long enough for the light to turn red in the direction in which he was heading, notwithstanding which he dashed across the street, only just managing to elude the surge of front bumpers. From the other side he looked back, so as to make a kind of shrug to let Mary Alice know his escape had not been intentionally that desperate, but already she could not be seen.
As usual, the most likely way to proceed where he was going was to walk, even though the Guillaume Gallery was quite a hike. As he passed the lunch counter from which he had slunk invisibly without paying the check at noontime, he remembered his earlier intention to drop off the money at the next opportunity, but did not so much as slow his pace at this moment. It would have been a different matter had he been on conversational terms with the owner or even one of the countermen. Then he could have stepped inside and made a joke of it. As things stood it would have been too embarrassing. Anyway, their food, which was often stale and always overcooked, was outlandishly overpriced as well, and the service was at best indifferent. Wagner had been present once when the owner, a stout swarthy man with an unkempt mustache, had actually threatened bodily to throw out a customer who had begun by complaining about the tepid coffee and gone on justifiably to several other delinquencies, such as fork tines webbed with dried food and the sweaty T-shirt on the short-order cook.
A block before reaching the gallery, Wagner took the precaution of stepping into an unlighted areaway full of garbage cans and becoming invisible. He wanted Babe to remain ignorant of his visit from start to finish, and for all he knew she might be out in the neighborhood someplace, fetching coffee for Cleve Guillaume, for she did that sort of flunky work from time to time, and Guillaume was too “fastidious,” her word, to keep a coffee-making device of any kind in the office of the gallery: after all, that’s where he took clients to write out checks. Babe was supposedly working as his assistant only until she learned enough about the profession to open a gallery of her own. She believed she had sufficient capital to get started, having got a bequest when her father died, which was the immediate pretext for leaving Wagner. She had actually tried to make him see his advantage in the new arrangement: he would not need to contribute a penny to her support. It was this sort of thing that made him suspect that in four years of marriage he had never penetrated to the core of Babe’s being.
Invisibly he now approached the big show window. When he was near enough to see what was on display therein, he recoiled. Siv Zirko, in the flesh, was sitting on a high stool, just behind the glass, staring, even glaring in his direction. Since Wagner could not be seen, this meant that Zirko’s expression was intended for anybody who looked at him. At the moment, despite the plentiful pedestrians abroad, he had no visible audience. It interested Wagner for a time to witness how long the egomaniacal artist could maintain his features in the same fix, without so much as the faintest tremor of eye.
It was ever so long before he first began to suspect that the figure under his surveillance was not the living Zirko but rather an extraordinarily accurate replica of the man. His certainty was still not absolute on leaving the window to use the door; he would not have been startled had the figure at last stopped holding its breath.
No one could be seen inside the gallery as he entered, but opening the door sounded an alarm somewhere, and from a room at the left emerged Cleve Guillaume, whom Wagner had met that time he attended an opening. It was difficult to think of Guillaume as sexually deviant when he was silent, for he was a thickset young man who would not have been questioned if seen in the uniform of a contact sport. And even when he spoke, he was not noticeably effeminate.
But now he was piqued, and petulance gave
As usual, the most likely way to proceed where he was going was to walk, even though the Guillaume Gallery was quite a hike. As he passed the lunch counter from which he had slunk invisibly without paying the check at noontime, he remembered his earlier intention to drop off the money at the next opportunity, but did not so much as slow his pace at this moment. It would have been a different matter had he been on conversational terms with the owner or even one of the countermen. Then he could have stepped inside and made a joke of it. As things stood it would have been too embarrassing. Anyway, their food, which was often stale and always overcooked, was outlandishly overpriced as well, and the service was at best indifferent. Wagner had been present once when the owner, a stout swarthy man with an unkempt mustache, had actually threatened bodily to throw out a customer who had begun by complaining about the tepid coffee and gone on justifiably to several other delinquencies, such as fork tines webbed with dried food and the sweaty T-shirt on the short-order cook.
A block before reaching the gallery, Wagner took the precaution of stepping into an unlighted areaway full of garbage cans and becoming invisible. He wanted Babe to remain ignorant of his visit from start to finish, and for all he knew she might be out in the neighborhood someplace, fetching coffee for Cleve Guillaume, for she did that sort of flunky work from time to time, and Guillaume was too “fastidious,” her word, to keep a coffee-making device of any kind in the office of the gallery: after all, that’s where he took clients to write out checks. Babe was supposedly working as his assistant only until she learned enough about the profession to open a gallery of her own. She believed she had sufficient capital to get started, having got a bequest when her father died, which was the immediate pretext for leaving Wagner. She had actually tried to make him see his advantage in the new arrangement: he would not need to contribute a penny to her support. It was this sort of thing that made him suspect that in four years of marriage he had never penetrated to the core of Babe’s being.
Invisibly he now approached the big show window. When he was near enough to see what was on display therein, he recoiled. Siv Zirko, in the flesh, was sitting on a high stool, just behind the glass, staring, even glaring in his direction. Since Wagner could not be seen, this meant that Zirko’s expression was intended for anybody who looked at him. At the moment, despite the plentiful pedestrians abroad, he had no visible audience. It interested Wagner for a time to witness how long the egomaniacal artist could maintain his features in the same fix, without so much as the faintest tremor of eye.
It was ever so long before he first began to suspect that the figure under his surveillance was not the living Zirko but rather an extraordinarily accurate replica of the man. His certainty was still not absolute on leaving the window to use the door; he would not have been startled had the figure at last stopped holding its breath.
No one could be seen inside the gallery as he entered, but opening the door sounded an alarm somewhere, and from a room at the left emerged Cleve Guillaume, whom Wagner had met that time he attended an opening. It was difficult to think of Guillaume as sexually deviant when he was silent, for he was a thickset young man who would not have been questioned if seen in the uniform of a contact sport. And even when he spoke, he was not noticeably effeminate.
But now he was piqued, and petulance gave
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