The Art of the Devil

by John Altman

  But during the third reel, he abruptly changed his mind. Right at the film’s best moment, just as Natalie Wood raised her arms to start the race and James Dean revved the engine of his Mercury Coupe, Buddy realized that he was too distracted to enjoy the show, aces though it was. That feeling that the guy would kill him as soon as look at him was back, fresh as it had been the day before. If Buddy double-crossed the man, he would live to regret it … or worse, he wouldn’t live to regret it. Either way, he would start jumping at shadows, scared to turn every corner. It wasn’t worth it. Beside, a deal was a deal – and a hundred extra bucks was nothing to sneeze at.

  That was how Buddy found himself, at a few minutes before noon on Tuesday, seated on the bench in Lincoln Square, guitar in tweed case by his side, looking for a girl he’d never met.

  Elisabeth’s cool turquoise eyes ticked past a family of four, past a businessman chasing a hat caught in the wind, past a clutch of shop girls looking for a patch of sun in which to eat their lunch – and then backtracked to the greaser, sitting on the bench on the far side of Lincoln Square, unaware that he was being observed.

  For a moment, her gaze lingered. Her contact was nowhere to be seen. The greaser was an unknown quantity. But he had the guitar at his feet and seemed to be waiting to make the trade-off. A trap?

  After dallying briefly, her gaze slid back into motion. The lunchtime crowd was growing ever thicker. Workers from nearby shops and hotels mingled with tourists and newspapermen, all determined to enjoy what one might reasonably expect to be one of the last pleasant days of the year. She saw a pair of well-dressed journalists with press cards stuck in the brims of their hats, an elderly man sitting on a bench and whittling with a penknife, and a trio of young girls writing in notebooks. Brow knitted, she followed vehicles – a sea-blue Dodge Royal, a red Chieftain, a green Hudson Hornet, a white Pontiac – entering on the Chambersburg side of the square and being funneled around the one-way traffic circle. She registered patrons moving into and out of the Plaza Restaurant, and tourists stopping to read a burnished plaque near the door of the Hotel Gettysburg.

  Checking back in with the greaser, she saw no change of note. Returning to the flow of traffic, she assimilated a new parade of cars … beige Ford, yellow Mercury, brown Airflyte with white-walled tires … but no sign of anyone else watching the bench. If it was a trap, she wasn’t finding evidence.

  The old clock ticked to twelve noon; distant church bells rang.

  Either she took a chance and approached the bench now, or she risked missing the appointment.

  Her weapon was right there in front of her, awaiting retrieval.

  Raising her chin, she stood and walked boldly toward the bench, into plain view of the waiting greaser.

  Seeing her coming, he reached down and picked up the guitar. She gestured for him to set down the case by the bench, where she could retrieve it and move on without exchanging a word … but he not only ignored the gesture, he stood to meet her: a rank amateur.

  ‘Aren’t you a doll,’ he said loudly. ‘Nobody told me—’

  She grabbed the case and walked past without a word of acknowledgement.

  She could feel his amazement; but already she was moving away, swiftly, without a backward glance.

  The road between Gettysburg and the Eisenhower farm ran straight – except for a single sharp curve around an immense, ancient oak.

  For the past twenty-four hours Richard Hart had sat parked behind this oak, peering through a thick screen of branches. At first, he had stiffened every time a car drove past. At last he had accepted that behind his partition of branches, behind the wizened old trunk, the stolen Chevy was invisible. He was safe.

  But the night had been cold. His leg ached; and early that morning, if it had not been his imagination, he had caught the overripe stink of decay coming from beneath the dressing on his right arm. Except for a single break to relieve his bladder, he had not left the car for a full day. Around midnight, he had finished the last of the food taken from Myron’s apartment. The final cigarette had been smoked two hours later. More foresight, he realized now, might have helped matters. But every second spent out in the open seemed to be asking for trouble.

  These thoughts came and went, subsumed beneath a larger truth:

  Isherwood must die.

