'Last Friday night he rents a car,' Reuben ventured.
'Yes,' said Natchez. 'To run away. To hide. He's in trouble with his loan sharks. A mouse in trouble with the snakes. He's got to stay in a little hole somewhere until he pays them off.'
'How will he pay?' asked Reuben, but he knew the answer before he'd finished the question. Natchez, smirking, lifted a heavy eyebrow toward his single Augie Silver canvas.
'It's so perfect,' the poet said. 'The mouse will pay the snakes with the money that some vulture will waste on a picture by a-'
Reuben interrupted to spare himself the pain and rage of hearing Augie insulted. 'You hate everyone,' he said.
It was not a question. Roberto Natchez did not bother to deny it. Rather, he straightened his back and appraised himself in the mirror, took his own measure as arbiter of all things. 'I hate weakness,' he said. 'I hate fakes. I hate people who think that by fooling themselves they can fool the world. I hate-' 'You hate Augie?' Reuben asked. Natchez paused, raised a finger in the manner of a preacher, then elected not to answer. He attempted a small ironic smile, but it stalled halfway through the muscles of his face and locked into a death's-head grimace. Reuben could not help falling back a step. The room suddenly seemed more suffocatingly close than it had been before, as if the air itself had melted away and left behind some noxious residue of stinging dust and the infernal swampy vapors of rotting vegetation. Reuben swallowed, his mouth tasted vile. With effort, he tore his eyes away from the poet's evilly contorted lips; he had to look at something else, anything else. His flitting eyes glanced at bookshelves, sooty windows, then came to rest on a wire cage standing end-up in a corner of the room.
The poet's gaze caught up with Reuben's, his grimace was transfigured to a scowl of diabolic pleasure. 'I catch chickens,' he explained. He paused, showed teeth, cinched in the corners of his eyes. 'Then I kill them. I wring their necks.'
'For food?'
'For moral exercise.'
Reuben blinked, recoiled. He felt shaky on his feet, he groped for some idea or image that would steady him and pictured the Silvers' yard, a place of sun and breeze and smells of living things. 'Why should a chicken die-' he began.
The poet cut him off, his scowl leavened but made no less horrible by the beginnings of a twisted grin. He moved toward Reuben, herded him to the door to be sure he'd get the last word in. 'The same reason a chicken should live,' he said. 'No reason. No damn reason at all.'
37
'Bad news,' Claire Steiger said, her voice weary and clenched as it crackled through the speakerphone. 'Lousy news. Peter Brandenburg smells a journalistic coup. He wants to do an interview with you, peg it to the auction.'
Augie was sitting on the sofa sipping tea and contentedly perspiring. He'd done a good day's work on the picture of Fred the parrot, the effort had left him feeling blithe and light. 'Was a time,' he said, 'you would have opened champagne on news like that.'
His agent ignored him. 'He wants to fly down there in the next day or two. Get the piece done fast, to run next issue. That means it hits the newsstands Sunday night and goes to subscribers Monday morning. Which means that by the time the auction starts at ten o'clock, the whole world knows you're painting again.'
Augie said nothing; it was all the same to him. Nina paced silently near the phone, concentrating less on her former boss's words than on her tone. There was something in it that Nina didn't think she'd ever heard before: a grudging acknowledgment that maybe she could not control events. At this, Nina felt a kind of triumph; she was not proud of the feeling, nor did it surprise her. What did surprise her was the flash of sympathy she felt as well: Take the ability to control things away from a person like Claire Steiger, and what was left of her?
'I tried to talk him out of it,' the dealer resumed. 'He went on a tear about how the critic has to stand above commerce and blah, blah, blah. It's not like Peter to get so righteous, so shrill. It's almost like he's being spiteful.'
'Why would he be?' asked Nina.
The agent paused, there was a seething helplessness in the silence. When she spoke again, something had snapped, her voice was both whiny and ruthless. It made Nina think of the terrifying girls she had sometimes seen in city playgrounds, remorseless girls who would fight harder and dirtier than any boy, biting and kicking and going after eyes with their fingernails and never saying uncle.
'He's a bitch,' Claire said of Brandenburg, 'and I have no idea what's on his mind. But Augie, I'm asking you one last time, please don't do this interview. Stall. Sandbag. Do whatever-'
Nina cut her off. 'Claire, there'll be other paintings, other auctions. Why not think about the long term-'
'For me this is the only one that matters,' Claire Steiger interrupted in turn.
'But if you're representing Augie's interests?' said his wife.
'That's just how it is,' the agent said. 'Don't ask me to explain.'
Nina paced, unappeased and unsatisfied. 'Claire,' she pressed, 'I think you should explain.'
For a moment the humid air seemed to oscillate, pulled first one way then the other by the tug of wills. But when the agent spoke again, her position had only hardened, her tone grown still more steely. 'Augie, Nina, there will be serious consequences, dire consequences, if this auction falls flat.'
'Consequences for whom?' pressed Nina.
Some static came through the speakerphone, but the agent didn't answer. Augie and Nina looked at each other, their eyes grabbed like only the eyes of longtime mates can do, affirming for the millionth time a concord much profounder than mere agreement. 'Claire,' said Augie, 'nothing personal, but your advice doesn't mean that much to me right now. We'll let you know.'
Pants are handy things but they never fit exactly right.
On thick-built men like Joe Mulvane, they tend to bind around the thighs, the back seam has an annoying tendency to crawl between the buttocks. When such men sit and lean forward, say, against a bar, the waistband of their trousers binds them in the belly, while at the base of their spines an unattractive gap appears and seems to tug their shirttails out as well as to create a natural channel for sweat to pour. A belt doesn't close the trench in back; it only presents a retaining wall that bites into the flesh below the navel.
About the only benefit a belt provided a man like Joe Mulvane was that it gave him a place to hang his beeper-and most of the time he wished the beeper had never been invented. He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar having an end-of-workday beer with Arty Magnus when the goddamn thing went off. Conversation died in a wide swath all around them; everyone had a morbid urge to listen in on the latest carnage when a homicide cop got beeped. Hogfish Mike Curran did a quick turn with his rag and mopped up condensation in Mulvane's direction. Even the gulls and pelicans standing on the nearby pilings fell silent for the moment. But the message was nothing gruesome. It was Augie Silver saying simply that he thought the two of them should talk.
The detective went back to his beer. A week before the summer solstice, the sun was still white hot at nearly 6 p.m. and cold beer seemed God's kindest gift to sweltering humanity.
Arty Magnus, reluctant journalist, felt a fleeting impulse to attend to the business of his newspaper. 'Augie Silver,' he said. 'The slightly famous painter with the dead parrot.'
'Yup,' said Mulvane, and left it at that.
Magnus nipped at his gin. He was a stringy guy, gangly even, and he liked the heat. He liked extremes. If you lived someplace hot, let it be hot. Let the streets melt, let exhausted air conditioners explode. 'Joe,' he said, 'can I ask you a question?'
Mulvane just looked at him without pulling his lips very far from his beer.
'Augie Silver-there something going on here I should know about?'
'That's two questions,' said Mulvane. He sucked the last of his brew and stood up so that the gap closed at the back of his pants and the cloth blotted the sweat that had rim down. In all, it was not a pleasant sensation. 'I'll see ya later,' said the cop.
