The Genius

MONDAY JANUARY 23 1967

breakfast oatmeal

lunch apple ham & cheese

dinner apple ham & cheese

McGrath looked at me. “That’s the day after Alex Jendrzejewski disappeared.”

I reread the journal entry.

breakfast oatmeal

“I know,” I said. “So what.” “So, it’s a difference.”

“Oatmeal? Who gives a shit?” Some part of my brain noted that we’d gotten a lot looser-tongued since our smoking break. “Who cares about fucking oatmeal?”

“It’s a difference, and that’s significant.” “Not the same thing.”

McGrath told me to lift the Jendrzejewski file out of the box. Inside, I found the familiar snapshot: blunt-cut hair, square teeth, beachball face, pug nose. Little Alex, had he grown up, probably would have turned out plug-ugly, had fate not frozen him cute.

“We talked to the mother,” he said, turning over pages of transcript. “I remember that. She sent the kid to the market. That milk bottle, I remember that.”

“You said you got a footprint.”

“No telling if it was the right guy, though. Lotta people around that area.

“Then how did he snatch the boy without being seen?”

“Maybe he lured him into a car. He might have offered him a ride home. It was freezing that night. Check the weather book, you’ll see.”

I did. The forecast had called for snow throughout the evening.

“Where are you,” he said to the file box.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m loo—ah. Here. Listen to this, this is the mother talking. ‘I sent Alex to the store.’ Detective Gordan: ‘What time?’ Pamela Jendrzejewski: ‘About five o’clock. I needed some things.’”

“Who’s Detective Gordan.”

“My old partner,” he said without looking up. His lips moved as he skimmed the transcript. “Mm, mm, mm, come on. I swear to God I remember her saying something about …” He didn’t finish.

“About what.”

“It’s not here,” he said. He found another transcript and let out a triumphant grunt. “This is it.”

I scooted my chair over to have a closer look. The transcript was of an interview conducted by Detectives L. McGrath and J. Gordan, New York Police Department, 114th precinct, January 25, 1967. The interviewee was Charles Petronakis, owner and proprietor of the corner market where Alex’s mother sent him to fetch groceries.

Det McGrath: You remember seeing the boy?

Charles Petronakis: I saw him, yes.

M: When did you see him?

P: He came in about five fifteen.

M: Was there anybody with him?

P: No.

Det Gordan: Was there anyone in the store at the time aside from you?

P: No.

G: Did you notice anything unusual, either with the boy or anyone outside the store?

P: I don’t think so. It was very cold that night, I didn’t see too many people. The boy was the first one I seen all afternoon. I was getting ready to close up when he came in. He wanted some milk, some oatmeal, and sugar. I said I could help him carry it home if he waited a few minutes for me to close up. He told me he couldn’t wait, he had to go or his mother would get mad at him. So he went

I stopped reading and looked at McGrath, who picked up a pencil and drew a circle around the word oatmeal.

10

have no early memories of my father. This is because he was most

Ë often out of the house. He worked (still does, as far as I know) incredibly hard, sometimes eighteen hours a day, and although I wasn’t around to witness the demise of his first three marriages, I can guess that his habit of sleeping at the office didn’t help. How I even came to be conceived is something of a mystery to me. The age gap between me and my siblings has often led me to believe that I was an accident, and for him, at least, not a happy one.

In his defense—a phrase that rarely crosses my lips, so you can be certain that what I’m about to say is true—it must be said that he singlehand-edly restored the Muller name to glory after inheriting a corporate structure swollen with inefficiencies. He downsized before downsizing was downsizing; and he spun off or closed antiquated branches of the company that he had no real business running: a commercial bakery in New Haven, a textile mill in Secaucus. What he understood was real estate, so he focused on that, thereby turning an already healthy sum of old money into a new, towering heap.

It is solely to my mother’s credit that I am not spoiled worse than I am. Despite the lavishness of our surroundings, and the dozens of people who waited on me from the moment I entered the world, she did her best to ensure that I never considered wealth a substitute for decency. It’s hard to

be rich and a true humanist. She was. She believed in the inherent value of every human being, taking that as the premise for her actions. Children have exquisitely sensitive bullshit detectors, and that’s why her lessons made an impression on me. If my father had lectured me similarly, I would have seen right through him; he seldom acknowledged the staff, and then only curtly. My mother, on the other hand, did not condescend to the people she employed; at the same time, she didn’t pretend that she was their friend, which is in its own way equally insulting. She always said hello and good-bye and please and thank you; if a door was held open for her, she hurried to step inside. She held a few doors of her own. I once saw her stop and help push a stuck taxi out of a snowbank.

I’ve never fully understood how she tolerated—let alone loved—my father, who could be so indifferent to the distress of others. I can only hope and assume that he was a better man before she died. Either that or she saw in him something invisible to the rest of us. Or maybe she liked a challenge.

My awareness of him thus begins with her death, and the most pungent memory is also the earliest. It was the morning of the funeral and I was getting dressed—or, rather, resisting attempts by the nanny to get me dressed. It’s my fault for throwing a tantrum. I probably should have felt the numbness in the air, known that I had a burden to shoulder. Looking back I realize that I was probably more confused than anything else: for days people had been acting skittish around me, making me feel like I was the source of everyone’s misery. I was in no mood to confront the public; I didn’t want anything to do with anybody, and I certainly didn’t want to be forced into a suit and tie.

The service was scheduled for nine A.M., and by eight thirty I was still half-dressed. If the nanny managed to tuck in my shirt, I would untuck it while she reached for the necktie. Then when she began again to tuck it back in I would start unbuttoning it from the top. She was on the verge of tears by the time Tony Wexler arrived to escort me downstairs. He found me pulling off my pants and stepped in to take over, and as he reached for my arm I slugged him in the eye.

Normally Tony was a model of patience. (In later years, he would endure much worse.) But that morning he wasn’t up to the task. He might have yelled or smacked me across the face; he had that kind of authority over me. He might have told the nanny to hold me down. Instead, he took more decisive action: he went for my father.

It was a Friday. My mother had died on the Tuesday prior, after three days in a coma. During those three days I had not been allowed in to see her—something I’ve never forgiven my father for. I think in some idiotic way he intended to protect me, but even thinking about it now makes me tense. Since I had been barred from the room, and he had barred himself inside to watch her slip away, we hadn’t seen much of each other for a week, my father and I; I had been with the nanny or else Tony. So this would be our first moment together as a family, a downsized unit of two. Though too young for symbolism, I had some idea that the conversation about to take place would be a neat preview of life without a mother.

He came into the room silently. That’s his way. My father is tall, like me; like his own father, he has a very slight stoop. He was at the time over fifty, but his hair was still dark and thick, like his mother’s. That morning he wore a black suit, white shirt, and gray tie; what I saw first, however, were the caps of his shoes. I was lying on the ground, refusing to get up, and these two shiny torpedo heads were coming toward me.

I rolled over and buried my face in the carpet. There was a long silence. For a moment I thought he had left. Then I opened my eyes and saw that he was right there, still looking down at me, although now he was holding the pre-knotted tie, as though it were a leash and I a stubborn puppy.

“If you don’t get dressed,” he said, “then you’ll go exactly as you are.”

“Fine,” I said.

The next thing I knew I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, down the hall to the elevator. The nanny had me by one arm, a maid by the other; my father was two steps ahead, never looking back as I howled. You can imagine that the house was especially quiet that morning, so this tantrum sounded even more horrific and piercing than my usual ones. As the four of us stepped into the elevator I saw my father wince. This only encouraged me. Maybe if I shouted loud enough they would let me go. We glided down to the first floor, where the doors parted on a scene that startled me into silence: twenty-some-odd faces—women tearstained, men flushed and grimacing—all staring at me as I thrashed against my captors. The entire house staff had gathered in mourning to see my father and me off.

At that moment I realized what I was doing—what was happening— how I looked—what humiliation I stood to suffer if I didn’t get properly dressed. I began to beg my father to allow me to go back upstairs. He said nothing, just stepped out of the elevator and walked stiffly through the parted ranks of the grieving, again two steps ahead of me and the nanny and the maid, who obeyed my father’s orders by carrying me, half-naked, through that gauntlet of horrified stares and down the front steps to the idling limousine. Tony had my pants waiting in the car.

THE PROBLEM WITH COLD CASES, McGrath explained, was that they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t crash planes into buildings. They didn’t release toxic gas on the A train, or detonate themselves in the middle of Central Park, or spray bullets into a crowded open-air market. National and local priorities being what they were, it had gotten harder and harder for cold-case detectives to find the time, money, and departmental approval they needed.

McGrath had worked the squad for the last eight years of his career and kept in touch. “Solid bunch, tip to tail,” he said. “They’re dedicated guys, and they don’t like to give up. But it’s not up to them. The world’s a different place.”

Different meant that old murders got in line and waited. It meant that even as the line grew, the number of detectives working the cases shrank, as the sharpest minds got bounced to counterterrorism or got fed up and left. It meant that literally thousands of boxes of evidence—boxes much like the one McGrath had in his dining room, the box we would spend the next several weeks poring over—had gone unexamined for decades, even though the intervening years had turned the DNA inside to gold.

“Right before I left,” he said, “we got a Justice Department grant. Five hundred grand to use for pulling old DNA. You know what, I still don’t think they’ve used all that money. Crap just sits there, waiting for someone to pick it up. They don’t have the manpower. Every time you want something, you have to schlep down to storage, send it to the lab, fill out the paperwork—how the hell are twelve guys supposed to do all that for every unsolved crime in New York? And then we got people breathing down our necks, the Feds whining about port security, the press making noise about stuff that happened last week. You try being the one who gets to approach his commander, ‘Hey, you know what, I have something thirty years old that I think I might maybe be able to put a name on. Sure the perp is probably dead, but wouldn’t you like to ease the family’s minds?’ Never gonna happen.”

Since retiring, he had kept himself amused by paging through old cases that continued to bother him. His former colleagues were all too happy to have an experienced thinker shouldering a small portion of their burden. Most of the time, he said, what solved a cold case was the passage of time, as witnesses who had been afraid to talk now came forward. That had its own set of drawbacks: namely, that people forgot what they’d seen or died before bothering to tell. With the Queens murders, though, there hadn’t been anyone, willing or unwilling, to talk to. No rumors, no drunken bragging in a bar. It seemed hopeless. But McGrath had long ago promised himself to go down swinging.

“What else am I gonna do?” he asked me. “Watch Dr. Phil?”

HAVING GOTTEN USED TO running the gallery while I was working with the drawings, Nat was all too pleased to take the reins back, and so for a few weeks my life went like this: a car would come for me around three o’clock; I would get in and endure the fight to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel; through the rear window I would watch the Manhattan skyline turn to backdrop, watch the gray highway, listen for gulls circling above Riis Park. We would pull up outside the entrance to Breezy Point just as the bar was setting out the marker board with the evening’s drink specials. By four thirty I would be sitting at McGrath’s dining-room table, talking about the case. A good portion of that time was spent waiting for him to go to the bathroom.

Most nights I stayed until Samantha showed up. Actually, my cue to leave was the sound of her coming up the front steps. There was always a moment when she had to put down the bags of food and her work stuff and look for her keys, which apparently were never where she had last put them. By the time she succeeded in finding them I had opened the front door for her, and while she gathered her bags back up we would have a short and invariably banal conversation. She seemed both puzzled by and grateful for my presence, asking in a detached way if we’d turned anything up. No, I would tell her. She would shrug and tell me not to give up. Really what she meant was: don’t leave him alone. If I tried to help her with the bags she waved me away, straggling into the darkened house as McGrath called out to me, “Same time Wednesday!”

I justified taking off from work by telling myself that I had to protect my artist. I wanted to keep McGrath on a short tether, so that if he turned up anything on Victor Cracke, I’d be the first to know, and could apply the correct spin. As for McGrath, I assumed that his motivations were similar. By making me a party to the investigation, he could prevent me from interfering, or at least be better positioned if I had done so. Not to mention that—incapacitated, virtually alone—he needed a pair of legs, and I had been the first person to come along.

I had another motive, though, in going to Breezy Point. Being there gave me those few moments with his daughter.

Now that’s a detective-novel trope for you: instantaneous romance. But this one requires a little explanation, as I am not generally subject to infatuations. Besides, I had Marilyn. As I mentioned before, she and I expected of each other a certain amount of extracurricular activity. Or at least I did: the size of her sexual appetite put most men’s to shame, and we spent too many nights in our own apartments for me to believe that she had never taken home one of the opening-night waitstaff. As for me, I didn’t fool around too much. Having gotten a lot out of my system between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, by the time I hit thirty I realized how lucky I’d been never to catch anything more virulent than a few choice words and a faceful of undergraduate-caliber champagne. There had been only two or three other women in the last five years. You could blame my age, but the fact remained that I still had a full head of hair, I still fit into the same size pants, I still ran four times a week. I hadn’t lost my edge; I’d merely learned that the old saw about quantity and quality applied even to sex. Sex without any sort of challenge bored me. To a large extent that explained why I stuck with Marilyn as long as I did: she never failed to keep me on my toes, and she could be ten women in a given day.

Surely, I had less in common with Samantha than with the women I ran into on a daily basis at the gallery, most of whom were trying to be Marilyn. And nothing about our brief encounters on the front steps of McGrath’s house suggested anything beyond two people passing a few cordial words, two people seated together on a plane. No prophetic words, no lingering glances, not that I can recall. I wish I’d paid closer attention.

MCGRATH AND I BEGAN BY CALLING AROUND. Most of the people mentioned in the files were either untraceable or dead—victims’ parents, the grocer who sold Alex Jendrzejewski his oatmeal, the woman on the porch in Forest Hills who had seen the strange vehicle—raising the distinct probability that the killer himself was dead, too.

That reduced the case to paper and physical evidence, the latter in storage at the Queens property clerk. To gain access, McGrath called a friend, a detective named Richard Soto, who said that if McGrath wanted to go fishing, God bless.

All the victims had been found outdoors, making analysis of the forensics that much more difficult. The boys had been killed elsewhere and taken to the dumping grounds or else left outside to be ravaged by weather. Either way, little remained that could be considered evidence, still less that could reliably be connected to the killer. There’s a lot of junk lying around

New York City, and apparently it was no different in the 1960s. (“It was worse,” said McGrath. “We have Giuliani to thank for that.”)

Among the items in storage were a cigarette butt, the broken milk bottle, the cast of the footprint. There was a very slender partial fingerprint, taken from a discarded coffee cup, which itself seemed to have gone missing in the intervening years. Everything went back to the lab for reanalysis and reprinting. Of greatest significance was a pair of boy’s jeans crusted with blood and semen. That, too, went to the lab; and when it did, I had an idea that the case would soon be solved. But McGrath told me to be patient. The soonest we could expect an answer was December. “They’re still IDing 9/11 remains. Not to mention that whatever they give us is useless without something to compare it to, something we know was his. We need to get someone over to that apartment.”

“There’s nothing there,” I said. “I had the place cleaned out.”

McGrath smiled wanly. “Why did you do that.”

“Because it was a pigsty. Every time I went in I had a coughing fit.”

“Where’s all the art?”

“Storage.”

He began to question me: was there anything that might have traces of DNA on it? A toothbrush? A hairbrush?

“A pair of shoes,” I said. “A sweater. I don’t know, maybe I left something behind.”

“Did you?”

“I doubt it. We catalogued everything.”

“Shit. Well, all right. Can’t hurt to look. Are you free Monday, around lunch?”

In theory, I had an appointment to show the drawings. The client was an Indian metals tycoon, stopping in New York on his way to the fair in Miami. We’d met at the last Biennale, and since then I had been stoking the embers of a correspondence. This was my first opportunity to make good. If I tried to reschedule I would likely lose him; he was notoriously fickle and impatient.

I very easily could have asked for another day; McGrath didn’t seem to be demanding Monday.

“I’m free,” I said and felt the rush of flagrant disregard.

This was, I believe, the first sign that my life had begun to change.

“Good,” said McGrath. “Someone’ll be there. Not me, but I’m sure you already figured that out.”

“Do you ever get out?”

“On a good day, I’m strong enough to piss off the front porch.” He cackled. “It’s not too bad. I have cable. I get all my books off the computer. I got Sammy. So, not too bad.” He passed me the joint. “Well, you know, that’s horseshit. It’s like prison.”

I inhaled, said nothing.

He said, “Every morning the wind comes through here smelling like salt. If memory serves, the beach is nice.”

“It is.”

He nodded and motioned for the joint. “All right. We got work to do.”

ON THE APPOINTED MONDAY, I stood outside the entrance to Muller Courts, right where Tony had stood for me nine months prior. I hadn’t been to the building since July, and as I waited for McGrath’s team to show up, I felt guilty, as though I was about to throw a party inside a crypt. I had done my best to separate the art on the gallery walls from an actual person who lived in an actual room. I made him a ghost. Now, though, I came in search of the opposite—a literal piece of his body. The better metaphor might be graverobbing.

Who exactly was McGrath’s team, anyway? He hadn’t said anything more specific, and I kept looking for a big white police van loaded with men in Kevlar.

Instead, I got a small blue Toyota.

“Don’t look so surprised,” said Samantha. “Who else do you think is going to give up their lunch break? I’m a huge sucker or I wouldn’t be

here.” She seemed to be in a good mood, or at least in a better mood than she was when I saw her in Breezy Point. If going home depressed her, I wasn’t in any position to criticize.

She whistled as she tore open a package of peanut butter and crackers and offered me one. “Nutritious and delicious.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I survive on these,” she said.

“Then I certainly don’t want to take one.”

“My blood is about two percent peanut butter… . He didn’t tell you I’d be coming?”

“No.”

“That’s hilarious. What did you expect, a guy in a lab coat?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a SWAT team.”

“Do we need a SWAT team?”

“I hope not. I didn’t realize that collecting DNA was part of your job.”

“None of this is part of my job. It’s a way to keep him occupied.”

“You don’t think he’s on to anything?”

“Based on what, the oatmeal theory?”

I nodded. “That, and everything else.”

“As far as I can tell, there isn’t much else. It’s interesting, but I don’t think anyone’s going to prison because of what they ate for breakfast. Besides, you don’t know where the guy is, do you?”

“No.”

“There you go. I’d rather spend my time going after people I know are guilty, and that I can find.”

“You must know how to track people down. You must have to do it all the time.”

“Not really,” she said. “That’s up to the police. Besides, people who commit crimes are stupid. Most of the time, they’re right where we expect them to be: in their mother’s basement, getting drunk and touching themselves.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Daughterly love. Anyway, in response to your question, no. I’m not collecting anything. I have a friend coming to do that. Now I owe her three favors.”

Before I could ask what the first two were, she turned to wave at a small dark woman coming up the block. She had curly black hair and purple lips and wore a form-fitting leather jacket. She set down her bag and rose up on tiptoes to kiss Samantha on the cheek. “Hey doll.” Then she offered her hand to me, revealing a tattoo of a bleeding rose on the inside of her wrist. “Annie Lundley.”

“Ethan Muller.”

“Pleased to meetcha.” She pointed a finger at Samantha. “That’s three.”

Samantha nodded. “Let’s go.”

