All the Bells on Earth Read online

  Walt turned around to avoid him, but it was too late. He’d been seen, recognized. Bentley hurried forward, as if he had something urgent to say. He looked rumpled and beat, and his wet jacket was streaked with dirt. The rain let up just then, and for a moment the sun showed through a gap in the clouds. The minister looked up at the clouds and smiled, as if he’d put in a request and God had seen fit to grant it.

  “Henry and Jinx on the horizon, then?” Bentley asked, shaking Walt’s hand.

  Walt nodded. The Reverend Bentley was an old friend of Henry’s; they went way back—lodge brothers of some sort. Walt hardly knew Bentley, though, and he was slightly surprised that the man recognized him so easily, looking half drowned and hiding behind the umbrella. “They’re due any moment, actually. They were in Needles last night, and were thinking about taking a detour through apple country, but I expect them any time.”

  “Good,” the minister said, looking around. “That’s good. I’m going to drag that old sinner in front of the congregation and flush out his soul with a firehose.”

  “It’s high time,” Walt said. “What brings you out on a day like this?”

  “Trouble in paradise,” Bentley said. “How’s your soul, by the way? You look like a worried man, like maybe you swallowed some kind of sin.”

  The question took Walt by surprise. The minister could be a hell of an irritating old interloper when he was on a mission in the neighborhood. He was something of a local joke, in fact, and his church had a congregation you could put into the back of a pickup truck and still have room for the dog. He did good works, though, taking food around to shut-ins and the like. Lord knows how he continued to fund his projects. He had a sort of meals-on-wheels van that Uncle Henry had driven for a few weeks last winter, dropping off hot lunches at the houses of neighborhood widows. Aunt Jinx had put an end to it, though, after talking to one of the widows among the vegetable bins at Satellite Market. Walt himself had donated a hundred bucks to the meals program in a generous moment. That was a few years ago, when money had been a little easier to come by.

  “I guess it’s still hobbling along,” Walt said.

  “What is?” The minister was looking vaguely off down the street, not paying attention.

  “My soul. You asked how my soul was doing.”

  “Well … good. Keep at it, then. This is Babylon we’re living in, make no mistake about that. There’s a lot of temptations out there.” He looked meaningfully at Walt now, as if this tidbit of information had been hand-selected.

  “That’s the truth,” Walt said.

  “I can tell you that a lot of people fall,” Bentley said.

  “Like ripe fruit.” Walt shook his head at the seriousness of it.

  “Don’t be cocky.” The minister narrowed his eyes, convinced that Walt was making fun of him. “Pride goeth, as they say. Here—here’s a little something to read.”

  He handed Walt a pamphlet, maybe three inches square, with a picture of a lion and a lamb on the front, lying down together with such wide, dopey grins on their faces that it looked as if they’d just been hit over the head with a mallet. The title of the booklet was “Marriage as an Obstacle to Sin.”

  Bentley took Walt’s elbow suddenly and steered him toward the corner, pointing across the street, toward St. Anthony’s. “What’s going on there? My vision’s not …”

  Without waiting for an answer he let go of Walt’s arm and hurried forward. Walt followed him, noticing now that there was a police car in the parking lot. Half a dozen people milled around near the base of the bell tower. It looked like the top of the tower had collapsed. At least one of the bells had fallen, and the bronze edge of it, shiny with rainwater, was shoved out of a gaping hole in the stucco tower. That was the noise he’d heard twenty minutes ago.

  Bentley slogged through the water in the gutter, waiting for a gap in the traffic before sprinting across, two steps ahead of Walt. There was the sound of a siren from up the boulevard, and in moments an ambulance pulled up, slamming to a halt, its siren cutting off. The crowd parted, and for a moment Walt got a good look at the man who lay on the concrete floor at the base of the tower. Clearly the heavy bell had gone right through the upper floor, smashing the bellringer on the head and knocking him down the steep wooden stairs. The side of his head was crushed, and his mouth hung open unnaturally….

