The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  Our entrees arrived then and she used them as an excuse to delay her reply, but after a while, she sighed and said, “I don’t know. I think they’re different paintings, but I don’t know how to prove it.”

  We ate for a while longer. If it was the fake painting that had gone up in smoke, where was the real one? “When you first brokered the deal to Sweeting, did you check the painting’s provenance?”

  “I took a look, of course. The then-owner had had possession for more than thirty years, and he showed me the provenance he had been given by the auction house in the sixties.” I frowned, but before I could say anything, she said, “A provenance from a reputable auction house is a bit like the deed to a house, like a bank note. You just…accept it.”

  “Do you have a copy of that provenance?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think we need a division of labour. I’ll check on the people, you take the painting.” She needed to be clear about the provenance; doubt about her own judgement was eating her up. “Find out everything you can. Check back more than a hundred years if you have to. I’ll need addresses for Honeycutt and Sweeting. And Julia, when I say division of labour, I mean it. Stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting. Stick to the painting. Can you do that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m making it a condition of working with you.” I took the oversized cheque from my pocket. “If you don’t agree, I’ll tear this up now and we’ll part on friendly terms.”

  “But why—”

  I held the cheque up. “Yes or no.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I? Yes, all right. I’ll stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting.”

  We talked some more but said nothing useful. I paid. We walked out into the sunshine, stopped by our respective cars. After chi sao, it seemed ridiculous to shake hands.

  “I’ll call,” I said.

  “Benny? It’s Torvingen. Yes, I know it’s been a long time but why would I want to spend my days hanging around the evidence locker when I don’t have to? Pretty good, pretty good. Listen, Benny, just curious: What can you tell me about the coke that was fished out of that Inman Park burn earlier this week? No, Benny…Benny, I don’t need to know everything. Just tell me if it was the real thing or dreck cut a hundred times. It was? You’re sure? Yeah, me too. How about later this week? There’s a new Katherine Bigelow coming out.”

  Ben Heglund was a movie buff. He would do anything to get a free pass and see a film a week before the general public. He was also five-foot-eight and thin as a rail and could eat more junk food at one sitting than anyone I have ever known.

  So the cocaine was pure. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it left to be found by the police. Why? It no more fit the drug killing scenario than the murder itself.

  Drug killings generally fell into two categories: simple, gang-related turf warfare—who controls what parts of the neighbourhood, who decides on the volume of product; and struggles among the real power brokers which usually led to the spectacular executions of whole families and sometimes even friends and acquaintances, executions gruesome enough to serve as a dire warning to other little fish who were tempted to grow bigger. The burn that killed Lusk, though, had been surgically precise.

  Three names: Lusk, Honeycutt, and Sweeting. Lusk was dead and out of the game, and it wasn’t to Sweeting that Julia had talked about Lusk and her doubts about the painting’s provenance. There was no hurry. Honeycutt would have no reason to think anyone suspected him of anything, and complacent people are rarely dangerous.

  I mulled it over. I had spent more time as a member of the Red Dogs, the hit squad of the APD, than I had as a regular detective, but the basics were very simple: gather information, assimilate the evidence, make an arrest—or, in this case, give everything to the police so they could make the arrest. But information was the first step.

  Although I had Charlie Sweeting’s phone number, I looked him up in the book. He was listed under Charlie Sweeting, not C. or Charles, and the number matched the one Julia had given me. One face for all comers. I phoned. He agreed, in the kind of Southern accent that seems to embarrass the inhabitants of the New Atlanta, to see me just as soon as I could get there.

  He lived ten minutes from me, on Spring Street, where the servants’ cottages in the back gardens were bigger than my house. I pulled up before a mansion with a sweeping front lawn that was probably planted sixty years ago, bright with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of perfect tulips. They would not last much longer in this heat, no matter how many gardeners he employed. One of them was out there now in threadbare summer chinos, clipping busily.

  He stood up as I approached the door and I realized immediately that he was not the gardener. “Miss Torvingen?”

  White moustache beautifully trimmed, greyish blue eyes, thin, freckled arms with crepey skin, liver spots showing through the thinning yellow-white hair. Old enough to be stubborn about the ways to address women. “Yes.”

  He stripped off his work gloves and held out a long, beautifully kept hand that looked absurdly young and able. “How do you do?”

  “A little warm.” I wasn’t, particularly, but I am tall and move too easily, and old-fashioned Southern men never relax around me until they can convince themselves that they are physically superior. It speeds things along a little if I help them out. He led me into the airy entrance hall and then a sunny drawing room. Air-conditioning whispered in the background. He spent some time pulling out the chair, ordering me iced tea from his housekeeper, asking me if the temperature was agreeable.

  “Lovely tea,” I said when it arrived, and it was: brown and strong as a tennis player’s arm, and cool, with just the right touch of lemon.

  “Thank you. Bessie’s been making it for the family to that same secret recipe for twenty years.”

