The Last Coin (28 page)

Andrew shrugged. All he was sure of was that Pickett hadn’t ever seen Aunt Naomi’s spoon, or rather
his
spoon. He was suddenly short of breath again.

“On Moneywort’s hat. Remember me telling you about his fishing lures? Well, this is the fish, swallowing its tail. It’s a common enough symbol in mythology, of course, serpents swallowing their tails. But it struck me like a ball bat that the likeness of this very fish should have been hanging from Moneywort’s hat. Think about it: Moneywort’s dead, murdered. And so is Pfennig. And the book is in Pfennig’s shop. And here’s the clerk with a hell of an unhealthy interest in it. Look at the picture—the multiple dorsal fin and the too-big head and the way there’s a crescent moon laid in behind it, half-hidden. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt—a miniature copy of it had been hanging on Moneywort’s hat. I saw it there. Ho, I said to myself. Here’s an unlikely coincidence. And the more I thought about it the unliklier it seemed.

“So just for the dickens of it I asked for the proprietor, for Pfennig—you know, just to feel the clerk out. Pfennig was gone—out of the country, said the man. Which was a lie, of course. Pfennig was lying in a bag on a slab at the morgue. The clerk couldn’t have been ignorant of it. I mentioned that I’d been a friend of Moneywort’s, but the clerk shrugged. I asked to buy the book, which, like I said, the clerk had been messing with when I came in through the door. He was nervous about it—tried to put me off. He said he couldn’t sell it at any price. It was just a ‘curiosity,’ he said. Nothing valuable. Nothing I’d want, really. I told him that in fact I wanted it very badly, and then he said that it was sold already. That he was holding it for a man who was a friend of Pfennig. I told him
I
was a friend of Pfennig and then told him to name his price. That’s just what I said: ‘Name your price, sir!’ I said, and snapped your credit card down onto the counter when I said it. The long and the short of it is that he named it. These days a credit card is as good as cash.” Pickett winked broadly, as if to underscore the story of his victory.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Andrew, sinking into a chair. Rose was going to kill him. He debated asking Pickett how much the clerk had soaked him for, but he didn’t. It was too late at night. He’d never get to sleep if he knew. He’d have to watch for the bill to come in the mail, just as he’d planned, and pay it off entirely, then destroy the record. “So what about this clerk?”

“He knew about Pfennig; you bet he did. You could see it in his eyes—raw terror. I thought he’d bolt before he got the book into a bag; and he nearly did. He sold me the thing, stuffed all the cash from the register into his pocket, and was out the door and locking it before I’d walked halfway down the block to my car. I’ve thought it over all the way down from Vancouver, and what I think is that we have a book that we shouldn’t have, and
that’s
why I didn’t at all like the idea of running into Pennyman out by Leisure World. And now you tell me he was out of the house for nearly thirty-six hours on the day Pfennig was murdered. He was in Vancouver himself; that’s what I think. And what’s more, I think he was the ‘friend’ who wanted the book.”

Andrew was suddenly overwhelmingly tired. His head spun with the bits and pieces of the mystery. He thought about the squid on the beach, sliced lengthwise, and Pennyman rummaging in its guts to retrieve a silver coin. He thought about the spoon lodged behind the books in his room, about the face on the front of it and the moon and fish on the convex curve of the bottom. He thought about Aunt Naomi giving it to him, almost making a production out of it, a ritual. He thought of Pfennig, sawed in two. Then a new thought chilled him—the thought of the credit card. “They’ve got my name,” he said flatly.

Pickett shrugged. “Forget about names,” he said. “They’re living in your house, for God’s sake. They don’t need your name.” He poured himself another glass of bourbon, and sat down, looking desperately fatigued.

Pickett was right, of course. Andrew opened the book again, to the frontispiece, just to make sure. “There’s something else living in the house,” he said flatly. “Wait half a minute.”

And with that he walked out tiredly, slumping through the kitchen and up the stairs to fetch the pig spoon.

