Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  The sale dragged on; people started looking out the windows. "The next lots," droned the auctioneer, "numbers C-forty-seven through C-seventy-four, are by the contemporary American Augie Silver."

  There was a stirring at the mention of the name, but it was perverse. Heads turned toward Peter Brandenburg; heads turned toward Claire Steiger. As during a streak of lousy weather, people perked up not in hopes of improvement but with a morbid curiosity as to how bad things could get.

  "What am I bid," the auctioneer continued, "for lot C-forty-seven, an early work, a lovely seascape, eighteen by twenty-four inches? The medium is oils, the estimated value is twenty thousand dollars."

  "Three dollars," someone said. "Same as an issue of Manhattan magazine."

  An edgy titter went through the room; the auctioneer squelched it with the gavel. "Serious bids only, please. Do I hear an opening of five thousand dollars for the Augie Silver seascape?"

  Silence spread like a fissure in the earth. Ray Yates and Clay Phipps, sitting side by side, looked between their feet and saw their hopes of a windfall slipping down into some black and bottomless chasm.

  Finally a plump hand went up. It belonged to Avi Klein. He had a wry look on his face, as if it were intrinsically droll to buy something, anything, for a mere five thousand dollars. No one topped his paltry bid.

  The next two works, whose estimates had been thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars, were sold for seven and nine respectively, to another longtime customer of Claire Steiger's, another high roller turned bargain hunter.

  Had Charles Effingham still been seated in the auction room, his keen nose would have by now detected a smell of something funky, something feral. It was not the reek of acquisition, however, but the meaner stink of scandal, the nasty excitement of being witness to a disaster, seeing the undoing of a career in art. A fourth Augie Silver was gaveled at less than a quarter of its estimate; a fifth picture did no better. Moment by moment, bid by grudging bid, Augie was being pulled down from the ranks of painters who mattered, was being flayed, shrunk, expunged from fashion, chipped away at like a toppled monument.

  Claire Steiger mustered her composure but could not keep her lower lip from quivering.

  Then an unexpected thing occurred. As the auction moved on to the later, larger, presumably more significant Augie Silvers, Peter Brandenburg began to bid. With a gesture so refined as to be nearly invisible, he raised his neat hand inside his immaculate linen sleeve. A spotter zeroed in on his impassive face; after that, nothing more ardent than a slightly lifted eyebrow was required to confirm his willingness to top. Almost before his fellow bidders realized it, he'd bought Jimmy Gibbs's painting for sixteen thousand dollars and one of Ray Yates's for twenty-two.

  A quick-fermenting exhilaration mingled with confusion filtered through the room. It was not unheard of for a critic to buy pictures, but it was rare. Critics had power, not money, and while Sotheby's lived on prestige it did not accept prestige as payment. Then too there was the ethics of the thing; it had been, after all, Brandenburg's article that had cast such a pall on the proceedings. But now that the famous critic was bidding, people thought back on what they'd read, and reconsidered. What had he really said that was so terrible, so damaging? He'd said that Augie Silver, an artist who was always growing, changing, was embarked upon a new phase of his work, a phase that promised to be extremely bold, ambitious, risky, and productive. Clearly, Brandenburg was gambling that this new phase would carry the artist to the next level of fame and reputation, the level at which everything the painter had ever touched would be assured of holding value.

  While other bidders were reasoning this out, Peter Brandenburg bought Ray Yates's other canvas for twenty-eight thousand dollars, and two of Clay Phipps's pictures, one for thirty-seven thousand, the other for forty-four. The prices were still well below pre-auction estimates, but the gap was narrowing, the numbers were becoming respectable.

  And now the bidding livened. The paintings that were left were the prizes: the artist's personal favorites that he'd given to his closest friends, the canvases of special merit that Claire Steiger had been stockpiling. Avi Klein jumped back into the fray; other top-tier collectors joined him. Brandenburg copped two more pictures, but they cost him—the six-figure plateau loomed very close.

