Scavenger Reef (9 page)

"I looked up and a spout was dancing
straight toward me, shimmying, swaying like a genie, homing in like
it had radar. I tried to dodge it. But it was too close now, the
swirling wind kept pulling the ocean out from under me like a rug.
I thought it was starting to hail, then I realized what was hitting
me was little fish, snappers and ballyhoo, that had gotten sucked
into the spout and now were raining down, bouncing off the deck,
slapping into the cockpit. The shrouds were twanging and groaning.
I think the mainsail tore but I can't be sure; the jib came loose
and was whipping around like a flag in a battle.

"And I really don't know what happened
next," the painter said. He was still staring at the ceiling and
speaking in a quiet monotone. His parrot shifted on its perch and
scratched its chest with its beak. "I might've been carried back to
the coral, I really can't be sure. Either I was pulled out of the
boat or the boat broke up around me. I think something hit me in
the head— maybe the boom, maybe just something flying. I suppose I
was knocked out. Then suddenly I was in the water, awake enough to
thrash through the foam like a madman. I looked around for the
boat. It was gone. I thought I saw the top of the mast
disappearing, but I may have imagined it. My arms were getting
exhausted, I was sucking too much water. Then the dinghy—half the
dinghy—came bobbing by. I managed to grab it and nestle in; it was
like a leaky clamshell. I must've passed out again."

Nina Silver put her hand on her husband's.
His skin was so thin it felt powdery and she thought she could
distinguish the small bones in his fingers. "Augie," she said, "if
this is too painful . . ."

The painter seemed surprised at the word. He
smiled, and his wife noticed how deep were the fissures in his
burned lips. They seemed to divide his mouth almost into tiles of
flesh. "Painful? I wasn't aware of it being painful. Beautiful and
terrifying. Painful, no."

He looked at his wife and realized he had
been misunderstood, and that the misunderstanding had hurt her.
"Missing you," he said. 'That was painful. The thought of leaving
you by dying—that was painful. But those things I didn't feel till
later—till I remembered. For a long time I knew nothing except what
I imagine an animal knows: I knew I was alive. I knew I was in
danger. And that was all."

He paused and closed his eyes. His wife
nestled closer and waited for him to continue. But he didn't
continue. His breathing fell back into the rhythm of sleep, his
foot kicked weakly under the sheet and half awakened him. "I love
you, Nina," he mumbled, and then his breath began to whistle softly
through his nose. His wife stayed in bed a few minutes more, then
went, as on any ordinary morning, to put up coffee.

"No," said Claire Steiger, "there won't be
any sales before the auction."

She hugged the phone against her shoulder
and looked down at her fingernails. It was a muggy morning in
springtime New York, a May day on the lam from August. Viscous,
dirty light spilled in through the windows of the gallery office.
Below, on 57th Street, people looked stylishly limp in the season's
first wilting linens.

"Yes, Avi," the dealer was saying, "I know
you've been a terrific client. I appreciate it. But this time I
can't make any special deals. The situation's too volatile, you
know that as well as I do."

The would-be buyer paused, then there was a
soft popping sound as of heavy lips reluctantly letting go of a
damp cigar. Avi Klein resumed his wheedling, and Claire Steiger
reflected with gamy zest on the perverse and malleable machinery of
human wants. What was so especially delicious about the phantom
cookie at the bottom of the empty bag? What was so particularly
beautiful about the painting that could not be had? Why was Avi
Klein, a generally shrewd and cool-headed collector, suddenly
prostrating himself for the privilege of paying more by far than
had ever been paid for an Augie Silver canvas?

"Half a million is a lot of money," Claire
Steiger purred. She gave an impressed curl to her lips, as though
the client were in the room, looking to be stroked. "Are you sure
it's worth that much?"

Klein was the fourth big customer to call
that morning, and Claire Steiger was having a better time than she
could easily remember having. She was dusting off some of her
favorite moves, the feints and tactics she had refined in the years
when the building of her business had seemed each day an adventure.
There was flattery, of course; nothing so crude as compliments, but
the passive flattery of sitting tight and letting someone show off
the size of his wallet. There was the preempting of doubt, the sly
reversal that forced the buyer to defend his judgment and so sell
the painting to himself.

