White Lead
Page 26
“At least he had Luke deliver flowers.”
“Marnie, please. At best he’s a married parasite.” I took the computer from her and shut it. Then I opened it again and asked her to do a search for “Grilke.”
The first entry was grilkegroup.com. The initial page popped up an environmentally friendly, benign olive-green platitudinous statement about a corporation that was all about global prosperity and a booming future. A series of images of smiling men and women in suits and hard hats posed high on construction sites, hands resting on beams or girders, looking down on the planet; in another series of images, the same figures posed in conference rooms (no hard hats), aerial vistas in the background seen from windows that ran from gleaming floor to ceiling, followed by pictures of lobbies and apartments or hotel suites, all superdeluxe. The developments weren’t all in New York. There were links to connect to investment opportunities in Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Abu Dhabi, Bombay, and elsewhere. Banners ran across the site, stating that the Grilke Group had an international presence in more than fifty countries worldwide.
“So what’s the problem? They’re developers. They’re big apes—no offense to primates. What can you do? Nothing. You know what? It’s time for my meds.” Marnie gave me the “stop this” look I’d so very often given her. She accidentally flipped her devil slipper off her right foot, and I stooped down to retrieve it, though my hands weren’t functioning very effectively.
“Few live in these apartments,” I said. “No one is meant to live in them. They cost multimillions of dollars because the money is just parked there. Like the Velázquez scheme. These are capital generators on a grand scale, but listen, Marnie, I have an idea.”
“Aren’t we done with this?” She started to shut the computer, but I put one bandaged paw over the keyboard.
“Ask Roy Bean to pose as a high roller, a whale who wants to invest with the Grilke Group. Do this for me.”
“ ‘Do this for me’? What are you, my mother returned from the dead? Why?” Marnie looked at me as if I’d asked her to start singing an aria at the top of her lungs in the faces of random passing doctors. “To find out what?”
“Who the Grilke Group really is.”
“Why would he even do that?”
“He owes you, and he knows it. He sent you flowers. We know he’s married, and he probably doesn’t want Dr. Freeman to know he has another identity as a successful intellectual property lawyer with an interest in copyright law and art. He’s a good actor. This we know.” One of the nurses slowed her pace and stared at me as she passed— eavesdropping, I could tell.
“Even if I could get in touch with Roy, and even if I wanted to persuade him, which I don’t, there are links he or anyone can click on to sign on to invest with Grupo Grilke.” She read from the Portuguese link.
“Yes, but big investors in specific developments, whether in Brooklyn or Calcutta, could arrange personal meetings, would want to. He doesn’t have a dime to invest, but he can pretend that he does, and that he’s interested. The Internet can reveal so much, and then there’s everything else. You can know ten out of a hundred facts. The ninety huge unknown and dangerous facts need to be pried out.”
“Right, so you want me to call a guy I fucked once, maybe two times, to play dress-up so you can nose around? Like you’re even going to find out? Like this Grilke is going to sit across a teak-inlaid conference table on the sixty-ninth fucking floor and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I had all those people killed. It’s what I do.’ Let it be, Stella.”
I wondered if the drugs Marnie was taking were accelerating mood swings.
“I can’t. Garfield says Mr. La-Di-Da, aka Ashby, will consider prison like a spell at Plato’s Retreat, a seventies sex club. I had to look it up. Ashby shouldn’t go to prison for these people.”
“I’m sorry about Ashby, but, you know, maybe he was more involved than you think. He was in the right place at the right time, wasn’t he? His hands were pretty dirty. Ashby could be a missing link in the evolution from legitimate business to illegal. Like Oscar, Ashby turns up everywhere—except that, right now, he’s nowhere.”
“No one knows where he is. That’s true, but Ashby’s just a small fish. If you had seen that apartment and all those white paintings…”
“I don’t need to. Look, the Grilkes of the world always get away with it. They always do. You know that.”
Marnie closed the computer, and this time I didn’t stop her. She changed the subject, letting me know that she was eager to get back to her apartment. I’d cleaned it up in the meantime and brought her the insurance papers, so she could file a claim, buy new equipment, get back to work and on the road again making airships and architecture out of light. I let up on the idea of recruiting Roy to pose as a large-scale investor, at least for the time being, and walked her to her room. The woman in the head brace glared at me as if I were Godzilla. I left the hospital, but felt as if everywhere I went, no matter how carefully I walked, I stepped on toes.
