The Horse You Came in On

The blind man smelled something new in Cider Alley, a new scent mixed with the old ones of urine and sweat, beer and whisky, coming from some doorway (he imagined) where a little cluster of men liked to gather. Often when he cut through this narrow street there would be tentative greetingsâa tap on his shoulder, a hand on his arm, a shouted hello. He resented and resisted pitying gestures and lachrymose words. For he did not regard himself as on the same level as the other homeless: he had, through tenacity and a sharpness of mind and tongue, held on to his own place for over a year. His spot, his grate. People knew him.

The blind man loathed being approached unless he himself sought help with directions or the time. He refused to fan the pavement before him with a white cane, but he did have a briar walking stick, and he was not averse to using it if anyone started any funny businessâor just plain annoyed him.

It wasn't the walking stick but the toe of his shoe that hooked into a pliable, unfamiliar obstacle that nearly toppled him. But he was used to obstacles and had become quick at regaining his balance.

What his foot struck was the source of the unfamiliar smell. He knelt and ran his hand over rough cloth and softer skin.

A man. Fallen, drunk, probably. He felt carefully; his sense of touch was even better than his sense of smell. What he touched was familiar, a kind of rough cross that his friend had always worn around his neck. John-Joy. His fingers ran over, first, the familiar topcoat and then went to the suit jacket beneath. Before he could fight with his conscience, he quickly removed the jacket and exchanged it with his own. John-Joy's was infinitely better; it was fine wool, expensive, and he'd always wondered who would ever throw such a garment in the rubbish. Now John-Joy would wake up, come to, find he was wearing Milos's old gray seersucker. Not the best thing for a night in January. But he could take a joke, John-Joy could.

Or could he?

For drink wasn't the smell. Quickly Milos ran his hand from head to
feet. The air was clotted with the smell; he did not have to feel the stickiness on his hand to know.

His tongue, his mouth formed what he knew was an audible cry, though he himself heard nothing. “Police!”

One of his hands scrabbled against the cold stone of the building; the other thrashed with his cane as he put more force behind the word: “Police! Police!”

What surprised people (and he revelled in their surprise) was that, although almost totally deaf, he could speak perfectly clearly. The accident which had caused his gradual loss of sight and hearing had happened only ten years before. If someone trumpeted directly in his right ear, he could sometimes make out what they were saying, but that was the extent of it. He shouted again.

Then he felt a presence; he felt someone there, and he wondered if the someone was joining in his shouts. He told this person he was deaf and that he must go for the police, but there was no movement. He did not know what was happening. He thrust out his hand and said, “Write on my hand!” He felt an arm. “Write on my hand!” he said again. This was his one means of communication. He felt the touch of the other person's finger, but the finger was moving too quickly, the finger on his palm. Stupid bastard! he thought, furious. What did they think he was, a fucking computer? “Slower, slower! I can't understand what you're telling me!” he shouted.

The finger drew the letters “I A M.” Then there was no movement, only a rustling. He could feel the other person go down, rise up again, as he himself was forcing breath out and yelling, “What? You goddamned fool! âI am'
what
? What's âI am'?” The blind man had never been known for so much as a shred of patience.

The other hand grabbed at his. Now, very slowly, a finger formed the letter “I.” Then “AM.” Then “POL.” There was a pause. Goddamned fool was taking his timeâbut at least the bastard had the sense not to write home to his mother. “Then ICE.”

AngryâMilos was always angry, often mutely angry, always had been, even before the accidentâhe shouted: “What the fuck's that? âIce'? What the hell's that?”

Again, the other hand held his and wrote, more quickly this time:

“I AM POLICE.”

“Goddamned motherfucker!” shouted Milos. “Why didn't you say that before?”

2
I

The girl's name was, ironically, Beatrice. And her skin was pale and her hair red, but not Rossetti-red, not the diaphanous red of the
Beata Beatrix
on the wall before her.

The girl and the boy, even in the face of the immortal paintings that surrounded them, could not keep their mortal hands away from each other. They clung and kissed, regardless of the people nearby who looked at them with vague disgust. They were too self-absorbed to care for anyone else in the gallery and too selfishly young to care that they presented a picture no artist would give a damn to paint. Purplish-red hair and black leather (the girl), a band of purple through brush-cut brown hair and black leather (the boy) suggested they could have been twins; but their groping hands suggested otherwise.

