"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.
they weren't figments, these presences. He'd met them face to face
(those that had faces) in alleyways and tenements and elevator shafts. Found them squatting in hospital garbage, sucking on soiled bandages; seen them in the mud at the river, eviscerating dogs. they were everywhere, and more arrogant by the day. It was only a matter of time, Harry knew, before they took the streets at noon. And when they did, they would be unopposed.
At the beginning of his career-when his investigations as a private detective had first led him into the company of the inhuman-he had entertained the delusion that he might with time help turn the tide against these forces by alerting the populous to their presence. He soon learned his effor., People didn't want to know. they had drawn the parameters of belief so as to exclude such horrors, and would not, could not, tolerate or comprehend anybody who sought to move the fences.
Hany's stumbling attempts to articulate all that he knew or suspected were met with derision, with rage, and, on one or two occasions, with violence. He quickly gave up trying to make converts, and resigned himself to a lonely war.
He wasn't entirely without allies. In the course of the next few years he'd met a handful of people who had all in some fashion or other come to know what he knew. Of these few, none was more important to him than Norma Paine, the black blind medium who, though she never left her tiny two-room apartment on Seventy-fifth, had tales to tell from every corner of Manhattan, passed on to her by the spirits that came looking for guidance on their journey to the Hereafter. Then there'd been Father Hess, who had for a little time labored with Harry to discover the precise nature of the presences that haunted the city. Their work together had come to an abrupt halt that Easter Sunday in Wyckoff Street, when one of those presences had sprung a trap on them both, and Hess had perished on the stairs while the triumphant demon sat on the bed where it had been found, speaking the same riddle to Harry over and over:
"I am you, and you are love, and that's what makes the world go round. I am you, and... "
In the years since that appalling day, Harry had never found an individual whose judgment he'd trusted as he'd trusted Hess's judgment. Though Hess had been a fervent Catholic, he'd not let his faith narrow his vision. He'd been a keen student of all manner of religions, with a passion for life and its mysteries that had burned more brightly than in any soul Harry had encountered, A conversation with Hess had been like a trip on whitewater rapids: by turns dizzying and dangerous. One moment he was theorizing about black holes, the next extolling the virtues of peppered vodka, the next speaking in reverential tones about the mystery of the Virgin Birth. And somehow always making the connections seem inevitable, however unlikely they were at first glance.
There wasn't a day went by Harry didn't miss him.
"Congratulate me," Ted said, appeafing at the office door with a broad grin on his face, "I sold another piece."
"Good for you."