False colors (3 page)

"Are you just taking his word for all this?"

"Why shouldn't I take his word for it? I'm sure he's a very good fighter. He's won every bout he's been in."

"We'll bill him in both his careers," I said, "as a knockout artist."

"I think you're horribly mean and suspicious. It just happens that he's fighting this very evening in Madison Square Garden. In the fight that follows the main bout. And he—oh, I wasn't supposed to tell anybody about that!"

"Why not? What's he got to cover up?"

"I can't tell you. And you haven't any right to ask."

"All right. Let's forget how he dumps other guys on the canvas, and talk about how he dumps paint on canvas. What are you going to do with his paintings?"

She had been acting defiant but now she moved up closer to me and dialed one of the buttons on my jacket and said softly, "I'm going to lend them to you for a one-man show in your gallery. You'll do that for me, won't you, Pete?"

I told her it was impossible. I explained that it would wreck whatever reputation I had. I said no. All the time, she kept looking up sadly at me and dialing the button on my jacket as if it might tune me to a channel with a better program. Her lower lip quivered and two large perfect tears formed slowly under each of her blue eyes. It was a completely phoney performance and it didn't change my mind a bit. I knew I would end up doing what she wanted.

"Besides," I said, "nobody would come."

"All you do is provide the gallery. I'll arrange everything else."

"I absolutely refuse to put up that one awful picture."

"You can turn your back and I'll put it up."

"That isn't what I meant. I—oh, all right. Do anything you want to my place. I haven't anything to lose but my lease."

"I think you're very nice," she said, dialing the button completely off my jacket. "Oh, look. Your button. I'm sorry."

"That's all right. Girls are always yanking off my buttons as souvenirs. They—"

"Speaking of souvenirs," she said, "I want to get a picture of us." She called over my shoulder to somebody, "Hello, Bill. Do you have a moment?"

A guy carrying a Speed Graphic camera stopped and said, "Hi, Nancy. Got all day for you. What's up?"

"Bill, this is a friend of mine, Pete Meadows. Do you have a spare film holder? Could you take a couple of pictures of us?"

"Sure. Anything you say, Nancy."

"Bill works for one of the papers," Nancy told me. "I can never remember which. He's been wasting film on me for years."

"Best looking legs in town," Bill said cheerily. "More than I can say for most debs. How do you want this, Nancy?"

"Wait a minute," I said. "This isn't for the paper, is it? There is no news in what we're doing."

"This is for my scrapbook," Nancy said. "Now if you'll kneel and point at one of the paintings, Pete . . ."

I posed with her for a couple of shots. Nancy's friend promised to send the photos to her after they were developed, and left. Then Nancy suggested taking the paintings to my shop right away. We gathered up Accardi's paintings and the ones Nancy had been exhibiting and walked across the square to Walnut Street. The way things had worked out, I was carrying the Accardi painting that I disliked on top of my pile. For some reason the thing made me a little nervous, and I remembered how Nick Accardi's landlady said she had a feeling it might bring bad luck.

Of course I should have known better. It's just superstition to say that a thing can bring either good or bad luck. As time went on, I learned that the unpleasant painting merely brought people. It was no fault of the painting that some of them were not the kind of people you want to meet in the dark.

3.

At six o'clock that night I dropped exhausted into a chair in my shop. Nancy had just left, probably to keep the date which Sheldon had mentioned earlier that afternoon. She had been in my shop for the past three hours getting it ready for the one-man show of Nick Accardi's stuff. It turned out that Nancy gets things ready the way a hurricane prunes trees.

What I call my gallery is just an old storeroom about sixty feet long by twenty wide, behind the shop. It's clean enough but rather bare, because I've never had any money to furnish

it. After one look Nancy said it would have to be fixed up. She left the shop and in fifteen minutes came back with four guys carrying rugs. Then she went out and returned with a small caravan bringing furniture. Another trip brought assorted lamps.

This seemed very mysterious to me, but the explanation was simple. When you are Nancy Vernon, of the Van Rensselaer Vernons, you walk into the best stores on Chestnut Street and explain sweetly to the manager that you need to borrow a few things for a one-man show to help a deserving young painter, and naturally the manager lends you half the joint and is a little hurt that you won't borrow more. So now the Accardi paintings were all hung and the gallery looked like a decorator's dream.

