Kitabı oku: «Imajica», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

Do this for the women of the world, read the note John Furie Zacharias held. Slit your lying throat.

Beside the note, lying on the bare boards, Vanessa and her cohorts (she had two brothers; it was probably they who’d come with her to empty the house) had left a neat pile of broken glass, in case he was sufficiently moved by her entreaty to end his life there and then. He stared at the note in something of a stupor, reading it over and over, looking - vainly, of course - for some small consolation in it. Beneath the tick and scrawl that made her name the paper was lightly wrinkled. Had tears fallen there while she’d written her goodbye, he wondered? Small comfort if they had, and a smaller likelihood still. Vanessa was not one for crying. Nor could he imagine a woman with the least ambiguity of feeling so comprehensively stripping him of possessions. True, neither the mews house nor any stick of furniture in it had been his by law, but they had chosen many of the items together - she relying upon his artist’s eye, he upon her money to purchase whatever his gaze admired. Now it was gone, to the last Persian rug and Deco lamp. The home they’d made together, and enjoyed for a year and two months, was stripped bare. And so indeed was he. To the nerve, to the bone. He had nothing.

It wasn’t calamitous. Vanessa hadn’t been the first woman to indulge his taste in hand-made shirts and silk waistcoats, nor would she be the last. But she was the first in recent memory - for Gentle the past had a way of evaporating after about ten years - who had conspired to remove everything from him in the space of half a day. His error was plain enough. He’d woken that morning, lying beside Vanessa with a hard-on she’d wanted him to pleasure her with, and had stupidly refused her, knowing he had a liaison with Martine that afternoon. How she’d discovered where he was unloading his balls was academic. She had, and that was that. He’d stepped out of the house at noon believing the woman he’d left was devoted to him, and come home five hours later to find the house as it was now.

He could be sentimental at the strangest times. As now, for instance, wandering through the empty rooms, collecting up the belongings she had felt obliged to leave for him. His address book; the clothes he’d bought with his own money as opposed to hers; his spare spectacles; his cigarettes. He hadn’t loved Vanessa, but he had enjoyed the fourteen months they’d spent together here. She’d left a few more pieces of trash on the dining-room floor: reminders of that time. A cluster of keys which they’d never found doors to fit; instruction documents for a blender he’d burned out making midnight margaritas; a plastic bottle of massage oil. All in all, a pitiful collection, but he wasn’t so self-deceiving as to believe their relationship had been much more than a sum of those parts. The question was - now that it was over—where was he to go, and what was he to do? Martine was a middle-aged married woman, her husband a banker who spent three days of every week in Luxembourg, leaving her time to philander. She professed love for Gentle at intervals, but not with sufficient consistency to make him think he could prise her from her husband, even if he wanted to, which he was by no means certain he did. He’d known her eight months - met her, in fact, at a dinner party hosted by Vanessa’s elder brother William - and they had only argued once, but it had been a telling exchange. She’d accused him of always looking at other women: looking, looking, as though for the next conquest. Perhaps because he didn’t care for her too much, he’d replied honestly, and told her she was right. He was stupid for her sex. Sickened in their absence, blissful in their company; love’s fool. She’d replied that while his obsession might be healthier than her husband’s - which was money and its manipulation - his behaviour was still neurotic. Why this endless hunt, she’d asked him. He’d answered with some folderol about seeking the ideal woman, but he’d known the truth even as he was spinning her this tosh, and it was a bitter thing. Too bitter, in fact, to be put on his tongue. In essence, it came down to this: that he felt meaningless, empty, almost invisible unless one or more of her sex were doting on him. Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so. More, he lived in hope that one such mirror would find something behind his looks only another pair of eyes could see: some undiscovered self that would free him from being Gentle.

As always when he felt deserted, he went to see Chester Klein, patron of the arts by diverse hands, a man who claimed to have been excised by fretful lawyers from more biographies than any other man since Byron. He lived in Notting Hill Gate, in a house he’d bought cheaply in the late fifties, which he now seldom left, touched as he was by agoraphobia, or, as he preferred it, ‘a perfectly rational fear of anyone I can’t blackmail’.