  It was reached in a phone bid from Japan, and once that magic divider had been crossed, the floodgates opened and it became a different kind of auction. Gone was any thought of bargain seeking; archaic was any notion of buying pictures for less than estimated price. Bidding went from thousand-dollar increments, to five, to ten, to twenty-five. Buyers sweated in their gorgeous suits; the profitable stink of art lust wafted forth. Spotters danced out of their chairs, the auctioneer cranked up the volume, put some syncopated jazz into his patter. A canvas went to Brandenburg for a hundred and twenty-five; the next was bought by Klein for one fifty; the following picture was scarfed up by the absent Japanese for an even two hundred thousand. Around this time Peter Brandenburg dropped out, and the big boys took it as a token of their prowess that they'd subdued him. By some mysterious buoyancy, the price fluttered higher till it transcended the niggardly custom of being reckoned in thousands and entered the quarter-million range. People leaned forward in their chairs, fanned themselves with catalogues, and barely breathed as the bidding on the final Silver canvas climbed ever upward and ended at last at the lofty level of three seventy-five.

  When it was all over, the auctioneer pounded his gavel and pounded some more, but the buzz in the room only mounted, a kind of rarefied bedlam had set in, it was a frenzied letting go poised tipsily between catharsis and exhaustion. Everyone, it seemed, was winded, wilted, fidgety—everyone but Peter Brandenburg, whose linen suit was crisp, whose forehead was unlined and dry. He'd bought fourteen paintings in all and spent just slightly over a million dollars that no one knew he had. He'd led the bidding for so long that no one really noticed that all but his last two purchases were bargains. He'd jump-started the auction, then he'd gotten out. He was very pleased. A whole new scale of value had been established for Augie Silvers, and Brandenburg and his partner now had the biggest holdings. The imminent leap in prices would allow them to live very comfortably indeed.

  The auctioneer continued to call for quiet; the audience continued to ignore him. Then quite suddenly the door to the left of the auction lectern opened and Charles Effingham, his white hair resplendent, stepped spryly through it. He raised both hands like a politician at a rally to ask for order. The buzz thinned to a hiss of flattered surprise—to be addressed by the chairman of Sotheby's was a rare event—then it gradually subsided. Effingham pushed aside the auctioneer's microphone. With his leonine growl of a voice and his precise clipped consonants he didn't need it.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "those of you who deal with us regularly are aware of Sotheby's deep regard for tradition. But we believe, as well, in being responsive to extraordinary circumstances. And in light of what I must say is the exceptional interest occasioned by these Augie Silver paintings, I would like now to do something most unusual: I would like to offer for sale a work not listed in the catalogue—a work, indeed, of which I myself was not aware until a few short moments ago. The work is unframed and off its stretcher. It in no way conforms to our general standards of presentation, yet I am confident you will agree it is in every way a remarkable picture. The house has placed on it a reserve price of one million dollars."

  The chairman nodded toward the open door. Two assistants came through lugging chairs, which they placed some six feet apart near the lectern. Two more employees followed, carrying between them a large furled canvas. They stepped up onto the chairs, signaled with their eyes, and let the picture unfold. The heavy scroll dropped open with a muffled snap.

  A huge parrot in biting green looked out red-eyed and all-seeing from a prodigious wanton jungle. The edges of the canvas were singed and frayed, here and there the foliage and plumage were smudged with soot and dulled with ash;
yet, like the flaws and cracks of ancient statues, these imperfections somehow increased the work's unsettling power, bore witness to the ravages and dangers of existence and asserted the reckless and undaunted determination to endure.

  No one had ever seen a picture quite like this, and there was a kind of nervousness, shame almost, in the rumbling inchoate murmur that greeted it. The painting somehow showed too much, cut too deep, was at once absurd and wise, sacred and wildly uncouth. People wanted to tear their eyes away and could not; the parrot's seared and searing gaze locked on like a strangling hand and would not let go. The murmur mounted, took on something of the character of keening. Then a voice, calm and certain, cut through it.

  "It's a fake."

  All eyes turned toward the speaker, who appeared just the slightest bit surprised that he had spoken. With the room's attention pulled away, no one at first noticed the two people who now slipped through the door.

