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preened himself on being the cause of divorce. If so, he would have to have the word on that.
    The flight came in at four-thirty, just ten minutes late. At the international section of the Mexico City airport, those meeting passengers stand in an open-air area behind a fence and watch the incoming passengers walk along a long shed arrangement that leads to the glass-walled customs room.
    “Which one?” Miles asked nervously.
    “That one. Right there,” Gloria said, pointing.
    “That one!” Miles said, staring at a very big man who strolled along with the manner of a man who owns the airline and is making a check flight to study passenger service. But in that manner there was an undercurrent of the con man, hunting a victim to whom he can sell the airline. He was big—thick through the chest, heavy in the arms and legs. He combined a bristling black brush cut with a bushy beard, tinged with gray. Nestling in the beard was a wide and petulant red-lipped mouth, a nose pink with tiny broken veins. His cheekbones were high and brown and solid, the pale eyes set in Mongol tilt. He wore an obviously ancient, rust-colored corduroy shirt, the collar open, a yellow silk ascot at his throat, faded baggy khaki pants, and the kind of black pseudo-cowboy boots that A.T.C. personnel used to buy in Brazil in the early forties. He wore a bulging and ratty musette bag slung over his shoulder, and carried a large painter’s portfolio.
    When he was opposite them, ten feet away, Gloria said, “Gam!”
    He stopped and turned, and a big slow smile spread the redlips wide, and he said, in a rich and resonant bass-baritone, “Gloria, love! You look edible, darling. Ravishing. What a foul thing this air age is. I’ll be with you as soon as I permit a horde of officious little men to paw over my poor belongings.” And he strolled on.
    “Good heavens!” Miles Drummond said.
    They went inside and watched him through the gates as he went through customs. He had one enormous black metal suitcase which he apparently kept closed with a complicated arrangement of khaki straps and buckles. When he came out into the terminal building, carrying his suitcase, they met him. Gloria made the introduction. Miles felt his hand give slightly under the hard engulfing pressure. Torrigan had put the big suitcase down. Miles decided it would be polite to carry it out to the parking lot. He picked it up. His eyes bulged. He raised it several inches off the floor before it clunked back down.
    Torrigan picked it up without effort, and they went out to the car. Miles and the suitcase and the portfolio and the musette bag shared the back seat. Torrigan seemed to talk constantly in that rich black voice of his. Miles, in a rare flight of imagery, thought it sounded like hot tar being poured out of a golden jug. He wished Gloria had told him more about what Gambel Torrigan was like. He had imagined many things, but not this.
    Gloria, for her part, had detected no visceral quiver. Gam was merely ludicrous, mannered, and slightly boring.
    Miles Drummond was the only witness to the first meeting between Gambel Torrigan and Agnes Partridge Keeley. He had stayed up late on Sunday night after they got back to the Hutchinson, stayed up with Gam and Gloria, listening to a bewildering conversation. Gam had showed him the paintings in the portfolio. They did not look like anything Miles had ever seen before. They were blobs and whorls and swoops of pure color. They had such titles as “Illusionary Number Eleven” and “Transcendant in Ochre” and “Majorcan Melody.”
    He said to Gloria, “You can see from this recent stuff, darling, that I’ve gone beyond my Dynamic Impressionism period. I was in stasis. There was no longer enough there to satisfy me. But the mood was germinating, even when I was most discouraged. Now I’m into what I like to call my period of Reversive Romanticism. I’m dealing entirely in the balance of tensions through luminosity and focal levels.