Innocent Monster (8 page)

“Okay, you can call Rusk now. Which way to his office?”

“Walk through the galleries and take the elevator down to the lower level, turn left and you’ll see his office door.”

As I walked across the stark, hardwood floor, Palumbo spoke my name in hushed tones. Made me smile to hear it. It had been thirty years since someone called me Officer Prager. I’d worry about how to explain away my lie when I got to Rusk’s office. For the moment, I was busy admiring the views through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that let ambient natural light flood into the gallery space. The views were nearly as impressive as the Lichtenstein and the Warhol, the Wesselmann and the Rauschenberg I passed on my way to the elevator.

Rusk met me at the elevator door and looked pretty much how I expected him to look. He was small, in his early sixties with delicate features and a ring of neatly groomed gray hair around a bald pate. He wore a blue camel hair blazer—gold buttons et al—with a gold and red family crest embroidered on the pocket. There was a red silk hanky in the pocket that matched his French-cuffed shirt. His tie was a perfectly knotted and textured piece of gold silk. His teeth were white and straight, of course, and the crimson-framed glasses he wore over his blue eyes cost more than the Honda in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell you the cost of the antique Patek Philipe watch he stared at impatiently as he waited to see who would get things going. I guess he got tired of showing me his watch.

“What can I do for you, Officer Prager?”

“This visit isn’t official,” I said, trying to sidestep the lie I’d told upstairs.

He furrowed his brow. “Then I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Sashi Bluntstone.”

“Oh, dear. Has there been some awful news?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Nothing in particular. It is simply that the child has been missing for some time now and I could think of no other reason for a police official to come to me.”

“That’s reasonable,” I said. “Again, Mr. Rusk, my visit isn’t official. I’ve been hired by the Bluntstone family to investigate their daughter’s disappearance, to make sure the police are doing all they can.”

“Investigate? Why on earth would you come see me? You couldn’t possibly think I had anything to do with her disappearance.”

“Well, you are one of Sashi’s most vociferous critics.”

“Vociferous... my, my, no dumb cops on this beat, eh?”

“I also know how to tie my own shoes and everything.”

“Please, Officer Prager, I’ve been rude. Come into my office and let us discuss this.”

Rusk’s office was startling. The back wall was a huge pane of glass not unlike those on the gallery levels upstairs and it looked out onto the Sound and the southern shore of western Connecticut. The furnishings themselves were all very austere, almost industrial, and there was not a stitch of art on the walls or anywhere else in the office. Rusk gestured at a metal chair in front of his desk and when I sat in it, he retreated around the desk and sat in a metal mesh desk chair.

“As you were saying...”

“No, I don’t think you had anything to do with Sashi’s disappearance. If the cops did, they would have been here already.”

“Forgive me, Officer Prager, but I now find myself even more confused by your presence here.”

“First, Mr. Rusk, please call me Moe or Mr. Prager, if that is more comfortable for you. Second thing is that although the case is over three weeks old, I’m new to it and playing catch-up. The police do things their way and I do things my way. Why I’m here is to try and get some understanding of why Sashi’s work and Sashi herself seem to make people like yourself, serious people involved in the art world, so incensed and crazed.”

“That, Mr. Prager, is a very easy question to answer. Art, in this case, painting, is more, much more than what appears on the canvas. Art is also what goes on in the artist’s mind before and during and after putting brush to canvas. Art is a continuum that stretches from conception to reaction and beyond.”

“Okay, let’s say I buy that. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of Sashi’s work,” I said, “and I know this is going to upset you, but it’s pretty good. I’m no art critic and certainly not the curator of a museum, but I know a little bit about art. Her work is undeniably reminiscent of Kandinsky and Pollock.”

Rusk clapped his hands together and laughed. “Ah, Mr. Prager, for an artist to produce work that is reminiscent of her forebears, mustn’t she be aware of those forebears? Jackson Pollock didn’t pull his art out of...”

“His ass?”

“I was thinking thin air, but your phrasing makes the point more emphatically. Pollock understood European Surrealism and had studied Jung in order to gain access to his unconscious processes and to free himself of conventionally constructed art.”

“Okay, then what you’re saying is that he knew what he was doing.”

“Exactly. The very concept of an unschooled prodigy doing abstract expressionism, a style that merged two sophisticated art styles—surrealism and cubism—with automatic process is absurd, simply impossible. Look, Mr. Prager, had Sashi Bluntstone made exquisite realistic paintings beyond her years, maybe she would be taken seriously, but anyone can smear paint on a canvas and say they are aping Pollock... including an ape!”

“Don’t you think her paintings have any merit at all?”

“Yes, I suppose, but not to a serious artist and not in the serious art world. I don’t so much object to the paintings as much as I do to where fools and uneducated critics place them. And in all honesty, Mr. Prager, I am not close to being Sashi Bluntstone’s most vociferous or meanspirited critic. Here...” Rusk tapped something out on the keyboard of his wafer-thin laptop and spun it around so as to face me.

I could scarcely believe what appeared on the screen. It was a rendering of three crosses on a hill under an ominous black sky. There were bloodied and brutalized bodies crucified on two of the crosses. To the far left was a naked man, hands amputated, his torso speared in so many places he looked like a pin cushion. The plaque behind his head read
Kinkade.
On the far right cross was a young girl’s body, her vagina afire, an arrow through her head, and her torso covered in blood splatter à la Pollock. The letters on the plaque behind her head spelled out
Bluntstone.
On the middle cross was the body of a frail young man wearing a thorny crown and the mutilation to his body was meant to replicate the damage done to Christ. His expression was beatific. His plaque read
Martyr.
I’d seen enough and turned the computer back around to Rusk.

“You see my point?” Rusk asked.

“Who is this guy?”