  "Why a fake, Peter?" said Augie Silver. His scorched red skin made his dark blue eyes look purple, he was wearing big clothes borrowed from Clay Phipps and they added pathos to his haggard frailty. "A fake because the real one was destroyed in a fire early this morning?"

  "Fire?" said Brandenburg. "I know nothing about a fire."

  "Yes you do," said Nina Silver. Her face was taut and scarlet, her legs were blistered beneath the man's shirt she was wearing as a dress. She looked up at the parrot's red and flashing eyes; Brandenburg's gaze ineluctably followed hers. "Who set it, Peter?" she went on. "Did you hire someone?"

  The room was silent, it was as if the air had changed its character and would no longer carry sound. Time too became something other than itself, it congealed like stanched blood and ceased to flow. Eyes flicked back and forth from Brandenburg to Augie, from Nina to the painting. And in that long suspended moment a sick certainty was growing like a cancer in Claire Steiger. Secretly she glanced to her left and to her right; there were strangers there. There were strangers everywhere, and she was sitting here without her husband. Her hand rose slowly to her mouth as if to hold her insides in. She spoke softly and she looked in no particular direction. "Kip," she said. "It was Kip, wasn't it?"

  Peter Brandenburg stood up slowly. His eyes were riveted straight ahead, still locked in a futile stare-down with the painted parrot. He didn't raise his voice.

  "He said everything was taken care of. He said everything was just as it should be."

  The security guards moved unhurriedly toward the critic, and the critic made no move to elude them. But he didn't like to be touched, he pulled his elbows back and made it clear he would go without resisting.

  The auctioneer pounded the gavel and pounded some more, but it was a long time before order was restored.

  47

  "It was Nina who figured it out," said Augie Silver.

  They were sitting at Clay Phipps's—their home while their own house was being rebuilt. It was a steamy evening at the beginning of July, the air smelled of closed, defeated flowers, and the ceiling fans turned lazily, heavily, seemed at every moment to be winding down. Joe Mulvane, his blue shirt splotched with sweat, leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. Claire Steiger sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her; her dandelion hair was round, her face was round, her curled body was relaxed in comfy circles. She was vacationing at the Flagler House, recovering from many disappointments, and yet she seemed serene. Clay Phipps had had his living room painted; gone were the lewd, accusing rectangles where Augie's pictures had been hung; gone with them seemed to be Phipps's penchant for self-blame, the nagging self-disenchantment that led him to do things that were blameworthy.

  "Really it was Reuben who figured it out," Nina said. "The way he seemed to know it would come down to that painting."

  Augie nodded. There was wonder in his face like the wonder of seeing the full moon lift red and mottled from the Florida Straits. "Yes, that was remarkable," he said. "But the real breakthrough—that was yours."

  Joe Mulvane leaned forward a notch farther. "Excuse me," he said, "but I guess the detective's always the last to know: What was the breakthrough?"

  Nina paused, savored the moment. She'd gotten younger in the last couple of weeks. Her skin had healed, her husband and her life were safe; she'd been swimming every day and she was full of joy. "You know how it is," she said, "when you lock yourself into a certain way of looking at a problem? The way, after a while, you're stuck with that approach, whether it gets you anywhere or not? Well, we'd been assuming all along that whoever wanted to hurt Augie was trying to drive the prices up, so they could sell. Then, the night of the fire, the timing of Brandenburg's article, it suddenly dawned on me that the plan was to drive the prices down, so they could buy."

  "Then sell," put in Clay Phipps.

  "At a vast profit," Augie added. "And very soon, so Kip could meet his July first obligations. The choreography had to be quite precise. When Kip set the fire, he timed it so the auction would happen before the news of my death had reached New York. Peter buys low, then I'm dead, and boom, prices go crazy. They turn the pictures over almost immediately."

  Mulvane considered. "But at the beginning, with the poison tart—"

  "At that point," Augie said, "things were simpler. Kip was working alone then. His plan A was to kill me far enough ahead of the auction so he'd make his money on the pictures Claire had."

