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I'm faithful that way when I am needed by those I loved.""Yeah, you were with your wife, Terry, too, weren't you?" It wascruel of me to say this, but I'd spoken without thinking, seeing herface again as he shot her. "Scratch that, if you will," I said. "I'msorry. Who in the name of God is Wynken de Wilde?"I felt so utterly miserable. "Dear God, you're haunting me," Isaid. "And I'm a coward in my soul! A coward. Why did you say thatstrange name? I don't want to know. No, don't tell me桾his isenough for me. I'm leaving. You can haunt this bar till doomsday ifyou want. Get some righteous individual to talk to you.""Listen to me," he said. "You love me. You picked me. All I wantto do is fill in the details.""I'll take care of Dora, somehow or other, I'll figure some way tohelp her, I'll do something. And I'll take care of all the relics, I'll getthem out of there and into a safe place and hold on to them for Dora,until she feels she can accept them.""Yes!""Okay, let me go.""I'm not holding you," he said.
Yes, I did love him. I did want to look at him. I did want him to tellme everything, every last little detail! I reached out and touched hishand. Not alive. Not human flesh. Something with vitality, however.
Something burning and exciting.
He merely smiled.
He reached across with his right hand and clamped his fingersaround my right wrist and drew near. I could feel his hair touchingmy forehead, teasing my skin, just a loose wisp of hair. Big dark eyeslooking at me.
"Listen to me," he said again. Scentless breath.
"Yes... ."He started talking to me in a low, rushed voice. He began to tellme the tale.
4THE POINT is, Old Captain was a smuggler, a collector. Ispent years with him. My mother had sent me to Andover,then brought me home, couldn't live without me; I went toJesuit, I didn't belong with anyone or anywhere, and maybe OldCaptain was the perfect person. But Wynken de Wilde, that startedwith Old Captain and the antiques he sold through the Quarter,usually small, portable things.
"And I'll tell you right now, Wynken de Wilde amounts to nothing,absolutely nothing, except a dream I had once, a very perverseplan. I mean my lifelong passion梐side from Dora梙as beenWynken de Wilde, but if you don't care about him after thisconversation, no one will. Dora does not.""What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?""Art, of course. Beauty. But I got it mixed up in my head when Iwas seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult梖reelove, give to the poor, raise one's hand against no one, you know, asort of fornicating Amish community. This was of course 1964, thetime of the flower children, marijuana, Bob Dylan seeming to besinging all the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a newBrethren of the Common Life, one in tune with modern sexualvalues. Do you know who the Brethren were?""Yes, popular mysticism, late Middle Ages, that anyone couldknow God.""Yes! Ah, that you know such a thing.""You didn't have to be a priest or monk.""Exactly. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of thisas a boy was all wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have beeninfluenced by German mysticism and all those popular movements,Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a scriptorium andstill did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand.
Wynken's books were completely different from those of others. Ithought if I could find all Wynken's books I'd have it made.""Why Wynken, what made him different?""Let me tell it my way. See, this is how it happened, the boarding-house was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, my mother didn't gether own hands dirty, she had three maids and an old colored manwho did everything; the old people, the boarders梩hey were onhefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the GardenDistrict, three meals a day, red carpets. You know the house. HenryHoward designed it. Late Victorian. My mother had inherited itfrom her mother.""I know it, I've seen it, I've seen you stop in front of it. Who ownsit now?""I don't know. I let it slip away. I ruined so many things. Butpicture this: drowsy summer afternoon there, I'm fifteen and lonely, andOld Captain invites me in, and there on the table in the secondparlour梙e rents the two front parlours梙e lives in a sort ofwonderland of collectibles and brass and such?
"I see it.""梐nd there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tinymedieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it;but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little,went to Mass every day for years with my mother, knew liturgicalLatin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books asdevotional and rare, and something that Old Captain is inevitably goingto sell.
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