Authors: Michael Marshall
“This Clark guy lives in the back end of Williamsburg. Works there, at least.”
“Am I allowed to come?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m hoping you will.”
I’d been back and forth on this, in fact. I did want Kristina to come. Partly because she had skills when it came to assessing people—far better than I, and drawing on deeper wells—and also because it would make a nicer trip of it. Assuming the guy didn’t become violent when confronted. In that case I’d prefer it to be just me and him.
“Well, I can’t,” she said. “The heater guys are coming, finally.” She looked cranky, but she often does, and I knew I’d said the right thing.
“So?”
“So be careful. And I want to know what happens. And not just the nonexecutive summary this time.”
I don’t enjoy the subway. I know I should, that it’s part of the fabric and texture of the city, and come, let us behold urban kind in its glorious variety, but I prefer to get that kind of experience aboveground, where you can walk away from it when you want. On the L line urban kind is like a too-tight, unwashed coat, and by the time I emerged in Brooklyn I was low on temper and pretty convinced that this was my second dumb idea of the day.
I’d traced Clark via Facebook. I’m not on it, but the restaurant is, courtesy of some nephew who thought it might shift more pizza. You can go like the Adriatico online if you want. I cannot imagine how that would help anything. It sure as hell will not get you a free pizza.
There were plenty of people listed under some variation of “Thomas Clark” but only one who lived in the area Catherine had suggested and who showed other likely characteristics. When they’d dated, Clark had been a decorative fine artist with a high opinion of himself. It was evident from his page that he now co-ran a small gallery instead. The gallery had a website with its street address all over it. As a job of hiding, it sucked.
Assuming he had reason to hide, of course.
The gallery was at the far end of the hipster pocket and I arrived just after two o’clock. The entire width of the store front was glass, a single large, square painting on an easel in windows on either side of a central door. I have no idea what they were paintings of. Apparently that’s not the point. In the back of the white-walled space beyond stood a minimalist white desk. A man sat behind it, slender in build. There was no long black coat with a high collar hanging on the wall. Life doesn’t hand things up that neatly tied.
When I pushed the door open, a discreet bell chimed three times. The man looked up and smiled generically. He had longish but tidy dark hair and a pair of neat round spectacles. “Good afternoon.”
I looked around the walls. Further large, square paintings—or canvases with paint on them, at any rate.
“Can I help you, or are we just browsing?”
I kept silent long enough for him to register something wasn’t right with this encounter. Then I turned to look at him. “Are you Thomas Clark?”
“Yes.”
“Catherine says hi.”
He looked confused. “I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t think the name sounds familiar …”
“Back then you were going to make it as an artist yourself. Fancy handmade pots, she said.”
He blinked as the penny dropped. “You mean … Catherine
Warren
?”
“I do.”
“But … I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Really?”
“Ask her.”
“I talked with Catherine three hours ago. She gave me your name.”
“Why? Who
are
you?”
“My name is John Henderson. Someone’s been following Catherine. At night. She thinks it could be you.”
“
What
? Why would I do that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “And your question doesn’t answer mine.”
His eyes flicked to the side. A smart-looking middle-aged couple were drifting to a halt outside. I could not see the painting that had caught their attention, only their eyes and a desire to acquire.
I walked over and flipped the open sign to closed. The guy outside stared at me. I stared back. They went away.
Clark meanwhile remained at his desk. “I haven’t seen Catherine since I moved out of Manhattan,” he said. “We split up and I called her a couple times afterward, I’ll admit, but—”
“Why did you call her? Were you uncertain why she was ending the relationship?”
He laughed. “Uncertain? Oh no. At first it was all ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ but it became clear she was leaving me for this guy she’d met. The marvelous Mark.”
That struck an off note, but I kept drilling. “You remember his name?”
“Of course I do. I was
in love with her
. Then one night over the phone it’s bam—she’s with this other guy instead. My services are no longer required; could I please let myself out of her life.”
“Why did you try to contact her afterward?”
