Jacob’s phone purred. He’d been in the middle of that Similar damned dream that always hijacked his deepest sleeps.
Paralysed from the waist down, clawing across a dusty plain, something in pursuit. But what?
‘Jacob?’
‘Yeah.’ Move your legs, dammit. ‘Daniel?’
‘Can we meet up?’
Jacob glanced at his watch, but it was like a Dalí painting.
‘What time is it?’
‘Ten after nine.’
‘Jesus, Daniel. I was working half-through the night.’
‘Sorry. It’s important.’
A pigeon made a fuss of landing on the balcony, doors wide open, breeze blowing. I’m in Sophie’s.
‘Let me call you later, yeah?’
Daniel wasn’t happy. ‘It’s just really important that we talk before you meet your Vierte contact. Somebody you know is connected. Understand?’
‘Fine. Bye.’ Christ, what am I going to do about this guy? A freaking Nazi-hunting hitman who wants me to be his assistant.
Jacob tried to get back to his dream, unsettling as it was, but his brain had snapped back to wide-awake-shitty-reality-mode.
So he got up.
‘Soph?’
He found the note. But you’re supposed to be taking the weekend off?
The pigeon was pecking at crumbs on the little table. Jacob shooed it away and looked over the balcony at the weekend city. But his eyes were tired of the postcard scene. He made coffee and sat before the computer. He accessed his bank account, just to confirm the hole that had been made in it by the Nostradamus buy. What were you thinking, Jacob? The hole was bad, yes, but a lodgement of twenty-five thousand had helped lessen the pain.
‘So I’m on Vierte’s payroll already. A bunch of fucking Nazis. What are the odds?’
But no turning back now. Blame the economy. Is this what it was like in Nazi Germany, why everyone pretty much just went along with Hitler? Place these uncomfortable thoughts in a drawer, Jacob. You can’t afford them.
So she called. Of course.
‘Good morning, Jacob. I’ve made a payment into your account. An act of good faith.’
‘I saw that. Thank you.’
‘Besides the auction, I have another contract for you. But it must be completed immediately. The fee for successful conclusion will be two hundred thousand dollars.’
‘Again, you have my complete attention.’
‘I’ll see you at the Guggenheim. Eleven, by Kandinsky?’
The first artist to exhibit non-representational art. Not paintings of anything, more a visual music.
A cockroach scuttled across the kitchen counter. Jacob wondered what that might symbolise, considered using his surprising, imminent wealth to bump up his patron status at the Gugg as he reached for the roach spray.
‘Perfect.’
Sophie arrived at the restaurant just as the cleaners were leaving, eyes red like tail-lights, mumbling at her in Spanish - malditos langostas - aiming for the A train to 110 St, join the line for some meth, the beautiful blue like in Breaking Bad.
The security guy would hold on until the cash van arrived for last night’s takings, then he’d amble down to a strip bar near Times Square, the one that did the midget show at weekends, and party ‘til noon.
People are funny.
Sophie imagined the gilded finger, just over there, realised she’d made a mistake, had turned up on autopilot. Or was it just to get some space between Jacob and my freedom? But how do I define freedom? Here? Tied to this business, locked up in mortgages, ‘til death do us part.
Coffee.
As she made a bitter double espresso, she didn’t see that Rod had frozen, just as his hand touched the glass of the main door.
She inhaled, felt the heat, drank in the sharp, edgy, earthiness of a sun-baked valley in Ethiopia, was transported there for a second. Her phone pulled her back.
‘Rod. Good morning.’
‘Hey Sophie, How are you feeling?’
‘A bit - , I don’t know. I’m at work.’
‘Awww, Sophie. Are you for real? I’m running things today. You promised.’ Got to get this meat into the refrigerator. ‘You don’t want to be at home. Is that it?’
‘That’s part of it, yeah.’
She prepared to press out another strong coffee.
‘Hey, why not take in an exhibition or something? You’ve got that PUNK show in the Metropolitan and there’s the food and culture exhibition at the Museum of Natural History. Tell me you wouldn’t love that?’
