The Murals

by William Bayer

  ‘Either way it’ll cost a fortune,’ I said.

  Hannah said she’d cover it. I didn’t want her to think I doubted her, but I felt I had to ask if she was serious.

  ‘Totally,’ she said. ‘We gotta find out if Courtney’s the Ragdoll Artist. I’ll ask Noah,’ she said, referring to her lawyer brother. ‘He uses investigators. Maybe he can recommend a good one.’ She smiled. ‘I’m actually feeling good about this, Jase. The boardroom portrait – that’s a huge clue. We’re finally getting somewhere.’

  I felt the same, especially after Tally came up with several internet leads on the deprogramming firm, Cult Intervention & Recovery Services in Buffalo, New York, which Joan discovered had filed for bankruptcy in 1998.

  ‘I knew there had to be some record of it,’ Tally said, handing me print-outs of articles from The Buffalo Enquirer.

  The articles, which went back to the early 1980s, told quite a story. CIRS, as the firm was called, turned out to have been the offspring of Synanon, a California-based drug-treatment program that had morphed through the years into a scary cult. CIRS was founded by two former Synanon group leaders, Chuck McGrath and Libby Harmon. They moved to Buffalo where they set up as cult deprogrammers, applying methods they’d learned at Synanon to brainwash adolescent cult members.

  CIRS filled a need. Parents of kids who’d been inducted into cults were willing to pay almost anything to people who promised to bring their children home. But as the CIRS owners pointed out, simply rescuing kids and bringing them home wouldn’t solve their problems. First, the kids had to be deprogrammed. Otherwise, they were apt to run away again and return to a cult where they felt safe and loved.

  McGrath and Harmon presented themselves as idealists. They printed up a glossy brochure filled with photos of them bear-hugging troubled kids, and of happy-looking young people practicing animal husbandry and crop cultivation in the fields of an idyllic working farm. The main house on the farm had been converted to a treatment center, and the outbuildings into boys’ and girls’ dorms. Fees ran high. The CIRS brochure didn’t claim otherwise. But as one set of parents stated, in an appreciative letter excerpted in the brochure: ‘No cost is too great when your child’s future is at stake.’

  In the first years of CIRS, articles recorded the organization’s growth, acquisition of adjoining properties and additions to its therapeutic staff. Starting in 1992, though, there were reports of lawsuits in which CIRS was accused of employing coercive methods.

  An article about one of these suits appeared in The Buffalo Enquirer on October 10, 1994:

  LOCAL COMPANY EMBROILED IN NEW LAWSUIT

  CLAIMING PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE

  In a lawsuit filed Monday by John and Sally Devigne of Scarsdale, N.Y., on behalf of their son, Paul, against Cult Intervention & Recovery Services, a local therapeutic firm specializing in deprogramming, reference is made to a procedure called ‘The Game’ in which teenagers are forced to stand in their underwear in front of peers while being subjected to ‘ruthlessly critical personal assessments which inevitably cause the teen to break down in tears.’

  Another form of abuse referred to in the lawsuit is called ‘The Ring,’ in which male and female teens, who refuse to own up to infractions at the CIRS farm, are surrounded by their peers in an ‘improvised human boxing ring and then pummeled by the group.’

  Although, according to the suit, all participants in ‘The Ring’ wear oversized boxing gloves, kids subjected to the punishment rarely attempt to fight back. Rather, the suit contends, they cover up to protect themselves, and are hit until beaten to the ground.

  The suit contends that both ‘The Game’ and ‘The Ring’ are variations of ‘totally discredited techniques previously used at Synanon in California, where the CIRS founders were formerly employed as group leaders.’

  When asked for comment, CIRS CEO Libby Harmon called the lawsuit ‘garbage.’

  ‘We at CIRS do not abuse the vulnerable young people placed in our charge, nor do we condone abuse in any form,’ she said in a written statement. ‘We are grateful to parents for their trust and confidence in our treatment of their children. Our sole aim is to deprogram troubled kids who have been abused at cults, then return them to loving homes. This suit was filed by disgruntled parents whose son we sadly couldn’t help despite our best efforts. Now they are demanding their money back even though they signed an agreement in which they acknowledged that CIRS does not guarantee success with every child enrolled in its program.’

