Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

TWO

Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather smaller than the oak door they'd come through to get to this level. Out came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer's surprise he and the priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the Fortress.

"Are you ready?" the Father asked.

"Absolutely," Zeffer said.

Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together vigorously.

"I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of something to warm us," he said. "What do you say?"

"I wouldn't say no," Zeffer said.

The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two glasses. Zeffer didn't remark on the liquor's proximity; nor could he blame the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when they came down here. Though the lower level was supplied with electricity (there were lengths of electric lamps looped along the walls of the corridor) the light did nothing to warm the air nor comfort the spirit.

Father Sandru handed Zeffer a glass, and took the cork out of the bottle. The pop echoed off the naked stone of walls and floor. He poured Zeffer a healthy measure of the liquor, and then an even healthier measure for himself, which he had downed before Zeffer had got his own glass to his lips.

"When I first came here," the Father said, refilling his glass, "we used to brew our own brandy, from plums we grew on our own trees."

"But not now?"

"No," the Father said, plainly saddened at the fact that they were no longer producers of liquor. "The earth is not good any longer, so the plums never ripen properly. They remain small and sour. The brandy made from such fruit is bitter, and nobody wants to drink it. Even I will not drink it, so you can judge for yourself how bad it must be!" He laughed at his self-deprecation, and used the laughter as a cue to fill his glass up again. "Drink," he said to Zeffer, tapping his glass against Zeffer's glass as though this were the first he'd had.

Zeffer drank. The brandy was stronger than the stuff he'd had at the hotel in Brascov. It went down smoothly, warming his belly when it arrived.

"Good, yes?" the Father said, having downed his second glass.

"Very."

"You should have another before we go on." And he filled Zeffer's glass without waiting for a reply. "We're a long way below ground here, and it gets hellishly cold . . ." Glasses were filled, and emptied. The Father's mood was noticeably better now, and his tone chattier. He put the glasses and the bottle back in the hole in the wall, and then led the way down the narrow corridor, talking as he went. "When the Order first came to the Fortress, there were plans to found a hospital here. You see, there are no hospitals within a hundred and twenty miles of here. It would be very practical. But this is not a place for the sick. And certainly not the dying."

"So: no hospital?"

"Well, we made preparations. You saw yesterday one of the wards—"

Zeffer remembered. He'd glanced through an open door and there'd been two rows of iron beds, with bare mattresses.

"I thought it was a dormitory for the brothers."

"No. We each have our own cells. There are only eleven of us, so we can each have a place in which to meditate and pray ..." He offered Zeffer a glance, accompanied by a small smile. "And drink."

"I can't imagine it's a very satisfying life," Zeffer said.

"Satisfying?" The idea was obviously a little confounding to Sandru. "Meaning what?"

"Oh, just that you don't get to work in the community. You can't help people."

They had come to the end of the passageway, and Sandru sorted through his collection of keys in order to open the third and final door.

"Who can truly be helped?" he said, his face turned down to the labor of sorting. "I suppose perhaps children can be comforted, sometimes, if it's dark and they're afraid. You can tell them you're with them; and that will sometimes stop them crying. But for the rest of us? Are there really any words that help? I don't know of any." He had found the right key, and now slipped it noisily into the antiquated lock. As he did so, he glanced up at Zeffer. "I think there's more comfort to be had from seeing beautiful women on the cinema screen than in any prayer I know. Well, perhaps not comfort. Distraction." He turned the key in the lock.

"And if that sounds like heresy, well so be it."

Sandru pushed the door open. The room was in darkness, but despite that fact there was a warmth in the air; at least in contrast to the chill of the passageway. Perhaps the difference was no more than two or three degrees, but it felt significant.

"Will you wait here a moment?" Sandru said. "I'll just bring a light."

Zeffer stayed where he was, staring into the darkness, enjoying the slight rise in temperature. There was enough illumination spilling from the passageway behind him to light the threshold. There, carved into stone beneath his feet, was a curious inscription:

Quamquam in fundis inferiorum sumus, oculos angelorum tenebimus.

He didn't linger to puzzle over this for more than a few seconds, but instead let his eyes drift up and into the room itself. The chamber before him was large, it seemed; and unlike the rest of the rooms and corridors, which were simply constructed, far more elaborate. Could he make out pillars, supporting several small vaults? He thought so. There were chairs and tables within a few yards of where he stood, and what appeared to be lamps or the like heaped on top of them.

