Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  Intruder. He was like the coldest ice, ice blood, ice brain. The water nearly froze at the touch of his flesh. Bad hunger. Bad lust was all he had, and now he smelled me, and homed in on the smell of my body, still hungry.

  Thunder. Avalanche. It was the sound of my own voice. This cold thing was after Johanna, and after my friends. This cold thing was a mouth and teeth and he was nothing to me but death.

  I dived after death, ignoring the cries far behind me, the pleas. I wanted only to destroy this intruder, this shape trailing blood.

  I found him. He tried to turn away at the last moment. Perhaps he realized, in the moonlit water, that I was too big. Perhaps he needed to get a look at me with his fixed eye.

  I ripped into him, deep into him, into the cold cartilage of his skeleton, and tasted the liquid tin of his blood. Then he turned, wheeling nervelessly, fighting on reflex alone, and he had me.

  Forty-Five

  His mind was a hammer. He was huge, a missile through the water. I buried my fangs in the peak of his nose, and tried to shake him from side to side. The gristle of his skull popped and twisted. His skin was wet sandpaper, and it tore.

  He wrenched, jerking, his body quick and strong. I fought my teeth inward, for a deeper grip, and his head dived into my fangs, as though wanting me to sink my teeth in as far as they could go.

  Again, I knew that I did not belong here. This hunter had long ago learned what mattered in this shifting, deep place. Hunger was all he could remember. It was the only word he had ever learned. He did not think of me as his adversary. He thought of me not at all. He whipped his tail. His heavy body shot us both up and out of the water, and back into it so hard I nearly lost my breath.

  This hunter never dreamed, and never guessed. He was a living weapon. When I was finished wrestling him from side to side, I threw him as far as I could, and it was like battling death itself, unthinking and relentless without any thought under the sky. I was hoping he would slip away, but he could not make such a decision.

  Cold soul, empty. He was back at once, and this time I tore him badly, sundered him from fins to tail with a long rip of my teeth. The shark doubled back on himself, his intestines trailing behind him, and even when he was upon me I knew that I could not fight such a creature. I could only kill him, and he was already dead, and did not know it.

  Teeth clashed together at my ear, and the killer worked to find me, his gill slits gaping with the force of his turn. I worked always just out of his range, and at last ripped the other side so that he spilled into the water, darkening it, emptying a sea of himself into the swells.

  I was exhausted. Fighting so far from land, in water that seemed to grow solid around me, forced me to the surface, where I gulped air. The shark churned water, working to find me, and loosing his innards in a spasm. He was an empty, gaping sleeve, but still he came on. He was dead now, entirely, and yet he came after me, his eyes white holes.

  Cold thing. Empty killer. I felt sorry for him. He had only wanted to survive.

  When my companions found me, dozens of them buoyed me, carrying me on their backs. I was too heavy for them. I had triumphed, but that would not save my life. My bones were girders, black and too heavy to do anything but drop all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

  My friends were too late. I did not have enough power within me to feel even a trace of fear. There was no more fight in me. I sank, bubbles spinning from my snout.

  My companions shouldered me upward, and then Johanna had me, and with her touch life began to return. Golden light broke inside me. What returned, as I paddled up the slopes of the swells, was more than life. It was power. I gave a strange, yapping laugh.

  Very dangerous, she said, nuzzling me. Very dangerous and foolish.

  I killed him! I killed death!

  It was ridiculous, I knew. The shark had been helpless, a victim to his instincts. But I felt that I had warred with death, and beat him. With Johanna behind me, each heartbeat made me keen. The stars were clean, and sharp, and there was the fragrance of land in the air.

  But we were far from land, and even though the tide had turned, and was drifting us toward shore, it was a long swim. A long swim, and I did not want to take it. Now I wanted to stay where I was.