“Nathan Martyr. About ten years ago he was a hot new commodity, but his work quickly fell out of favor and he devolved into a very bitter man. He has a particular distaste for Thomas Kinkade and Sashi Bluntstone. But he’s not alone. There are many such sites.”

“Do you happen to know where I can find Mr. Martyr?”

“I don’t have an address for him, but he used to show at the Brill Gallery on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. They should have an address for him.”

I stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rusk. It’s been enlightening.”

“My pleasure, really,” he said, shaking my hand. “I do hope you find the child. Maybe you can get her away from those exploitive monsters she was born to so she can get a real artist’s education.”

“I’ll settle for finding her alive.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.”

“That’s okay.”

He walked me to the elevator and wished me farewell. Upstairs a few visitors—older women—were roaming about the museum. They were perfectly put together, tanned from weekends in the sun, every stitch of their clothing and every accessory just so. I guessed they were about the same age as my mom when she passed away. Yet my mom had looked so much older. My late friend Israel Roth once said that money was a retreat, not a fortress, and that the rich suffered as much as any of us. Some days that was easier to swallow than others. Today it was going down hard.

Jimmy Palumbo stopped me on the way out and handed me his contact information. He thanked me, but didn’t seem encouraged.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll call.”

“Yeah, no offense, but I heard that before. Last coach I had told me he cut me so another team could pick me up, that a few teams had shown interest in me. He told me not to worry. That I’d get a call from somebody. Yeah, well, I’m still waiting for the call.”

“No sweat. I understand.”

“And I’m sorry for going on about my kids,” he said. “It’s just that I miss ‘em.”

“My daughter didn’t talk to me for a year and it still hasn’t stopped hurting, so no need to apologize.”

I waved the paper at him and waved goodbye. Nothing I had to say was going to make him feel any better. I’d been cut by the NYPD. At least they’d had the good sense not to promise me anything but my pension as they shoved me out the door.

The Brill Gallery was less impressive than a brown paper bag and the art inside less interesting. Basically, it was a rectangle of four white walls, a white ceiling with tiny halogen spotlights, a blond hardwood floor, and a few white pedestals for sculpture. There was a small white table in one corner for brochures and a white desk in the opposite corner. A curveless woman of thirty with heavy-framed black glasses, cropped black hair, and lip, nose, and eyebrow piercings sat at the desk. The best and most colorful art in the place were the tattoos that covered her exposed flesh. Unfortunately, she was as interested in me as I was in the art. She paid far more mind to whatever was flashing on the laptop screen.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes,” she said, not gazing up.

“Are you the owner of the gallery?”

Still not looking up. “Do I look like the owner?”

“I don’t know. What does the owner look like?”

She raised her eyes, unamused. “Not like me.”

“Can I speak to the owner?”

“If you have her cell phone number and know what time it is in Bali, I imagine you could.”

“So you’re it?”

“Tag, what fun,” she said, returning her gaze to the screen.

I snapped the computer closed without removing any of her fingertips.

“Fuck! What did you do that for?”

“To get your attention. That’s what this is for too.” I showed her my badge. I figured I should put it to good use, having aired it out once already today.

“Are you like the art police?”

“If I was, this place would be a crime scene. This stuff is crap.”

She smiled. It was actually a pretty and welcoming smile. “I know. It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

“Let’s start over.”

“I’d like that,” she said. “My name’s Lenya.”

“Moe.”

“What can I do for you, Moe?”

“I need an address for Nathan Martyr.”

“Why, are you actually going to arrest him for this stuff?”

“This is
his
work?”

“In all its vapid glory.”

“As my mom used to say,
feh!”

Double
feh.
It’s putrid.”

“Then why does the owner bother?” I asked.

Lenya leaned forward conspiratorially. “The truth?”

“Nothing but.”

“I think she’s hoping he drops dead. Then his new crap becomes valuable crap and his old crap becomes extremely valuable crap.”

“Why?”

“Because if he’s dead, he won’t be able to produce any more crap. They’ll do retrospectives and the critics will reevaluate him and he’ll become in death what he wasn’t in life. Nothing like a little death to raise your profile in the art world.”

“But what makes the gallery owner so hopeful about Martyr kicking?”

“His habit.”

“Heroin?”

“Yep.”

“Bad?”

“He’s the man on the monkey’s back, not the other way around.” She frowned. “Damn. I don’t suppose I should have told that to a cop.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m not interested. Do you have an address for him?”

She hesitated. I didn’t jump on her. If she needed a push, I knew how I’d push, but bullying wasn’t the way to go.

“Swear to me it’s not about the drugs,” she said, flicking a Rolodex card with her fingers.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Here.”

I wrote the salient information down and thanked her. She smiled that smile at me again, only this time her intentions were a little more obvious.

“You’ve got a beautiful smile, but I’m old enough to be your father.”

“I love my father.”

“He’s a lucky man. Bye, Lenya.”

Given what Rusk and Lenya told me, I half expected Nathan Martyr to be living down a rat hole and sleeping on a bed of used needles. Some rat hole! The address Lenya gave me turned out to be a converted factory building in DUMBO—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—not more than a ten-minute walk from Bordeaux In Brooklyn. The bricks had been repointed and the terra cotta work around the huge arched windows had been beautifully restored. Anyone living above the fifth floor would have spectacular views in any direction.

The doorman was an ex-cop. I didn’t recognize him by face, but by attitude. He gave me the you’re-not-getting-past-me stare when I came through the wrought iron and glass entrance. His “Can I help you, chief?” sounded more like a threat than a question. I guess if I lived in this joint and shelled out what the residents paid for the pleasure, I’d want this guy as my gatekeeper too. But from where I stood, he was just an annoyance, an obstacle to get around that wasn’t going to make it easy for me.