He knew that the penlight belonged to Andrew Vanbergen, but he didn’t know what it was doing under the bedroom chair. Someone had been in his room while he had been traveling. He smiled, regarding himself in the mirror. He tipped his head. There was a clinic in Paris that performed hair transplants in such a way that one didn’t emerge with a head that looked like a palm grove. And there was a shaman, a Professor M’gulu, in Zambia who could restore hair outright. The African’s process, though, involved the application of loathsome substances to one’s scalp and the chanting of mystical phrases. Jules Pennyman rather preferred a more clinical approach. He didn’t function at all well in earthy, ritualistic settings. That was the enemy’s territory, for the most part. Pennyman preferred the antiseptic cleanliness of stainless steel and vinyl and Formica scrubbed down with chemical sterilizers.

While the coins worked well enough prolonging life, they weren’t at all kind to hair. There was a subtle, gradual decay and debilitation that they generated, even after one had got around the initial wasting away, the aches and pains and brittle bones. Pennyman had been plagued with random baldness for the last fifty years. The elixir manufactured by Moneywort and his cronies had done its work, and as long as he had it, he felt tip-top. Not even a cold. But he was beginning to suspect that there was a limit even to the elixir’s effects; it was as if slowly but surely he’d become immune to the elixir’s effects—as if it were an opiate—and now even with increased doses … That would be the effect of the coins again. But there was nothing he could do about it. There was always a price.

He could see in the mirror that his hair was thinning, unnaturally, in patches. He brushed it back carefully, checking the effect in the hand mirror. He’d have to have something done to his ears, too. There were certain body parts that kept growing, regardless of age, and their growing was enhanced by Moneywort’s potion. Ears were the worst of them, because you couldn’t cover them up. He despised the idea of surgery. One was so vulnerable when lying on a surgeon’s table. But he couldn’t abide looking comical either, and oversize ears were nothing if not comical.

There were aspects of the problem that he wouldn’t have minded when he was young—those bodily members which, unlike ears,
could
be covered up. It had got to the point at which he could command a ducal salary on the club circuit, but he’d lost his taste for that sort of thing long years ago. Debauchery had worn thin after a while, and he had abandoned it as he had abandoned everything else. Even when he was young, he’d never understood the nature of the urgings that the common man referred to as love. They were nothing but fear—a matter of clinging to each other, just as a blind man, finding himself on the edge of an unfamiliar street, might cling to a tree or a lamp-post simply to keep his bearings as he listened to the traffic whiz by. Pennyman had no such fears. The unknown held no secrets from him, and he was no stranger to darkness.

He liked to think of the human heart as a clockwork mechanism, a thing of gears and crystals. He’d seen one at a laboratory in Munich, during the war. It had been removed from its host and maintained artificially in a sterile glass box, a complication of rubber tubes and circulating fluids. There was nothing sentimental about it; it was merely a mechanical device, more ghastly, perhaps, than a man-made contrivance because of its awful fleshiness, because it was more authentically alive.

If his plans failed, he’d go to the Paris clinic and have his ears attended to. If his plans
didn’t
fail, then it wouldn’t much matter.

What he couldn’t quite fathom was the faint smell of perfume on his blanket. He knew whose perfume it was, but what had she been doing lying atop his bed? They’d never had any such relationship. The idea of it appalled him. The idea of physical contact of any sort appalled him, and that sort doubly so. What in the world had she been up to? Some sort of odd fantasizing? If so, then she’d come unhinged, and he’d be better off if she disappeared off the end of the pier on the next foggy night. His mind wrangled with the mystery. Why on top of the bedclothes and not under them? Clearly it hadn’t simply been a matter of her sleeping in his bed. And why Andrew Vanbergen’s penlight? Had she taken it from him? Andrew carried it clipped into his shirt pocket on occasion; it would be a simple enough thing to steal. But why would she bother?

There was the possibility, of course, that she hadn’t been in his room at all—that it had been Andrew all along, and that he’d soaked a tissue in her perfume and rubbed it onto the blankets. But again, why? Why not slip in and out again? Why leave telltale signs? Simply out of lunacy? That would almost seem the answer, especially when Andrew Vanbergen was involved. He was raving mad; that was the truth of it. There was no other explanation, certainly, for the note that had come in the mail. The idiot’s face had been an open book. And the contents of the note, too—senseless, decayed jabber. There was no question about its being Andrew’s work. The man was a case study in several of the more novel forms of insanity. And he was a pest. Sooner or later it would be necessary to reach out and crush him, too, now that Pennyman had ascertained that Andrew wasn’t a Caretaker.

