by Robert Bloch
“You haven’t lost the grant?” His voice was accusing. She was dumb enough to do something like that. They needed that money to keep going. Arthurs wasn’t quite sure why the University of Colorado gave her a red cent for studying Pre-Raphaelite poetry, whatever that was, but he needed the money. After finishing with the three-headed Cerberus maquette, he could sell it for thousands and put them on easy street. Who wouldn’t buy the miniature of an entire mountain of sculpture known around the world?
“I haven’t,” she said angrily, “and that’s not the point. You’re the point.” Anita turned and pointed in the direction of the bedroom. “That’s the point, too. And so are they.” She puffed out her chest and Arthurs knew she was really mad at him. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
“They’re my friends. They need a place to stay.” Arthurs faced Jamil and the two men with him. They had returned at a bad time. Why did Anita always have to make a scene in front of his friends?
“Of all the places in Boulder, why do they have to crash here?”
“Please,” spoke up Jamil, seeing the problem. “You are upset. My friends do not speak the good English. Art has been kind enough to allow us to reside here. It is not for long.” The silent communication passing among the three Iranians was undecipherable. Anita was past caring.
“You stay, I’ll go. I’ll have my things out of here in an hour—if you haven’t welded them into some hideous sculpture weighing a million pounds.” She jerked free when Arthurs tried to take her arm. Storming into the bedroom, she slammed the door hard enough to send a shock wave through the apartment.
“Mr. Arthurs—” began one of Jamil’s friends, but Arthurs wasn’t in the mood to listen. He threw of? the welder’s mask and dropped the torch. He didn’t bother checking the tanks to be sure they were tightly valved down. Let the whole place burn—and Anita with it! She deserved it. She couldn’t treat him like this. He was an artist. A great one!
Marvin Arthurs stormed into the hallway, saw Jamil’s van keys on the table and scooped them up. He heard Jamil and the other two yammering away in Farsi. They were upset. Arthurs thought they had every right to be. Anita could be such a shrew.
He slid into Jamil’s battered maroon van parked at the curb. The key was the only thing about the van that worked well. The engine sputtered and sounded as if it were ready to throw a rod. When Arthurs got the van moving, he thought he was driving through molasses. There wasn’t any acceleration. He wanted to jam his foot down and roar off. Maybe he could find a pedestrian over by the university. He hunched over the wheel, thoughts of running down someone giving him a moment of savage satisfaction.
Driving aimlessly, he turned onto Baseline Road.
The sheer rock face of the Flatirons rose on his right. He wheeled the protesting van up the road to the Flagstaff Mountain lookout. He needed to be above the pettiness, the small minds, the people who refused to believe he was a great sculptor. The van gave out before he had gone a quarter of the way up the steep road. Cursing, he pulled over and got out, slamming the door as hard as he could.
Arthurs walked the entire way to the lookout. The cold wind whipping through the Rockies helped take away some of the anger, and he did enjoy looking down on Boulder and the mental midgets there. What the hell did they teach in that red-tile-roofed madhouse they called a university? No one in the art department would talk to him. They had even poisoned Anita against him. They must have told her she’d never get her damned degree if she didn’t dump him.
His watery blue eyes lifted from the city, and focused on distant Denver. They were no better out there. Almost two million people and they all conspired to keep him unknown. He’d show them, he’d show them all. His sculpture would bring adoring critics from around the world!
Marvin Arthurs, known to the world as Art. He would be art!
Heart beating faster, he started back down the road. He got to Jamil’s van and couldn’t start it. He pushed it out into the center of the road, then jumped in and let it roll. He got back to Baseline Road before the momentum died. The van refused to turn over. Earlier, this would have infuriated him. Not now. He had a mission. He knew his destiny.
Fame. Greatness. Those were his.
He pushed the car into a deserted lot and left it. Let Jamil fix it. He started walking. It took almost an hour to reach the tree-lined street where he lived.
Arthurs frowned when he neared his apartment. Police cars with lights flashing and military vehicles of all descriptions blocked the street. Arthurs started down the sidewalk but was barred by two soldiers carrying M-16’s.