The confusion inside was explained a moment later, when the Father returned with one of the bare bulbs, attached to a length of electric cord.

"We use this as a storeroom," he said. "Many of the items we found in the Fortress when we arrived we put down here, just to get them out of the way." He lifted the light to give Zeffer a better view.

Zeffer's estimation of the size of the place, and of the complexity of its construction, had been conservative, it now turned out. The chamber was fully thirty-five feet long; and almost as broad, the ceiling (which was indeed divided into eight elaborately-vaulted sections, divided by pillars) higher than the passageway by six feet or more. The floor was littered with furniture and crates; the place plainly filled by hands that had little or no respect for the objects they were moving; wishing only to put them quickly out of sight. It occurred to Zeffer that if indeed there were treasures here the chances of finding them—or indeed of their being in reasonable condition when discovered—were remote. Still, the Father had brought him this far at no little inconvenience to himself; it would be discourteous to now show no interest in what the chamber contained.

"Did you have a part in moving all of this?" he asked Sandru, more out of a need to fill the silence between them than because he was genuinely curious.

"Yes, I did," the Father replied. "Thirty-two years ago. I was a much younger man. But it was still a back-breaking labor. They built things big here. I remember thinking that maybe the stories were right . . ."

"Stories about—"

"Oh . . . nonsenses. About this furniture having been built for the retinue of the Devil's wife."

"The Devil's wife."

"Lilith, or Lilitu. Sometimes called Queen of Zemargad. Don't ask me why."

"This is the same woman Katya spoke about?"

Sandru nodded. "That's why the locals don't have much hope for the sick if they stay here. They think Lilith's curse is on the place. As I say: nonsenses."

Whether it was nonsense or not, the story lent some flavor to this banal adventure. "May I look more closely?" Zeffer asked.

"That's what we're here for," Father Sandru replied. "I hope there's something that catches your eye, for your sake. All these stairs and doors. I'd forgotten how far down it was . . ."

"I'm sorry to have made this so burdensome," Zeffer said, quite sincerely. "If I'd known you were going to go to so much trouble I wouldn't have—"

"No, no," Sandru said. "It's not a trouble to me. I only thought there might be an item here that pleased you. But now I'm down here I doubt it. To be truthful I believe we should have taken all this trash up the mountain and thrown it in the deepest gorge we could find."

"Why didn't you do just that?"

"It wasn't my choice. I was just a young priest at the time. I did as I was told. I moved tables and chairs and tapestries, and I kept my counsel. Our leader then was Father Nicholas, who was very clear on the best thing to be done—the safest thing for our souls—and would not be moved on the subject. So we did as we were told. Father Nicholas, by the way, had the foulest temper of any man I ever knew. We all lived in fear of him."

Zeffer moved into the room, talking as he went: "May I say something that I hope won't offend you?"

"I'm not easily offended, don't worry."

"Well . . . it's just that the more I hear about your Order, the less like priests you seem to be. Father Nicholas's temper and the brothers all familiar with Theda Bara. And then the brandy."

"Ah, the sins of the flesh," Father Sandru said. "We do seem to have more than our share, don't we?"

"I have offended you."

"No. You've simply seen the truth. And how can a man of God be justly offended by that? What you've observed is no coincidence. We are all . . . how shall I put this?... men who have more than our share of flaws. Some of us were never trusted with a flock. Others, like Father Nicholas, were. But the arrangement was never deemed satisfactory."

"His temper?"

"I believe he threw a Bible at one of the parishioners who was sleeping through the good Father's sermon." Zeffer chuckled; but his laughter was silenced a moment later. "It killed the man."

"Killed—"

"An accident, but still . . ."

"—with a Bible? Surely not."

"Well, that's how the rumor went. Father Nicholas has been dead twenty years, so there's no way to prove it or disprove it. Let's hope it isn't true, and if it is, hope he's at peace with it now. The fact is, I'm glad I was never trusted with a parish. With a flock to tend. I couldn't have done much for them."

"Why not?" Zeffer asked, a little impatient with Sandru's melancholy now. "Do you have difficulty finding God in a place like this?"

