The 51 Tones of Green

You remember when Epstein's Adam was shown a few years ago," Palmer said. "People who had never been in a gallery before mobbed the place to see it. And when the Whitney had that Larry Rivers portrait of a man and his wife, nude in front of a crumpled bed – I've forgotten who they were, I knew at the time – the same thing happened. The place was crawling with art-lovers who didn't know the difference between a Peterdi etching and a Picasso oil. wandering through the rooms trying to look interested and wondering where it was. You remember?"

"I wasn't going to galleries then," Buccieri said. "And what is the difference between a Peterdi and a Picasso, in your view?"

"You look at a Peterdi print and you realize you couldn't do anything like that in 10 years of trying," Palmer said. "But you see some Picassos and you wonder if you couldn't do better with five dollars' worth of paint and some shirt cardboards. That's the way it is with me, anyway, shoot me in the morning for it, I don't care. But anyway, I have to tell you that Tascha's will be mobbed today, a fire-sale a-owd. I'm sorry you couldn't have come with me to the opening and seen it in peace and quiet."

"I don't mind," Buccieri said. "I want to see it anyway, because I know Hell-bourne."

"Sure," Palmer said. "Did you hear what Dorothy Kilgallen said yesterday? She said that the current definition of an East Side square is somebody who doesn't know who Ruth Mornay had in mind when she painted Portrait Lighted from Below."

They turned off Park Avenue onto 57th, moving in the sweet warmth of the kind of day New York knows once or twice in a good year. The clock over the sidewalk in front of the IBM building was reaching for three.

They came to Tascha's and went in. Bunched up against the walls in thick clusters were the viewers — serious, intent, their faces carefully masked in the uniform attitudes of detachment of people afraid that either enthusiasm or distaste will betray them.

"This whole show is Walter Bareiss'," Palmer said. "It's one of the best collections of contemporaries. I could show you some things, but there's no point with this mob milling around. We might as well go right upstairs."

They moved through, leaving a wake of soft "Excusemes" and "Sorrys" behind them. They came to the big street-front room on the second floor and stood in the doorway and there it was. There were 50 people in the room, most of them staring silently. You could hear the muffled sibilance of their breathing, the rustling of their clothes, and now and again someone would speak, and the words would rise in the air like bubbles and pop softly: "Astounding." "My God, how she must have hated him," "No, I don't like it. It's awful, its a horror."

They stood in the doorway. The painting was a big one; it had been hung fairly high, and they could see it clearly. The dominant color was green: someone had counted 51 tones oE green on the canvas. There was much gray, too. It was a portrait of a man seated at a desk in an office – nothing more, at first glance. But this was no common man, no common desk or office, and minute by minute as they looked they began to feel their skins crawl and squirm. The face was as old as a mummy's but bright with the rosiness of youth on the surface, and green in the pendulous folds of flesh. And it was all pendulous. His ear lobes dangled loosely, his lips hung like a Ubangi matron's might if someone wrenched out her expanding wooden plug. The desk at which he sat was old, old weather-beaten wood, worm-holed, gray-surfaced, but, again, green in the little sinuous valleys in the eroded grain. Its top was a witches'-cupboard of shapeless objects that slowly assumed form as they stared: a stack of paper-thin human bodies, flattened as in a steel mill, weighted with neat piles of gold and silver coins; pencils capped with tiny ivory skulls in place of erasers; a deep-framed painting, lying flat, was the ashtray, and a wet-ended cigar lay in it, hot ash burning into the pigment. A brass desk clock, ¦corroded green, faced outward on the desk. It had no hands. The young-old face of the fat man behind the desk smiled, a smile of infinite guile and infinite satiety. The intent of the artist was clear as gin: this was an octogenarian who brought to the implacable pursuit of evil the drive and the strength of a 20-year-old.

Behind him the wall was covered with paintings, frame to frame. They were all hung upside down, and draped across them was a string of paper-doll cutouts, hand joining hand, perhaps alternate men and women, but it was hard to tell, since they, like the miniatures on the desk, had been steam-roller-flattened. In the foreground was the figure that had brought the crowds: a nude girl crouched in the kneehole of the desk, and one of the man's feet, bunion-bulging in an impossibly shiny shoe, dug negligently into her at the waist.