  Far away, near the vanishing point, a silhouetted figure appeared on the road.

  Hart squinted. He had been expecting this figure ever since sighting the girl walking into town, four hours before. Indeed, it was she, returning. And she carried the bulky black guitar case. The greaser had done his job. The youth would no doubt be disappointed, upon returning to the motor court, to find Hart and thus the rest of his payment gone; but by then it would be too late for him to interfere.

  Hart watched the girl walk past. She looked calm, with her bell of blonde hair bouncing around slim shoulders in time with her stride. Then she was moving away, and he was alone again with birds and squirrels and pain and hunger and incongruously lovely late-autumn foliage opening overhead in a colorful canopy.

  Minutes passed. Drowsily, he pinched a fold of skin inside his elbow between two fingers, startling himself awake again: an old trick from his war days. He wanted a cigarette. He wanted to piss. He wanted a drink of water. He wanted to impress the senator. He wanted to give the girl the chance she would need. He wanted clean hands, free of blood. He wanted to wind back the clock, one year, two, three, before any of this had happened … but most of all, he wanted Isherwood dead.

  The burr of an approaching engine. Again he squinted, peering owlishly through the screen of branches.

  There: the Packard Mayfair.

  His target, at last.

  Steeling himself, he reached for the Chevy’s starter button.

  The road turned into a bend ahead.

  Isherwood headed into the blind curve without slowing – and then jammed his foot against the brake, twisting the wheel, cursing hotly.

  The Mayfair slammed into the Chevy at forty miles per hour.

  Shuddering from grille to tailpipe, the car bucked violently. Inside, Isherwood bounced commensurately, slamming his head against the roof hard enough to set off starbursts behind his eyes. His already-wounded shoulder jostled hard, bolting pain down his chest and back. The windshield buckled, sagging inward.

  The world turned dark.

  By degrees, light filtered back in.

  Blinking, he reached up to rub his jaw. He couldn’t remember where he was, or how he had gotten here, or what had happened to his face – had somehow slugged him? He was surrounded by steel and glass, and outside the steel and glass, steam hissed and dust settled. Bright-red paint had been splashed everywhere.

  Presently, it dawned on him that the steel and glass and pumping steam around him belonged to a car. Working backward, putting the pieces together, he deduced that he had been in an accident. That made the red paint splashed everywhere not paint at all, but blood – his blood.

  The radiator was mangled; hence the jetting steam. And his jaw was also mangled – and that was where the blood was coming from. Unless, of course, it was coming from the top of his head, which throbbed painfully. Shoulder, face, breastbone, ribs: throbbing, throbbing, throbbing. Keeping track of all the pain suddenly gave him a terrible headache. He decided to take a break from thinking and simply sat, looking dumbly at the blood dripping slowly down the inside of the craggy windshield, letting moments pass, trying to hold on to consciousness.

  Ballooning dust seethed around him. Steam kept squirting. Blood trickled from his mouth and cheeks, off his chin. He looked to his left and saw a pretty autumn day, a forest quiet with shock. He looked, in slow motion, to his right; on the way, his gaze passed the wrecked Chevy into which he had plowed. The car had been accordioned by the blow and pushed a few feet down the road. Why had the goddamn asshole driver parked across the road like that? Right around the blind curve, too. Almost as if he had meant for this to happen—

  Hart.
>
  But where? Through the veil of dust and steam, Isherwood could see that the seat behind the Chevy’s steering wheel was empty.

  His gaze moved to the rear-view. There was Hart: materializing from the woods, shambling forward on one crutch. In his left hand the man held a gleaming revolver, aiming into the wrecked Mayfair.

  Eyes widening, Isherwood threw himself down, grappling for his pistol in its holster.

  Richard Hart lurched forward, crutch beneath right arm, Colt Python in left hand, blasting .357 Magnum shells mechanically into the stalled-out ruin of the Mayfair – blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam – until the six-round cylinder clicked empty.

