Dead Sleep (5 page)

“You, if you're Christopher Wingate.”

He beckons me forward with his hand, then turns and starts back up the stairs. I follow.

“You always wear sunglasses in the evening?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Something wrong with that?”

“It's just so Julia Roberts.”

“That'll be the one thing we have in common, then.”

Wingate chuckles. He's barefoot, and his pale dirty heels seem to float up the steps. He passes the second floor, which houses sculpture, and continues up to the third. This is clearly where he lives. It has a Danish feel, all spare lines and Scandinavian wood, and it smells of fresh coffee. Standing in the middle of the room is a large, unsealed wooden crate with packing material spilling out of its open end. There's a claw hammer lying atop the crate, a scattering of nails around it. Wingate brushes a proprietary hand against the wood as he passes the crate, which comes to his shoulder.

“What's in the box?”

“A painting. Please, sit down.”

I gesture at the crate. “You work up here? This looks like your apartment.”

“It's a special painting. It may be the last time I see it in person. I want to enjoy it while I can. Would you like an espresso? Cappuccino? I was about to have one.”

“Cappuccino.”

“Good.” He walks to a blue enameled machine on a counter behind him and starts to fill a small mug. While his back is to me, I move to the open crate. There's a heavy gold frame inside. Peeking between the box and the frame, I can't see much, but it's enough: the upper torso and head of a nude woman, her eyes open and fixed in a strangely peaceful stare. Wingate is dispensing the cup as I back away.

“So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asks the wall.

“I've heard good things about you. They say you're a very selective seller.”

“I don't sell to fools.” He sprays out some steamed milk with a flourish. “Unless they know they're fools. That's different. If someone comes to me and says, ‘My friend, I know nothing about art, but I wish to begin collecting. Would you advise me?' This person I will help.” Another hissing jet of steamed milk. “But these pretentious WASP millionaires make me puke. They took art criticism at Yale, or their wife majored in Renaissance masters at Vassar. They know so much, what do they need me for? For cachet, yes? So fuck them. My cachet is not for sale.”

“Not to them, anyway.”

He turns with a grin and offers me a steaming cup. “I love your accent. You're from South Carolina?”

“Not even close,” I reply, stepping forward to take the mug.

“But the South. Where?”

“The Magnolia State.”

He looks perplexed. “Louisiana?”

“That's the Sportsman's Paradise. I'm from the home of William Faulkner and Elvis Presley.”

“Georgia?”

I'm definitely in New York.
“Mississippi, Mr. Wingate.”

“Learn something every day, right? Call me Christopher, okay?”

“Okay.” After Ron Epstein's characterization of Wingate, I half expected the man to make some crack about Mississippi being the home of the lynching. “Call me Jordan.”

“I'm a huge fan of your work,” he says with apparent sincerity. “You have a pitiless eye.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Of course. You don't shy away from horror. Or absurdity. But there's compassion there, too. That's why people connect with your work. I think there would be quite a demand, if you were inclined to market it as fine art. Not much photography really qualifies, but yours . . . no doubt about it.”

“You're not living up to your advance billing. I heard you were a son of a bitch.”

He grins again and sips his cappuccino. The pure blackness of his eyes is startling. “I am, to most people. But with artists I like, I'm a shameless flatterer.”

I want to ask him about the painting in the crate, but something tells me to wait. “It's been said that a photograph can be journalism or art, but not both.”

“Such crap. The gifted always break the rules. Look at Martin Parr's book. He turned photojournalism upside down with
The Last Resort.
Look at Nachtwey's stuff. That's art, no question. You're every bit as good. Better in some ways.”

Now I know he's bullshitting me. James Nachtwey is the preeminent war photographer at Magnum; he's won the Capa five times. “Such as?”

“
Commercial
ways.” A glint of mischief in the black eyes. “You're a star, Jordan.”

“Am I?”

“People look at your photos—stark, terrible, unflinching—and they think, ‘A woman was standing here looking at this, recording it. With a woman's sensitivity. A woman has stood this, so I must stand this.' It floors them. And it changes their perspective. That's what art does.”

I've heard all this before, and while largely true, it bugs me. It smacks of
Not bad, for a girl.

“And then there's you,” Wingate goes on. “Look at you. Hardly any makeup, and still beautiful at—what?—forty?”

“Forty.”

“You're marketable. If you'll suffer through a few interviews and an opening, I can make you a star. An icon for women.”

“You said I'm already a star.”

He barely skips a beat. “In your field, sure. But what's that? I'm talking pop culture. Look at Eve Arnold.
You
know who she is. But if I walk downstairs and ask a hundred people on the street, not one will know. Dickey Chappelle wanted to be a household name. That was her dream. She schlepped all over the world, from Iwo Jima to Saigon, but she never became what she most wanted to be—a star.”

“I haven't schlepped all over the world to become a star, whatever that means.”

A feral gleam in the eyes betrays a new level of interest. “No, I believe that. So, why? Why do you traipse from pillar to post, cataloguing atrocities that would shock Goya?”

“You haven't earned the answer to that question.”

He claps his hands together. “But I already know it! It's your father, isn't it? Dear old daddy. Jonathan Glass, the legend of Vietnam. The shooter's shooter.”

“Maybe you are a son of a bitch after all.”

The smile widens. “I can't help it, as the scorpion said to the frog. It's my nature.”

Some of the biggest bastards I ever met were charismatic, and Wingate is no exception. My gaze settles on the crate between us.

