sparkling, convivial event in the house on Russian Hill. Frequently Celeste,s mother joined the family, and Grace thought nothing of asking any intern or resident working with her, especially if he or she was far from home. Phil wrote a new poem each year for the occasion, and one of his old students, an eccentric genius who lived in a Haight-Ashbury flophouse, frequently wandered in and stayed until someone inevitably challenged him on his intense conspiratorial views of society being destroyed by a clandestine organization of the rich and powerful, after which he would storm out.
Well, Reuben was not going to be there this year.
He walked Jim to the car.
The wind had come up off the ocean. It was dark at six o,clock, and Jim was anxious and cold. He agreed to tell the family Reuben needed this time alone, but he begged Reuben to stay in contact.
At about that moment, Galton drove up in his shining pickup truck and announced jubilantly, as his feet hit the flagstones, that the mountain cat that killed his dog had been "got."
Jim, in his inevitably polite manner, showed great interest in what Galton was saying. So Galton pulled his collar up against the wind and told the whole story of the dog again, how the dog had once read minds, sensed danger, saved lives, worked miracles, and turned off a light switch regularly with its paws.
"But how did you find out the big cat is dead?" Reuben asked.
"Oh, they found her out there this afternoon. She,d been tagged by the university four years ago, tagged on her left ear. It was her, all right, and whatever got her gave her what for! There,s a bear out there in those woods, now you be careful, you and that pretty girl."
Reuben nodded. He was turning to ice, but Galton seemed impervious to the cold in his goose-down jacket. He railed against the mountain cat. "They should have given me a depredation permit to shoot that sucker," he said. "But oh, no, they were going to wait till she killed a human being and, believe me, she would have, too."
"What about her cubs?" Reuben asked with a little bit of concealed glee. He was gloating inwardly that he had slain the cat and half devoured it, and it gave him a sinister pleasure that Jim knew this, because he had told Jim, and Jim could say nothing, and Galton would never know. He felt ashamed of these feelings, but mostly he remembered the cat, the feast, the bower in the trees, and he was gleeful and that was all.
"Oh, those cubs will scatter now and find new territory. Maybe one of them will hang around here, who knows? There are likely five thousand of those big cats in California. One come into town and took a walk in north Berkeley, right past the shops and restaurants, not so very long ago."
"I remember that," said Jim. "Caused a little panic. But I,ve got to run. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Galton, and I hope to see you again."
"So you have your very own priest in the family," said Galton as Jim drove his old Suburban towards the forest, the taillights soon disappearing in the dark. "And you drive the Porsche, huh, son, and he drives the old family car."
"Well, it,s not as if we don,t try to get him a decent set of wheels," said Reuben. "My mom bought him a Mercedes, and he lasted with that about two days. He just took so many wisecracks from the homeless in his parish, and then he brought it right back."
He took Galton,s arm. "Come inside," he said.
At the kitchen table, he poured Galton a cup of coffee, and asked what Galton had known of Felix Nideck.
"What kind of a man was he?"
"Oh, the finest. An Old World aristocrat, if you ask me. Not that I know a hell of a lot about aristocrats. I guess in truth I don,t. But he was larger than life, if you know what I mean. Everybody out here loved him. There never was a more generous man. When he left these parts everybody was the loser. Course we didn,t know we,d never see him again. We always thought we would."
"How old was he when he disappeared?"
"Well, they said later on that he was sixty years old. That,s what the papers said when they started really looking for him. But I never dreamed he was that age. He didn,t look a day