Our Lady of Darkness

24

In the street outside the Veterans Building, Franz resumed his sidewise and backward peerings, now somewhat randomized, yet he was conscious not so much of fear as of wariness, as if he were a savage on a mission in a concrete jungle, traveling along the bottoms of perilously wailed, rectilineal gorges. Having taken a deliberate plunge into danger, he felt almost cocky.

He headed over two blocks and then up Larkin, walking rapidly yet not noisily. The passersby were few. The gibbous moon was almost overhead. Up Turk a siren yelped some blocks away. He kept up his swiveling watch for the paramental of his binoculars and/or for Thibaut’s ghost—perhaps a material ghost formed of Thibaut’s floating ashy remains, or a portion of them. Such things might not be real, there still might be a natural explanation (or he might be crazy), but until he was sure of one or the other, it was only good sense to stay on guard.

Down Ellis the slot which held his favorite tree was black, but streetside its fingered branch-ends were green in the white street lights.

A half-dozen blocks west on O’Farrell he glimpsed the modernistic bulk of St. Mary’s Cathedral, pale gray in the moonlight, and wondered uneasily about another Lady.

He turned down Geary past dark shop fronts, two lighted bars, and the wide yawning mouth of the De Soto garage, home of the blue taxicabs, and came to the dingy white awning that marked 811.

Inside the lobby there were a couple of rough-looking male types sitting on the ledge of small hexagonal marble tiles below the two rows of brass mailboxes. Probably drunk. They followed him with their dull eyes as he took the elevator.

He got off at six and closed the two elevator doors quietly (the folding latticed and the solid one) and walked softly past the black window and the black broom closet door with its gaping round hole where the knob would have been, and stopped in front of his own door.

After listening a short while and hearing nothing, he unlocked it with two twists of his key and stepped inside, feeling a burst of excitement and fear. This time he did not switch on the bright ceiling light, but only stood listening and intent, waiting for his eyes to accommodate.

The room was full of darkness. Outside the open window the night was pale (dark gray, rather) with the moon and with the indirect glow of the city’s lights. Everything was very quiet except for the faint, distant rumbles and growls of traffic and the rushing of his blood. Suddenly there came through the pipes a solid, low roaring as someone turned on water a floor or two away. It stopped as suddenly and the inside silence returned.

Adventurously, Franz shut the door and felt his way along the wall and around the tall clothes cabinet, carefully avoiding the work-laden coffee table, to the head of his bed, where he turned on the light. He ran his gaze along his Scholar’s Mistress, lying slim, dark, and inscrutably silent against the wall, and on to the open casement window.

Two yards inside it, the large oblong of fluorescent red cardboard lay on the floor. He walked over and picked it up. It was jaggedly bent down the middle and a little ragged at the corners. He shook his head, set it against the wall, and went back to the window. Two torn corners of cardboard were still tacked to the window sides. The drapes hung tidily. There were crumbles and tiny shreds of pale brownish paper on his narrow desk and the floor at his feet. He couldn’t remember whether or not he’d cleaned up those from yesterday. He noted that the neat little stack of ungutted old pulps was gone. Had he put those away somewhere? He couldn’t remember that either.

Conceivably a very strong gust of wind could have torn out the red cardboard, but wouldn’t it also have disordered the drapes and blown the paper crumbs off his desk? He looked out to the red lights of the TV tower; thirteen of them small and steady, six brighter and flashing. Below them, a mile closer, the dark hump of Corona Heights was outlined by the city’s yellowish window and street lights and a few bright whites and greens in snaky curves. Again he shook his head.

He rapidly searched his place, this time not feeling foolish. In the closet and clothes cabinet he swung the hanging garments aside and glanced behind them. He noticed a pale gray raincoat of Cal’s from weeks back. He looked behind the shower curtain and under the bed.

On the table between the closet and bathroom doors lay his unopened mail. Topmost was a cancer drive letter from an organization he’d contributed to after Daisy had died. He frowned and momentarily narrowed his lips, his face compressed with pain. Beside the little pile were a small slate, some pieces of white chalk, and his prisms, with which he occasionally played with sunlight, splitting it into spectrums, and into spectrums of spectrums. He called to his Scholar’s Mistress, “We’ll have you in gay clothes again, just like a rainbow, my dear, after all this is over.”

He got a city map and a ruler and went to his couch, where he fished his broken binoculars out of his pocket and set them carefully on an unpiled edge of the coffee table. It gave him a feeling of safety to think that now the snout-faced paramental couldn’t get to him without crossing broken glass, like that which they used to cement atop walls to keep out intruders—until he realized just how illogical that was.

He took out Smith’s journal too and settled himself beside his Scholar’s Mistress, spreading out the map. Then he opened the journal to de Castries’s curse, marveling again that it had so long eluded him, and reread the crucial portion:

Now to work out, he told himself, this problem in black geometry, or would it be black physics? What had Byers said Klaas had said de Castries had called it? Oh, yes, Neo-Pythagorean metageometry.

Monkey Clay was the most incongruous item in the curse, all right. Start there. Donaldus had maundered about simian and human clay, but that led nowhere. It ought to be a place, like Mount Sutro—or Corona Heights (under the Bishop’s Seat). Clay was a street in San Francisco. But Monkey?

Franz’s mind took a leap from Monkey Clay to Monkey Wards. Why? He’d known a man who’d worked at Sears Roebuck’s great rival and who said he and some of his lowly coworkers called their company that.

Another leap, from Monkey Wards to the Monkey Block. Of course! The Monkey Block was the proudly 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 “BE” and the three big capitalized words.

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 now, with the TV tower standing three-legged on Mount Sutro and with Montgomery-Clay the location of the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco’s tallest building! (The “something else” was that the Monkey Block had been torn down to clear a site first for a parking lot, then for the Transamerica Pyramid. Closer and closer!)

That was why the curse hadn’t got Smith. He’d died before either structure had been built. The trap hadn’t become set until later.

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) Megapolisomancy?

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 The Maltese Falcon, but there were no memorials for Thibaut de Castries, a real person. Where was the elusive X, or mystic (0)? Where was 607 Rhodes? Really, he should have asked Byers when he’d the chance. Call him up now? No, he’d severed his connection there. Beaver Street was an area he didn’t want to venture back to, even by phone. At least for now. But he left off poring over the map as futile.

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 naïve.

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.