  Then he jammed the gun into his waistband, taking care to keep a layer of cotton between hot barrel and bare skin. He removed the scalloped blade, in case a coup de grace proved necessary. He came up alongside the driver’s side door, crumpled open. Agent Isherwood was slumped across the Mayfair’s wheel, bleeding heavily from a wound to the temple and another to the shoulder, and another near the mouth and another by the ribs. The man’s right hand rested in his lap.

  Inside the hand, a gun barrel glimmered.

  Without lifting his head, Isherwood fired a bullet into Hart’s stomach from point-blank range.

  Hart staggered back. Dropping the knife, he drew the Python again and tried to return fire – but the chamber was empty, and the hammer snapped ineffectively.

  Clasping a hand over his bleeding belly, Hart looked down. Large pallid worms slithered between his fingers. After a moment, he realized that the worms were his intestines. He tried to hold them in, dropping the Python and bringing his other hand into play, but as he kept backing away, his intestines kept slithering out between his fingers, splattering against the unpaved road.

  He lost the crutch. Swearing, he fell onto one knee. How had this happened? His plan had been simple and direct. He had made no mistakes.

  Here came the pain in earnest: a terrible white-hot agony, which drew a sheer red film down over his eyes. Just one bullet against his six, but evidently it had hit something vital, opening his gut in the process like a can of soup. He waited for the red film to withdraw so that he could get back on his feet, finish Isherwood, and clean up after himself – the knife and gun and crutch and spent shells would need to be collected before he made his escape – and then get the fuck out of here. And perhaps this time he would not report back to Charlottesville. Perhaps the time had come to seek brighter horizons elsewhere, away from Senator Bolin.

  He vomited a thin stream of gruel across the road’s shoulder.

  Steam and dust were everywhere. As he watched, squinting through an ever-thickening crimson curtain, a first lick of flame leapt behind the fog. The image was slanted sideways now, because Hart’s head had lowered completely to the ground. Blinking, he opened his mouth. The only sound his parched lips could produce was a reedy whisper. You know what they say about a boy who can’t whistle …

  Listening to the venting steam and crackling fire, feeling the warmth of wintry sun against his cheeks, he let his eyes close.

  A scraping sound made them open again.

  Francis Isherwood was dragging himself from the burning Mayfair.

  Hart felt a thump of admiration. Shot, butchered, bloodied – but the man was still going.

  Watching Isherwood, he found within himself an untapped reserve of will. He tried again to stand, even though he felt a slippery release of intestine as his reward. His fury was so hot as to push back even the pain. Tottering, he tried to regain the knife. It was still not too late to correct his failures.

  But his body refused to cooperate; he collapsed back to the road with a sigh. A new sound reached his ears, below the stealthy crackle of fire and the diminishing hiss of steam – the voice of the old gypsy fortune-teller, from the fairground in his native Ohio. Mingled with the stinks of spilled oil and burning fabric and peeled rubber wafted the slaughterhouse scents of blood and death. And entwined with them, forming a macabre confection, the enticing odors of corn dogs and cotton candy and popcorn and frying peppers, of youth and endless summers and illimitable promise …

  You see here, how the ominous line crosses the lifeline – a short life, this one. A pity.

  He gave another sigh. He let his eyes drift shut again. The fairground was waiting just ahead. The venting steam belonged not to a ruined engine, he realized then, but to an old-fashioned calliope, playing a merry old tune, beckoning him forward.

  NINETEEN

  The sky overhead remained a pristine chalky blue; but inside Elisabeth’s mind, storm clouds were gathering.

  Moving toward the front gate, she tried to swing the guitar case with a jaunty negligence – as if she was well-rested and calm and carefree, as if dark clouds were not filling her head. But she found herself unable, as she approached the gate, to look the guard directly in the eye. Instead, she concentrated on a large prominent nose beneath industrial spectacles.

  Finding a smile that in reality probably came off more like a baring of teeth, she closed the distance. ‘Hi.’

  Stepping down from the booth, he searched her with slightly more than professional interest. Finishing, he turned his attention to the black case. ‘Guitar?’ he asked.

