Authors: John Case
To his dismay, he saw that the bags were lying in a couple of inches of water. Fortunately, neither was torn. He dragged the bags across the lawn to the Bomber, opened the trunk, and tossed them inside. Then he drove back to Adams-Morgan, accompanied by a faint whiff of rotting fruit.
In the morning, he picked up a jar of Vicks VapoRub at the local CVS, then crossed the street to Martin’s Hardware. There he bought a couple of plastic tarps, a package of rubber gloves, and a “state-of-the-art” air freshener called Ozium. Finally, he carried his purchases the two blocks to where the Bomber was parked and drove to his studio.
This was on the third floor of what had once been a department store at the corner of Florida and Tenth Street, Northeast. Looted and firebombed in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the building had become a moldering pile of brick, festooned with graffiti. A fringe of trash and broken glass glittered against the old store’s foundation, which was itself a backdrop for countless petty drug dealers and dozing drunks.
As mean as the building was, the studio itself was filled with light and remarkably spacious. Not to mention dirt cheap. Though the first floor had been bricked up for twenty years, each of the other tiers was girded round by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out across the ghetto toward the suburbs.
Danny’s “atelier” (as Caleigh jokingly referred to it) was in the building’s northwest corner, a rectangular space with ten-foot ceilings and a row of floor-to-ceiling windows along both of its exterior walls.
The northwest corner of the room served as Danny’s “office,” with an old steel desk facing a threadbare couch and a worn leather chair. Nearby, a beat-up TV rested on a recycled filing cabinet, while a few feet away an electric kettle stood on a counter next to a small sink.
It was the industrial equivalent of the “clean, well-lighted place” that Hemingway had once described, though it was anything but “crisp.” The hardwood floors were spattered with paint, as if Jackson Pollock had suffered a seizure with a brush in each of his hands. In one corner of the room, a welding rig stood before a tangled mass of rebar whose sculptural intent Danny could no longer recall (if, indeed, he ever really knew). Across the room, a soapstone bust of J. Edgar Hoover, an artifact of Danny’s college days, gazed fixedly at the world beyond the windows. Elsewhere, half a dozen canvases leaned against the wall beside the door, which looked as if the DEA had kicked it in—and not just once. Most of the canvases had been painted years before when Danny was just out of college and living on Mallorca with a beautiful (if schizy) Dutch mime.
As he entered the studio with Terio’s garbage and the things he’d bought at Martin’s, it occurred to Danny that he really ought to make an inventory of the pieces that he had and those that he’d loaned to friends. Then he’d know where he stood when it came time to organize the Neon show.
Dropping the garbage bags on the floor, he snapped on the TV (the radio was on the fritz) and glanced around the room. What was there? What did he actually have that he could show? Some wire sculptures, a couple of collages, a nascent “installation” whose focal point was a mordant white outline on the floor. At first glance, it seemed to be the taped silhouette of a homicide victim. But closer inspection revealed something else or, rather, two things: a bulge in the shoulders that might have been wings or the beginning of wings, and a carefully painted hand at the end of an outflung arm. The effect of the wings and the hand was ambiguous and disquieting, precisely because one couldn’t be sure if they were coming or going. Were they remains—or portents? Was the figure fallen—or emerging? Even Danny didn’t know.
It had taken him most of a week to get the silhouette (and the hand) just right, and now he wanted to buy one of those turning red lights that police cars have. With the lights flickering over the outline and Handel’s
Messiah
in the background, the installation would be unsettling. And maybe more.
Then there was
Babel On II
.
Standing in a pool of sunlight in the center of the room, Danny’s most recent work was eerie and yet undeniably beautiful—a see-through city with a mysterious hologram at its heart. In daylight, the floating image looked even more like the apparition he’d intended: washed-out and faded, the hologram was hallucinatory, startling.
He threw open the windows, stretched the tarps out on the floor, and applied a dab of Vicks VapoRub to each nostril, hoping it would mask the sour smell emanating from the bags of garbage. That done, he dumped one of the sacks onto the tarp and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves.