From this small dukedom he managed to prosper, employed as he was in a business which required a few choice contacts, a nose for the changing taste of his market, and an ability to conceal his pleasure at his achievements. In short, he dealt in fakes, and it was this latter quality he was most deficient in. There were those amongst his small circle of intimates who said it would be his undoing, but they or their predecessors had been prophesying the same for three decades, and Klein had out-prospered every one of them. The luminaries he’d entertained over the decades - the defecting dancers and minor spies, the addicted debutantes, the rock stars with Messianic leanings and the bishops who made idols of barrow-boys - they’d all had their moments of glory, then fallen. But Klein went on to tell the tale. And when, on occasion, his name did creep into a scandal-sheet or a confessional biography, he was invariably painted as the patron saint of lost souls.

It wasn’t only the knowledge that, being such a soul, Gentle would be welcomed at the Klein residence, that took him there. He’d never known a time when Klein didn’t need money for some gambit or other, and that meant he needed painters. There was more than comfort to be found in the house at Ladbroke Grove; there was employment. It had been eleven months since he’d seen or spoken to Chester, but he was greeted as effusively as ever, and ushered in.

‘Quickly! Quickly!’ Klein said. ‘Gloriana’s in heat again!’ He managed to slam the door before the obese Gloriana, one of his five cats, escaped in search of a mate. ‘Too slow, sweetie!’ he told her. She yowled at him in complaint. ‘I keep her fat so she’s slow,’ he said. ‘And I don’t feel so piggy myself.’

He patted a paunch that had swelled considerably since Gentle had last seen him, and was testing the seams of his shirt, which, like him, was florid and had seen better years. He still wore his hair in a pony-tail, complete with ribbon, and wore an ankh on a chain around his neck, but beneath the veneer of a harmless flower-child gone to seed he was as acquisitive as a bower-bird. Even the vestibule in which they embraced was overflowing with collectables: a wooden dog, plastic roses in psychedelic profusion, sugar skulls on plates.

‘My God you’re cold,’ he said to Gentle, ‘and you look wretched. Who’s been beating you about the head?’

‘Nobody.’

‘You’re bruised.’

‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

Gentle took off his heavy coat, and laid it on the chair by the door, knowing when he returned it would be warm and covered with cat hairs. Klein was already in the living room, pouring wine. Always red.

‘Don’t mind the television,’ he said. ‘I never turn it off these days. The trick is not to turn up the sound. It’s much more entertaining mute.’

This was a new habit, and a distracting one. Gentle accepted the wine, and sat down in the corner of the ill-sprung couch, where it was easiest to ignore the demands of the screen. Even there, he was tempted.

‘So now, my Bastard Boy,’ Klein said, ‘to what disaster do I owe the honour?’

‘It’s not really a disaster. I’ve just had a bad time. I wanted some cheery company.’

‘Give them up, Gentle,’ Klein said.

‘Give what up?’

‘You know what. The fair sex. Give them up. I have. It’s such a relief. All those desperate seductions. All that time wasted meditating on death to keep yourself from coming too soon. I tell you, it’s like a burden gone from my shoulders.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Age has got fuck-all to do with it. I gave up women because they were breaking my heart.’

‘What heart’s that?’

‘I might ask you the same thing. Yes, you whine and you wring your hands, but then you go back and make the same mistakes. It’s tedious. They’re tedious.’

‘So save me.’

‘Oh, now here it comes.’

‘I don’t have any money.

‘Neither do I.’

‘So we’ll make some together. Then I won’t have to be a kept man. I’m going back to live in the studio, Klein. I’ll paint whatever you need.’

‘The Bastard Boy speaks.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘It’s what you are. You haven’t changed in eight years. The world grows old but the Bastard Boy keeps his perfection. Speaking of which —’

‘Employ me.’

Don’t interrupt me when I’m gossiping. Speaking of which, I saw Clem the Sunday before last. He asked after you. He’s put on a lot of weight. And his love-life’s almost as disastrous as yours. Taylor’s sick with the plague. I tell you, Gentle, celibacy’s the thing.’

‘So employ me.’

‘It’s not as easy as that. The market’s soft at the moment. And, well, let me be brutal, I have a new Wunderkind.’ He got up. ‘Let me show you.’ He led Gentle through the house to the study. ‘The fellow’s twenty-two, and I swear if he had an idea in his head he’d be a great painter. But he’s like you, he’s got the talent but nothing to say.’

