The Paper Grail (48 page)

Rain beat down now in vast waves, sluicing sideways into the car. It forced its way past the weather stripping around the doors and windows and ran in rivulets down the inside of the passenger
door to pool up on the mat. Sylvia tried to crank the window shut, but it was already tight.

“It won’t last long,” Howard half shouted, squinting to see through the murk and trying to be heard above the roar of rain drumming against the roof. He could see nothing in the sky now, only a black, low canopy. Water poured down the inside edge of the highway in a muddy torrent, wrapping around the cliffside and rushing beneath the car and over the cliff in a cataract. Howard switched on the headlights, but most of the light was thrown back at them, reflected off the heavy curtain of rain. A shower of fist-sized rocks tumbled down the cliff, scattering across the highway in front of them before being swept up in the torrent.

“We can’t stay here,” Sylvia said. “There’ll be slides in weather like this. A few years ago fifty yards of road just fell into the ocean. It was a month before it was open to travel again. You had to drive inland nearly to Philo and then back out to Elk.”

“Fine,” Howard said. “We
can’t
go anywhere. We can’t see ten feet.” He turned the radio on but there was nothing but static. Three rapid flashes of lightning lit the dark landscape like noonday, and Sylvia screamed, jamming herself back into Howard so that he was crushed against the door handle. An explosion of thunder masked her scream, and in the silence that followed there was a furious knocking at the window on the passenger side and a face peering in at them, its mouth working as if it were shouting something.

Howard lunged for the ignition, instantly remembering every apocryphal story about cult murders and escaped lunatics with hook arms. He twisted the key, wondering how the hell he was going to turn around on the flooded highway. Forget turning around. He threw the car into gear and edged forward, looking wildly at the face in the window. Sylvia was shouting at him, slugging him on the arm.

“It’s Jimmers!” she shouted. “Wait! It’s just Jimmers!”

Howard stepped on the brake, his hand on the key again. She was right. It was Jimmers, his hair wild in the wind. Rain poured off his yellow rain slicker, beating against his back as he held on to both door handles for balance. Howard cut the engine and Sylvia unlocked the rear door, letting Jimmers pull it open as he fought against the gale. Rain hammered in around his shoulders as he crammed himself into the backseat, and the door smashed shut behind him, driven by the wind.

“Unfold the paper,” he gasped.

26

H
OWARD
looked at him, not understanding what he meant.

“The sketch. Unfold it.” He pointed at Howard’s hand, which was still closed over the folded paper. Howard opened the paper up so that it lay flat again. Almost at once the storm began to abate. There was a flash or two of distant lightning but only the vague echo of thunder now. The wind fell off and the rain lessened to a sprinkle. Out over the ocean the starry sky shone through torn apart clouds that seemed to sail away in all directions at once, leaving the windswept sky clear again.

“Perhaps you’d better quit fiddling with it and put it away.” Mr. Jimmers said slowly, as if he were talking to a man with a loaded gun.

Howard laid it back into its case, clipping the thing shut and setting it onto the dashboard again. “What did I do he asked.

“Very simply, you called up a storm. Or started to at any rate.”

“
Started
to?”

“It was nothing alongside what it might have been. It was the lemon next to the pie.”

“The pie?” Howard said.

“It was my fault,” Sylvia said. “I was the one who wanted to fold it.”

“Fault doesn’t enter in.” Mr. Jimmers wiped his hair back, wringing water down his raincoat.

“How did you know?” Howard asked. “I’m just curious. Were you home all afternoon?”

“I went up to town to buy groceries and got back about a half hour ago. I spotted your car through the attic telescope and so knew it was you two banging around down below. And then when the storm rose out of nowhere like that, I went upstairs again, and there you were, sitting in your car on the roadside, meddling with the … sketch, oblivious to the danger.”

“And you let us have the sketch, then, when you knew it was us in the cellars.”

“You knew where it was,” Jimmers said.

“What difference does that make?”

Mr. Jimmers stared out of the window. Suddenly he began shivering, and Sylvia said, “Start up the heater.”

