SoHo Sins (14 page)

“Very conscientious of you.”

“Isn’t it, though? I’m quite a devoted father, Jack. The wild nanny sex is just a bonus.”

I watched the au pair leading the two girls back toward us through the park. Emmanuelle held their hands tightly, making a straight path through the crowd. The girls—one blond, one dark-haired—jumped and dodged and chattered away, at elbow height. As the threesome came closer, Emmanuelle smiled. She was still some way off, but even at this distance her ripe lips could stir an instinctual response. It was the kind of smile you might encounter on a corner of the Boulevard de Clichy at nightfall.

“And after you sleep with them,” I said to Philip, “all you want to do is get rid of them.”

“Of course. To make room for the next. It’s a biological thing.”

“Renewing the species, I suppose. Like looking for breakout artists at an MFA show.”

“Sure. We all do our best.”

So it was that, out of old friendship and brand-new empathy for Philip’s loss, I was pulled relentlessly deeper into the Oliver affair. It’s what I had to do, for the sweet vulnerable Melissa, for my own peace of mind, for some vague but insistent sense of propriety.

Or so I told myself anyhow.

Maybe a guilty conscience was the real reason I drank too much that night in Switzerland. I don’t know.

Back in my room, already a little tight, I downed a couple glasses of minibar scotch before I called Hogan, and another as we talked. I filled him in about Paul Morse—what Laura had told me, little though it was. He thanked me grudgingly, as though he’d rather have heard something more directly tied to Amanda or nothing at all.

“How are you doing?” he asked. “Partied out?”

“It’s duller than you think.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

I let it go. It’d be hard to convince Hogan that evenings of champagne and canapés with German industrialists who collect works by Roni Horn or Wolfgang Laib—polished metal tubes, piles of yellow pollen—are not as madly debauched as he might imagine.

“Any news about Philip?” I asked.

“Nothing solid, but I’m getting a fix on life inside Oliver Technologies. The place is run like a cult.”

“That doesn’t sound like Phil.”

“It’s not him, it’s Andrews. He directs the show these days, and that’s how he directs it. They have regional managers competing for jewel-studded money clips in the shape of different countries, the ones with new high-tech markets they want to crack. The salesmen all memorize long passages from a couple of books ghost-written under Philip’s name a few years ago.
Sell To Be Rich: Winning the Microchip Revolution
and
The O-Tech Way to Lifetime Success
. I have copies here. Each chapter lays out some bullshit promotional strategy: ‘The Future Is Cybernetic,’ ‘One World, One Market, One Winner,’ ‘Netting Profits from the Internet.’ ”

“I get the idea.”

“You don’t know the half of it. They have these guys standing on chairs together in team spirit sessions, chanting O-Tech slogans and singing company songs.”

“Makes the gallery business sound tame. Who’s your source for all this?”

“Margaret.”

“Who?”

“Remember the tight-assed business lady, the junior exec who showed us around the offices that day?”

“Do you ever miss one?”

“What? Is it my fault she’s unhappy with her boss’s scheme?”

“There’s a scheme?”

“I don’t know for sure yet, but Margaret describes a pretty vicious scenario. Andrews and his cronies associate the company as closely as possible with Philip Oliver. He’s the genius, their very own Howard Hughes, and all that. When he gets arrested on the murder charge, the news stories come out about his confession and his messed-up brain. The company stock tanks. Andrews and the boys, as a gesture of faith in the underlying strength of O-Tech, buy big and buy cheap—knowing all the while that Philip will get off because they put him up to the bogus confession in the first place.”

“But even if Philip walks, his credibility is shot.”

“By then, given the pace of our justice system, Andrews will have been running things for a good year and a half. Six quarters of steady growth, even without the boy wonder. Andrews becomes chairman, the stock returns to its true value, and he and his crew cash in big.”

“Why is Margaret letting you in on this? What did Andrews ever do to her?”

“Nothing unusual, for a place like O-Tech. Let’s just say he’s a pig.”

“That makes Margaret an awfully biased source.”

“You know anybody who isn’t? Believe me, she’ll be a great witness.”

“But is she telling the truth?”

