Scavenger Reef (33 page)

When it was all over, the auctioneer pounded
his gavel and pounded some more, but the buzz in the room only
mounted, a kind of rarefied bedlam had set in, it was a frenzied
letting go poised tipsily between catharsis and exhaustion.
Everyone, it seemed, was winded, wilted, fidgety—everyone but Peter
Brandenburg, whose linen suit was crisp, whose forehead was unlined
and dry. He'd bought fourteen paintings in all and spent just
slightly over a million dollars that no one knew he had. He'd led
the bidding for so long that no one really noticed that all but his
last two purchases were bargains. He'd jump-started the auction,
then he'd gotten out. He was very pleased. A whole new scale of
value had been established for Augie Silvers, and Brandenburg and
his partner now had the biggest holdings. The imminent leap in
prices would allow them to live very comfortably indeed.

The auctioneer continued to call for quiet;
the audience continued to ignore him. Then quite suddenly the door
to the left of the auction lectern opened and Charles Effingham,
his white hair resplendent, stepped spryly through it. He raised
both hands like a politician at a rally to ask for order. The buzz
thinned to a hiss of flattered surprise—to be addressed by the
chairman of Sotheby's was a rare event—then it gradually subsided.
Effingham pushed aside the auctioneer's microphone. With his
leonine growl of a voice and his precise clipped consonants he
didn't need it.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "those of
you who deal with us regularly are aware of Sotheby's deep regard
for tradition. But we believe, as well, in being responsive to
extraordinary circumstances. And in light of what I must say is the
exceptional interest occasioned by these Augie Silver paintings, I
would like now to do something most unusual: I would like to offer
for sale a work not listed in the catalogue—a work, indeed, of
which I myself was not aware until a few short moments ago. The
work is unframed and off its stretcher. It in no way conforms to
our general standards of presentation, yet I am confident you will
agree it is in every way a remarkable picture. The house has placed
on it a reserve price of one million dollars."

The chairman nodded toward the open door.
Two assistants came through lugging chairs, which they placed some
six feet apart near the lectern. Two more employees followed,
carrying between them a large furled canvas. They stepped up onto
the chairs, signaled with their eyes, and let the picture unfold.
The heavy scroll dropped open with a muffled snap.

A huge parrot in biting green looked out
red-eyed and all-seeing from a prodigious wanton jungle. The edges
of the canvas were singed and frayed, here and there the foliage
and plumage were smudged with soot and dulled with ash; yet, like
the flaws and cracks of ancient statues, these imperfections
somehow increased the work's unsettling power, bore witness to the
ravages and dangers of existence and asserted the reckless and
undaunted determination to endure.

No one had ever seen a picture quite like
this, and there was a kind of nervousness, shame almost, in the
rumbling inchoate murmur that greeted it. The painting somehow
showed too much, cut too deep, was at once absurd and wise, sacred
and wildly uncouth. People wanted to tear their eyes away and could
not; the parrot's seared and searing gaze locked on like a
strangling hand and would not let go. The murmur mounted, took on
something of the character of keening. Then a voice, calm and
certain, cut through it.

"It's a fake."

All eyes turned toward the speaker, who
appeared just the slightest bit surprised that he had spoken. With
the room's attention pulled away, no one at first noticed the two
people who now slipped through the door.

"Why a fake, Peter?" said Augie Silver. His
scorched red skin made his dark blue eyes look purple, he was
wearing big clothes borrowed from Clay Phipps and they added pathos
to his haggard frailty. "A fake because the real one was destroyed
in a fire early this morning?"

"Fire?" said Brandenburg. "I know nothing
about a fire."

"Yes you do," said Nina Silver. Her face was
taut and scarlet, her legs were blistered beneath the man's shirt
she was wearing as a dress. She looked up at the parrot's red and
flashing eyes; Brandenburg's gaze ineluctably followed hers. "Who
set it, Peter?" she went on. "Did you hire someone?"

