Face on the Wall (29 page)

He knew exactly what would happen. Garibaldi would write a phony column about Annie that would make her landlord look like a bastard. Bob could write it for him, every lying word. “Cruel landlord evicts famous artist. Masterpiece destroyed.”

“
Goddamn
you, Annie Swann,” he said, with an intensity that welled up from his bowels and sifted pathetically down from the 752 remaining hairs on the top of his head.

In Jerry Neville's original out-of-court settlement with the Gasts, Annie was not required to pay rent. But now she was eager to pay. She produced a handful of hundred-dollar bills. “Here, this is for next month.”

He shouted at her, “You won't be here next month.”

Annie tossed the bills at his retreating back. They flew up, then fluttered down into the pachysandra bordering the north side of the house. Some of them blew across the driveway.

She went inside and slammed the door.

It began to rain, beating down on the roof of Annie's house and the driveway and the pachysandra, plastering the unclaimed greenbacks to the pavement, thrusting them into crevices between the shiny leaves of the ground cover. Later on, when the sun came out, Charlene discovered them and picked them up, pouncing on one after another. It was like an Easter-egg hunt, but with hundred-dollar bills instead of jelly beans. That afternoon she flipped through the catalogue from the pool company and picked out a poolside chaise and sent the money in cash. Later on, when the big box was delivered by UPS, her mother said, “Charlene, what's this?” and Charlene said, “It's okay, Mummy, I found the money on the driveway,” and Roberta, scandalized, said, “
What?”
But of course this time Charlene was telling the truth.

“They can't knock anything down if I'm in the way, can they?”

Flimnap looked at Annie soberly. “Superior force. A couple of big cops, that's all it would take. They'd haul you out of here.” He glanced up at the endangered wall. “Who's that in the big chair?”

Annie looked up too and smiled. “Charles Dodgson. You know, Lewis Carroll. He's reading to Alice Liddell.”

Flimnap stared at Dodgson. Annie waited for him to say something complimentary. Instead he began talking about moral force. “Look, Annie, it's all you've got to fight with. You need publicity, a protest movement. They've got the law. You've got righteousness, justice, and truth.”

She laughed. “You sound just like my Uncle Homer. He loves big sweeping abstractions. But you're right. I'll write a letter to the
Globe.”

“Let me take care of it,” said Flimnap. “I know somebody there.”

So it was Flimnap, not Annie, who went to the
Boston Globe.

His friend at the paper just happened to be the executive editor, Harvey Broadstairs. When the editorial assistant mentioned the visitor's name, Broadstairs summoned him at once and listened to his story sympathetically.

“Great stuff,” said Broadstairs. “Sob story. Worth its weight in gold. Sure, it's Garibaldi's kind of thing, but not just Garibaldi. When does the bulldozer arrive? Good. We'll have somebody out there. Color shot.”

“Well, thanks, that's great. Oh, say, there's just one thing. Don't use my name, all right?”

“Why not? I should think it would carry weight. Why don't you capitalize on it? No? Well, all right, if you say so.”

The story in the
Boston Globe
did indeed create a stir. And Gabe Garibaldi's column oozed with sympathy. Garibaldi knew nothing about the death of Eddy Gast. His outrage was directed at Eddy's father, who was threatening the safety of a work of art.

Moral force,
Flimnap said,
it's all you've got to fight with,
but Annie couldn't see what good his publicity was doing. Everything was in such a mess. A new unwanted face had appeared on her wall, even more savage than before, and those bastards were about to bring in their machines and knock her house down.

In despair Annie decided she would die before she'd allow them to destroy her wall. Just let them try! They'd have to destroy Annie Swann at the same time. Melodramatically Annie told herself that the people who believed in the publicity value of moral force could take a picture of her mangled body and publish
that.

Then Minnie Peck, the found-object sculptor, and Trudy Tuck, the creator of artistic candles, saved the day. Together they roused the countryside.

Chapter 44

Pins and needles bend and break,

Bend and break, bend and break,

Pins and needles bend and break,

My fair lady.

Mother Goose rhyme

“I
just wondered if you've had time to work on the sample I brought in last week,” said Sergeant Bill Kennebunk, at last connected by phone to the forensic botanist in the Bureau of Investigative Services, after jumping over a series of electronic hurdles.

