The Wolf Gift (4 page)

The western conservatory was filled with dead plants in colorful old Oriental pots. The white metal framework, holding up the high glass dome, reminded Reuben of bleached bones. There was an old dried
fountain in the middle of the soiled black granite floor. This Reuben had to see again in the morning, with the light streaming in from three directions. Right now, it was so damp and cold.

“You can see out that way when the weather’s pleasant,” Marchent said, pointing to the French doors, “and I remember a party once where people were actually dancing in here, and drifting out there on the terrace. There’s a balustrade right at the cliff’s edge. Felix’s friends were all there. Sergei Gorlagon was singing in Russian, and everyone so loved it. And of course Uncle Felix was having a fabulous time. He adored his friend Sergei. Sergei was a giant of a man. And there was no one quite like Uncle Felix at a large party. Such a vivacious spirit, and how he loved to dance. And my father was skulking about mumbling about the expense.” She shrugged. “I’ll try to get the place all cleaned up. Should have done it before you arrived.”

“I can see it clearly,” said Reuben, “filled with potted orange trees and banana palms, and great towering weeping ficus and maybe orchid trees and flowering vines. I’d read the morning papers in here.”

She was delighted, obviously. She laughed.

“No, darling, you would read the morning papers in the library which is the morning room. You’d drift in here in the afternoon when the western sun floods the room. Whatever made you think of orchid trees? Ah, orchid trees. And in summer you’d hang about in the early evening here until the sun sinks into the sea.”

“I love orchid trees,” Reuben confessed. “I’ve seen them in the Caribbean. I guess all us northern people crave tropic climes. One time we stayed in this small hotel in New Orleans, one of those bed-and-breakfast hotels in the Quarter, and there were orchid trees on either side of the swimming pool, actually dripping purple petals into the water, just a whole sweep of purple petals on the water, and I thought it was the loveliest thing.”

“You should have a house like this, you know,” she said. A shadow darkened her face, but only for a second. Then she smiled again and squeezed his hand.

They only glanced into the white-paneled music room. The floor there was white-painted wood, and the grand piano, Marchent said, had been long ago ruined by the damp and taken away. “These painted walls in here, all this came right out of some house in France.”

“I can believe it,” he said admiring the deeply carved borders and
faded floral decorations. Now, this was something Celeste would approve of, because Celeste loved music, and often played the piano when she was alone. She didn’t attach much importance to her own playing, but now and then Reuben had awakened to hear her playing the small spinet in her apartment. Yes, this she would like.

The great shadowy dining room was a surprise.

“This isn’t a dining room,” he declared. “It’s a banquet room, a mead hall, to say the very least.”

“Oh, indeed, it used to be a ballroom in the old days,” Marchent said. “The whole country round came to the balls here. There was a ball even when I was a child.”

The dark paneling prevailed here as in the great room, as lustrous and beautiful under a high-coffered ceiling of myriad plaster squares scoring a ceiling painted dark blue with bright stars. It was a bold decoration. And it worked.

His heart was beating.

They made their way to the table. It was easily twenty feet long and yet it seemed small in this great space, floating on the dark polished floor.

They sat down opposite each other in red velvet high-backed chairs.

Two massive black wooden hunters’ boards stood against the wall behind Marchent, both identically carved with rich Renaissance figures, hunters with their retinue, and piled with heavy silver platters and goblets and stacks of what appeared to be yellow linen, napkins perhaps.

Other imposing pieces loomed in the shadow, what seemed an immense armoire, and a number of old chests.

The fireplace was huge and Gothic, of black marble and replete with solemn-faced helmeted medieval knights. The hearth was high with a medieval battle scene carved in its base. Now surely Reuben would get a well-illuminated photograph of that.

Two baroque candelabra provided the only light, other than the crackling fire.

“You look like a prince at this table,” Marchent said with a light laugh. “You look as if you belong.”

“You have to be teasing me,” he said, “and you look like the grand duchess in this candlelight. I think we are in a Viennese hunting lodge here, not in California at all.”

“You’ve been to Vienna?”