“I THOUGHT MY PLACE WAS SMALL.” From the threshold, Annie peered into the apartment. She had on latex gloves and a hairnet. “You didn’t leave much when you cleaned up, huh.”

“Not really,” I said. “I like things neat.”

“How many people were in here?”

“A lot.”

“We’re going to need to rule them out, so make a list.” She checked her watch and sighed. “You might want to come back in four or five hours.”

Samantha and I stepped outside to give Annie the full run of the roost.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said.

“That’s funny,” she said. “I was just going to say the same thing to you.”

“Don’t you have to get back to work?”

“Eventually. Civil service isn’t as rigorous as you’d think.”

“I don’t think it’d be that rigorous at all.”

“Then you’d be right on the money. They’re still out to lunch. The guys in my office will do anything to avoid their jobs. You don’t know how much porn they send me on an hourly basis.”

“It’s a nice thing you’re doing,” I said. “For your father.”

She half smiled. “Thanks.” Her tone implied that I had no right to grade her behavior. “It’s hard to remember that when he calls up and tells me I have to be somewhere on Monday, noon sharp. He can be pretty overbearing. Tunnel vision. It’s not just this, it’s everything.”

“He probably doesn’t realize he’s putting you out.” I felt hypocritical defending McGrath; who better than I to sympathize with someone suffering under a father’s ridiculous demands? But things your own parents do to drive you crazy can seem piteous and understandable when it’s someone else’s parents doing them.

“Oh, he realizes it. Sure he does. He knows it’s a pain in the ass. That’s why he asks me. I’m the only one who’ll do it. If you don’t believe me, ask my mother. I’m sure she’ll be happy to share her war stories with you.”

I didn’t ask about Mrs. McGrath. I had a feeling she lived someplace far away.

Samantha leaned against the wall. “So you’re an art dealer. That must be fun.”

“It has its moments.”

“More glamorous than my job.”

“It really isn’t. Most of the time I’m sending e-mails and making phone calls.”

“You want to switch for the day? You can interview rape victims.”

“That sounds awful.”

“I hate to say it, but you get used to it pretty fast.” Her phone rang. “Excuse me.” She walked down the hall to take the call.

Boyfriend calling, I guessed. I tried to listen in but couldn’t, not unless I got up and followed her. She talked for a good fifteen minutes. Eventually, I opened the door to the apartment and poked my head in. I saw Annie crouched near the baseboards, slowly playing a flashlight back and forth.

“You really do like things neat,” she said.

Samantha appeared behind me. “Anything?”

“Hair, but I don’t think they belong to your man.”

“Why not?”

“Did your man have a pink dye job?”

“That would be Ruby,” I said. “My assistant.”

“I have to tell you,” Annie said, “I’ll keep looking, but I don’t think I’m going to get much here. What about that other stuff you told me about?”

“The storage locker?”

“Yeah. What’s there.”

“A hundred and fifty thousand pieces of paper,” I said. “And a pair of old shoes.”

“Delicious,” said Annie. “I can’t wait.”

TWO DAYS LATER I had another appointment with McGrath, but when I showed up nobody answered my knocks. I pounded and pounded, and then I tried the door. It was open. I went inside and called his name. From the bathroom came a weak Hang on. I sat at the dining-room table and waited. And waited. And finally I went to the bathroom door and knocked. I heard a retch. I tried the knob but it was locked.

“Lee? Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” Another retch.

“Lee?”

“Hold your fucking horses.” He sounded awful; and when he opened the door, and I saw how he looked, and the blood on the rim of the toilet that he had not quite succeeded in mopping up, I said, “Jesus Christ.”

He shuffled past me. “Help me with the box.”

“You need to get to the hospital.”

He said nothing, went to the back room. I followed.

“Lee. Did you hear me?”

“You gonna give me a hand or you want me to lift this myself.”

“You need to see a doctor.”

He cackled.

“You look like shit,” I said.

“Thanks, you too.”

“You need to go to the hospital.”

“You want to drive me?”

“Fine.”

“You’re not supposed to say yes, you’re supposed to stop arguing with me.”

“I’m saying yes.”

“My guy, you need an appointment to see him, you can’t show up unannounced.”

“Then I’m calling an ambulance.”

“For crissake,” he said. He sounded grief-stricken. “Pick up the box and—” He erupted in coughs. His hand came away from his mouth bloody.

I picked up the phone on the desk, managing to dial 9-1 before McGrath hobbled over and wrestled the receiver away from me. He was surprisingly strong for someone in his condition, and he also had the protection of knowing that I wouldn’t fight back, for fear of hurting him. He unplugged the receiver and put it in the pocket of his robe. He pointed at the box.

I stood there, trying to decide whether to use my cell phone. He probably would have confiscated that, too, or thrown it out the window. I decided to give him a few minutes to calm down before saying anything. I picked up the box and carried it to the dining-room table. “Sit,” he said. I sat. Silently, we began spreading out our work. His nose ran and I handed him a tissue, which he used and then tossed on the floor with utter contempt—whether for me or his own condition, I couldn’t tell.

He said, “I called Rich Soto about those cases.”

The cases in question consisted of everything Soto could dig up with a similar MO. McGrath had grown fond of the notion that the Queens murderer had other notches in his belt, and that locating one of them might yield more information—a suspect, perhaps; or someone already doing time.

“And?”

“He’s getting the files together. He said two weeks, but don’t hold your breath.”

“All right.”

He closed his eyes then, and I could see how badly our struggle had worn him out.

“Lee.” I put my hand on his arm. It was warm and frail. “Maybe we shouldn’t work today.”

He nodded.

“Do you want to lie down?”

He nodded again, and I helped him to the back room, settling him into the La-Z-Boy.

“You want the TV on?”

He shook his head.

“You want some water?”

No.

“Are you going to be all right?”

Yes.

“Are you fixed for food? Is Samantha coming?”

ce-n ť

Tomorrow.

“What about tonight.” I tapped my foot. “Lee. What are you going to eat for dinner?”

“Fuck dinner,” he croaked.

“Do you want a joint?”

Yes.

I went to the kitchen, found his stash and his rolling papers. It had been a while since I’d rolled one myself, and I ended up spilling flakes all over the floor. I sponged up the debris, found a lighter, and brought McGrath his medicine.

“Thank you.” He groped around for an ashtray that had gotten moved across the room. I brought it to him and watched him smoke.

“Hungry yet?”

He laughed, a balloon losing air.

“I’m going to call Samantha and have her check in on you.”

“Don’t,” he said.

I said nothing. I waited until his eyes closed and his breathing changed, then went into the next room and made the call. I told her what had happened.

“I’m coming,” she said.

When I returned to the back room, I found McGrath feebly smiling.

“You’re a real buzzkill, you know that?”

“Well what do you want me to do?”

“Go home,” he said.

“No chance.”

“Go to hell,” he mumbled.

I sat on the floor at his feet and waited.

It would take Samantha a while to get over from Borough Hall, and I considered calling the paramedics in the interim. But I didn’t. McGrath looked a little better now; he had stopped coughing, and I knew that waking up in the back of an ambulance would be the ultimate assault on his dignity. He wanted to stay where he was, wanted to make his own decisions. I chose to respect that.

By the time she did show up, McGrath was out cold: snoring and wheezing like a man twenty years older. She gave me a wrung-out smile and mouthed thanks. I nodded and started to go. As I turned I heard McGrath say, “We’ll work next week.”

Samantha and I exchanged a look.

“I’m going to Miami next week,” I said. “You know that, right?”

McGrath nodded loosely. “Have a good trip.”

“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “We’ll finish up then.”

10

Victor Cracke’s debut show closed the next day. Taking the canvases down put me in a terrible mood, although part of me did note with relief that Victor had nothing to complain about anymore. He wanted me to STOP and I had. I also had much less reason to want to come in in the morning.

Three days before I left for Miami, I arranged to have Kevin Hollister’s canvas transferred to his home, an hour and a half outside the city, in an upscale area of Suffolk County that he seemed to own wholesale, as though the bucolic fixtures in the distance—a shingled post office, quaintly decrepit farmhouses, gray-and-blue meadows roamed by purple specks of livestock— had been placed there by his landscaper for that authentic feel. I decided to accompany the piece, to oversee its installation and shake hands with the man himself, who sounded pleased as punch to get his art.

At his request, I hired an armored car. It seemed like overkill to me, but then Marilyn explained that I was not only delivering the Cracke drawing but several dozen items Hollister had bought from her.

“How much stuff are we talking about?”

“Eleven million,” she said. “Give or take.”

My sale no longer seemed that impressive.

“You haven’t seen the house yet, have you.”

“No.”

“Well, darlin, you are in for something rare.”

“You’re not coming?”

“No. It’ll give you boys a chance to bond.”

Considering where I grew up, it takes quite a bit of house to impress me, and the neoclassical monstrosity that appeared as we cleared security (ID check, bomb sweep) and passed through the imposing over-wrought-iron fence didn’t do much to heat my bluish blood. It was large but utterly vulgar, a nouveau-riche temple, no doubt filled with hideous statuary and histrionic window treatments. I was surprised that Marilyn had not warned me.

“Holy shit,” said the driver of the armored car. He gawked at a long structure, evidently the garage; outside, a group of men lovingly detailed a Mayfair and a Ferrari. The garage had eight more doors, like the set of a game show.

At the end of a quarter-mile driveway stood a butler and two men in red jumpsuits. I stepped out of the car and waited while the butler gave instructions to the driver. Then I followed the butler up the steps, which seemed wider and shallower than necessary, causing me to lean forward as I walked. I was reminded of the palaces of Mughal kings, their doorways built purposefully low, so that all entering bent their heads.

“I’m Matthew,” said the butler, in a shockingly Californian voice. “Kevin is waiting for you.”

Contrary to expectation, there wasn’t anything ugly inside. In fact, there wasn’t anything at all: the entry hall was empty, its walls gallery-white and bathed in cold light. Soaring ceilings and skylights created a dizzying sense of upward drift, and I felt as though trapped in a Minimalist dream: Donald Judd’s idea of heaven.

“Would you like a Pellegrino?” asked Matthew.

I was still looking at the ceiling. The place did not seem fit for human habitation.

“You’ll have to excuse us. We’re in the process of redecorating. Every so often Kevin wants a change of pace.”

“This looks more like a total overhaul.”

“We have a designer on retainer. Kevin likes to make use of her. Did you want that Pellegrino?”

“No, thank you.”

“Right this way, please.”

He steered me down a long, blank corridor.

“Where’s the art?” I asked.

“Most of it is in the museum. We haven’t really had time to do this wing of the house yet. We’ll get there. As Kevin says, it’s a work in progress.”

I questioned the decision to leave the front part of the house unfinished. Didn’t you want to make a good impression on visitors? I supposed that Hollister didn’t have many people to impress.

We stepped into an elevator (blank), walked another hallway (blank), made several more turns down several more hallways (all blank), arriving finally at a heavy-looking door. The butler pressed a buzzer. “Ethan Muller is here.”

The door clicked, and Matthew held it open for me.

“I’ll be right back with your beverage,” he said, disappearing before I could tell him that I didn’t want a beverage.

Hollister’s office was the first room in the house that didn’t feel like the inside of an asylum, although I can’t say that it was very cozy. To begin with, there were no windows. Then there was the design scheme, which I can best describe as a hypermodern rendering of the traditional English hunting lodge. Low-slung sofas and Eames-like chaises had been scattered throughout the room. There was a steel globe large enough to incite the envy of James Bond villains; there were five identical jet-black bearskin rugs; there was a moosehead cast in resin. The walls, paneled in black leather and brass nailheads, absorbed much of the ambient light, making an already vast, dark, and masculine room seem endless, lightless, and more than a little homoerotic. Hollister’s desk—a block of smoked, crackled glass spotlit with halogens—was easily the brightest object there, throwing an unearthly halo around its occupant and making him look like the Wizard of Oz.

On a headset phone, he waved for me to sit down.

I sat. Like in the rest of the house, there was no art up—not unless you counted the room itself, which I think you would have to.

“No,” he said and took off the headset. “Everything in one piece?”

“I think so.”

“Good. I told them to wait for us before they put anything in place. I’d like to get your opinion, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

A small tone sounded on his computer. He glanced at the screen and touched a spot on the desktop. I didn’t see anything like a button, but behind me the door clicked open and the butler appeared with a tray of drinks, which he set on a stand before withdrawing in silence.

We talked about the house, which had taken three years to build. The original design scheme “was my ex-wife’s. All Shabby Chic. When we split up, I decided to give the place a fresh start. I hired a designer, wonderful girl, extremely creative and intelligent. So far we’ve been down several roads. First we put in all Arts and Crafts; then we went the art nouveau route. Nothing quite fit, so on to version three-point-oh.”

I might have suggested he find a designer with less wonderfulness—which I took to mean T&A—and more forethought. Instead, I said, “What are you going for?”

“I’d like it to be a little more intimate.”

I nodded, said nothing.

“You don’t think that’s possible, do you.”

“Anything’s possible.”

Hollister grunted a laugh. “Marilyn told you to agree with whatever I say.”

“She did. Although with enough money I really do think anything is possible.”

“Did she mention my secret?”

“I don’t think so.”

He smiled and touched another spot on the desktop, and a mechanical whirr started up. Slowly, the leather panels in the walls began to rotate, revealing, on the reverse, blank canvases. I counted twenty of them.

“I asked her for a list of the world’s greatest paintings,” he said. “Full

Fathom Five is going there.” He pointed to the next canvas, far smaller. “The View of Delft.” Next. “Starry Night.” And around the room he went, naming a canonical work and indicating an appropriately sized piece of primed cotton duck.

I wondered how he intended to acquire The Persistence of Memory, not to mention Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, The Nightwatch, and the Mona Lisa.

“She recommended an excellent copyist.” He then named an Argentinean, living in Toronto, best known for having been arrested—but never convicted—for forging Rembrandts.

I considered the decision to line up all those competing pictures questionable at best. But Hollister seemed honestly thrilled by the idea. Describing himself as a “heavily quantitative thinker,” he raved to me about Marilyn’s ability to cut through the jargon and give a clear picture of what art mattered and what did not. She had given him some sort of numerical guideline for assessing a piece’s worth, and it was with this scale that he had decided to make me an offer on the Cracke drawing.

“To be frank,” he said, “I would have gone as high as four-fifty.” He touched the desk again, causing the panels to slowly rotate back to their original positions.

Except for one—the future resting place of The Burial of Count Orgaz, which got stuck after about a quarter turn. Hollister banged at it, found it intractable, and, reddening, touched the desk to summon Matthew. The butler appeared post-haste and, seeing the catastrophe, hurried from the room, cell phone in hand. As Hollister and I stepped from the office and made our way back toward the elevator, I heard a California accent rising to the top of its lungs.

HOLLISTER’S PRIVATE MUSEUM stood at the highest point on his estate. A glass dome, dimpled and latticed with iron pipes, the structure resembled nothing so much as a gigantic, half-buried golf ball. I could only imagine the cost involved: the foundation work alone probably ran toward eight figures, once you took into account that the top of the hill had to be chopped off. Add to that an architect so prominent that Hollister declined to name him (“It was a favor. He doesn’t want it getting around that he does residential work”) and bulletproof glass for the entire exterior and you began to approach a new universe of money.

The armored car was parked by the loading dock, the jumpsuited men waiting for us. Like the butler, they addressed Hollister by his first name.

A retinal scan later, we stepped inside the dome, and I looked up at a series of concentric balconies culminating in an enormous Calder mobile seven stories overheard. Whoever the architect was, he had ripped off the New York Guggenheim to the extent that I wondered if that had been Hollister’s express wish. He wanted copies of the world’s most desirable paintings; why not replicate the most famous buildings, too? The glass I saw as a nod to I. M. Pei, and I felt certain that if I looked hard enough I would find other references as well.

A tweedy, greenish man in a well-cut suit met us in the lobby. Hollister introduced him as Brian Offenbach, the museum’s manager, who I gathered was basically a glorified picture hanger. In the cadences of a well-rehearsed speech, Offenbach explained the logic behind the museum’s layout; the work was displayed not chronologically or thematically but tonally, with the darkest pieces on the ground floor, and every successive floor getting lighter. Light and dark could mean the color of the piece, but more often it meant the emotional response the piece provoked, or the sense of weightiness it gave. Hence the Calder, despite its immensity—five tons of painted steel—occupied the apex, for the feelings of flight it evoked. Hollister had designed the scheme himself, and was proud of it; as one went higher, one transcended the physical realm and found oneself elevated to an understanding of blah blah blah blah blah.

I distrust binary systems—light and dark, good and evil, male and female—and the arrangement seemed to me self-defeating: an attempt to whittle down art’s ragged irrationality that ultimately created not order but muddle.

“It’s wonderful,” I said.

They had already begun bringing the new art up to the third floor, and when we stepped out of the elevator we confronted a tornado of packing material and exploded crates. Hollister had to keep raising his voice above the whine of drills.

“I’ve been wondering if the Cracke PIECE BELONGS HERE WITH THE REST OF THE, of the collection. I mean, it’s so disturb DISTURBING, AND I WONDER IF I’D BE BETTER OFF PUTTING IT in a separate wing. For outsider art. I could tack on another few rooms. NEAR THE BACK. THAT WOULD HAVE SYMBOLIC RESONANCE, WOULDN’T IT, PUTTING the outsider art segregated in its own sphere. WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

I nodded.

“On second thought. The THE WHOLE POINT OF COLLECTING OUTSIDER ART AS I UNDERSTAND IT—MARILYN HAS BEEN GIVING ME SOME GREAT, great books to read. Have you read”—and he named a bunch of obscure monographs. The only name I recognized was Roger Cardinal, the British critic who gave Dubuffet’s term Art Brut its English equivalent.

“The whole point is to REASSESS THE TRADITIONAL STANDARDS OF WESTERN CULTURE, AND to bring to light the talent of people untempered by SOCIETY. RIGHT?”

The Cracke drawing had special value to Hollister, as the first piece he had purchased of his own volition rather than Marilyn’s; he took a personal stake in its location. Offenbach offered suggestions, each one dismissed: “It’ll get lost.” “It’ll stand out.” “Too sterile.” “Not well framed.” It was as though this one piece had revealed all of the scheme’s flaws.

As a last resort we moved back to the lobby, It was my idea to have the workers hold the canvas up immediately to the left of the entrance. That would make the Cherubs the first thing you encountered.

“Perfect,” said Hollister.

Perfect meant another thirty minutes of discussion about height and centering and lighting. It couldn’t be too perfectly square; that wasn’t in keeping with the piece’s Otherness. But if you cheated to the left, you had an unpleasant gap; to the right and the edge of the drawing began to jut around the corner …

When they were done we all stood back to admire our handiwork.

“What is that?” Offenbach asked. He approached the canvas. “It’s like a star.

“I believe it is a star,” I said.

“Hm,” he said. “Is that a reference?”

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Offenbach began, and then said, “I think it looks marvelous. And that’s what’s important.”

THE RISE OF THE ART FAIR over the last three decades has drastically changed the contemporary market. A lot of business now takes place over a few frenetic weeks: the Armory Show in New York, the sprawling campuses of Tefaf Maastricht and Art Basel. I made a third of my sales at fairs; less trafficked galleries can do as much as fifty or sixty percent of their yearly totals.

