intruder. The man who came when the pain came is here now to hurt her mistress. It was dangerous, I told myself. The memory made me close my eyes for a moment. And yet I put my hand on the door handle and tugged the door open, and the dog limped in, still plainly hurting but moving as eagerly as she could.

  She recognized me. I knew it as clearly as if I’d possessed her body for an instant. Her snout was in my hand, and she was licking my palm, her tongue amazingly hot. She was glad to see me. Glad! And I felt such warmth toward her, such affection and such gratitude, that I knelt with tears in my eyes.

  At that moment I forgot my dream entirely, and I forgot to wonder why Belinda’s attitude had changed. I accepted it as good fortune and nothing more. My power to wonder, my ability to question, was already nearly gone.

  The next morning there was a pink memo on my desk at the office. There was a phone number and a name, Lieutenant Solano.

  The police consulted me from time to time. I had an old San Francisco name, and despite my shrinking practice I was still respected. Orr got the new clients, but if the Chronicle needed a quote on holiday depression, or if the police needed a quick profile on a suspect based on his tendency to masturbate on stolen panty hose, I was their man.

  Lieutenant Solano thanked me for calling. He had a policeman’s dislike for small talk, so he plunged ahead at once. “We have an expert in town doing research on a specific type of crime. He wants to talk to some local shrinks. Your name came up. We’d like you to see him.”

  He also had, I noted, a policeman’s reluctance to be specific. I said that I’d be glad to help, but then I asked, “What sort of crime is he investigating?”

  Solano sounded nearly embarrassed. “Strange stuff. Sick stuff. Crime waves that don’t make sense.”

  “Do crime waves usually make sense?”

  “Sure they do. I mean, when you figure people are greedy and pissed off.”

  I had met Lieutenant Solano for lunch a few times. Someone had been stealing Ming ceramics from the de Young, and I was asked to glance over the work histories and resumes of current employees of the museum and make a bright guess or two, confidentially. I fingered a young man with an international background, his father a career diplomat with a gambling problem, his mother a fixture of society pages, the entire family well traveled enough to know a dozen people who wouldn’t mind owning a one-of-a-kind. I knew from my own experience how few hard questions can be asked when a really delightful acquisition becomes possible.

  My guess had been right. The young man later shot himself, and I learned to regret the experience while gaining a certain reputation with the city and county of San Francisco.

  So I knew I could ask for more information, and get it. “Who is this expert?”

  “It’s semi-secret. Not to be admitted by officials if anybody asks. Like the Air Force files on UFOs. Anything goes wrong, an investigator gets fried by a death ray, Washington never heard of it.”

  “UFOs,” I echoed, I hoped helpfully.

  There was a policeman’s silence on the line. Then, “He’s on special assignment, troubleshooting out of the FBI but not exactly with them. He’s on a not-to-be acknowledged assignment. A man named Gneiss.” He spelled it. “Karl Gneiss.”

  “What kind of crime is he investigating?”

  “Honestly, Doctor, I think it’s a waste of time and energy. I really hate this kind of thing.”

  “He’s investigating the UFOs of North Beach?”

  “He wants to talk about really bizarre crimes of violence. Like if a client of yours has confessed to something you can’t believe it’s so bad, or if you’ve heard of such crimes.”

  “There’s client confidentially—”

  “Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

  I knew. If a therapist learns of a crime a client or patient is about to commit, the professional is legally bound to attempt to prevent it.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to cooperate in a speculative investigation, and yet my curiosity was stirring. “So what sort of crime are we talking about?”

  “He wants to know if there’s been talk of clients wanting to commit really terribly violent crimes. Really sick ones.”

  I did not, at that instant, want to know anything more. But my voice was calm as I asked, “Sick in what way?”

  “Crimes of not just killing people, but really mutilating the bodies. Tearing the bodies up, and then eating the flesh.”

  Eleven

  I was naked, lying on the bedroom floor. My sudden awakening did not help. It was too fast, and I did not for a moment know where I was, or who. For a few moments I was a human only, nameless, arms, legs sprawled, awake to nothing but the day.

  My memory was a limb that had fallen asleep. Gradually, in stages, circulation returned to it. I was lying on the bedroom floor. I had not been drinking the night before. In truth, I could not remember ever drinking so much that I woke lying on the floor with no memory of the celebration. Besides, I had no hangover.

