Four

JAMES GARRETT SAT BACK in the Logan Airport cab, staring at the traffic. The car he had hailed had no air-conditioning, but rolling down the windows—to the slow-moving congestion and the diesel-polluted air—was a much worse option than sweltering on the faux fur seat.

He looked at the driver: a kid in his twenties, black hair greased to the nape of his neck. He had his own window down, and was drumming his fingers on the outside panel of the car in a complicated rhythm.

“Plenty cars, huh,” he shouted at James, looking at him in the mirror.

James said nothing. He glanced at his watch. Seven-ten. The arrangement had been to meet her outside Arrivals at five forty-five. The flight had been on time. He had waited in the claustrophobic heat for over an hour, while other travelers surged around him. He had watched an irritating number of courtesy buses arrive and depart, making for the rental-car compounds. He had let probably sixty cabs go past, until he finally hailed this one.

He watched as, distantly, the Hancock Tower came into view. He looked at his watch again, and then fished his cell phone from his jacket pocket. He had double-checked Anna’s number and her house. He had even, with some misgiving, called Grace. All with no reply.

He looked, now, out of the window.

They had at last gotten to Tremont Street; the Common was just coming into view. He leaned forward and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “Stop here,” he said.

“We ain’t at Irving yet.”

“I know that.”

He got out, paid the fare, and pulled his portfolio from the backseat. Crossing Tremont, he set off across the Common, past the souvenir stalls, the drunks on the bench near the fountain, the guy selling lemon ice, the chain of mothers pushing strollers. He walked briskly, linen jacket over one shoulder. More than one woman glanced at him.

Handsome and slim, and looking younger than his forty-two years, James Garrett gave off an air of understated but unmistakable wealth: the Italian suit, the open-necked cream shirt, the discreet jewelry. He looked European—Tuscan, perhaps. French. There was a distinguished scattering of early gray in the thick dark hair, and a slightly sallow, Mediterranean tone in his skin. He had dark eyes, with a sardonic glint in them. Only the mouth, thin-lipped and always slightly down-turned, betrayed a less than outgoing nature.

He crossed at Beacon Street, walking past the State House and turning up Joy Street. The brownstone mansions of Beacon Hill, rising above the Common, were in sharp contrast to the noisy city spread out before them. Here, the streets rapidly became quiet, even hushed. At the next intersection, Garrett stopped, and looked up at the ornate wrought-iron grilles and balconies.

When he had first come to Boston, twenty-four years ago, it had been his ambition to live here, among the Brahmins, looking out toward the Charles River and Cambridge beyond. He had coveted one particular house, at the corner of Joy and Myrtle, a beautiful French-looking frontage with shuttered windows. His hunger for a kind of life—the life he imagined was lived behind such shutters, behind such closed, expensive drapes—had struck him like a physical need.

He had been born just outside North Conway, in New Hampshire. It was at the edge of the White Mountains National Forest.

The forest was picturesque country. In the winter, it made money from skiing and sledding and sleigh rides; in summer, the tourists came for the walking and the wooded mountain scenery. Mount Washington was further up the valley, with the cog railway toiling up its scoured, windswept slopes.

His father had a job as caretaker in one of the resort hotels: an impressive, sprawling chalet-style building, set back on a private road high above the town. The hotel had four hundred rooms, and a swimming pool, and tennis courts, and a golf course. Every day, James’s father towed the baggage carts, cleaned the filters of the pool, fixed the broken lights, mowed the grass, helped on deliveries. His mother was the housekeeper. Every day, James walked down the private road and got the school bus into town.

He had been a tall, thin kid, who had inherited his dark looks from an Italian grandmother. His father, by contrast, betrayed his Irish roots, with his pale blue eyes, and reddish face, and the urge to drink, and sing, and become sentimental. Father and son were an odd couple: a big, awkward man, clutching the hand of a ten-year-old silent boy. His father had always wanted to hold his hand. At ten. At fifteen. He saw nothing odd in it: he was a man in the grip of unfathomable passions that made him shake. Not with drink anymore, but with tearful concern.

