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  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.

  Colors were spinning in front of my eyes. At first they blurred together but the spinning slowed down gradually and I could pick out chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine blue and oxide of chromium. They seemed to be painted on a phonograph record. The disk had a crack in it and I heard a tick each time the needle hit the crack. The disk slowed down more and more and became that weird painting of Accardi's. Just about the time I identified it, the thing turned into a jigsaw puzzle and somebody picked it and all the pieces vanished and I was staring into blackness again. The ticking from the cracked record kept on though.

  My face hurt. Somebody was using it as the pivot for a seesaw. I moved a little and found that the floor was the
seesaw, and my face was flat against it. I rolled over and managed to sit up. The cracked record ticked madly for a moment and turned out to be blood pulsing inside my head. I looked around and couldn't see anything but a couple of gray squares bandaged against the darkness. I crawled over the floor until I hit a wall and worked my way up it to a standing position and felt along the wall until my fingers touched a light switch. I nipped it up. Light jabbed needles of pain into my eyes. I located a door and opened it and stared at a piece of cardboard tacked on the outside. The name Accardi was lettered on it.

  A few facts began limping back into my head. Somebody had been preparing a small accident for Nick Accardi and I had insisted on having it for him. Somebody wanted one of his paintings badly. The level of art appreciation among thugs must be quite low.

  Since I had paid a steep admission price to get into Accardi's room, I figured I might as well look around. I closed his door

  23

  again. The two gray squares which I had seen through the darkness were windows. The room held a bed, bureau, two chairs and a washstand. The bedclothes had been ripped of} the bed and the mattress turned up. The door of a closet sagged open and things in it had been tossed around. The bureau drawers were open. The guys I had walked in on had obviously looked hard for the painting.

  As a matter of fact there wasn't a painting in sight. An old easel stood in one corner, and some brushes and equipment filled a couple of shelves along one wall. I glanced over the stuff. There were tubes of pigment, but there was also a grinding slab, a muller, a steel spatula, some slightly roughened glass plates, and a container of poppy seed oil. That meant Accardi ground some of his own colors. I was mildly surprised. Not many painters today go in for that. You can get better effects when you grind your own colors, and you can be sure of what goes into the colors and how it will react over the years, but it's a lot of work and most modern painters don't want to bother. On one upper shelf I saw a lineup of wide-necked jars. Accardi kept his paints in them, covered with a little water, after he finished the grinding.

  None of this interested me very much, and I didn't want to hang around to meet any more local art collectors. I switched off the light and left the room. Nobody came out to take a look at me as I wobbled downstairs. Perhaps they were used to guys walking unsteadily, and to sounds like the thud I had probably made hitting the floor in Accardi's room. I walked back to my place on Walnut Street and got in my apartment and showed my face to a mirror. It was a colorful sight. The bruises looked like old paint on a palette. My nose had bled a little but didn't seem to be any more off-center than usual.

  I splashed water on my face and then got out a bottle of bourbon and treated myself to a solid one. It didn't seem to help my rocky feeling. I poured another jolt and lifted the glass and checked the distance to my bed and its direction. I tossed down the bourbon. It hit my stomach and sent a shock wave

  tingling up to my head. The wave jarred something loose. It was a thought. Suddenly a couple of things were clear to me.

  "That wasn't another guy's accident you just had," I told myself. "It belonged to you. Those thugs didn't know it but they probably had the right guy after all. Ten to one, you have that picture they want."

  I dropped the empty glass and went lurching to the phone. It seemed like a good idea to call Nancy, and tell her that a one-man show of Accardi's stuff might draw the wrong kind of patrons. Of course I didn't know her number. I riffled through the phone book looking for Vernon. There weren't any Vs. There weren't any names at all. The pages were a gray blur. I picked up my phone and tried to dial Information but I couldn't find the right set of numbers.

  Finally I must have dialed somebody's number by chance, because a voice started coming through the receiver. It sounded vaguely familiar and I introduced myself and tried desperately to explain that I had to talk to Nancy Vernon and tell her the show was off. The voice made some shrill noises that hurt my ear and I put down the phone to wait for the voice to shut up. Apparently I put the phone back in its cradle and broke the connection, because when I picked it up again all I could get was the dial tone. There was also a strong dial tone buzzing inside my head. I decided to rest a few minutes, and located my bed after a long search. It was rocking badly, like a rowboat in a storm, but I managed to crawl in without upsetting it. In two seconds I was asleep.

  When I awoke, something cool and pleasant seemed to be patting my face. I opened my eyes and saw a curtain of bright hair shining in the sunlight coming through the bedroom window. The bright hair framed a girl's face. She was bending over me and patting my face with a damp washcloth. I closed my eyes and decided to dream on.

