animal kingdom felt perverse—an arrangement so wrong that it might contain even sexual implications.
The rocks in the background, superimposed upon a blue of Mediterranean tranquility, recalled Capri, that playground of Tiberius, Caligula and their pals. It was even now a watering spot for persons without visible moral ties. Who were the moral equivalents of Tiberius and Caligula in Leonardo’s day? Whoever they were, they certainly existed. They always exist.
Should he sleep at Bernie’s? It would be soft, and dry, and not that far away.
No, there was cardboard stacked in the alley, only slightly damp. Fred made a mattress of it and slept. If something moved on Pekham Street, he’d wake and see it.
Chapter Eight
Dogs woke him early, an inquisitive pair who sniffed at him half-heartedly until, concluding that he was not dead, they lost interest. It was almost six o’clock. He’d been here longer than he intended. He must have found a place the police were unused to checking for sleeping strangers who did not belong here, and probably nowhere else.
“Nothing for you today,” Fred told the dogs. Fourteen Pekham, almost opposite his alley, was still. It wasn’t his business. He had no business. No, wrong. Fred had an urgent, almost pleasant desire for coffee.
The drugstore at the foot of Charles Street let him buy coffee in a paper cup to drink by the river while the advancing daylight slowly replaced sleep. The river in the early morning steamed in a frankly bucolic way. It served as the common reference point for gulls, cormorants, a pair of mallard ducks, and swallows. Nothing commercial had any business on this river. But by seven the first of the institutional sculls, rowed by students, streaked slowly past, followed by the odd kayak.
Wind, blowing upstream at the same rate as the current flowed against it, seemed to hold the ripples steady, keeping the odd bits of floating material, leaves, sticks, or crumpled paper, in such ambivalence that they could not decide whether to obey the force of the current, give up, and move toward the Atlantic, or to give in to the wind and use it as an excuse to sail upstream. Since it was May the grass, though it was kept cut short, was struggling to bloom along with the clover. A few wild yellow irises bloomed against the bank, in places the mower could not reach. In the same protected areas milkweed was sending up its spikes. Swallows, swooping in swags after insects too small for anyone else to see, were too busy to make a sound.
The city was fully awake, with traffic bustling along the parkway separating the riverbank from the city. The river continued running against the wind. The wind continued blowing against the river. Two sculls from rival universities, happening to find themselves in the same stretch of water at the same time, moving upstream, started an improvised race too suddenly serious for the women in one boat and the men in the other to shout things at each other.
“Though it’s not my business,” Fred went on, “what’s Tilley doing this far from Atlanta, with a queen’s ransom in paintings he can’t understand?”
The coffee was sweet and black. It no longer held even the memory of heat. Fred took a sip and rolled it around his mouth. A thin man, wearing jeans and a Red Sox jacket and hat, wandered down the bank from the paved footpath, slapping a folded
Herald
against his thigh. He stood looking up and down the expanse of grass. The sun, burning out from the early mist, made a long shadow lurch away from the man’s feet so suddenly, with such visual violence, that the shadow should have made noise: a ripping or tearing sound.
“The box he sold us, was it inherited or stolen?” Fred said.
The thin man glanced at him as if he’d spoken aloud. Maybe he had. Being alone so much, perhaps he’d gotten into the habit.
The thin man with the paper began the elaborate calculations by which a single male on an expanse of public green decides the
Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta