“He gets around the profit-on-crime laws because he was never brought to trial.” One hand shaded her eyes from the light of the noonday sun as she looked up at him. “But your family lawyer would have told you that.”
It was impossible to miss her suggestion that he was making up useless small talk. And of course, he was.
A warm breeze ruffled a bright silk banner overhead, and he could follow the wind down the SoHo street with the lift and swirl of similar banners which hung out over the sidewalk to advertise galleries and trendy boutiques.
He was walking faster now, to keep pace with her, and casting around for some bit of unfoolish conversation that might hold her attention for a while.
Mallory broke the silence. “Did you know Koozeman scheduled another show of Dean Starr’s work?”
“Yes. I thought it might be going up today. I was surprised by the Oren Watt drawings.”
Her face was telling him she didn’t think he was all that surprised, and he wasn’t. She quickened her steps, putting some distance between them. He walked faster.
“Koozeman never handled Oren Watt before,” he said, in self-defense. “So, it is odd.”
“Koozeman says he’s not handling Watt.” She consulted the stolen clipboard as she walked. At the top of the first sheet was a network logo followed by a schedule of places and dates. “He says it’s a temporary installation. The television crew rented the space for the day.” She made a check mark by the Koozeman Gallery and this day’s date. “The Dean Starr show goes up in three days. Do you know why Koozeman’s so hot to have another showing of Starr’s work?”
“He’ll want to take advantage of the publicity on the murder. Also, he has to unload the work as fast as he can. It’s such a crock, it even strains the credulity of the amateur collector.”
“What about the artist who died with Aubry? Was he any good?”
“Peter Ariel? Well, for a dead junkie and a third-rate hack, he had one hell of a run on the secondary market. But what a critic thinks of his work doesn’t matter.”
“Explain.” It was an order.
He obliged her. “Collectors don’t listen to art critics anymore. They listen to their accountants, who tell them how the artist is doing in the primary market. Then, they can make projections on the staying power in the secondary market.”
“What is this, Quinn? Are we talking art, or stocks and bonds?”
“Same thing. The actual art means very little in the greater schematic of finance. The initial buyers paid a low price for Peter Ariel’s sculptures. After his death, the work was worth a small fortune on the resale market. The early resale buyers were ghouls who collect souvenirs of messy homicides. The amateur collectors misunderstood, bought the work at the inflated price, and held on to it too long. Once the ghoul market was saturated, the price declined to the cost of the artist’s materials.”
She stopped walking, and he stopped. By only standing there, she was tethering him to the same square of the sidewalk. “You never mentioned any of this to Markowitz, did you?”
Now how did she manage to frame a question as an accusation? “No, I didn’t. The focus was always on Aubry, not Peter Ariel.”
She resumed her purposeful walking, and he kept pace with her, still tethered. “There was another artist mentioned in Bliss’s review-Gillian, the vandal artist. What do you know about him?”
“He has an exhibition of photographs in a gallery at the end of this block. You might find it diverting.”
“Photography? I thought vandalism was his style.”
“Wait till you see the photographs, Mallory.”
They entered the Greene Street gallery by way of a narrow stairway to the second floor. The rough steel door opened onto a large white space filled with light from loft windows lining the street front. People were milling around, some looking at the photographs on the wall. A man stood by a desk, holding sheets of slides to the light. Done with one sheet, he tossed it onto a pile at his feet and went on to the next.
Quinn pointed to this man. “Some artists spend a hundred hours on a single painting, and the gallery director spends a minute looking at twenty slides of their work. Occasionally, I time them. Call it a hobby. This man’s about average, a minute an artist.”
They drifted to the collection of photographs on the near wall. The work was an amateur’s effort in bad lighting, with no eye for composition. The first photograph was of a crack in an old statue. Gillian’s signature was printed in the fresh wound. All the rest were much the same, differing only in the statuary. Each work of art was harmed by a chip or a crack and signed by the assailant.
Mallory looked bewildered for a moment, but made a quick recovery. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Vandalism of priceless art? Yes. There’s a more interesting show in the next room.” He took her arm and guided her into the adjoining gallery space.
“At least it doesn’t smell,” said Mallory, counting the spilled garbage cans. There were twelve in all, contents strewn about the floor. He led her down a clear passage, sans garbage, saying, “I want you to know that the garbage was authentically spilled, and not purposefully arranged this way. The artist is a purist. He has integrity.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes, but it’s also true.”
Other people stood in ones and pairs, inspecting garbage spills. One young man, wearing the art student’s slashed-at-the-knee-for-no-good-reason blue jeans, was standing in the corner making notes on the half-eaten guacamole which he had found in the garbage spill that he was fondest of.
“So why doesn’t it smell?” she asked.
“The gallery owner thought it might put off the paying customers. It’s coated with resin. The artist didn’t like that. He wanted it to rot naturally.”
“Naturally-he’s a purist.”
“Now you’ve got it, Mallory.”
“And that show in the front room, the vandalism?”
“All the statues are from the Greek collection of a major museum, and they don’t want to encourage any more of this. The museum director gave me a ‘No comment,’ but I noted all the statues had been removed. When they go on display again, there won’t be any trace of the damage.”
“I bet they bought out the show.”
He nodded. “You’re right, they did. This show will close as soon as their check clears the bank. They were very good-natured mugging victims. Rumor has it they ransomed the negatives, too.”
“I just can’t believe this,” she said.
“New York City. What’s not to believe?”
Twenty minutes later, Quinn was sipping espresso under the green awning of a sidewalk cafe on Bleecker Street and ferreting out Mallory’s tastes in art. It seemed she only liked minimalism, and only because it was neat and clean, not cluttered with tony metaphors and messy paints. She had no use for any extraneous line or shape.
When she was done, he said, “Well then, why not take a blue pencil to James Joyce, edit out all the extraneous stuff that doesn’t really further the plot? Most people don’t understand the metaphors anyway. So we could probably whittle Ulysses down to a manageable short story.”
He was smiling now, because she was smiling, and he was helpless to do otherwise. He wondered where she had learned that beguiling trick. An old memory brought him up short, as he realized she was perfectly mimicking the smile of the late Louis Markowitz. He was startled, but also confident that it did not show.
He continued as though nothing had happened, as though he had not just seen a ghost. “And then we’ll have literature that’s more accessible to a thirteen-year-old subnormal. Why make people reach for art, when they can pick it up off the floor?”