  The Devigne lawsuit is the third of similar suits brought against CIRS in the last two years.

  By 1997 a total of five lawsuits had been filed, the number of teenage residents at the CIRS farm had fallen from twenty-seven to eight, numerous staff members had resigned, and institutions that had bankrolled construction at the farm were calling in their loans. In early 1998, when CIRS went belly-up, McGrath and Harmon left Buffalo and returned to California.

  Just as I finished reading the Enquirer article, Tally suddenly let out with a yelp.

  ‘Get this, Jase! There’s a CIRS survivors’ site!’

  The site welcome page explained that, due to the highly personal nature of the material, access to content was restricted to bona fide former CIRS kids. There was an email address to which inquiries could be made, and to which former CIRS kids could apply for site membership.

  I immediately wrote explaining who I was and why I wanted to know if anyone in the group recalled a Courtney Cobb and/or a Penny Dawson. Two days later I received a reply. The group leader, Saul, wrote that he’d asked around, and that one of the CIRS survivors, Kate, had a vague recollection of a girl named Penny.

  ‘At the farm we didn’t use last names,’ Saul wrote, ‘so she might not be the person you’re asking about. Kate says this Penny didn’t stay long, maybe five or six weeks, and that she didn’t make much of an impression. Kate thinks she said she was an artist. This other girl you mentioned, Courtney – nobody remembers her, but Kate remembers there was a girl Penny talked about in group sessions. The way she spoke about her made Kate think the two of them had been close. Sorry, Jason, that’s all I could come up with. Good luck with your quest.’

  Hannah’s brother, Noah Sachs, gave her the name of a New York private investigator he’d used, a former NYPD detective named Lou Dimona.

  We called him together, got his voicemail. He had a no-nonsense New York accent: ‘Hey! This is Lou. I’m out on the job. You know the drill. Leave word and I’ll get back to you.’

  From his accent, I figured Dimona for a tough outer-borough deez-dems-and-dose-type guy. The man who called us back on FaceTime fit the voice. He wore a tight black T-shirt and sported a bushy mustache.

  Dimona looked disappointed when he discovered we weren’t lawyers. He told us he was busy, but was willing to listen to our story.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said, after we filled him in. ‘There’s this schizo in Switzerland who makes artsy ragdolls, and you don’t know this person’s name, age or gender. The only lead you can give me is the name of the gallery that sells the dolls. That about it?’

  We told him it was.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘here’s my deal. Three grand per day plus expenses. If I travel, I fly business and stay in four-star hotels. Because I don’t want to waste your money, I’ll cut my daily fee to two if you agree to pay me a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus if I find and ID this Ragdoll Artist. One other thing. I’m pretty much booked up. Can’t get to this till January. Give it some thought and get back to me if you want to go ahead.’

  After we hung up, we looked at each other.

  ‘I don’t want to wait till January,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Why don’t we take a crack at it?’

  ‘You mean fly over there?’

  ‘Why not? Maybe we’ll find something. I think we should give it a try.’

  Our first thought was that we would go there together, which led to an amusing discussion as to whether we’d share a room
, and, if we did, whether sex would be optional. In the end, to limit expenses we decided it would be better if I went there alone.

  Soon as I got to Lucerne, I took a taxi to Galerie Susanne Weber on Zuerichstrasse. Miracle of miracles, there was a hotel directly across the street. Hotel Metropol was only rated two-star, but for my purposes it couldn’t have been better.

  Bernice, the pleasant young lady at the front desk, tried to persuade me to take a room at the back.

  ‘It will be much quieter facing the garden,’ she advised.

  I replied that I enjoyed listening to the pulse of a city.

  She smiled knowingly, then offered me a room on one of the higher floors, but I insisted on one on the first or second.

  ‘You’re an interesting man,’ she said, checking me in.

  You have no idea, I thought.

  The room was neat and clean: lumpy bed, small desk facing the window, shallow closet and tiny bath. What more did I need? The price was right – ninety-nine Swiss francs per night including continental breakfast. I figured Hannah would appreciate that.

