The Last Coin Read online

  He’d gotten back just four weeks past from his trip to the Middle East. His coins were tucked away, waiting against the day that he’d possess them all. There was still only one of the remaining five that puzzled him, and he suspected that somehow, somewhere in antiquity, something had been done to it to render it unrecognizable. He’d find it, though. Someone knew what it was and where it was, and it was only a matter of time before, one by one, he’d wring the information out of them.

  He wasn’t the only one who sensed that something was in the wind. There’d been a rash of odd stories in the newspaper over the past months—and not in the tabloids, either, but in big-city papers. A goat had climbed into a truck owned by a shadowy delivery service and had knocked the handbrake loose and steered the truck down a hill and into a tree, jumping out the open window a moment before the truck had caught fire and burned, along with its contents. Two pigs a month back had terrorized a doughnut shop, making away across a parking lot with half a dozen glazed doughnuts and rooting through a drive-in dairy until the startled clerk had given them milk to drink. When they were rounded up at last they seemed to be playing a complicated game on the asphalt of the parking lot, snuffling the doughnuts up and down with their noses. And then there were reports in Huntington Beach of a hippopotamus that had appeared through the mist of a foggy morning and then disappeared just as thoroughly and quickly. Thirty whales had beached themselves in Mexico.

  It had all been very funny to the journalists, but it wasn’t funny to Pennyman; it reminded him a little too much of the demoniacs and the Gadarene swine. It was as if an unseen hand were stirring nature out of her long lethargy, as if there were counterplots and divine conspiracies that he didn’t entirely see or understand. There was nothing he liked less than something he didn’t understand.

  Someone would rise up to take the places of Moneywort and Aureus. And when Pennyman had his way with Pfennig, there would be a person in the world unwittingly ready to take his place, too, if any of the coins found him. The trick was recognizing them when they appeared; and they would appear—one of them possessing the untraceable coin. It had been thousands of years that they’d worked as one, all the Caretakers, and all the time there was someone’s shadow cast across their enterprises. There were surreptitious visits, disappearing coins, coins reappearing in the possession of apes or in the pouches of opossums after being lost for decades—all of it a sort of shadow symphony, orchestrated by—whom?

  Pennyman knew the secret identity of the man who conducted the orchestra; he knew who the overseer really was. And he knew that the man sought to ransom himself by keeping the coins apart. It was a two-thousand-years-old good deed. The man’s assumed identity was a mystery to him, though. One couldn’t simply look up “Iscariot, Judas” in the Seal Beach phone directory and come up with an address. It might be the mayor, or a television repairman, or, even more likely, the hobo that slept right now against the wall of the concrete rest room beneath the pier. He might call himself anything at all. There were certain tests that betrayed the identity of one of the Caretakers, but their master wasn’t susceptible to tests, not unless you caught him out—in the moonlight. Well, he would show his hand soon enough, whoever he was. Pennyman would force it. He’d been forcing it for close onto two hundred years now—hoarding and hiding the coins, giving up one here to gain two there, committing any sort of atrocity, buying and selling kings and presidents and piling up the silver coins one on top of another. And now the pot was almost full. Almost.

  Things were falling into disorder—a condition that suited Pennyman just fine. He sometimes, more often lately, preferred white noise to music on the radio. He sought out the hoarse, chaotic cry of nighttime terror and closed his ears to the insipid laughter of human beings pretending to be jolly. He found his flask in his coat pocket and drained off the rest of the chalky, pink antacid in it. The skin of his scalp felt as if it were crawling, and for a moment it seemed as if he were breathing dust. He could almost feel his pulse creeping along like a tired, rusted engine. With a shaking hand he fumbled after a glass vial in the pocket of his trousers. He squinted at the little dribble of elixir in the bottom of it, and he shook his head, as if dissatisfied. Then, grimacing, he drank it off, capped it and put it away.

