The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

How he loved the library.

But it was one of those showplace rooms in which no one ever wrote a letter or read a book. Marchent confessed as much. The old French desk was exquisitely polished and its brass ormolu as bright as gold. It had a clean green blotter, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with the inevitable classics in leather binding that would have made them awkward to carry in a knapsack or read on a plane.

There was the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes, an old Encyclopaedia Britannica, massive art tomes, atlases, and thick old volumes whose gilded titles had been worn away.

An awe-inspiring room. He saw his father at the desk watching as the light faded from the leaded windows, or sitting in the velvet-padded window seat with a book. The eastern windows of the house along that wall must have been thirty feet wide.

Too dark now to see the trees. In the morning, he,d come into this room early. And if he bought this house, he,d give this room to Phil. In fact, he could bait his father with a description of all this. He noted the oak parquet with its huge intricate inlaid squares, and the ancient railroad clock on the wall.

Red velvet draperies hung from brass rods, and a great large photograph hung over the mantel, of a group of six men, all in safari khaki, gathered together against a backdrop of banana and tropical trees.

It had to have been taken with sheet film. The detail was superb. Only now in the digital age could you blow up a photo to that size without degrading it hopelessly. But this had never been retouched. Even the banana leaves looked engraved. You could see the finest wrinkles in the men,s jackets, and the dust on their boots.

Two of the men had rifles, and several stood quite casually and free with nothing in their hands at all.

"I had that made," Marchent said. "Quite expensive. I didn,t want a painting, only an accurate enlargement. It,s four by six feet. You see the figure in the middle? That,s Uncle Felix. That is the only really current picture I had of him before he disappeared."

Reuben drew closer to look at it.

The names of the men were inscribed in black ink across the mat border just inside the frame. He could barely read them.

Marchent turned on the chandelier for him and now he could see plainly the figure of Felix, the dark-skinned and dark-haired man who stood near the middle of the group, a very agreeable-looking figure really, with a fine tall physique, and the same lean graceful hands he admired so in Marchent, and even something of the same very gentle smile. A likable man surely, an approachable man, with a near-childlike expression: curious, enthusiastic perhaps. He looked to be anywhere from twenty to about thirty-five.

The other men were undeniably interesting, all with rather abstracted and serious expressions, and one in particular stood out, to the far left. He was tall like the others and he wore his dark hair shoulder length. If it hadn,t been for the safari jacket and the khaki pants, he might have looked like an Old West buffalo hunter with that long hair. There was positive radiance to his face - rather like one of those dreamy figures in a Rembrandt painting who seems touched at a particular mystical moment by a key light from God.

"Oh, yes, him," said Marchent rather dramatically. "Isn,t he something? Well, that was Felix,s closest friend and mentor. Margon Sperver. But Uncle Felix always called him just Margon and sometimes Margon the Godless, though why in the world he called him that I don,t know. It always made Margon laugh. Margon was the teacher, said Felix. If Uncle Felix couldn,t answer a question, he,d say, ,Well, maybe the teacher knows,, and off he would go to find Margon the Godless by phone wherever he was in the world. There are thousands of photographs of these gentlemen in the rooms upstairs - Sergei, Margon, Frank Vandover - all of them. They were his closest associates."

"And you couldn,t reach any of them after he disappeared?"

"Not a single one. But understand. We didn,t start trying for about a year. We expected to hear from him any day. His trips could be very short, but then he,d vanish, you know, just drop off the charts. He,d go off into Ethiopia or India beyond anyone,s reach. One time he called from an island in the South Pacific after a full year and a half. My father sent a plane to get him. And no, I never found a single one of them, including Margon the Teacher, and that was the saddest part of all."

She sighed. She seemed very tired now. In a small voice, she added: "At first my father didn,t try very hard. He came into a lot of money right after Felix disappeared. He was happy for the first time. I don,t think he wanted to be reminded about Felix. ,Felix, always Felix,, he would say whenever I asked questions. He and my mother wanted to enjoy the new legacy - something from an aunt, I believe." This was costing her, this painful confession.

He reached out slowly, giving her full warning, and then put his arm around her and kissed her cheek just the polite way that she had kissed him earlier that afternoon.

She turned and melted against him for a moment, kissing him on the lips quickly and then said again that he was the most charming boy.

"It,s a heartbreaking story," he said.

"You are such a strange boy, so young yet so old at the same time."

"I hope so," he said.

"And there,s that smile. Why do you hide that smile?"

"Do I?" he asked. "I,m sorry."

"Oh, you,re right, you certainly are. It,s a heartbreaking story." She looked again at the photograph. "That,s Sergei," she said, pointing to a tall blond-haired man, a man with pale eyes who seemed to be dreaming or lost in his thoughts. "I suppose I knew him the best. I didn,t really know the others that well at all. At first, I thought sure I,d find Margon. But the numbers I found were for hotels in Asia and the Middle East. And they knew him, of course, but they had no idea where he was. I called every hotel in Cairo and Alexandria looking for Margon. As I recall, we tried every place in Damascus too. They,d spent a lot of time in Damascus, Margon and Uncle Felix. Something to do with an ancient monastery, newly unearthed manuscripts. In fact, all those finds are still upstairs. I know where they are."

"Ancient manuscripts? Here? They could be priceless," said Reuben.

"Oh, they probably are, but not to me. To me they,re a huge responsibility. What do I do with them to see they,re preserved? What would he want done with them? He was so critical of museums and libraries. Where would he want all this to go? Of course his old students would love to see these things, they,ve never stopped calling and asking, but such affairs have to be carefully managed. The treasures should be archived and under supervision."