"Could I maybe get a Coke or something?" the girl said, looking past Harry into the apartment.
The word sure was barely out of Harry's mouth and Sabina was pushing past him. What she lacked in manners she made up for in curves, he thought, watching her head on down the hall. He could live with that.
"the kitchen's on your right," he told her, but she headed straight past it into the living room.
"Got anything stronger?" she said. "There's probably some beers in the fridge," he replied, slamming the front door with his foot and following her into the living room.
"Beer gives me gas," she said.
Harry dropped the package in the middle of the floor. "I've got some rum, I think."
"Okay," she shrugged, as though Harry had been the one to suggest it and she really wasn't that interested.
He ducked into the kitchen to find the liquor, digging through the cupboard for an uncracked glass.
"You're not as weird as I thought you'd be," Sabina said to him meanwhile. "This place is nothing special."
"What were you expecting?"
"Something more crazy, you know. I heard you get into some pretty sick stuff."
"Who told you that?"
'Fed."
"You knew Ted?"
"I more than knew him," she said, appearing at the kitchen door. She was trying to look sultry, but her face, despite the kohl and the rouge and the blood-red lip gloss was too round and childlike to carry it off.
"When was this?" Harry asked her. "Oh... three years ago. I was fourteen when I met him." "That sounds like Ted."
"We never did anything I didn't want to do," she said, accepting the glass of rum from Harry. "He was always real nice to me, even when he was going through lousy times."
"He was one of the good guys," Harry said.
"We should drink to him," Sabina replied.
"Sure." they tapped glasses. "Here's to Ted."
"Wherever he is," Sabina added. "Now, are you going to open your present?"
It was a painting. Ted's great work, in fact, DAmour in Wyckoff Street, taken from its frame, stripped off its support and somewhat ignominiously tied up with a piece of frayed string.
"He wanted you to have it," Sabina explained, as Harry pulled back the sofa to unroll the painting fully. The canvas was as powerful as Harry remembered. The seething color field in which the street was painted, the impasto from which his features had been carved, and of course that detail Ted had been so proud to point out to Harry in the gallery: the foot, the heel, the snake writhing as it was trodden lifeless. "I guess maybe if somebody had offered him ten grand for it," Sabina was saying,
"he would have given you something else. But nobody bought it, so I thought I'd come and give it to YOU."
"And the gallery didn't mind?"
"they don't know it's gone," Sabina said. "they put it in storage with all the other pictures they couldn't sell. I guess they figured they'd find buyers sooner or later, but people don't want pictures like Ted's on their walls. they want stupid stuff." She had come to Harry's shoulder as she spoke. He could smell a light honey-scent off her. "If you like," she said, "I could come back and make a new support for the canvas. Then you could hang it over your bed-" she slid him a sly look,
"or wherever."
Harry didn't want to offend the girl. No doubt she'd done as Ted would have wished, bringing the picture here, but the notion of waking to an image of Wyckoff Street every morning wasn't particularly comforting.
"I can see you want to think about it," Sabina said, and leaning across to Harry laid a quick kiss beside his mouth. "I'll stop by sometime next week, okay?" she said. "You can tell me then." She finished her rum and handed the empty glass to Harry. "It was really nice meeting you," she said, suddenly and sweetly fon-nal. She was slowly retreating to the door as if waiting for a sign from Harry that she should stay.
He was tempted. But he knew he wouldn't think much of himself in the morning if he took advantage. She was seventeen, for God's sake. By Ted's standards that was practically nile, of course. But there was a part of Harry that still anted seventeen year olds to be dreaming of love, not being ed with rum and coaxed into bed by men twice their age.
She seemed to realize that nothing was going to come of this, and gave him a slightly quizzical smile. "You really aren't the way I thought you'd be," she remarked, faintly disappointed.
"I guess Ted didn't know me as well as he thought he did." "Oh it wasn't just Ted who told me about you," she said. "Who else?"
"Everyone and no one," she replied with a lazy shrug. She was at the door now. "See you, maybe," she said, and opening the door was away, leaving him wishing he'd kept her company a little longer.
Later, as he trailed to the john at three in the morning, he halted in front of the painting, and wondered if Mimi Lomax's house on Wyckoff Street was still standing. The question was still with him when he woke the following morning, and as he walked to his office, and as he sorted through his outstanding paperwork. It didn't matter either way, of course, except to the extent that the question kept coming between him and his business. He knew why: He was afraid. Though he'd seen terrors in Palomo Grove, and come face to face with the lad itself in Everville, the specter of Wyckoff Street had never been properly exercised. Perhaps it was time to do so now: to deal once and for all with that last corner of his psyche still haunted by the stale notion of an evil that coveted human souls.
He turned the notion over through the rest of the day, and through the day following that, knowing in his gut he would have to go sooner or later, or the subject would only gain authority over him.
On Friday morning, he got to his office to find that somebody had mailed him a mununified monkey's head, elaborately mounted on what looked suspiciously like a length of human bone. It was not the first time he'd had such items come his way-some of them warnings, some of them talismans from well-wishers, some of them simply illadvised gifts-but today the presence of this object, its aroma stinging his sinuses, seemed to Harry a goad, to get him on his way. What are you afraid of9 the gaping thing seemed to demand. Things die, and spoil, but took, I'm laughing.
He boxed the thing up, and was about to deposit it in the trash when some superstitious nerve in him twitched. Instead he left it where it lay in the middle of his desk and, telling it he'd be back soon, he headed off to Wyckoff Street.
It was a cold day. Not yet New York-bitter (that was probably a month, six weeks from now), but cold enough to know that there'd be no more shirtsleeve days this side of winter. He didn't mind. The summer months had always brought him the most trouble-this summer had been no exception- and he was relieved to feel things running down around him.
So what if the trees shed, and the leaves rotted and the nights drew in? He needed the sleep.
He found that much of the neighborhood around Wyckoff Street had changed drastically since he'd last been here, and the closer he got the more he dared hope his destination would be so much rubble.
Not so. Wyckoff Street remained almost exactly as it had been ten years before, the houses as gray and grim as ever. Rock might melt in Oregon, and the sky crack like a dropped egg, but here earth was earth and sky was sky and whatever lived between was not going to be skipping anywhere soon.
He wandered along the littered sidewalk to Mimi Lomax's house, expecting to find it in a state of dilapidation. Again, not so. Its pres-ent owner was plainly attentive. The house had a new roof, a new chimney, new eaves. The door he knocked on had been recently painted.
There was no reply at first, though he heard the murmur of voices from inside. He knocked again, and this time, after a delay of a minute or so, the door was opened a sliver and a woman in late middle-age, her face taut and sickly, stared out at him with red-fimmed eyes.