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“Smart guy,” the Tazzman snarled. “Yo gonna git yo smart white ass stuck all over dis here wall yo doan watchit.” His wary, scared eyes took us both in. “Gimme what’s inna till an whut you got on you.”

I fanned open my wallet. The two fives made me feel briefly ashamed.

“Shee-
it!
“ the Tazzman opined as he lifted the bills so expertly I hardly knew they were gone. “Ain’t you even got a watch?”

“Time means nothing to me,” I said, showing him my naked wrists. “Speaking of which, you don’t look like you’ve eaten anything for a bunch.”

The Tazzman chewed on his lip and glowered at me as he sized up the situation. He was as jumpy as a bear scenting humans, which should have warned me. But as I said, those phone calls put me in one pissy mood and I was ready to take up arms against the next person who crossed my path. Stupid, right? The ancient Greeks had a better word for it:
hubris
.

“Mike, make this guy a burger, would you?” Since the Tazzman couldn’t make heads or tails out of this, I decided to press on. “What’s your name?”

“Huh?” He seemed stupefied. I guess I couldn’t blame him much. I doubt this robbery was going the way he had envisioned.

“You got a name, don’t you?” I got up from my booth. “My name’s Bill, and like I said before this here’s Mike. What do your friends call you?”

“You makin’ fun a me? I’ll whup yo white ass, dass fo sho.”

“I’m not making fun of you.”

He squinted suspiciously at me. “Ain’t got no friends.” He pursed his lips, looking from me to Mike and back again. “I be da Tazzman on accounta my hair.” He lifted one hand to touch it; it didn’t seem to give an inch. “Kids say it make me look like a
Tazz
manian Devil, sumpin lak dat.” That’s how Tasmanian came out in his odd accent. He gestured at Mike with the machine pistol. “He really gone make me a bugga?”

“Sure,” I said, giving Mike the high sign.

As Mike unwrapped a patty and slapped it on the griddle, I took a step toward the Tazzman. His nostrils flared as he smelled the frying beef and I took another step toward him. He didn’t like that.

“Hey, muthafucka,” he said, beginning to swing that damn weapon in my direction.

Mike yelled: “Bill, for Chrissake!”

And I threw Ms. M into the Tazzman’s face. I don’t know whether you know it or not but she gets into your eyes and she’s one mean momma.

“Mutha
fucka!”
the Tazzman said, with a thorough lack of originality.

He squeezed the trigger just as I slammed my left arm against the barrel of the machine pistol. A sound blast seemed to open a hole in my head, boring straight through to my brain. I trod hard on the Tazzman’s instep, and he howled like a banshee. But I had underestimated the beanpole, just as I had misjudged the entire situation.

He got off a second squeeze. A hail of bullets stitched a lethal line across the mirrors. Mike tried to duck but he got in the way and was blasted back into the triple tier of liquor bottles behind him. Liquor and blood combined in one god-awful spew.

“Ah, hell,” I said. As the machine pistol swung toward me, I kicked over a table, ducked behind it, then screamed as the high-velocity bullets shredded the solid oak tabletop as if it were paperboard.

I lurched drunkenly into the shadows at the rear of the bar, but the Tazzman was in full bore and he followed me. The machine pistol quit erupting long enough for him to slam home another magazine. How many did he have? I wondered as I ran.

I bypassed the doors to the rest rooms knowing that there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The bullets were chattering into the old plaster as I hit the rear door. It wouldn’t open! I fumbled with the deadbolt, then frantically pulled it open as constellations of lathe and wood flew past my head and struck me on the shoulder.

I hurtled into the stinking back alley where Mike dumped his garbage and his hamburger meat when it started to turn into a laboratory experiment.

And silence …

Silence?

Where was the unholy racket of the Tazzman’s machine pistol? you might ask. But that was the least of it, because I wasn’t in any stinking back alley. Turning around in a complete circle I could see that, well, let me put it this way, if I’d had a tiny terrier at my side I would no doubt have blurted out: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

I finally returned to the direction from which I’d come, but there was no filthy facade, no door back into Helicon; there was only air and space and light—glorious, luminous light. I was in a high-ceilinged room, looking out a tall window at a curiously familiar structure with a rounded dome that looked almost Middle Eastern. Lower down, a large city fanned away in the blue-and-gold dusk. But it had been morning just moments ago, and this place was definitely not Manhattan. The plethora of chimneys and mansard roofs made me think immediately of Europe.

