Two days after Chance and Fitz pay me their nocturnal visit I go to see Rachel Gold. It’s been a long time since we have had any contact. I think she has phoned several times; the telephone rang so persistently, so doggedly, I concluded it had to be either her or Fitz, and I didn’t want to speak to either of them. But now, cornered by my conscience, I ride a streetcar to her pink stucco apartment building with its Spanish courtyard. It’s as if when my illness, my fever broke, something broke loose in me too, sending things floating to the surface, things I have to deal with.
My knock gets no answer, despite the fact I can hear somebody moving around inside. I bang the door, loudly.
“Pedlar begone!” she shouts imperiously.
“It’s me, Rachel. Harry. Open up.”
The sound of rapid, thudding footsteps and the door is flung open. She’s wearing a Chinese-looking robe, red dragons on a black satin ground. She is barefoot and the famous black hair is alive. So is her face, registering shock at my appearance.
“God, Harry, where’ve you been? Why haven’t I heard from you? What’s happened? You look like hell.”
“I’ve been sick,” I say curtly, inviting myself in, walking past her.
She trails concern after me into the living room. “You look like you could use something to eat. I’ll make you something to eat.”
“No, I don’t want anything to eat.” I sag down into an armchair. I’m nervous because of what I’ve come to say; my eyes drift around the apartment, avoiding hers, the anxiety in her face. “This won’t take long. I have something to tell you. And a favour to ask.”
“Shoot,” she says. I hear her settling on the sofa across from me. I’m reluctant to start; a strained, expectant silence forms.
“Harry, look at me.”
I do.
“What’s the matter?”
I begin, “Remember that day on the beach? When you told me I had to decide? Well, I’ve decided.”
“What have you decided, Harry?”
“I acted on impulse that day and I made a fool of myself. I’m sorry, but I’m acting on impulse again. There’s something that’s been eating at me. Something I didn’t tell you. About Chance.”
She shoots me a penetrating look. “What didn’t you tell me about Chance?”
I want to make this clear. “I’m not taking revenge on him,” I continue awkwardly, “and the last thing I want to do is hurt you, but I think you have a right to know.”
“Forget the pussyfooting. Out with it.”
“Remember what you said about Fitz in the Cocoanut Grove -that he was an anti-Semite?” I hesitate. “Well, so is Chance. In earnest. I’ve heard him say things.”
Rachel stiffens visibly, someone prepared for a slap in the face. She knows what is coming. “What kind of things?” she demands, voice brittle.
“Don’t ask me to spell it out. Take it from me. You don’t want to hear.”
Rachel draws the robe a little tighter around her shoulders. “A drink might help take the bad taste out of my mouth,” she says disgustedly. “Unfortunately for me, I quit drinking.” Her lips twist slightly, struggling to summon up an ironic smile. “But looking on the lighter side, maybe this cloud has a silver lining. When I hand the son of a bitch my resignation, I’ll be free to write that novel I’ve been threatening the public with for as long as you’ve known me.”
“Sure.”
“But I won’t,” she says quietly, more to herself than me.
I don’t contradict her. We both know she’s right on that score. Rachel says nothing else, sits absolutely still and quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She glances up at me. “That’s the second time you’ve said sorry this afternoon, Harry. Don’t be a parrot.” She moves now, abruptly, leans over and plucks a cigarette from a lacquer box on the coffee table, lights it with a flick of a match. Rachel back to business, the decisive close to a distasteful subject. Chance dismissed like a fly. “You mentioned a favour,” she says, shaking out the match, tossing it into an ashtray. “What is it?”
“I want you to visit my mother.”
Her eyes lift quizzically. “Of course. When would you like to go?”
“Not the both of us. Just you.”
She scrutinizes me closely. “Now what the hell is all this about?”
It seems lately there are no clear explanations. The best I can offer is, “I can’t face her right now.” I lay my hands on my kneecaps and watch them shake there uncontrollably.
“You’re a mensch, Harry. A mensch doesn’t abandon his mother,” she says sternly.
That word, whenever she used to apply it to me, would make me angry and envious. I would have preferred to be one of her gigolos. Now it fills me with despair. The debris of a lot of mistakes has floated to the surface in the past couple of days. It seems I have a long history of betrayals. “I let her down once before, Rachel,” I whisper without lifting my eyes. “You know what she asked me just before I left to come down here? To buy her a new dress so I could pick her out from all the rest of those drab women on the ward the next time I visited. She sensed I was running out on her. Knew it.”
