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After a moment's pause Eilif threw two coins down on the table. 'Two Venetian ducats on our boy Bobo.'
'Covered,' said Duffy, producing two coins. The rest of the landsknechten began shouting and making bets of their own, and the Irishman kept track of the money.
Bobo kicked a few benches aside and cautiously circled the slender Oriental, who just revolved on a heel and watched impassively. Finally the Swiss leaped forward, lashing out at the other man's head with a heavy fist - but the robed man simply crouched under the rush and then instantly bounced up again with a whirl of arms that sent Bobo somersaulting through five feet of air into, and finally through, one of the leadpaned front windows. The abrupt percussive crash died away into the clink and rattle of individual pieces of glass on the cobblestones outside, and after a few moments Duffy could hear Bobo's gasping
groans wafting in with the cold breeze that now swept through the hole.
'If there is no one else interested in discussing the price of cattle feed,' said the victor politely, 'I think I'll leave you after all.' There were no takers, so he bowed and walked out of the room. Duffy gathered in the coins on the table top and began doling them out among himself and the two others who'd bet against Bobo.
There was a quick thumping down the stairs, and then the innkeeper's voice screeched, 'What the hell's going on? Duffy, why aren't you preventing this?'
'He's taking bets on it,' growled one of the losers.
'Oh, of course!' said Werner with an exaggerated nod. 'What else would a bouncer do? Listen to me, you old wreck: when Aurelianus gets back here - pray God it's soon! - you are going to be unemployed. Do you follow me?'
The Irishman pocketed his share and picked up Epiphany's bundle. 'I do.' After bowing to the company he crossed to the door and stepped outside. The air still had a bite of morning chill in it, but the sun was well up in the cloudless sky and steam was curling from the shingles of nearby roofs.
Bobo had got up on his hands and knees and was crawling toward the door. Duffy dropped several coins where he'd be sure to come across them, and then strode off, whistling.
Under the gaiety, the Irishman had been obscurely depressed all morning, as he always was when he intended to look in on Epiphany's invalid father. What is it, he asked himself now, that upsets me about the old artist? I guess it's mainly the smell of doom that clings to him. He's so clearly on the downward side of Fortune's wheel -studied under Castagno in his youth, was praised by Durer himself ten years. ago, and now he's a drunkard going blind, drawing on the walls of his tawdry Schottengasse room.
As Duffy turned down the Wallnerstrasse a couple of mongrels smelled the food in the cloth-wrapped package he was carrying, and pranced around him as he walked. The street became wider as it neared the northwest face of the city wall, and the Irishman made his way right down the middle of it, following the gutter, weaving around vegetable carts and knots of yelling children. Where is it, he thought, craning his neck; I'm always afraid I've passed it. Ah, right here. He shook his free arm menacingly. 'Off with you, dogs, this is where we part company.'
Edging his way out of the traffic flow and pushing open the creaking boarding house door, the Irishman stepped reluctantly out of the morning sunlight and into the stale-smelling dimness of the entryway. Maybe, he thought, what bothers me is the possibility that I'll be like this myself soon, living in a crummy hole and mumbling jumbled memories to people who aren't listening anyway.
He crossed the dusty entry, stepped through the stairway door - and froze.
In front of him, beyond a narrow beach, stretched away to the horizon a vast, listless lake or sea, reflecting with nearly no distortion the full moon that hung in the deep night sky.
Duffy's stunned mind scrabbled for an explanation like an atheist at the Second Coming. I was slugged from behind, he thought, and brought here (Where's here? There's no body of water this size within a hundred miles of Vienna) and I've been unconscious for hours. I just now came to, and I'm trying to get away.
He took two paces toward the lake and tripped painfully over the bottom steps of an old wooden stairway. Leaping to his feet, he stared around him bewilderedly at the close
walls and the stairs. He ran back through the entry hail to the street, stared hard at the front of the building, the crowded sunlit street and the blue sky, and then slowly walked back inside.
He winced when he stepped again into the stairwell, but the old, peeling walls remained solid, almost sneering at him in their mundanity. He clumped hurriedly up to the second floor and knocked on the door of Vogel's room. Then he knocked again.
A full minute after his third and loudest series of knocks, a chain rattled and the door swung inward, revealing the cluttered mess of blankets, books, bottles and paper-rolls that Duffy had always seen there.
'Who is it?' rasped the ancient, scruffy-bearded man who now poked his head around the edge of the door.
'It's Brian Duffy, Gustav. I've brought you food and ink.'
'Ah, good, good - Come in, son. Did you bring any...?' He did a pantomime of sucking at the neck of a bottle.
'I'm afraid not. Just ink.' He held up the ink pot. 'This is ink. Don't drink it this time, eh?'
'Of course, of course,' Vogel said absently. 'I'm glad you happened to drop by today. I want to show you how The Death of Archangel Michael is coming along.' Duffy recalled visiting the old artist two weeks ago, for the first time in three years, and being greeted with the same casual 'Glad you happened to drop by today.'
'Come on,' the old man wheezed. 'Tell me what you think of it.'
The Irishman allowed himself to be led to the far wall, which was fitfully illuminated by two candles. Filling the wall entirely, from floor to ceiling and corner to corner, drawn with painstaking care on the plaster in a near-infinity of fine, close-knit penstrokes, was a vast picture.
Duffy gave a polite glance to the maelstrom of churning figures. When he had first seen the picture, possibly seven years ago, he'd had to look close to see the faint outlines of the shapes on the white plaster; and when he left Vienna in 'twenty-six the wall was a finely shaded drawing, crowded and vague in subject but faultless in execution. Now it was much darker, for every day the artist added hundreds of strokes, deepening shadows and, very gradually, blacking out some peripheral figures altogether. Three years ago the scene pictured seemed to be occurring at noon; now the tortured figures writhed and gestured in the shade of deep twilight.
'It's coming along wonderfully, Gustav,' Duffy said.
'You think so? Good! Naturally your opinion counts in this,' the old man chittered eagerly. 'I've invited Albrecht to come and see it, but lately he hasn't even been answering my letters. I'm nearly finished, you see. I've got to complete the thing before I lose my sight entirely.'
