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about it. I mean, the great majority of art is religious.
The place was utterly devoid of life.
Indeed, it stank of insecticide. Of course, he had saturated it to
save his old wooden statues, he would have had to do that. I could not
hear or smell rats, or detect any living thing at all. The lower flat was
empty of its occupants, though a small radio chattered the news in a
bathroom.
Easy to blot out that little sound. On the floors above, there were
mortals, but they were old, and I caught a vision of a sedentary man,
with earphones on his head, swaying to the rhythm of some esoteric
German music, Wagner, doomed lovers deploring the "hated dawn"
or some heavy, repetitive, and distinctly pagan foolishness. Leitmotiv
be damned. There was another person up there, but she was too
feeble to be of any concern, and I could catch only one image of her and
she appeared to be sewing or knitting.
I didn't care enough about any of this to bring it into loving focus.
I was safe in the flat, and He'd be coming soon, filling all these rooms
with the perfume of his blood, and I'd do my damnedest not to break
his neck before I'd had every drop. Yes, this was the night.
Dora wouldn't find out until she got home tomorrow anyway.
Who would know that I'd left his corpse here?
I went on into the living room. This was tolerably clean; the room
where he relaxed and read and studied and fondled his objects. There
were his comfortable bulky couches, fitted with heaps of pillows, and
halogen lamps of black iron so delicate and light and modern and
easy to maneuver that they looked like insects poised on tables and on
the floor itself, and sometimes on top of cardboard boxes.
The crystal ashtray was full of butts, which confirmed he pre-
ferred safety to cleanliness, and I saw scattered glasses in which the
liquor had long ago dried to a glaze that was now flaked like lacquer.
Thin, rather frowsy drapes hung over the windows, making the
light soiled and tantalizing.
Even this room was jammed with statues of saints a very lurid
and emotional St. Anthony holding a chubby Child Jesus in the crook
of his arm; a very large and remote Virgin, obviously of Latin
American origin. And some monstrous angelic being of black granite,
which even with my eyes I could not fully examine in the gloom,
something resembling more a Mesopotamian demon than an angel.
For one split second this granite monster sent the shivers through
me. It resembled ... no, I should say its wings made me think of the
creature I'd glimpsed, this Thing that I thought was following me.
But I didn't hear any footsteps here. There was no rip in the fabric
of the world. It was a statue of granite, that's all, a hideous ornament
perhaps from some gruesome church full of images of Hell and
Heaven.
Lots of books lay on the tables. Ah, he did love books. I mean,
there were the fine ones, made of vellum and very old and all that, but
current books, too, titles in philosophy and religion, current affairs,
memoirs of currently popular war correspondents, even a few
volumes of poetry.
Mircea Eliade, history of religions in various volumes, might have
been Dora's gift, and there, a brand-new History of God, by a woman
named Karen Armstrong. Something else on the meaning of life
Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard. Hefty books. But fun,
my kind, anyway. And the books had been handled. Yes, it was his
scent on these books, heavily his scent, not Dora's.
He had spent more time here than I ever realized.
I scanned the shadows, the objects, I let the air fill my nostrils.
Yes, he'd come here often and with someone else, and that person ...
that person had died here! I hadn't realized any of this before, of
course, and it was just more preparation for the meal. So the murderer
drug dealer had loved a young man in these digs once, and it
hadn't been all clutter. I was getting flashes of it in the worst way,
more emotion than image, and I found myself fairly fragile under the
onslaught. This death hadn't occurred all that long ago.
Had I passed this Victim in those times, when his friend was
dying, I would never have settled on him, just let him go on. But then
he was so flashy!
He was coming up the back steps now, the inner secret stairway,
cautiously taking each step, his hand on the handle of his gun inside
his coat, very Hollywood style, though there wasn't much else about
him that was predictable. Except, of course, that many who deal in
cocaine are eccentric.
He reached the back door, saw that I'd opened it. Rage. I slipped
over into the corner opposite that overbearing granite statue, and I
stood back between two dusty saints. There wasn't enough light for
him to see me right off. He'd have to turn on one of the little halogens,
and they were spots.
Right now, he listened, he sensed. He hated it that someone had
broken open his door; he was murderous and had no intention of not
investigating, alone; a little court case was held in his mind. No, no
one could possibly know about this place, the judge decided. Had to
be a petty thief, goddamn it, and those words were heaped in rage
upon the accidental.
He slipped the gun out, and he started going through his rooms,
through rooms I'd skipped. I heard the light switch, saw the flash in
the hall. He went on to another and another.
How on earth could he tell this place was empty? I mean, anyone
could be hiding in this place. I knew it was empty. But what made
him so sure? But maybe that's how he'd stayed alive all this time, he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]