Ancient of Days (31 page)

To Bilker’s and my surprise, the habiline shed his clothes. He pulled off his shoes, shimmied out of his trousers, and ducked free of his shirt. “I am silenter this way, and better camouflaged . . . like a commando.” He looked at me. “You too?”

“Oh, no.”

“The shoes, then. The shoes and socks. To make you have a grip both firm and silent on the ladder rungs.”

Bilker grinned, enjoying my discomfiture. I removed my shoes and socks. Adam nodded the bodyguard toward the door, and Bilker used the key to open it. He gave us a thumbs-up sign and disappeared into the concrete maw of the building. Adam and I ran to the truck’s loadbed, eased into it, and squatted in the rain looking at the great hinged door high in the rear wall. Next to this door, or shutter, were three tall windows of a more conventional design; they lacked glass, and someone had fitted them with opaque sheets of polyethylene, which, now tattered, made faint popping noises. My fear deepened. I was developing, while still on the ground (or near it), a bad case of acrophobia. A surreal kind of dizziness gripped me. Adam attributed to me more courage and athletic ability than I had. By this route, I could fall to my death trying to enter Abraxas.

“Adam—”

“I will go first. No need to brace ladder. Side of truck suffices.” Naked, the mist matting his body hair, he swung to the pickup’s side to mount the ladder. Bouncing on its rungs and pulling at its uprights, he tested its reliability. “Is okay,” he announced, and he climbed it like a monkey shinnying lickety-split up a tree. At the top, Adam grabbed the rope hanging from the sill and threw himself clear of the ladder. Expecting him to come crashing down on the rampway’s corrugated roof, I flinched. Adam’s feet hit the vertical face of the wall, though, and he walked himself up the rope to the hinged window shutter. Here, he turned and squatted on the sill, a gargoyle on a somewhat shoddy cathedral. The gargoyle beckoned to me.

I willed myself to move. My bare feet tingled on the ladder’s cold aluminum rungs. I climbed with my eyes on Adam. If I looked down, I’d panic. The habiline drew nearer as I rose, but still seemed far, far away. At the top of the ladder, I had no idea what to do. I could not grab the hanging rope without letting go of the ladder’s uprights. Trapped between heaven and hell, I laid my face against the unyielding bricks of the building. Dear God. Dear God.

A creaking sound made me look up again. A second rope fell out of the sky, to slap and abrade my forehead. Adam had pushed the hinged door of the window outward, revealing a block-and-tackle by which the gallery sometimes lifted heavy objets d’art to the third floor. I slipped the loop of this rope around my waist and gripped it high with both hands. Adam, holding the other end, backed away from the window, and I began to rise, my feet dangling like stunned pink fish. I closed my eyes until the faint squeaking of the pulley had ceased and the window ledge was there before me as an accomplished fact. More noisily than I wanted, I went over it into the supply room.

Adam touched my shoulder. “Somewhere he is in the galleries. As yet, I think, the rain has let us escape his detection. Soon, he will return. Come.” Even his whisper was something of a growl. I disentangled myself from the rope, and together we crossed the supply room to the door. We eased through into nearly impenetrable dark, hearing the rain as a steady drumming, a hum like that of a huge refrigerator. Without it, Craig would have long since detected us—or
me
, at least. Adam could move as silently as a daddy longlegs racehorsing over a mound of warehoused cotton.

We crept past Blau’s huge office into Gallery One: a bleak, echoing immensity. A miserly kind of illumination entered via the horizontal windows at the top of the wall fronting McGill Boulevard. No paintings, installations, or sculptures. Abraxas was between shows, and the galleries reposed high above the street like empty boxcars. Gallery Three was even darker than the one in which we were standing. It had no windows. But from Gallery Two, the chamber in which Blau had shown M.-K. Kander’s upsetting photos, pale light spilled. It lay across Gallery One’s scuffed hardwood floor like a film of buttermilk, a liquid gleam in the dimness. Adam pointed at it. With his other hand, he clutched my arm. I imagined him clutching a habiline lieutenant on a prehistoric African savannah, giving directions for a life-or-death hunt, just as he gripped me now. What we did in the next one or two minutes would no doubt determine the outcome of our stalk.

Adam said, “I go to door. You make noise. He come out, I grab. This not work, you shout,
‘Bilker!
’
Understand?” I nodded.

Adam floated, making no noise, across the room, flattened his back against the wall, and twisted his torso to look into Gallery Two. Then he vented such a powerful cry that it vibrated my bones, bounced from the walls, and flooded the building like a dam burst of gasoline, threatening to plunge everything into a chaos of fire. Still yelling, Adam charged into the gallery. Without listening for them, my ears registered Bilker’s footsteps and belugalike snorts as he pounded upstairs to the third floor.

