by Susan Daitch
In order to start the machine, he had to release my hands. Why not? How was I going to get away? In one arc, with my right hand I reached into my pocket and swung at the hawk tattoo. Ove was tall, over six feet, maybe seven inches taller than I am. Muscles stretched from standing on your toes, shoulder joint working like a pivot as fast and steady as a steel pin, fueled by fear and adrenaline, or so I imagined. In reality, I was up against twin thugs who fed human beings into machines. Bleeding from his forehead and his cheekbones, Ove swung back, knocking me off my feet. The hook landed in a container of semisolid chocolate icing. I swung again but missed, my fingers sticky with frosting. Per was taunting Ove about being licked by a girl, drawing out the word licked.
As we circled each other, we approached Svalbard’s boiling cherry syrup, and the older man stepped away. He reached for a rag to wipe the sweat that was rolling down his face. Trying to make eye contact with him was futile. He wouldn’t look at me. I yanked my hand free, grabbed the handles of the pot with both hands, and flung the syrup at Ove’s face. The handles were made of a different metal, so they were less hot than the pot itself but still scalding.
Ove screamed, blinded, burned by the sticky cherry syrup. He put his hands on his face, burning them as well. Per charged toward me. Once again, he knocked me to the floor, then grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me upright, so that I lost the advantage of lying on the floor. My hands dangled helplessly behind me, then I felt someone nudge something into them. Behind my back, Svalbard had put an empty pot in my hands. In an overhead arc, I brought it down on Per’s head with as much force as I could muster, but he was stunned for only a moment. He tackled me, and we rolled around on the floor, over and over each other, over spills of flour, drifts of sugar, and even a few crackling eggshells. I could tell that Per found our body contact, tossing around on the floor, kind of erotic, which made me want to gag. Using the legs of a metal table bolted to the floor as leverage, I twisted out of his grasp, but he grabbed me from behind. A mop lay inches out of reach. Straining, I couldn’t quite get my hands on it. Per was choking me, pulling me in the opposite direction. Once again, Svalbard came out of the shadows, and I felt the mop in my hands. Ove was blinded and could see nothing. Per either didn’t see what Svalbard was doing or had been ignoring the old man for so many years that he wasn’t about to pay attention to him now. I twisted around, so for a second I was facing the hawk tattoos. Per smiled, as if he were about to lean in and kiss me, while simultaneously crushing my trachea. I returned the favor by jamming the mop handle straight under his jaw. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell.
The Mexicans gestured. At first, I thought it was because they couldn’t speak English, then I realized it was because they couldn’t speak at all, and therefore couldn’t scream. It wasn’t just an empty lot that buffered hellish sounds from the back of the bakery. When these two immigrants were used up, no doubt others would replace them. The Dagbents selected their victims carefully.
Then I ran.
Chapter 15
The bakery was only a few blocks from Eighty-sixth Street, Bay Ridge’s main thoroughfare, but it was two in the morning—maybe the next morning, for all I knew. I had no idea what time it was. Bay Ridge isn’t Times Square at 2 a.m. Not by any means, but neither is it Yuba City. Most businesses, big chains that took over the street years ago, were shuttered, as was the Narrows Coffee Shop, Elite Nails, and the Air Force Reserve Recruitment Center. A Beemer with tinted windows drove by silently and slowly, turned onto Fourth Avenue, rolled down a window, made a sale to club kids going into the city. Men came out of a mosque, bought halal shawarma from a truck parked nearby. Then I saw it, a twenty-four-hour deli, shingled with signage for Te-Amo imported cigars, ATM, the New York State Lottery, Lotto.
My disposables were in Marnie’s apartment, and I needed an instant replacement. There were no miracle phone booths this far out in Brooklyn, but here was an answer to one short prayer. I bought a phone.
My keys. Marnie’s keys. Gone. Fallen on the floor of the bread-and-cake torture chamber.
