by Michael Pye
Seth Goodman mustn’t be missed, or else there will be questions. He can never go back to Martin Arkenhout. But he can’t be Seth Goodman anymore, so he must become somebody else. In the papers, he’s read how easy it is to steal someone’s name and credit; but that doesn’t seem quite safe. A living person may notice what is done in his name. So he needs papers, but he needs more than papers: he needs a life to inhabit.
He watches the families parade past: the Japanese in knots, the wide shoulders of West Indians, the occasional old ladies in twos or threes, a few Hasidic Jews so dazzled by their children they hardly see the flowers. They’d be missed, he thinks, even if they had lives worth taking.
This doesn’t seem terrible at the time because he’s busy finessing the situation. Not being Arkenhout, not being Goodman, he’s all concentration. He can read the little gaps and shifts in people with senses they don’t know he is using: taste, say, or smell, like a cat, or a prickle like fever on his skin.
“You work for David Silver?”
He is in some photographer’s apartment past Tompkins Square, at a party for someone’s unemployed black art administrator boyfriend: there are many large women, who treat the gay men like cabaret and the straight men like treasure. Arkenhout now brings a powerful seriousness to these events. He feels the sheer efficiency of his own body, as though he were always running a short race.
“I said, you work for David Silver?”
The man asking is dome-headed, with a stick body, jointed awkwardly, which is sad because he is also young and insistent.
“Sometimes,” Arkenhout says.
The man is impressed. He’d like to ask what Silver is really like, but he wants to seem sophisticated enough to know Silver someday; so he says, “I’d like to own a David Silver.”
“They’re for sale.”
“You have to deal. There’s a short list. I sent a check last time and—”
Arkenhout calculates. A Silver drawing is a half million, a painting one and a half; it’s a reality you can’t miss in Silver’s house, that gives the corporate hush to the marble hallways.
He wonders about being rich.
Besides, this dome-headed man, free of physical grace, still can’t be more than—what?—early twenties. It’s time Arkenhout fast-forwarded his life, strode out of student days into real life. He’s not preparing for some douce career. He might want to tour the world, and Seth Goodman doesn’t even have a passport.
“Someone said you lived in his house.”
“Over Christmas. He was away.”
“With all the pieces—”
This guy must know people, or he wouldn’t be here, but he’s no social magnet; he foists himself on talking groups, then shuffles out of them. He’s not cute, sharp, or with someone. From his anthropology of art, Arkenhout deduces: the man is here because he’s money.
“The Museum of Modern Art show,” he’s saying. “I thought that kind of missed the point.”
Very soon, it’s going to seem significant that Arkenhout does not try to get away. He’ll get dinner out of it.
They eat at a Vietnamese place in SoHo, which would be like an Edward Hopper cafe except for the paper lanterns, and the green lights in the fish tanks in the window. The man’s name, Arkenhout now knows, is John Gaul.
He has an accent Arkenhout doesn’t know, odd long vowels. He talks about wanting to be a collector as though it were a career, but how dealers won’t somehow take him seriously. He wants the fine pieces, the great pieces, but he’s marked down for works on paper, minor drawings, paintings by people who don’t get covers in Artforum. He’s an unconvincing buyer, as he’s an unconvincing man.
He invites Arkenhout back for a drink, and it’s early, so Arkenhout goes. The doorman says it’s good to see Mr. Gaul again, and will he be staying long?
Arkenhout half expects a pounce, but Gaul just frets around his apartment finding bottles of wine. And Arkenhout stares: at glass walls, puffed-up sofas, room after room, a corner cabinet of ladylike porcelain, a pair of old oils of bright, open autumn that might suggest taste but more likely are spares from a family house. The man isn’t poor. What’s more, he bitches at dust in corners, at the state of the heat, as though he hardly used this weirdly overgilded empire of an apartment.
“I’m going to the Bahamas,” he says, as though it is another worry in a burdened life.
Arkenhout never, ever acts impressed. He knows better. He makes Gaul keep raising the stakes.
“My uncle left me a house there. Big and pink, my parents say. I never saw it.”
