The Paper Grail (20 page)

“I’m your man,” Howard said, trying to decide if he had learned anything particularly useful or new. Uncle Roy seemed to live in a world of euphemism and metaphor, and it left Howard with a hundred practical questions, all of them clattering around, colliding with each other. Maybe over breakfast …

“My advice right now,” Uncle Roy continued, “is to lie low. You know nothing at all. That’s the byword. Don’t tip your hand. Forget the sketch for the moment. It’ll be there right enough when the time comes. Or else it won’t. I don’t know quite where it is, and that’s the solemn truth. Jimmers reported it stolen to the police, and for all I know that’s gospel. He’s a deep one, though, and in a business like this it’s better if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Do you follow me? They don’t know which way to jump when you work it like that.

“This business of Jimmers’ shed …” his uncle was saying as they trooped in through the back door. He cut off the sentence,
though, at the sight of Aunt Edith washing dishes. “Ready in five?” he asked Howard.

“Easy,” Howard replied, and went up the hallway to change his clothes, hearing his uncle in the kitchen saying something to Aunt Edith about them “making a connection on the barn lumber.”

A
T
midmorning, Howard found himself pulling into the parking lot of the ghost museum again, along with Uncle Roy, two propane lanterns, and a heavy flashlight. Uncle Roy had a “hunch,” and he couldn’t rest until he’d taken a look at the museum. But they must try to be back up in Mendocino before noon, he said, in order for Howard to meet Bennet, who spent his mornings working on his house. Howard intended to ask Sylvia out to lunch today, too. Time was short.

The place seemed doubly deserted in the wind that blew off the ocean, whipping the tree branches. A little flurry of pine needles and autumn leaves whirled across the gravel lot, pinning Howard’s pants to his legs, and the hollow-eyed cow skulls on the pickets stared straight into the wind, watching the whitecaps through the trees. The whole place was inhospitable, geared to frightening people away—a perfect habitat for ghosts but a bad one, perhaps, for customers.

The rocks beside the rear steps were scattered over the ground. “Sylvia piled those back up last night,” Howard said, suddenly tense.

“Of course. They came back is what they did. It’s just as well you got out of there, although I suppose they gave you a chance to do that so as to avoid confronting you. They don’t want outright trouble. Not yet. Key’s gone, of course, the bastards.”

“No, it isn’t,” Howard said, spotting the key in the dirt along the concrete foundation where someone had tossed it. “Why did they lock it back up, do you think? Why bother?” He handed his uncle the key.

Uncle Roy shrugged, stepping heavily up the stairs. Now that they were around out of the wind and into a little bit of sunlight, he had started to sweat. “Maybe they didn’t find what they wanted but are afraid it’s still here,” he said, unlocking the door and pocketing the key. He lay the propane lanterns on one of the tables and fired them up, adjusting the flame.

What there was left of the place had been dismantled. The framed photographs, one by one, had been pulled off the walls, taken apart, and lay now scattered over the tables and floors.
Nothing was smashed or wrecked. The intruders hadn’t been in any sort of fury. Again, the whole business was methodical, painstaking—something that Howard found troubling. It seemed to argue that their adversaries, “the enemy” as Uncle Roy had referred to them during their cryptic talk at breakfast, were calm and organized and moderately sure of themselves.

In the little bathroom, the lid had been removed from the top of the drained toilet, and the medicine cabinet had been pulled entirely out from its niche in the wall and yanked apart. They’d taken the steel band off from around the mirror and pulled it away from its backing. They’d even looked into the hollow chrome-plated bar of the towel rack.

Out in the main room, the floor vents were pulled up. Howard looked down through the hole in the floor at the old gravity heater below, sitting in an open concrete box. With the flashlight it was easy to see where the dust had been disturbed on top of the dark metal. Someone had hung through the hole and had a look around down below.

“So they were looking for the sketch,” Howard said, helping his uncle gather stuff up. “They thought it was framed up behind one of these photographs or rolled up and shoved into the towel bar or something. Thorough crowd. As I read it, though, their being here means they don’t have it. Not yet.”

“Don’t be so sure. If they have it, they need time, and this could be a ruse. Throw us off the track with a lot of tomfoolery.”

“Why would they have been so careful about it, though? I guess because paper is delicate, and they didn’t want to tear it up, to damage it.”

