FOUR
The Kia Bongo mini-truck stopped at the edge of the canal, about twenty yards from the white Toyota pickup. Omar grunted with exasperation when the driver turned off his lights.
"How are we supposed to see what we're doing?" he complained to the policeman standing outside the passenger window, speaking past Ghaith as though he was not there. Did it salve the conscience to treat the man you were going to kill as though he were already gone?
The policeman gave a noncommittal grunt. He was cradling an assault rifle.
Ghaith finished his DJ and dropped the glowing butt out the window. The man outside, after resisting the impulse for a moment, crushed it out with his heel.
Omar stepped out of the Toyota and shouted at the newcomers. The driver of the mini truck switched his headlights back on, jumped out, and waved his arms in angry frustration. Omar returned the gesture as he walked over. Ghaith noted the dust kicked up by Omar's feet. It seemed at odds with the pounding of water from the canal outlets. With an artist's eye he studied the skeletal reeds beyond Omar, then the crude painting of an apricot on the cab door of the mini truck. Then he returned his gaze to the three hooded men and two guards seated in the bed of the truck. No doubt Ghaith and the prisoners were all slated to die together.
He considered lighting up another cigarette, felt a slight rasp in his throat, and abandoned the idea. He had been smoking too much lately, and these cheap DJ’s were deadly. Up to a point, smoking steadied his nerves, but over the last week he had concluded he was overdoing it. He had promised himself to cut back to two packs a day, maybe even to one. Give himself a little more wind.
Omar went to the back of the truck and spoke to the guards, who stood and forced the prisoners to their feet.
"What's your name?" Ghaith asked the policeman holding the gun on him.
"Why?"
"I was thinking it would be more polite to use your name than just calling you 'Idiot'."
"Do you want me to shoot you now?"
"Not really, Idiot. I was wondering if you knew what this was all about."
"Of course I know."
"Really? Say, Idiot, could you let me in on it? Like Omar said, I'm a godless man. The meaning of life has totally eluded me."
"What are you talking about?" Idiot twitched.
"Oh...sorry. You really think this has something to do with the power shift in the Ministry? The Shia are replacing the Sunnis. Do you think that interests God?"
"Don't talk about such things."
"I'm sorry. I have a tendency to rudeness. Omar…a good Sunni, by the way…can tell you. I didn't even thank him when he let me fuck him up the ass."
"I'll shoot you..."
"I'm sure you'll get around to it. Anyway, we were young. We hardly had hair on our balls. But we parted ways before I ever got the chance to return the favor. He's been dying for my ass ever since."
"Abid Ali!" the policeman shouted.
At first, Ari thought the webmaster was mistaken. It seemed that Richmond, after dark, was practically abandoned. All the shops along Broad Street were closed, or boarded up, and life was limited to clumps of young men and women standing at street corners, their collective mood variable, sometimes staring glumly, sometimes laughing, occasionally yelling at other clumps of young men and women. He turned back to Main Street, only to encounter a rank of office towers that seemed in their way equally stark, with the added deficit of blank sterility. But as he progressed down Main he began to see more pedestrians, and at the bottom of a hill--Shockhoe Bottom, in fact--lights, noise and music announced the presence of a reasonably vibrant nightlife.
He parked under a raised railway. Seeing shadowy figures flit under the skeletal trestle, he wondered if he would be lucky enough to find the xB gone when he got back. Crossing the cobblestone pavement, he made his way past bars and tattoo parlors. It seemed comfortably godless. Women in formal but extremely revealing dresses walked unaccompanied up the block. Ari assumed they were headed for the restaurants and clubs burrowed in a row of old tobacco warehouses. He found the women exotic, if not particularly sophisticated. Very scenic and, judging by the length of the slits in their skirts (another Mediterranean assumption), very available. He was interested, but unavailable.
There seemed little evidence of artistic inclination among these revelers. It was hard to imagine a gallery thriving in this environment, especially at this hour. But according to Tina the Webmaster, Foxlight closed at ten.
At the next intersection he turned right and came upon a cluster of old shops converted to new sins. But it was limited in scale, suitable to a small city, without the pervasive air of decadence of a major metropolitan red light district gone to seed. Was this part of the area slated to be condemned to make way for a baseball park? Then sin here was very weak indeed.
