by Susan Daitch
“Look at the scribble again,” Marnie said. I pulled out Oscar’s book. The potential u’s, i’s, and w’s looked like a minuscule drawing of waves but could well have been “uiowa.edu.” This was good to know, but it was still a fake address.
We had a name for the woman, though, and from there we went to Facebook. Fortunately, her privacy settings were nonexistent, though it appeared that she hadn’t posted anything new in years. We scrolled down her pictures with friends, and there he was in a group photo taken at a bar in Iowa City to celebrate a team win. He himself was not on Facebook, of course, but that didn’t stop the woman from naming him, as she had written all her friends’ names in the label. The name of the man with the hawk-eye tattoo: Per Dagbent.
“Somehow I don’t think he was an exchange student at the university,” I said.
“You don’t think so? ‘I am more cerebral.’ ” Marnie imitated the former governor of California comparing himself to Sylvester Stallone.
There was no record of Dagbent as a student at the University of Iowa. We googled Juni Svalbard. She was a promising athlete, originally from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She and Per had married at St. Olaf Church. Before the end of her honeymoon, she was dead.
“No wonder she hadn’t posted in several years, and there were all those ‘Juni, we miss you’s.’ ”
“A green-card marriage?” I asked.
“Possibly. She drowned off a secluded section of Jones Beach.” Marnie read the article from the screen. “Per was swimming with her, and either tried to save her or held her down. Unknown and much disputed. She was a good swimmer, and a star athlete, but not stronger than Per, from what you described.”
“Jesus! Imagine you’re swimming with someone you trust, that you’re in love with, they say, ‘Let’s swim farther out.’ And farther and farther. You’re a little apprehensive, just a little, but you’re in love, and it’s a bit of an adventure. You love it that this is a guy who takes risks, so you follow his lead. You trust him. He loves you, too, and he wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Then, as you both dive to look around, as far out as you are, he starts holding you down. At first you can’t believe it—maybe this is some kind of game—but within seconds panic and the chemical changes it engenders take over every cell of your body. Your throat closes involuntarily to keep out the seawater. You try to fight the guy off, flailing in the water, but no one can hear you scream.”
“There was a time lag between when Per got to shore and when he called 911. The beach was deserted. It was off-season, so there were no witnesses. He claimed he was in shock but may or may not have gone to a clam shack up the road for a snack first. The guy taking orders claimed he served him, but Per denied ever going near the shack. Charges were dismissed. He was never deported, as we know.”
“Anything else?”
A text from Demetrius popped up:
Destroy your phone. Use only disposables. The victim shorter than you. Contusions on neck not likely administered by man with big hands.
Marnie wheeled herself back to the screen. “Not really. The wedding announcement. A couple of articles about the drowning. Otherwise zilch on Per. He drops off the map.”
“Marnie, I have to go.”
“I did a search in Norway, too, and using translate. Just so you know.”
“I trust you, but I need to walk out the door.”
“Juni’s family owns a bakery in Bay Ridge, like I said.”
“Look, I really need to deal with something. Now.”
She nodded, though clearly distracted, and just as clearly didn’t think I appreciated all she’d just done, though I had. She reminded me to take the copy of her keys, pointing to a set on the counter, and switched to reading a site about a band that had sent her an offer to design its lighting.
As soon as I was outside, I threw my phone into the canal. There were numbers I hadn’t memorized, pictures of family, friends, and cats, but it had to be done. I would go to several delis to buy a few phones, not wanting to purchase them all from one place. I didn’t want to be remembered.