“That’s the stuff,” Mr. Jimmers said. “A cup of Postum would be nice, wouldn’t it? I’m going to pop back up to the house and brew one, but you won’t want to come along. There was trouble down at the harbor. I saw it from the road on the way back down here. You’ll want to have a look. Fire department was there. It looked like a fire in among the trailers, maybe. A couple of eucalyptus trees were burning like torches.”

He paused for a moment to contemplate before going on, and then said tiredly, “A week ago it wouldn’t have mattered what you wanted. It wasn’t mine to give, was it? But now poor old Graham is dead and someone’s got to carry on. I believe that’s you. It certainly isn’t me.”

“Why isn’t it you?” Howard asked softly.

“Because I’m a pawn,” Mr. Jimmers said sadly. “You’re the king, aren’t you? Promise me you’ll remember something that I once forgot. Heloise Lamey is a dangerous adversary. The people who surround her are thugs and morons. She uses them as easily as she once used me. I thought I loved her once, years ago, and betrayed poor Graham by giving the sketch, as you call it, to her. I simply gave it away. I did it out of love, mind you. No one can say that I didn’t. I had good intentions in some ways, but as they say, the road to hell is paved with that sort of brick. She threw me out when she thought she had what she wanted, and I knew I had betrayed my friend for nothing. Then it turned out that Graham had manipulated all of us by manufacturing a spurious sketch, and she had got nothing, after all.

“I was furious with him. He had seen the truth all along, seen straight through both of us, and yet had allowed me to betray him, and because of it I lost everything. I moved north and was living in the old Vance Hotel, on Second Street up in Eureka, when he found me at last and brought me back, saying that he was sorry to have used me to fight a battle in a war that I hadn’t signed up for. He
hadn’t
used me, though. I was sharp enough to see that. I had used him, and for purely selfish reasons. It’s been my perpetual shame. I’m … unworthy. I won’t be the man to pretend to protect the thing I once betrayed.”

“That’s the worst sort of rubbish,” Sylvia said. “Tell it to the prodigal son.”

Mr. Jimmers looked vaguely startled, as if he hadn’t expected her to disagree. It had sounded like he was reciting an apology that he had worked out over and over for twenty-odd years. “Pardon me?” he said.

“That’s all nonsense,” Sylvia said. “It’s true, maybe. The facts are. I’m not saying you’re lying about what happened. But all these years of locking yourself away, living in your cellar—that’s more a matter of feeling sorry for yourself, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it is. How transparent I’ve become.” He smiled at her, putting on his old theatrical face but making a bad show of it. He looked hard at her for a few seconds before putting his hand on the door handle. For a moment Howard thought of pulling out the book that he had in his pocket, of asking Mr. Jimmers about it outright. But he had already presumed too much, involved himself in other people’s business.

“We ought to get down to the harbor,” he said to Sylvia.

“Yes, you should,” Mr. Jimmers said.

“You’ll be all right?” Sylvia asked him.

“Right as rain.” He stepped out onto the muddy roadside and half closed the door before pulling it back open. “Remember what I said about Heloise Lamey. There’s trouble on the boil. She’ll see through this storm, too,” he said to Howard, looking grave now.

“They’ll know you’ve got it, and they’ll know you’ve used it.”

M
UCK-COLORED
lilies, soft-throated and with curved, heavy-headed stamens, lay scattered across the bed, which had been partly covered with a sheet dyed red. A thick, milky-pink fluid leaked slowly out onto the sheet. The color of the flowers was nearly indescribable, as was their odor, which reminded Stoat of a pig farm. Their throats were almost black, fading to the brown-ocher of old blood at the outer rim of the petal.

A small earthen pot half full of muddy, grassy water sat on a little table beside the bed, as did a ceramic tray on which sat a slice of the cane that they had begun to cut up last night, before Howard Barton exploded the clothes dryer and stole the cane back.

“Those lilies have to be your most startling creation,” Stoat told her, not particularly happily. He sat in a chair near the window, peering out through the curtain at the street now and then. He yawned and rubbed his face blearily. “You get used to the smell, I suppose.”