“Who knows? The D.A. will be able to build a solid case around her, I can guarantee that. And that’s all Bernstein asks.”

“How’s Philip’s condition?”

“Worse. He’s almost totally out of it these days.”

“So what do you think? Is he faking?”

“I don’t know. Those slick folks back at the Whitney service didn’t know. His doctors don’t know. Only Philip knows. And he may be fooling himself.”

Once I hung up the phone, everything in the room was off kilter. Downing that third scotch didn’t help, I suppose, but it was something to do. Of all the varieties of solitude, none is worse than the void you inhabit, the void you are, at midnight in a foreign hotel room alone. Stunned by booze, trying not to feel or think, you sit on the edge of the bed with the lights out, seeing the vague shapes of furniture in the glow from the window, and then you are gone.

That had been Philip’s life for many years. When I first met him, he was convinced that he would die before thirty, and in a sense he was right. The young man he had been—inventive, whip-smart, tireless—gave way in time to a calmer, slower self, still hungry to win but more calculating in his maneuvers. Marrying Amanda was his single best career move. Then that Philip, too, gradually vanished, leaving only the skilled CEO, haunted by his casualties—damages inflicted, losses sustained—alone and restless in luxury hotel suites late at night. There, over the years, he grew ever more exacting in his requirements for call girls and casual pickups, as though the women were subcontracted microprocessor parts—until luckily, at last, Claudia materialized out of the pages of a magazine and restored his lost eager youth.

The spirited artist sustained him for a couple of years, pumping him full of false vigor. But now, with Mandy’s murder, the fight seemed to have gone out of Philip once and for all. The person he argued with most often, most vociferously, had ended up suddenly and violently dead. In his psyche, corrupted by disease and liquor and God knows what else, a causal link had been forged between their old bitter words and Mandy’s gory demise—a judgmental voodoo that his heart endorsed over the futile protests of his rational mind, whatever was left of it.

He was always susceptible that way.

Once, on a visit to the Sistine Chapel years ago, Philip stopped and stood transfixed in front of the
Last Judgment
, Michelangelo’s soaring depiction of the saved on the right hand of Christ being swept up gloriously into Heaven and the damned on the left being cast ignominiously into Hell.

“Stunning,” he said. “Terrifying.” Other visitors pressed around him, and the guards tried to move him along. He turned expectantly to his wife.

“Oh, what nonsense,” Mandy opined. “It’s just art, Philip. Pictures selling some tiresome old religion. No one takes these things seriously anymore.”

“Don’t be such a heathen, my love.”

“Oh, I’m not. Faith in rituals is exactly what we need.” Mandy gestured with her sunglasses. “Right now, I’m all in favor of the four-course lunch ritual. Then, at six, I’d like to partake of the evening cocktail ritual. By all means, yes. Ceremonies and rituals. What else can preserve us in this barbaric age?”

What indeed?

Once the four of us had paid to visit a young matador as he prepared for the corrida in Madrid. His attendant wrapped him tightly about the middle with a strip of white cotton and encased him in his dazzling jacket. Hardly a word passed between them. To us, the rich
turistas
, the young man said nothing at all—merely nodded once at Nathalie before the door was swung open in front of him. He was already his role.

Well, isn’t that what we do for each other time and again, in marriages and the arts, in jobs and professions? Each day we get up and put on the suit of lights—striding out to defy death in a ritualized sport, until the day death inevitably wins.

Death had certainly beaten Nathalie, in the nastiest way, taking its long painful time. At first, after I lost her, everything seemed lighter and cleaner. A weight had been lifted, and I felt joyously free. Only months afterwards did I realize that the lightness came from being empty, and the emptiness would go on forever.

I woke up in the dark, and took off my clothes. The alcohol was still coursing through me like poison. I could feel it in my capillaries and joints, trying to kill me—which might have been all right, if it weren’t for the nagging discomfort required. I threw myself back on the bed and wondered what it would feel like to pray.