  My entire life, every thought and syllable, had been a mistake. But it was not too late. I swam away from everything I had ever been, the shark’s carcass sinking with my past. Gaining strength, I began to race again, coursing toward land, but in no hurry to reach it. I was lost in this play, as I had lost myself as a child. The future, a country which had always owned me, was gone. I dived far into the ocean, and when the water’s weight squeezed the air from my lungs, I shrugged, turned, and speared upward.

  When I broke the surface I climbed on the air itself, until the gravity of my planet swung me back, and I fell as sleep falls, back where I belonged.

  It was, no doubt, only one night, and only a part of that night. But when Johanna and I dragged our paws into sand again, and trotted up a beach, we were like creatures who had not felt earth under our feet for a lifetime.

  Our companions looped in the combing surf, and then they were gone, because we were only another miracle to them, in a world of surprises.

  Weariness made it impossible to think. The hiss sand made with each step was amazingly loud. The mutter and rumble of the land was wonderful, and yet troubling. How restless it all was, how empty of peace. It would be dawn in an hour or two, I guessed, and the air was vibrant. Insects, birds, humans.

  Surf chopped, rolled, hissed. Far off down the beach a creature saw us and froze, a creature who knew us well. I threw a silent bark at this cat, and it shrank into itself. I wanted to tell the cat how fine it looked, and how delighted I was to see it. I sniffed in its direction, and it flattened into the sand.

  Johanna trotted ahead, and looked back. She tossed her head. This way, she said. I have another hiding place.

  I could not move. The sand glittered in my forepaws, and an ant labored to cross the foot-cratered beach. An engine chattered into power. An airplane murmured. It all stilled me, and made me lift my head to drink it in. This was all there was. This was the only world.

  And I was home.

  Sleep is when our bodies possess us, or repossess us, claiming us from our lives. But this sleep was an act we chose, a span of dark we decided to swallow. It could not have been a long sleep. There were no dreams at all. When I woke, I squinted against the spatter of sunlight, and wondered: where am I?

  And what am I? I put my hands to my chest—my human chest—and marveled at what I was wearing. Clothes, I thought heavily, cotton and baggy. Some sort of loose clothing. I wondered again where I was, and I sat up.

  I made myself think with a primitive logic. Strange clothing, and yet another strange hiding place. Sunlight, I puzzled. Early sun, and a smell of leaf mold. My clothes were simple: a very large, new sweatshirt and sweatpants. The dye had a strong, chemical smell.

  I concluded, however, only one thing that mattered: I was alone.

  I half-hissed, half-whistled: where are you? It was not a sound so much as a thought.

  Johanna, where are you?

  She was not, I felt, far off. Our short sprint from the beach, and our plunge through the shrubs came back to me. She had chosen this place well. This hiding place was as safe as any other, but I could not trust it without her.

  A nuthatch worked a branch. A woodpecker stuttered high above. Leaves shivered, and Johanna, human and dressed as I was dressed, knelt beside me.

  “I wanted you to sleep all day, if that’s what you needed.”

  “I don’t need sleep.” It was true. I had never felt more vigorous.

  But I had seen so much, just a few hours before. “You were right. It was a night like nothing I have ever experienced.”

  She touched my wrist, where she had touched me so long ago, in another life. “You know everything now.”

  I wanted to smile, to laugh, to deny that I could ever know eve
rything. But I knew what she meant. I knew her past, and I knew how strong we really were.

  I can never go back now.

  I don’t know if I spoke this thought. But she knew exactly what I felt. She touched my lips with hers.

  I could never go back to being a man with a collection and a safe and an office. That was part of another life. That belonged to a man who was now no longer alive.

  Her kiss strengthened me, but I could not stop another thought. It made me shiver: what would become of us?

  “We should go now,” she whispered.

  I did not want to ask.

  I didn’t have to. She must have read my question. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anywhere—but we can’t stay in San Francisco.”

  “We can hide here as well as anywhere.”

  “I know,” she smiled. “I did, for a long while.”

