door.
Donaldus (or Jaime) spoke no really intelligible word himself during this period before Franz’s departure, except perhaps “Don’t!” but he gasped and squealed and babbled a lot, with breathless little laughs thrown in. He stayed bent half-double and twisting from side to side, his hands constantly but rather ineffectually fending off the clutching ones. His pale violet dressing gown, unbelted, swished as he twisted.
It was the women who did all the talking and at first only Fa Lo Suee. “We really scared you, didn’t we?” she said rapidly. “Jaime scares easily, Shirl, especially when he’s drunk. That was my key scratching the door. Go on, Shirl, give it to him!” Then resuming her Fu Manchu voice, “What have you and Dr. Petrie there been up to? In Honan, Mr. Nayland Smith, we have an infallible Chinese test for homophilia. Or is it possible you’re AC-DC? We have the ancient wisdom of the East, all the dark lore that Mao Tse-tung’s forgotten. Combined with western science, it’s devastating. (That’s it, girl, hurt him!) Remember my thugs and dacoits, Mr. Smith, my golden scorpions and red six-inch centipedes, my black spiders with diamond eyes that wait in the dark, then leap! How would you like one of those dropped down your pants? Repeat—what have you and Dr. Petrie been doing? Be careful what you say. My assistant, Miss Shirley Soames (Keep it up, Shirl!) has a rat-trap memory. No lie will go unnoticed.”
Franz, frozen, felt rather as if he were watching crayfish and sea anemones scuttling and grasping, fronds questing, pincers and flower-mouths opening and closing, in a rock pool. The endless play of life.
“Oh, by the way, Jaime, I’ve solved the problem of the Smith journal,” Fa Lo Suee said in a bright casual voice while her own hands became more active. “This is Shirl Soames, Jaime (you’re getting to him, girl!), who for years and years has been her father’s assistant at the Gray’s Inn bookstore in the Haight. And she remembers the whole transaction, although it was four years ago, because she has a
The name “Gray’s Inn” lit up like neon in Franz’s mind. How had he kept missing it?
“Oh, traps distress you, do they, Nayland Smith?” Fa Lo Suee went on. “They’re cruel to animals, are they? Western sentimentality! I will have you know, for your information, that Shirl Soames here can
As she was saying that, she was sliding her silk-gloved right hand down the girl’s rump and inward, until the tip of her middle finger appeared to be resting on the spot midway between the outer orifices of the reproductive and digestive systems. The girl appreciatively jogged her hips from side to side through a very short arc.
Franz took coldly clinical note of those actions and of the inward fact that under other circumstances it would have been an exciting gesture, making him want to do so himself to Shirley Soames, and so be done by. But why her in particular? Memories stirred.
Fa Lo Suee noticed Franz and turned her head. Giving him a very civilized glassy-eyed smile, she said politely, “Ah, you must be Franz Westen, the writer, who phoned Jaime this morning. So you as well as he will be interested in what Shirley has to say.
“Shirl, leave off excruciating Jaime. He’s had enough punishment. Is this the gentleman?” And without removing her hand she gently swung the girl around until she faced Franz.
Behind them Byers, still bent over, was taking deep breaths mixed with dying chuckles as he began to recover from the working over he’d been given.
With amphetamine-bright eyes the girl looked Franz up and down. While he was realizing that he knew that feline, foxy little face (face of a cat, presently licking cream), though on a body skinnier still and another head shorter.
“That’s him, all right,” she said in a rapid, sharp voice that still had something of a brat’s “yah! yah!” in it. “Correct, mister? Four years ago, you bought two old books tied together out of a lot that had been around for years that my father’d bought that belonged to a George Ricker. You were squiffed, really skew-iffed! We were together in the stacks and I touched you and you looked so queer. You paid twenty-five dollars for those old books. I thought you thought you were paying for a chance to feel me up. Were you? So many of the older men wanted to.” She read something in Franz’s expression, her eyes brightened, and she gave a hoarse little laugh. “No, I got it! You paid all that money because you were feeling guilty because you were so drunk you thought—what a laugh!—you’d been molesting me, whereas in my sweet girlish way, I’d been molesting you! I was very good at molesting, it was the first thing dear Daddy taught me. I learnt on him. And I was Daddy’s star attraction at the store, and didn’t he know it! But I’d already found out girls were nicer.”
All this while she’d continued to jog her little hips lasciviously, leaning back a little, and now she slipped her own right hand behind her, presumably to rest it on Fa Lo Suee’s.
Franz looked at Shirley Soames and at the two others, and he knew that all that she had said was true, and he also knew that this was how Jaime Donaldus Byers escaped from his fears (and Fa Lo Suee from hers?). And without a word or any change in his rather stupid expression he turned and walked out the open door.
He had a sharp pang—“I am abandoning Donaldus!”—and two fleeting thoughts—“Shirl Soames and her touchings were the dark, musty, tendriled memory I had on the stairs yesterday morning” and “Would Fa Lo Suee immortalize the exquisite moment in slim silver, perhaps titling it ‘The Loving Goose’?”—but nothing made him pause or reconsider. As he started down the steps, light from the doorway spilling around him, his eyes were already systematically checking the darkness ahead for hostile presences—each corner, each yawning areaway, each shadowy rooftop, each coign of vantage. As he reached the street, the soft light around him vanished as the door behind him was silently shut. That relieved him—it made him less of a target in the full onyx dusk that had now closed once more on San Francisco.
23
As Franz moved cautiously down Beaver Street, his eyes checking the glooms between the rather few lights, he thought of how de Castries had ceased to be a mere parochial devil haunting the lonely hump of Corona Heights (and Franz’s own room at 811 Geary?), but a ubiquitous demon, ghost, or paramental inhabiting the whole city with its scattered humping hills. For that matter, to keep it all materialistic, were not some of the atoms shed from de Castries’s body during his life and during his burial forty years ago around Franz here at this very moment and in the very air that he was discreetly sniffing in?—atoms being so vastly tiny and infinity-numerous. As were the atoms, too, of Francis Drake (sailing past San Francisco Bay-to-be in the
Blocks off, a siren yelped. Nearby, a dark cat darted into a black slit between walls set too close for human passage. It made Franz think of how big buildings had been threatening to crush man ever since the first mega-city had been built. Really Saul’s crazy (?) Mrs. Willis wasn’t so far off the track, nor Lovecraft (and Smith?) with his fascinated dread of vast rooms with ceilings that were indoor skies and far walls that were horizons, in buildings vaster still. San Francisco was carbuncled with the latter, and each month new ones grew. Were the signs of the universe written into them? Whose wandering atoms didn’t they hold? And were paramentals their personification of their vermin or their natural predators? In any case, it all transpired as logically and ineluctably as the rice-paper journal had passed from Smith, who wrote in purple ink; to de Castries, who added a deadly, secret black; to Ricker, who was a locksmith, not a bibliophile; to Soames, who had a precociously sexy daughter; to Westen, who was susceptible to weird and sexy things.
A dark blue taxi coasting slowly and silently downhill ghosted by Franz, and drew up at the opposite curb.
No wonder Donaldus had wanted Franz to keep the journal and its newfound curse! Byers was an old campaigner against paramentals, with his defense in depth of locks and lights and stars and signs and mazes, and liquor, drugs and sex, and outre sex—Fa Lo Suee had brought Shirley Soames for him as well as for herself; the humorously hostile groping had been to cheer him. Very resourceful, truly. A person had to sleep. Maybe he’d learn, Franz told himself, to use the Byers method himself some day, minus the liquor, but not tonight, no, not until he had to.