"Aside from the detail, the imagination, the palette," Palmer said softly, "you must look at the composition. Look anywhere on the canvas and you'll find a line that leads you straight to his face, and it will take your eye across one separate detail, only one. Start anywhere on the canvas, you'll see this will happen every time. Everything leads to his face, and yet every single object in the painting stands out with almost equal force. If it's like anything, it's like an Albright, but she makes most Albrights look like something by Rosa Bonheur."

"It's unbelievable," Buccieri said. "It's an assassination."

Palmer shrugged. "She didn't like him," he said. "She really did not like the man."

"I've had enough," Buccieri said. "I'll come back, but for now I've had it all."

They came to the street again, and Buccieri blinked in the bright sunlight. "Thanks for suggesting we come over," he told Palmer. "It'll give me nightmares, but I wouldn't have missed it. You know, I hope I don't see Hell-bourne soon. I think I might go pale. I might gag."

They walked across town to the Plaza and sat in a window overlooking the park.

"I'm glad you didn't tell me before, at lunch," Buccieri said, "but now that I've seen the painting . . ."

"Oh, you had to see the painting first," Palmer said. He called a waiter. "Scotch and water?" he asked Buccieri.

"Sure."

"The way it began," Palmer said, "Ruth Mornay started painting when she was about 18. She's about 30 now, so that would be 12, 13 years ago, when she was in school. She had money, and she painted only for kicks. I met her when she was about 21, a strange, wispy kind of girl, not beautiful but sometimes strangely pretty, so that you almost thought she was beautiful. She did have a nice body, very nice, clear, paper-white skin, black hair, blue-black. She was shy as hell, moody, neurotic to the bone. She might not say anything for hours, and then she'd get on such a talking j;ig you wanted to shine a light in her eye and see if she'd been taking something in the arm. A virginal air, Ruth had, and yet if you bored her long enough, or offended her persistently enough, she might turn to you and say softly, 'Look, Mother, why don't you run over to the zoo and stuff yourself ' – you know. The girl had a rich, varied imagination.

"She ran around for a couple of years after college and then, out of boredom, I suppose, she got a job in an ad agency art department – Boswell and Perkins, they were big at the time. She stuck it out there a couple of years, and during that time she didn't paint at all. She was having an affair with one of the v.p.s and one night the fellow took her to a party at the Metropolitan, and that was the night it happened. That was the night she met Hellbourne.

"She told me the whole story herself. I was very fond of Ruth then – I still am – we used to go out together every couple of weeks and oftener than that I'd drop in to see her for a drink or whatever. She said she first noticed the old goat when he was all the way across the room. He was staring; you've probably seen him do it, it's his patent. He lays his eyes on a girl as if they were arms 12 feet long, and he'll do it for an hour if he feels like it. Somebody comes over to talk to him, he'll reach out and move them aside so as not to lose sight of the girl. You've seen him do it, everybody has.

"So he was giving Ruthie the treatment, and she thought it was pretty funny at first, but after a while she began to sweat a little; and about then some character took her arm and led her over to the old s.o.b. and introduced them. One of his macs, of course – Hell-bourne wouldn't walk to the elevator without a pimp in attendance.

"She'd about decided to spit in his eye, but when she heard his name of course she folded up halfway, and then he apologized for staring at her, told her he couldn't help himself. 'My dear,' he said, 'when you're as old as I am, and you think you've seen all the beauty the world holds, and then something utterly lovely presents itself to you – you stare. Out of surprise, you see, out of sheer wonder and surprise. I know, I know. You're thinking that I'm a fossilized old liar, that you're not beautiful. And you're right. You're not, in the common way. There are a dozen women in this room prettier than you are, but they look like magazine covers in a row on a newsstand, and you, you look like a Watteau portrait seen through a wisp of fog. Yours is the infinite beauty that is half hidden. Tell me instantly, who are you, and what do you do? ' "

"'I'm nobody,' Ruth told him, 'and I do very little.' "

"'I see,' Hellbourne said, 'and what did you used to do?

" 'I used to paint,' Ruth said.

"'Ah, now everything is explained,' Hellbourne said. 'You're an artist, and that's what I saw. You know, my dear, I've lived and worked with artists for 50 years, and I can sense the aura that is true beauty, the beauty that derives only from the creation of beauty. Where are your paintings? Where are they at this moment?'

"Ruth wanted to believe that he was parroting the time-tested line of an old, crinkled-face rouel, but my God, why should he be throwing her a curve? To her he looked 117 years old if he was a minute, his prostate not even a memory any more; too, she knew who he was, and what: a thing that might be said to be by Berenson out of Duveen, a colossus standing over the whole world of art, and she was intrigued. So she said she kept the few things she had saved at her apartment, and next thing she knew one of his stooges was whistling up the Rolls-Royce and away they went.