  Somebody shook me and said briskly, "Mr. Meadows, I saw you open your eyes. Come on now. Sit up."

  I peered at the speaker. Lost: one dream girl. This was Miss Krim, with her hair pulled back in a braid and her lips stitched

  in a firm seam. She looked like a teacher working on a backward pupil.

  "Please," I said weakly, "I'm not myself today."

  "That would be an improvement," Miss Krim said.

  "I think he's rather nice as he is," another voice said.

  I looked at the other side of the bed. There she was again, golden hair and all. Unless my eyes deceived me, which was possible at the moment, it was Nancy Vernon. "Let me get this straight," I said. "Is my name Peter Meadows and is this my apartment?"

  "He's still drunk," Miss Krim said.

  "Don't be too hard on him," Nancy said. "I know there's an explanation."

  "There certainly is," Miss Krim said. "It's an eighty-five proof explanation and it's called bourbon."

  "I think he was in a fight," Nancy said. "That would account for the bruises."

  "I think he was falling-down drunk. That would account for the bruises."

  "But you said he has never been like this before."

  "That's merely a guess," Miss Krim said. "Perhaps in the past he recovered more quickly."

  I said, "I wish you two would leave the room if you want to talk about me behind my back. What are you doing here, anyway?"

  "We are," Miss Krim said, "engaged in the task of bringing you to. I find it quite unrewarding."

  "I've seen worse sights the morning after a college prom," Nancy said.

  "You telephoned me last night," Miss Krim said. "It was not easy to understand your words, but I gathered there was some urgent need to get in touch with Miss Vernon and call off the Accardi show. Then the phone connection was broken. I tried to call back and kept finding the line busy. I telephoned Miss Vernon. As you know, she lives on Delancey Place quite near Rittenhouse Square. I told her you sounded sick or hurt. She walked down here and saw that the lights were on, but she

  couldn't get an answer when she rang the bell. She called me back. I came down in the middle of the night, all the way from Chestnut Hill—you will find a bill for my cab fare on your desk— and got the spare key from the office and in company with Miss Vernon entered your apartment. Please note, in company with Miss Vernon. And—" she shuddered delicately "—we found you like this."

  "Like this, huh?" I muttered, remembering how dirty and rumpled my clothes must be. I looked down at myself. "Where are my clothes?" I gasped. "How did I get into these pajamas?"

  "Your clothes?" Miss Krim said. "I suppose they're in the closet or wherever you hang them. I don't know how you got into your pajamas. In fact I would rather not discuss anything as personal as pajamas."

  "Don't you even remember getting undressed?" Nancy asked.

  "No," I said, staring at each of them in turn, and feeling my face toasting.

  "You were probably," Miss Krim said, "quite far gone at the time."

  I pulled the sheet up around my neck and said hoarsely, "I'd like to be left alone."

  "I ought to go down to the shop anyway," Miss Krim said. "It is nearly ten o'clock."

  Nancy said, "Do you think it's all right for me to stay in the living room? I want to talk to him."

  "Yo
u're perfectly safe," Miss Krim said. "Where Mr. Meadows is concerned, the only thing a woman risks losing is a little time."

  They went out of the room and closed the door. I stared glumly after them. Things had turned out quite badly. Miss Krim would never believe that I had collected my bruises battling to save the Accardi paintings. Come to think of it, she would be right, too. I hadn't done any battling. I had merely let a guy pour punches into me until I spilled over. Maybe Nancy would believe my story if I told it straight, without any heroic touches, but it certainly wouldn't impress her. Well, we would

  call off the show and I would say good-by to her and send her a couple of nice prints when she married Sheldon Thorp.

  I showered and shaved and dressed and went into the living room. Nancy looked up at me with a bright smile. "I have breakfast ready for you in the kitchen," she said.

  If a short fat ugly girl had gone to that much trouble for me, I would have been very pleased. But in this case it irritated me. Obviously the girl hadn't done it because she liked me. She was a Junior Leaguer playing at charity work, and I was one of the underprivileged. "I don't want breakfast," I said.

  "Please, Pete. You're upset. I know Miss Krim said some sharp things to you. But she talks that way to cover up the fact that she thinks you're wonderful."

  "This is killing my appetite for lunch too."

  "If she were twenty-five years younger, I'll bet she wouldn't let another girl get your breakfast. Come on, Pete. I'm really a very fine cook."

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen. There was hot buttered toast and an omelet and steaming coffee. She was not a fine cook. The toast had been scraped to remove burned places. The omelet was too dry. The coffee had the life boiled out of it. That cheered me up. This girl wasn't perfect after all. I began eating with a surprisingly good appetite.

  "There!" Nancy said. "See how much better you feel? I don't think you take care of yourself properly."