Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.

“My God,” I said.

Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.

“I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”

“I know,” Adam said.

“Is this the way you always see them?”

“Of course not.”

“But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly… hardly worth keeping.”

“Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”

“A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”

“Yes. But only when she has got… beyond them.”

Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.

“They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”

Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.

A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.

On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.

At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”

Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?

“Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”

Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”

“Depends on who I’m talking to.”

Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between us. “A chameleon, huh? Well, so am I, I guess.” He halted about five feet away, his outfit that of a pulpwood worker: khaki pants, blue work shirt, rope-soled shoes, and a ball cap with a perforated crown.

“I’m Special Agent Neil Hammond. Can we go inside?”

These words lifted a weight. I shook Hammond’s hand and led him inside through the narrow front foyer. We found Adam sitting on the stairs with a shoeshine kit applying cordovan polish to the hand-tooled leather boots (with elevator heels) he’d worn to the West Bank in December. In his slacks and T-shirt, in his dedication to the simple task, Adam reminded me of an elderly black man who had shined shoes at the Ralston Hotel in Columbus in the early 1960s. Sitting halfway up the stairs, he nodded at Hammond and me without ceasing to rub polish into the toes and heels of his boots. There was an air of melancholy to his expertise, but a melancholy devoid of self-pity. Hammond and I watched him work. Adam finished applying the wax, tugged his left boot on, grasped a shoeshine brush with his bare right foot, and buffed the instep of the boot with an easy rocking motion that made a whispery noise in the stairwell. This sound was strangely soothing. Adam brought the left boot to a high cordovan shine, then removed it and duplicated the procedure in reverse, wearing the right boot and brushing it with his left foot. Hammond and I stood there beneath him in the stairwell, entranced.

“Done,” Adam said. He positioned the polished pair of boots on the step so that the toes were even with its outer edge. They shone. They smelled good.

Then Special Agent Hammond began to speak. He had just arrived from Atlanta with a photocopy of the letter addressed to the Montarazes by the kidnappers. On Saturday, the GBI had received federal authorization to fetch the letter from the U.S. Postal Service in advance of its scheduled Monday delivery. That was how he had managed to bring the message to Adam so early in the day. For the past month, Hammond explained, he’d been doing undercover investigation for the Bureau’s drug unit in Hothlepoya County. Yesterday morning, he’d been summoned back to Atlanta to assume the role of message runner for this particular case. He was living in a mobile home between Beulah Fork and Tocqueville, frequenting grubby roadhouses every evening to see if any dope deals were going down, and periodically staking out the Muscadine Gardens private airport to determine if any of the aircraft coming into it were pot planes. Although it might be wise if Adam and I kept our contacts with him to an absolute minimum, Niedrach wanted us to know that Hammond was our official liaison in Hothlepoya County.

“The letter,” Adam croaked.

Hammond went up the steps with the photocopy. I climbed to a spot behind Adam so I could read it over his shoulder. It was a tight fit for the three of us—but we arranged ourselves cozily enough, and Adam shook out the photocopy.

“Fingerprints on the envelope have already conclusively identified the author as Craig Puddicombe,” Hammond said.

The letter consisted of an introductory paragraph, a list of the ten organizations to receive donations from the Montarazes, and a final paragraph directing them to post the “genuine canceled chex” in a glass case at the interior entrance to Rich’s department store in Lenox Square Mall. The “genuine canceled chex” had to be posted by the second Monday in August, two weeks away, so that thousands upon thousands of mall patrons could view them as they entered Rich’s. The well-known signatures on these checks, and the surprising fringe organizations on their PAY TO THE ORDER OF lines, would surely stimulate a flood of copy-cat contributions. Also, nearly every young person who glanced at the canceled-check display would become a suspect in the kidnapping—assuming, of course, that either the FBI or the GBI set up continuous video surveillance of the store’s entrance.

“Which we will,” Hammond said. “This isn’t as clever a ploy as Puddicombe thinks. It’ll be very easy to fake the canceled checks.”