"To be honest, Mister Zeffer, with every week that passes—I almost want to say with every hour—I find it harder to see a sign of God anywhere. It would not be unreasonable, I think, to ask Him to show Himself in beauty. In the face of your lady-companion, perhaps . . . ?"

Katya's face as proof of God's presence? It was an unlikely piece of metaphysics, Zeffer thought.

"I apologize," Sandru said. "You didn't come here to hear me talk about my lack of faith."

"I don't mind."

"Well I do. The brandy makes me maudlin."

"Shall I take a look then?" Zeffer suggested, "At whatever's in here?"

"Yes, why don't we?" Sandru replied. "I wish I could give you some kind of guidance, but . . ." He shrugged; his favorite gesture. "Why don't you start looking, and I'll go back and get us something more to drink?"

"Nothing more for me," Zeffer replied.

"Well then, for me," Sandru said. "I'll only be a moment. If you need me, just call. I'll hear you."

Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let his thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly enough, there was something mildly chaotic about his thought processes. One minute he was talking about furniture, the next about the mad Duke and his hunter's habits, the next about the fact that they couldn't make a hospital here because the Devil's wife had cursed the place.

When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulbs were stark, of course, and their light far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer's eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.

And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls beyond.

The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tile. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulbs threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer's weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.

He didn't wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through the piles of furniture toward the designs that covered the walls. They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.

In all his years of traveling and collecting he'd never seen anything quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust-laden webs which covered every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tile. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swath across four or five, he realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked about ready to prance off around the room.

"It's a hunt."

Sandru's voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly that it was as though he'd had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying toward the cleaned tile, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.

It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father's shape until his eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the world he'd been looking at—the painted man on his painted horse, riding past a painted tree—was more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.

"A hunt?" he asked at last. "What kind of hunt?"

"Oh, every kind," Sandru replied. "Pigs, dragons, women—"

"Women?"

Sandru laughed. "Yes, women," he said, pointing toward a piece of the wall some yards deeper into the chamber. "Go look," he said. "You'll find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what they saw."

Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.

"Where now?" he asked the Father when he'd got to the other side of the catafalque.

"A little further," Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a swig from the bottle.

"I need some more light back here," Zeffer said.

Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where Zeffer was standing.

The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its own.

"Closer," Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of the picture. Despite the sickly light off the bulb, its luminescence still showed that the color of the image had not been diminished by time. The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a dozen kinds of green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them. Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the trunks and branches, skillfully highlighted to lend the impression that light was falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.

Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the work of journeymen; some—especially those that were devoted to areas of pure foliage—the handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas that their masters had neither the time nor perhaps the interest to address.

But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the representational sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.

And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

"I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here," Sandru said. "It's a view, from the Fortress Tower."

"But not realistic?"

"It depends what you mean by realistic," Sandru said. "If you look over the other side"—he pointed across the room—"you can see the delta of the Danube." Zeffer could just make out the body of water, glittering in the gloom: and closer by, a mass of swampy land, with dozens of inlets winding through it, on their way to the sea. "And there!" Sandru went on, "to the left"—again, Zeffer followed Sandru's finger—"at the corner of the room, that rock—"

"I see it."

The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs springing from its flank.

"That's called the May Rock," Sandru said. "The villagers dance there, on the first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and try to make children. It's said the women always became pregnant if they stayed with their men on May Rock."

"So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there."

"Yes, it's right outside the Fortress."

"And so all those other details? The delta—"

"Is nine miles away, in that direction." Sandru pointed at the wall upon which the Danube's delta was painted.

Zeffer smiled as he grasped what the artists had achieved here. Down in the depths of the Fortress, at its lowest point, they had re-created in tile and paint what could be seen from its pinnacle.

And with that realization came sense of the inscription he'd read on the threshold.

Though we are in the bowels of Hell, we shall have the eyes of Angels.

This room was the bowels of Hell. But the tile-makers and their artist masters, wherever they'd been, had created an experience that gave the occupants of this dungeon the eyes of angels. A paradoxical ambition, when all you had to do was climb the stairs and see all this from the top of the tower. But artists were often driven by such ambition; a need, perhaps, to prove that it could even be done.

"Somebody worked very hard to create all this," Zeffer said.

"Oh indeed. It's an impressive achievement."

"But you hide it away," Zeffer said, not comprehending the way the room had been treated. "You fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy."

