Our Lady of Darkness (8 page)

FRANZ MADE HIMSELF
more coffee—it had been full daylight now for some time—and lugged back to bed with him an armful of books from the shelves by his desk. To make room for them, more of the colorful recreational reading had to go on the floor. He joked with his Scholar’s Mistress, “You ‘re growing darker and more intellectual, my dear, but not a day older and as slim as ever. How do you manage it?”

The new books were a fair sampling of what he thought of as his reference library of the really eerie. Mostly not the new occult stuff, which tended to be the work of charlatans and hacks out for the buck, or naive self-deceivers innocent even of scholarship—flotsam and froth on the rising tide of witchcraft (which Franz was also skeptical about)—but books which approached the weird obliquely yet from far firmer footings. He leafed about in them swiftly, intently, quite delightedly, as he sipped his steaming coffee. There was Prof. D.M. Nostig’s
The Subliminal Occult
, that curious, intensely skeptical book which rigorously disposes of all claims of the learned parapsychologists and still finds a residue of the inexplicable; Montague’s witty and profound monograph
White Tape
, with its thesis that civilization is being asphyxiated, mummy-wrapped by its own records, bureaucratic and otherwise, and by its infinitely recessive self-observations; precious, dingy copies of those two extremely rare, slim books thought spurious by many critics—
Ames et Fantomes de Douleur
by the Marquis de Sade and
Knochenmadchen in Pelze mit Peitsche
by Sacher-Masoch; Oscar Wilde’s
De Profundis
and
Suspiria de Profundis
(with its Three Ladies of Sorrow) by Thomas De Quincey, that old opium-eater and metaphysician, both commonplace books but strangely linked by more than their titles;
The Mauritzus Case
by Jacob Wasser-man;
Journey to the End of the Night
by Celine; several copies of Bonewits’s periodical
Gnostica; The Spider Glyph in Time
by Mauricio Santos-Lobos; and the monumental
Sex, Death and Supernatural Dread
by Ms. Frances D. Lettland, Ph.B.

For a long space his morning mind darted about happily in the eerie wonder-world evoked and buttressed by these books and de Castries’ s and the journal and by clear-cut memories of yesterday’s rather strange experiences. Truly, modern cities were the world’s supreme mysteries, and skyscrapers their secular cathedrals.

Scanning the “Ladies of Sorrow” prose poem in
Suspiria
, he wondered not for the first time, whether those creations of De Quincey had anything to do with Christianity. True,
Mater Lachrymarum
, Our Lady of Tears, the eldest sister, did remind one of
Mater Dolorosa
, a name of the Virgin; and the second sister too,
Mater Suspiriorum
, Our Lady of Sighs—and even the terrible and youngest sister,
Mater Tenebrarum
, Our Lady of Darkness. (De Quincey had intended to write a whole book about her,
The Kingdom of Darkness
, but apparently never had—
that
would have been something, now!) But no, their antecedents were in the classical world (they paralleled the three Fates and the three Furies) and in the labyrinths of the English laudanum-drinker’s drug-widened awareness.

Meanwhile his intentions were firming as to how he’d spend this day, which promised to be a beauty, too. First, start pinning down that elusive 607 Rhodes, beginning by getting the history of this anonymous building, 811 Geary. It would make an excellent test case—and Cal, as well as Gun, had wanted to know. Next, go to Corona Heights again to check out whether he’d really seen his own window from there. Sometime in the afternoon visit Jaime Donaldus Byers. (Call him first.) Tonight, of course, Cal’s concert.

He blinked and looked around. Despite the open window, the room was full of smoke. With a sorry laugh he carefully stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the heaped ashtray.

The phone rang. It was Cal, inviting him down to late breakfast. He showered and shaved and dressed and went.

IN THE DOORWAY
Cal looked so sweet and young in a green dress, her hair in a long pony tail, that he wanted to grab and kiss her. But she also still had on her rapt, meditative look—“Keep intact for Bach.”

She said, “Hello, dear. I actually slept those twelve hours I threatened to in my pride. God is merciful. Do you mind eggs again? It’s really brunchtime. Pour yourself coffee.”

“Any more practice today?” he asked, glancing toward the electronic keyboard.

“Yes, but not with that. This afternoon I’ll have three or four hours with the concert harpsichord. And I’ll be tuning it.”

He drank creamed coffee and watched the poetry of motion as she dreamily broke eggs, an unconscious ballet of white ovoids and slender key-flattened fingertips. He found himself comparing her to Daisy, and, to his amusement, to his Scholar’s Mistress. Cal and the latter were both slender, somewhat intellectual, rather silent types, touched with the White Goddess definitely, dreamy but disciplined. Daisy had been touched with the White Goddess too, a poet, and also disciplined, keeping herself intact…for brain cancer. He veered off from that.

