Taking her by the arm, he had drawn her towards the door. ‘If you like my work, come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘To be part of the next one.’
Jerry remembered how readily she had obeyed when he had asked her to undress, and her excitement when he had started to splash her with paint.
He could still hear the sound of the shower. The paint was swirling down into the drain, like excrement. Art and shit are the same thing, he thought. And there’s always someone who can sell either.
His exhaustion was starting to make itself felt. His eyes were stinging, his neck muscles aching. He needed something – anything – to help him out of this physical impasse. And there was only one person who could get it for him. He stood up, went to the telephone and lifted the receiver without caring about the fact that he was staining it with the fresh paint on his hands. He dialled a number, and before long a drowsy voice answered.
‘Who the fuck is this?’
‘LaFayette, it’s Jerry. I’m working and I need to see you.’
‘Christ, Jerry, it’s six in the morning.’
‘I don’t know what time it is. What I do know is, I need to see you – now.’
He put the receiver down without waiting for an answer. LaFayette Johnson would curse for a while and then get up and come running. Johnson owed most of what he had to Jerry, and it was only right for him to take care of his needs.
Jerry looked up and stared at his own image reflected in the mirror over the telephone. His painted face looked demonic. ‘It’s all going according to plan, Jerry Ko,’ he grinned. ‘All according to plan.’
Meredith’s return, also reflected in the mirror, jolted him out of this dialogue with himself. She had washed her hair and was wearing one of his robes, which hadn’t been laundered for a long time and was caked with paint.
Now that she had removed both the paint and any last trace of make-up, she looked vulnerable in the pitiless light of day. Jerry felt a kind of hatred for her, for the adoration in her eyes whenever she looked at him. He hated her profoundly – and at the same time envied her for being such a total nonentity.
‘Get your clothes and go. I have work to do.’
Meredith went red in the face. In silence, she started gathering her clothes from where they lay strewn on the floor, holding the robe with one hand to stop it opening as she bent. She turned her back on him and started getting dressed. Jerry watched as her nondescript body miraculously disappeared beneath her clothes. When she turned round to face him, she was again the grey woman of the previous night, but drained of the idea that had made her attractive to him for a few hours.
She held up the paint-stained robe. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘Of course.’
Meredith smiled. She hugged the robe to her chest and walked silently towards the door. Jerry thanked her mentally for sparing him a last look and a last nauseating farewell as she went out.
He was alone again. When he heard the noise of the elevator starting on its way down, he went and lay on his back in the middle of the sheet on the floor. Opening his arms wide, he gazed up at the image of his crucified body in the ceiling mirror.
He did not have the strength to pull himself together and get back to work. The TV screens continued to transmit their splashes of colour and their cruel, obscene images. The work – he thought of it as a totem – had been commissioned to be displayed in the huge lobby of the New York State Governor’s Residence in Albany. The day it was installed, in the presence of the governor and a distinguished audience, there had been a murmur of anticipation when it was switched on. As the images had succeeded one another, however, the murmur had gradually been replaced by a stony silence.
The Governor was the first to pull himself together. His stentorian voice had echoed through the vast space.
‘Turn that filth off!’
The totem had been switched off, but that did not put an end to the scandal. Jerry Ko was charged with defamation and obscenity, which had the effect of making him famous overnight. LaFayette Johnson, the gallery owner who was on his way now to supply him with drugs, had started to add noughts to the prices of his works.
The doorbell rang, and Jerry, without even bothering to put on any clothes, made his way through the chaos of his loft to the door. He was surprised to find it ajar. That idiot Meredith couldn’t have closed it properly on the way out. But if it was LaFayette, why hadn’t he come straight in without ringing?
When he opened the door wide, he saw a man standing out on the landing, shrouded in shadow. The light must be out of order and he couldn’t quite make out who it was. It certainly wasn’t LaFayette: this man was taller.