Back on the subway, I sat opposite an older couple who looked as if they should have been riding in the back of a limo, not the D train, and they were deeply aware of this. The man was silver-haired and wore a wool coat that had once been expensive, soft and itchy. His shoes and tie were worn thin, though they had probably also once been pricey, and his wife wore a very short skirt showing very white legs that didn’t, even in heels, touch the floor. Her thinning hair was dyed rust, and looked like an expensive cut but wasn’t brushed, and her expression was both defiant and droopy. Metal earrings shaped like Chinese hats stuck out of her ears like lobe armor. I guess the days of diamonds and pearls were over. Then two young women got on, talking loudly about their jobs as baristas at a midtown Starbucks; their manager was a first-class prick, but what can you do? Then they shifted to discuss who, on the subway, they would never, ever, give money to. One of the two had a very deep laugh, like a man’s, and the elderly couple looked at them with great discomfort and distaste. I lost myself in reading the fantasy chapter on the land of lead in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. When I next looked up all were gone. This far out on the D, the car was almost empty, and I was glad no tails, bearded or otherwise, sat on orange plastic seats pretending to study ads for language schools or for Dr. Zizmor.
My next stop was to the unnamed no-man’s-land to return Star Hammersmith’s driver’s license and passport to Knox Barkley. I no longer needed them and figured they had more resale value for Knox than sentimental value for me. Knox was asleep in a chair, an empty bottle of Kings County whiskey (bottled in the Brooklyn Navy Yard) at his feet. I left the documents on the counter and departed without letting the door slam. I hope he removed my pictures before recycling. From Barkley’s, I walked to the Greenwood Diner.
A movie was being shot under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so pedestrian and vehicular traffic was being redirected as I made my way to the diner, where Demetrius was waiting for me. We ordered coffee, which I was ready to pay for. Demetrius was still suspended pending. The brick of cash that, in theory, had my name on it somewhere on the premises of the Grilke Group never materialized. Perhaps it blew out into the sky along with two swimmers, thousands of gallons of water, sheets of molded glass designed by aerospace engineers to withstand gale-force winds but not the impact of a tower crane. I was getting disability.
I looked at the empty black screen of my phone. Masuji never sent any kind of message, but then it had been a long time since he had.
“I should have recognized that the painting was a fake. Charles Hill, the Scotland Yard detective who retrieved Munch’s The Scream, memorized its surface. Munch blew a candle out over the surface, so random spots of wax appear on it. When Hill went undercover, and pretended to buy the painting back from the thieves, he saw those wax drips, and knew the painting was genuine. A forgery wouldn’t have those dots of wax on it. This is the kind of knowledge that enters conservator lore. Earlier centuries are their own kind of search engine, and if you know how to read them
they can tell you volumes. I had never seen the painting in Madrid, but I should have known.”
Art history didn’t interest Demetrius that much. He gazed into his coffee as if an answer or two might lie at the bottom of the cup. “Why is it the first swallow is always the best and the rest spirals down to cold bitterness?” I hoped he wasn’t talking about me.
I glanced at an actor getting his makeup adjusted, then being shown how to shoot an automatic weapon. “Why do I feel like a Christian has been fed to the lions?”
“I don’t know, Stella, you tell me. They searched Ashby’s apartment. According to the Birdwell tapes, there’s not only the question of Moonelli’s murder but Birdwell’s.”
“We don’t know that Ashby had anything to do with Birdwell, or that they even knew each other. Birdwell’s murder must have been well known in certain circles. Even the Dagbents knew about it, and it occurred when they were in, maybe, seventh grade. Ashby liked to dress up, to use expensive art and artifacts as backdrops, but he didn’t hang out with guys who wore tracksuits and a lot of gold jewelry, believe me. He’d die first.”
“How many people keep a stock of costumes like they’re Shakespearean actors? Like they never know when they’re going to get a call, ‘Hey, we need a Richard III over on Forty-eighth and Broadway.’ ”
“I’m not convinced Ashby was connected to Valentine’s operation or even to the Grilke Group. He looked like a duck and walked like one, but he wasn’t a duck.” No one would believe me, but it didn’t matter. Ashby had disappeared. Good for him. I don’t know how he thought the recording of Moonelli’s murder would help him. It was only puncturing the tires of a thoroughly mired car.
“And then there’s Grilke. He’s still out there.”
“The Grilkes will always be out there as long as there’s big money to be made from something, and their support structure, with all its diverse tentacles, stays well fed.” This I knew; we both did.
What bothered me the most was Oscar. I kept thinking of what Marlene Dietrich said of Orson Welles, the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan, in Touch of Evil. Oscar thought he could do business in the lion’s den, speak their language, give them what they wanted yet keep his hands clean. He also wanted some of their glamour. It didn’t work out that way. He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people? I did a bad imitation of Marlene Dietrich. I’d recently walked past the site of his store. It had already been torn down.
Demetrius ordered a slice of cherry pie, which he said was damn good. He offered me a bite, holding the fork a few inches from my mouth. “Still allergic?” he asked.
