Darker Than Night

29

“You see the problem, Romulus,” said Victory Wallace, who was decorating a brownstone on West Eighty-ninth Street. His clients were a wealthy oil wholesaler and his wife, who were relocating from Turkey. The old building would never have dreamed this could happen.

They were in the bathroom off the master bedroom on the second floor, a spacious cubicle of beige tile, with veined marble flooring and vanity tops. The shower stall, large enough to accommodate half a dozen, and with myriad gold-plated spray heads aimed in all directions, had doors with what looked like handwritten love letters pressed between layers of etched glass. Overhead was a gold chandelier that looked as if it belonged in a palatial grand hall in Saudi Arabia rather than in a West Side bathroom. Oddly, Victory Wallace (whose real name was Victor Padilla) had made it all seem right. But then, that was his talent.

Another of his talents was the grande-dame act he’d made part of his professional personality. Romulus was used to it and ignored it, though he did appreciate its marketability and Marlene Dietrich shadings.

“I mean, Romulus, my clients are under extreme pressure and determined to move in next week, and I must make everything tight and right. You do see the problem, dear man?”

Romulus flicked lint from the sleeve of his black Armani suit and nodded.

Victory, who affected the startled gaze of a deer reminded of hunting season, stared at him as if he’d expected more response. “My clients want something done with this awful steel support pole. They insist. And it’s load bearing. It simply can’t be moved!” He was a slender man, with a wasp waist, wearing tight designer jeans and a charcoal shirt with bloused sleeves. Sometimes he wore a red beret. Costume was part of the extreme shtick that was often necessary for clients at this stratospheric price level. “I mean, a big steel supporting pole in the middle of the bathroom! It looks like a drainpipe from upstairs, something human refuse gurgles through!” He made a gargoyle face, momentarily sticking out his tongue. “You do see what we’re dealing with here?”

“Box it in,” Romulus suggested.

Victory pressed a palm to his forehead as if stricken with a migraine. “No, no, we’re way beyond the plaster-dust stage, Romulus. There’s simply no going back. No time.”

Romulus looked at the gold-plated faucets and the deliberately exposed gold plumbing beneath the marble basin. Vulgar. Garish. “You said the pole looks like plumbing. So don’t try to hide it. Flaunt it. Make it gold-plated like the other plumbing. It would show well, but I warn you it would be expensive.”

Victory waved his long right arm out to the side as if trying to flick away pesky cellophane that had stuck to his fingers. “We’re way, way beyond expensive. Money isn’t the issue at all. Simply not part of the equation. The problem is that the pole’s surface isn’t the sort of alloy that will accept gold plating.” He grinned in a way he no doubt thought fetchingly at Romulus. “That’s why I called you for advice, dear man. Everyone in the trade says that in a dilemma like this, call Romulus and call him first. He’ll ride to the rescue like the cavalry in one of those Cinemascope Westerns, where all the colors look like they’ve dripped off Gauguin’s palette. Well, you have gotten the call.” Victory cupped a hand to his ear as if listening. “Do I hear a bugle playing charge?”

“I can paint the pipe and make it look like gold plating. But it will be every bit as expensive as real gold.”

“Not an issue!” Victory reassured Romulus. “Now here’s another request that would save my life and give my clients sheer bliss: can you, extra please, do the job rush rush?”

“Three days from now okay?”

Victory shook his head and brushed away the words as if they were bees swarming about him. “Two? Could you possibly make it two days? Put a rush charge on your bill. Twenty percent.” He made a backhand motion. “Thirty.”

“Two days,” Romulus said.

“You are the best, dear man!”

“Of course I am.”

Romulus left the brownstone and walked half a block to where his black Cadillac was parked. He knew precisely what to use on the steel pole: a special paint he’d concocted utilizing gold leaf and an off-brand primer. Neither ingredient was easy to find on short notice, but he was sure he had some among the wide array of supplies he maintained just for this kind of request. The paint had to be applied expertly in three or four coats, but the finished product looked amazingly like genuine gold plating.

Romulus settled back in the Cadillac’s cool interior and pulled away from the curb. He smiled as he drove along narrow side streets, watching New York slide past outside the car’s tinted windows, the tiny restaurants pretending to be sidewalk cafés, the cars double parked, the lovers walking close to each other, the life-worn and weary seated on concrete stoops, the lost wandering in slow confusion.

Life was good for Romulus and getting better. Everything was under control. For now, at least. There was order and satisfaction in this world of his own making.

He’d invented his job description: specialty painter. That was what it said on his gilded white business cards, along with his professional name: Romulus.

It hadn’t been easy for him to gain the respect and admiration of those who at first regarded him as merely another subcontractor, a spreader of paint who was particularly neat in his work.