‘Thanks,’ said Gentle sourly.

‘You know it’s true.’ Klein switched on the light. There were three canvases, all unframed, in the room. One, a nude woman after the style of Modigliani. Beside it, a small landscape after Corot. But the third, and largest of the three, was the coup. It was a pastoral scene, depicting classically garbed shepherds standing, in awe, before a tree in the trunk of which a human face was visible.

‘Would you know it from a real Poussin?’

‘Is it still wet?’ Gentle asked.

‘Such a wit.’

Gentle went to give the painting a more intimate examination. This period was not one he was particularly expert in, but he knew enough to be impressed by the handiwork. The canvas was a close weave, the paint laid upon it in careful regular strokes, the tones built up, it seemed, in glazes.

‘Meticulous, eh?’ said Klein.

To the point of being mechanical.’

‘Now, now, no sour grapes.’

‘I mean it. It’s just too perfect for words. You put this in the market and the game’s up. Now, the Modigliani’s another matter -’

That was a technical exercise,’ Klein said. ‘I can’t sell that. The man only painted a dozen pictures. It’s the Poussin I’m betting on.’

‘Don’t. You’ll get stung. Mind if I get another drink?’

Gentle headed back through the house to the lounge, Klein following, muttering to himself.

‘You’ve got a good eye, Gentle,’ he said. ‘But you’re unreliable. You’ll find another woman and off you’ll go.’

‘Not this time.’

‘And I wasn’t kidding about the market. There’s no room for bullshit.’

‘Did you ever have any problem with a piece I painted?’

Klein mused on this. ‘No,’ he admitted.

‘I’ve got a Gauguin in New York. Those Fuseli sketches I did-’

‘Berlin. Oh yes, you’ve made your little mark.’

‘Nobody’s ever going to know it, of course.’

‘They will. In a hundred years’ time your Fuselis will look as old as they are, not as old as they should be. People will start to investigate, and you, my Bastard Boy, will be discovered. And so will Kenny Soames, and Gideon; all my deceivers.’

‘And you’ll be vilified for bribing us. Denying the twentieth century all that originality.’

‘Originality shit. It’s an overrated commodity, you know that. You can be a visionary painting Virgins.’

‘That’s what I’ll do then. Virgins in any style. I’ll be celibate, and I’ll paint Madonnas all day. With child. Without child. Weeping. Blissful. I’ll work my balls off, Kleiny, which’ll be fine because I won’t need them.’

‘Forget the Virgins. They’re out of fashion.’

‘They’re forgotten.’

‘Decadence is your strongest suit.’

‘Whatever you want. Say the word.’

‘But don’t fuck with me. If I find a client, and promise something to him, then it’s down to you to produce it.’

‘I’m going back to the studio tonight. I’m starting over. Just do one thing for me?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Burn the Poussin.’

He had visited the studio on and off through his time with Vanessa - he’d even met Martine there on two occasions when her husband had cancelled a Luxembourg trip and she’d been too heated to miss a liaison - but it was charmless and cheerless, and he’d returned happily to the house in Wimpole Mews. Now, however, he welcomed the studio’s austerity. He turned on the little electric fire, made himself a cup of fake coffee with fake milk, and under its influence thought about deception.

The last six years of his life - since Judith, in fact - had been a series of duplicities. This was not of itself disastrous - after tonight it would once more be his profession - but whereas painting had a tangible end result (two, if he included the recompense), pursuit and seduction always left him naked and empty-handed. An end to that, tonight. He made a vow, toasted in bad coffee, to the God of Forgers, whoever He was, to become great. If duplicity was his genius why waste it on deceiving husbands and mistresses? He should turn it to a profounder end, producing masterpieces in another man’s name. Time would validate him, the way Klein had said it would; uncover his many works, and show him, at last, as the visionary he was about to become. And if it didn’t - if Klein was wrong and his handiwork remained undiscovered forever - then that was the truest vision of all. Invisible, he would be seen; unknown, he’d be influential. It was enough to make him forget women entirely. At least for tonight.