  He poured the rest of his coffee onto the ground and nodded his head at a man who approached along the sand. He felt the elixir from the vial seeping along his arteries, bracing him. The man coming toward him was a bore, all full of drivel about flying saucers. He’d insisted Pennyman come to a literary society thereabouts, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was always possible, of course, that the man knew more than he let on—that he was a Caretaker, that he had the coin. Maybe it was in his pocket right now. Maybe he possessed it and didn’t know what it was. Was he the one? Pennyman gestured toward a chair and half stood up, as if in greeting. He rummaged in his pocket for a silver quarter, and winked as the man sat down, a wide, stupid grin on his face. “Take a look at this,” said Pennyman, flipping the coin end over end. The coin seemed to vanish, and then, as if by a miracle, Pennyman, looking vastly surprised, hauled it out of the man’s ear.

  Halfway down the pier, affixed to an old, rusted swivel that used to be painted a jaunty red and white, stood a telescope that you could aim out to sea on a clear day in order to catch a glimpse of Catalina Island. Or you could point it north, toward Los Angeles Harbor or south toward the oilfields of Huntington Beach. A tall old man with brush-cut hair dropped a dime into the slot and cranked it around toward the beach, slowly turning the focus. Parked beside the telescope was a red car, a little electric car like a golf cart, that was about twenty percent interior space and eighty percent fins, as if it were an old Cadillac shrunk down by an urban witch doctor. It was driven by a twelve-volt battery that plugged into a wall socket for a recharge, and you could drive it on the pier if you were old enough or if your legs were no good.

  Arthur Eastman squinted through the lens. He could read nothing in the face of the man he watched, except that the man was waiting for something, or someone. There was desperation in the wind, the slow creak of a century turning fitfully to a close, the quiet whisper of the shuffling of the last pages of a book. Uncle Arthur didn’t like it a bit. The next week would tell. He swung the telescope around and scanned the sea. There was nothing.

  The telescope shut off, and Arthur stepped down off the little plinth that the thing stood on. He might as well stroll down the pier and see what people were catching. The air would do him good. He caught sight, just then, of Naomi’s nephew, Andrew Vanbergen, fishing by the bait house along with young Pickett, both of them laughing out loud. Apparently they hadn’t seen him yet. It was best, perhaps, to leave them alone. Pickett would ask too many questions. The pot was boiling, and there were too many cooks as it was. He didn’t need Pickett to come staggering toward the broth with a saltshaker. He was a good man—both of them were—and their time would come. But right now wasn’t their time. He would let them fish.

  Climbing into his car, he noticed that Jules Pennyman had struck up a conversation with one of Andrew’s idiot friends. Pennyman was desperate—but then desperate men were as often as not dangerous men. He was plying the man with coin tricks. Uncle Arthur sat and thought for a minute, then looked out once again at the open sea before motoring silently away up the pier and down onto Main Street.

  The doctor visited Aunt Naomi that afternoon. “She’s had a fright,” he said under his breath when Andrew poked his head into the room. The doctor stepped out onto the landing and half-shut the door behind him. Andrew shook his head sadly, hiding a bag full of chocolates behind his back. The doctor paused to take his glasses off, then wiped them slowly and carefully with a shred of tissue before putting them back on, squinting, taking them off again, and wiping some more, turning the activity into a sort of drama. Andrew stared at him, controlling himself.

  “Bed rest; that’s what I’d advise. And a certain amount of quiet, too.” The doctor was
a fraud. Andrew could see that in an instant. There was a look in the man’s eyes that advertised it, that seemed to say: “I know nothing at all about anything, and so I look very grave instead.” He was perfect for Aunt Naomi, who wanted a doctor that knew nothing. A decent doctor would merely tell her to get out of bed, to quit whining, to pitch out the cats and air the room for a week.

  The doctor had almost no chin, as if he were inbred or had evolved in a single generation from the fishes. And his hair had fallen out in two symmetrical clumps, so that he was bald as a vulture above his forehead and on the very crown of his head, and combed the little strip of wispy hair in between so that half of it fell forward and half of it backward, making him look as if he were wearing a rare sort of foreign hat.

  He made housecalls, though, for an exorbitant sum that Aunt Naomi gladly paid. Andrew was happy enough about that, for it would be he, if anyone, who would otherwise have to cart her across town to the doctor’s office. Doctor Garibaldi, he called himself. He wore a black suit and tie in the sweltering heat. “She needs exercise, you know,” he said, peering sideways at Andrew as if he were revealing a secret that he ought not to reveal.