Why leave the penlight, though? And why the stolen elixir? Pennyman hadn’t hidden that half well enough. He’d been sloppy. On an impulse he put away his brush and mirror and bent down by the bed, hauling open one of the drawers below it. Behind folded sweaters lay a package wrapped loosely in brown butcher paper. Next to it was a leather bag, a lidded Plexiglas cube, and a lead-lined silver and pewter box designed by Archibald Knox and made by Liberty and Company in 1904, during a time when Pennyman had fancied the trappings of wealth and pretended an interest in art. He had come to see through that, finally. It was as transparent as the rest, art was, and not worth his time. His energy had been focused over the years onto a tinier and tinier target, and he had shed his trivial, youthful enthusiasms for art and liquor and tobacco and the rest of the “productions of time.” Let heaven be in love with them. He was in love with—nothing. Maybe love was the wrong word.

The boxes in the drawer hadn’t been touched. He took the silver box out anyway. He’d have to find a safer place.
Someone
had been skulking in his room when he was out—at night, to judge from the penlight. Surely a nitwit like Andrew Vanbergen would have no interest in the coins. But Pennyman had traveled too many miles, dealt with too many powerful men, to take any chances now, especially with a man as irrational as Vanbergen.

And there was the matter of the last four coins. He’d see the emergence of two of them soon enough. And the third, he knew, he would have to fish for. The fish would come to him, though. He had discovered that accumulated coins drew the scattered coins; and the more he had accumulated, the stronger had been their attraction. He possessed twenty-six of them, and the few missing coins were even now tumbling and burrowing and swimming toward him through the earth and sea. And when they arrived, he wouldn’t need to drink carp elixir in order to drag out a few more years of life. As had happened when Judas Iscariot had been tempted to suicide out of remorse; immortality had been thrust upon him as a curse. Well, it wouldn’t be a curse to Pennyman.

Pfennig knew that too—what it was the coins granted. All his kind did. And they pretended not to be attracted to the idea of it. They hoarded their coin or two and assumed the role of Caretaker. But it was all affectation. Pennyman was certain of it. Old Aureus had accumulated more of the coins than had been good for him, and their attraction had begun to work on him, to debilitate him. He was tainted with them. The possession of any single one of them would have turned a common man into an invalid. Fourteen of them had brought Aureus enough power so that he’d been a formidable enemy, with his obedient beggars and his calling up of spirits. Pfennig and Moneywort had been nothing. Caretakers! If their business was to keep the coins dispersed, then they were a sorry lot, weren’t they? And one by one they were a dead lot.

But the fourth coin—where was it? It clearly had been altered some time in the past, and then lost. Pfennig had been on the track of it. It was there somewhere. He was tolerably sure, though, that neither Andrew nor Rose
knew
it was there. He would have sensed it long ago if they had. The coin
had
been altered—that was the truth of it—and cleverly, too.

A vague doubt flickered across the back of his mind—just the ghost of one. What if Andrew Vanbergen and his idiot friend weren’t the fools that he took them for? What if their tomfoolery was monumental cleverness? What if they knew
exactly
what they were doing, but were operating at depths that he couldn’t fathom, on wavelengths that he couldn’t detect? Andrew wasn’t a Caretaker; their meeting on the front porch had told Pennyman that much. When Pennyman had confronted Pfennig for the first time on his way home from Jerusalem, his silver test quarter had been torn from his hand and had slammed Pfennig in the forehead. Pennyman hadn’t had to bother with the pretense of coin tricks. If Pfennig had been smart, he would have left the country then and there. But he hadn’t been smart. Was Andrew Vanbergen smart? Had he managed to hide the altered coin more cleverly?

Then there was the old lady—Aunt Naomi. Pennyman would look in on her that very afternoon. She’d be a tougher case. Interesting her in idiotic coin tricks would be more difficult than it had been with Andrew or with any of the rest of them. Naomi wouldn’t be in the mood for light-hearted parlor tricks. He’d have to flatter her—bring her a bit of a present, perhaps. If she had one of the coins on her person, he’d … No he wouldn’t. He couldn’t; not with the alleged “treasure hunt” just a couple of days off. Anyway, he had promised to leave her to Mrs. Gummidge. He’d have to be patient.