For collectors, fairs provide motivation. If you had to traipse to every last gallery in Chelsea, who could blame you for tiring out and giving up within an hour or two? But when every dealer has his best twenty pieces out, hundreds of them lined up under one neat, climate-controlled tent—and when you can stop at the espresso counter for muffins or duck confit—then you really have no excuse not to get out and see the damned art.

The Miami fair to which I boarded a plane that Tuesday afternoon was an offshoot of a European fair, and over the last few years, as prices went through the roof, it had undergone an incredible transformation, from a regional outpost to a circus entirely its own: red carpets and stretch Hummers; blinged-out hip-hop moguls in floor-length ermine; crusty Brits and unctuous Swedes and Japanese in Day-Glo eyeglasses; fashionistas, heiresses, events and parties and after-parties, hobnobbing and flashbulbing and the electric crackle of a lot of people about to have sex. Hair got dressed.

And then there was the art. So much of it, and so much of it bad. There was a Persian rug woven with images from Abu Ghraib. There were some photos of cups and saucers being shattered by bullets. There were sober paintings of Britney Spears and, courtesy of Damien Hirst, panels of laminated houseflies. In the center of the main tent was an installation by rory z called Jizz? or Salon Secrets Volumizing Conditioner with Hibiscus Extracts?, whose title pretty much says it all: a row of hinge-top cases, the lids of which showed a color photo of an object—a pencil, say, or a Tickle Me Elmo—spotted with nacreous liquid from either a bottle of the aforementioned product or rory z’s own reproductive glands. Viewers could study the photo and muster a best guess before opening the case to discover the truth inscribed on a little gold placard.

Another piece I took the time to look at was a video installation by Sergio Antonelli, who had filmed himself walking into a midtown Starbucks, ordering a triple-shot espresso, drinking it, getting back in line, ordering another, drinking it, getting back in line, and so forth. (He never seemed to have to pee, although I suppose that could have been edited out.) Eventually, he consumed enough caffeine that he had—or appeared to have—a myocardial infarction. It’s hard to overstate the comedy of him thrashing through the mid-morning crowd. One man actually stepped over him en route to the cream-and-sugar station. The final shot showed Antonelli in the emergency room, being revived by a doctor wearing a green apron. The piece was called Deathbucks.

But most of the time I wasn’t looking at art. For someone like me, part of the fun was that I got to catch up with colleagues I hadn’t seen since the last fair. Marilyn had been cranking the rumor mill, and our booth received a steady stream of gawkers who put their noses right up to the drawings, asking was it true, had he really. Word of the Hollister sale had gotten around— no doubt I had Marilyn to thank for that as well—and by week’s end I sold everything. Ruby began referring to our booth as the Cracke House and to us as the Cracke Whores. Guilty or not, Victor was a gold mine.

Nat calculated that were I to turn the whole collection around at the prices I’d been getting, I’d net close to $300 million. That would never happen, of course; I could ask as much as I did because most of the drawing still sat unassembled, in boxes. Since closing the show, I had moved the remaining material to a secure warehouse in the east twenties, and made plans to start assembling some new canvases—just a few, enough to moisten the market without flooding it.

Cracke’s success rubbed off on the rest of my artists, too. I sold some Ardath Kaplans, some Alyson Alvarezes, the remaining Jocko Steinberger; I had a request for first pick of the new Oshimas when they came in. I even got rid of an old piece by Kristjana, one that I’d begun to think of as a white elephant. I tried to let her know the good news, but she wouldn’t take my call.

I ARRIVED BACK IN NEW YORK exhausted and in desperate need of dry cleaning. I left the gallery closed for a day and lay around my apartment, letting my head clear. Then I called McGrath to see if anything had come up since our last meeting.

He didn’t answer, not then nor on the subsequent two days. By the time somebody picked up, on Wednesday afternoon, I’d begun to worry.

The voice that answered was a woman’s, unfamiliar.

“Who’s calling.”

“Ethan Muller.”

A hand muffled the receiver. I heard talking. The woman came back on. “Hold on.” A moment later another female voice came on, cracked and dry to the point that at first I didn’t recognize it as Samantha’s.

“He’s dead,” she said.

I told her I’d get in a taxi.

“Wait. Wait. Don’t come, please. The house—everything is crazy right now.” Someone said her name in the background. “One second,” she said. Then she said, “The funeral’s on Friday. I can’t talk right now, I’m sorry.”

“What happened?” I asked, but she had hung up.

11 Ť2

n retrospect, I’m glad she didn’t hear my question, which I asked re-flexively and which needed no answer. I didn’t need her to tell me what happened; I knew what had happened. I had been watching it happen for the last month and a half.

Since she hadn’t told me where the service would take place, I spent the rest of my day making awkward cold calls, inquiring after the McGrath funeral party. I found the right place, a church in Maspeth, and hired a car for Friday.

I’d always heard about police funerals being large, ceremonious affairs, but perhaps that’s true only when an officer goes down in the line of duty. At McGrath’s service there were a fair number of blue uniforms, but nobody that stood out as top brass, and definitely no representative from the mayor’s office.

Mass began. Prayers were offered, hymns sung. Not knowing what to do—the Mullers are not a pious bunch—I stood at the rear of the sanctuary with my hands knotted behind my back, trying to see all the way to the front, where Samantha rested her head on the shoulder of a woman I assumed was her mother.

The Word of the Lord Thanks be to God

McGrath’s brother delivered a eulogy, as did Samantha’s older sister, whose name I could not remember. Had McGrath told it to me? I didn’t know. Our time together had been spent under strangely intimate circumstances, but almost everything about him remained a mystery to me. I told myself I had an idea of who he was—a wry sense of humor, a lust for justice—but how much could I possibly know? I looked out at the sea of heads, trying to put names on people: his old partner? The famous Richard Soto? I did spot Annie Lundley, and, glad to find a familiar face, I almost waved.

“I doubt that anybody here can think of him as anything other than a police officer. And that’s what he was, that’s what he always was, and he was great at what he did. I remember when I was a little girl, and he would take me out for a drive. He’d switch on the sirens, just for a couple of seconds, and people would look at us as we passed. And I remembering thinking, That’s my dad. They’re looking at my dad.’ I was so proud of him. Daddy, I’m so proud of you. We all are, and we know how much you put into your life, how much you cared about the people you helped. You never stopped being the man I was proud of.”

The Eucharist; the wine, the wafer.

Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our brother Leland

Thomas McGrath.

Six brawny men shouldering the casket.

The processional was brief, five blocks. I walked along alone, keeping pace with the somber train of SUVs and Town Cars. The day was brisk, the light harsh, as though the sun had turned on its own headlamps in sympathy.

During the burial I kept my eye on Samantha. She stood apart, no longer leaning on her mother, who instead took the arm of a man with a walrus-like moustache. He wore a light blue blazer that stuck out against the predominant black, and I got very clear dislike vibes from Samantha regarding him. Her sister didn’t seem to bear him as much animosity, and at one point clasped his hand.

In my mind, I tested out several explanations, rejecting all but the most obvious: the man was the wife’s second husband. Evidently, the collapse of McGrath’s marriage had fallen harder on Samantha than on her sister. Maybe the sister had been out of the house already, leaving Samantha to watch her parents’ relationship in its dying throes.

Lord hear our prayer

The service concluded, and people broke off in twos and threes. I approached Samantha to offer my condolences but turned away when I saw her arguing quietly with her mother, their heads cocked forward and their hands fluttering. Mother and daughter shared the same slightly insolent mouth, the same jutting hips. The former Mrs. McGrath had an unhealthy tan, the work of someone who spends too much time on a UV bed; by comparison, Samantha’s pallor looked like the work of someone trying desperately not to look like her mother.

“Do you want to split a cab?”

Behind me stood Annie.

“There’s a reception at the house,” she said.

I told her I had hired a car. “No charge.”

“I hope not,” she said.

On the ride out I pumped her for information about the McGrath family dynamics. Many of the conclusions I’d drawn were correct: the tanned woman was in fact McGrath’s ex-wife, and the man with the walrus face her second husband. There was another wrinkle, though: walrus face was also McGrath’s former partner.

I poked around in my memory for the name on the transcript. “Gordan?”

“I think his name is Jerry,” she said.

“That’s right. J. Gordan. Jerry.”

“If you say so,” she said.

“That must be a little tense.”

“You think?”

“Here I thought I was the odd man out.”

“Not by a long shot.” “What happened?”

“I don’t think it’s very complicated. McGrath’s a workaholic. His wife is lonely. Roll credits. Although she really went for the jugular, didn’t she?”

I thought of Samantha’s sister’s speech. I doubt that anybody here can think ofhim as anything other than a police officer. Originally I’d interpreted that comment as a compliment. Now it sounded like more an indictment. That Samantha had decided to go into law enforcement seemed to me a way of siding with her father. Then why had she not spoken her farewells, made her defense?

I said to Annie, “You’re close.”

“Very.” They met, she told me, at a forensics conference, during a training session for cops and ADAs.

“We hit it off right away,” said Annie. “Like sisters.”

“Her sister—remind me of her name?”

“Juliette. She lives in North Carolina.”

“Uh-huh. Well, thank you for the inside scoop.”

“You’re interested,” said Annie.

“Interested?”

“In her.”

I laughed. “I have a girlfriend.”

“That’s too bad, she could use somebody like you.”

“Like me how.”

“Rich,” she said and started laughing. “What makes you think I’m rich?” “Your shoes.” “My shoes?”

Still laughing, she shrugged.

I said, “Anyway, I thought she had a boyfriend.”

Annie gave me a strange look.

“They broke up?”

She said, “He was a firefighter.” “Oh,” I said.

And like that we ran out of words. Both of us remembered where we had come from and where we were headed. Annie shifted around to stare out the window. I did the same. The ride took longer than I remembered.

TRAYS OF CUT FRUIT and soggy sandwiches had replaced the pill bottles on the dining-room table. Samantha was nowhere to be seen; nor could I find her sister or mother. Most people congregated around the liquor, and after Annie and I drifted off in different directions, I found myself in conversation with a thickset man with a tangle of gray curls. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Richard Soto. “You’re Lee’s guy,” he said when I told him my name.

“I guess so,” I said.

“I owe you a drink,” he said, guiding me to a sidetable stocked with bottles.

“What for.”

“For getting that bastard off my back. He used to call me up every five damn minutes until you came along. Jameson,” he said, and handed me a cup, which I held politely. “You really did him a world of good. You’re a good man. Bottoms up.”

As he threw back his shot, I quickly spilled mine into the carpet. Then I raised the cup and pretended to wince.

“The next one’ll be easier,” he said, taking my cup and unscrewing the bottle.

“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.

“What?”

“With the case. Thank you.” Again he drank and I poured out.

“Good stuff.”

“Are you going to take it over?”

Soto looked at me blankly. “What.”

“The case.”

“What about it.”

“Are you going to take it over? There’s a lot left to do. I told Annie I’d get her a list of people who had been in the apartment, but I’m having trouble getting in touch with the superintendent of the building, who seems to be on vacation. I was planning to go over there myself this week. She and I also have to go over to the storage locker, because once the lab results come back—”

As I talked, I saw Soto’s gaze slide away from me and over my shoulder, toward a group of detectives joking loudly and making toasts. He got a mean look in his eye and said, “Would you excuse me.”

I followed him over and joined the group. Jerry Gordan had the floor. Through his moustache I noticed the impetus for growing a moustache to begin with, a large mole on his upper lip. He was ruddy and sweating and talking about old times with his buddy Lee McGrath. The other cops exchanged smirks.

“Hey Jerry, you and Lee were pretty close, huh?”

“The closest.”

“All for one and one for all, eh Jerry?”

That prompted snickering. Gordan didn’t seem to notice.

“He was a good fuckin man,” he slurred.

“Hey Jerry,” said Soto. “Was he honest?”

“Oh you know it.”

“Let me hear you say it: Lee McGrath was an honest man.”

“The honestest man in Queens county, Lee McGrath.”

“You swear?”

“I sweardagod.”

“Honest enough for the both of you, isn’t that right, Jerry.”

“Sure was.”

“You bet he was. And giving, too, huh? A generous man, huh?”

Gordan laughed insensibly.

“That’s right, Jerry. He gave his all. Share and share alike, right Jerry?”

More snickering.

I didn’t like the tenor of the conversation, so I detached myself and paddled through the crowd. I intended to look at the file, to make sure it was still there and to give myself a reason for being in McGrath’s home.

The door to the back room was locked. I didn’t knock, but my rattling the knob brought a red-eyed Samantha to answer.

“Oh,” she said, wiping her face. “I didn’t know you were here.” Her body blocked the doorway, but over her I saw her sister in the La-Z-Boy, a wet towel across her forehead.

“I came with Annie,” I said. I meant it by way of explanation; she, however, heard a request for her to come out of hiding.

“That’s so sweet. It’s very sweet of you both. I’ll be out in a little bit.”

“You don’t have to come out.”

“I want to. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave until I come out.”

“Okay.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Okay. I’ll be out soon,” she said, and closed the door.

I waited in the corner, gnawing on celery and nodding at strangers. All I intended to do was give Samantha my best and head home, but after forty minutes she still hadn’t emerged, and I wandered past the group of cops, all of them by now pink and talkative. They hadn’t noticed my absence, addressing me as though I had been standing with them all along, pulling me into their circle and handing me shot glasses that I would discreetly dump into a nearby floor plant. When I had all but guaranteed its death from poisoning, I slipped away and went into the kitchen, where I found an army of women in dish gloves trying to cope with the stampede of dirty glasses.

I gave up. I left the house and walked down to the beach.

Samantha was standing barefoot by the 9/11 memorial. Her pumps lay on their sides where the concrete boardwalk met the sand. I kept my distance, watching the wind turn her hair into streamers, resisting the urge to come up behind her and hold her. Slumping to one side, her

hand on her hip, she looked frail, like McGrath had been toward the end, and I had an odd fear that she was dying, too. The wind bit down hard; she shivered.

As I turned to go she noticed me and gave a little wave. I made as though to take off my shoes and she nodded. I stood beside her and together we looked at the memorial.

“I’m sorry I snuck out,” she said. “I meant to say hello, I really did.” “It’s okay.”

“I can’t go back in there right now.” “You don’t have to.”

The wind bit again and she trembled. I gave her my coat. “Thank you.” I nodded.

“Did you make any new friends?” she asked.

“We’re all going out tonight after the depressing shit gets finished.” She smiled faintly. A silence.

“I am so tired..” She looked at me. “Do you know what I mean?” “After my mother’s funeral I slept for a week. They thought something was wrong with me. They took me to the hospital.” “I didn’t know your mother died.” I nodded.

“How old were you?” “Five.”

“Do you mind if I ask what she died of?”

“Breast cancer.”

“That must have been hard.”

I smiled at her. “Is this helping you?”

“It is, actually.”

“Okay.”

“Do you mind?” “Not at all.”

“All right,” she said, but she didn’t say anything else.

I said, “Maybe you have narcolepsy.” She smiled.

Silence. The sea fired glittering buckshot.

She said, “They were up all night with him. The cops. They had a party, like it was his birthday. I know they meant well, but they can go back to work tomorrow. I’m the one that has to deal with it after today.” I nodded.

She pointed to the memorial. “I knew him.”

“I know.”

She looked at me.

“Annie told me,” I said.

“She did?”

I nodded.

“I wish she hadn’t done that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“It is what it is.”

I said nothing.

“That’s him.”

“Ian.”

She nodded, wiped her face, laughed once. “I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous. As soon as I’ve begun to deal with that … and now this. Come on.” She laughed again. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

I put my arm around her shoulder, and she leaned against me. We stood there until the wind turned ferocious and her feet began to go numb.

THE FEW PEOPLE THAT REMAINED were halfway into coats. Jerry Gor-dan had left, as had Samantha’s sister. Samantha told me to go on upstairs and wait for her there, but before I could, her mother emerged from the kitchen, grinding a dishtowel into a mug. “Where did you go?” she asked Samantha.

“I needed air.”

“I needed you.. Julie had to take Jerry”—she looked at me, then at Samantha, then back at me. She put on a terrible smile. “Hello. Who’re you.”

“Ethan Muller. I was a friend of Mr. McGrath’s.”

She snorted. ” ‘Mister’?”

“Mom.”

“I don’t think he’s ever been called that.”

“Mom.”

“What, sweetheart. What’s the problem.”

Samantha was staring at the ground, her fists balled.

“He must have liked when you called him that,” Samantha’s mother said to me. “He must have loved that. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” At first she had seemed merely angry, but now I saw that she was very drunk. Over and over the mug started to slip from her hands, only to be caught at the last moment.

“What happened to Jerry,” said Samantha.

“Your sister had to drive him to the emergency room. Don’t look like that, he’s fine. He needs some stitches.”

“What happened.”

“One of your father’s shithead friends”—she stopped again, looked at me, seeming to appraise whether what she had to say could harm my tender ears—”what the hey, we’re all friends here, aren’t we.”

I nodded cautiously.

“Richard hit him,” she said. “He cold-cocked him in the middle of a toast.”

“Oh my God.”

“I threw them out, the bunch of fucking apes. They split his lip open. I needed you. Where did you go.”

“I told you. I went out for a walk.”

Her mother stared at her, reloading; then she turned abruptly toward me and smiled. “And what’s your story?”

“I’m an art dealer.”

“Well la-dee-dah. I didn’t know Lee was into that. Excuse me, Mr. McGrath.”

“I was helping him look into an old case,” I said.

That set Samantha’s mother off; she laughed and laughed. “Really,” she said. “Which one would that be.”

“Mom.”

“It’s just a question, Samantha.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs?” Samantha said to me.

“Actually, I think I’m going to go home—”

“Oh, Lee. All the way til the end. Oh, Christ, what a joke.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute, Mom.” Samantha yanked her mother into the kitchen. I vacillated, then went quietly upstairs.

In all my time at McGrath’s, I’d never been upstairs, and on the second floor I faced two options, a yellow-and-brown master bedroom still filled with signs of illness: a cane, a bucket for vomit. The other room had woodblocks glued to the door.

JULIE AND SAMS

OOM

Inside I found a bunk bed with matching comforters, pilled and smelling of dust. Girlish stickers adorned the bedframe. On the floor was a duffel bag emblazoned with the logo of the Queens County District Attorney’s office, half open and spilling out hastily crammed clothes, a stick of deodorant, a running shoe.

Downstairs I heard yelling.

I looked through the books on the desk. A Wrinkle in Time. The Catcher in the Rye. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Julie had friendz forever, according to the picture frame. Samantha’s paper number from the 1998 New York City Marathon hung on a corkboard.

The yelling crescendoed. A door slammed.

A few minutes later Samantha entered and closed the door behind her. “Fucking bitch.” She stood for a moment with her face in her hands. When she looked up again, her expression was sober and purposeful. She stared at a blank spot on the far wall as she unbuttoned her shirt, shook it off, let it fall to the floor. “Help me with this, please,” she said, turning around.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO GO ON THE TOP BUNK?”

“It’s all right.”

“I don’t think this was made for someone your size.”

“Probably not.”

“How tall are you, anyway?”

“Six-three.”

“You must be uncomfortable. I can go up there.” “Stay.”

