Unknown - The Genius

The movie was a big hit. There was laughter; there were tears. I can’t relay the plot because I spent most of its 106 minutes checking my watch, waiting for permission to look back. Gudrais gradually sank down into his seat, until all I could see was the top of his head, his hair so black and glossy with pomade that it reflected the screen’s shifting blues and whites. Rationally I knew that I wasn’t doing a thing; I couldn’t really see him, his hands, anything other than that crescent of hair. But I hoped that my presence would somehow radiate out and encircle the families sitting around him.

The credits rolled; I looked back; he was gone. I waited until I saw Stuckey stand, and then all three of us went up the aisle.

As we’d hoped, he had been a bad citizen, leaving behind a wax cup full of melting ice and an empty container of popcorn with a napkin crumpled inside. Sam let out a happy yelp. Stuckey went out to the car and came back with a forensics kit. He put on gloves and crouched down and began to put things in bags. Then he stopped and sniffed near the popcorn container. He tweezed out the napkin. “Boy oh boy.”

“What.”

“Smell that?”

I detected corn and salt and artificial butter, but above all something evocative of an overused swimming pool, equal parts sweat and chlorine.

“That,” said Stuckey, “is semen.”

BY THAT SUMMER I had long given up on my stolen artwork, and so I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Detective Trueg.

“Well,” he said, “we found your stuff.”

“Where?”

“eBay.”

Trueg couldn’t take all the credit, he confessed. Since his second son went off to school, his wife had had too much free time on her hands; in her boredom, she had become something of an auction junkie. Tired of her blowing money on Smurf mugs and secondhand pashminas, Trueg had put her to work, giving her copies of missing art and telling her to be on the lookout. Just between us, he considered this nothing more than a way to make her feel useful and to prevent her from buying crap. In three years she had never found anything. But lo and behold, she had unearthed some suspiciously Crackean work indexed under Art > Drawings > Contemporary (1950-now).

The seller’s handle was pps2764 and he was in New York, New York. The rotating photo gallery showed a half dozen drawings along with assorted close-ups.

Five original drawings by famous artist VICTOR CRACKE. The pages go together. [One of the close-ups displayed a seam between two drawings.] Cracke’s work inhabits the shadowland between Expressionism and abstraction, yet this is no mere recapitulation of shopworn modernisms, rather a deliberate act of stylistic bricolage that incorporates the most striking elements of Pop and contemporary figuration.

The paragraph continued on in this dreary vein, concluding,

I have more of these for sale if you are interested.

What bothered me most about the description was not its wordiness or its limp bunches of artspeak. What bothered me most is that I had written it. With the exception of the first two and the last sentences, the text had been lifted verbatim from the catalogue copy I’d written for Victor’s show.

Also insulting was the price being asked. So far only one person had expressed enough interest to bid, and, as there were only six hours left on the auction, his offer of $150 looked like it would carry the day.

On the bright side, anyone could Buy It Now for $500.

I decided that it would be better not to tell Kevin Hollister about this.

Trueg said, “The first thing I’d like to do is get ahold of the drawings and confirm that they’re for real.”

“And that Kristjana didn’t draw them.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I mean. It would be pretty dumb of her to keep making copies, though. She sounded pretty scared the last time we talked to her.”

I said that I didn’t think she would stoop to eBay to promote herself.

Trueg laughed. “Bear in mind also that it might be a third party. Can you think of anyone else we should be talking to?”

I almost suggested that he call Jocko Steinberger. But that wasn’t his style. He was more the self-pitying type. There were, of course, plenty of other people angry at me, and plenty of those people could draw—not as well as Kristjana, but at this point I made myself no guarantees. “You really think there might be another forger?”

“Did you think there’d be a first?”

I admitted that he had a point.

“Let’s say we check him out and he seems to be for real, enough that we want to get to know him a little better. We make contact with him, make it sound like we’re interested in buying a lot more, get to him that way. Failing that, we can go after his account information, although that’ll take longer, cause we’ve got to go through the legal channels.” He paused. “I hope you realize how lucky this is. Most of what we go after we don’t find, ever. You really oughta thank the god of your choosing that this guy is such an idiot.”

I offered to Buy It Now.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “That bid is me.”

THE PARTY THAT SHOWED UP at Freddy Gudrais’s door on a late May afternoon included two uniformed Staten Island cops, Sam, detective Richard Soto, and—way in the background—me. I had been allowed to go along for the ride, although it had taken a lot of strenuous lobbying. Nobody wanted an art dealer interfering, it seemed—Sam included.

“It’s not safe,” she’d said.

“What’s unsafe about it?”

“We’re dealing with unknowns.”

“But what, specifically, are you worried about.”

She didn’t answer me. Perhaps I should have known then that something was different, that her silence marked the beginning of a new phase of the investigation. At the time I was too excited by the prospect of an arrest to understand that the professionals had begun to take over and that I was slowly being shut out.

THE LOCK TURNED and the door whined and there he was: a skinny old man in a billowing workshirt, his cheeks sunken and unshaven, one gnarled hand on the edge of the door and the other on the jamb, his left thumbnail nearly gone, replaced by a clump of scar tissue. Close-up, he appeared less well preserved. He looked us up and down. Then he smiled, and the change it brought over him was remarkable. He spoke like we were a group of old friends, fishing buddies or a reunited bowling team.

He said, “Am I gonna need my coat?”

Soto said, “That depends on how easily you get cold.”

The cops followed Gudrais into the apartment, which was dim and overheated. Sam and Soto and I stepped inside, lingering near the door, as though to go any farther would be to poison ourselves with his air. A television sat opposite a folding chair. On the floor was a tray with a chipped mug and dozens of coffee rings. It was a sad room.

As they led him out, Gudrais said, “I’ll prolly die first. Ever think of that?”

Sam said, “Next time I have a drink, Freddy, I’ll drink to your continued health.”

MARILYN AND I DIDN’T SPEAK for several months following her return from Europe. She made herself so busy with work that it was impossible to get her on the phone, or, at least, impossible for me. I’m sure that relevant people had no difficulty getting through. After sending her that first couple of e-mails, I decided that my prodding was worsening things. She was not afraid to make demands. If she wanted to hear an apology, she’d let me know.

Late that summer—about two weeks after the Gudrais trial hit the papers, deep into a heat wave—my cell phone rang. “Please hold for Marilyn Wooten,” said the voice on the other end. That’s what they do when the president calls you.

It was an inopportune moment for her to invite me to lunch: I was standing in the middle of the gallery, my sleeves rolled up, overseeing the installation of a menacing eight-foot sculpture of a bag of organic lettuce. I wanted to request a postponement, but I understood that if I didn’t go now I might never see her again.