“Do you really not know if they're alive or dead?”
“Give me a break,” he grunts, straining to apply adequate force without damaging the frame. “They're models. If some horny Japanese wants to think they're dead and pay millions for them, that's great. I'm not complaining.”
“Do you really believe that?”
He doesn't look at me. “What I believe doesn't matter. What matters is what I know for sure, which is nothing.”
If Wingate doesn't know the women are real, he's about to find out. As he straightens up and wipes his brow, I turn squarely to him and take off my sunglasses.
“What do you think now?”
His facial muscles hardly move, but he's freaked, all right. There's a lot more white showing in his eyes now. “I think maybe you're running some kind of scam on me.”
“Why?”
“Because I sold a picture of you. You're one of them. One of the Sleeping Women.”
He must not have heard about what happened in Hong Kong. Could the curator there have been afraid to risk losing his exhibit?
“No,” I say softly. “That was my sister.”
“But the face . . . it was the same.”
“We're twins. Identical twins.”
He shakes his head in amazement.
“You understand now?”
“I think you know more than I do about all this. Is your sister okay?”
I can't tell if he's sincere or not. “I don't know. But if I had to guess, I'd say no. She disappeared thirteen months ago. When did you sell the painting of her?”
“Maybe a year ago.”
“To a Japanese industrialist?”
“Sure. Takagi. He outbid everybody.”
“There were other bidders for that particular painting?”
“Sure. Always. But I'm not about to give you their names.”
“Look, I want you to understand something. I don't give a damn about the police or the law. All I care about is my sister. Anything you know that can help me find her, I'll pay for.”
“I don't know anything. Your sister's been gone a year, and you think she's still alive?”
“No. I think she's dead. I think all the women in these paintings are dead. And so do you. But I can't move on with my life until I
know.
I've got to find out what happened to my sister. I owe her that.”
Wingate looks at the crate. “Hey, I can sympathize. But I can't help you, okay? I really don't know anything.”
“How is that possible? You're the exclusive dealer for this artist.”
“Sure. But I've never met the guy.”
“But you know he's a man?”
“I'm not positive, to tell you the truth. I've never seen him. Everything goes through the mail. Notes left in the gallery, money in train station lockers, like that.”
“I don't see a woman painting these pictures. Do you?”
Wingate cocks one eyebrow. “I've met some pretty strange women in this town. I could tell you some stories, man. You wouldn't believe what I've seen.”
“You get the paintings through the mail?”
“Sometimes. Other times they're left downstairs, in the gallery. It's like spy novelsâwhat do they call that? A blind drop?”
“What legitimate reason could there be for that kind of arrangement?”
“Well, I thought it might be the Helga syndrome.”
“The what?”
“The Helga syndrome. You know Andrew Wyeth, surely?”
“Of course.”
“While everyone thought all he could do was rural American realism, Wyeth was secretly painting this woman from a neighboring farm. In the nude. Helga. Wyeth kept the paintings secret, and they were only revealed years later. The first Sleeping Woman I got was simply left here. It wasn't one of the early ones. It was from his Nabi period. As soon as I saw it, I recognized the talent. I thought it might be by an established artist, one who didn't want it known that he was experiment ing in that way. Not until it was successful, at least.”
“How do you pay him? You can't leave millions in train station lockers. Do you wire the money to a bank account somewhere?”
A languid expression comes over Wingate's features. “Look, I sympathize with you. But I don't see how this part of my business is your business, okay? If what you say is true, the police will be asking me all this soon enough. Maybe you'd better talk to them. And I better talk to my lawyer.”
“Forget I asked that, okay? I'm not trying to hurt you. All I care about is my sister. All these women disappeared from New Orleans. Not one has been found, alive or dead. Now suddenly I discover these paintings in Hong Kong. Everyone assumes the women are dead. But what if they're not? I
have
to find the man who painted these pictures.”
He shrugs. “Like I said, we'll just have to wait for the police to sort it out.”
A buzz of alarm begins in the back of my brain. Christopher Wingate does not look like a man who would welcome the attention of police. Yet he is stalling me by claiming he wants to wait until they become involved. It's time to get out of here.
“Who knows about all this?” he asks suddenly. “Who else have you told?”
I'm wishing my hand was in my pocket, wrapped around the Mace can, but he's watching me closely, and the hammer is within his reach. “A few people.”
“Such as?”
“The FBI.”
Wingate bites his bottom lip like a man weighing options. Then a half-smile appears. “Is that supposed to scare me?”
He picks up the claw hammer, and I jump back. He laughs at my skittishness, then grabs a handful of nails, puts a few in his mouth, and begins hammering the side panel back onto the crate, like a man taking maximum precautions to protect his treasure.
“Every cloud has a silver lining, right?” The nails between his lips make him answer out of one side of his mouth. “The FBI starts investigating these paintings in a murder case, they become worldwide news. Like the guy in Spain who murdered women and posed them like Salvador Dalà paintings. That means money, lady.”
“You
are
a bastard, aren't you?”
“It's not illegal, is it? Yes, I'm going to make a
lot
more money on this painting than I thought. Maybe double the bid.”
“What's your commission?” I ask, stepping out of range of the hammer and sliding my hand into my pocket.
“That's my business.”
“What's a standard commission?”
“Fifty percent.”
“So this one painting could land you a million dollars.”
“You're quick at math. You should work for me.”
The crate is nearly sealed. When he's finished, he'll tell me to leave, then get on the phone and start promoting his newly appreciated asset.
“Why are you selling these paintings in Asia rather than America? Were you trying to delay the connection to the missing women?”