“Are you sure?” “Yes.”

“Okay. Good, because I don’t want to go up there. That one’s Julie’s.” A silence. I felt her smile. “How does it feel to take advantage of a vulnerable woman?” “Fantastic.”

“This isn’t really what I do,” she said. “Grief makes us do strange things.” “In bed.” “Yes.”

“No: in bed. You never played that game?”

“What game.”

“The fortune cookie game.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“You read your fortune cookie and then you add ‘in bed.’ You’ve never done that?”

“I think you’re saying that I sound like a fortune cookie.”

“You did just then.” “When.”

“When you said, ‘Grief makes us do strange things.’ ” “It does.”

“Okay,” she said, “but it’s still silly to talk like that.” My first instinct was to be offended, but then I saw how she was smiling and I had to smile, too. For years Marilyn had been telling me that I had to lighten up; how irritated would she be to learn that all it took was a single goofy look?

I said, “Your lucky numbers are five, nine, fifteen, twenty-two, and thirty.” “In bed.”

“In bed. I don’t remember the last time I had a fortune cookie.” She said, “At my office we get Chinese twice a week. It’s horrible but it’s better than peanut-butter crackers.” “I could buy you lunch sometime.” “That might be nice.” “Well all right.” “All right.” A silence.

She said, “But, I mean, really. I’m not used to this.” “So you said.”

“I don’t know what this is.” She turned onto her elbow. “What is it?”

I said, “I don’t know,” and she burst out laughing.

“What?”

“You should have seen the look on your face.” “What.”

“You were like, ‘Oh shit, now she thinks she’s my girlfriend.’ ” She fell on her back, laughing. ” ‘What have I done!’ ” “I didn’t think that.” “Okay.” “I didn’t.”

“Okay, I believe you. You just had a funny look.”

I smiled. “If you say so.”

She finished laughing and wiped her eyes. “I feel better now.” “I’m glad.”

She nodded, then fixed me with a serious look. “I don’t really want to think about this right now. All I want is to not be crying.” I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” I nodded again, still unsure of what’d been gotten out of the way. “You and my dad seemed to get along.”

“I liked him,” I said. “He reminded me of my father, except not an asshole.”

“He could be an asshole, too.” “I’m sure he could.”

“What’s wrong with your dad?” she asked.

“A lot of things.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Nope.”

“All right,” she said. Then she said, “I know who he is, you know.” I looked at her.

“I Googled you. You’re hanging out with my dad, I wanted to make sure you weren’t one of those guys who scams old people.”

“As far as I could tell, Lee McGrath was not the easily scammed type.” “You can never be too careful.” “Fine, then, you know who I am.”

“I know a little bit. Enough not to worry about you going after my dad’s retirement fund.”

I laughed. “If you think I’m as rich as my father you’re sorely mistaken.”

“Darn.”

“What.”

“I was hoping I’d get, like, a morning-after present in the mail. Like a diamond necklace or something.” “I can give you a lithograph.”

“That’s it. I don’t even get a painting.”

“For preferred clients only.”

“Aw,” she said. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Please,” she said. “Where do you think I learned it.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry about when I called her a bitch. She’s not.”

I nodded.

“We’re all a little on edge right now.”

“That’s understandable.”

“She was angry that I brought you here.”

“I can apologize to her, if you’d like.”

“Are you kidding? Absolutely not.”

“I will if it’ll help.”

“She’s not angry at you. She’s angry at me. And, you know, she’s not even angry at me, either. She never drinks. This is the first time I’ve seen her that way in my entire life. She used to hate my father’s drinking.”

“I didn’t know he drank.”

“You didn’t know him most of his life.” She sniffled. “He smoked, too. You don’t get esophageal cancer at sixty-one unless you’re trying pretty hard.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll never get them,” she said. “She loved him. I don’t think she ever stopped. You know what she said one time? Julie told me this. My mom was visiting her in Wilmington. They were driving along, and she goes, ‘Other than the fact that Jerry’s a total moron, he’s a good husband.’” She shifted; I felt her smile against my arm. “Can you believe that?”

“Easily.”

“I’d get upset except I agree with her.”

“You and Jerry don’t get along.”

“We have nothing to say to one another.”

“So I gathered.”

She smiled again. “Did Annie tell you that, too?”

“I figured it out myself. She did tell me about your mom and Jerry.” “She really gave you the goods, didn’t she?” She turned over and our faces were close. I brushed the hair out of her eyes. She said, “Anything you don’t know?”

“Plenty,” I said and kissed her again.

11 12

A/nd then nothing happened.

U For a week my life became as quiet as it ever had been, pre—Victor Cracke quiet. At the gallery we began hanging a new show. For the most part, the frantic phone calls had tapered off; after a big fair, everyone needs time to recuperate, to make sure they’re still solvent and still care about art. I had lunches and dinners with clients and friends. A totally ordinary, totally empty week, and in trudging through it, McGrath’s void loomed unexpectedly large. I kept picking up the phone to call him and then standing there dumbly, holding the receiver and wondering who was in charge of the case now.

The answer, of course, was no one. The mystery ofVictor Cracke would remain exactly that.

I had to ask myself if that was such a bad thing. The show had come and gone; the sales had gone through, the checks cleared. I stood very little to gain by asking more questions. It’s true that we are, by design or by fluke, a curious species, and ignorance grates inside us like sand in an oyster. But I had long trained myself to accept and love ambiguity. Why should five boys, four decades dead, matter to me when every day I read about murder, war, global injustice—without being moved to act? Any obligation I felt toward McGrath was strictly my own invention. I had not known the man

long enough to feel guilty letting his last wishes go unfulfilled. The sense of loss that overtook me, then, was as surprising as it was overwhelming.

As I mentioned, my reasons for helping McGrath were purely selfish. So I had told myself every time I got into a car and went to Breezy Point. With him gone, though, I had to admit that I actually missed the old bastard. Going back to work made me realize the degree to which he represented the polar opposite of everyone I normally dealt with. Without pretension, unafraid to admit ignorance or to show his hand when he wanted something. He had never attempted to keep up appearances, even as he fell apart; and in his physical frailty I discerned a profound honesty, verging at times on beauty. He became in my mind a walking work of art, a human Giacometti: sanded down by illness to within an inch of his bare essence, radiance peeking through the cracks.

And I began to wonder if there hadn’t been something else motivating McGrath, as well. Why had he trusted me to begin with? Surely he had believed I had a vested interest in proving Victor innocent. (If he’d known the truth—that Victor’s popularity had tripled following the rumors—he might have suspected me of bias toward guilt.) By putting off his requests for a copy of the drawings as long as I did, I had made my caginess clear enough. And then—freaking out over the phone, turning up with that letter—I could hardly have seemed rational and levelheaded enough to be of any use. I was going to either conceal or exaggerate.

Maybe, as Samantha had implied, I was the only person willing to help him.

Or maybe he liked me, too.

In any event, the idea that the case would simply return to some slush pile, never to be resolved, depressed me immensely. I’ve already mentioned that I hate to fail. You might find that amusing now that you know a little bit more about me and how much my early years consisted of failure. But here’s the thing: I always took my self-debasement very seriously. Once I had committed to becoming a fuckup, I strove to be the best fuckup around: a prince of debauchery. That drive is part of my character, as much a gift

from my forebears as my inflated sense of self-worth—one is probably an outgrowth of the other, although I’m not sure which is which—and having reopened the case, I did not want to believe that it had bested me.

The easiest opening move would have been to call Samantha. But I couldn’t very well do that. The fact that she hadn’t called me I took as a sign that she regretted our night together. Who was I to argue? But that couldn’t stop me from thinking about her. It had been one of the more physically awkward bouts of lovemaking of my life, the bedframe seemingly about to collapse into splinters and the sheets curling off at the corners—and for that, all the more exhilarating.

All of a sudden my life was back to normal, and the drudgery crushed me. The phone was leaden in my hand; a client in the doorway gave me the beginnings of a headache. My mind wandered, and I found myself unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone hold a sparkling conversation.

“Ethan.”

Marilyn put down her cutlery, for her a grave gesture. She had been going on about something someone had done to someone else in Miami, could I believe the audacity. “Can you at least pretend to listen, please.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where are you? Are you sick?”

“No.” I paused. “I was thinking about McGrath.”

Notice that I hadn’t lied. I had merely failed specify which McGrath.

“Who? Oh. Your policeman?”

Of the three or four—or maybe I’m misremembering, maybe it was five or six—digressions I’d taken since Marilyn and I got together, I had never once bragged to her afterward. But I’d also never lied.

Your policeman.

I lied, then: I lied with a nod.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s very, very sad. Are you too sad to eat that?”

It came quickly, then, a stab of hate for her. Many times in the past I had been annoyed with her, but this was different, and I had to excuse myself.

I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and slapped myself a couple of times. Pay attention. Common courtesy. I resolved to put the McGrath family out of my head and to be civil. And then—not tonight, but in a few days—and in a vague way—I would hint to Marilyn that I’d been with someone else. I didn’t have to say who. She’d be fine. I’d get it off my chest. I’d get over it, and so would she. I dried my hands and returned to the table. Marilyn had paid the check and left.

THE END OF MY QUIET WEEK came with a phone call—again a phone call—from Tony Wexler.

“Your father would like to see you. Before you say no—”

“No.”

Tony sighed. “May I speak, please?”

“You can try.”

“He wants to buy some art.”

That was a new one. My father owned plenty of paintings, but his taste ran rather toward seascapes and bowls of fruit. To be fair, I hadn’t been to the house in years, and in the meantime he might have assembled a preeminent collection of twentieth-century art; he could have hired Julian Schnabel to design his wallpaper and Richard Serra to do the flatware. But I had the distinct feeling that Tony was struggling to sound serious.

“You can laugh,” I said. “I give you permission. I won’t tell.”

“The offer is one hundred percent genuine.”

“I thought you’d run out of pretexts. Well done.”

“It’s not a pretext. He wants you to come to the house. Think of him, in this context, as a customer.”

“If he’s a customer then he can come by the gallery like everyone else.”

“You know as well as I do that not all your clients come into the gallery.”

“I bring work to clients when I have a prior relationship with them.”

He gave a tired chuckle. “Touche.”

“If he wants to buy some art I’ll gladly set him up with someone who can better suit his needs. What’s he in the market for?”

“The Cracke drawings.”

That caught me off guard. It took me a moment to reply: “Well, in that case, he’s out of luck.”

“Look, why don’t you come by the house tonight?”

“I already sa—”

“You don’t have to see him. You can deal directly with me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Just come by the house. If you’re unhappy you can leave. Or—forget the house. I’ll meet you someplace of your choosing. You can send someone ahead and make sure I’m alone. It’ll be like a spy movie. Name your terms, name the circumstances.”

“You come here.”

“I would really rather keep it private.”

“You said name my terms. Those are my terms.”

He stopped and started several times, and his fumbling confirmed my suspicion that the deal hinged on my coming to him, and not vice versa. Either he was trying to get me in the same room as my father, or he had been ordered to make sure that I understood who was working for whom in this transaction.

“This is childish,” he finally said.

“What’s childish is calling me up and demanding that I conduct my business according to someone else’s rules.”

“He’s serious. It’s a serious offer. A serious and committed offer.”

“How many.”

“Pardon?”

“How many does he want? I don’t make house calls except for my most serious and committed clients, so let’s see how serious and committed he is. How many does he want to buy?”

“All of them.”

I sighed. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, Tony, but I don’t have time for it.”

“Wait a minute, wait. I’m being straight with you. He wants them all. He wants the ones you’ve sold, too. You’ve sold some already, am I right?”

“Tony, for God’s sake.”

“You answer me now. How many have you sold?”

“A few.”

“Ah? Ah? You tell me.”

“A dozen.”

“Exactly a dozen.”

“Give or take.”

“Well which is it, give or take.”

“They’re already sold. They’re not coming back.”

“How much did you sell them for?”

I told him.

There was a silence.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Yes. Now, you can make offers on them, but I don’t think anyone’s going to want to part with them that fast, not unless you pay through the nose.”

“We’ll worry about that later. How much do you want for the rest of them.”

“You had the pieces. You could have kept them without paying a cent. Now you want to buy them back? Excuse me when I say that this doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“He didn’t want them before. He wants them now.”

“It’s an impulse buy?”

“Call it that if you want.”

“Bullshit. My father’s never done anything impulsive in his life. He’s a calculating son of a bitch and I’m sorry that he’s put you up to this. Let me ask you something, Tony: how do you work for him? Doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it drive you nuts, having to go work for that son of a bitch every day?”

“There are things about your father that you don’t know.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s life. Thanks for calling.”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER HANGING UP I regretted the way I’d spoken to him. Tony had been the one to hand me Victor Cracke, after all; and he’d borne my ingratitude for far too long already. I felt the urge to call him back and agree to a meeting—not at the gallery, not at the house, but at a museum or restaurant—an urge that I fought off, fought off repeatedly throughout the rest of the day, so that by the time I went home I had grown downright indignant about the entire matter.

Who the hell did my father think he was? The decision to throw the art to me had obviously come down from him, not from Tony; Tony was acting in his capacity as capo. Typical of my father; so typical. Make a deal, then change the terms. Give a gift that becomes an obligation. I had no reason to feel guilty telling Tony to get lost, no reason at all; no more reason, at least, than all the other times I had shunned my father’s warped attempts at intimacy. I owed them nothing. Victor Cracke’s art had come to me as though out of the void, like I’d found it in the trash. I had done the work. Alone.

I’d nearly come to convince myself of this, two days later, when I got another letter in the mail. Like its predecessor, it was written in Victor’s neat, uniform hand, on white, 81/2-by-11-inch paper. Like its predecessor, it had a simple message, repeated over and over and over. I AM WARNING YOU.

13

‘etting Samantha on the phone took more work than I expected. The home number she’d given me rang indefinitely, and her cell phone went straight to voicemail. I left two messages the afternoon I received Victor’s second letter, and two more the next day. Fearing I was becoming a pest, I waited an agonizing twenty-four hours before calling her at work. She seemed surprised to hear from me, and not particularly thrilled. I told her I’d been trying her for days, then waited for her to offer an excuse. When she didn’t, I said, “I need to see you.”

“I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”

She sounded remote, and I realized she had misunderstood me. “It’s not about that. I got another letter.”

“Letter?”

“From Victor Cracke,” I said. When she said nothing, I added, “The artist?”

“Oh. I didn’t know you’d gotten a first one.”

“Your father didn’t mention it?”

“No. So you can contact him, then.”

At first I thought she meant her father, and that she was making a sick joke. “There’s no return address. You’re sure your father didn’t mention it.”

“Positive.”

“That’s strange.”

“Why’s it strange.”

“Because I assumed he would’ve wanted you to know what was happening with the case.”

“It wasn’t my thing. It was his and yours.”

“Be that as it may, I need to show you this. Let me pick you up, I can—”

“Wait,” she said.

“What.”

“I don’t think you should do that.”

“Why?”

“Because I just—I just don’t.”

I said, “It’s got nothing to do with that.”

“I understand. I still don’t want to get together.”

“Why.”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Samantha—”

“Please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay? I think it’s better for the both of us if we just forget all about it and go back to doing what we were doing before.”

I said, “I swear to you, it isn’t about that.”

And furthermore, what exactly did she mean by forget all about it. It might never happen again, but we couldn’t undo reality. I had enjoyed that night, and I thought she had, too. My fantasies had been feeding on its memory for two weeks, the film reel turning in my mind. At the time she seemed fine, but now I wondered if there had been something wrong with her that I, in my eagerness, failed to notice, an abstraction in her face that I had interpreted as ecstasy. And afterward: lying there, feeling fatigue, satisfaction, embarrassment, some small part of loneliness, need—had she felt something else, something unspeakable? She hadn’t seemed in any hurry to get me out the door. Did we look each other in the eye as we dressed? No, but that’s not uncommon. I had kissed her good-bye, and it had been a nice kiss. A lingering kiss. She hadn’t said anything indicating that she intended to blot me out.

She said, “If you’re trying to figure out a way to—” “To what.”

“To see me, then this—”

“Are you kidding, it’s got nothing to—”

“This is not the way to—”

“Are you even listening to me?” I could imagine her, hunched over her desk, the hand on the forehead, the pout. The other hand wiggling a pen. Inventing reasons to put me off. Sorry to have bothered with me; I was turning out to be clingy… .

“I’ll fax you a copy of the letter,” I said. “You can decide for yourself.” “Fine.”

Ten minutes later she called back. “All right,” she said. “Thank you.”

“But I still don’t think I’m the person you should be calling.” “Then tell me who to call.” “The police.”

“Your father said they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“They can do more than I can,” she said. “I’m not even in your borough.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“I—”

“You’re the only other person aware of what’s going on. We still have the DNA to deal with, we still have transcripts left—”

“Whoa whoa whoa. I don’t have anything to do with this.” “He must have talked to you about the case.” “In passing, but—”

“Then you’re involved, whether you want to be or not. Don’t tell me you don’t care whether this gets finished or not.” “I don’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Believe whatever you’d like,” she said. “He would’ve wanted—” “Oh please don’t start with that.”

“I’m involved. You’re involved. It might have been his, but he’s gone and it’s ours now and I need your help.”

“I can’t” she said and burst into sobs.

Right then I realized that I’d been—if not shouting, then at least speaking with great force. I began to apologize, but she would have none of it.

“You don’t get it, do you. I want to be away from all of this.”

“I really am sorry—”

“Shut up. I don’t care about the case. Okay? I don’t give a fuck about the case, or about your letter, or anything else. I want to be left alone. Do you understand me?”

“I—”

“Just acknowledge that you understand me. I don’t want to hear anything else.”

“I understand, but—”

“I don’t want to hear it. All right? I’m hanging up and that’s the end of it.”

“Wait—”

She was gone. I held the phone until it began to croak.

I CALLED THE NYPD. The person who answered seemed not to understand me, so I gathered up the letter and a copy of the first one (the original was still at the crime lab) and headed over to the station on West Twentieth. Construction in the lobby made it impossible for the desk sergeant to hear me; he directed me and a patrolman into another room, away from the clatter.

“Huh,” said the patrolman after I’d explained the story. He seemed thoroughly confused. “So you already talked to someone in Queens?”

“Not exactly. He was retired. And then he passed away.”

“Huh.” He picked up the letters, one in each hand, as though checking them against each other.

“We’ve been trying to track down … Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but is there anyone else I can talk to?”

He glanced at me. Then he looked at the letters. “Hang on.”

While he was gone I watched through a window of reinforced glass as a female officer asked a snotty-looking kid questions. Behind her hung a banner congratulating the tenth precinct on another quarter of record lows. On a bulletin board hung a sheet of statistics, and adjacent, a poster of the Twin Towers.

The patrolman came back. His name, I saw, was VOZZO. “I made copies,” he said, giving me back the letters. “We’ll want to have them in case the writer does anything actionable. It’s probably just a prank, though. I wouldn’t freak yourself out.”

“That’s it?”

“Unfortunately, there isn’t much more I can do for you.”

“It doesn’t look like a prank to me.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t, and I wish I could tell you more. From our end, though, I can’t do a whole lot, not with this.”

“And there’s nobody else—”

“Not at the moment.”

