فصل سی و نهم

CHAPTER 39

Dolarhyde paid his taxi fare in front of an apartment house on Eastern Parkway two blocks from the Brooklyn Museum. He walked the rest of the way. Joggers passed him, heading for Prospect Park. Standing on the traffic island near the IRT subway station, he got a good view of the Greek Revival building. He had never seen the Brooklyn Museum before, though he had read its guidebook - he had ordered the book when he first saw “Brooklyn Museum” in tiny letters beneath photographs of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

The names of the great thinkers from Confucius to Demosthenes were carved in stone above the entrance. It was an imposing building with botanical gardens beside it, a fitting house for the Dragon.

The subway rumbled beneath the street, tingling the soles of his feet. Stale air puffed from the gratings and mixed with the smell of the dye in his mustache.

Only an hour left before closing time. He crossed the street and went inside. The checkroom attendant took his valise.

“Will the checkroom be open tomorrow?” he asked.

“The museum’s closed tomorrow.” The attendant was a wizened woman in a blue smock. She turned away from him.

“The people who come in tomorrow, do they use the checkroom?”

“No. The museum’s closed, the checkroom’s closed.”

Good. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Dolarhyde cruised among the great glass cases in the Oceanic Hall and the Hall of the Americas on the ground floor - Andes pottery, primitive edged weapons, artifacts and powerful masks ftom the Indians of the Northwest coast.

Now there were only forty minutes left before the museum closed. There was no more time to learn the ground floor. He knew where the exits and the public elevators were.

He rode up to the fifth floor. He could feel that he was closer to the Dragon now, but it was all right - he wouldn’t turn a corner and run into Him.

The Dragon was not on public display; the painting had been locked away in the dark since its return from the Tate Gallery in London.

Dolarhyde had learned on the telephone that The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun was rarely displayed. It was almost two hundred years old and a watercolor - light would fade it.

Dolarhyde stopped in front of Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains - Mt. Rosalie 1866. From there he could see the locked doors of the Painting Study and Storage Department. That’s where the Dragon was. Not a copy, not a photograph: the Dragon. This is where he would come tomorrow when he had his appointment.

He walked around the perimeter of the fifth floor, past the corridor of portraits, seeing nothing of the paintings. The exits were what interested him. He found the fire exits and the main stairs, and marked the location of the public elevators.

The guards were polite middleaged men in thicksoled shoes, years of standing in the set of their legs. None was armed, Dolarhyde noted; one of the guards in the lobby was armed. Maybe he was a moonlighting cop.

The announcement of closing time came over the publicaddress system.

Dolarhyde stood on the pavement under the allegorical figure of Brooklyn and watched the crowd come out into the pleasant summer evening.

Joggers ran in place, waiting while the stream of people crossed the sidewalk toward the subway.

Dolarhyde spent a few minutes in the botanical gardens. Then he flagged a taxi and gave the driver the address of a store he had found in the Yellow Pages.