by Konstantin
He slipped his cell phone into his jacket pocket and sat down across from me. He examined his wineglass and decided it was too close to empty. He lifted the bottle of Syrah and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head and he shrugged and filled his glass.
“Todd’s always happy to serve the cause of art,” Monroe continued, “and especially if it improves the value of his own collection.” He drank some wine and heaved a satisfied sigh.
“Did he say when?” I asked.
“Tonight. He’ll call me back with the time.” Monroe bent again to what remained of the lunch I was buying. He speared the last of his cassoulet even as he scanned the dessert menu.
Finding Chaz Monroe hadn’t been hard. I’d returned home on Sunday afternoon with Ricky’s words still playing in my head, and with my worry ticking louder. I thought about Holly’s videos and knew that if I wanted to understand what she was about— and maybe figure out what she wanted with my brother— I’d have to see them for myself.
I returned to the Candy Foam blog and followed BeatTilStiff’s postings from there to another contemporary-art blog called ArtHaus Polizei. It turned out to be Beat’s home turf. Polizei was an edgier version of Candy Foam, and besides Beat’s musings on recent gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and auctions there were long riffs on anime, music videos, sneaker fashion, and tattooing. “Fucking” was apparently his adjective of choice.
I’d clicked on a “Profile” link and learned that, besides being the proprietor of Polizei, Beat was “a New York–based freelance writer, art critic, and art acquisitions consultant.” I’d lingered over that description for a while and then clicked on the “Contact Me” link. I’d been vague in my e-mail about what kind of consultation I needed, but I was pretty clear about my ability to pay. I’d included my telephone number, too. The market for freelance writer–art critic–art acquisition consultants must’ve been a little thin, because I didn’t wait an hour for his call.
I told him I was interested in Cassandra Z’s work, and that I was looking for help in seeing some of it. My problem didn’t surprise him.
“I take it you spoke to Don Orlando?” Monroe asked. His voice was hoarse and ironic.
“We didn’t exactly hit it off.”
He snorted. “Which puts you in good company, my friend. O’s very control-freaky, and particularly when it comes to Cassie. I used to think it was a German thing, but now I think it was always fucking strategy. All that mystery and exclusivity has built a real buzz in certain circles, and done wonders for her prices.”
“Wonders,” I said. “Can you arrange a viewing for me?”
“A viewing with an eye toward acquisition?”
“That’s the general idea.”
We’d talked about his fee, but I hadn’t bargained hard. I wanted him motivated, and in any event it was David’s money I’d be spending. I’d heard a cigarette light when we settled things, and Monroe had seemed relieved and eager to get started.
“I’ll make my calls and we can touch base tomorrow, let’s say for late lunch.”
He’d picked Cousin Dupree’s, a new and much hyped bistro on the Upper East Side, and he’d kept me waiting for twenty minutes. He was talking on his cell and smoking a cigarette when he almost stepped through the door— a rounded, fortyish man in a gravely abused camel hair coat and wilted Gucci loafers. The hostess had stopped him at the threshold and pointed him and his cigarette at the sidewalk, but he’d taken it affably enough. I’d watched through the window as he puffed away and made more phone calls. His tangled hair was black and shiny, and so were his eyes. They sparkled above his ruddy cheeks and, along with his sly, puffy mouth, gave him the look of a seedy cherub.
Monroe drained his glass. “No dessert for you?” he asked. I shook my head and he looked suspicious and ordered a flan. He was looking over the list of Sauternes when I cleared my throat.
“How many of her videos have you seen?” I asked.
Monroe answered quickly. “Five: Interviews Two through Five and Interview Eight.”
“How many are there?”
“Twelve so far.”
“What are they like?”
He thought about this longer. “I won’t ruin things for you by trying to describe them,” he said finally, “and in any case I wouldn’t do them justice— but I will give you my opinion, which is that they’re fucking brilliant. Weird shit, definitely, strange enough to give a sick kind of thrill, but fucking brilliant. You’ll see.”
Monroe’s flan came and he was halfway through it when his cell phone burred. He raised his eyebrows and excused himself to the bar again. He wore a satisfied smile when he returned.
“Nine o’clock,” he said, “at Todd’s place.”
* * *
Which left me five hours to kill when I said goodbye to Monroe. I disposed of one of them with a cold, stiff-legged run along the Hudson, up into the twenties and down to TriBeCa. The phone was ringing as I came through the door. It was Clare.
“I was wondering if you wanted your key back,” she said. I heard street noise in the background.
“I was a little surprised you didn’t leave it behind on Saturday.”
“I thought about it. I thought about throwing it at you too. Do you want it back or not?”
“Not,” I said. “Where are you?”
She was quiet for a moment. “In the neighborhood,” she said eventually.
“You want to stop by?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and hung up. But she was there when I got out of the shower. She was perched in the sofa with her coat still on and blue dusk falling around her. She turned the key over in her hand.
“Still thinking about throwing it?” I asked. I belted my robe and sat at the table.