The dropping crime statistics and the 9/11 poster told me a story, a continuation of the one McGrath had begun. September 11 had changed the way crime got handled in New York. A couple of angry letters, an un-solvable murder—who cared.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay. If you need anything, here’s my card. You can call me.” He held up the photocopies. “Meantime I’ll hang on to these.”

I doubted that he’d hang on to them much farther than the next trash can, but I thanked him again and went back to the gallery.

ANTSY AT SPINNING MY WHEELS, I decided to return to the only evidence I had at my disposal: the cache of drawings. Ruby and I hadn’t nearly finished going through them, and the ones I’d seen had been given a cursory examination at best. Somewhere in that vast map, I hoped to find the road to Victor Cracke.

After closing up, I took a cab across town to the storage warehouse. I signed in and rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, where I made my way through corridors overlit by fluorescent tubing. Mosley’s was New York’s preeminent art depository; any given locker might hold a Klimt, a Brancusi, a John Singer Sargent. In my temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, UV-radiation-controlled, vibration-controlled, air-quality-controlled, $5,760-a-month locker, all I had was Victor Cracke, thirty boxes of him—the embodiment of ten months’ emotional and professional energy.

There was a viewing room at the end of each floor, but I didn’t intend to sit in an airless cell all night long; I’d had enough of that. Instead I chose a box at random, dollied it back to the front desk, signed out, and shlepped down to the street to catch a cab.

I live in TriBeCa. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that. My apartment has a deck in back, with a quaint garden left by the previous owner that has survived my every attempt to kill it through negligence. I’m not much of a caretaker. The rest of the apartment is all me: pieces that I’ve set aside, either because I thought they would sell better down the line or because I wanted them for myself. I have a good deal of period Deco furniture, and an alcoholic neighbor who leaves a huge shopping bag clinking with empty wine bottles in the trash closet every Sunday night. I like my home and my chosen neighborhood. It’s close to the gallery but not so close that I feel like I’m living in The Scene; close enough to Marilyn’s town house that I can be there within minutes, not so close that we drop by unannounced. Around the corner from me is a fifteen-seat sushi bar where I eat two nights a week, and that’s where I went.

The hostess greeted me by name. Usually I sit at the bar, but that night I asked her for a table. “For me and my friend,” I said, indicating the box.

“Oooh,” she said and, when I nodded permission, pried open the top. I asked her what she thought. She bit her lip. “Dizzy,” she said finally.

Indeed.

I ordered dinner for myself and a carafe of sake, which I set in front of the box of drawings. “Cheers,” I said. “Drink up, motherfucker.”

Before I left, the hostess asked if I would show the art to the manager. I obliged. Soon the entire staff had gathered round, oohing and aahing their approval, or disapproval—I couldn’t tell. Either way, they sounded fascinated. I showed them how the drawings connected, eliciting further admiration. Their reaction delighted me, and seeing the work through their eyes, I remembered why I’d been attracted to it in the first place. It was enormously complex, enormously rich. If I looked hard enough, I would find a clue. Had to be there. Had to.

It was chilly that night, October hardening. There was no moon, and many of the streetlights were burnt out or obscured by the scaffolding that crops up in my neighborhood like kudzu. Once I stumbled and almost lost control of the box. A block and a half can seem pretty far to walk when you’re wearing a Savile Row suit and topcoat and carrying fifty pounds of paper. At that point, though, I couldn’t possibly indulge in a cab: my building was less than ten yards away.

I set the box down on the sidewalk and arched my back. It was eleven thirty, and I was tired. I wouldn’t be able to get to the art tonight. I’d get up early the next morning and work until I found something or until Samantha changed her mind.

In New York you don’t notice other people. They’re there, always, but you don’t see them. Who pays attention to people on the street? My neighborhood is safe at night. That’s why I didn’t turn around to see who was walking a few feet behind me. In fact, I don’t think I was aware of anyone else, not until I got hit on the back of the head with something extremely hard and heavy, and by then I was unconscious.

On Friday nights Mother reads while Father listens to the radio. David does not make noise. He sits on the rug and plays in his head, he has lots of games he plays. Or he tells himself stories. His favorite stories to make up involve a great exploring pilot named Roger Dollar. Roger Dollar always gets into trouble but then he always gets out because he’s clever and he has a suitcase full of tricks. Sometimes David will play with the train but then he forgets to keep still and sooner or later Mother will tell him to be quiet. If you want to make noise you can play in your room.

David does not like to play in his room. He hates his room; his room scares him. His room is tall and damp and dark. The whole house is tall and damp and dark. When he was born his mother painted the room a bright creamy boy’s blue. But all colors look the same in the dark, and no paint can prevent the bureau from turning into a hulking beast. David will lie with his blanket jammed up under his chin, shivering because the room is so cold. The bureau will gnash its teeth and open its jaws to swallow him. David will scream. The maid will come running. When she sees that he is fine, only having a nightmare, she will scold David for being such a fraidy-cat. Does he expect to grow up and be strong, or does he want to be a fraidy-cat all his life? No, he wants to grow up. Then why does he act like a fraidy-cat? Why isn’t he brave? Why doesn’t he shut his eyes and go to sleep? The maid’s name is Delia and she looks like a monster, too, with blotchy cheeks and bony fingers and a nightcap sitting high on her head, like brains swelling out of a broken skull. She yells at him all the time. She yells at him if he is late and if he is early. She yells at him if he eats too much and if he does not eat. She bakes cakes but won’t give him a slice, she leaves them under crystal domes until they turn stale and crumble. Then she discards them and bakes new ones. David doesn’t understand. Why bake a cake if not to eat it? What else are cakes for? Once he tried to take a piece and she whipped him. He now regards the cake stand as a betrayer, giving it a wide berth when he passes.

On nights when he screams, she will scold him and perhaps whip him, if she is in a sour enough mood; then she will leave him there, in bed, among the monsters. He will try to be brave, he will try to go to sleep. Roger Dollar would not scream so there’s no reason for him to scream, he ought not to be such a fraidy-cat. But then every time he opens his eyes, he will see more of them: the bureau, yes; also the mirror, the miniature wooden valet, the carved posts at the end of his bed. His hat rack, so cheery in daylight, teems with snakes, hissing and spitting and crawling up the mattress toward the only exposed part of him: his eyes, they are going to bite him, bite his eyes, slither into his face and then he will be unable to scream, they will eat his tongue, he had better scream while he still can …

Nevertheless he learns not to scream. He learns his lesson. At home you must keep your mouth shut and not say anything. That is the rule.

On Friday nights (Father calls them Family Nights), David sits on the rug and plays in his head, because although Mother does not often yell her rules are the same as Delia’s, and more swiftly enforced. Sometimes he wonders if they are in fact sisters, Mother and Delia, so similarly do they behave. David has noticed that Delia sometimes talks to Father the way that Mother does: with sass. She is the only employee who may do so, and she does it under Mother’s protection. Certainly David cannot sass. He has been warned. How it is that Delia can sass to Father and Mother can sass to Father and Father can sass at everyone else but David cannot sass to anyone, he does not understand. When he sasses he gets whipped. Does Delia get whipped when she sasses? Does Mother? Does it happen out of his sight? There are many things he does not understand. David turns six soon. Perhaps then he, too, will be allowed to sass. Perhaps that is what it means to grow up.

The news on the radio is all about the Depression. Like Delia’s untouched cakes and the rules of sass, the Depression is another thing that David wants to understand. Father talks of tightening his belt and Mother in response says that they must live like human beings. David does not understand the connection. If you tightened your belt, why couldn’t you live like a human being, except with tighter pants? Could you live like a human being if your pants were falling down? Of course not. David sides with Father, decisively.

The Depression has always existed. Yet his parents talk about Before. Before, we used to have more help around the house. Before we made adjustments. Delia talks about Before, too; Before, she had a friend, and now there is nobody for her to talk to. David can see that Delia is lonely. Why? There are plenty of other people around her. There’s Mother and Father and the cook and the driver and the butler and the man who comes to take the pictures and the doctor with the oily leather bag and all sorts of people, all the time. The house is never empty. So why does Delia seem so lonely? And if she’s so lonely, why does she act so nasty? David can easily see that more people would smile at her if she smiled herself. That much he understands. There may be a lot she knows that he doesn’t, but at least he can feel smarter about that.

The Depression, as far as David can tell, has something to do with the weather. So says Father. We’ll have to weather it. Or horses: we’ll have to ride it out. Perhaps—and here David feels on uncertain ground—it has to do with ships, and leaking. He wishes he understood better, because these storms and horses and leaky vessels exert a strong effect on his parents’ mood, particularly Father’s. Sometimes Father will come home in a terrible state, casting a black spell across the household. Dinners will be silent, no sound but squeaking knives. Father might start to talk about the news but

Mother will then say Not at the table or Please, Louis and Father will fall quiet again.

Friday night, Family Night, Father retreats to the corner with the big radio and switches on the lamp with the pretty green glass shade and sits with his legs crossed, tenting his fingers or chewing at the corners of his nails, a habit Delia calls dirty. Or he pulls gently on his earlobes, as though he’s trying to stretch them like taffy. He seems to disappear into the cushions, and David will sometimes stop playing the game in his head and look at him, with his hairy lip and his sunken cheeks and eyes like marbles that want to shoot across the floor. He fiddles with his necktie but never removes it. His shoes are a lustrous black, and if David creeps close enough he can see his bulging reflection in their shiny, rounded caps.

Mother reads books. They have names like The Rose of Killearney and The Wife of the Saxon Chieftain. David tried to look inside one of her books once, but could not understand. This is not because he cannot read. He learned to read, the tutor taught him. To practice he reads the picture books. Sometimes, when Delia has thrown away the newspaper—she reads it out loud to the chef, who is from Italy and whose accent makes him sound like he’s singing, all the time, even when he is not—he will fish it out of the trash and sit in the cupboard with it. Like Father, all the newspaper seems to care about was the Depression.

On Friday nights David stands at the window and looks down at the men and women walking in their hats and their scarves. Cars used to honk until the noise drove Mother loony and she couldn’t stand it a second longer and she had the men come and put on a second set of windows, glass as thick as David’s fingers. Now the picture show in the street makes no sound at all. David doesn’t mind. He can supply the voices and the sounds in his head, where he keeps so much.

Come away from there, David.

He goes back to his spot on the rug, lies down, and looks at the ceiling, where there are paintings of angels that Father had put there. They are playing trumpets and flowers are coming out of them. The trumpets, not the angels. It would be funny if flowers came out of the angels. But coming out of the trumpets they just look silly. David never says anything because Father seems quite fond of his angels.

This Friday night in particular, he is in the middle of extracting Roger Dollar from a very difficult situation. Roger has been kidnapped by lawless bandits who want to take his gold. He is using an oar to fight them off, and as the bandits fire their guns, David hears someone coming down the stairs. He is surprised. Nobody may come into the drawing room on Family Night; anybody who does will probably get whipped, worse than if they sassed.

He looks at Mother and Father. Neither of them have noticed anything.

David wonders if he imagined the footsteps. He has a strong imagination, so strong he sometimes gets lost in it. Instead of reviewing his lessons, math or German or music, he will focus on the faint whoop of a cardinal, two slow calls and then a series of sharp ones, or on the way a crack in the plaster traces its way up the wall, like a river flowing upward. He will spin such impressions into elaborate stories, jungle exploration, clashes between savage tribes full of men with pointy teeth and drawings on their bodies, he saw them in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. David knows that distraction takes him easily. When he returns to the world, it is usually through a tunnel of shouts, at the end of which Delia stands, grinding her jaw and cracking her knuckles.

He did not imagine the footsteps. They are coming closer, in bursts of four or five, as though the person is learning how to walk.

Should he get up? He could pretend to go to the bathroom, and on the way warn the approaching stranger to turn back. It’s Family Night, don’t go in there!

But what if the stranger is dangerous: a monster, or worse? What if David needs to protect Mother and Father? What if he can save only one of them? Who would he choose? The answer comes quickly: Father. Father is skinnier, and David likes him more. Mother, with her heaving bosom, her huge raft of skirts, could probably defend herself. If she didn’t manage that would be okay, too.

Now Mother puts down her book.

“Louis.”

Father has passed out, his eyelids fluttering.

“Louis.”

Father wakes. “What’s that, Mother?”

“There’s someone in the hall.”

“Who’s that.”

“I heard a noise.”

Father nods sleepily. “Yes.”

“Well? Go see what it is.”

Father takes a deep breath and unfurls himself from deep within his armchair. His legs looks like a spider’s, frail and long and jointed, and though he looks small in his chair, when he rises, it is always to an awesome height.

“Did you hear something?” he asks David.

David nods.

Father tugs at his collar and yawns. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Before he can, the door swings open with a shriek. Father jumps back and Mother puts her hand to her chest and David blinks furiously, trying to keep quiet. In comes a girl he has never seen before. She is wearing a white nightgown, so thin that the fabric is see-through; and she is weird-looking, with small bosoms and a rounded stomach and hairy arms. She is short. Her face is squashed, like a frog’s. Her tongue sticks out of her mouth like she has tasted something rotten. Her hair is smooth and tied back with a yellow bow. She has slanty eyes that dart around the room, looking at this chair and that wall and then at Mother and Father. Then she looks at David and she seems to start to smile. He does not smile back; he is frightened and he wants to hide.

Mother leaps up, dropping her book on the floor.

Father says, “Bertha—”

Mother crosses the room in three big steps; she takes the girl by the wrist and pulls her from sight. David hears them going up the stairs.

Father says, “Are you all right?”

Why wouldn’t he be all right? Nothing happened to him. David nods.

Father runs a hand down his shirtfront, smooths down his tie. He touches his moustache, as though the commotion might have ruffled it. He looks for his glasses—they are in his breast pocket, where they always are—but instead of putting them on he repockets them.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Good. Good. Good.” Father smooths his tie again. “Dear God.”

Dear God what? It sounds to David as though Father wants to write a letter. But he says no more.

Mr. Lester Schimming’s variety hour is sponsored by Mealtime, Mealtime, the once-a-day nutritional powder that—

Father shuts the radio off. He curls into the armchair, once again becoming small. He is pale, his breathing is loud, and he pulls on his earlobes. David would like to go to him, to put a hand on his forehead the way Mother does when David is sick. He would like to bring him water, or some of the sharp-smelling purple stuff that Father drinks before going to sleep. But David knows to be quiet. He stays in place. He says nothing.

Later, Mother comes back. Her mouth is a wire. She does not look either at David or at Father, but picks up her book and returns to the chaise. She lies down and begins turning pages as though never interrupted, and although Father is staring at her with a fearful expression, she clears her throat loudly and he looks away.

NOW DAVID HAS A MYSTERY.

More than one. So many mysteries that he can barely contain himself, and when he lies awake that night, it isn’t from fear but from excitement. He can be an explorer, like Roger Dollar. He will make a plan; he will—as the detective on the radio show says—get to the bottom of this.

He begins by making a list of questions.

Who is the girl?

Why does she look weird?

How did she get in the house?

How old is she?

Where is she now?

Why did Mother react the way she did?

Why did Father react the way he did?

Why did Mother grow angry at Father?

Why did they ignore David for the rest of that evening? (Actually, that question needs no answer. They always ignore him.)

The questions flap around his head like owls whooping who who who, how how how, why why why.

He knows one thing for sure: he cannot ask Mother or Father. He feels certain that to ask is to earn a whipping. The same applies to Delia. He must seek out the answers on his own. And he must be very careful, because he has the feeling that Mother will not tolerate one ounce of mischief.

First he gathers information. The next night at dinner David observes his parents, watching for anything unusual. They eat barley soup and roast beef and the tiny pasta ears that the cook makes. Father has his purple drink early. When he motions for another Mother gives him an evil stare, and he changes his request to a half a glass. Otherwise all goes normally.

At least until the end of the meal. Then—instead of parting, as they usually do, Father to his study and Mother to her sewing room—both of them rise and head out the same door, the one that leads to the east wing of the house. David would like to follow, but Delia arrives to escort him to his bath.

Afterward he climbs into bed. Delia asks if he wants a story and he says no thank you. He cannot wait for her to leave, and when she does he counts to fifty, then slips quietly from underneath the blanket and stands in his socks, shivering, strategizing.

The house has four stories. Like his bedroom, Mother’s sewing room is on the third floor. Father’s study is on the fourth. David reckons that they are not likely to meet in either of those places; they have changed their pattern, and will probably choose a third place. But where?

The first floor has a foyer where guests take cocktails. There are lots of rooms hung with paintings, one of which has the family portraits: his grandfather and great-grandfather, as well as great-uncles, great-great-uncles, men stretching back almost a hundred years, an inconceivable amount of time. There is Solomon Muller, smiling kindly. Beside him, his brothers: Adolph with the crooked nose and Simon with the warts and Bernard with the bushy balloons of hair at either side of his head. Papa Walter, looking like he has eaten too much peppery food. Father’s portrait is halfway done, David knows. Father has shown him where it will go once completed. And yours will go here. And your son’s, there. David saw the empty panels as windows into the future.

The second floor does not seem a likely meeting place: aside from the dining room and the kitchen, it is mostly taken up by the ballroom, which stays shuttered and dark all year, except for the night when Mother throws her Autumn Ball. Then the doors swing open and the featherdusters fly. Chairs are unbelted and unstacked, tables erected, linens spread, silver polished and aligned. The orchestra arrives and the room fills with swishing silk of all colors. Last year David was allowed to attend for the first time. Everybody fawned over him in his coat. He waltzed with Mother. They gave him wine; he fell asleep and woke up the next morning in his bed. He feels confident assuming that his parents will not have their meeting there.

The third floor is his bedroom, Mother’s sewing room, and lots of guest rooms. That is what his room is: a guest room they have made into a special room for him. You are always a welcome guest, says Father. David’s not sure what that means. Also on the third floor are the library, the music room, the Round Room, the radio room (where they spend Family Night), and many rooms full of breakable objects whose purpose he has yet to discern. All of these seem too small and ordinary to contain an event David expects to be momentous.

The fourth floor, the top floor, belongs to his parents’ private suites. It is a realm seldom visited and redolent of unanswered questions. He will try there first.

It’s not an easy operation. He cannot take the elevator; too much noise. He cannot take the east stairs, because servants use them to go up and down, and if they see him, he will be returned to bed. The south stairwell is near Delia’s room—she, too, has a guest room, unlike the rest of the help, whose rooms are in the basement. She leaves her door open at night, so that if David needs something he can call her with the bell. That way, too, she can hear him screaming when he sees monsters. Surely she will hear him if he walks past. He wraps his blanket around his shoulders and thinks.

Sometimes Delia has visitors in her room. David can hear them laughing, can taste the smoke drifting down the hall. He could wait until they arrived and hope to slip by unnoticed …

No. Tonight she might not have any visitors, and even if she does, who knows when they will come. He has already wasted too much time. He needs a different plan.

Down the hall is a bathroom adjacent to Delia’s room. The toilet there has a big chain you pull on, and it makes a lot of noise, enough to cover a quick dash from there to the stairs. A problem: he has his own bathroom. Using a different one will arouse Delia’s suspicions. What would Roger Dollar do?