But White was certainly Cal’s adjective; all right, no Lady of Darkness, but a Lady of Light and in eternal opposition to the other, yang to its yin, Ormadz to its Ahriman—yes, by Robert Ingersoll!

And she really did look such a schoolgirl, her face a mask of gay innocence and good behavior. But then he remembered her as she had launched into the first piece of a concert. He’d been sitting up close and a little to one side so that he had seen her full profile. As if by some swift magic, she had become someone he’d never seen before and wasn’t sure for a moment he wanted to. Her chin had tucked down into her neck, her nostril had flared, her eye had become all-seeing and merciless, her lips had pressed together and turned down at the corners quite nastily, like a savage schoolmistress, and it had been as if she had been saying, “Now hear me, all you strings and
Mister
Chopin. You behave perfectly now, or else!” It had been the look of the young professional.

“Eat them while they’re hot,” Cal murmured, slipping his plate in front of him. “Here’s the toast. Buttered, somehow.”

After a while she asked, “How did you sleep?”

He told her about the stars.

She said, “I’m glad you worship.”

“Yes, that’s true in a way,” he had to admit. “Saint Copernicus, at any rate, and Isaac Newton.”

“My father used to swear by them, too,” she told him. “Even, I remember once, by Einstein. I started to do it myself too, but Mother gently discouraged me. She thought it tomboyish.”

Franz smiled. He didn’t bring up this morning’s reading or yesterday’s events; they seemed wrong topics for now.

It was she who said, “I thought Saul was quite cute last night. I like the way he flirts with Dorotea.”

“He loves to pretend to shock her,” Franz said.

“And she loves to pretend to be shocked,” Cal agreed. “I think I’ll give her a fan for Christmas, just to have the delight of watching her manage it. I’m not sure I’d trust him with Bonita, though.”

“What, our Saul?” he asked, in only half-pretended astonishment. The memory came, vividly
and uncomfortably, of laughter overheard on the stairs yesterday morning, a laughter alive with touching and tickling.

“People have unexpected sides,” she observed placidly. “You’re very brisk and brimming with energy; this morning. Almost bumptious, except you’re being considerate for my mood. But underneath you’re thoughtful. What are your plans for today?”

He told her.

“That sounds good,” she said. “I’ve heard Byers’s place is quite spooky. Or maybe they meant exotic. And I’d really like to find out about 607 Rhodes. You know-peer over the shoulder of ‘stout Cortez’ and see it there, whatever it is, ‘silent upon a peak in Darien.’ And just find out the history of this building, like Gun was wondering. That would be fascinating. Well, I should be getting ready.”

“Will I see you before? Take you there?” he asked as he got up.

“No, not before, I think,” she said thoughtfully.’ ‘But afterward.” She smiled at him. “I’m relieved to hear you’ll be there. Take care, Franz.”

“You take care too, Cal,” he told her.

“On concert days I wrap myself in wool. No, wait.”

She came toward him, head lifted, continuing to smile. He got his arms around her before they kissed. Her lips were soft and cool.

AN HOUR LATER,
a pleasantly grave young man in the Recorder’s Office at City Hall informed Franz that 811 Geary Street was designated Block 320, Lot 23 in his province.

“For anything about the lot’s previous history,” he said, “you’d have to go to the Assessor’s Office. They would know because they handle taxes.”

Franz crossed the wide, echoing marble corridor with its ceiling two stories high to the Assessor’s Office, which flanked the main entrance to City Hall on the other side. The two great civic guards and idols, he thought, papers and moneys.

A worried woman with graying red hair told him, “Your next step is to go to the Office of Building Permits in the City Hall Annex across the street to your left when you go out, and find when a permit to build on the lot was applied for. When you bring us that information, we can help you. It should be easy. They won’t have to go back far. Everything in that area went down in 1906.”

Franz obeyed, thinking that all this was becoming not just a fantasia but a ballet of buildings. Investigating just one modest building had led him into what you could call this Courtly Minuet of the Runaround. Doubtless the bothersome public was supposed to get bored and give up at this point, but he’d fool ‘em! The brimming spirits Cal had noticed in him were still high.

Yes, a national ballet of all buildings great and small, skyscrapers and shacks, all going up and haunting our streets and cross streets for a while and then eventually coining down, whether helped by earthquakes or not, to the tune of ownership, money, and records, with a symphony orchestra of millions of clerks and bureaucrats, papermen all, each intently reading and obediently tootling his scrap of the infinite score, which itself would all be fed, as the buildings tumbled, into the document-shredding machines, ranks upon ranks of them like banks of violins, not Stradivariuses but Shredmasters. And over everything the paper snow.

