The Day Before Midnight

about thirty.

“Hi, my name’s Jim Uckley, I’m with Ridgley Refrigeration, we’re putting in the plant out in Keedysville. Listen, I had an appointment with your husband today at two and he wasn’t there. I was just wondering if—”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Uckley. Jack’s in Middletown. There was a breakdown in the high school heating system. The main duct split and he had to go weld it up. I’m real sorry if he missed his appointment, but sometimes these emergencies come up and—”

“Oh, listen, that’s all right. I understand. Would it be all right if I came in and—”

Herman put his hand on the Uzi trigger and drew the weapon to his shoulder. Let this man come in and he’d squeeze off a three-round burst.

“Mr. Uckley, have you had the flu this year? It’s horrible stuff. Would you believe that both my girls are down with it. Why, Bean’s been vomiting for two days. It’s a horrible thing. And the house is a disaster. You can imagine, with two sick children, how terrible it is.”

“Well, ma’am, I sure don’t want to add to your difficulties. Maybe you could tell your husband I’ll call him in the morning. It’s a pretty big job we have in mind, and we’d like to talk to him soon as we can.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Uckley. I’ll see that he gets the message.”

She closed the door.

Herman slithered to the window, peeked over the edge, and watched the young man mosey down the walk and climb into a little blue car and drive away. He raced to the back of the house and followed the car after it had turned up the block and headed on down to Route 17 and out of town. All right, maybe it’s just a man about a job, he thought as he lost track of the car.

“Yep, they’re there, you bet, I could almost smell ’em,” said Uckley.

“How many?” asked Delta Three.

“I couldn’t exactly ask,” said Uckley, who was feeling somewhat heroic in regard to his exploit. “So what have you got?”

“Three-bedroom house, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry downstairs. Stairs up front from the living room and out back from the dining room. Tough to crack with five guys.”

“Hmmm,” said Uckley. He was basically an accountant. He had an M.B.A. from Northwestern and had heard that five years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Embezzlement Division looked great on a resume, especially if you wanted to go into tax accountancy, where the bucks were. He was engaged to a girl named Sally and had been born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. He had begun the day going over the books of Mid-Maryland Federal Savings, where the vice-president had fled with over $48,000 in bank funds, looted from a variety of accounts over the past several weeks. The man had left with his twenty-three-year-old secretary, leaving behind a forty-two-year-old wife and three children.

“Tough to crack especially when we don’t know how many there are or where they are.”

“Is it best to infiltrate slowly or hit ’em with a rush?” Uckley asked.

“The Israelis like to go in fast, low, and hard. GSG-9 will wait until the cows come home, inserting their operators a lick at a time.”

“That’s a tough place to rush,” said Uckley. “You could stage from Mrs. Reed’s place next door, but nothing on the other side.” He looked at his watch. Time was really flying. It would be dark soon.

“So, who’s got an idea?”

They just looked at each other.

What am I doing here, Uckley thought. He wished he could concentrate a little bit better.

“Look, what about this?” said Delta Three. “We set off a smoke grenade in Mrs. Reed’s house, call the fire department. Say, you and me ride in on the truck, rush up the lawn. Except we hit the Hummel place instead. We’re in raincoats. Meanwhile Rick and Gil move in on the place from behind; they go through that back door, into the kitchen. We go in, yelling Tire, fire, you have to evacuate.’ We’ve got our pieces under our raincoats. Then we take ’em out.”

It was better than anything Uckley could come up with.

Megan Wilder took the tin can and put it in a vise. She spun the handle, watched the tin crumple. The can imploded and ruptured, achieving various interesting configurations of destruction as she drew the jaws of the vise closer and closer. It finally became a fully formed blossom of catastrophe, the light glinting in fascinating patterns off its tortured sides.

Quickly she spun the handle the other way, plucked the crippled thing from the vise’s grip, and took it over to a table. There she had several dozen other crumpled cans.

She stared at them. Some had collapsed neatly; there was something bland and banal in their demise. Others, like this one, had a curious inner vitality and force; they fought the jaws with every last shred of resilience. And when they died reluctantly, they died most spectacularly, forming orchids of broken metal. Of the dozens there were perhaps less than five that really touched her, that spoke to her, including the last one. She took them all to another part of the room.

Megan Wilder specialized in what she called “constructions” or, sometimes, “destructions,” depending on her mood and her honesty. Their form attempted to push out the boundaries of art; they would not fit into conventional categories. They were not quite sculptures, because although they occupied space and had plastic form, they had at the same time not escaped entirely from the tyranny of the frame and the organizing impulse of two dimensions. They were meant, in short, to be viewed only from one angle, and although certain influential critics had denounced this as cowardice to the tyranny of convention, she could not force herself to abandon it.

But neither, of course, were they paintings, although they depended for their impact on color as it defines form. For she implanted the twisted tin buds with other shapes that took her fancy — beer bottles, for example, the insides of burnt-out calculators, filaments from light bulbs, this, that, and the other thing, the detritus of American society — and stapled them inside rough frames and shelves that she had constructed herself, against a plasterboard backing. When by accident she found harmony, she destroyed it. She was interested in disharmony, the radical lack of symmetry and structure that somehow especially pleased her since Ari had left. Anyway, when she got these items arranged just so, she painted them. Not flat black like Nevelson’s bleak little masterpieces, but comic-book colors, hot pink, Popsicle orange, sunburst yellow, mashed- banana yellow, a rainbow, a riot of flat, harsh, hot colors. There were critics who also despised this. Color is dead, they had decreed, and it irked them that she hadn’t read their position papers. They could really be nasty, too, particularly one faggot on Art News.

It didn’t matter. Megan was really beyond other people now. After all the years and all the pain, she’d finally fought her way to her own private place. She’d finally found her own voice. It felt authentic and passionate. It satisfied her.

The work was going so well now, it was a shame it had to end. In fact, the imminence of its end gave it all a certain perishability and poignance that made her almost cry, something no man had ever been able to do, short of punching her, and both Peter and Ari had punched her. You could forgive Peter, he was an asshole genius with an IQ of about 900 and an emotional age of about eleven, but Ari had been different; she had expected so much more.

Thus when the knock came and she became aware of the shapes of men in suits moving around the studio, up on its roof, out back in the frozen garden, it did not surprise her, but merely filled her with regret. It had to happen sooner or later and it was happening sooner. What seemed to her tragic was that she’d never see the series of constructions played out unimpinged upon, untainted by the inevitable scandal.

“It’s open,” she called.

There were three of them, Gentiles, strong-looking older men without irony or outrage in their eyes. They identified themselves as something or other from the FBI; she immediately forgot their names and ranks. Their blankness surprised her. She didn’t see the need for it. People could be so cruel. They said she ought to call a lawyer. She didn’t feel like it. She just wanted to go on working, she was so close to being finished.

“Do you have a lawyer, Ms. Wilder?”

“I have an agent,” she said.

“It’s not the same thing.”