  The dealer shook her head in self-reproach. "I encouraged him. I'm the one who planted the idea that, handled right, the auction could bring in enough—"

  Augie reached over and patted her knee. "Claire, Claire, you're my agent, don't ever blame yourself for jacking up my price. . . . But anyway, when the tart killed Fred instead of me, Kip started getting worried that he was running out of time, that he needed a different strategy. That's when he persuaded Brandenburg to come aboard."

  Claire Steiger frowned. "Another thing I did," she said. "Threw the two of them together."

  The others let that pass.

  "The turquoise ragtop," Nina said. "Kip drove it, but it was rented with Brandenburg's I.D. Brandenburg didn't own paintings, we had no reason to put him on the list of names to check."

  "And the picture on the license?" Mulvane said.

  "When someone looks as rich as Kip, clerks don't check things very closely," said Claire Steiger. "Besides, there's a more than passing resemblance between them—that same kind of constipated preppy handsomeness. Probably that was part of the attraction."

  "Attraction?" said Clay Phipps. "Don't tell me they were an item."

  "Oh, God no," said the agent. "Nothing so straightforward as that. But I think there's no question that Kip had him in some crazy kind of thrall. Maybe it was in some way sexual. Probably it was. But who knows what that means between a straight, stiff, married man and a cold-fish eunuch who can't even bear to have a friend pat him on the wrist?"

  There was a pause. The ceiling fan turned slowly, heavy air seemed to spiral down from it like something solid. Outside, sagging fronds scratched sleepily against tin roofs.

  "I can see it," Claire went on. "Long close talks in the locker room after a good hard game of squash. Kip starts talking about business, about deals—he makes it sound extremely exciting and adventurous, amoral, heroic. I can see Peter being totally mesmerized, aroused in his way, at the idea of dealing with deeds rather than words for a change."

  "Not to mention," Augie said, "having Kip bankroll him with borrowed funds so he could finally make some money to go with his clout."

  "Yes," said Claire. "I imagine the thrill wears off having one without the other. And if you think about it, Peter and Kip made a formidable team: a critic with an incredible ability to manipulate the market, a wheeler-dealer with an incredible ability to manipulate the critic."

  "So say they'd pulled it off," said Joe Mulvane. "What then?"

  Claire shrugged. "Peter—who knows? Maybe he'd have run off to Tahiti, the south of France—"

  "Maybe he thought," Clay Phipps put
in, "that Kip would run off with him."

  "He might have thought that," said the agent. "Kip wouldn't be above leading him to think it. But I can't imagine it would've happened. They would've had to hide the partnership, of course. And if Kip had raised enough to buy his way out of bankruptcy, he probably would have had some new stationery printed up and gone back into business."

  The mention of bankruptcy made Claire think about her beach house. Her eyes went vague and she stopped talking. But the sadness seemed to pass right through her, she held it no tighter than the sun holds clouds. She'd put herself through this a thousand times and had finally realized, what the hell, it was a wonderful house but it was just a house. She began chatting again as though someone had asked her a question, though no one had.

  "And me, I'm starting over. Fresh. The big apartment—gone. The Sagaponack house—gone. I'm moving the gallery to a smaller space, I'm getting rid of all the debt that asshole got me into—"

  "But you know, Claire," said Clay Phipps, "some of that debt went for very worthy causes."

  "Like?"

  The host decided not to mention how much of it had gone toward his own quite affluent retirement. "Like fifty grand of it," he said, "saved Ray Yates's life."

  "He paid off Ponte?" asked Joe Mulvane.

  Phipps nodded. "After commissions, he came away with forty-five thousand. He paid back the forty he owed—and I think he's already thrown away the extra five. Some people just don't learn."

  "Yeah," said Joe Mulvane, "but other people do. Jimmy Gibbs, for one. Maybe I'm a jerk for thinking this, but I think he's really got a shot."

  "The deal's done?" Augie asked. "He bought the boat?"

  "Made the down payment," said the cop. "Now all he's gotta do is find customers and stay on the wagon."