Clare’s gray eyes were clouded and her voice was low. “It’s too light,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any damage.”
I smiled. “I’m sorry about Saturday.”
“Sorry about what part?”
“About prying.”
“Was that prying? I’m sort of amazed you never asked before. Anyway, it wasn’t that.”
“Then what was it?”
She sighed massively and stood and paced slowly along my bookshelves. Her hair was white in the twilight and she swept it off her shoulders. “Timing. Your timing sucks.”
I nodded. “Then I’m sorry about the timing, and about being insensitive.”
Clare’s laugh was short and bitter. “Insensitive? A few years of therapy, some medication maybe— and maybe you can work your way up to insensitive.” She leaned against a cast-iron column and folded her arms across her chest. “Besides, ‘insensitive’ is boyfriend talk. Is that what you think you are?”
“A friend, anyway.”
Another small laugh. “A friend with privileges? A fuck buddy?”
“What do you call it, if not a friend?”
She said something I couldn’t make out and I crossed the room and stood in front of her. Her head was bent and her shoulders quivered in the shadows.
“What do you call it?” I asked again. My throat was tight and my voice sounded far away.
Clare leaned forward and rested her forehead on my shoulder. She tapped me lightly in the chest with my house key. “Hell if I know,” she murmured. “You’re the fucking detective, you figure it out.” Then she put the key in her pocket and turned her face up and kissed me.
* * *
Clare was sleeping when I got into the shower and gone when I got out. I dressed quickly in gray flannels and a black turtleneck and headed for the subway and Brooklyn.
Chaz Monroe was waiting on the corner of President and Hicks streets, smoking a cigarette, talking on his cell, and stamping his feet in the cold. The collar was up on his camel hair coat and his dark eyes glittered in the streetlight. He said his goodbyes and snapped his phone shut.
“Bring the popcorn and soda?” he said, smiling. He took my elbow and led me toward Henry Street and he talked the whole way to Todd Her
ring’s house.
“Todd’s a major music-biz lawyer,” Monroe said. “He bought this place two years ago— the same time he traded in his wife for a newer version— and he’s been renovating ever since. About the only thing he’s managed to finish is the home theater, which is lucky for us. He’ll be showing us Interview Two and Interview Four tonight.”
Herring’s place was a wide four-story brownstone, with a construction Dumpster parked outside and scaffolds climbing up the front. There were broad steps from the sidewalk to a pair of tall, deep-set black doors. Monroe leaned on the doorbell and smiled into the video intercom.
A lanky, red-haired man in jeans and a FUBU T-shirt ushered us into a high-ceilinged entrance hall that was decorated in dropcloths and plaster dust.
“Chaz, my brother,” the man said. He had a deep, radio voice, and he wrapped Monroe in a stiff-armed, stylized hug, and pounded him lightly on the back with a fist. Monroe endured it with amusement.
“Todd, my man,” he said, and kept nearly all the laughter from his voice. “This is John March.”
“Good to meet you, bro,” Todd said, and held a fist out to me. I tapped it lightly with my own.
Todd Herring was tall, skinny, and abundantly freckled. His carroty hair was expensively cut but salted with white, and despite the business with the fists and the “bro” talk I figured him for fifty.
“We’ll go downstairs,” he said, and he led us past a curving stairway and many paint cans to other, narrower stairs going down.
The brownstone’s garden floor was thickly carpeted, heavily paneled, and flush with recessed halogen lighting. We followed Todd down another hall, past a well-equipped kitchenette.
“Drinks for anybody?” he asked. I declined, but Monroe hit him up for a beer. Todd fetched a Carta Blanca and a frosted mug and led us to the theater. He flicked a switch and muted lights came up on the walls and from the ceiling. There were twenty thick, theater-style seats, arranged in four curving rows before a large screen. Todd went to a black cabinet at the back of the room and fiddled with some technology inside.
“Sit anywhere,” he said. He flicked a switch, and a large flat monitor swiveled quietly out of the ceiling at the front of the room.
Chaz took a seat in the second row center and put his beer bottle and glass into the slots built into the armrest. I wandered to the front of the room, and looked at a pair of glass-fronted wooden boxes leaning against the wall. They were the same size, about twelve inches by fifteen inches by four inches deep. One was made from cherry wood and one was bird’s-eye maple, and there were shelves and cubbyholes built inside of them, and little objects mounted there. They reminded me of Joseph Cornell boxes and I walked closer and knelt for a better view. A chill went through me.
“She calls them reliquaries, bro,” Todd said. “She makes them by hand, and there’s one for each of her videos, but I’d wait until afterward to look at them. They make more sense, and the impact is…bigger.”
I looked at Chaz and he nodded. “It’s a context issue,” he said, and he swallowed some beer.
I nodded back and took a seat behind Chaz. Todd hit the lights and the room went black and I wondered what context would make sense of what I’d seen behind the glass.
11
“You don’t want a real drink?” Chaz Monroe asked me. “Because you look like you could use one.”
