Antenna Syndrome (24 page)

Globik studied my card. “Robert Birch, Building
Inspections Officer.” He fixed me with jet-black eyes squeezed
tightly between puffy eyelids. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Our office has a policy of rotating its officers, a
precaution against developing personal, perhaps unprofessional,
relationships with clients.”

“That’s too bad. Your predecessor and I’d come to an
amicable understanding. Didn’t he share that with you?”

“What sort of understanding?”

“He’d give 24-hour notice of his visits, so I’d have
time to, um, prepare necessary documents. Otherwise, spur of the
moment it was less efficient. I have a business to run and you have
other buildings to inspect, don’t you?”

“What documents?”

“Building permits, maintenance contracts, utility
bills, environmental audits...” He paused as if he’d just thought
of it. “And of course, petty cash accounts.”

“I see.” Business as usual. Throughout the city,
property managers struggled not to be buried like fossils under
layers of government sediment, in the form of laws and by-laws,
statutes, rules and regulations, codes and restrictions. “What’s
your float?”

“Given proper notice, five thousand.”

“And today?”

“Perhaps two thousand.”

“Okay. I’ll need to see your business license and
floor plan, and then conduct a complete walk-about.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Your property’s new to me. I need to familiarize
myself with it.”

Globik scowled but swiveled in his chair to open a
file drawer in the credenza behind him. He placed two folders on
the desk, one containing City permits, the other with plan and
profile views for each floor.

“Do you have these on digital?”

“Your office should have them already.”

“Let’s not assume. I need a copy.”

He tapped his intercom and said something into it.
“My secretary will prepare a digital file for you.” He turned back
to his credenza, fiddled there a moment and slid a small envelope
onto the desk.

I leafed through the floor plans, video running in
my goggles. In case he held out on the digital copies, this was my
backup. Finished, I closed the folders and pushed them back across
the desk. I looked inside the envelope. A wad of bills. I dropped
the envelope into my attaché case.

I was suddenly gripped by an irrational but
overpowering fear. My spidey-sense wasn’t just tingling, but
trembling. The room lighting had changed subtly. On the wall above
Globik’s credenza was a smoked-glass mirror. As the lighting
changed I saw the mirror was etched with an incredibly detailed
design of an insect head with large multi-lens eyes.

I had the sickening sensation I was being watched
through a one-way mirror. Worse, by someone or something so
terrible I barely dared lift my eyes to meet its unseen gaze. I was
so shaken by the intuition of impending attack that the hairs in my
false goatee bristled with alarm.

I tapped the panic button on my tablet. It obliged
with a klaxon sound. I stared at the screen, thrust the tablet into
my attaché case and stood. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’ll come back
another day for my walk-about. I’ve just received a message from
the office. Some sort of emergency at the Leonard Street
sub-station. I’m the nearest officer in the neighborhood. I’ve got
to go immediately.”

“When do you want to schedule your follow-up?”
Globik said, but I was already halfway down the hall.

As I trotted through the reception area I saw a
flash drive on the corner of the secretary’s desk. I grabbed it
without breaking stride. I burst from the clinic and ran to my car.
I heard a garage door rumble as I jumped into the Charger. I gunned
it down the street. In the rearview mirror I saw a dark blue van
with a rooftop bubble pull out into the street but by then I was
rounding the next corner in a squeal of rubber.

Chapter 42

I ran two red lights going up West Street like a
maniac, and made a sliding turn onto Spring. It was a miracle I
didn’t hit anyone, with my eyes on my rearview more than the
street. As I headed back to SoHo, spots jittered across my field of
vision. I was hyper-ventilating. I pulled over beside a park,
fumbled for my vaporizer and sucked back a dozen hits of KavaKat
before returning to normal.

As an exterminator, I’d been in some creepy places.
Once in a sewer, I’d broken my headlamp and a pack of giant rats
had followed me for five blocks until I’d reached my exit point. Or
that time in an abandoned Bowery walk-up when I’d met a python in a
narrow stairwell, and me armed with only a pry bar and a tank of
DDT.

