Scavenger Reef (18 page)

"You did," she said. She struggled to smile
and struggled to move forward without letting Augie see that
anything was wrong.

"You're very pale," he said to her. "Do you
feel all right?"

"Hm?" she said. She glanced quickly at
Reuben and he understood he should not speak. "Just feeling a
little peaked."

Augie took her hand. "Upset about Fred."

It was not a question and Nina didn't have
to answer. Instead, she took Reuben's hand with her free one. She
felt she owed him that, and more, for the secret and grotesque
insult of suspecting him.

The young man put the razor down and
solemnly beamed at Nina's touch. Augie smiled softly. It seemed to
him that the three of them were sharing a moment of mourning for
the fallen parrot, and to complete the circle he took Reuben's
other hand. They were silent for a while as the sun beat down.
Doves cooed and blue butterflies flew past, and by the linking of
their fingers a pact was formed that was no less sacred for the
fact that each of them had a different notion of what the moment
was about.

In the conference room at Sotheby's,
everything had a name.

The chairs were not just chairs, they were
Barcelona chairs. The lamps were Corbusier, the long blond tapered
table was Eero Saarinen. The overhead lights were the same that
Mies designed for the Seagram Building, and coffee was poured from
a Bauhaus pot represented in the permanent collection of the Museum
of Modern Art.

None of this was affectation. It was
business. In the world of antiques and collectibles, provenance was
all. Who designed it? What was the vintage? Had the creator had the
grace and the savvy to die and thereby join the Pantheon of
bankable reputations? The auction houses had a clear mission to
enhance the wealthy public's concern, not to say obsession, with
questions such as these. It was all done to enlarge appreciation of
the finer things.

Funny thing about the finer things, though:
Their value could change dramatically while they themselves became
neither finer nor less fine. And this was precisely the phenomenon
being discussed in the Sotheby's conference room on the morning of
the sixth of June.

Campbell Epstein, head of the Painting
Department, flicked the white cuffs of his blue-striped shirt.
"We're thrilled, of course, that the artist is alive," he said.
"Delighted." He said this in the direction of Claire Steiger, as if
he was paying her a personal compliment. But Epstein didn't look
delighted. Nerves had put a yellowish tinge in his slightly hollow
cheeks, crinkles gathered between his eyes from the tension that
fanned in a scallop pattern across his forehead. "But it does put a
radically different complexion on the auction."

"I should think," muttered Charles
Effingham, the chairman of the board. Effingham hated meetings. He
hated coming into the office at all. He was sixty-four years old,
unabashedly a figurehead, and absolutely perfect in that role.
Upper-crust British, with a shock of white hair generally described
as leonine and an American wife typically characterized as
incredibly rich, he served his shareholders best at charity balls,
golf tournaments, regattas. Absently, he now riffled through the
glossy four-color catalogue that had already been printed at vast
expense for the Solstice Show. He found the pages devoted to the
works of Augie Silver. Next to each illustration was listed the
painting's size, approximate date of execution, medium, and
Sotheby's most expert guess as to the value. He read the numbers,
then stared at Campbell Epstein over the tops of his elegant
half-glasses. "Rather Utopian, these estimates," he said.

The head of Paintings swallowed so that the
knot of his yellow tie bobbed upward above the gold collar pin then
quickly subsided like a dying erection. "Sir, may I be candid?"

Effingham gave forth a soft harrumph. Among
his favorite peeves were these spasms of veracity that sometimes
overwhelmed executives at meetings. What did they accomplish except
to clinch the case that they were talking hogwash the rest of the
time?

"The painting market is in a doldrum,"
Epstein went on. "That's common knowledge. The Silver estimates are
optimistic, yes. But our hope was that record-breaking prices for
this one artist would buoy the entire show, would spawn a sort of
chain reaction—"

The chairman cut him off. "There'll be a
chain reaction, all right. When the actual bids fall egregiously
short on the Silvers, a chain-reactive pall will descend. There'll
be the sad sound of closing wallets. Paddles will come to rest on
well-upholstered laps. The bottom feeders will be most
grateful."