There was a moment’s pause, a sense of time suspended, like the lull before a summer storm. Then:
‘Hello, Linus. Aren’t you going to let an old friend in?’
It was a voice he hadn’t heard for a long time, and yet he recognized it immediately. Like everyone, Jerry Ko had fantasized often, especially under the influence of drugs, about his own death. He had wanted what every artist wants: to be the one to decide how it would happen – to choose, as it were, the colour and material of his own shroud.
When the man on the landing entered the room, Jerry knew that his fantasies were about to be overtaken by reality. As he looked the man in the eyes, he was barely aware of the gun he was holding. What he saw rather was a hand throwing a bucket of black paint over the questionable artwork he had called his life.
CHAPTER 3
LaFayette Johnson parked his brand new Nissan Murano on the corner of Peck Slip and Water Street, took his keys from the ignition and bent down to pick up a small package hidden in a compartment under the driver’s seat. He got out of the car and locked it with the remote, then stretched and took a deep breath. A warm southerly breeze had risen, bringing with it a slightly brackish air and sweeping away the grey clouds of the past few days. Now, above his head, the sky was incredibly blue. But when you looked up, whether in the middle of the skyscrapers or in narrow streets like this one, all you could see was a small rectangle of it. In New York, the sun and the sky and a decent view were the privilege of the rich.
And that was what he had finally become. Very rich, thanks to that sleazebag Jerry Ko. Jerry’s call had woken him but not surprised him. When, the previous night, he had seen him leave with a real dog, he knew perfectly well the function she had in Jerry’s twisted mind. He, LaFayette, wouldn’t have fucked a woman like that even with another man’s dick, but he could hardly object if the goose that laid the golden eggs for him needed to mortify his flesh in order to turn out those daubs that LaFayette personally couldn’t stand, but for which the public had an insatiable appetite. Jerry’s work had given rise to a new interest in contemporary art, especially the work of young artists. People were collecting again, money was circulating. It was almost like the good old days of Andy Warhol. And LaFayette had bagged one of the winning horses for his stable. That meant he had to take care of him, pamper him and feed him, just like a thoroughbred. It didn’t bother the dealer that Jerry’s ideas were fuelled by almost every kind of drug on the market. LaFayette was shrewd enough to be devoid of scruples, and Jerry adult enough to choose his own means of destruction. It seemed like a fair exchange. He would supply Jerry with whatever he wanted to put in his body, and as a reward, he would receive 50 per cent of everything that came out of his fucked-up head.
LaFayette Johnson slipped the package into the pocket of the tracksuit he was wearing and turned right onto Water Street.
The section of Brooklyn Bridge straight ahead of him was lit by the sun, but there wasn’t quite enough light yet to rescue Water Street from shadow. There were already cars on the bridge, and the low hum of morning traffic.
Johnson turned to look back at his shiny new car, and thought of the distance he had put between himself and his poverty-stricken upbringing. Now he could finally afford all the toys he should have had as a kid.
He was onl
y seventeen when he had run away from the little town in Louisiana where he was born – a sleepy place where waiting seemed to be part of the inhabitants’ DNA. You waited for everything. Summer, winter, rain, sun, the passing of the train, the arrival of the buses. You waited for the only thing that would never arrive: life. The community of Three Farmers consisted of a few tumbledown houses around a crossroads, where the mosquitoes ruled and the only aspiration of the locals was a jug of cold lemonade out on the porch.
There was his mother, grown old before her time, surrounded by the strong smell of Cajun cooking, and with stretchmarks even on the calves behind her knees. And there was his father, who conceived of the family only as something on which to vent his frustration and anger when he had been drinking. LaFayette Johnson had grown tired of fried potatoes and blows, and one evening when his father had once again raised his hand to him, he had broken the old man’s teeth with a baseball bat and run away, grabbing all the money he could find in that stinking hovel he’d never managed to call home.
Farewell, Louisiana.
It had been a long slow journey, but at the end of the road, Hello, New York.