I called Marnie. There was a lot of noise in the background. Designing light shows wasn’t like working in a library, but this sounded like bar noise. There were some big “if”s that I needed to communicate to her:
If the Dagbents find the keys
If they figure the keys belonged to me
If they know I’m staying at Marnie’s in the Gowanus
If they’ve had me followed or followed me themselves
Hence, get the locks changed immediately.
I heard a man buy her a drink, and then Marnie told him she had to go to the bathroom.
“Don’t leave your drink on the bar!” I shouted into the phone before the connection gave out. Of course, Marnie knew that you never leave your drink unattended. Of course.
Chapter 16
In terms of anything concrete for Garfield, my pockets were still empty except for a large metal hook and a folded piece of a calendar page. The next person I needed to talk to was Jack Ashby. This conversation was long overdue. Actually, I didn’t want to speak to him. I knew he’d tell me exactly what he told the police, that he’d never met Sandro Moonelli.
But the sounds I heard as I stood in my studio that night were just like sounds I had heard on so many other nights. What I wondered about, though, was the Dagbents. Aside from the tattoos and the fact that they wore their scars and their battered faces like badges of honor, they looked like Nordic models in an ad for a ski lodge. I saw only their brutality, but I’d walked in on Ashby enough times to have a sense of how he found potential in all kinds of places. It was possible they’d responded to one of his craigslist ads not to actually do anything with him but to gain access to Claiborne’s. Perhaps it was a crime of opportunity. Or Sandro was their accomplice, the Ashby bait.
The sun had already risen above the East River. Ashby would be on his way to work. I tried to clean myself up in a restaurant restroom and sponge off the stains on my shirt and jeans. A shower would have been nice but was unavailable. I emerged with wet patches all over my clothes, but none of the patrons, brooding over their phones at the counter or in booths, so much as glanced at me. Everyone was deep into their morning coffee, and I hoped the wind and sun would dry me off.
Ashby lived on West Twenty-fourth Street, very far west in a small yellow brick apartment building. He had the two top floors and a private roof garden. There was no doorman. I watched from across the street. A UPS man had parked his truck a few buildings down and was making deliveries. When he got to Ashby’s building, I timed my steps so when he was buzzed in I pretended I lived at that particular address, and just happened to walk in behind him rather than fumble for my keys.
Alcoves in the stairwells held arrangements of lilacs and peonies, perfuming the hallways; everything shone, from the floors to the doorknobs and the lighting fixtures, which told me that this was a high-maintenance domicile, so a super must be around somewhere. I had to move quickly. When I got to Ashby’s floor, I wasn’t alone. An electrician was tinkering with a hall light, so I turned the corner of the short L-shaped corridor, where I knew that I’d find stairs to the roof.
The door to the roof was locked but easily opened by shoving a credit card into the space between the bolt and the door and wiggling it out. It was a simple lock. The roof garden was still in bloom, with trellised roses, planters of bamboo, lavender, and rosemary, but I wasn’t here to enjoy the view. Ashby had the whole top floor, so there was no mistaking the apartment. From the roof to his apartment, there was an alarm, but I knew the code: 04-15-1519. Tax day in Renaissance Florence? No. Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday, the code for Ashby’s alarm system. Last year, just before a private auction of the Nevelson sculpture that had been in his office, Ashby needed a monograph on her work that he’d mistakenly left at home. It wasn’t my job to be his errand girl, but it was urgent, he knew I wasn’t doing anything timely at that moment, made a joke about Fieldston eating a choc
olate off the floor when he thought no one was looking that made me feel like he and I were on the same side of things, handed me a wad of cash for cab fare, and waved me out of his office. That’s when he gave me the code. The book was sitting on a Japanese tansu near the door. I didn’t explore his apartment. I’d already been witness to the scene with the Micronesian canoe, in which Ashby played John D. Rockefeller before he was allegedly cannibalized. I didn’t want to know more about Ashby, believe me.