The cement yard was semi-deserted, as usual. Its structures looked as if they’d been wrenched from an Escher print. Metal stairs led from huge aerial vats to a spiraling chute that led to a series of silos. Stacks of wooden palettes abutted a line of Callahead portosans. A lone guy operating one of the trucks got out of his cab and jerked his head in my direction; at least I thought he did, though he didn’t actually look directly at me. Cement overshoes had probably, historically, been manufactured here, and perhaps still were. The yard was on the corrosive Gowanus, and any number of other bodies of water were extremely close: New York Harbor, the Hudson, Wallabout Bay, the Atlantic itself. There were all kinds of choices. The yard had always been spooky, appearing abandoned for weeks on end, then there would be some kind of activity. Some of the cement mixers were painted with colorful polka dots, as if a giant clown had draped his jumbo-sized costume over them, but there was nothing jolly about the place. Marnie thought it made the neighborhood safe, that the people who came and went didn’t want trouble, so they looked out for her and others on the block. If anyone harassed her or tried to break into her apartment, someone from the yard might appear. It had happened. I walked past the yard and made my way up to the street to find a bodega where I could buy a couple of disposable phones.
It was on my walk between Mubarez Alomari, a deli on Degraw, and a bodega near the Gowanus Houses, projects on Hoyt Street, that I saw the guy. He was white, bearded, black hair tied in a topknot, turned-up cuffs on his jeans, high-top Converse sneakers, as if he’d just stepped out of an ad for Brooklyn Industries clothing. Not what you’d expect of a tail—or maybe this was what perfect anonymity looked like in this neighborhood until you crossed Hoyt, which was what I’d done. What I thought about when I thought about a tail: a swarthy guy in a tracksuit, cleaner than the guy who went through my garbage—someone who blended in easily on the G train, on the street, in an elevator. Not this guy. Mr. Man Bun was scarier because of his confidence, and the way he advertised his shopping preferences, because he would need to prove that he was every bit as professional as any ex-cop, felon, skip tracer, or bail bondsman, rather than someone with the studied dork look from an advert. In the back of the bodega, across from the projects, he stood out as he browsed the chili-flavored Doritos, probably checking the label for salt and trans-fat content. But he was good at what he did. This guy was no amateur. He had followed me for maybe ten blocks before I realized he was there. He had stayed out of my “ten to two.” Ten to two is the zone between ten o’clock and two o’clock, which, if you imagine a field of vision in that cone of space, ten to two, angled out from your nose; if you’re really good at following someone, you never enter that zone, your quarry’s ten to two. How do I know this? A story Ashby told me about Anthony Blunt, a British art historian, who was also a spy for the Soviets.
I couldn’t outrun him, but perhaps there were places I could hide, wait it out. Walking quickly, I turned a corner and slipped into a narrow strip of concrete between two buildings that stank from the garbage bins that were stashed there. Not all buildings share walls. Once in a while there are a couple of feet between them, but you had to know when these alleys would turn up and where they led. I ducked and scrambled to a backyard that led to a parking lot. In one corner stood an elevated kiosk, empty but illuminated, normally the post for a parking-lot attendant. The door was open, so I climbed up. The closet-like house wasn’t a place you could move into, but it seemed like a decent place to hide. I sat on the floor, wishing I had my phone or an iPod, so I could listen to music. Whoever had last manned the booth left empty beer and soda cans, and tickets, wrappers from Five Guys, and penny-saver handouts littered the floor. It smelled like Jolly Rancher gum, green-apple flavor. If he hadn’t seen me climb up—and I didn’t think he had—I could wait out Mr. Man Bun. I was wrong. I was also wrong in thinking that he was less intimidating than the man with the eye tattoos.
H
e stood in the door for a few minutes, arms folded across his chest, then he reached around to his back pocket and pulled out a knife, quickly and quietly, the blade flicked open. If you think of a switchblade as a weapon from 1950s musicals about the West Side of Manhattan, you’d be living in a dream world. That gesture, that click, that now you don’t see it, now you do, is final. In a parking-lot kiosk about six feet square, there is no way to dig or jump out. There is no exit at all.
As he lunged at me, the metal skewer fell out of his topknot. I quickly picked it up. It was no match for a blade, but I aimed for his eyes, which were momentarily covered by his hair. There is something sexy about someone letting his hair down, even accidentally, but getting close to this guy would only lead to cremation. I felt a sting and the warmth of my own blood trickle down into my shirt. It was a warning. The next cut would be deeper, then deeper still, until there was nothing left to cut.