If there was one thing that James had loathed as a teenager, it was to see his father weep, which he did often, and at slight and embarrassing events. Something on the TV. A guest giving him a tip. James’s mother was a silent woman, and she kept both her son and husband at arm’s length, her mouth habitually down-turned in cold stoicism. She had, she told James frequently, seen the worst of times with his father. Now they were here, holding down decent jobs, she would make sure that they kept them; and it was as if she believed that they kept their places by freezing out whatever feelings she might once have had.

He still had an image of her in his head, an image that he could never erase, and which would spring back at him sometimes at the darkest times, both figuratively and literally. It would come to him in the early hours, if he couldn’t sleep. It would come if he were thwarted or at some temporary disadvantage: the image of his mother seated at the plastic-topped table in their basement apartment, her face stony with disapproval, and, behind her, the picture of the Madonna and child that she had carried from one house to another.

It wasn’t a great picture. It wasn’t by a famous artist. It was just a souvenir, a tacky and lurid portrait. The kind you saw in the worst roadside stalls in Cyprus or Greece, overdrawn and bleached by strong light, and side by side with playing cards and chewing gum and cheap leather purses. Nevertheless, her face had got into his head, his memory, and his claustrophobic, closed-off heart. The mother of Christ gazed out with piercing, questioning eyes, and a little bewildered smile; her skin was the color of skimmed milk, opaque, fragile. Her expression of both alarm and mystification clung to his soul. By contrast, her child was gazing at His outstretched fingers, His face averted.

James had tried not to think of his own mother for years. But instead, the Madonna would come streaming out of his subconscious and assault him with her pitiful five-and-dime purity.

If James’s mother was cold beneath the weight of her frustrations, however, James’s father was the exact opposite. All the emotions that had been drowned in the years of his drinking had come bubbling back up to the surface. For James as a child, it was like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. He didn’t like his mother, but at least he could admire her rigid calm. His father was nothing but an embarrassment.

James had seen him standing in the hotel driveway one December, after a snowfall. He had been looking at the colored lights, reflected on the snow down the hill. He had turned to James, after meeting him from school, and held his son’s shoulders, and shown him the colors on the snow, and his hands had been trembling with the pleasure of it. And all the while James had been thinking how unlike a man his father was, and how like a child. The kind of child you couldn’t bear near you.

He made the kind of mistakes that James never forgot. Just after James had begun school, just after he got the job in the hotel and they moved to the area—James was perhaps six—his father had given him a schoolbag. It was a bag that a guest had given him.

As soon as you laid eyes on this bag, you knew that the man who had owned it had maybe been carrying it around for years. It had been good, once. So good that the owner hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw it away. It was leather with a red trim, of which just a little scuffed red piping remained. It had a brass clasp. And whoever this guest was—James had never seen him—had finally handed the case to his father as a tip.

Inordinately proud, his father had given it to him, and insisted, with those watery blue eyes fixed on him, that he take it to school. He’d stood with him at the stop on the first day, and watched him board the bus, smiling hugely all the while, and nodding down at the case, as if James carried some fantastic prize.

Everyone on the bus had watched him board, too.

They watched this Hispanic-looking kid get on, and sit by himself.

They looked at the bag.

“What you got here?” some boy had demanded, when he was hardly through the gate of the school. Immediately, a pair of large, red-knuckled hands had fastened on the case. “What you got?” Shaking the handle. Ear against the leather, eyebrows raised in mock inquiry. A ripple of appreciative guffaws from the crowd. “Hey, kid. You FBI? Huh?”

The bag was grabbed, and kicked around the yard.

It was not the kind of thing he could tell his father. It was not the kind of thing his father could understand. The kicking, maybe. But not the loathing of the bag. He couldn’t see what a hand-me-down it was. He thought it was valuable.

And his gratitude, and his tears, and his ridiculous trembling—all these things smothered James, and choked him.

When he told his mother about the bag, she had shrugged, and hissed a dismissive laugh. “Throw it away,” she said. She had that familiar look on her face: tired cynicism.

“But what will I tell Dad?” he’d asked her.

“Tell him it was stolen.”

He’d said nothing, merely looked at her.

She’d nodded at him. “A lie will get you where you want to go,” she’d said. “That’s a fact. You learn that.”