“Really?” Arkenhout has worked to get his “really” just as vacant as anyone’s in New York.
“It’s real estate. You have to check out real estate. You never know.”
“You know people there?” Arkenhout says.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Gaul says. “You don’t have to know people. You pick them up as you go along.” He’s starting to sound angry.
Arkenhout says nothing. He hates to fill up useful silences.
“I hate to be bored,” Gaul says. The phone rings and he goes to answer it.
A bored man, always in motion, about to go somewhere he never went before; Arkenhout sees the promise in this. Gaul’s jacket is slung across the shiny, stripy couch. He can hear Gaul’s voice in the next room but one.
He doesn’t touch the jacket. He stands looking out of the windows across to the islands in the East River. He thinks about touching the jacket, checking the cards, the signature Gaul uses. In the restaurant it looked like a half-circle for the G with the rest trailing away like a fine hair. Credit cards get you almost anything, ATM cards get you money around the world.
There is a credit card slip on the side table, tucked into a book. Arkenhout doesn’t think; he acts on instinct, stuffing it into his pocket. He has a bit of Gaul now. There may even be information.
Gaul isn’t talking anymore. He is standing at the door.
He knows something has happened. He sees satisfaction on Arkenhout’s face, that’s all. But Arkenhout isn’t furtive, isn’t hiding anything. Besides, he’s not some hustler. He’s David Silver’s assistant, a kid with entree. John Gaul really wants to say nothing at all.
“The doorman will get you a cab,” he says coldly.
The next afternoon, Arkenhout hangs out at the house of David Silver, shifting canvases out of the cool hall into the sharp summer light of the studio. Jeff and Raoul don’t help. Since Silver will soon be back from some German junket, they’re playing away the last hours that feel free.
They have their passports out; a cartoon of Bugs Bunny with his mouth full, not of carrot; and the laser copier in Silver’s clinical white office. They have glue, fine blades, a small machine for laminating. They’ve brought Bugs down to a postage stamp, a perfect color miniature, and they’ve produced page after page of the inside page of his passport, the one with birthdate, state of birth, all on a tasteful watermark.
“You could slip the plastic off the page,” Raoul is saying. “The photograph bumps up a bit, so that’s not a problem. And you use the thing a few times, it looks wrecked anyway. Then you just put the plastic, the page, and the cover back together.”
“Just,” Jeff says. “That’s all we have to do.”
“It’s technique. Like they teach you at art school.”
Arkenhout watches carefully.
“You could spoil someone’s trip that way,” he says.
Raoul and Jeff are still discussing where Bugs Bunny was born: Burbank, or Brooklyn.
“There’s this guy who keeps chasing me,” Arkenhout says. “We could fuck up his passport—”
Raoul and Jeff look up, interested. They like things to be discreet about.
“Get the passport when you see him,” Jeff says. “You can do it.”
Raoul has the laminating machine, the neatly cut rectangle of plastic, Bugs Bunny’s in-flagrante picture, the faked-up version of his particulars. He brings them all together and, a f
ew minutes later, shows Arkenhout the result.
“The type looks wrong,” he says, “where it says place of birth.”
Raoul says, “Then don’t change the details. Switch the picture, just the picture, don’t let him know, and the next time he tries to leave the country, he’s Bugs Bunny and he’s under arrest.”
That afternoon, Arkenhout walks through the meat market down to the Hudson River. He sees old warehouses hollowed out with neglect, windows long gone, nettles growing in deep basements. Nobody cares about them. Nobody checks them.
John Gaul is shifting about his apartment. For a few minutes after lunch, he even agonizes. He doesn’t want to lose this chance of a connection to David Silver. He is suspicious, and he hates to leave suspicions unresolved. All these are clear reasons to call Arkenhout. But he doesn’t trust Arkenhout. His life gets invaded so rarely that he reckons he can at least choose the invaders.
Still, he calls.