“Or to
pretend
to care about not tearing it up, of course. The trick is to separate illusion from reality here, isn’t it? This is a powerfully tricky lot of scum. Their purposes are never apparent. Nothing is.”

Uncle Roy squinted at Howard, making this last statement seem to apply to everything, to the north coast in general, to the wide world.

“Too bad about these pictures,” Howard said. “They don’t seem to be ruined, though. We can put them back together again.”

Uncle Roy smiled at him, as if he’d said something funny. “That’s the way to talk,” he said. “These are all copies, actually. I took everything valuable along home two years back, when the place folded. You can only keep so much stuff.”

“How about the police?” Howard asked suddenly. “The place has pretty clearly been ransacked. Let’s call the police and put them onto Stoat “

“Let’s not,” Uncle Roy said. “Let’s not even think about the police. We don’t want institutionalized help.” With that he shut the lanterns down, picked them up, and headed for the door. Five minutes later, after ditching the key in a new hidey-hole, they set out for Mendocino, Uncle Roy directing Howard through town and up onto Albion where they parked at the curb in front of the house with the Humpty Dumpty on the roof, the very house where Howard had nearly wrecked his truck yesterday morning.

The front lawn of the house was a wonderland of miniature windmills and whirligigs. A small, dark-haired man in a string-sleeve T-shirt worked out front, shoveling concrete out of a galvanized tub. Across the street, dressed in a sort of red kimono and a pair of Wellingtons, Mrs. Lamey watered her roses.

Howard was surprised to see her there, in public, just like that, living across the street from the Humpty Dumpty house. It meant that she had a life of some sort, a favorite chair that she sat in, maybe a family. Up until then he had defined her entirely in terms of mortgages and percentage points. It surprised him even more sharply when she recognized him and waved, as if she were happy to see him. Well, he thought, business is business. Maybe this is watering the roses, and business doesn’t apply.

He waved back. There was no use being troublesome. Then he gave his attention to Mr. Bennet, who nearly broke Howard’s fingers when they shook hands. He spoke with an accent, but just the trace of one, and Howard couldn’t place it.

“I build things,” he said, hosing wet concrete off his shovel and seeming to sum up his life in that one statement. He gestured at the yard. It was a pincushion of gimcracks, all wind-operated: little men sawing boards in two, ducks flapping their wings, fish on wires swimming around posts, Dutch windmills and whirligig cows slowly cranking away in the wind off the ocean. “They never stop,” he said. “Something’s always moving.” He lit a cigarette and puffed hard on it.

Bordering the house were beds full of wooden, painted flowers—tulips and daisies cut out with a scroll saw and complicated roses glued up out of individual wooden petals. There were wooden animals behind the wooden flowers, with heads that tilted and wobbled continually. The entire lawn was alive with movement, up and down and back and forth and sideways. The
roof of the house was spiked with weather vanes, too, swiveled toward the east, and in the midst of them, with his legs crossed and wearing high-water pants and the familiar red-soled shoes, sat the plywood Humpty Dumpty, like a judge on a bench, leering across the street toward where Mrs. Lamey sprinkled the roses. A strong gust blew straight off the ocean, and one of the Humpty Dumpty’s arms lowered in a solemn sort of wave and then was jerked back upright by a spring.

Mr. Bennet turned off the hose, ran his hands through his hair, and stepped onto the porch and then into the house. Uncle Roy followed, saying to Howard, “I think he planted this whole passel of whirlibobs just to drive the old lady nuts. That’s part of why she hates me, because I’m friends with Bennet. She thinks this place is a disgrace. Tried to burn him out two weeks ago, too. That’s when we put the egg man on the roof. She can’t stand to have the damned thing waving at her day and night. She tried to get an injunction against it.”

“Really?” asked Howard, honestly surprised. “She tried to burn his house down?”

Uncle Roy nodded slowly and decisively, like Oliver Hardy, while grinning with the same sort of raised-eyebrow expression that had betrayed him when he was talking about the fleet of underground Buicks yesterday.

Mr. Bennet pulled a steel coffeepot off the stove and poured coffee out into three heavy porcelain cups that were stained brown on the inside. The coffee was tepid and bitter and full of grounds, but Mr. Bennet drank it with relish, as if it were the last cup he’d ever see, and smoked on his cigarette between sips. The place was only sparsely furnished, with plain wooden furniture, and the old area rug in the living room was pulled back across the red pine floor and rolled up onto itself. An oak dresser lay dismantled in the middle of an ocean of wood dust, and a belt sander sat inside one of the drawers along with three or four loaded-up sanding belts.