The steam pressure forced the 200 degree Fahrenheit water through the ground coffee.
‘Maybe do the two?’ She had wanted to, but work always got in the way. ‘Take in some lunch and amble across Central Park?’
‘Sounds like a good day, Soph. Why don’t you call in for dinner later? I loved cooking for you.’
‘You’re on. I’ll be out of here in five.’
‘Good, that’s good. I’ll hold a table. Enjoy.’
Jacob took a yellow cab to the Guggenheim, chugging north on Madison Avenue, hanging left onto 89th St and to the museum on Fifth, facing the Park, arriving exactly when Sophie’s long walk brought her to the neoclassical monster that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just seven blocks south of Jacob.
It was seven minutes before eleven.
Jacob stopped on the sidewalk, joined the gaggles of dumb-struck tourists, stared up at Frank Lloyd Wright’s winding, organic, sinuous masterpiece as it glowed in the hot sun. He was entranced, as always when confronted with aesthetic truth. This great thing, this curvy wonder in a landscape of sensible geometry, capturing every gaze like a beautifully-proportioned woman lounging before an array of cold and dead machines. The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum was the purest essence of art and design as distilled by a genius architect, the whole design dictated by the human requirements of the internal space. Always the mental image of Dennis Stock’s grainy opening day photo. And it was all the better for meeting that human need. And she was.
Then many things happen at once, the whole tense of the moment shifts.
Jacob looks over his shoulder, down towards the Met, his instinct drawn.
He looks back towards the Gugg, notices a stall full of Banksy art. That’s interesting.
A fast-moving shadow on the Guggenheim roof.
A low-flying jet screams overhead, startling an eighty-year-old jogger with her poodle in a harness.
The dog yelps.
The shadow falls, becomes a man, splashes like a Pollock - yes! - on the sidewalk, the eighth Red. More blood sprays across the canvasses on the art stalls, unwanted intervention, even the original Banksys, on sale for just a couple of hundred apiece as a publicity stunt. The tourists lounging on the low wall start to scream and wave their arms. One collapses heavily to the sidewalk.
The poodle lady is painted. Gasps. Collapses.
Jacob turns back, sees the mess before him.
Jacob slowly recognises his Nazi-hunter. He sees the essence of Daniel.
His elbow is touched.
Julia.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Another suicide,’ into his ear. ‘How awful. Well, we can’t just step over him and go in there. Kandinsky will have to wait. A walk in the park?’
‘Yes - , I - . A walk. No. A drink.’
‘You need a martini. Let’s get to Bemelmans.’
So she stopped a yellow cab and they drove, past the Neue Galerie, past Sophie, to the Carlyle Hotel on 76th St and Park Avenue, where an Irish bartender mixed their twenty dollar drinks, and she sipped and he swallowed and asked for another. Then the shock began to ebb. Then a creeping realisation.
She knows. Daniel was a message to me.
Her hand was on the back of his neck, rubbing him there.
‘Are you okay to talk business now, Jacob?’
‘Talk. Please.’ The martinis had worked their magic.
‘We have probably the greatest private art collection in the world, Jacob. I want you to see it. Soon. And I need you to value it.’
‘You need three -’
‘Yes, we need three independent valuations to meet our insurers’ requirements. Two have been completed. You’re our third. Naturally, the market is so buoyant, we’re aiming for the maximum possible values so that, in the event of a disaster, well, we wouldn’t be left wanting.’
‘What’s the total valuation?’
‘Both our valuers have agreed on a figure over ten billion.’
Jacob called for another pair of martinis, hoped that more alcohol would save him from the abyss.
‘Ten billion? That’s enough to bankrupt your insurance company.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And what if I can’t do it.’
‘Oh? You can. Don’t worry. Look, finish your drink.’ She hung her handbag over a shoulder. ‘We can’t talk here.’
She called the barman and requested that a bottle of Krug be delivered to Room 612 in thirty minutes.
