“The lieutenant says you’re in charge?” he said.
John nodded. “The owner of the house is out of the country,” he said.
“Right, okay. Well, we’ve been through the whole house. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we recovered one body from the western side of the building. But everybody else got out. The rest of the house is clear. We’ve been through all of it.”
“Thank you,” John said solemnly to him, and the EMT nodded curtly and backed away. A while later John got on his cell phone and called Mal, still on the ground in Rome, to tell him that the good news was that Molly was still alive.
* MESSAGE *
No Empire Lasts For ever.
*
IN A STATEMENT he handwrote in his airplane seat on the way back from Italy, Mal announced to the world that Palladio would rebuild, that its work would go forward despite the tragic and incalculable loss of life and historical property, not to mention the loss of the artwork hung, stored, or in progress in the mansion at the time of the fire, a loss estimated to go well into the millions. John typed it up himself — Tasha, angry and traumatized, had gone home to her parents in Richmond — and distributed it via the fax machine in his room in the Charlottesville Sheraton. He felt simultaneously proud and foolish. The Sheraton had given them two whole floors, that first disastrous night; but today he and Mal were the only ones there. The rest of them had flown up to Boston, where it turned out Milo’s parents lived, for his memorial service. As for Mal, Mr and Mrs Milo had tersely requested, through their lawyer, that he not attend. Mal chose to believe that this request was made out of the understandable desire for privacy, since his presence at the service would surely provoke the attention of the media. John suspected other motives, but he kept this to himself. Nor did he share with Mal his premonition — correct, as it turned out — that many of the artists, having taken advantage of this unimpeachably somber pretext for leaving, would not return to Charlottesville when it was over.
Return to what, after all? They couldn’t conduct business out of hotel rooms for long, if they expected potential clients to take them seriously. Two weeks went by before they moved their business operations to an office borrowed from their lawyer, a silver-haired Southern gentleman who looked at least a decade younger than his seventy-three years and who owned the two-story office building in which he practiced, in the commercial section of downtown Charlottesville. The move made sense, since most of what was left of Palladio was a matter for everybody’s lawyers to pick through anyway. In the flurry of local and then national interest in the half-sinister, half-absurd circumstances of Milo’s self-immolation, the Charlottesville DA had even announced he was opening a criminal investigation, but Shays laughed this off, both publicly and privately, and he was right. On the other hand, lawsuits filed by clients seeking refunds (even when the work they’d commissioned had already been completed and displayed — they claimed all the work that had ever emanated from Palladio, except for Milo’s, was tainted and devalued now), by a group of former employees claiming emotional distress, and by the Virginia State Historical Commission were all harder to ignore.
John sat at a desk six feet from Mal’s, without much to do, having been decorously told by Shays that the best help he could provide right now, in light of all the pending lawsuits, was not to say anything at any time to anybody. Still, he did have a particular responsibility. Several times a day Mal would ask him if there was any word yet from, or about, Molly. There was not. As far as taking a more active approach to finding her, the few things they could think to try had all been tried in the first day or two: the Virginia state police had no luck locating the car; and if she had any credit cards there was no record of her using them anywhere. Nervously, John had called Dex in New York, who affirmed that he had had no contact at all with Molly, though if he did he would welcome the opportunity to hang up on her or slam the door in her face, and by the way John and Mal deserved what they had gotten and should go fuck themselves. Later that same day, John dialed the number of Molly’s parents’ home in upstate New York. It rang and rang, but no one answered.
He couldn’t know whether Molly had taken his advice to heart and fled the place, coincidentally on the day it burned down; or whether she had simply been out on an errand that day, returned to find the house in flames, and taken this as some sort of opportunity or directive to move on; or, as seemed most likely to him, whether there was some other explanation entirely for her disappearance, one that he wasn’t equipped to imagine. John’s most persistent worry, though, was that it would occur to his boss, in a moment of idleness, to ask about what might have preceded that disappearance, if John had seen Molly, spoken to her, heard her say anything significant in the days just before the fire, when Mal was still in Italy. But he never asked. As with the lawsuits, which he made no effort at all to dispute but only to dispose of, Mal made a point of refusing to dwell on the recent past, because his current mindset was all about the future.
Bulldozers came and razed the walls of Palladio, and with them, so it seemed, went the general air of secrecy that had surrounded the place; anonymously sourced news accounts of its mysterious inner dynamics, of Milo and Mal Osbourne and the woman whose arrival in the mansion seemed to prefigure its destruction, went into their customary upward spiral. Milo’s ambiguous legacy proved suggestive to every sort of extreme opinion. To some, the whole episode only cemented Mal’s own genuinely messianic status. Then there were those who concluded Milo had been nothing but a sort of double agent all along, bent on destroying the house of Osbourne from within, all for the cause of integrity in art, even at the cost of his own life. And many, to be sure, did not consider Milo an artist at all, but simply a young man suffering from a mental illness, whose suicidal cries for help were turned to account in a Barnumesque fashion by cynics interested only in money.
And then in September, John, too, left Virginia, under sad circumstances. His mother died of a swift and unprecedented heart attack, on her knees in the flower garden behind her condo. Mal, who despite their physical proximity had lately seemed quite withdrawn, frowned at this news but remembered to offer John his condolences. John went out to the parking lot behind Shays’s office, put on his sunglasses, and drove to South Carolina to help his stepfather, Buzz, make arrangements.
* MESSAGE *
You have to appreciate authenticity in all its forms.
I will peer around corners.
I will see past clouds.
I will get to the source.
“Isn’t it good to believe in something?” he asks the crowd as he strides on to the stage after an introductory hymn from the choir, his eyes bugging, teeth gleaming, blond-tipped hair holding fast in its swept-up place. “Isn’t it bizarre to believe in something?”
But there’s a twist. The artist is not Garry Gross, who took the picture, but Richard Prince, who took a picture of the picture and then
THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP IS EVERYTHING
*
THE NANNY CALLED in sick, which was a huge inconvenience; it would shorten Roman’s hours at work, and Jo’s, and certain things they had come to take for granted they didn’t need to know, like what time Little Bear was on, they would now have to figure out for themselves. But at least you could be sure, when the nanny said she was sick, that she wasn’t faking. This was only the third time, and she’d been with them five years. You couldn’t get too angry about it.