But a month later I was inside the apartment when Ashby had a Christmas party. He invited only a few people from Claiborne’s, and for some reason I was one of them. The duplex was gorgeous, and this was no surprise. Waiters circled with champagne and trays of smoked mussels, bite-size lamb kebabs, caramelized shallots and chanterelles on thin slices of toast. A Juilliard student played Bach cantatas sung by a friend of Ashby’s who’d just flown in from Berlin. Everyone was wearing black and white but me. I wore a short red strapless dress with a metal zipper that felt cold against my skin. Ashby said, “How lovely—you look like a red hyphen standing upright,” and I knew I’d blown it again, sartorially speaking. In other words, welcome to our representative who shops in thrift stores, not because she isn’t a highly paid skilled artisan but because she doesn’t know any better. I left early with one of the art handlers who had also, for reasons unknown, merited an invitation. We ended up at Jacky’s Fifth. He talked about how he had hoped Ashby would help him get an exhibit of his own work somewhere. I knew this was pointless. Ashby would never do this, unless there was something in it for him. I went home alone, but I remembered the humiliation of that night, and I remembered da Vinci’s birthday. The code hadn’t changed.
Ashby’s duplex was a small museum of paintings and artifacts that had not been out or hung the night of his party. For good reason. Every inch contained a picture that looked familiar. How did all this end up in his private collection? I touched an Edward Hopper painting of a stripper in blue shoes walking across a stage. Wet blue paint came off on my fingertips. Edward Hopper died in 1967. But there was something slightly different about this painting. It might have been Hopper style, not an absolute passed off as an original copy.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and walked through the living room to a hallway. The first door led to a bathroom with a heated marble floor and a huge ball-and-claw tub. The second door led to his study, which was lined with the most amazing art books I had ever seen. Huge volumes from all over the world: treasures from the Vatican that must have weighed fifty pounds, catalogs from the Tate Modern, autographed books on Robert Mapplethorpe and Damien Hirst. On and on the shelves and tables went. I could have spent the rest of my life reading them, but I had only a few hours, tops. He had a desk that looked as if it came from the Museum of Modern Art’s design department, and maybe it had. I went into the kitchen, found a couple of knives and even a jeweler’s screwdriver, so the locks on his desk drawers were easy to pick. Besides old tax documents, receipts, and bills, the papers told a few stories. Ashby had tried to buy out Jaap Rietman’s inventory, the famous art bookstore that used to be on Spring Street. There were some personal jottings about a dinner in Washington with Fieldston and the director of the Smithsonian, whom Ashby felt had high-hatted him. Fieldston failed to introduce Ashby to a senator. More about Fieldston. Ashby felt that the director of Claiborne’s was a knuckle-dragger in fancy dress. He had once had to suffer through a meeting during which Fieldston tried to impress a museum director from Barcelona by speaking Spanish with what he claimed was a Catalan accent. His accent was execrable, and his grammar mistakes were mortifying. Ashby prayed inwardly that he would switch to English. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. No photographs, nothing that referenced tattooed twins. Marnie would say, “It’s all on the computer, numbskull.” You won’t find any physical evidence, she’d say. You spend too much time in centuries before the lightbulb was invented.
Even in absentia, she was right. The study was turning up zero, and if that beach was swept clean it was unlikely any other room in the apartment would show me anything I didn’t already know. I didn’t want to go into Ashby’s bedroom. Really, that was the last room I wanted to search, but apart from that I was done.
Someone was unlocking the door to the apartment. It was now the middle of the day. Sounds of a foreign language spoken at the doorway—his housekeepers being let in by the super. I had no time to retrace my steps, slip out the window, and depart via the fire escape. I opened the bedroom door. This room was like a chamber out of The Arabian Nights: Persian carpets and pillows, lamps from Morocco, wall hangings from India. Ashby’s Orientalist fantasies were secluded in this far end of the penthouse, but there was no place to hide except the closet, which was packed with custom-made suits and shoes. Footsteps could be heard coming down the hall. I had no choice but to wedge myself in.
There, between English wool and Italian silk, was Velázquez’s black doublet with a red cross running down the center. Without even knowing it, this was what I’d been looking for.
