“Aphrodite,” I said. “A beauty married to a clubfoot.”
“Hera was Hephaestus’ mother,” he said. It was the first thing he hadn’t meant to say.
“Chucked him out of heaven,” I said.
“All the way to the glittering sea,” Wilton Hoxley said. “But he got back-”
“Which is more than you’ve managed to do.” The semi was still cold between my knees. My cut had stopped bleeding, so I drank some beer.
“You’re boring me,” Hoxley said flatly. “I’m way beyond baiting.”
“What’s next, Wilton? You got a new mission?”
“My mission at the moment is to explain to you about Pandora. Aphrodite made her irresistible, like a tailor cutting a coat for a dandy. And she went to earth, this girl, this ancestor of Eleanor’s, and she attached herself, as she was meant to do, to stupid Epimetheus.”
“And she brought her box with her.”
“Oh, good, you are sentient. And the box contained all the evils that the gods could conceive to plague mankind, and she, with feminine curiosity, opened it. The only good thing in it, the spirit Hope, was trapped inside when Pandora, terrified by the things she had let loose upon the world, snapped the lid shut. Typical woman,” he said. “Too little, too late, like all of them. And you think I still want Eleanor? Although I’ll admit that it would be interesting to see her burn.”
“What’s next?” I asked out of sheer desperation.
“Oh, Simeon,” Wilton Hoxley said, “out of all the people in the world, I would have thought you could have figured out what’s next. You know my history. If you can’t work it out, what’s the use of faith in this world? I simply cannot tell you how disappointed I am. Why should Eleanor, why should anybody, trust you with her life when you’re such a stumblefoot?”
“But wait,” I said. He disconnected.
PART FOUR
18
This is what it said: 127.
The letters were black and even, set in type. They occupied maybe a square inch of paper that must once have been the upper right-hand corner of a left-facing page. There was nothing else.
The cheery canary-yellow envelope was tiny, the kind little kids get birthday cards in. It had arrived in the regular mail, and my name and address were in blue ballpoint in a normal, everyday handwriting, a small and precise handwriting but nothing as inhumanly rigid as the square, tightrope-straight gold calligraphy of the first notes.
I might have dismissed it, except for the return address on the envelope’s back flap. It said: From the forge of Hephaestus.
“One twenty-seven,” Schultz said over the phone. He lit up.
“Page one twenty-seven,” I corrected him.
“Yeah,” Schultz said. “Put it in the mailbox. We’ll call the Topanga P.O. And tell them we’ll be by to pick it up after they collect it. We’ll analyze it six ways from Sunday.” Then he started to cough.
“You really ought to quit,” I said. “Your prognosis is terrible.”
“Look who’s talking,” he said.
There’s not a lot you can do to get ready for someone who’s promised to burn you to death, but in the two days between my telephone conversation with Wilton Hoxley and the arrival of the three-number note, I’d done everything I could think of, mainly to keep moving. Sometimes even a futile gesture can be reassuring.
I’d started on Friday morning, the morning after the call.
“Six eight-gallon plastic buckets,” said the checker at the Fernwood Market, ringing them up. “Twenty-four- can that be right, twenty-four? — cotton towels, two, um, sixteen-foot garden hoses, four of whatever these are called, at two-twenty-nine apiece.” I didn’t know what they were called either, but they were short lengths of metal tubing with spiral threads at both ends. She dropped them into the bag. “Two nozzles?”
“I’ve got two hoses,” I explained.
“Piano wire?” she said, holding up a spool.
“It’s a jazz piano. Always wants to get wired.”
“And seven sets of wind chimes,” she said, putting them onto the counter with an unmelodious clatter. “All those bells,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re a sound sleeper.”
“Let’s hope I’m not,” I said.
I coasted Alice into the Valley, where I bought an extralarge sweat suit. Last stop was a Thrifty Drug Store, all overbright white fluorescent lights and underpaid brown help. The help sold me three of those thin plastic raincoats that meteorological paranoids fold up and carry in their pockets. All the way home I hummed complacently.
But halfway up the driveway, toting my haul in two huge cardboard paper-towel cartons with Bravo Corrigan trotting along at my heels and offering moral support, I got mad. If I hadn’t had to behave as though I were living under a mad scientist’s microscope, I could have carried the things up a few at a time, like a normal suburban American, over the space of an hour or so; instead, I’d needed cartons so he couldn’t see my surprises, pathetic as they were. I dumped the junk where I stood and clambered up to the phone to call Schultz’s number of the moment.
“Where’s he living, damn it?” I demanded.
“Nowhere.” Schultz sounded hoarse, but there was no way to tell whether it was from nerves or nicotine. “He’s underground.”
“You’re checking hotels?”
“And motels, and rooming houses. Literally every cop in this city has his picture. And it’s just jerking off, Simeon, and you know it. It could take weeks.”
“Has he bought a new Mazda?”
“Nein. We’re plugged into the DMV. All Mazda sales are being filtered out and fed back to us. There’s a lag of a couple of days from the sheer volume of the data, but so far-say, up to forty-eight hours ago-nothing.”
I thought. “Maybe an RV. Something mobile. Does Mazda make an RV?”
“RVs,” Schultz sighed. “Okay, we’ll get the RV transfers, too. I don’t think Mazda makes an RV, but he may not need a Mazda any more. That may have nothing to do with his new mission. He may be a new god by now.”
“Something mobile,” I said. It sounded right. “Something he could sleep in. It would solve all his problems. He could move around, plan whatever the hell the new mission is, not have to check in anywhere at night.”
The line was silent for a moment. “An RV would be pretty big,” Schultz said.
“So?”
“He saw the kid checking your mailbox. After he torched the Mazda.”
“Whooee,” I said.
“Can’t be that many spots where you can park an RV,” Schultz said. “Can there?”
“Check the RVs, okay?”
“Sure. Same forty-eight-hour lag, though.”
“Norbert,” I said. “You’re a brick.”
Before exploring Schultz’s idea, I went out and lugged the cartons the rest of the way into the house. Bravo Corrigan had gone to sleep in the shade. The sun’s heat sat on my shoulders like a fat, feverish kid. Thumb-sized bumblebees droned drunkenly through still air. A big one had decided to give up and rub its legs around in the dust. I stepped over it enviously, staggering along beneath the weight of the boxes.
The junk got dumped, like junk, in the center of the living room. I went into the bedroom to get my hawk-watching binoculars, a nice pair of lightweight Nikons that Eleanor had given me for my thirty-fifth birthday as a subtle way of contradicting my conviction that I was growing farsighted in my old age.
I closed the curtains to let the house cool, or at least stop heating up, for a few minutes. Then I moved methodically around the house, opening each curtain only a couple of inches and surveying the hills opposite.
The house perches very precariously on a ragged, triangular point of land that is almost the highest in the canyon. Rising behind it is a sheer cliff of decomposed granite that stretches twenty-five or twenty-six feet to the peak of the mountain. There is no way up to the peak except to leave the road and claw your way up through the rattlesnakes and chaparral, an unpleasant fifteen-minute hike highlighted by scratched arms and legs, branches in the eye, and worse. I’d done it, out of pigheaded curiosity, when I first rented the place. In front of the house and on both sides is nothing but air.