CHAPTER THREE

At dusk the clouds over Manhattan, which had threatened snow all day, cleared and revealed a pristine sky, its colour so ambiguous it might have fuelled a philosophical debate as to the nature of the blue. Laden as she was with her day’s purchases, Jude chose to walk back to Marlin’s apartment at Park Avenue and 80th. Her arms ached, but it gave her time to turn over in her head the encounter which had marked the day, and decide whether she wanted to share it with Marlin or not. Unfortunately, he had a lawyer’s mind. At best, cool, and analytical; at worst, reductionist. She knew herself well enough to know that if he challenged her account in the latter mode she’d almost certainly lose her temper with him, and then the atmosphere between them, which had been (with the exception of his overtures) so easy and undemanding, would be spoiled. It was better to work out what she believed about the events of the previous two hours before she shared it with Marlin. Then he could dissect it at will.

Already, after going over the encounter a few times, it was becoming, like the blue overhead, ambiguous. But she held on hard to the facts of the matter. She’d been in the menswear department of Bloomingdales, looking for a sweater for Marlin. It was crowded, and there was nothing on display that she thought appropriate. She’d bent down to pick up the purchases at her feet, and as she rose again she’d caught sight of a face she knew, looking straight at her through the moving mesh of people. How long had she seen the face for? A second; two at most? Long enough for her heart to jump, and her face to flush; long enough for her mouth to open and shape the word Gentle. Then the traffic between them had thickened, and he’d disappeared. She’d fixed the place where he’d been, stooped to pick up her baggage, and gone after him, not doubting that it was he.

The crowd slowed her progress, but she soon caught sight of him again, heading towards the door. This time she yelled his name, not giving a damn if she looked a fool, and dived after him. She was impressive in full flight and the crowd yielded, so that by the time she reached the door he was only yards the other side. Third Avenue was as thronged as the store, but there he was, heading across the street. The lights changed as she got to the kerb. She went after him anyway, daring the traffic. As she yelled again he was buffeted by a shopper about some business as urgent as hers, and he turned as he was struck, giving her a second glimpse of him. She might have laughed out loud at the absurdity of her error had it not disturbed her so. Either she was losing her mind, or she’d followed the wrong man. Either way, this black man, his ringleted hair gleaming on his shoulders, was not Gentle. Momentarily undecided as to whether to go on looking or to give up the chase there and then, her eyes lingered on the stranger’s face, and for a heart-beat, or less, his features blurred, and in their flux, caught as if by the sun off a wing in the stratosphere, she saw Gentle, his hair swept back from his high forehead, his grey eyes all yearning, his mouth, which she’d not known she missed till now, ready to break into a smile. It never came. The wing dipped, the stranger turned, Gentle was gone. She stood in the throng for several seconds while he disappeared downtown. Then, gathering herself together, she turned her back on the mystery, and started home.

It didn’t leave her thoughts, of course. She was a woman who trusted her senses, and to discover them so deceptive distressed her. But more vexing still was why it should be that particular face, of all those in her memory’s catalogue, she’d chosen to configure from that of a perfect stranger. Klein’s Bastard Boy was out of her life, and she out of his. It was six years since she’d crossed the bridge from where they’d stood, and the river that flowed between was a torrent. Her marriage to Estabrook had come and gone along that river, and a good deal of pain with it. Gentle was still on the other shore, part of her history; irretrievable. So why had she conjured him now?

As she came within a block of Marlin’s building she remembered something she’d utterly put out of her head for that six-year span. It had been a glimpse of Gentle, not so unlike the one she’d just had, that had propelled her into her near-suicidal affair with him. She’d met him at one of Klein’s parties - a casual encounter - and had given him very little conscious thought subsequently. Then, three nights later, she’d been visited by an erotic dream that regularly haunted her. The scenario was always the same. She was lying naked on bare boards in an empty room, not bound but somehow bounded, and a man whose face she could never see, his mouth so sweet it was like eating candy to kiss him, made violent love to her. Only this time the fire that burned in the grate close by showed her the face of her dream-lover, and it had been Gentle’s face. The shock, after so many years of never knowing who the man was, woke her, but with such a sense of loss at this interrupted coitus she couldn’t sleep again for mourning it. The next day she’d discovered his whereabouts from Klein, who’d warned her in no uncertain manner that John Zacharias was bad news for tender hearts. She’d ignored the warning, and gone to see him that very afternoon, in the studio off the Edgware Road. They scarcely left it for the next two weeks, their passion putting her dreams to shame.