  Golden Gate Park was wet with dew, and the culvert Johanna had chosen was behind tall ferns. A cyclist whirred by in the early morning. We looked, I knew, like two athletic people out for morning exercise. I carried my shoes in my hand, however, dangling from their laces. The shoes Johanna had chosen were just slightly too small.

  “There are,” I said at last, “two things I have to do.”

  She must have known what they were. But she put her hand on my arm. Danger is everywhere, she did not have to say. Don’t trust the sunlight.

  She was right. But there were things I had to do, and I was determined. “You should stay here,” I said. “I’ll meet you—”

  “I’ll stay with you. If you go.”

  She should stay here, by the bust of Shakespeare. Here, where there were trees. Don’t go with me, I wanted to tell her. Stay here.

  It would take only one bullet, a single shot. A gleaming window, a passing car. She must have had a plan. A car hidden somewhere, and perhaps money. Nothing she could do would surprise me. I said it again, to remind myself what I had to do. “I have to be sure.”

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  Conversation between us was nearly unnecessary now. What she meant was plain: if I died, she wanted to die with me. I wanted to beg her to hide here, where it was reasonably safe, but she knew all the phrases I could use before I spoke them. It was as though this had all happened before, many times.

  So we went together. We jogged like normal people, normal people with ordinary lives, across the dew-bright grass.

  Forty-Six

  Police cars passed us in the street. Their tires made an unusually bass hum, like the fattest string of a cello. I could nearly feel the short-wave transmissions as they passed through my body, laden with chatter about the two of us. Perhaps there were not really more police on the street, but there seemed to be.

  The morning was crisp. Pedestrians hurried toward bus stops. I blinked at passing cars, and marveled at such sights as a postal worker stuffing letters into a plastic tub as they fell in bunches from a red and blue mailbox. Cracks in sidewalks seemed remarkable, and I found myself admiring the flight of a pigeon across the sky.

  My shoes were not so tight after all, and I was pleased to have some protection against the harsh pavement. My human feet were not so tough. But I was reluctant to stride so fast when we drew close to our destination.

  Zinser’s street, I told myself. Stay calm. Stay steady. The pulse in my neck was so strong I had trouble breathing. A rifle is a powerful weapon. A high-velocity bullet could make my head explode. The thought of it sang in me. Johanna should not have come.

  The morning went even colder, and the chirp of sparrows was ugly. My feet would not move. There was no more luck in the world. They were here. That car, at the end of the street, that gray, empty car, had brought them. They were meeting with Zinser as we stood there at the gate.

  Run away and hide. We shouldn’t be here. The day was dead. It was time to be far, far away.

  She touched my hand, for an instant.

  We moved quickly. Don’t breathe, I told myself, and don’t make a sound. The shoes were even looser, and the soles whispered over the wet grass. Too loud. My shoes were too loud.

  Be like air, I told myself. Be like smoke drifting. Have no substance at all.

  We were inside the house easily. A back door had been opened to allow what looked like gunpowder to be slathered over the frame, and the door had been left ajar.

  Masculine voices, ponderous, matter-of-fact, broke the silence in a distant room. My lips lifted, and I nearly growled. I knew those voices. Not the actual men, but the source of those sounds. They spoke with the granite rasp of the law. Hate kept me where I was, crouching beside a large, colorful painting that turned out to be, when I could look at it, an unfinished Utrillo.

  I was breathing too hard. I melted against a wall, and wondered if I had learned that ability I had noticed in Johanna, that power to be, for an instant, nowhere.

  I held my breath. I commanded my heart to ease its loud thumping. Surely anyone could hear it, throughout the house. The wall behind me was harder than any wall I had ever leaned against before. Walls are prisons, I knew. Walls are death, like rifles, and like law.

  The wait would never end. We would stay here against this wall for months. Zinser’s voice rose and fell. A male voice responded, and then, after what seemed like half a day, a door shut.

  There was quiet. It was not complete silence—a step creaked a floorboard, leather soles against carpet. A door opened. I recognized the sound of that door. I put my finger to my lips. There was no need to remind her. There was nothing to be done but exactly what we were doing. I sprang to a doorway, listened, and then lightly as a dancer I was down a hall.

