The Paper Grail Read online

  Mrs. Lamey was silent. There was nothing on earth she had to admire. Where she came from limousine drivers spoke when spoken to. They weren’t street-corner sociologists. He shook his head after a half minute of her refusing to speak, and they drove in silence up Columbus to Vallejo.

  She directed him up an alley between graffiti-scrawled brick façades. Midway down, the alley opened onto a courtyard. “Stop here,” she said suddenly.

  “Here?” He turned and looked at her incredulously, having expected, perhaps, some more reasonable destination.

  “That’s right. Here. In the alley. I won’t be needing your services any longer. I’m getting out here. Can you fathom that?”

  He shrugged. “Suits me.” He got out and went round to her door, opening it and gesturing gallantly at the littered asphalt.

  “I won’t be giving you a tip of any sort,” she said to him, staring at his chin with a look of determination. “I don’t know what you’re accustomed to, but I’ll tell you right now that I had thought at first to give you two dollars. You can ruminate on that for the rest of the afternoon. I’m moderately certain that I would have gotten quicker, more courteous service from a taxicab. One expects a certain amount of gracious behavior from a driver, a certain level of professionalism and expertise.”

  She took two steps to distance herself from him, then turned around to face him squarely. With an air of someone having the last word, she showed him the two crisp one-dollar bills that might have been his. She tucked them away finally and irretrievably into her pocket, turning away into the courtyard without a backward glance.

  She hadn’t gone three steps, though, when a horn honked. Without thinking she looked back at the alley, where the limousine accelerated slowly past the mouth of the courtyard. The driver was bent across the front seat, waving out the open passenger window. He shouted a parting obscenity which somehow involved eating. Mrs. Lamey closed her ears to it just a second too late, continuing across the courtyard and resolutely listening to nothing now but the tap, tap, tap of her shoes on concrete, blocking out the whole filthy world round about her.

  There was a breezeway at the corner of the courtyard, opening onto another small, winding alley that ran steeply uphill. At the top she crossed a small parking lot and went in through the side door of a white concrete building with red letters on the side proclaiming itself to be the “Whole Life Mission.” Below that, in italic lettering, was the legend “The Church of the Profiting Christian.”

  Inside the church the air was heavy, still, and musty. The building was bigger than it appeared to be from the street, and Mrs. Lamey walked through the nave, past rows of empty pews built of wood-grain Formica. She peered into the empty sacristy and then into an adjacent chair-lined room, also empty of people, and containing a glass-fronted, water-filled tub. Heavy-looking television cameras and big reflecting lights hung from the ceiling and stood in the corners. She went on, pausing to knock on an office door and listen at the cloudy glass window. A sign on the door read, “Reverend White, Ministry Office.” There was nothing but silence inside. Reverend White, apparently, was somewhere on the second floor.

  She climbed a stairs and with a key from her purse let herself into a kitchen. Beyond it was a corridor with rooms leading off to either side. There was the smell of carbolic acid and alcohol in the air now, and the floors were tiled in white linoleum. A chrome pole on wheels stood in the corridor, hung with an IV bottle and with plastic tubing and clamps. Through one open door she glimpsed a gurney and a surgical table. A thrill of fear and anticipation surged through-her, and she was struck with the notion that in the air of that room her destiny hung like a rain cloud.

  She knocked twice on the window of the next door down, then pushed the button on an adjacent intercom.

  “Who is it?” asked a man’s voice.

  “Heloise.”

  The door opened an inch and a man peered out, as if to ascertain whether it was really Mrs. Lamey standing in the hallway or somebody playing a trick. Satisfied, he smiled broadly and waved her in. He wore a white coat over a red shirt and black trousers. His patent-leather shoes matched his shirt. “Heloise!” he said, as if he’d been waiting for this moment for weeks. “I half expected you wouldn’t come.”

  “Well, I’m here, Reverend,” she said sarcastically. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “It would be better to call me ‘doctor.’ I’m a minister downstairs, a doctor upstairs.”

  “An abortionist, maybe. ‘Doctor’ is a weighty word.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t perform abortions anymore, actually. I was an abortionist when it was illegal and more profitable. Now I perform elective surgery—reconstructive surgery, mostly.”

