Scavenger Reef (32 page)

Rapt by this dead menagerie, Clay Phipps did
not for a moment notice the Augie Silver painting murdered on the
wall. When he saw it he could not believe it. He moved closer; the
dead cat's tail brushed against his ear as it swung by and he
shuddered. He lifted a tatter of canvas; he felt the flaking paint
and felt, as well, the rage, the hate. "Good Christ," he said
aloud. "It's Natch."

Dizzy, reeling, sickened, he bolted the
apartment and trundled down the stairs. Sweating in the silent
street, he turned toward Augie Silver's house and begged his
flaccid legs and burning lungs to take him faster than they
could.

He was still five blocks away when he
started hearing sirens.

Dade County pine is rich in resin and makes
good kindling. Houses built from it burn very fast and very hot,
with blue and yellow flames that lick their way from board to board
and make popping crackling sounds as they sear into the deep
hollows of captured sap.

The fire at the Silver house did not seem to
have a beginning in either space or time. It sprang up everywhere
at once, and there was about it an awful aspect of fulfillment, as
though embers had been smoldering forever, waiting with a patient
malice to burst forth and consume. Flames crawled up the porch
steps and lapped at the front door. In the side yards, sparks shot
from knotholes and ignited shrubs and palms; green things hissed
away their moisture in the instant before they caught and
blackened. A ring of fire framed the backyard like something from
an infernal circus; oleanders burned like pinwheels and gave off
poison fumes, the great umbrella of the poinciana began to flame,
its dainty leaves tore off and flew away like fireflies.

In the same horrifying instant everyone woke
up. Augie and Nina, naked, feeling their skin begin to bake and
coughing in the strangling smoke, ran into the hallway. Reuben, in
his innocent pajamas, was already on his way to fetch them. United
now, they staggered into the hell of the living room. Sheets of
yellow flame were flapping like ghosts in the windows; here and
there panes exploded from the heat. The picture of Fred the parrot
turned incandescent in the ungodly light; the bird's red eyes
absorbed flame and flashed back blood. There was a low whistling
roar as the fire greedily sucked air into itself, leaving less and
less to breathe.

Bent low, their hands cupped over their
mouths and noses, the three of them moved toward the front door
just as the door crackled and began to blaze. They wheeled through
the thickening smoke, coughing, choking, eyes tearing and the tears
instantly simmering to nothing. Reuben led them over the steaming
floor to the back of the house, he picked up a chair and smashed
the glass panels of the French doors. Fire was converging on the
portal, it was becoming an unbroken archway of flame. Reuben went
through first then grabbed Nina by the wrist, then Augie, and
pulled them after. There was no way out of the backyard, all its
borders were made of fire, black smoke billowed up, rained down,
spread its toxins everywhere. Reuben pushed his friends toward the
swimming pool, urged them toward the flashing water, the only thing
that was not burning.

Weakly, desperately, Nina and Augie dragged
themselves across the patch of lawn and tumbled in. The splash of
their landing was lost in the sputter and whoosh of the fire, the
mild water felt like dry ice against their reddened flesh. For a
moment they did not realize that Reuben was not with them.

Then they turned back toward the blazing
skeleton of their home. The tin roof had buckled, entire walls had
burned away, the house was ceasing to exist. Against the wreckage
of what was left, moving through the indigo smoke sparked with
orange flame, they saw a slender form. Reuben was going back in; he
was going to rescue Augie's canvas.

"My God," the painter said. He screamed out
Reuben's name to call him back; the sound was swallowed by the fire
and the futile whine of approaching sirens, for all its anguish it
went no farther than an unfelt prayer.

The young man vanished in the black and
choking fog. When he appeared again, the huge prophetic picture of
the parrot was on his shoulders and he was struggling toward the
doors. But the flames were beyond all boundaries now, there was no
inside and no outside, there was only fire everywhere. The fire
caught up with Reuben, and when he staggered through the blazing
archway, he himself was burning. Yellow flame crawled up his legs;
pathetically he tried to run and the flames streamed back behind
him; a blue gleam came off his burning hair. He struggled forward
then pitched down on the patch of grass; with supreme effort he
tried to throw the monumental painting clear of the inferno; it
landed very near him, singed but not destroyed.

