It was probably wonderful that such a place existed. It would probably change the world, if the world were ever to find out. But she didn't care. All that concerned her right now was Joe. Without him, the world wasn't worth a damn.
She got up and pulled back the drapes. It was Festival Saturday, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. An escaped helium balloon, shining silver, floated into view. She watched it as the breeze carried it up over the pinetops towards the Heights. She would be following soon, she thought. No matter that this was Everville's day of days. No matter that the valley would be ringing from end to end with the din of people making music and money and love. Somewhere on the mountain a door stood open, and she would be through it before noon, or be dead in the attempt.
PART FOUR. THE DEVIL AND D'AMOUR
"That," said the man with the salmon-pink tie, gesturing towards the canvas on the gallery wall, "is an abomination. What the hell's it called?" He peered at his price sheet.
"Bronx Apocalypse," the man at his side said.
"Bronx Apocalypse," the critic snorted. "Jesus!" He eyed the man who'd supplied the title. "You're not him, are you?" he said. "You're not this fellow Dusseldorf.?"
The other man-a well-made fellow in his late thirties, with three days' growth of beard and the eyes of an insomniac-shook his head. "No. I'm not."
"You are in one of the paintings though, aren't yout' said the Asian woman at Salmon Tie's side.
"Am]L
She took the sheet from her companion's hand and scanned the twenty or so titles upon it. "There," she said. "DAmour in Wyckoff Street. It's the big painting next door," she said to Salmon Tie, "with that bilious sky."
"Loathsome," the man remarked. "Dusseldorf should go back to pushing heroin or whatever the hell he was doing. He's got no business foisting this crap on people."
"Ted didn't push," D'Amour said. He spoke softly, but there was no doubting the warning in his voice.
"I was simply stating my opinion," the man said, somewhat defensively.
"Just don't spread lies," D'Amour said. "You'll put the Devil out of work."
It was July 8, a Friday, and the Devil was much on Harry's mind tonight. New York was a stew as ever, and, as ever, Harry wished he could be out of the pot and away, but there was nowhere to go; nowhere he wouldn't be followed and found. And here, at least, in the sweet-and-sour streets he knew so well, he had niches and hiding places; he had people who owed him, people who feared him. He even had a couple of friends.
One of whom was Ted Dusseldorf, reformed heroin addict, sometime performance artist, and now, remarkably, a painter of metropolitan apocalypses.
Tiiere he was, holding court in front of one of his rowdier pieces, all five foot nothing of him, dressed in a baggy plaid suit, and chewing on a contender for the largest damn cigar in Manhattan.
"Harry! Harry!" he said, laying eyes on D'Amour. "Thanks for coming."
He deserted his little audience and hooked his arm over Harry's shoulder. "I know you hate crowds, but I wanted you to see I got myself some admirers."
"Any sales?"
"Yeah, would you believe it? Nice Jewish lady, big collector, lives on the park, fancy address, buys that"-he jabbed his cigar in the direction of Slaughtered Lambs on the Brooklyn Bridge-"for her dining room. I guess maybe she's a vegetarian," he added, with a catarrhal laugh. "Sold a couple of drawings too. I mean, I ain't gonna get rich, you know, but I proved something, fight?"
"That you did."
"I want you to see the masterwork," Ted said, leading Harry through the throng, which was divided into three distinct camps. The inevitable fashion victims, here to be seen and noted in columns. A smattering of well-heeled collectors, slumming. And Ted's friends, several of whom had tattoos as colorful as anything on the walls.
"I had this guy come up to me," Ted said, "fancy shoes, designer haircut, he says: Fantasy's so pass,6. I said: What fantasy? He looks at me like I farted. He says: These works of yours. I said: This isn't fantasy. This is my life. He shakes his head, walks away." Ted leaned closer to Harry. "I think sometimes there's two different kinds of people in the world. The people who understand and the people who don't. And if they don't, it's no use trying to explain, 'cause it's just beyond them, and it always will be."
There was an eight-by-six foot canvas on the wall ahead, its colors more livid and its focus more strident than anything else in the exhibition.
"You know, it keeps me sane, doing' this shit. If I hadn't started lettin' all this out onto canvas, man, I'd have lost my fuckin' mind. I don't know how you keep your head straight, Harry. I really don't. I mean, knowing what you know, seeing what you see... "
The knot of people standing in front of the picture parted, seeing the artist and his model approach, giving them plain view of the masterpiece. Like most of the other works it too depicted a commonplace street. Only this was a street Harry could name. This was Wyckoff Street, in Brooklyn, where one sunny Easter Sunday almost a decade before Harry had first been brushed by infernal wings.
Ted had painted the street pretty much as it lookeddrab and uncomfortable-and had placed the figure of D'Amour in the middle of the thoroughfare, regarding the viewer with a curious gaze, as if to say: Do you see what I see? At first glance it seemed there was nothing untoward about the scene, but further study gave the lie to that. Rather than simply accruing a host of disturbing details on the canvas, Ted had worked a subtler effect. He'd laid down a field of mushy scarlets and ochers, like the guts of an over-ripe pomegranate, and then stroked the details of Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.
"Good likeness, huh?" Ted said.
Harry assumed it was, given that he'd been recognized from it, but hell, it was less than comforting. He had good bones-Nonna had told him so the first time she'd touched his face-but did they have to protrude quite so rpuch? The way Ted had laid the paint down on Harry's face he'd practically carved the features: long nose, strong jaw, wide brow and all. As for the marks of age, he hadn't stinted. The gray hairs and the frown-lines were much in evidence. It wasn't a bad face to be wearing into his forties, Harry supposed. Sure, there was none of the serenity that was rumored to be compensation for losing the bloom and ease of youth-his stare was troubled, the smile on his lips tentative to say the leasthut it was a picture of a sane man with all his limbs and faculties intact, and of the people who'd wrestled with the beasts of the abyss, that pretty much put Harry in a league of one.
"Do you see it?" Ted said.
"See what?"
Ted brought Harry a couple of steps closer to the canvas and pointed to the lower half. "There." Harry looked. First at the sidewalk, then at the gutter. "Under your foot," Ted prompted.
There, squirming under Harry's right heel, was.a thin black snake, with burning coals for eyes.
"The Devil Himself," Ted said.
"Got him where I want him, have I?" Harry said.
Ted grinned. "Hey, it's art. I'm allowed to lie a little."
At Ted's request, Harry hung around for an hour or so in the offices at the back of the gallery until the crowd had begun to thin. He put his feet up on the desk and flipped through a couple of old copies of the Times while he waited. It was good sometimes to remember how other people, ordinary people, lived their lives: entertained by political dog-fights and foreign misery; by scandal and frippery and murder. He envied them their ignorance, and the ease with which they idled their lives away. Right now, he would have given just about everything he had for a week of that bliss; a week going about trivial business for trivial reasons, forgetful of the presences that scurried beneath the surface of things.