“You goddamn hibber!” a voice in the lighted chamber cried.

A gunshot barked, reverberated, pinged away. Fear forgotten, or submerged, I sprinted toward the sound. A two-legged blur in stained whites burst from the chamber, bumped me hard, and spun away from the impact as I crashed down on my tailbone and slid backward across the floor. Sprawling sidelong, I saw this figure disappear into the supply room through which Adam and I had entered.

As I tried to sit back up, Adam scampered in from Gallery Two, one gnarled hand holding his forearm just below the elbow. Blood glistened on his hairy fingers, oozed from the wound beneath them. He paused to regard me sitting on the floor, but his eyes danced frantically from me to the supply room.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“’Bye. Be back.” He hurried toward the supply room, and I shouted a warning that the other man still had his gun. As soon as I did, the figure in white reemerged from the supply room and fired several more shots into the gallery. Flames leapt from the stubby barrel like the sinister tongue flickers of a gila monster. Adam dove to his left, while I rolled over and over, praying the bullets gouging the nearby hardwood would not ricochet into my body. The gunman decided against trying to escape by rope and ladder, unlatched the big door between Blau’s office and the supply room, and slipped into the stairwell opposite the one by which Bilker Moody had just now reached the galleries. Adam, back on his feet, pursued the fleeing man.

Another gunshot sounded in the dark, this one from behind me. I ducked and covered my head. Two more shots bit into the third floor’s sundered stillness. I uncovered cautiously. Bilker had shot the lock off the door blocking his way into Abraxas’s main display rooms. He kicked that door open and waddled into view like a trash-compacted Marshal Dillon. “Why’re you sittin’ there on your butt, Mr. Loyd?” He blew on the barrel of his Ruger. “Where’d they go?”

“Down. Out. Lot of good that pistol of yours did us.”

Bilker looked about, narrowing and widening his eyes, to get them to adjust. The light spilling from Gallery Two seemed the major source of his discomfort. He shielded his eyes with his hands.

“Craig wounded Adam,” I said. “He damned near
killed
us both. And you, our armed protector, too late to do anything but shoot holes in a door. Good show, Bilker.” I got up. My coccyx felt like the tip of the burning candle of my spine. I put a hand to the seat of my pants and held it there, grimacing.

“Mr. Montaraz posted me downstairs.”

“You’re not there now. Craig’s getting away.”

“You think I’m fuckin’ twins, a upstairs Bilker to hold your hand, a downstairs Bilker to guard the exits?” He’d just lumbered up three flights, exertion equivalent to an average man’s doing the same thing toting fifty pounds of potatoes. Miraculously, he was not breathing all that hard. “I got one body, doofus. It don’t do simultaneous appearances at two or three different locales.”

“I guess not. Forgive me.”

“Mr. Montaraz’ll catch the sucker. The bastard’s doomed in a foot race.” But he had finished bantering. “Where’s Paulie?”

The question sobered me. I nodded at Gallery Two. “In there, I’m afraid. The scream you heard—it was Adam’s. Something in there set it off.”

Side by side, we entered the peculiarly shaped room. Bilker stared for several moments at what it revealed. Then he mumbled a threat against the perpetrator, backed away, turned, and trotted off after Adam and Paulie’s murderer. I heard him yank open the stairwell door and its wheeze as it shut behind him. Then there was nothing but the air-conditioner hum of the rain.

Evidently, Craig had brought T. P. up the ladder with him dead. He’d carried the kid in a cardboard box with makeshift rubber shoulder harnesses (pieces of innertubing) pushed through slits in the cardboard. The box lay at the far end of the gallery. It had contained a few other items besides my godson’s body—a sheaf of
Newsweek
covers, a package of blue balloons, a coil of rope, and a large fabric-sculpture doll licensed by Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia. From this female Little Person, Craig had ripped all the high-priced designer clothes, exposing the pinched knot of her bellybutton and the faint Caucasian flush of her fabric nudity.