“Or you think she did.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to let her down again. My money’s going fast. What if she ends up in one of those goddamn state-run asylums?”
“Stop this, Harry,” she says.
“But don’t you see?” I look up, plead with her to understand. “I can’t let that happen.”
“I told you before,” she says impatiently, “if you need money, I’ll lend it to you. Take my word on it.”
“She’s my mother. My responsibility. I’m going to do my best to take care of her. But I just can’t face her now.”
Rachel isn’t about to relent. “Go and see her, Harry.”
“Believe me, she’d rather see you.” I’m begging, desperate. “You said I was abandoning her. I’m not abandoning her, I’m just asking for a reprieve, a little time to get things straight in my mind. Is that so much to ask? Look at me, for Christ’s sake! Do you think she should see me looking like this?” I hold up my trembling hands as testimony.
She studies my face, my hands. They are the only arguments which have any effect. “Sure I’ll go visit your mother,” she says at last, gently. “But what about you? When will I see you again?”
I’ve made my mind up about that, too. No more lingering hopefully for love. It’s time to try to get Rachel Gold out of my system. “I don’t know. Sometime” is the only answer I can manage.
“Come on, Harry. What are you up to?”
I get to my feet. “Don’t you get it, Rachel? I’m ashamed. About my mother. About you. I can’t forget Chance once accused you of being an influence on me. He meant a bad influence. What I didn’t say is that if you were an influence – it was only for the good.”
“Harry, there’s no reason for this.”
“Listen to me, Rachel. I’m not fit for human company just now. Grant me a little time. Okay?” That said, I start to leave the room.
“Harry,” she shouts after me, “this is nuts!”
I pause, momentarily, to look back at her on the sofa. “Give me this one last thing, Rachel. Please. Don’t try to find me.”
Then I go.
To save some money I sell whatever I can of my household goods and move into a rooming house whose only other boarder is a cadaverous-looking retired Lutheran minister from Minnesota. For the next few months I continue to look for work, but aside from jobs as an extra, everywhere I meet with failure. Evenings, I sit in my landlady’s verandah, depressed, worried, fatalistic, waiting for something to happen; what, I’m not sure. Something. In another economy move I’ve dropped my subscriptions to the movie magazines, but the Lutheran minister’s daily newspaper is full of tittle-tattle about the approaching premiere of Chance’s epic Western. The chat columns retail gossip, there are full-page ads for the picture, and Chance has obviously forsaken his role as the Hermit of Hollywood. Now interviews with him multiply alarmingly. His mild professorial face greets me at the breakfast table, staring out from the morning edition. A buzz is building around the picture and show-biz reporters, after the success of Cruze’s The Covered Wagon and rumours about Chance’s picture, stoke it with headlines announcing the rebirth of the Western.
Then one afternoon Chance’s Hispano-Suiza pulls to the curb outside and a chauffeur in livery comes briskly up the walk with an envelope in his gloved hand. Chance has tracked me down. The envelope contains two passes to the premiere of the Best Chance production of Besieged. There is also a note which explains something else the envelope holds, a cheque for five hundred dollars.
Dear Harry,
Enclosed are two tickets to the premiere of our film; bring your inamorata if you wish. I’m sure you have been informed she has left my employ and is now at Metro, but I bear no grudges. I hope you will be able to say the same and lay aside personal prejudices, and judge for yourself whether or not Besieged crystallizes the idealistic hopes for American film which we shared in our first conversations. Please come, I would like to hear that you approve of what has been accomplished. Oddly enough, your good opinion remains important to me.
You and I share credit for the scenario. Mr. Fitzsimmons tried to dissuade me from this step, but upon reflection I knew I could not deny what you have meant to this picture; it is only right to acknowledge your contribution.
Which leads to the delicate question of money. You will find enclosed a cheque for five hundred dollars. I believe this sum is a fair settling of my account with you, if not yours with me. I am sure you are currently encountering financial difficulties, so please note that the cheque is drawn on company finances and not on my personal account. This, I trust, will dispel any notion you might have that this could be regarded as an act of charity. It is, rather, the closing of the books on a debt.
Yours sincerely,
Damon Ira Chance
The premiere is one week off. I put the tickets and the cheque in my night-table drawer, determined to make use of neither. But as the date draws near I find myself wavering; one minute I am rock-solid in my determination never to give Chance the satisfaction of seeing me at his premiere, and the next this determination dissolves like salt in water. One part of me needs to see what Chance has done, another dreads it.