Though in the present instance the idea was
not to sell the painting—and this offered an impish satisfaction
all its own. Withholding. There was a power in it that was like the
power of sex. The power to entice and frustrate, to beckon and
dismiss. When its exercise was temporary, playful, that power could
be delicious, could stoke appetites and make the nerve synapses
incandescent. But when withholding became one's normal stance, a
habit of the heart . . .

Claire Steiger did not ask to be visited by
this thought. It simply descended in the midst of her negotiations
and spoiled her mood the way a swarm of gnats spoils a walk in the
garden. She fell out of her professional trance and remembered her
life. She was married to a man she no longer loved. She was no
longer on the glad ascent of making her reputation and her fortune,
but was locked now in the squalid scramble of trying to hold on to
those very few things she still cared about. A wave of bitterness
squeezed up from her belly and brought an evil taste to her throat.
Avi Klein was still talking moistly in her ear, still trying to
persuade her, and his voice had become maddening, appalling, a
devil voice that spoke glozingly of wanting and paying, selling and
haggling, a wet salacious voice that made all transactions seem
inherently shameful, fundamentally corrupt, and somehow
humiliating. For an instant the dealer envied Augie Silver,
serenely dead and beyond the fray. When she spoke again, her voice
was sour and abrupt, the charm had dried up like a lemon forgotten
at the back of the fridge.

"Avi, I'm leaving this to the open market. I
hope to see you at Sotheby's."

*

"What the fuck is Sotheby's?" asked Jimmy
Gibbs.

Ray Yates, his apricot and
turquoise shirt sticking to his broad and furry back, sucked an ice
cube and reminded himself where he was and who he was talking to.
Key West. A piece of limestone crust barely poking out of the ocean
a hundred fifty miles from anywhere, the very tip of the very long
tail of keys tucked under the sandy ass of the American dog.
Difficult of access, bathed in sun and myth, splendidly
uninterested in the high dry world outside, it was one of the last
places where a person could truly be provincial. Had Jimmy Gibbs
ever read a newspaper other than the Key West
Sentinel
? Did he read that for any
farther-afield intelligence than the hopeful fibs of the fishing
report and to see which of his bubbas had made the police
blotter?
What the fuck is Sotheby's?
This was in its way a glorious question, a
question full of archaic purity.

"It's an auction house, Jimmy," Yates told
him. "Ya know, a place where people bid on things. Art, antiques,
famous people's autographs."

Gibbs took a pull of his beer, clattered the
dripping bottle back onto the bar, and belched demurely into his
nicked-up fist. "What kinda asshole would pay good money just for
someone's autograph?"

"Lotta people do, Jimmy. They keep 'em
awhile, then sell 'em at a profit."

"To a bigger asshole."

Yates shrugged, and Gibbs tried to picture
what this Sotheby's must be like. He'd been to an auction once. It
was up on Big Pine, mile marker thirty-one. It was held in a church
parking lot under sheets of corrugated tin nailed down on
four-by-fours. The auctioneer was a cranelike man in a string tie,
and he'd had a voice as loud and irritating as an outboard with the
cowling off. Jimmy Gibbs didn't like to talk in front of a lot of
people, but he'd bid on a couple of things by raising his hand. He
went three dollars on a tackle box of someone who had died, but the
gear ended up fetching five fifty. Feeling thwarted, he bid eight
bucks on a slightly used dinette set for the trailer, but the
auctioneer had hawked his way into double figures before Jimmy
Gibbs knew what hit him.

"It's indoors, this Sotheby's place?" he
asked.

"Jimmy," said Ray Yates, "this is like a
very fancy operation. Big room. Crystal chandeliers. Women in
designer suits. Men with hundred-dollar ties. You get the
picture?"

Gibbs sucked beer and burped.

"People fly in from London, Paris, just to
go to these auctions. People phone in bids from Tokyo,
Germany—"

"They don't even see what they're
buying?"

"They have advisers."

"They need other people to tell 'em what
they want?"

Yates ran a hand through his damp hair. The
humidity and Jimmy Gibbs's logic were making him confused and
sleepy. He sipped his tequila and glanced around the Clove Hitch
bar. If you kept your eyes under the pseudo-thatch roof of the open
structure, the light was soft and easy, but as soon as your glance
strayed onto the water or over to the charter-boat docks, the late
sunshine was sharp and scalding. The earth was tilting each day a
little farther toward full summer, the ever-fiercer sun made the
whole world seem to creak the way swollen wood complains at an
over-tightened screw. Ray Yates was getting irritable, wondering
why he'd bothered to try doing the impossible Gibbs a favor.