  Andrew nodded. “Bed rest and exercise,” he said. “How about chocolate?”

  The doctor shook his head violently. “I wouldn’t. Too rich for her.”

  “Liquor?”

  “No more than a glass of dry white wine with a meal.”

  “What exactly is wrong with her,” asked Andrew, “besides her being an invalid?”

  “Well,” said the doctor, “it’s a complicated business for a layman. The veins and arteries, you understand, are like little subways, let’s say, for the blood to—what is it?—traverse, perhaps.” He gestured with both hands, driving one through the other like a car through a tunnel. “Do you follow me?” he asked. Andrew smiled and nodded. “When we’re young, they have a certain elasticity to them, not unlike rubber tubing.”

  Andrew widened his eyes, as if struck by the extent of the doctor’s knowledge of anatomy. “I begin to see,” he said. “Elasticity?”

  “Yes indeed. The pressures, you know. The heart is like a pump …”

  “There’s biblical precedent for all of this, I believe—all of this elasticity. In Exodus, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The doctor looked at him sharply and shook his head, as if he didn’t quite follow.

  “Moses,” said Andrew, “was out in the scrub—how did that go? He was looking for something. I don’t remember what it was; the fatted calf, I think. We can look it up if we have to. It says, if I recall the substance of the text, that he tied his ass to a tree and walked half a mile.”

  The doctor stared at him. Andrew smiled. It wasn’t worth laughing out loud over, maybe, but it was worth more than six seconds of staring. Nothing came of it, though, except more staring. He thinks I’m insane, Andrew thought. That sort of thing happened to him a lot. It was like the baby ‘possums in the teaspoon business. The world wasn’t built with a sense of humor. It took itself too seriously. He’d once laughingly informed a gas station mechanic that there was something wrong with the “Johnson rods’’ in the Metropolitan. The man had wiped his greasy hands on his pants and given him a look that matched exactly the look that the doctor was giving him now. “Ain’t no such thing,” the man had said, and shook his head over it, as if of all the living idiots he’d seen in his life, none had amounted to half as much as Andrew amounted to.

  The doctor opened his bag, looked inside quickly, and stepped toward the stairs. “And no coffee, either. Especially no coffee. The acid could ruin her stomach lining. And the caffeine!—well, leave it at this: She simply shouldn’t get worked up. At all. It’s the worst thing. I’ve prescribed Valium. It’s tranquility that she needs, poor soul. I gather there was some sort of disturbance this morning—an animal or something in her room.”

  “That’s right,” said Andrew, feeling ashamed of himself now. “A ‘possum, actually. Cats tore it to shreds in the night. I’ve read that they’re on the march, in their way—migrating south. There’s talk of a coming ice age, according to Scientific American. Do you read it?”

  “Yes … That is, when I can. I’m a busy man, what with house calls and all. Are you talking about cats?” He wiped his glasses again, peered at Andrew, and backed away down the stairs. “I’ll come round again in a week. Keep these creatures out of her room, cats or no cats.”

  Andrew followed him down, thinking that if he himself were a bald man he’d have something tattooed on the crown of his head—on the very top, so that almost no one could see it unless he bent over. He thought briefly of writing something on Dr. Garibaldi’s head with a felt-tipped pen, but it would quite likely be impossible unless the doctor were asleep or dead. And if he were dead there wouldn’t be much point to it, beyond exciting a certain amount of wonder and suspicion among coroners and immediate family. Something completely unfathomable would be best. If you were going to do a job, he thought, watching Dr. Garibaldi step out into the living room from the stairs, then you do a job. You’d have to write something on a man’s head that had no sane explanation. Nonsense syllables might do the trick. And if they rhymed, then it would be all the better, since it would seem as if they signified something. He could imagine Beams Pickett innocently noticing such a thing written onto the top of the doctor’s head. His eyes would expand like pond ripples until he fell face-first into the bushes.