“Oh, that one. You mean the sample from Southborough? You're—uh—Patrolman Kensington?”

“Southtown, not Southborough. And my name's Kennebunk.” Sergeant Kennebunk's faith in the scientific accuracy of the Bureau of Investigative Services plummeted. How could he trust anything this bungler came up with?

But there were still no findings. “Sorry, Kensington, we're still way behind. Our chief just retired, and his replacement, he's a new broom.” A tone of bitterness crept into the botanist's voice. Kennebunk suspected he had been passed over for promotion. “He wants us to clean out all our old files. So we've been throwing out stuff. Not your stuff, of course. At least I hope not.”

Kennebunk called Homer Kelly, and explained the delay.

Homer was used to bureaucratic foot-dragging, and anyway he had forgotten the point of Kennebunk's botanizing. “Any sign of Frederick Small? Where did his furniture end up?”

“Storage warehouse in Northtown. Nobody seems to know where he is himself. McNutt just grins and won't tell me anything, but I think he knows. Oh, say, Homer, his house has been torn down.”

“No kidding! I suppose it wasn't elegant enough for Songsparrow Estates. The better class of buyers might turn up their noses.”

Like most construction workers, demolition expert Ted Hawk rose early. This morning he was up at four-thirty. There was always a lot to do, mobilizing a job. You had to haul the forty-ton excavator up onto the low-bed trailer with a hydraulic lift and lash it down with chains and get it out on the road by five-thirty, because, Christ, during commuting hours you couldn't obstruct the highway with two slow-moving heavy trucks and a tractor trailer lugging a monster machine.

Therefore, it was only six-thirty when his car pulled into the Gasts' driveway, followed by the two trucks and the tractor trailer with its colossal burden. Hawk was dismayed to find the scene of his day's work already teeming with the friends and relatives of Annie Swann. They were carrying signs—

BARBARIAN, GO HOME!

GET LOST!

STOP THIS MADNESS!

SAVE THIS ARTISTIC TREASURE!

PRESERVE THIS WORK OF ART FOR THE NEXT

MILLENNIUM!

Flimnap O'Dougherty was nowhere in sight, but someone had braced the north side of the house with props, heavy wooden beams like flying buttresses on a church. Homer Kelly too was somewhere else, trying to wake up a judge and get an injunction.

The protestors shrieked at Hawk and jiggled their signs up and down. Minnie Peck turned on her boom box, and a chorus of thousands began roaring “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thunderclaps of patriotic music battered Hawk's windshield. A video camera was aimed in his direction. Somebody else was taking pictures.

Hawk dropped his hands from the steering wheel and said, “Oh, fuck.”

Hawk's passenger, his subcontractor, said, “God almighty.”

“I told the guy we didn't want any trouble,” said Hawk. “Look at those sons a bitches.”

Someone opened the car door. It was one of Hawk's truck drivers. He gestured with his thumb. “There's a guy inside, see?” Hawk craned his neck, and saw Bob Gast beckoning from a window. “He's scared to come out,” said the truck driver, grinning.

They followed Gast's pointing finger to his front door and went inside, while Annie's friends hooted and booed.

“They're just bluffing,” said Bob Gast, his face white. “Go ahead. Get the machine down off the truck. Start it up. They'll disappear in a hurry.”

“No way,” said Ted Hawk. “A couple of those people, they've got cameras. You said there wouldn't be any trouble.”

“There won't be, I tell you.” Gast was frantic. “Go ahead and get started.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Gast, but protesters are bad news. We're leaving, so that'll be two thousand dollars, okay? For our time, and tying up the equipment.”

Gast was scandalized.
“What?
But you haven't
done
anything yet.”

“Mobilizing fee. Six guys, couple of trucks, and all this equipment, creeping down 128 thirty miles from Braintree and thirty miles back, and then three guys have to get the machine down off the flatbed again, whaddayamean, that's not doing anything?” Hawk took a rumpled form out of his pocket, slapped it on the kitchen table, and scrawled on it with his pen. “So I'd like a check right now, if it's all the same to you.”