There...between some kind of parlor and some kind of shop that sold smoking paraphernalia...Foxlight. Unfamiliar with local fashions, Ari did not know if the wooden sign out front signaled a rebellious reticence or a trendy departure from the gaudy neon to either side. Through an unadorned window with a wide chrome border that reflected his tie a dozen or so people were milling between two powder-blue walls. Ari went inside.
The sounds from neighboring bars and of cars revving across the cobblestones were swept away by silence, leaving only a trace of bass vibration. A few patrons glanced his way, their attention drawn by the short burst of noise from the street. Then they double-taked on Ari, his blue suit emphasizing his athletic build, his dark gaze taking in the scene like some mystical X-ray machine. He was aware of how unsettling his glance could be and consciously worked at softening it with amusement. He couldn't change his eyes--but he could smile.
Reassured by his amicable demeanor, the people who had turned his way turned back to the exhibit. Ari let his smile subside into benevolent curiosity. He didn't, after all, want to look like a yokel. He walked tentatively into the center of the small gallery, thinking an aggressive stride might be interpreted as a desire to attack modern art and its advocates. Even critics needed to approach gingerly, a delicate step being equated with sensitive objectivity.
Each painting was hung from the ceiling by a pair of wires that converged behind the canvas. Sidling up to the first canvas, an orange, squarish smudge planted in a field of smaller purple smudges, he allowed his cursory inspection to drift down to a small plaque.
Elevation #6 circa 2003
Jerry Riggins - Richmond, Virginia
1973 - 2005
Ari's chin was lifted on a cloud of perfume. A tall brunette in a low-cut, skin-hugging tube top had come up next to him. His eyes involuntarily drifted away from the orange smudge to the aromatic cavern of the woman's breasts. She must have detoured to the gallery while on her way to one of Shockoe's bars. She began to speak, but was interrupted by a man in a business suit who urged her to come on, they were wasting their time here. The woman's glossy lips twisted in a moue of disappointment as she followed him out.
Most of the others present seemed to be serious connoisseurs of Jerry Riggins' blurry visions. Although twelve was not many, in a place like this it constituted a crowd. It ranged from a silver-haired couple to a pair of young men, apparently also a couple, in skimpy T-shirts and threadbare jeans. Ari found himself drawn into a small orbit of murmurs, the observers treating the gallery like a library, or a morgue. Had anyone been sitting at the black imitation-marble desk in the back, Ari would have expected a hush of admonition directed against the one or two voices raised above a whisper.
"The optimism just fades. You can see it."
"They get darker at the end."
"As if he knew..."
The gallery door opened, letting in some buddy-buddy shouts from the street and a petite blonde in gray slacks and a non-matching khaki jacket. Ari wondered if this was typical business apparel of Western females. She wore a flustered, busy air--until her eyes fell on Ari. She turned away quickly to one of the darker blotches on the far wall. Ari resumed his inspection of the orange smudge, determined to delve its meaning.
"What people call 'art' these days."
Ari turned to the speaker. The new arrival. He had thought she wanted to avoid him, for whatever reason, and was surprised she had so quickly changed her mind and crossed the room.
"Oh, I don't know," Ari said sagely, turning back to the smudge. "Notice, for example, the intensity of the encrustation and the fine brush strokes on the border."
The woman shot him a hooded glance. "You're joking, right?"
"Do you think these paintings are worth a lot of money?"
The silver-haired man overheard and spewed venom from his raised nose. Ari supposed that, outside of an auction house, money and art did not belong in the same sentence.
The blonde, on the other hand, did not seem to think the question gauche. "They are now," she answered. "You know what happened?"
"To the artist and his family? Yes. A terrible crime."
She seemed vaguely amused by his response, as though he had missed a joke.
She knows me.
Ari found her unstudied pertness attractive, but the gum she was gnawing at was unsightly in the extreme.
"You know what they say. The value always shoots up when the artist...demises."
"Ah. They were shot, weren't they?"
"I didn't mean a pun--"
"Of course not."
How can she possibly know me?
The gallery door opened. Ari heard a harsh snap of words from someone on the sidewalk.
"Bill, you've drunk too much. You're falling--"
The door shut. Ari did not bother glancing toward the window to see if Bill had gone down face-first. He was focused on the woman with the girlish face, now turned up at him in unwarranted sarcasm. He wanted to prolong the conversation, to gnaw at her identity with the same intensity that she worked her gum.