The trash was anything but fresh, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It looked as if Terio had been a vegetarian. At least there wasn’t any meat in the bags, so there weren’t any maggots, either. But there
were
fruit flies, a cloud of them that rose up, dancing in the air above the tarp.
Using the handle of a broom, he stirred the trash around, separating it so he could see if there was any medical waste. For all Danny knew, Terio could have been a junkie, a diabetic, or a hemophiliac. But there were no needles or bandages or anything else with blood. What there was, was a lot of packaging: an empty box of Cheerios, an egg carton, some yogurt containers, and a wad of corn husks, black with mildew. There were coffee grounds and Melitta filters, some crushed Coca-Cola cans, and half a dozen Dasani water bottles. A crumpled shoe box that had once held a pair of Nike Predators (size 10
1
⁄
2
)—and lots of old newspapers.
Not a recycler,
Danny thought.
More substantively, he found some notes with handwriting on them, Post-its with telephone numbers, reminders and short lists
(butter leeks yogurt bread)
, envelopes and bills, junk mail, catalogs, and credit card receipts. Danny set the paperwork aside to be examined later—the priority being to get the trash back into the bags and onto the street before the smell could take up residence.
Meanwhile, he noticed that the television was tuned to Caleigh country, MSNBC, where a couple of analysts were yakking about “basis points” and an upcoming meeting of the Fed. For Caleigh, MSNBC was more entertaining than a U2 concert. In the apartment, it seemed like the channel was always on, with his girlfriend mesmerized by the ebb and flow of valuations, the hubris of the dot-coms, the moving-average of the Dow.
The first time he’d realized that her interest in finance was as much an avocation as a job, he’d reacted with suspicion—as if he’d learned a dark secret. It seemed to Danny that Caleigh’s interest must be symptomatic of some deeper flaw—specifically, greed—and that this flaw did not bode well for a future with an artist. But, very quickly, he’d come to understand that while her fascination with finance had a lot to do with money, it had nothing to do with consumption. She was not a shopper. For Caleigh, the equity markets were a kind of track meet in which she was called upon to perform feats of insight and analysis. The money itself was just a measure of performance, the financial equivalent of a stopwatch.
Danny understood all this, but he didn’t share her enthusiasm—not for the market and not for the channels that covered it. To him, MSNBC was a kind of visual Novacain, with talking heads droning on and on above an inscrutable scroll of red and green symbols. He would have changed the channel, but his hands were filthy. At least it was company of sorts, and it had the advantage of being easy to ignore.
Soon he was finished with the first bag, his “finds” pushed to one side of the tarp. Rebagging the rest of the trash, he pulled the red drawstring tight and set that bag aside. Then he dumped the second bag onto the tarp and, crouching, began to sort through the mess, glancing up from time to time at the TV.
The numbers on the tube were mostly green—which was good, because it meant that Caleigh would come home in a good mood. It occurred to him that it might be fun to create something involving Wall Street. Maybe he could put together an installation using a ticker of some kind. Get it to undulate, rather than scroll. Or not just undulate. Why not put it on the forehead of a guy in a pinstriped suit? And not just any guy—the Man in a Bowler-Hat, of Magritte’s famous painting.
Or maybe not. It was kind of literal.
Before long, he was almost done with the second bag of trash and idly wondering about the scroll. Would he have to get permission from Dow Jones to use it? Or could he just videotape it, and then play with it—
on his new video-editing suite.
Not that he had one. Not yet. So far he’d racked up fourteen hours on Belzer’s payroll—which was fourteen hundred bucks. That was a lot of money in a very short time, but it was still just a drop in the bucket. He needed twenty grand—fifteen, if he could get it wholesale.
The idea gave him pause—literally. There was no need to rush through what he was doing. In fact, why not take his time? Be thorough. With a sigh, he looked up at the TV and saw that one of the network’s correspondents was doing a stand-up outside a
Blade Runner
–like fortress.
What is that place?
Danny wondered as the correspondent told how Silicon Valley denizens were shocked in the wake of a CTO’s murder.
Danny didn’t know, or even care, what a “CTO” was, but the story piqued his interest because murder wasn’t the kind of story that you saw on MSNBC.
