I grabbed the phone book and looked up his number. He was unlisted. As I sat there, turning over the possibilities, I reached into my pocket for my last Gauloise—a nouvelle vague affectation of mine—crumpled the package, and tossed it into the wastebasket under my desk. It was half full. Then I noticed that there was still ash in the ashtray, and the things on my desk top—the Selectric, the yellow pads, the HB pencils, the Mont Blanc pen, the bronze souvenir of the Perisphere and Trylon from the 1939 World’s Fair—had not been straightened out. When I checked further, the windowsill was covered in a film of New York soot you could write your name in. Mrs. Wilcox had been a no-show. There was nothing especially unusual in this since she was given to taking days off without remembering to let me know, but then what explained the fact that the lights had been left on?
I told myself I was definitely getting paranoid, and decided to pay Pedrosian’s neighborhood a visit.
SoHo, in those days, was just a godforsaken industrial ghetto wedged between Little Italy and Even Littler Italy. It didn’t have a proper name. Firemen called it Hell’s Hundred Acres because so many of them had been killed or maimed in fires there. Other people called it the loft district and left it at that because that’s what it was—two dozen square blocks of Victorian loft buildings that, until a few years earlier, had been packed with sweatshops and other shabby businesses scavenging at the low end of the commercial food chain—manufacturers of novelties and cheap jewelry, dealers in rags and scrap metal. Sure, the buildings were of enormous historical importance, masterpieces of cast iron, and part of New York’s cultural heritage, but who knew? They’d been neglected for decades, were coated in grime, and pissed on by dogs and bums, and by Robert Moses who wanted to tear half of them down to make way for a ten-lane elevated expressway. In 1968, a few businesses that had been there for decades still held on. Others had moved out to New Jersey or North Carolina, or wherever the cheap labor was. As lofts became vacant and rents plunged, artists had begun to move in, thrilled to find fifteen-hundred square feet of raw space for a hundred and fifty bucks a month.
I walked south to the intersection of Prince and Mercer, to Fanelli’s, a comfy tavern used by both artists and working stiffs. In those days, Mike Fanelli, who’d run the place since Prohibition, closed up when he felt like it, and tonight was one of the nights he’d gone home early. So I headed west on Prince to a Mafioso bar, on the far side of West Broadway, where loft dwellers sometimes stopped by to shoot pool in the back room. It was almost empty, but at a corner table Martin Wolfe was bullshitting two girls in tie-dye T-shirts and a young dude with a beret, a mustache, and serious sideburns. Probably students from Cooper Union or SVA—at least, they had paint on their jeans. Wolfe had paint on his jeans, too, and his share of facial hair, but his beard was getting grizzled, though he was probably still in his forties. He had been one of those talented younger painters—along with the likes of Mike Goldberg, Alfred Leslie, and Friedel Dzubas—who had toiled in the shadows of giants like Pollock and de Kooning, hanging out with the masters at the Eighth Street Club and the Cedar Tavern. He’d learned from the best, and that went for his expansive and disputatious manner as well as his work.
I heard him before I even saw him, a pastrami sandwich of a voice, cured with plenty of garlic somewhere in the shtetels that once clustered around the Grand Concourse.
“You kids think you’re hot shit. You go on a couple of marches to protest the war—smoke a joint, hug the Washington Monument, get laid by someone with an Afro, sing a few choruses of ‘We Shall Overcome’—and you think you’re fuckin’ Che Guevara on roller skates. You’ve seen it all, you’ve got all the answers.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” the boy with the sideburns protested angrily, his accent from somewhere west of the rust belt. “What I am saying is that, as artists, we have the possibility—the duty—to reimagine the political landscape.”
“Aspiring artists,” Wolfe corrected him. “And what is this political landscape going to look like? Billboards of Mao along every interstate? Fidel added to Mount Rushmore?”
“I mean,” said the boy, flushed with self-righteousness, “that we’ve got to rethink everything. Start from scratch, man.”