Jacob stirred, Sophie flashing across his brain, his heart picking up rapidly, fighting the deadening effect of the martinis.
‘Shall we?’
He rose unsteadily, followed her to the elevator. No need to check in, it’s all planned.
He watched her legs, followed their curves to the Chanel houndstooth, monochrome tweed skirt, which began just over her knees, hugging the perfect proportions of her perfect arse.
She pressed the button.
Inside the moving box, she pressed herself hard against him, her hands on his hips, pinching hard.
Her lips on his, the nude lipstick, the taste of her - so fresh! - and the thoughts baser now, she the nude Nazi dominatrix, clad in nothing but a swastika armband and he - the oh-so-liberal him! - tied to a huge, looted Francis Bacon and loving it, absolutely God-damned loving it.
Lovely, beautiful, blessed martinis.
Then he was on the bed, the cool linen on his back as she undressed him, his attention transfixed - oddly, given the circumstances - on an original print, from Audubon’s Birds of America, of a great white heron with a little, pink fish in its beak.
Then they were both naked, his mind having apparently slowed to a near-stop, she sitting on him, facing his feet. I know this, I’ve heard of this position!
He wondered if he’d been drugged by something more than premium vodka as he watched her sleek back, her hair rippling with her shoulders and the delicious crack of her arse as she slowly rocked him to the edge of reason.
Then he tried to reach her, to grab her flesh, more contact, more touch, but she felt his angle change and pushed him back down, without even turning to look.
So he called to all the gods and she kept rocking, needed just that little more, then she called to her gods, but silently.
And she lay beside him on the bed then, looking at him as he lay a heavy hand on her flowing hip and fixed his gaze on her mound of Venus, wondered if she actually was Venus, pondered what Botticelli would have made of her, felt the heat of her, all thirty-seven degrees C of her, just two shy of the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city, July sixty-six, amazed that we are such hot creatures.
‘I needed that,’ she said then.
‘I hope -’
She put a finger to his lips. ‘You were wonderful. Now get some rest. The auction is tonight. We must have that Champagne.’ A knock at the door. ‘Ah. Perfect.’
The Krug came on a silver tray. Two glasses were filled.
‘Cheers.’
‘Prost. This will do for now. So, the others will meet you, right here, at one. You’ll have lunch and agree on strategy. All costs are covered, so stay as long as you need to. Just check out when the police give back your apartment.’
‘Thanks.’ I’d forgotten that I was homeless.
She got out of bed, hung his suit in the wardrobe. Then she began to dress, Jacob enjoying the view of her. But the gnawing feeling that he was being played, used.
‘How did you get into this, Jacob?’
‘Art? I think I can trace it back to my grandfather. I never got to meet him. He fought in Europe in World War Two, very brave man, by all accounts. He brought back a little painting. I don’t know how he got it, but he had it framed, hung it in his living room, down in Florida. Then, one night, he died. Drowned. An accident, everyone said. That night, his house was broken into. My grandmother was killed and the painting was stolen.’
‘How awful.’
‘My father was asleep in the next room. He was ten years old. He never got over it. He was sent to my aunt’s, down in the Everglades.’
‘Where you grew up too?’
‘Yes. When I was a kid, my dad was obsessed with what had happened to his father. He kept going over the old war diaries, researching the Third Reich. He learned German, made me take it at school too.’
‘Curious.’
‘My father was dead at forty. Alzheimer’s. So I studied art history at NYU because I didn’t know what else to do. I had a photo of my grandfather’s painting and identified it as a work by Cézanne. Value in today’s market? Maybe twenty million. I was sickened by the fact that he didn’t know what he had. How different life would have been for him, for my father. For me. So I vowed to help others avoid the same - I don’t know - mistake? Tragedy?’
She tutted. ‘Your favourite period?’
