Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Christopher Wingate. Ever heard of him?”

“ Naturellement. Very chic, very cool. He’s made Fifteenth Street the envy of SoHo. The old dealers kiss his ass now, and the more they do, the more he treats them like shit. Everyone wants Wingate to handle their stuff, but he’s very picky.”

“What about the Sleeping Women?”

A coo of admiration. “Aren’t you in the circle. Not many American collectors know about them yet.”

“I want to see him. Wingate, I mean.”

“To photograph him?”

“I just want to talk to him.”

“I’d say you have to stand in line, but he might just be intrigued enough to talk to you.”

“Can you get me his phone number?”

“If I can’t, no one can. But it may take a while. I know he’s not listed. He lives above his gallery, but I don’t think the gallery’s listed either. It’s that exclusive. This guy will skip a sale just because he doesn’t like the buyer. Are you somewhere I can call you?”

“No. Can I call you tomorrow? I’m going to sleep for a while.”

“I’ll have it for you then.”

“Thanks, Ron. I owe you dinner at Lutece.”

“Let me choose the place, honey, and you’re on. I hope you’re not sleeping alone. No one I know needs love more than you.”

I glance around the first-class cabin at a rumpled platoon of businessmen. “No, I’m not alone.”

“Good. Tomorrow, then.”

The fog is descending so fast now that I can barely get the Airfone back in the armrest. Thank God for drugs. I couldn’t bear to be alert right now. When I wake, the museum will seem like a bad dream. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a door. A door to a world I have no choice but to reenter. Am I ready for that? “Sure,” I say aloud. “I was born ready.” But deep down, beneath the brittle old bravado, I know it’s a lie.

Two hours before the Cathay Pacific jet landed in New York, I surfaced from my drug-induced dive, stumbled to the rest room and back, and asked the flight attendant for a hot towel. Then I called Ron Epstein and got Christopher Wingate’s number. It took an hour of steady calling to get the art dealer on the phone. I had worried that I might have to mention the Sleeping Women to get Wingate’s attention, but Epstein’s hunch proved correct: Wingate was intrigued enough by my modest celebrity to see me at his gallery after hours without explanation. I couldn’t tell much about him from his voice, which had an affected accent I couldn’t place. He did mention my book-in-progress, so my guess is that he hopes I’m looking for a dealer to sell my photographs to the fine art market.

Meeting Wingate alone is a risk, but my work has always involved calculations of risk. Photographing wars is like commercial fishing off Alaska: you know going out that you might not come back. But on an Alaskan boat, it’s you against the ocean and the weather. In a war zone there are people trying to kill you. Going to see Christopher Wingate could be like that. I have to assume he’s heard about the scene at the museum by now. He won’t have my name, but he will know that the woman who caused the disturbance in Hong Kong looked exactly like one of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that one of the Sleeping Women looks like the photographer Jordan Glass? He knows my reputation, but it’s unlikely that he’s seen a photo of me. I haven’t lived in New York for twelve years, and my work wasn’t nearly so well known then. The real danger depends on how involved Wingate is with the painter of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that the subjects in the paintings are real? That they’re missing and probably dead? If so, then he’s willing to turn a blind eye to murder in order to earn a fortune in commissions. How dangerous does that make him? I won’t know until I talk to him. But one thing is certain: If I go on to Washington now and meet the FBI, they’ll never let me close to him. Every piece of information I get will be secondhand, just like it was after Jane disappeared.

After I clear customs at JFK, I roll my bags to the American Airlines gate, collect my e-ticket to Washington, and check my bags on that flight. Then I walk out of the airport and hire a cab. I don’t like letting my cameras go to Washington without me, but later tonight, when I tell Daniel Baxter I got sick and missed my plane, he’ll be more likely to believe me.

Before going to Lower Manhattan, I have the cabbie take me to a pawnshop on Ninety-eighth Street. There, for $50, I buy a can of Fortified Mace to carry in my pocket. I’d prefer a gun, but I don’t want to risk it. The NYPD takes weapons violations very seriously.

When the cab pulls up to Wingate’s Fifteenth Street gallery in the failing light of dusk, I find a simple three-story brownstone like a thousand others in the city, with a bar on one side and a video rental store on the other. The tony atmosphere of the Chelsea art district stays in another part of Chelsea, I guess.

After paying the cabbie to wait, I get out and study the doorway from the curb. There’s a buzzer by the front door, which looks normal enough but probably hides all sorts of security devices. I slip on sunglasses as I approach, in case there’s a videocam.

There is. I push the buzzer and wait.

“Who are you?” asks the stateless voice I recognize from my earlier call.

“Jordan Glass.”

“Just a moment.”

The buzzer burps, the lock disengages, and I pull the door open. The ground floor of the gallery is half-illuminated by fluorescent light from the second floor, spilling down an iron staircase. With my sunglasses, it’s hard to see, but the decor seems spare for a trendy New York art gallery. The floor is bleached hardwood, the walls white. The paintings look modern for the most part, or what my idea of modern is, anyway. A lot of stark color arranged in asymmetrical patterns, but it means little to me. I’ve been called an artist – often during attacks by purist photo-journalists – but that doesn’t qualify me as a judge of art. I’m not even sure I know it when I see it.

“Do you like that Lucian Freud?” asks the voice I heard on the speaker outside.

There’s a man standing on the landing, where the iron staircase turns back on itself. Fixed squarely in a shaft of light, he looks as though he simply materialized there. He is wiry and balding, but he compensates for the baldness with a shadow of trimmed black stubble. In his black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket, he looks like the midlevel mafia thugs I saw in Moscow a few years back: slightly underfed but fiercely predatory, particularly around the eyes and mouth.

“Not really,” I confess, with a quick look at the painting hanging nearest me. “Should I?”

“Should doesn’t come into it. Though it would have a better chance of impressing you if you took off those sunglasses.”

“I wouldn’t like it any better. I’m not here to see this.”

“What are you here to see?”

“You, if you’re Christopher Wingate.”

He beckons me forward with his hand, then turns and starts back up the stairs. I follow.

“You always wear sunglasses in the evening?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Something wrong with that?”

“It’s just so Julia Roberts.”

“That’ll be the one thing we have in common, then.”

Wingate chuckles. He’s barefoot, and his pale dirty heels seem to float up the steps. He passes the second floor, which houses sculpture, and continues up to the third. This is clearly where he lives. It has a Danish feel, all spare lines and Scandinavian wood, and it smells of fresh coffee. Standing in the middle of the room is a large, unsealed wooden crate with packing material spilling out of its open end. There’s a claw hammer lying atop the crate, a scattering of nails around it. Wingate brushes a proprietary hand against the wood as he passes the crate, which comes to his shoulder.