Walking toward him, at the far end of an astonishingly long and narrow aisle of beetling shelves, was none other than his actress, Vera.
His first impulse was to shout her name and run down the long aisle, take her in his arms and kiss her, but she seemed to be going away from him rather quickly — not running, but going further and further as if by rents of unconsciousness in his perception, and then suddenly she was gone. He let the curtain fall in alarm, strode backward into the display case and banged it loudly, rattling the chromed fittings, the sparkling jets and needles, the red, white, and blue handlebar streamers, the glinting opaque glass and glistening black rubber of the goggles. He set his hands upon it and leaned over, as if to settle and dampen the jingling things and suggest a casual interest in the concentric piles of gears next to a typed and folded card listing ratios and prices. He assumed Vera would reappear, in the shop proper, shortly, and prepared a smile for the young woman’s arrival, conscious that his instinct had failed him, that he had, no other way to put it, fled in the face of her appearance and disappearance. But she did not reappear. And what, after all, had she been doing there in the first place? After quite a long time, he moved stealthily back to the curtain and pulled it slowly away: Vera had her back to him, about halfway down the aisle. Still he could not call out to her: Was she really there? He let the curtain swing stiffly back in place.
Above and behind him, a door in one of the mezzanine cubbyholes was opened with a bang on its hinges and closed with an even louder bang. He craned about and looked up but no one appeared.
Vera was now standing in the doorway, holding the red curtain aside with one finger. She and Charles regarded each other in what seemed like a long silence. Then he greeted her brightly, pretending that if they did not exactly know each other very well, they had seen each other around, were a part of the big happy family that the shop really was, fancy meeting you here and so on. She raised her head slightly, narrowed her eyes, and smiled faintly. Sandy hair, a face somehow smooth and clear and weathered at the same time, and smooth, deep, clear black eyes, sculptured lips. She seemed neither to know Charles nor to care that she did not. And yet there was something of remembrance or premonition in her mild, indifferent scrutiny. Charles was more fascinated than confused. Fascination precluded confusion. She nodded almost imperceptibly — or was he merely imagining such a validation of his wounded, vaunted instinct — then suddenly brightened, laughed, and said that she worked there. She said “Just a sec,” and turned back into the narrow aisle and let the curtain once again fall. Had she been lost in thought? Or had she been appraising Charles privately, or remembering their professional embraces and finding some genuine erotic content, and was just as startled to see him as he was to see her? Perhaps she was shy and manifested it with a kind of mystical hauteur. Perhaps she was drugged. Perhaps he was drugged. Indeed he felt somewhat high. Perhaps she had not been there at all. It was just barely possible, but possible nevertheless. Believing her to be, in that instant of embarrassment and redoubled desire, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he struggled to hold her image in his mind, but could not recall, a second later, a single feature. Sandy hair? Dark eyebrows? Flashing teeth? He moved like a puppet to the curtain and drew it back but she was nowhere to be seen.
He moved silently, with a kind of dreamlike dread and volition, down the aisle, calling out a greeting every few paces, until he reached the end, and retraced, silently, fully awake now for just that moment, his steps, parted the curtain yet again, and found the room noisily full of people, bustling about as if, yes, as if they were on a stage set: three colorfully distinct pairs of men coming one after another in a train through the big double doors with crated motorcycles, another man, a Mexican probably, a gentleman at a small table cluttered with newspapers against the far wall and the last window, which appeared to be pulsing now, faintly, with ore-bearing light, and four men again leaning over the gallery railing but not in shadow — at least three of them — this time, and laughing as if at a baseball game or in a saloon of the Gold Rush years. These four looked like rough and tough men — certainly not the hard but jolly mechanics — if not altogether desperados, and their laughter was clearly not the kind inspired by mirth or light-heartedness, but rather of defeat, despair, mockery, defiance. Still they appeared to have popped out of stage doors and were about to sing. One was a sleek and pink-faced gorilla with a luxurious head of hair, another had sunken cheeks and a monocle, the third had a round and close-shaven skull and a week’s growth of beard, and the fourth hung back in the shadow of a pillar. There were a couple of young men too, boys, who were trying to look and act like customers standing on either side of a yellow Beveridge Cyclone. They were younger than Charles, but not much, dirty and unnecessarily loud, boasting in an Italian dialect he could not make out. Beyond Rome, beyond Naples. Eboli perhaps. Sicilian. A lot of shu-shu-shushing. Sicilian. The truth was they offended him in some way he could not articulate. They looked like gang boys hoping for a chance to do something outrageously violent and useful. One of the men looking down at the shop from the mezzanine half-turned and let another man cross the trembling resounding gallery behind him. The man descended the stairs against the far wall of the shop, banging loudly on each step. He was owlish-looking, with large eyes that seemed nearly yellow behind his thick spectacles, and great shaggy brows shooting like black-veined bolts of lightning from the bridge of his equally remarkable nose to his bulging temples. He smelled strongly of whiskey and Charles faltered a bit before this predatory but teetering ferocity. He carried his hands before him, not quite balled in fists, as if wishing to grasp some invisible thing and tear it to shreds. Not appearing to notice Charles, the man left the shop, negotiated his way through a particularly dense crowd on the sidewalk, waited for a cable car, several Fords, and a horse-drawn wagon to pass, then crossed the street and entered, with exaggerated gestures of formality, into conversation with a jitney driver who was smoking a cigarette outside his little bus. The driver took an envelope from the owlish man and the two shook hands. Another man, wearing a bright red driving cap and a big black moustache, who Charles thought owned the shop joined the owlish man and the jitney driver, and after a moment they all crossed the street and entered the shop. The Owl stood center stage and announced that he had “spoken to the president,” and that said president had agreed to give him, Owl, it seemed, but possibly the others were included, sixty thousand dollars.
“You spoke to Mahon,” said Owner. There was no incredulity, feigned or unfeigned, in his voice.