Arkenhout calls back at seven, and he’s willing to go to dinner. He goes to a hardware store on Sixth Avenue. He needs a box cutter, he says, but they won’t sell him one because there is a school around the corner. This does not seem logical to a sensible Dutch boy. He has the dorm room to himself. He takes paper from the printer and practices his own signature, his signature as Seth Goodman. He wants to see how much variation people take for granted.
He gets to the designated bar under a violet backpack, which irritates Gaul; it makes the boy look like a student, not a man who knows David Silver. Both men have a beer.
Gaul says he’s sure the house in the Bahamas will be a zero. He’ll be back in a week. Arkenhout says he might like it, might stay there. Gaul says, “I could, I suppose. I could always stay anywhere.” Arkenhout ignores the self-pity in the voice; he notes down absence of planning, limitless possibilities.
“I just want to know about it,” Gaul says. Daringly, he adds, “Silver has a place in the Caribbean, doesn’t he? I read about it once.”
“I never went to the Caribbean place,” Arkenhout says. “I was just the house sitter.”
Gaul thinks it’s too early for dinner, but he wants to be on the move. Arkenhout follows. Gaul takes more beers, then gin, then a glass of red wine. Arkenhout doesn’t. Evidently Gaul has given up on impressing Arkenhout and is juicing himself for some more direct attack.
They take a cab into SoHo and get tucked into the corner of a gray restaurant that claims to be Provençal. Gaul is so precise he’s like a tin toy at table; Arkenhout simply eats. At the end of the meal, Gaul has coffee and more coffee. Then, when he stands, he is punctiliously drunk, a man who has just remembered the program for standing, walking, turning.
Arkenhout hails a cab.
“I don’t want a cab,” Gaul says.
Arkenhout pushes him in the small of the back and he tips into the cab seat. Gaul sits there, not quite sure enough to complain.
Arkenhout thinks he can kill, probably. The boundaries weakened when he took a rock to Seth Goodman’s head. Besides, it will be Seth Goodman’s crime, and he will not be Seth Goodman anymore.
The cab driver squeals between lanes as though he wants to jolt Gaul sober.
The problem, Arkenhout is thinking, while Gaul is thinking someone is being kind to him, is the body. It would be too much luck if the cops muddled up the bodies as they did in Florida, and besides, Gaul is that much older than Seth, with more time to have broken teeth or bones in ways that get recorded. So the body has to be lost for a long while.
The doorman doesn’t rise from his desk when Gaul sweeps in, so Gaul wants his name, his apologies. The man can smell the drink, so he understands.
The doorman hardly notices Arkenhout.
In the apartment, Gaul throws off his jacket and sits down suddenly on his striped, shiny sofa, and lists a little to the left.
Arkenhout doesn’t even have to sympathize with the man. There is no man to attract sympathy, just a few random functioning elements with no core of purpose or life.
Gaul is snoring now, still startlingly rigid, with the dark East River behind his fatuous head.
All Arkenhout needs now is information. He opens his backpack and puts on rubber gloves.
He takes Gaul’s jacket into the hall, in case Gaul should suddenly surface, and checks the credit cards, the ATM cards. The signatures are simple enough and, besides, everyone varies their signature subtly. Hardly anyone checks with the eye of a graphologist.
Fine. He can access the money, but is the supply constant? Gaul seems to think he can travel anywhere; that’s good. He seems to travel on whim. But perhaps that’s just the appearance he wants to give. With all that movement, he can’t simply wait for his credit card bills at a fixed address; there must be someone who settles them for him.
There is a rolltop desk in a side room, closed but not locked. Arkenhout opens it, hears the mechanism jar, then listens hard to Gaul, who is snoring and gasping down the hall. He pulls papers out, letters with long trails of names on the envelopes, a passport; next to the passport is an air ticket, Delta, round-trip to Nassau going out in two days and the return open. So Gaul is going, and doesn’t know when he’ll be back.
There’s a lawyer’s letter attached to the ticket with a rubber band. Gaul is to “introduce” himself to the agent, some woman on Bay Street. If he has to “introduce” himself, then he’s not known. The lawyers have arranged credit in Nassau, they say. He might want to stay for a few months.
