by Susan Daitch
The days Masuji was at Claiborne’s added electricity and anticipation to the overwhelming chilliness of offices that, in the past, had been ruled by a constant fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. We went out for a while, and I fell hard for the guy. There was something about the sureness with which he would hold a sheet of paper up to the light and know if it was fake or not. The way he didn’t care about auction-house protocols, the way Adnan Sami leaked from his headphones, the way he never wore a tie, the way he added vodka to his afternoon coffee and smoked in the elevator when we were alone in it. That wasn’t all we did in the elevator that we shouldn’t have. I mean, Ashby wasn’t the only one who used the premises for other purposes.
Masuji’s mother was Japanese, his father Quebecois. They owned a dry-cleaning business in Montreal. He went to art school and painted photo-realist pictures of what he called ghost buildings: ornate movie theaters, silent-film-era firehouses, schools, amusement parks, restaurants and bowling alleys from the modernist Googie era. They had mostly been torn down, so initially he got the images online, though sometimes he was able to travel to what remained of the actual sites. I thought his paintings were extraordinary, but no one was interested in his work. Assistants to gallery assistants gave him general email addresses while scanning art openings for someone more useful to talk to, other artists, dealers, collectors. There is no point in going into how hard he worked and how much he failed, though he concealed it, at least from me. He was fierce about doing his own work, not getting a full-time job even if it meant risking the roof over his head. Between watermark and rare paper consultations, which don’t provide a steady paycheck, he supported himself by driving for Uber, essentially boomeranging between Manhattan and Kennedy Airport day after day. His hands on the steering wheel were just as suggestive as when he held a watermark up to the light. After a block of time spent driving, he said his sense of the city was that there was an endless tide of people arriving and departing, coming and going, but what did any of them actually do? It was a mystery to him. He was painting less and less. Abruptly, he stopped calling or texting. I never knew why. I heard that he’d left the city. And now here he was, paying for jars of pigment and tubes of paint while talking to Oscar Kronstadt as if they were old friends, and, for all I knew, they might have been.
“A shark in formaldehyde in the Museum of Natural History is just marine taxidermy, but an identical shark, sitting in an identical tank less than a mile away in the Museum of Modern Art, has an artist’s name on it, and is worth millions. I’m telling you Oscar, as a student I understood this, but as the son of a French-speaking dry cleaner who scratches his head and flips the top off another bottle of Labatt’s, I want in on the con.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I had heard this argument about the shark before, but I froze in the doorway. Though his back was to me, Oscar was standing by the cash register and saw me first. It was too late to quickly turn on my heel and regain the safety of the street. It had been a while since I’d visited Kronstadt’s, but Oscar was always happy to see me and, with the effusive greeting, Masuji turned around.
He smiled as if nothing had ever happened between us, asked me how I was, how was Claiborne’s? Why was I here in the middle of the day? Oh, sorry to hear you lost your job.
To say that his presence in Kronstadt’s was unexpected and made me nervous was an understatement, but I tried very hard to appear as if it was no big thing.
“What happened?” He seemed genuinely interested, as if we’d last seen each other only the night before I found a dead body underneath a painting of a king of Spain.
“I mean, I didn’t lose it,” I quickly corrected myself. “I got another offer. Can’t say exactly where yet. The ink isn’t dry on my contract. I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Another city? Europe? Please let me know where and when. We’ll have a drink before you leave.” He coughed, hacking—the smoking must have been catching up with him.
“You’ll be the first one I’ll call.” I tried not to sound sarcastic. That would have been too easy, and in some small, hard-to-admit corner of my brain I didn’t mean it sarcastically. I would have liked to see him, and didn’t want to let him know he’d got to me. So I couldn’t ask, “Why did you fall off the earth?” With Oscar standing there, the man who loved everybody, there could be no pertinent personal questions, no screaming, no what the hells, and I didn’t want to be that person anyway.