Augie, dazed, acting without the need of
thought, pulled himself from the water and crawled beneath the
waves of smoke to the unconscious Reuben. An acrid smell came from
the young man's scalp, flames still licked at his back and legs;
Augie smothered them with his own wet body, choked back nausea at
the unspeakable feel of his friend's oozing skinless flesh. He
pulled and rolled the ravaged form toward the coolness of the pool;
it left a trail of ash and blood. Nina helped him lower the
unmoving body into the water, then cradled it against herself as
Augie, weeping, worked desperately to breathe life back into
Reuben's slack mouth.

Charles Effingham, the white-maned chairman
of Sotheby's, had been in the business forty years and could
predict the success or failure of a given sale by the presence or
absence of a certain smell in the auction room. This smell needed
to be ferreted out behind the aromas that always pertained in
gatherings of the wealthy—the round spiced scents of expensive
perfumes, the creamy leather musk of the finest shoes and handbags.
The odor Effingham sought out was rather less refined. It was a
lusty, avid smell; nervous and glandular, it was a grown-up,
toned-down version of the soupy stink of prep school dances. It was
a smell that happened when people wanted something badly and were
willing to be as stupid as necessary to get it.

In the minutes before the opening of bidding
at the Solstice Show, the chairman worked the room. He greeted, he
joked, he sniffed; he didn't smell much lust.

"I think I'll sit in the back," he said to
Campbell Epstein, the head of Paintings. Epstein got the message;
it made his stomach burn and caused the scallop-pattern furrows in
his forehead to etch themselves a trifle deeper.

And yet the turnout wasn't bad at all.
Perhaps a hundred fifty people were treading the huge Bokhara
carpet in the auction room, chatting softly under the Venetian
crystal chandeliers. The heavy critics, the important dealers, the
big collectors were there in force. Claire Steiger was there,
hiding her hangover and her despair. She talked with Avi Klein and
several other of her clients, clients to whom she had refused to
sell Augie Silvers back when the price was skyrocketing; she felt
them gloating now, she smiled but her face hurt. She made a point
of keeping far away from Peter Brandenburg, whose calamitous
article had already been read by nearly everyone and was the
subject of half a dozen conversations in that room. Dressed in
perfect linen, distant and impregnable, he stood by himself and
made notes in his well-thumbed copy of the auction catalogue.

Among the debonair crowd were a few people
who were less so. One of these was Ray Yates. Bearded, wearing
sunglasses and an ill-fitting jacket over a palm-tree shirt, he
skulked in a corner and avoided the insulting glances of the
security guards. He'd been running for his life for almost two
weeks now; the habit of furtiveness did in fact make him look
decidedly suspicious. And lonely, desperately lonely. So much so
that when, just at ten o'clock, Clay Phipps, looking frazzled but
not inelegant in a pale yellow suit, swept into the room, Yates
almost threw himself against his chest.

The new arrival barely had time to drop a
mention of his Learjet ride before the auctioneer pounded the gavel
and people were asked to take seats.

The auction began, and it went badly from
the start.

Works by Larry Rivers and Jim Dine sold for
disappointing prices after languid bidding; a Helen Frankenthaler
was practically stolen. Campbell Epstein, sitting near the
auctioneer at a table manned by unbusy spotters, looked slightly
jaundiced. A Jasper Johns was carried for display through a door at
the auctioneer's left; no one ante'd up the work's lofty minimum,
and the spurned canvas was ignominiously carted back to
storage.

After twenty minutes a young assistant
approached Charles Effingham and whispered in his ear. The head of
Paintings, his yellow tie dancing against his throbbing Adam's
apple, watched the chairman rise and leave, and wondered if the sly
old boy had arranged to be called away from the debacle.

The sale dragged on; people started looking
out the windows. "The next lots," droned the auctioneer, "numbers
C-forty-seven through C-seventy-four, are by the contemporary
American Augie Silver."

There was a stirring at the mention of the
name, but it was perverse. Heads turned toward Peter Brandenburg;
heads turned toward Claire Steiger. As during a streak of lousy
weather, people perked up not in hopes of improvement but with a
morbid curiosity as to how bad things could get.

"What am I bid," the auctioneer continued,
"for lot C-forty-seven, an early work, a lovely seascape, eighteen
by twenty-four inches? The medium is oils, the estimated value is
twenty thousand dollars."

"Three dollars," someone
said. "Same as an issue of
Manhattan
magazine."

An edgy titter went through the room; the
auctioneer squelched it with the gavel. "Serious bids only, please.
Do I hear an opening of five thousand dollars for the Augie Silver
seascape?"

