“Sorry?”
“The Temple boy.” Her eyes were on the book; her voice was bright, as if she were speaking to a stranger at a cocktail party. “What his excuse was. When they asked why he knocked Andy unconscious.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“He said, ‘Because that kid gets on my nerves.’ He’s an attorney now, they tell me, I certainly hope he holds his temper a bit better in the courtroom.”
“Win wasn’t the worst of them,” I said, after a languid pause. “Not by a long shot. Now Cavanaugh and Scheffernan—”
“The mother wasn’t even listening. Texting away on her cell phone. Some terribly urgent matter with a client.”
I looked at the cuff of my shirt. I’d taken care to change into a fresh one after work—if there was one thing my opiated years had taught me (not to mention my years of antiques fraud), it was that starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners’ went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins—but I’d been loopy and careless from the morphine tabs, drifting around my bedroom and humming to Elliott Smith as I dressed, sunshine… been keeping me up for days… and (I noticed) one of my cuffs wasn’t done up properly. Moreover the knots I’d chosen weren’t even a matched pair: one purple, the other blue.
“We could have sued,” said Mrs. Barbour absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why we didn’t. Chance said he thought it would make things harder for Andy at school.”
“Well—” There was no way I could inconspicuously do up my cuff again. It would have to wait for the cab. “That thing in the shower was really Scheffernan’s fault.”
“Yes, that’s what Andy said, and the Temple boy too, but as for the actual blow, the concussion, there was no question—”
“Scheffernan was a sneaky guy. He pushed Andy into Temple—Scheffernan was across the locker room and laughing his head off with Cavanaugh and those guys by the time the fight started.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but David—” David was Scheffernan’s first name—“he wasn’t a bit like the others, always perfectly nice, so polite, we had him over here a good deal, and always so good about including Andy. You know how a lot of the children were, with birthday parties—”
“Yes, but Scheffernan had it in for Andy, always. Because Scheffernan’s mother was always forcing Andy down his throat. Making him ask Andy, making him come over here.”
Mrs. Barbour sighed and set down her cup. The tea was jasmine; I could smell it where I sat.
“Well, goodness knows, you knew Andy better than I did,” she said unexpectedly, drawing the embroidered collar of her wrap closer. “I never saw him for who he was and in some ways he was my favorite child. I wish I hadn’t been always trying to make him into someone else. Certainly you were able to accept him on his own terms, more than his father and I or God knows his brother. Look,” she said, in much the same tone, in the rather chilling silence that followed this. She was still leafing through the book. “Here’s St. Peter. Turning the little children away from Christ.”
Obediently I got up and circled behind. I knew the work, one of the great, stormy drypoints at the Morgan, the Hundred Guilder Print as it was called: the price that Rembrandt himself, according to legend, had been forced to pay to buy it back.
“He’s so particular, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects—it’s as if the saints came down to model for him in the life. These two St. Peters—” she gestured to her own little pen-and-ink on the wall—“completely different works and years apart but the identical man, body and soul, you could pick him out of a line-up, couldn’t you? That balding head. Same face—dutiful, earnest. Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer.”
Though she was still gazing down at the book I found myself looking at the silver-framed photo of Andy and his father on the table beside us. It was only a snapshot but for a sense of foreshadowing, of transience and doom, no master of Dutch genre painting could have set up the composition more skillfully. Andy and Mr. Barbour against a dark background, snuffed candles in the wall sconces, Mr. Barbour’s hand on a model ship. The effect could have been no more allegorical, or chilling, if he’d had his hand on a skull. Above, in lieu of the hourglass beloved by the Dutch vanitas painters, a stark and slightly sinister clock with Roman numerals. Black hands: five minutes to twelve. Time running out.
“Mommy—” It was Platt, barging in, stopping cold to see me.
“Don’t bother knocking dear,” said Mrs. Barbour without glancing up from her book, “you’re always welcome.”
“I—” Platt goggled at me. “Kitsey.” He seemed rattled. He dug his hands in the bellows pockets of his field coat. “She’s been held up,” he said to his mother.
Mrs. Barbour looked startled. “Oh,” she said. They looked at each other and some unspoken something seemed to pass between them.
“Held up?” I asked amiably, looking between them. “Where?”
There was no answer to this. Platt—gaze fixed on his mother—opened his mouth and shut it. Rather smoothly, Mrs. Barbour put her book aside and said, without looking at me: “Well, you know, I slightly think she’s out there playing golf today.”
“Really?” I said, mildly surprised. “Isn’t it bad weather for that?”
“There’s traffic,” Platt said eagerly, with a glance at his mother. “She’s stuck. The expressway is a mess. She’s phoned Forrest,” he said, turning to me, “they’re holding dinner.”
