The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  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. “Touché.”

  “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, 8½-by-11-inch paper. Like its predecessor, it had a simple message, repeated over and over and over. I AM WARNING YOU.

  • 13 •

  Getting 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 unsolvable 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.