The man rummaging in a desk drawer jumped back in a spasm of guilty acknowledgment. A more fragile young man Qwilleran had never seen. Although Noel Farhar seemed young for the job, his unhealthy thinness gave him a ghostly look of old age.

"Sorry to intrude. I'm Jim Qwilleran from the Daily Fluxion."

Noel Farhar's clenched jaw was all too obvious, and he was unable to control the tremor that afflicted one eyelid. "What do you want?" he demanded.

Amiably Qwilleran said, "Just wanted to introduce myself. I'm new on the art beat and trying to get acquainted." He extended a hand and received a reluctant, trembling hand from Farhar.

"If they added you to the staff to mend matters," the director said coldly, "it's too late. The damage is done."

"I'm afraid I don't understand. I've just arrived in this city."

"Sit down, Mr. Qwilleran." Farhar folded his arms and remained standing. "I presume you know the museum has just lost a million-dollar grant."

"I heard about it."

"That would have given us the incentive and the prestige to raise another five million from private donors and industry. It would have given us the country's outstanding pre-Hispanic Mexican collection and a new wing to house it, but your newspaper subverted the entire program. Your critic, by his continual harassment and ridicule, presented this museum in such an unfavorable light that the Foundation withdrew its consideration." Farhar spoke forcefully despite his visible trembling. "Needless to say, this failure — plus Mountclemens' personal attacks on my administration — has forced me to offer my resignation."

Qwilleran mumbled, "That's a serious charge."

"It is incredible that a single individual who knows nothing about art can pollute the city's art climate. But there's nothing you can do about it. I'm wasting my time talking to you. I have written to your publisher, demanding that this Mountclemens be stopped before he destroys our cultural heritage." Farhar turned back to the files. "Now I have some work to do — some papers to organize —»

"Sorry to interrupt," said Qwilleran. "Very sorry about this whole business. Not knowing the facts, I can't comment —»

"I've told you the facts." Farhar's tone put an end to the interview.

Qwilleran wandered about several floors of the museum, but his mind was not on the Renoirs and the Canalettos. The Toltec and Aztec cultures failed to capture his interest. Only the historic weapons stirred his enthusiasm — the left-handed daggers, German hunting knives, spiked maces, Spanish stylets and rapiers, Italian poniards. And repeatedly his thoughts went to the art critic that everyone hated.

Early the next morning Qwilleran was on the job at the Fluxion. In the reference library on the third floor he asked for the file of Mountclemens' reviews.

"Here it is," said the library clerk with a half-wink, "and when you finish with it, you'll find the first aid room on the fifth floor — in case you need a bromo."

Qwilleran scanned twelve months of art reviews. He found the blistering appraisal of Cal Halapay's curly, haired kids ("drugstore art") and the cruel words about Uncle Waldo's primitives ("age is no substitute for talent"). There was a column, without mention of names, on private collectors who are less dedicated to art preservation than to tax avoidance.

Mountclemens had strong words to say about Butchy Bolton's life-size metal sculptures of the human figure, which

reminded him of armor worn in a rural high-school performance of Macbeth. He deplored the mass production of third, rate artists at Penniman School, whose assembly lines would do credit to a Detroit automobile factory.

He complimented the small suburban galleries for their role as afternoon social centers replacing the bridge club and the sewing circle, although he questioned their value as purveyors of art. And he inveighed against the museum: its policies, its permanent collection, its director, and the color of the uniforms worn by the guards.

Interspersed among the tirades, however, were the critic's enthusiastic endorsements of certain artists — especially Zoe Lambreth — but the jargon went over Qwilleran's head. "The complexity of eloquent dynamics in organic texture… internal subjective impulses expressed in compassionate linguistics."

There was also a column that had nothing to do with painting or sculpture but discussed cats (Felis domestica) as works of art.

Qwilleran returned the file to the library and looked up an address in the telephone book. He wanted to find out why Mountclemens thought Zoe Lambreth's work was so good — and why Cal Halapay thought it was so bad.

He found the Lambreth Gallery on the edge of the financial district, in an old loft building dwarfed by nearby office towers. It seemed to have class. The sign over the door was lettered in gold, and in the window there were only two

paintings but thirty yards of gray velvet.

One of the canvases in the window was navy blue, sprinkled with black triangles. The other was a mysterious gravy of thick paint in tired browns and purples. Still, an image seemed to emerge from it, and Qwilleran felt a pair of eyes peering from its depths. As he stared, the expression in the eyes changed from innocence to awareness to savagery.

He opened the door and ventured inside. The gallery was long and narrow, furnished like a living room, rather richly, in uncompromising modem design. On an easel Qwilleran spotted another arrangement of triangles — gray scattered on white — which he preferred to the one in the window. The artist's signature was "Scrano." On a pedestal stood an elbow of drain tile spiked with bicycle spokes. It was titled "Thing #17."

A bell had jangled somewhere when he entered the shop, and now Qwilleran heard footsteps tapping on the treads of the spiral staircase at the rear of the gallery. The iron structure, painted white, resembled a huge sculpture.

Qwilleran saw feet, then narrow- trousered legs, and then the crisp, formal, supercilious proprietor of the gallery. It was hard for him to imagine Earl Lambreth as the husband of the warm, womanly Zoe. The man appeared somewhat older than his wife, and he was painfully dapper.

Qwilleran said, "I'm the new art reporter from the Daily Fluxion. Mrs. Lambreth asked me to visit your gallery."

The man did something that started to be a smile but ended as an unpleasant mannerism: he raked his bottom lip with his teeth. "Mrs. Lambreth mentioned you," he said, "and I suppose Mountclemens has told you that this is the leading gallery in the city. In fact, it is the only gallery worthy of the name."

"I haven't met Mountclemens as yet, but I understand he speaks highly of your wife's work. I'd like to see some of it."

The dealer, standing stiffly with hands behind his back, nodded toward a brown rectangle on the wall. "That is one of Mrs. Lambreth's recent paintings. It has the rich painterly quality recognized as her signature."

Qwilleran studied the picture in cautious silence. Its surface had the texture of a heavily iced chocolate cake, and he unconsciously passed his tongue over his lips. Yet he was aware, once more, of a pair of eyes somewhere in the swirls of paint. Gradually there evolved the face of a woman.

"She uses a lot of paint," Qwilleran observed. "Must: take a long time to dry."

The dealer cleaned his lower lip again and said, "Mrs. Lambreth employs pigment to capture the viewer and enmesh him sensually before making her statement. Her declamation is always elusive, nebulous — forcing her audience to participate vitally in the interpretation." Qwilleran nodded vaguely.

"She is a great humanist," Lambreth continued. "Unfortunately we have very few of her canvases here at present. She is holding everything back for her one- man show in March. However, you saw one of her most lucid and disciplined works in the window."