“Maybe,” said Mrs. Barbour, thoughtfully, after a pause, “maybe you and Theo should go out and have a drink? Yes,” she said decisively, to Platt, as if the matter had been settled, folding her hands. “I think that’s an excellent idea. You two go out and get a drink. And you!” she said, turning to me with a smile. “What an angel you are! Thank you so much for my book,” she said, reaching to clasp my hand. “The most wonderful present in the world.”
“But—”
“Yes?”
“Won’t she need to come back here and freshen up?” I said, after a slightly confused pause.
“Sorry?” Both of them were looking at me.
“If she’s been playing golf? Won’t she need to change? She won’t want to go to Forrest’s in her golfing clothes,” I added, looking back and forth between the two of them, and then—when neither of them replied—“I don’t mind waiting here.”
Thoughtfully, Mrs. Barbour pursed her lips, with heavy-looking eyes—and all at once, I got it. She was tired. She hadn’t been expecting to have to sit around and entertain me, only she was too polite to say so.
“Although,” I said, standing up, self-consciously, “it is getting on, I could use a cocktail—”
Just then, the phone in my pocket, which had been silent all day, chimed loudly: incoming text. Clumsily—I was so exhausted I could hardly figure out where my own pocket was—I fumbled for it.
Sure enough, it was Kitsey, jingling with emoji. ♥♥Hi Popsy ♥ runningan hour late! Hope I caught you! Forrest & Celia holding dinner, meet you there 9pm, love you mostest! Kits
xiv.
FIVE OR SIX DAYS later, I still had not fully recovered from my evening with Boris—partly because I was busy with clients, auctions to go to, estates to look at, and partly because I had grueling events with Kitsey nearly every night: holiday parties, black-tie dinner, Pelléas et Mélisande at the Met, up by six every morning and bed well after midnight, one evening out until two a.m., scarcely a moment to myself and (even worse) scarcely a moment alone with her, which normally would have driven me crazy but in the circumstances kept me so submerged and embattled with fatigue that I didn’t have much time to think.
All week long, I’d been looking forward to Kitsey’s Tuesday with her girlfriends—not because I didn’t want to see her, but because Hobie had a dinner out and I was looking forward to being on my own, eating some leftovers from the fridge and going to bed early. But at closing time, seven p.m., I still had some catching-up to do
in the shop. A decorator, miraculously, had shown up to inquire about some expensive, out of fashion, and impossible-to-sell pewter that had been gathering dust atop a cabinet since Welty’s day. Pewter wasn’t something I knew much about, and I was looking for the article I wanted in a back number of Antiques when Boris dashed up from the curb and knocked on the glass door, not five minutes after I’d locked up for the day. It was pelting rain; in the ragged downpour he was a shadow in an overcoat, unrecognizable, but the cadence of his rap was distinct from the old days, when he would circle around to the patio at my dad’s house and tap briskly for me to let him in.
He ducked in and shook himself violently so the water went flying. “You want to ride with me uptown?” he said without preamble.
“I’m busy.”
“Yes?” he said, in a voice at once so affectionate, and exasperated, and transparently, childishly hurt, that I turned from my book shelf. “And won’t you ask why? I think you might want to come.”
“Uptown where?”
“I am going to talk to some people.”
“And that would be about—?”
“Yes,” he said brightly, sniffling and wiping his nose. “Exactly. You don’t have to come, I was going to bring my boy Toly, but I thought for several reasons it might be good if you wanted to be there also—Popchyk, yes yes!” he said, stooping to pick up the dog, who had trundled up to greet him. “Glad to see you too! He likes bacon,” he said to me, scratching Popper behind the ears and rubbing his own nose at the back of Popper’s neck. “Do you ever cook bacon for him? Enjoys the bread too, when is soaked with grease.”
“Talk to who? Who is this?”
Boris pushed the dripping hair out of his face. “Guy I know. Named Horst. Old friend of Myriam’s. He got stung on this deal too—honest, I do not think he can help us, but Myriam suggested might not hurt to talk to him again? and I think maybe she is right about that.”
xv.
ON THE WAY UPTOWN, in the back of the town car, rain pounding so hard that Gyuri had to shout for us to hear him (“What a dog’s weather!”) Boris filled me in quietly about Horst. “Sad sad story. He is German. Interesting guy, very intelligent and sensitive. Important family too… he explained to me once but I forgot. His dad was part American and left him a load of money but when his mother remarried—” here he named a world-famous industrial name, with a dark old Nazi echo. “Millions. I mean you can’t believe how much money these people have. They are rolling in it. Money out the ass.”
“Yep, that’s a sad story, all right.”