John Gaul wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have the patience to stay out of people’s way. But Martin Arkenhout might.
He’s a boy in a foreign country still. He’s not sure he has read everything right. But he has the ticket, the money, the cards, the possibilities; and he needs a new life. Why should it matter how long this life can last?
He closes the desk carefully, but he keeps the ticket and the lawyer’s letter.
He walks back to the room where Gaul is sleeping. Now it comes down to this: how to kill someone, how to make the body disappear.
It isn’t time yet.
He makes himself coffee, and sits in the hallway. There is a stack of heavy art books, catalogs, and monographs, but that doesn’t seem distracting enough; instead, he looks around for magazines. He has to settle for a thumbed paperback of some English whodunit that’s been read over and again.
One o’clock. He goes to the desk to see if there’s a letter opener. He finds one that is surprisingly sharp. There are paper towels and large black garbage bags under the sink; he helps himself and stuffs them into his backpack.
One-thirty. Gaul has toppled to his right, torso and thigh and calf a zigzag of black.
Arkenhout remembers the doorman saying it was good to have Gaul back and how long was he staying? After the date on that Nassau ticket, nobody here expects to see John Gaul. Nobody will particularly care, except to avoid the possibility that he might complain.
Two o’clock. Arkenhout takes off the rubber gloves, pulls Gaul up, slaps a cold washcloth across his face, waits for his eyes to creep open, then focus, then see.
“I’ve got to get the car,” he says.
Gaul doesn’t want to think because it would upset the delicate balance in his head. He looks around for his jacket, pulls out the keys.
“Come on,” Arkenhout says.
“Where are we going?” Gaul says.
“We’re going to see David Silver. It’s a”—he can’t quite bring out the word without giggling, so he tries again—“a surprise.”
Gaul works at being sober, works furiously.
“I should change,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter.” But Gaul insists on cleaning his teeth.
“There isn’t much time,” Arkenhout says, shepherding him through the door. There are two other apartments on this floor, owned by old-money relicts, so Gaul says, who won’t go wandering this early, and would never dare hear sudden movements through their fog of sleeping pills.
When the elevator comes, the operator is tryin
g to stop yawning.
“I’ll get the car,” Arkenhout says. “Wait for me out front.”
Gaul needs every ounce of his concentration to prepare for the moment this kid is offering him like a Christmas parcel: to meet a man impossible to meet. He nods to the elevator man.
The elevator doors snap shut at the garage level. Arkenhout pulls out the keys. He looks around the acreage of shine, white bruisers, sleek town cars, even a Jaguar that belongs to some old-guard traditionalist.
So what the hell does Gaul drive?
He ought to know, he ought to have found out. It was such a simple thing to ask. But they’d always been in cabs, and besides, he had other things to consider that made up a future and not just the next hour.
Only you can’t get to the future except through the next hour, he tells himself, thinking he sounds like his father at his most sententious.
He checks the keys. There are two sets, with no color code to distinguish them, no license number cut in the metal.
“Sir?”
He expects security, some official kind of challenge. He spins round. But he sees only a man in a mechanic’s overall, the night garageman.
Arkenhout says, “John Gaul’s car,” with all the authority he can summon. When the car arrives, he doesn’t know if he should give the mechanic money.
He collects Gaul at the front of the building. The man is perfumed like a bar, breath the caricature fresh of peppermint, with skin like egg white over paper: not in good shape.
“We’re meeting in the meat market,” Arkenhout says.
For a moment, Gaul doesn’t understand. He thinks of social meat markets, sexual ones.
“The one,” Arkenhout says, “where they sell meat.”
He takes Tenth Avenue downtown, a wide channel of dark and moving red taillights, and cuts across toward the river. There are people around, of course; he expected that. There’s more light than he remembered, the meat trade starting up, the night trade drifting off in high heels and Lurex.
He parks a block away from any lights. He waits a moment. There may be someone stirring behind a Dumpster, a door shutter about to rise up rattling and reveal a store set with carcasses. He wants to be sure.