Masuji shifted back and forth a bit, not in a shifty way but as if he seriously wasn’t sure if he should stay or go. For a moment, I thought maybe he hadn’t meant not to call me back all those months ago. We’d been together only a short time, and maybe he just got busy but he meant to call back. Maybe he had to dig the dry cleaners out of the snow, maybe he was working on a job at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, maybe a million untrue excuses. In the moment when someone is two inches away, I can convince myself of anything. Then he picked up his bag of paint, waved to both of us, and was on his way. All possible excuses evaporated. He had stopped contacting me because he was done, and I should have been, too. In fact, I was. It would always be unfinished. I stared after Masuji until I was sure he was somewhere down the block.
As soon as he was absolutely gone and unlikely to return, I told Oscar the real reason I was fired from Claiborne’s and showed him the receipt. Even if there had been no murder, no theft, Oscar was the kind of man I tended to confide in. Paternal without being condescending or judgmental, he always seemed like the kind of guy who could get you out of the Holland Tunnel with the floodwaters rising and everyone around you in a high panic.
“Do you remember who you sold these half a dozen tubes of paint to?” I asked.
“Yes. There were two men. Identical twins. One had tattoos of sharks swimming into the corners of his eyes; the other had the same, only birds—hawks flying in or pulling out the corners. Impossible to say. If not for the tattoos, you couldn’t tell them apart, but these designs are tame compared to what I usually see: springs piercing noses, wingnuts at the temples, skin marked to look like leopard or tiger pelt. I enjoy seeing what people can do to their bodies—why not? These guys wanted real white lead, like the kind Vermeer used.”
“Lead carbonate and sulfate.” Because of its toxicity, lead white isn’t easy to find. It makes paintings luminous. There’s nothing quite like it. Some painters accepted its dangers in order to achieve that kind of brilliance, but it was ultimately replaced by titanium white, which, in fact, Oscar tried to sell them.
“ ‘Look,’ I said to them, ‘I can sell you this, but I highly recommend titanium. It’s not as sound structurally as a pigment, that’s true, but from this you will not drop dead.’ ”
“Did they listen to you?”
“No. Of course not. These are young men. They know they’ll never die. But that’s m not all they wanted. Scheele’s green, they asked for.”
“Cupric hydrogen arsenite.”
“Yes, and this I do not sell.” Oscar had an expression of half-lidded eye-rolling that let you know he did not suffer fools gladly.
Napoleon insisted that his prison room be painted this yellow-green, and when traces of arsenic were found in his hair it was believed that arsenic vapors from the paint were the cause, or one of the causes, of his demise. The pigment was used in toys, cloth, wallpaper, candles—all led to sickness or death. At a children’s Christmas party in eighteen-something, all the children died from candles dyed with Scheele’s green. It’s deadly stuff.
“You didn’t get the names of the twins?”
“No. They paid cash, as you can see, but that day my grandson was working with me, and he asks people to sign a logbook, with their names, addresses, and email, so that they can be notified of sales and in-store events. This is a crazy idea. I don’t do email, and there will be no sales or in-store events in my lifetime. Where would I stage an in-store event? On the ceiling?”
He was right. There was no room to display even
postcards. Every square inch of the shop was utilized for jars of powdered pigment and boxes, tubes of paint, some older than the Treaty of Versailles. In terms of email and related technology, Oscar had a mid-century view of computers and the Internet. The information in his brain spanned many centuries—over a millennia, in fact—of color and pigment production, and he felt it could store no more. In some ways, Oscar wanted time to stand still. The encroachment and swallowing up of his beloved neighborhood confused him, as it would anyone of his generation who thought those shops and tenements would be there forever. Turning his back on a certain amount of technology was an old man’s way of spitting in the wind, forgetting the fact that the wind was blowing against him, throwing his contempt right back into his face.
“Do you have the book? Could I look at it?” I didn’t believe the twins would sign the book, but I couldn’t not ask.