"Jimmy," he said, "you do what you like. But
I'm telling you, you wanna pull some money out of that painting,
that's the way to do it."

Gibbs considered. The first thing he
considered was whether, if he signaled for another drink, it would
still be on Ray Yates. The radio host had paid for the first round
with a twenty. Fourteen bucks in soggy bills and some silver was
sitting on the bar, and Jimmy Gibbs decided to take a chance. He
caught the eye of Hogfish Mike Curran, wagged his empty bottle,
then, as the proprietor approached, gave the slightest and most
discreet nod in the direction of Yates's cash. Curran bounced this
signal over to the talk-show host in the form of a subtly lifted
eyebrow, and Yates answered with a no less minimal tilt of his
chin: The deal was done, a successful transaction among men who
drink.

Gibbs then turned his attention to the
question of Augie Silver's painting. The fact was he, Gibbs, was
vaguely terrified at the thought of picking up the phone, calling
New York, and having to explain to someone who talked fast and had
a brisk and snooty Yankee accent who he was and what he wanted. He
was afraid he'd be asked to describe the picture, and his
description would sound stupid. He'd have to ask all sorts of dumb
questions about how to wrap the painting, how to send it. "Seems
like a lotta trouble," he said at last. "I mean, what could the
thing be worth —three, four hundred dollars?"

Ray Yates hadn't wanted another drink, or at
least he hadn't until one was put in front of him. Then he couldn't
help noticing that the fresh ice and lime tasted great and the
alcohol wasn't too bad either. He smacked his lips, put his glass
down slowly, and made a grand sweeping gesture past the unwalled
Clove Hitch bar, across the cloudy water of Garrison Bight, up the
Keys to the whole snaking coastline and continent beyond. "Jimmy,"
he said, "there's a whole 'nother world out there. We're not
talking hundreds. We're talking thousands, Jimmy. Probably tens of
thousands. Maybe more."

"You're shitting me," said Gibbs, but he
looked hard at the talk-show host and realized that he wasn't. He
sucked beer, swallowed it, and worked at holding his face
together.

Yates studied him in turn. Gibbs's scalp had
started to crawl, the gray hair pulled tightly back began to
wriggle like worms so that the small ponytail bobbed up and down.
It seemed to Yates that this restless writhing scalp was the birth
of greed made visible, and it occurred to him to wonder whether
he'd ever really intended to do Jimmy Gibbs a favor or whether his
real purpose had been to observe the corrupting of a local.
Corrupting not in the sense of the innocent turning bad, because
there was nothing remotely innocent about Jimmy Gibbs. Corrupting,
rather, in the sense of someone being pulled away from what he was
and pushed toward what he could never be, tempted into a fantasy of
change that could only end in bafflement and failure.

A cormorant flapped its jointed wings and
took off from a post. A spray of tiny fish roiled the water as they
fled some large thing feeding on them from below. Jimmy Gibbs
pictured himself at the wheel of the Fin Finder, alone in Ray-Bans
at the steering station just below the tuna tower. Captain Jimmy.
He'd hire a couple young guys to haul the lines, clean the fish;
his hands would heal. Maybe he'd buy himself a new truck too.
Captains didn't show up at the charter docks in dinged-up old heaps
that sifted rust.

Yates watched him, felt a quick pang of
remorse, and raised a cautionary finger. "No such thing as a sure
thing, Jimmy. Don't spend that fortune before you have it."

It was sound advice and it was too bad the
talk-show host was not following it himself. It was five o'clock,
the sun was still throwing heat as heavy as bricks tossed off a
building, and Ray Yates reminded himself that he had to meet a guy
to discuss a small matter of some gambling debts. He took a final
swig of his tequila and got up with all the gusto of a man on his
way to a root canal. He waved goodbye to Hogfish Mike, put a hand
on Jimmy Gibbs's shoulder, then trudged the length of the pier. At
the foot of it, right up against the seawall, the remains of a
filleted fish were floating. The affronted eye stared heavenward,
some opal meat still clung to the backbone, and Ray Yates didn't
like the look of it at all.