Lost (31 page)

“The sign, you're not welcome yet, out,” said Ritzi.

“Sorry. I won't bother you. I'll just finish this note and you can call me. Unless you can just sell me something while I'm here? I'm just looking for that book listed on your Web page. That monograph on
Les Fleurs des chroniques
of Bernard Gui, by, oh you know, who is it. Crowther. The one about the dead
clavelière
nun who came back from her grave to deliver the keys to her abbess—”

“It's not for sale.”

“You advertised it.”

“I'm busy, can't you see it, I have patrons.”

“Just tell me how much. I've got cash, I'll leave it right here on the table. Sneak right out without interrupting. Excuse me, ladies, but as long as I've already barged in—”

“I sold it yesterday.”

“No kidding. How much?”

“Forty-eight pounds.” Ritzi smirked. “Now will you be leaving?”

“I'd have given you seventy,” said the newcomer. “You're not much of a fortune-teller if you couldn't see that coming. You should have updated your entry? So I wouldn't have wasted my time? Sorry, ladies.”

“Zis mornink ze entry I am updating. You should haff rung first and saved yourself ze trip. Pliss, sir, vill you leave?” The accent was getting embarrassing. Winnie couldn't look up for fear she'd lose it.

The customer didn't seem to notice, or mind. “You always have good stuff,” he said. “I don't know what deposit libraries you steal
from. I don't ask questions and mum's the word anyway.” He unfolded a piece of paper from a coat pocket. “What about
Recherches sur les phénomènes du spiritualisme,
the 1923 edition out of Paris or even the first English edition, 1878?”

“I don't haff a catalog,” said Ritzi, “in my brain. I haff to look and you'll haff to come back. Tomorrow.”

“May I browse? Is this your new stock over here? Any back-room stuff? Anything on the Londonian Society of Psychical Research of the last century? I mean, sorry, the nineteenth century? I keep forgetting we're twenty-first now. You can't teach old dogs new calendars.”

“Ze sign said closed,” said Ritzi, “and now I am beink closed. Everyvone, out. You, don't bring zat shroud back. It is for me too upsettink.”

“You didn't read my leaves,” said Rasia, getting up.

“I am beink knackered. Your friend is too obscure, her aura is wounded. My eyes are hurtink. And zat fabric! Who can be concentratink? Besides, with you, it's alvays
Quentin, my Quentin
. Too redundant. Brink me a new ghost, like zis lady, or go find another psychic.”

“What do I owe you?” said Winnie, glad to be sprung from this. But he wouldn't take a penny.

“Not if zat's involved,” he said, brisking his fingers at the chimney cloth. “Vhatever's involved with zat is too much for me. I don't vant to get involved. Out now, pliss, I'm tired, my head aches. Am I puttink on a
performance
here?” He slammed the door on all three of his visitors, and they filed down the steep steps to Cowcross Street, newly bleached by the next spilled cargo of sunlight.

“Well,” said Rasia. “Satisfied?”

Winnie could only laugh, but it was a fake laugh of sorts; she waved Rasia toward the Tube stop, saying, “Next time let's smoke
some peyote and try to contact some archangel or shaman or bodhisattva that way.” She didn't want to get back in the underground, not yet. Rasia threw air kisses and disappeared. Then Winnie realized the other customer was lurching along behind her, nearly beside her.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I aborted your session.”

“I didn't care for what I got, but what it was, I got for free, thanks to you,” she said. “I guess I owe you.”

“The sign said closed and I didn't mean to trespass. Did I really break that lock? I don't think I did. Did I? I'm not exactly the Incredible Hulk.” He laughed at himself. “The Unremarkable Hulk, more like.” He wasn't blubbery, but he was—Winnie considered the right word—portly. It was nice, for a moment anyway, to be sharing a sidewalk with a man who looked as if he could bounce the Ghost of Jack the Ripper into the gutter if it possessed the
cojones
to come sidling by.

A small rain hit them, on a search-and-drench mission; the other side of the street stayed dry and even sunny. “Shoot, I dropped my Old Navy rain hat,” he said, riffling his sparse hair so it looked like a stand of baby beach grass. “We'll have to go back.”

“You'll have to go back,” she said. “We're not together.”