“Many times,” he said. He thought of Phil leading him through
Maria Theresa’s palace there, discoursing on everything from the painted walls to the great ornate enameled stoves. Yes, Phil would love this place. Phil would understand.

They dined on old lavishly painted china, some of it chipped, but still incomparable. And the silver was the heaviest he’d ever used.

Felice, a small shrunken woman with white hair and very dark skin, came and went without a word. “The girl” from the village—Nina—was a robust brown-haired little person who seemed a bit in awe of Marchent, the dining room, and every plate she brought to the table on a silver charger. Amid nervous giggles and sighs, she grinned at Reuben as she hurried out of the room.

“You have a fan,” Marchent whispered.

The filet roast was perfect, the vegetables extraordinarily fresh and crisp, and the salad perfectly done with light oil and herbs.

Reuben drank a little more of the red wine than he planned to drink, but it was so smooth, and had that dark smoky taste he associated entirely with the best vintages. He really didn’t know wine.

He was eating like a pig. That’s what he did when he was happy, and he was happy, remarkably happy.

Marchent talked about the history of the house, the part he’d already researched.

Her great-grandfather—the founding Felix—had been a lumber baron in these parts, and built two sawmills along the coast, along with a small harbor, now gone, for his ships. He’d had the lumber for this house milled and planed on the site, and brought a good deal of the marble and granite up the coast by boat. The stones for the walls of the house came over land and by boat.

“All the Nidecks had European money, apparently,” Marchent said, “and they made plenty of money here.”

Though Uncle Felix had had the bulk of the family wealth, Marchent’s father, Abel, had still owned all the shops in the town when she was growing up. Nearby beachfront lots south of the property had been sold off before she went away to college, but few people had ever really built on that land.

“All that happened while Felix was gone on one of his long trips, my father selling the shops and the beachfront lots, and Felix was so angry when he came back. I recall their arguing about it furiously. But it couldn’t be undone.” She grew sad. “I wish my father hadn’t resented
Uncle Felix so much. Maybe if he hadn’t, if we’d looked for Uncle Felix sooner. But all that is long past.”

The property still comprised forty-seven acres including the protected old-growth redwoods behind the house, and a great many live oaks, and the wooded slopes down to the beach all along the western flank. There was an old tree house out there in the forest, built by Felix, and remarkably high up. “I’ve never actually been in it,” Marchent said. “But my little brothers said it was quite luxurious. Of course they should never have been in it before Felix was officially declared dead.”

Marchent really didn’t know much about the family other than what everybody knew. They were part of the history of the county. “I think they had money in oil and in diamonds, and in property in Switzerland.” She shrugged.

Her trust funds were all conventional investments managed in New York. Same with her younger brothers.

With the settling of Uncle Felix’s will had come the revelation of a great deal of money in the Bank of America and the Wells Fargo Bank, more than Marchent had ever expected.

“So you don’t need to sell this place,” Reuben said.

“I need to sell it to be free,” she said. She paused, closed her eyes for a second, and then, making a little fist with her right hand, she tapped her breast. “I need to know that it’s over, you see. And then there are my younger brothers.” Her face changed, and so did her voice. “They’ve been bought off not to contest the will.” Again came one of her little shrugs, but she looked faintly sad. “They want their ‘share.’ ”

Reuben nodded, but he really didn’t understand.

I’m going to try to buy this place
.

He knew that now, no matter how daunting, no matter how expensive to fix up, to warm up, to maintain. There are times when one simply cannot say no.

But first things first.

She started talking finally about the accident that had killed her parents. They’d been flying back from Las Vegas. Her father was an excellent pilot, and it was a trip they’d made a hundred times.

“They probably never even knew what happened,” she said. “It was the most unfortunate thing that they would fly right into that electric tower in the fog.”

Marchent had been twenty-eight at the time. Felix had been gone
for ten years. She became the guardian of her two younger brothers. “I think I made a mess of it,” she said. “They were never the same after the accident. From there on out, it was drugs and booze for them, and the most disreputable friends. I wanted to go back to Paris. I didn’t spend enough time with them, then or ever. And they just went from bad to worse.”