“Of course, of course, darling. You’d think my grandson would take his stuff with him? He leaves everything: his jacket, his phone, this book. I’m supposed to keep track. He only makes work for me.”
He pulled a Moleskine notebook from below the counter, slowly looked at the date on the receipt, and turned to the page in the notebook that had the same date written across the top. There hadn’t been many customers that day, but would Oscar remember who was who?
“Hmm…hard to read some of these scribbles. We’re looking for two men’s names. Maybe with the same address.”
I was sweating with anxiety. If it were as simple as names and addresses, I was done. Demetrius could have them arrested. I could go home. I might even get my job back.
“Yes, here are the twins with the wildlife tatts. I’m sure of it.”
He turned the book around and pointed to two illegible names. No physical addresses had been written, but there were two email addresses:
[email protected]
[email protected]
Chapter 7
Marnie lived in Gowanus, which she looked at as the Venice of the future, when all the palazzos had crumbled and an impoverished government could only afford to replace them with industrial warehouses and a few lone apartment buildings like the one she lived in, on the edge of a street alongside a cement yard. I liked the idea of Gowanus as a futuristic Venice, though it’s hard to imagine vaporetti skimming the surface of its fatally toxic path. I pressed the buzzer labeled Sleeter. No answer. I pressed again, and called her phone. Finally Marnie came down to let me in. She had been asleep, and the buzzer wasn’t working.
“Jeez, Marnie.” She was wearing barely anything, but the street was empty. “So Roy was dreamy?” I stumbled on the last word. It seemed to me he might have been many things, but more crass than badass, and definitely not the stuff that dreams are made of.
“Who?”
“The lawyer from Jacky’s Fifth. I’m not sure he’s actually a lawyer”
“Oh, okay, I guess.” She had only a sketchy memory of the guy.
Marnie made coffee and heated up some croissants that were probably fresh during the Ford administration. I told her what I’d learned or hadn’t learned about the guys in the bar, circling my real mission: the email addresses and the identity of the twins who bought paint from Oscar Kronstadt. Marnie was eminently distracted when she was infatuated with someone. Though the infatuations were short-lived, while in the grip of the obsession she would be oblivious of a city bus bearing down on her from only a few feet away. In this case, the bus was bearing down on me. Throat-burning coffee swallowed, cup in hand, her eyes lit up, and she wheeled herself over to a laptop sitting on a cluttered table.
“Hey, it’s too bad you lost your job. There’s a lot of Picasso paintings, some very famous, that are going to be sold in a few days, most likely to private owners, not to museums, and they will never be seen again in public in our lifetimes. People are lined up for hours to see them before the auction. You could get us right to the front of the line if you still worked at Claiborne’s.”
“Who’s ‘us’? Marnie, please, focus! This is what I have: two email addresses. I googled them, but nothing came up. I sent empty emails, which immediately boomeranged back. Of course, they gave Kronstadt’s grandson old or fake addresses, so this is a dead end, but it’s all I have. What do you think? Can you find anything? Any footprints in these fake email addresses, do you think, or is this absolutely less than zero?”
“Later. I want to tell you about Roy.”
“Marnie, the judge, whoever he is, can wait. If you tell me about him now, I’m afraid you’ll be telling me the rest of the story from behind a glass wall at a women’s correctional facility.”
“Just a minute.”
“No, there is no minute.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows to indicate that I was missing out on hearing about someone incredibly interesting. “You should probably throw those out. Why would they, in their wildest dreams, leave accurate contact information? Do you think they’re morons?”
“Humor me, then I’ll listen to anything. You find things no one else does. I’ve seen you unearth information about guys with little more than a half-remembered first name and a job description that was an exaggeration of an inconvenient truth. Marine biologist at Woods Hole turned assistant lab technician. A restaurateur who was a convicted dealer.”
“Dredging the Pandora’s box that is the Internet doesn’t usually offer rewards, Stella, you know that. More often, in my experience, it’s stuff that should remain hidden. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Then we’re done.”
