"Hi, Matthew," said Holly, to the paper-tosser. "You're not bored, by any chance?"
"Bored? Bored doesn't even comeclose. I am way beyond boredom, in a fourth dimension of total yawnation, where I am losing interest even inbreathing."
Tyrone gave Holly a finger wave and said, "Sorry, Holly, I won't be long. I'm trying to arrange a special exhibition."
He listened, and nodded, and then he said, "Tsimshian transformation masks. Very deep Native American stuff. Like, very,verydeep." Then, into the phone: "Yes, Ms. Spring Moon, Idounderstand their mystical significance. Yes, I know. Of course your shaman can supervise their hanging. We wouldn't want to upset any malevolent spirits, now, would we?"
As Tyrone talked, Matthew was mimicking his exaggerated hand gestures, so Tyrone threw the copy ofArchitectural Digestat him and hit him on the shoulder.
"Ow!"Matthew protested.
"I don't know why you don't find yourself something more challenging to do," Holly suggested, taking off her raincoat and sitting down next to him.
"I don't think there's anything more challenging in the whole world than trying to bug Tyrone. Except-I don't know-maybe climbing the east face of Mount Hood in midwinter, totally naked."
"Oh my God. So long as you don't expect me to watch you do it."
Holly waited for a while, but Matthew kept on tossing paper and Tyrone kept on talking, and nodding, and saying "Uh-huh, uh-huh," so in the end she stood up and walked along the gallery looking at the paintings. Most of them were strong, simplistic images in primary colors: nudes, abstracts, landscapes. But at the very end of the gallery there was a large painting propped up against the wall that appeared to be nothing but solid black.
When she approached it, however, she realized that the paint had varying textures, some of them glossy and some of them matte. In the very center, too, almost invisible from a distance, were two dark red circles, like totally bloodshot eyes. Viewing the painting from an angle, so that the lights shone across it, Holly was sure that she could distinguish the ragged outline of black feathers.
She suddenly felt as if somebody had come very close up behind her and was breathing against her neck. Her first instinct was to turn around, but then she thought of what the woman in the Bellman Bookstore had warned:There's something following you Something behind you Don't you go looking behind you, whatever you do.
This is completely irrational,she thought.There can't be anybody there.But she felt ridiculously reluctant to look around, and she was sure that somebody was breathing very close to her ear.
She was still standing in front of the black painting when Tyrone came up to her and put his arm around her shoulders. "What do you think of it?" he asked.
"I don't know. Who painted it?"
"Some guy who came in this morning. He asked if I'd consider selling it for him."
"Does it have a title?"
"It's calledIll Fortune VII.Don't ask me why. I haven't seenIll Fortune IthroughVI."
"You're kidding me. That's what it's called?"
"Why should I kid you?"
"I don't know. I think I'm being, what, hypersensitive. Superstitious, maybe. It's just that somebody wished bad luck on me this morning and ever since then I keep on seeing things. I don't exactly know what you'd call them omens, Iguess."
"Omens? What? You mean like black cats and funeral processions and haloes around the sun?"
"No, I just mean things that make me feel uneasy." She told him how Elliot Joseph had put a curse on her in the courtroom, and about the Porsche parked on Salmon Street and what the woman in the Bellman Bookstore had said. "And now this painting,Ill Fortune VII.And itcouldbe a raven, couldn't it?"
Matthew had joined them. He tilted his head on one side and said, "It could be a raven, yes. But then it could equally be the inside of Mike Tyson's shorts at midnight."
"For Christ's sake, Matthew," said Tyrone. Then to Holly: "Why don't you join us for lunch? We were only going across to the Quarter Deck for a sandwich."
Memories of Bad Luck
"Ever since you were a kid, you always seemed to know when bad things were going to happen, didn't you?" said Tyrone. He had put his half-glasses on and he was picking stray alfalfa sprouts off his plate and nibbling them. "Don't you remember that Fourth of July when that girl from next door got burned? What was her name?"
"Margaret Pickard," said Holly. "How could I ever forget?"
"What was that all about?" asked Matthew, his mouth obscenely full of sandwich.
Tyrone tidily patted his lips with his napkin. "I guess it was Holly's deafness: It gave her kind of a psychic awareness. You know, things that most people don't usually pick up on. She could always tell you if it was going to rain, for instance."
"In Portland? You don't need a psychic awareness for that. It happens once every fifteen minutes, without fail."
"No, there were other things too. Like, she could tell when the phone was going to ring about ten seconds before it did. And once we were walking through Waterfront Park and an old guy was mowing the grass on a ride-on mower and Holly said, 'You have to stop him, he's going to hurt himself.' Well, our dad went over and talked to the old guy, but of course the old guy just laughed. The next thing we knew, he was trying to clear a piece of broken branch out of the mower blades, and somehow it started up and chopped most of his fingers off. I'll never forget that. He was standing there with his hand held up and only his thumb and half of his index finger left, and blood running off his elbow, and he was staring at Holly with thislook,like she had actually made it happen."
"Excuse me. I'm trying to eat a very rare steak sandwich here."
"Well, come on, Matthew, you wanted to know. What happened on the Fourth of July was different, though. This girl next door, Margaret, she was only about eleven, and she was real quiet and never said a word to anyone. The neighbors had a big Fourth of July barbecue with a bonfire and professional fireworks. But Margaret's parents kept teasing her to mingle with the boys, and in the end she went off up to her room because she was so shy."
Holly said, "I was sitting in the garden, on a bench under the trees, and I had a premonition. I mean an actualvision,almost, of a girl falling, her arms spread out wide, and she was burning. It was, like, I don't know: like an angel falling out of heaven. You know those medieval paintings. The trouble was, I didn't know who it could be. I just kept on seeing it again and again."
"Holly came and told me," Tyrone put in. "I told my mom but my mom didn't really know what to do. It's a bit of a downer if you go up to your hosts at a Fourth of July party and say, 'Excuse me, my daughter's had this premonition that somebody's going to burn to death.' So mom told dad and between them they agreed to keep a careful eye on all of the kids around the bonfire."
"Right near the end of the party they had this incredible rocket display," said Holly. "There were dozens and dozens of rockets, and I saw Margaret come out onto the balcony in front of her parents' bedroom to watch it. I'll never forget it. She was wearing this white flouncy frock with a big pink bow, and a bow in her hair."