Over the years, James had watched his father become narrower, smaller. He became a slow-moving, fastidious man, endlessly cleaning, repairing, polishing. Watching him one day in the summer, cleaning the restaurant windows with incredible care, James had felt the need to turn away. He had suddenly been suffocated by the movement of his hands, the way they described endless little tight circles. Because he was beginning to get arthritis, his father—sixty now to James’s sixteen—took fifteen minutes to do a three-minute job, and a wave had swept through his son, something akin to revulsion, and it had added a secondary shame to the persistent feeling he carried around with him. That his father had finished with drinking and picked up his life again was, James supposed, good; that it had turned him prematurely old, slow-witted, and sentimental was not good. That he liked James to sit with him in the evenings, those he had free, was not good either. James wanted to be out, walking by himself. It was only then that he felt clean, as if his life stuck to him like a greasy skin. He wanted out. He wanted to shed that skin. He wanted to be someone else. Not the kid from White Mountain or North Conway. Not the kid with a reformed drunk for a father.

When he thought like this, he would get a great heavy beat in his chest, as if the person that he really was was fighting to get out of him, and throw this inconsequential identity aside. He didn’t belong to his father, or the school, or any friend, or this place.

He had left high school without a diploma. He had simply walked out one day. He had walked the four miles back to the hotel, and gone to his room, and taken the hundred and twenty dollars that he had saved, and left. He had hitched all the way to Boston, without speaking to his parents, without even leaving a note.

James increased his pace as he turned into Myrtle Street.

His first job in the city had been at a bookstore on Brasely Street. It was no longer there now, but twenty-four years ago it had had a modest reputation, and the owner hired James for, above all else, his air of silent—even superior—calm. They had been short-handed that particular week. It had been his first stroke of luck.

And the second—perhaps the greatest piece of luck, indeed, of his life—had been Catherine Graham. She had come into the shop one morning, a glossy catalogue tucked under one arm. She was a tall woman in her early forties. She wore a charcoal-colored suit, low heels, and little jewelry. She walked slowly, with her head held up. Slowly, and smoothly, as if gliding, or sailing. She had come over, and asked him something. He had pointed her to a display. He remembered, even now, the amused expression in her blue eyes.

As she spoke, he had suddenly noticed what she was carrying under one arm: it was an auction catalogue. On the front cover was a painting.

“Jean Dubuffet,” he said.

She had raised her eyebrows. “Yes,” she murmured, looking at the catalogue, and then back at him.

“Art is nothing more than a product of exhilaration and joy,” he told her. She frowned. He pointed at the picture. “That’s what he said. Art is…”

“Oh, I see,” she murmured. And laughed, as if to herself, before turning away.

He saw her again two weeks later. She was on Congress Street, turning up toward Faneuil Hall. It was his day off, and he had been walking, as he always did, rather than stay in his one room on Braddock Parkway. It started to rain—it was February, and cold—and he saw her, through the crowds, begin to hurry, holding a newspaper over her head.

He had followed her. Right through Quincy Market, past the food stalls, past the tables where people were squeezed along the benches and around the walls, sheltering from the downpour—and he saw her run out and across to the shopping center opposite.

He caught up with her on the stairs, waiting for a family to come down the red-painted open walkway.

He had touched her arm.

“Hello,” he said.

She had looked at him.

“The bookstore,” he reminded her.

Her gaze had been blank.

“I work there,” he told her. “You asked me…”

A hot flush of embarrassment had crept up his neck. She didn’t remember him. The family passed them, a father and mother carrying a stroller between them, a little boy of four or five hanging on to his mother’s spare hand.

“Dubuffet,” he reminded her. He hoped to God that she wasn’t meeting someone here. Some older man to whom she would turn, while casting a sardonic look back at James over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He started back down the steps. She let him get around the curve of the landing before reaching down to touch his shoulder, where he stood on a lower step.

“Don’t be sorry,” she had said. “I don’t meet many people who can quote Dubuffet.”

Of course, he never told her. He didn’t tell her when she bought him a cup of coffee that morning; and he didn’t mention it when he arrived at a gallery that she owned, grasping the invitation to an opening that she had given him. And he didn’t tell her when she took him home with her, and showed him the paintings that she owned in her house: the Rothko, the Ossorio.