  Mrs. Lamey made a face, imagining what he meant despite herself.

  He grinned at her for a moment and then put on a serious, bedside, medical-man face. “It’s a fact,” he said. “People come to me from all over the city. Up from Los Angeles, too. Men and women both. In fact, half a block up the street, at a bar called the Cat’s Meow, there’s a dancer who owes her entire career to me. You’d be surprised what people will pay to see. Enormous breasts are a dime a dozen in North Beach. People are tired of that sort of thing. But there’s a certain fascination for—what can I call it? Alien results, let’s say. For anatomy that’s … physiologically wrong.” He watched for her response, but she stood stony-faced. He couldn’t phase her. He shrugged. “Anyway, even that’s going by the boards. They’re turning the Cat’s Meow into a dinner theatre, and my client is out of a job. Your case is comparatively simple, though, isn’t it? You’ve got too low an opinion of my talents, Heloise, which is a mystery to me.”

  “A mystery? A back-alley surgery like this. Performing whatever sorts of ghastly operations fifteen years after your license was revoked. And my opinion is a mystery to you?”

  “Oh, no, not that. I don’t have any problem with that at all. What mystifies me is why you seem to want my help and yet insist on insulting me.” He lit a cigar and sat down, leaning back in his swivel chair, shifting the cigar from side to side in his mouth.

  Mrs. Lamey brushed the heavy smoke away from her face. “Because I pay you not to ask questions,” she said. “And I’d rather not hear about your loathsome work, thank you. How long will this take?”

  He shrugged. “Moderately simple surgery. No exterior cutting at all. One just hauls the plumbing out through—”

  “Save the filthy talk, Mr. White. How long will this take—until I’m home again?”

  “A week in bed, under observation. You’ll need a nurse, someone trained. Then four or five weeks before a full recovery. There’s the threat of infection, of course. This is a moderately risky surgery, you know. I can’t fathom why you’d elect to have it unnecessarily at this … late age.” He smiled at her.

  “Business,” she said. “That will have to suffice.”

  He nodded. “You undertake the strangest sort of business, Heloise, don’t you? I have faith in you, though. Our business efforts always seem to end satisfactorily. And, of course, I make it a point not to pry into my patients’ affairs.”

  “Don’t, then. There’s the matter that we discussed over the telephone, too. Can we take care of that right now, do you think, before we carry out this surgery?”

  “That requires a different coat,” he said, standing up and gesturing toward the door. They went out, back through the kitchen and down the stairs into the church. He unlocked the door to the ministry office, letting Mrs. Lamey through first and then locking the door behind them.

  The office was large and ornately decorated, with oil paintings on the walls and an oriental carpet on the parquet floor. A six-panel Japanese screen covered half of one wall, and on a low, gaudily carved table in the center of the room sat a glass-encased collection of Franklin Mint coins. The Reverend White stepped straight across to the wall opposite the door where he lifted and took down a Norman Rockwell painting. “This is an original,” he said, nodding a
t it and squinting. “Cost me plenty.”

  “I’m sure it did.”

  “I love Rockwell, though, don’t you? He captures a sort of spirit, a sort of …” He lost track of the thought as he turned the dial of a wall safe that had been hidden behind the painting. The safe door swung open, and he carefully removed a velvet-wrapped bundle, laying it gently on the edge of the rug. He untied a ribbon at either end and unrolled the bundle, revealing two long, pale bones, streaked with brown and black. The bones themselves, looking porous and dry, seemed to have crumbled partly away at both ends.

  “And these are what we discussed?” she asked, looking at the bones doubtfully.

  “Yes, they are. They come with papers detailing their history over thousands of years, and not a particularly complicated history, either. I got these at a bargain-basement price, I can tell you. I’ve dealt in relics for years, and I know the man I bought these from personally. Here’s his affidavit.” He held out a signed paper, insisting that the bones were from the forearms of Joseph of Arimathea, the first of the so-called Fisher Kings, according to some of the Grail legends. The bundle included the two radii, recovered from beneath a church in Lithuania.

