Pursuit: A Novel

11

Prescott traveled with a suitcase that had nothing inside it that he couldn’t replace within ten minutes in a department store. He bought dress shirts of 60 percent cotton and 40 percent polyester that said permanent press and meant it, some blue jeans, and some worsted trousers with a razor crease. The sport coats were always summer-weight and dark colored. They were the belongings of a man so ordinary as to seem barely differentiated from others, a fictional person that Prescott had invented to keep from being too easily noticed and remembered. He picked up his suitcase at the baggage claim at Kennedy Airport, then took a cab into Manhattan to begin his preparations.

He checked into a hotel on Park Avenue and began making his calls to art galleries. In the next twenty-four hours, he spoke with thirty-six men and women whose voices told him they were genuinely convinced that they were experts. On each call, he patiently explained what he wanted and listened carefully to the response. At the end of his thirty-six calls, he had heard one name twelve times and no other name more than three times. He made three calls to curators of contemporary collections at museums to see whether they had a different sense of things, but it became clear to him that the voices were essentially the same. The name Prescott heard so many times was Cara Lee Satterfield. He dialed her number, listened to her quick, businesslike hello. He introduced himself, told her that he wondered if she would be willing to speak with him about a commission for a special kind of piece—a picture of a man he would describe.

She said in an unhappy monotone, “Did you get my name from the police?”

Prescott said, “No, from an art gallery. Do the police know you?”

“Come to my studio and we’ll talk.”

“Now?”

“Four o’clock. I’m working now.”

Prescott took a cab to the address she gave him, stepped out onto the street, and looked up. It was a brick building that had at some point had some business purpose, but the upper windows were too big for a business, and the frames were too new and expensive to have been from that era. He went into the man-sized door set into the larger garage door, and found himself facing a freight elevator. He stepped into it and pressed the UP button. The elevator rose two stories and stopped at a steel door with a big face on it that looked like a photograph. Prescott looked more closely. The face was an extremely realistic painted portrait of a grandfatherly man with a beard and glasses, crinkle lines at the corners of his wise old eyes, and an expression of mild puzzlement. He seemed to Prescott to be saying, “What do you want here—it wouldn’t be something that isn’t so good for you, would it?”

The thin woman who opened the door looked about forty. She wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Her hair had been chestnut brown, but it had been allowed to gray, so there were bright silver streaks in the tightly tied ponytail. Her face had no makeup and it had a bare look as though it had just been scrubbed. She gave a perfunctory half smile as she looked at him sharply. “Mr. Prescott?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come in.”

He entered and looked at the loft. The high windows and skylight above threw a bright, even light everywhere, bouncing off the white walls to leave no shadows. There was a huge space to his right occupied by several easels, a big workbench cluttered with tubes of paint, brushes soaking in coffee cans, and assorted palette knives and rags. There was a second bench with a vise, a miter box, a table saw, a few tools.

She led him past that area, through what looked like a living room set on display in a department store. The furniture was modern, simple in its lines, and upholstered in a coarse black fabric. There he could see that a set of stairs led above to a wide balcony with another steel door that was open. Through it, he could see part of a carpeted hallway that seemed to have at least four doorways leading off it, and at the end, a big room with a vaulted ceiling, bookcases and furniture, and a huge window with green things growing on a balcony beyond.

He gravitated to the walls, where finished portraits hung. From a distance, they were different enough from one another to be the work of several painters, but as he drew nearer, subtle similarities appeared. It was not a similarity of feature, but of eye: the artist’s interest in the curve of a young girl’s cheekbone, the mottled texture of an old woman’s skin, somehow the same interest expressed with the same intensity. This was a calm, unhurried treatment, with no flattering smoothing over of features, but the effect was more than flattering. The precise rendering was a fascinated elucidation of the creature who was being recorded and preserved. Cara Lee Satterfield stood a dozen feet behind him, waiting patiently while he looked. He reluctantly relinquished his gaze at a picture of a young woman with shiny blond hair. He was not sure how he could tell, but the woman was proud of the hair, thinking about it at the moment of the portrait. “You’re the best I’ve seen alive,” he said without a smile.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s not exactly a compliment, it’s more on the order of a congratulation,” he said. “A waste of breath too, because you know it.”

She looked at him, puzzled, but did not deny it. “I don’t think that’s a compliment either.”

“Nope,” he said. “It’s not. People have what they have. When what they have is something special, you can always tell they’ve had to work very hard for it. If it’s this special, they’ve gone more distance than anybody can go just by working.”

“That sounded positive rather than negative, so I’ll thank you,” she said. “Tell me about your commission.”

“It’s what I said on the telephone,” Prescott answered. “I want a picture of a man I describe to you.”

“Who is he?”