Only later, when she was in love with him and it was too late for common sense to qualify her feelings, did she learn more about him. He trailed a reputation for womanizing that, even if it was ninety per cent invention, as she assumed, was still prodigious. If she mentioned his name in any circle, however jaded it was by gossip, there was always somebody who had some titbit about him. He even went by a variety of names. Some referred to him as the Furie; some as Zach or Zacho or Mr Zee; others called him Gentle, which was the name she knew him by, of course; still others John the Divine. Enough names for half a dozen lifetimes. She wasn’t so blindly devoted to him that she didn’t accept there was truth in these rumours. Nor did he do much to temper them. He liked the air of legend that hung about his head. He claimed, for instance, not to know how old he was. Like herself, he had a very slippery grasp on the past. And he frankly admitted to being obsessed with her sex - some of the talk she’d heard was of cradle-snatching; some of deathbed fucks - he played no favourites.

So, here was her Gentle: a man known to the doormen of every exclusive club and hotel in the city, who, after ten years of high living, had survived the ravages of every excess; who was still lucid, still handsome, still alive. And this same man, this Gentle, told her he was in love with her, and put the words together so perfectly she disregarded all she’d heard but those he spoke.

She might have gone on listening forever, but for her rage, which was the legend she trailed. A volatile thing, apt to ferment in her without her even being aware of it. That had been the case with Gentle. After half a year of their affair, she’d begun to wonder, wallowing in his affection, how a man whose history had been one infidelity after another had mended his ways; which thought led to the possibility that perhaps he hadn’t. In fact she had no reason to suspect him. His devotion bordered on the obsessive in some moods, as though he saw in her a woman she didn’t even know herself, an ancient soul-mate. She was, she began to think, unlike any other woman he’d ever met; the love that had changed his life. When they were so intimately joined, how would she not know if he were cheating on her? She’d have surely sensed the other woman. Tasted her on his tongue, or smelt her on his skin. And if not there, then in the subtleties of their exchanges. But she’d underestimated him. When, by the sheerest fluke, she’d discovered he had not one other woman on the side but two, it drove her to near insanity. She began by destroying the contents of the studio, slashing all his canvases, painted or not, then tracking the felon himself, and mounting an assault that literally brought him to his knees, in fear for his balls.

The rage burned a week, after which she fell totally silent for three days; a silence broken by a grief like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Had it not been for her chance meeting with Estabrook - who saw through her tumbling, distracted manner to the woman she was - she might well have taken her own life.

Thus the tale of Judith and Gentle: one death short of tragedy, and a marriage short of farce.

She found Marlin already home, uncharacteristically agitated.

‘Where have you been?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s six thirty-nine.’

She instantly knew this was no time to be telling him what her trip to Bloomingdales had cost her in peace of mind. Instead she lied. ‘I couldn’t get a cab. I had to walk.’

‘If that happens again just call me. I’ll have you picked up by one of our limos. I don’t want you wandering the streets. It’s not safe. Anyhow, we’re late. We’ll have to eat after the performance.’

‘What performance?’

‘The show in the Village Troy was yabbering about last night, remember? The Neo-Nativity? He said it was the best thing since Bethlehem.’

‘It’s sold out.’

‘I have my connections,’ he gleamed.

‘We’re going tonight?’

‘Not if you don’t move your ass.’

‘Marlin, sometimes you’re sublime,’ she said, dumping her purchases and racing to change.

‘What about the rest of the time?’ he hollered after her. ‘Sexy? Irresistible? Beddable?’

If indeed he’d secured the tickets as a way of bribing her between the sheets, then he suffered for his lust. He concealed his boredom through the first act, but by intermission he was itching to be away to claim his prize.

‘Do we really need to stay for the rest?’ he asked her as they sipped coffee in the tiny foyer, ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s any mystery about it. The kid gets born, the kid grows up, the kid gets crucified.’

‘I’m enjoying it.’

‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ he complained, in deadly earnest. The show’s eclecticism offended his rationalism deeply. ‘Why were the angels playing jazz?’

‘Who knows what angels do?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a satire, or what the hell it is,’ he said. ‘Do you know what it is?’