  I sorted the events of the previous day, trying to turn up an explanation. I had carefully avoided Orr, and I had thrown away at least a third
of my files. The day had been a mix of pessimism and hope, my usual emotional blend.

  I had gone to a symphony alone because Johanna, to her regret, was committed to a lecture for a university extension course on the French romantic poets. For the first time my new solitude had seemed heavy. Johanna had been the cure, but when I could not see her I began to ache. My marriage was over. Cherry was gone. The Dvorak had been lovely, however, and I had come home feeling great peace.

  And yet, here I was. I crawled to my feet, stiff in my knees and back, and when I saw what was wrong at first I did not fully register it. And then I crept to the bed, and sat.

  There were lawn clippings on my toes. An innocent sight, even cheering under normal circumstances. But they were lawn clippings, and they were on my feet and this meant that I had been outside in the night. Out there.

  The words resounded, and I shivered. Out There.

  Naked. I was going mad. The phrase is not medical, but it is exactly the way a professional puts it when all the more technical words fail. Mad. Losing my mind.

  Perhaps living without Cherry was even more harrowing than I had admitted to myself. I needed Johanna more desperately than I thought. I was possessed by something that was not me, not my personality, not my conscious self. It was an elaborate sort of sleepwalking. I had heard of this. One of my clients had once driven to an all-night grocery and bought ten ounces of chicken livers while asleep.

  But to have it happen to oneself, to have it actually happen, is frightening. Furthermore, it makes one realize what a fiction we are, this little ego, this little history, this sense of self like a little puppet in the head. The body, and most of the mind, allows the skit to continue. It sets the table and manages to keep the refrigerator stocked. But it is only a fiction, perhaps the first myth. That we are creatures with a past and a future, a set of hopes, a tool chest of desires.

  Perhaps, I reflected, I should make an appointment with Dr. Ashby. My old mentor had always been so helpful. I consulted him sometimes in my imagination, and I would have called him then but I felt that it would be too bald an admission that adulthood was defeating me. Not yet, I told myself. Call him some other time—not now.

  I showered and dressed. I took comfort in putting on my tie. My familiar costume, I thought, the way an athlete might think, “My old uniform, with my old number. And it still fits.”

  My bedroom overlooked the backyard from a Spanish-style balcony. The ivy that climbed the wall was burnished with autumn color, and the grass below was sun-splashed.

  I was not hungry, and I usually enjoy a big breakfast. The dried cereal, the pop tarts, and the whole wheat bread were all in packaging that seemed too garish. I turned on the water at the kitchen sink, and surprised myself by drinking directly from the tap, thirstily.

  And why not? As a boy I had drunk from the garden hose, enjoying the feeling of water lapping into my belly, filling it, under my shirt.

  I stood at the door to the garden, eyeing the sun on the yet unblossoming azaleas with a feeling like suspicion, as though someone were trespassing out there.

  Out There. Again the thought, a sense of the openness, the great openness of the world under the sky, the hills and canyons and fields which were not human, which had nothing to do with human life. It was a feeling I had gotten very occasionally when looking at a starry sky, or walking beside the ocean. But this was an even sharper feeling that the Out There was all around me, just a few steps away, and that I could be a part of it.

  Out There meant something else, something I could not fathom. It meant Night.

  I did not want to stay in the house any longer. I stepped across the lawn. The grass was so wet the soles of my shoes squeaked on it, and I regretted that I wore shoes at all.

  When I saw them I did not recognize what they were, there among the azaleas, in the bright sun. I saw and yet did not see, alert to the squall of jays, the yammering of the small brown birds that fight each other in the bushes.

  I wanted to call Johanna. And I would call her right now. And yet, at the same time, how silly I felt in a jacket and tie, how nearly choking within the collar. I felt like a boy in his first suit. I had to laugh at myself. How hard it was to breathe!

  As I stepped into the kitchen and put my hand on the telephone I realized what I had seen, and at once denied it. How could I be sure, standing here inside the house? I had always been bad at little details. I would make a terrible detective.

  Still, I did not want to turn and go out again into the back garden, although that is exactly what I did. I did not want to step again across the lawn, and look at the dark soil between the azaleas and see the great gouts there, the great striding footprints there in the wet earth.

