The Genius

KELLERMAN

Trouble Sunstroke

Beyond Our Control

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Publishers Since 1838 Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia) 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright Š 2008 by Jesse Kellerman

All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kellerman, Jesse.

The genius Jesse Kellerman.p>

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4362-1338-X

1. Art galleries, commercial—Fiction. 2. Drawing—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3561.E38648G46 2008 2008005810

813’.54—dc22

BOOK DESIGN BY MEIGHAN CAVANAUGH

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Gavri

True art is always found where we least expect it, where nobody is thinking about it or saying its name.

Art hates to be recognized and greeted by name.

It flees instantly.

—Jean Dubuffet

… a mirror of smoke, cracked and dim in which to judge himself …

— The Book of Odd Thoughts 13:15

5

n the beginning, I behaved badly. I’m not going to lie to you, so allow me to get that on the table right away: while I would like to believe that I redeemed myself later, there’s no question that—in the beginning at least—I lacked a certain purity of purpose. That’s putting it mildly. If we’re being honest, let’s be honest: I was motivated by greed and, more important, by narcissism: a sense of entitlement that runs deep in my genes and that I can’t seem to shake, no matter how ugly it makes me feel, some of the time. Part of the job description, I suppose, and part of the reason I’ve moved on. Know thyself.p>

Christ. I promised myself that I’d make an effort to avoid sounding like a pretentious prick. I ought to be more hardboiled; I’d like to be. I don’t think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes. (My heroine’s a brunette, and not the especially sultry kind; her hair isn’t jet-black and dripping; it’s medium chestnut and, more often than not, pragmatically tied back, workmanlike ponytails or flyaway buns or stashed behind her ears.) I can’t do it, so why bother trying?

We each get one story to tell, and we have to tell it the way that comes naturally. I don’t carry a gun; I don’t get into car chases or fistfights. All I can do is write down the truth, and truthfully, I might be kind of a pretentious prick. That’s all right. I can live with that.

As Sam is fond of saying It is what it is.

Generally, I don’t agree. A more appropriate rule of thumb—for my life, my line of work, and this story—might be It is what it is, except when it isn’t, which is most of the time. I still don’t know the whole truth, and I doubt I ever will.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

All I mean is that, having lived a long time in a world of illusions, a costume-party world, wink-wink and knowingness and quote marks around everything everybody says, it’s a relief to speak honestly. If my honesty doesn’t sound like Philip Marlowe’s, so be it. It is what it is. This might be a detective novel, but I’m no detective. My name is Ethan Muller. I am thirty-three years old, and I used to be in art.

OF COURSE, I LIVE IN NEW YORK. My gallery was in Chelsea, on Twenty-fifth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, one gallery of many in a building whose identity, like that of the city around it, has been in flux more or less since birth. A row of stables; a garage for hansom cabs; then a corset factory, whose downfall coincided with the rise of the brassiere. The building lived on, though, subdivided, reunited, resubdivided, condemned, uncondemned, and—finally—rezoned as residential lofts for young artists, some of whom had taken to wearing corsets as a protofemi-nist throwback. But before the first struggling MFA filmmaker could sign her lease and get her boxes out of storage, the entire art world decided to drag its sagging ass uptown, creating a neighborhood mini-boom.

This took place in the early 1990s. Keith Haring was dead; the East Village was dead; SoHo was dead; everyone had AIDS or AIDS ribbons. Everyone needed a change. Chelsea fit. The DIA Foundation had been there since the late 80s, and people hoped that the move would redeem art from the rabid commercialization that had metastasized the downtown scene.

The developers, nosing out an ideal opportunity for rabid commercialization, took their newly prime piece of real estate and had it rezoned yet again, and in May of ‘95, 567 West Twenty-fifth reopened for business, accepting into its white-walled bosom a few dozen smallish galleries and several large ones, including the airy, double-high, fourth-floor space that would eventually become mine.

I used to wonder what the corset-maker or the stablehands would make of what transacts on their former plot. Where horseshit used to turn the air sulfurous and rank, millions and millions and millions of dollars now change hands. So goes the Big City.

Because of the number of tenants engaged in the same activity—i.e., the sale of contemporary art—and because of the nature of that activity—i.e., frantic, jealous, shot through with schadenfreude—567 frequently feels like a beehive, but a hip and ironic one. Artists, gallerists, assistants, collectors, consultants, and assorted flunkies buzz up and down its smooth concrete halls, nectar-heavy with gossip. It’s a schmoozer’s paradise. There are openings to attend, a sale to scoff at, a resale that makes the first sale look like a bargain—plus all of New York’s standard social touchstones: adulteries, divorces, and lawsuits. Marilyn refers to the building as the High School, for her a term of endearment. Marilyn was homecoming queen, after all.

There’s no lobby, as such. Three concrete steps lead to a steel gate, opened by a numerical keypad, which has about as much thief-stopping power as a twist tie, or perhaps a banana peel on the floor. Everyone relevant knows the code. On the off chance that you’d recently arrived from Mars or Kansas and, never having seen an art gallery before, that you took the first taxi you could find to 567, you would have little trouble gaining admittance. You could wait for an intern to come toddling in, balancing four cups of coffee, all prepared with extreme precision, one for herself and three for her employer. Or you could wait for an artist to show up lugging a hangover and the new canvases he promised eighteen months ago. Or for a gallerist himself, someone like me, getting out of a cab on a cold and windless January Monday, phone pinned between head and shoulder, negotiating with a private party in London, fingers going numb as I count off the fare, filled with a sourceless and dreadful certainty that today was going to be one hell of a day.

FINISHING THE CALL OUTSIDE, I let myself into the building, hit the button for the freight elevator, and savored my solitude. I tended to show up at about eight thirty, earlier than most of my colleagues and a full hour before my assistants. Once work began, I was never alone. Talking to people is my strong suit, and the reason I’ve been successful. For the same reason, I treasured those few minutes to myself.

The elevator arrived and Vidal pulled open the screeching accordion gate. As we exchanged greetings, my phone went off again. The caller ID read KRISTJANA HALLBJORNSDOTTIR, confirming my hell-of-a-day premonition.

Kristjana is an installation and performance artist, a behemoth of a woman: six feet tall, thick-limbed, with a drill sergeant’s crew cut. She manages to be somehow dainty and enormously heavy-footed, like a bull in china shop, except that the bull is wearing a tutu. Born in Iceland, raised all over the place: that’s her provenance as well as her art’s; and although I admire the work deeply, it’s barely good enough to justify the headache of representing her. When I took her on I knew her reputation. I knew, too, that other people were rolling their eyes at me. It had become a point of pride that I’d kept her in line, putting up her most successful show in years: reviewed well and sold out for well above asking, a feat that left her literally weeping on my shoulder with gratitude. Kristjana is nothing if not demonstrative.

But that was last May, and since then she had gone into hibernation. I’d gone by her apartment, left messages, sent e-mails and texts. If she was angling for attention, she failed, because I stopped trying. Her call that morning was our first contact in months.

Cell phone reception in the elevator is spotty, and I couldn’t make her out until Vidal hauled open the gate and that huge, panicked voice came bursting across the airwaves at full bore, already deep into an explanation of her Idea and the material support she required. I told her to slow down and start again. She drew in a wet, heavy breath, the first sign that she’s about to go haywire. Then, seeming to reconsider, she asked about the summer. I told her I could not show her until August.

“Impossible,” she said. “You are not listening.”

“I am. It can’t be done.”

“Bullshit. You are not listening.”

“I’m looking at the calendar as we speak.” (Not true; I was looking for my keys.) “What are we talking about, anyway? What am I committing myself to, before I say yes?”

“I need the whole space.” “I_”

“It’s not negotiable. I need the full space. I am referring to landscape, Ethan.” She launched into a highly technical and theoretically dense discourse on the disappearing Arctic ice pack. She had to show in June, at the absolute peak of summer, opening on the night of the solstice, and she wanted the air-conditioning off—the heat on—because that underscored the notion of dissolution. Dissolfingshe kept saying. Everything is dissolfing. By the time she got to post-post-post-critical theory, I had ceased listening, absorbed by the problem of my keys, which had migrated to the bottom of my attache. I found them and unlocked the gallery doors as she outlined a plan for destroying my floors.

“You can’t bring a live walrus in here.”

Wet, heavy breathing.

“It’s probably not legal. Is it? Kristjana? Have you even looked into that?”

She told me to go fuck myself sideways and hung up.

Knowing that it was a matter of time before she called back, I left the phone on the front desk and began my morning routine. First voicemail. There were six from Kristjana, all between four and five thirty in the morning; God only knew who she had expected to reach. A few collectors wanted to know when they could expect their art. I was currently running two shows: a series of lovely, shimmery paintings by Egao Oshima, and some of Jocko Steinberger’s papier-mache genitalia. All of the Oshimas had presold, and several of the Steinbergers had gone to the Whitney. A good month.

After phone came e-mail: clients to touch base with, social machinery in need of grease, arrangements for art fairs, arrangements to look at new work. Much of dealing art consists of keeping one’s plates spinning. A friend of mine in the business wrote to ask if I could get ahold of a Dale Schnelle he lusted for. I replied that I might. Marilyn sent me a macabre cartoon one of her artists had drawn of her, depicting her as Saturn eating his children, a la Goya. She found the image delightful.

At nine thirty, Ruby showed up, coffees in hand. I took mine and gave her instructions. At nine thirty-nine Nat arrived and resumed typesetting the catalogue for our upcoming show. At ten twenty-three my cell phone rang again, a blocked number. As you’d imagine, most of the people I liked selling to had blocked numbers.

“Ethan.” A voice like flannel; I recognized it immediately.

I’d known Tony Wexler all my life, and I considered him the closest thing I have to a father that I didn’t despise. That he worked for my father, had worked for him for more than forty years—I’ll leave the psychoanalysis up to you. Suffice it to say that whenever my father wanted something from me, he sent Tony to go fetch.

Which had happened with increasing frequency over the last two years, when my father had a heart attack and I didn’t visit him in the hospital. Since then I’d been getting calls from him, through Tony, every eight or ten weeks. That might not sound like much, but given how little communication we’d had prior to that, I had lately come to feel a tad assaulted. I had no interest in bridge-building. When my father builds a bridge, you can bet there’s going to be a toll on it.

So while I was pleased to hear Tony’s voice, I didn’t especially want to know what he had to say.

“We read about the shows. Your father was very interested.”

By we he meant himself. When I started at the gallery nine years ago, Tony got himself subscribed to several of the trades; and unlike most art-mag subscribers, he reads them. He’s an authentic intellectual in an age when that term has come to mean nothing, and he knows a shocking amount about the market.

He also meant himself when he said your father. Tony tends to pin his own sentiments on his boss, a habit designed, I believe, to conceal the absurd fact that I have a closer relationship with the payroll than with the man who sired me. Nobody’s fooled.

We talked art for a little bit. He asked me how I felt about the Steinbergers in the context of his return to figuration; what else Oshima had planned; how the two shows communicated. I kept waiting for the request, the sentence that began Your father would like.

He said, “Something has come to my attention that I think you should know about. Some new work.”

It’s always open season on art dealers. Quickly one develops strict submission policies. In my case, impenetrable: if you were good, I would find you; otherwise I didn’t want to hear from you. It might sound elitist or draconian but I had no choice. It was either that or face the endless pleading of acquaintances convinced that if you would take the time to come to their sister-in-law’s best friend’s husband’s half-brother’s debut show at the Brooklyn Jewish Community Center you’d be bowled over, converted, dying to showcase their genius on your obviously bare walls. Et tu, Tony?

“Is that a fact,” I said.

“Works on paper,” Tony said. “Ink and felt-tip. You need to see them.”

Warily, I asked who the artist was.

“He’s from the Courts,” Tony said.

The Courts being Muller Courts, the largest housing development in the Great State of New York. Built as a postwar middle-class utopia, drained of its founding intent by white flight, it holds the ignominious title of most crime-ridden area in Queens; a blight on an already blighted borough; a monument to wealth, ego, and slumlordship; two dozen towers, fifty-six acres, and twenty-six thousand people. Bearing my surname.

Knowing that the artist hailed from that hellpit awakened a sense of obligation in me, one that I had no right to feel. I didn’t build the damn thing; my grandfather did. I wasn’t responsible for its poor upkeep; my father and brothers were. Nevertheless I began to rationalize. There wasn’t any harm in having a look at this so-called art by this so-called artist. Provided word didn’t get around that the Muller Gallery had flung open its

doors, all I stood to lose was a few minutes of my time, a sacrifice I would make for Tony. And he had a decent eye. If he said a piece had merit, it probably did.

Not that I intended to represent anyone new. My roster was full. But people like to have their good taste confirmed, and I supposed that even Tony, who I considered the picture of self-composure, was not immune to the need for validation.

“You can give him my e-mail address.”

“Ethan—”

“Or he can come by, if he’d like. Tell him to call first and use your name.”

“Ethan. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know where he is.”

“Who.”

“The artist.”

“You don’t know where the artist is?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. He’s gone.”

“Gone where.”

“Gone gone. Three months he misses rent. Nobody’s seen him. They start thinking he might have died, so the super opens the place up, but instead of finding the tenant, finds the drawings. He had the good sense to call me before tossing them.”

“He called you directly?”

“He called the management company. They called up the tree. Believe me, there’s a reason it got this far. The work is out of this world.”

I was skeptical. “Drawings.”

“Yes. But they’re as good as paintings. Better.”

“What are they like?”

“I can’t describe them.” An unfamiliar note of urgency came into his voice. “You have to see for yourself. The room itself is essential to the experience.”

I told him he sounded like catalogue copy.

“Don’t be snarky.”

“Come on, Tony. Do you really think—” “Trust me. When can you come?”

“Well. It’s a busy couple of weeks. I’m going to Miami—” “N-n-n. Today. When can you come today.” “I can’t. Are you kidding? Today? I’m in the middle of work.” “Take a break.”

“I haven’t even gotten started.”

“Then you’re not interrupting anything.”

“I can come up—next Tuesday. How about then?”

“I’ll send a car for you.”

“Tony,” I said. “It can wait. It’ll have to.”

He said nothing, the most effective rebuke of all. I held the phone aside to ask Ruby for a slot in my schedule, but Tony’s voice came squawking from the receiver.

“Don’t ask her. Don’t ask the girl.”

CCTJ ť

I m—

“Get in a cab. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

As I gathered my coat and bag and walked to the corner to pick up a cab, my cell phone rang again. It was Kristjana. She’d done some thinking. August could work.

4

ll twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab at elegance that misses its mark by some distance. I had the driver circle the block until I spotted Tony waiting for me in front of the Garnet unit, his tan camel-hair coat vivid against the brick, sniffing distance from a heap of trash bags bleeding into the gutter. Above a concrete awning fluttered the three flags of country, state, and city, and a fourth, for the Muller Corporation.

We entered the lobby, overheated and fumy with institutional floor cleaner. Everybody in uniform—the security guard inside his bulletproof kiosk, the handyman prying off baseboards near the management office— seemed to know Tony, acknowledging him out of either cordiality or fear.

A reinforced glass door led into a dark courtyard, hemmed in by Garnet behind us, and on three sides by the Tourmaline, Lapis Lazuli, and Platinum units.

I remember once asking my father how they could have named a building Platinum, which even I, at age seven, knew was not a stone. He didn’t answer me, and so I repeated myself, louder. He kept reading, looking supremely annoyed.

Don’t ask stupid questions.

All I wanted to do from then on was to ask as many stupid questions as possible. My father soon declined to look up at me when I approached, finger crooked, mouth full of imponderables. Who decides what goes in the

dictionary. Why don’t men have breasts. I would have asked my mother but she was already dead by then, which might help explain why my questions so irritated my father. Everything that I did or said served the same purpose: to remind him that I existed, and that she did not.

At some point I figured out why they chose Platinum. They ran out of stones.

Seen from high above, the courtyards from which Muller Courts draws its name look like dumbbells. Each consists of a pair of hexagons, four sides of which are residential towers and two of which taper into a rectangular stretch of community property—the bar of the dumbbell—that features a playground, a small parking lot, and a grassy patch for sitting when weather permits. Between them, the various courtyards also contain six basketball hoops, a volleyball net, an asphalt soccer field, a swimming pool (drained in winter), a handful of unkempt gardens, three small houses of worship (mosque, church, synagogue), a dry cleaner, and two bodegas. If your needs were simple enough, you could get by without ever leaving the complex.

As we crossed the hexagon, its towers seemed to loom inward, weighed down by air conditioners painted in pigeon shit. Balconies served as overflow storage for decrepit furniture, moldy carpet remnants, three-legged walkers, charcoal grills abandoned in mid-assembly. Two kids in oversized NBA jerseys played a rough game of one-on-one, driving toward a basket whose broken rim drooped at a thirty-degree angle.

I pointed this out to Tony.

“I’ll write a memo,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

The so-called artist lived in the Carnelian, on the eleventh floor, and on the way up I asked Tony what efforts he’d made to get in touch with the man.

“He’s gone, I told you.”

I felt uneasy waltzing into a stranger’s apartment, and told Tony as much. He assured me, though, that the tenant had forfeited all rights when he stopped paying his rent. Tony had never misled me in the past, and I didn’t think him capable of doing so. Why would the thought have crossed my mind? I trusted him.

Looking back, I might have been a tad more careful.

Outside the door to C-1156, Tony asked me to wait while he went in and cleared the way. The entry-hall fixture didn’t work, and the rest of the place was very crowded; he didn’t want me to trip. I heard him moving around inside, heard a soft thud and a muttered oath. Then he emerged from the gloom and pinned an arm across the door.

“All right.” He stood back to allow me in. “Go nuts.”

BEGIN WITH THE MUNDANE, the squalid. A narrow entrance opens onto a single room, no more than a hundred and twenty square feet. Floorboards worn down to the bare wood, dried out and shrunken and splitting. The walls waterstained and pricked with thumbtack holes. A dusty lightbulb, burning. A mattress. A makeshift desk: inkstained particleboard balanced on stacks of cinderblock. A low bookcase. In the corner, a white enamel sink, ar-chipelagoed with black chips; underneath, a single-burner electric hotplate. The windowshade permanently down, unable or unwilling to retract. A gray short-sleeved sport shirt on a hanger hooked around the bolt of a heat pipe. A gray sweater draped across a folding chair. A pair of cracked brown leather shoes, soles pulling away from uppers, making duckbills. A doorless bathroom; a toilet; a sloped tile floor with a drain underneath a ceiling-mount showerhead.

All of this I saw later.

At first I saw only boxes.

Motor oil boxes, packing tape boxes, boxes for computers and printers. Fruit crates. Milk crates. 100% REAL ITALIAN TOMATOES. Boxes lining the walls, tightening the entryway by two-thirds. Smothering the bed. Tottering in stacks like elaborately vertical desserts; on the sink; in the shower, crammed in up to the ceiling; boxes, bowing the bookcase and bricking up the windows. The desk, the chair; the shoes crushed flat. Only the crapper remained exposed.

And in the air: paper. That rich smell somewhere between human skin and bark. Paper, decaying and shedding, wood pulp creating a dry haze that eddied around my body, flowed into my lungs, and burned. I began to cough.

“Where’s the art?” I asked.

Tony squeezed in beside me. “Here,” he said, resting his hand on the nearest box. Then he began pointing to all the other boxes. “And there, there, there, and there.”