‘It’s down to my dad, twentieth century German art. Late nineteenth century France, yeah, that’s pretty amazing, the source of what we call modern art, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, everyone specialises in those guys. But Germany? There’s an extra depth, another layer. I love the variety, the politicisation of art and its influence to this day. From the early period, the progressive groups like The Bridge and The Blue Rider, with people like Kandinsky coming over from Russia. Klee, Marc and Nolde. Looking for Utopia and giving us Expressionism. The influence of gestalt theory from the Berlin School, that the whole is other than the sum of its parts, the power of the human mind to join the dots, surely this is the essence of all art?
‘Then the whole Weimar Republic, Cabaret, Grosz, Dix and Beckmann, perhaps Europe’s Golden Age of that entire century. The closest we’ve come to artistic Utopia.
‘Bauhaus and Walter Gropius. They gave us the design blueprint for the modern world.
‘Even Hitler, what about his preferred career as an artist? He was drawn to Germany, to the artist buzz. He said he wanted to end his life as a painter, once he’d conquered the world. Funny how most of his buyers were Jewish. If only he’d sold enough art to make a living.
‘But he didn’t. So then came the whole degeneracy episode, so extreme, the flight of great art from Europe, the destruction of wonders. The destruction of everything, followed by Germany finding its feet, making sense of the world through Conceptualisation, people like Joseph Beuys, who I consider a hero. Provoking a reaction, any reaction. Is that the essence of art?’
‘I wonder. You’re very passionate about your subject, Jacob. That’s why I chose you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Did you know that the US Government still holds most of Hitler’s paintings in storage?’
‘Yes, it’s an odd little situation. Like they fear the power of his art.’
He watched her closely, considering again the mysterious aesthetic of human beauty. Your face, it stuns me to my sexual core. And what is it, but a collection of sense organs, positioned close to your brain for faster reaction to danger? Why do I find your particular facial proportions so attractive? Conditioning by art since the Greeks? And your body, your killer body, nature’s perfect design for bearing and raising children, loveheart pelvis for delivery, perfect breasts for feeding. Yet neither of us has any interest in that functionality. Form following function. Is it that nature knows we don’t want the complication of kids? She’s trying to catch us out? Then DNA, the fucker, has a chemical attraction to alcohol. Drunkenness begets kids.
Jacob was having thoughts. He looked at his glass, then put it down.
‘So I need you at Vierte tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘let’s say ten. The valuations must be completed this week.’
‘Hnnh? Will I end up falling from the Guggenheim’s roof when this is done?’ Did I think that or say it?
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, checking herself in the full-length mirror in the corner.
Shit!
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled, ‘it’s all a bit weird, this past week. I don’t know what to think.’
She finished adjusting her hair, then applied a fresh layer of coloured wax, London postbox red, to her lips. She turned to him, took her handbag from the table, opened it and handed him an envelope. ‘You don’t need to think, Jacob. You just need to do as I tell you and you won’t come to any harm.’
‘What’s this?’
‘Insurance. Remember the other night, after the Nostradamus auction?’
‘Just about,’ as he lifted the flap and saw that there were photographs.
‘You got lucky with that intern from the magazine. And her friend.’
The pictures. Oh Christ.
She stood at the door. ‘Her seventeen-year-old friend.’
Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
The door closed, gently.
But its click may as well have been made by the safety catch of a cold and heavy gun held to the back of his head, its hardness pressing into the jangly, nervy scalp there, causing a rippling shock to dance up his spine and into his dreams, where he expected it to lodge until his last breath.
Sophie stood in a line outside the Met, vaguely heard the sirens as she listened to Sex Pistols through Dre phones.
She paid her admission, joined another line as Jacob had his first taste of martini. So she got visually and aurally assaulted with, of course, The Ramones. That album cover outside CBGB, then the recreated bathroom from the iconic club, down on Bowery and Bleecker Street, where Sophie tasted, learned and lived punk. Timing is everything, when you reach that certain age, turning on to the world and what you experience then forms you for life. Her experience was The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television and The Cramps. Gone now, a fashion store or something. The moneymen have taken Manhattan. Was it ever any other way? Was punk and anything of cultural merit that belonged to the masses ever just a blip? And what will form today’s generations on the cusp of adulthood? Antisocial media? Envy TV? Misogynistic rap music?
