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Show 161 "Harry's fine," said Harry, pleased. She sat drinking her coffee and glancing from face to face, little knowing she had entered an elaborate construct. He had destroyed Shannon and Harry for her. Now he would destroy Simon. Simon was thick and squat, with a heavy head, sad eyes, and a face otherwise without expression. The lack of expression was annoying because it meant you could not tell if he found you inconsequential. He affected slovenliness. He wore, for instance, sandals with broken straps repaired with electricians' tape, shirts with buttons missing and frayed at the elbows, pants that he had tied in knots and thrown into a tub of bleach, and in cold weather a sheepskin vest he had found hanging at Goodwill and had carefully ripped up the back before purchasing, to drive down the price. He smoked Turkish cigarettes with an offensive odor, buying them in cases from a pipe shop in the Village. He let his hair, sprinkled with dandruff, grow uncombed. He rarely bathed. When you talked to him he waited until you were in the middle of a sentence and then wiped the back of his hand across a nostril and sniffed, and pulled a long soiled handkerchief from his picket, gripped his nose through it, and blew violently, blinking his eyes afterward, and looked at you and said "What?" In contrast to Shannon and Harry, Simon was a man of some means. His father had built the family's modest fortune out of character roles he had played in scores of movies dating from before the war. He had played gangsters, scientists, and ranch hands. Lorin always felt a certain prior acquaintance with Simon because he had seen some of those movies when he was growing up and his vulnerabilities had been touched by some of the characters he could only now identify. He remembered a leather-faced white hunter who had lost his nerve, for instance, in a jungle movie he had seen in fifth grade with Billy Dunkle and Benny Mathis, both of whom on the bus going home |