Unknown - The Genius

“He seemed to think you were very helpful.”

“If he says so.”

She smiled. “Sometimes,” she said, “he gets ideas.”

At the subway I thanked her for the ride.

“Thank you for coming out,” she said.

“You’re welcome, although I really don’t know that I’ve done anything.”

“You’ve given him something to do,” she said. “You don’t know how much that’s worth.”

7

t had been a long time since I’d ridden the subway. Growing up, public transport was off-limits; I took cabs or cars or, when accompanied by Tony, a 1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith chauffeured by a silent Belgian named Thom. I can’t call Tony’s fear of the MTA entirely illegitimate. Think about what New York City was like back in the 1980s, and then put me—an underweight white preppie with anger issues—on one of those filthy, ungoverned trains, and you have real reason for concern. Of course, blanket restrictions on my freedom made me all the more likely to buy a token or, if I felt particularly rebellious, jump a turnstile. Viva la revolution.p>

The ride home took ninety minutes, plenty of time for me to think about my conversation with McGrath and its implications for me, thoughts I shared with Marilyn the next night over dinner at Tabla.

Her initial reaction was to giggle.

“You took the subway?”

“That wasn’t the point of the story.”

“Poor baby.” She stroked my cheek. “Is your tender flesh sore? Can I order you up a poultice?”

“I’ve taken the subway before.”

“You’re so easy. You might as well have a big button on your chest. ‘Push me.’ “

“Did you listen to anything I just told you?”

“I listened.” “And?”

“And I’m not surprised. You will recall, darlin, that I warned you. I said it on opening night: your artist is a baddie, you can tell by his relish in depicting pain.”

“The fact that he drew pictures of the victims means nothing,” I said. “He could have seen them in the paper and copied them.”

“Did they print them in the papers?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But whatever the case may be, the piece as a whole is enormous. It contains all sorts of things, all sorts of crazy scenes, and plenty of them are recognizable. We’re not ascribing Yankee Stadium to him, but it’s in the drawing.”

“Is it?”

“Either it or something that looks a lot like it.”

“So, there you go,” she said. “There’s your defense.”

“It’s not a defense—”

“You know, I love that you’re solving a murder mystery. That’s what we need around here, a good murder mystery.”

“I’m not solving anything.”

“Personally, I can think of a few people I’d like to kill.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Or have killed.” She took a huge swig of wine. “I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do it myself. I’m more of a big-picture kind of a gal, wouldn’t you agree?”

I said nothing, swabbing my bread in olive oil until it disintegrated.

“Stop brooding, please,” Marilyn said.

“Do you really think he killed them?”

“Who cares?”

“I do.”

“Why in the world would you care about that?”

“Put yourself in my position,” I said.

“All right,” she said. She got up and made me switch chairs with her, put a finger to her temple. “Mm. No. I still don’t care.”

“I’m representing a murderer.”

“Did you know that when you took him on?”

“No, but—”

“Would knowing that have stopped you?” she asked.

I had to think about that one. Even if Victor Cracke was a child-killer, he would hardly be the first artist to misbehave. The greatest outsider artist of all time, Adolf Wolfli, spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital after being arrested for molesting girls, one as young as three. Taken as a group, nonoutsider artists don’t fare much better on the Model Citizen Scale. They do wretched things to themselves and to others: drink themselves to death, shoot themselves, stab themselves, destroy their work, destroy their families. Caravaggio killed a man.

How surprised could I be that Cracke—by most descriptions completely asocial—had a worm-eaten soul? Wasn’t that the point? Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a-or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic. Gauguin famously called civilization a sickness. He also said that art is either plagiarism or revolution. And nobody wants to be remembered as a plagiarist. Starving painters console themselves by thinking of a day in the distant future when their crazy behavior is admired for being ahead of its time.

But more important, I had divorced Victor Cracke the person from the work. It therefore didn’t matter how many people he’d killed. In appropriating the art, I made it my own, transforming it into something larger and more significant and more valuable than he had ever intended, just like Warhol did when he elevated soup cans to iconic status. That Cracke had physically created the drawings seemed to me a rather minor quibble. I owned his sins no more than Andy owned the sins of the Campbell’s corporation. That I even paused to consider the question of morality made me feel incredibly stodgy and retrograde. I could hear Jean Dubuffet rolling around in his grave, flabbergasted and scorning me in French for swallowing bourgeois norms.

“Look at it this way,” Marilyn said. “Whether he did or did not kill anyone, the very suggestion ups his mystique. Spin it right and you have a new selling angle.”

“Bars on the gallery door?”

“Too kitschy.”

“I was joking.”

“I’m not. You have to regain your sense of playfulness, Ethan. This whole experience is making you very serious, and it’s bad for you.”

“What’s playful about rape and murder?”

“Oh, God, please. That’s just another way of saying sex and violence, which is just another way of saying mass-market entertainment. Besides, let’s remember that you don’t know the truth yet. He could have seen the pictures in the newspaper, like you said. Go investigate or something.” She smiled. “Ooh, I just love that word. Don’t worry, this’ll be fun.”

I WENT TO THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY and spent four hours with microfiche. Not knowing what kind of news Victor Cracke preferred, I checked the Times and all the tabloids for the weeks surrounding the murders, whose dates I obtained from McGrath.

“Any word on that drawing?” he asked when I called.

“Which drawing.”

“You said you’d send me a copy.” “Right.”

But before I sent him anything, I wanted to see what I turned up on my own.

And what I turned up confirmed my gut instinct: all five of the victims’ pictures had ended up in one paper or another. The similarity between the newspaper portraits and the Cherubs struck me as awfully close. Not just faces but positions and expressions. I made copies and took them back to the gallery for comparison. Lo and behold, they matched. Not perfectly— perhaps a little artistic license?—but well enough that I felt confident reporting to Marilyn that I’d found the originals.

“Aren’t we resourceful?”

I was grateful to her for sparing me the obvious follow-up question; I knew she was thinking it, because I was, too: why them?

Plenty of people get killed in New York. Plenty of photos make the pages of its public records. In the first two weeks of August 1966 alone I counted three other murders—and those were just the ones gooey enough to make the news. But those boys had become the literal center of Victor’s universe, the impetus for a life’s work. Why?