I wondered what her name was. Babyland General gave them all their own names, no two alike, and Xavier Roberts, their creator, and his staff had once sent birthday cards to the dolls and their owners on the dolls’ “placement dates.” Many times at the West Bank, I’d had to fix a special plate for a doll whose pouting adoptive mother had refused to eat her own meal unless Abigail Faye or Dorothy Lilac was served something, too. We had made a little extra money from the intractability of these little girls, but the sniveling surrender of their parents and the sight of a moronic fabric-sculpture doll leaning into a bowl of chocolate chile had always galled me. Moreover, the supposedly individualistic Little People had cost seven or eight times what a poorer or less indulgent parent would pay for a plastic doll of comparable size—a doll like the one Craig had left in Nancy Teavers’s lap at the Unaffiliated Meditation Center on Euclid Avenue.

Anyway, this naked Little Person hung four feet off the gallery floor on a piece of nylon cord. The cord was tied to a movable metal track just below the ceiling. As naked as his female companion, Tiny Paul hung to her left on another cord. Both pathetic little figures were lifeless, the doll from the moment of its manufacture, Tiny Paul deprived of breath at an instant I could not estimate. Limp blue balloons clung to the mouths of both figures. Craig had stuck them to their lips with mucilage. Excess mucilage glittered on their faces like dried semen. Other limp blue balloons lay strewn about the floor as if the Great Inflator had lost either his faith or his mind. By contrast, Paulie’s minute penis poked out like the valve on a bicycle tire, mocking the flaccid bladders on the floor. I sagged against a wall and knocked four or five
Newsweek
covers to the floor. Dozens of repetitions of Adam and RuthClaire, above the legend
THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY
/
An Art in Militant Transition
, were plastered to the chamber’s walls.

That’s what Craig had been doing when Adam looked in, pasting up magazine covers, applying them with a hand-held brush and a solution of wallpaper paste. A Tupperware container full of the oatmealish goo was propped at an angle against the base of the door. Craig had brought everything upstairs with him in his cardboard box: murder victim, doll, magazine covers, cord, brush, wallpaper paste. A performance-art activity of fatal comprehensiveness, the ultimate existential Dadaism. I slumped to the floor, dragging more covers down with me. Fie on art. Fie on
THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY
. Fie on Craig Puddicombe.

Looking at my godson’s rotating shadow on the floor, and then at my own upward-jutting toes, I began to weep. This little piggie went to market, this little piggie stayed home. I studied my toes through a distorting film of tears. They were fascinating, my toes, each indisputably unique: Abigail Faye, Dorothy Lilac, Hepzibah Rose, Karma Leigh, and Cherry Helena. The other five had names, too. They were all detachable. You could unplug them from my feet and adopt them out to deserving amputees. Some of the sorry farts would treat them badly, of course, and maim them in unconscionable ways that made you ashamed to belong to a species possessing toes. Detachable little piggies suspended from gallows, so many innocent little lynching victims. . . .

Bilker had his hand on my shoulder. “You didn’t cut the poor little fella down, Mr. Loyd?” His voice was gentle.

“I was going to.”

“I’ll do it.”

A scruple surged into my murky brain. “Should you touch him? This is a crime scene, Bilker. Shouldn’t everything stay as it is?”

“The poor kid’s been away from home long enough as it is.”

I began to get to my piggies, my bare, dirty feet.

Bilker doubled a loop in the nylon cord above Tiny Paul’s head, inserted the blade of his pocketknife, and sawed at the cord vigorously. “Do I give a shit,” he said, “about the holiness of crime scenes? I’ve just blown Puddicombe’s fuckin’ face away. Which the Effin’ Bee Aye ain’t likely to be crazy about, neither.” He sawed and sawed. “And I’ll be damned if even
that
worries me.” The cord finally broke, and Bilker caught T. P. in his arms. “You want to hold him?”

Did I want to hold him? I must have appeared to, for Bilker brought the child to me and put him in my arms. He was cold and rigid, like a plastic doll. The small pudgy half-breed who had charmed Caroline in Everybody’s. The same but not the same. A shell. A gallery room without statues or paintings. Where had all the life gone?

And where was Adam? I asked Bilker.

“Puttin’ on his clothes. I tied a hankie ’round his goddamn elbow. It’s not too bad. C’mon, let’s not make him shinny up here after us again. He might pass out.”

I pulled the balloon off T. P.’s lip and dropped it into the container of wallpaper paste by the door. We left the galleries by the stairs that Bilker had earlier climbed and found Adam in the parking lot, fully dressed except for his shoes. He was holding his shoes with his fingers hooked inside their heels so they hung down beside his knee. As he stood in the middle of the parking lot, rain slowly filled the oily puddles around his bare feet. Puddicombe’s truck sat behind him with its driver’s-side door open and the driver slumped forward, his head between the open door and the steering wheel. The ladder once propped against the wall from the loadbed lay on the asphalt, on an impotent diagonal.