Incredulous, I opened one of the boxes. Inside was a neat stack of what appeared to be blank paper, sour yellow and crumbling at the corners. For a moment I thought Tony was playing a joke on me. Then I picked up the first page and turned it over and everything else disappeared.

I lack the vocabulary to make you see what I saw. Regardless: a dazzling menagerie of figures and faces; angels, rabbits, chickens, elves, butterflies, amorphous beasts, fantastic ten-headed beings of myth, Rube Goldberg machinery with organic parts, all drawn with an exacting hand, tiny and swarming across the page, afire with movement, dancing, running, soaring, eating, eating one another, exacting horrific and bloody tortures, a carnival of lusts and emotions, all the savagery and beauty that life has to offer—but exaggerated, delirious, dense, juvenile, perverse—and cartoon-ish and buoyant and hysterical—and I felt set upon, mobbed, overcome with the desire to look away as well as the desire to dive into the page.

The real attention to detail, though, was concentrated not in these characters but in the landscape they populated. A living earth, of wobbling dimensions: here flat, there exquisitely deep, inflated geographical features, undulating roads labeled with names twenty letters long. Mountains were buttocks and breasts and chins; rivers became veins spilling purplish liquid nourishing flowers with devil’s heads; trees sprouting from a mulch of words and nonsense words; straightrazor grass. In some places the line was whisper-fine, elsewhere so thick and black that it was a miracle the pen had not torn straight through the page.

The drawing pushed at its edges, leaching into the murky air.

Electrified, unnerved, I stared for six or seven minutes, a long time to look at a sheet of of 81/2-by-11 paper; and before I could censor myself, I decided that whoever had drawn this was sick. Because the composition had a psychotic quality, the fever of action taken to warm oneself from the chill of solitude.

I tried to place what I was seeing in the context of other artists. The best references I could muster at the time were Robert Crumb and Jeff Koons; but the drawing had none of their kitsch, none of their irony; it was raw and honest and naive and violent. For all my efforts to keep the piece orderly—to tame it with rationality, experience, and knowledge—I still felt like it was going to jump out of my hands, to skitter up the walls and spin itself into smoke, ash, oblivion. It lived.

Tony said, “What do you think?”

I set the drawing aside and picked up the next one. It was just as baroque, just as mesmerizing, and I gave it the same amount of attention. Then, realizing that if I did that for every drawing in there, I’d never leave, I picked up a handful of pages and riffled them, causing a sliver near their edges to disintegrate. They were all dazzling, all of them. My chest knotted up. As early as then, I was having trouble coming to grips with the sheer monomania of the project.

I put the stack down and returned to the first two drawings, which I set side-by-side for comparison. My eyes went back and forth between them, like those games you do as a child. There are nine thousand differences, can you find them all? I began to feel light-headed. It might have been the dust.

Tony said, “You see how it works.”

I didn’t, and so he turned one of the pages upside down. The drawings aligned like puzzle pieces: streams flowed on and roads rolled out. Faces half-complete found their counterparts. Then he pointed out that the backs of the drawings were not, in fact, blank. At each edge and in the center, lightly penciled in a tiny, uniform script, were numbers, like so:

2016

4377 4378 4379 6740

The next page was numbered 4379 in the center, and then, clockwise from the top: 2017, 4380, 6741, 4378. The pages connected where the edge of one indicated the center of the other.

“They’re all like this?”

“As far as I can tell.” He looked around. “I haven’t made much of a dent.”

“How many are we talking about?”

“Go on in. See for yourself.”

I squeezed into the room, covering my mouth with my sleeve. I’ve inhaled plenty of unnatural substances in my day, but the sensation of paper in my lungs was entirely new and unpleasant. I had to shove boxes out of the way; dust leopard-printed my slacks. The light from the hallway dwindled, and my own breaths seemed to have no echo. The eight feet between me and the door had effectively erased New York. Living here would be like living ten miles below the earth, like living in a cave. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was supremely disorienting.

From far away, I heard Tony say my name.

I sat on the edge of the bed—six exposed inches of mattress; where did he sleep?—and took in a stomachful of dirty, woody air. How many drawings were there? What did the piece look like when assembled? I envisioned an endless patchwork quilt. Surely they could not all fit together. Surely nobody had that much mental power or patience. IfTony turned out to be correct, I was looking at one of the larger works of art ever created by a single person. Certainly it was the largest drawing in the world.

The throb of genius, the stink of madness; gorgeous and mind-boggling and it took my breath away.

Tony shimmied between two boxes and stood next to me, both of us wheezing.

I said, “How many people know about this?”

“You. Me. The super. Maybe some of the other people at the company, but they were just passing on the message. Only a few people have seen it firsthand.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

He nodded. Then he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What was the question.”

“What do you think?”

3

he artist’s name was Victor Cracke.

ROSARIO QUINTANA, apartment C-1154: “I didn’t see him a lot. He came in and out a couple times a day, but I’m at work, so I didn’t see him unless I was home sick or I had to come back for some reason, to pick up my son when his father drops him off too early. I’m a nurse. Sometimes I passed him in the hall. He left early in the morning. Or, you know what, he might’ve worked at night, because I don’t think I saw him after six o’clock. I think maybe he drove a taxi?”

ROSARIO’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, Kenny: “He was weird-looking.” How so? “His hair.” What color was it? “Black.” [rubs nose] “And white.” Gray?

“Yeah. But not all of it.” Long or short? “… yeah.”

Which one. Long? [nods] Or short? [rubs nose] Both?

[nods, makes gesture indicating spikes in every direction] “Like that, kind of.”

Like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket? [look of confusion]

JASON CHARLES, apartment C-1158: “He talked to himself. I heard him all the time, like a party goin on.” How do you know he was alone?

“I know cause I know. He never talked to nobody else. Unfriendly dude.” So you never really spoke to him.

“Hell naw, man. What we suppose to talk about, the Ns-daq?” What did he say when he talked to himself ? “He had, like. Different voices.” Voices.

“You know, different kinds of voices.” Different accents?

“Like. Like a high one. Yiiii yiii yiii. Then low. Like hrmahrmahrmm. Yiii yiii yiii, hrmmhrmmhrmm …” So you couldn’t understand him. “No. But he sounded mad.” Mad about what?

“All I hear’s him screaming at t’top of his mufuckin lungs. Sounds mad to me.”

He was screaming. “Sometimes, yeah.”

What about a job? Do you know what he did? [laughs]

Why’s that funny?

“Who’s gonna give him a job? I wouldn’t.”

Why not?

“You want some crazy-ass crazy-lookin dude running around your restaurant scaring the fuck out the customers?”

Someone said he was a cabdriver.

“Shit. All I know, I get in a cab and it’s him, I’m gettin out.”

ELIZABETH FORSYTHE, apartment C-1155: “He was lovely, just a lovely, gentle man. Always he said hello to me when I saw him in the hall or the elevator. He used help me carry my groceries. I may be an old woman— don’t shake your head, you don’t think I believe you, now do you? Well aren’t you a flirt… . What was I saying? Oh, yes, well, however old I may be, he was hardly in a position to help me, at his age. He lived in that apartment longer than I can remember. I moved in in 1969, and he was already living here, so that should give you an idea. My husband passed in 84. He wanted to leave because he said the neighborhood wasn’t the same anymore. But I used to teach right around the corner—at the high school? Math. So we stayed put.”

Do you know how old he was?

“My husband? He was—oh, you mean Victor. Well. Around my age.” [sees questioning look] “You’re not supposed to ask a lady that, you should know that.” [smiles] “Now let me see. Well, I remember on V-E Day, going with my sister to meet her boyfriend, who had just come home from the Navy. She left me alone, right there in the middle of the street, so they could go off and neck. Sally was five years older than me, so you can figure it out. But I never knew exactly how old Victor was. He wasn’t too chatty, if you get me. It took a while for him to warm up to us. Years, I imagine it was. But once he became familiar with us, we came to see that he was very gentle, not at all the person that he seemed at first.”

How could you tell?

“Oh, well, you should have seen him. You know things about a person

the first time you look at them. You just look at their hands. Victor had the smallest hands, like a boy’s. He wasn’t much bigger than a boy, only an inch or two taller than I am. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he was very religious, you know.”

Was he?

“Oh yes. He went to church all the time. Three times a day.”

That’s a lot.

“I know. Three times a day, for Mass. Sometimes more! I go to the First African Methodist on Sundays, but before I knew Victor I wasn’t aware you could go that often, that they would keep on admitting you. When you buy a ticket for the movies you can only go to one show, after all. My husband and I used to watch the double features, back when they still had them.” [sighs] “Well. What was I saying?”

About church.

“Yes, church. Victor liked to go to church. That’s where he was headed, darn near every time I saw him. ‘Where are you off to, Victor?’ ‘Church.’ ” [laughs] “Our Lady of Hope, I believe that’s where he went. It’s near here. He had that look that Catholics have, you know the look? Like they’re about to be punished.”

Guilty.

“Yes, guilty, but also resigned. And afraid. Like his own shadow might jump up and bite him. I think the world was a bit much for him.”

Does he have a job?

“Well, I’m sure he must have, but I don’t know what it is. Is he all right? Has something happened to him? From the way you were talking before, I thought he might have passed, but now you’re making it sound as though he’s still around. Is he? I haven’t seen him for months.”

It’s not terribly clear.

“Well, you find something out, you let me know. Cause I liked Victor.”

One more question, if you don’t mind.

“Go right on ahead. You can stay as long as you want. But you have to leave at six, that’s when my girls come over. We play Scrabble.”

Did you ever hear him talking to himself ?

“Victor? Goodness, no. Who told you that?”

Your neighbor across the hall.

[makes face] “He’s one to talk, with the music that he plays. He plays it so loud that I can hear it, and I’m half deaf. It’s true.” [indicates hearing aids] “I complain to the superintendent, but they never show up. You know, my husband was probably right: we probably should have left a long time ago. I keep hoping things might get back to the way they used to be. But. They never do.”

PATRICK SHAUGHNESSY, superintendent: “Quiet. Never complained and I never had a complaint about him. That’s the kind of tenant you like to have, although he was so damn quiet you have to wonder how a person could stand to hold it in for so long. When I saw the state of the place, that’s when I figured it out. I said to myself, ‘Patrick, that’s where all his talk is going.’ Sight to behold, I tell you.” [spreads hands three feet apart] “Incredible.”

Yes.

“I said to myself, ‘Patrick, what you’re looking at is art. You can’t g’wan and throw it out like it’s garbage.’ I know it when I see it, am I right? You’re the art dealer, so you tell me: am I right?”

You’re right.

“Right, then. Hey, now: do you think those paintings are worth anything?”

Do you?

“I would think so. I would think so. But you tell me. You’re the expert.”

It’s impossible to say just yet.

“I sure hope so.”

Do you know where he went?

[shakes head] “The poor fellah might’ve gone off anywhere. He might be dead. What do you think, he’s dead?”

Well—

“How do you know, you’re not the police, right?”

No.

“Okay, then. That’s who you should be talking to, if you want to find him.”

Would the police know?

“They’d know better than I would. That’s their job, isn’t it?”

Well—

“You want to know what I think, I think he decided he didn’t like it here anymore. Can you blame him? Got his money saved up and went to Florida. That’s where I’m going. I’m getting prepared. The nest egg and more coming, I tell you. If that’s what he did, then good for him. More power. I hope he has a good time. He never seemed too happy, I will say that.”

Unhappy in what way. Depressed, or guilty, or—

“Most of the time I remember him looking at the ground. Straight down at the ground, bent-over-like, weight of the world n’so forth. I used to see him and think that he wanted to look up but couldn’t stand what he’d see. Some people might keep quiet but get along fine, cause they don’t have anything to stay. Him, though. He had a lot to say and no way to say it.”

DAVID PHILADELPHIA, upstairs neighbor: “Who?”

MARTIN NAVARRO, Rosario Quintana’s ex-husband, now moved eight flights below: “I can tell you what I remember. Wait a minute, though, you talked to Kenny?”

Kenny?

“My son. You said you talked to him.”

Yes.

“What did he look like?” Like—

“I mean did he look happy. I know what he looks like. He looks like me, you don’t need to tell me that. She keeps saying that he looks like her father but, trust me, she doesn’t know what end it’s coming out of. Not a clue. So whatever she told you about your guy, you can bet it’s wrong. What did she tell you?”

That he was a taxi driver.

“Okay, first of all, first of all, that is wrong. No way that guy could drive. He couldn’t even see. He was always bumping into the walls. That’s what used to drive us crazy, because he was always dropping things and bumping into the walls at two in the morning. You should ask the neighbor downstairs, I’m sure they can tell you about that.” So what was he, then?

“I don’t know, but he wasn’t driving no taxi. What kind of job does somebody like that have? Maybe he was a bus driver.” You said he couldn’t see.

“Have you ever been on a bus in this city? Maybe he was one of those guys that sold the pretzels.” He seems a little old for that.

“Yeah. You’re right. I didn’t think about that. How old was he?” What do you think?

“He was old. How old did Rosario say he was?” She didn’t say.

“Whatever she said, add ten years. Or twenty. Or subtract. Then you’ll have the real answer.”

GENEVIEVE MILES, downstairs neighbor: “It sounded like he was kicking sandbags up there.”

Her husband, Christopher: “Yeah, that’s about right.”

What does that sound like?

“What do you think it sounds like.”

Like—thumping?

“Uh-huh. Like thumping.”

HOW DO YOU DISPLAY TWO ACRES OF ART? That was the question facing me as I began to claw through the Victor Cracke oeuvre. By our estimate, there were around 135,000 drawings, each on the same type of 8^-by-11 paper, low brightness, cheap and readily found—enough paper

to cover 87,688 square feet. We couldn’t very well hang the entire piece, unless the government of China decided to lease us the Great Wall.

I advanced a year’s rent on Victor’s apartment and brought in a photographer to document the placement of every item inside. I hired two temps, whose sole mission was to number the boxes, record their general contents, and haul them down to a truck. After the apartment was empty, I had it scrubbed and vacuumed to clear out the rest of that choking dust. Then the operation moved from Queens to Manhattan, where I set up a makeshift laboratory in a storage facility three blocks from my gallery. With the boxes piled high in one locker, I outfitted the adjacent locker with a desk, chairs, a high-powered surgical light, a plastic tarp that I spread on the floor, cotton gloves, a magnifying glass, a space heater, floodlamps, and a computer. Nightly, through the end of winter and all of spring, Ruby and I sat with two or three boxes, sorting their contents as rapidly as possible while still noting pieces of exceptional quality, racking our brains to figure out how in the world to put up a show.

In theory we could have—I don’t know—laminated them all. I suppose we could have done that. We could, I suppose, have laid them all out in a field in western Pennsylvania or the Hudson River Valley and affixed them to the ground, invited people to walk around the perimeter, like some big conceptual piece by Smithson. That would have been one option.

But the logistics upset my stomach. Once sheathed in plastic, how well would the drawings align? Standing at the edge of the piece, would you be able to tell anything about its center, a hundred feet away? Was there even a center? What about glare, or wind, or warping? How could I possibly get people to make the drive?

At the same time, I had to acknowledge that shown individually, the drawings lost much of their power. Which is not to say that they weren’t still arresting—they were. But splitting them up undermined what I believed to be one of the piece’s essential themes: connectedness, the unity of everything.

I drew this conclusion soon after bringing the first box out of storage and laying out fifty or sixty of the drawings. When had I pieced them together, I saw immediately the true nature of Victor Cracke’s monumental work: it was a map.

A map of reality as he perceived it. There were continents and boundary lines, nations and oceans and mountain ranges, all labeled in his meticulous handwriting. Phlenbendenum. Freddickville. Zythyrambiana, E. and W. The Green Qoptuag Forest, sending its fingers down into the Valley of Worthe, in which gleamed the golden cupola of the Cathedral Saint Gudrais and its Chamber of the Secret Sacred Heart—KEEP OUT!, he warned. Names ripped from Tolkien, or Aldous Huxley. Adding more panels, zooming out, you encountered other planets, other suns and galaxies. Wormholes led to distant parts of the map, alluded to by their numbers. Like the universe itself, the edges of the piece seemed to be speeding away from its unfathomable center.

It was not just a map of space; it was a map of time as well. Places, figures, and scenes recurred in adjacent panels, moving in slow motion, like a comic book photocopied a thousand times, torn up, thrown into the air. Walking alongside the piece, reading its repetitions, one sensed the frustration at being unable to record everything, seen and imagined, in real time—the lines on the page always a few seconds out of date, and Victor sprinting to keep up.

DOES ANY OF THAT MAKE SENSE? I’m not sure that it does. Great art does that: it cuts out your tongue. And Victor’s art is especially hard to describe, not just because of its size and complexity but because it was so damned weird. Everything was out of whack; everything repeated ad nauseam, giving rise to two unsettling sensations. On the one hand, once you got used to his visual vocabulary—the creatures, the wild proportions—you began to feel a profound sense of deja vu, the strange becoming familiar, the way jargon starts to sound normal when everyone around you speaks it. On the other hand, the moment you stopped looking at the drawings, you were besieged by jamais vu, the familiar becoming strange, the way a regular word starts to sound wrong if you repeat it enough. I would look up from the drawing and notice Ruby playing with her tongue stud and the sound of it, the glint of it—her whole face—her knees tucked under her—her stark shadowed shape on the locker wall—all of it would somehow seem wrong. That is to say: the drawing was so massive and encompassing and hypnotic that it had a hallucinogenic effect, distorting our perception of the real world to the extent that I sometimes felt like Ruby and I were figments of Victor’s imagination—that the drawing was reality and we were characters inside it.

I fear that I’m not making sense again. Let me put it this way: we had to take a lot of breaks for fresh air.

SO THAT WAS THE PARADOX I FACED: how to exhibit an artistic Theory of Everything in fragments.

After a lot of thought and struggle, I settled on showing ten-by-ten segments, a decision that yielded “canvases” approximately seven feet by nine. The gallery could not accommodate more than fifteen or so—or about one percent of the total work. I would suspend the canvases away from the wall, allowing viewers to walk all around them, to see the drawings’ luminous fronts as well as their systematic backs, which I came to interpret as a war between Victor’s right and left brain.

He had done his best to create a work of art that thwarted the notion of public exhibition; however, I am not easily put off, and I hate to fail once I’ve begun. In short, I didn’t give a damn about the creator’s intent.

I told you I behaved badly, didn’t I? I did. You were warned.

HE DID MORE THAN DRAW. He wrote as well. A few of the boxes contained thick, faux-leather-bound journals dating back to 1963. In them he had recorded the weather, his daily intake of food, and his church attendance, each category filling several volumes: thousands of entries, many of them identical. The food journal, in particular, was mind-numbing.

TUESDAY MAY 1 1973 breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

WEDNESDAY MAY 2 1973 breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

His meals never varied, with the exception of Christmas, when he ate roast beef, and one week in January 1967, when he ate oatmeal for breakfast—an experiment that must have failed, because by the following week he was back to scrambled eggs, a habit dutifully recorded for the next thirty-six years.

The weather journal, while it varied every day (containing information on temperature, humidity, and general conditions), conveyed much the same effect.

They made for dreadful bathroom reading. But I saw a kinship between the journals and the drawings, the same obsessiveness and strict adherence to routine. You could even call it love; for what is love, if not the willingness to repeat oneself ?

