“I don’t mean to sound impertinent,” Matthias said, sounding exactly that, “but you said some things that aren’t true.”
“Salesmanship, Matt. Name of the game.”
“But why can’t we tell them about the building’s height? That’s the whole point of the thing.”
“In time. In time. We do this step by step.” He looked at his huge, glittering watch. “I’ve got to go over to the office. Meet with some people. Why don’t you take Diandra home? I’ll join you later. Probably this evening, after dinner.”
“I think I’d better see to my father,” Matthias said. “I fear he found this rather taxing.”
“I’ll have Lenny Krasowski drive him home in the limo. He can stretch out. He looks like he could use the nap.”
At the penthouse, in Poe’s living room, Diandra offered Matthias a drink, and he took it. She made herself one and seated herself at some distance from him on a couch facing away from the windows, putting her face in dark silhouette against the light. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but perhaps that was just as well.
He looked at his watch, an old-fashioned sportsman’s timepiece that had been in his family since the 1940s. “It’s all of ten after three. Your husband said he won’t join us until after dinner.”
“This just dawned on you, Matthias?”
He felt himself blushing. “Would you like to do something? Go for a walk? Have dinner somewhere after?”
“Matt, you know why he had us come over here, why he’s leaving us alone for so long. He wants his damned painting, his trophy painting of me.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Would you rather go to church?”
“Why is he so obsessed with having this thing?”
“I don’t think it’s that. He’s hung up on making us do it. It’s his way of putting his brand on us, as if he hasn’t done that already.”
“You haven’t told me what you think of my design.”
“I haven’t quite made up my mind. It’s not beautiful, not like your other building, that Halsman Tower. Neither is it grotesque. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s so different, so huge. If he gets to build it, if he gets the money, he’ll change the city. There’ll be all the other buildings, and there’ll be this.” She crossed her legs, leaning back. “That’s what he’s always wanted. I guess I have to say, Matthias, that it’s a brilliant success.”
“Tomorrow we’ll start hearing from the critics.”
“Don’t worry about them. Peter won’t.”
Only a few minutes had gone by.
“Do you want to do this, Diandra?”
“Pose nude for you, for a painting? No. I don’t particularly. But I don’t mind. Do you?”
“I want to paint you. Very much.”
Diandra rose. “He’s prepared a room for this. Isn’t that sweet?”
He followed her to an elevator. They stood close together, without touching, as it rose to the penthouse’s third floor. He studied her skin, wondering how he would ever capture its softness and clarity. He looked for imperfections, finding only a few faint, tiny freckles. Her hands were beginning to show her age. He hadn’t noticed that.
The door opened. She led him along a carpeted hall past several doors to a corner room at the end. Its windows faced north and east. Most of the furniture had been removed, but for two chairs, a plush, old-fashioned chaise longue, and an easel and work table covered with art materials, including a large wooden box filled with tubes of oil paint. There were three floor lamps in the room—a suggestion that there might be night work.
The canvas mounted on the easel was large, four feet by six feet. Matthias noted that a red drapery had been hung over the wall behind the chaise longue.
“He seems to have planned the whole damned picture.”
“That’s how he does things. You can work to order, can’t you? You did it with the building.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“I’m not going to undress in front of you, Matthias. Excuse me a moment.”
She walked very slowly, leaving the room. Matthias looked at the paint and equipment Poe had provided. It was more than complete. There were a hundred or more tubes of oils, three different palette knives, and a dozen or more brushes. He picked up one and ran his fingers over it, deciding it must have cost twenty or thirty dollars. The palette itself was large, with rounded edges. He found he could hold it quite comfortably in his left hand, despite the burns and bandages.
He wanted to paint her lying down. She was a beautiful woman and Poe wanted her painted beautifully. As Matthias had learned in his life classes at art school in Philadelphia, models who had to stand for a long time tended to slump. Those put in a sitting position tended to sag—breasts slack, even flat stomachs bulging a little.
“All right, Matthias.”
Diandra entered wearing a light-blue silken robe and nothing else. She went to a chair and, turning away from him, slipped off the garment and hung it over the back.
“Lie down,” he said. “This will be a reclining nude. It will be easier for you.”
She sat carefully on the edge of the chaise, then, in a single graceful movement, swung back, assuming a perfect pose.
“Should I be more decorous?” she asked. “Where do you want my hands?”
She was leaning on one elbow. Her other hand was resting on the curve of her hip. Her pubic hair was amply exposed.
“You’re fine just as you are. The modesty should show in your face.”
“Do you want me to be modest?”
“Yes. This will be a Dürer, not a Goltzius.”
“Goltzius.”
“He was a Dutch master, as was Albrecht Dürer. Goltzius is most famous for his Bacchanalian works—wanton smiles on everyone. Dürer went for the sublime. One of his models was probably the most brazen hussy in Amsterdam. She sometimes walked the streets naked—in the seventeenth century. But in Dürer’s pictures, she was sublime.”