  She shrugged lightly. ‘Surprise Christmas gift for Josie. Don’t spoil it by telling.’

  ‘Let’s take a look.’

  She handed over the case. He set it on the gravel driveway and hit the catches. For a moment he admired the guitar in silence; then he nodded. ‘Very nice.’

  When he took out the instrument, her breath caught. But he seemed only approving, not suspicious. ‘Nice,’ he said again. ‘Very nice. I play a little myself, you know …’ To prove the point he straightened, leaning against the guard booth, and strummed a few chords. After adjusting the tuning of the highest two strings, he strummed again. Without warning he burst into song: ‘Oh, some people say a man is a-made out of mud, a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood; Muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong …’

  She managed to keep smiling. ‘What a lovely voice you’ve got!’

  He blushed with surprising force, tucked the guitar back into the case. ‘Great gift,’ he said. His voice cracked on the last syllable, and suddenly she realized that this man was sweet on her. If she had not been so distracted, she would have seen it earlier. ‘Josie will love it. And our ears won’t bleed after listening to her play. Hide it in your room and don’t let anyone see it until Christmas Day! Don’t worry – your secret’s safe with me.’

  Inside the herdsman’s home, she climbed the stairs quickly.

  Cursing the lack of a lock on the bedroom door – Dunbarton’s insistence – she pushed the guitar under the bed until the case encountered the wall. Briefly, she considered using a pillow to block it from view; but that might attract attention. Better to trust the shadows. It would be a matter of small time anyway.

  Sitting on the bedspread, she tried to shove back the encroaching mental thunderclouds and form a plan of action. Afternoon had not yet turned on its axis toward evening. Enough daylight remained for her to assemble the rifle and take the shot now. But the optimum time to fire would be morning, when the sun, due east to anyone standing on Farm One, would give her essential extra seconds of confusion.

  Haste will be your downfall.

  She bit her lip hard enough to draw salty blood.

  A dainty knock on the door; then Josette allowed herself entrance without waiting for permission. ‘Do you ever have the feeling,’ she asked as she came in, ‘that you’ve been waiting so long for something that you slept right through it?’

  Elisabeth fixed a smile onto her face.

  ‘That’s how I feel today.’ Josette plopped down beside her on the bed. ‘In a way it’s a marvelous feeling though, because I know it’s not true. What did you find out from the travel agent?’

  Elisabeth paused. She had forgotten her promise. ‘Josie – they were closed.’r />
  ‘What?’

  ‘I meant to get back later in the day. But time just ran away with me.’

  Josette gave her a black look. ‘Time,’ she repeated, ‘just ran away with you.’

  ‘I had errands to run.’

  ‘Errands to run.’

  Elisabeth shrugged.

  ‘Libby,’ said Josette after a moment, gravely. ‘Sometimes I wonder about you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t make a big fuss. On your day off you can swing by and—’

  Josette stood. The mattress sighed relief. ‘I can read between the lines. I told you: I may be a lot of things, but I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Josie—’

  ‘If you really wanted to go with me, you would have done this. So I guess you don’t. But that’s all right.’ She wiped an easy tear from one round cheek. ‘Better to find out now, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re making too much out of this,’ said Elisabeth.

  Deep creases appeared on Josette’s face. ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ she said.

  Turning, she let herself out.

  Stonily, Elisabeth watched the door, waiting for the girl’s return. Twenty seconds passed; forty; a minute. At last she released a strained breath. This proved the point. During daylight, behind an unlocked door, there was insufficient privacy to assemble the rifle.

  She changed into her Viyella robe and then went to draw a bath in the second floor’s free-standing, claw-footed tub. When she eased into the scalding water, her back and legs unclenched gratefully. Pushing wet hair out of her face, she settled deeper. She soaked until her entire knotted body relaxed, releasing tension in a spasm. Then she toweled off, returned to her room, collapsed across the bedspread. Her muscles oozed; her breathing was rapid and shallow. She found her still, calm center and tapped into it.