But I’d never come so close to shitting my pants as
in Globik’s office. I was still shaking my head and saying, WTF?
Crazy thing was, I hadn’t actually seen anything. Was it just that
image in the etched mirror that had triggered something in me? Or
the suspicion that Globik’s bodyguard Buzz, who’d literally
disarmed the gunman at the MediaTech Center, had been behind the
mirror?

No way I could have risked sticking around to find
out. Now I couldn’t go back. My nerves wouldn’t take it.

I drove back to Prince Street. The grille was now
up, the Realistik Gallery open for business. I parked in a small
commercial lot on the same block and crossed the street. The
Realistik had a shiny modern look, its entrance and front window
framed in brushed aluminum.

Inside, the well-lit space was filled with
hyper-realistic works of art. No still life here; every piece
depicted a living creature – human, animal, fish, bird, reptile. It
made me nervous, seeing dogs twice my size...

I hadn’t browsed long before a big man in a dark
green suit emerged from an alcove at the rear. He approached me
with the rolling gait of an overfed bear.

“Good day, sir. May I help you?” His dark eyes
scanned my attire. He’d probably like to help me on my way, but he
was cautious. Even millionaires dressed casually these days in
off-the-rack suits and scuffed shoes.

“Perhaps. Are you the owner?”

“Vladimir Rossikoff, at your service.” He tilted his
head a millimeter in lieu of a bow. He had hair on his nose and the
jowls of a grandfather hog. He wore two fistfuls of gold rings and
enough jewels among them to span the rainbow. I added Art Dealer to
the long list of jobs that paid better than mine. But he had
red-rimmed eyes and a nervous tic in his fat mouth that suggested
life wasn’t as smooth as he might wish.

“I’m looking for something out of the ordinary,” I
said, “a little edgier than mainstream realism.”

“How about this Colville?” He directed my attention
to a large elliptical canvas of a butchered moose hanging from barn
rafters.

“Perhaps something less sanguine,” I suggested.

“You can’t match the Magic Realists for brilliance.
Take this one by Parkes.” He indicated a canvas in which a trio of
mermaids frolicked in the surf of a rocky shore.

“Too surreal,” I said. “I want something that
exhibits the artist’s ability to explore the world at an intimate
level. But maybe you don’t have what I’m looking for.”

“May I ask what your budget is?”

“I have a blank space on a wall that needs to be
filled.” I held my arms outstretched. “My budget’s flexible.”

“Come.” Schiller touched my elbow. “I have something
for you.”

“I don’t see it here.” I brushed my sleeve where his
hairy paw had touched it.

“Downstairs,” he said, “I have a few paintings that
may interest you.”

“Why downstairs? Not good enough to hang with the
rest?”

“I just received them from the artist. They’re not
even framed yet.” He plucked my sleeve again.

We descended a stairway at the gallery’s rear to a
large basement room. A bench stood along one wall, with tools of
the picture-framer’s trade – hammer, saw, stapler, paste and wire.
A rack of framing materials stood against one wall. On the opposite
wall, a dozen large canvases leaned together beneath a sheet.
Rossikoff pulled the sheet aside to reveal the first of them.

A metallic black praying mantis clutched the corpus
of a brown headless cousin. From a filament in the background, a
tiny green inchworm formed an inverted question mark.

“Yes,” I said.

“You like it?”

“Very much.” I recognized it from Marielle’s studio.
“How much?”

He quoted me something in six figures.

I whistled. “My budget’s not that flexible.”

“This is a brilliant young artist.”

I peered at the signature. “
Marielle
? Never
heard of her.”

“You will.”

“Got anything with a lower price tag?”

His lip curled in disappointment. But now that he’d
come this far, there was no turning back. He revealed one canvas
after another, seeking my approval and dollars. He had almost a
dozen of Marielle’s paintings.

“Surely there’s one among these you like.”

“This may be it.” I picked up the smallest painting
among them, a close-up of a praying mantis head, and studied it
under the light. The painting was only two feet square.

“I thought you said you wanted something large.”

“I did, but my wife may not appreciate a giant bug
on our bedroom wall. However, this is a talented artist, and this
small piece would be just right for my office.”

