The Paper Grail (29 page)

“It’s tiring to face yourself, Gwen, if you don’t like what you see in the mirror.”

The woman named Gwen wore a khaki dashiki, a necklace of wooden beads, a pair of old combat boots. She had long, straight, unevenly cut brown hair, as if she were working hard to affect the look of an urban guerrilla at a Halloween costume party.

“Let’s ignore your conscience, then, shall we?” Mrs. Lamey said to Stoat. “What I’m talking about is some squalid empty lots and a run-down lot of flats occupied by human rubbish.” She held up a hand to silence Stoat, who had started to speak. “What will happen, as it’s happened time and time again in the past, is that one fine day a cigarette and a mattress will bum another half block to the ground and all those people will be on the street, anyway, if they’re not dead. The entire area is an unsanitary warren of drug havens and bathhouses and human degradation. What I propose is to rebuild all of it, and human dignity into the bargain.”

“What you propose is turning two hundred people out of their homes in order to profit by it. Let’s keep all this motivation talk straight, just like Gwen suggested.”

“It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?”

“It’s a matter of something.”

“Don’t pretend to be above it, Stoat,” Gwen said. “You’re a fine one to talk about profit. How long ago was it that you sold out? And didn’t I just hear you propounding a lot of shit about there being no such thing as a social conscience? Now you’re coming in on the side of the huddled masses.”

“On the side of the poor bastard who’s trying to get by from day to day.”

“Shit happens, Stoat.”

Mrs. Lamey frowned. “My dear,” she said pettishly, “could you try to be less fecal about this whole thing?”

“Shit, shit, shit!” Gwen said at Mrs. Lamey’s face. “You and my goddamn mother. Let me give you a piece of advice. It’s a couple of lines from my last poem. ‘You’ve got to be able to shit and look at it. That’s all that matters.’“

“All?” Stoat asked, blinking at her. “I would have thought something else … a good bottle of wine …”

“Fuck
what you would have thought.”

Mrs. Lamey recoiled, like a snail touched with an electric prod. After a moment’s silence she said, “Forgive me if I try to get us back on subject. This little venture would return quadruple the investment within a couple of years. It’s
quite
an opportunity. Now, here’s a thought. If you want so badly to help the downtrodden, why don’t you make them an offer—each and every one of them. Let them all be partners in this. For every hundred dollars each of them invests, we’ll return two hundred dollars after two years, guaranteed. There’s nothing more egalitarian than profit sharing. There’s two hundred and fifty or so of them. Squeeze a hundred dollars out of them on the average and we’ll have enough to rent a crane and wrecking ball.” She smiled at the dashiki-clad woman, who frowned back at her. “You don’t seem to want to agree with anyone today, do you, Gwen?”

“Agreeing doesn’t agree with her,” Stoat said. “I’d cut off her allowance if I were you, Heloise. Being a patron of artists and poets ought to give you a certain power over them. Here’s one of them waxing obscene in your living room. Let’s wash her mouth out with soap.”

“You took my money greedily enough when you were drawing your disreputable comic books and living in poverty, Mr. Stoat. Leave Gwendolyn alone. She’ll come into her own.” Mrs. Lamey cast the woman a motherly look.

“Why don’t you both suck on a gun barrel?” Gwendolyn said.

The door opened just then and in walked two men, one of them wearing a beard and dressed in a coat and tie, and the other in a fashionable knitted sweater and pleated pants and carrying a leather shoulder bag like a yuppie banker dressed for a country excursion. Mrs. Lamey stood up, looking sharp at them. “Did you locate it this time? Or did you simply tear the place up and hit the man over the head again?”

“Got a fix on it this time,” the second one said. He reached
into the shoulder bag and hauled out Mrs. Lamey’s magical divining rod—the two lashed-together forearm bones. A rotten, musty smell issued from the bag and from the bones. The man held them gingerly, as a person might hold a loaded gun with a cocked hair trigger. It was clear that he found it a loathsome object and wanted to get rid of it as quick as he could.

Mrs. Lamey took the thing from him, then strode across the room to lay it on a distant table, out of harm’s way.