“All right. Sublime it is.”
“Don’t force the expression. Just relax.”
It was his practice to make a rough sketch first, getting all the proportions and perspective right—a lesson he had learned studying the figure studies of Thomas Eakins. Then he would concentrate on the details of the face, attending to the body last, working to make the body reflect the mood he found in the face.
He sketched, erased, and sketched for nearly an hour, but in the end, rubbed everything out again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t get it right,” he said. “Your face. All I see are your eyes. You’re staring at me.”
“Shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t I be looking out of the painting?”
“Yes, but …”
He put down his pencil. Her eyes were still fixed on him. When he kept standing there, she rose and walked slowly toward him. He thought she was going to look at the rough sketch on the canvas, but she ignored it.
“I think,” she said, “that we’d better surrender to the inevitable.”
She stood before him. His eyes fell from her face to her small, very round breasts. The nipples were erect.
Diandra leaned close and kissed him, softly, then more eagerly. His arms went around her. The skin was so soft—everywhere. He closed his eyes, feeling dizzy, trembly and tingly, and more.
Her lips left his. She stepped back, taking both his hands in hers.
“You’re very warm,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Take off your clothes, Matthias, and come to the chaise.”
Afterward, they lay facing each other, their arms around each other, each perfectly still. Finally he reached to stroke her face and hair. This had been so much more than their first encounter, more than making love had been for him in years. He knew it was over forever with Sally, with Marie-Claire in France, with any and all other women. He supposed he had known this the first moment he had looked upon her, but then she had repre
sented nothing but impossibility. Now she was naked beside him. His. Not Poe’s.
“I’m waiting for the earth to break open and the flames of hell to engulf us,” he said.
“You weren’t thinking of heaven, Matthias? I was. Actually, I was thinking that I was just now as far from death as I’ll ever get.”
She kissed his hand.
“And now?” he said.
“Now we should get on with the painting,” she said, moving slightly away from him. “The light’s changed. It’s getting late.”
Matthias sat up. “This is going to take many sessions.”
“We’ll let them take care of themselves.”
His clothes were in a jumble. He began sorting them out.
“What if Peter had walked in?” he said, pulling on his trousers.
“I don’t think he would do that. I don’t think he’s going to bother us until the painting’s done.”
“But doesn’t he …?”
“Peter Poe considers all possibilities. I’m sure he considered this one.”
“I don’t understand.”
Her only response was to resume her pose.
Matthias worked steadily. The lines came easily. In a few minutes, the Diandra on the chaise began magically to appear on the canvas.
“Is it going better now?” she asked.
“Enormously.”
“What do you see in my face?”
“Something sublime.”
“What?”
“I’m embarrassed to say.”
“You can’t be embarrassed with me, Matt. Not anymore. Tell me.”
“I see love.”
She smiled.
“Peter will be pleased,” she said. “He’ll like that looking out at him.”
Zany had spent most of the day fishing on a friend’s boat with several buddies. The Grand Pier crime rate was remaining near zero, and George Hejmal finally took a day off to join them. All he had to tell Zany about the Langley case was that the State Police had taken over the investigation completely but had made no progress. Curland had come and retrieved his boat, blithely sailing it back by himself, despite some windy weather. He hadn’t stopped to see Zany.
They got sunburned and drank too much beer, but Zany enjoyed himself thoroughly. His catch amounted to four far from huge perch and an undersized coho. He would have thrown them all back but wanted to come home with something to prove to Judy he hadn’t been off somewhere playing policeman again.
She looked at him as if she darkly suspected he had.
“You got another call from Chicago,” she said. “A woman.”
“What woman?”
“She didn’t leave her name. She wasn’t very nice. She said you should return the paintings.”
Zany froze. “I can’t return the painting. It was stolen from me.”
“She didn’t say ‘painting.’ She said ‘paintings.’ Plural. What the hell is that about?”
He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I don’t have any paintings. She didn’t leave a name and number?”
“No.”
“Did she say she’d call back?”
“No. She just said to tell you that you’d made a mistake. A big mistake.”
CHAPTER 19
Poe had a hit. The news stories and commentary about the project came in all week, and by anybody’s measure, the response had to be considered a big cheer. There were a few minor complaints, mostly about the lack of details in his announcement, and a news commentator at the CBS TV station tossed in a jibe about the building being as big as Poe’s ego, but Poe rather liked that.
He was less pleased with the Tribune’s architecture critic, who praised the design but said he hoped the rumors were not true that Poe planned to make the structure so outsized as to reclaim the tallest building title for Chicago. The critic thought this a dubious and extravagantly wasteful ambition at a time when Realtors were still in financial trouble because of the recession and past overbuilding.
But Poe had been expecting some really harsh attacks, and the architecture critic’s mixed and politely worded review looked to be the worst he was going to get. Poe had been most afraid of the two newspapers’ editorial boards, and had courted them assiduously. But both weighed in by the end of the week in support of the project, having bought his sales points in their entirety.