“My business is finding people who have done bad things,” he said.

“I didn’t ask about business,” she said testily. “I asked about him.”

“He’s a young guy, late twenties, probably. He gets paid to kill people. I’ve seen him, watched him for a couple of hours before I knew who he was. Now his image is in my mind, and I want you to put it into a picture.”

“If you found your way here, someone must have told you about me. You must know that I’m always pretty busy,” she said. “What made you think I would do it?”

Prescott said, “I asked people who was the best, not who needed the commission.” He added carefully, “I checked with galleries to find out what they get for your work. Of course I would expect to pay much more for—”

“I don’t want to talk about money just yet.” She stared at Prescott’s eyes. “You can see him, still?”

“Yes.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Yes,” he said. “A few times. I’ve been doing pretty well at getting to know him.”

She kept her gaze on him, unblinking, but she was no longer focused on his eyes. “All right. We’ll start it and settle the price later, when I decide what it is.”

“When?”

She seemed to think the question was beneath answering. She sat down on a couch, pulled her feet under her, picked up a sketch pad and pencil from the end table, and began to work as she spoke. “Let’s start with general outline, simplest stuff. You talk, I’ll listen.”

Prescott sat in the armchair facing her. “His hair is straight, dark brown. His forehead is high and narrow, but shaped, so you can tell there’s a very slight ridge where the eyebrows are that disappears as you move in above the nose. His chin has no cleft, but it comes out a little in a slight horizontal oval, the way some chins with clefts do. The nose is thin and narrow, but the nostrils have a slight flare to them.” She was sketching furiously as he spoke, and he could tell that his curiosity was going to make this experience miserable. He added, “His ears are small, kind of rounded, and close to his head.”

“Eyes big or small?”

“Average, and not particularly close-set, either.”

“Tell me about his mouth.”

“It’s narrow, with the lower lip a little bit thicker than the upper—not red or overly full, or strange.”

“How about this part of his face, right here?” She put one hand across her face just above her mouth to touch both cheekbones at once lightly, with thumb and forefinger.

“Only slightly wider than the rest of the face, tapering gradually to the chin.”

She worked in silence for a few minutes while Prescott began to feel the curiosity tormenting him again. Then she stood up, spun the pad around, and stuck the pencil in his hand. “Here. Fix the lines where they’re wrong.”

He looked at the picture in surprise. “Me? I’ll ruin it.”

“So ruin it. This is just a preliminary step to get the shapes and sizes of things right. Study your memory and make marks. Too wide, too narrow? Eyes too big, whatever.” She tossed a gum eraser onto the pad in his lap. “Take your time.”

He was disconcerted. The drawing already looked enough like the man to be almost recognizable. He closed his eyes and brought back the image, watched the man sitting behind the console in the lighted lobby, his face unconcerned, at ease while he waited to kill his companion. Prescott began to make lines, faint and tentative at first, then more sure and bold when he saw that the lines made the resemblance clearer.

While he worked, he was aware of her. She was moving around in the kitchen area, moving things, opening cupboards and closing them. After a while he smelled coffee, and she appeared with a big tray that had two cups and a thermos pot, and several kinds of tea cakes. She set it on a table nearby.

She looked over his shoulder. “Good. Very, very good. Leave it now and have some coffee.” She pointed at the table. “You don’t strike me as the tea-cake type, but they won’t hurt you.” She poured him a cup of coffee and went to the couch to take up the pad. She used the gum eraser and pencil and worked on the drawing.

He said, “This isn’t what I expected.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “You could have gone to a police composite artist if you had wanted something simple. You went to a lot of trouble to find a real portrait painter.”

“I mean the way you go about it.”

“This isn’t the way it’s done, but this isn’t a normal portrait,” she said. She looked up and noticed he was surveying the huge loft. “You like my studio?”

“Artists all seem to be nesters. I’ve seen a few studios that are better than anything the owner ever made to sell.” He frowned. “That’s not you.”

She chuckled. “It’s a sick indulgence—something you do when you need to work but can’t do anything right. Maybe if I add a skylight, the shadows over here will be gone. Maybe if I move the wall over here in a little bit, I’ll have a small corner that glows just right. Then everything will work.” She spun the sketch again. Now the lines that he had made had been refined, and had become the new boundaries of the face.

He stared at it. “That’s closer.”

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at the picture, then propped up the pad so it faced him. “Let’s have some of those cakes while you get used to him. I want more lines as soon as you see something that’s wrong, remember something you forgot.” She sat at the table with him. “How did you get to chasing a killer around? Is it personal?”

He shook his head. “Nothing as honest and dignified as that. It’s something I fell into a while back.”

“How?” she asked.