“Well—Horst is a bad junkie. You know me—” philosophical shrug—“I don’t judge or condemn. Do what you like, I don’t care! But Horst—very sad case. He fell in love with this girl who was on it and she got him on it to o. Took him for everything, and when the money ran out, she left. Horst’s family—they have disowned him many years ago. And still he eats his heart out for this awful rotten girl. Girl, I say—she must be nearly forty. Ulrika her name is. Every time Horst gets a little money—she comes back for a while. Then she leaves him again.”
“What does he have to do with it?”
“Horst’s associate Sascha set up things with this deal. I meet the guy—he seems okay—what do I know? Horst told me that he had never worked with Sascha’s man in person, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t go into it the way I should and—” he threw up his arms—“poof! Myriam was right—she is always right—I should have listened to her.”
Water streamed down the windows, quicksilver heavy, sealing us into the car, lights winking and melting around us in a roar that reminded me of when Boris and I used to ride in the back of the Lexus in Vegas when my dad went through the car wash.
“Horst is usually a bit fussy about who he does business with, so I thought it would be okay. But—he is very restrained, you know? ‘Unusual’ is what he said. ‘Unconventional.’ Well what is that supposed to mean? Then when I get down there—these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy. And situations like this—you want it calm and quiet! It was like, have they seen too much TV or something? like, this is how to act—? normally in this type situation everyone is very very polite, hush-hush, very peaceful! Myriam said—and she was right—forget about the guns! What kind of crazy thing is this for these people to keep chickens in Miami? Even a little thing like that—this is Jacuzzi neighborhood, tennis courts, you understand me—who keeps chickens? You don’t want a neighbor phoning in complaint because of chicken noise in the yard! But by that time—” he shrugged—“there I was. I was in. I told myself not to worry so much, but turned out I was right.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t really know. I got half the goods I was promised—rest coming in a week. That’s not un-typical. But then they were arrested and I didn’t get the other half and I didn’t get the picture. Horst—well, Horst would like to find it too, he is out some big green as well. Anyway I am hoping he has a bit more information than when we spoke last.”
xvi.
GYURI LEFT US OUT in the Sixties, not far at all from the Barbours’. “This is the place?” I said, shaking the rain off Hobie’s umbrella. We were out in front of one of the big limestone townhouses off Fifth—black iron doors, massive lion’s-head knockers.
“Yes—it’s his father’s place—his other family are trying to get him out legally but good luck with that, hah.”
We were buzzed in, took a cage elevator up to the second floor. I could smell incense, weed, spaghetti sauce cooking. A lanky blonde woman—short-cropped hair and a serene small-eyed face like a camel’s—opened the door. She was dressed like a sort of old-fashioned street urchin or newsboy: houndstooth trousers, ankle boots, dirty thermal shirt, suspenders. Perched on the tip of her nose were a pair of wire-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses.
Without saying a word she opened the door to us and walked off, leaving us alone in a dim, grimy, ballroom-sized salon which was like a derelict version of some high-society set from a Fred Astaire movie: high ceilings; crumbling plaster; grand piano; darkened chandelier with half the crystals broken or gone; sweeping Hollywood staircase littered with cigarette butts. Sufi chants droned low in the background: Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Someone had drawn on the wall, in charcoal, a series of life-sized nudes ascending the stairs like frames in a film; and there was very little furniture apart from a ratty futon and some chairs and tables that looked scavenged from the street. Empty picture frames on the wall, a ram’s skull. On the television, an animated film flickered and sputtered with epileptic vim, windmilling geometrics intercut with letters and live-action racecar images. Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov’s Despair and Heidegger’s Being and Time with the cover torn off, sketch books, art books, ashtrays and burnt tinfoil, and a grubby-looking pillow where drowsed a gray tabby cat. Over the door, like a trophy from some Schwarzwald hunting lodge, a rack of antlers cast distorted shadows that spread and branched across the ceiling with a Nordic, wicked, fairy-tale feel.
Conversation in the next room. The windows were shrouded with tacked-up bedsheets just thin enough to let in a diffuse violet glow from the street. As I looked around, forms emerged from the dark and transformed with a dream strangeness: for one thing, the makeshift room divider—consisting of a carpet sagging tenement-style from the ceiling on fishing line—was on closer look a tapestry and a good one too, eighteenth century or older, the near twin of an Amiens I’d seen at auction with an estimate of forty thousand pounds. And not all the frames on the wall were empty. Some had paintings in them, and one of them—even in the poor light—looked like a Corot.
I was just about to step over for a look when a man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty appeared in t
he door: worn-looking, rangy, with straight sandy hair combed back from his face, in black punk jeans out at the knee and a grungy British commando sweater with an ill-fitting suit jacket over it.