“Can’t you shift it farther than that?” Stoat asked. “Why does magic stink so badly?”

“Nearly everything stinks that badly,” Gwendolyn said. “You’ve been holding your nose all these years. Let go of it once, you’ll learn something.”

“Where, then?” Mrs. Lamey asked.

“Near as we can tell, in the tin shed. Who would have thought he would leave it out there? We used triangulation to home in on it, just like you suggested. Took us straight to the edge of the bluffs. For my money it’s either locked in the shed or thrown off the cliff.”

“And you extricated it, then, from this tin shed?”

“No, we didn’t. The nut—what’s his name?”

“Jimmers.”

“That’s it. He spotted us out the window. Said he’d already called a cop. So we moved on. He might have been telling the truth. Shouldn’t be any real trouble to get at it—pair of bolt cutters when the old boy’s asleep.”

“No, we’ll get it now, before anyone else has a go at it. There’s more in that shed than … what it is we’re after.” She stepped to the window. Across the street sat Mr. Bennet’s house with its garden of wooden gizmos. Bennet himself had gone off with Roy Barton two hours ago. His truck sat carelessly at the curb. The street was silent and empty.

“You know Sylvia Barton, I think,” Mrs. Lamey said to Gwen.

“I did once,” she replied, speaking to Mrs. Lamey’s back. “When she was sweet on Stoatie here.”

Mrs. Lamey turned around, looking shrewdly at her. “Your voices aren’t so very different. Hers is pitched just a little higher. Could you mimic it, do you think?”

She shrugged. “I suppose so. How’s this? Hello,” she said, sounding something like Felix the Cat, “I’m Sylvia Barton, raven-haired beauty.”

“Too high. I don’t want a cartoon imitation. I want something that will fool our friend Jimmers.”

She tried again, modulating her voice until Mrs. Lamey told her to stop, that she had it at last. “Practice that,” she said. “And you three, you’re going back out to that house one more time. Please don’t come back empty-handed this time. Bring me what I ask for or go home and make an honest living.”

“What about Jimmers?” the man in the suit asked. “He’ll be watching for us. What shall we do to him?”

“Nothing,” Stoat said immediately. “There’s no profit in violence here. If I’m going along, you can be damn well sure Jimmers is not going to get a glimpse of my face. I’m fairly well known around these parts. I’m not going in there waving a lead pipe. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one around here that values subtlety.”

“Or fear, for that matter,” Gwendolyn Bundy said in the voice of Sylvia Barton. “How’s that? Do I still have it?”

“Just right,” Mrs. Lamey said proudly. “That’s my girl. Mr. Stoat is entirely right in this case. Leave your lead pipes in your car and leave your car where it is. Better yet, move it around the corner. I don’t want you parking in front of my house anymore. You’ve bungled this twice, and that sort of bungling leads to troubles.”

“What, we’re
walking
down to Elk?” the man in the sweater asked.

“I’ve arranged for transportation. You’ll leave at once. When you get there, Mr. Jimmers’ car will be gone, with him in it. You’ll have a good half hour to do the job and then disappear along with the goods. Don’t dawdle, though. I don’t want any possibility of a slipup. Gwendolyn, you’re to phone Mr. Jimmers. You’re Sylvia Barton, and you’ve run out of gas—where?”

“Irish Beach,” said the man in the sweater.

“Too close. Point Arena. Just north of Point Arena, on the side of the highway. That’s safe. Poor Sylvia will have to walk three or four miles back into town if he doesn’t bring her up a gallon of gas in a can.”

“What if she can’t convince him?” the man in the coat asked.

“She’ll convince him. I promise you. I know Mr. Jimmers and I know his past. He’s a born champion, or wants to think so, and he has a special place in his heart for our Sylvia. By the way,” she asked Stoat, “has she been notified that her lease won’t be renewed come January?”

“Sent the notice off in the mail this morning. I’m not certain, though, why she has to be punished for the obstinacy of her crazy father.”

