by John Verdon
No one’s left to leave,
In this time of my life
At the end of my time
In this world.
Lied to my lovers,
Chased all the others,
Left all my lovers behind,
When I had all the time
In the world.
When I had all the time
In the world.
While Lake was crooning the final maudlin refrain, Gurney was passing between his barn and pond, with the old farmhouse just in sight beyond the patch of goldenrod at the top of the pasture. As he hit the player’s “off” button, wishing he’d done so sooner, his cell phone rang.
The caller ID displayed the words REYNOLDS GALLERY.
Jesus. What the hell did she want?
“Gurney here.” His voice was all business with an edge of suspicion.
“Dave! It’s Sonya Reynolds.” Her voice, as usual, radiated a level of animal magnetism that could get her stoned to death in some countries. “I have fabulous news for you,” she purred. “And I don’t mean a little fabulous. I mean change-your-life-forever fabulous! We have to get together ASAP.”
“Hello, Sonya.”
“Hello? I’m calling to give you the biggest gift you’ve ever been given, and that’s all you can say?”
“It’s good to hear from you. What are we talking about?”
Her answer was a rich, musical laugh, a sound as disturbingly sensual as everything else about her. “Oh, that’s my Dave! Detective Dave with the piercing blue eyes. Suspicious of everything. As though I were—What do you call it? A ‘perp’ like on TV? As though I were a perp—that’s what you call the bad guy, right? As though I were a perp giving you a fishy story.” She had a slight accent that reminded him of the alternate universe he’d discovered in the French and Italian movies of his college years.
“Never mind ‘fishy.’ So far you haven’t given me any story.”
Again that laugh, bringing to mind her luminous green eyes. “And I’m not going to, not until I see you. Tomorrow. It must be tomorrow. But you don’t have to come to me in Ithaca. I’ll come to you. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—anytime tomorrow you want. Just tell me what time, and we’ll pick a place. I guarantee you won’t be sorry.”
Chapter 25
Enter Salome, dancing
He still had no final name for the experience. Dream missed all the power of it. It was true that the first time it happened he was in the process of falling asleep, his senses disconnected from all the shabby demands of a disgusting world, his mind’s eye free to see what it would see, but there the superficial resemblance to common dreaming ended.
Vision was a larger, better word for it, but it, too, failed to convey even a fraction of the impact.
Guiding light captured a certain facet of it, an important facet, but the soap-opera association polluted the meaning hopelessly.
A guided meditation, then? No. That sounded trite and unexciting—the opposite of the experience itself.
A living fable?
Ah, yes. That was getting closer. It was, after all, the story of his salvation, the new pattern of his life’s purpose. The master allegory for his crusade.
His inspiration.
All he had to do was turn out the lights, close his eyes, put himself in the infinite potential of the darkness.
And summon the dancer.
In the embrace of the experience, the living fable, he knew who he was—so much more clearly than he did when his eyes and heart were distracted by the glittering trash and slimy cunts of the world, by noise, by seduction and filth.
In the embrace of the experience, in its absolute clarity and purity, he knew exactly who he was. Even if he was now, technically, a fugitive, that fact—like his name in the world, the name by which ordinary people knew him—was secondary to his true identity.
His true identity was John the Baptist.
Just thinking of it gave him gooseflesh.
He was John the Baptist.
And the dancer was Salome.
Ever since the first time he’d had the experience, the story had been all his, his to live and his to change. It didn’t have to end the stupid way it ended in the Bible. Far from it. That was the beauty of it. And the thrill of it.
Part Two
Salome’s Executioner
Chapter 26
The verisimilitude of incongruity
“After I ice the stupid fuck, I see he’s only wearing one shoe. I think, what the fuck? Closer look, I see there’s no sock on the foot that’s got the shoe on it. On the bottom of the shoe, I see this little slanted M, the Marconi logo, so this is like a two-thousand-dollar shoe. The other foot that’s got no shoe—that one’s got a sock on it. Cashmere. I think, who the fuck does that? Who the fuck puts on one cashmere sock and one two-thousand-dollar shoe—on different feet? I’ll tell you who does that—a fucking juicehead with bucks, a rich fucking drunk.”
That was the way Gurney opened his presentation that morning. Ultimate cut-to-the-chase approach. And it worked. He had the attention of every set of eyes in the bleak, concrete-walled police-academy lecture hall.
“The other day we talked about the eureka fallacy—the tendency of people to put a lot more faith in things they’ve discovered about someone than in things that person has told them. We’re wired to believe that the hidden truth is the real truth. Undercover, you can take advantage of that tendency by letting your target ‘discover’ the things about you that you most want him to believe. It’s not an easy technique, but it’s very powerful. Today we’ll look at another factor that creates credibility, another way of making your undercover line of bullshit sound true: layers of unusual, striking, incongruous detail.”
All the people in the room appeared to be in the same seats they were in two days earlier, with the exception of the attractive Hispanic cop with the lip gloss who had moved into the front row, displacing the dyspeptic Detective Falcone, who was now in the second row—a pleasant switch from Gurney’s point of view.