The conference room fell silent save for the
subtly maddening hum of the overhead fluorescents. Shoes slid
softly over the Bokhara rug, someone rattled a Rosenthal cup back
into its saucer. Claire Steiger felt that the moment had come to go
on the offensive. "Am I the only one here," she said, "who believes
the Augie Silver canvases will hold their value?"

She panned her soft brown eyes around the
table, and for a moment none of the half-dozen men seated there
took up the challenge. Finally, Campbell Epstein said, "Claire,
your faith in your client is touching. But the estimates were based
on the assumption—"

'That you had a hot dead painter on your
hands," Claire Steiger said.

Epstein's tie did its little dance, he
glanced nervously at his boss. Effingham looked interested for the
first time all morning.

"Well," the dealer resumed, "I'm arguing
that you now have something better. A miracle man. The publicity
will be incredible. And on top of the reviews we already have? The
Brandenburg alone—"

"Rather embarrassing for Peter," came a
nasal voice from the far end of the table. It belonged to Theo
Stanakos, the director of public relations. Where other people had
a brain, Stanakos had a switchboard, a tracking station for gossip
in and gossip out, a radar screen on which were etched the
trajectories of news, opinions, careers as they took flight, arced,
and fizzled.

"I don't think I follow you," Claire Steiger
said. "Are you suggesting his review was not sincere?"

"I'm saying it was too sincere," Stanakos
said. "A great deal too sincere. So unlike Peter to get swept up in
the emotion of the moment. Or any emotion. He got choked up at the
thought of writing a eulogy, I suppose. But now—it seems so
excessive. Gushy. Smarmy. Don't you agree?"

"No, I don't agree. I think Peter
Brandenburg got it right, and it makes no difference whatsoever if
it was a eulogy or a midlife appraisal. What he said would have
been said ten years ago if Augie Silver was more ambitious, if he
pushed—"

"Claire, Theo," Campbell Epstein
interrupted, "I think we're getting off the point."

"We are
not
getting off the point," Claire
Steiger shot right back. "The point is that Augie's price will hold
because his reputation is made, it's assured. The
momentum—"

"A living artist can always muck it up,"
Charles Effingham put in. He spoke softly but there was something
incisive about the Oxford accent, it cut right through the flabbier
consonants of the other speakers. "Every collector is aware of
that. This year's genius is next year's buffoon. Look at Schnabel.
You can't sell him and you can't even have him on your wall without
looking like an idiot. It's a nuisance."

"But an artist only mucks it up by
continuing to paint," Claire Steiger argued. "Augie Silver hasn't
worked in years—"

"He could always start again," said
Effingham. "He won't," said the agent, with greater certainty than
in fact she felt. "I know him. He's—"

"What does he think about the prices?" put
in Theo Stanakos.

Damn him, Claire thought. Damn his bitchily
sharp way of cutting through to what someone doesn't want to talk
about. "I don't know," she admitted. "I haven't spoken to him."

"Odd," said the chairman. "He's ill. He's
weak. His wife is hiding him—" "Then presumably," Effingham went
on, "he doesn't even know his works are being offered."

Claire Steiger struggled to control her
voice. "If he knows, he doesn't know, what's the difference? The
point is that in terms of reputation, in terms of output, he's . .
. he's—"

"As good as dead?" suggested Theo Stanakos.
Charles Effingham shook his noble head. "In this business nothing
is as good as dead."

There was a pause. Someone's stomach
gurgled, the sound was like the last swirl of water going down a
half-clogged bathtub drain.

Campbell Epstein cleared his throat. "Right.
But we still have the question of whether we revise the estimates
downward, and if so, how to do it most discreetly and with least
damage."

The chairman of the board looked quickly at
his Cartier watch. "I have a luncheon to get to," he announced, and
the spry old fellow was on his feet before the short statement was
completed.

Epstein rose with him and tried to smile.
The attempt was accompanied by a sharp convulsive pain in the gut.
The head of Paintings understood corporate shorthand. He knew the
chairman had just washed his hands of the Solstice Show, the event
whose success or failure defined Campbell Epstein's performance for
the year. His job, which he hated far too much to be able to
imagine losing, seemed now to hinge on whether Augie Silver living
was worth anywhere near as much as Augie Silver dead.