As usual, Delia’s door is halfway open. He knocks. She says to come in, sounding friendly; when she sees that it is him, she frowns and asks what’s wrong.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

Her frown deepens. “Then use it, then.”

“There’s no paper,” he says.

She crushes out her cigarette and turns over her book and sighs, flicking a finger at the hallway behind him. “Use mine, then.”

He thanks her and says goodnight. She does not answer.

He closes her door on his way out. Not all the way; that would arouse her suspicion.

He goes to the bathroom. It’s not hard to pee when you want to. He wads up some paper and throws it in the bowl. Then he takes a deep breath and pulls the chain, bringing a roar of water and eight seconds of freedom. He goes.

He does not stop moving until he has reached the fourth-floor landing. He tiptoes down the hall until he comes to two pairs of large, wooden doors, each carved with the family crest, separated by twenty-five feet of satiny wallpaper: the entrances to his parents’ private suites.

Behind one door, his father is talking.

David presses his ear to the door but cannot understand the conversation. The door is too heavy and thick. He must get inside. But how? He remembers that the two suites are connected by an internal passageway. If he enters one suite, he could hide in that passageway and listen. Success depends on whether he chooses the right suite to begin with. Otherwise he will walk straight into them, and he will be in hot water. He listens at the other set of carved doors. The voices sound stronger—still incomprehensible, though—leading him to conclude that his best bet is to go through Mother’s room.

His heart speeds up as he reaches for the doorknob, turns, and pushes.

It is bolted from the inside.

Now what? He scans the hallway for another option, and right away he finds one: a closet. He checks to make sure that he can fit inside. Then he goes to the door of his mother’s suite and presses the buzzer.

The voices inside cease. Footsteps approach. David scampers into the closet and closes the door. He waits in the darkness.

“Damn you,” he hears his father say, “I gave”—the snap of a deadbolt— “instructions”—the squeal of a door—”not to be—”

Silence.

The door closes.

David lets out his breath. He counts to fifty, exits the closet, and goes to the doors, which he prays his father has forgotten to lock.

He has.

In David goes, moving stealthily across the large Persian carpet. From the passageway drifts the sound of his father’s voice. His parents’ suites are enormous, consisting of many rooms—a bedchamber and a bathroom and a sitting room; drawing rooms and Father’s study … and each of those rooms is ten times as big as David’s. In Mother’s suite she keeps her own gramophone and radio, a matched set inlaid with mother-of-pearl. David knows what mother-of-pearl is because he has a toy box with mother-of- pearl on the top. When he asked Delia what it was and she told him, he thought she meant a person. He asked where she lived, Pearl’s mother who made boxes, and Delia laughed at him. Also in Mother’s suite are a grand piano and a small painted harpsichord, neither of which she plays. Atop a carved table sit three dozen glass eggs. He knows the name for them: hand coolers. He picks up a brightly colored one and indeed it helps soothe his sweaty palms. He goes barefoot into the passageway and follows the voices until he reaches the entrance to Father’s sitting room. He gets down on the ground and crawls forward, peeks out through the crack in the door. He cannot see Mother’s face, as it is obscured by a tall vase. All he can see of her is a motionless arm. Father is pacing the room and flinging his hands in every direction. David has never heard voices quite like these: angry whispering, whispers that would be shouts if they were only a bit louder.

Father is saying, “—forever.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then what do you propose. Give me a better idea and I will do it.”

“You know what I think.”

“No. No. Aside from that. I told you already, I will never—never, never— consent to that, never. Can I possibly make myself clearer?”

“I have no other suggestions. I’m already at wit’s end.”

“And I’m not? Do you imagine that this is easier for me than it is for you?”

“Not at all. Frankly, I would think that it has been a great deal more difficult for you. You are vastly more sentimental.”

Father says a word David has never heard before.

“Louis. Please.”

“You aren’t helping me.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Help me.” Father stops pacing and stares where Mother’s face should be. He looks like he’s on fire. He points up at the ceiling. “Don’t you feel anything.”

“Stop shouting.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too.”

“I will not have a conversation with you when you’re like this.”

“Answer me.”

“Not if you insist on sh—”

“Look, Bertha. Look up. Look. You can’t feel that? Tell me you cannot, I don’t believe that anyone has so little heart, not even you, to pretend as though you can walk around without being crushed by that weight.” Silence. “Answer me.” Silence. “You have no right to sit there and say nothing.” Silence. “Damn it, answer me.” Silence. “You do not behave like this. Not after everything I’ve given you. I’ve given you everything you’ve asked for, been exactly what you demanded—”

“Not everything, Louis. Not exactly.”

Silence of a different kind: infused with terror.

Father upends a table. Ceramic dishes and a wooden cigar box and crystal figurines sail across the room, producing a mighty crash. The glass tabletop shatters. Mother screams. In the passageway, David cringes, ready to bolt. From another place in the room comes a second, smaller shattering, and when the noise finally subsides, he hears weeping, two different rhythms in two different registers.

HE WORKS OUT THE CLUES. It takes a few days, because he has to wait until he goes to the Park with Delia in order to confirm his hunch. As they return from their walk, David counts windows and discovers that he has been wrong. The house does not have four stories. It has five.

How this could have escaped him until now, he does not know. The house is big, though, and he has often been scolded for wandering into forbidden territory. A whole wing remains off-limits, and David, generally lost in his own head, prone to long bouts of stationary dreaming, has never been one to overstep, not under threat of a whipping.

But to get to the bottom of this, he must break the rules.

The entrance to the rear wing lies through the kitchen, a place thick with steam and hazards. He has never ventured beyond the sink. Four days later, when he is supposed to be in his room, reviewing his German lesson, he sneaks downstairs. The cook is rolling dough. David straightens his backbone, puts on a bold face, and walks past him. The cook never looks up.

Through a swinging door he comes to a second room, where a pile of raw meat lies on a huge, scarred table. With its reek of fat and flesh, its spattered walls, its lakes of blood pooling round the table legs, the room exerts a queer, morbid pull, and David has to remind himself to keep moving, not to stop and examine the heavy, menacing instruments hung on the wall, the bloodstained grout …

He comes to a hallway checked black-and-white. He tries a number of doors before finding the one he wants: an alcove for the service elevator.

He gets in. Unlike the main elevator, this one has a button for a fifth floor.

As the car rises, it occurs to him to worry about who he might run into up there. If the girl is indeed there, what will he do? What if there are other people—a guard, say. Or a guard dog! His heart skips. Too late for worrying. The car bounces to a stop and the doors open.

Another hallway. Here the carpeting is loose and worn, pulling away from the walls. At the end of the hall are three doors, all closed.

The wind sings, and he looks up at a skylight. The sky is cloudy. It might rain.

He walks to the end of the hall and listens. Nothing.

He knocks softly on each of the doors. Nothing.

He tries one. It is a closet full of sheets and towels.

The next door swings open and the smell of camphor rolls over him. He stifles a cough and steps inside.

The room is unoccupied. There is a small bed, neatly made, and opposite it an armoire, painted white with horses and other animals, a peaceful little scene. He throws it open and jumps back, ready to fight off a snarling beast.

Bare hangers stir.

Disappointed, he tries the third door and finds a bathroom, also empty.

He returns to the bedroom and walks to the window. From it he has a wonderful view of Central Park, perhaps the best in the house. The trees are soft and green and shivering beneath the slaty sky. Birds turn circles over the Reservoir. He wants to stick his head out and see more but the window is nailed shut.

He tries to put together what he has learned, to set out all the clues in front of him, but they do not add up. Perhaps he will learn when he gets older. Or perhaps he was wrong: there was no girl, and he imagined the entire episode. It wouldn’t be the first time he accidentally grafted one of his fantasies onto a real memory. He might have misunderstood his parents’ argument. He doesn’t understand, and he knows he doesn’t understand, awareness making ignorance twice as painful.

Spirits sinking, he turns to go. For a moment he hopes something will have changed. But the room is still empty, the bed still mute, the floor still dusty and plain.

Then he sees something he missed. Under the bed, against the wall, almost invisible; he kneels down and reaches for it and grasps it and pulls it out and holds it up. It’s a girl’s shoe.

14

woke up in a bed at St. Vincent’s, and the first thing I said was, “Where’s the art?” Marilyn looked up from her magazine. “Oh good,” she said. “You’re up.” She went into the hallway and returned with a nurse, who began subjecting me to a battery of tests, hands and instruments shoved up my nose and down my throat.

“Marilyn.” It rather came out as Mayawa. “Yes, darlin.” “Where’s the art?” “What did he say?”

“Where’s the art. The art. Where’s the art.” “I can’t understand him, can you?” “Art. Art.”

“Can you give him something so he won’t bark?” Some time later I woke up again. “Marilyn. Marilyn.”

She appeared through the curtain, her smile fatigued. “Hello again. Did you have a nice nap?” “Where’s the art?” “Art?”

“The drawings.” My eyes hurt. My head hurt. “The Crackes.”

“You know, the doctor said you might be a little disoriented.”

“The drawings, Marilyn.”

“Do you want some more pain stuff ?”

I grunted.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

I’ll spare you further details of my reemergence. Suffice it to say that I had a wretched headache, that the busyness of the emergency room made my headache worse, and I was glad when they determined me well enough to leave. Marilyn didn’t want me going home, though, and through money or influence she secured me a private room on the inpatient floor, which she told me I’d have as long as I felt unwell.

They wheeled me upstairs.

“You look like Etienne,” Marilyn said.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“About sixteen hours. You know, you’re very boring when you’re unconscious.” Underneath her sarcasm was genuine terror.

I was not too confused and miserable to wonder how she had gotten there.

“Your neighbor came back from walking his dog and found you on the front step. He called the ambulance and the gallery. Ruby called me this morning. Here I am. Incidentally, she’s going to try to come by again this evening.”

“Again?”

“She was here. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“She and Nat both. They brought a box of eclairs, which the nurses took away, I believe for themselves.”

“Thank you,” I said to her. Then I thanked the intern pushing me. Then I fell asleep.

THE NEXT VISIT I REMEMBER CLEARLY was from the police. I told them as much as I could remember, starting from the moment I left the gallery and up until I set the box down on the sidewalk. They seemed disappointed that I couldn’t given them even the thinnest description of my assailant, although my account of dinner at Sushi Gaki seemed to interest them particularly. Even in my semi-addled state, the idea that someone from the restaurant had assaulted me for a box of drawings struck me as outlandish. I tried to convince them of this, but they kept harping on my “showing the stuff around.”

“I wasn’t advertising anything,” I said. “The hostess asked to see it.”

“Does she know what you do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I might have mentioned it at one time or another. She’s ninety-five pounds, for God’s sake.”

“It didn’t have to be her, necessarily.”

They continued to pursue this line of questioning until my headache forced me to close my eyes. When I opened them next, the police were gone and Marilyn was back. She’d brought eclairs to replace the ones the nursing staff had filched.

“You don’t deserve me,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said. “Marilyn?”

“Yes, darlin boy.”

“I’m feeling something on my face.”

She took out her compact and pointed the mirror at me.

I was aghast.

“It’s not that bad,” she said.

“It looks bad.”

“It’s just a big bandage. It won’t even scar.”

“Am I missing a tooth?”

ce-n ť

Two.

“How did I not notice that?” I poked my tongue around in the gaps.

“You’re on a lot of drugs.” She patted her purse. “I’ve got some myself.”

Ruby came. “Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier, things’ve been crazy. We’ll be ready, don’t worry.”

“Ready for what?” I asked.

“You have an opening tonight,” said Marilyn.

“We do? Whose?”

“Alyson.”

I sighed. “Shit.”

Ruby said, “She sends her best. She’s going to visit tomorrow.”

“Tell her not to come,” I said. “I don’t want to see anyone. Shit.”

“It’ll be fine. We have everything under control.”

“I’m giving you a raise,” I told her. “Nat, too.”

Marilyn said, “Ask for a health plan.”

“They already have a health plan.”

“Then ask for a company jet.”

“Actually,” Ruby said, “we could do with a new mini-fridge. The old one’s been making noise.”

“Since when?”

“A few weeks.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

Ruby shrugged, the meaning of which was clear enough. Of course I hadn’t noticed; I hadn’t been around the gallery.

“Go ahead,” I told her. “Get whatever you need. And call me after the opening.”

“Thank you.”

She left, and I said to Marilyn, “I hope they’re okay.”

“They’ll be fine. In fact, as far as I can tell, your absence is serving only to prove how irrelevant you are.”

THE COMBINATION OF A SEVERE CONCUSSION and all-you-can-eat painkillers doesn’t do wonders for your ability to gauge the passage of time. I think it was on my third morning when I woke up and saw that Marilyn, sitting in the purple vinyl chair, reading Us Weekly, was no longer Marilyn but Samantha.

I considered this a fairly nasty joke on the part of my subconscious. I said, “Give me a break.”

Samantha/Marilyn looked up. She put down the magazine and stood by my bedside. “Hi,” she said. Her warm hand made the rest of me feel cold. I began to shiver.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Give me a break… .”

“I’m going to get the nurse.”

“That’s right, Marilyn! Get the nurse!”

I expected the nurse to have Samantha’s face, as well. But she was black.

“Very funny,” I said.

“What’s he talking about?” Samantha/Marilyn asked.

“I don’t know.”

Then Marilyn herself came in, carrying two cups of vending-machine coffee. She saw the nurse checking my blood pressure and said, “What’s going on.”

“He called me your name.”

“Well,” said Marilyn/Marilyn, “that’s better than if he called me your name.”

I fell asleep.

AN HOUR LATER I woke up feeling clearheaded. Both Marilyn and Samantha were still there, engaged in a lively conversation that, thankfully, had nothing to do with me, Marilyn in the middle of one of her Horatio Alger stories about when she was penniless and used to steal fruit from the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. I groaned, and they both turned to look. They came and stood by the bed, one on each side of me.

“Did you have a good nap?” Marilyn asked.

“I feel much more awake now,” I said.

“There’s a reason for that. I was noticing that you looked a little glazed over. Then you started to call everyone Marilyn, so we brought the doctor in and he scaled back your drip a tiny bit. Better?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I have to admit: I found it rather flattering that it was me you saw everywhere.”

I smiled weakly.

“Samantha was telling me about your case,” said Marilyn. “There’s so much more to it than you shared with me, so many lovely little details. Oatmeal?”

I said, “It’s just a theory.”

“Well, I’ll let you two do your sleuthing. I’m going home. I need a shower. Nice to meet you. Take care of him.”

Samantha pulled the chair up to the bedside. “You didn’t say anything about having a girlfriend.”

“Our relationship doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“What way would that be? Honestly?”

“It wouldn’t bother her if she knew,” I said. “I’ll tell her right now, if you’d like. Catch her before she gets in the elevator and bring her back.”

Samantha rolled her eyes.

“What did you two talk about?” I asked.

“Clothes, mostly.”

“She’s got plenty to talk about.”

“So I gathered.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “Clothes.”

“I didn’t tell her, if that’s what you’re getting at.” She shifted around, straightened up. “Are you surprised to see me?”

“A little.”

“You should be. I’m a little surprised to be here myself. When do you get out?”

“Soon, I hope. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.”

“Okay. In the meantime I’m going to finish up collecting DNA from people who were in the apartment. I found the list you made. I also spoke to the lab. We’ll have results on the semen and bloodstains within three weeks. Anything else I’m missing?”

“The other cases.”

“What other cases.”

“Your father wanted to look through old cases to see if any of them fit the profile. Detective Soto was working on it for him.”

“All right. I’ll call him. You rest up and get out of here and we’ll talk then.” She stood up. “You know, you really made me feel like shit about my dad.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Too late now.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“So am I,” she said.

15

checked out the next day. Marilyn sent a limousine to pick me up, instructing the driver to take me to her town house. Certainly I had no intention of going back to my place. The person who had assaulted me had to be familiar with my comings and goings; either he had followed me from the warehouse or he’d been waiting around the corner from my building. Either way, I thought a few days under the radar would be prudent.

My prudence was nothing compared to Marilyn’s. In the back of the limo was a bodyguard, a mammoth Samoan in a Rocawear tracksuit. He introduced himself as Isaac; his hand swallowed mine; he was at my service until further notice. To me, this was going overboard, but I wasn’t about to start arguing with a man his size.

As one would expect, Marilyn’s house is done in the best taste; it’s also surprisingly livable, albeit tailored to her quirks. She has two kitchens, a full one on the bottom floor and a smaller one near her bedroom, so she can cook herself waffles or eggs or a steak or whatever strikes her fancy at three in the morning. You’ve seen her block before; it has appeared as the backdrop for many a television show, the downtown real-estate equivalent of Murderer’s Row—tall, skinny, picturesque West Village brownstones, each with a patio out back and a throng of camera-happy Midwesterners out front. The Sex and the City bus tour stops two doors down to allow its patrons the opportunity to memorialize the spot where, I’m told, Carrie and Aidan had an argument during season four.

Isaac, used to battling paparazzi, had no trouble getting me through the crowd.

The maid let us in. Marilyn had ordered a room made up on the first floor so that I wouldn’t have to walk up the stairs. On the bed were three new sets of clothing, Barneys tags still attached. She had set out a tray of spice cookies and a little plastic jack-o’-lantern with a note tucked inside. I opened it up. It said Boo.

I went into the bathroom and got my first good look at myself in days. They had changed the dressing on my face several times, each time putting on a slightly lighter one, until all I had were Band-Aids covering my left cheek from dimple to hairline. I peeled one of bandages back and saw a thin patch of scab, like someone had gone after me with a potato peeler. The missing teeth were also on the left side. The shock of seeing them gone started me laughing; I looked like I’d just wandered down out of the Appalachians.

I found a bottle of ibuprofen and shook out four. In my jacket I had a prescription for OxyContin, which I intended to fill and then give away, either to Marilyn or as party favors. I went to grab a bite from the lower kitchen and found Isaac on a folding chair outside my room, blocking the hallway with his girth.

“I really think I’ll be okay,” I said.

“That’s what they want you to think.”

We went to the kitchen. I swallowed my pills. My appetite dwindled as soon as I took a bite of my turkey sandwich, so I offered Isaac the other, bigger half. He accepted gratefully, discarding the bread before eating the meat, lettuce, and tomato.

“No carbs,” he explained. “Right.”

All I wanted to do was sleep. Three days of sleeping will do that to you. I made myself a cup of coffee and called Marilyn at work.

“Did you find everything all right?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“How’s the man I sent you?”

Across the kitchen, Isaac was pouring himself a bowl of cereal. So much for his diet. “Superb.”

“Greta recommended him. He used to work for Whitney Houston. Don’t tell me you don’t need it, I can tell you’re about to say that.”

“I wasn’t, in fact. I was just going to thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Really—I’m so grateful for—”

“Hush,” she said and hung up.

Next I called the gallery. Nat picked up. I asked how the opening had gone.

“Beautifully. Alyson was ecstatic.” Like me, Nat went to Harvard, but he graduated summa cum laude, writing his thesis on ambisexual iconography in Renaissance tapestry. His Boston accent is clipped and wry and fabulous, making him sound sort of like a gay Kennedy.

He told me about the show, concluding, “And the fridge is on order. Oh, and something came in the mail for you from the Queens District Attorney. Do you want me to open it?”

“Please.”

