Sublime

Robert avait quitté Hall Street, il dormait chez des amis près de Myrtle Avenue. Contrairement à moi, il n’était pas attiré par les voyages. Gagner une indépendance financière grâce à son œuvre était son but premier mais, en attendant, il dépendait de ses petits boulots et bourses d’étudiant.

These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries. As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt.

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

Kim Novak in Vertigo.