“Process of elimination,” he said. He picked up the pad and began working on it again. “I started out wanting to be a great man, but then I noticed that every time there was a great man, somebody would lay the crosshairs on his forehead. Then I figured I’d be a saintly man. But it meant I would have to deny myself all the things my mama wouldn’t have approved of, and end up getting burned at a stake or something. Then I thought I’d settle for being a good man. But no matter how hard I applied myself to it, I couldn’t detect that I was getting any better than anybody else. In those days you had to go into the service, so I did. After a couple of years I got out and had nothing to do. I got a job at a detective agency, then started my own. I solved a couple of cases, and got a reputation. At that point, either I could keep making very good money doing that, or I could go start all over again at something I wasn’t even good at. So I kept on.” He handed the drawing back to Cara Lee Satterfield. “How about you? How did you get to be a famous portrait artist?”

She went to work with eraser and pencil again. “It’s a lot like your story.” She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, then down again at the pad. “Except that mine is true. I came up from Virginia twenty years ago. I needed to draw, and I needed money. I live in a century when representational art is something that’s only in style among people who wear cheese hats to football games and watch pro wrestling on TV. So I did odd jobs—quickie sketches at amusement parks, greeting cards, witness sketches for the police.”

He looked around him at the loft, then back at her. “Something else happened to both of you.”

“Both?”

“You and this building.”

She grinned as she worked. “I bought this place because I couldn’t afford SoHo, which was where artists were living then. This was a hellhole, a place where transients and addicts hung out. There had been four or five fires. I got it cheap. I made it secure so nobody could get in, fixed it up a little, and went to work. Over the years, the rent in SoHo got too expensive for artists, and most of them moved in around me anyway. In the meantime, I discovered that no matter how rich and sophisticated you are, you don’t want your portrait to be abstract. You want realism, with ten years lopped off.” She showed him the portrait.

“That’s close,” he said. “Really close. I don’t know what I could do to it.”

“Then let’s talk ethnic stereotypes.”

“Stereotypes?”

She said, “Nice people don’t. But all we’re talking about here is looks. You look the way the genes your grandparents brought from the old country tell you to look. The question is, Which old country?”

He shrugged. “His skin is pale. I thought about that when I saw him. His hair is dark brown, almost black. His eyes . . . I wasn’t close enough to tell the color, exactly. They looked light, not dark. Blue or gray. The old country is somewhere in Europe on both sides. But it could be anywhere from Ireland to Russia. You see him, you think ‘white guy,’ but you don’t think about a country.”

“If he were out in the sun, would he get freckles?”

“Maybe. He doesn’t have any right now.”

She did some more sketching. “Tell me about how he seems. You talked to him, watched him. What’s his personality?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Guess.”

“I think he’s got the skills he needs for getting along. If he’s supposed to smile, he smiles. If he’s supposed to look like he’s sad, he can do that. He doesn’t feel any of it.”

Prescott looked into her eyes. “You understand? He knows what people are supposed to feel and what their faces look like while they’re feeling it. He’s spent a lot of time practicing—probably in front of a mirror when he was young, and since then by watching people’s reactions—but it’s all the same. It’s like a man doing birdcalls: if he practices enough, he can hit the same notes, maybe not exactly, but close enough to fool a lot of birds. But he’s not a bird. He doesn’t know what the bird feels when it sings, or what it means. He just knows that when he does it, birds will come close enough so he can kill them.”

She looked up from the pad. “He doesn’t feel anything?”

“That’s not exactly right. He feels hunger, cold, heat, pain, a little fear—too little of that—and there’s a big reservoir of resentment or jealousy or something. I haven’t quite isolated that to the point where I can put a name to it. He thinks that other people have things that he deserves. He’s smarter, stronger, more disciplined. He works harder than they do—has been working harder than they do since he was a child—to improve himself. That’s the only sign of fear I’ve seen so far. Something made him afraid when he was young, I think, and that was how he got started on making himself dangerous . . . ‘potent’ is probably the word.”

“Is he?” she asked. “He has power?”

Prescott looked at her in surprise, as though he had been in a reverie and heard a discordant note. He nodded. “Yeah. Of a sort. We live in a beautiful, warm, cozy society. We don’t always know it, but we do.” Prescott paused. “He doesn’t.”

“How is that?”

“We have wars, crime, and so on—but only a few of us, and only some of the time. It isn’t a daily experience. For most of human history, it wasn’t that way. People had to walk around with a different attitude: heavily armed, watchful, ready to react instantly and violently. What he’s done is turn himself into a man from another time and place: training himself physically and mentally, learning the practices of old warrior societies, developing attitudes and skills of men in cultures that had some practical use for that kind of thing, that rewarded it with high status. He’s succeeded. He’s a killer, just as they were.”

“What about the fear? You said he didn’t have much.”