“What the fuck! Who the hell are you?”
A large woman with pink hair, wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, yanked open the door.
“Get the fuck out of my parking lot!”
She must have been smoking crack or molly or something, because her rant was all about it was her shift and what the fuck? Her yelling would have drawn citizens strolling down the Grand Concourse all the way in the Bronx, but anyone within earshot did nothing. She focused on me, backing me into a corner of the booth. I kept stepping away from her until I was at the door.
Climbing down the metal stairs, still holding the skewer—the kind used for kebabs—I didn’t understand why she’d zeroed in on me. I wasn’t the one with the knife. When I reached the bottom, I looked around. Mr. Topknot had vanished. The street was as good as empty. The realization answered my question.
Back at Marnie’s, I found that she had already left for work. She’d left a note which said that she hadn’t found anything connecting the Dagbents to drug trafficking and I should borrow some clothes if I needed to. I took a shower, put on jeans and a black Ramones T-shirt I knew she wouldn’t miss. I checked in with Demetrius on one of the disposables. He responded instantly, as if he’d been waiting for me to contact him:
Body washed up (or fished out of the water) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard had high levels of white lead in bloodstream and in scrapings from under fingernails. Cause of death: strangulation. Name: Sandro Moonelli. Mean anything to you?
The person to ask about Sandro Moonelli was Ashby, not me.
Certain metals found in tattoo ink appear in particles so small—nanoparticle-size—that it’s easy for toxins to travel from just below the skin, where they’re injected to form kanji characters, anchors, hearts, hawks, sharks,whatever, to major organs, where they lodge happy as clams to do their ultimate work forming cancers, for example, or otherwise wreaking havoc. I’d read that tattoo ink is so full of heavy metals that when tattooed folks get MRIs the magnetism employed pulls at the skin, leaving it red and painful as hell. The lead in Sandro’s body could have come from his snake, for all I or anyone else knew.
No. Meet @ Jacky’s Fifth @ 10.
Chapter 8
Who was buying lead white? The number of customers and users is not a large one. How much and over what period of time would it take to die from exposure? This was something Oscar would know.
Kronstadt’s kept irregular hours, depending on Oscar’s health, energy levels, and the availability of his grandson to help out in the store. The grandson wasn’t interested in taking over the business, so the store’s days were numbered, and I imagined the landlord gleefully anticipating a range of high-paying businesses for which he would more than quintuple the rent: a gallery, a Basque restaurant, a branch of a swank London clothing store, a Starbucks. Though the space was small, there was room to expand upward.
At eight in the evening I wasn’t surprised to find the door open when I pushed it, though the lights were dim. There was a metallic smell in the air, which wasn’t necessarily unusual, and the shop was empty. I waited at the counter in the back, looking up at the shelves full of rainbow-hued inventory: jars labeled madder lake, raw sienna, burnt umber, gamboge. There was a spiral staircase that led up to the mezzanine office. Where Oscar ground his pigments I didn’t know. Apart from those ordered from all over the world, Oscar had his own irreplaceable formulas that, unless they were passed on to his grandson, would go with him when he left. There was no lab on the premises. Upstairs in the safe, he kept rare and unusual pigments—or so the rumor among artists went. I tapped the bell on the counter and waited ten more minutes. There was a photograph of Oscar with a white beard from his Mr. Natural period, smiling as he stood next to a woman in paint-spattered pants—the late Carmela Kronstadt, his wife. Since I knew him, Oscar had been clean-shaven. In more recent pictures, he was seen with the mayor, Leonard Nimoy, Patti Smith, with artists whose faces I recognized and others whose faces I didn’t.
The shop made me nostalgic, for what I wasn’t sure. I remembered a bit from a color-theory class where we read that Goethe believed every color produced a distinct impression on the mind and memory, as well as on the eye—that “color could be employed for moral and aesthetic ends.” I’d worked on enough paintings, old and new, to believe this was true, but what about colors on the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the spectrum that humans can’t see? Trying to imagine these colors is impossible, a formula for madness, just as some mathematicians were said to go mad trying to formulate the nature of infinity. Some animals—spiders, bees, mantis shrimp—can see colors we can’t. The mantis shrimp has claws like hammers that can deliver blows as fast as a .22-caliber bullet and stun prey with two hundred pounds of force. The shrimp have twelve color receptors, while humans have only three.