"Ruth had an enchanting little apartment in the East 60s; she gave the old beast some coffee and showed him her paintings. He seemed to be enthusiastic. Perhaps he really was. I had (continued on 81)the 51 tones(continued from 28) been, when I had first seen Ruthie's things. I think the girl had talent. She was almost totally unschooled, unless you can count a few semesters of 'art' at college, but it didn't matter – she had what we so properly call a gift. That is, she could do things she hadn't been taught to do, things she had no right to know how to do. That is talent, that's the gift, the free gift from God or whatever. I'm not saying that Ruthie's talent was of the first order, it certainly wasn't, but it was real and Hellbourne surely spotted it instantly and cataloged it precisely.

" 'My dear,' he said, 'I am going to do great things for you. You will hear from me.' He kissed her hand and he left her.

"The next day his chauffeur brought a note. She must come to lunch. Have you ever seen his place? I suppose it's the loveliest town house in New York. There is nothing in it – from the doorknobs, looted out of a doge's palace in Venice, to the English slates on the roof – that is not perfection, and of course there isn't a museum in the world that would not covet the art in that house. The one time I was there I counted three Van Goghs alone. There are two dining rooms, a big one on the second floor and a small one on the floor above, next to Hellbourne's sitting room, which is next to his bedroom. They lunched a deux in the smaller room.

"When I saw Ruth that night she was floating three feet in the air. She was, she told me, going to be the best-known contemporary artist in the world. Matthias Hellbourne had promised her. Notice she didn't say the best artist in the world, but the best known. That, I suppose, was the fatal flaw in the girl: fortune she was born with and fame was all she wanted. And I was astounded to find that she wanted it very badly – astounded because she had never showed that particular devil's hunger before. Still, it had been there. She told me that all her life she had desperately wanted to be sought after, to be known, to be famous. That was the word she used, over and over: famous. Nothing so unusual about that, of course, but when I asked her why, then, she hadn't worked with the persistence – the desperation that most people so hungry for recognition usually show – she said she thought it was because she so piteously craved to be famous: she associated hard work with the image of years of waiting for reward, and she couldn't bear to think of such postponement, she would dream instead. But now, she said, with the reward not only in sight, but just around the corner, she was going to work, and work hard. Hellbourne had told her that she must paint like mad, she must produce a show, and quickly. She was going to quit her job, drop everything, and paint.

"In a way I was glad for her, because I liked Ruth a great deal really, and I wanted to see good things happen to her. But I thought she ought to have a road map. and I told her a few things about Hellbourne. It was of no use. Nothing I said made any impression. I told her that he was, among artists, the most hated man alive; that he had ruined more talents and broken more hearts and stolen more money than any other dealer in history. She finally had to believe me, as to the facts, but even conviction made no difference to her.

" 'If I were beautiful, if I were Suzy Parker, or somebody like that,' she said, 'I might take it all seriously. But Matthias Hellbourne isn't going to do all this for me out of lust for my lily-white body. I'm sure he had hundreds of women, literally hundreds, years ago, when it interested him. You can't tell me that now, when he's 75 or whatever, he's embarking on an elaborate campaign for my seduction. It doesn't make sense. No. I believe what he says: he thinks I have talent and he wants to help me. Why not? What else is there left for him in life? He is famous, he has money, he has everything but the ability to create. To help someone like me, that's a form of creation, and that's his kick, I'm sure it is.'

" 'I'd advise you to plan for the unlikely eventuality anyway,' I told her. 'Supposing he does proposition you, then what?'

"She thought about it for a minute. If he doesn't do it too soon . . .' shesaid. 'Look, Pete, I wouldn't say this to anybody but you ... I think, there's at least a possibility that the dear old goat is in love with me."

" 'You're absolutely out ol your mind,' I told her. 'You're gone, you've lost touch with reality.'

" 'No, I'm serious. It's a possibility. And if he's sincere, if he really does begin to do the things he says he'll do for me, well, I'll go to bed with him if he wants me to. I don't think it would be the greatest experience a girl could have, but I'll do it. Actually there probably wouldn't be much more to it than holding his hand until he went to sleep.'

" 'Don't bet on that,' I told her. 'This is an unusual man.'