"Whom could we show it to?" the Father replied. "It's too disgusting. . . "

"I see nothing—" He was about to say disgusting, when his eye alighted on a part of the tile-work that he'd cleaned with his arm but had not closely studied. In a large grove a round stadium had been set up, with seating made of wood. The perspective was off (and the solution to the perspective changed subtly from tile to tile, as various hands had contributed their piece of the puzzle. There were perhaps twenty tiles that had some portion of the stadium represented upon them; the work of perhaps five artists). The steep benches were filled with people, their bustle evoked with quick, contentious strokes. Some people seemed to be standing; some sitting. Two more groups of spectators were approaching the stadium from the outside, though there was no room for them inside.

But what drew Zeffer's eye, and made him realize that the Father had been right to wonder aloud whom he might show this masterwork to, was the event these spectators had assembled to witness. It was an arena of sexual sport. Several performances were going on at the same time, all unapologetically obscene. In one section of the arena a naked woman was being held down while a creature twice her size, his body bestial, his erection monstrous, was being roped back by four men who appeared to be controlling his approach to the woman. In another quarter, a man had been stripped of his skin by three naked women. A fourth straddled him as he lay on the ground in his own blood. The other three wore pieces of his skin. One had on his whole face and shoulders, her breasts sticking out from beneath the ragged hood. Another sat on the ground, wearing his arms and pulling on the skin of his legs like waders. The third, the queen of this quartet, was wearing what was presumably the piece de resistance, the flesh which the unhappy owner had worn from mid-breast-bone to mid-thigh. She was cavorting in this garish costume like a dancer and, by some magic known only to the maker of the mystery, the usurped skin still boasted a full erection.

"Good God . . ." Zeffer said.

"I told you," Sandru said, just a little smugly. "And that's the least of it, believe me."

"The least of it?"

"The more you look, the more you see."

"Anywhere in particular?"

"Go over to the Wild Wood. Look among the trees."

Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he couldn't make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful advice.

"Step away a foot or so."

In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too close to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum-headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the tree. Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).

"Is it like this all over?" Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.

"All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight of them."

"You've obviously made a study," Zeffer observed.

"Not I. An Englishman who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting. For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it's old age. Things you want to remember, you can't. And things that don't mean anything stick in your head like a knife."

"That's not a pretty image, with respect."

"With respect, there's nothing pretty about the way I feel," Sandru replied. "I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead."

"Lord."

Sandru shrugged. "That's what living in this place does to you after a while. Everything drains out of you somehow."

Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and he had no patience with Sandru's melancholy; his thoughts were with the walls, and the pictures on the walls.

"Are there records documenting how this was created? It is a masterpiece, in its way."

"One of a kind," Sandru said.

"Absolutely one of a kind."

"To answer your question, no, there are no records. It's assumed that it was funded by Duke Goga, who had lately returned from the Crusades with a large amount of booty, claimed from the infidel in the name of Christ."

"But to build a room like this with money you'd made on the Crusades!" Zeffer said incredulously.

"I agree. It seems like an unlikely thing to do in the name of God. Of course none of this is proved. There are some people who will tell you that Goga went missing on one of his hunts, and it wasn't he who built this place at all."

"Who then?"

"Lilith, the Devil's wife," the Father said, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Which would make this the Devil's Country, no?"

"Has anybody tried to analyze the work?"

"Oh yes. The Englishman I spoke of, George Soames, claimed he had discovered evidence of twenty-two different styles among the designs. But that was just the painters. Then there were the men who actually made the tiles. Fired them. Sorted out the good from the bad. Prepared the paint. Cleaned the brushes. And there must have been some system to align everything."

"The rows of tiles?"

"I was thinking more of the alignment of interior with the exterior."

"Perhaps they built the room first."

"No. The Fortress is two-and-a-half centuries older than this room."

"My God, so to get the alignment so perfect—?"

"Is quite miraculous. Soames found fifty-nine geographical markers— certain stones, trees, the spire of the old abbey in Darscus—which are visible from the tower and are also painted on the wall. He calculated that all fifty-nine were correctly aligned, within half a degree of accuracy."

"Somebody was obsessive."

"Or else, divinely inspired."

"You believe that?"

"Why not?"