Twenty minutes later, she rolled away from the screen.
“Of sharkbooty@gmail there is no record and, yes, it was likely made up on the spot to humor Kronstadt. Hawkbait probably was, as well, even if we could make out the scribble that precedes the “.edu.” The brothers would be careful to be off the grid as much as possible. If they don’t want to be found, they would disguise what they can about their identities online; reroute their IP addresses using Tor or some other system; use cash and never credit cards; continually destroy their cellphones, remove batteries, snap SIM cards in two, relying on a steady stream of disposable burners. Assuming they know all this, and yet they might make one tiny mistake, one crack in the window just to let in a little air, then wham, we open the window the rest of the way. For most people, an online identity isn’t very different from their actual physical selves. Most everyday walking-around folks don’t care who knows their preference for a certain restaurant, a funny YouTube video, a song, that they endorse a political candidate, whatever—it’s a reflection or extension of their actual selves. If someone doesn’t want to be found, they can try two things: change their identity so the online shadow is someone else entirely, and construct a false floor; or you go nineteenth century and eschew any transactions that remotely touch the Net. This is hard to do but not impossible. So I’m looking at whatever path Sharkbooty and Hawkbait chose for a possible slipup.
“While it’s true that the emails both reference their tattoos, they’re not idiots; the addresses are totally fake, but then there’s the “edu.” A lot of high schools and colleges have hawks as their mascot, but I narrowed down the search, given the age of the brothers, and the fact that they’re white. It was just a wild guess. Skilled liars know that the most effective lies contain some grain of truth, inconvenient or otherwise.”
She gestured for me to take a look at her computer screen while she slowly scrolled down a page from Google images, but there were thousands.
“Do any of these faces look familiar? I’m not going to scroll all the way—there are too many. This is just a test.”
Initially using “hawk,” “mascot,” and “sports,” Marnie kept refining the search. She eliminated the Atlanta Hawks, for example, and others if they weren’t connected to a school.
“You heard him curse when he uncovered the giant burger, right?”
“I only heard a few words, and I would guess maybe in Scandinavian you know, that kind of singsong accent t
hat goes up at the end of a word or sentence. But singsong with muscle behind it, not like a pleasant lullaby.”
“So let’s narrow things down further. I’m going to guess they followed soccer and were indifferent to American sports. They could be relatively recent arrivals, still have strong accents. Baseball is a snooze to them. Basketball is too fast, like soccer on crack.”
Schools with soccer teams that used the hawk as a mascot were plentiful: Quincy University in Illinois; Chowan University in Murfreesboro, North Carolina; McMurry University in Abilene, Texas; Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, “transforming lives through Christ.” These all got totally eliminated. And that was only the beginning, but we kept looking. There was Lehigh, SUNY New Paltz, Northeastern State. Hawks all.
Then there were the Iowa Hawkeyes.
“We’ll skip them,” Marnie decided. “Because of the ‘eyes.’ We’re looking for just plain, straightforward hawkness. No fancy stuff. I don’t have all night. I say ixnay to the eyes.”
“No. Hawkeyes might be it. One of the twins had hawk-eye tattoos. Let’s look at recent pictures of the Iowa Hawkeye games, men’s soccer team.”
“They appear to only have a women’s team.”
“Maybe we should try American football.” The whole idea was harebrained.
In the split second before Marnie flipped back to the Web pages, there on the page of images for Iowa University’s women’s soccer team, I glimpsed a picture of a man with elongated eyes standing next to a woman in a black-and-yellow Hawkeyes jersey. He had his arm around her.
“Go back for a second. Find that picture.”
“That one?”
“Yeah.”
According to the caption, her name was Juni Svalbard, and she played defense. The man was unnamed, but when we enlarged the photograph the elongated eyes were clearly normal-size eyes. They appeared elongated when the picture was reduced because, close-up, you could see that the man’s eyes were tattooed.