“Let me give you one bit of advice,” said Wolfe. “If you become an artist—and I hope you make it—don’t forget that you’re still going to be a worker. Nothing more, nothing less. You’ll get plenty of practice, because if you do make it, you’re going to drive a fucking cab first, or serve tables, or learn to put up drywall—”
“I can already put up drywall,” said the kid huffily.
“Then you’re on your way,” said Wolfe. “But what I’m trying to tell you is that your paintings may hang on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, you may be feasted by Wall Street princelings, and feted by titans of the military-industrial complex, but it doesn’t mean shit. Whatever happens, you’re still working for the Man. He may pay thousands of bucks for your paintings, and tell you you’re the greatest genius to grow his hair long since Leonardo da Vinci, but you’re still down there with the paid help, just like the butler, the caddy, the family attorney, the crooked accountant, the hooker, and the fag decorator.”
The kid was about to respond, but Wolfe had spotted me and his face lit up.
“My friend is here,” he said. “I gotta go.”
With that, he stood up, telling the kid, “Keep the faith, baby,” then grabbed me by the arm, and led me toward the exit.
“I hope you didn’t plan a rendezvous with some hot bimbo in here,” he said, “because I’ve gotta get away from these kids before they drive me crazy. Come back to my place, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
Martin Wolfe and I knew each other pretty well, though our relationship hadn’t always been as relaxed as it was now. The biggest case I had been involved with during my sojourn at the DA’s office had been what one newspaper had dubbed The Factory of Fabulous Fakes. A Dutchman named Smit, himself a talented forger, had set up a stable of forgers, each specializing in the work of one or two artists. Wolfe, whose own paintings were not selling at the time, had linked up with Smit and proved extremely adept at faking the work of Marc Chagall. To this day, there are probably dozens of canvases titled Clown with Mandolin or Village with Two Lovers and Donkey in Opera Hat hanging in distinguished public and private collections around the world, purporting to be Chagalls, but, in fact, painted by Marty Wolfe, who had become a key figure in the investigation. I had been instrumental in negotiating a plea bargain that enabled him to escape with a suspended sentence in return for the evidence he supplied against Smit. The story was commonly known in the art world, but it had only served to enhance Wolfe’s reputation, making his own work moderately sought after once more. He was the kind of guy who knew a lot of people and heard about a lot of things, so I took him up on his invitation.
We walked the short distance to his building on Grand Street, skirting bales of rags, watching the rats party in the gutter, not encountering a soul. Wolfe’s current modest success was evident in the furnishings of his loft. In those days, most lofts occupied by artists were raw spaces tarted up with the basic amenities—self-installed plumbing, a camp bed, a worktable, and a few chairs scavenged from the street. In addition to studio space, Wolfe’s loft had a fully equipped bathroom, a partitioned-off bedroom, an open kitchen built around a butcher-block island, and polyurethane floors. Throw in a couple of matched Borzois and it would have been camera-ready for Architectural Digest.
He poured me a scotch, mixed a vodka tonic for himself, and showed me some new paintings he was working on. I cut through the small talk and asked him if he’d run into Pedrosian lately.
“I saw him in the liquor store on Canal Street a few days ago. He was cashing a check.”
“How long ago?”
“Friday, maybe?” Wolfe shrugged.
“How big a check?”
“I’ve no idea. I don’t know how much credit Manny allows him.”
“Did he say anyt
hing about going out of town?”
“No. He asked me about Pol Smit. He said he’d heard that Pol’s been sick. I told him he’s been diagnosed with cancer.”
“Why was he interested?” I asked.
Wolfe grinned.
“That’s right,” he said, “I forgot that even you don’t know about that, but you had your suspicions, I remember. I guess it’s okay now that it’s all done with, and you’re not the Man anymore. Let me put it this way—and you didn’t hear this from me—there was someone who looked a lot like Pedrosian who was in on the game with Smit, but who managed to stay clean when the shit hit the fan. This guy had an unusual specialty. Collage. You don’t hear much about people who do fake collages, but this guy had a real feel for it. He could do you a Kurt Schwitters even a specialist would swear was the real thing—Max Ernst, Picasso—he really knew how to pull that stuff off.”