“Little project,” Mr. Bennet said, nodding at the dresser. “Woman up near the harbor owns it. I’m cleaning it up for her. Poor old lady.” He shook his head. “Mrs. Deventer,” he said to Roy.

“Oh, sure, Mrs. Deventer.” Then to Howard he said, “Mrs. Lamey’s trying to run her out of her house, too. Lamey owns the land on either side. They want to put up a bank, and Mrs. Deventer’s smack in the middle of the project. She’ll hold out, though. She’s Dutch, just like me.”

“What he means is a German with his brains kicked out,” Bennet said, nodding broadly. “You ain’t a Dutchman,” he said to Uncle Roy. “Last week you were telling me you were—what’ was it?” He looked at Howard, as if he needed help sorting things out. “A South Sea Islander of some nature. A Fiji, I think it was.”

“What I said,” Uncle Roy said, shaking his head tiredly, “was that my grandfather
lived
in the South Seas. He wasn’t any kind of native. He was in the hotel business.”

“That ain’t how I remember it.” Mr. Bennet pursed his lips and then changed the subject abruptly. “I’ve been studying numbers,” he said.

Uncle Roy nodded in assent. “He’s going to crack the lottery.”

“It’s something I call the Principle of Universal Attraction. Numbers are just like people, just like you and me. Do you know what I mean?”

“Like people?” Howard asked.

“Just like that. Like people going to a banquet, going down to the VFW for a fish fry. They walk in the door and they don’t know nobody. Not a soul. Think about it. Hold it still in your mind. They mill around, don’t they, and sit down somewhere, on one of them folding chairs. Pretty soon they strike up a talk with someone they don’t know from Adam, and what does it turn out but that both of them like baseball. They can’t get enough of the Giants. Or maybe they got the same kind of dog or their wives are up to the same damned foolishness. You with me so far?”

“Sure,” Howard said. Through the window he could see Mrs. Lamey sitting on her porch, which was sheltered from the wind. She was reading a book now and drinking something hot out of a cup. Howard began to think that he’d sold Mrs. Lamey short. Still, though, if she’d really tried to burn Mr. Bennet’s house down and if she was the sort of monster that Uncle Roy seemed to think she was …

“’Nother cup of coffee?” Bennet gestured at their half-filled cups.

“Not unless you’ve got a pack of Rolaids to sweeten it with,” Uncle Roy said, nudging Howard in order to illustrate how funny the remark had been. “Your coffee tastes like rat poison. What the hell do you do to it?”

“You don’t know from coffee,” Mr. Bennet said, waving at him in disgust and then ignoring him and talking straight at Howard. “So anyway, numbers are like that, too, like people.
You dump them in a box and away they go, searching out someone to have a chat with. Birds of a feather is what it is. Shake them up, spin them around, and here comes number forty-three, sitting down with number eighteen, and then number six and number eight, maybe, and number twelve making a third, feeling more and more comfortable with each other as the night goes on. Next Tuesday there’s another fish fry, but this time, as soon as they’re in the door, they’re searching each other out straight off. The trick is to watch them, figure out who it is that’s attracting who. That’s all it is—attraction. Simple attraction. Not like love. I don’t mean like that. This is a casual thing, day by day. You’ve got to study it hard if you want to peg it.”

“Mr. Bennet went out to Vegas ten years ago and nearly beggared them,” Uncle Roy said. “Went to town on keno, day and night. Wouldn’t stop. They nearly had to shut down. Brought the whole damned town to its knees. Where was it?” he asked Mr. Bennet.

“Place called Benny’s.”

“Penny’s, wasn’t it? I thought you said it was Penny’s.”

“That’s because you don’t listen worth a damn,” Mr. Bennet said, draining his coffee mug. “You and your Samoan grandfather.” Then to Howard he said, “It ain’t one of your Strip hotels, nor downtown neither. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself, you see, in one of the big spots. They’ll work you over in the alley if they catch on. Small joint, though, doesn’t pay any attention. They think it’s a run of luck. I took them to the cleaners, too. I’m going back again someday, when I’ve got the goods, the particulars.”