All these random thoughts drifted in and out like dust motes while I began to smell burning coffee. It was faint, not a full-out acid smell. It crept up on me. Oscar moves slowly, and it was possible that he went out for a moment and forgot to lock the door, or he could have been in the bathroom upstairs.
A piece of paper fluttered down from the balcony that enclosed the mezzanine. It landed a few inches from my feet. It was an invoice for a shipment of paint from Amsterdam dated February 2005.
In an instant I ducked under the counter and ran up the stairs.
It looked as if a bomb had gone off.
Two desks, both overturned. Papers and paint everywhere. Powdery pigment was splashed on the walls and floor, but there were no footprints. The intruder would have to have flown in or been a drone. A faint groan came from behind one of the desks.
Oscar’s body, the smock he always wore to work, were completely clean, untouched by the chaos of his office. But his face was another matter. His mouth was ringed with yellow-green and luminous white, like the Joker. Lead white and Scheele’s green. I knew just by looking. His eyes had been glued shut with Krazy Glue, but he was still breathing.
“Oscar, it’s Stella Da Silva. Hang on, Oscar. I’m calling an ambulance.” My phone was downstairs.
Acute lead poisoning causes shock, rupturing of red blood cells, an astringent metal taste that doesn’t go away. Also, it didn’t help that Oscar had been exposed to lead over time, though I would guess he’d taken precautions. Whether the lead is ingested or absorbed, sufferers make irrational decisions—that’s one symptom. A mouthful of paint was a huge dose. Adding Scheele’s green, with its component of arsenic, was the coup de grâce, the cherry on top.
“Stella, some water, please.”
The water cooler had been overturned; the ancient Mr. Coffee had not been turned off—the bottom contained crackling sludge. I had a bottle in my bag left downstairs on the counter. I ran down, called 911, grabbed not just my bag but a bunch of photographs from the wall. This took only seconds. Oscar needed to remain conscious and talking; like someone who’s overdosed and in danger of nodding out forever, he needed to be kept awake and compos. The lead would cause convulsions soon, and then death would follow.
Back upstairs. Seeing Oscar’s eyes shut
was a searing pain for a man who had based his life’s work on vision. I lied to myself: Once EMT arrives, things can be fixed, the tape can go to rewind, be reversed, there are antidotes for every venom, every poison, there are harmless solvents for every adhesive. As even a rusty chemistry student, the logical part of my brain told me, “Of course, this isn’t true.” But the part of me that loved and respected Oscar didn’t want to believe that he would go this way, or that I could have led his killers to him. I needed to believe there was hope, that for every WMD chemical compound there was a Navy Seal team, a neutralizer. I poured water into his mouth so that he could spit out the paint.
“Oscar, did you see who did this?”
“No, their faces were covered by knit masks….” His voice trailed off. He was struggling against the effects of the paint. I got more water. I had to keep him conscious.
“I have some pictures here, and I need you to keep talking to stay conscious, so let’s try to talk about them. Here’s your father with Diego Rivera. Here’s one of Carmela. Tell me about them.”
“I don’t want to remember. Give them to my grandson.”
“Okay.” Painful stuff. I should have known. “What about Leonard Nimoy? Do you remember meeting him? What can you tell me about Spock?”
“The doctor who wrote books about children?”
“No. The guy from Star Trek.”
“Nice fellow. Wore a white shirt with buttons and gave me a rubber copy of a pair of his pointed ears. I stuck them on either side of the cash register till someone stole them.”
“There’s a picture of you and Mayor Ed Koch. What did you think of Mr. ‘How Am I Doing?’ ”
“Stella, of this, too, I don’t want to speak.”
It was getting harder for him to stay conscious. White foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. Soon the convulsions would start.