by John Verdon
He should call Madeleine, let her know how late he’d be. But how late was that going to be? Should he tell her about the amnesia? Waking up across the street from St. Genesius? The photo threat? Or would all that just worry her sick for no reason?
Maybe he should call Sonya first, see if she could throw any light on what was going on. How much did she really know about Jay Jykynstyl? Was there any reality at all to the hundred-thousand-dollar offer? Was all that just a ruse to get him to come to the city for a private lunch? So he could be drugged and … and what?
Maybe he ought to get to an ER and have them run a tox screen—find out before they were metabolized away exactly what chemicals he’d ingested, replace his suspicions with evidence. On the other hand, the record of a tox screen could create questions and complications. He found himself in the catch-22 of wanting to find out what had happened before taking any official steps to find out what had happened.
As he felt himself slipping into a pit of indecision, a large white van came to a stop less than thirty feet away, directly in front of the brownstone. The wash of headlights from a passing car made the green lettering on the side of the van legible: WHITE STAR COMMERCIAL CLEANING.
Gurney heard a sliding door open on the far side of the van, followed by a few comments in Spanish, then the door sliding shut. The van pulled away, leaving a drably uniformed man and woman in the semidarkness at the door of the brownstone. The man opened it with a key affixed to a ring at his belt. They entered the building, and moments later a light came on in the foyer. Shortly after that a light came on in another ground-floor window. That was followed at approximately two-minute intervals by the appearance of lights in windows on each of the building’s four stories.
Gurney decided to bluff his way in. He looked like a cop, sounded like a cop, and his membership card in an association of retired detectives could be mistaken for active credentials.
When he came to the front door, he found it still open. He walked into the vestibule and listened. There were no footsteps, no voices. He tried the door that led from the vestibule into the rest of the house. It, too, was unlocked. He opened it and listened again. He heard nothing except the muted whine of a vacuum from one of the upper floors. He stepped inside and closed the door gently behind him.
The cleaning people had turned on all the lights, giving the large, foyerlike room a colder, barer look than he remembered. The brightness had diminished the richness of the mahogany staircase that was the room’s main feature. The wood-paneled walls had been cheapened as well, as though the unflattering light had stripped off their antique patina.
In the far wall, there were two doors. One of them, he recalled, was the door to the little elevator into which he’d been escorted by Jykynstyl’s daughter—if in fact that’s who she was, which he now doubted. The door next to it was ajar, and the room beyond it was as brightly illuminated as the large foyer in which he stood.
It appeared to be what real-estate ads refer to as a “media” room. It was visually dominated by a flat-panel video screen with half a dozen armchairs arranged at various angles to it. There was a wet bar in the rear corner, and against an adjoining wall there was a sideboard with an array of wine and cocktail glasses and a stack of glass plates appropriate for elegant desserts or lines of coke. He checked the drawers of the sideboard and found them empty. The wet bar’s cabinets and small refrigerator were locked. He left the room as quietly as he’d entered it and headed for the staircase.
The Persian runner cushioned his rapid steps as he climbed the risers two at a time to the second floor, then to the third. The vacuum sound was louder here, and he imagined that at any moment the cleaning team might descend from the floor above, so reconnaissance time was limited. An archway led into a corridor with five doors. He assumed that the one at the far end would be for the elevator and the other four would open into bedrooms. He went to the nearest door and turned the knob as soundlessly as he could. As he did so, he heard the muffled thump of the elevator stopping farther down the hall, followed by the smooth whoosh of its sliding door.
He stepped quickly into an unlit room he assumed was a bedroom and eased the door shut behind him, hoping that whoever had emerged from the elevator, presumably one of the cleaning people, had been looking in another direction.
It dawned on him that he was in a bit of a situation: unable to conceal himself because the room was too dark for him to locate an appropriate spot and unable to turn on a light for fear it would give him away. And if he were caught hiding pathetically behind a bedroom door, he could hardly bluff his way out at that point by flashing a set of retired-detective credentials. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? What was it he hoped to discover? Jykynstyl’s wallet with a clue to another identity? Conspiratorial e-mail? The photographs referred to in the text message? Something incriminating enough to Jykynstyl to neutralize any threat? Those possibilities were the stuff of implausible caper movies. So why had he put himself in this ridiculous position, lurking in the dark like an idiot burglar?
The vacuum roared to life in the hall outside the door, its shadow passing back and forth across the half inch of light that intruded between the door bottom and the carpet pile. He stepped back gingerly against the wall, feeling his way. He heard a door opening directly across the hall. A few seconds later, the roar of the vacuum diminished, suggesting that it and its operator had entered the opposite room.
Gurney’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, which the crack of light shining under the door was diluting just enough for him to make out a few large shapes: the footboard of a king-size bed, the curving wings of a Queen Anne chair, a dark armoire against a lighter wall.
He decided to take a chance. He felt along the wall behind him for the light switch and found a dimmer knob. He turned it until it was approximately in the middle of its range, then depressed it to its “on” position and immediately back to its “off” position. He was betting that the cleaners were sufficiently busy that the resulting half-second flash of muted light beneath the door would go unnoticed.