The door to the bedroom opened, then I could hear nothing more. Footsteps were silent on the rugs, but someone was whistling what sounded like “Danke Schoen.” A vacuum began to whir so loudly from down the hall that the whistling was drowned out. I was relieved that it was his housekeepers, but would they be whistling a Wayne Newton song?
The closet door opened. A hand rummaged around in the dark. Looking for the dry cleaning? One finger was encircled by a heavy gold ring, flat across the top, engraved with a Dartmouth crest and a number on the side. Ashby hadn’t gone to Dartmouth. But he wore a class ring that he bought many years ago at a Flatbush Avenue pawnshop to make people believe that he had.
Chapter 17
I pressed myself as far back into the closet as I could, but the hand found my face. He screamed, but in the next second he realized the face was female and yanked me out of the closet. With the other hand, he grabbed his phone in an attempt to call 911.
“I wouldn’t do that, Jack.” I looked at the blue paint on my jeans. It was a small streak but still visible.
“Nice to see you, too, Stella. I’m not even going to ask what you’re doing in my apartment. You can tell that to the police.” He sounded so sure of himself. He would make the call, then stroll up to his roof garden, midday dry white in hand, and text other curators and art dealers inviting them for weekend brunch. He would do all this without giving me or the people who cleaned his apartment a backward glance.
“I noticed you have an enormous art collection.” I rubbed the fresh blue paint stain on my jeans. “I’m guessing some of it’s real but some of it isn’t, and even the real stuff maybe shouldn’t be here.”
Ashby put down the phone.
“Stella, this isn’t any of your business.”
“I could make it my business. That’s my point.” I was taking a gamble.
He picked up his phone and stared at the screen as if it would swallow him and all his troubles would be over. The sound of vacuuming grew louder. The cleaners would be opening the door any minute. He locked it.
“This is a gentleman’s business, Stella, you know that.” He plopped down on a huge pillow and motioned for me to sit. I didn’t. “Suit yourself. Listen. You’ve been in this business long enough to know that I had to appear to have a way of life that I didn’t have. Especially when I first started out.” He made himself comfortable, but he was nervous. “I’m as honest as I can afford to be.”
“But you found a technique to pay for the appearance you needed to keep up.”
“Debt is a cruel taskmaster. When I started at Claiborne’s I wanted to present a certain image, wanted people to believe I had a certain life and had known no other. I needed to go to a particular tailor, stay in particular five-star hotels, eat at certain restaurants and pay for my guests. My furnishings had to come from custom cabinetmakers and artisanal wood workers with shops in expensive parts of the city. I didn’t have the means at my disposal, but I did have cr
edit cards, and soon amassed more debt than I could ever pay back, no matter how high my commissions. This was before the price of art went through the roof, and, even still, the thing is there are always other needs and desires for more. During my early years at the house, I met people who made good copies, more than good; they were professional and produced objects that were very difficult to tell from the originals. It was one man, really, whom I dealt with exclusively. Your predecessor let me know when a painting was a forgery. She had an excellent eye, and that was how I found him. Claiborne’s couldn’t auction these, but I could sell them privately.”
“She lost her job.”
“She moved on.” Ashby abruptly got to his feet, walked to his closet smelling of cedar, and began to smooth out his suits. He shook his head and assumed the tone of talking to someone who’s not very bright. “It’s not the era of the gramophone anymore. The Internet has been invented. A painting is listed as stolen on the Stolen Art Database. I provide copies. I don’t aid and abet theft. I only act as an intermediary because I know collectors, and I have a skilled painter working for me out of a very pleasant detached house in Bushwick.”
“How many buyers did you round up for the Velázquez?”
“Stella, please. One, I told you I don’t steal art, only utilize what’s already been misappropriated, and two, Las Meninas is too well known. I don’t deal in high-profile work; it’s too risky. Everything I sell privately is small work—under the radar, so to speak.”
“Edward Hopper is pretty well known. Nighthawks, just to name one of his paintings, was on the cover of New York City telephone books back when they were in use.”