The room was silent, it was as if the air
had changed its character and would no longer carry sound. Time too
became something other than itself, it congealed like stanched
blood and ceased to flow. Eyes flicked back and forth from
Brandenburg to Augie, from Nina to the painting. And in that long
suspended moment a sick certainty was growing like a cancer in
Claire Steiger. Secretly she glanced to her left and to her right;
there were strangers there. There were strangers everywhere, and
she was sitting here without her husband. Her hand rose slowly to
her mouth as if to hold her insides in. She spoke softly and she
looked in no particular direction. "Kip," she said. "It was Kip,
wasn't it?"

Peter Brandenburg stood up slowly. His eyes
were riveted straight ahead, still locked in a futile stare-down
with the painted parrot. He didn't raise his voice.

"He said everything was taken care of. He
said everything was just as it should be."

The security guards moved unhurriedly toward
the critic, and the critic made no move to elude them. But he
didn't like to be touched, he pulled his elbows back and made it
clear he would go without resisting.

The auctioneer pounded the gavel and pounded
some more, but it was a long time before order was restored.

"It was Nina who figured it out," said Augie
Silver.

They were sitting at Clay Phipps's—their
home while their own house was being rebuilt. It was a steamy
evening at the beginning of July, the air smelled of closed,
defeated flowers, and the ceiling fans turned lazily, heavily,
seemed at every moment to be winding down. Joe Mulvane, his blue
shirt splotched with sweat, leaned forward in his chair with his
elbows on his knees. Claire Steiger sat on the sofa with her legs
tucked under her; her dandelion hair was round, her face was round,
her curled body was relaxed in comfy circles. She was vacationing
at the Flagler House, recovering from many disappointments, and yet
she seemed serene. Clay Phipps had had his living room painted;
gone were the lewd, accusing rectangles where Augie's pictures had
been hung; gone with them seemed to be Phipps's penchant for
self-blame, the nagging self-disenchantment that led him to do
things that were blameworthy.

"Really it was Reuben who figured it out,"
Nina said. "The way he seemed to know it would come down to that
painting."

Augie nodded. There was wonder in his face
like the wonder of seeing the full moon lift red and mottled from
the Florida Straits. "Yes, that was remarkable," he said. "But the
real breakthrough—that was yours."

Joe Mulvane leaned forward a notch farther.
"Excuse me," he said, "but I guess the detective's always the last
to know: What was the breakthrough?"

Nina paused, savored the
moment. She'd gotten younger in the last couple of weeks. Her skin
had healed, her husband and her life were safe; she'd been swimming
every day and she was full of joy. "You know how it is," she said,
"when you lock yourself into a certain way of looking at a problem?
The way, after a while, you're stuck with that approach, whether it
gets you anywhere or not? Well, we'd been assuming all along that
whoever wanted to hurt Augie was trying to drive the prices up, so
they could sell. Then, the night of the fire, the timing of
Brandenburg's article, it suddenly dawned on me that the plan was
to drive the prices
down
, so they could
buy
."

"
Then
sell," put in Clay
Phipps.

"At a vast profit," Augie added. "And very
soon, so Kip could meet his July first obligations. The
choreography had to be quite precise. When Kip set the fire, he
timed it so the auction would happen before the news of my death
had reached New York. Peter buys low, then I'm dead, and boom,
prices go crazy. They turn the pictures over almost
immediately."

Mulvane considered. "But at the beginning,
with the poison tart—"

"At that point," Augie said, "things were
simpler. Kip was working alone then. His plan A was to kill me far
enough ahead of the auction so he'd make his money on the pictures
Claire had."

The dealer shook her head in self-reproach.
"I encouraged him. I'm the one who planted the idea that, handled
right, the auction could bring in enough—"

Augie reached over and patted her knee.
"Claire, Claire, you're my agent, don't ever blame yourself for
jacking up my price. . . . But anyway, when the tart killed Fred
instead of me, Kip started getting worried that he was running out
of time, that he needed a different strategy. That's when he
persuaded Brandenburg to come aboard."

Claire Steiger frowned. "Another thing I
did," she said. "Threw the two of them together."

The others let that pass.