“Hold on.” He put the phone down and came back a moment later. “There’s a little cotton swab thingy and a vial. It’s some sort of—what is this?”

I heard Ruby say, “A paternity kit.”

“It’s a paternity kit,” Nat said. “Did you impregnate the Queens District Attorney?”

“Not yet. Messenger it over here, would you.”

“Si, senor.” Then, to Ruby: “You know, you sound awfully well acquainted with this paternity thing. Are you in a family way again?

“Bite me,” she called.

I smiled. “Listen, I’m worried about the two of you. Whoever did this to me is out there and I don’t want anything happening to you.”

“We’re fiiine.”

“It would make me more comfortable if you didn’t hang around the gallery. Close down for a couple of weeks and take a vacation. Paid.”

“But we just opened. Alyson will go ballistic. And I wouldn’t blame her.”

“Keep your eyes open, then. Please. Do that for me.”

“We’re fine, Ethan. Ruby knows kung fu. Tell him.”

“Ki-yai!”

I LEFT A MESSAGE FOR SAMANTHA and she called back within the hour, her tone all business.

“Did you get the kit?”

“Yes. Thank you. I’ll do it today.”

“Good. I need you to think, Ethan: was there anything else that might possibly have a trace of Cracke’s DNA on it?”

“There might be,” I said. While watching the nurse change my dressing in the hospital, I’d noticed that the color of the bloodied gauze looked eerily like that of the five-pointed star at the center of the Cherubs, a theory that appeared to me more and more brilliant as they continued to feed me drugs. In the sober light of day, it seemed not quite as brilliant, but given our shortage of viable leads, I didn’t see how it hurt to consider the possibility.

“Even if it’s blood,” she said, “it might not be his blood.”

“That’s true.”

“But it can’t hurt. Let’s give it a whirl.”

“Well, hang on. Here’s the tough part. I don’t have the drawing anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I sold it.”

“You’re joking.”

I told her about Hollister.

“Are there any other drawings like that one?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. We can go through all of them but it’ll take a while. First let me see what I can do about that one.”

I had no doubt that Hollister liked me enough to invite me back to his house. But he’d have to like me a lot more than that to allow me to start cutting samples out of his artwork. Which left me one option: if I really wanted that piece, I’d have to buy it back.

I hate to buy back art. Some dealers guarantee that if an item’s market drops, they will repurchase it at sale price, allowing the buyer to walk away even. I won’t. I think it infantilizes the client; part of the point of collecting is to hone one’s own aesthetic sensibilities, and that happens only when one takes a personal stake in the matter.

And, understandably, I balked at forking over a large amount of money only to discover that the bloodstain was not a bloodstain, or not one that could give us any information. My hesitation turned out to be moot; when I called Hollister the next morning, his secretary told me he was unavailable.

Monday and Tuesday I lounged around Marilyn’s house, Isaac tailing me, like I’d swapped shadows with a sumo wrestler. When I went to get my missing incisors replaced, he lobbied for gold rather than porcelain: “All the big dogs got gold.”

On Wednesday the NYPD sent two men over to the house. These were not the same two I’d met in the hospital—at least as far as I could remember, which wasn’t very far—but detectives from the major case squad who specialized in art theft. Immediately, I flagged them as rather an odd couple. Phil Trueg was all belly; his garish Jerry Garcia print tie stood out like an abdominal Mohawk. He had a strong Brooklyn accent and a tendency to laugh at his own jokes, which came fast and furious. His partner, on the other hand, was ten years younger, taut and tan and reserved, his outfit likewise muted, khaki bleeding into itself. His name was Andrade, although Trueg told me to call him Benny, an instruction that I decided to disregard.

Andrade and Trueg believed that the attacker’s primary motivation had been to get the drawings rather than to injure me, and in support of this theory, they pointed to the fact that my wallet hadn’t been taken. Nor, said

Trueg, had I been beaten up “any more than necessary.” (I replied that I didn’t think any beating was necessary at all.) The thief was almost certainly an insider, connected to the art world or working for someone who was; otherwise, it was hard to understand how he would know of me or how he could hope to resell the drawings. The detectives asked me a long series of questions. I evaded the ones about my clientele; I didn’t want the police pestering people who were obviously innocent and who would take strong umbrage at having their privacy invaded. I showed them the threatening letters I’d received from Victor Cracke and described at length my attempts to find him, my meetings with McGrath, my visit to the precinct.

Andrade squinted at the letters. “Are you sure these came from him?”

“They look like his handwriting.”

“What does he want you to stop?” Trueg asked.

“I have no idea. I assume he was unhappy about the show. But in that case I can’t understand why he would still be angry; the show came down almost a month ago.”

“He might want his drawings back,” said Andrade.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Anybody else you can think of might have a grievance with you?”

The best name I could come up with—and I gave it to them reluctantly— was Kristjana Hallbjornsdottir.

“Spell that, please.”

The plan was to wait and see where the art popped up. Since I was presumed to have in my possession all but a few of the drawings, any that came onto the market would by definition be stolen. This strategy was far from foolproof. There might have been other Crackes out there that I didn’t know about, or the thief might never sell. But without eyewitnesses, we had few other options. And since I could not confirm my attacker’s identity, a conviction would be difficult, if not impossible, without a tangible link—to wit, the drawings—between the crime and the perpetrator.

They left me in a state of utter exhaustion.

For the first few days of my convalescence, Marilyn played the role of overbearing mother. She called to check on me every half-hour, often cutting short my naps. She sent her assistants over with books that I couldn’t concentrate on. At night she brought in dinner or else made me something, chicken, hamburgers—anything with protein—and forced me to eat, saying that I had lost too much weight and that I was beginning to look like Iggy Pop. I think she was trying to buoy my spirits, but the relentless stream of mockery began to grate on me. Her fear of losing me came in just shy of her fear of appearing corny, and so whenever she considered herself verging on sentimentality, she would pull back and make some unreasonable demand of me, resulting in conditions that were both doting and ruthless, as when she brought me in a sushi platter but ordered me out of bed to eat it.

“You have to move,” she said.

“I’m not an invalid, Marilyn.”

“Your legs are going to atrophy.”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s the first sign. You need to get up and walk around.”

I told her that she would have made a terrible doctor.

“Thank God I’m a bitchy art dealer.”

Improbably, she also tried to insist on having sex. I told her I had a headache.

“You don’t expect me to fall for that, do you?”

“I have a head injury.”

“All you have to do is lie there,” she said. “Like you usually do.”

“Marilyn.” I had to physically pry her from my neck. “Stop.”

She stood up, red-faced, and left the room.

The more she did things like that, the more I thought of Samantha. I know that it’s cliche to run from those who love you most, and equally cliche to want what you cannot have, but for me these were new emotions. I’d never wanted to run from Marilyn; why would I? She gave me all the latitude a man could ask for. Only the most recent display of affection had caused me to feel stifled. And I’d never desired someone out of reach—mainly because nobody has ever been out of reach for me, not really.

KEVIN HOLLISTER CALLED ME BACK from Vail, where he was enjoying an unseasonably early snowfall.

“Eighteen inches of fresh powder. As close as it gets to perfect. God’s country.” He sounded out of breath. “I’ll send a plane, you’ll be on the slopes by noon.”

As much as I liked to ski, I couldn’t stand up quickly without feeling like I’d been shot in the face. I told him I was under the weather.

“Next year, then. I’m having a birthday party at the house. My ex-wife put in a kitchen that can cook for two hundred. There are twelve ovens and I can’t even make toast. I’m having”—here he named a celebrity chef— “cater the whole thing. You’ll be there.” He was huffing and puffing now, and I heard a faint noise, like Velcro.

“Are you skiing?” I asked.

“We are,” he said.

“I hope you’re on a headset.”

“My jacket has an integrated microphone.”

I wondered who else he had with him. His interior designer, probably, or some other special lady friend two decades his junior. That’s who my father would have had.

I told him our conversation could wait until he got back to New York.

“I’m traveling until after New Year’s. Better now.”

“It’s about the drawing.”

“Drawing.”

“The Cracke?”

“Aha, right.” He sniffled. “You know, you’re the second person this week to ask about that piece.”

“Really.”

“Yes. I had long conversation about it, just a few days ago, in fact.”

“Who with?” I asked. He didn’t hear me.

“Hello? Ethan?”

“Hi.”

“Ethan. Are you there.” “I’m here. Can you—”

“Ethan? Hello? Shit. Hello? Fuck. Piece of shit.” He hung up.

“I need to get a new system,” he said when he called back. “This thing’s always breaking. What was it you were saying?” “I wanted to know about the drawing.” “What about it.”

“I’m wondering if you might be interested in selling it back to me.” “Why.” Instantly his voice went cold. “Someone made you a better offer?” “No. No. Not at all. I just feel a little regretful, is all, breaking up the piece the way I did. That section you have is the center, after all, and I think the integrity of the work should be preserved.” “You had no problem breaking it up before.”

“Fair enough. But having had some time to think it over, I’ve changed my mind.”

“Out of curiosity, how much are you offering me?” I quoted purchase price plus ten percent. “That’s not a bad return for one month.”

“I’ve had plenty of better months than that,” he said. “Fifteen, then.”

“You seem like you’re on a mission,” he said. “And while I’d love to see where this goes, unfortunately for you, I’m a man of my word. The piece is spoken for.” “Pardon me?” “I sold it.” I was dumbstruck. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?” “I’m here.” “Did you hear me?”

“I heard you… . Who’s the buyer?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Kevin.”

“I’m sorry about that, I truly am. You know me, I’d love to tell you. But the buyer was very specific in wanting to remain anonymous.”

He sounded more like an art dealer than I’d thought possible. Marilyn had created a monster.

“What did you get for it,” I asked, expecting the same answer. Instead he replied with an absolutely staggering number.

“The nuttiest part? That was the first offer they made. I might have asked for more but I thought, ‘No sense in being greedy.’ Still, I made out like a fucking bandit.”

You’d think that, to a man like Hollister, selling a piece of art—even for a big profit—would provide little thrill, especially if you looked at the numbers in comparison to his net worth. What he made on the drawing, while mind-boggling to me, would at most take a decent bite out of his electricity bill. Yet he sounded like a gleeful child; I could almost see him rubbing his hands together. Rich men get rich in the first place because they never lose that lust for the kill.

I asked if he’d delivered the piece yet.

“Monday.”

I thought about asking if I could take one last look at it. But what would I do? Grab it and sprint away? How far could I get: running, with a head injury, carrying a sixty-square-foot canvas made of one hundred individual sheets of disintegrating paper? Besides, I had a clear notion of who the buyer was. Very few people had that kind of money to drop on an essentially unknown artist, and fewer still had the motivation.

Still a little shellshocked, I congratulated him on his sale.

“Thank you,” he said. “Invitation stands if you want to join me.”

I wished him happy skiing and dialed Tony Wexler.

20

W hat can I say? He’s in love with it.”

We had agreed to meet up at a steakhouse in the east thirties. The first part of our conversation consisted of Tony oy-veying about my injuries (Why didn’t you call me? What did the police say? I don’t like this, Ethan. Your father would want to know about this kind of thing. What if something worse happened? What would it take for you to give us a call? Would you have to lose a limb? Would you have to be run over? Because by that time, you won’t be able to call anymore) and me putting him off (Fine, Tony. I’ll call next time, Tony. No, I hope there won’t be another next time, either).

Then, glancing at Isaac, sitting three tables down, he had said, “Where on God’s green earth did you get that ?”

I went on the offensive, accusing him of going behind my back.

He scoffed. “The last time I checked, we live in a free-market society. We wanted something, we had the right price, everyone was in agreement, we bought it. I’m not sure you should be complaining. We significantly raised the profile on your artist.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point, then.”

“That drawing is part of the piece as a whole, and it should be restored.”

“Then why’d you sell it in the first place?”

“It was my mistake.” I turned my clenched teeth into a smile. “Let me

buy it from you. I’ll give you—don’t shake your head, you haven’t heard my offer yet.”

“I seem to recall having this same conversation with you, in reverse.”

“I’ll give you what you paid Hollister, plus an extra hundred grand.”

He looked offended. “Do me a favor. Anyhow it won’t matter: he’s not selling.”

“You haven’t even asked him.”

“I don’t need to. If you’re truly worried about leaving the piece incomplete—is that your concern? It’s a matter of principle?”

cc ť

“… yes.”

“Then I have a very elegant solution.”

I looked at him.

“Sell us the rest.”

ce-n ť

Tony.

“Sell us the rest. Then it’ll be complete.” He took a sip of water. “That’s the principle at stake, isn’t it? You want to reunite the drawings. Fine. Sell us the rest of the piece and you can sleep easier at night.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“What’s not to believe?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What am I doing?”

“You know what you’re doing.”

“Tell me.”

“You’re fucking me.”

“There’s no need for that kind of language.”

“I mean, seriously, Tony, what do you expect me to say? ‘Thank you, what a great offer’?”

“Actually, I do. It is a great offer.”

“It’s a shitty offer. I don’t want to sell the pieces to you, I want one piece back. That’s a lot more reasonable than me selling you the rest of the art.”

“As far as I can tell, the result is the same.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll have it, and I won’t.”

“You’re an art dealer, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you do? Sell art to other people?”

“This isn’t about the sale,” I said. “You’ve already tried to buy the pieces from me, and I’ve already said no.”

“Then I believe we’re at what they call an impasse.”

The clatter of forks and knives grew as the tables filled up, and my head began to pound. I turned from Tony and watched Isaac tuck into his porterhouse. I must have looked distressed, because he caught my eye and asked: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I gave him a thumbs-up and he went back to eating. Under Tony’s watchful, judgmental eye, I swallowed four ibuprofen, these in addition to the four I had taken before lunch.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” I rubbed my eyes. “Listen, it’s not just for the sake of getting the piece back together that I want to buy it from you. There’s something else going on.”

He waited.

“It’s too complicated for me to explain.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“It is.”

He waited again.

I sighed. “All right, listen.” I explained to him about the murders. As I talked he nodded sagely, taking it all in, and when I got through he said:

“I know.”

“What?”

“I heard all about that already.”

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that surprised. As I’ve mentioned, Tony knows more about the art world than he lets on. He keeps his ear to the ground, and I had no doubt that he’d done his homework before approaching Hollister. He’d know exactly how much to offer in order to avoid the inconvenience of haggling.

“Then what’d you make me repeat it for?”

“I knew about the rumors. I didn’t know what you needed the drawing

for.” He sat back, pursing his lips. “Let me get this straight. You want to cut a hole in it.”

“A small one, I hope.”

He half-smiled. “What happened to restoring the piece’s integrity.”

“I’ll have it repaired.”

“And you think—what. This is going to slam the coffin on him?”

“I have no clue. It might. It might not.”

“As far as I can see,” he said, “even if you sample the piece, and it turns out to be blood, and that turns out to match, you’re still facing the same problem.”

“Which is?”

“Which is you don’t know where it came from. It could be Victor’s, it could be someone else’s.” The same point Samantha had made. “If he did all that stuff you’re accusing him of, I don’t see why it’s that big a stretch for him to keep an inkpot with blood in it. So getting the drawing won’t help you very much.”

“Well, let me be the judge of that.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “In case you’ve forgotten, the piece belongs

ť

to us.”

“Can we not make this an issue of territory?”

“Listen to you. You’re the one making the demands here. You’re the one crying droit moral. And you’re telling me not to be territorial? That’s some chutzpah you’re putting out on display there.”

“Why shouldn’t I have the droit moral? I discovered him.”

He smiled. “Is that so. Because the way I remember it, I had to beg you to—”

“Once I saw them—”

“That’s right. Once you saw them. If anybody’s got a claim, it’s your father. The land belongs to him, the contents of the apartment were his. We did you a favor.”

I said, “I’m not going to argue about this with you.”

“What is there to argue?”

“You’re right. Okay, Tony? You’re right. I don’t care about that. I want to make a deal. Let’s make one. I’ll pay you double what you paid Hollister.”

He shook his head. “You’re missing the—”

“Triple.” That was far too much money for me, but I didn’t care.

“Forget it,” Tony said. Perhaps he knew I couldn’t afford to pay him.

“How much do you want, then? Name it.”

“It’s not the money. You have your principles. We have ours. We’re not going to sell you art so you can destroy it.”

“Will you give me a fucking break.”

“If you keep talking like that, I’m not going to pay for dessert.”

“I’m not destroying the art, Tony.”

“Really. What do you call it.”

“They sample canvases all the time,” I said. “For research.”

“Not from the dead center. Not on a piece of contemporary art. It’s not the Shroud of Turin, for crying out loud. And why the hell do you care, anyway?”

“Because this is important, Tony. It’s more important than a drawing.”

“Listen to you,” he said. He took out his wallet and put two hundred dollars down on the table. “You sound like a different person, you know that?”

“Wait a second.”

“That’s for lunch.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “You’re not even going to ask him?”

“I don’t need to,” he said, standing up. “I know his priorities.”

I CALLED SAMANTHA.

“It’s a delicate situation,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“There must be another panel with blood on it.”

“Can’t you, I don’t know. Subpoena him.”

“I’m not sure that anybody’s going to believe we have compelling reason to seize the drawing from your father. What he said to you is essentially correct: the blood might not be blood, it might not be the right blood, it might not tell us anything. If we start asking for permission to slice up a multimillion-dollar piece of artwork—”

“It’s not worth that much.”

“In your opinion.”

“I’m telling you, he overpaid. He’d never get that much on the open market.”

“Well, I’m reasonably sure your father can find another expert who’ll testify it’s worth more. And I’m sure he has some pretty good lawyers with a lot of free time. All I’m saying, if you can find me another drawing, that’d make both our lives easier.”

“The last time I got a box out of the warehouse I got assaulted.”

“I hope you’re more careful, then.” She paused. “Sorry. That was a little harsh.”

“It’s all right.”

“Look, we’ll go through the drawings together. How does that sound.”

“Fine.”

A silence. When she spoke again, she sounded much milder: “How’s your head?”

“Better every day. It’d be a lot better if I had some idea who did this to me.”

“I hate to break it to you, but you’d be better off forgetting about that.”

I lightly fingered the bandages on my face. “Is it really that bleak?”

“Without a witness or a description? It really is.”

I found this enormously depressing.

“Let’s meet up in a few days,” she said. “We’ll start by reviewing the evidence that you and my dad had.”

I suggested dinner.

“I was thinking more like you come to my office. Did you send back that swab?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call and find out what’s going on with the rest of the samples.”

“All right.”

“And Ethan?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t ask me to dinner anymore.”

16 17

f he Queens District Attorney’s office comprises several bureaus, scattered throughout various buildings in and around the criminal courthouse in Kew Gardens. The Investigations Division occupies several stories of a shiny sublet across Queens Boulevard, set toward the street at a rakish angle. Young men and women in suits bustled up the sidewalk, carrying salads, congealing pizza, take-away noodles. Traffic roared along the Union Turnpike and the Van Wyck, both of them edged with black frost. Stepping out of the car, Isaac and I were nearly bowled over by a blast of wind.

That’s not exactly true. I was almost bowled over. Isaac seemed to feel nothing. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt underneath a denim jacket that could have yielded enough pairs of jeans to outfit a dude ranch. He attracted the attention of the cops sitting in front of the building, who halted their shit-shooting to jab gloved thumbs at the giant coming up the steps.