“Secured area. No admittance,” one said.
“But I—” Arthurs clamped his mouth shut tightly. He had started to say he lived here and for them to get the hell out of his way. He saw the gurneys coming out of his apartment. Bright orange bags filled with bodies loaded down the wheeled carts. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“That’s classified information,” one said.
The other soldier sneered at the idea of anything being secret and said, “Iranian terrorists. Wasted three of the bastards.”
Frightened, Arthurs backed away. He didn’t break out in a dead run until he reached the end of the street. Dead. Terrorists. Jamil? Arthurs had known him at Brown University before he had flunked out. He figured Jamil had gone on to graduate. He hadn’t seen or heard from him until a week ago when he showed up with his two friends begging for someplace to stay.
He sank down, his back to a tree. He started tracing patterns on the street, using his finger to cast a shadow. Faster and faster he sketched, inspiration on him. The police hadn’t thought Jamil was a terrorist. Not really. They wanted him. They wanted to stop him from creating his masterwork. Anita might have called them. They’d all moved in unison to keep his genius in check. Poor Jamil and his two yammering friends had only gotten in the way.
He’d have to hurry. Without the Cerberus maquette as a guide, he’d have to create something else that would be too great for a mere police department, even one in league with the federal government, to ignore. Arthurs’ mind raced. What could he do? His finger worked harder, building shadow on shadow until a name rose to taunt him.
Christo. The Bulgarian Christ man. The one who always commanded attention with his artistry.
He could do better than the Running Fence or pinkly diapering entire islands in the Bay of Biscayne or the nylon curtain across Rifle Gap. Christo’s work was transient, but it was of the proper scale. Big. Magnificent. Arthurs could do better. He would do better.
Arthurs walked aimlessly, turning over one scheme after another in his mind. Walking along Pearl Street, he stopped suddenly, grabbed a pencil stub lying on the sidewalk and began scribbling on a wall. He quit only when the owner of the store came out and shouted at him. Arthurs walked on, more excited than ever.
“Art by Art,” he muttered. He stopped in front of an appliance store. Fourteen televisions blinked and flashed at him. The opening fragment of the news anchor’s lead story caught his attention.
“Three members of the Iranian Freedom Jihad were killed in a shootout at an apartment on Thirty-second Street this afternoon. Authorities refused to reveal details about the shooting, but KVKK news sources have uncovered that the three entered the country illegally two weeks ago, crossing the Canadian border near Banff. Being sought for questioning is the apartment’s occupant, Marvin Arthurs.”
Arthurs cringed. He hated the name Marvin. He was an artist. Artists didn’t have pansy names like Marvin.
“If you have information about this man, contact the Boulder Police immediately or phone the district office of the FBI.” Numbers marched across the bottom of the fourteen screens, but Arthurs had moved on.
They wanted him. They wanted him. He had to create! He wouldn’t allow the so-called authorities to prevent him from producing the greatest art the world had ever seen. How dare they try to stop him?
He roamed for hours until the streetlights winked on. Arth
urs dodged frequent police patrols on the city’s main streets. It was as easy to avoid the unmarked cars loaded with men in plain suits and grim expressions. He didn’t even have to see the white and blue government plates to know they were federal agents. And they wanted to keep his genius from the world. All of them.
Arthurs returned to Jamil’s abandoned van and crawled into it to sleep. He pushed against the curtain separating the front seats from the rear and, to his surprise, found the van filled with a large crate. Squeezing past, he slithered to the back where Jamil had made a small nest.
A rumpled blanket showed how Jamil had curled up and slept. Empty cereal boxes, bags and a few beer bottles marked what his friend had eaten here. Under a pile of potato chip sacks Arthurs saw the edge of a small spiral notebook. He pulled it free. He couldn’t understand the curlicue script on most of the pages. It might as well have been written in code, but the parts in English in Jamil’s precise hand made him read faster.