  I watched the gallery from my lookout for two days. There was a lot of foot traffic in front; some people stopped to peer in the window, but few, I noticed, actually ventured inside.

  The street window display was intriguing – two framed pieces, a charcoal sketch of an intense young man holding his hand in front of his face, and a complex painting of tiny multicolored figures set between long German words. Resting between them, so as to engage passers-by, was one of the Ragdoll Artist’s double-faced dolls.

  I noted that just before closing time at six p.m., a young woman removed the doll from the window, and then, a couple of minutes later, came outside, cranked down the roller screen, padlocked it, checked to make sure the lock was secure, then walked briskly up the street. At nine fifty-five a.m., just before the ten a.m. opening, she reappeared in front, unlocked the screen, cranked it up, entered, and a couple of minutes later replaced the doll to its original position. All like Swiss clockwork.

  Was she the gallerist? I doubted it. She had the bearing of an assistant.

  On my third morning I decided to find out. I lingered for a time in front of the window, studying the three works with special attention to the doll. A bell tinkled when I opened the door. The young woman I’d been observing peered up at me from her desk and smiled. She was a bit on the plain side, but her brown eyes were lovely. She wore oversized hoop earrings and a Chinese knock-off Cartier tank watch on her wrist.

  She addressed me in British-accented English.

  ‘May I help you, sir?’

  ‘Just browsing.’ I asked if she was Ms Susanne Weber.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she giggled. ‘My name’s Constance. Frau Weber isn’t here very much. Right now she’s attending an art fair in Rome.’

  ‘So you’re in charge?’

  She looked down. ‘I wouldn’t put it that way, sir. I’m just her assistant.’

  I chatted her up. Was she British? Indeed she was. Had she lived here long? A little less than a year. Was she interested in outsider art? Oh, yes, she was fascinated by it. She viewed this job as an apprenticeship. She hoped someday to open a gallery of her own in Britain.

  She asked if I was interested in outsider art. I told her I very much was. That pleased her, she said, because most people who stopped in did so merely out of curiosity. She told me she rarely sold anything to these drop-ins – tourists for the most part. She wished she could sell more, she said. Her salary was small, barely enough to get by. When she did manage to make a sale, Frau Weber kindly paid her a small commission.

  As she showed me about, I drew her out, interspersing my questions between her explanations of the works. I asked permission to photograph pieces that interested me. She told me to go right ahead. Clearly she was hoping I’d make a purchase.

  On the plane from New York I’d boned up on outsider art, enough to carry on a basic conversation. As she spoke, I threw in knowledgeable-sounding phrases to prove my bona fides: ‘compulsive quality of the mark-making,’ ‘visualization of the artist’s world-view’ and, my favorite, ‘projection of a troubled self.’

  She asked if I was a collector. I told her the truth, that I taught photography for a living, which, I added, made it difficult to afford to purchase major pieces. I told her that I loved outsider art and enjoyed prowling galleries that offered it, occasionally picking up a piece here and there on behalf of a wealthy friend back home.

  ‘She relies on what she calls my “good eye.” I take photos, and if she decides to buy an artwork, I get a commission just like you.’

  This fib had a bonding effect.

  ‘Well, seems we’re similar that way, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘Like two peas in a pod.’ She stuck out her hand. ‘Please call me Connie.’

  ‘Please call me Jason,’ I said, handing her one of my cards.

  She spent an hour and a half with me, showing me the gallery inventory. In that time she fielded two phone calls, both times speaking in German. After the second call she smiled at me.

  ‘That was Frau Weber. She’ll be back the day after tomorrow. She asked how things are going. I told her I was busy with a prospect.’

  I assured her that I definitely was a prospect.

  ‘Soon as I leave I’ll send photos to my friend. If she’s interested, I’ll come back later and let you know.’ I hesitated. ‘It’s such a pleasure to talk with you. I don’t know anyone in Lucerne. You’re the only person here I’ve had a real conversation with.’ I paused again. ‘Forgive me, Connie, if I’m being too brazen, but I’m wondering if I could take you out to dinner tonight?’