He laughs again. “It just happened that way. A Frenchman from the Cayman Islands bought the first five, but I found out he'd spent most of his life in Vietnam. Then a Japanese collector stepped in. A Malaysian. Also a Chinese. There's something in these images that appeals to the Eastern sensibility.”
“And it's not very subtle, is it? Dead naked white women?”
Wingate turns to me long enough to wrinkle his lips. “That's crude, and it's an oversimplification.
“Where is the painting in the crate going?”
“An auction house in Tokyo.”
“Why go to that trouble, Christopher? Why not auction them here in New York? At Sotheby's or wherever?”
Pure smugness now. “It's like Brian Epstein with the Beatles. You're number one in England, but at some point you have to take them to America. Maybe the time has come.”
Wingate's arrogance finally triggers something deep within me, a well of outrage I try to keep capped, but which sometimes explodes despite my best efforts or interests.
“I was lying about the FBI,” I say in a cold voice. “I haven't told them about the paintings yet. I wanted to talk to you first. But since you're being such a prick, and you haven't told me anything helpful, I
am
going to tell them. Do you know what will happen then? This canvas you're drooling over will become evidence in a serial murder case, and it'll be confiscated. And you won't make jack
shit
off it, because it won't be sellable. Not for a very long time, Christopher. It's like assets being stuck in probate, only worse.”
Wingate straightens up with the hammer and turns to face me. He still has a couple of nails in his mouth; I'd like to shove them down his throat.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“I want a name. I want to know who paints these pictures.”
He hefts the hammer and drops its head into the palm of his other hand with a slap. “If you haven't told the FBI yet, you're not in a very good position to make that kind of demand.”
“One phone call.”
Now he smiles. “A phone call requires access to a phone. Do you think you can get to that one?”
He points the hammer at a cordless phone on the counter behind him. I could probably Mace him and get to it, but that's not really the point. The point is that he's willing to hurt meâmaybe to kill meâto protect his little art monopoly. Which means he probably knows a lot more than he's saying about the origin of the Sleeping Women.
“Well?” he says, almost playfully.
I back toward the iron staircase, finding the spray nozzle with my finger as I go.
“Where are you going, Jordan?” He takes three quick steps toward me, the hammer held waist high. As he does, a new scenario hits me with chilling force. What if the painter isn't the killer at all? What if Wingate mas terminded the whole thing to earn millions in commissions? What if
he
kills the women and merely commissions the paintings from some starving artist? His dark eyes flash as he moves forward, and the violence in them unnerves me.
In one movement I whip out the Mace can and blast his face from six feet, the powerful stream filling his eyes, nose, and mouth with enough chemical irritant to set his mucous membranes on fire. He screams like a child, drops the hammer, and starts clawing his eyes. I almost want to steer him to the sink, so pitiful are his cries, but I'm not that crazy. As I whirl toward the stairs, my heart beating wildly, a giant hand swats me back into the room and a fusillade of distant cannon hammers my eardrums.
When I open my eyes, I see gray smoke and a screaming man. Wingate is shrieking so loudly that I can't think. You don't hear men scream like that except in war zones, when they're lying on the ground holding their guts or genitals in a bowl some medic gave them. Now Wingate is running around the room like a blind rat in a sinking ship; he might just go out a window. I scrabble to my knees and crawl toward the staircase, but the smoke only gets thicker. The lower floors of the gallery are on fire.
“Is there a fire escape?”
I shout, but he doesn't hear me. He's still trying to claw his eyes out.
To my left I see a faint blue glow, a streetlight. That means a window. I crawl quickly to it and raise my head above the sill, hoping for a fire escape. I find a thirty-foot drop instead. Crabbing back toward the stairs, I stop halfway and wait for Wingate to rush by. A couple of seconds later he does, and I tackle him.
“SHUT UP!” I shout. “IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP, YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!”
“My eyes!”
he wails.
“I'm blind!”
“YOU'RE NOT BLIND! I MACED YOU! STAY HERE!”
Standing erect in the thickening smoke, I rush to the sink and fill a coffee decanter with water. Then I stagger back to him and flush out his eyes. He screams some more, but the water seems to do him some good.
“More,”
he coughs.
“No time. We have to get out. Where's the fire escape?”
“Bed . . . bedroom.”
“Where is it?”
“Baâback wall . . . door.”
“Get up!”
He doesn't move until I yank his arm hard enough to tear a ligament. Then he rolls over and starts crawling beside me. As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire's voice. I've heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There's a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it.
I go through the bedroom door first. The smoke here is not as bad. There's only one window. As I crawl toward it, Wingate grabs my ankle.
“Wait!” he rasps. “The painting!”
“Screw the painting!”
“I can't leave it! My sprinklers aren't working!”
The pressure of his hand on my ankle is gone. When I turn back, I see no sign of him. The fool is willing to die for money. I've seen people die for worse reasons, but not many. I stand in the door and try to see through the smoke, but it's useless.
“Forget the goddamn painting!”
I shout into the gray wall.
“Help me!” he calls back. “I can't move the crate alone!”
“Leave it!”
No reply. After a few seconds, I hear something whacking the crate. Probably the hammer. Then a creaking sound like tearing wood.
“It's stuck!”
he yells. Then a series of racking coughs cuts through the roar of the advancing fire.
“I need a knife! I can cut the canvas loose!”
I don't much care if Wingate wants to commit suicide, but it suddenly strikes me that the painting in that frame is worth more than money. Women's lives may depend on it. Dropping to my knees, I take a deep breath and crawl toward the coughing.