‘The sins of the fathers,” Mrs. Lamey said, “will be visited upon the heads of their daughters. I mean to bring the whole family down in the manner of the Chinese communists. Get at the cousins and the aunts and the grandfathers, too, if I can find them.”

Stoat shrugged.

She turned back to the man in the coat. “If worse comes to worst,” she said, “then Gwen will have failed to convince him, and Jimmers’ car will still be in the drive. In that case you’ll have to terminate the immediate plan and figure out more forceful methods, even if they discommode Mr. Stoat, who perhaps ought to wear an extra pair of socks to keep his feet from getting cold.” She looked hard at Stoat until he looked away.

Gwendolyn Bundy smiled widely. “Poor Stoatie-Woatie,” she said.

The man in the sweater didn’t look entirely convinced. “What about this transportation business?”

“Simple as anything,” Mrs. Lamey said, breaking into a grin and stepping across to the window again.

17

H
OWARD
slept in late the next morning, but woke up feeling better than he would have expected. His cuts and scrapes were superficial, and twelve hours of sleep had done a lot to restore him. Chasing around in the back of his mind was the idea that he knew something now that he hadn’t known before, but he couldn’t say just what. It was more likely a feeling of having fallen in among people with a common interest—as if he had been baptized at last and was finally part of a congregation.

Uncle Roy and he took the morning off and drove up along the coast to fish. They caught nothing but seaweed, though, and came home early in the afternoon to an empty house. Aunt Edith
was off doing volunteer work at the hospital, and so when Uncle Roy drove off to the harbor to meet Bennet, Howard stayed home to glue decals onto the windows of his truck. It was a frivolous way to kill an hour, but it gave him time to think, and somehow gluing on the decals seemed right to him, appropriately strange. He was caught up in crazy activities, and this was no crazier than the rest.

Afterward, he went to work on the barn lumber, cleaning a good part of it up and stacking it against the wall. At six it was time to meet Sylvia at the worrisome haunted house. He half dreaded becoming involved in the project. Aunt Edith would probably have him arrested for contributing to the delinquency of an uncle. There was no way on earth, though, that once he was asked he could decline to help with it, or that he could even say anything serious against it.

He drove down to the harbor, finally, and found the old wooden icehouse. It had been painted white once, but the white paint had faded to a sort of uniform gray in the weather. There was a sign on top that read “Snowman Ice” above a painting of a winking snowman in a hat. The place didn’t look a lot like a haunted house, maybe because of all the activity going on around it—kids on bikes and tourists looking for fish restaurants and fishermen going back and forth in pickup trucks. It was run-down enough, though, with broken windows and a couple of old ground-draping pepper trees at the corner. Uncle Roy was hard at it when Howard arrived. Howard could hear the sound of a dull circular saw whining and burning its way through a piece of wood. Sylvia’s car was there, too, parked in front.

The door creaked open when he pushed on it, and Howard walked into an entry hall gaudy with dark red, velvety wallpaper. The skeleton from the university hung from a noose tied to a brass chandelier fixture in the ceiling, its wired-together toes pointed at a threadbare piece of oriental carpet. The ceiling was high, easily twelve feet, but the skeleton’s knees dangled at eye level, anyway, and Howard was tempted to give it a knock just to hear it clatter like a wind chime. It would be a mighty temptation on Halloween night.

Beyond the entry hall was a big, open room with a dirty wooden floor, littered and stained and water-warped. In the dark, maybe, the place wouldn’t look too bad. Uncle Roy sat at a plywood table near a pair of tall windows, carving ornate pumpkins. A plugged-in circular saw lay on the floor next to a couple of little triangles of plywood that had just been cut
off the corners of the table. The air smelled of sawdust and friction-burned wood. Uncle Roy scraped sticky orange strings and seeds onto a heap of newspaper. “I figure we need quite a few,” he was saying when Howard walked in. Sylvia still had her coat on.

“Damn it!” Uncle Roy cried just then, and threw his knife down onto the plywood. “Look at this! Hell. I’ve screwed it up.” He tilted his head back like an artist, regarding his pumpkin, and then sliced delicately at the comer of the thing’s mouth.