I don’t know what is happening to me. One evening, sitting in the sun-porch watching darkness descend, I have the thought that the darkness sifting down into that empty street is like the darkness filling my own emptiness. I cover my face with my hands and cry. And that is how my landlady finds me, as Shorty McAdoo’s landlady Mother Reardon found him, in the darkness, his face wet with tears. And like him, I try to deny them.
Tuxedoed, I make my way to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, two blocks up the street. Searchlights are visible against the blue-black wall of night sky, golden sabres slashing and wheeling, crossing and clashing, bright blades of gleaming light. People overtake me on the sidewalk. Skipping insect-like toward this mesmerizing display, the women utter chirps of excitement as they brush impatiently by me “Oh!” “Look, Herb!” Little jolts of delighted anticipation set their hips to switching, rattle their heels on the sidewalk; they jerk with impatience. Despite trying to lock down their enthusiasm, the men are the same. Their excitement is proclaimed in the rigid set of their shoulders and faces, a pose of nonchalance. A young man in a straw boater trots by me, pretending to scan the thickening crowd for a friend, and, like horses in a paddock, others infected by his example start trotting too.
Suddenly he stops, his eye caught by a long, luscious limousine crawling up the street. All the rest of the trotters halt too, halt and edge toward the curb for a better look. One looses a low, appreciative whistle and his bird-like call is copied – they all trill their homage as their polished black dream glides by. Then the young man in the boater lifts his head – he’s spied another car – and all the other heads turn too, staring up the street, songbirds transformed into birds of prey.
The throng begins to clot, coagulate, as the Pierce Arrows, Stevens-Duryeas, Rollses, Renaults, and Mercedes pour out of the side streets in a parade of luxurious rolling stock running on golden rails laid down on the asphalt by headlight beams. Clusters of star-gazers crane necks for a peek into windows, into back seats. Reports of sightings fly about, fickle breezes which blow heads in this direction and that. “Is that Buster?” “Is that Doug and Mary?” They strain to see, ripple, bend as one, bow down over the curb like tall grass in a gust of wind.
I keep walking, moving as fast as the traffic jamming the roadway, touching shoulder after shoulder to beg passage, beckoned by Grauman’s marquee, hundreds of electric bulbs pulsing out a single word, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged…
Opposite the theatre, onlookers are packed deep on the narrow sidewalk, bobbing up and down on tiptoes, heads tossing like turbulent waves. Blue-jacketed cops patrol a rope strung mid-thigh at the edge of the pavement, good-humouredly keeping the crowd behind it with fatherly nods and gentle taps of the nightstick, friendly reminders not to trespass on the street.
Young couples with infants tucked in their arms; old couples gripping purses and canes, fragile in shiny black clothes and high-topped shoes and boots, red noses sharp, red eyes sharper; men wearing hand-painted ties and others in work shirts and cloth caps; fast-looking, painted girls and respectable young females whose scrubbed cheeks exude rosy virtue: one happy congregation. With this mingling of humanity comes a mingling of scent, bay rum and tobacco, camphor and peppermints, lilac water and stale sweat, chewing gum and dirty diapers.
Chance’s publicity campaign has worked. Despite being no household name, no DeMille, no Griffith, despite having no actors in this picture who are stars of any magnitude, the ordinary people, the giants of the industry, have come.
A great stir of shuddering excitement. The crowd groans, “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!”, a moan of sexual pleasure. Above the roof of the car, a mop of curly black hair, two black eyebrows, and a chunk of black moustache drawn on the alabaster face of a corpse by a cartoonist pops up to stare back across the street at us. It ducks back down to assist a young lady from the vehicle. The young lady is Leonore Ulric. The dapper little man graciously escorts Leonore Ulric out from behind the vehicle to greet us; they wave to us across a river of asphalt, Chaplin grinning impishly. Mad cheering as he wheels Miss Ulric in a military about-face on to the long red carpet running from curb to picture palace, snapping a sergeant-major’s salute to the bank of photographers. “This is too good!” “Catch this one!” The camera bulbs pop and blink like muzzle-flashes of distant artillery on a night horizon.
If Chaplin is here, the evening is already a success. But the magnificent automobiles keep disgorging celebrities on the crimson carpet; they wave to fans, blow kisses, strike preposterous poses for photographers. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, Pola Negri and Will Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are all here. With each new arrival frenzy mounts, the mob calls names like they were the names of children lost in a forest; they skitter forward like iron filings answering the pull of powerful magnets. The press of people behind me drives me hard against the rope, it saws at my thighs; there’s an elbow in my back, a cane tangled between my legs. The smell of desperation pollutes the air. I start to scramble over the barrier before I get dumped over it on to my face.
