Skyscape by Michael Cadnum

struggle to separate the two. One of the diners had a police transmitter in his fist. He was one of the senior police bureaucrats Margaret had met over tea at the Museum of Modern Art, something in press liaison. More police were coming as Margaret whispered premature thanks into the ear of the graying cop.
    Curtis was looking around as one of the burliest bouncers put his arm around the artist and said something in a joking tone. Curtis’s eyes took in the scene without seeing very much. He was panting, a half-smile on his lips.
    When Margaret was sure that the episode had spun itself out, that everything was finished, she began to experience a tiny bit of relief.
    The broker touched his fingertips to his mangled nose. He examined the blood. He looked lost in a reverie, a philosophical consideration of clotting factors, of hemoglobin. The big man shook himself, and the bouncer who had his arm dropped it.
    Then, like a man reaching into his hip pocket for a wallet, the broker worked at getting something out of his belt, or his pants, something back there, something snagging and not coming out as easily as it was supposed to.
    It took awhile, but he finally got it out.
    The pistol was black—a dead, carbon black. It made the man’s fist look pale and freckled. The people in the restaurant had stirred, surprised, disturbed, and, Margaret sensed, perhaps even a little pleased at the tussle they had witnessed.
    Now chairs toppled, bodies fell to the floor, there was a general gasp, a cringe throughout the room, as the revolver, dull and chunky with its snub-barrel, searched up, away from the floor, up toward Curtis’s knee, his groin, upward.
    The fist was trembling, the pistol unsteady as the fingers worked to unfasten a safety or a catch, thumb and fingers hesitating as Margaret forgot every promise, every sorrow.

11
    Her father had known it: the moment is everything.
    The feel of the felt on the bottom of a chess piece, the subtle absence of sound as the piece slides across the chess board.
    She did not know what allowed her to act. Later, she would understand. At that moment she knew only this room, this tableau. Just a step was all it took.
    She put her hand over the pistol, over his fist. She said, in a whisper, “Thank you so much for doing everything you could to help.”
    What an absurd thing to say. She sounded like a demented stewardess, or lethally sarcastic—or both. She had no idea what else to do.
    But then, just that simply, she did.
    His hand was cold. Her heartbeat was so strong she could feel it in her fingers, feel her pulse against the man’s knuckles, against the gun, each heartbeat moving the man’s arm minutely but urgently as his eyes met hers with an expression of anger fading to shock: what am I doing?
    Then the room flung itself into motion. There were hands, faces, voices. Two uniformed police were there, grappling the big man easily and kneeling on him, fastening the handcuffs on him as though they were a well-practiced team, the two cops and the arrested man all a part of a crew of stunt men.
    Margaret found herself sitting, gazing at the unwrinkled white table linen. Someone thrust a glass of water into her hand. It was the police bureaucrat, and he was saying, “Don’t worry about a thing.”
    There was nothing like his painting. She had run across it in the local library as a girl, the big volume of contemporary art, much of it already boring and out of date.
    The Sacramento summers were hot, the sun broken by elms and oaks. The winters were, to a girl, long and ceaselessly wet, the lawns bleached white by frost. The art she could find, needed to find, found herself thinking of the first thing in the morning, always eventually left her dissatisfied.
    But not Curtis Newns. His work did not have “sparkle and magic,” as the notes in the book expressed it. Magic, Margaret knew, was what her own art relied on. Even in high school she had earned