  I smiled, and we complacently admired our exchange of information: I had the breeding and manners to not rush, to appreciate his hospitality; he was rich and settled enough to have an old family retainer and to putter about in his own garden if he chose.

  “Now then, Miss Torvingen—”

  “Aud, please.”

  “Then you must call me Charlie. Miss Lyons-Bennet tells me there’s been some unpleasant business with the painting I sold to Honeycutt. Something about a fire, and now questions about the insurance.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think I can help?”

  “I do. I’d be grateful if you could tell me first why you decided to sell.”

  He looked at the European cut of my clothes. “I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Atlanta, Aud, but it’s a thrusting, hot-blooded place. Fortunes to be made, even now.” He knew as well as I did that Atlanta fortunes were now made by real estate reptiles with cold eyes and flickering, forked tongues. “I’m a hot-blooded man myself, and that Friedrich was a cold piece of work to wake up to, day after day, every brushstroke just so, making the ice look like a bunch of stacked bricks. I just got tired of the darn thing.”

  “You didn’t start to wonder whether or not it was authentic?”

  His face stilled for a moment, then stretched in a grin that was wide enough to draw what was left of his widow’s peak an inch closer to his eyebrows. “So that’s what this is about! No wonder Julia was so goddamned coy on the phone. Looks like I got rid of it in the nick of time. They think my Friedrich’s a fake?”

  “Actually, it depends on who you mean by ‘they.’”

  “Oh, let’s quit fencing, shall we?” He was full of good humour now: he hadn’t been skunked in any deal. He was still a top dog. “So what you want to know is: was I a dupe, or was I trying to dupe someone else?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “All I can tell you is that I bought a painting from Julia Lyons-Bennet in good faith, and sold that exact same painting in just as good faith three months ago. I believed—still do, as a matter of fact—that it was genuine. No one but a poker-faced German with a high pucker fact
or could have painted such a humourless thing. No, no,” he said genially, “the only thing I can’t tell you is why I bought it in the first place.”

  I switched direction. “How did you come to offer the painting to Honeycutt?”

  “He made an offer to me.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “We were at one of those damn charity dinners, for the zoo, I think, or maybe it was the symphony. Anyhow, he was asking about reputable dealers in the city. I told him about Julia—how she got me a good price on the Friedrich even though I now hated the damn thing. Then a few months later we bumped into each other in Turner’s box at a Braves game.” He was much too well bred to wait to see if I had picked up on the fact that he had been Ted Turner’s guest, but I obliged him with raised eyebrows anyway. “He’d remembered our conversation. We talked some more about other things, investments and so on. It’s always good to know another banker, so I invited him to the party I give every year to pay off all my social obligations—kills about a hundred birds with one stone. Anyhow, he accepted. During that party—and I remember particularly because we were just about to start serving the food, and goose goes cold so fast—he asked to see the painting. It used to hang in the upstairs dressing room, so I told him to take a look but not to be too long if he wanted any of the bird. When he came down, he said he’d like to buy it. I told him he could have it and welcome if he paid what I paid for it two years ago, plus ten percent—art goes up all the time, you know, even stiff Germanic mistakes like that—plus any expenses. And that was pretty much that.”

  “When was your party?”

  “January nineteenth.”

  “And the Braves game?”

  “That would have been September or thereabouts.”

  “Tell me what you think of Honeycutt.”

  His eyes gleamed with amusement. “He speaks well and knows the right people but I wouldn’t put my money in his bank, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust him to be able to shoot his own dog if he had to.”

  I considered for a moment. Good old Charlie Sweeting liked me, probably thought I was a smart, sweet thing. “I’d like to ask you a favour.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I’d like to meet Mr. Honeycutt, but I don’t want him to know why I want to meet him. It’s all very delicate, with Ms. Lyons-Bennet’s reputation involved and so on. Perhaps you could think of a way?”

  “Well, now, I might just at that. Give me a day to chew on it.”

  I gave him my card and left him feeling quite pleased with himself.

  When I built the deck and the master suite, I turned one of the original two bedrooms into my work space. It is a big, square room, with a heart-of-pine floor, large windows and a skylight. Up against the two white walls farthest from the door are my benches and vises, the mitre, jig, and radial arm saws, the sanders, well machined, efficient and reasonably new. I use them when needed and forget about them when not. The wall on the right as I enter the room is where I keep my hand tools, some of which I have had since I was a teenager. I found my brad-awl, for example, in a junk shop in a small Yorkshire town; it was probably made in the 1920s; its smooth wooden handle nests perfectly in my palm. I have several planes, different sizes and types. Their handles are painted sober, strong colours—navy blue, hunter green, chocolate—their blades all gleam that particular oily grey of quality steel. The chisels, with their matching pale oak handles, are a complete set that belonged to one of my mother’s uncles. I know the foibles of every single tool, how each shapes the wood to which I set it.

  Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend’s house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from.

  When I want to use my long muscles, feel arms and legs flex and bend, the sweat run down my neck and get in my eyes, I build something big. Framing in the master suite extension had taken me two weeks, the deck another six days. But after talking to Sweeting, I wanted something more exacting than energetic, something to free my mind.