She shuddered, then gave herself up to the experience. Sophie’s head beat to the memories and the ideas while her heart beat to the unforgettable rhythm of the memories of what made her.
Then the clothes. Leather, zips, tartan, all so mixed up and crazy and loud at the time, but now part of the fabulous, fizzy fabric of humanity. So the people that punk hated most now own it. Chaos to Couture really summed it up. The music made Sophie dizzy, the Sid Vicious and the Clash and Hey ho! Let’s go!
So she went upstairs for a perfect, bitter Ethiopian espresso in the roof garden. Sipping her coffee, she noticed a strikingly beautiful, thin, blond woman at the table beside her. She drank green tea. She was Deborah Harry. Sophie gushed. Blondie was perfectly sweet, interesting, happy to talk about the punk days for a time. Sophie excused herself before it got weird. Then into the Park.
She realised that she would open her own restaurant, call it Punk Food, shake up the New York food scene, break stuff, offend people who need to be offended. She’d embrace the original punk ideals, be anti-establishment, rebellious, nihilistic, loud, fast. And bring in the elBulli language of cooking at ground level, build from there, use food to express creativity, poetry, beauty, culture, humour, provocation, harmony, happiness, complexity, magic. Cooking as provocation. God this navel-gazing, politically-correct city needs it. We’re energetic, liberal, open-minded and progressive. But we’re not the shining beacon of hope that we think we are.
‘What will Rod think?’
So Rod called. She sat on a weathered bench by a dry softball pitch and she told him.
‘I love it. It works. It’s so Anglo-American, people will love it. I’ll lead an investment panel, no problem getting funding. But what about here? Who’ll fill your shoes?’
‘I think you, Rod. You’re more of a front man anyway, cooking as theatre. Push any of the sous guys up to be your stand-in. Carl’s as good as you or I. And young. Or there’s Jesus. You know they can do it and you don’t want to be stuck in there every weekend night, you know that.’
‘It could work, yeah. Listen, Soph, reason I called, need a big favour.’
‘Anything.’
‘I need you to cook with me. You know the guys up in my club?’
‘That place on the west side?’ She squinted, gazed towards the sun. ‘I’m probably looking at it.’
‘Yeah, well we’re organising a big dinner for next week, something really special. Elaborate menu, best of the best.’
‘Has the menu been created?’
‘Yeah, I’ve just emailed it to you. Let me know what you think.’
‘So it’s your show. How many people?’
‘Forty.’
‘Fine. Make sure Carl’s rostered in and I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow.’
She bought a French Vanilla Dove Bar from a guy on a bike and started thinking about the food at her new restaurant. London staples with a New York twist, certainly bacon sandwiches, pies, fish and chips, but also some new, radical thinking.
Deconstruct everything? The big idea? Nail that and everything follows. What is punk?
Then she read Rod’s menu, read it out loud.
‘Ballotine of pheasant. The boned thigh, stuffed with a ground meat, served hot or cold.
‘Oysters. Thinking about the hotel feast.
‘Chestnut soup. Okay.
Scallops. The mollusc associated with female fertility because the shell looks like a vulva. As seen in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Thank you for that little nugget, Jacob.
‘Wild duck. Not some poor, farmed creature that’s never been wet.
‘Wild salmon. The king of fish, enjoy it while you can - mutant, inbred farmed salmon will wipe out the wild stocks before we know it.
‘Slow roasted pork. Crispy skin essential, Jews don’t know what they’re missing.
‘Salad with gold leaf. Why?
‘Iced cheese.’ Now what can we do with that?
Sophie wondered. Very 1700, Rod. Salad with gold leaf, now that’s interesting. What was it that Gary Oldman said in that last Batman movie? To be a detective, you have to stop believing in coincidences.
And another question. Why hasn’t the congressman called?