“She’d always said we’d be friends forever. It had been this big thing of hers. She didn’t mean it, though. Once you stop being useful to Catherine you’re cut out of the script for good. I called a few times. I sent her a letter … and two cards. I sent …”
He trailed off, memory dulling his face. “I sent her a bunch of irises. They were her favorite. That was something I’d known about her back when we’d been friends, before we started dating. It was supposed to signal, you know, that we could go back to that, if she wanted. There was no response. I gave up.”
“When did you move out of Manhattan?”
“Eight years ago.”
“Do you go back?”
“Of course. I used to have an agent there, but he let me go about the same time I realized people were using the pots I’d slaved long hours over … to keep flowers in. I visit an exhibition once in a while, see friends, and, well, yes—obviously I’m there sometimes. But my real life is here now.”
“Where were you last night?”
He gestured around. “Hanging these. If you need witnesses you’ll have to find someone who happened to walk by. It’s a busy street at night and I’m sure there were some, but I don’t know their names.”
“I don’t need witnesses. I’m not a cop.”
He cocked his head. “Then what right do you have to be asking all this?”
“None. I apologize if I’ve been intrusive.”
“So what happened? Did Catherine dump Mark? Is she with you now?”
“No. They’re married. They have two kids.”
“Huh. Guess at least I can tell myself that I lost to the winning team.”
“If that helps. You got any message for her?”
“Seriously?”
“If you do, I’ll pass it on.”
He thought about it. “Sure,” he said, looking down at the papers on this desk. “You can tell her to go fuck herself.”
It was twenty-four hours before Golzen had a chance to speak to Reinhart. The man’s movements were wholly unpredictable, and his presence could not be guaranteed even at the club he owned on Orchard, in the ratty, crumbling backstreets of the Lower East Side, south of the Village and east of anywhere good, above which Golzen and others laid their heads at night in exchange for services rendered.
He slipped in through the street door. It was ajar, as often in the mornings, in a vain attempt to clear the stale, secondhand air inside, a stealthy, underhand odor that seeped up from the crumbling building’s foundation. The area beyond was empty, cavernous, and dark, a wide central space with black-painted walls shading off into low-ceilinged, shadowy little corridors and booths where the small hours would find the bar’s racier patrons taking drugs and advantage of one another.
Golzen walked across this, past the bar along the right-hand wall, and into the office in the back. Reinhart was sitting behind his desk. The space was otherwise empty. No filing cabinets, no computer, no pictures on the wall. No second chair, even. Just a boxy old 1970s-style phone, positioned to line up neatly with the corners of the desk. As always, Reinhart was wearing a coat, as if he’d recently arrived or would be leaving almost immediately. He was watching the door as Golzen entered, as though waiting for him.
He didn’t wait for Golzen to speak. If you needed that kind of fluff, you did business with someone else—the problem being, so far as Golzen knew (and his contacts were indeed good, and situated far and wide), there was no one else working this game in the entire city. It was Reinhart or nobody.
“Did you talk to him?”
“I tried.”
“The fuck is up with that guy?”
Golzen considered his response. Idealists who cleave to different ideals seldom mix well. His view was that Maj was unpredictable, full of himself, and basically an asshole. Moreover, a dangerously volatile asshole. He’d expressed this opinion more than once. Reinhart evidently saw something else in the guy, however, and wouldn’t let the matter drop. “He learned at Lonely Clive’s knee.”
Reinhart grunted, irritable and dismissive combined. Golzen knew the man got what he’d meant—some of it, at least. Reinhart had taken the trouble to understand the world inhabited by the people he now did business with. He knew Golzen meant that when Maj arrived in the city he’d been taken under the wing of a member of the old guard—the ones sometimes called the Gathered, before the term became loosely applied to all of them. Originally it had referred to a cabal of friends who’d started introducing structures and systems into their lives. The Jesuits declared that if you gave them a boy, they’d give you the man. It had been the same with the Gathered, or the few that were left. The Scattered would be a better name now. They’d done good in the way back, for sure, dominating the scene for fifty years or more—but had been fading in authority even before Reinhart arrived. It had happened much faster since, and good riddance to them. They’d never listened to Golzen’s ideas either.