  A couple of kids came around the side of the church, and a woman in the crowd turned and corralled them with her arms. “Stay back,” someone else hollered. “One of the bells came down. It’s still …”

  Walt didn’t hear the rest of it. He turned away, walking back toward the street. The shadow on the roof early this morning—someone had been up there. Someone evidently had sabotaged the bell. Why the hell hadn’t he called the police? Now the bellringer was dead.

  Without thinking he stepped down into the gutter, heard a horn honk, and jumped back up onto the curb as a car whizzed by, the driver shouting something at him and flipping him off out the window, over the top of the car.

  Walt waved. The picture of the dead man—surely he was dead—remained in his mind as he waited to recross the street: in his mind he saw the bell tower, the stairs leading away into the shadows above, a shoe lying on the second step, the bottom step smeared with blood, a woman’s face mesmerized with the horror of it, her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself from screaming….

  Walt shuddered. He wanted desperately to go home, to change out of his wet clothes and warm up. It was raining again, but he didn’t raise the umbrella. He walked a few steps farther, standing in the shelter of a big cypress tree and shielding his eyes from the water dripping through the branches. The two ambulance drivers stepped toward the back of the ambulance, carrying the body on a blanket-covered gurney. Presently the ambulance pulled out into traffic, switching on its siren and accelerating toward the west, probably heading for the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. Walt wondered if there was anything hopeful in the sound of the siren. Would they bother with it if the bellringer was dead? Would they cover the man’s face if he wasn’t?

  He realized he was still carrying the tract that Bentley had given him, and suddenly the little folded bit of paper enraged him—a trivial little scrap of holier-than-thou advice in a world where someone had just been crushed to death in a blind instant. And at such a moment! Did the bellringer have a wife, a family? Did his wife consider marriage an obstacle to sin, or something considerably more than that?

  Bentley was nowhere to be seen now; otherwise Walt would have thrown the tract in his face. He shoved it into his pocket instead, and then walked toward where two policemen stood talking, up under the roof of the portico at the front of the church.

  And even as he stepped toward them he told himself that he could just as easily not say anything at all. It was too damned late now anyway. Speaking up now was nothing but useless humiliation, self-revenge….

  But he forced himself forward, refusing to listen. One of the policemen turned and nodded at him, and Walt introduced himself, clearing his throat but still unable to get the gravel out of his voice, suddenly wishing to heaven that Ivy was there with him, holding his hand, that he wasn’t standing there wet and alone and empty on this bleak December morning.

  9

  WALT UNLOCKED THE padlock on the garage door and pulled it open, taking Bentley’s tract out of his pocket and tossing it into the galvanized bucket he used as a trash can. His hand shaking, he switched on the space heater and then filled the coffeemaker at the sink, spooned ground coffee into the filter, and plugged it in. He found his work sweater and put it on, only now realizing how cold he was, and for a long time he stood in front of the heater, letting the warm air blow across him while he listened to the sounds of the coffeepot and the rain on the roof.

  The two policemen had listened closely to his story, which had taken all of forty seconds to recount. They nodded, writing down maybe two sentences along with his name and address. Neither of them seemed to see anything shameful
in any of it. One of them, though, seeing that somehow this had wrecked Walt, had tried to make him easier about it. Even if they’d sent a squad car to the church, he said, they’d have found nothing. The prowler wouldn’t have shown himself—even if he were still hanging around—and there was no way the officer would have climbed onto the roof in the pouring rain. And it certainly wouldn’t have dawned on anyone that the bells might have been sabotaged. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have guessed it.

  “Give yourself a break,” the cop had said, squeezing Walt’s shoulder. And his being kind about it had turned out to be the hardest part.

  Walt looked around the floor now, thinking suddenly that it was high time to get to work. Pouring a cup of coffee, he looked at the boxes on the floor. Random odds and ends had been hastily unwrapped and set around, as if the burglar had tried to be neat, and didn’t want to break anything. Nothing about it made any sense. If the burglar wasn’t after quick cash, then what was he after, one of the plaster-of-Paris tiki god mugs that sat now on the concrete floor? There were sixty or seventy cartons stacked up in the garage, maybe more; had the burglar meant to work his way through every blessed one of them?

