"Reuben, you have never had your priorities straight," she said gently, emboldened obviously by the miles between them. "You know, nobody who knows you expected you to write such interesting articles for the Observer and you should be writing right now. I mean when you took that job, I thought, Yeah, sure, and How long will this last? and now you,re the one who,s given the Man Wolf his name. Everybody,s referencing your description - ."
"The witness,s description, Celeste - ." But why was he bothering to argue, or to talk at all?
"Look, I,m here with Mort. Mort wants to say hello."
Now that was cozy, wasn,t it?
"How,re you doing, old buddy?"
"Fine, just fine," said Reuben.
Mort went on for a little while about Reuben,s article on the Man Wolf. "Good stuff," he said. "Are you writing something on the house up there?"
"I don,t want to draw any more attention to this house," he said. "I don,t want to remind anybody about it anymore."
"That figures. Besides, this is one of those stories that will be over before it ever grows legs."
You think so?
Mort mentioned he might take Celeste to a movie in Berkeley, and he wished Reuben was there to come with them.
Hmmmm.
Reuben said fine, he,d catch up with them both in a few days. End of phone call.
So that was it. She was with Mort and she was having too good a time and she felt guilty and so she rang me. And what is she doing going to a movie with Mort when the whole city,s looking for the kidnappers or the Man Wolf?
Since when did Celeste want to be in a Berkeley art house with those kinds of things going on? Well, maybe she was falling for Mort. He couldn,t blame her. The fact was, he did not care.
After he,d put the plate and fork in one of the three dishwashers he discovered under the counter, he started his real tour of things.
He went all through the ground floor, peering into the closets and pantries that were everywhere, finding all as it had been, except that old abandoned conservatory had been thoroughly cleaned, and all the dead plants taken away, and the black granite floor tidily swept. Even the old Grecian fountain had been scoured apparently, and someone had fixed a neat note, "Needs pump," to the side of it with Scotch tape.
Beneath the main stairs, he found the steps to the cellar, and it was small, a cement room about twenty feet square, lined with darkly stained wooden storage cabinets, floor to ceiling, filled with stained and torn linen that had seen its day. One dusty obsolete furnace still stood against the wall. He could see where other furnaces had once been. The ductwork was gone, the ceiling patched. A broken dining room chair stood in one corner, and an old electric hair dryer, and an empty steamer trunk.
Now came a key moment, one he,d anticipated as he deliberately put it off: the library and the distinguished gentlemen of the jungle in their gilt frame. He headed back upstairs.
He entered the library as if it were a sanctum.
Turning on the overhead chandelier, he read the names written in ink on the framing mat.
Margon Sperver, Baron Thibault, Reynolds Wagner, Felix Nideck, Sergei Gorlagon, and Frank Vandover.
Quickly he typed them into an iPhone e-mail and sent it to himself.
What remarkable and cheerful faces these men had. Sergei was a giant as Marchent had mentioned, with very blond hair and bushy blond eyebrows and a long rectangular face. Quite Nordic looking, indeed. The others were all slightly smaller, but varied in physiognomy quite a bit. Only Felix and Margon were dark skinned, as if they had some Asian or Latin blood.
Were they sharing some kind of personal joke in this photo? Or was this just a marvelous moment during a great adventure shared by close friends?
Sperver; Nideck. Maybe it was just coincidence and nothing else. The other names didn,t mean anything much to Reuben at all.
Well, they,d be here forever now; and he could spend hours with them later this evening or tomorrow or tomorrow after that.
He went upstairs.
Now came more very special moments. He opened the doors that had been locked that first night. All were unlocked now.
"Storerooms," Galton had said dismissively.
He saw the crowded shelves he,d anticipated with such relish, the countless statues in jade or diorite or alabaster, the scattered books, fragments....
He went from room to room, hoping to capture the scope of it.
And then he pounded up the bare steps at the front of the house to the third floor, and groping for a light switch, quickly found himself in a vast room beneath the sloping roofs of the southwest gable, gazing at wooden tables scattered with books, papers, more statues, and curios, boxes of cards covered in scribbled writing, blank books, what seemed to be ledgers, even bundles of letters.
This was the room above the master bedroom, the one that Felix had sealed off. Indeed he saw the square of replaced flooring where the iron stairs had once been.
There were big old sagging comfortable chairs in the center of this room beneath an old black iron chandelier.
On the arm of one chair, he found a small dusty paperback book.
He picked it up.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
How I Believe
Now this was most curious. Had Felix been a reader of Teilhard de Chardin, one of Catholicism,s most elegant and mysterious theologians? Reuben didn,t really have a mind for abstract philosophy or theology, any more than he did for science. But he loved the poetic dimension of Teilhard and always had. So did his brother, Jim. Reuben found a kind of promise in Teilhard, who,d been not only an ardent believer in God but a believer in the world, as he had often put it.
Reuben opened the book now. The paper was aged and brittle. Copyright 1969.
I believe that the universe is an evolution
I believe that evolution proceeds toward spirit
I believe that spirit is fully realized in a form of personality
I believe that the supremely personal is the Universal Christ
Well, bully for Teilhard, he thought bitterly. He felt a deep sadness suddenly, a bit of anger and then something akin to despair. Despair wasn,t in his nature really. But he knew it in moments like this. He was about to put the book back when he saw there was something scribbled in ink on this page:
Beloved Felix
,
For You!
We have survived this;
we can survive anything
In Celebration
,
Margon
Rome ,04
Well, this was his now.
He shoved the small relic into his coat pocket.
Far to the back of the room, he saw the discarded iron stairs, all of a circular piece lying on its side in the dust. There were boxes there, boxes he wouldn,t try to search just now.