“Keep on it,” Reinhart said. His hair was cropped short and the single bulb above caught the top of his hard, square head. “Get your buddies to stick to him, too. Like glue. Any sign of an angle, tell them to work it. Hard.”
“Okay.”
Reinhart smiled. It was pitch perfect as a coordinated movement of muscles, but once you got to know the guy, his ability to do this only made him even more unnerving. “Don’t worry—you’ll always be my number one. I’d simply prefer to have that guy inside the tent pissing out, instead of the other way around. Get it?”
Golzen shrugged. Talk of Maj bored him. “Sure.”
“Good. Because we’re getting close, my friend.”
No longer remotely bored, Golzen looked up. “For real?”
“The time for change is upon us.”
Golzen felt his stomach flip. “How soon?”
Reinhart closed his eyes, as if listening to something beyond the hearing of normal men, perhaps simply the dark workings of his own mind. “I don’t know. But
soon
. Maybe even within the week.”
He opened his eyes. “Put out a broadcast to the chosen. Encourage readiness.”
“Saying … ?”
“I’ll leave that to you. Just hold the date. There
is
no date yet, but … hold it anyway.”
Golzen grinned. “You got it.”
“And bring me fresh blood. I’m going to lose some of my best stealers on this. We need replacements in training before I can open the door to Perfect and let us walk the road to our brave new world.”
“I’m on it.”
“Not while you’re standing here.”
Golzen walked quickly out through the bar and onto the street. He already had ideas for friends to turn, clueless wanderers to bring into the fold: people who could learn to do what he and the others had been doing for Reinhart, while the chosen left on a mission Golzen had been preparing (and advocating and prophesying) for years. He had no problem with performing this task for Reinhart. Relished the prospect, in fact. He’d tell his buddies to sniff harder around Maj, too, if that’s what Reinhart wanted. Why not? It wouldn’t be much longer that he had to work with the man.
Golzen was built to hold impulses in check, most of the time. He’d been very patient, working every opportunity to bind the other eleven of the chosen to him through the treats and advantages he’d gained for them. The relationship between him and Reinhart had been very useful in this, symbiotic.
But such relationships end.
As he entered Roast Me, David confirmed—with a sinking feeling—that Talia was working the counter. He considered turning around, but not seriously.
“Hey, Norman,” she hollered, as she cranked through the orders of those ahead of him in line.
He sighed. Yesterday it had been “Ernest.” Couple days before that, “F. Scott.” The previous week they’d been more contemporary—Richard, Don, and Jonathan (two or three guys she could have been shooting for with that last, the handle of choice for today’s nascent Great American Novelist). She evidently believed she’d found a rich seam of comedy and was determined to mine it out.
And that was okay. He’d always liked Talia, a big, cheerful woman in her fifties who cussed freely and had been holding down the Gaggia in the town’s only coffee shop since it opened. Very occasionally they let Dylan have a turn for light relief, but basically if you wanted a latte in Rockbridge, Talia was the go-to gal. She was fiercely resistant to the term “barista” and happy to remain—as she was prone to tell their rare, easily intimidated tourists—just “the fat chick who makes the fucking coffee.”
When David had been working in an office up the street he’d often passed the time of day with Talia, content that in Rockbridge everyone knew everybody else along with a fair portion of their business. He was aware that Talia lived with nine cats in a trailer on the other side of town near the creek, was long-term single but had once been the lover of a man called Ed who’d died under tragic circumstances, and that she possessed a strong creative urge, manifest in prolific journaling and collage-making and a vast novel of epic fantasy upon which she’d been working for at least five years.
And therein lay the problem.
While he’d been holding down a day job David had been happy to shoot the breeze with Talia. They’d been hobbyists, engaged in the same struggle. Since he got his deal, things had changed. Talia seemed to believe David had breached a citadel—like one of the characters in her forever-in-progress novel, perhaps, a book David really,
really
did not want to read—therein defeating the dragon who had guarded the How To Get Published Spell. Instead of something they could enjoy gossiping about, it had become a matter on which Talia wanted
clues
. She wanted to be sold the magic potion that put you onto the bestseller lists forever and stopped people from seeing you as just that big, noisy woman who had way too many cats.