Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

A creaking sound made me look up again. A second rope fell out of the sky, to slap and abrade my forehead. Adam had pushed the hinged door of the window outward, revealing a block-and-tackle by which the gallery sometimes lifted heavy objets d’art to the third floor. I slipped the loop of this rope around my waist and gripped it high with both hands. Adam, holding the other end, backed away from the window, and I began to rise, my feet dangling like stunned pink fish. I closed my eyes until the faint squeaking of the pulley had ceased and the window ledge was there before me as an accomplished fact. More noisily than I wanted, I went over it into the supply room.

Adam touched my shoulder. “Somewhere he is in the galleries. As yet, I think, the rain has let us escape his detection. Soon, he will return. Come.” Even his whisper was something of a growl. I disentangled myself from the rope, and together we crossed the supply room to the door. We eased through into nearly impenetrable dark, hearing the rain as a steady drumming, a hum like that of a huge refrigerator. Without it, Craig would have long since detected us—or me , at least. Adam could move as silently as a daddy longlegs racehorsing over a mound of warehoused cotton.

We crept past Blau’s huge office into Gallery One: a bleak, echoing immensity. A miserly kind of illumination entered via the horizontal windows at the top of the wall fronting McGill Boulevard. No paintings, installations, or sculptures. Abraxas was between shows, and the galleries reposed high above the street like empty boxcars. Gallery Three was even darker than the one in which we were standing. It had no windows. But from Gallery Two, the chamber in which Blau had shown M.-K. Kander’s upsetting photos, pale light spilled. It lay across Gallery One’s scuffed hardwood floor like a film of buttermilk, a liquid gleam in the dimness. Adam pointed at it. With his other hand, he clutched my arm. I imagined him clutching a habiline lieutenant on a prehistoric African savannah, giving directions for a life-or-death hunt, just as he gripped me now. What we did in the next one or two minutes would no doubt determine the outcome of our stalk.

Adam said, “I go to door. You make noise. He come out, I grab. This not work, you shout, ‘Bilker! ’ Understand?” I nodded.

Adam floated, making no noise, across the room, flattened his back against the wall, and twisted his torso to look into Gallery Two. Then he vented such a powerful cry that it vibrated my bones, bounced from the walls, and flooded the building like a dam burst of gasoline, threatening to plunge everything into a chaos of fire. Still yelling, Adam charged into the gallery. Without listening for them, my ears registered Bilker’s footsteps and belugalike snorts as he pounded upstairs to the third floor.

“You goddamn hibber!” a voice in the lighted chamber cried.

A gunshot barked, reverberated, pinged away. Fear forgotten, or submerged, I sprinted toward the sound. A two-legged blur in stained whites burst from the chamber, bumped me hard, and spun away from the impact as I crashed down on my tailbone and slid backward across the floor. Sprawling sidelong, I saw this figure disappear into the supply room through which Adam and I had entered.

As I tried to sit back up, Adam scampered in from Gallery Two, one gnarled hand holding his forearm just below the elbow. Blood glistened on his hairy fingers, oozed from the wound beneath them. He paused to regard me sitting on the floor, but his eyes danced frantically from me to the supply room.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“’Bye. Be back.” He hurried toward the supply room, and I shouted a warning that the other man still had his gun. As soon as I did, the figure in white reemerged from the supply room and fired several more shots into the gallery. Flames leapt from the stubby barrel like the sinister tongue flickers of a gila monster. Adam dove to his left, while I rolled over and over, praying the bullets gouging the nearby hardwood would not ricochet into my body. The gunman decided against trying to escape by rope and ladder, unlatched the big door between Blau’s office and the supply room, and slipped into the stairwell opposite the one by which Bilker Moody had just now reached the galleries. Adam, back on his feet, pursued the fleeing man.

Another gunshot sounded in the dark, this one from behind me. I ducked and covered my head. Two more shots bit into the third floor’s sundered stillness. I uncovered cautiously. Bilker had shot the lock off the door blocking his way into Abraxas’s main display rooms. He kicked that door open and waddled into view like a trash-compacted Marshal Dillon. “Why’re you sittin’ there on your butt, Mr. Loyd?” He blew on the barrel of his Ruger. “Where’d they go?”

“Down. Out. Lot of good that pistol of yours did us.”

Bilker looked about, narrowing and widening his eyes, to get them to adjust. The light spilling from Gallery Two seemed the major source of his discomfort. He shielded his eyes with his hands.

“Craig wounded Adam,” I said. “He damned near killed us both. And you, our armed protector, too late to do anything but shoot holes in a door. Good show, Bilker.” I got up. My coccyx felt like the tip of the burning candle of my spine. I put a hand to the seat of my pants and held it there, grimacing.

“Mr. Montaraz posted me downstairs.”

“You’re not there now. Craig’s getting away.”

“You think I’m fuckin’ twins, a upstairs Bilker to hold your hand, a downstairs Bilker to guard the exits?” He’d just lumbered up three flights, exertion equivalent to an average man’s doing the same thing toting fifty pounds of potatoes. Miraculously, he was not breathing all that hard. “I got one body, doofus. It don’t do simultaneous appearances at two or three different locales.”

“I guess not. Forgive me.”

“Mr. Montaraz’ll catch the sucker. The bastard’s doomed in a foot race.” But he had finished bantering. “Where’s Paulie?”

The question sobered me. I nodded at Gallery Two. “In there, I’m afraid. The scream you heard—it was Adam’s. Something in there set it off.”

Side by side, we entered the peculiarly shaped room. Bilker stared for several moments at what it revealed. Then he mumbled a threat against the perpetrator, backed away, turned, and trotted off after Adam and Paulie’s murderer. I heard him yank open the stairwell door and its wheeze as it shut behind him. Then there was nothing but the air-conditioner hum of the rain.

Evidently, Craig had brought T. P. up the ladder with him dead. He’d carried the kid in a cardboard box with makeshift rubber shoulder harnesses (pieces of innertubing) pushed through slits in the cardboard. The box lay at the far end of the gallery. It had contained a few other items besides my godson’s body—a sheaf of Newsweek covers, a package of blue balloons, a coil of rope, and a large fabric-sculpture doll licensed by Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia. From this female Little Person, Craig had ripped all the high-priced designer clothes, exposing the pinched knot of her bellybutton and the faint Caucasian flush of her fabric nudity.

I wondered what her name was. Babyland General gave them all their own names, no two alike, and Xavier Roberts, their creator, and his staff had once sent birthday cards to the dolls and their owners on the dolls’ “placement dates.” Many times at the West Bank, I’d had to fix a special plate for a doll whose pouting adoptive mother had refused to eat her own meal unless Abigail Faye or Dorothy Lilac was served something, too. We had made a little extra money from the intractability of these little girls, but the sniveling surrender of their parents and the sight of a moronic fabric-sculpture doll leaning into a bowl of chocolate chile had always galled me. Moreover, the supposedly individualistic Little People had cost seven or eight times what a poorer or less indulgent parent would pay for a plastic doll of comparable size—a doll like the one Craig had left in Nancy Teavers’s lap at the Unaffiliated Meditation Center on Euclid Avenue.