“Ginger ale is fine,” I said. Monroe shrugged and wedged into the pack at the bar to order. In fact, he had a point. I felt wobbly and somehow disoriented, and the walk from Todd Herring’s house to Smith Street had made no dent in that. “Like nothing else I’ve seen,” Ricky had said. Ricky hadn’t lied.
I found an empty table in a corner of the crowded room and slid along the green banquette. Monroe wasn’t long in coming and he handed me my drink and took the seat opposite. He tilted his glass to mine.
“To art, bro,” he said ironically. He swallowed some scotch and gave me a speculative look. “So, what did you think?”
I shook my head. “Are they all like that?”
“The particulars are different, but the narrative arc is the same— all the ones I’ve seen, anyway: the e-mail, the first meeting, the dominance and submission, the investigation, and the final interrogation.”
“Do you ever see the men’s faces?”
Monroe shook his head. “They’re always digitally masked, the faces and anything else that might identify them— scars, tattoos, that kind of thing. And their voices are distorted. It depersonalizes them— destroys their individuality and turns them into objects, into nothing more than their desires and demands. At least, until you start feeling sorry for the poor fucks.”
“But you always see Cassandra?”
“All there is to see— and you always hear her voice too. Nothing masked there.”
Not much, I thought, and shook my head. “Jesus,” I said.
“Indeed,” Monroe said, and he drank off the rest of his scotch. “Too quick,” he sighed. “Another soda for you, or maybe something stronger?” I declined and he headed for the bar. I looked into my glass and thought again about the videos. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was impossible to stop.
They were each about fifty minutes long, and they both began with hand-held, documentary-style camera work— close-up, fidgety images of printed e-mail. The To and From fields, and any other information that could have identified sender or receiver, were redacted with thick black lines, and the messages themselves were brief— guarded, two- or three-line responses to an on-line personal ad. A woman’s voice read the text as the camera panned across the pages. Flat and emotionless as it was, I recognized it from David’s cell phone. Wren.
The first video, Interview Two, cut from the e-mail to hidden camera footage taken at tabletop level in a blurry bar or cafГ©. There was a man at the table with Cassandra, and I came to think of him as Skinny. His face was a mass of flesh-toned pixels, and his speech was synthesized and mechanical. But for the expensive tailoring, he could’ve been a government informant or the emcee on some hostage video.
“Late afternoon works for me— five-thirty or six…. I’m not into drugs, and if you are, we can stop right here…. I like to talk while we…you know.”
The robot voice seemed at first too deep for Skinny’s narrow frame, and too detached for the awkward situation. But after a while, it was the human bits that remained in his speech— the coughs and sighs and breathing, the pauses and small stutters— that seemed out of place.
For her part, Cassandra was demure throughout. She nodded agreement to nearly everything Skinny said, and when she spoke, her words were few and just above a whisper.
“I have a room a few blocks from here. Would you like to go now?”
And then came the sex.
It began without segue, in a dim hotel room with yellow light spilling from an open bathroom door and bleeding through a tiny gap in the drapes. The images were fuzzy and the visual style was amateur Internet porn: greenish, ghostly figures, the weightless movements of moonwalkers, and nothing left to the imagination. Eventually, I realized that the scene was actually several scenes, a montage of many late afternoons, and I realized there was a progression to the sex: from the more to the less conventional. From the variety of the angles, I guessed Cassandra must have had three cameras hidden around the room, and with them she captured a full catalogue of trajectories and thrusts. Through it all Skinny called the shots, tentatively at first, and then without reservation.
“You like that, don’t you…” “You want it there…” “Tell me you want it there…” “Say it like you mean it…” “Say it again, bitch.”
The soundtrack was dominated by his synthesized commands and exhortations, and by his unadulterated panting, grunts, and huffing. The unprocessed sounds were startling in their intimacy, and more unsettling than his words.
Beneath Skinny’s dictates and the other noises he made, Cassandra’s voice was a leitmotif of gasping obedience. She did what Skinny tol
d her to do and said what he told her to say, and when he told her to say it again, she did. She moaned and cried out and pleaded, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes not, and her white, limber body bent and twisted beneath Skinny’s cubist face. Her own icon’s face, when it was visible, was pale and empty-eyed.
What Monroe had called the investigation segment began with what seemed a pause in the sex montage, and with a gradual change in the sound and look of the video. The commands and moaning faded away, and the noise of a running shower grew louder. Colors bled from the screen and were replaced by a smoky black and white. The tang of seedy sex dissipated and a sweaty paranoia took its place.
The bathroom door was opened wide and Cassandra was alone on the wrecked bed. Her naked body was luminous but her movements were stiff and achy as she rose and moved to a chair, to a jacket hanging there, to a pocket and a wallet inside. She looked over her shoulder as she rifled through the wallet and withdrew some cards. She held them to the camera lens, and though their surfaces were masked it was plain that they were credit cards and business cards. I’d thought of David when I saw it. My wallet was in my suit jacket…