"A couple of weeks went by and in that time I had begun to hear things. One or two people told me that Hell-bourne had something up his sleeve. There was a line in one of the columns: 'Matthias Hellbourne's intimates hear that the great man has discovered another artist – female, this time, and fabulously talented.'

"I went around to see Ruthie one night. She'd been painting, all right. She was finishing a canvas every two days, she told me. What was the stuff like? Well, it was pretty bad. It couldn't be altogether bad, she had too much talent for that, but it was empty, it was dull, there was no emotion in it. The best of it was merely slick, smooth, technically clever; the worst was awful. She stood there chewing on the end of a brush, watching me. We were in her dining room, she'd ripped the furniture out of it and made a studio, and it looked as if she'd bought Arthur Brown out of paints and canvas, things were piled in mounds. Her smock was stiff with paint, she was wan and tired, and her eyes, they were a greeny color, really did seem to burn in the white skin stretched tight over her cheekbones. She had her hair pulled up tight. She's a tiny little thing, you know. She looked scared, and before I could say anything, she said, 'Pete, don't tell me it's bad or I won't be able to go on, and I've got to go on.'

"What the hell, I thought, let the girl have her ride. I'm not going to play deus ex machina, for all I know Hell-bourne can sell her on this stuff. So I tried to be detached. Not bad, I told her, not bad, and what I could legitimately praise I praised: a few bright touches, the fact that she had produced so much in such a short time, and so on. She was relieved, she kissed me and made me a drink.

" 'You can't imagine how hard I'm working, Pete,' she said. 'I get up in the morning, I don't even dress, I have some coffee and a piece of toast and I begin to work. Every day. Sundays.'

" 'What does the great man say about these paintings?' I asked.

" 'I haven't let him see anything yet,'

Ruth said. 'When I have 15 good pieces finished, then I'll show him.'

" 'So what else is new with him?' I said. 'We had a little mind-bet going, remember?'

"She clasped her hands together on her chest and shrugged, a sort of dismal, hopeless gesture. 'I lost that bet,' she said. 'A week to the day after I met him, I lost it. I didn't put up any great fight. I told you I wasn't going to put up a fight.'

" 'So how was it?' I said.

" 'I lost the second bet, too,' she said. 'I should have learned by now not to bet with you. He didn't want his hand held, Pete. As you said, an unusual man.'

" 'More,' I said.

" 'No, no more,' Ruth said. 'I wouldn't tell even you, and Lord knows I'd tell you anything. Anyway, it was just that once, and the next time – he took it for granted the next time, of course – I just told him no, and it's been no ever since.'

" 'He takes that?' I said. 'He's still going to make you famous?'

" 'Nothing has changed in him,' she said. 'Absolutely not a thing. The phone calls, the notes, the flowers keep coming; I see him every other day at least, and half the time I'm with him he spends trying to get me in bed again. He brings me clippings – Paris papers, art magazines in London, in Vienna, Berlin, Rome; it's fantastic, the things he can do, I'll show you the clippings. Every important critic in the world is waiting for my show. Oh, and he got me a dealer of my own, Hotchkiss. Hotchkiss I showed these paintings to, and he thinks they're sensational, wonderful. He raved for hours. He says he'll get me fabulous prices. So all I have to do, you see, is work, just work and work and work. Matthias says I must have 40 canvases for the show. It seems like a lot, but it isn't, not the way I'm going.'

"She pushed me out after that. 1 went away baffled. I walked around town for an hour, trying to make some sense out of it. I gave up, finally. I wondered if I really knew good paintings when I saw them. I must have been wasting my time lor the last 20 years, I thought. Maybe I'd lost touch with the trends. What else could I think? If Hellbourne had merely wanted the girl, well, he'd had her, why didn't he drop her? He hadn't dropped her, so either he knew, from Hotchkiss, that Ruthie's stuff was really great – I had assumed that Hotchkiss merely told her what Hellbourne had ordered him to – or else she was right, and he was in love with her. I couldn't buy it. He'd never loved anybody in his life except his mother, and you could get a contrary opinion even on that.

"I spent a couple of months in Japan that winter, and while I have no doubt that the writ of Matthias Hellbourne runs even that far, I was out of touch.

I can't read even kata-kana. I wrote to Ruth a couple of times, but she didn't answer. I put that down to the pressure of her work. When I came back, toward spring, I phoned her first thing, couldn't get an answer. I asked my partner if her show had come off.