We made our way into the lobby, where Samantha was waiting. She saw Isaac and blinked in wonderment. “Uh, hi.”

“Hi,” Isaac said. Then he chucked me on the arm, more like a good hard punch by most people’s standards. “Zit okay if I wait in the car? Police make me nervous.”

I told him I’d call when I was ready. Samantha watched him lumber out.

“Wow,” she said.

The elevator required a keycard and a code. On the fifth floor we walked

into the midst of a raucous lunch break, three young men and two young women whose conversational leitmotifs appeared to be fuck, fuck you, and fuck you you fucking fuckface. Samantha introduced me as a friend, which I thought was generous.

“Hey,” they said, variously.

“What’s going on?” Samantha asked one of the girls.

“Mantell’s car got broken into.”

“Right in front of the fucking building,” said one of the men. He had black hair and wore a heavy gold watch.

“They took his GPS.”

“You bet they did. It’s ten o’clock in the fucking morning. There’s fucking cops everywhere. There’s fucking Mr. Wong’s across the street, with a picture fucking window. And nobody saw anything?” He shook his head in disgust. “What the fuck. The cop I talked to goes, ‘Do you know anyone who might have anything against you?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, only about three hundred people I’ve put in prison. How’s that narrow it down for you.’”

Everyone laughed.

“The apocalypse is nigh.”

“The apocalypse, my friend, is old news.”

“Did they take your badge?”

“Why would they take my badge? If I were them, I wouldn’t want to impersonate us. We can’t stop a breakin—in broad daylight—in the fucking epicenter of borough law enforcement. So, no. They did not take my fucking badge. You know what Shana said, though. I couldn’t fucking believe this. You know what she said?”

“What.”

“I told her what happened, and she was like, ‘Who did it?’ “

There was a pause. Then everyone broke up laughing.

“No …”

“She said that?”

“Sweardagod.”

“Who says that?”

“She does.”

“She’s a fucking moron.”

“Hey Shana.”

“Yeah,” came a voice from a distant cubicle.

“You’re a fucking moron.”

“Fuck you.”

Samantha escorted me across the floor. For the most part, it looked like any other office, with fuzzy gray partitions, desks crammed into corners, a copy machine loose at the hinges, bulletin boards, file cabinets shingled with magnets, family photos pinned up wherever room could be found. Any other office, except for the anti-domestic violence campaign posters; or the state trooper with the shaved head and large gun, chickenpecking on an old-fashioned word processor; or the significant chunk of a compact car—hood, two doors, and a tire—lying in the hallway (“Evidence,” Samantha explained). She greeted and was greeted by all.

“Why is everyone so young?” I asked.

“Dick Wolf does the hiring,” she said.

Her office had a glass door that she shut to drown out the curses and laughter.

“Did he really get his car broken into outside the building?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s Queens.” She rummaged around on her desk, shuffling forms and e-mail printouts and files and unopened envelopes. Atop the windowsill were three mugs: a DA seal, Fordham, NYU law. A matted teddy bear dressed as a fireman. A photo of her father, and another of her and her sister in bathing suits on the beach. A brass Gordian knot, dangling on a string tacked to a shelf holding legal books. The screen saver on her computer faded in and out hypnotically, rotating images of a green countryside.

“Ireland,” she said, noticing my stare.

“Is that where your family’s from?”

“County Kerry. My dad’s side. My mom’s Italian. I’ve never been to either place, but if I start saving up what’s left of my salary at the end of every month I should be able to afford a trip when I’m seventy-five.”

She found what she was looking for, a set of keys for her file cabinet. She opened up a drawer full of compact discs and transcripts. I glanced inside but she closed it.

“Not ours.”

“Love letters?” I asked.

“Wiretaps.”

From the next drawer down she produced our box of evidence. It looked bigger than when I’d last seen it, and as she started taking out files and laying them on the desk I realized that she had contributed to its growth.

“This is what Richard Soto came up with.” She handed me a list of old cases, fifteen pages of names, dates, locations, brief descriptions, and the names of the arrested party, if any. I glanced through it and was about to ask her a question when I looked up and saw her staring at the photo of her father, a tissue loosely crumpled in her hand.

She said, “I miss him so much.”

I almost said “I do too.” But I didn’t. I laid a hand on the files and said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS we met frequently, either in person or on the phone. During her lunch break we would meet at the Chinese place near the DA’s office; Isaac would take his place three tables away and commence to consume mind-boggling amounts of pork fried rice. We gave him our fortune cookies.

We decided to start from scratch, laying out a fresh timeline of the killings, examining it for patterns. We had the footprint cast reexamined, and were told that the person who’d made it was probably taller than six feet. Samantha asked how big Victor was, and I had to confess that, although one person had told me he was short, in truth I didn’t know. Now that I think about it, that was how we spent the bulk of our time, at least at first: outlining what we did not know.

“Did he go to school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he have family?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“How hard were you looking for him?”

“Not very,” I admitted.

“Well,” she said, “now’s your chance to redeem yourself.”

We picked up where I’d left off: calling churches, but this time with greater success. Through dumb luck or diligence, we found a Father Ver-laine, at Good Shepherd in Astoria, who gave us our first sign that Victor had been a real person and not a figment of someone’s imagination. We drove to the rectory and found the priest; he was doing a crossword puzzle, and he greeted us cheerfully.

“Of course I knew Victor,” he said. “He had a better attendance record than I do. But I haven’t seen him in a year or two. Is everything all right?”

“We want to make sure he’s safe. Nobody’s heard from him in a while.”

“I can’t believe he would ever do anything wrong,” said the priest. “His conscience was cleaner than anyone’s, with the possible exception of the Holy Father.”

I asked what he meant.

“Every time I opened the confessional window I’d find him on the other side.”

“What did he confess?”

The priest clucked his tongue. “Those are matters between a man and God. I will tell you that he had far less reason to be there than most people, including the ones who don’t come to confess at all. I told him once or twice not to be so hard on himself, and that if he didn’t, he’d be in violation of the sin of scrupulosity.” He smiled. “All that meant was that I found him in there the next day, confessing to me about that.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of him, would you?”

“No.”

Samantha said, “Could you describe him?”

“Oh, let’s see. He was small, about five-foot-four and on the thin side.

He sometimes grew a little moustache. Always he wore the same coat, no matter how hot or cold it was. That coat had seen better days. You’re probably not old enough to remember—how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“Well, then you’re definitely not old enough, but I’ll tell you that he looked a bit like Howard Hughes.”

“Was he unwell?”

“He didn’t seem especially healthy. He often had a cough. I could always tell he was there, because I’d hear it coming from the back pews.”

I said, “Did he have any obvious psychological problems?”

He hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than I have. My office forbids it.”

In the car, Samantha said, “That’s a start.”

“He said he was small. Doesn’t that rule him out?”

“Not really. Footprinting isn’t an exact science. A photo would be more helpful, so we could ask around the neighborhood. What about that cough? He might have gotten treated for it.”

“It sounds more like he wasn’t treated at all.”

“But if he was, then there’s a record of him somewhere. Based on what you’ve told me, the picture I’m getting, people like him, they fall through the cracks. They don’t have a regular doctor. They show up at the emergency room.”

“Then let’s call the local emergency rooms.”

“I’ll work on it. You’d be surprised how hard it is in this state to get medical records. Did he have a job?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“He had to pay for things. He paid his rent.”

“The building manager told me he paid in cash. His apartment was rent-controlled from back in the sixties. He was paying a hundred dollars a month.”

She whistled in admiration, and for a moment she wasn’t the arm of the law but just another New Yorker envying someone else’s lease. “Still, that’s a hundred dollars he had to come up with every thirty days. Maybe he panhandled.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But how does that help us? There isn’t a panhandlers’ union we can call.”

“You know what else,” she said, her gaze wandering toward the sky— and away from me. I sometimes got the impression that when we were talking she paid attention to me only long enough to start thinking on her own. In this she differed from her father, who had taken—or seemed to take—a real interest in my opinion. I have to give her credit for her honesty. From the outset, she never pretended she was doing this for anyone other than him. Certainly not for me.

“The paper,” she said. “He had to buy lots of it; you’d think he’d be on good terms with whoever sold it to him. And food. Why don’t you tackle that. I’m going to keep chasing down the witnesses in the old cases and see what I can come up with. Here. I pulled some of the old mug shots from those cases and made copies for you so you can show them around. Don’t worry. We’ll get something.”

“You think so?”

“Not a chance.”

I WENT BACK TO MULLER COURTS, starting at one of the two bodegas. Once the countermen got through staring at Isaac, they confirmed my description of Victor. They knew who he was—”Weird dude”—but, other than a preference for a certain brand of wheat bread and Oscar Mayer ham, could provide no information. I asked about paper, and they handed me a notepad with greenish, lined pages.

“What about white,” I said. “Plain white.”

“We don’t got that.”

Thinking of the food journal, I asked what kind of apples he bought.

“He didn’t buy apples.”

“He must’ve bought apples,” I said.

“Did you see him buy apples?”

“I didn’t see him buy no apples.”

“No, he didn’t buy no apples.”

In an effort to be helpful, one of them suggested that he had bought, rather, pears.

I said, “What about cheese?”

“No cheese.”

“He didn’t buy no cheese.”

“No cheese.”

I went to the other bodega. This time I had Isaac wait outside, which he did happily, on condition that he could run across the street and get a meatball hero. I gave him ten bucks and he bounded off like a little kid.

The girl behind the register, a pretty Latina with red plastic glasses, put down her poetry magazine when I approached. She, too, recognized Victor by my description.

“I called him ‘sir,’ ” she told me.

“Why’s that.”

“He looked like the kind of person who you call sir.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“Twice a week when I was here. I don’t work on Friday or Saturday, though.”

I asked what he would usually buy.

She went to the rattling dairy case and handed me a package of inexpensive presliced Swiss cheese. “Same thing every time. Once I think I asked, ‘Sir, maybe you want to try something else?’ “

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He never said anything to me.”

“Can you remember if he ever talked about—”

“He never said anything.”

She was equally firm in her conviction that he had purchased neither apples nor paper.

“We don’t sell paper,” she said. “There’s a Staples on Queens Boulevard.”

Ten months prior I would have resisted the idea that Victor’s life extended beyond the confines of Muller Courts—that he’d gone anywhere without my imagination giving him permission to do so. Now I found myself obeying him. I spent several chilly November afternoons walking in and out of

local markets, canvassing the neighborhood in widening concentric circles: a one-block radius, two blocks, three … until I reached the triangular plaza at Junction Boulevard and a fruit stand run by a middle-aged Sikh.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “My friend.”

He held up a small mesh bag of Granny Smiths.

The vendor, whose name was Jogindar, said that he and Victor would talk for at least a few minutes every day.

“The weather,” he said. “Always the weather.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, a long time. Perhaps a year and a half. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m looking for him. Did he sound okay to you?”

“He had a terrible cough,” said Jogindar. “I told him he must go to the hospital.”

“Did he?”

He shrugged. “I hope so.”

“Was he ever with anyone else?”

“No, never.”

“Let me ask you this: was there anything strange about the way he behaved?”

Jogindar smiled. Wordlessly he gestured all around us, at the steam-breathing pensioners slouched on park benches; at Queens Boulevard, its lumbering parade, its tangle of wind-whipped powerlines. The whole honking throb of the metropolis, ethnic markets and 99-cent stores and CHECKS CASHED and pawnshops and nail salons and dialysis centers and a wigmaker that sold hair by the pound. He gestured to Isaac, standing ten feet off; to an ancient-looking lady making her way through the intersection, heedless of the red light and the horns exploding at her. She kept shuffling, shuffling, until she made it to the other side. Then everyone drove on.

I understood what he was saying. He was saying It’s all crazy.

He breathed into his hands. “When he stopped coming I thought it was a sign.”

“Of what.”

“I don’t know. But after so many years he became very comforting to me. I am thinking of finding a different job.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Since I came here. Eighteen years.” He smiled. “That is a kind of friendship.”

For the heck of it, I bought a bag of Victor’s favorite apples. On my way back to Manhattan, I bit into one. It was unusually sour.

THE BRANCH MANAGER ofthe local Staples had no idea what I was talking about; nor did any of the cashiers, although most of them seemed to have started on the job that very morning. They did offer to sell me paper, though.

When Samantha and I next conferred, she pointed out Victor’s tendency to routinize. “Think about the picture of him that we’re getting so far. He gets his bread from one place. He gets his cheese someplace else, his apples. He does this every day for God knows how long. How long has that Staples been there, five years? That’s not our man. That’s not where he’s going to go for something as important as his paper.”

I called around until I found the oldest place in the neighborhood, a stationer’s a half-mile due west of the Courts, open Tuesday through Thursday, from eleven to three thirty. I had to leave work especially early—earlier than I’d been leaving, which was already beyond self-indulgent—to get out there on time.

My first impression of Zatuchny’s was that it could have been managed by Victor himself, so clogged was it with junk. I walked into a cloud of that same woody smell I’d first encountered in Victor’s apartment, only several orders of magnitude more powerful. It made me wonder how customers could shop without keeling over.

More to the point, I had a hard time believing that the store had customers at all. From the outside the place looked closed, windows plastered over with curling fliers, neon sign extinguished. I stood at the counter and dinged the bell a couple times.

“Shaddap shaddap shaddap. Shaaaddap.”

An old man appeared, his cheeks flecked with tomato sauce. He paused briefly to stare at me, paused longer to stare at Isaac, and then, frowning, he snatched the bell off the counter and tossed it in a drawer. “It ain’t a toy,” he said.

If I hadn’t known any better, I might have taken him for Victor Cracke. Moustachioed, disheveled, he fit with my preconceived notion quite nicely. So did the disorder of the surroundings … and the smell …

A crazy thought occurred to me: he was Victor.

I must have been staring a bit too intensely, because he sneered and said, “I didn’t interrupt my afternoon repast so you could ogle my titties. Whad-daya want.”

I said, “I’m looking for someone.”

“Yeah, whossat.”

I showed him the mug shots.

“Ugly bastards,” he commented as he leafed through them.

I said, “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

“Do I mind, sure I do.”

“Well, can you tell me anyway?”

“Leonard,” he said.

“I’m Ethan.”

“You a cop, Ethan?”

“I work for the District Attorney,” I said, which wasn’t totally untrue.

“What about you, fatso,” he said to Isaac, who remained unmoved behind his sunglasses. “Whassis problem. Can’t he speak?”

“He’s more of the strong silent type,” I said.

“He looks more like the big fucking fatso type. What do you feed him, whole sheep?” He handed me back the photos. “I don’t know these sons of bitches.”

I couldn’t bring myself to come out and ask about Victor, scared as I was that he would turn out to be Victor, and that my questions would send him scurrying out the back door. In trying to dance around the central point, I allowed my questioning to get more and more convoluted, until, eyeing the Band-Aids on my face, he said to Isaac, “You must be the brains of the operation.”

“I’m looking for a man named Victor Cracke,” I blurted, half expecting him to press a button and drop through a trapdoor. But he only nodded.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

“You know him.”

“Sure I know him. You mean with the—” He wiggled his index finger atop his upper lip, meaning moustache, which was bizarre, because he had an actual moustache.

“He was a customer?”

“Sure.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“I’d say a couple times a month or so. All he ever bought was paper. He ain’t been by in a while, though.”

“Can you show me what kind of paper he bought?”

He looked at me like I was insane. Then he shrugged and led me to a tiny stockroom, metal shelves sagging with unopened boxes of pens, stencils, photo albums. Atop a card table sat a microwave, and in front of it, a plastic bowl with fusilli floating in watery marinara sauce. A fork rested atop a stack of comic books.

Leonard grabbed a box on the lowest shelf and dragged it to the middle of the room, huffing and puffing as he bent, revealing a preexisting split in the seat of his pants. He took a utility knife off his belt and sliced open the packing tape. Inside was a box of plain white paper, less yellowed than the drawings but—insofar as plain white paper can be positively identified—correct enough.

“How long has he been shopping here?” I asked.

“My father opened up after the War, passed in ‘63, the same day Kennedy got his head blown off. I think Victor started showing up around then. He came in maybe twice a month.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“I sold him paper.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

Leonard stared at me. “I … sold … him … paper.” Satisfied that he had impressed my own stupidity upon me, he went back to his lunch.

“Excuse me—”

“You’re still here?”

“I just wondered if you ever noticed anything unusual about Victor.”

He sighed, scooted around in his chair. “All right, you want a story, I’ll tell you a story. I once played him checkers.”

I said, “Pardon?”

“Checkers. You know what checkers is, dontcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I played him. He came in here with a little checkers set and put it down and we played checkers. He beat my pants off. He wanted to play again but I didn’t want to get beat so bad twice in one day. I offered to box him but he just left. The end.”

Something about the story broke my heart, as I pictured Victor—how I saw him in my mind’s eye, I can’t say; I suppose I saw his spirit, translucent and fuzzy—wandering the neighborhood, a board tucked under his arm, desperate for a competitor.

“Happy now?” Leonard asked.

“Did he use a credit card?”

“I don’t take credit cards. Cash or check.”

“All right, then, did he use a check?”

“Cash.”

“Did he ever buy anything else?”

“Yeah. Pens and markers. Pencils. What are you, the goddamned paper gestapo?”

“I’m concerned about his safety.”

“How the hell is knowing about a bunch of pens going to help him stay safe?”

Despairingly, I thanked him for his time and handed him a card, asking him to call if Victor came in.

“Sure,” he said. As I left, I glanced back and saw him tearing the card into confetti.

20

ecause Samantha worked during the day, I did most of the footwork s^S on my own. This, of course, implies that I did not work during the day, which was increasingly true. I felt restless and trapped at the gallery and kept inventing excuses to leave. Even when I didn’t need to go to Queens, I didn’t want to stay in Chelsea. I would take long walks and ruminate about Victor Cracke and art and myself and Marilyn, fancying myself a private investigator, narrating to myself. He stumbled into the coffee shop and ordered a cuppa joe. Cue saxophone. These self-indulgent fantasies, these stirrings of dissatisfaction, were all too familiar to me. I had them on average every five years.

Samantha’s job was to go down Richard Soto’s list of old cases. Right off the bat she concluded that the majority of them were irrelevant to us—the victim was either female or older or had been murdered without any sign of sexual assault—but she followed them up, just in case. Listening to her, I began to understand that the most outstanding feature of policework is its tedium; throughout November and December there were plenty of idle days, plenty of blind alleys, plenty of conversations that went nowhere. We groped blindly, crushing together hunches to form theories that we then discarded, trial-and-error but mostly error.

The week of Thanksgiving we began meeting at night at the storage warehouse. Samantha would take the train in after work, and we’d select a

box at random, have Isaac lug it to the viewing room, and spend three or four hours flipping pages in search of bloodstains. The task went faster this time around than it had before, as I was looking now with a single criterion, rather than to evaluate the work. Nevertheless, I still had trouble focusing for more than thirty or forty minutes at a stretch. My headaches, though diminishing, still made squinting painful. At those moments, I would surreptitiously watch Samantha as she worked; her delicate fingers hovering over the surface of the page, her lips extruded in that beautiful pout, concentration coming off her in waves.