a wad of cash in the maître d’s face until we were seated, usually as far away from other patrons as possible. There we would bask in the splendor of a dim dining room’s live pianist or an outdoor veranda’s warm Pacific air. Instinctively Boggs would dial back his persona just enough to fool diners into believing he was a garden-variety meth-head. Even I’d be fooled. Sitting there with my ranks of silverware and heated towels, I would look around at the businessmen with their PDAs and the shiny newborns in beechwood high chairs, and I would fancy myself one of them until hearing the slurps of Boggs licking the inside of his wineglass. One meal we’d be eating decadent dishes like candied bacon suspended from piano wire and the next we’d be crapping ten feet from where we wiped the ants from our pizza crusts.
His grudge against the Monro-Barclay Pact began to make sense. The West Coast had indeed quickened his corruption. These furloughs among the very rotters he most despised—actors, agents, celebrity chefs, even snooty waitstaffs—proved how nevertheless desperate he was to gain their attentions, which was precisely the larger purpose of the Rotters Book. Each time he turned his camera upon a Californian corpse, it was as if he were a paparazzo taking unauthorized and unflattering shots of unsuspecting subjects. But such was the tabloid photographer’s charge—to expose how everyone looked the same once the makeup was off and the lights were out.
Five-star restaurants were not the only strange places he took me. At least once a week we’d visit a public library. Like Lionel and Harnett, I, too, suspected that the ultimate distribution of the Rotter Book would be online, and Boggs was indeed a savvy user of the Internet. He’d lock his shopping cart to the bike rack or book drop and weasel his way in front of a monitor along with myriad other homeless patrons. Sometimes I would look quickly enough to find him salivating over the website of some Iowa newspaper. I didn’t need to read along to know that the aftershocks of my revenge were still being felt.
It was while he was in one of these libraries that I made an important discovery. Not wishing to be party to his inevitable expulsion, I sat against the cart beneath a palm tree. The twine used to secure the quilt over that long-hidden cargo scratched at my sweaty neck until I impulsively pulled it down, ripped free the bindings, and unrolled the blanket. Beneath was not the termite-riddled lumber I had expected, but history’s finest instrument: Harpakhrad.
Everything Lionel had said was true—the multi-beveled blade of iron and gold, the braided handle of petrified branches, the fantastically bejeweled scarab—but no poetry or paean could convey such splendor. If Lionel’s mythic stash of riches truly existed, nothing in it could rival Harpakhrad. The only indication of wear was a delicate shading where Boggs’s hands had once fit. It wasn’t difficult to guess why he no longer used it. This was a tool of the gods. Even Boggs, in his delirium, questioned whether his current work fit that description.
Yet Lionel and Harnett had been wrong about Harpakhrad’s fate. Boggs had resisted selling it. Instead he clung to his master’s greatest gift. Suddenly I saw Harpakhrad and the Rotters Book as two halves of the same whole, the former exemplifying what Boggs could have been and the latter epitomizing what he was. I concealed the instrument with the blanket and twine and slumped into its shade, covering my face with fingers of both flesh and wood. I, too, had two halves and this was the one I had chosen.
30.
DESPITE THE ABSENCE OF my sink calendar, I knew that I had been with Boggs for a long time. It was summer—even in California, I could tell the difference. The bikinis got smaller, the convertibles went topless, and the grave dirt sweated loose to such a degree that it seemed to leap out of our way.
And just as I became inured to the textures and temperatures of the West Coast, it was over. I awoke to the sputtering of a rusty hatchback filling our alley with exhaust. My discombobulated brain scrambled to make sense of the threat. We were near Colma, California. Located about twenty minutes outside of San Francisco, it was well known as a place where the dead outnumbered the living thousands to one. Known as the City of the Silent and slapped with the ironic slogan It’s