  Mrs. Lamey looked the document over. It was signed by four different people, the signatures unreadable and full of flourishes as if the document were intended to be framed and hung on the wall alongside spurious doctoral diplomas. “This is certainly worthless,” she said. “But then what isn’t? I have moderately sure methods of proving their authenticity. And I’m entirely certain that you wouldn’t defraud me, Reverend. You wouldn’t sell me a couple of old monkey arms, not at a hundred thousand dollars.” She paused and looked hard at him, waiting for his response.

  “No,” he said, as if surprised that she’d suggest such a thing. “Of course not. You have my word on it as well as this affidavit of authenticity.”

  She smiled at him and stood up, moving toward the door. “Keep the affidavit of authenticity,” she said. “Line the birdcage with it. Leave the bones in the safe for now. We’ll settle my account after my recovery. Any news of the Ruskin skeleton? I want him, too. All of him.”

  “No news at all. I’ve got feelers out, though. If it’s available, we’ll get it. You’ve got my solemn oath on that. My man in England has confirmed that the bones aren’t in Coniston.”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn what your man in England confirms. If the bones aren’t in Coniston, then they’ve got to be somewhere else. John Ruskin, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like the man was unknown. Don’t they keep track of the corpses of great thinkers and writers? I can’t believe they’d be so careless as to misplace such a thing.”

  The Reverend White shrugged. “It appears as if the bones were taken ages ago. Maybe he was never interred at all. My man can recover his flowered shroud, though, if that will be of any use to you. There was a claim made once that vines grew out of the shroud when it was sprinkled with holy water. If my man can recover it …”

  “Tell your man to recover his wits.”

  “I’ve got him pursuing the matter. As I said, you’ve got my solemn oath …”

  She interrupted him. “Your solemn oath. That’s very good. There’s no chance, is there, that the gentleman we spoke of has the skeleton? He might have had access to it, you know.”

  “In fact, I do know. I make it my business to know. Someone would have heard of such a thing. This gentleman you refer to is a noted lunatic, isn’t he?”

  “He’s very subtle. A deceptive man. It’s hard to say what he is.”

  “Well, he isn’t the owner of the Ruskin skeleton. I’ll make further inquiries, though, if you’re serious about this.”

  “I’ve never been more serious, I assure you. And I would be very disappointed if you had dealt with him instead of with me. Don’t play games with me.”

  “I’m impervious to games, I assure you.”

  “Then let’s get on with the afternoon’s business, shall we?”

  “Happily,” he said. “That’ll require a different coat, though.” He put the bones back into the wall safe, rehung the painting, and led the way back up the stairs to where, in the surgery, a gowned nurse was already laying out instruments.

  HOWARD turned down the gravel drive, which dipped steeply into the darkness of the woods. It must have been nearly impossible to navigate right after a heavy rain. As it was, the truck wheels spun a little in the gravel and the pickup wallowed from side to side, in and out of deep ruts. He crept along, taking it slow through the ghostly, overgrown cypress trees, which ended abruptly on the meadow’s edge, fifty yards or so from the cliff.

  There was the house itself, half cloaked in fog, the whole thing a beautiful driftwood gray, the color of the ocean, with moss growing between the stones and with the meadow wild around it. Howard was amazed at how clearly he remembered it—how much it was like the house in his dreams. It was uncanny—troublesomely so. It was fifteen years ago that he had last driven down this gravel driveway, and yet it seemed to him that he could recall even the shapes of individual stones in the walls of the house and the weathered ends of exposed roof rafters.

  He had been climbing the stairs in his dreams, the old mill having turned into Graham’s stone house. The stairs hung to the outside wall of the turret, wrapping around to a landing and second-floor doorway. The steps were built of irregular, chunked concrete, sledgehammered out of a sidewalk and reinforced underneath with lengths of angle iron from an old bed frame torched into pieces. There was an iron pipe handrail along the wall where the steps were mortised into the stones of the turret, but the other three edges of each step hung in the air, and now it made him dizzy just to look at them.