  He took a long sip of coffee, listening to the rain on the roof and wondering what Ivy would make of the break-in, if you could call it that; more like the walk-in. Then abruptly he saw that he couldn’t tell Ivy about it at all. What was the use? They’d never been broken into before. The idea of it would only frighten her—intruders snooping around in the night, then breaking into the garage in midday. Every little noise would set her off. She’d wonder out loud if this was another one of the risks of doing business out of your garage. Walt wasn’t making enough money at it yet to justify any kind of risk at all. From now on he’d keep the place locked up, just like you’d lock up any business when you went to lunch. And besides, this wasn’t looking much like a real burglary anyway; it was certainly more curious than threatening.

  It dawned on him then that the burglar had no idea what he was after; he had apparently opened a couple of boxes, discovered that the stuff wasn’t valuable enough to steal, and then, hearing Walt come outside, had gone out through the back door in such a hurry that he didn’t even see the stuff on the desk. This was some kind of random incident, the sort of thing that probably happened in dozens of garages every afternoon….

  He turned a snow globe over in his hand. Silver glitter cascaded around a washed-out pink flamingo standing on one leg. There was no way the base of the thing was deep enough to be hollow. All of the stuff in the boxes was Chinese—from mainland China, but shipped out of Hong Kong—and somehow that suggested opium to him, heroin, whatever. But what sort of dope smuggler would be so dainty about retrieving his contraband? That theory just didn’t figure.

  Rewrapping the flamingo, he put it back in the box, then weaved the top of the box shut and scribbled the contents on the side with a felt marker. It was a crude system of organization, but there was no way he had enough space in the garage and in the sheds to unpack any boxes. Someday, when the business was humming, he’d open up in a small industrial building or in one of the old turn-of-the-century houses that were zoned for commercial use along Chapman Avenue. Meanwhile he’d make do with a garage and a couple of sheds.

  In the second box there were bags of rhinestone-studded sunglasses, a dozen umbrella hats, and a gross of boxes of Magic Rocks, which were big stocking stuffers at Christmastime. All of the boxes were sealed, the bags were stapled shut. Nothing, apparently, had been tampered with.

  One small box had been opened but not emptied; no doubt the burglar hadn’t had time for it. It was stuffed tight with some kind of primitive, coarsely cut packing material that looked like the fiber from coconut husks. There was a bag visible at the corner of the box, folded up out of heavily waxed paper, as if someone had melted a candle over unbleached butcher paper. The ends were twisted tight and tied off with strips of the coconut-husk fiber. Puzzled, Walt untied the little parcel and folded it open. There was a bundle of sticks inside—sticks about six inches long, carefully stripped of bark. The glistening wood was a fleshy-looking pink, and the wood and paper both smelled of something—creosote, maybe. He parted the packing material and looked beneath it. There were three little bundles of wax-soaked cloth, tied off with string. He squeezed one, trying to determine what was inside, but it was impossible to say; it felt like a beanbag full of human teeth. The whole box, now that it was opened, smelled vaguely rancid, as if there was a dead mouse inside.

  He sure as hell hadn’t ordered any twigs, or sacks of teeth either. This was some kind of mistake. He looked at the invoice he’d razored off the cover flap of the first box, but there was nothing on it that sounded even remotely similar to this. He pulled out more of the packing material, exposing a box full of small vials with crimped-on metal lids. Inside each vial was a jumble of small seed pods and quartz crystals and colored beans packed in oil, as well as an inch-long segment of what might have been alabaster, crudely painted with the depiction of an elongated human figure the color of dried blood.

  There was something awful about the vials—the discolored oil inside, maybe, or the yellowed alabaster that might as easily have been bone or fossil ivory. There were other boxes of vials in the carton, too—unsymmetrical, hand-blown bottles made of clouded glass and filled with amber-colored liquid, corked and then dipped in wax.

  Nearly at the bottom lay a cloth bag with something inside—a small jar, maybe an ounce, sealed with a piece of canvas like a stiff fragment of an old ship’s sail, tied off with twine and again dipped in wax. Despite the wax, the jar stank to high heaven, which explained the rancid smell, and Walt could see that ointment of some sort had oozed out from where the layer of wax was cracked. There was writing on the bag—two Chinese ideograms above a short phrase that might have been in English, except that it was so ill-written that Walt could barely make it out. He held it under the light, trying to puzzle through the words letter by letter.

