Money from Holme Read Free Page A

more through the crush. What he believed he had seen he must see again. Indeed, he must touch it. The concurrent testimony of two senses was something which it would surely be irrational not to accept.
    The bearded man had again moved on. The picture he was now examining appeared to be of some sort of barbaric dance performed by luridly painted savages. It was another remarkable performance – so remarkable that Cheel, despite his extraordinary situation, found himself in some genuinely aesthetic engagement with it as he advanced. It wasn’t that this instantancity of whirling bodies and flailing limbs had been ingeniously frozen into a complex decorative arabesque, as in some amusing hunt or battle, say, by Uccello. It was rather that from this world of gesture, an irrefrangible stasis or solemn timelessness had been educed. Hulking Tom in the Tropics, Cheel thought – recalling, with his customary erudition, just what, in Italian, Masaccio means.
    This release into professional musing lasted only for seconds. Then he was up against it – and up against the bearded man. The bearded man held a catalogue in his left hand. He wasn’t consulting it (why should he, since he was the painter?), but was holding it more or less in the position of a fig-leaf. His index finger, middle finger, and thumb were employed on the job, the catalogue being gripped between the first and second of these, and the third being inserted among the pages. Cheel took one glance at the area of the bearded man’s hand thus exposed (it lay, of course, at the triangular base of the index finger and thumb), and what he had already remembered returned to him in fresh, and painful, detail.
    He remembered the party – although he couldn’t, naturally enough, remember who had given it. He remembered the girl whom (under the clever cover of withdrawing to relieve himself) he had ambushed in the alcove at the top of the stairs. He remembered the manner – embarrassing yet at the same time stimulating – in which the little trollop had decided to struggle and scream. He remembered the firm line he had consequently adopted (the excitement of a bogus rape was, of course, what she had been after) – and then be remembered the impertinent intrusion of the young dauber, Sebastian Holme. Fortunately there had been a bottle to hand; fortunately (or unfortunately) the vigour with which he had himself grasped and swung this had resulted in his shivering it against a banister. What had been left in his grasp (like the tronchon in the grasp of a medieval knight who has broken his spear) remained a weapon formidable enough. He had brought it down on Holme’s left hand. At least he had managed that, before Holme had laid him out.
    And there, before him, was the scar. He could almost see it, as he looked, dripping the blood it had once dripped. If he’d only got the right hand – he found himself reflecting – and if, at the same time, he’d got the tendon, he might effectively have cooked the goose of Sebastian Holme’s genius.
    ‘Excuse me – but I wonder whether I might glance at your catalogue?’
    Cheel couldn’t have told whether it was in a sepulchral croak or in the casual but well-modulated accents of a cultivated Englishman that he uttered these words. But he made no mistake about the accompanying action. Without waiting for a by-your-leave, he reached out as he spoke and took the catalogue from the bearded man’s hand. And he did so with a slight clumsiness that allowed a finger to brush lightly over the vital spot. Its report was unequivocal. There could be no question of mere visual hallucination. The small, hard cicatrice was palpable to the touch.
    Since he lacked the resolution to venture a straight glance at Sebastian Holme, Cheel was unable to tell whether the man had taken alarm. He himself continued for the moment simply to be dead scared – although indeed there may already have been dawning in the recesses of his capacious mind the