"The turquoise ragtop," Nina said. "Kip
drove it, but it was rented with Brandenburg's I.D. Brandenburg
didn't own paintings, we had no reason to put him on the list of
names to check."

"And the picture on the license?" Mulvane
said.

"When someone looks as rich as Kip, clerks
don't check things very closely," said Claire Steiger. "Besides,
there's a more than passing resemblance between them—that same kind
of constipated preppy handsomeness. Probably that was part of the
attraction."

"Attraction?" said Clay Phipps. "Don't tell
me they were an item."

"Oh, God no," said the agent. "Nothing so
straightforward as that. But I think there's no question that Kip
had him in some crazy kind of thrall. Maybe it was in some way
sexual. Probably it was. But who knows what that means between a
straight, stiff, married man and a cold-fish eunuch who can't even
bear to have a friend pat him on the wrist?"

There was a pause. The ceiling fan turned
slowly, heavy air seemed to spiral down from it like something
solid. Outside, sagging fronds scratched sleepily against tin
roofs.

"I can see it," Claire went on. "Long close
talks in the locker room after a good hard game of squash. Kip
starts talking about business, about deals—he makes it sound
extremely exciting and adventurous, amoral, heroic. I can see Peter
being totally mesmerized, aroused in his way, at the idea of
dealing with deeds rather than words for a change."

"Not to mention," Augie said, "having Kip
bankroll him with borrowed funds so he could finally make some
money to go with his clout."

"Yes," said Claire. "I imagine the thrill
wears off having one without the other. And if you think about it,
Peter and Kip made a formidable team: a critic with an incredible
ability to manipulate the market, a wheeler-dealer with an
incredible ability to manipulate the critic."

"So say they'd pulled it off," said Joe
Mulvane. "What then?"

Claire shrugged. "Peter—who knows? Maybe
he'd have run off to Tahiti, the south of France—"

"Maybe he thought," Clay Phipps put in,
"that Kip would run off with him."

"He might have thought that," said the
agent. "Kip wouldn't be above leading him to think it. But I can't
imagine it would've happened. They would've had to hide the
partnership, of course. And if Kip had raised enough to buy his way
out of bankruptcy, he probably would have had some new stationery
printed up and gone back into business."

The mention of bankruptcy made Claire think
about her beach house. Her eyes went vague and she stopped talking.
But the sadness seemed to pass right through her, she held it no
tighter than the sun holds clouds. She'd put herself through this a
thousand times and had finally realized, what the hell, it was a
wonderful house but it was just a house. She began chatting again
as though someone had asked her a question, though no one had.

"And me, I'm starting over. Fresh. The big
apartment—gone. The Sagaponack house—gone. I'm moving the gallery
to a smaller space, I'm getting rid of all the debt that asshole
got me into—"

"But you know, Claire," said Clay Phipps,
"some of that debt went for very worthy causes."

"Like?"

The host decided not to mention how much of
it had gone toward his own quite affluent retirement. "Like fifty
grand of it," he said, "saved Ray Yates's life."

"He paid off Ponte?" asked Joe Mulvane.

Phipps nodded. "After commissions, he came
away with forty-five thousand. He paid back the forty he owed—and I
think he's already thrown away the extra five. Some people just
don't learn."

"Yeah," said Joe Mulvane, "but other people
do. Jimmy Gibbs, for one. Maybe I'm a jerk for thinking this, but I
think he's really got a shot."

"The deal's done?" Augie asked. "He bought
the boat?"

"Made the down payment," said the cop. "Now
all he's gotta do is find customers and stay on the wagon."

"Will he?" Nina asked.

"He loves that boat," said Mulvane. "And
besides, it's part of the deal that was cut with the car company.
He stays sober a year, they'll drop all charges."

Augie shook his head, and said, not without
affection, "I never figured Jimmy for a car thief."

"He wasn't one," said Joe Mulvane, "till he
gave up believing he'd ever see any money from your painting. Then
he got it in his head he owed himself a bunch of cash. Heard about
the stolen rent-a-car racket and liked the arithmetic: five grand a
car at the loading docks in Jacksonville, a pat on the back and no
questions asked."