Antenna Syndrome

by Alan Annand

  “Her paintings are worth a lot,” Schiller nodded. “Demand is high because we’ve been releasing them slowly.”

  “You know people in the art world,” I said. “Any private collector who’s expressed frustration at not being able to acquire any of her work on the open market? Or a gallery owner who may have tried to offer Marielle better representation?”

  “I can think of a few prospective buyers, but none so venal as to engage burglars...”

  “Know anyone who drives a white Cadillac?”

  “Well, yes, a few people, I suppose...”

  “Who’s also a collector, or an art dealer?”

  Schiller stared into space. Suddenly he slapped his hand on the desk, hard enough to make the water in my glass ripple. “Rossikoff.”

  “Who?”

  “Vladimir Rossikoff.” Schiller made a face. “He’s Russian. And a hoodlum.” Schiller lowered his head and rubbed his face with both hands. “He’s a caricature, the kind of crooked art dealer that embarrasses the rest of us.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Easier to ask, what hasn’t he done? Gouged clients for evaluation, storage, display, insurance and transport fees. Reneged on sales and marketing agreements. Promoted the sale of counterfeits. Bought and sold stolen art. You know what they call him? Bad Vlad.”

  “He ever express any interest in Marielle’s art?”

  “He bought a couple of her earliest pieces. He wanted more but even he was surprised, I think, at how quickly her work appreciated, and he balked at paying market rate. He offered to give her a solo show at his gallery, but Marielle turned him down.”

  “Where’s his gallery?”

  Schiller took a tablet from his desk drawer, fiddled with it a few moments, and read off an address for the Realistik Gallery in SoHo.

  “And he drives a white Caddie?”

  “Trades up every year.”

  I thanked Schiller for his time, and reminded him not to discuss this with anyone. “And for the time being, please don’t call Vivien. Things are tense in the Randall household these days. We don’t need you rocking the boat.”

  He held his hands in the air, indicating he understood. “What about Marielle?”

  “Until I get to the bottom of this, observe the cone of silence, okay?”

  Chapter 41

  I drove down Sixth to Prince Street in SoHo. I found the Realistik Gallery, but its entrance and front window were sealed with a retractable grille. A plaque on the door said business hours were 10-6 on weekdays, 11-5 on weekends. I checked my watch. I had some time to kill, so I drove over to Tribeca to look for trouble.

  I parked a block from the Avatar Clinic and shuffled through my extensive collection of fake business cards. In the course of my various investigations, I sometimes adopted an alias to gain access to a property or a person. I’d developed a wide range of personae – insurance adjustor, vehicle inspector, plumber, sanitation engineer, probation officer – with business cards and contact numbers for each, even websites for some.

  Several years ago, Skype had used their clout with the Department of Communications to secure dozens of new area codes for the burgeoning market in on-board vehicle phones. In one of their early promotions, they’d offered blocks of individual numbers at low prices, and I’d bought 16 of them. Subsequently I’d assigned numbers to each of my aliases, set up voice-mail systems with off-the-shelf robotic software, and printed up hundreds of phony business cards.

  If anyone called one of my alias numbers, they’d end up talking to a robot on voice-mail, or get routed to speak with me, depending on whether I was busy or not. It was a sweet system and got me into places to talk to people who otherwise wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

  Today’s objective was to get beyond the clinic receptionist, meet Dr. Globik and, God willing, get a walk-through of the building. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I’d find Marielle that easily, but maybe I’d get an idea if she was resident there.

  I retrieved my disguise bag from the trunk and selected a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a goatee. The glasses had a micro-lens and a wireless feed to my iFocals. I synced the pair and slipped my goggles into my jacket pocket. I looked in the mirror and decided I looked functionary. I carried my attaché case to the clinic, rang the bell and got buzzed in.

  A different receptionist from two days ago was at the front desk. This one was actually working. The translucent screen between us wasn’t tuned to any TV show, but displayed a dense block of text into which she was appending words at a fierce rate. Without pausing, she looked at me through the screen. “Do you have an appointment?”

  The lighting didn’t do her justice. Total darkness would have been better. Her skin was the color of a Camembert left too long in the fridge. Her shag haircut, feathery around her small pointed ears, looked like cobwebs. She had an oval face and large unblinking eyes with centipede eyelashes. Her dress fit snug around her neck but fell loose and shapeless from a pair of blunt mounds on her chest. Her arms were slim, her fingers long and twitchy. I couldn’t see her legs and didn’t want to. She looked like she’d crawled out from under a rotten stump.

  “No.” I gave her an alias card from the New York Building Maintenance Office. “We don’t provide advance notice of site visitations.”

  “Let me see if the Director’s available.” She tapped her headset and had a brief exchange in what sounded like Russian. She pointed me to a passage on her left. “Down this hall, last door at the end.”

  I went down the hall, measuring it by steps. On either wall were display cases of insects – beetles and ants and flies and mites and things too small to identify. At the end of a 20-foot corridor was an L-shaped room where a man behind a large desk beckoned to me.

  “Please take a seat, sir.”

  “Dr. Globik, I presume?” I placed my card on his desk.