A cop catches me straddling the rope. “What you doing, Bub?”
“I’ve got to get over to the theatre,” I tell him.
“Sure you do,” the cop says.
“I’ve got tickets.” I stick them under his nose.
At the mention of tickets, a resentful look slides on to his flat face.
“You can’t cross the road,” he says. “We got traffic control here.”
“Look,” I say, “I’ve got a bad leg. It can’t take much more of this pushing and shoving.”
“If you got a bad leg, take it home. Take it home or stay where you are.”
I’m prepared to argue when I spot the Hispano-Suiza gliding up in front of Grauman’s. I nod to the cop, a tacit promise to stay put. He clamps his jaw with authority, takes a couple paces down the rope, glances over his shoulder to make sure I’m not up to any funny business behind his back.
Chance and Fitz get out of the car. They are wearing tails and silk top hats. The enthusiasm of the crowd dips, they don’t recognize these two. The expensive car, the beautiful young girl in the evening dress sweeping forward with a bouquet to present to Chance announce these men are important – but why? Chance accepts the bouquet with a stiff little bow, passes it to Fitz who grapples it clumsily to his chest.
Slowly Chance turns to face us, slowly his hand rises in a hieratic gesture to the marquee. He points and we cease even to murmur, watch in enthralled silence, struggling to decipher this obscure gesture. Now he is shaking his finger at the sign, emphatically, schoolteacher waiting for the answer.
A single voice rises in a shout from the back of the crowd. “Besieged!” Radiant pleasure, pride, happiness flood Chance’s features. He straightens, grows taller. Yes, his body is saying, yes, yes, yes. The finger prods once more, jabbing a smattering of high, thin, involuntary-sounding cries out of the mob. Behind me a hoarse voice, roughened by a foreign accent, joins in, to my left I hear a child’s, a woman’s. Now Chance’s finger is marking time, more voices add to the deep, swelling chorus of, “Besieged! Besieged! Besieged!” People shout it recklessly, happily, making a noise like the noise of empty barrels rolled in an empty street. “Besieged! Besieged!”
Chance raises his hands above his head, clasps them in a prizefighter’s gesture of victory, shakes them at the mob. The mindless roar is physical, a hot wave of breath on my back. I twist around and confront a wall of faces; a painted midway canvas of freaks, a nickel’s worth of depravity, the mouths yawning cavernous and hungry, the eyes blazing.
But now the mad clamouring sputters, fades out, disintegrating into lonesome cries, desultory handclapping. I look back and Chance is strolling up the carpet into a barrage of winking flashbulbs, Fitz walking carefully in the rear, the tall hat balanced on his head, the flowers bundled in a big fist.
Around me everyone subsides into disappointment. It’s over now. A sort of post-coital tristesse settles on us, a listless shame. We avoid each other’s eyes, shrink from touching one another; the knot which briefly held us together is unravelling, people are drifting away like scraps of paper blowing in an aimless wind. Across the street, uniformed flunkies are closing the main doors of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the temple is being secured. It is too late for the picture. I will miss Besieged.
For three hours I sit in a café drinking coffee, keep trying to imagine what the audience is being treated to up on the big screen four blocks away. Every fifteen minutes I check my watch and light another cigarette. People stare at me because of the tuxedo. At eleven I pay the bill and go out into the night. A fitful wind has sprung up, a wind that seems to nudge me in the direction of Grauman’s. Although it feels like rain, I don’t turn for home. Instead I button my jacket, stuff my hands in my pockets, and permit myself to be shoved along by the wind at my back. The self-congratulatory speeches will have ended long ago, the last reel will be playing itself out, soon the theatre will empty. It’s a short walk but feels endless. The avenue is deserted and still, the streetlight poles stark, the ponds of light at their feet bright, shallow, sterile. My left shoe rasps on the concrete, hoarsely, monotonously. I drag it past a line-up of parked automobiles, chauffeurs killing time as they wait for the picture to finish. The police have left, the rope barrier is down, but a few stubborn souls still huddle in the wind, waiting. Tramping up the theatre side of the street, I am treated to a star’s-eye view of the fans. From this perspective and distance they look small and pitiable, like children somebody has forgotten to collect after a birthday party.