Whereas the church journal made the idea of a benevolent, present God seem absurd. If you prayed every day, three times a day or sometimes more, wrote down all your rosaries and Hail Marys and trips to the confessional, and yet nothing changed—your meals remained the same, the weather kept on being gray or slushy or muggy, just like it always had been—how could you continue to believe? “Mass” began to sound like just that and no more: a bulk of useless activity that added up to nothing.

Lest you think I was reading too much into the work, let me tell you that I was not alone in finding something awe-inspiring about the journals. They were Ruby’s favorite part of the installation, much preferred to the drawings, which she found somewhat overbearing. At her behest I decided to display the journals in their own corner, without explanatory text. We would let people decide for themselves.

We put the opening on the books for July 29. Usually I run shows for four to six weeks. I slotted Victor Cracke in for eight, with a mind to let him run longer if I so chose. We hadn’t even touched the bulk of the work, but I simply could not wait to get the pieces up. I called Kristjana and told her that her Arctic ice pack installation would have to wait. She swore at me, threatened me, told me I’d hear from her lawyer.

I didn’t care. I was lovesick.

For those six months I barely went out. Marilyn would come by the storage locker after work, bring me a panino and a bottle of water. She’d tell me I looked like a homeless person. I’d ignore her and eventually she’d shrug and leave.

While Ruby and I labored to compile the catalogue raisonne, Nat handled the front end of the gallery. He consulted me on important decisions, but otherwise he had total control. He could have stolen anything he wanted, sold pieces for half off, and I would not have noticed. The lone apostle has a full-time job.

AND THE PROPHET HIMSELF?

To tell you the truth—and here begins my confession—I stopped looking for him. Before very long I thought that I might be better off never meeting the man.

I conducted the interviews excerpted at the beginning of this chapter, as well as a handful of others with people who claimed to have noticed Victor roaming the halls of Muller Courts. All their stories turned out to be fragmentary, anecdotal, and self-contradictory. One of the security guards told me that Victor had been a drug dealer. Others suggested janitor, cook, writer, and bodyguard.

A physical description proved slippery as well. He was tall; he was short; he was average. He was gaunt; he had a big belly; a scar on his face, a scar on his neck, no scars at all. A moustache. A beard. A moustache and a beard.

That everyone remembered him differently made sense; he had never been in one person’s presence long enough to leave a distinct impression.

He tended to stare at the ground rather than look you in the eye. On that people agreed.

With Tony’s help I learned that Cracke had been a tenant since 1966, and that his apartment was heavily rent-controlled, the monthlies low even for the slummiest part of Queens. Until the time of his disappearance, in September 2003, he had never missed a payment.

There were no other Crackes in the phone book.

Father Lucian Buccarelli, of Our Lady of Hope, had never heard of Victor. He recommended that I talk to his colleague, Father Simcock, who had been around the parish a lot longer.

Father Allan Simcock didn’t know any Victor Cracke. He wondered if I had the right church. I told him I could be wrong. He made a list of all the neighborhood churches—a list far longer than I expected—and, wherever possible, gave me the names of people to talk to.

I did not follow up on them.

I am not a detective. And I owed Victor nothing. He could have been dead; he could have been alive. It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was his art, and that I had, in spades.

PEOPLE DON’T APPRECIATE the creativity of dealing art. In the contemporary market, it is the dealer—not the artist—who does most of the work. Without us there would be no Modernism, no Minimalism, no movements at all. All the contemporary legends would be painting houses or teaching adult education classes. Museum collections would grind to a halt after the Renaissance; sculptors would still be carving pagan gods; video would be the province of pornography; graffiti a petty crime rather than the premise behind a multimillion-dollar industry. Art, in short, would cease to thrive. And this is because—in a post-Church, post-patronage era—dealers refine and pipeline the fuel that drives art’s engine, that has always driven it and always will: money.

These days especially, there is simply too much material out there for any normal person to be able to distinguish between good and bad. That’s the dealer’s job. We are creators, too—only we create markets, and our medium is the artists themselves. Markets, in turn, create movements, and movements create tastes, culture, the canon of acceptability—in short, what we think of as Art itself. A piece of art becomes a piece of art—and an artist becomes an artist—when I make you take out your checkbook.

Victor Cracke, then, was my definition of a perfect artist: he created and then he disappeared. I couldn’t have imagined a greater gift. My very own tabula rasa.

SOME OF YOU MIGHT DEEM my actions ethically squishy. Before you judge me, consider this: plenty of times art has been dragged into public without its creator’s knowledge—even against his will. Great art demands an audience, and to deny that is itself unethical. If you’ve ever read a poem by Emily Dickinson, you will agree.

Moreover, it’s not as though I lacked precedent. Consider, for example, the case of the so-called Wireman, the name given to the creator of a series of sculptures discovered in a Philadelphia alley on a trash night in 1982. I’ve seen them; they’re eerie: thousands of found objects—clock faces, dolls, food containers—cocooned in loops of heavy-gauge wire. Nobody knows who the artist was; nobody knows what motivated him to produce. We don’t know for certain that he was, in fact, a he. And while the question of whether the pieces were intended as art is open to debate, that they were pulled out of the garbage would seem to indicate quite clearly that they weren’t intended for public consumption. This misgiving, however, has not stopped galleries from selling the pieces at commanding prices; it has not stopped museums across the United States and Europe from mounting exhibitions or critics from commenting on the work’s “shamanistic” or “totemic” properties, speculating about its similarities to African “medicine bundles.” That’s a lot of talk and cash and activity generated by what might have ended up as landfill, were it not for a sharp-eyed passerby.

The point is that in creating his objects, the Philadelphia Wireman did only some of the work, and I would argue not the majority of it. He made things. It took dealers to make those things into art. Once anointed as such, there’s no going back. You can destroy, but you can’t uncreate. If the Wireman showed up tomorrow and began shrieking about his rights, I doubt anyone would listen to him.

And so I regarded as more than fair my vow that were Victor ever to turn up at my door, I would pay him according to the traditional artist-dealer split: fifty-fifty. In fact, I congratulated myself on my generosity, knowing that few of my colleagues would have made such an outlandish and indulgent promise.

I’LL SPARE YOU THE GORY DETAILS of prepping the show. You don’t need to hear about rail mounts and track lighting and the procurement of mediocre pinot. But there is something I don’t want to leave out, and that’s the strange discovery Ruby and I made late one night at the storage locker.

We had been working for four months. The space heaters were gone, replaced by a series of fans strategically placed so as not to send piles of paper flying. For weeks we had been searching of panel number one, the point of origin. The boxes had gotten mixed up in transit, and we’d start on one that seemed promising—whose top sheet numbered, say, in the low hundreds—only to find that the page numbers went up, not down.

We did eventually find it—more on that later—but on that night it was a different page, from the 1,100s, that caught Ruby’s eye.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re in here.”

I stopped working and came over to have a look.

Near the top of the page, in slashing letters three inches high:

MULLER

All the warmth went out of the room. I can’t say why the sight of my own name terrified me the way it did. For a moment I heard Victor’s voice shouting at me over the whirr of the fans, shouting at me through his art, clapping his hands in my face. He did not sound pleased.

Somewhere, a door slammed. We both jumped, I against the desk and Ruby in her chair. Then silence, both of us embarrassed by our own skittishness.

“Odd,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And creepy. “

“Very.”

We looked at my name. It seemed vaguely obscene.

“I guess it’s reasonable,” she said.

I looked at her.

“He did live in Muller Courts.”

I nodded.

She said, “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not in there more often.”

I tried to resume work, but I couldn’t concentrate, not with Ruby clicking her stud against her teeth and that drawing radiating ill feelings. I announced that I was heading out. I must have sounded paranoid—I certainly felt paranoid—because she snickered and told me to watch my back.

Normally, I take a cab straight home, but that night I ducked into a bar and ordered a soda water. As I sat there watching people trickle in, gasping and cursing the sultry night, my uneasiness began to change shape, to soften and turn to encouragement.

Ruby was right. Victor Cracke had been drawing the universe as he knew it. Naturally, the Muller name would loom large.

The bar had a jukebox. Somebody put on Bon Jovi, and the place filled with off-key singing. I got up to leave.

I gave the cabbie directions and sank back into the sticky vinyl. If anything, I reflected, my name in Victor’s art could be interpreted generously. I was no intruder. Quite the contrary. I had every right to be there. I was there all along.

Solomon’s cart has many miles on it, and holds the entire world. Cloth, buttons, tinware. Tonics and patent medicines. Nails and glue, writing paper and appleseeds. So many different kinds of items, unclassifiable except perhaps as What People Need. He works a kind of magic, showing up unexpected in some dreary Pennsylvania town, drawing a crowd with shouts and theatrics, laying out his wares, defying the townsfolk’s attempts to stump him. I need a hammer. Yes, sir. Glass bottles, about so big? Yes, ma’am. People joke that the cart is bottomless.

He understands much more English than he speaks, and when forced into a particularly heated negotiation he will resort to the use of his fingers. Seven cents? No, ten. I’ll give you nine. Okay? Okay.

Everybody speaks bargain.

The same rigamarole applies when he needs to pay for a room, although he avoids that if he can, preferring to sleep outside, in a field or an open barn. Every penny he saves will bring his brothers over that much sooner. When Adolph comes they will be able to earn twice as much money, and when Simon comes, three times. He plans to bring them over in that order: first Adolph, then Simon, and last, Bernard. Bernard is the second oldest; but he is also the laziest, and Solomon knows that they will achieve much more, much more quickly, if they leave him behind for now.

But sometimes … when it is so cold outside … when he craves the dignity of a roof … when he cannot face another night on the dirt, in a pile of hay, bugs crawling all over him like an animal … Too much! He caves in, wasting an entire day’s earnings on a featherbed—only to spend the rest of the week chastising himself. He is not Bernard! He is the eldest; he should know better. Their father sent him first for a reason.

The crossing nearly killed him. Never had he been so sick, nor had he ever seen so much sickness around him. The fever that took his mother could not be compared to the horrors he witnessed on that boat, people dissolving in piles of their own waste, wracked and groaning bodies, the wet stench of physical and moral failure. Solomon took care to eat alone; against his nature, he did not socialize with his fellow passengers. His father had commanded him to keep to himself, and he obeyed.

Once he saw a woman go mad. Solomon, alone on deck, up from the hold for fresh air, joyous to feel the light rain, saw her come up the stairs, shaky, green, bloodball eyes. He recognized her. The day before she had lost her son. When they pried the body from her arms she had let out a noise that stood Solomon’s hair on end. Now he watched her stumble to the bow where she did not hesitate but leaned over the railing and dropped into the churning sea. Solomon ran to where she had existed a moment ago. He looked down and saw nothing but whitewater.

The shiphands came running. She fell! Solomon said, or tried to say. What he said was Sie fiel! But the crew came from England. They did not understand him, and with his babbling he was getting in the way. They ordered him belowdecks, and when he protested, four of them picked him up and carried him away.

By the time the Shining Harry dumped its human cargo at Boston Harbor, Solomon had been at sea for forty-four days. He had lost twenty percent of his body weight and had developed a painful rash on his back that would persist for months, making his nights spent on the ground all the more miserable.

At first he lived with a cousin, a cobbler, their relation so distant that neither of them could quite pinpoint where their blood mingled. Right away Solomon could tell that the arrangement would not last. The cousin’s wife hated him and wanted him out of the house. While he tossed and turned on the workbench that served as his bed, she would tramp around upstairs in wooden shoes. She fed him rotten fruit and made his tea with muddy water and let bread stale before cutting him a slice. He planned to leave as soon as he had enough money and English, but before he managed to get there she came downstairs one night and bared her breasts to him. Early the next morning he loaded what little he had in a burlap pack and set out walking.

He walked to Buffalo, arriving in time for an awful winter. Nobody bought his odds and ends. Chastened, he hurried south, first to New Jersey, then into the heart of Pennsylvania, where he met others who spoke his language. They became his first regular customers: farmers who came to depend on him for specialty items that did not justify a long trip into town, indulgences such as a new razor strop or a box of pencils. He filled his burlap sack to bursting, but soon it could not hold enough to meet his clients’ demands, and he got another, one as tall as he was. As his inventory grew, so did his route and his clientele; and despite his limited vocabulary, he revealed himself as an able salesman: quick to laugh, firm but fair, and always aware of the latest trends. The second sack did not last long. He bought himself a cart.

On its side he painted

SOLOMON MUELLER DRY GOODS

“Dry goods” has always sounded wrong, as some of the items he sells are not, in fact, dry. He merely copied what he saw on the sides of other carts, belonging to other men—the competition. He is not the only Jew walking these back roads.

He knows that he has plenty to be thankful for, having exceeded his own expectations. When he dons his tefillin, he praises God for sustaining him through these dark days and begs for yet more assistance. So much remains to be done. In April he turns eighteen.

WITH ADOLPH’S BIRTHDAY COMING UP, as well, Solomon has decided that the time has come to send for him. In Punxsutawney he starts a letter, in Altoona he mails it. The thought of having his brother with him brings a lightness to his step that carries him humming over the Appalachians, though his cart and back creak with fatigue.

York, Pennsylvania, sounds like the place to treat himself to a night indoors. Though he knows that he really should wait until he needs a bed, wait for a night of blistering cold or pounding rain, rather a balmy evening that predicts spring. But what good is life if you cannot enjoy it? He has been prudent, perhaps too much so. Luxury reminds us of the purpose of toil. With his remaining money he will allow himself a taste.

Taverns glow along the main thoroughfare, which is rutted and damp with urine. He pushes his cart and thinks about beer. His mouth waters with the remembered taste of yeast. He misses his home. He misses his sister, who makes the most delicious cakes, tender and light, recipes their mother passed along before she died. The coarse bread and beans on which he currently subsists make him want to weep. He has not eaten meat in four months. The most available—not to say affordable—is pork. That he refuses to touch. He has his limits.

Some of the taverns offer rooms, and when he steps inside one to inquire about vacancies, a wave of hot air and body odor breaks over him. In one corner a piano roars. Every table is full. He shouts his request at the bartender, who misunderstands and brings him a glass of beer. Solomon considers giving it back, but his thirst gets the better of him. The bartender comes back to collect the glass and offer another, but Solomon shakes his head and points to the ceiling. Upstairs?

The man shakes his head. “Silver Spoon,” he shouts.

Solomon waves his hands around, indicating I’m lost. The bartender walks him to the door and points down an alleyway. Solomon thanks him, unties his cart, and heads for the Silver Spoon.

The alley is dark, spilling onto another wide road. Cicadas fiddle. His limbs feel half connected to his trunk. Perhaps he should stop right here, go to sleep … It is tempting. How bad could it be? Then he steps in a pile of dung and, having regained his purpose, goes up the street one way, back down it along the other side. The wheels on his cart have begun to squeak; he should oil them. He finds nothing. Sighing, he heads back toward the alley. Three men approach, singing, their arms linked.

Solomon raises a hand. “Hello, friends.”

Like one body they veer toward him. They smell like a belch.

“Hello, friends,” says one of the men, and the other two begin to laugh.

Solomon doesn’t get the joke, but it would be impolite not to participate. He laughs. Then he asks about the Silver Spoon. The men start laughing again. One asks where Solomon is from.

“Here.”

“Heeeee-ah, huh?” says the same man. His imitation of Solomon’s accent is absurd but it strikes everyone as extremely funny. More laughter ensues.

Once they’ve finished, Solomon tries to repeat his question. But the man—the talking man, the man with the felt hat and the cheeks stubbled black, the one a great deal larger than the other two—interrupts again, asking more questions. While Solomon does his best to answer, he gets tangled up in the net of words, tripping and stuttering, eliciting hoots and howls and backslapping and bringing a purposeful smirk to the man’s face.

What happens next is unclear. It begins with a shove; it then becomes a wrestling match, no blows falling but a grunting stalemate, Solomon pinned against the cart, which rocks as the man holds his arms and presses against him, his embrace warm and boozy and almost intimate as he fills Solomon’s ears with incomprehensible threats.

Then Solomon dares to resist, and all three of them—like ten men, so many fists and feet they have—converge, stomping. They are too drunk to be methodical, and that is why he lives.

WHEN HE CAN WALK AGAIN, it is with a limp. He considers abandoning the cart and starting over, with a shop, one he doesn’t have to carry on his back. He could go back to Boston, back to Buffalo. Nobody bought, but at least they didn’t try to kill him.

But no. To begin with, they robbed him blind; how could he open a shop? If he’s very lucky, his suppliers will extend him credit; only a fool would loan money to a crippled immigrant with no tangible assets.

There is another reason not to quit: in less than a year, Adolph arrives. The physical damage—the limp, the divots on his face—that cannot be hidden. Spiritually, though, Solomon cannot show himself a broken man. Adolph will drop dead of fright, or else he will flee back to Germany on the first boat. That mustn’t happen. For his family’s sake, Solomon must show that America still has much to offer—a belief that he himself wants so badly to retain, one he longs for even as it oozes out of him.

He looks on the bright side. Three men beat him; but one man has taken him in, fed him, and healed him. That man reads to him from a Bible and, upon discovering that his patient is not a Christian, has spent hours sharing the wisdom of the Lord Savior. Solomon, understanding that this is the price of his recovery, listens politely, noting with interest that the Lord Savior indeed went through a fair amount of hardship. That doesn’t make him God, but it does make him a sympathetic character.

One idea that comes to Solomon while he lies in the bed—a real bed! Strange, how agony begets pleasure—listening to tales of the Lord Savior is that he needs to improve his English. Silver Spoon he had asked for, except that his Silver came out as silber and the Spoon as shpoon, clanging shibboleths. If he had been able to speak he could have talked his way to safety. And how much more business would he bring in if he sounded like an American?

As the healer speaks of the salt of the earth, Solomon devises a plan for self-improvement.

Four and a half weeks later he rises up from his bed and limps to the most American place he knows: smoky, impatient Pittsburgh, a town for the up-and-coming, the meshed cogs of industry. Smiling through pain, he peddles his wares to women doing the washing in their front yards. He peddles outside factories and saloons. He forces himself to talk, counting every complete conversation a victory, even if he sells nothing. He asks for help with his pronunciation; sometimes, he gets it. At the end of the day he walks along the riverbanks, reciting whatever new words he has learned that day, going until he feels too tired to continue, at which point he sits down and makes camp. Twice he flees to avoid arrest for trespassing. Though he has stopped putting on his tefillin, he takes a moment to thank God when he reaches safety.

As summer comes to a boil, he improves. With enough effort he will soon sound no different from the men who attacked him. By the time Adolph arrives, they will be unable to communicate! The idea makes Solomon laugh.

One morning he spots a poster announcing the arrival of a new theatrical enterprise specializing in the most dramatic and comedic and thrilling, etc., etc. Normally, he would never waste money on such stuff, but then he considers the educational benefit: in the theater, people do nothing but talk. He can sit and take in the words. He copies down the information on the poster. The Merritt Players open that evening, at seven o’clock, at the Water Street Theater.

THE MERRITT PLAYERS turn out to consist of a single massive fellow draped in a velveteen cape. His beard looks like a horde of skunks has burrowed halfway into his chin, tails wagging as he bellows his lines and wiggles his sausage fingers, sweeping and stabbing for emphasis. His trousers could hold two Solomons, one in each leg.

He performs selections from Shakespeare at a rapid clip, pausing now and then to savor a particular phrase. Try as he might, Solomon cannot keep up. Moreover, he senses that this fellow’s diction does not match what one hears on the street. In other words, the show completely fails as a learning tool.