“This time I think I can handle it.” I put one of my bandaged hands over his as I bit down on the fork. Maybe I had a future as a destabilization artist.
I no longer wanted to talk about painting. The bones between my knuckle and my finger joints were setting, but there were no assurances that I’d ever be able to work as a conservator again. Demetrius asked me if I was looking forward to physical therapy. He knew what it was like for back and knee injuries incurred on the job, but hands? What can you do about all those small interconnected joints?
“I expect Tinkerbelle will manipulate my joints and give me exercises to do.”
Trucks pulled up outside the halal butcher shop, delivering chickens, lambs, and goats on their way to becoming kebabs. Their last clucks and bleats mixed with the sounds of actors being shot and falling behind cars. A woman in very high heels hid behind a black SUV. I knew from experience that with shoes like those she wasn’t going to get far. Best-case scenario: the heels are cheap, come apart under stress, you can ditch them and run. Kids tumbling out of school doors had to be restrained from photobombing the set.
“If it ends with a close-up kiss, that’s happy, one of the waitresses explained, staring out a window. “A new world is opening up—the characters have each other, no matter what.”
“What if it’s a long shot?” I asked her, not sure which it would be if Demetrius leaned across the table.
“Then watch out, there’s no escaping the apocalypse. More coffee?”
More guns were fired, more bodies felled as characters ran toward Second Avenue. A stuntman rolled over a slow-moving car, then had a time out with his trainer, a big man with hair the color of orange juice who kept hiking up his tracksuit—no gold jewelry that I could see. The trainer moved his hands in gestures that imitated ocean waves and repeatedly stood on his toes, then came down, bending his knees, demonstrating life-saving choreography.
Imagine an isolated tribe of color-blind people. The condition is genetic, so this isn’t outside the realm of possibility. This tribe could definitely exist. They can only see black and white, so they don’t even know what they don’t know. Maybe a traveler from outside the village tries to describe color to them. Although this is hopeless, he compares chrome yellow to the taste of lemon, cobalt blue to the sound of bells. In the end, words fail him, but the members of the tribe don’t feel depressed about what outsiders try to tell them is a serious deficit in how they perceive the world. They can’t imagine what madder lake or burnt sienna might be. “So what?” they say, shrugging. The sky is always gray, but they know nothing else, so the state of a constantly gray sky isn’t a royal downer, not for them. I’m looking out at the movie, thinking about Maribola, the dwarf in the Las Meninas, who put up with the royals and tried to be entertaining. It was her job, whether she knew that Spain was at war with the Dutch over its colonies or not. I felt that I had looked at the whole business as if on the grayscale, without knowing what was right in front of my eyes. Well, you do the best you can with what’s available, as a conservator and as a patron of a diner, waiting for a kiss, then make your way through the imitation of life that’s a movie set and hope your bones heal soon.
Acknowledgments
Enormous thanks to:
Julie Stevenson, the best agent ever. Kate Miciak, editor with X-ray vision, and Julia Maguire, the same: They both saw things I couldn’t possibly see and kindly revealed the extent of my ignorance. Paul Rosenstrauch, engineering consultant, and Helena Rosenstrauch, linguistic and speech pathology consultant. Rachel Danzing, art conservator, with her technical expertise, and Richard Newman, head of scientific research at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, were invaluable. Any and all mistakes are mine.
Friends and family who read drafts, offered advice and suggestions, and listened to me talk out loud: Laura Bentz, Barbara Daitch Cary, Margo Cooper, Sam Crawford, Irene Daitch, Anna Di Lellio, Marion Falk, John Foster, Jonathan Hammer, Alice Kaltman, Bill Kanemoto, Mary Kanemoto, Rosemary Rogers, Brooke Stevens, Radhika Subramanian, Lynn Vogelstein, Karen Weltman, and Daniel Wiener.
My mom, and my sisters Amy and Cheryl, for their comedic timing and support, and of course my once-in-a-while in-house staff, Nissim.
BY SUSAN DAITCH
White Lead
The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir
Paper Conspiracies
Storytown: Stories
The Colorist
L.C.
PHOTO: NISSIM RAM
SUSAN DAITCH is the author of five works of fiction, including The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir and Paper Conspiracies. Her short fiction has been included in Tin House, Slice, Black Clock, Guernica, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Her work has been the recipient of an Artists’ Fellowship for fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and two Vogelstein awards. Her novel L.C. won an NEA Heritage Award and was a Lannan Foundation Selection. She teaches at Hunter College.
susandaitch.net
Every great mystery needs an Alibi
eOriginal mystery and suspense from Random House
randomhousebooks.com
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.