My assistant, Miss Krim, sighed and said, "Isn't it lovely?"

I had expected Miss Krim to resent the way Nancy took over the place, but she acted like a mother at her daughter's coming-out party. "It's lovely," I said, "but nobody will come to see it. Nancy wants to open the show tomorrow night. You can't stage a one-man show without notice, and draw a crowd. Not that I'm complaining. The fewer people see these paintings, the better I'll like it."

"Miss Vernon said she would invite some of her friends."

"That doesn't mean they'll come."

"I would not," Miss Krim said, "sell Miss Vernon short. In addition to being a charming girl, she has some quite practical ideas. We can," she added thoughtfully, "use a few practical ideas around here."

"Name one of her practical ideas."

"All right. She thinks that with proper encouragement you could make something out of yourself. Some people might say that's impractical, but it could be done."

"What's wrong with me the way I am?"

"If I may use an art term," Miss Krim said, "there are times when you remind me of the type of painting known as a still-life. Pleasant to have hanging around, but not very full of action."

I wished Miss Krim owned the place, so I could threaten to resign. "I am," I said, "keeping a tight hold on my temper."

"If you let it go," Miss Krim said brightly, "I'll bet it would just roll over and play dead. Well, time for me to leave. I must say I'm delighted that you have become interested in such a lovely girl as Miss Vernon."

"She may be lovely but she's too wilful."

"She'll need to be wilful. After all, she will have to make up your mind as well as her own."

That was a cryptic remark, but before I could ask for an explanation Miss Krim smiled and marched out of the shop.

After she left I closed the place and went upstairs to my apartment on the second floor. Ever since Miss Krim came to work for me she's been dying to see my rooms. She thinks that I exist upstairs in a man-made slum. Actually it isn't bad at all: clean, bright, a few nice prints, a good Chinese rug that I picked up at an auction at Freeman's, and a small jew 7 el of a landscape by Vlaminck that would bring a nice profit if I could give it up.

Miss Krim believes that no man can be trusted to do his own cooking, and each morning she always asks hopefully if I went out for a nourishing dinner. I was irritated at Miss Krim, so it gave me some pleasure to prepare crab flakes Creole, fresh green peas, shoestring potatoes and a tossed salad. I ground up coffee beans—Panama upland coffee is the best, if you can get it— which had been freshly roasted for me, and had two cups of the kind of coffee no husband ever gets at home.

I was settling down for a quiet evening when I remembered that weird painting of Accardi's hanging below me in the gallery. Thinking of it made the evening seem less quiet. I squirmed around on my chair for a while, trying to read a book, and finally decided to go down and look at the thing. I didn't have anything especially in mind. I merely went to look at it like a man thinking back over a nightmare, so that he can reason away its unpleasant memory.

When I turned on the lights in the gallery, the picture seemed to spring at me. Nancy had given it a wall by itself. And while

we had framed the other canvases, Nancy had insisted on leaving this one unframed. Now I saw what she had in mind. A frame would have fenced in the picture and tamed it. This way, it had a certain crude power. Its raw greens and blues and yellows and reds blazed away like an incendiary bomb. More than ever, I had a feeling that the guy had burned into the canvas the essence of rage and disgust.

Of course that was impossible. There was no thought or plan behind the wild swirls and streaks of color. My reaction to the picture was entirely the product of my imagination. I had been mildly stirred by meeting a pretty girl, and Sheldon Thorp had annoyed me more than usual, and Lassiter had given me a brushoff, and so when I saw an ugly mess of color on canvas I transferred my resentment of Sheldon and Lassiter to the canvas. Accardi's painting was the sort of thing anybody could do if they threw pigment on canvas and sloshed it around a bit.

In fact, I was going to prove that.