Nevertheless Solomon remains in his seat. He’s paid for his ticket, and he intends to get his money’s worth.

Over the next hour, against his will, an unexpected thing happens: he falls under the actor’s spell. The man has a voice that could stop a train, yes, but he can also sound beguiling and innocent. Though Solomon cannot understand all the words, he hears perfectly the emotions behind them. The man’s pain evokes Solomon’s own pain; their longings and joys and fears merge, making him feel, momentarily, that he has a friend.

The show finishes and the scant audience gets up to leave, but Solomon remains, unwilling to move for fear of shattering the magical sense of peace and belonging and companionship that he has been so long without—the humanity missing in his lonely, lonely life—remains sunk down in his chair so that the top of his head is invisible to the manager, who closes up without further ado, locking him inside.

When the lights go off and he discovers his predicament, he does not panic. At worst he’ll spend the night indoors. Then he remembers his cart tied up outside, and he sets about looking for a way out, groping around in the near dark. All the exits are bolted shut, as is the stairwell to the second floor. Nonplussed, he climbs onto the stage, wanders into the wings. A single shaft of moonlight aids his search, not enough to prevent him from tripping over a pile of sandbags and banging his head against a chunk of scenery, causing it to tip over and nearly crush him. In leaping to safety he accidentally pushes open an unseen door, revealing a stairwell that descends to a dim corridor. There are many doors, all of them locked except the last. Relieved, he opens it and steps facefirst into the actor himself: naked to the waist, pouring sweat, beard unkempt, filthy, a ham hock in long johns.

“By God!” he shouts. “Who’s this!” He lifts Solomon by the lapels. “Eh? You? You! By God, man, you’d better say something or I’ll snap you like a twig! What! What’s that! Eh? Man! Speak up! Cat got your tongue?” The man drags him, not unkindly, to a chair, and seats him with two firm hands on Solomon’s shoulders. “Now, what. What, man, what! What’s your name!”

“Solomon Mueller.”

“Did you say Solomon Mueller?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well. Well, good, Solomon Mueller! Tell me something, Solomon Mueller: do we know each other?”

Solomon shakes his head.

“Then how is it you’re in my dressing room! Mary Ann!”

A fleshy woman in a gingham dress pokes her head through a rack of costumes. “Who’s that?”

“Solomon Mueller!” says the actor.

“Who’s Solomon Mueller?”

“Please—” says Solomon.

“Who are you?” asks Mary Ann.

Helplessly, Solomon indicates the stage above them.

“You were here for the show? Yes? Yes? I see! And? Yes? Did you enjoy the show?” He takes Solomon by the shoulders, gives him a friendly shake. “Yes? Yes?”

Solomon smiles as best he can.

“You did!” cries the actor. “Good boy! Did you hear that, Mary Ann? He enjoyed the show!” He begins to shake with laughter, his stomach bouncing and his breasts jiggling.

“Isaac, it’s time to get dressed.”

Ignoring her, the actor kneels down and takes Solomon’s scuffed, sinewy hands in his own moist ones and says, “Tell me something, Solomon Mueller: you truly enjoyed the show, yes? Yes? Then let me ask you this: would you like to buy me dinner.”

THE ACTOR’S FULL NAME is Isaac Merritt Singer. As he explains over a meal of potatoes and sausage—which he consumes unaided—Mary Ann is his second wife. He had a first wife, but the show must go on. “Isn’t that so, Solomon!”

“Yes,” says Solomon, happy to agree with anything this strange man says.

Isaac talks about Shakespeare, for whom he does not have enough superlatives.

“The Bard of Avon! The Pearl of Stratford! The Pride of England!”

Every so often Solomon makes an effort to insert a comment, but Isaac’s monologue ceases only when he pauses to swallow a length of sausage or to lift his mug. He seems thrilled to have a dining companion, especially when Solomon buys him a second plate of food and a third beer.

“Now,” says Isaac, wiping his moustache of sauce and crushing his hands together, “tell me something, Solomon Mueller: you’re not from around here, are you?”

Solomon shakes his head. Then he sees that Isaac is waiting; his chance to speak has arrived.

Briefly, he recounts his youth in Germany, the boat to America, the success of his business and tragedy of his assault. As he talks, Isaac knits his brows, scoffs, scowls, laughs. Even as a listener he never ceases performing, so that by the time Solomon concludes his tale, he feels as though he has composed a masterwork, akin to Homer.

And, as far as he can tell, he has done it accent-free.

“By God,” says Isaac Merritt Singer. “That is a fine story.”

Solomon smiles.

“I wouldn’t mind listening to a story like that again. I wouldn’t mind putting such a story up on the stage. I like a man who can tell a story. A man who has a story to tell is a man who’s a friend of mine. Eh? Ah! Well”— taking a huge draught of beer—”I’m glad we’ve met, Solomon. I think we might become dear friends. What do you say?”

THEY BECOME DEAR FRIENDS.

A friendship driven on the one side by Solomon’s loneliness, his desire for talk, and on the other side by Isaac Singer’s desire not to pay for dinner. Later, Solomon would estimate that during that summer he spent twenty-five to thirty percent of his income—money he could not afford to spend! Profligate!—on meals with Singer. Or loaning Singer money to patch his trousers, or for a new gewgaw for one of Singer’s many children, or for flowers for Mary Ann, or for no reason at all, simply giving Singer money, giving it away, because his friend asked.

Not with a mind toward getting rich does he do these favors. He does them because he needs to give something to someone, and Singer makes him feel unalone.

Nevertheless his generosity comes back to him a millionfold. In 1851, Singer moves to New York, taking with him his family and his wagon and some of the money that he has borrowed from Mueller. There he founds a company called the “Jenny Lind Sewing Machine Company,” a multilay-ered name. Lind is Singer’s favorite singer; naming his company for a singer puts a pun on his last name, hinting as well at his affection for Life in the Theater.

However meaningful, though, the name proves a touch unwieldy, and soon enough people have begun to refer to his machines simply as “Singers.”

Plenty of people in the United States make sewing machines; by the time Singer’s hit the stores, there are four other competing designs. But his is the best, and in a very short period of time, he becomes one of the wealthiest men in the United States—taking along with him Solomon Mueller.

Still, we may wonder what if. What if Solomon had never been beaten within an inch of his life; if he had gone back to Germany; if he had not enjoyed the show; if he had declined to pay for dinner. If he knew then—as he found out later—that Mary Ann Singer was not, in fact, Isaac Merritt Singer’s second wife, but his mistress; and that she would be the first of many, and that Singer’s philandering would eventually force him to leave the country. As a young man, Solomon Mueller had a priggish streak; perhaps he would have disassociated himself from Singer if he had known the truth. Many alternative realities stood between Solomon and the great fortune that became his. Might he have succeeded on his own?

He might have. He worked hard, and he had brains. What else do you need?

ONE OF THE LAST THINGS Isaac Merritt Singer said before he departed for Europe in shame was, “You remind me of my father.”

This conversation took place many years later, in a drawing room richly furnished, in a home a hundred feet high. By then, Solomon Mueller was Solomon Muller, and Mueller Dry Goods had grown into Muller Bros. Manufacturing, Maker of Finest Machine Parts; Muller Bros., Importers of Exotic Wares; Muller Bros. Railroad and Mining; Muller Bros. Textiles; Ada Muller Bakeries; Muller Bros. Land Development Corporation; and Muller Bros. Savings and Loan.

“How so?” Solomon asked.

“You always sounded like him,” said Isaac Singer. “His name was Reis-inger, you know. Did you know that?”

Solomon shook his head.

“Saxony! He spoke German to me until I was five. By God! Uncanny, I tell you, man.” Singer smiled. “The first time I heard you I said to myself, ‘Well, now, Singer, that fellow is the very ghost of your father!’ Ha! Like Hamlet’s father, yes? Yes. Well what’s the matter, Muller, you look like I shot and ate your dog.”

Solomon explained that he had thought his accent gone by the time they met.

“My friend, you still sound like my father.”

Solomon, chagrined, said, “I do?”

“Of course you do, man. Every time we speak I yearn to see the old bastard again … Ha! Well, now. Don’t look so sad, Muller, that voice of yours contributes a large part of your charm.”

Solomon Muller ne Mueller said, “I would prefer to sound like the American that I am.”

Isaac Merritt Singer, he of the libido and the fortune and the belly and the laugh, that laugh like a bellowing shiphorn, the siren song of America—he laughed and hammered his friend on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry, old man. Round here, you are what you say you are.”

4

f hese days, the idea of an “opening” has become something of a farce;

usually all the work on display has been presold. I decided to buck the trend by refusing to allow any previews or advance sales, and by midsummer I had begun receiving anxious phone calls from collectors and consultants, all of whom I put at ease with assurances that nobody was getting preferential treatment. They’d all have to come discover Victor Cracke for themselves.

Marilyn thought I was making a terrible mistake. She told me so at lunch, the week before I opened.

“You want to sell them, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I said. And I did, not for the money so much as for the legitimacy: by convincing other people to literally invest in my vision of genius, I made my act of creativity a matter of public record. A closely related part of me, however, wanted to keep the drawings all to myself. I always felt pangs letting go of a favored piece, but I’d never felt the possessive impulse as strongly as I did toward Victor—largely because I considered myself his collaborator rather than his sales representative.

I said, “Whether I sell them now or after the show, they’re sold.”

“Sell them now,” Marilyn said, “and they’re sold now”

People had a hard time understanding my relationship with Marilyn. To begin with, there was the question of age: she is twenty-one years older

than I am. Come to think of it, that part might not be so hard for women in their fifties to understand.

My less discreet friends, though, tended, when drunk, to point out the peculiarity of my situation.

Newsflash!

She’s old enough to be your mother.

Not quite. Were my mother still around, she would be four years older than Marilyn. But thank you; thanks very much. I hadn’t noticed that similarity at all, not until you brought it to my attention. I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.

These same friends were usually careful to add (I guess as a means of breaking the hard news to me more gently) She looks good. I’ll grant you that.

Thanks again. I hadn’t noticed that, either.

Marilyn does look good, and not just for her age: objectively, she is a beautiful woman and always has been. True, she’s had work done. Who around here hasn’t? At least she comes by her beauty honestly: Ironton High School Homecoming Queen, 1969. What you see is the result of maintenance rather than a complete fiction.

The southernmost city in Ohio, Ironton bequeathed to its fairest daughter a ferocious ambition and, when she is annoyed, a hint of northern Kentucky drawl, useful both for feigning innocence and for dropping the sledgehammer of Southern condescension. You do not want to make Marilyn mad.

Today her haircuts cost as much as her first car. She has phone numbers for people who don’t have phone numbers. I strongly suspect that when she walks into Barneys they press a special button to mobilize the sales force. But any true New Yorker knows that the real measure of success is real estate and what you do with it. Marilyn has succeeded. In the dining room of her West Village town house hangs a de Kooning worth ten times as much as her parents made, cumulatively, in fifty years of honest labor. Her uptown apartment on Fifth and Seventy-fifth affords a generous view of Central Park; and when the sun sets across the island, silhouetting the

Dakota and the San Remo, flooding the living room with sweet orange light, you feel as though you are floating on the surface of a star.

You can’t take the Ironton out of the girl. She still gets up at four thirty A.M. to exercise.

Her rise on the scene is the stuff of legend. The family of eleven; the arrival in New York, literally on a Greyhound bus; the handbag counter at Saks; the banker buying a birthday present for his wife, leaving also with Marilyn’s phone number; the affair; the divorce; the remarriage; the charity balls; the museum boards; the swelling collection; Warhol and Basquiat and disco and cocaine; the second divorce, rancorous as a Balkan blood feud; the jaw-dropping settlement; and the Marilyn Wooten Gallery, opening night, July 9, 1979. I was seven years old.

However random or fortuitous this chain of events might seem, I have always envisioned her planning it all out—on the Greyhound, perhaps, rocketing eastward, perhaps written down in a little Gatsbyesque composition book. MY VERY OWN TEN-STEP PLAN FOR SELF-BETTERMENT, FAME, AND FORTUNE.

She found the similarities between selling art and selling handbags to far exceed the differences. And she could sell. The house in the Hamptons, the flats in Rome and London—those she bought with her own money, alimony be damned.

Everyone knows her; she has run with or over everyone in her path. She called Clement Greenberg, the most prominent American critic of the twentieth century, an insufferable asshole to his face. She was the first to show Matthew Barney, whom she still refers to as “the Boy.” She has capitalized on our culture’s penchant for recycling, buying up unfashionable work and then creating, through sheer force of will and charisma, a revival whose profits accrue largely to her. She sells artwork that she does not own, on the assurance that she will own it sooner or later—a practice that got her banned from the auction houses for a time. Again and again people pronounce her dead. Always she ascends, phoenix triumphant in her tailored suit, gimlet in hand, to say Not quiteyit, honey.

We met at an opening. At the time, I was working the floor for the woman who would leave her gallery to me. I had moved in the art world for a few years by that point, and though I certainly knew who Marilyn was, I had never spoken to her before. I saw her eyeing me through the bottom of her wineglass, and then, in defiance of her own tipsiness, making a beeline for me, wearing her Acquisition Smile.

“You’re the only straight man in this room I haven’t fucked or fired.”

An auspicious beginning.

People used to describe me as having tamed her, which was ludicrous. We simply met at the right time, and the connection proved so expedient, pleasant, and intellectually invigorating that neither of us had any reason to call it off. She is a talker; I am a nodder. We both sold, albeit in very different ways; and though we were both control freaks, we maintained our own private lives, which prevented us from clashing. And although she would never admit it, I think the Muller name plucked a chord of awe inside her. In the pantheon of Old American Money, I might not rate very high, but to Marilyn “My Father was an Industrial Mechanic” Wooten, I must have looked like John Jacob Astor.

It also helped that we had no expectations of fidelity. That was the unspoken rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

“LEAVE IT TO YOU,” she said, forking her roasted-pepper-and-goat-cheese napoleon, “to find the one who can actually draw. I thought that was the whole point of outsider art, that it looked like shit.”

“Who said it was outsider art.”

“You have to call it something.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because people like their hands held.”

“I think I’ll let them dangle a bit.”

“You’re really lousing this up, you know that?”

“I’m not doing it for the money.”

” ‘I’m not doing it for the money.’ ” She sat back, wiping her mouth. Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her

food will be taken away, and when she pauses it’s not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself. “You’ll never get over your love of pretty things, Ethan. That’s your problem.”

“I don’t see why that’s such a problem. And they’re not pretty. Have you even seen them?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“They’re not pretty.”

“They’re like something Francis Bacon would draw in detention. Don’t listen to me, darlin. I’m just jealous of your margins. Mine, please?”

I handed her the rest of my salad.

“Thank you.” She dug in. “I hear Kristjana is on the warpath.”

“I had to cut her loose. I felt bad about it, but—”

“Don’t. I don’t blame you. I had her for a time, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“I discovered her,” she said.

This I knew to be a lie. “Is that a fact.”

She shrugged. “In a way. I discovered her at Geoffrey Mann’s. He wasn’t doing anything for her. So I rediscovered her.”

“Stole her, you mean.”

“Is it stealing if you want to give it back?”

“I offered to reschedule her show, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“She’ll live. Someone’ll pick her up, they always do. She called me, you know.”

“Did she.”

“Mm. Thank you,” she said, accepting her duck from the waiter. “She pitched her project to me. With the ice? I told her no thank you. I’m not turning off the air-conditioning in my gallery so she can stroke herself off about the environment. Please. Make me something I can sell.”

“She used to be a good painter.”

“They all start out that way,” she said. “Hungry. Then they get a couple of suck-up reviews and next thing they start thinking if they shit in a can it’ll be brilliant.”

I pointed out that Piero Manzoni had, in fact, sold cans of his own shit.

“It was original then,” she said. “Forty years ago. Now it just smells bad.”

I DID CONCEDE MARILYN’S BASIC POINT: Victor Cracke’s art didn’t fit into any clear category, which made my role in its success—or failure— that much stronger. Part of a dealer’s skill, his creativity, lies in surrounding a piece with the correct context. Everybody likes to be able to talk about their art to their friends, to be knowledgeable. In this way one can rationalize spending half a million dollars on crayon and string.

In theory, I had the easiest job imaginable: I could make up whatever I wanted. Nobody would contradict me if I decided to make Victor a dishwasher, a professional gymnast, a retired assassin. Ultimately, though, I decided that the most compelling narrative was none at all: Victor Cracke, cipher. Let people write the story themselves, and they will insert whatever hopes, dreams, fears, and lusts they want. The piece becomes a Rorschach test. All art of value achieves this to a certain extent, but I suspected that the scale of Victor’s piece, its hallucinogenic totality, would make for a lot of audience countertransference. That, or a boatload of confusion.

I thus found myself answering a lot of opening-night questions the same way.

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t really know.”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I know that.”

Or:

“What do you think?”

At an opening, you can identify the novice by his interest in the work. Gallery people don’t bother to look at all. They’re there for the wine and crackers, and to talk about who’s up or down this week.

“Smashing,” Marilyn said, tipping back her plastic cup.

“Thank you.”

“I brought you a present. Did you notice?”

“Where.”

“There, silly.” She nosed at a tall, handsome man in a slim-cut suit.

I looked at her with surprise. Kevin Hollister was a good friend of Marilyn’s, her ex-husband’s Groton roommate. Quarterbacking Harvard to three Ivy League titles earned him a spectacularly cushy banking job right out of school, and ever since then he’s been on the rise. He lives, you might say, comfortably. His hedge fund is named Downfield.

Recently he had turned his attention from shorting Eastern European currencies to art, a typical Culture Climber, to whom a canvas was little more than an expensive ticket to an exclusive party. I am forever astonished at how men with money and brains—men who control world markets, run major corporations, have the ear of politicians—become dribbling imbeciles in front of a painting. Not knowing where to begin, they run to the nearest source of guidance, no matter how biased or mercenary.

In a spectacular display of poor judgment, Hollister had hired Marilyn as a consultant, giving her what amounted to a private tap on his bank account. Needless to say, she had sold him work exclusively by artists she represented, barking at anyone who tried to step onto her territory. Earlier she had told me, “He doesn’t appreciate that a world-class collection is the product of thought and patience, and cannot be created in one fell swoop. But I’m happy to help him try.”

I’d met him once or twice, but we’d never spoken for more than a few minutes, and never about art. That Marilyn had brought him tonight meant one of two things: she thought Victor Cracke was good, or she considered me and my art no threat at all to her monopoly.

“I’m expanding his horizons,” she said. She winked at me and went to take Hollister’s arm.

I worked the room all evening, chatting up the usual suspects. Jocko Steinberger, who looked as though he hadn’t shaved since his own opening the previous December, came and spent the whole evening staring cata-tonically at one drawing. We had a surprise visit from Etienne St. Mauritz, who, along with Castelli and Emmerich, used to be one of the premier

American dealers. Now he was old, a liver-spotted demigod being wheeled around by a woman in a long fur coat and Christian Louboutin heels. He thought the work excellent and told me so.

Nat brought his boyfriend and they hit it off talking to another dealer named Glenn Steiger, a former assistant to Ken Noland with a dirty mouth and an arsenal of dirty stories. As I passed them I overheard him saying, “… tried to buy a canvas from me with forty-eight thousand dollars … in one-dollar bills … that fucking reeked of marijuana … fucking playground money …”

Ruby, her hair in a complex plait, had sequestered herself near the Cracke journals. I’d never met her date before, although she’d spoken of him in the past.