  In his dream he had climbed slowly, looking hard at the wide lines of cleanly troweled mortar between the stones. He had seemed to be looking for something, but he didn’t know what. Abruptly he realized that odds and ends of things had been shoved very carefully into the wet mortar: cheap, colored-glass perfume bottles laid sideways, tiny iron toys, a faded ceramic Humpty Dumpty wearing a polka-dot shirt and a green tie with a stickpin and with a broad, leering, know-it-all grin.

  One moment he had been halfway up; the next he was at the top of the stairs, facing the weathered door; his heart hammering in his chest. He had turned and gone back down, taking the irregular steps two at a time, thinking that something had come out of the door and was watching him, had noticed him for the first time. He had gone straight out onto the bluffs, where the driveway ended in weeds, and had nearly stumbled headlong into an old truck from which two workmen were off-loading straw-stuffed crates of the ceramic Humpty Dumptys.

  It was a ridiculous dream, that part of it was. He could see that clearly in the daylight. At night, though, at two in the morning … Darkness tended to multiply the significance of dreams. Dream mathematics acquired its own logic after dark. And night was falling quickly now. In twenty minutes there wouldn’t be much daylight left.

  Howard watched the house for a moment longer, waiting for the door to open, for someone to peer out. Anyone in the house would have heard him rattle up. Berry vines grew so dense as to nearly cover the west-facing downstairs windows, and had been hacked away to let in sunlight. Split shingles lay in a pile on the meadow, alongside a telephone pole that had been sawed into foot-and-a-half lengths. There were piles of sand and gravel with sun-shredded plastic tarps staked over them, and an old cement mixer hooked up to a rusty gasoline generator on wheels. Heaps of size-sorted stone lay stacked along the wild edge of the vines, most of the stones covered up by new growth. Beyond the open door of a long, low, lean-to barn in among the cypress and eucalyptus trees, a chain-saw mill sat in the middle of a mountain of wood chips.

  The place seemed empty, deserted. He climbed out of the truck, taking his keys with him. There was a heavy odor of cedar and moldering vegetation and fog, and the thick silence was cut only by the low sound of a foghorn moaning somewhere to the north. He walked around the house toward the cliffs,
stopping next to a prefabricated tin shed, probably bought out of a catalogue from Sears and Roebuck. The house appeared to be dark.

  The fog cleared momentarily, and there was enough daylight left to see the black rocks nearly a hundred feet below the cliffs. Waves broke across them, surging up the cliffside and then washing back down. On one of the rocks, partly submerged and crumpled up, sat an old car like a piece of statuary on a plinth. It had obviously gone off the cliff. What was it? Something peculiar; he couldn’t tell at first if he was looking at the front end of the car or the back end. A Studebaker? The ocean rushed out to feed an incoming wave, exposing the car entirely. It was a Studebaker—an old one, from some year in the early fifties. What a coincidence; it might have been the ghost car itself.

  Howard chuckled to himself. He loved the whole idea of ghosts driving around in oddball cars, getting into trouble, maybe robbing a liquor store or setting fire to someone’s shoes. Then he thought about the empty spirit museum and Uncle Roy’s sad bankruptcy, the loss of his house and his having to rent it back from one of his creditors who had come to own it as a piece of collateral. What with all that and the fall of night, the subject of ghosts wasn’t very funny at all.

  The ocean raced in again, parting around the smashed front end of the Studebaker, water streaming off the fenders. The car hadn’t rusted much, either, from what Howard could see of it. It must have gone over pretty recently.

  Straight behind him, uphill, was the garage end of the barn. It looked as if someone hadn’t set the brake, and the car had rolled across the grass and off the cliff edge. It would have continued to roll for a long ways, down the steepening slope, which was strewn with scree and loose boulders. There was a gnarled old piece of scrub half torn out of the cliff face some twenty feet above the beach, and hooked to it was the car’s rear bumper, which had no doubt slowed the car’s descent and explained why it wasn’t an utter ruin now.

  A pelican appeared from around the headland, angling along the back of a swell, into Howard’s line of sight. It pulled up when it neared the beach, and perched on the front of the car like a hood ornament. Howard stepped back away from the cliff edge, suddenly dizzy, the sound of the waves becoming disturbingly rhythmic, like the sound of the mill wheel in his dream.