Robert Natchez, dressed all in black, sat
alone in his tropical garret. From the jungly lot next door came
the musky smell of decomposing leaves, the utterly baffled clucks
and screams of citified chickens that had blundered into this patch
of wild and were unable or unwilling to escape.

An old lamp threw stale yellow light across
the poet's desk, put a brown glow in his glass of rum. At his elbow
lay a grant application that had grown limp in the steamy air. The
South Florida Rehabilitation League was offering two thousand
dollars for a poet to teach haiku to crack addicts in halfway
houses. Natchez didn't like haiku, found its modesty fake, and he
wasn't crazy about crack addicts either. Their eyes were a spooky
red and they had a lot of tics. Their shoulders twitched and their
noses ran. They tended to like crack more than life, and Robert
Natchez, given his own passionate morbidity, would have had a tough
time mustering the conviction to talk them out of that preference.
But he needed the money.

He needed the money, yet his one Augie
Silver canvas still hung on the wall above his desk.

This was because there were other things
that Robert Natchez needed more. He needed to feel exceptional. He
needed to maintain the rigid priestly purity that justified him as
the final arbiter of right and wrong. He needed to feel superior to
Phipps, to Yates, to everyone who had run out to hock his Augie
Silver paintings, and as he had lately realized, he needed maybe
most of all to triumph in some final way over Augie Silver himself.
Augie the sudden darling of the marketplace. Augie the lightweight
who had somehow bamboozled the critics with the illusion of
substance. Augie whose lucky and so far inconclusive dance with
death had cast a falsely dramatic fight on what was in the end a
small, conventional, bourgeois talent.

Natchez sipped his rum, breathed deeply of
the molasses fumes that blended with the lewd and fetid smells of
the rotting flowers from the lot beyond the alley. Fine, he
thought, as he glanced once more at the application angled on the
blotter: Let Augie be the sweetheart of the trendoids from New
York, the moneyed philistines with their vapid pictures in their
vapid houses filled with vapid conversation. He, Natchez, would
fill a nobler, more heroic role: Poet Laureate to the addicted and
the retarded, troubadour to the incontinent and the insane. Now
here was a mission: bringing haiku to the doomed, sonnets to the
senile, nonsense verses to those pure and damaged souls beyond the
iron grip of sense. This would be no mere dabbling, no whore's
diddling in the gross lap of commerce. It would be a
liberation.

Yes. And he, Robert Natchez, would be a
Liberator.

The word excited him, warmed his chest like
a sudden image of remembered sex. Poet and Liberator. He swigged
rum, pushed his chair back on its hind legs, narrowed his eyes as
if contemplating some grand vista, as if orating to a rapt
multitude. Liberator. Freeing men from their slavery to a wan and
mediocre falseness. Pointing the way to a new order where reigned a
more muscular and savage truth, where the authority of the artist
was untrammeled and supreme.

Liberator. Isn't that what the greatest of
his forebears had always been? Bolivar. San Martin. Even Fidel.
Robert Natchez felt a sudden brotherhood with these men who had
bloodied themselves in glorious victory over the smugness of wealth
and choked tradition. It was exalting, this sudden sense of
kinship, and it was odd: Natchez's family had been American for
five generations, Hispanic pride had been for him the merest
remnant of an echo. Now suddenly that echo was resonating,
swelling, doubling back on itself as though whispered in an oval
room. He was Robert Natchez, of hot and ancient Iberian blood.

Natchez. It was a strong name and a proud
one. But Robert? This gave the Liberator pause. What kind of name
was Robert? It was bland, white, uncompelling, neutered. Then there
was Bob, a name he'd always loathed, a name for a bait-shop
assistant or someone's idea of a funny thing to call a dog. No,
these names were unworthy of his newfound vocation, they were names
he'd let himself be saddled with too long, but they had never been
his true name. His true name was Roberto. In an instant this was
clear to him, the realization was as bracing as a north breeze that
put to flight the drooping and complacent clouds.