If he’d had a licence, he might have become a cab driver. Instead, he had been forced to do whatever he could, until he had struck gold. He had found work as an errand boy in a Chelsea gallery owned by an art dealer named Jeffrey McEwan – a middle-aged man, snobbish and slightly effeminate, always dressed in Savile Row suits.
Christ, what a hypocrite you were, Jeffrey McEwan.
Although he was married, that faggot Jeff had an ass you could have driven an electric train-set through and flabby white skin the boy had never managed to touch without repressing a shudder of disgust. But Jeffrey was rich and he liked good-looking young men with dark skin. Although LaFayette preferred women, he had immediately understood that this could be a crucial turning-point in his life. It was a great opportunity and he had to be careful not to waste it. And so the game had commenced, a game of glances and silences, sudden advances and tactical retreats. After a few months of that, old Jeffrey McEwan was cooked and ready to serve. The climax had come when LaFayette had been caught naked in the shower in the bathroom of the gallery – just by chance, of course. The old queen had literally gone crazy. He had gone down on his knees in front of him, embraced his legs, and declared his love.
LaFayette had lifted the man’s head and stuffed his cock in his mouth. After that, he had sodomized him, forcing him to bend over the wash-basin in the bathroom, holding him down with one hand on his back and pulling his fine ginger hair back with the other to force him to look at their images in the mirror.
At that point old McEwan had thrown caution to the winds, left his wife, and set up home with him in an apartment. They had become partners and had started working together, at least until Jeff had seen fit to make his exit in style, struck down by a heart attack at the private view of a highly rated painter to whom he had the exclusive rights.
Unfortunately for LaFayette, the stupid faggot had never divorced his wife, and the bitch had grabbed every bit of Jeff’s inheritance that hadn’t been left to him, which amounted to about 50 per cent.
All things considered, it hadn’t gone too badly.
But there was something else that Jeff had bequeathed him, something that in this line of work was worth all the money in the world: he had taught him the value of culture. By the time his lover’s widow had evicted him from the gallery in Chelsea, he had been in a position to stand on his own two feet. Following the trend that was slowly shifting the centre of gravity of the art world towards SoHo, he had bought a large space on the second floor of an elegant building on Greene Street, near the corner with Spring. There he had opened the L&J Gallery, determined that from now on he would be his own boss. Apart from the gallery, he also possessed the small apartment where he lived, and the seventh-floor loft on Water Street, where he had housed Jerry.
As he passed a steakhouse, closed at this hour, he looked at his reflection in the window. Saw a handsome, successful black man in his early forties, wearing a Ralph Lauren tracksuit. He uttered a phrase Jerry Ko often used: ‘It’s all going according to plan, LaFayette, all according to plan.’
Reaching the front door of Jerry’s building – a sandstone edifice with faded paint and fire escapes on the front – he searched in his pocket for the keys and realized he had left them in the Nissan. He rang the doorbell, hoping that idiot Jerry wasn’t completely sunk in a drugged stupor and would hear him.
He rang twice, but there was no reply.
He was about to go back to his car to get the keys when a figure emerged from the half-light of the entrance and pressed a button to release the door. It was a white guy wearing a grey tracksuit with the hood up and a pair of sunglasses. He kept his head tilted slightly forward, and throughout their brief encounter moved in such a way that LaFayette could not see his face. He came out as if he was in a hurry, shoving past him without the slightest apology. Once outside, he straightened his head and back and set off at a slow run.
Holding the entrance door open, so he could get inside, LaFayette watched him as he moved away. He noticed that the man was running in a strange way, as if he had a problem with his right leg.
Loser.
That was LaFayette Johnson’s opinion of all runners, and this one in particular, as he entered the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. The door opened immediately, which probably meant that the elevator had just been used by the guy who had shoved past him. Not so athletic as to use the stairs, apparently. Or maybe the problem he had with his leg prevented him from negotiating steps easily . . .
