Robert Silverberg - The Second Shield

But he was talking to a dead phone.

The shield that Beckerman had made for Apostolides, had dreamed for him one humid spring night three years ago, was one of his supreme masterpieces, his two or three finest works ever, and he regretted its evaporation even more, perhaps, than Apostolides did. But he couldn’t simply whip up another one, just like that, to replace it. He could only trust to luck, the random scoop of his dreaming mind, as with all of his pieces. And meanwhile here was Alvarez hounding him constantly, chivvying, bullying, fulminating, disturbing his peace of mind in a hundred different ways. Couldn’t he see that he was only making things worse?

Apostolides was a shipping magnate—Greek, of course, and he was mixed up in a lot of things besides shipping—with his name on the Forbes list of international billionaires and his fingers in all sorts of pies around the world. His main residence, the one where he had so proudly displayed Beckerman’s wondrous shield, was on a private island in Biscayne Bay, back of Miami, but there were homes in London and Majorca and South Africa and Thailand and Caracas too, and business offices in Geneva, the Cayman Islands, Budapest, Kuwait, Singapore, and one or two other places. Beckerman had never actually met or spoken to him. Not many people ever did, apparently. The artist’s dealings with Apostolides had been conducted entirely through the medium of Alvarez, who was some sort of agent for him.

Alvarez had tracked Beckerman down on the beach at the Hotel Halekulani in Waikiki, where he had gone for a week or two of tropical sunshine during one of San Diego’s rare spells of cool, wet winter weather. He was quietly sipping a daiquiri when Alvarez, a small smooth-faced man with rumpled sandy hair and a thin graying goatee through which you could easily see his chin, came up to him and greeted him by name.

Warily Beckerman admitted that he was who he was.

“I have a commission for you,” Alvarez said.

Beckerman disliked and distrusted him instantly. The little man’s eyes were troublesomely shifty and hard, and there was something weirdly incongruous, here on this sunny beach in 80-degree weather, about the fact that he was dressed in an elegant, closely cut Armani suit of some glossy gray-green fabric—jacket and tie, no less, probably the only necktie being worn anywhere in Hawaii that day. It made him look not only out of place but in some way menacing. But Beckerman made it a rule never to turn down the prospect of new business out of hand. After all these years of making money by pulling works of art literally out of thin air, he remained perversely afraid that all that prosperity would vanish some day, fading back to its mysterious source just as his sculptures inevitably did.

“I represent one of the world’s wealthiest men and greatest connoisseurs of art,” Alvarez said. “You would recognize his name immediately if I told it to you,” which he proceeded almost immediately to do. Beckerman did indeed recognize the name of Pericles Apostolides and he suddenly began to pay considerably more attention to Alvarez’s words. “Mr. Apostolides,” said Alvarez, “is, as perhaps you are aware, a student in the most intensely scholarly way of the heroic age of Greece, that is, the Mycenean period, the time of the Trojan War. You may have heard of the Homeric theme park that he is constructing outside Nauplia, with the full-scale replica of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and life-size virtual-reality reenactments of the great moments of the Iliad and Odyssey , particularly the holographic simulations of Scylla and Charybdis and the blinding of Polyphemus, et cetera, et cetera.”

Beckerman had heard of the project. He thought it was nauseatingly tacky. But he went on listening.

Alvarez said, “Mr. Apostolides is aware of the quality of your work and has admired your splendid art in the collections of many of his friends. In recent months he was particularly keenly taken by the remarkable figure of a centaur in the possession of the Earl of Dorset and by the extraordinary Medusa that is owned by the Comte de Bourgogne. Mr. Apostolides has sent me here to inquire of you whether you would be willing to create something of a Homeric nature for him—not for the park, you understand, but for his personal and private gallery.”

“Mr. Apostolides must understand,” said Beckerman, “that I’m unable to work specifically to order—that is, that he can’t simply design a piece and expect me to execute it literally. My medium is dreams, dreams made tangible, and dreams are by their very nature unpredictable things. I can attempt to create what he wants, and perhaps it will approximate what he has in mind, but I can make no guarantees of specific pieces.”

“Understood.”

“Furthermore, Mr. Apostolides should realize that my work is quite costly.”

“That would hardly be a problem, Mr. Beckerman.”

“And finally, is Mr. Apostolides aware that the things I make are inherently impermanent? They will last a year or two, perhaps five or six in some cases, but almost never any longer than that. A man with his appreciation of ancient history may be unhappy to find that he has commissioned something that has hardly any more substance than—well, than a dream.”

Furrows appeared in Alvarez’s smooth forehead.

“Is there no exception to this? No kind of preservative that can be applied to particularly choice pieces?”

“None whatever.”

“Mr. Apostolides is a powerfully retentive man. He is a builder, a keeper. He does not sell the securities he invests in, he does not deaccession the works of art that he collects.”

“In that case perhaps he should give this commission some further thought,” Beckerman said.

“He very much wants a piece of yours comparable to those that he saw in the collections of the Earl of Dorset and the Comte de Bourgogne.”

“I would be extremely pleased to provide one. But the limitations on the durability of my work are not, I’m afraid, within my power to control.”

“I will explain this to him,” said Alvarez, and turned swiftly and walked away.

He reappeared two nights later, while Beckerman was enjoying a peaceful solitary dinner at the Halekulani’s elegant second-story open-air French restaurant, looking out over the moonlit Pacific. Taking a seat opposite Beckerman without being asked, Alvarez said, “How soon can you deliver?”

Beckerman had had an unusually productive autumn, to the point where by late November he had thought he might need to be hospitalized for exhaustion and general debilitation. By now he had recovered most of his loss of weight and was beginning to feel healthy again, but it had not been his plan to go back to work until the summer.

“July?” he said.

“Sooner,” said Alvarez.

“I can’t. I simply can’t.”

Alvarez named a price.

Beckerman, concealing his astonishment with some effort, said, “That would be quite adequate. But even so: my work is very demanding— physically demanding, is what I mean, with effects on my health—and I’m not ready just now to produce anything new, especially of the quality that Mr. Apostolides is undoubtedly expecting.”

Alvarez raised the offer by half.

“I could manage something by May, perhaps,” said Beckerman. “No earlier.”

“If the difficulty is that prior commissions are in the way, would some additional financial consideration persuade you to make changes in your working schedule?”

“I have no other work waiting. The issue is entirely one of needing time to build up my strength.”

“March?”

“April 15 at the earliest,” said Beckerman.

“We will expect it at that time.”

“Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions?”