Silence spread like a fissure in the earth.
Ray Yates and Clay Phipps, sitting side by side, looked between
their feet and saw their hopes of a windfall slipping down into
some black and bottomless chasm.

Finally a plump hand went up. It belonged to
Avi Klein. He had a wry look on his face, as if it were
intrinsically droll to buy something, anything, for a mere five
thousand dollars. No one topped his paltry bid.

The next two works, whose estimates had been
thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars, were sold for seven and
nine respectively, to another longtime customer of Claire
Steiger's, another high roller turned bargain hunter.

Had Charles Effingham still been seated in
the auction room, his keen nose would have by now detected a smell
of something funky, something feral. It was not the reek of
acquisition, however, but the meaner stink of scandal, the nasty
excitement of being witness to a disaster, seeing the undoing of a
career in art. A fourth Augie Silver was gaveled at less than a
quarter of its estimate; a fifth picture did no better. Moment by
moment, bid by grudging bid, Augie was being pulled down from the
ranks of painters who mattered, was being flayed, shrunk, expunged
from fashion, chipped away at like a toppled monument.

Claire Steiger mustered her composure but
could not keep her lower lip from quivering.

Then an unexpected thing occurred. As the
auction moved on to the later, larger, presumably more significant
Augie Silvers, Peter Brandenburg began to bid. With a gesture so
refined as to be nearly invisible, he raised his neat hand inside
his immaculate linen sleeve. A spotter zeroed in on his impassive
face; after that, nothing more ardent than a slightly lifted
eyebrow was required to confirm his willingness to top. Almost
before his fellow bidders realized it, he'd bought Jimmy Gibbs's
painting for sixteen thousand dollars and one of Ray Yates's for
twenty-two.

A quick-fermenting exhilaration mingled with
confusion filtered through the room. It was not unheard of for a
critic to buy pictures, but it was rare. Critics had power, not
money, and while Sotheby's lived on prestige it did not accept
prestige as payment. Then too there was the ethics of the thing; it
had been, after all, Brandenburg's article that had cast such a
pall on the proceedings. But now that the famous critic was
bidding, people thought back on what they'd read, and reconsidered.
What had he really said that was so terrible, so damaging? He'd
said that Augie Silver, an artist who was always growing, changing,
was embarked upon a new phase of his work, a phase that promised to
be extremely bold, ambitious, risky, and productive. Clearly,
Brandenburg was gambling that this new phase would carry the artist
to the next level of fame and reputation, the level at which
everything the painter had ever touched would be assured of holding
value.

While other bidders were reasoning this out,
Peter Brandenburg bought Ray Yates's other canvas for twenty-eight
thousand dollars, and two of Clay Phipps's pictures, one for
thirty-seven thousand, the other for forty-four. The prices were
still well below pre-auction estimates, but the gap was narrowing,
the numbers were becoming respectable.

And now the bidding livened. The paintings
that were left were the prizes: the artist's personal favorites
that he'd given to his closest friends, the canvases of special
merit that Claire Steiger had been stockpiling. Avi Klein jumped
back into the fray; other top-tier collectors joined him.
Brandenburg copped two more pictures, but they cost him—the
six-figure plateau loomed very close.

It was reached in a phone bid from Japan,
and once that magic divider had been crossed, the floodgates opened
and it became a different kind of auction. Gone was any thought of
bargain seeking; archaic was any notion of buying pictures for less
than estimated price. Bidding went from thousand-dollar increments,
to five, to ten, to twenty-five. Buyers sweated in their gorgeous
suits; the profitable stink of art lust wafted forth. Spotters
danced out of their chairs, the auctioneer cranked up the volume,
put some syncopated jazz into his patter. A canvas went to
Brandenburg for a hundred and twenty-five; the next was bought by
Klein for one fifty; the following picture was scarfed up by the
absent Japanese for an even two hundred thousand. Around this time
Peter Brandenburg dropped out, and the big boys took it as a token
of their prowess that they'd subdued him. By some mysterious
buoyancy, the price fluttered higher till it transcended the
niggardly custom of being reckoned in thousands and entered the
quarter-million range. People leaned forward in their chairs,
fanned themselves with catalogues, and barely breathed as the
bidding on the final Silver canvas climbed ever upward and ended at
last at the lofty level of three seventy-five.