Why not? It was a hell of an exciting new building for Chicago. It would add generously to the city’s tax base and, if built where promised, would make the reclamation of the Near North Side complete. Incorporating some park area and a museum complex in the project won a lot of applause—especially his inclusion of a Holocaust Museum.
He knew they sure as hell weren’t going to applaud his real plans, but he’d certainly softened these people up. Whatever they might eventually think of his trying to put his project on the lakefront—when at last he dropped that megaton bomb—they were on record now at least as saying it was a wonderful building.
What he hadn’t figured on was a racial problem. A local civil rights group that Poe had never heard of—that had probably been organized for this specific purpose—raised objections to the project, calling the building “a white man’s monster” that was invading the African-American community and driving blacks out of the Near North Side. The group complained that if there was to be a Holocaust Museum it should go in a Jewish neighborhood. A few protesters staged a demonstration outside Poe’s Michigan Avenue office building, but the news media largely ignored them. Poe didn’t. They irritated him. He’d spent a lot of money helping the city relocate the remaining residents of Cabrini Green and could say without exaggeration that every one of them was going to be better off. He sent memos off to Cooperman and Matthias—with copies to the news media—saying there should be an African-American collection included in the ethnic museum complex as well. He’d announce that at his next news conference—once the protestors went away. He didn’t want to seem to be bending to pressure. He cursed himself for not including African-Americans in the first place.
In any event, he was now ready for his next big step—his audience with the mayor, the invitation for which came with great swiftness.
The man was a little miffed that Poe hadn’t come to him before his news conference, but seemed mollified by profuse apologies and by Poe’s invitation for the mayor to stand beside him when he finally unveiled the scale model of the project and revealed its exact dimensions. Poe said he planned to do that very soon, but would be happy to hold everything in abeyance if the mayor was going on vacation or had some other reason for delay.
Poe brought Yeats, Aaron Cooperman, and Matthias along with him to the mayor’s office, and it turned out to be Curland who made the clinching pitch. He showed the mayor a series of enlarged, mounted photos of other city skylines—New York, with its unique twin World Trade Center towers; San Francisco and its TransAmerica Pyramid and Golden Gate Bridge; Sydney, Australia, with its huge, exotic opera house overlooking the harbor; London with St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Parliament buildings; Paris, and the Eiffel Tower.
He was about to turn to the District of Columbia and the Washington Monument, but the mayor waved his hand.
“I get the idea,” he said.
“Chicago has several architectural signatures,” Matthias said. “Aside from the three big high-rises, which really aren’t all that distinctive except for their height, there’s the Water Tower, the Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, the Picasso statue at the Daley Civic Center. But they all rather blend into the general skyline and are comparatively small. I wouldn’t diminish their importance for a moment, but when you look at the city from any distance, they’re not visible—not like the Sydney Opera House, not like the World Trade Center, not like …”
“The Eiffel Tower,” the mayor said. “Any estimate on the number of jobs this will mean?”
A man from the chamber of commerce who had also accompanied Poe quickly produced a suitably impressive figure.
“What’s t
he area zoned for?” the mayor asked.
“Residential and commercial; also high-rises,” said one of his aides.
“That’s the first thing I checked before proceeding with this, Mr. Mayor,” Poe said. “I’ve never asked for noncompatible use in any of my developments.”
The mayor eyed him with that shrewd look of his, then let a little smile creep onto his face. “Do you really plan to put up what will be the world’s tallest building?”
“I’d like to. If I get the F.A.A.’s approval and enough financing. A lot of the money’s going to come from Japan. Is that all right with you, sir?”
“I don’t mind the Japanese spending money in Chicago. You’re going to have an Irish Museum?”
“Yes, sir. I can’t think of a people who’ve contributed more to the city. I also want to have a Polish one. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but I’m Polish-American. I was born here, grew up in Congressman Rostenkowski’s district. My father was a precinct worker.” That last bit was a lie, but he didn’t think the man would bother to check it out.
The mayor picked up the painting Matthias had done of the proposed project as seen from the lake.
“Sailboat,” he muttered, though not pejoratively.
“What better symbol for Queen City of the Great Lakes, Mr. Mayor?” said Yeats.
“The museums and the surrounding park land acquisition I envision will require City Council approval,” Poe said, “and your approval, of course. We’ll need authorization to issue bonds, and the city will have to levy that quarter percent hotel tax the legislature just passed. I humbly submit that for your consideration, sir.”
The “humbly” was a bit much. Poe regretted that; made him sound like some groveling office seeker. He could lose the man’s respect if he kept that kind of bullshit up.
“No problem. We need a bigger hotel tax.” The mayor set down the painting and pursed his lips. “I don’t think I have any objection to this. But I want my office to be consulted every step of the way.”
“Of course, Mr. Mayor. Bill Yeats will be my liaison. I think you know his uncle, Judge Yeats? In Chancery Court?”
The Big Score Page 36