  I had been working for the last two weeks on a chair of English pine. My hand plane slid down the wood, zzst zzst, and buttery shavings curled to the floor. Zzst zzst. English pine is darker than its acid-yellow American cousin, so rich it makes you want to reach out and put it in your mouth. The grain is finer, denser, a little less spongy, such a joy to plane that when I first started working it I often took off more than I needed in the sheer pleasure of watching the blade slide through it. Zzst zzst. The shavings piled up. Sunlight, shivered and greened by the foliage outside the window, warmed the heaps, filling the room with the simple, uncomplicated scent of fresh-cut pine. Zzst zzst. I could feel my face relaxing, the muscles around my ribs letting go.

  The phone rang. I listened with only half an ear as the answering machine stopped clunking and the caller started to talk. Helen and Mick, telling me about the performance artist and body sculptor who would be at the King Plow Arts Center on Thursday night, and asking if I wanted to go with them. I hadn’t seen Helen and Mick for two or three weeks. I might enjoy it.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. “Ms. Torvingen, this is Philippe Cordova. Our client is arriving in two days and I would like to go over some of her intended activities with you before then. At your convenience.”

  Less than fifteen seconds. Very European: no hello-how-are-you, no extraneous information, blessedly uncluttered.

  I put down the plane, twirled the brass handle of the vise, lifted the thick oblong of wood. Coming along nicely. I resecured it. Set the plane to the wood, stopped when I realized this side needed slightly less pressure, then began again until I was back in the unhurried, endless rhythm. Zzst zzst. This was the kind of work I understood. I knew where the wood came from, that for every tree cut down, another was planted, that I could make a chair both functional and beautiful. I was adding to the world, not taking.

  Did Julia ever feel this kind of inner satisfaction? I had only ever seen her look tense or worried or irritated. I could not imagine that face in contented repose, or that the fierce competitiveness of collecting might induce such a frame of mind. But everyone has a private and joyful hobby, even if it’s just bobbing about in the bath playing with yellow rubber ducks. I smiled at the thought of Julia talking to her ducks, hair pulled up in a topknot, soap bubbles clinging to the damp skin just below her bare collarbone….

  Zzst zzst.

  Little Five Points is Atlanta’s East Village, the hipcoolfunky heart of the city where the two most recent commercial buildings are a tattoo parlour and a leather and fetish rummage store called The Junkman’s Daughter. I don’t know if there’s a special tenants’ committee, but the uncool are not allowed. Even the pharmacy is run by a man called Ira who knows everything about everybody and flips pills and salves and prescription printouts with the pizzazz of a cocktail waiter. Here is where you’ll find Charis, the city’s only feminist bookshop, and Sevenandah, the whole-food cooperative. Here is where Atlanta’s musicians and poets and artists hang out to reassure themselves that, yes, they really are right to starve for their art.

  The two triangular patches of grass at the nexus of the five converging roads were as usual full of long-haired men and short-haired women trying to look drawn and anguished and tragic and succeeding only in looking a little muddled, rather young and tolerably well fed. Dornan calls them the Oh-I’m-so-depressed-I’ll-paint-my-room-black-and-purple crowd. He takes their money with great delight.


  Dornan owns the Borealis Café chain. There are seven stores in Atlanta and its suburbs but the L5P store was the first, and Dornan spends most of his time there. Today, it smelled of dark, bitter coffee, frothed milk, red wine and, very faintly, pot—as always.

  “Torvingen! Luck smiles on you as usual. A second or two later and I’d be away to Marietta to pay a little visit to the newest addition to our café family. But now that you’re here, perhaps I’ll stay a minute or two.”

  He was always just about to leave, always about to pick up the phone, and he always persuaded himself to sit for a minute or two that stretched into thirty, into two hours, all night. We go back a long way.

  “And what’s new in your life?” he asked as we took our usual table in the corner where he could lean over and beckon a server, watch the other tables, and look through the window all at the same time.

  “This and that.”

  “Ah, now, don’t be coy. You’re wearing your hunting face. Two lattés, tall, and biscotti, Jonie, if you please.” The long-suffering barista was already lifting cups and spoons onto a tray. “Thank you, my dear.” As always, he looked delighted, but I knew if she had not known what to prepare, those merry blue Irish eyes would have glinted cold as Galway Bay in February. He sipped, sighed with pleasure as though it were his first coffee of the day, and leaned over the table. “So tell me about your hunt.”

  I told him about bumping into Julia, the fire, Denneny poking his nose in, and Julia’s offer. “So unless it’s all one big coincidence, I’m looking for someone who can find a professional torch at six hours’ notice, who thinks nothing of leaving several keys of pure cocaine behind as false evidence, and who is somehow tied in with a valuable piece of art.”

  “Is that all,” he said comfortably.

  “And she doesn’t even realize that the burn was as much directed at her as Lusk, or the painting.”