When I woke again, the room was painfully bright. I stood unsteadily before the bathroom’s vicious mirror, glancing furtively at the wreck of my body. If you have ever once been athletic, you get up each morning feeling, knowing, that today you are weaker than yesterday, and that there is no reversing course now, no winning back the force that has gone. There is no hiding the insidious, sad facts from yourself. You drop your eyes. You try not to think about what you have been, try not to see yourself in the glass. Above all, you do not stare at the shriveled thing that dangles, crooked and thin, from your mangled left shoulder. You focus on coffee, a newspaper, and the morning light. For as long as possible, you forget the splendid things you did once with Nathalie, using two good arms and your fit body and the strength that pulsed through them.

Somehow, I made myself presentable in a white shirt and fitted gray suit (Italian but not too Italian for Switzerland) and got down to the dining room for my croissant and café au lait, resolutely silent in my seat near a window. Outside, the good citizens of Basel went about their late-morning business, strolling between stores and offices with enviable, seemingly untroubled precision.

After breakfast, I wandered through some nearby shops, killing time before the fair opened to the first rank of VIP buyers. On a side street, in a Milanese boutique, I came across several racks of dresses for preteens. Pulling one out, I held it at arm’s length on the hanger.

“May I help you, sir?” a young woman said in English.

“Yes, thanks, I’m looking for a birthday present.”

“For your daughter?”

“No, for a friend.”

She regarded me for a long moment.

“For the daughter of a friend.”

“Of course.” She laid a well-manicured hand on one of the racks. “What is the size of the girl?”

“I’m not sure exactly.” I raised my good arm to the level of my sternum. “About this tall. Slender.”

“Very good, sir.”

She showed me several choices, each more brightly elegant than the last. I settled on a solid-color jumper, pale green, with a plain bodice and thin shoulder straps.

“It’s very fetching,” the sales girl said.

I wondered where she had learned that mildly arcane English word.

“Your friend will be quite happy, I’m sure.” She handed back my credit card. “And her mother as well.”

For dealers, Art Basel is a work pit. I met Laura at the fair, and for the next five days all we did was sit in the booth and pitch deals to collectors and chat up magazine editors and case other dealers’ wares and stay out much too late in restaurants currying favor with curators and museum board members. We sold well—about three and a half million dollars worth over the course of the four-day event—but our plane tickets, shipping, space rental, installation fees, hotel bills, meal checks and bar tabs were higher than ever before. Once the artist cuts were deducted (I have a quirk of always paying my artists promptly and in full), I felt I could have done as well working for a week in a stamping plant.

After the fair, Laura departed immediately for New York. Left on my own, I couldn’t get the image of Paul Morse out of my head. In my tainted and restless dreams, he was talking again and again to the Viking’s blond, open-faced young Anna, who was also somehow Melissa, while the figure of Amanda Wingate hovered in the background, watching and listening. What did Mandy know? What did she say to Paul once the girl vanished from my dream and the two adults drifted toward the hulking Prince Street building together?

“This Morse punk,” Hogan said when I checked in by phone again. “Can you get close to him?”

“I can pretend to be interested in his work. That usually does the trick.”

“Good. I need something. Bernstein is all over my ass.”

“He’s a lawyer,” I said. “It’s his favorite position.”

“Yeah, tell me. So when do you get back?”

“Around the end of August.”

“That’s over two months from now.”

“I need a vacation.”

“Your whole life is a vacation, isn’t it?”

“Compared to yours, I suppose.”

Later, I spent a few days in Lisbon, arranging a museum show for a Portuguese artist, and a couple weeks with friends at a broken-down villa near Siena. Every evening we sat out at a long wooden table with a view down the hills to the darkened valley. We ate and drank wine and talked endlessly. None of the Italians had any firsthand knowledge of Philip and Mandy, though some of them had heard of Claudia. When I asked them about her father’s family, their expressions grew defensive. She had an uncle whose name was known with respect, especially farther south.

“And he has friends and relatives in New York?” I asked.

“Certainly, many,” someone answered.

“Dangerous friends?”

My host lifted his hands, palms up. “All friends are dangerous,” he said, “if you offend them.”

That night, after one of the local village’s erratic mail deliveries, I retired early to watch a tape that the Viking had sent me—the documentary short that Paul Morse had made for him the year before in New York.