LaFayette shrugged. He had better things to think about. He had to get Jerry back to work as quickly as possible, since he was planning to mount a show for the fall. He had already sounded out some collectors he considered trendsetters, as well as arousing the interest of the specialized press. The time had come to make the leap from New York to America and the rest of the world.
The elevator door opened on the seventh-floor landing. Jerry’s loft occupied the whole of the floor.
His door was ajar.
Suddenly and without any reason, LaFayette Johnson felt a strangely rusty taste in his mouth. If there was such a thing as a sixth sense, his had just been activated.
He pushed open the door with its peeling paint and entered the loft, to be greeted by the usual chaos, composed in equal measure of colour and dirt, which seemed to be the one environment in which Jerry could survive.
‘Hey, you awake?’
Silence.
LaFayette moved slowly through that mess of canvases, plates, beer cans, leftover food, books, and dirty laundry. On his left were a set of metal shelves on which Jerry kept his cans of paint and the rest of the materials he used in his work. In front of him, on the floor, lay a white sheet covered in red and blue patches of colour.
There was a strong smell of paint in the air.
‘Jerry? Man, you really shouldn’t leave your door open. Any two-bit junkie hustler could get in here and grab all these masterpieces of contemp—’
He came past the shelves, to be greeted by a sight that made all thoughts of contemporary art flee from his head.
Stark naked and covered in dried red paint, Jerry Ko was sitting against the wall in a position so comical, only death could have made it tragic. The thumb of his right hand was in his mouth, and with his left hand he was holding a blanket to the side of his face in such a way as to cover his ear. His eyes were wide open, frozen in astonishment and horror.
On the white wall behind him, at the level of his head, was a thought bubble, drawn in blue spray paint. Inside the bubble, in the same colour paint, was written a number:
LaFayette realized two things simultaneously. The first was that his goose would never again lay a golden egg. The second was that he himself was in big trouble. And there was only one way to get out of it. For once, he had to act according to the rules.
Taking his cellpho
ne from the pocket of his tracksuit, he frantically dialled 911. When the operator replied in a polite impersonal voice, he reported that he had discovered a homicide. He gave his name and the address, promising that he would stay there until the police arrived.
Then he grabbed a camera and started taking photographs of the corpse from all angles. There would certainly be more than one newspaper ready to pay a fortune for these pictures, even if they weren’t of outstanding quality. When he was done, he went to the bathroom, took out the pills he had in his pocket and threw them down the pan. He pressed the button that worked the flush and, as the water carried them away in a little whirlpool, LaFayette Johnson wondered how he was going to get Jerry Ko’s latest works out of here.
CHAPTER 4
Standing by the window, Jordan Marsalis watched the removal truck reverse out of the parking space he had reserved for it in front of his building. Only a few minutes earlier, with the overheard comments of the removal men still ringing in his ears, he had signed the receipt the man in charge of the company had handed him. He was a huge black guy, with a wrestler’s physique and big biceps that swelled the sleeves of the yellow and red coveralls he was wearing. On the back was printed the word Cousins – the name of the Brooklyn-based removal and storage company to which Jordan had entrusted the few items of furniture in his apartment that meant anything to him. The other things would be left for the new tenant. Jordan had scribbled his signature on the paper, giving his consent for part of his life to be hidden away in a warehouse somewhere, in some place he didn’t know.
As he held out Jordon’s copy of the receipt, the man had looked at his motorcycle leathers with a mixture of curiosity and envy. Jordan had put his hand in his pocket and taken out a hundred-dollar bill.
‘Here, have a farewell drink on me and take a look at my things every now and then.’
The man pocketed the bill with a solemn gesture. ‘Sure thing, sir.’ Then he had stood there, without making any move to go. After a moment, he had looked Jordan in the eyes and said, ‘It’s probably none of my business, but I get the impression you’re going on a long journey. And you look to me like someone who doesn’t know where he’s going to end up.’