  He plucked it up with an elegant hand, read it and looked at me with more than normal curiosity. I realized I hadn’t put much thought into my disguise. We were both wearing goatees. I hoped he believed imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

  I sat in a straight-backed chair and took a tablet from my attaché case. In the corner behind Globik, a six-foot translucent globe was suspended from the ceiling. Inside, like two yolks in a monstrous egg, were two spheres the size of basketballs. A large red spider, the same kind that had bitten Joey Myers, emerged from its nest and bounced around inside the globe. Others soon joined in, and in moments a dozen were jumping like popcorn in a hot pan.

  Globik studied my card. “Robert Birch, Building Inspections Officer.” He fixed me with jet-black eyes squeezed tightly between puffy eyelids. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “Our office has a policy of rotating its officers, a precaution against developing personal, perhaps unprofessional, relationships with clients.”

  “That’s too bad. Your predecessor and I’d come to an amicable understanding. Didn’t he share that with you?”

  “What sort of understanding?”

  “He’d give 24-hour notice of his visits, so I’d have time to, um, prepare necessary documents. Otherwise, spur of the moment it was less efficient. I have a business to run and you have other buildings to inspect, don’t you?”

  “What documents?”

  “Building permits, maintenance contracts, utility bills, environmental audits...” He paused as if he’d just thought of it. “And of course, petty cash accounts.”

  “I see.” Business as usual. Throughout the city, property managers struggled not to be buried like fossils under layers of government sediment, in the form of laws and by-laws, statutes, rules and regulations, codes and restrictions. “What’s your float?”

  “Given proper notice, five thousand.”

  “And today?”

  “Perhaps two thousand.”

  “Okay. I’ll need to see your business license and floor plan, and then conduct a complete walk-about.”

  “Is that really necessary
?”

  “Your property’s new to me. I need to familiarize myself with it.”

  Globik scowled but swiveled in his chair to open a file drawer in the credenza behind him. He placed two folders on the desk, one containing City permits, the other with plan and profile views for each floor.

  “Do you have these on digital?”

  “Your office should have them already.”

  “Let’s not assume. I need a copy.”

  He tapped his intercom and said something into it. “My secretary will prepare a digital file for you.” He turned back to his credenza, fiddled there a moment and slid a small envelope onto the desk.

  I leafed through the floor plans, video running in my goggles. In case he held out on the digital copies, this was my backup. Finished, I closed the folders and pushed them back across the desk. I looked inside the envelope. A wad of bills. I dropped the envelope into my attaché case.

  I was suddenly gripped by an irrational but overpowering fear. My spidey-sense wasn’t just tingling, but trembling. The room lighting had changed subtly. On the wall above Globik’s credenza was a smoked-glass mirror. As the lighting changed I saw the mirror was etched with an incredibly detailed design of an insect head with large multi-lens eyes.

  I had the sickening sensation I was being watched through a one-way mirror. Worse, by someone or something so terrible I barely dared lift my eyes to meet its unseen gaze. I was so shaken by the intuition of impending attack that the hairs in my false goatee bristled with alarm.

  I tapped the panic button on my tablet. It obliged with a klaxon sound. I stared at the screen, thrust the tablet into my attaché case and stood. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’ll come back another day for my walk-about. I’ve just received a message from the office. Some sort of emergency at the Leonard Street sub-station. I’m the nearest officer in the neighborhood. I’ve got to go immediately.”

  “When do you want to schedule your follow-up?” Globik said, but I was already halfway down the hall.

  As I trotted through the reception area I saw a flash drive on the corner of the secretary’s desk. I grabbed it without breaking stride. I burst from the clinic and ran to my car. I heard a garage door rumble as I jumped into the Charger. I gunned it down the street. In the rearview mirror I saw a dark blue van with a rooftop bubble pull out into the street but by then I was rounding the next corner in a squeal of rubber.

  Chapter 42

  I ran two red lights going up West Street like a maniac, and made a sliding turn onto Spring. It was a miracle I didn’t hit anyone, with my eyes on my rearview more than the street. As I headed back to SoHo, spots jittered across my field of vision. I was hyper-ventilating. I pulled over beside a park, fumbled for my vaporizer and sucked back a dozen hits of KavaKat before returning to normal.

  As an exterminator, I’d been in some creepy places. Once in a sewer, I’d broken my headlamp and a pack of giant rats had followed me for five blocks until I’d reached my exit point. Or that time in an abandoned Bowery walk-up when I’d met a python in a narrow stairwell, and me armed with only a pry bar and a tank of DDT.

  But I’d never come so close to shitting my pants as in Globik’s office. I was still shaking my head and saying, WTF? Crazy thing was, I hadn’t actually seen anything. Was it just that image in the etched mirror that had triggered something in me? Or the suspicion that Globik’s bodyguard Buzz, who’d literally disarmed the gunman at the MediaTech Center, had been behind the mirror?

  No way I could have risked sticking around to find out. Now I couldn’t go back. My nerves wouldn’t take it.

  I drove back to Prince Street. The grille was now up, the Realistik Gallery open for business. I parked in a small commercial lot on the same block and crossed the street. The Realistik had a shiny modern look, its entrance and front window framed in brushed aluminum.