But they soon learned he wasn’t an ordinary painter, which was why he now commanded such an exorbitant price from the top decorators who hired him, and who then passed on an even more exorbitant price to their wealthy clients. He matched colors precisely, shaded beveled edges and moldings so door panels appeared shadowed and deeper even in direct light, calculated colors so they best complemented furnishings. He altered texture, tinted to make rooms appear larger or smaller, created light and shadow where none really existed.

He was an artist. An original. That was what his clients wanted, just as they wanted original gowns and one-of-a-kind everything else.

He would arrive at the job in his black Cadillac, wearing an Armani suit and carrying all his supplies in a single large black suitcase. Romulus did final work after the common wall painters had left, usually letting himself in with a key provided by the decorator. He preferred to work alone, without anyone observing or interrupting him. He didn’t like suggestions, or having to answer stupid questions.

Romulus wasted no time after returning to his condo, which had been refurbished to suit his professional needs. He gathered his materials, then stood at his workbench and began to tint cautiously, adding drops at a time, stopping to clamp the gallon paint can in the electric mixer bolted to the bench. The mixer perfectly imitated the hand motion of an expert bartender shaking a martini, only with much more speed and force, churning the can’s contents thoroughly. He added gold leaf, using thin latex gloves and flaking it gently and expertly with his fingertips so it drifted down like metallic snow. After each test mix he would spread a few strokes of paint on a length of pipe he was sure was the same composition as the steel support pole in the brownstone, then lay the pipe on a wooden block before a small fan that would dry it within minutes.

It took him almost three hours to find the precise formula, but the result was magical.

Romulus would bail out Victory on this job, and Victory would assume the persona that served him so well and strut and brag about the brownstone’s interior to his fellow decorators—among the most sought after and expensive in New York. It would be good for Romulus’ business.

For his art.

His work was done painstakingly, with tools mostly of his own making and with small, fine brushes, and it gave him the kind of visceral elation and soul-deep satisfaction da Vinci himself must have enjoyed.

It was the second highest level of elation Romulus could achieve.

Lars Svenson sat at his table in Munchen’s and studied the brunette at the end of the bar. She was junkie thin and her dark eyes burned in the back-bar mirror whenever they caught him staring at her.

There were several things besides her gauntness and eyes that he liked about the woman. Like the way she sat with her legs wrapped around each other on the high stool, one black pump about to fall off her foot. The way she gazed from time to time with such hopelessness into her drink, knowing he was watching her, had to know. The dark bruises on her bare arms, and on the sides of her neck.

He was especially intrigued by the neck bruises.

When he carried his drink over and sat on the stool next to her, she didn’t seem surprised. And why would she be? This was why she came here. Why every woman in the place came.

Losers’ lounge.

“You a regular customer here?” he asked, giving her his smile at half wattage. Not coming on too strong too fast.

“I don’t know if that’s precisely the word,” she said, not looking over at him.

“I’m Lars.”

“I’m strung out, Lars.”

“Hard night?”

“Not so far. I’m still looking.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“You really think you have what I need?”

He turned her on the stool so she had to look at him, then gave her the whole smile. “I know exactly what you need, and I can supply.” He signaled the bartender for fresh drinks.

Her dark eyes were steady on him now. Pools of need. “We gonna have a few drinks now, get to know each other before we go to my place?”

“We should get to know each other,” Lars said. Terribly sincere, terribly concerned Lars. “You should be careful. You might take somebody home who might really hurt you.”

“I keep trying.”

By midnight Lars had her tied spread-eagle and whipped to a rag. She’d never stopped liking it.

By twelve-thirty he’d found her stash in a hollowed-out romance novel. Crap coke, but it would do.

By three A.M. she’d showed him how she got the bruises on her neck.

By six he’d left her sleeping or unconscious or dead.

He never had learned her name.

At a little after seven A.M. he was sitting on a bench in Washington Square. Around him the city was waking up and stretching and getting into its mood.

He didn’t feel good. The pressure was gone, but he knew it would return. It kept coming back after each time, sooner and sooner. And there was something odd this time. Different, anyway. He found himself wondering how the woman was. Feeling…what…sorry for her?

Not likely!

A guy across the square, big man but old, dressed in a bunch of rags, pushed himself up from where he’d been sitting on the grass and kicked at a pigeon. Good luck with that. He hacked and spat phlegm on the grass, then hitched up his oversize pants and limped away in the direction the pigeon had flapped.

Don’t wanna be like that guy…not ever….

Younger, stronger, employed Lars stood up shakily from the bench. He needed to get home, have some real sleep, then get to New Jersey for an afternoon move. His stomach was knotted and for some reason he felt like sobbing.

Not that he was actually going to sob. He had it under control.

He started walking toward Waverly, deciding it was probably bad drugs making him feel so down.

Where’d she buy the shit?

Maybe he should get rid of the rest of it, that he’d stolen from the woman—doing her a favor—and slipped beneath his shirt before letting himself out of her apartment. Throw it down a fucking sewer someplace and forget it.

Maybe he should think about that.