Fuzzy loved the coat. It was possible that the pelt had come from his mother, though Howard had been adamant about never doing the DNA testing to determine just which Curson Avenue carcass was the mother.
Until the events on Wilshire Boulevard no one had known anything about the skin and possible furriness of a Columbian mammoth. It turned out that Columbians did have hair, three to four inches in length. This was nothing like the luxurious coat of the woolly, up to three feet long in some places, black or reddish brown, but it would do, it would do, and Howard found the very best tanners and furriers in Russia, who worked wonders with the coarse and lifeless material they were given, ending with a small number of coats, hats, and stoles that sold for unbelievable prices.
Now Fuzzy momentarily ignored the offered handful of grapes and reached through the bars of the enclosure to rub the sensitive tip of his trunk over Andrea's coat, from her shoulders down to the hem at her knees... and what must he be thinking? Howard wondered.
So who knew what was going through that large brain? Though there could be little of mammoth scent or of mammoth texture on the hairs Fuzzy was so fondly stroking, who knew what Fuzzy's incredibly superior nose and extremely sensitive trunk tip smelled and felt? Howard looked into the old, wise eye—and all mammoth eyes were old and wise, just like elephants, even when they were infants—and he looked at the slight figure of Andrea standing there, looked at the two beings most beloved to him in the universe, and he felt himself smile.
THE feeling persisted out of the mammoth house and into a slow Oregon drizzle, Warburton carefully holding a big umbrella over Andrea and a bodyguard holding open the door of the pearl-gray 1936 Cord Cabriolet convertible. Howard was about to get behind the wheel when Warburton leaned over and said something into his ear, and Howard's mellow mood vanished at once. He got in the car and slammed the door and just sat there for a moment, until his fiancee looked at him with a brow wrinkled in a way only Andrea de la Terre could wrinkle an eyebrow.
"Something wrong, darling?" she asked.
For a moment Howard could only sit there, the oversized steering wheel in his hands. It had been five years, five long frustrating years since that face had loomed in his sights, so close he had felt he could reach out and touch it, and in those five years he had never again felt that feeling of utter omnipotence, never held a man's life in his hands so intimately. And for the first two years he had felt, at best, ambivalence about his decision not to shoot because, after all, there might be answers to secrets locked up in that head, the secrets of how the universe was really put together, if answers there were.
Over the next years, as Matt Wright wandered the globe like some demented Diogenes looking for an honest philosophy, Howard had come to believe the man knew no more than he himself did, that the answers didn't exist. For the last year, Howard had devoted himself to pure and simple hatred.
At last, he sighed and started the car.
"Andrea, Matt Wright has returned."
22
SUSAN had been contrite about the blow. It was inexcusable for one person to hit another except in self-defense, she said, and he told her he figured if anybody ever had good reason to strike another, she was it. She didn't have anything to say to that, but after a long pause during which he felt like a specimen under a microscope, and not a very appetizing one, she unlocked the front door and invited him in.
And then it was... awkward.
He had a million things he wanted to tell her and another million things he wanted to ask her, but he had been far from sure he'd even be invited in the door, and, once in, his tongue seemed tied in knots. So... what have you been up to? He knew most of that; Susan's life had been well documented from the time Fuzzy came into her life. She was famous, had been on the television many times in the early years. Hell, she was a character on a Saturday morning animated television show, she had been played by Andrea de la Terre in the movie version of Little Fuzzy.
There was only one question worth asking, and he couldn't just come right out and ask it, certainly not with the cold look in her eye as she sat stiffly on a big cane chair opposite him, one leg curled up under her and the other one, the bad one, carefully extended. No, you'd have to work up to that one, if you ever had the guts to ask it at all, and she sure wasn't giving anything away.
What little conversation there was soon died away, and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands and neither did he, so finally she asked, in a tone of voice that sounded to him a little like one you might use if your least favorite uncle had plopped himself down in your living room and just wouldn't go away, if he wanted something to eat. And he wasn't proud, no sir, he'd use any excuse to stretch his time with her until what he was beginning to feel would be the final and inevitable outcome, himself trudging once more down that lonesome road outside.
So he showered, and hacked away at his unruly and scraggly beard until it was almost presentable, dressed in the only change of clothes he had, and descended the stairs again to find her in the kitchen just pouring spaghetti into a colander.
"You know I'm not a cook," she said, wiping the condensed steam from her forehead with the back of her hand in a gesture that made him almost weep with longing. "But there's nobody around here that delivers except a so-so pizza shop, and I did make this sauce—spaghetti sauce is one of the five things I know how to make. Anyway, it's from the freezer, and so is the bread, and there's no salad because I'm hardly ever here and I just can't keep the refrigerator stocked with fresh things." She shrugged, and set the bowl of noodles and the bowl of bubbling red sauce on the simple pine table. "Anyway, here it is. Do you want some wine?"
He did, and she selected a red from a walk-in cellar with rack space for hundreds of bottles, only a dozen of them occupied.
He was hungry, he hadn't had anything since an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, having spent the whole day pacing or sitting on her front deck, and the food was good, when he could bring his attention to it, but most of the time it tasted like nothing in his mouth, just something to choke down until they could move on to the next stage, which was finding out if she was at all interested in listening to his story or if she'd shake his hand on the way out the door.
It was the tensest meal he ever ate, consumed in absolute silence.
Then they retired to the vast living room with glasses of wine and she invited him to sit on a plush couch with some sort of Indian art pattern, facing the fire ring, which was an artful arrangement of native stones, no mortar, set on glistening white beach sand in the center of the room. A copper funnel hung from the ceiling high above to catch the smoke. She struck a long match and touched it to several places around the stack, then sat in the same chair she had been in before she had invited him to dinner. She reached over to the small table beside her chair and picked up a small stack of postcards, shuffled them idly through her fingers before tossing them onto the small coffee table that separated them, where they fanned out in accusation. He reached out and picked up the topmost card, saw the picture of the Big Sur coast, waves crashing on huge rocks. He turned it over and could barely read his own indecipherable scrawclass="underline"
I am well, but cannot contact you as yet.
Will explain later.
I love you.
Matt
His face flushed as he flipped rapidly through them. Had anything ever sounded so lame? But he didn't know how else to say it.