“Ethan, this is Lance DePauw.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Same here.” Lance’s eyes were bloodshot and in constant motion. He, too, smelled like playground money. “This is some pretty crazy shit.”

“We’ve been looking at the food journal,” Ruby said. “I find it comforting, the way he always ate the same thing. My mom used to pack me lunches, and she’d always give me the same sandwich, cream cheese and jelly. That’s what this reminds me of.”

“That,” Lance said, “or prison.”

We all looked at the food journal for a moment.

Lance said, “Whack.”

From across the room, Marilyn waved at me. I excused myself and went over to talk to Hollister. His handshake was not at all the masculine vise clamp you’d expect, but dry and wary. I noticed also that he had a manicure.

“We were just admiring this piece,” Marilyn said.

“Good choice,” I said.

“Am I right in thinking this is the center of the piece? Ethan?”

I nodded. “Panel number one.”

“How bizarre,” Marilyn said. “What are those? Babies?” “They look like cherubs,” said Hollister.

“Funny you say that,” I said. “That’s how we refer to them. ‘Victor’s Cherubs.’ “

At the center of panel one was a five-pointed star, its dull brown an uncharacteristically muted note in an otherwise lurid palette. Around it danced a ring of winged children, their beatific faces in stark contrast to the rest of the map, which teemed with agitation and bloodshed. Victor had been a very capable draftsman, but evidently these figures had been important enough to him that he wanted to take no chances: they had been rendered with a precision that suggested tracing rather than freehand.

Marilyn said, “They look—oh, I don’t know. Like Botticelli meets Sally Mann. Sort ofpedophilic, don’t you think?”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

Hollister leaned in and squinted. “It’s in remarkably good condition, all things considered.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the place when it was like that?” he asked, gesturing to a wall where I had hung enlarged photos of the apartment before disassembly.

“I discovered it,” I said. Behind him, I saw Marilyn smile.

“Kevin would like to learn more about the artist.”

“I honestly don’t know how much more I can tell you,” I said.

“How would you compare him to other outsider artists?” Hollister said.

“Well,” I said, shooting a quick evil eye at Marilyn, “I’m not sure that I’d call him an outsider artist.”

Hollister blanched, and I quickly added, “Per se. I’m not sure, per se, that he’s comparable to any other artist—although you might be right, then, in calling him an outsider artist, because part of what defines outsider art is its lack of reference.”

Behind him, Marilyn rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

I spooled out a lot of textbook stuff on Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, the anticultural movement. “Usually we’re referring to work created by prisoners, children, and the insane, and I’m not sure that Cracke was any of those, per se.”

“I think he was all three,” said Marilyn.

“He was a child?” asked Hollister. “I thought he was old.”

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean—yes. No, he wasn’t a child.”

“How old was he?”

“We don’t know, precisely.”

“I don’t mean literallysaid Marilyn. “I mean look at his concept of the world. It’s so juvenile. Dancing angels? Come on. Who does that? You can’t do that sort of thing with a straight face, you just can’t, and I think it’s terribly sweet that he did.”

“Cloying,” said Hollister.

“It might be, except the bulk of it’s not like that at all—just the opposite, it’s so awful and gory. That’s what makes the piece interesting to me, the extremity of the two emotions at work. I think—you can tell me if I’m wrong, Ethan—but it looks to me like there are two Victor Crackes: the one who draws puppies and cupcakes and fairy rings, and the one”—she pointed to a canvas filled with graphic battle scenes—”who draws decapitations and torture and so on.” She smiled at me. “What do you think.”

I shrugged. “He was trying to encompass everything he saw. He saw kindness and he saw cruelty. It’s not two Victor Crackes: it’s the fault of the world, for being inconsistent.”

Marilyn gestured around the room. “You can’t deny that the work has a crazed quality to it. The obsession with filling in every square inch of the page … Only a madman would draw for forty years and stick it all in a box.”

I admitted that my first thought had been as such.

“See, there you go. That’s part of its appeal, of course.”

“All I know is it’s good.”

“Well, fine, but wouldn’t you feel a little less inclined to show it if you knew it was an SVA student’s senior thesis?”

“An SVA student couldn’t produce anything this honest,” I said. “That’s exactly the point.”

“Now you’re sounding like Dubuffet.”

“Fine. I think it’s refreshing not to have to think four levels of irony deep.”

“Let’s imagine, for a second, that he was a criminal—”

“Hang on,” I said.

“I’m just saying. As a thought experiment.”

“There’s nothing to suggest that. He was a loner. He never bothered anybody.”

“Isn’t that what they say about serial killers?” she said. ” ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ “

I rolled my eyes.

“Regardless,” she said, “the term outsider artist seems right to me.”

I didn’t really believe that Victor Cracke could be so easily and neatly packaged. But I inferred from Marilyn’s expression that she was trying to do me a favor by giving Hollister something concrete to cling to. He was, I gathered, a labels-and-categories kind of guy.

“We can call him that,” I said. I smiled at Hollister. “For argument’s sake.”

He squinted at the canvas again. “What does it mean.”

“What do you think it means?”

He spent a few moments pursing and unpursing his lips. “Nothing, inherently.”

We decided to leave it at that.

All evening long I kept an eye out for Tony Wexler. I had sent him an invitation—pointedly addressed to his home rather than to the office. I knew he couldn’t come. He never did. He couldn’t come if my father had been snubbed, and I invariably snubbed my father, which mooted the whole point of sending Tony an invitation.

Given his interest in the artist, and his contribution to the discovery of the work, I had figured that I’d at least get a phone call. But I’d heard nothing. It rankled a tiny bit. Even the goddamn superintendent, Shaughnessy,

showed up, stuffed into a heavy sport jacket that had not recently seen the light of day. At first I thought he was some artist dressed deliberately down, a crude parody of a lower-middle-class wardrobe. Then he waved at me from afar and my memory clicked into place: the smudged glasses, the thick wrists. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he’d come—or how he had even known about the show. I mentioned this to Nat and he told me that—per my request—we’d sent postcards to everyone I’d interviewed as a way of thanking them.

I was bewildered. “I said to do that?”

Nat smiled. “Senile already.”

“I’ve been living in a bubble,” I said. “Anyhow I doubt I expected anyone to take the invitation seriously.”

“He did.”

“Indeed.” I felt bad for Shaughnessy, who spent the evening walking around and around the drawings, awkwardly trying to pick up the tails of other conversations. Finally, I went over to shake his hand.

He waved at the canvases. “Something else, huh? Was I right?”

“You were.”

“I know it when I see it.”

“You certainly do.”

“I like this one.” He showed me where Victor had drawn a bridge— Ruby thought it looked like the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—turning into a dragon whose tongue forked and grew into the air trails of a jet, which flew into an ocean, which itself became the open mouth of a giant fish … and so forth. The pictures tended to nest inside one another, so that every time you had found the largest unit, you discovered, upon the addition of more panels, a more impressive superstructure.

“Wild stuff,” said Shaughnessy.

I nodded.

“So’d you sell any yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You think you will?”

I glanced at Hollister. “I hope so.”

Shaughnessy licked his lips. “Hey, lemme ask you something. You think I might be able to get some?”

For a moment I thought I was being propositioned. “Get some.”

“Yeah, you know.”

“You mean—buy a drawing?”

“Not so much.” He licked his lips again.

“What then.”

“Like a commission.” He smiled. “Finder’s fee.”

In the distance I saw Hollister talking to Marilyn as they headed for the front door. I said, “You want me to give you one of the drawings.”

Abruptly he reddened. “It’s not like they’re yours.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and left Shaughnessy standing there.

Before going, Hollister handed me a card and asked me to call him on Monday. He left a wake; everyone stepped aside to watch him go. They had been tracking him all evening long, eager to learn if he was no longer off-limits as a client.

I turned to find Shaughnessy again and spotted him across the room, furiously stuffing canapes into his mouth. Then he concealed an entire bottle of wine inside his coat, rolled up three exhibition catalogues, and left without saying good-bye.

THE ONE TRUE DARK SPOT on an otherwise bright evening arrived close to the end, when only I, my staff, and a handful of the hardest-core booze moochers remained. Nat, having gone behind the front desk for some promotional postcards, tried to intercept Kristjana, but she blew right past him. He then ran to warn me, but by then it was too late: she had taken her position in the middle of the gallery.

All eyes fell on her. How can you ignore a six-foot Icelandic manic-depressive with a boot-camp hairdo, her mouth sealed with duct tape, wearing a—

“Is that a straitjacket?” Ruby whispered.

It was. A red patent-leather one.

“Asylum, by Jean Paul Gaultier,” Nat whispered.

We were whispering because we knew that we had all been co-opted into a piece of performance art.

It didn’t last long. She held her arms up to the sky, arched her back gracefully, and slowly—very, very slowly—began to peel the tape from her face. The sizzle of glue was audible throughout the entire gallery. It hurt to watch. With a flick of her wrist she sent the tape fluttering to the ground. Then she whipped her torso forward and expelled a shockingly large quantity of mucus smack in the middle of my gallery floor, where it sat, glistening, like a frog.

She turned on her heel and marched out.

The first person to react was Ruby’s friend Lance. Everyone else was still too stunned to move, but he got up from where he’d been sitting in the corner and ambled toward the loogie, which had begun to send out little drippy green tendrils. From somewhere inside his track jacket he produced a handheld video camera. He switched it on, twisted off the lens cap, and knelt to get a close-up of Kristjana’s latest work.

3

he show was a hit. I got good notices in the trades, including one in ArtBox by an old friend who loved nothing more than to swim against the stream, and who I had expected to eviscerate me. The Musee D’Arte Brut, the modern-day outgrowth of Jean Dubuffet’s personal collection, expressed interest in bringing the work over to Lausanne. And somebody must have tipped off the Times, because they sent over a reporter—not from Arts but from the metro section.

I waffled over whether to talk to him. Everyone knows that when it comes to the avant-garde, the Times is all but irrelevant; their report on a trend marks the surest sign that said trend has declined and fallen. Furthermore, I worried about how they would spin me. With very little stretching of the truth I could come off as a vulture, feasting off the remains of the poor and disenfranchised.

In the end, though, I had to agree. Otherwise I had no control over the situation whatsoever; I couldn’t stop them from running the article, magnifying my lack of comment into a self-indictment.

The same traits that make me a good salesmen make me a good interviewee, and when the article came out, I was pleased to see that I had convinced the journalist we were friends. He called the show “hypnotic” and “unsettling” and printed a large close-up of one of Victor’s

Cherubs on the front page of the section. My picture didn’t look too bad, either.

Irrelevant or not to me, the Times carries a certain prestige, particularly in the minds of Culture Climbers. Within days I had gotten several offers far above the ones I’d gotten on opening night. On Marilyn’s advice, I put everyone off until I’d spoken to Kevin Hollister, who she promised would call as soon as he got back from Cap Juluca.

She didn’t disappoint. Two days later he asked me to lunch at a place on the ground floor of a midtown skyscraper that he owned. The restaurant staff hovered and swirled around him, whisking away his coat as he shucked it, pulling his chair out, draping his lap with a napkin, pressing his cocktail of choice into his hand before he had uttered a word. Throughout this frenzy he appeared not to notice anyone but me, asking how I’d gotten into art, how I’d met Marilyn, and so on. We were seated in a private room, where the chef personally presented us with an assortment of gemlike sushi. It was excellent. Hollister called for another round and, midway through it, offered me a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for the Cherubs. I told him that sounded low, especially considering that in giving him a single canvas I’d be breaking up the integrity of the piece as a whole—which really ought to stay together. Without batting an eye he doubled the figure.

We settled at three eighty-five. That kind of money wasn’t going to make any headlines, but bear in mind that not too long ago the drawings had been bound for the landfill. The pleasure I took in watching Hollister sign the check was secondary to the godlike thrill of making something from nothing, cash from trash, creation ex nihilo.

After the deal was done I detected a change in Hollister’s attitude, a surge of confidence. Now that he owned, he knew how to act. Men like him believe that nothing is beyond their grasp—be that thing a piece of land, a piece of art, a brand of savvy, a person. Once they’ve paid and order is restored, they can go back to being masters of the universe. It’s a metamorphosis I recognized from years of dealing with my father.

I RETURNED TO THE GALLERY that afternoon elated by the deal but depressed about the prospect of losing my art. Mine, and I didn’t feel ashamed to say so.

When a show goes well, or I make an unusually handsome sale, I will send my assistants home, close the gallery, and invite the artist over to commune with the object we have created together. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a sentimental ritual. But no one has ever told me he didn’t want to do it. Anyone so jaded that he fails to experience a sense of loss— that person, to me, can neither see art nor experience its transcendency. I don’t want to represent him.

Without Victor Cracke, I stood alone in the vast white space, watching the pages of the drawings billow gently. I took off my shirt, bundled it behind my head, and laid down on the floor in front of the nearest canvas, feeling like a child confronting the ocean for the first time, overcome by its vastness and its melancholy.

I LIKE TO ORGANIZE MY LIFE in five-year fragments, give or take. My mother died when I was five. When I turned eleven my father, tired of listening to me, sent me off to boarding school. Then came about five years of getting kicked out of various educational institutions across the globe. Let me see if I can remember the correct order: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Brussels, Florida, Connecticut again, Berlin, Vermont, and Oregon. By the time I got back to New York I knew how to say dime bag and blow-job in several dialects of American English, as well as Turkish, German, French, and Russian.

When I turned sixteen, a despairing Tony Wexler—he, rather than my father, had been the one managing my woes—phoned my half-sister, Amelia, and begged her to put me up for a while.

Amelia and I had never been close. She lives in London, where she has been since her mother and my father divorced in 1957; that also gives you an idea of the generation gap separating us. I saw her once in a very rare while—at my own mother’s funeral, for instance. Certainly I had done little to endear myself to her. I regarded all three of my half-siblings not as peers but shadowy semiparental figures not to be trusted. My half-brothers, who I saw a least a few times a month, are brownnosers extraordinaire, and at the time I had no reason to believe that Amelia would be any different. I set out for London with a hard, hard heart.

To everyone’s astonishment—not least my own—I thrived. The wetness of English weather aligned with my adolescent sense of impending doom, and the dryness of English humor made more sense to me than the rampant goofiness of American pop culture. At school I managed not to get expelled, and with private tutoring I managed to graduate. I made some of my best friends during those years, friends I still keep in touch with and see whenever I travel abroad for work—which I do more often than I need to, just to catch up. In certain ways I feel like my real life is still over there.

It was Amelia who first stoked my interest in art. Her husband is a lord, and while he spends his time drafting legislation in defense of fox hunting, she spends his money in support of radical aesthetics. During my time abroad she took me to openings and parties at the Tate; I was the charming younger brother, the tousle-haired, devil-may-care Yank. I loved the pageantry, the snobbery, the love and loathing that infused every conversation. People cared—or seemed to, anyway, which is what mattered to me at that age. After living with my father, legendary for his stoniness, my time in London felt like a beautiful, melodramatic dream.

Amelia taught me how to see not through my eyes but through the eyes of the artist, how to accept a piece on its own terms, a skill that enabled me both to understand contemporary art and to explain it to others. With her guidance I used my own savings—money that accrued to me from my mother’s bequest when I turned eighteen—to buy my first piece, a Cy Twombly drawing that I took with me when I returned to the United States to attend Harvard, where I lived in a dormitory that had been occupied by my half-brothers and my father and my grandfather and great-uncles before me, and that made people laugh when they learned my name. You live in Muller Hall?

Without Amelia standing guard, I slipped back into my old ways. My next five-year period consisted of me drinking vodka, breathing cocaine, having sex, taking enforced “time off,” and flunking out.

You have no idea how difficult it is to flunk out of Harvard. They will do anything to rid themselves of the stink of failure. I finally succeeded by getting into a brawl with one of my professors in the middle of a seminar room, whom I drunkenly—but correctly, mind you—declared a “know-nothing yeast infection.” Even then, I had to throw the first punch.

After retrieving me from Cambridge, Tony Wexler sat me down and told me that unless I got a job I would be cut off.

It obviously hurt him to have to threaten me, and though we both knew that he wasn’t giving the orders, I despised him for carrying them out. I used my last thousand dollars to get on the next flight to London, where I showed up at Amelia’s door, virtually flammable from the countless Tanqueray-and-tonics I’d ingested on the way over.

She took me right in. She never asked how long I planned on staying, never asked what had happened. She fed me and let me sleep and never judged me, perhaps knowing that I would come to judge myself harshest of all.

With nothing to do except sit in the garden and read, I began to understand what a mess I’d made of my life, a realization that left me sad and lonely but most of all angry. I remember sitting on a bench at the end of the arbor, listening to the birds and feeling jittery after two days without a drink or drugs. I got up and went to the cabinet where Amelia’s husband kept his single malts, fully expecting it to be locked. Tony had probably called ahead and told her to clear out the cupboards. I resented her in advance for pretending to like me, for being no better than the rest of them, just another one of my father’s minions.

The cabinet was open. Burning with shame, I closed it and slunk from the room.

The breaking point came a few days later, when Amelia asked in passing what had become of my Twombly, the one we’d bought together and that I’d loved.

Only then did I realize that I’d left it at Harvard. My departure had been so abrupt, so hazy, so filled with lawyers and ultimatums, that I’d forgotten to take it. As far as I knew it was still there.

I called up a friend from the Fly and asked him to go over my room. The Twombly hung above my bed, where it attracted the immediate attention of everyone who entered. Those in the know—art history concentrators, always, and mostly girls—tended to assume, until corrected, that I had picked it up at the Fogg’s semesterly Print Rental, where even the hardest-up scholarship cases can plunk down thirty bucks to own a Jasper Johns for two semesters. When I told them that no, in fact, the drawing was mine and all mine, they tended, these art-history-concentrating girls, to sleep with me. I loved my chosen major for many reasons.

At any rate, my friend called back to say that as far as he could tell, the Twombly, like everything else I had abandoned, had been carted away with the trash.

That killed me. For the first time since losing my mother, I cried. Amelia’s husband, unequipped to deal with such a wanton display of self-pity, avoided me for days. Amelia brought me tea and held my hand, and gradually it dawned on me that the real tragedy was not the loss of my drawing but the fact that I couldn’t muster tears for anything save a piece of paper.

To this day I have no desire to drink. All the black thoughts and bitterness that fueled my self-destruction have been channeled into two new areas of expertise: art and hatred of my father. Fair or not, we all have our outlets.

With Amelia’s help I got a job at a gallery in London, and when I decided to go back to the States, she called her friend Leonora Waite, who ran a gallery on the fourth floor of 567 West Twenty-fifth Street.

Leonora and I hit it off famously. A lusty, chain-smoking lesbian from the Bronx, she leaned toward feminist art, pulp novels, and slasher flicks.

She laughed big, threw incredible parties, and hated Marilyn Wooten with a passion, threatening to fire me when Marilyn and I started dating.

She didn’t. Instead, she sold me her space at a shamefully low price when she retired after September 11. Six months later she died, and I had the sign out front changed to MULLER GALLERY. In her honor, my first show consisted of new works by the Lilit Collective, a self-sustaining artistic community in rural Connecticut whose cofounder, Kristjana Hallbjornsdottir, would soon become my artist.

