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TWO · THE $HOPING LI$T

"He was gnawing on the outside bort bricks" I said, "and when I asked him what he wanted in fluent Swahili, he dropped dead."

"Probably couldn't stand your accent," Adam grinned, inspecting the bod. "He looks like nothing. Complete John Doe. Any ID on him?"

"I didn't search. Just hauled the corpus in out of sight and waited for your glorious epiphany."

"Check him, Nan. A brick-chewer ought to be interest­ing." Ms. Ssss silently began a rather gloomy inspection. "Now give me the full, Alf. What were you doing outside? Taking a runout powder? Dereliction of duty?"

"No way. I don't deny that I was considering it but the hitching post came charging in."

"What? Not the late, great Ludwig B.?"

"Beethoven in the flesh-ch, storming about his ghost making him compose a Symphony in Blue."

Adam guffawed. "Oy gevald!"

"My very words."

"How did you handle it?"

"I psyched him."

"Go on!"

"I scout's honor did."

"Not in there," pointing to the Hellhole.

"Right out here, at the harpsichord, and I wonder what your observers are making of it."

"Cela m'importe peu. Tell all."

"It was easy. I hummed, sang, one-fingered on the key­board all I could remember from his fifth. He began to shake with excitement, said I was his new inspiration, and jotted it down on slips of score paper. I escorted him out, him bless­ing me in Deutsch, and there was the brick-chewer."

"Alf, you're the genius absolute. Did the late, great offer to pay?"

"Too inspired, but I collected anyway."

"How?"

"I pinched one of his notes." I handed Adam a slip of score paper on which were scribbled various measures with Allegro con brio and Andante con moto and the initials LvB.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" he exclaimed. "This is worth a fortune! I'm thinking of taking you on as a permanent partner, Alf."

"Never mind that. Why isn't Glory talking to me or looking at me? Is she angry? Did I do something wrong?"

"No, no, she's getting ready to molt and that always depresses her."

"Molt? Shed her skin?"

"Right on. She's from the serpent crowd, remember? She never knows what her new look will be and she wor­ries."

"But snakes don't change, they just become more than they were before."

"So does Nan, but she worries all the same."

"I don't see how she could possibly be less magnetic."

"Uh-huh. She's got you in her power."

"What about you cat people? Do you have problems, too?"

"My God, yes! A raunchy song goes with it." And Adam sang:

Cats on the rooftops, cats on the tiles. Cats with syphilis, cats with piles. Cats with their assholes wreathed in smiles, As they glory in the joys of fornication.

"With Glory?" I admit I was jealous.

"With my nursemaid? My guardian? Are you mad? Never! Anyway, I'm only attracted to cat-type girls."

I felt better. "So where, when, and how long were you? It's only been a couple of hours, here-time."

"New York. Twenty-fifty. A week."

"So it's still standing."

"More or less."

"Get anything for the Count's Iddroid?"

"Yes, by God! A sixth sense. It's like precognition."

"If it exists. I know women claim they've got intuition."

"Oh, it's real, Alf. I've got some beauties in stock. One's from Doc Holliday, which is why he got kilt in the OK Corral."

"The gunfighter? Why'd he dump it?"

"Said he knew he was going to die soon anyway. Just didn't want to know the exact time and place. But I'm talk­ing about an omnichronosense that enables you to see up and down the Arrow of Time, past, present, and future, simultaneouswise."

"Impossible!"

"Which is why Cagliostro will dig it."

"Where'd you find it?"

"To quote you, in the flesh-ch."

"Quoting right back at you, tell me all."

"About five years ago," Adam obliged, "this guy came in with a portrait of himself painted by a fashionable artist named Van Ryn. He was from the States in the early twenty hundreds, and he was scared out of his wig because Van Ryn had depicted him as 'Le Pendu' from the Tarot fortune-telling cards: The Hanged Man, slung upside down from a beam with a cord around one foot and his hands tied behind his back. Dead.

"The client wanted me to probe him and find out if he had some hidden savage criminal streak which would earn him this frightful punishment. If so, he wanted it wiped. It was crazy, but I explored him and found nothing more dangerous than a yearning for adventure. So I sent him back to twenty-thirty and thought no more about it.

"Until a few years later, when I learned from one of his contemporaries that the client had died in an awful acci­dent. He'd taken up skydiving—that adventure yen—and when his chute opened he'd gotten tangled in the cords, upside down, and smashed to the ground head foremost. How could this Van Ryn have called it in advance, even though he painted the scene differently?

"So when I spotted a sixth sense on Alesandro's list I thought maybe this Van Ryn had something like that and was worth a try. Went off to the Big Apple up then and cov­ered museums, galleries, art schools, and found out the fol­lowing.

"Victor Van Ryn was, is, will be a magnificent and suc­cessful artist. He was born Sam Katz, but that's no name for a fashionable painter. Victor suffered from cognitive astig­matism."

"What's—"

"Wait for it, Alf. Wait for it. Physical astigmatism is a dis­tortion of the eye lenses that causes rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is what afflicted El Greco and caused him to paint elongated faces and figures.

"But the challenge for the portrait painter is to see through the persona mask of the subject into the true per­sonality, and put them both on canvas, the outward and the inner. This insight requires a sensitive, perceptive cognition. Van Ryn had it but it was astigmatic. He saw the past, pres­ent, and future of whoever or whatever he was painting and got mixed up.

"He didn't know what to believe so he settled for painting everything he perceived, past or present or future and sometimes all together. Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in a coffin. He even painted one as a small boy engaged in what the Chinese call 'hand lewdness.' Naturally, they refused to pay.

"The end came when Van Ryn received a secret com­mission from a presidential candidate to paint the secret pleasance of his secret mistress, and Van Ryn produced a bijou of her in the garden of same, naked and en flagrante with another lover. You don't dast mess around with pow­erful politicians and their popsies.

"We tracked him down at last. What made it tough was that he'd gone back to his original name and original Bronx, which was a ghetto. He was camping on the top floor of a low-income housing ruin, scraping a living by lettering sales signs for stores and posters for protesters. A damn bad scene."

Glory broke in quietly. "I've finished, Dammy."

"Great. Any ID on the brick chewer?"

"Nothing, except two negatives."

"Such as?"

"No chance of using fingerprints. He has no loops, whorls, anything on his fingertips."

"But that's impossible," I argued. "Even the apes have primitive prints."

"Not our friend here." But she didn't answer me; she only spoke to Adam. "He's a complete blank. Take a close look."

We looked. She was right. I've never seen a more anonymous blank. There was no outstanding feature. He was beige and doughy, the way an android might look before the final processing.