What he saw in the brief moment of illumination was a spacious bedroom with the furnishings whose outlines he’d discerned in the semidarkness, plus two smaller chairs, a low chest of drawers with an elaborate mirror above it, and a pair of nightstands with ornate lamps. There was nothing unexpected or strange—except for his reaction. In the instant it was visible, the scene ignited in him the experience of déjà vu. He was sure he had seen before everything exactly as it appeared in that flash of light.
The visceral sense of familiarity was followed a few seconds later by a chilling question: Had he been in this bedroom earlier that day? The chill grew into a kind of nausea. He must have been here, in this room. Why else would he have such an intense feeling about it, about the bed, the position of the chairs, the scalloped crest of the armoire?
More important, how far might the disinhibiting power of alcohol and Rohypnol take one? How much of what one believed, how much of one’s true value system, how much of what was precious to one—how much of all that could be swept away by that chemical mixture? Never in his whole life had he felt so vulnerable, such a stranger to himself—so unsure of who he was or of what he might be capable of doing—as he did at that moment.
Then, gradually, the vertiginous feeling of helplessness and incomprehension was replaced by alternating currents of fear and rage. Uncharacteristically, he embraced the rage. The steel of the rage. The strength and willfulness of the rage.
He opened the door and stepped out into the light.
The drone of the vacuum was coming from a room farther down the corridor. Gurney walked rapidly the other way, back to the big staircase. His recollection of the brevity of his noontime elevator ride told him that the sitting room and dining room were almost certainly on the second floor. Hoping that something in those rooms might provide a thread of memory he could follow, he descended the stairs.
An archway led from the landing to th
e rest of the second floor. Passing through it, Gurney found himself in the Victorian parlor where he’d met Jykynstyl. As elsewhere in the house, all the lights had been turned on by the cleaners, with a similarly bleak effect. Even the giant potted plants had lost their luxuriance. He walked through the sitting area into the dining room. Dishes, glasses, silverware had all been removed. So had the Holbein portrait. Or Holbein fake.
Gurney realized he knew nothing for certain about his lunch visit that day. The safest assumption would be that every element of it was phony. Especially the extravagant purchase offer for his mug-shot portraits. The idea that all of that was bogus, that there never was any money on the table, never any admiration for his insights or talents, brought with it a surprising shock to his ego—followed by chagrin at how much the offer and the accompanying flattery had meant to him.
He recalled a therapist once telling him that the only way one can judge the strength of one’s attachment to something is by the level of pain caused by its removal. It seemed clear now that the potential rewards of the Jykynstyl fantasy had been as important to him as … as believing that they weren’t important at all. Which made him feel like an idiot doubled.
He looked around the dining room. His ecstatic vision of a sailboat on Puget Sound returned with the sourness of regurgitated wine. He studied the freshly polished surface of the table. Not a hint of a smudge or fingerprint anywhere. He went back into the sitting room. There was a faint, complex smell in the air of which he’d been dimly aware as he’d passed through the room minutes before. Now he tried to isolate its elements. Alcohol, stale smoke, ashes in the fireplace, leather, moist plant soil, furniture polish, old wood. Nothing surprising. Nothing out of place.
He sighed with a sense of frustration and failure, the pointless risk of having entered the house. The place radiated a hostile emptiness—no feeling that anyone actually lived there. Jykynstyl had admitted as much with his vague description of a traveling lifestyle, and God only knew where the “daughters” spent their time.
The vacuum sound on the floor above grew louder. Gurney took a last look around the room, then headed for the staircase. He was halfway down to the first floor when a vivid recollection brought him to a full stop.
The smell of alcohol.
The little glass.
Christ!
He strode back up the stairs, two at time, back into the sitting room, over to the cavernous leather armchair from which Jykynstyl had greeted him upon his arrival, the chair from which the apparently infirm man had had such difficulty rising that he needed two free hands on the arms to support himself. And having no convenient table on which to lay his little glass of absinthe …
Gurney reached into the base of the thick tropical plant. And there it was—shielded from casual sight by the high rim of the pot and the dark, drooping leaves. He carefully wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
The question facing him, back in his car a minute later, was what to do with it.
Chapter 45
A curious dog
The fact that the Nineteenth Precinct station house was just a few blocks away on East Sixty-seventh Street focused Gurney on a mental list of the contacts he had there. He knew at least half a dozen detectives in the Nineteenth, maybe two of them well enough to approach for an awkward favor. And getting a set of prints lifted from the pilfered cordial glass and run against the FBI database—a process that would demand some wiggling around the need for a case number—was definitely awkward. He wasn’t about to explain his interest in knowing more about his luncheon host, but he wasn’t about to invent a lie that could later blow up in his face.
He decided he’d have to find another way to go about it. He placed the little glass carefully in the console compartment, put his cell phone on the seat beside him, started the car, and headed for the George Washington Bridge.
