The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"That must have been very discouraging," he said.

She laughed. "It certainly was. The tragedy is these things are gone forever and what did the boys get out of it? A drunken bash in Sausalito raided by the local police."

Felice drifted in, silent, seemingly fragile and unsteady, yet efficiently cleared the plates. Marchent slipped out to pay "the girl," and soon came back.

"Has Felice always been with you?" Reuben asked.

"Oh, yes, along with her son who died last year. He was the man of the place, of course. He managed everything. How he hated my brothers, but then they set fire to the guesthouse twice, and wrecked more than one car. I,ve hired a couple of men since but it never worked out. There,s no man on the place just now. Just old Mr. Galton, down the road, but he contracts for anything and everything we need. You might mention that in your article. Mr. Galton knows this house inside and out. He knows the forest, too. I,m taking Felice with me when I go. There,s nothing else to be done."

She paused only long enough for Felice to bring in the dessert of raspberry sherry in crystal glasses.

"Felix brought Felice here from Jamaica," she said, "along with a load of Jamaican curios and art. He was always coming through the door with some treasure - an Olmec statue, a colonial oil painting from Brazil, a mummified cat. Wait till you see the galleries and storerooms upstairs. There are tablets up there, ancient clay tablets by the boxful - ."

"Tablets, you mean actual ancient Mesopotamian tablets? You,re talking cuneiform, Babylon, all that?"

She laughed. "I certainly am."

"That has to be priceless," Reuben said. "And that would be worth a story in itself. I have to see those fragments. You will show them to me, won,t you? Look, I won,t put all this into the story. It would be too distracting. We want the house sold of course, but ..."

"I,ll show you everything," she said. "It,s a pleasure. Quite a surprising pleasure actually. It doesn,t all seem so impossible now that we,re talking about it."

"Look, maybe I could be of assistance in some way, formally, or informally. I did a little time in the field during my summers at Berkeley," he said. "My mother,s idea. She said if her boy wasn,t going to be a doctor, well, he had to be an educated man. She signed me up for several different trips."

"And you liked that sort of thing."

"I wasn,t patient enough for it," he confessed. "But I did enjoy it. I got to spend some time at ?atal Hoyük in Turkey - that,s one of the oldest sites in the world."

"Oh, yes, I,ve been there," she observed. "That is simply marvelous," she said. Her face brightened. "And did you see Gobekli Tepe?"

"I did," he said. "The summer before I left Berkeley, I went to Gobekli Tepe. I wrote a piece about it for a journal. Helped me get the job I have now. Seriously, I,d love to see all these treasures. I,d love to play some role in what happens, that is, if that,s what you want. How about a separate article, one that wouldn,t be published until everything was safely out of here, but you know, a piece on the heritage of Felix Nideck. Is that something you,d like?"

She reflected for a moment, her eyes very calm. "More than I can say," she answered.

It was thrilling to see her interest. Celeste always cut him off when he talked about his archaeological adventures. "I mean, like, where did all that get you, Reuben? What did you take away from those digs?"

"Did you ever want to be a doctor like your mother?" Marchent asked.

Reuben laughed. "I can,t remember scientific information," he said. "I can quote you Dickens and Shakespeare and Chaucer and Stendhal, but I can,t retain anything about string theory or DNA or black holes in space. Not that I haven,t tried. I couldn,t possibly have been a doctor. Besides, I fainted once at the sight of blood."

Marchent laughed, but it was a gentle laugh.

"My mother,s a trauma center surgeon. She operates five or six times a day."

"And she has been disappointed that you didn,t go into medicine, of course."

"A little, more in my older brother, Jim, than me. His becoming a priest was quite a blow. We,re Catholic, of course. But that was something my mother had simply never dreamt of, and I have my theory why he did it, you know, the psychological angle, but the truth is, he,s a fine priest. He,s stationed in San Francisco. He works at St. Francis at Gubbio Church in the Tenderloin, and runs a dining room for the homeless. He works harder than my mother. And they,re the hardest-working two people I know." And Celeste would be the third-hardest-working person, wouldn,t she?

They talked on about the digs. Reuben had never been one for details, didn,t get very far examining potsherds, but he loved what he did learn. He was eager to see the clay tablets.

They talked of other things. Marchent,s "failure," as she put it, with her brothers who were never interested in the house or in Felix or in the things that Felix left behind.

"I didn,t know what to do after the accident," Marchent said. She rose and wandered towards the fireplace. She poked at the flames, and the fire flared bright again. "The boys had already been through five different boarding schools. Kicked out for drinking. Kicked out for drugs. Kicked out for selling drugs."

She came back to the table. Felice shuffled in with another fifth of the superb wine.

Marchent went on, her voice low and confiding and amazingly trusting.

"I think they,ve been in every rehab in the country," she said, "and a few overseas as well. They know just what to tell the judge to get sent to rehab, and just what to tell the therapists when they,re inside. It,s amazing the way they win the doctors, trust. And of course they load up on all the psychiatric meds they can before they,re discharged."

She looked up suddenly. "Reuben, you will not write about this ever," she said.

"Unthinkable," he replied. "But Marchent, most journalists can,t be trusted. You do know that, don,t you?"

"I suppose," she said.

"I had a good friend at Berkeley who died of an overdose. That,s how I met my girlfriend, Celeste. He was her brother. Anyway, he had everything, you know, and the drugs just got him, and he died like a dog, in a barroom toilet. Nobody could do a thing."

Sometimes he thought that it was Willie,s death that bound them together, him and Celeste, or at least it had for a while. Celeste had gone on from Berkeley to Stanford Law School, and passed the bar as soon as she finished. Willie,s death gave the affair a certain gravity, a musical accompaniment in the minor key.