I stop and light a cigarette under the marquee. None of the officious staff raising the green-and-white awning against the possibility of rain tell me to move on. It is the tuxedo. They assume I am waiting for a friend.
All at once there’s an excited rushing about of Grauman employees, the doors are opening, the picture is over. The first of the audience spilling out talk animatedly, always a good sign for a picture, while others linger in the lobby, an even more auspicious sign. Out in the fresh air women draw their furs tightly around their shoulders, the men light cigars and impatiently scan the street for drivers and automobiles. One of Grauman’s young men beckons imperiously to the line-up, headlights snap on, the cars move forward like dominoes tipping in a chain reaction. The remnant of fans wave autograph books in the air and cry out beseechingly from across the road.
Here a tuxedo can loiter, smoke a cigarette, cast eyes up to the sky for portents of rain. Betty Blythe, star of the Queen of Sheba, passes close enough for me to touch, and so do Bessie Love and Colleen Moore. Others troop by, gentlemen and ladies I don’t recognize, L.A. businessmen, lawyers, doctors, their wives. People with enough social standing, enough money, to be granted the boon of buying a ticket to a premiere, to be granted the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with Charlie Chaplin, people who fifteen years ago would have dismissed picture people as vulgarians.
I hear bits and snatches of conversation popping up like bright birds in a bush. “Superb!” says someone. “All it needed for perfection was a true star!” is the opinion of another. “Where is he? Where’s Chance?”
I spot Fitz, a head taller than anyone else, doing a chain-gang shuffle through the bottleneck of congestion in the lobby doors. Where Fitzsimmons is, Chance will be too.
I’m correct. Once under the awning Chance holds court, greeting admirers. Actors behave like they do before a camera, pantomiming their awe, their delight, their amazement. When actresses seize Chance’s arm and cuddle against his shoulder, or raise themselves on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek for photographers, he receives their attentions with awkward, old-fashioned, gentlemanly courtliness.
Chance is happy. He shines with it, happiness suffuses him. Nodding and smiling, he shakes hands, accepts pats of congratulation on the shoulder. Men offer him cigars. I read his lips. Over and over he is saying, Yes, yes, yes.
Now Fitz is guiding him away, escorting him down the carpet. For an instant Fitz’s and my eyes lock, and he deftly steers Chance a little to the right to avoid us meeting. They go past. A determined well-wisher importunes them, expressing admiration for the picture. Chance begins nodding again.
It starts to rain lightly, just hard enough to flicker in the light of streetlamps and headlights, sparse and granular, like a shower of rice at a wedding. Across the street, the little covey of devotees, neglected, is breaking up. Someone opens a newspaper over her head. Someone is crossing the road. Someone else is following him.
The first jaywalker moves like a somnambulist, looks neither right nor left, steps into the path of an oncoming car. The pavement is slick with rain, a horn blares, the car brakes, slides to a stop inches from the man’s legs. Under the awning people break off conversations to stare curiously. In the glare of the headlights the man stares back, searching the faces.
Shorty in a black suit and white shirt, collar buttoned tightly. His face lit from beneath by the car headlights, the planes of his face like snow, his eyes black and sunken. He looks old, a walking corpse. He steps up on the bumper of the car and surveys the crowd under the green-and-white awning. “Chance!” he shouts. A woman laughs in surprise, as if this were a joke.
Shorty steps down from the bumper, advances. Wylie follows, eyes switching nervously back and forth. The light of the marquee falls full upon McAdoo, carrying himself like an old soldier, wearing his black suit like a uniform. He passes everybody as if they were nothing more than fur coats and evening dress hung on a clothesline for airing. People step aside, make way for him. He looks strange under the electric light; his tan is gone and his face burns with a hospital pallor. Sick, you would think, if the firm, steady tread, the young man’s stride which bears the old face onward, didn’t belie it.
Reaching Chance and Fitz he says loudly, “I’d like a word.”
Chance stands with a sceptical smile on his lips, his head turned ever so slightly to one side, his eyes fastened on the belly of the awning. “If this is business,” he says without looking at McAdoo, “you must make an appointment to see me. I do not conduct business on social occasions.”
Wylie shifts his feet on the carpet. McAdoo’s mouth tightens. “I come to ask you to write to the newspapers and tell them that feller in your picture ain’t me.”
Chance is still smiling, still refusing to look McAdoo in the face. He watches the awning flutter with gusts of wind and rain. “Of course it isn’t you,” he says. “Mr. McAdoo is dead.”
