Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”
“Abraxas?”
Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes!”
Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.
“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”
“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”
“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”
“And if I don’t promise?”
Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.
“You give me no choice,” I said.
“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.
We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.
“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”
“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”
We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.
Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.
It had begun to rain, lightly. An ocean of upside-down combers rumbled above the treetops. Traffic was nonexistent, and the three of us trudged uphill on the margin of the street. The plummeting runoff had not yet acquired volume or momentum, our shoes remained dry, and the cooling thunderstorm seemed an ally rather than an enemy.
“Dristle,” I said. “That’s what Livia George calls a rain like this.”
“Very good,” Adam replied.
Bilker halted at the top of the hill. An elm-lined row of clapboard houses curved downhill to our left. In the dark, we could see Atlanta’s skyline, traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement between Abraxas and the city. The old school building loomed in the rain like an insane asylum from a florid gothic novel. Its studio annex perched on the downslope of the ill-kept property as if it might soon slide away, like a stilt-supported house on the California coast. Brooding. Medieval. (Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe would have loved the place.)
“No security?” Bilker said. “At a gallery?”
“The third-floor galleries are between shows,” Adam said. “So the studio wing is tightly locked.”
“Locked-schmocked. Folks will pick locks. This place needs round-the-clock security. Needs some lights on it, too.”
“Needs its grass mowed,” I said.
“No money for a guard,” Adam said. “No money for lights.”
I remembered that on my first trip to Abraxas, David Blau had griped about the current administration’s miserly treatment of the arts. Of course, Blau and his staff members could, and did, initiate money-raising projects of their own, but funding a security force had always taken a back seat to strong financial support for major new shows and deserving artists. For the two weeks of the Kander-Montaraz-Haitian exhibit, Blau had in fact hired a full-time security guard, but no one served that function tonight because there was nothing noteworthy to protect.
Adam said we must enter from the back. We crossed an asphalt drive that dead-ended forty or fifty feet farther on, and crept into the shadow of the print shop next to the school. We advanced single-file through soggy leaves and grass, hung a left at the end of the print shop, and wound up staring into the rear half of the facility’s car park. Trees closed off the back of the lot. Power-company spools and strange varieties of metallic trash showed in the gaps among the trees as mysterious lumps and silhouettes. Tonight, unlike in February, the trees’ branches were weighted with summer foliage, and the mist dripping through the leaves made the asphalt echo as if it were a basement drying room with dozens of frilly black-green dresses on its lines. We entered the shelter of a covered rampway leading directly to the main building’s rear entrance. From this ramp, we saw the whole parking lot and, straight across from us, the studio wing enclosing the lot on that side. Near the building’s door sat the only vehicle in the lot, a red GM pickup with its tailgate lowered. Whoever had parked it had placed an extension ladder in its loadbed so that the ladder cleared the rampway’s corrugated roof and leaned against the wall about twenty feet above the covered door.
“He’s here,” I said. “The bastard’s actually here.”
Adam shushed me. He told Bilker and me to stay under cover while he tried to determine exactly how Craig had entered Abraxas. Adam would go because he was less likely to be seen than Bilker or I. So, bending his back almost parallel to the asphalt, he did a graceful Groucho Marx slither that carried him to a crouching position behind the GM. He tilted his head to gaze up into the rain at the ladder and the wall. Then he Groucho Marx’d his way back to us and said that Craig had apparently climbed to the full extension of the ladder and then thrown a rope with a grappling hook into the barnlike window on the building’s third floor. This window belonged to a vacant supply room across an interior corridor from the curator’s office. The grappling hook was still caught on the sill, the rope from it dangling down a foot or two below the top of the ladder. Craig probably did not intend to use it again, though, because he could far more easily come down the stairs and let himself out the back than risk the slippery rope and the slippery ladder by which he had gained entry.
“We ought to call the house,” I said. “Tell Niedrach.”
“No. Up there, Mister Paul, I am going now.” Adam took a key from his trouser pocket and gave it to Bilker. “Go inside and guard the stairs so that, by them, the villain does not make successful his getaway.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Following me up is okay and probably silenter than taking stairs. Or wait down here. I am happier, though, should you come.”
“Why?”
“Morale support: To subdue young Puddicombe may take two of us—someone to bludger him, someone to rescue Tiny Paul.”
“Then you’d better let me do it,” Bilker said.
“I fear you’re too heavy,” Adam said. “Paul is much lighter.” He looked me over a tad grimly. “By comparison.”
I was scared. Neither Adam nor I had a firearm. Bilker would have the Ruger, of course, but he would be standing in the downstairs corridor waiting for Craig to come to him. Craig might not choose to do so. He’d have a weapon or two of his own, and if Adam and I bumbled into him in the galleries, he would not hesitate to cut us down. More important, if he had rappeled up the wall after climbing the first third of the way on his extension ladder, could we expect him to have T. P.? Our chances of retrieving the child alive dwindled by the moment. I think even Adam knew that.
To Bilker’s and my surprise, the habiline shed his clothes. He pulled off his shoes, shimmied out of his trouser
s, 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 G
allery 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.
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