  But they were the steps of a man, I told myself. Someone trespassing. An intruder. Perhaps they were even my own footprints. Surely that was what they were. But as I followed the prints across the flower bed, across the lawn where they had left no trace at all, to the sidewalk far beneath the bedroom window, I realized that they could not be my footprints. How had I managed to climb the ivy, thick-stalked and stout though its stems were? I was not so athletic, even in my sleep, and besides—there on the concrete, dried and dim but definite in shape, was the print of a very large dog.

  For a moment I could not move.

  It had been an extremely large dog. The impression was larger than any paw print I had ever seen before. Unmistakable—there were two other prints in dried mud, faint but quite discernible. The prints of an extremely large dog, bounding toward the hairy stem of the ivy, that thick, ancient stem, greater in diameter than my arm. And I could not pretend I did not see it: the paw print on the wall.

  A dog could not have climbed the ivy. Perhaps it was on its hind legs. That was it—a dog stood on its hind legs to look upward, toward my bedroom balcony. I wound the hose and turned on the water. I used the hard spray to wash away the prints. Then I turned off the water, hard. The hose squeaked as I rewound it into a tight circle.

  It was then that something caught my eye, a pair of socks, I thought, rolled into a ball. Or perhaps a ball of gray yarn about the size of a fist. I nearly ignored it, but I did not. I wandered toward it, water drying from my hands in the sun, and when I saw at last what it was I had to sink to my knees. Certainly this could not be what it appeared to be. Who could do such a thing? Who could be so cruel? An animal of some kind, I told myself. It could only have been an animal.

  A cat’s head grimaced at the sun. Its eyes were black, half-shut, tasted by a sole fly. A beast of some kind had killed the cat, and, I imagined, hurrying to get a shovel, had eaten the entire body, leaving only the head.

  The real estate agent met me at the office space on Laguna, a tidy little place next to an orthodontist, with an empty slot on the door for my name, and a brick flower box protecting one miniature cedar and a pansy.

  I liked it before I saw what it looked like inside, and said so. The balding young man insisted that I look at the cozy waiting room, the consulting room, the shelf space, and it all smelled of fresh paint. I signed the lease.

  “In the interest of celerity,” Tina had said, “you might come over with a few empty boxes and begin taking your files yourself.”

  So she was decidedly not in my camp. That was unfortunate. Tina was not unattractive, and she was very efficient, completely professional, and able to coax the computer with one hand, answer the telephone, and mouth a message to Orr or myself at the same time, and keep it all straight.

  “There was a message,” she said, “from a Mr. Zinser. He wanted you to call him immediately.” I accepted the pink While-You-Were-Out slip, but did not glance at it.

  “I have,” I told her, “found a new office.”

  Was there a moment of sadness in her eyes? It could hardly be surprise; she had seen me cleaning my desk.

  I gave her the address. I said it loudly enough that Orr could have heard it, except his door was shut. Was it a client, I wondered, or an interview for a magazine. Or some
one’s wife? Or all of the above?

  I described the office glowingly, surprised at my enthusiasm for it, and my powers of description. “To be blunt, it’s a big improvement over this place.”

  Tina looked away. And I realized that she didn’t want me to move. She would miss me.

  “I’ll meet clients here for another few days.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help.”

  I smiled, and turned to leave, but stopped myself. I did not feel like a man defeated, cuckolded, forced to retreat from this fashionable office. I felt like a man on the very edge of something. A new beginning, of course, but something even more important than that. Whatever it was, I was humming with excitement and with something else—the keenest confidence.

  “Tina,” I said, “look at me.”

  I had never spoken to Tina that way before. I had never spoken to anyone in quite that way. It was an unmistakable command. Not unkind, even friendly—but the voice of a man who expected to be obeyed.

  She looked at me. It was an open-eyed stare, and she did not lower her eyes.

  “I’ll need a receptionist,” I said. It was absurd. I couldn’t keep her busy, not with my meager set of clients. It was pointless to expect her to leave this glamorous practice for my doubtful new beginning. That was why even in my optimism I continued, “someone who knows what they are doing.” So that she could deliberately not understand, and say that she would mention it to her friends.

  But she looked away just then, at that moment. And did not answer.

  Then she looked back, and her cheeks were just slightly more pink. “Mr. Zinser asked me to stress that it was very important.”

  She did not have to say so: she did not want to work for Orr. She wanted to come with me.