“He won't open the door to me. Please, it's my favorite hat. I'll buy you coffee afterward.”

“I'll do it on the condition you buy me no coffee and we go our own ways immediately after.”

“Deal.”

But Ritzi, seeing it was them, said, “Go avay, vhat is zis, conspiracy? I don't vant to zee zat shroud again! I'll ring ze police and haff you arrested. I'm closed for business. I'm plucking.” He slammed the door.

“No hat,” she said.

“What shroud?” said the American man.

“It's still raining, would you like to borrow said shroud in lieu of your missing hat?”

“I'd rather coffee. Reconsider?”

A few doors down from Ritzi's they found a tiny lunch place. It was nearly deserted but for an ancient slope-stomached waitress who warbled “You're too seraphic to go out in traffic” as she made her way from the back.

“A full cream tea. Two of them,” declared the beefy man.

“We do fresh sandwiches. Egg mayonnaise, prawn and avocado, minty lamb, cheese and pickle, chicken tikka. On your choice of sandwich bread, bap, ciabatta, or foccacina.”

“No cream teas in central London?”

“You poor ducks, we don't. Not since the Blitz. The cows ran away.”

“I didn't know anyone said ‘ducks' anymore.” He was charmed.

“Only to Americans. They like it and tip healthily.” She performed a moue for them, betrayed no surprise when they opted only for tea, and she hobbled away humming.

“Irv Hausserman,” he said.

“Opal Marley,” she replied.

“Delighted, et cetera. How's that guy as a psychic, by the way?”

“You should try him yourself and see.”

“Had I done so, he'd have said, ‘You will leave your hat behind, and I'll sell it back to you for forty-eight pounds plus VAT.'”

She laughed. It was a relief to laugh about nothing much. “What secrets were you there to see if he could sniff out?”

“None. I'm tedious and I have no secrets. I just wanted to buy something. He deals in out-of-print stuff, ephemera, most of it schlocky and awful, but good things with some historical interest come his way, too, so I look in whenever I'm in town. He's a shrewd
bargainer. I bet he still has the pamphlet I want. I'll have to go back tomorrow and he'll say he spent the afternoon hunting up another copy for me. Then he'll charge me a hundred pounds for it, saying it's in better condition than the one he just sold. Can't blame him.”

He was from the University of Pittsburgh, history department, an associate professor, still pretenure because he'd come into the field late after a career as financial officer of several high-tech start-ups that skyrocketed and tanked one after the other, before he had the chance to bail. History a much more sober and safe environment.

“Your field?” she said.

“Western medievalism, English, Frankish, Norman, from the time of monks to the time of parliaments. Roughly. Kids take my courses wanting to do papers on
The Name of the Rose
and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. When I point out that Brother Cadfael's worldview is decidedly post-Freudian, they think I'm defaming the dead of long ago. In the student guidebooks I get high marks because I give them high marks—grade inflation is contagious. But I can't sell my old-fashioned notion, my pre-postmodern notion of history. I still think history is really the study of how we change, even how human psychology changes. Not how universal and interchangeable we all are across the ages. And you?”

She dandled her spoon in the slurry-colored tea and considered the public relations campaign. She had no reason to mistrust him. So why had she started out with an alibi? Instinct? Neurosis? And it wasn't an alibi, it was a lie: call it what it was. A habit that was getting more and more entrenched. Why couldn't she shuck it off? A question she might have asked Ritzi Ostertag.

“Recovering from a broken marriage,” she said.

“Oh, that.”

“Not to worry.” She hastened to extemporize her way out of
danger. “Not broken in the traditional sense. Really, just frayed a little. He's having a rest cure at a ranch in Arizona and I'm on my own for two months. The damp of English winters is just exactly what he can't stand. It's Jack Sprat and his wife; he can breathe no mold and I find dry sunny heat stultifying and it makes me drink gin at ten
A.M
.”

“So the happy medium is . . .”

“Ritzi Ostertag,” she couldn't resist, “a happy medium, or gay anyway.”

He blinked. She suspected he was willfully not following. She didn't blame him; she was being feeble. “I was taking him this cloth I found,” she said, trying for honesty of some sort. “For a lark, and because I'm bored.”