“And the way he died,” Wingate exults, “shooting a Pulitzer-winning roll of film. That's
mythic.
Then his daughter follows in his footsteps? It's a legitimate phenomenon, no hype required. We could do a double show. Talk about free publicity. Who controls the rights to your father's images?”

“I don't believe my father died in Cambodia,” I say in a flat voice.

Wingate looks as though I just told him I don't believe Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. “You don't?”

“No.”

“Okay . . . so . . . that's even better. We could—”

“And I'm not interested in exploiting his work for money.”

He shakes his head, his hands imploring. “You're looking at it all wrong—”

“What painting is so wonderful that you have to keep it this close to you?” I interrupt, pointing at the packing crate with my free hand.

Momentarily off balance, he answers without thinking. “It's a painting by an anonymous artist. His work fascinates me.”

“You like looking at pictures of dead women?”

Wingate freezes, his eyes locked onto mine.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

He gives a philosophical shrug. “I'm not here to answer your questions. But I'll answer that one. No one knows if the subjects are dead or not.”

“Do you know the identity of the artist?”

Wingate sips his cappuccino, then sets his mug on the counter behind him. I slip my hand into my pocket to feel the cold, reassuring metal of the Mace can.

“Are you asking as a journalist?” he asks. “Or as a collector?”

“All I can afford to collect is experiences and passport stamps. I figured you could tell that with one look at my shoes.”

He shrugs again. Shrugs are a major part of this guy's vocabulary. “One never knows who has money these days.”

“I want to meet the artist.”

“Impossible.”

“May I see the painting?”

He purses his lips. “I don't see why not, since you already have.” He walks around to the open side of the crate, braces his feet against the bottom, and reaches in for the frame. “Could you give me a hand?”

I hesitate, thinking about the claw hammer, but he doesn't look like he wants to bludgeon me to death. Having been in situations where people wanted to do just that, I trust my instincts more than some people might.

“Hold the other side while I pull,” he says.

I set my cappuccino on the floor, then take hold of the other side of the crate while he slides out a padded metal frame that holds the gilt frame inside it.

“There,” he says. “You can see it now.”

I'm torn between wanting to step around the crate and wanting to stay right where I am. But I have to look. I might recognize one of the victims who was taken before Jane.

The instant I see the woman's face, I know she's a stranger to me. But I could easily have known her. She looks like ten thousand women in New Orleans, a mixture of French blood with some fraction of African, resulting in a degree of natural beauty rarely seen elsewhere in America. But this woman is not in her natural state. Her skin should be café au lait; here it's the color of bone china. And her eyes are fully open and fixed. Of course, the eyes in any painting are fixed; it's the talent of the artist that brings life to them. But in these eyes there is no life. Not even a hint of it.

“Sleeping Woman Number Twenty,”
says Wingate.

“Do you like it better than the paintings downstairs?”

Only now do I see the rest of the painting. The artist has posed his subject against a wall, knees drawn up to her chest as though she's sitting. But she is not sitting. She is merely leaning there, her head lolling on her marbled shoulder, while around her swirls a storm of color. Brightly printed curtains, a blue carpet, a shaft of light from an unseen window. Even the wall she leans on is the product of thousands of tiny strokes of different colors. Only the woman is presented with startling realism. She could have been cut from a Rembrandt and set in this whirlwind of color.

“I don't
like
it. But I feel . . . I feel whoever painted it is very talented.”

“Enormously.” Genuine excitement lights Wingate's black eyes. “He's capturing something that no one else working today is even close to. All the arrogant kids that come in here, trying to be edgy, painting with blood and making sculpture with gun parts . . . they're a fucking joke.
This
is the edge. You're looking over it right now.”

“Is he an important artist?”

“We won't know that for fifty years.”

“What do you call this style?”

Wingate sighs thoughtfully. “Hard to say. He's not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is
dead.
Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?”

“The what?”

“Nabis. It means ‘prophets.' Bonnard, Denis, Vuil lard?”

“What I know about art wouldn't fill a postcard.”

“Don't blame yourself. That's the American educational system. They simply don't teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university.”

“I didn't go to college.”

“How refreshing. And why would you? American institutions worship technology. Technology and money.”

“Are you American?”

A bemused smile. “What do you think?”

“I can't tell. Where are you from?”

“I usually lie when someone asks that question. I don't want to insult your intelligence, so we'll skip the biography.”

“Hiding a dark secret?”

“A little mystery keeps me interesting. Collectors like to buy from interesting dealers. People think I'm a big bad wolf. They think I have mob connections, criminal clients all over.”

“Do you?”

“I'm a businessman. But doing business in New York, that kind of reputation doesn't hurt.”

“Do you have prints of other Sleeping Women I can see?”

“There are no prints. I guarantee that to the purchaser.”

“What about photographs? You must have photos.”

He shakes his head. “No photos. No copies of any kind.”

“Why?”

“Rarity is the rarest commodity.”

“How long have you had this one?”

Wingate looks down at the canvas, then at me from the corner of his eye. “Not long.”

“How long will you have it?”

“It ships tomorrow. I have a standing bid from Takagi on anything by this artist. One point five million pounds. But I have other plans for this one.”

He takes hold of the metal frame and motions for me to brace the crate while he pushes the painting back inside. To keep him talking, I help.

“For a series of about eight paintings,” Wingate says, “he could have been one of the Nabis. But he changed again. The women became more and more real, their bodies less alive, their surroundings more so. Now he paints like one of the old masters. His technique is unbelievable.”