He had never told her, even right up to the end, that the reason he knew about Dubuffet was that a previous tenant of his rented room had left a poster tacked to the wall. It was a print of Dubuffet’s “Bustling Life,” with Dubuffet’s quotation running along underneath it. Up until that moment in the bookshop, he had never had the remotest interest in painting or painters. After she took him home, he never thought of anything else.

A lie will get you where you want to go.

Catherine Graham had taught him a lot, of course. Everything within her own strict, tight code. She had made the game plan very clear from the very first night he had come home with her.

“Don’t suppose that I’ve brought you here for a sexual reason,” she had said, in her loud, flat voice. She had slung her coat onto the nearest couch. “Everyone else will assume it,” she said. “But you must not.” She had eyed him from head to foot. “If that’s what you’re here for, you can leave.”

“I’ll stay,” he said.

She had sat down, still staring at him. “I was married at twenty-one, and divorced at twenty-two,” she said. “I tried it.” She shrugged, smirking a little. “Like mealy grubs. I tried them once, too,” she said. “And I didn’t like that, either.”

He smiled. She had started to laugh. “That’s right, James,” she had said. “Life is a sort of joke. If you can’t look at it that way, you’re lost.” She had lit a cigarette, then stopped, and pointed a finger at him. “Except in business,” she said. “That is serious.”

He had merely nodded. He was overawed. He was in an amazing house. There was very little furniture, but what there was was rare, and expensive. There was a wonderful ormolu clock on the nearest cabinet, and two Art Deco figures.

“Where are you from, James?” she asked.

He had looked at her. A long beat passed. “Nowhere,” he said.

“Nowhere,” she repeated, slowly. “Not an interesting place.”

“No,” he replied.

She had leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “A blank page,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Was it so bad?” she asked.

“Yes,” he repeated.

“You want something else.”

Her fingers had described a slow, tapping rhythm on the arm of the chair. She had still not asked him to sit down. “Are you honest?” she asked him abruptly.

“Yes,” he told her.

“Have you any money?”

“No.”

“Are you in any kind of trouble?”

“No.”

Her gaze flickered to the wall, where a tapestry hung. He could read her thoughts. Here was a young man with no money, who would say nothing about himself. And here was she, a wealthy woman, alone.

“I guess I could kill you right off,” he told her, as she was still looking at the tapestry. “I guess I could make a lot of money out of what I could carry.”

She glanced back, raised her eyebrows.

“You were thinking that,” he said.

They had stared at each other for a few seconds. Seconds in which all the previous years fell into place for him, and he saw in her expression that she had always lived as he had lived, outside the world, looking in.

“And will you?” she said.

“Will I what?” he asked.

“Take what you can carry.”

“No,” he told her. “Never.”

She leaned back against the chair. He saw something—a reflex of pain—cross her face. Although he was not to know it then, it was the illness that would eventually kill her, and the reason she needed help now. But, as suddenly as it had appeared, the expression was gone. “I used to run all over the place,” she murmured. “Now I need a man to run for me.”

“I can do it,” he told her.

“We’ll see,” she replied.

Catherine Graham was a specialist, working as a consultant for major art and auction houses. She was asked to buy for corporations and for private individuals; she was called upon to authenticate recently discovered or long-lost works. She had once traveled in Europe, and had been based in London, but had come home to Boston that previous Christmas for a reason she wouldn’t divulge. He grew used to Dubuffet, and Baziotes, and Motherwell. More used still to her personal favorites, particularly Leger and Braque. Schiele, Franz Marc, Theophile Steinlen.

She had a gallery on Newbury. It was a place that you couldn’t enter without ringing a bell first. There was nothing on show outside, no plate-glass window. You stood on the stone step and waited until she answered, by intercom, from behind the black-painted door. If she recognized you, or you had an appointment, you were admitted. If not, you could wait outside until hell froze over.