A map of Colorado Springs clearly marked NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain. But these had been crossed off with heavy black X’s. A smaller section carried the caption “The Second Big Blue Cube.” Odd footnotes about a spy satellite control center meant nothing to Arthurs.
Details on detonating the thirty-kiloton nuclear device in the van did, though. Any fool could have followed them because Jamil was a meticulous planner.
Arthurs licked the grease from inside several discarded potato chip bags. His stomach growled but a fire burned in his belly and brain. He knew what to do. He knew how to make all the damned critics—including that bitch Anita!—sit up and notice him. Marvin Arthurs curled up in the tight space on the dirty blanket, his head resting against the bomb crate, thoughts of creating irresistible art fluttering across his tortured dreams.
Arthurs awoke, feverish and afraid. He thrashed around, smashing his hand against the bomb. He recoiled, then calmed. His eyes fixed on the simple wooden crate. Reaching out, he placed a trembling hand on it, caressing it like a lover’s hair. Then he pulled back.
“I must work. Work. I cannot make any mistakes.” He found Jamil’s notebook and went through it page by page. The light shining in the van’s dirty back window fell on the pages like a laser. Only one line at a time was illuminated. That was fine with Arthurs. He didn’t want to miss a single detail.
As he read, he realized some of the Arabic snake tracks were done to keep prying English-reading eyes from secrets. The English parts were intended to keep Jamil’s two assistants from discovering that they were to be sacrificed in a funeral of fire, dying for the glory of the Iranian Freedom Jihad. These pages Arthurs hurried past. He lingered on those describing the blast range, the radiation release, the radioactive filth to be kicked up into the atmosphere. Jamil had intended not only for the spy satellite control complex to be destroyed, he wanted fallout to blanket Denver for years to come. With any luck, the entire Rockies might be overlaid with deadly dust, forcing the Air Force to abandon NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain.
Arthurs knew nothing of politics, except as it applied to his art. He had been denied NEA grants repeatedly. The thought crossed his mind that he might have been refused because of Jamil. How had they known he was friends with an Iranian terrorist? He hadn’t known that himself.
Arthurs shook off such a notion. They wanted to keep him in the ghetto. They didn’t want the world to see the splendor of his work. He let out a deep sigh. It was a pity to lose the Cerberus sculpture, but he dared not go back to his apartment. He might drive by and not see anyone, but they were watching. The authorities were everywhere, all searching for him.
Again he patted the side of the atomic weapon. He had no idea where Jamil had gotten it. He’d mentioned something about touring India. Maybe he had stolen it there—or been given it by the Indians. They never cared for the US, after all, cozying up to the Commies every chance they got. Arthurs felt a rage building. The Indians might have sent the bomb over to prevent his public from viewing his work.
The thirty-kiloton explosion Jamil envisioned in Colorado Springs would take all the attention away from Marvin Arthurs’ work, where it belonged.
A stub of a pencil wedged between the van’s floor and wall popped free. Arthurs began scribbling on the back of a blank sheet from Jamil’s spiral notebook. Radiation. X-rays. Set up a functional, if expendable, sculpture that focused attention on a bigger arena.
He chucked to himself, rubbing his finger across the now clean potato chip bag. Who needed to eat? He had his art to sustain him!
Arthurs went to work in earnest looking for the right place for the van—and his tour de force, his masterpiece, the sculpture that would bring him the celebrity his genius deserved.
Flagstaff Mountain was less than seven thousand feet high, but the Flatirons were prominent enough for his work. Marvin Arthurs eyed them critically, estimating height and width. They must be a full three thousand feet high. Rock climbers scaled their treachery throughout the year, several dying in the attempt each year. They rose majestically, inclined just slightly away from true perpendicular, flat, bare, barren rock.
Christo’s work was forgotten in a few weeks. It was nothing but gaudy nylon and rope and fencing. Arthurs knew how to create permanent sculpture, a work so vital that tourists and art lovers the world over would flock to Boulder to see it.
And it would be his work. No one else’s. They’d never be able to forget him after he unveiled it.