“The story I just started telling you about whacking the guy with the Marconi logo on the sole of his shoe, that’s a story I actually told in an undercover situation. The odd little facts are all there for specific reasons. Can anyone tell me what they might be?”
A hand went up in the middle of the room. “Make you sound cold and hard.”
Other opinions were offered without raised hands:
“Make you sound like you got a little problem with drunks.”
“Like maybe you’re a little crazy.”
“Like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.”
“Distraction,” said a thin, colorless female in the back row.
“Tell me about that,” said Gurney.
“You get somebody focused on a lot of weird shit, trying to figure out why the guy you shot is only wearing one shoe, they don’t focus so much on the main question, which is whether or not you shot anybody to begin with.”
“Bury ’em in bullshit!” another female voice chimed in.
“That’s the idea,” said Gurney. “Now, there’s one more thing—”
The pretty cop with the glistening lips broke in, “The little M on the sole of his shoe?”
Gurney couldn’t help grinning. “Right. The little M. What’s that all about?”
“It makes the hit more credible?”
Falcone, behind her, rolled his eyes. Gurney felt like tossing him out of the class but doubted he had the authority to make it stick and didn’t want to get tangled up in an academy pissing contest. He concentrated on his Hispanic star pupil, a much easier task.
“How does it do that?”
“By the way you picture it in your mind. The victim is down, shot, on the floor. That’s how the sole of his shoe would be visible. So when I’m picturing that, wondering about that little logo, I’m already believing the guy has been shot. You know what I mean? Once I’m seeing his feet in that position, I’m already past the question of whether you shot him. It’s kind of like
the other little detail you tossed in—that the sock on the other foot was cashmere. The only way to know something is cashmere is to feel it. So I’m picturing this killer, curious about the sock, feeling the dead guy’s foot. Very icy. Scary guy. Believable.”
The restaurant where Gurney had agreed to meet Sonya Reynolds was in a hamlet outside Bainbridge, halfway between the police academy in Albany and her gallery in Ithaca. He’d finished his lecture at eleven and got to the Galloping Duck—her choice—at a quarter to one.
There was a curious disconnect between the country-cutesy name of the place with its cockeyed cutout of a giant duck on the front lawn and the plain, almost Shaker-like decor inside—like the crossed wires of a bad marriage.
He arrived first and was shown to a table for two next to a window overlooking a pond, the possible home of the eponymous fowl if ever it had existed. A chubby, cheerful teenage waitress with pink spiked hair and an indescribable mélange of neon clothes brought two menus and two glasses of ice water.
Gurney counted a total of nine tables in the small dining room, only two of which were occupied, both silently—one by a youngish couple staring intently at their BlackBerry screens, the other by a middle-aged man and woman from the pre-electronic era staring stolidly into their own thoughts.
Gurney’s gaze drifted out to the pond. He sipped his water and thought about Sonya. Looking back on their relationship—not a “relationship” in the romantic sense, just a business association with a fair amount of suppressed lust on his part—it struck him as one of the stranger interludes in his life. Inspired by an art-appreciation course Sonya was teaching, which he and Madeleine attended shortly after moving upstate, he’d begun creating art prints from the mug shots of murderers—illuminating their violent personalities through the subtle manipulation of the stark official photographs taken at the time of their arrests. Sonya’s great enthusiasm for the project and her sale of eight of the prints (at two thousand dollars apiece through her Ithaca gallery) kept Gurney involved for several months, despite Madeleine’s discomfort with the morbid subject matter and with his eagerness to please Sonya. The tension in that conflict came back to him now, along with an uneasy recollection of the near disaster that ended it.
In addition to almost getting him killed, the Mellery murder case had brought him face-to-face with his acute failures as a husband and father. In the humbling clarity of the experience, it had occurred to him that love is the only thing on earth that matters. Seeing the mug-shot art endeavor and his contact with Sonya as disrupters of his relationship with the only person he really loved, he turned away from them toward Madeleine.
Now, however, a scant year later, the white light of his realization had dimmed. He still knew there was truth in it—that love, in a sense, was the most important thing—but he no longer saw it as the only true light in the universe. The gradual fading of its priority happened quietly and did not announce itself as a loss. It felt more like the growth of a more realistic perspective, surely not a bad thing. After all, one could not function long in the state of emotional intensity created by the Mellery affair, lest one forget to mow the lawn and buy food—or make the money one needed to buy food and lawn mowers. Wasn’t it in the very nature of intense experiences to settle down, permitting the ordinary rhythms of life to resume? So Gurney wasn’t especially concerned that now, from time to time, the “love is all that matters” idea seemed to have the ring of a sentimental shibboleth, a country-music title.
Which is not to say that his guard was completely down. There was an electricity in Sonya Reynolds that only a very foolish man would consider harmless. And when the pink-haired girl ushered the shapely, elegant Sonya into the dining room, that electricity was radiating like the hum of a power plant.