When I had been investigating the Smit case, I had had my suspicions that Pedrosian might have been involved, but I’d never come up with anything that linked him to Smit. Now I remembered that back in one of his early shows, Pedrosian had shown a group of collages montaged from magazine clippings and technical drawings torn out from some old textbook. I recalled that, at the time, I had thought that he had a nice touch.
“That’s not why you’re asking about him, though—I hope,” said Wolfe, looking a little uncomfortable, “because, like I said, you didn’t hear anything from me.”
“Nothing to do with any of that,” I assured him, “but I could use his phone number if you have it.”
Wolfe wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.
“We used to hang out back then,” he said, grinning. “We used to kid ourselves that producing fakes was an antibourgeois gesture—a critique of the underlying values of capitalism. Jerry’s come a long way since then.”
FOUR
In those days, someone with my modest income could afford to rent the parlor floor of a row house in the West Village. Mine was on West 12th, between Hudson Street and the Hudson River. At about one thirty that morning, there was a knock on the window. I knew who it was. Janice, my ex. She made a habit of doing this. I got out of bed, let her in, and asked her if she could use a drink. She shook her head.
“I’m already sad,” she said.
She sat down on the worn leather sofa I had inherited with the apartment and looked up at me with a wan smile. Samba, the cat I had inherited with the sofa, jumped up beside her and stretched onto her lap. Samba liked Janice. Maybe she reminded him of the whores in the Sao Paolo bordello where he’d been raised, but that’s not only a different story, it’s an entirely different genre.
“Where’s the boyfriend?” I asked.
“LA,” said Janice. “He’s shooting a pilot. I don’t know if he’ll be back.”
“I thought this was the real thing.”
“As real as it gets with an actor.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“I don’t want to sleep alone. Is that okay?”
This was a familiar routine, repeated a couple of times a month. We had it down pat.
“Yeah, that’s okay.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and smoked the tail end of a joint as I watched her undress. Her body still interested me. I guess she knew it because she took her time and occasionally glanced over to make sure I was watching.
“So you still sleep with your watch on,” she said.
“Why would I change?”
“Did I ever tell you it bothered me?”
“About a million times.”
“It always seemed to mean that you weren’t fully committed—a part of your head was somewhere else. You know what I mean?”
She was down to her underwear by now, an image spoiled only by the prehistoric pantyhose women wore in the sixties, which never quite fit and always seemed to be baggy around the crotch.
“Take it off,” she said. “Just this once. For me. Let yourself be completely naked.”
I took the watch off and put it on the night table.
She mimed applause, removed the offending tights, and climbed into bed. I took a couple more drags and climbed in with her. She turned her back.
“It’s been a long day,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said, easing up to her.
“Thanks for being here for me,” she said. “It must be difficult, you knowing I’ve been sleeping with other men.”
“I’ll get used to it,” I told her.
She giggled.
“It probably turns you on.”
“Hey,” I said, “none of my business. We’re both single.”
“Feels like you’re making it your business,” she said.
My erection was pressed up against her ass.
“Trouble is my business,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to think about me fucking other men. It’s only natural.”
This was part of the routine we went through every time she stopped by.
“Sometimes I do,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with Jerry Pedrosian?”
Janice sat up in bed, as if I stuck a needle into her.
“How did you know about that?” she demanded.
I was taken aback by her reaction.
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Because I know I never told you about him,” she said. “That was when we were still together. While you were on that junket to Mexico—something to do with a Poussin ripped off by the Nazis.”
And I had to ask!
The phone woke me at seven thirty. It was Kravitz. He wanted to know if I had made any progress. I gave him a rundown on my previous evening, acknowledging meeting with Andrea, but leaving out most of what she’d told me, and any mention of the gun. I made it sound as much like a bland police report as I could manage.
“Sounds like you found out exactly what I already knew,” he said, hanging up on me.