He wiped away the sweat on his upper lip and studied his stony easel. Then he set to work accumulating the material he would need.
Arthurs grew increasingly nervous. The police had been hunting him for three days. Jamil’s van was too conspicuous. But he had made progress. He had wood struts. He had damned near a square mile of thin sheet aluminum, or so it seemed as he lugged it out of the construction site where he had stolen it.
“Don’t need that much,” he told himself. “Just enough for Proud Aphrodite.” Arthurs glowed when he thought of the sculpture. His name for it sang lyrically in his ears. He wheeled through the steep streets of Boulder in a rental car, going past the university, searching for just the right spot to build.
“She’ll be worshiped by millions,” he muttered, swerving and cutting off a young woman in a battered blue VW.
She honked. He paid no attention. His eyes were on the Flatirons. He wouldn’t need the entire expanse. Just fifteen hundred feet. That would be enough to burn in his artistry.
Arthurs slammed on the brakes when he saw the rundown flophouse. His mouth went dry and his heart clenched like a tight fist in his chest. The brick building dated from the turn of the century; it was sturdily built. And it was the four stories he needed.
He fumbled for Jamil’s notebook and his calculations. Proportions and triangles and lines ran everywhere. He found the part about being 320 feet away to give the proper angle for the radiation from the blast.
“Here, here it is,” he whispered, as if touching a holy relic. His grimy finger traced across the page, smearing it. He lifted his finger slightly, letting the shadow delineate the angles and heights. “I need to park three hundred and twenty feet feet from a four-story tall building. And then Proud Aphrodite goes onto the roof!”
Arthurs fell forward, facedown over the passenger’s bucket seat when he spotted a prowl car cruising down the street. They were everywhere. And if he avoided the police, the FBI and CIA picked up the trail. Having to cut the CIA spy’s throat yesterday with the jagged piece of glass had bothered him. She had been so pretty. But she would have kept him from creating his art. She’d had to die.
Cautiously looking up over the dashboard, he saw that the cruiser had moved on. Arthurs jumped from the van and ran to the side of the building. He had thought about this for hours. He knew how to do it right. Finding the Flatirons was easy. They stretched up the mountain five miles behind the hotel. He started pacing, each step a precise one yard.
“One hundred six, one hundred seven,” he finished. He swallowed hard and w
iped more sweat from his face, in spite of the increasingly brisk, chill wind blowing down off the Rockies. His stomach growled in protest from not having eaten in days, but when he turned and sighted along the line the blast would follow, Marvin Arthurs knew the fast was worth it.
He parked the van as close to the spot he had marked as possible, then went to take a room in the hotel.
“Mister, I don’t care jackshit what you’re doin’ in there, just be quiet, will ya? It’s past midnight and people are trying to sleep.”
Arthurs hunkered down, his body protecting the frame for Proud Aphrodite. The hotel room was cramped. He had to move to the roof soon now that it was dark, but when he did there would be no turning back. Everything had to be precisely in place.
The irate clerk left, mumbling all the way down the hall. Arthurs heard the elevator clank in protest as it lowered the fat clerk to the lobby where he belonged. Arthurs smiled crookedly. Soon enough the clerk would become part of history. He would die in a fiery blast that both destroyed filth and created marvelous art. Arthurs wished he could tell him of his noble role, but he didn’t. Too many cops came and went. And the man across the hall might look like a derelict, but he had to be a spy for the military. There was a glint in his eye that didn’t go along with the vast quantities of cheap wine he guzzled.
They were everywhere and they wanted to stop him. But they were too late!
Arthurs peered into the hall. The only sounds he heard were the settling of the building and the soft gusting of night wind off the mountain. Dragging the wooden frame behind him, he got to the emergency door leading to the roof. He cursed at the time it took to file off the padlock. They’d put it here to slow him down. He knew it. It wouldn’t do them any good. It wouldn’t!
The sweat matting his T-shirt to his body dried as a sudden frigid blast of the ever-present wind tugged at him. Arthurs pulled the frame onto the roof and closed the door.