" 'My God,' he said, 'you've really been away, haven't you?'

"Then he told me. Ruthie had had her show, in an unimportant little gallery on 72nd Street. It had been a disaster. Every first-line critic in town had appeared, but after they saw Ruthie's paintings not many had bothered to write reviews. Of the ranking New York men only Akie Jensen gave her a notice, and what he said was scarifying. He was brutal, unforgiving, destructive. Even in the junk Ruthie had ground out for the show he had been able to see her talent, and he called her everything but a charlatan for doing what she had done with it, and to it. And Matthias Hellbourne? He had appeared nowhere on the scene, my partner said, either before or after.

"I kept on Ruthie's phone until I got her, late the next day. Her voice was quiet and flat. She said I could come over, so I picked up a bottle of sherry and jumped into a cab. I was in a hurry. I suppose I expected to find a wreck, the poor girl in despair, drowning in a sea of cigarette butts and coffee cups. Nothing of the kind. She was pale, and thinner than I'd remembered her, but that was all. And the dining-room furniture was back. There wasn't an easel in sight. We opened the sherry and drank without saying much. I was glad to see her.

" 'I suppose you've had time to catch up with the outstanding events of your absence,' she said finally.

"'In a way,' I said. 'I read Akie Jensen.'

"'At first I did really want to kill him,' Ruthie said. 'Now I've got my sense of balance back. Akie's all right.'

" 'Where was the great man?' I said. 'That's what I don't understand. There's a lot I don't understand. Why an insignificant gallery on 72nd, for instance?'

"Ruthie stretched her legs out in front of her, rocking her feet on her heels to bang her toes together, and dumbly held out her glass for more wine. 'I don't really believe that Matthias did what I know he did,' she said. 'Nobody could be that monsterish. There must be some other explanation."

" 'That I doubt,' I said.

" 'The pattern didn't vary a bit right up to three days before the show opened,' Ruth said. 'That night he came up here with a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket of ice – you know him, he wouldn't put you to the trouble of taking out a couple of trays of ice cubes – and we sat around while he told me how adorable I was, and how talented,and how desperately he wanted to go to bed with me that very minute. I said no, just as I had been saying no for weeks on end. I was absolutely convinced that it was all a set piece, this yen of his. I admit I'd been surprised when he propositioned me the first time, and surprised again, when I got in bed with him, but I still couldn't believe he meant half what he said every day. And of course I knew, and so did anybody who could lead Cholly Knickerbocker, that he was seeing three or four other girls. Can you imagine, that old goat, 77 years old, trying to run a harem?

" 'Anyway, I patted him on the head and sent him home. Just before he left, he said, "I guess you really mean no, don't you, Miss Mornay?" The "Miss" jarred me a little but I made some gag, told him I didn't know if I really meant no or no no at all, and that was that. The next day I picked up a paper and there was his picture, at Idlewild climbing into a plane for Rome.

" 'I called Hotchkiss. It was a surprise to him, he said. But by the way, he had bad news for me. It would be impossible to open my show at Dreyfus & Dreyfus. Something had come up. However, he had been able to make an arrangement with the Smith Gallery, and he was sure I'd like it almost as well.

" 'I didn't say anything, or argue with him, Pete. I just hung up. I knew I was dead. Daddy-o had spoken. Daddy-o giveth, and Daddy-o taketh away.

" 'As' for what the critics said about my work, they were right. Akie Jensen in particular was right. Talent and no work. Ruthie Mornay, girl idiot. When I showed Matthias the first 15 paintings, you know, he said they were wonderful. I know now that they were nothing at all, just junk, but how could I know then? How could I deny Matthias Hell-bourne, when no one in the world would even question his judgment on a painting? To deny him, I'd have had to know his motives, and only someone with a mind like his could have known his motives, and is there a mind like that in the world?'

" 'Have you seen him since?' I asked.

" 'I talked to him. He was back in New York 10 days after my opening. He called me. He was sorry to hear the opening had gone badly, he said. Distressed was the word he used. He said it was particularly unfortunate in that things need not have turned out that way. I knew what he meant. It all came clear then: To say no to him was bad enough, but to go to bed with him once, and then never again – that was the mortal sin.

" 'It was a short conversation. He just wanted to give me another turn of the knife. I found myself hating him. I told him that I was solacing myself with a new lover who wouldn't let me sleep more than three hours a night – it happened to be true – and I said, "I wish I had met you before you became impotent, Matthias." Men who hunt have told me that sometimes you can hear a bullet hit an animal, and I heard that one hit Matthias. We haven't spoken since, naturally.'