Around me, the pale stucco walls were hung with paintings. These huge Impressionist canvasses were dense with color, vibrant with protean movement. They swirled about me like eddies in a stream.

“Do you like them?”

The voice was melodious, rich as Devonshire cream.

I turned around to see a woman with a long face whose determination made handsome features that were at best plain. She had a stem countenance eerily like the cursed headmistress of the Adirondack prep school I’d escaped to at the age of fourteen (even that had been better than my intolerable home life), then had promptly escaped
from
. Salt-and-pepper hair fell lankly to her slight shoulders and in one hand she held a cluster of paintbrushes, so I assumed she was the artist. She was dressed in an orange shirt and rust-colored trousers over which she wore a long red apron, stiff with dried paint. Even so, I could see a white pentagram stitched to its front. You might think this a curious getup, and you’d be right. But by far the most curious thing about her was her eyes. I swear they were the color of unpolished bronze, and they had no pupils.

“Lady, I don’t know who you are but I’d be much obliged if you’d tell me where the hell I am. Also, do you have a drink—preferably something high in alcohol content.”

“I was speaking of the paintings. Even though they are unfinished I’d be interested to know whether you find them effective.” She spoke with the intensity possible only when one is consumed by a passion. Had she even heard what I’d said? No matter; her passion impelled me to give the paintings a more focused look. So far as I could tell they were all of the same subject: a series of landscapes deliberately interconnected by composition and style, caught at different times of the day and season. I was certain I didn’t know what I was looking at and yet, curiously, that very certainty filled me with an inexpressible sadness, just as if I had been pierced through the heart.

“Sure, sure. They’re beautiful,” I told her. But I was still distracted, and in desperate need of a stiff drink. “Listen, I don’t think you get it. One minute I was in a New York bar running from a madman with a machine pistol and the next I’m here. I’m asking you again, where
is
here?”

“Regard the paintings,” she said in the slightly stilted locution of the European. Her arm rose and fell like the swell of the ocean. “They will tell you.”

“Lady, for the love of—”

“Please,” she said. “My name is Vav. And yours is William, yes?”

“Did you say Viv, like Vivian?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“No.
Vav.”
She enunciated it clearly. “It is a very old name—ancient, one might say. It is the Hebrew word for ‘nail.’ “ She smiled, and her face broke open like a ripe melon spilling out its fragrant and delicious juice. “I am the nail that joins the beams overhead. I am the one who provides shelter to lost travelers.”

Looking at that face I had to laugh; I had no other choice. I imagined she could make even a condemned criminal feel good about his final moments of life. “Well, that seems to be me, all right,” I admitted. I took a quick glance out the window. “That wouldn’t—Whoa! I mean, it couldn’t possibly be Sacré-Coeur. Hell, that’s in Paris.”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“But that’s impossible!” I closed my eyes, shook my head and opened them again. There was Sacré-Coeur. It hadn’t dissolved in a sudden puff of smoke. “I must have lost my mind.”

“Or most likely gained it.” She chuckled. “Come now, do not be alarmed.” She led me away from the window. “Have another look at the paintings, yes? I am creating them just for you.”

“You mean you knew I was coming?” Why did that make me feel so good?

“That hardly seems possible, does it?” She laughed until I joined her, and we shared a joke the origin of which was beyond my ken. She took my arm as if we were old friends. “But come, tell me if anything here seems familiar,” she urged as we moved slowly around the high-ceilinged room.

My brow furrowed in concentration. “Funny, I’d been thinking just that, but …” I shook my head. “Maybe when you’ve completed them.”

“Obviously you need more time,” she interrupted. She did this a lot, as if she was oddly pressed for time.

“All things considered, I think I’d prefer to get back home,” I said.

“Didn’t I hear mention of a madman with a machine pistol?” She stripped off her apron. “Why in the world would you want to go back there?”