A year apart, sixteen and seventeen at the time of the accident, they were more like twins, secretive with a personal language of smirks, sneers, and murmurs that few could penetrate or tolerate for very long.

“There were some very fine Impressionist paintings in this room until a few years ago,” she said. “My brothers stole them, came up when no one was here but Felice, and sold them off for a pittance. I was furious. But I simply couldn’t get them back. I found out later they’d taken some of the silver as well.”

“That must have been very discouraging,” he said.

She laughed. “It certainly was. The tragedy is these things are gone forever and what did the boys get out of it? A drunken bash in Sausalito raided by the local police.”

Felice drifted in, silent, seemingly fragile and unsteady, yet efficiently cleared the plates. Marchent slipped out to pay “the girl,” and soon came back.

“Has Felice always been with you?” Reuben asked.

“Oh, yes, along with her son who died last year. He was the man of the place, of course. He managed everything. How he hated my brothers, but then they set fire to the guesthouse twice, and wrecked more than one car. I’ve hired a couple of men since but it never worked out. There’s no man on the place just now. Just old Mr. Galton, down the road, but he contracts for anything and everything we need. You might mention that in your article. Mr. Galton knows this house inside and out. He knows the forest, too. I’m taking Felice with me when I go. There’s nothing else to be done.”

She paused only long enough for Felice to bring in the dessert of raspberry sherry in crystal glasses.

“Felix brought Felice here from Jamaica,” she said, “along with a load of Jamaican curios and art. He was always coming through the door with some treasure—an Olmec statue, a colonial oil painting from Brazil, a mummified cat. Wait till you see the galleries and storerooms upstairs. There are tablets up there, ancient clay tablets by the boxful—.”

“Tablets, you mean actual ancient Mesopotamian tablets? You’re talking cuneiform, Babylon, all that?”

She laughed. “I certainly am.”

“That has to be priceless,” Reuben said. “And that would be worth a story in itself. I have to see those fragments. You will show them to me, won’t you? Look, I won’t put all this into the story. It would be too distracting. We want the house sold of course, but …”

“I’ll show you everything,” she said. “It’s a pleasure. Quite a surprising pleasure actually. It doesn’t all seem so impossible now that we’re talking about it.”

“Look, maybe I could be of assistance in some way, formally, or informally. I did a little time in the field during my summers at Berkeley,” he said. “My mother’s idea. She said if her boy wasn’t going to be a doctor, well, he had to be an educated man. She signed me up for several different trips.”

“And you liked that sort of thing.”

“I wasn’t patient enough for it,” he confessed. “But I did enjoy it. I got to spend some time at Çatal Höyük in Turkey—that’s one of the oldest sites in the world.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been there,” she observed. “That is simply marvelous,” she said. Her face brightened. “And did you see Göbekli Tepe?”

“I did,” he said. “The summer before I left Berkeley, I went to Göbekli Tepe. I wrote a piece about it for a journal. Helped me get the job I have now. Seriously, I’d love to see all these treasures. I’d love to play some role in what happens, that is, if that’s what you want. How about a separate article, one that wouldn’t be published until everything was safely out of here, but you know, a piece on the heritage of Felix Nideck. Is that something you’d like?”

She reflected for a moment, her eyes very calm. “More than I can say,” she answered.

It was thrilling to see her interest. Celeste always cut him off when he talked about his archaeological adventures. “I mean, like, where did all that get you, Reuben? What did you take away from those digs?”

“Did you ever want to be a doctor like your mother?” Marchent asked.

Reuben laughed. “I can’t remember scientific information,” he said. “I can quote you Dickens and Shakespeare and Chaucer and Stendhal, but I can’t retain anything about string theory or DNA or black holes
in space. Not that I haven’t tried. I couldn’t possibly have been a doctor. Besides, I fainted once at the sight of blood.”

Marchent laughed, but it was a gentle laugh.

“My mother’s a trauma center surgeon. She operates five or six times a day.”

“And she has been disappointed that you didn’t go into medicine, of course.”