derisive name of a huge old San Francisco apartment building, long torn down, where bohemians and artists had lived cheaply in the Roaring Twenties and the Depression years. Monkey—short for the street it was on— Montgomery! Another San Francisco street, and one crosswise to Clay! (There was something more than that, but his mind hung fire and he couldn’t wait.)
He excitedly laid the ruler on the flattened map between Mount Sutro and the intersection of Clay and Montgomery Streets in the north end of the financial district. He saw that the straight line so indicated went through the middle of Corona Heights! (And also rather close by the intersection of Geary and Hyde, he noted with a little grimace.)
He took a pencil from the coffee table and marked a small “five” at the Montgomery-Clay intersection, a “four” by Mount Sutro, and a “one” in the middle of Corona Heights. He noted that the straight line became like a balance or scales then (two lever arms) with the balancing point or fulcrum somewhere between Corona Heights and Montgomery-Clay. It even balanced mathematically: four plus one equals five—just as was noted in the curse before the final injunction. That miserable fulcrum (0), wherever it was, would surely be pressed to death by those two great lever arms (“Give me a place to stand and I will stomp the world to death”—Archimedes) just as that poor little lower-case “his” was crushed between that dreadful “
Yes, that unfortunate (0) would surely be suffocated, compressed to a literal nothing, especially when “the weights” were “on.” Now what—?
Suddenly it occurred to Franz that whatever had been the case in the past, the weights were certainly on
The Transamerica Pyramid and the 1,000-foot TV tower—those were crushers, all right.
But it was ridiculous to think that de Castries could have predicted the building of those structures. And in any case coincidence—lucky hits—was an adequate explanation. Pick any intersection in downtown San Francisco and there was at least a 50 percent chance of there being a high rise there, or nearby.
But why was he holding his breath then; why was there a faint roaring in his ears; why were his fingers cold and tingling?
Why had de Castries told Klaas and Ricker that prescience, or foreknowledge, was possible at certain spots in mega-cities? Why had he named his book (it lay beside Franz now, a dirty gray)
Whatever the truth behind, the weights certainly were on now, no question.
Which made it all the more important to find out the real location of that baffling 607 Rhodes where the old devil had lived (dragged out the tail end of his life) and Smith had asked his questions… and where, according to the curse, the ledger containing the Grand Cipher was hidden… and where the curse would be fulfilled. Really, it was quite like a detective story. By Dashiell Hammett? “X marks the spot” where the victim was (will be?) discovered, crushed to death? They’d put up a brass plaque at Bush and Stockton near where Brigid O’Shaunnesy had shot Miles Archer in Hammett’s
His gaze fell on the 1927 San Francisco City Directory he’d ripped off that morning that formed the midsection of his Scholar’s Mistress. Might as well finish that bit of research right now—find the name of this building, if it ever had one, if it had, indeed, become a listed hotel. He heaved the thick volume onto his lap and turned the dingily yellowed pages to the “Hotels” section. At another time he’d have been amused by the old advertisements for patent medicines and barber parlors.
He thought of all the searching around he’d done this morning at the Civic Center. It all seemed very far off now and quite naive.
Let’s see, the best way would be to search through the addresses, not for Geary Street—there’d be a lot of hotels on Geary—but for 811. There’d probably be only one of those if any. He began running a fingernail down the first column rather slowly, but steadily.
He was on the next to last column before he came to an 811. Yes, it was Geary too, all right. The name was… the Rhodes Hotel.
25
Franz found himself standing in the hall facing his closed door. His body was trembling very slightly all over —a general fine tremor.
Then he realized why he had come out here. It was to check the number on the door, the small dark oblong on which was incised in pale gray, “607.” He wanted to see it actually and to see his room from the outside (and incidentally dissociate himself from the curse, get off the target).
He got the feeling that if he knocked just now (as Clark Smith must have knocked so many times on this same door) Thibaut de Castries would open it, his sunk-cheeked face a webwork of fine gray wrinkles as if it has been powdered with fine ashes.
If he went back in without knocking, it would be as he’d left it. But if he knocked, then the old spider would wake…
He felt vertigo, as if the building were beginning to lean over with him inside it, to rotate ever so slowly, at least at first. The feeling was like earthquake panic.
He had to orient himself at once, he told himself, to keep himself from falling over with 811. He went down the dark hall (the bulb inside the globe over the elevator door was still out) past the black broom closet, the black- painted window of the airshaft, the elevator itself, and softly up the stairs two flights, gripping the banister to keep his balance, and under the peaked skylight of the stairwell into the sinister black room that housed under a larger skylight the elevator’s motor and relays, the Green Dwarf and the Spider, and so out onto the tarred and graveled roof.
The stars were in the sky where they should be, though naturally dimmed somewhat by the glare of the gibbous moon, which was in the top of the sky a little to the south. Orion and Aldebaran climbed the east. Polaris was at his unchanging spot. All round about stretched the angular horizon, crenellated with high rises and skyscrapers marked rather sparsely with red warning and yellow window lights, as if somewhat aware of the need to conserve energy. A moderate wind was from the west.
His dizziness gone at least, Franz moved toward the back of the roof, past the mouths of the air shafts that were like walled square wells, and watchful for the low vent pipes covered with heavy wire netting that were so easy to trip over, until he stood at the roof’s west edge above his room and Cal’s. One of his hands rested on the low wall. Off a short way behind him was the airshaft that dropped straight down by the black window he’d passed in the hall and the corresponding ones above and below it on the other floors. Opening on the same shaft, he recalled, were the bathroom windows of another set of apartments and also a vertical row of quite small windows that could only let into the disused broom closets, originally to give them some light, he supposed. He looked west at the flashing reds of the Tower and at the irregularly rounded darkness of the Heights. The wind freshened a little.
He thought at last, this is the Rhodes Hotel. I live at 607 Rhodes, the place I’ve hunted for everywhere else. There’s really no mystery at all about it. Behind me is the Transamerica Pyramid (5). (He looked over his shoulder at it where its single red light flashed bright and its lighted windows were as narrow as the holes in a business- machine card.) In front of me (he turned back) are the TV tower (4) and the crowned and hunchbacked eminence (1) where the old spider king’s ashes lie buried, as they say. And I am at the fulcrum (0) of the curse.
