it—the Black Dog and a cockatoo. You see, the fabulously jeweled gold falcon enameled black (and finally proven a fake) is sometimes called the Black Bird in Hammett’s detective story. He and de Castries talked a lot about black treasures, Klaas and Ricker told me. And about the historical background of Hammett’s book—the Knights Hospitalers (later of Malta) who created the falcon and how they’d once been the Knights of Rhodes—”
“Rhodes turning up again!” Franz interjected. “That damn 607 Rhodes!”
“Yes,” Byers agreed. “First Tiberius, then the Hospitalers. They held the island for two hundred years and were finally driven out of it by the sultan Mohammed II in 1522. But about the Black Bird—you’ll recall what I told you of de Castries’s
“Not so odd as all that when you think about it,” Franz countered, his eyes on one of their roving trips again. “Besides being one of America’s few great novelists, Hammett was a rather lonely and taciturn man himself, with an almost fabulous integrity. He elected to serve a sentence in a federal prison rather than betray a trust. And he enlisted in World War I when he didn’t have to and served it out in the cold Aleutians and finally toughed out a long last illness. No, he’d have been interested in a queer old duck like de Castries and showed a hard, unsentimental compassion toward his loneliness and bitterness and failures. Go on, Donaldus.”
“There’s really nothing more,” Donaldus said, but his eyes were flashing. “De Castries died of a coronary occlusion in 1929 after two weeks in the City Hospital. It happened in the summertime—I remember Klaas saying the old man didn’t even live to see the stock market crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression, ‘which would have been a comfort to him because it would have confirmed his theories that because of the self-abuse of mega-cities, the world was going to hell in a handbasket.’
“So that was that. De Castries was cremated, as he’d wished, which took his last cash. Ricker and Klaas split his few possessions. There were of course no relatives.”
“I’m glad of that,” Franz said. “I mean, that he was cremated. Oh, I know he died—had to be dead after all these years—but just the same, along with all the rest today, I’ve had this picture of de Castries, a very old man, but wiry and somehow very fast, still slipping around San Francisco. Hearing that he not only died in a hospital but was cremated makes his death more final.”
“In a way,” Byers agreed, giving him an odd look. “Klaas had the ashes sitting just inside his front door for a while in a cheap canister the crematory had furnished, until he and Ricker figured out what to do with them. They finally decided to follow de Castries’s wish there too, although it meant an illegal burial and doing it all secretly at night. Ricker carried a post-digger packaged in newspaper, and Klaas a small spade, similarly wrapped.
“There were two other persons in the funeral party. Dashiell Hammett—he decided a question for them, as it happened. They’d been arguing as to whether de Castries’s black ring (Klaas had it) should be buried with the ashes, so they put it up to Hammett, and he said, ‘Of course.’ ”
“That figures,” Franz said, nodding. “But how very strange.”
“Yes, wasn’t it?” Byers agreed. “They bound it to the neck of the canister with heavy copper wire. The fourth person—he even carried the ashes—was Clark. I thought that would surprise you. They’d got in touch with him in Auburn and he’d come back just for that night. It shows, come to think of it, that Clark couldn’t have known about the curse—or does it? Anyhow, the little burial detail set forth from Klaas’s place just after dark. It was a clear night and the moon was gibbous, a few days before full—which was a good thing, as they had some climbing to do where there were no street lights.”
“Just the four of them, eh?” Franz prompted when Byers paused.
“Odd you should ask that,” Byers said. “After it was all over, Hammett asked Ricker, ‘Who the devil was that woman who stayed in the background?—some old flame of his? I expected her to drop out when we got to the rocks, or else join us, but she kept her distance all the way.’ It gave Ricker quite a turn—for he, as it happened, hadn’t glimpsed anyone. Nor had Klaas or Smith. But Hammett stuck to his story.”
Byers looked at Franz with a sort of relish and finished rapidly. “The burial went off without a hitch, though they needed the post-digger—the ground was hard. The only thing lacking was the TV tower—that fantastic cross between a dressmaker’s dummy and a Burmese pagoda in a feast of red lanterns—to lean down through the night and give a cryptic blessing. The spot was just below a natural rock seat that de Castries had called the Bishop’s Seat after the one in Poe’s ‘Gold Bug’ story, and just at the base of that big rock outcropping that is the summit of Corona Heights. Oh, incidentally, another of his whims they gratified—he was burned wearing a bathrobe he’d worn to tatters—a pale old brown one with a cowl.”
22
Franz’s eyes, engaged in one of their roving all-inspections, got the command to check the glooms and shadows not only for a pale, blank, triangular face with restless snout, but also for the thin, hawkish, ghostly one, tormented and tormenting, murder-bent, of a hyperactive old man looking like something out of Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s
His mind was busy assimilating the thought that Corona Heights was literally impregnated with Thibaut de Castries. That both yesterday and today he had occupied for rather long periods of time what must almost certainly be the Bishop’s Seat of the curse, while only a few yards below in the hard ground were the essential dusts (salts?) and the black ring. How did that go in the cipher in Poe’s tale? “Take a good glass in the Bishop’s Seat…” His glasses were broken, but then he hardly needed them for this short-range work. Which were worse—ghosts or paramentals?—or were they, conceivably, the same? When one was simply on watch for the approach of both or either, that was a rather academic question, no matter how many interesting problems it posed about different levels of reality. Somewhere, deep down, he was aware of being angry, or perhaps only argumentative.
“Turn on some lights, Donaldus,” he said in a flat voice.
“I must say you’re taking it very coolly,” his host said in slightly aggrieved, slightly awed tones.
“What do you expect me to do, panic? Run out in the street and get shot?—or crushed by falling walls? or cut by flying glass? I suppose, Donaldus, that you delayed revealing the exact location of de Castries’s grave so that it would have a greater dramatic impact, and so be truer, in line with your theory of the identity of reality and art?”
“Exactly! You
“Turn on some lights,” Franz repeated. “What I find amazing, Donaldus, is that you’ve known about paramental entities for many years, and about the highly sinister activities of de Castries and the suggestive circumstances of his burial, and yet take no more precautions against them than you do. You’re like a soldier dancing the light fantastic in no-man’s-land. Always remembering that I, or you, or both of us may at this moment be totally insane. Of course, you learned about the curse only just now, if I can trust you. And you did bolt the door after I came in. Turn on some lights!”
Byers complied at last. A dull gold refulgence streamed from the large globular shade suspended above them. He moved to the front hall, somewhat reluctantly, it appeared, and flicked a switch, then to the back of the living room, where he did the same and then busied himself opening another bottle of brandy. The windows became dark rectangles netted with gold. Full night had fallen. But at least the shadows inside had been banished.
All this while he was saying in a voice that had grown rather listless and dispirited now that his tale had been told, “Of course you can trust me, Franz. It was out of consideration for your own safety that I didn’t tell you about de Castries. Until today, when it became clear you were into the business, like it or not. I don’t go babbling about it all, believe me. If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that it’s a mercy