“Hello,” he said to me, quiet British voice with a faint German bite, “you must be Potter,” and then, to Boris: “Glad you turned up. You two should stay and hang out. Candy and Niall are making dinner with Ulrika.”
Movement behind the tapestry, at my feet, that made me step back quickly: swaddled shapes on the floor, sleeping bags, a homeless smell.
“Thanks, we can’t stay,” said Boris, who had picked up the cat and was scratching it behind the ears. “Have some of that wine though, thanks.”
Without a word Horst passed his own glass over to Boris and then called into the next room in German. To me, he said: “You’re a dealer, right?” In the glow of the television his pale pinned gull’s eye shone hard and unblinking.
“Right,” I said uneasily; and then: “Uh, thanks.” Another woman—bob-haired and brunette, high black boots, skirt just short enough to show the black cat tattooed on one milky thigh—had appeared with a bottle and two glasses: one for Horst, one for me.
“Danke darling,” said Horst. To Boris he said: “You gentlemen want to do up?”
“Not right now,” said Boris, who had leaned forward to steal a kiss from the dark-haired woman as she was leaving. “Was wondering though. What do you hear from Sascha?”
“Sascha—” Horst sank down on the futon and lit a cigarette. With his ripped jeans and combat boots he was like a scuffed-up version of some below-the-title Hollywood character actor from the 1940s, some minor mitteleuropäischer known for playing tragic violinists and weary, cultivated refugees. “Ireland is where it seems to lead. Good news if you ask me.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“Nor to me, but I’ve talked to people and so far it checks out.” He spoke with all a junkie’s arrhythmic quiet, off-beat, but without the slur. “So—soon we should know more, I hope.”
“Friends of Niall’s?”
“No. Niall says he never heard of them. But it’s a start.”
The wine was bad: supermarket Syrah. Because I did not want to be anywhere near the bodies on the floor I drifted over to inspect a group of artists’ casts on a beat-up table: a male torso; a draped Venus leaning against a rock; a sandaled foot. In the poor light they looked like the ordinary plaster casts for sale at Pearl Paint—studio pieces for students to sketch from—but when I drew my finger across the top of the foot I felt the suppleness of marble, silky and grainless.
“Why would they go to Ireland with it?” Boris was saying restlessly. “What kind of collectors’ market? I thought everyone tries to get pieces out of there, not in.”
“Yes, but Sascha thinks he used the picture to clear a debt.”
“So the guy has ties there?”
“Evidently.”
“I find this difficult to believe.”
“What, about the ties?”
“No, about the debt. This guy—he looks like he was stealing hubcaps off the street six months ago. “
Horst shrugged, faintly: sleepy eyes, seamed forehead. “Who knows. Not sure that’s correct but certainly I’m not willing to trust to luck. Would I let my hand be cut off for it?” he said, lazily tapping an ash on the floor. “No.”
Boris frowned into his wine glass. “He was amateur. Believe me. If you saw him yourself you would know.”
“Yes but he likes to gamble, Sascha says.”
“You don’t think Sascha maybe knows more?”
“I think not.” There was a remoteness in his manner, as if he was talking half to himself. “ ‘Wait and see.’ This is what I hear. An unsatisfactory answer. Stinking from the top if you ask me. But as I say, we are not to the bottom of this yet.”
“And when does Sascha get back to the city?” The half-light in the room sent me straight back to childhood, Vegas, like the obscure mood of a dream lingering after sleep: haze of cigarette smoke, dirty clothes on the floor, Boris’s face white then blue in the flicker of the screen.
“Next week. I’ll give you a ring. You can talk to him yourself then.”
“Yes. But I think we should talk to him together.”
“Yes. I think so too. We’ll both be smarter, in future… this need not have happened… but in any case,” said Horst, who was scratching his neck slowly, absent-mindedly, “you understand I’m wary of pushing him too hard.”
“That is very convenient for Sascha.”
“You have suspicions. Tell me.”
“I think—” Boris cut his eyes at the doorway.
“Yes?”
“I think—” Boris lowered his voice—“you are being too easy on him. Yes yes—” putting up his hands—“I know. But—all very convenient for his guy to vanish, not a clue, he knows nothing!”
“Well, maybe,” Horst said. He seemed disconnected and partly elsewhere, like an adult in the room with small children. “This is pressing on me—on all of us. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you. Though for all we know his guy was a cop.”
“No,” said Boris resolutely. “He was not. He was not. I know it.”
“Well—to be quite frank with you, I do not think so either, there is more to this than we yet know. Still, I’m hopeful.” He’d taken a wooden box from the drafting table and was poking around in it. “Sure you gentlemen wouldn’t like to get into a little something?”
I looked away. I would have liked nothing better. I would also have liked to