Zeffer glanced back at the arena on the wall behind him, with all its libidinous excesses. "Does that look like the kind of work that somebody would do in the name of God?"

"As I said," Sandru replied, "I no longer know where God is and where He isn't."

There was a long silence, during which Zeffer continued to survey the walls. Finally he said: "How much do you want for it?"

"How much do I want for what?"

"For the room?"

Sandru barked out a laugh.

"I mean it," Zeffer said. "How much do you want for it?"

"It's a room, Mister Zeffer," Sandru said. "You can't buy a room."

"Then it's not for sale?"

"That's not my point—"

"Just tell me: is it for sale or not?"

Again, laughter. But this time there was less humor; more bemusement. "I don't see that it's worth talking about," Sandru said, putting the brandy bottle to his lips and drinking.

"Let's say a hundred thousand dollars. What would that be in lei? What's the lei worth right now? A hundred and thirty-two-and-a-half to the dollar?"

"If you say so."

"So that's what? Thirteen million, two hundred and fifty thousand lei."

"You jest."

"No."

"Where would you find such money?" A pause followed. "If I may ask?"

"Over the years, I've made some very lucrative investments on behalf of Katya. We own large parts of Los Angeles. Half a mile of Sunset Boulevard is in her name. Another half mile in mine."

"And you would sell all that to own this?"

"A little piece of Sunset Boulevard for your glorious Hunt? Why not?"

"Because it's just a room covered with filthy tile."

"So I have more money than sense. What does it matter to you? A hundred thousand dollars is a great deal of money."

"Yes, it is."

"So, do we have a deal or not?"

"Mister Zeffer, this is all too sudden. We're not talking about a chair here. This is part of the fabric of the Fortress. It has great historical significance."

"A minute ago it was just a room covered with filthy tile."

"Filthy tile of great historical significance," Sandru said, allowing himself a little smile.

"Are you saying we can't find some terms that are mutually satisfying? Because if you are—"

"No, no, no. I'm not saying that. Perhaps we could eventually agree on a price, if we talked about it for a while. But how would you ever get it back to California?"

"That would be my problem. This is the twenties, Father. Anything's possible."

"And then what? Suppose you could get everything back to Hollywood?"

"Another room, the same proportions—"

"You have such a room?"

"No. I'd build one. We have a house in the Hollywood Hills. I'd put it in as a surprise for Katya."

"Without telling her?"

"Well if I told her it wouldn't be a surprise."

"I'm just astonished that she would allow you to do such a thing. A woman like that."

"Like what?"

The question caught Sandru off-balance. "Well. . . so .. ."

"Beautiful?"

"Yes."

"I think our conversation's come full-circle, Father."

Sandru conceded the point with a little nod, lifting the brandy bottle as he did so.

"So she's not as perfect as her face would suggest?" he asked at last.

"Not remotely. Thank God."

"This place, with all its obscenities, would please her?"

"Yes, I think it would. Why? Does that make you more open to the idea of selling it to me?"

"I don't know," Sandru replied, frowning. "This whole conversation hasn't turned out the way I thought it would. I expected you to come down here and maybe buy a table, or a tapestry. Instead you want to buy the walls!" He shook his head again. "I was warned about you Americans," he added, his tone no longer amused.

"What were you warned about?"

"Oh, that you thought nothing was beyond your grasp. Or beyond your pocket."

"So the money isn't enough."

"The money, the money." He made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. "What does the money matter? You want to pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? Pay it. I'll never see a lei so why should I care what it costs you? You can steal it as far as I am concerned."

"Let me understand you clearly. Are you agreeing to the sale?"

"Yes," Father Sandru said, his tone weary now, as though the whole subject had suddenly lost all trace of pleasure for him. "I'm agreeing."

"Good. I'm delighted."

Zeffer returned through the maze of furniture to the door, where the priest stood. He extended his hand. "It's been wonderful dealing with you, Father Sandru."

Sandru looked down on the proffered hand, and then—after a moment of study—took it. His fingers were cold, his palm clammy. "Do you want to stay and look at what you've bought?"

"No. I don't think so. I think we both need a little sun on our faces."

Sandru said nothing to this; he just turned and led the way out along the corridor to the stairs. But the expression on his face, as he turned, was perfectly clear: there was no more pleasure to be found above than there was down here in the cold; nor prospect of any.