  The doctor went out through the front door and onto the porch. Andrew shook his hand, which, it occurred to him, felt rather like a mushroom, as if pressing it too hard would release a little cloud of spores. He dropped it abruptly. “About animals in the room, Doctor Garibaldi—the cats, that is. All the hair and noise and cat boxes and half-eaten food. That can’t be healthful. It would be hard for me to see them go, of course, but perhaps they should. We’re fond of them, my wife and I, but we could sacrifice ourselves just a bit if it would improve Naomi’s health.”

  The doctor grimaced. “If it were a matter of asthma or allergies I’d concur,” he said. “But this is general debility, so to speak. The cats are a boost to her lagging spirits.” He paused, then winked broadly at Andrew. He bent forward and whispered, “She’ll outlive us both if she’s kept away from rich foods, liquor, and tobacco.’’ And then he turned and hurried away like a fat little animal, a marmot or a raccoon, toward his car.

  Andrew stepped into the house, and popped back up the stairs whistling, still carrying his chocolates. He tapped twice on the door before shoving it open a crack and looking in. There sat Aunt Naomi, propped against pillows. She looked tired—but who wouldn’t, lying around all day in a room full of cats? In fact, when he looked more closely, it wasn’t so much tired as put-upon that she looked—by circumstance, by doctors, by ‘possums, by the world in general.

  Aunt Naomi was inscrutable; that was her problem, or one of them anyway. Either that or she was merely empty-headed. In truth, Andrew hadn’t ever been able to figure her out—not entirely. He had always had mixed thoughts about inscrutable people, about eastern mystics or people claiming to be geniuses or certain sorts of knowing, pipe-smoking men whom he’d meet in bookstores or aquarium shops. Their knowledge could never be clearly defined, and although when he was younger he had assumed that he simply hadn’t the brains to fathom that knowledge, when he’d gotten older he began to develop suspicions.

  Aunt Naomi’s suffering was the same sort of thing. It was this, it was that, it was the other: twinges, pains, general listlessness. Iron capsules accomplished nothing. Orthopedic pillows brought on headaches. An army of doctors had come and gone over the long course of her life, and those that had gone the quickest had been the ones to suggest that her maladies were “psychosomatic.” Uncle Arthur had recommended something called a “Bed Massage,” which he had peddled, in his day, door to door. It was an electronic contrivance that hummed and rippled the stuffing in the mattress. Somehow it had gone haywire, though, after Andrew had hooked it up, and had,
through some kink in the laws of physics, caused the leg on the nightstand to collapse and then couldn’t be turned off until, hearing an ominous hammering on the floorboards and Aunt Naomi shouting, Andrew had dashed up the stairs and jerked the plug out of the wall socket.

  Andrew preferred maladies that were more sharply defined. If he were a doctor he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with Aunt Naomi. One time when discussing the death of Naomi’s husband after only two years of marriage, Andrew had said to Rose, “Who wouldn’t have died?” thinking to be funny. It hadn’t been funny, though, and Rose had given him a look.

  There were secrets in Aunt Naomi’s past, skeletons in the closet. The circumstances of her husband’s death was one of them. Mrs. Gummidge was familiar with them. The women had been fast friends in school, if such a thing were possible. There had been a falling out. The two had been in love with the same man—Miles Lepton, but it had been Aunt Naomi who had married him. He’d been fascinated with the story of the pig spoon and had actually come to possess it, or so Rose had heard. Mrs. Gummidge—who hadn’t, of course, been Mrs. Gummidge at the time—toad felt jilted and swore to do them ill, but Lepton had died, and old wounds slowly began to heal. But it was years afterward that the reconciliation between the two women occurred. Mrs. Gummidge had come west, down on her luck, and Aunt Naomi had condescended, charitably, to take her in. That gave Andrew a pain. It was his house, after all. It had been him who had taken Mrs. Gummidge in, and yet Aunt Naomi had become a sort of saint because of it.

  He regarded Aunt Naomi with a smile. “How are you feeling?” he asked, sitting softly on the end of the bed. She opened one eye and looked at him as if he were some creature in a zoo and had wandered inadvertently into the wrong cage. “Piece of chocolate?”