“Not enough,” said Prescott. “There are theories about that, but they’re just theories.”

“Tell me,” she said. “I need to hear everything that comes to mind when you look at him.”

“Once in a while the psychiatrists do tests on a certain kind of people—ones who jump out of airplanes a lot, or go for speed records, or whatever. Supposedly a lot of them have a deficiency in a chemical called monoamine oxidase. It’s a chemical that regulates other chemicals, and it’s released when you’re scared. When monoamine oxidase is released, it gives you more dopamine and norepinephrine, so you feel a rush. I think that could be what’s going on with him. He needs that rush, like an addict. But both intentionally and unintentionally, he’s been making himself resistant to fear. He needs more and more objective danger to trigger it.” He sighed. “But all of that stuff is invisible. It doesn’t have much to do with a picture.”

She handed the drawing to him, a refutation of what he was saying. There was the young, clean-cut man he had seen in the crisp security-guard uniform.

It seemed to Prescott that the last time he had seen the drawing it had been extremely good. The term for it was a “likeness.” But now something else had happened. The face was alive. In the skull that had simply been an accurate outline, then a three-dimensional shape, there were thoughts. He tried to analyze this impression, and realized it had to be the eyes. They were watchful in exactly the right way. The mouth was almost smiling, but the eyes were doing something different that made the smile just an extremely convincing lie. In the eyes was cunning opportunism; inside the pleasant young face a different person was waiting, with cold patience, for his chance.

“It’s him,” he said. “It’s the one.” He tried to say it more accurately: “It’s that man, and it’s nobody else.” That was what she had done. An hour ago, it had been a picture of the man. In subtle degrees, she had made it more like him, but absolutely not like other men who resembled him. She had eliminated them.

“Good,” she said, without surprise. She stood up and took the drawing away from him, then walked toward the other end of the room, where her workbenches and easels stood and everything was paint-spattered.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“It’s time to paint,” she said in a distracted voice, without removing her eyes from the drawing. “I’m a painter.”

“You already have him,” said Prescott, getting to his feet.

She kept walking. “Go sit down. Have more coffee, take a nap or something. This will take some time.”

“But why are you doing it?”

“I told you. I’m a painter. I’m not sort of a painter. I don’t quit just because some ignorant character comes in and tells me it’s good enough for him. It has to be good enough for me.”

Prescott sat and drank coffee. He paced the loft, looked out the windows at the night streets below, now surprisingly empty for New York. After a time, he lay on the couch and dozed, then woke. Each time he looked toward the other end of the loft, he could see her still standing, working intently, paying no attention to anything but the sketch and the canvas. It was daylight before she looked in his direction, then beckoned.

He walked to the easel and looked. The killer looked back at him. It was no longer just a representation. Somehow, contained in the painted version, there were all of the things that Prescott believed about this man and had told Cara Lee Satterfield. The painting was more like him than any blown-up color photograph could be. “When can I have it?”

“You don’t want this,” she said. “You want eight-by-ten photographs of it. I’ll take them now.”

The photographs took time. Big floodlights on stands had to be moved around, then white reflective screens arranged and rearranged until she was satisfied. She set up a camera on a tripod, took shot after shot, moved the lights and screens, then took more. At last, he heard the camera’s automatic rewinder humming. She popped the camera’s back open, took out the film, then looked at her workbench, tore the printed address off an old envelope full of slides, and handed him the address and the film. “That’s the place to get them developed.” She looked around, seeming to notice the daylight for the first time. “What time is it?”

“Nearly noon.”

“Good. They’re open.”

“You’re going to want to go to sleep, so maybe we’d better settle your fee before I go.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a checkbook.

She held up her hand. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to be enough.”

“I keep this account’s balance pretty high,” he said.

She shook her head. “That’s just money. This is magic. It’s a collaboration, an experience. I figured out my price.”

“What is it?”

“You can’t pay off until you’ve finished chasing this guy,” she said. “About how long will it take?”

He looked at her uneasily. “You know, I don’t want to be dramatic, but the finish could be that I stop chasing because he kills me.”

“I’ve seen you, and now I’ve seen him,” she said. “I’ll take that chance. Give me a call when it’s done, and you can pay off.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Sure,” she said. “There are two things. You’ll fly back here to sit for me. I want to paint you.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“In November I have a one-woman show,” she said. “The opening is a big, pretentious party, and they’re awful. They’re boring, frightening, and embarrassing all at the same time. You will be my escort. The women will be nice to look at, but you won’t be able to, or I’ll be angry. The men are not all bad, either, but there will be a few . . . you’ll want to pinch their heads off. You won’t do that, either.”

“Why would you want me as an escort?”

She walked toward the steel door, and opened it for him. “I don’t have to tell you that, so I won’t. It’s my price. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”