“Because you miss your husband.”

“I do.” She looked him in the eye in case he was getting ideas.

But he was looking fondly at her, fondly and without any predatory gleam of interest. “Don't worry about me. I admire people who stick by their spouses.”

“Meaning you don't?”

“Meaning nothing of the sort. May I see the cloth?”

She drew it out. In this atmosphere it looked more brittle, filthy, more barnyard.

He looked at it closely, as if he could read a language in its warp and weft. Then he pushed it away. “I don't know anything about cloth.”

“Some historian you are.”

“It looks old,” he said. He laughed. “I'm a better historian when it comes to reading books than reading artifacts, I admit it.”

“What's your particular field?” she said. “Your professional idée fixe?”

“Aspects of the supernatural in medieval thought. How
Christian concepts of the supernatural derive in part from origins dating back to late antiquity. How the scribes and bishops encountered Roman and Teutonic myths and legends, and grafted them in a crafty local way upon Hebraic and early Christian theology and lore. How incompatible some of that lore was, how the Church used it anyway, that line of goods.”

“Why aren't you engaged in a history of, oh, cooking pots? Or the migration of nomadic populations? Of course your field is the occult. Naturally, supernatural. Everything is, these days. I'm feeling quite paranoid.”

“Nothing odd in the supernatural as a field of interest. Nor in our sharing the interest. We did meet in a clairvoyant's salon, after all.”

“But what do you believe of it?”

“You mean would I go to have my palm read, my I Ching thrown? My fate in the cards, the tea leaves? The crystal ball? Balderdash. Balderdash, idiocy, poppycock. Stuff and nonsense. You want more? Codswallop. I hardly even believe in the Internet. I can't get my head around ley lines and crop circles and such.”

“Makes you good at your job, then. The appreciative skeptic. Publish much?”

“Too much, in the wrong journals.”

But she realized she didn't want to talk about publishing. “I have to go.”

“You believe in some of it, or you wouldn't have been there,” he said to her. “It's okay. People believe in different things. Some people believe in dreams and voices. I think dreams and voices are important, but primarily as a way your psyche has of getting your own attention, that's all.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“If I had, I'd have to be a believer, and you already know I'm
not. Of course I haven't. But people in the Middle Ages thought they did, all the time.”

“Maybe their innocence allowed them to see what our eyes are clouded to.”

“More things in heaven and earth, et cetera. Have
you
ever seen a ghost?”

“I have to go,” she said again. “Our meeting was an accident and I don't read significance into it. I'm not looking for a dalliance while my husband is recuperating with a pulmonary ailment in Scottsdale. Thanks for the coffee. I'll leave the tip.”

“You look as if you've seen a ghost,” he said. “I didn't mean anything by the questions. Hell, I wouldn't know a ghost if it stopped and asked me for directions.”

The day was nice. She walked all the way back up the hill to Hampstead, thinking of anything except for the catalog of ghosts scrolling in her head. Medieval, Jack the Ripper, some Irish housemaid he might have killed, the ghost of Marley, the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come.

The ghost of old Scrooge himself, bequeathed to the world by Dickens, and still haunting it.

The ghost of old Ozias Rudge, hovering about Rudge House?

The Either/OR of it.

No, she was not thinking about ghosts, not at all. The day was bright now, clouds sent scudding southeast toward the lowlands, France, and beyond that the Alps, the Tyrol, the great Danubian plain. All this clutter, this nonsense, swept with the biggest broom, cobwebs torn from the sky. Exercise always made her mind cleverer. The sun a merciful tonic, the November brightness a bromide.

 

They landed in Bucharest long after dark. The Alps behind them, physically and mentally, bunched and
puckered in slow silken ripples of stone and snow. The airport was in a state of construction, or demolition, or both. Arriving passengers had to step over slabs of stone left higgledy-piggledy, had to avoid staggering into electrical wires that snaked out of unfinished walls.

John took her by the elbow--she was tired, the seats had been lumpy and the food poor--and as she began to fret, he rose to the occasion. He loved the obstacles of the third world, the wooden-handled seals thumping down into the passport, the self-importance of two-bit officials, the smell of open drains. The world seemed realer to him there.