AS I LAY ON THE GALLERY FLOOR, contemplating the long, strange road I had taken, I felt at peace. Victor Cracke represented my first big-boy step as a dealer. With the exception of Kristjana, I inherited my entire client list from Leonora, and in the minds of many, the Muller Gallery had failed to distinguish itself from its predecessor. As much as I appreciated Leonora’s taste, I had long wanted to make my mark felt, to find an artist I loved and make him a star. Victor gave me that chance, and I had not let him down.

“Thank you,” I said to the drawings.

They waved like seaweed.

If I’d known what was about to happen, I would have got up and preemptively disconnected the phone. Or perhaps I would have leapt up to answer. That depends on whether you consider what followed good or bad.

Either way: the next part of the story begins with a ringing phone. This is a detective novel, remember?

THE MACHINE PICKED UP. A soft, tired voice, said,

“Mr. Muller, my name is Lee McGrath. I read the article and I’m interested in learning some more about the artist Victor Cracke. Would you mind please giving me a buzz?” He left a number with a 718 area code.

That night I went home without returning his call, and when I came in the next morning there was another message.

“Hi Mr. Muller, Lee McGrath. Sorry to bother you again. Please, if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate hearing from you.”

I dialed his number and introduced myself.

“Hi,” he said. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“Of course. What can I do for you?”

“I was reading the paper and I came across the article about this person, Victor Cracke, the artist. Sounds like some story.”

“It is.”

“Yes, a really interesting story. Do you mind if I ask how you came across him and the drawings? Because I’d like to learn some more about him.”

Obviously, McGrath hadn’t read the article too carefully; the reporter had clearly stated that I’d never met Cracke. At the end of the piece they’d printed my phone number and a request for any further information.

I said as much to McGrath, who said, “Hm.”

At that point, a lot of people would have made an excuse to get off the phone. Many dealers decide within seconds of meeting you whether you’re worth a conversation. In my experience, though, restraint pays. I once had a dowdy-looking couple (Mervyns print pants, Hush Puppies) walk in, stroll around for ten minutes, ask a couple of benign questions, and walk out. Two weeks later they called me from Lincoln, Nebraska, and bought seven paintings at a hundred twenty thousand dollars apiece, followed by another half million dollars’ worth of sculpture.

So I try to be patient, even if it means answering redundant questions and waiting for an old man—I’d decided, for no particular reason, that McGrath was old—to formulate his thoughts. If he cared enough to call me about a photo in the paper, he might be the kind of person I could sell to in the future.

He said, “I understand that there were a lot of those drawings, not just the one they reprinted in the paper.”

Again, a detail the reporter had noted. “There are lots more.”

“How did they choose which one to reprint?”

I explained about the numbering system.

“Really,” he said. “That’s panel number one?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t say … I’d really like to see that one for myself. Is that possible?”

“You’re welcome to come down anytime you like. We’re open Tuesday through Saturday, ten to six. Where are you coming from?”

He chuckled, which turned into a cough. “I can’t drive anymore. I don’t leave the house too much. I was hoping I might be able to convince you to make a house call.”

“I’m very sorry, but I don’t think that’s possible. I can e-mail you pictures of the work. Although I should let you know that the piece you saw in the paper has been sold.”

“Well, geez. Too bad for me. If you don’t mind, though, I’d still like to find out about Mr. Cracke. Any chance you would like to come by for a bit, just to chat?”

I began to tap my fingers against the desk. “I wish I had more to tell you, but—”

“What about these, eh”—I heard the sound of a newspaper being lifted—”journals. The journals he kept. Are those sold, too?”

“Not yet. I’ve had several offers.” Not completely true. Some collectors had admired the journals, but nobody had put a price on them yet. People wanted objects readily displayed on a wall, not a dense, tedious text.

“Do you think I could see them?”

“If you come to the gallery, I’d be happy to show you,” I said. “Right now I’m afraid I can’t transport them anywhere. They’re falling apart as it is.”

“This isn’t my lucky day, huh.”

“I’m truly sorry,” I said. “Please let me know if there’s another way I can accommodate you.” Something about McGrath’s folksiness made me want to be as formal as possible. “Was there something else I could help you with?”

“Probably not, Mr. Muller. But I have to take a chance and ask you one more time if you’d consider taking a trip out to see me. It’d mean a lot to me. I’m close by.”

Without realizing what I was doing, I said, “Where.”

“Breezy Point. You know where that is?”

I didn’t.

“Rockaways. You take the Belt. You know how to get to the Belt?”

“Mr. McGrath. I didn’t agree to come.”

“Oh. I thought you had.”

“No, sir.”

“Oh. Well, okay then.”

There was a pause. I started to say, “Thanks for calling” but he said, “Don’t you want to know what this is about?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

“It’s about the picture in the paper. The one of the boy.”

I realized he meant the Cherub in the Times. “What about him.”

“I know him,” said McGrath. “I know who he is. I recognized him straightaway. His name was Eddie Cardinale. Forty years ago someone strangled him to death, but we never found out who.” He coughed. “Can I give you directions or do you know how to get to the Belt?”

6 Í7

AY lthough technically part of Queens, the long, flat Rockaway penin-U sula juts beneath Brooklyn’s potbelly, like the concealed feet of a perching waterfowl. To get there you drive through Jacob Riis Park, a marshy preserve more Chesapeake Bay than New York City. Turning northeast takes you to JFK and some of the most ghettoized areas in the Five Boroughs, neighborhoods you’d never think of as dangerous, simply because they abut the beach. How can the beach be dangerous? Go to the Rockaways and you’ll get your answer.

Breezy Point Cooperative sits at the other end of the peninsula, in every sense of the phrase. Nonwhite faces become less common as you head southwest, as does traffic, which thins out as you approach the parking lot. I pulled up in a cab around three. Just outside the entrance to the community was a pub that had drawn a decent crowd. The driver bobbed his head noncommittally when I asked him to wait, or to come back in an hour. As soon as I paid him, he sped away.

I entered a warren of low-slung bungalows and Cape Codders and right away felt the eponymous breeze: cool and briny, whipping up grit from the beach a hundred yards away. My loafers filled with sand as I walked the alleyways, past houses done up with nautical themes: lifesavers and signs carved from weather-beaten teak: JIM’S CLIPPER or THE GOOD SHIP HAL-LORAN. Irish tricolors abounded.

Later I learned that most of the homeowners are summerfolk who flee after Labor Day. But in mid-August they were still out in droves: out on their cramped porches or down by the boardwalk, sweating and crushing cans of Budweiser and watching towheaded skateboarders dive-bomb the pavement. Charcoal smoke turned the air heavy. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and nobody knew me. Kids playing basketball on a low hoop with a water-filled base stopped their game and gathered to stare at me, like I had a big scarlet letter on my chest. N, perhaps, for Not Local.

I got lost looking for McGrath’s house, ending up on the beach beside a memorial to local firefighters killed at the World Trade Center. I shook out my shoes.

“Lost?”

I turned and saw a girl of about nine in denim shorts over a bathing suit.

“I’m looking for Lee McGrath.”

“You mean the professor.”

I said, “If you say so.”

She hooked a finger and went back into the maze. I tried to keep track of her turns but gave up and let myself be led to a shack with a well-kept front yard, peonies and pansies and a lawn cut golf-course close, good enough to make the cover of Martha Stewart Living. A hammock with a lumpy pillow hung at the far end of the porch, and behind it an old Coca-Cola sign leaned against the wooden siding. The mailbox out front read MCGRATH; underneath, an NYPD decal. In the front window was a sun-bleached poster of the Twin Towers, an eagle, and an American flag.

NEVER FORGET

I knocked, drawing slow footsteps.

“Thanks for coming.” Though Lee McGrath was not as old as he sounded over the phone, time had not been kind to him. Hairless calves gave him a feminine quality, and slack skin hinted that he had once been a much larger man. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe and disintegrating slippers that made a ghostly sound as he turned and shuffled back inside. “Take a load off.”

The interior of the house smelled of ointments, and its clutter didn’t square with the neatly kept yard. Before seating me at the dining-room table, McGrath spent a good five minutes clearing out a workspace, shuttling piles of unopened mail, half-empty paper cups, and pill bottles to the passthrough, one item at a time, a process maddening to watch. I tried to help him but he waved me off, breathing hard and making small talk.

“You find your way okay?” he asked.

“I got help.”

McGrath cackled weakly. “I told you to take directions. Everyone gets lost the first time. It’s an interesting neighborhood but a bitch to walk around. I’ve been here twenty-two years and I still get confused.” He surveyed the exposed stretch of tablecloth and deemed it sufficient. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“There’s juice and water, too. Maybe some beer, if you want.”

“I’m okay.” I wanted to leave. Sickness makes me anxious. Watching your mother waste away will do that to you.

“Speak up if you do. Before we get started, mind giving me a hand?”

The back room had a threadbare area rug, a rickety-looking desk, a computer, a small television atop a rolling stand, and two large bookcases, one filled with paperbacks and the other with numbered three-ring binders. A yellow La-Z-Boy looked recently vacated, a John le Carre novel splayed on one arm. Along the far wall hung a dozen or so photographs: a younger, more robust McGrath in a police uniform; McGrath holding two squirming girls; McGrath shaking hands with Mickey Mantle. Several framed service commendations had been crowded in at the side of the display, afterthoughts. The adjacent wall was bare, save a laser-printed wanted poster for Osama bin Laden.

On the floor was a box, cardboard with a woodgrain print. McGrath pointed to it. I hefted it—it weighed a ton—and carried it back to the dining-room table.

“This is a copy of the file on the man who murdered Eddie Cardinale,” he said, sitting. He began taking out clipboards, manila envelopes tied with string, two-inch-thick police reports held together with alligator clips. He took out a stack of black-and-white crime scene photos and turned them over rapidly—but not so rapidly that I failed to notice the carnage.

“Here.” He slid a picture across the table. “Look familiar?”

It did. Every pore on my body opened at once. There was no doubt that the smiling boy in the snapshot was one of the Cherubs from Victor Cracke’s drawing.

My shock must have been obvious, because McGrath sat back, rubbing his unshaven chin.

“Thought so,” he said. “At first I figured I was going crazy. Then I said, ‘Hey, Lee, you ain’t that old yet. You got some brains left. Give the man a call.’ “

I said nothing.

He said, “Sure you don’t want some juice?”

I shook my head.

“Suit yourself.” He picked up the picture of Eddie Cardinale. “Poor kid. Some things you don’t forget.” He put the photo down, crossed his arms, and smiled at me with an intelligence that belied the Clueless Geezer persona he’d fed me over the phone.

I said, stupidly, “You’re a professor?”

His laughter ended in a coughing fit. “Oh, no. They just call me that.”

“Why?”

“Hell if I know. I think because of my glasses. I have reading glasses.” He pointed to his head, where said glasses resided. “I used to read on the porch, and the neighborhood kids would see me and call me that. BA from City College, that’s me.”

“BA in what?” I preferred asking the questions.

“American history. You?”

“Art history.” I neglected to mention my lack of degree.

“Look at us, buncha historians.”

“Yup.”

“You all right? You look perturbed.”

“I’m not perturbed,” I said. “I am a little surprised.”

He shrugged. “Look, I don’t know what it means. It might mean nothing.”

“Then why did you call me up?”

He smiled. “Retirement bores the shit out of me.”

“I honestly don’t know how much I can help you,” I said. “Other than what I told you over the phone, I know nothing about the man.”

I don’t know why I felt so defensive. McGrath hadn’t accused anybody of anything, least of all me. A murder forty years old would have been a bit beyond my reach, unless you believe in karma and reincarnation, and I didn’t have McGrath pegged as the mystic type. (There. I hardboiled a sentence. Aren’t you proud?)

“You must know a little more,” he said. “You wouldn’t pick up some drawings out of a Dumpster and put them up in your gallery.”

“That’s essentially what happened.”

“Did you hope that he’d read the article and show up?”

I shrugged. “It occurred to me that he might.”

“But you haven’t put an ad in the paper or anything.”

“No.”

“Aha.” I got the sense that he thought I had manufactured the “missing artist” story for publicity. On some level he was right. I wasn’t lying when I told people that Victor was missing. I had stopped looking, though.

“If that really is the case,” McGrath said, “then I might be wasting your time.”

“As I told you this morning.”

“Well, my sincere apologies.” He did not appear sorry at all; he appeared to be sizing me up. “Since you’re here already, let me tell you a little about Eddie Cardinale.”

EDWARD HOSEA CARDINALE, b. January 17, 1956. Residing 34-17 Seventy-fourth Street, Jackson Heights, Borough of Queens, Queens

County, New York City, New York. P.S. 069; good kid; well liked. In his class photo he’s a prepubescent Ricky Ricardo; big, pointy collar and slicked-back hair, smile revealing a slender gap between his two front teeth.

On the evening of August 2, 1966, a Tuesday night in the middle of a crushing heat wave, Eddie’s mother, Isabel, sits on the stoop of their apartment, her shirt dusty and creased from bending constantly to pick up litter or toys. She is worried. The twins have just learned to walk, and keeping track of them is a full-time job. To give herself room to think, she sent Eddie to the park with his baseball glove, telling him to be back by six.

Now it is eight thirty and he is nowhere in sight. She asks her next-door neighbor to keep an eye on the twins and goes out looking for her eldest son.

An hour later Eddie’s father, Dennis, a shift manager at a Brooklyn sugar factory, comes home from work and, upon being told of Eddie’s disappearance, goes out to have a look of his own. Isabel stays back to phone the parents of Eddie’s friends. According to boys who’d been at the park, the game lasted roughly from one until five, when everyone broke up to walk home. Nobody saw Eddie all day.

At ten P.M. the Cardinales phone the police. Two officers are dispatched to the residence, where they take statements and a description. Patrolmen are notified to be on the lookout for a boy of ten, black hair, wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans and carrying a baseball glove.

Initially, police speculate that Eddie, unhappy with the amount of time his mother has been spending with his younger brothers, has run away to get attention and will likely turn up within a half-mile radius. The Cardinales adamantly maintain that their son is too mature to pull such a stunt—a belief confirmed in the most gruesome way imaginable three days later, when a caretaker at Saint Michael’s finds a body just outside the cemetery grounds, near the Grand Central Parkway. An autopsy reveals semen on the buttocks and thighs, as well as traces of semen and blood on the victim’s jeans and underwear. A broken hyoid bone and severe bruising around the neck indicate manual strangulation as the cause of death.

However sensational and titillating the case might be, it does not spread beyond the local papers. Another, far more sensational crime is already hogging the national news: Charles Whitman’s sniper massacre at the University of Texas, Austin. Only so much dark territory exists in the modern American consciousness, and for a few weeks in the summer of 1966, Whitman has staked out the entire plot. The murder of Eddie Cardinale goes cold.

MCGRATH SAID, “He wasn’t the first.”

I did not look up from the stack of crime scene photos, which McGrath had handed to me as he talked. I saw Eddie; Eddie’s mother and father, both of them hollowed out; I saw the body, so ungraceful in death, like a broken violin. According to McGrath, the heat had accelerated decomposition, turning a slender, good-looking boy into a bloated sack, his face inhuman. I decided that the photos were half Weegee and half Diane Ar-bus, and then I remembered that I was looking at a dead child, a real dead child, not a piece of art. And then I remembered that Weegee and Diane Arbus had been looking at real people, too. Only my lack of familiarity with the subjects made their pictures suitable for looking at. Now that I knew Eddie Cardinale, I found him hard to look at.

I saw, too, pages of transcripts: interviews with neighbors, with local business owners, with the Cardinales, with Eddie’s friends who had been at the park. I saw the coroner’s report and the accompanying photographs. I saw a map of Queens marked with the location of the body and the location of the Cardinales’ home in Jackson Heights—a distance of less than a mile. Less than a mile from either was another spot, one not marked on the map but whose proximity to Eddie Cardinale’s walk of death was all too clear to me: Muller Courts.

Finally, I registered McGrath’s words. I looked at him. “Pardon?”

“There was another before him,” he said. “Nobody connected the two until they assigned a new detective to the case.”

He didn’t need to tell me that he was the detective in question; I knew it from his proprietary mien. I sound the same way when I talk about my artists.

“Back then we didn’t have computers. You kept everything on paper, and that made it easy to miss connections, even with a lot of overlap.” He began digging through the file box, removed another large trove of evidence marked STRONG, H. “This kid, Henry Strong, disappeared about a month before Eddie Cardinale, on the Fourth of July. His family was having a party, and he wanders off. Witnesses were all drunk, and nobody can tell us a damn thing, except an uncle, who reports seeing a colored guy in a leather jacket. They never found a body.”

“Victor Cracke wasn’t colo— black.”

“You said in the article that you didn’t know what he looked like.”

“I know he was white,” I said. “That much I know.”

McGrath shrugged. “All right. Frankly I think the guy who told us that was just trying to make himself feel useful. We never considered it a fruitful line of inquiry.”

I said nothing.

“Do you want to see the rest?” he asked.

I asked how many more he meant by the rest.

“Three.”

I took a deep breath and shook my head.

“You don’t?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

He seemed surprised. “If you say so.” He closed Henry Strong’s file and set it back in the box. “Did you have a chance to bring that drawing?”

At McGrath’s behest, I had brought a color photocopy of the central panel, the one with the five-pointed star and the dancing Cherubs. The original I’d left behind; no reason to overhandle an already delicate piece of art.

“I forgot it,” I lied.

If I imagined myself protecting Victor, I thought wrong; lying could only make him—and me—seem more suspect. Immediately I saw the futility of what I’d done, but what could I do at that point? Take it back? Before he could express disappointment I asked for a glass of water.

“In the fridge,” he said.

I went to the kitchen and stood in front of the open refrigerator. The house had no air-conditioning and I let the cool roll over me as I absent-mindedly touched packages of sliced ham, a half-eaten block of white cheddar, a jar of kosher dills. On the door, adjacent to a carton of OJ and a plastic pitcher full of water, I saw more medications, amber bottles labeled KEEP REFRIGERATED. What did he have? I vowed to be brave enough to ask him.

But McGrath got the jump on me, and when I returned I almost coughed out my water at the sight of him spreading out photos of the other three victims, lining them up like a team portrait: Victor’s Victims. The phrase flashed through my head and I let out a startled laugh.

“I …” I began but found I had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. What was there to say? Every one of the murdered boys was a Cherub, a perfect five for five.

“All strangled, all within seven miles of one another. If you include Henry Strong, that’s starting on July 4, 1966. The last one happens in the fall of 67. Well,” he said, “so far as I know. I’d be willing to bet there’s others that match the MO, later on or in other places. What do you think?”

“Pardon?” I said.

“Do you think I should cast a wider net?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Fair enough. Doesn’t hurt to solicit an opinion, right?” He laughed, again dissolving in coughs.

“Right.” I felt uneasy, as though McGrath was softening me up before springing some trap: the damning revelation that I had Victor Cracke hidden in my walk-in closet.

Which, of course, I did not. I had nothing to feel guilty about.

“I wish I could be more helpful,” I said.

“There’s nothing you know about. The places he liked to hang out, maybe?”

“I have his address,” I said, before correcting, “where he used to live. He left long before I came on the scene.”

“Where was that, anyhow? The article said in Queens but didn’t specify where.” “It did. Muller Courts.”

“Did it?” McGrath picked up the Times and slid his reading glasses on. “I must be going senile.” He read. “Indeed. I stand corrected. Weeell”—he tossed the paper aside and picked up the map of Queens—”we can probably guess the punchline.” With a pen he dotted the locations of the other three bodies. They fanned out neatly from Cracke’s neighborhood, as close as a half-mile and as distant as Forest Hills.