She said nothing, and after a moment he said, “Maybe it’s a necessary hazard to the occupation of power broker—living in the middle of bad smells.”

Still she said nothing, but went about her business humming. He seemed determined to make her speak, to make her acknowledge his existence. “Curious thing about the water, too. I don’t see why we can’t bottle it. Make a fortune.”

She took a step back and surveyed the bed, looking satisfied with what she had accomplished so far. “Because it’s already stopped flowing,” she said to him. “I found a half dozen indentations altogether—all of them in the backyard of that little hovel halfway down the block. I assume that he ran through the backyard in an effort to elude the three of you, although I can’t for the life of me determine why he bothered at all. Collectively you don’t amount to much of a threat. The other boys sleeping the afternoon away, I suppose?”

Now it was Stoat who didn’t respond, but looked out the window again instead. After a minute of silence he said, “He’ll be full of regrets before the night is through. You’ll have some satisfaction out of it.”

“He who?”

“The fat man. The other one—Howard—what will he be full of? You tell me. Silver or lead?”

Mrs. Lamey began to hum again as she worked away at one of the lilies, pressing the liquid out of it with her fingers so that it dribbled into the convex hollow of a tautened patch of silk cloth. “Too late for silver,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Pity the water dried up so quickly. The earth behind the house was soft, or the cane wouldn’t have left any indentation at all. It was like six little fairyland springs—artesian water bubbling up through wells the size of a nickel and no deeper than your knuckle, flowing out into the grass. A cat was actually drinking at one of them when I came along and found them. It was a very satisfied-looking creature, quite clearly drunk, too. Dreams of springtime in its eyes. Within ten minutes of my coming all six were dry.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Stoat said facetiously, letting the curtain drop. “Surely your coming had nothing to do with it …” He fell silent. There was a look on her face that suggested she was in no mood to put up with him. “What interest do you have in—what did you call it? Inglenook Fen? Why not some gesture more grand than that? Why not Lake Tahoe? Why can’t you dry up Lake Tahoe?”

She shrugged. “I rather like Lake Tahoe. I own considerable interest in a casino at Lake Tahoe. I don’t require grand gestures, anyway. They’re inartistic and they call attention to one, don’t they? If we succeed this afternoon, though, I’d like to see what I can do with some rather large and useful reservoir. Hetch Hetchy, I think.”

“Why
my
neighborhood?”

“The East Bay is so utterly dependent on that one source, isn’t it? Imagine what two years of absolute drought would do to them? They would begin to
think
differently, and that’s appealing to me. I would love to have been in Los Angeles in the thirties and forties and had a hand in draining the Owens Valley. For today, though, I’ll concentrate on Inglenook Fen. It’s always been one of my very favorite places—a remnant of the ice age. Did you know that?”

“Fascinating,” he said. “Kill it as quick as you can.”

“I used to go out there to walk on the dunes. I’ve come to think of it as my own, I guess. I’m just a nostalgic old fool.” For a moment her face was overcome with a wistful, faraway look, as if she were remembering a distant, more pleasant time—days, maybe, when she could see some point in walking on the dunes, or perhaps when she had gone out walking with someone else, before that had all been spoiled for her. Just as suddenly as the wistful look had appeared, it was gone, and she applied herself to her work.

She finished with the lilies, having pressed all the juices out of them onto the silk, and she picked up a knife and swept it back and forth across the surface of the cloth, forcing the heavy juices through it, collecting the sieved liquid drop by drop on a circular mirror. “Water is everything, you know. Money is nothing. Would you own north Africa, or would you own the Nile? And imagine the billions of gallons of water flowing south through this state right now, through the California Aqueduct alone, irrigating tens of millions of acres of orchards and vineyards and cotton and rice fields. What if one could shut off the flow, like water out of a sink? Imagine two or three snowless years in the Sierra Nevada. No ice pack. No rain at all across the Northwest. Water is power. It’s more than that. It’s life and death.”