“David, my love, you look … exactly the same!” she cried, gliding toward him as if to music, offering him her cheek to kiss. “But of course you do! How else would you look? You’re such a rock! Such stability!” This last word she pronounced with an exotic delight, as though it were the perfect Italian term for something the English language was inadequate to express.
She was wearing very tight designer jeans and a silky T-shirt under a linen jacket so casually unconstructed it couldn’t have cost less than a thousand dollars. There was neither jewelry nor makeup to distract from her perfect olive skin.
“What are you looking at?” Her voice was playful, her eyes sparkling.
“You. You look … great.”
“I should be mad at you, you know that?”
“Because I stopped producing pictures?”
“Of course because you stopped producing pictures. Wonderful pictures. Pictures I loved. Pictures my customers loved. Pictures I could sell for you. Pictures I did sell for you. But with no warning you call me and you tell me you can’t do it anymore. You have personal reasons. Can’t make any more pictures, can’t talk about it. End of story. Don’t you think I should be mad at you?”
She didn’t sound mad at all, so he didn’t answer, just watched her, amazed at how much bright energy she managed to channel into every word. It was the first thing that had seized his attention in her art-appreciation class. That and those wide-set green eyes.
“But I forgive you. Because you’re going to make pictures again. Don’t shake your head at me. Believe me, when I explain what’s happening, you won’t shake your head.” She stopped, looked around the little dining room for the first time. “I’m thirsty. Let’s have a drink.”
When the pink-haired girl reappeared, Sonya ordered a vodka with grapefruit juice. Against his better judgment, so did Gurney.
“So, Mr. Retired Policeman,” she said after their drinks had arrived and been sampled, “before I tell you how your life is going to change, tell me about the way it is now.”
“My life?”
“You do have a life, yes?”
He had the disconcerting feeling that she already knew all about his life, complete with its reservations, doubts, conflicts. But there was no way she could know. Even when he was involved with her gallery, he’d never talked about those things. “My life is good.”
“Ah, but you say this in a way that makes it not true, like it’s something you’re supposed to say.”
“Is that the way it sounds?”
She took another sip of her drink. “You don’t want to tell me the truth?”
“What do you think the truth is?”
She cocked her head a little to the side, studied his face, shrugged. “It’s none of my business, right?” She looked out at the pond.
He consumed half his drink in two swallows. “I suppose it’s like everyone’s life—some of this and some of that.”
“You make this-and-that sound like a pretty grim combination.”
He laughed, not happily, and for a while they were both silent. He was the first to speak.
“I find that I’m not so much of a nature lover as I hoped I might be.”
“But your wife is?”
He nodded. “It’s not that I don’t find it beautiful up here, the mountains and all, but …”
She gave him a shrewd look. “But it gets you tangled up in double negatives when you try to explain it?”
“What? Oh. I see what you mean. Are my problems that obvious?”
“Discontent is always obvious, no? What’s the matter? You don’t like that word?”
“Discontent? It’s more like … what I’m good at, the way my mind works, isn’t very useful up here. I mean … I analyze situations, unravel the elements of a problem, focus on discrepancies, solve puzzles. None of which …” His voice trailed off.
“And, of course, your wife thinks you should be loving the daisies, not analyzing them. You should be saying ‘How beautiful!’ and not ‘What are they doing here?’ Am I right?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“So,” she said, changing the subject with sudden enthusiasm, “there’s a man you must meet. As soon as possible.”
“Why is that?”
“He wants to make you rich and famous.”
Gurney made a face.
“I know, I know, you’re not very interested in getting rich, and famous you’re not interested in at all. I’m sure you have good theoretical objections. But suppose I were to tell you something very specific.” She glanced around the dining room. The older couple were standing slowly, as though getting up from the table were a project to be undertaken with care. The BlackBerry couple were still at whatever it was they were at, texting away rapidly with the edges of their thumbs. The antic idea that they might be texting each other across the table popped into Gurney’s mind. Sonya’s voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “Suppose I were to tell you he wants to buy one of your portrait prints for a hundred thousand dollars. What would you say to that?”
“I’d say he was crazy.”
“You think so?”
“How could he not be?”
“Last year at an auction in the city, Yves Saint-Laurent’s office chair sold for twenty-eight million dollars. That might be a little bit crazy. But a hundred thousand for one of your amazing serial-killer portraits? I don’t think that’s crazy at all. Wonderful, yes. Crazy, no. In fact, from what I know of this man and the way he operates, the price of your portraits is only going to go up.”
“You know him?”
“I just met him face-to-face for the first time. But I know of him. He’s a recluse, an eccentric who every so often emerges, shakes up the art world with some purchase or other, then disappears again. Dutch-sounding name, but no one knows where he lives. Switzerland? South America? Seems to like being a man of mystery. Very secretive, but more money than God. When Jykynstyl shows interest in an artist, the financial impact is huge. Huge.”
Cute little Pink Hair had added a chartreuse scarf to her eclectic ensemble and was clearing dessert plates and coffee cups from the vacated table across from them. Sonya caught her eye. “Darling, could I have another vodka grapefruit? And, I think, for my friend here, too?”