Shadow Dancers by Lieberman Herbert

Author:Lieberman, Herbert [Lieberman, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 0312922884
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

“AND YOU’RE SURE THIS WAS A SIXTY-EIGHT Mercedes?”

“In mint condition. Positive.”

“How come he wanted to paint it?”

“He had some rust going on around the headlights and fenders. So while I was taking care of that, he said I should also paint it.”

They were in the cramped little space that served as Mr. Anthony Pagano’s office. A glass partition separated them from the big floodlit paint shop where just then an old Coupe de Ville was being sprayed.

Mr. Pagano sat behind a desk stacked with little hills of invoices, paper coffee cups, and unemptied ashtrays reeking of dead cigar stumps.

“And it was a two twenty,” Pickering went on. “Right. A two twenty.”

“You’re sure?”

“Course I’m sure,” Mr. Pagano snapped. “Pretty sure, anyway.”

“What color did you paint it?”

Mr. Pagano’s eyes closed and his head tilted back slightly. “Lemme see. It was green when he brought it in.”

“What shade of green?”

Pickering tried to control his excitement. This was the ninth auto body shop he’d been to that morning. He’d visited nearly a hundred over the past several days, with no luck whatsoever.

By that time he was tired, and there was a conviction deep in his bones, going back to boyhood, that overenthusiasm for anything leads inevitably to disappointment.

“It was dark green.” Mr. Pagano snatched some color swatches down from the pegboard and pointed his paint-stained finger at one. “That’s a basic Mercedes color. What we call your basic forest green.” Beyond the glass wall, masked and suited figures drifted phantomlike through steamy clouds of vaporized paint hissing under great pressure.

“And the color you painted it?”

Pagano’s head rolled backward again. The eyes closed. “Now, you gotta remember this is like four, five weeks ago. I paint maybe a hundred cars a week.”

Pickering’s brow started to lower.

“But this one,” Mr. Pagano continued, “I got a distinct impression we sprayed gray.”

“Yeah. How come?”

“How come we sprayed it gray?”

“No. How come you remember this one especially? What was so special about this one?”

Pagano turned to watch the ghostlike figures of his painters drifting beyond the glass partition. ” ‘Cause of the guy,” he remarked distractedly. “It was the guy. Something about him.”

“Strange?”

“Not at all. Friendly. Pleasant. Chatty, you know. Spoke in a low voice. Kind of dignified. Knew a lot about cars.”

“Did he say why he wanted it painted?”

“There was this rust, I told you. And I guess he figured if he was gonna spring for that, he might as well go all the way with a paint job. Car’s nearly twenty years old, don’t forget.”

“This was the first paint job it’s had in twenty years?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?” Mr. Pagano was irritated by the question. “As a matter of fact, when we scraped it down, there must’ve been four, five layers of paint. All different colors. A regular fucking rainbow.” Pagano beamed amiably. “That’s how come I recall this car. You don’t see that too often. People spray a car, they generally spray it the same color.”

Pickering had been sitting there spinning his thumbs. Over the past several minutes the speed of his rotations had steadily increased.

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