“Liar!” bursts out Wylie. He rounds on the gaping bystanders. “Don’t you believe him! This here’s Shorty McAdoo! I know him! Know him good as anything!”
“You’re mistaken,” Chance says. “Shorty McAdoo is dead and this man is an impostor.” For the first time he looks directly at Shorty. “Stand aside,” he says coolly, “let me pass.”
“Every day he waits at that gate for a word and you drive on by! He ain’t waiting no more!” Wylie screeches.
McAdoo grabs Wylie’s arm, pulling him up short. “You listen to me,” he says with urgency. “Take hold of yourself. I told you. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. I come for my say. That’s all – a say. I can do my own talking without help from you. Go home.”
“Once more,” says Chance. “Stand aside.”
McAdoo shakes his head. “You’ve had one walk over me. You ain’t going to get two. Not until I’m finished.”
Chance gives Fitz a sign and he slips between them. McAdoo runs his eyes up and down him. “So you’re the big dog.”
“That’s right.”
“Cock your leg and piss on somebody else,” says McAdoo and moves to step around him. As he does, Fitz grabs him by the lapels of the black suit, jerking him off his feet, shaking him, snapping the old white head back and forth in a blur. McAdoo kicks at him, battering the Irishman’s shins, boots thudding against fenceposts. That’s it. Flying head, flying feet, everything a blur.
Something cracks, hard and sharp like fracturing bone, and Fitz sways with the old man slumped unconscious in his fists. A woman screams, a long aria of terror. A thought lurches in my mind. He’s snapped the old man’s neck, like a dry brittle stick broken over a knee. But then Fitz’s eyes roll upward, trying to locate the source of his own death, the neat black hole drilled square in the middle of his forehead. He falls, a big tree axed, crashes to the carpet, dragging McAdoo down with him.
Wylie is walking forward jerkily, his arm held stiff and straight at shoulder height, my pistol on the end of it, pointed at Chance. I hear people running, feet pounding, there are more screams, shouts for the police, but they reach me from a far way off, a place divorced from this moment. A fine mist of smoke hovers under the awning; the thick oily smell of a discharged weapon startles my nostrils.
Chance stands, a prisoner in the dock awaiting judgement, his lips moving. What looks like prayer is really only Chance repeating, over and over, “Fitz, Fitz, Fitz, Fitz…”
“Wylie!” I scream, the name tearing my throat. Recognizing the voice, his face veers to me, the movement tortured. “Christ, Wylie, let him go,” I beg. “Don’t do it. Don’t.”
Pronouncing the last don’t, I understand Wylie is looking at me with cold hatred, that my own death is being debated in his slow, clumsy mind at this instant.
The wailing of a police siren saves me. Wylie swings his head to the sound, swings back to Chance, decision written on his face. “You-you-you ought to talked to him,” he says, stumbling over the words. “If you’d just only talked to him. We would been in Canada now. We would been in Canada… happy.”
Chance’s face wears the blank look it wore months ago at supper as he tore the bread, eating like an animal. When Wylie’s pistol rises up so do Chance’s arms, not in surrender, but in an extravagant gesture of welcome.
The bullet buckles him as if two strong hands from behind had ripped down hard on his shoulders. His legs give way, sinking him to his knees, a flower of blood spreading vivid petals on his starched shirt front. Wylie takes two steps forward, shoves the gun against his chest and fires, the flash scorching Chance’s linen.
By the time I reach Chance, Wylie has dropped the gun and is gazing at the rain as it drums down harder and harder, draping a silver blanket on either side of the awning, enclosing the four of us in a lonely tent. I hear its wild thrashing on the canvas roof and, underneath that, the keening of police sirens.
As I prop Chance’s head in my arms he snatches me by the nape of my neck, pulling my face within inches of his with a brutal, frantic strength.
“Harry?” he whispers.
I struggle to pull my face away from the dire mask confronting me, but the grip is unbreakable.
“Harry,” he gasps, “when we talked… you see… I could not bring myself to tell you everything.”
“What? What couldn’t you tell me?”
“The consequences of the truth.” His breath rasps short and quick in my face. “Artists… visionaries… they always find a way to kill us, Harry. Always.”
“Who?” I shout down at him. “Who are they?”
He is beyond speech. He makes a gesture to the wall of rain, to whomever, whatever, he imagines lurks behind it. The canvas rips, shreds in the wind with a wrenching, desolate sound as I watch his eyes darken, as he struggles for his last breath, as the open pit of his mouth slowly fills with blood, as the frothy pink liquid spills down my arm, marking me.