Someone loomed up next to him--a large presence, impossible to ignore. He stopped a foot away from Ari and swiveled to the wall, facing the orange smudge.
"So...Miss..." Ari perched himself on the edge of the sentence and waited for the petite blonde to respond. She stared him, then at the large man next to him, then again at Ari, as though trying to decide if one or both belonged in a zoo. He made a modest sliding gesture to guide or accompany her to the next painting. But this bit of universal body language went untranslated. The new arrival had obviously put her out. That was Ari's conclusion, at least. It could not have anything to do with himself, or else she would not have approached him the way she had.
"Okay, it's orange." The newcomer spread his jacket away from his stomach and hooked his thumbs in his trousers, giving Ari a sidelong leer after delivering his assessment.
"You don't need to be a detective to see that," Ari smiled.
The man lifted his hands in mock horror. "Busted!"
"Not at all. I saw your picture in the news journal."
"'Journal?' You make me sound like Man of the Year."
Detective Lewis B. Carrington had been careless with his razor that morning. A fresh scab, surrounded by small white flecks from a styptic pencil, nestled just under his jaw. Ari sensed his baseline was bull-headed aggressiveness, that he was quick on the attack, even when going after his own face.
"So tell me, do you like this stuff, Mr. Cinnamon?" Carrington jutted his scarred chin towards the orange smudge.
"As I was telling this young lady..."
But the petite blonde was no longer at his side. Ari scanned the room. There was a burst of noise and he turned in time to see her scooting out the door.
"Your girlfriend take off?" Carrington flinched unconvincingly. "Didn't mean to chase her away."
"Do you know her?"
"You mean you don't? You were just starting to put the move on her?" Carrington shrugged. "Double whammy on me!"
He was intentionally putting Ari on guard, inferring that he was being observed, studied...followed. For what reason, Ari could only guess. He smiled. "It's Mr. Ciminon, Detective."
"I stand miscorrected." Carrington again nodded at the painting before them. "So you didn't say...you like this stuff?"
"I haven't formed an opinion, yet."
"That's good," said the detective. "Keeping an open mind and all. I'm no good that way. My mind clammed shut from twenty feet off. I thought, 'they fire the janitor or something? When are they going to clean up around here? When does the show start?'"
"That's what you thought."
"Like a clam. I told Jerry the same thing. Told him most of his stuff was like ham on rye that's been sitting around for a couple years. Whoa, I'm sorry. You people don't go in for ham, right?"
"You knew Jerry?"
"Sure I knew him. Him and his wife were good people. I get the guys who killed them, they'll end up looking a lot worse than this." Carrington winked at the smudge. "But this is America. People can do pretty much what they like. And do."
"You're speaking about the paintings."
"Oh...yeah." Carrington grinned. At least his teeth looked lean. "Told ol' Jer right up, this isn't anything but shit on a shingle. Give him credit, though--at least he didn't make pictures of crosses soaking in piss."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"Say, Cinnamon, now that we've been properly introduced, why don't we go out for a drink. Whoa! There I go again! You people don't go in for alcohol, do you?"
"A cup of tea would suit me," Ari said.
"Tea?"
"But first, please excuse me for a moment."
"Well, sure, but--"
Ari made a rapid tour of the gallery. There were no other artists on display to distract him. The show was devoted entirely to Jerry Riggins. And since the deceased had limited himself (or been limited by his talent) to smudges of various shades and hues, the exhibit did not hold his attention for long. He concentrated mainly on the small plaques and the dates of composition, with brief glances at the paintings. By the time he rejoined Carrington he had fallen into a speculative mood.
"They were right," he said to the detective as they emerged onto the street.
"Who about what?"
"Two women I overheard. They said Mr. Riggins' paintings had grown darker towards the end of his life." Ari ran his eyes over the street, but there was no sign of the petite blonde. "And indeed, starting two years ago, his style grew increasingly darker."
"Maybe he changed his brand of paint." Carrington was smirking, as though the subject was inane.
"That's possible. It's also possible that he was becoming depressed."
"You forget, I knew him. He had the perfect life. It was just the ending that screwed him." The detective released a long, philosophical breath. "But I guess the same applies to all of us."
"Yes, indeed. Where is it you want us to go? I'm parked under those railway tracks. I can follow you."