“The last one,” he said. “Abie Kahn.” He picked up a photo of a boy in a yarmulke. Without referring to the file, he told me the date of the disappearance: September 29, 1967. “A Friday afternoon. His father’s a handyman, runs ahead to the synagogue to fix a leak in the rabbi’s office before the Sabbath services. Abie is messing around in the house, his mother finally yells at him to get moving, he’s going to be late. Nobody’s on the street at that time—they’re either already in the synagogue or at home getting dinner ready. Abie sets out on foot and never gets there. He was ten.”

At that point I began to wonder if McGrath knew I was lying about the drawing—if he meant for the macabre lineup to plumb my conscience.

“That’s my daughter,” he said, following my gaze, which had until that moment been out of focus. The daughter in question, her picture adjacent to the kitchen, a waify brunette with a studious expression, did not resemble McGrath so much as echo his intensity. On the other side of the doorway hung another photo, also of a woman, similarly shaped but more severe, older than the first by five or six years.

“My other daughter.”

I nodded.

“You have kids?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“There’s time,” he said.

“I don’t want children,” I said.

“Well, all right.”

The crash of the ocean; Springsteen on the radio; gleeful shrieks.

“My car is waiting for me,” I said.

McGrath stood. Rising from his chair left him out of breath, rheumy and sallow and smiling like Bela Lugosi.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said.

He stopped at the edge of the porch, explaining that if he went down the stairs I’d have to carry him back up, and that didn’t make much sense, now did it?

I agreed it didn’t.

“You’ll let me know,” he said, shaking my hand, “if you turn up anything.”

“Sure thing.”

“You have my number.”

I touched my breast pocket, where I’d placed the Post-it he’d given me.

“All right, then,” he said. “Drive safe.”

More time had passed than I realized, and if the driver had in fact decided to come back for me, he was gone by the time I found my way out of the maze and into the cooperative’s parking lot. The pub had swelled with happy-hour patrons, and I encountered a host of curious stares as I entered and asked the bartender for the number of a local car service.

“You can try,” she said, “but they don’t like to work too much.”

Thirty minutes later I called the dispatch again, wondering where the fuck my car was. The man at the other end did not seem inclined to help me, so I went back into the bar and got the number for a second service, who told me they had no cars available.

By that time I had been waiting for over an hour, and my options had dwindled to two: get to the subway—itself a good five miles away—or call a friend. I tried Marilyn, who did not pick up. Nor did any of my other friends who owned cars, friends I could count on one hand. I called Ruby, who offered to get in a cab, drive out, and bring me back; but rush hour meant the outbound portion of the trip alone would take more than an hour. I told her not to go anywhere yet and walked back to McGrath’s house.

This time I found it myself, although I did make several wrong turns. I knocked and footsteps came swiftly, making me wonder if he had been malingering to draw sympathy.

“Yes?” The woman who answered wore a gray pantsuit, a black cotton blouse, simple silver earrings in the shape of fleurs-de-lis. I recognized her as the younger daughter, much better looking in real life than in her photo, which made her seem like the Captain of the Debate Team. Had she been there the entire time?

“Can I help you?”

“I’m Ethan,” I said.

“Can I help you, Ethan?”

“I was just here,” I said. “With your father. My car didn’t pick me up. Would you mind if I came in for a moment to ask him for—I need a number, so I can—I can get back home.” I paused to appreciate the inanity of the preceding paragraph. Not lost on her, I noticed.

“I live in Manhattan,” I added.

From inside, McGrath called, “Sammy?”

“Is that him? Tell him I’m here. Ethan Muller.”

The woman gave me another quick up-and-down. “Hold on,” she said, and closed the door in my face. A short while later she returned, smiling apologetically. “Sorry. He hates solicitors.”

(Did I really look like a Jehovah’s Witness?)

“I don’t know what it is about Breezy Point,” she said, allowing me inside, “but we have a hard time getting taxis out here. They think it’s in Jersey or something. I’m Samantha, by the way.”

“Ethan.”

“There’s a neighborhood guy who drives a cab.” She dialed for me and handed me the phone.

“Thank you.” I let it ring ten times. “I don’t think he’s picking up.”

“Sammy.” McGrath’s voice crawled down the stairs. He sounded half dead.

“Coming.” To me: “If you can wait a few minutes I’ll drive you to the subway.”

I told her that would be fine and sat down at the dining-room table.

Samantha went into the kitchen. I heard her draining a pot into the sink. She emerged with her hands in a dishtowel and set a glass of water in front of me before proceeding upstairs.

Alone, I went into the kitchen. Samantha didn’t seem to be much of a cook. A mop of spaghetti dripped from a colander in the sink. Nearby sat an unopened jar of marinara sauce. Saddened by the sorry state of her dinner—or was it his, or both of theirs?—I poured the sauce into the empty pan and put it over heat.

Upstairs, I heard Samantha arguing with her father, the words indistinct but the tone clear enough: pleading, and failing. Amazing how much you can tell about a song without understanding the lyrics; the frustration she sang broke my heart a bit, and mine is a heart not easily broken, not when it comes to fathers.

As I listened to her, the same thought kept occurring to me: if I were her, I would’ve left a long time ago—had I bothered to go upstairs at all. I thought about my own father, sending me imperious messages via Tony Wexler. Your father wants. Your father would like. Your father would prefer. What a nightmare my life would be if my family couldn’t afford intermediaries.

Upstairs, I heard Samantha say, “Dammit, Dad.”

The sauce began to bubble. I stirred it and lowered the flame.

She came downstairs half an hour later, apologizing. “He’s in a mood.” Then, noticing the saucepan, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s better warm.”

“He says he’s not hungry.” She rubbed her forehead. “He’s very stubborn.”

I nodded.

She stayed in that position for a moment longer: heel of hand ironing her brow, her fingers curled like a shell. She had a lovely pouting mouth, and her cheeks were brushed with freckles subdued by office work. Did she run a shipping center? Was she in publishing? Administrative assistant at an investment bank? I decided I wasn’t giving her enough credit. She was, I decided, the kind of girl who had made good on her parents’ hard work. Probably she was a social worker… .

As I watched her calm herself down, the similarity between her and her father sharpened. What I had earlier interpreted as intensity I now understood as stoicism. Upstairs, her father began to cough and there was almost nothing on her face—just the slightest strengthening of resolve, the slightest narrowing of the eyes and tightened jaw. She was hardly the most glamorous woman I knew, but standing there, unconcerned with what I thought of her predicament, she had an unvarnished quality that I found oddly attractive. I didn’t meet many girls-next-door.

She said, “I’ll take you to the train.”

We walked to the parking lot. Her Toyota had a police placard in the windshield.

“You’re a cop,” I said.

She shook her head. “DA.”

During the short ride we fell into conversation. She laughed—a big, snorty laugh—when I told her about her father’s first phone call.

“Oh boy,” she said. “That thing again, huh. Well, good luck with it.”

“With what.”

“He said you were helping him out.”

“That’s what he told you?”

“I take it you don’t agree.”

“I’d like to help him,” I said. “I can’t. I spent a fair amount of time explaining that to him.”

“He seemed to think you were very helpful.”

“If he says so.”

She smiled. “Sometimes,” she said, “he gets ideas.”

At the subway I thanked her for the ride.

“Thank you for coming out,” she said.

“You’re welcome, although I really don’t know that I’ve done anything.”

“You’ve given him something to do,” she said. “You don’t know how much that’s worth.”

7

t had been a long time since I’d ridden the subway. Growing up, public transport was off-limits; I took cabs or cars or, when accompanied by Tony, a 1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith chauffeured by a silent Belgian named Thom. I can’t call Tony’s fear of the MTA entirely illegitimate. Think about what New York City was like back in the 1980s, and then put me—an underweight white preppie with anger issues—on one of those filthy, ungoverned trains, and you have real reason for concern. Of course, blanket restrictions on my freedom made me all the more likely to buy a token or, if I felt particularly rebellious, jump a turnstile. Viva la revolution.p>

The ride home took ninety minutes, plenty of time for me to think about my conversation with McGrath and its implications for me, thoughts I shared with Marilyn the next night over dinner at Tabla.

Her initial reaction was to giggle.

“You took the subway?”

“That wasn’t the point of the story.”

“Poor baby.” She stroked my cheek. “Is your tender flesh sore? Can I order you up a poultice?”

“I’ve taken the subway before.”

“You’re so easy. You might as well have a big button on your chest. ‘Push me.’ “

“Did you listen to anything I just told you?”

“I listened.” “And?”

“And I’m not surprised. You will recall, darlin, that I warned you. I said it on opening night: your artist is a baddie, you can tell by his relish in depicting pain.”

“The fact that he drew pictures of the victims means nothing,” I said. “He could have seen them in the paper and copied them.”

“Did they print them in the papers?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But whatever the case may be, the piece as a whole is enormous. It contains all sorts of things, all sorts of crazy scenes, and plenty of them are recognizable. We’re not ascribing Yankee Stadium to him, but it’s in the drawing.”

“Is it?”

“Either it or something that looks a lot like it.”

“So, there you go,” she said. “There’s your defense.”

“It’s not a defense—”

“You know, I love that you’re solving a murder mystery. That’s what we need around here, a good murder mystery.”

“I’m not solving anything.”

“Personally, I can think of a few people I’d like to kill.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Or have killed.” She took a huge swig of wine. “I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do it myself. I’m more of a big-picture kind of a gal, wouldn’t you agree?”

I said nothing, swabbing my bread in olive oil until it disintegrated.

“Stop brooding, please,” Marilyn said.

“Do you really think he killed them?”

“Who cares?”

“I do.”

“Why in the world would you care about that?”

“Put yourself in my position,” I said.

“All right,” she said. She got up and made me switch chairs with her, put a finger to her temple. “Mm. No. I still don’t care.”

“I’m representing a murderer.”

“Did you know that when you took him on?”

“No, but—”

“Would knowing that have stopped you?” she asked.

I had to think about that one. Even if Victor Cracke was a child-killer, he would hardly be the first artist to misbehave. The greatest outsider artist of all time, Adolf Wolfli, spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital after being arrested for molesting girls, one as young as three. Taken as a group, nonoutsider artists don’t fare much better on the Model Citizen Scale. They do wretched things to themselves and to others: drink themselves to death, shoot themselves, stab themselves, destroy their work, destroy their families. Caravaggio killed a man.

How surprised could I be that Cracke—by most descriptions completely asocial—had a worm-eaten soul? Wasn’t that the point? Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a-or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic. Gauguin famously called civilization a sickness. He also said that art is either plagiarism or revolution. And nobody wants to be remembered as a plagiarist. Starving painters console themselves by thinking of a day in the distant future when their crazy behavior is admired for being ahead of its time.

But more important, I had divorced Victor Cracke the person from the work. It therefore didn’t matter how many people he’d killed. In appropriating the art, I made it my own, transforming it into something larger and more significant and more valuable than he had ever intended, just like Warhol did when he elevated soup cans to iconic status. That Cracke had physically created the drawings seemed to me a rather minor quibble. I owned his sins no more than Andy owned the sins of the Campbell’s corporation. That I even paused to consider the question of morality made me feel incredibly stodgy and retrograde. I could hear Jean Dubuffet rolling around in his grave, flabbergasted and scorning me in French for swallowing bourgeois norms.

“Look at it this way,” Marilyn said. “Whether he did or did not kill anyone, the very suggestion ups his mystique. Spin it right and you have a new selling angle.”

“Bars on the gallery door?”

“Too kitschy.”

“I was joking.”

“I’m not. You have to regain your sense of playfulness, Ethan. This whole experience is making you very serious, and it’s bad for you.”

“What’s playful about rape and murder?”

“Oh, God, please. That’s just another way of saying sex and violence, which is just another way of saying mass-market entertainment. Besides, let’s remember that you don’t know the truth yet. He could have seen the pictures in the newspaper, like you said. Go investigate or something.” She smiled. “Ooh, I just love that word. Don’t worry, this’ll be fun.”

I WENT TO THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY and spent four hours with microfiche. Not knowing what kind of news Victor Cracke preferred, I checked the Times and all the tabloids for the weeks surrounding the murders, whose dates I obtained from McGrath.

“Any word on that drawing?” he asked when I called.

“Which drawing.”

“You said you’d send me a copy.” “Right.”

But before I sent him anything, I wanted to see what I turned up on my own.

And what I turned up confirmed my gut instinct: all five of the victims’ pictures had ended up in one paper or another. The similarity between the newspaper portraits and the Cherubs struck me as awfully close. Not just faces but positions and expressions. I made copies and took them back to the gallery for comparison. Lo and behold, they matched. Not perfectly— perhaps a little artistic license?—but well enough that I felt confident reporting to Marilyn that I’d found the originals.

“Aren’t we resourceful?”

I was grateful to her for sparing me the obvious follow-up question; I knew she was thinking it, because I was, too: why them?

Plenty of people get killed in New York. Plenty of photos make the pages of its public records. In the first two weeks of August 1966 alone I counted three other murders—and those were just the ones gooey enough to make the news. But those boys had become the literal center of Victor’s universe, the impetus for a life’s work. Why?

And another question poked at me: how had he connected the crimes? Not all of the articles referred to one another. Henry Strong wasn’t described as a murder, because at the time of his disappearance, no body had been found. To know that both he and Eddie Cardinale had been the work of one person, and that the same person had gone on to kill three more boys, a reader would have to be able to match up the victim profiles as well as similarities in the cases: the fact that all the boys had been strangled, for example. A person casually leafing through the paper would be unlikely to take notice unless he was particularly astute—or already aware of the common thread.

Either of those conditions potentially applied to Victor, whom I imagined sitting alone in his cell of a room, afraid of going outside, brimming with conspiracy theories, tracing connections between the boys and himself, the boys and the federal government… . Maybe, by putting the boys around his central star, he hoped to insulate himself from whatever had taken them: a kind of burnt offering to a faceless killer … rocking himself to sleep, clutching his talismans, haunted by the notion that he could be the next victim … no matter that he was not ten years old, that he never left the building … no matter … he is frightened, so frightened …

Far-fetched? Absolutely. But I badly wanted to believe he was innocent.

Now I have another confession to make: while it’s true I wanted to protect Victor, this had more to do with me than with him. I felt for him, yes;

wanted to shield his good name, yes. But my most pressing concern was that he become too real. When he had been nothing but a name, I could exert my creative power over the art, control how people read it. The more he made his presence felt, however—the realer he became—the more he excluded me. And I didn’t especially like the Victor who had begun to emerge: a frantic scribbling pervert, a cloistered maniac. Pure evil isn’t very interesting; it has no depth. Frankly, it conflicted with my vision.

Not to mention that I was worried about the impact on sales. Who’d want to buy a drawing by a serial killer?

AS IT TURNS OUT, a lot of people. My phone began ringing off the hook. Collectors I knew, others I knew of but had never met, and an assortment of unsavory types began leaving me messages or showing up to talk to me about Victor Cracke. At first I was pleased at the spike in interest, but after the first few calls I understood that they were less interested in the art than the sordid tale behind it. Apparently, having “sociopathic sex offender/ murderer” on your resume was worth more than an MFA from RISD.

Is it true he raped them, one man wanted to know. Because he had just opened up the perfect wall space in his dining room.

I knew things had gotten out of hand when I started hearing from Hollywood. A well-known director of independent films called to ask if I would loan some of the pieces out for use as a backdrop in a music video.

I called Marilyn.

“Oh, relax,” she said, “I’m just having a little fun.”

“Please stop spreading rumors.”

“It’s called creating buzz.”

“What did you tell people?”

“As much as you told me. If folks get overexcited, that says much more about them than about you, me, or the art.”

“You’re letting the story get away from me,” I said.

“I didn’t realize you had a copyright.”

“You know as well as I do the importance of managing the discourse, and—”

“That’s precisely what I’m trying to demonstrate, darlin: you need to stop trying to manage the discourse. Loosen up.”

“Even if,” I said, “even if that’s true, I don’t need you spreading rumors.”

“I told you, I—”

“Marilyn. Marilyn. Shhhhh. Stop. Just stop doing it, okay? Whatever you want to call it, knock it off.” And I hung up on her, much angrier than I’d realized.

From across the room, Nat gave me a look.

“She told everyone that he was a pedophile.”

He snickered.

“That’s not funny.”

“Well,” said Ruby, “it kind of is.”

I threw up my hands and walked to my computer.

ABOUT A WEEK AFTER MY MEETING with McGrath, I still hadn’t sent him a copy of the drawing. When he called, I had Ruby and Nat stonewall him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Muller isn’t available right now. Can I take a message? Right. We have your number here already. I’m sure he’ll call you when he has a free moment. Thank you.” I felt nervous putting him off; I didn’t want to give the impression that I was scared. I wasn’t. Let me make that plain: McGrath didn’t scare me at all. He was old, he was retired, and he wanted to get Victor, not me; to him I was nothing more than a source of information. And since I had nothing to be ashamed of, not really, I might have decided to play along.

Just because he hadn’t threatened me, though, that didn’t mean I had to go out of my way to help him. I decided that if he wanted to look at the drawing he could come to the gallery, like everyone else.

All that changed when I opened the mail that afternoon. Tucked in with the bills and postcards was a plain white envelope bearing a New York postmark, addressed to E. Muller, the Muller Gallery, fourth floor, 567 West Twenty-fifth Street, NY, NY 10001.

I opened it up. Inside was a letter. It said, five hundred times,

STOP

The handwriting—cramped, uniform, shaky—I recognized as I might my own. Although it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to notice that the very same handwriting hung all around the gallery, calling out the names of rivers, roads, nations, landmarks—thousand of examples by which to confirm that Victor Cracke had written to me.

And Solomon Mueller rebegat himself, Solomon Muller.

And Solomon Muller begat daughters, who married into other firms.

And his brother Bernard, lazy as always, wed late and had no children. His chief interests—horses, parties, tobacco—kept him occupied until he died at the ripe old age of ninety-one, having outlived all three of his industrious brothers.

And the third brother, Adolph, begat two boys, Morris and Arthur, neither of whom proved financially adept. At first Solomon extended them a long leash. “People must make mistakes to learn,” he told Adolph. But soon enough the elders came to understand that the only lesson the boys had taken from their mistakes was that they could make mistakes without consequence. Adolph turned his hair white trying to find them jobs worthy of their surnames yet that did not imperil the family fortune.

And the youngest brother, Simon, begat Walter, who became like a son to Solomon, and who inherited the crown when his cousins proved worthless. Walter had an old-world quality to him, a refinement and slyness that spoke of the noble European roots the Mullers now boasted.

That Solomon had come penniless, that he had begged seed money, that he had pushed a cart for ten thousand miles—all effaced from the family history. Everyone came together to decide that no, contrary to popular opinion, the Mullers came from regal stock. They hired a genealogist, in whose hands Jewish paupers (Hayyim, Avrohom, Yonason) became German aristocracy (Heinrich, Alfred, Johann). A coat of arms appeared on the company letterhead. Churches were joined, clubs established. Loans to the Union cause, extended by Solomon, came due, leading to dinners eaten at the White House, the signing of lucrative government contracts, the passing of motions on the Senate floor, declaring the Mullers First Citizens of the United States of America.

Isaac Singer spoke the truth. You became your claim.

And Walter, fashioned in his uncle’s form, begat Louis.