Although the hallway was dark, the inner door led into a space flooded with light. Catherine had altered the entire ground floor, stripped it back to a beech floor and starkly plain white walls. In this long room hung maybe six, maybe eight paintings. Also perhaps three pieces of sculpture, or bronzes, or ceramics. She had been showing a new artist when James first came to the gallery, and he had hated the pictures of cafés and tables. To his eyes, the red tablecloths and blue bottles and yellow flowers not only clashed, but looked broken and misshapen. Dishes of food—a crab, a few pieces of fruit—would lie stranded in a sea of pink, with a pencil scribble indicating a bottle label, or a shadow, or a knife. Catherine explained to him why this artist was talented, and why he was worth so much. The whole collection, five in all, had been sold to a national bank for three million dollars only two days later, and, if James didn’t see before, he saw then. Or, to be more accurate, he was damned sure that he would learn to see.

Catherine didn’t give him any money in the first year. She fed him, she gave him the roof over his head, of course; she took him with her to auctions and parties and other collections and museums, and to some artists’ homes. She paid for all his travel, and she paid for some of his clothes—the two business suits, one gray and one black. But she never offered him payment, and, after only a short while, he began to realize that this was some sort of test: whether he would earn anything on the side, or take tips from customers, or try the minor swindles of inflating the cost of the utilities he paid for or the tickets he booked. Whether, more outrageously, he would be tempted to steal from the purse she left lying around. But he never did. Neither did he go out in the evenings. Instead, with her permission, he read all the books she had, and he listened to all her music. And it was an education more important than all the years that had gone before.

Most important of all, he watched. He watched how she talked to customers, or how she didn’t talk. He learned when it was best to keep silent. He learned not to flatter too much. He came to know the women, much like Catherine, of a certain age, involved with certain charities, invariably with very uncertain marriages, who invested their old money in new talent because they wanted to touch the artist in some way, or because spending their money gave them a little comfort, a few minutes of security. He watched the businessmen who were not interested in a painting, and how their gaze would skate over a picture; how they would stand with their hands locked behind their backs in front of a bronze, as if willing themselves not to connect with it at all. And he at last understood the peculiar conversation that went on between the piece of art and its viewer.

He reached his house now.

He took out his key, and opened the door.

When he had first bought this place three years ago, it had been split into three condominiums. One was for sale; one was usually empty, as the owner traveled. The third, on the ground floor, was owned by an elderly woman.

The top floor, which had been renovated, was for sale for three hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Over a period of eleven months he had bought out the other two. In the next year, he had stripped the house and refurbished it. The whole project had cost him a little in excess of two million. The ground floor was his office; the second, his sitting room, kitchen, and library. The third was his bedroom and bathroom. Let down through the center of the house, at enormous expense and through ever greater negotiation with the planning authorities, was a massive skylight that spilled light down the original wooden stairwell.

The house was minimalist in the extreme. Every floor was stripped, and every piece of furniture—of which there was little—was a neutral color. He had given space and air to his paintings, and, when he came home, as now, the first thing he did, before even putting down his bags, was to stand in the center of the second floor and look around him at the fortune that hung on the walls.

When Catherine Graham had died, she had given him the Rothko.

In addition, there were a Braque and a Lukaschewski.

Women had told him they were masculine paintings. Angular and uncompromising. They told him that the pictures said a lot about his own character.

And he was always surprised when they told him that. Because he thought of himself as the easiest and most compromising of men.

He walked over to the phone and listened to the messages, skipping through the business calls. He checked his watch again. Seven-thirty.

There would surely be something soon.

And, as if in answer to his thought, the doorbell rang downstairs.

He pressed the intercom.

“Yes?”

“James,” said a familiar voice. “It’s Grace.”

He looked at the intercom grille in surprise. “Grace?”

“Let me in, James.”

He paused a beat. “Of course.”

He went out to the head of the stairs. She came in and slammed the door, and stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She didn’t look all right. She looked gray.

“What is it?” he said.

She put a hand on the banister, and then shook her head. She bowed her head, and he realized that she was crying.

He began to walk down.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

He drew level with her. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she moved away. She moved right back to the wall, and leaned against it, and her face was in shadow, and her hands, stained with paint and nicotine, were in the light, and she looked very old, much older than her years.

“It’s Anna,” she told him. “If you want to see her, you had better come now.”