The correspondent was standing next to a sign that read
VSS,
hair flying, squinting into the sun. “—in the foothills, and I have to say that people here are really unnerved, and not just because the company is known to be seeking investment and this is the kind of thing that tends to make lenders skittish. According to police, Mr. Patel was found early this morning in an extremely remote area of the Mojave Desert, an area so out-of-the-way that it is rarely visited, even by campers and hikers. Authorities consider it something of a miracle that the victim—who was tied to a Joshua tree with fiber-optic wire and apparently tortured—was discovered at all, let alone so quickly.”
Patel?
The camera shifted to the studio, where an attractive Asian woman asked, “What about the company where Mr. Patel worked? Have they issued a statement?”
“Not yet, Pam.”
Danny found himself gaping at the screen, a loopy half grin on his lips.
No way! It’s a different guy—gotta be!
Still staring at the tube, Danny watched as a middle-aged man in a dark suit emerged from the building—only to be buttonholed by the correspondent. The man, with a froth of red hair and a skittery look in his eyes, obviously wanted to bolt—but the camera held him like a deer in headlights.
“Did you know the victim?”
There must be a zillion Patels,
Danny told himself.
Bob, Ravi, Omar—
“Everyone knew Jason.” Whoa!
Jason!
“We’re not that big a firm. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“He was the chief technology officer at VSS, isn’t that right?” the correspondent asked.
“Yes,” the man replied, eyes swinging left and right, as if he was looking for the exits.
“Can you tell us what he was working on?”
“No.” And with that, the interviewee strode out of the frame.
Fuckin’ hell,
Danny thought.
Does Belzer know about this?
Maybe he should call him. Or maybe not. The likelihood of multiple Jason Patels in California seemed small but not impossible. Before he called Belzer with the news (if it was news), he should find out if the dead man’s telephone number was the same one that Chris Terio had called.
Not that Danny doubted for a second that it
was
the same guy.
It had to be.
Two people, crazy-dead. One tortured, the other entombed. Maybe the phone calls were a coincidence, but Danny didn’t think so. No matter what anyone said, “a cigar” was almost never just a cigar.
But first things first.
Turning away from the TV, he got back to work on the trash, retrieving a schedule for George Mason’s soccer team, a take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant, and appeals from Greenpeace and the Paralyzed Veterans Association. Finally, he stirred the broom handle through the mess one last time, then swept it into a Hefty bag and tied it shut.
The tarp was slick with vegetative slime. He thought about cleaning it but decided it would be more discreet to get rid of it in the Dumpster. So he jammed the tarp and the plastic gloves into a third garbage bag and carried the three of them down the fire stairs, into the basement, and outside.
Returning, he sniffed the air, and retrieved the can of Ozium. Waving it as if it were a conductor’s wand, he sat down on the floor and began to sort through the bits of paper that he’d collected.
For the most part, they weren’t of much interest. A couple of offers for credit cards, some familiar catalogs, and perforated receipts for payments that Terio had made to Virginia Power, AOL, Sprint, and DirecTV. A reminder from the Fairfax County Library that
Engines of Creation
was overdue.
Then he saw it. A FedEx receipt, damp from the garbage and dated July 19. This was the same day that Terio had made his telephone calls to Jason Patel and the guy in Turkey and the same date mentioned in the
Washington Post
story—the one on the Home Depot receipt for the do-it-yourself tomb. Danny sat up straight and studied the receipt:
Recipient: Piero Inzaghi, S.J.
The address was blurry with dampness, the ink feathering out, but he brought it into focus with a squint:
Via della Scrofa
N. 42A
Roma, Italia
This guy, Inzaghi, must be a priest—a Jesuit, in fact, judging by the initials after his name. Maybe an old friend, Danny thought, someone from Terio’s own days as a priest. Danny’s eyes drifted to the space beneath the recipient’s address, where Customs information was recorded:
Total Packages: 1
Total Weight: 7.8 lbs
Commodity Description: IBM Thinkpad (used)
Total Value for Customs: $900