“Somebody makes it, somebody else sells it, and some other somebody buys it.”
“Yes, go on.” Quinn lit his cigarette, disregarding the laws against smoking in public buildings.
“So the sellers and the buyers are cutting out the middleman. They’re cutting out the artists.”
“And so a new order replaces the old, entrepreneurial talent supersedes artistic talent. Superb reasoning, Charles, as always. My compliments.”
The hidden door in the wall opened a crack, and a hand deposited a standing ashtray on the floor next to Quinn. The door had closed again before Quinn looked down at the ashtray. He seemed to take its presence for granted as he deposited an ash. So Quinn knew about the door and never thought it worth mentioning to Mallory.
“If this movement ever caught on, what would happen to the real artists?”
“You mean,” Quinn corrected, “the artists of the old order.”
Charles sensed that roads of deep feeling and roads of conversation were merging here. Perhaps in Quinn’s mind the farce was already a sad fait accompli.
“Some will drown and some will be absorbed,” said Quinn. “Others will become accountants, perceiving accountancy as a related field. And it is.”
“Is that woman sucking on a rat?”
“Yes.”
The performance artist nibbled on the rat’s ear, basking for three seconds in J. L. Quinn’s glance as he turned around to confirm that she was indeed sucking vermin. Then the performance artist jammed the rat back into her sleeve and hoped it would suffocate. Nasty creature. It gave her the creeps.
She turned her attention back to the blind portrait artist. He had misplaced his white-tipped cane and was currently at her mercy in his quest for directions to a drink. He was a sour man, not at all the cheerful cliché she had anticipated.
“I think it’s so brave of you to go into portraiture without being able to see the model.” She stretched out one foot to nudge his fallen cane against the wall. “It’s a new frontier, isn’t it? I mean, working with color you can’t even-”
“Could you point me toward the bar?” His voice was plaintive, whining.
“I give you so much credit for being blind.”
“Being blind is a pain in the ass. Could you-”
“And all that corporate grant money. I was wondering how you pulled that off. I had a double mastectomy. Do you think I could use that as a-”
“Point me toward the bar, you moron.”
She obligingly turned him around and gave him a push in the direction of a blank wall, and the blind portrait artist promptly smashed into it.
Koozeman leaned against the back wall, eyes trance-gazing on the line of Mallory’s cheek. His mind was completing a pratfall that had begun twelve years ago. If she turned now, if she saw what she had done to him.
He took his seat on the platform. A woman was standing before his chair, inquiring about a ticket.
“What? Number fourteen? Just a moment.” Koozeman squinted at the sheet of paper in his hand and simultaneously appraised the value of the diamond bracelet on the woman’s arm. “Oh, yes, fourteen. Mr. Starr’s idea for that one is a big red wheel a quarter mile across. It’s being airlifted by a blimp, you see? And it’s absolutely useless because it has no reason to be there, but there it is.”
Off to one side, Mallory suddenly appeared. She was watching him sweat. Now she came closer, walking slow. What beautiful green eyes, eyes of an assassin. A muscle in his chest constricted. Her voice was soft in the mode of casual conversation.
“I understand you still write art reviews. Charles gives you a lot of credit for never reviewing your own stable of artists.”
“I try not to be obvious.”
“Now that artist who died with Aubry Gilette-Peter Ariel? Before Ariel was one of your artists, you trashed his work in a review. I read it. Pretty brutal stuff.”
“Peter’s work improved considerably over the next season.”
“Then it’s lucky you didn’t kill him earlier.”
“What?”
“Quinn tells me your reviews were better at killing emerging talent than nurturing it. I suppose it’s wise to stick with what you know best-the butchery.”
And now she looked down at her empty hand. She turned around, head bowed, searching the ground for something lost. She slowly walked away from him, her eyes scanning the floorboards.
Sweating profusely, Koozeman rose from his chair and walked around to the back of the platform. He pressed his hand to a place on the wall, and the hidden door swung open.
A minute after he had closed the door behind him, two muffled, angry voices were bleeding through the wall.
Mallory kept her eyes to the floor, looking everywhere for the lost red ticket, her gift from Charles. He would be hurt if he thought it meant so little to her that she could lose it so easily. Though this was true.
She drifted near a small cluster of people and glanced up to see a blind man delivering a lecture to a stone pillar, as the surrounding people, including Charles, politely watched on.
“You’re showing your ignorance, Mr. Butler,” said the blind man to the pillar. “Sabra was overrated. Women will always hold an auxiliary place in the art world. They haven’t sufficient power of personality to create meaningful work.”
Mallory backed up a few steps to the spot where she had seen a dead fly. She scooped it up and pitched it into the blind man’s wineglass and continued scanning the floor for her lost ticket.
The small group surrounding the blind man wondered, each one, if it might be rude or, worse, politically incorrect to mention the dead bug in his glass. Wouldn’t that call attention to his blindness?
Ah, too late.
A small group of prospective ticket buyers had collected around the chair on the platform. Koozeman was unresponsive to any of their questions. He had a red ticket in his teeth, and the number was just visible. When the matron from Ridgewood, New Jersey, consulted the sheets in Koozeman’s lap, she found the line giving the artist’s idea for that number. The original description had been a reconstruction of elephant jokes, using dead elephants. How amusing. All but the heavily underscored word “dead” had been crossed out with the line of a pen.
Dead?
She stared into Avril Koozeman’s unblinking eyes for a full minute more. Then her own eyes drifted down to the small spot of blood on his chest, and she began to shriek. Four gallery boys converged upon her with the mistaken idea that she had run out of wine.
Her hands fluttered, and she nearly dropped her glass. She turned in time to see a young blond girl disappear into a solid white wall. The matron put her glass on the floor, and then she put herself down beside it.
Behind the wall, Mallory ran down a narrow corridor and collided with a gallery boy, knocking him to the floor. “Did anyone come this way?”
“No, ma’am.” On hands and knees he scrambled after a rolling wine bottle. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“Could anyone have gotten past you?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” He got to his feet and slapped at the dust on his black pants. “I just came back from the main room.” He was staring at the wine bottle in his hand. “Damn, the label is torn.”
Mallory turned back the way she had come. With the brightness of the gallery behind the seamless door, one shining point of light stood out from the rough boards. She put her eye to the pinhole. It gave her a view of gallery patrons gathered near the wall.
“This hole?” she prompted the boy, who had come to stand beside her.
“The peephole. Yes, ma’am, that’s so we don’t open the door and jostle a wineglass in someone’s hand. You could get fired for that.”
She reentered the main gallery and grabbed a cellular phone from the hand of a collector, disconnecting his call and giving curt instructions to the operator. As she came closer to Koozeman’s body, she noticed the ticket number was forty-four. Her lost ticket.