‘I think it’s very funny.’

‘So you’d like to stay?’

‘I’d like to stay.’

The second half was even more of a grab-bag than the first, the suspicion growing in Jude as she watched that the parody and pastiche was a smoke-screen put up to cover the creators’ embarrassment at their own sincerity. In the end, with Charlie Parker angels wailing on the stable roof, and Santa crooning at the manger, the piece collapsed into high camp. But even that was oddly moving. The child was born. Light had come into the world again, even if it was to the accompaniment of tap-dancing elves.

When they exited, there was sleet in the wind.

‘Cold, cold, cold,’ Marlin said. ‘I’d better take a leak.’

He went back inside to join the queue for the toilets, leaving Jude at the door, watching the blobs of wet snow pass through the lamplight. The theatre was not large, and the bulk of the audience were out in a couple of minutes, umbrellas raised, heads dropped, darting off into the Village to look for their cars, or a place where they could put some drink in their systems, and play critics. The light above the front door was switched off, and a cleaner emerged from the theatre with a black plastic bag of rubbish and a broom, and began to brush the foyer, ignoring Jude - who was the last visible occupant - until he reached her, when he gave her a glance of such venom she decided to put up her umbrella and stand on the darkened step. Marlin was taking his time emptying his bladder. She only hoped he wasn’t titivating himself, slicking his hair and freshening his breath in the hope of talking her into bed.

The first she knew of the assault was a motion glimpsed from the corner of her eye: a blurred form approaching her at speed through the thickening sleet. Alarmed, she turned towards her attacker. She had time to recognize the face on Third Avenue, then the man was upon her.

She opened her mouth to yell, turning to retreat into the theatre as she did so. The cleaner had gone. So had her shout, caught in her throat by the stranger’s hands. They were expert. They hurt brutally, stopping every breath from being drawn. She panicked; flailed; toppled. He took her weight, controlling her motion. In desperation she threw the umbrella into the foyer, hoping there was somebody out of sight in the box office who’d be alerted to her jeopardy. Then she was wrenched out of shadow into heavier shadow still, and realized it was almost too late already. She was becoming light-headed; her leaden limbs no longer hers. In the murk her assassin’s face was once more a blur, with two dark holes bored in it. She fell towards them, wishing she had the energy to turn her gaze away from this blankness, but as he moved closer to her a little light caught his cheek and she saw, or thought she saw, tears there, spilling from those dark eyes. Then the light went, not just from his cheek but from the whole world. And as everything slipped away she could only hold on to the thought that somehow her murderer knew who she was.

‘Judith?’

Somebody was holding her. Somebody was shouting to her. Not the assassin, but Marlin. She sagged in his arms, catching dizzied sight of the assailant running across the pavement, with another man in pursuit. Her eyes swung back towards Marlin, who was asking her if she was all right, then back towards the street as brakes shrieked, and the failed assassin was struck squarely by a speeding car, which reeled round, wheels locked and sliding over the sleet-greased street, throwing the man’s body off the bonnet and over a parked car. The pursuer threw himself aside as the vehicle mounted the pavement, slamming into a lamp-post.

Jude put her arm out for some support other than Marlin, her fingers finding the wall. Ignoring his advice that she stay still, stay still, she started to stumble towards the place where her assassin had fallen. The driver was being helped from his smashed vehicle, unleashing a stream of obscenities as he emerged. Others were appearing on the scene to lend help in forming a crowd, but Jude ignored their stares and headed across the street, Marlin at her side. She was determined to reach the body before anybody else. She wanted to see it before it was touched; wanted to meet its open eyes and fix its dead expression; know it, for memory’s sake.

She found his blood first, spattered in the grey slush underfoot, and then, a little way beyond, the assassin himself, reduced to a lumpen form in the gutter. As she came within a few yards of it, however, a shudder passed down its spine, and it rolled over, showing its face to the sleet. Then, impossible though this seemed given the blow it had been struck, the form started to haul itself to its feet. She saw how bloodied it was, but she saw also that it was still essentially whole. It’s not human, she thought, as it stood upright; whatever it is, it’s not human. Marlin groaned with revulsion behind her, and a woman on the pavement screamed. The man’s gaze went to the screamer, wavered, then returned to Jude.