Janice looked tasty, sprawled out on my bed, half-covered by a sheet, but I dressed and got out of there, bought a New York Times, and ate breakfast in a greasy spoon on 8th Avenue. I learned that American troops had suffered heavy losses during a firefight in Quang Tri Province, the Russians had conducted an underground nuclear test, the Beatles had opened a new Apple boutique somewhere in Blighty, and Bruno the hyperactive short-order cook had had a falling out with his mother-in-law. Business as usual.
I headed east on 14th Street, past the Puerto Rican stores selling transistor radios, Julio Iglesias records, and communion dresses. It was already warming up, and ominous-looking clouds were massing behind me. By the time I reached Union Square, the place was jumping, crowds headed for the subway entrances. The usual group of lushes was parked alongside the Temperance fountain, and a skinny black kid dressed as Mahatma Gandhi harangued commuters with a speech that no one paid any attention to.
I bought a coffee from the Dominican guy at the kiosk on the corner of 16th Street and took it up to my office. I checked the safe. Not that I thought that the gun would have disappeared, but I checked it anyway. Then I checked my answering machine. No new messages. I remembered that Wolfe had written down how to reach Pedrosian’s number. He was listed as Michigan J. Frog. It was a big thing in New York at the time. Artists who fancied they were about to become world famous had themselves listed under fictitious monikers. It was like wearing shades in the hope of passing as a movie star. Andy had started the whole thing. He was listed as Clark Kent. Everyone aped Andy. Pedrosian’s choice was the Tin Pan Alley star of a classic Chuck Jones cartoon.
I grabbed the phone book, looked up Michigan J. Frog, and dialed. Pedrosian had an Ansaphone, too. It broadcast a few bars of “The Michigan Rag” then announced, “You have reached the studio of Michigan J. Frog. Please leave a message after the tone.”
I hung up and tried to think of something clever to do next. That’s when the door was pushed open, and in walked Mrs. Gabriel Kravitz. She wasn’t what I’d pictured, but it had
to be her.
She was still a good-looking woman with an enviable figure, but there wasn’t much left of the former Miss Cuyahoga County. It wasn’t hard to picture her in a one-piece swimsuit, but it was tough to imagine this piece of work as a kid facing a panel of Cleveland car dealers and greasy-haired dance academy impresarios, spouting her piece about the wholesomeness of the American family. As for what her talent was, back in the Truman era, I wouldn’t care to guess. In any case, she had shampooed all trace of the industrial hinterlands out of her Grace Kelly hair and transformed herself into a million-dollar Manhattan matron.
She was done up in a tailored linen safari suit, from the souks of Saks Fifth Avenue. On her head was a safari hat with a floppy brim that shaded her eyes, which were already concealed behind oversize Ray-Bans, ideal for hiding any telltale signs of recent tears. Everything about her appearance signaled concealment, yet at the same time invited you to imagine what was underneath. The outfit verged on the severe, but when she moved, the way the skirt moved led you to believe you would not be disappointed by her legs, or anything adjacent.
Without introducing herself, she sat in the chair across the desk from me, and helped herself to one of my cigarettes.
“I quit last month,” she explained.
Taking her time, she lit the Gauloise, inhaled, and looked around the office.
“I used to work in a place like this,” she told me. “Seventy words per minute on an old Underwood, and my shorthand was not to be believed, darling. Spectacular. Sometimes I wish I was back there.”
She didn’t look or sound like someone who had spent much time behind a desk, unless it was the reception desk at some billion-dollar foundation—one of those volunteer jobs you segue into when you’re the kind of girl who doesn’t want to take a real job away from someone who needs it. Marion Kravitz had totally reinvented herself, down to the Breakfast at Tiffany’s drawl.
“For lunch,” she continued, “we’d go to this place called the Diamond Deli, on Main Street. That was in Akron, Ohio. Nobody in this town realizes that Akron is the real corned beef capital of America. You can have your Lower East Side, darling—there’s nothing there to touch the Diamond Deli. Reubens to die for! And on Saturday nights I’d go to a movie at the Linda with Jimmy Stone—I liked the ones with hardboiled guys like Robert Mitchum and femmes fatales. Did you like femmes fatales, darling?”
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 3