  He was looking right at both of us as we entered the room, his gaze so even that it surprised me.

  “They told me you’d show up.”

  He was exactly where I expected him to be. He was in his study, the private one with all the treasures. He was standing in the room with his hands on his hips, as though surveying a mess he would have to clean up. The room was as tidy as ever, and when he saw us he did not seem startled at all, and seemed to have been waiting for us.

  “I hope we haven’t startled you—” I began.

  He waved away the suggestion. “Not after the night I’ve had. Nothing could startle me.” Then he smiled, and he shook our hands warmly. “I’m beyond surprise.”

  I began to stammer something about letting ourselves in.

  “I don’t blame you. Housekeeper took one look, and needed to go home for her asthma pills. Can’t stand stress.” He waved us into chairs. “It’s great to see you. You should see what I have just in—Mayan gold. Absolutely amazing.”

  But Mayan gold was not on his mind. Something had happened here, and I ached to ask. But I let Zinser continue. He was ecstatic with something else he had just remembered. The crossbow was now in the Tower of London. “It turns out they had been looking for it for years.”

  The Mayan gold was, in truth, amazing, although I was attracted to a dung beetle of Nilotic clay, a heavy object of doubtful provenance. “Ten dollars,” said Zinser when he saw me handling it. “Just simple Egyptian mud. Take it with you.”

  I remembered the last time I had accepted such an offer from him, and I put it down at once.

  But the crossbow and the gold were attempts to cheer himself up. At last he said, “You know who was just here, don’t you? You must have passed them on the walk.” He said the word carefully: “Detectives.” He shifted his shoulders. “The police. The truth is I am delaying. I’m delaying telling you something awful. I had a bad night here. Very bad. I hardly know how to tell you about it.”

  I cleared my throat. “What is it? Is there.…” We all knew the words I left unsaid: something wrong.

  He exhaled through his nostrils. “There is.”

  I could not ask.

  “The fangs,” he said, with an expression of distaste.

  It would be better to hear no more. I closed my eyes for a moment. I feared what he was about to tell us. I
hated the sound of my voice. “We wanted to make sure that you destroyed them,” I said.

  Zinser took a deep breath. He put his hands on his knees, and gazed at both of us. “What a rotten day it was when I ever set eyes on those damned teeth.”

  My voice creaked. “Are they—?”

  “Stolen.”

  I was ice.

  “That’s right.” He said the word with careful emphasis. “Thieves.” He pounded his knee with a fist. “I’m furious! With myself, with the criminals, whatever and whoever they were. With everything! Someone broke in here, some smart burglars, and stole them from where they were, right here on this desk. I say ‘smart.’ It was stupid, really. Think of the gold they could have taken. I was just going to break them up and melt them down this morning.”

  I could not speak.

  “I was a fool!” He waved a hand, speechless with frustration for a moment. “That’s all they took, because the security alarm went off and the cops were here so fast they had to cut out.” He leaned forward. “Can you imagine! I am disgusted to my heart. I left town for a few days, and didn’t melt them down right away. I don’t know why—a whim. What a fool I was! When I got ready to do it.… It makes me sick. Sick!”

  He considered for a moment, and laughed. “I get furious with myself thinking about it. I’ll tell you how crazy I am. I sometimes think the fangs made it all happen.” He laughed again, and added, “They wanted to escape, and so they did.”

  I surprised myself with what I said next. “The government did it. Someone official, somewhere, has them. They think they can study them, in secret.”

  Zinser shot a glance at me, a look of recognition. He tilted his head, examining me like a worried physician. “But you’re all right, aren’t you? They haven’t caused you any harm, have they?”

  I could not bear to lie to this lively man. Yes, I told him. We were fine.

  And then I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I laughed until I had to wipe tears, because the fangs had won, in a way. They had outsmarted us.