  After a moment it struck him, not one word at a time, but the whole phrase at once, and he dropped the bag onto the countertop. “Dead mans grease” was what it said. There was no apostrophe, and the writing was mostly loops and slashes, but once he saw it, the meaning was clear.

  Some kind of joke gift? A starter kit for suburban witches? He picked up the jar, slid it back into the bag, and tied the top shut. Then he pulled the rest of the packing fiber out of the carton. At the bottom lay a painted tin box. Stamped on the lid of the box were the words “Gong Hee Fot Choy,” and beneath them was the painting of a bluebird on the wing, towing a banner that read “happiness.”

  Vaguely relieved, Walt pried the lid off the box. Inside lay a tiny folded pamphlet that reminded him immediately of the kind of thing the Reverend Bentley passed out. Under the pamphlet, protected by a ring of corrugated paper, lay a jar, this one smelling weirdly of gin and containing what appeared to be a dead bird. It looked awful, as if it had been dead a week before it was pickled in the gin. Abruptly, as if he had shaken the jar, the bird moved, or seemed to. He set it on the bench and stood back, shivering with a sudden chill. He must have imagined it. The bird floated there, turning slowly in the moving liquid until one of its open eyes seemed to be staring right at him, as if in contemplation.

  He picked the jar up again and slid it back into the tin, then opened the pamphlet, which was written on some sort of parchment. It looked like instructions in about ten languages including Korean, French, Spanish, and German, two or three lines each, and a couple of other languages that were unidentifiable Arabic-looking swirls and dots. The English was illiterate—the kind of thing you’d find on badly translated directions for assembling a foreign-made toy.

  “Best thing come to you, ” it read. “Speak any wish. ”

  It was a good-luck charm, some kind of wish-fulfillment object that was apparently meant to bring happiness to its owner—although not, presumably, to the bluebird itself, which was as unhappy an object as he had ever seen.
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  He decided suddenly that the whole works disgusted him. How it had gotten mixed up in his order he couldn’t say. There was something nasty and primitive about it, even without the jar of “dead mans grease,” whatever the hell that was. He started to shove the stuff back into the box, cramming the packing fiber back in around it. His first impulse now was to throw it into the trash can, but then he decided he wanted it out of there altogether—better to pitch it into the bin behind the medical buildings on the corner. Probably it would be even better to incinerate it and bury the ashes.

  It dawned on him then—surely this must be the stuff that the burglar had been after, this box of diabolical trash.

  Walt turned the box over and looked for the first time at the mailing label on the bottom side. He saw at once that it had been misdelivered. It was addressed to a party named Dilworth at a residential address a block away. The number was the same as Walt’s own, but the street was wrong. This had happened before. The address numbers on the downtown streets, both north and south, repeated so often that it was a mailman’s nightmare. What was puzzling about this was that 225 North Cambridge wasn’t owned by anyone named Dilworth; it was owned by a man named Robert Argyle—the one man in the world with whom Walt was not on speaking terms.

  At one time he and Argyle had been close friends and business partners. And it wasn’t just because Argyle had been in love with Ivy, either, back when they were both just out of college. Walt couldn’t hold that against the man; it was almost the only thing about him that was sane. Argyle had turned out to be a corrupt, cheating son-of-a-bitch. Ultimately, he had ended up with the business, and Walt had ended up with almost nothing, except Ivy, of course, and the rotten realization that he’d been betrayed by a man whom he had once considered a friend. Hell, who had been his friend.

  Argyle, gratifyingly, had gone broke after falling into some sort of trouble, and for years Walt had lost track of him. Then he had reappeared, buying the house at 224 North Sycamore—the most ostentatious house in Old Towne. It was built on a half acre—three stories, leaded glass windows, a wrought-iron elevator and detached servants’ quarters. With his money Argyle could have moved up Chapman Avenue and bought one of the big homes on Orange Hill, but then he would have been just one more Orange County millionaire among the teeming masses of them. Here in his hometown he could be a tin god, a man who had made something of himself by working like a pig and behaving the same way.