  She gazed into my eyes as she made her decision.

  ‘I would like that very much,’ she said.

  ‘Great!’

  ‘I close at six. Come by then. There’re some pieces in the backroom I’d love to show you. I’d take you back there now but I can’t leave the front without first locking the street door.’

  Ah, a secret stash! What wonders did she have? I thought.

  Back in my hotel room, I phoned Hannah and filled her in. As we spoke, I emailed images of the pieces I’d photographed, all in the 2,500–3,000 Swiss Franc range, suggesting that if she saw one she liked, she’d authorize me to buy it.

  ‘I think a purchase will help me move things along with Connie,’ I told her.

  ‘Do you intend to sleep with her?’ she asked, amused.

  ‘Only if I must,’ I said. ‘She seems a nice kid. Anyway, I doubt I’m her type.’

  ‘Hey, you’re on a mission, Jase. Do what you have to do,’ she said. ‘OK, your images just came through. You have a good eye. I guess we already knew that. I like one of them – the small mandala on silk. Buy it for me, please. I’ll enjoy having it, and hopefully the purchase will, as you so nicely put it, move things along.’

  Hannah could be pretty funny when she wanted to be.

  I turned up at the gallery again just before six, prepared to buy and woo. Connie smiled when she saw me, checked her watch, locked the front door from inside, then beckoned me toward the backroom.

  ‘Before we go further, I want you to know my friend wants to buy the mandala.’

  ‘Terrific!’ she exclaimed. ‘May I kiss you for that?’ And she did, so quickly I didn’t even have time to consent.

  ‘I’ll write you a check right now. Are dollars OK?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ She quickly calculated the amount, then gazed again into my eyes. ‘I am so happy!’ she said, giving me a second kiss as I handed her my check. ‘Now I’m going to show you some pieces few get to see. Please, not a word! Frau Weber would kill me if she knew,’ she said, unlocking the backroom door.

  I liked the way things were going. She’d not only initiated physical contact, but she’d shown a willingness to betray her boss. I had no idea what she was going to show me. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe my luck.

  ‘Erotic outsider art,’ she said, opening a closet in the backroom. ‘
We have a client in Germany who’s into this stuff.’ She showed me a painting of numerous small penises-with-testicles arranged like notes on a blank sheet of music staff paper.

  ‘How about this one?’ she said, giggling, as she showed me an elaborate pen-and-ink drawing of a woman giving head to a horned priapic monster.

  I didn’t pay much attention to either of those works, or to the others she showed me. Rather, my eyes were fastened to a doll made in the Ragdoll Artist’s style, but unlike any of that artist’s other creations. This one differed in that the figure was naked, her legs were spread, showing oversized labia and other female parts depicted out of carefully cut and sewn scraps of pink silk.

  ‘Isn’t she the bomb!’ Connie exclaimed. ‘It’s by the same artist who made the doll in the window.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The Ragdoll Artist.’

  ‘You know about her?’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yes, the Ragdoll Artist is a woman,’ Connie said.

  ‘Ah! A secret!’

  ‘It’s really the only one I know.’

  ‘You’ve never met her?’

  Connie shook her head. ‘Neither has Frau Weber.’

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘How do the dolls come to us?’ Connie smiled. ‘Sorry, I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that she created this one on commission. As I understand it, this is the only fully naked doll she’s ever made. Our German collector was desperate to have it. It’s going to cost him plenty. Probably double the price of her other dolls, and that’s a lot of money.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  She studied me. ‘Seems you know quite a lot. I’m impressed.’

  ‘I think everyone into outsider art knows about the Ragdoll Artist.’

  I asked her if it would be OK if I photographed the erotic doll.

  ‘You really shouldn’t. Frau Weber would positively slay me if she found out.’ She shrugged. ‘Promise you won’t show it to anyone?’

  ‘I promise,’ I lied, clicking off three shots.

  She peered at me again. ‘You’re the kind who does pretty much what he wants, aren’t you, Jason?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I like that in a man. Give me a couple of minutes to lock up, then we’ll go have dinner.’