"I poured some more sherry. I wasn't surprised. Hellbourne had done worse things. Back in the Thirties he supported Tomas Mobar for two years, kept him sober, and took every painting he did in all that time. Then he cut him loose, sent him back to the bottle and waited for him to die. When he'd been dead a few years Hellbourne pressed the button and began the build-up. He made over $200,000 on Mobar. So what he did to Ruthie wasn't unusual. For him, it was an easy, short-term project. He really would have made her famous, bad paintings or good, but she didn't have enough sense to go along with him, or not a strong enough stomach, so he smashed her.

" 'I see you've stopped painting,' I said to Ruthie.

"She shrugged, looking up at me, lost in a big black chair. 'Why not?' she said. 'I couldn't show a painting on a fence in Greenwich Village today. And that isn't all. I know now that I'm no good. I'm no painter. It's as I said to Matthias the night I met him: I'm nobody and I do very little.'

" 'You're wrong,' I told her. 'You still have what you had when you met him, and that was a lot.'

" 'Take me to dinner,' she said. 'And let's not talk about it any more.'

"That's the story," Palmer said. "Episode in the early life of Ruthie Mornay."

"How long ago was all this?" Buccieri said.

"Spring of '55," Palmer said.

"Well, obviously she did start painting again."

"She went to France. She used to write to me once in a while, and she said she was painting," Palmer told him, "but I think she worked all that time just on Portrait Lighted from Below. Next time you see it, look closely in the bottom right-hand corner and you'll see a Roman numeral VI. The sixth version, I think that means. She did it over five times, in other words. She didn't want to leave anything out."

"So she had the last word after all," Buccieri said. "She turned out a great painting, and the idea for it she got from Hellbourne. Everybody in town's talking about her now. She has it made, hasn't she?"

"Not really," Palmer said. He looked around the dark oak room, filling with the five o'clock crowd. "Most of us are sheep, you know. Everybody in this room is a sheep, I imagine: mostly nice enough people, hustling a little, trying to make a dollar, get a girl to bed, do a little work. If they don't make out, well, they can have a drink, take a deep breath, forget it. Hellbourne is no sheep. He's a killer. He doesn't forget much. When Ruthie finished the painting she sent it to a little shop in the 80s for framing. Hellbourne found out about it almost immediately, and he managed to buy it. It wasn't for sale, but he bought it. I can guess how, of course, so can you. One little twist of the arm. Anyway, Ruthie's framer told her he thought she wanted him to sell it. Hellbourne's stooge, whoever he was, gave him §1000 for it. The picture disappeared. Ruth was back in New York by that time."

"But it's at Tascha's now," Buccieri said.

"That's right, and Walter Bareiss owns it. One Saturday, just after closing, it showed up in Dreyfus' window. Just Portrait and nothing else. It stayed there one full week, with a price tag on it. Unheard of, you know, a price tag in Dreyfus' window. Bareiss bought it on the Monday, but he couldn't have it until the following Saturday. It had to stay in the window for the full week."

"What was the price on it?" Buccieri asked.

"Thirty-seven fifty. Thirty-seven dollars, fifty cents."

"My God!" Buccieri said. "I'd have thought Hellbourne would have burned it."

"Never. Don't be silly, he knew she'd just paint it over again. No, he was establishing the going price for Mor-nays, that's all."

They stood on the steps of the Plaza. The soft sun, westering, hung over the buildings across the park, indigo-edged in the failing light. A pretty colored girl, her back to the stone wall bordering the far sidewalk, lifted her arms with infinite grace to a boy's shoulders and held him away. At the corner of Fifth Avenue a cop's whistle blew and a tire screeched. A limousine pulled up to the curb. A boy, a man, a something in its twenties popped out, all in black, narrow-cuffed and svelte. He bent to look into the car, he spoke to a woman crouched in the corner like an ancient painted bear. "Sweetheart!" he said. "I'll call you the very first thing in the morning." He romped up the steps, one white hand flickering at his throat.

"I'm going back tomorrow and see it again," Buccieri said.

"You do that," Palmer said. "I'd like to meet Ruth Mornay sometime," Buccieri said.

A cab pulled in and Palmer started down the steps toward it.

"She'll be away for a while," he said. "Maybe by the fall she'll be well enough." He waved from the cab, and slammed the door.