I considered a moment, thinking of poor dead Mike and the Tazzman, Ray on my back about Lilly, and that sonuvabitch brother of mine, not to mention a writer’s block as frightening as the death zone atop Mount Everest. Then I considered the unusual woman beside me, being in Paris on a perfect drizzly velvet night, and I felt a certain lightness of being I hadn’t felt in I don’t know how long. “To be honest, I can’t think of a reason.”

She squeezed my arm. “Good, then you’ll come with me to the opening of the new exhibition.”

I licked my lips. “First, I need a drink.”

She went to an antique sideboard, poured a liquid into a squat glass of cut-crystal, and brought it back to me. I put the glass to my lips. My nostrils flared at the scent of mescal, and I threw my head back, downing it in one long swallow.

“That’s always helped before, hasn’t it,” she said as I put the empty glass aside.

Normally, I’d be pissed as hell at that kind of comment, but Vav had a way of speaking that held no judgment. It was as if she were simply holding up for me to examine a facet of my life. It was entirely up to me what I thought of it.

“It certainly has its place,” I said as we walked across the apartment’s living room. I got a brief impression of deep-cream-colored walls, a long Deco-style sofa, a couple of Art Nouveau lamps, all of which seemed to have been put there with a minimum of thought. Then there was the antique Oriental carpet on which was curled a black cat with a single white spot in the center of its forehead. The cat awoke as we passed, its luminous citrine eyes following us as Vav led me out the front door.

At the bottom of a well-worn stone staircase, we found ourselves in a high, musty vestibule typical of Parisian apartment buildings. It smelled of stone softened by the dampness of the ages. A light came on as we entered, then winked out as we departed.

Mist borne like a flock of birds on the evening wind fluttered in gossamer veils past the iron streetlights. We began to walk east, into the night.

“The gallery is only a few blocks away,” Vav said.

“Listen, I can see for myself I’m in Paris, but how the hell did I get here?”

We came to a curb and crossed the street on a fairly steep upgrade. “Which explanation would satisfy you?” she said. “The scientific, the metaphysical or the paranormal?”

“Which one is the truth?”

“Oh, I imagine they’re all equally true … or false. It all depends on your particular point of view.”

I shook my head in frustration. “But that’s just it, you see. I don’t
have
a point of view. To do so I would have to understand what is happening, and I don’t.”

She nodded, thinking through every word I said. “Perhaps it’s only because you aren’t ready yet to hear what I’m saying. In the same way you aren’t ready to see the paintings.”

As we turned left, then left again, past the Art Nouveau entrance to the Anvers Métro station, I curiously found my mind wandering backward in time. I saw with astonishing clarity my mother’s face. She had been a handsome woman, powerful in many ways, weak and frightened in others. In her dealings with other people, for instance, she was rock solid and extremely forceful. Once I’d seen her wrangle the price of a Rolex watch down a hundred dollars by telling the shop owner she had nine sons (instead of the two she really did have), all of whom would one day require graduation presents just like this watch she’d picked out for me. I remember having to keep my eyes cast down lest I giggle into the shop owner’s greedy face. Outside, the Rolex encircling my right wrist, my mother and I had laughed until we cried. That moment still reverberated inside me, though she was long gone.

On the other hand, my mother was riddled with fear and superstition, especially when it came to her children. Her own father, whom she had adored, had died when she was only fourteen. She once told me that when I was born she was consumed with all the terrible things that could happen to me: disease, accidents, being gulled by the evil people she imagined on all sides. She did not want me taken prematurely from her as her father had been. She dreamed of him, of seeing him asleep in his chair at night, in shirt and vest, carpet slippers on his feet, his gold pocket watch lying open in the palm of his hand, as if he needed its weight to ensure he’d wake up in time for work. She would pad softly across the living room and climb into his lap, curling like a dog, closing her eyes and dreaming of him.

My mother did not, as might have been expected, relax after I and my brother, Herman, were born. This, she would later tell me, was because she knew she was fated to have Lily. Lily confirmed my mother’s worst fears, her essentially bleak view of the world. Of course she blamed herself for Lily’s deformities. Of course she had a nervous breakdown. And of course this made everything worse, for us and for her. You could say with a fair degree of certainty that hers was a self-fulfilling prophesy. She was terrified of life and so she gave birth to a life that terrified her. Was it any wonder then that Lily horrified us? We learned, Herman and I, like all animals, by example.