We bargained and finally settled on a price in five
figures.

“It’s a sacrifice,” he said, rubbing his jeweled
hands together in consternation, waiting for my wallet to appear.
“How will you pay?”

“If I pay cash, can I dodge the sales tax?”

“Of course.”

“I can give you a deposit now and pay the balance
tomorrow.”

“Is it possible to come back today?”

“No. I have business meetings uptown...” checking my
watch, “...that will occupy me until this evening.”

“As you wish.”

I turned my back on him, took out Globik’s payola
envelope and counted off the money. I stuffed the envelope back in
my jacket and gave Rossikoff the deposit. He counted it and
pocketed it.

“I’ll need a receipt.”

We went back upstairs and he got a receipt book from
his desk. “I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

I gave him one of my alias cards. Robert Krueger.
Consultant, Corporate Governance
. Chicago phone number and
LaSalle Street address.

He wrote me a receipt for the deposit. We shook
hands and he walked me to the door. “See you tomorrow,” he
said.

I headed back to the car, wishing I could have
walked off with physical evidence under my arm. But I’d had the
video recorder running through my synced eyewear all the time we’d
been in the basement workshop. Proof he had all of Marielle’s
stolen paintings.

Near the parking lot where I’d left my car, a
bearded guy lay in a painful-looking yogic posture. Flowers were
strewn all around him. In the direct path of passersby was a
baseball cap with an index card that read
Alms for Nicotine
Nirvana
. I dropped some change as I passed. The yogi didn’t
blink. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a smile on his face.

Chapter 43

Back in the car, I removed my goatee and exchanged
the horn-rims for my iFocals. I put my attaché case in the trunk
and removed the gym bag I’d packed this morning. I used a coffee
shop washroom to change from my suit back into regular clothes.
Time to go to the Village.

In Sheridan Square, the cafés were full of
well-dressed young men drinking coffee, one eye on their smart
phones, another on the pedestrian parade. I saw a young Chinese
dude wearing a dog collar whose leash was held by an older man in a
white Stetson. The older gent wore a belt with leather holsters
carrying two sizes of dildo. It was that kind of neighborhood.

Ron LeVeen’s brother Dale lived on Christopher
Street. As I passed Sly’s, a popular gay bar, bass-heavy hip-hop
throbbed from a doorway. It wasn’t yet noon but inside a bunch of
guys were dancing under dim lights, drinking and laughing as if
they didn’t have a care the city was falling apart all around
them.

The brother lived in a walkup above Sly’s. I climbed
four flights and looked for apartment numbers. Numbers seemed to
have gone out of style. The doors were decorated with art work,
ranging from paint-by-number Beardsley reproductions to blowup
photographs of anonymous genitalia. If Marcel Duchamp were alive
today, he’d cart the whole place off to the Met and exhibit it as
found art.

Dale LeVeen was more conventional. His surname and
the apartment number were etched on a small brass plaque just below
the peephole. I rang his bell. Someone inside called out, “Coming!”
and the door opened the width of a chain latch. A young bearded man
looked at me. “Are you from Mr. London’s office? Didn’t he get my
message last night? There’s been a family crisis, so I can’t finish
the design until tomorrow.”

“May I come in anyway?”

“Might as well. I’ll show you what I’ve done so
far.”

He opened the door to admit me. He had long hair, a
neatly trimmed beard and a silk shirt partially buttoned. It was a
cozy little apartment. The galley kitchen was equipped with
everything, except perhaps the space to flip a pancake. Down the
hall I could see a small bedroom. He beckoned me into the living
room. A sofa and coffee table faced a sound system in a wall of
books. The Moroccan carpet smelled of hashish.

In front of the bay window was a workstation with a
large monitor and all the wireless peripherals. Onscreen was a 3-D
mockup of what looked like a space craft interior. LeVeen expanded
the image.

“I’ll place the control console here, so when
Captain Fallik brings the Plutonian Princess aboard for the sex
scene, the audience will have a clear view of both his zero-gravity
bed and the monitor revealing the approaching Klaxon warship. What
do you think?”