One felt, glancing at these two, that they were not in the grip of worldly or otherworldly passion; not even, really, of lust. Their public display was simply for its own sake, something that would convey to the world that they didn't give a flying fuck for the sensibilities of others, not the ones walking about, or standing to gaze at these marvellous paintings, or sitting near them on the bench.

One such patron of the museum sat nearly shoulder to shoulder with the girl, who was at the moment pronging her tongue into the mouth of the boy and moaning unconvincingly. When she felt the woman slightly behind and to her right, felt the burden of the woman's shoulder against hers, she moved sharply (still tongue-in-mouth with her boyfriend), trying to shrug off the unwelcome burden. The burden, however, grew heavier and heavier as the woman listed farther into the girl's back, until the girl turned and told her to stop it, the stupid old cow.

But the woman, middle-aged, very richly and tastefully dressed, did not stop. Her weight grew heavier, and she might have been seeking refuge for her head on the shoulder of the girl.

“Heyâ!” the girl began, wrenching away from the boy. Her movement put a distance between herself and the dozing woman. “La-dy!” she said with searing impatience.

The lady didn't answer, simply fell slowly sideways, onto the bench.

“Bloody â
ell,”
whispered the girl, suddenly rising.

Her name was Bea and his was Gabe, and the irony of this was not lost on Richard Jury, though it must have been on the guards at the Tate Gallery.

The girl hadn't stopped chewing gum for even a minute. The red hair was teased and spiky; the black leather skirt barely covered her rump. If anything, she was the underground version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beatrice.

It was the boy, Gabe, who was doing the talking at the moment, though Bea cut across his guttural vowels with her own. “Â 'Ow was we t'know, then? Coulda been pissed, couldn't she?”

“Or on the needle,” said Gabe, in his worldly wisdom.

Richard Jury assumed these two couldn't imagine the mind's light flickering out in any other way. Dead, pissed, stonedâit was all the same.

The dead woman had been trundled away on a stretcher across the polished floor. Her going had been overseen by Inspector Marks of C Division, who was now talking (and clearly relieved to be doing so) to Scotland Yard CID, represented by Superintendent Jury. He had got to the room before Marks and, with the help of the gallery guards, had kept the peopleâabout a dozen of themâfrom leaving.

Jury had been in the Tate, coincidentally, to see the Swagger Portrait exhibit, which was closing. He felt himself to be dull-witted about art and thought perhaps he could educate himself in the differences between Reynolds and Gainsborough. More than any other gallery in London, Jury loved the Tate. And his favorite room was the one he was now standing in, the one in which Bea and Gabe had made their dreadful discovery. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Millais's
Ophelia
âhe found them indescribably romantic. The boy and girl had been sitting on the end of the bench, opposite the Rossetti painting; the dead woman had been sitting on the side of the same bench, across from the famous painting of Chatterton.

“Mrs. Frances Hamilton,” said Inspector Marks, looking at his notes. “Warminster Road, Belgravia. She had ample IDâsix credit cards, checkbooks. No driver's license, though.”

Why did the address sound familiar? Jury frowned, unable to place it. He had been standing to one side while the crime scene people and then the medical examiner took their photographs and prodded the body of Frances Hamilton. The ME said it was probably a stroke, but he couldn't
be certain. The late Mrs. Hamilton appeared to be a middle-aged woman, early sixties, in good health. He could not, until a more thorough examination, tell them more.

“Any of them see what happened?” Jury nodded towards the nervous little knot of gallery-goers at one end of the room. They were being questioned by Marks's men.

“No. Only the two kids. And they didn't actually
see
anythingânot until the body slumped. Funny about these kids, how they act like they've seen it all, like nothing can jar them; but just let somebody peg out, let there be an emergency, and they completely lose it.”

III

Chatterton, skin like blue ice, lay with his arm draped over the edge of his narrow bed, his fingers barely touching the floor, as if he might retrieve the fragments of manuscript pages that looked, in the painting, like confetti tossed across the bare boards. The pages the poet had torn up before he drank the fatal draught.

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