The first call he made along the way was to Sonya Reynolds.
“Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing all afternoon?” She sounded angry, anxious, and completely ignorant of the day’s events, which he found reassuring.
“Great questions. I don’t know the answer to either one.”
“What happened? What are you talking about?”
“How much do you know about Jay Jykynstyl?”
“What’s this about? What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure. Nothing good.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How much do you know about Jykynstyl?”
“I know what’s reported in the art media. Big buyer, very selective. Huge financial influence on the market. Likes to be anonymous. Doesn’t allow his photograph to be taken. Likes there to be a lot of confusion about his personal life, even where he lives. Even whether he’s straight or gay. The more confusion, the more he likes it. Kind of obsessed with his privacy.”
“So you’d never met him, never even seen a photo of him, before he dropped into your gallery one day and said he wanted to buy my stuff?”
“What are you getting at?”
“How do you know that the man you spoke to is Jay Jykynstyl? Because he said so?”
“No. Exactly the opposite.”
“He said he wasn’t Jay Jykynstyl?”
“He said his name was Jay. Just Jay.”
“So how …?”
“I kept asking him, told him it would be very difficult to do business with him without knowing his full name, that it was ridiculous for me not to know who I was dealing with when so much money would be involved.”
“And he said … what?”
“He said Javits. His name was Jay Javits.”
“Like Jacob Javits? The guy who used to be a senator?”
“Right, but he said it sort of odd like, like the name just occurred to him and he felt he had to say something because I was making a big issue out of it. Dave, tell me why the fuck we’re talking about this. I want to know right now what happened today.”
“What happened is … it became plain that this whole deal is bullshit. I believe I was drugged and that lunch was some kind of setup that had nothing to do with my artwork.”
“That’s insane.”
“Getting back to the man’s identity—he told you his name was Jay Javits and you concluded from that that his name was Jay Jykynstyl?”
“Not like that, no. Don’t be silly. During the course of our conversation, we were talking about how pretty the lake was, and he mentioned he could see it from his room, so I asked him where he was staying, and he told me at a very beautiful inn, like he didn’t want me to know the name. So later I called the Huntington, the most exclusive inn on the lake, and I asked if they had a Jay Javits registered there. At first the guy sounded confused, and then he asked me if maybe I had the name wrong. And I said sure, I’m getting older and my hearing is bad and sometimes I get names wrong. I tried to sound pathetic.”
“And you think you succeeded?”
“I must have. He said, ‘Could the person you want be named Jykynstyl?’ ”
“I asked him to spell the name, and he did, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy fucking Christ, is it really possible?’ So I asked him to describe this Jykynstyl guest, and he did, and it was obviously the same guy who had come to the gallery. So, you see, he didn’t want me to know who he was, but I found out.”
Gurney was silent. He thought a far more likely possibility was that Sonya had been smoothly manipulated into believing that the man was Jykynstyl—in a way that would leave her with no doubts about her conclusion. The subtlety and expertise of the con job was almost more disturbing than the con itself.
“You still there, David?”
“I need to make some more calls, and then I’ll get back to you.”
“You still haven’t told me what happened.”
“I have no idea what happened—other than the fact that I was lied to, drugged, driven around the city in a blackout, and threatened. Why and by whom I have no ide
a. I’m doing my best to find out. And I will find out.” The optimism in those last five words bore little relationship to the anger, fear, and confusion he felt. He promised again to get back to her.
His next call was to Madeleine. He made it without thinking about what he was going to say or checking the time. It wasn’t until she picked up with a sleepy sound in her voice that he glanced at the dashboard clock and saw that it was 10:04 P.M.
“I was wondering when you’d finally call,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Pretty much. Sorry I didn’t call sooner. Things were a little nuts this afternoon.”
“What do you mean, ‘pretty much’?”
“Huh? Oh, I mean I’m okay, just in the middle of a little mystery.”
“How little?”
“Hard to say. But it seems that the Jykynstyl thing is some kind of con. I’ve been sort of running around tonight trying to get a handle on it.”
“What happened?” She was totally alert now, speaking in the perfectly calm voice that both masked and exposed her concern.
He was aware that he had a choice. He could relate everything he knew and feared, regardless of the effect on her. Or he could present a less complete, less disturbing version. In what he would later see as a self-deluding bit of fancy dancing, he chose the latter as a first step and told himself he would present the whole story as soon as he understood it better himself.
“I started feeling funny at lunch, and later, in the car, I was having trouble remembering the conversation we’d had.” He told himself that this was true, albeit somewhat minimized.
“Sounds like you were drunk.” Her voice was more questioning than assertive.
“Maybe. But … I’m not sure.”
“You think you were drugged?”
“It’s one of the possibilities I’ve been considering. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I’ve been checking the place out, and all I know for sure is that there’s something wrong about the whole situation—and the hundred-thousand-dollar offer is almost certainly baloney. But what I actually called to say is that I’m just leaving Manhattan and I should be home in about two and a half hours. I’m really sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