I went into the shop and got a canvas about the size Ac-cardi had used, and collected some tubes of oil paint and a palette and palette knife and easel, and went back into the gallery. While I'm no artist, I know all the techniques fairly well. I set up my stuff and went to work. I didn't try to copy Accardi's painting, because nobody could have done that, but I aimed at the same effect. I squeezed out masses of chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine blue and oxide of chromium. With a palette knife I slapped blobs of pigment on the canvas and smeared them around. After fifteen minutes I finished and stepped back for a look. At a quick glance, there was a resemblance between the two canvases. But as soon as you looked again, you found yourself staring at Accardi's job and forgetting mine.

It was ridiculous. It was just my imagination at work again. I put away my stuff and propped the canvas I had ruined in a corner of the shop and went back upstairs. At least I had proved my theory about the way Accardi had done his. He hadn't painted it at all. He had merely thrown stuff on canvas and smeared it around like a plasterer working on stucco.

I read for a while but I was still restless. Around ten o'clock I switched on the television set and watched the fight out of Madison Square Garden. The main go ended in a knockout in the third round, and they brought on the extra bout to fill in the air time. This was the bout Nick Accardi was supposed to be in. Neither of the fighters was named Accardi, though.

The kids in the extra bout were welterweights. One of them looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't remember seeing him before on TV. He had black hair and a thin hungry face and hot eyes. He came out of his corner at the bell like a panther going for sheep, and ripped in a brutal series of hooks and had his opponent down and out in the first minute. Then he climbed out through the ropes without waiting for the announcer to raise his hand. He didn't even do a little jig for the benefit of the TV camera. That seemed odd. You'd think a fighter would take full advantage of his first chance at television, especially since it was only a lucky break that the main bout ended quickly and gave him the chance.

I switched off the set and wondered where I had seen the guy before. Finally I got an idea. I went downstairs and looked at the two Accardi portraits—self-portraits, Nancy had told me —which were hanging in the gallery. It was the right hunch. Of course I couldn't actually compare a face seen fleetingly on TV with a face done in Cezanne's style. But both faces had given me the same feeling: here were two hungry kids trying to claw and smash their way through a tough world.

By now my quiet evening was pretty well wrecked, and I had worked up a lot of curiosity about Nick Accardi. I decided to walk over to his rooming house and see what I could learn about him from his landlady or other people in the place. Nancy had given me his address. I walked out Walnut Street to Twenty-second and over to his rooming house. It was a three-story place faced with red sandstone that was flaking off like old sunburn. The door into the tiny vestibule was open. Inside were mail boxes, and one of them carried the words "N. Accardi, 3rd back." I rang the bell but nobody came. I tried the inner door. It was unlocked so I went in. There was nothing in the

dimly lighted hall except a pay phone. I went upstairs, the treads of the stairway squeaking underfoot like mice.

The light in the third floor hall showed me a door at the back on which Accardi had tacked up his name. Apparently nobody was in; the door was open an inch or so and the room beyond was dark. I didn't have any right to push die door open and peek in. I did it anyway. It was a mistake.

The next second hands clamped on my throat. They yanked me inside, slammed me up against a wall. The door clicked shut. Then I didn't hear anything for a few moments but the mounting roar of blood in my head. A black fog started drifting toward me. The hands eased up a notch and a voice filtered through to me.

"All right," it said harshly. "Where's that picture, Nick?"

I tried to speak but couldn't force any sound up past the hands on my throat. The hands thought I was trying to get away. They tightened, shook me.

"Not too much," the voice rasped. "Let him talk. All right, Nick. Come across. You're in no spot to play cute with me."

The hands loosened. I tried to gasp that I wasn't Nick. The words came up my throat like hunks of broken glass and all I could hear was a scratching noise. The hands dug in once more and the black fog moved nearer and then far back in the fog a light flickered. It came closer, hurt my eyes. The thing was a flashlight.

"He's not Nick," a voice said, very far away.

"What do I do now?" another voice said.

"Take him," the first voice snapped.

The hands jerked away from my throat. I started to fall but things came out of the blazing light and propped me up. For a moment I couldn't figure what they were. Then dull jolts of pain got through to my head. The things propping me up were fists, crunching into face and body. I swayed there for a moment and finally the fists went away and let me topple forward into the dark.