  Inside, the well-lit space was filled with hyper-realistic works of art. No still life here; every piece depicted a living creature – human, animal, fish, bird, reptile. It made me nervous, seeing dogs twice my size...

  I hadn’t browsed long before a big man in a dark green suit emerged from an alcove at the rear. He approached me with the rolling gait of an overfed bear.

  “Good day, sir. May I help you?” His dark eyes scanned my attire. He’d probably like to help me on my way, but he was cautious. Even millionaires dressed casually these days in off-the-rack suits and scuffed shoes.

  “Perhaps. Are you the owner?”

  “Vladimir Rossikoff, at your service.” He tilted his head a millimeter in lieu of a bow. He had hair on his nose and the jowls of a grandfather hog. He wore two fistfuls of gold rings and enough jewels among them to span the rainbow. I added Art Dealer to the long list of jobs that paid better than mine. But he had red-rimmed eyes and a nervous tic in his fat mouth that suggested life wasn’t as smooth as he might wish.

  “I’m looking for something out of the ordinary,” I said, “a little edgier than mainstream realism.”

  “How about this Colville?” He directed my attention to a large elliptical canvas of a butchered moose hanging from barn rafters.

  “Perhaps something less sanguine,” I suggested.

  “You can’t match the Magic Realists for brilliance. Take this one by Parkes.” He indicated a canvas in which a trio of mermaids frolicked in the surf of a rocky shore.

  “Too surreal,” I said. “I want something that exhibits the artist’s ability to explore the world at an intimate level. But maybe you don’t have what I’m looking for.”

  “May I ask what your budget is?”

  “I have a blank space on a wall that needs to be filled.” I held my arms outstretched. “My budget’s flexible.”

  “Come.” Schiller touched my elbow. “I have something for you.”

  “I don’t see it here.” I brushed my sleeve where his hairy paw had touched it.

  “Downstairs,” he said, “I have a few paintings that may interest you.”

  “Why downstairs? Not good enough to hang with the rest?”

  “I just received them from the artist. They’re not even framed yet.” He plucked my sleeve again.

  We descended a stairway at the gallery’s rear to a large basement room. A bench stood along one wall, with tools of the picture-framer’s trade – hammer, saw, stapler, paste and wire. A rack of framing materials stood against one wall. On the opposite wall, a dozen large canvases leaned together beneath a sheet. Rossikoff pulled the sheet aside to reveal the first of them.

  A metallic black praying mantis clutched the corpus of a brown headless cousin. From a filament in the background, a tiny green inchworm formed an inverted question mark.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You like it?”

  “Very much.” I recognized it from Marielle’s studio. “How much?”

  He quoted me something in six figures.

  I whistled. “My budget’s not that flexible.”

  “This is a brilliant young artist.”

  I peered at the signature. “Marielle? Never heard of her.”

  “You will.”

  “Got anything with a lower price tag?”

  His lip curled in disappointment. But now that he’d come this far, there was no turning back. He revealed one canvas after another, seeking my approval and dollars. He had almost a dozen of Marielle’s paintings.

  “Surely there’s one among these you like.”

  “This may be it.” I picked up the smallest painting among them, a close-up of a praying mantis head, and studied it under the light. The painting was only two feet square.

  “I thought you said you wanted something large.”

  “I did, but my wife may not appreciate a giant bug on our bedroom wall. However, this is a talented artist, and this small piece would be just right for my office.”

  We bargained and finally settled on a price in five figures.

  “It’s a sacrifice,” he said, rubbing his jeweled hands together in consternation, waiting fo
r my wallet to appear. “How will you pay?”

  “If I pay cash, can I dodge the sales tax?”

  “Of course.”

  “I can give you a deposit now and pay the balance tomorrow.”

  “Is it possible to come back today?”

  “No. I have business meetings uptown...” checking my watch, “...that will occupy me until this evening.”

  “As you wish.”

  I turned my back on him, took out Globik’s payola envelope and counted off the money. I stuffed the envelope back in my jacket and gave Rossikoff the deposit. He counted it and pocketed it.

  “I’ll need a receipt.”

  We went back upstairs and he got a receipt book from his desk. “I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

  I gave him one of my alias cards. Robert Krueger. Consultant, Corporate Governance. Chicago phone number and LaSalle Street address.

  He wrote me a receipt for the deposit. We shook hands and he walked me to the door. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  I headed back to the car, wishing I could have walked off with physical evidence under my arm. But I’d had the video recorder running through my synced eyewear all the time we’d been in the basement workshop. Proof he had all of Marielle’s stolen paintings.

  Near the parking lot where I’d left my car, a bearded guy lay in a painful-looking yogic posture. Flowers were strewn all around him. In the direct path of passersby was a baseball cap with an index card that read Alms for Nicotine Nirvana. I dropped some change as I passed. The yogi didn’t blink. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a smile on his face.

  Chapter 43

  Back in the car, I removed my goatee and exchanged the horn-rims for my iFocals. I put my attaché case in the trunk and removed the gym bag I’d packed this morning. I used a coffee shop washroom to change from my suit back into regular clothes. Time to go to the Village.