And Louis begat consternation when he was discovered receiving fellatio from a kitchen boy. What was wrong with the scullery maids? They had suited Bernard just fine. What was wrong with women, with the debutantes falling all over themselves for the handsome young millionaire, swooning at their cotillions, competing to see who could stand longest in his presence, by silent consensus electing him the most eligible bachelor in Manhattan—if not the entire Eastern Seaboard—what was wrong with them? What was wrong with women? Daughters of partners to strengthen bonds, daughters of competitors to forge new ones, daughters of foreign dignitaries and of city politicians and of state senators, daughters from the old country; what was wrong with any of them? What was wrong with a woman, a polite and pretty and proper and sturdy-hipped heir-bearing woman, what was wrong? What? What in the world could be wrong with women?

Louis got married.

EARLY EVENING, APRIL 23, 1918. Louis walks the halls of the house on Fifth, a gift from his parents on the occasion of his wedding two years ago. On the day he and Bertha moved in, his mother said to him, “Fill every room,” and since then all he has heard are complaints. One would think they are on death’s door, so crazed are they for grandchildren.

Fill every room. A preposterous idea, that. He’d have to have a harem.

He’d have to be Genghis Khan. Five towering stories of wood, marble, glass, gold, and gemstones, done in the French Gothic style, groined and soaring and drafty—the house on Fifth will never be full. Every year they burn thousands of pounds of coal just trying to keep the place warm enough for human habitation.

All that stone makes the screaming echo like the very depths of hell.

Bertha despises the house. She has told Louis that she’d rather live in a mausoleum. He doubts that this is literally true, although the family resting place is in fine taste, and he assumes that fewer things break there. Homeownership holds not the slightest appeal to him, what with its tendency to disappoint: a ruptured pipe, a buckling floor. Such petty disasters would not concern the dead. Let them live on Fifth; he and Bertha will move to Salem Hills!

At least he goes to work during the day. Bertha, left alone, has had to hire staff in order to prevent herself from going mad. An average day at the Louis Muller household finds twenty-seven full-time employees, every one of them screened personally by the mistress of the house. To those unfamiliar with Louis’s proclivities, Bertha’s requirements must seem entirely backward: they must be women or men old enough to have lost their looks.

She got what she wanted. She always does.

On April 23, 1918, the day staff have all been sent home early, and those who reside permanently at the house ordered to take the evening off—leaving a silence unlike anything Louis has heard since their first, terrible night alone together, a silence that turns a ticking clock into a falling axe; magnifies, too, his anticipation, as it is only between screams that the silence prevails. A spring shower has kicked up, smudging the view from the third floor, where he stands and waits for another.

There she goes.

What sounds! Louis admires his wife’s energy. He supposes that she has proven as appropriate a companion as he could have hoped for. She does not waste time, money, or words. When she became pregnant she stopped demanding that he come to her room at night; she even threw him a bone, in the form of a new sous chef. She had achieved her goal. “One child,” she told him. “We will be happy with whatever we get.”

Already he understands that even a single child will work many changes. Every year since he was a boy Louis has gone—first with his parents, and then with his wife—to take the waters at Bad Pappelheim. When he told his mother that Bertha had canceled their upcoming summer tour, that she demanded he stay and instead accompany her and the child-to-be to the house in Bar Harbor, he expected a show of maternal support.

Instead, she defected to Bertha’s side. “Naturally she won’t be ready to sail. We’ll all stay. We’ll all go together; your father will love the idea.”

Big changes coming, seismic changes.

Again she screams, causing him to tear the delicate antimacassar he has been kneading between his fingers. He lets it flutter to the floor and paces the room, massaging his earlobes, which is what he does in moments of crisis.

He should be grateful, he knows. His shame could have been much worse. Nobody raised a finger to him, nobody shouted. They merely took him into a room and introduced him to a girl with wavy brown hair and a beauty mark underneath her left eye. Pretty, he knew, the way girls are meant to be. She had a sleepy smile, as though forever sinking into a warm bath, and appeared unaware of the proceedings. All an act, he later discovered; nobody noticed more, took more precise social notes, than Bertha.

They have that in common, the fight to maintain an outward appearance. He must look the Muller man, and she must look a normal woman— when in fact she could run the company with one arm.

The company. At least he has not let his father down in that regard. They have different styles, he and his father, but they work well together. In his middle age, Walter has become something of a fat cat, his obsession with destroying unionism bordering on the pathological. On several occasions, he and Roosevelt have exchanged words. “I have never liked the man. He reminds me of a child in need of a spanking.”

Louis, on the other hand, prefers to conciliate. You most often get your way by allowing others to believe that they are getting theirs.

The screams grow more frequent. A good sign? Or a bad one? Is she near the end? Childbirth mystifies him. Pregnancy, too. He hardly saw her the entire time; he would leave for work in the morning before she had risen, come home and find that she had already gone to bed. Each time he saw her she seemed to have doubled in size, so enormous by the end that she seemed not a person but an egg with legs.

Dear God, listen to her.

Should she sound like that? He paces. He might not love her in the way people assume, but nobody could listen to that sort of yowling without feeling a twinge of sympathy. The doctor has sequestered her on the fourth floor, along with a trio of nurses and two of her most trusted maids, two unrelated women who look identical to Louis’s eye. He never addresses them directly, because he can never remember their names, Delia and … Delilah. As if they were not difficult enough to tell apart! Too many names to keep track of, in general. Why is life so complicated? Many days he does not want to talk to anyone but simply to crawl back into bed and sleep.

The screaming goes on for another hour and then, just as Louis has begun to adjust to the noise—as he begins to wish they had kept at least the chef around, for his hunger is becoming unbearable—the house goes dead still.

His heart hiccups. A wild thought: she is dead. Bertha is dead, and he is again a bachelor. The best of times, the worst of times. He will be free, blissfully free—but only until they force him to remarry. And they will do that as quickly as possible. They will find him some pink flower, an innocent ten years younger than he, a girl who knows nothing of his history; who will perceive him as slain by grief; who will want to attend to him, soothe him; who will strive to supplant Bertha’s ghost by climbing into his bed every single night … Every single night! Oh, God!

His chest aches. He will have to produce another heir. He wishes she would scream again, just to let him know that she’s alive. Scream, for God’s sake. Scream and I’ll know you’ve gotten your child. He might not love Bertha but he could do worse. More than that—more than that: he has a sort of affection for her. If she died he would be stuck in that house, all alone, incapable of giving orders. Bertha runs the ship. Bertha knows everyone’s name and how much they are paid; it is fear of Bertha that prevents them from running off with all the valuables. He holds her in high esteem. She is the Prime Mover. He might even love her a little, as one loves a longtime friend. He does not want her to die, even as visions of liberation whirl through his mind; the stress of clashing emotions speeds up his pacing, the enormous brass coat of arms above the fireplace winking at him malignantly with each circuit. Scream, for God’s sake, scream!

Unable to stomach any more, he barges up the stairs and through the door to the designated suite. Beyond the sitting room is a bedroom they have covered in heavy sheets of rubber and canvas. He saw them setting up several weeks ago and wondered what in the world could possibly require such precautions. Did the baby explode out?

The bedroom door is locked but inside they are murmuring. Louis pounds.

“Hello! Hello, what’s happening!”

The murmuring ceases.

From within, the doctor says, “Mr. Muller?”

“What’s happening with my wife.”

The doctor says something Louis cannot make out.

“Bertha?” Louis has had enough. He rattles the knob and the door swings out abruptly, a nurse barreling into him, ushering him away from the threshold. He tries to see past her but a second nurse has already shut the door.

“I demand to know what’s happening in there.”

“Please come this way, sir.”

“Did you hear me? Tell me—”

The nurse takes him by the arm and pulls him from the room.

“What are you doing.”

“Sir, it’s best for the mother and child if you came with me.”

“I—I will not—” He wrests away. “What was all that screaming about? Answer me or I’ll put you out into the street.”

“The birth was normal, sir.”

“Then what was all that screaming?”

“That’s normal, sir.”

“Then why did it stop like that? Where’s Bertha?”

“She’s resting, sir. She had a spell.”

“What do you mean a spell?”

“Labor can be trying, sir.” She has no expression but Louis feels distinctly mocked.

“I want to see her,” he says.

“Please, sir, why don’t you return downstairs, and when the doctor feels it safe—”

“Nonsense. She’s my wife, it’s my house, and I intend to go where I please.” He starts to move forward but the nurse blocks his path.

“It’s better if you let her rest, sir.”

“You’ve made your position clear. Now move.”

“I can ask the doctor to come speak with you, if you’d like.”

“Right away.”

She bows her head and turns to go, leaving Louis in the middle of the hall.

Five minutes later, the doctor emerges. He has done his best to tidy up, but Louis is still aghast to see flecks of blood on his collar.

“Congratulations are in order, Mr. Muller. You have a new daughter.”

A daughter? Unacceptable. He needs a son. He wants to tell the doctor to try again. “Where’s Bertha.”

“She’s resting.”

“I need to speak with her.”

“Your wife has undergone a terrific ordeal,” says the doctor. His hands are trembling. “It’s best if we let her rest.”

“Has something happened to her?”

“Not at all, sir. As I said, she’s tired, but otherwise perfectly healthy.”

Louis is no fool. He knows something is wrong. He repeats his question, and the doctor again assures him. But those shaking hands … A new thought occurs to him.

“Is something wrong with the baby?”

The doctor opens his mouth but Louis interrupts him.

“I want to see her. Now. Take me to her.”

Again the doctor hesitates. “Come with me.”

As they pass through the sitting room, Louis thinks about what will happen if the baby dies. They must try again—but wouldn’t they have to do that, regardless? A girl will not do. If the baby dies, he will be sad most of all for Bertha, for whom the entire process—conception to delivery— has been a project undertaken virtually singlehandedly. Having invested so much hope and desire in one moment, she will be inconsolable until she has a real, live child at her breast. He owes her that much. He promises himself that if the baby dies, he will put up a brave face and get her pregnant again as soon as possible.

The doctor is talking but Louis has not paid attention: “… such things happen.”

What is he talking about, such things. Stillbirths aren’t rare. Louis knows that. His mother had one before him. Out with it, he wants to tell the doctor. Be a man.

A second bedroom branches from the sitting room. The maid—for the life of him, Louis cannot recall which one—has a bundle on her lap, and her rocking chair creaks soothingly. A flash of red flesh; a brief cry; it’s alive.

He did not expect to feel joy. He has not prepared himself. Without having seen the child’s face he knows that he will love her, and that this love will be different from any of his previous loves—all of which have revolved around his own gratification. What he feels now is a crushing need to protect.

The doctor takes the bundle from the maid. Louis almost leaps to snatch the baby away. His child. He doesn’t want her held by those shaky hands.

The doctor shows Louis how to support the head, resting the bundle in the crook of Louis’s arm. Her face is still mostly obscured by a fold of cloth.

“I can’t see her,” he says.

Looking queasy, the doctor peels back the cloth. “You must understand,” he says. “We have no means of predicting.”

Louis looks at his daughter and is confused. They appear to have given him a Chinese baby. Bertha has been unfaithful? He does not understand. His daughter has a small mouth, and her tongue protrudes in a sloppy way … and her eyes. They are narrow and slanted, the irises spotted with white. The doctor speaks of mental defects and therapies of various sorts, words Louis hears but does not understand.

“As I said, we cannot be sure why such things occur, as they are impossible for science to predict, yet, and unfortunately I cannot offer you a definitive course of treatment. Very little success has resulted thus far, although much research remains to …”

Louis does not understand any of this babble, does not understand talk of “mongoloidism,” does not understand why the maid has begun to weep quietly. He understands only that he has a new cause for shame, and that some things cannot be hidden, not even in America.

8

s soon as I saw the letter, I called McGrath. He said, “You remember how to get here?”

This time I did some advance planning and hired a car and driver for the following day. It took me the better part of an afternoon to unmount and pack up the journals, which I took along with photocopies of the Cherubs and the newspaper portraits that I’d dug up. I couldn’t think of anything else that would help except the letter itself, and that I had in a large Ziploc bag, imagining that McGrath would whip out a fingerprint kit and plug the information into a database yielding Cracke’s location and life history.

Instead he just chuckled. He put the bag with the letter on the table and stared at its tight command: STOP. After a few moments he said, “I don’t know why I’m still reading this. I’m pretty sure I know what’s going to happen next.”

“What do I do?”

“Do?”

“With that.”

“Well, you could take it to the police.”

“You are the police.”

“Ex,” he said. “Sure. You can take it to the police if you want. I’ll call ahead for you, if you’d like. Let me save you some time: they’ll won’t be

able to do a thing. You don’t know who he is, you don’t really know that he wrote it, and even if you had those two nailed, he hasn’t broken the law.” He smiled like a death’s-head. “Anybody can send a letter like this, it’s in the Constitution.”

“Then why am I here?”

“You tell me.”

“You implied that you had something to offer me,” I said. “I did?”

“You asked if I remembered how to get here.”

“So I did,” he said.

I waited. “And?”

“And, well. Now that you’re here, I’m just as confused as you are.”

We both looked at the page.

STOP STOP STOP

The same tendency toward repetition that had previously fascinated me now seemed repellent; where before I saw passion I now read malice. Art or threat? Victor Cracke’s letter could very well go up on my gallery wall. Were I so inclined, I could probably turn it around to Kevin Hollister for a nice profit.

“I’d hold on to it,” said McGrath. “In case anything gets more serious, you want to have it on file, to show the cops.”

I said, “Plus you never know what it might be worth one day.”

McGrath smiled. “Now, what about that drawing.”

I handed the photocopy of the Cherubs to McGrath. While he studied it I noticed that the number of pill bottles on the dining room table seemed to have grown in the space of a week. McGrath, as well, had changed: he’d lost weight, and his skin had acquired an unhealthy sheen. I could make out the prescriptions on some of the bottles, but not knowing anything about medicine, I couldn’t draw any conclusions except that he seemed to be in a lot of pain.

“That’s Henry Strong.” He lightly touched the Cherubs. “That’s Elton LaRae.”

“I know,” I said. I took out the photocopies of the microfiche and showed him the pictures. “This is where he got them from.” I didn’t mention my misgivings about this theory, but McGrath leapt on me right away.

“I have no idea,” I admitted when he asked how Cracke would be able to connect Henry Strong with the others.

“We also have to ask ourselves why he chose to draw these particular people, out of everyone in the paper.”

“I thought about that,” I said. “You have to bear in mind that he drew literally thousands and thousands of faces. There could be all sorts of real people in his works. The presence of these people only proves that he was thorough.”

“But this is panel number one,” said McGrath. “They were important.”

“That’s subjective,” I said.

“Who said I was objective?”

It felt bizarre arguing with him: me, the art dealer, pressing for a clearer standard of truth; him, the policeman, claiming his critical faculties were sharp enough to draw inferences about the intent of the artist. Strange, too, that he had anticipated my asking certain questions. I felt a weird sort of mental synergy, and I think he did, too, because we stopped talking then and sat looking at the page.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “he could really draw.”

I nodded.

He put his finger on another of the Cherubs. “Alex Jendrzejewski. Ten years old. His mother sends him down to the store before dinnertime to buy some groceries. We find a bottle of milk cracked open on the corner of Forty-fourth and Newtown. It’d snowed that afternoon, so we picked up some tire tracks, as well as a footprint. No witnesses.” He rubbed his head. “That was end of January 1967, and this time the papers picked up the story and ran with it. ‘Are Your Children Safe?’ and that sort of jazz. He must’ve got spooked, because he didn’t do anything for a long time. Or maybe he wasn’t a cold-weather sort of guy.”

“There are fewer children out on the street in the winter.”

“You’re right. That could be it, too.” He pointed to another Cherub. “Abie Kahn, I told you about him, he was the fifth.”

“No witnesses.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. I was rereading the case file, and I saw that there was someone we talked to, a neighborhood type, one of these women who sit out on their porch all day long. She remembered seeing a strange car go past.”

“That’s it?”

He nodded. “She told us she knew what everyone drove. Like she made a point of knowing. And this car didn’t fit in the neighborhood.”

Had Victor owned a car? I didn’t think so, and told McGrath.

“That in itself doesn’t mean anything. He could have stolen one.”

“I can’t see him being capable of breaking into a car.”

“You can’t see him at all. You don’t know anything about him. Can you see him being capable of this?” He gestured to the Cherubs.

I said nothing. I knew some of what McGrath was telling me about the victims; I had read the articles in the paper. The critical difference between seeing a story in print and getting it from him directly was the fatherly devotion that came through as he talked.

“That kid, LaRae—him I felt bad for. I felt bad for all of them, but this kid … He’s a solitary type, likes to take long walks by himself. I don’t think he had too many friends. You can tell from the way he’s smiling that he doesn’t like to have his picture taken. He was the oldest of the bunch, twelve, but small for his age. He had a rough time at school because of his size, and because he’s got a single mother, black. You can imagine the kind of ribbing the poor kid took. And the mother, God, it broke my goddamned heart. White husband runs off, leaving her with the kid. And then he ends up dead. Oh, brother. She looked like I tore her heart out with my bare hands.”

Silence.

“You want a joint?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“Cause I’m having one.” With difficulty, he rose and shuffled into the

kitchen. I heard him open a drawer, and I craned over the table to look. I’ve seen thousands of joints rolled in my day, but never by a policeman, and never with such diligence. He finished, resealed the bag, and returned to the dining room.

“This works better than anything they give me,” he said, lighting up.

I then asked a supremely silly question. “Do you have a prescription?”

His laughter sent out little billows of smoke. “This ain’t California, buddy.”

Based on the poster in the front window and bin Laden wanted sign, I had assumed that McGrath wasn’t especially liberal. I asked his political affiliation.

“Libertarian,” he said. “Drives my daughter crazy.”

“She’s … ?”

“Bloodiest heart you’ll ever find.” He inhaled, and said in a choked voice, “Doesn’t stop her from putting people away. Her boyfriend used to bust her ass about that.”

I should have been less disappointed than I was to hear that Samantha was already attached. I had spoken to her for a grand total of—what? Perhaps twenty minutes. Nevertheless I couldn’t resist reaching over to take the joint from McGrath.

He watched me take a big hit. “That’s an offense punishable by law,” he said.

I made as if to throw the joint away, but he snatched it back.

“I’m dying,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”

NEXT WE CHECKED THE JOURNALS. As I opened them up, I said that unless the weather or Cracke’s dietary habits had some bearing on the case, I didn’t see the point. McGrath agreed, but all the same he wanted to look at the dates of the murders.

Henry Strong had gone missing on the Fourth ofJuly 1966. The weather journal entry for that day read

high of 93. humidity 90%.

Sounds about right,” said McGrath. “Queens in July.

The next few days proved equally uninteresting.

high of 91. humidity 78%. high of 97. humidity 82%. high of 85. humidity 90%.

“Are these numbers accurate?” I asked.

“How the hell would I know?” He paged through the journal. “I’m not getting very much out of this, are you?” I shook my head.

“What about the one with the food?”

MONDAY JULY 4 1966

breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

TUESDAY JULY 5 1966

breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

“This is a waste of time,” I said.

“Probably,” he said. “Let’s look at Eddie Cardinale.”

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 3 1966

breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

“You know what I’d like to know,” he said. “How the guy could eat the same damn thing day in and day out. That’s the real mystery.”

SUNDAY JANUARY 22 1967 breakfast scrambled eggs lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

“Happy now?” I asked. “Hold the fucking phone.”