In the annex, a businesslike building with low ceilings, Franz was pleasantly surprised (but his cynicism rather dashed) when a portly young Chinaperson, upon being properly supplicated with the ritual formula of numbered block and lot, within two minutes handed him a folded old printed form filled in with ink that had turned brown and which began “Application for Permit to erect a 7-story Brick Building with Steel Frame on the south side of Geary Street 25 feet west of Hyde Street at Estimated Cost of $74,870.00 for Use as a Hotel,” and ended with “Filed Jul 15, 1925.”

His first thought was that Cal and the others would be relieved to hear that the building apparently had a steel frame—a point they’d wondered about during earthquake speculations and to which they’d never been able to get a satisfactory answer. His second was that the date made the building almost disappointingly recent—the San Francisco of Dashiell Hammett…and Clark Ashton Smith. Still, the big bridges hadn’t been built then; ferries did all their work. Fifty years was a respectable age.

He copied out most of the brown-ink stuff, returned the application to the stout young man (who smiled, hardly inscrutably), and footed it back to the Assessor’s Office, swinging his briefcase jauntily. The red-haired woman was worrying elsewhere, and two ancient men who both limped received his information dubiously, but finally deigned to consult a computer, joking together as to whether it would work, but clearly reverent for all their humor.

One of them pushed some buttons and read off from a screen invisible to the public, “Yep, permit granted September nine, 1925, and built in ‘26. Construction completed Jun—June.”

“They said it was for use as a hotel,” Franz asked. “Could you tell me what name?”

“For that you’d have to consult a city directory for the year. Ours don’t go back mat far. Try in the public library across the square.”

Franz dutifully crossed the wide gray expanse, dark green win little segregated trees and bright with small gushing fountains and two long pools rippling in the wind. On ail four sides the civic buildings stood pompously, most of them blocky and nondescript, but City Hall behind him with its greenish dome and classic cupola and the main public library ahead somewhat more decorated, the latter with names of great thinkers and American writers, which (score one for our side) included Poe. While a block norm the darkly severe and wholly modern (all glass) Federal Building loomed up like a watchful elder brother.

Feeling ebullient and now a bit lucky, too, Franz hurried. He still had much to do today and the high sun said it was getting on. Inside the swinging doors he angled through the press of harsh young women with glasses, children, belted hippies, and cranky old men (typical readers all), returned two books, and without waiting for an okay, he took the elevator to the empty corridor of the third floor. In the hushed, rather elegant San Francisco Room a slightly precious lady whispered to him mat her city directories went up only to 1918, the later (more common?) ones were in the main catalog room on the second floor with the phone books.

Feeling slightly deflated and a bit run-around again, but not much, Franz descended to the big, fantastically high-ceilinged familiar room. In the last century and the early years of this, libraries had been built in the same spirit as banks and railroad stations—all pomp and pride. In a corner partitioned off by high, packed shelves, he found the rows of books he wanted. His hand went toward the 1926, then shifted to the 1927—that would be sure to list the hotel, if there had been one. Now for some fun—looking up the addresses of everyone mentioned in the application and finding the hotel itself, of course, though that last would take some hunting, have to check the addresses (which might be given by cross streets rather than numbers) of all the hotels—and maybe of the apartment hotels, too.

Before seating himself he glanced at his wristwatch. My God, it was later than he’d thought. If he didn’t make up some time, he’d arrive at Corona Heights after the sun had left the slot and so too late for the experiment he intended. And books like this didn’t circulate.

He took only a couple of seconds coming to a decision. After a casual but searching look all around to make sure no one was watching him at the moment, he thrust the directory into his deep briefcase and marched out of the catalog room, picking up a couple of paperbacks at random from one of the revolving wire stands set here and there. Then he tramped softly and measuredly down the great marble stairs that were wide and lofty and long and broad-stepped enough for a triumph in a Roman film epic, feeling all eyes upon him but hardly believing mat. He stopped at the desk to check out the two paperbacks and drop them ostentatiously into his briefcase, and then walked out of the building without a glance at the guard, who never did look into briefcases and bags (so far as Franz had noticed) provided he’d seen you check out some books at the desk.

Franz seldom did that sort of thing, but today’s promise seemed to make it worth taking little risks.

There was a 19-Polk coming outside. He caught it, thinking somewhat complacently that now he had successfully become one of Saul’s kleptomaniacs. Heigh-ho for the compulsive life!