Phil Scarpetti wasn’t listed in the Manhattan directory, which delayed Jacob’s decision to make contact. He didn’t like drop-ins, much less being one, and based on Elk’s comments about the artist’s personality, he doubted he’d be turned away with anything approaching politeness.
He was more afraid of his own reaction. In his youth, he had accepted social slights peacefully (“taken shit,” in barracks lingo). He no longer knew that person. The incident that first time in Pickering’s pawnshop had made him aware of something inside him, something disturbing that might come to the surface suddenly and without warning. The army spent six weeks training a man to act on reflex, without thinking, and no time at all retraining him to use his brain when the crisis was over.
For all his show of British understatement, Elk wasn’t subtle. The day after their lunch, a special-delivery package came containing color reproductions of Scarpetti’s cover paintings: Plainly the publisher didn’t want him to forget his advice to pump the ex-convict for dirt.
Here was the standard paperback palette of bright primaries, the brute imagery. But the brushstrokes were savage: raw slashes, with scant concern for composition or perspective. And unlike the work of other Blue Devil artists, the faces and figures weren’t stamped from a mold. They looked like flesh-and-blood types you saw on the street, each unique. Real people, caught in moments of naked emotion: pain, lust, hate, terror. The images approached vivisection.
There was one Jacob kept staring at: A man in his underwear, sitting on the edge of a mattress in a dingy hotel room, a pistol dangling from his hand between bare knees, a woman in a slip sprawled dead at his feet. His face buried in his other hand expressed a depth of despair beyond imagining.
This was no marketing tool. It was a purge.
Damn Elk, anyway. He had to seek Scarpetti out, if only to catch a glimpse of the animal in its cage.
The bus carried him away from twentieth-century New York, letting him off in the collapsed and twisted spinal column of old New Amsterdam, where streets doubled back on themselves, running parallel and perpendicular at the same time, with tiny unexpected parks scattered like divots, each equipped with its anonymous equestrian statue. Armed with a tourist’s map from the bus station, he wandered streets barely wide enough to admit a rickshaw, almost colliding with an old woman pushing a cart loaded with piles of steaming onion-smelling dough, and asked for directions three times, until he stood in front of a block warehouse with bricked-in windows and a bay door secured with a padlock. The address, spray-painted on cement, was the one Elk had given him. He turned two corners before he found an unsealed door. When no one answered his knocks he tried the pitted brass knob. It turned and the door opened on freshly oiled hinges—an encouraging sign of life beyond.
“Watch it, brother! You want to lose an eye?”
He froze, his hand still on the knob. The voice, middle-register masculine, caromed off the walls long after it finished. After bright sunshine on snow, the interior was dark as a cave.
“Fire in the hole!”
There was a flash, a sharp crack followed by a wet smack, and a blinding burst of color. Jacob hit the dirt from instinct.
His ears were still ringing when the man spoke again. “Sorry about that, soldier. You never know what you’re barging into this deep in the Village.”
He rose and brushed off dust. His eyes had adjusted. The room was vast. At the far end stood an eight-foot slab of stretched canvas, propped up like a flat on a stage set. A sheet, stained many colors, curtained it on either side. A splotch of violent red and yellow splattered the canvas, running down in rivulets and pooling on the drop cloth at the base. It looked like an evil blossom. On the floor just this side of it slumped the remains of what looked like an army knapsack, burst and smoldering; the odor of scorched cloth filled the room. Wires ran from inside the sack to a two-by-four construction in a corner, braced like a railroad barricade. A man stepped out from behind it, wearing a filthy smock and welder’s goggles. He carried a demolition box with a plunger handle. The wires were attached to terminals fixed to the sides.
Just as he made his appearance, the nibbling flame found something it liked inside the knapsack and flared up two feet, pouring black smoke into the rafters. Hurriedly, the man in the smock traded the box for a copper-and-brass fire extinguisher, trotted over, and snuffed out the blaze with a whoosh. The chemical stench was suffocating.
“Can’t be too careful. Sometimes a charge goes off late. I lost a week’s work last time, and almost an arm.”
Jacob studied the man, but could make out nothing beyond blank lenses and shapeless cotton. “How’d you know I was a soldier?”
“If you don’t want people to know, next time don’t dive. Most people straighten up and clap their hands over their ears. But then, most people knock first.”
“I did. Three times.”
“Shit, I forgot.” He set down the extinguisher and pulled two inches of cotton batting out of each ear. “I thought you were a mumbler.”
“Are you Scarpetti?”
“Who the hell else did you expect to find in this dump? And who the hell are you?”
“Jacob Heppleman.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Robin Elk gave me your address. He might have mentioned me as Jack Holly.”
The goggles went up and down in a nod. “Should’ve known it was an alias. Name like that, I expected a guy with a diamond on his pinky. I liked Chinese Checkers. Wish Elk had gone to me for the cover. Red Cooper loads his brushes like spackle.”
“I’m with you. I’ve seen your work.”
Jacob grasped a hand stained indelibly, corded on the back with veins as thick as hydraulic cables. The grip came just short of punishing. Scarpetti stood just medium height; he looked taller at a distance. When he took off the goggles, they left a perfect mask of clean olive-colored flesh inside a palimpsest of paint. His hair was cut in a flattop, marine style. He had a rectangular face with high cheekbones and a mitered chin; everything about him was square and sharp, like one of those drafting knives with a blade you broke off in sections to get to a fresh edge. Straight lips and good teeth in a smile that didn’t look as if it came cheap. Jacob put him at thirty, although he might skew younger after a good scrubbing.
He found the face familiar. In a flash he knew why. It belonged to all the men in Scarpetti’s paintings. The superficial things—hair, coloring, expression—that had made each appear unique were an illusion; a disguise to obscure the fact that the artist served as his own model.
Jacob realized he was staring. He gestured at the canvas.
“I didn’t figure you for abstraction.”
“Horseshit. You have to be half-mad to be a genius like Picasso, and I’ve got paying work due tomorrow. Geniuses don’t work on the clock.”
“Elk thinks you’re a genius.”
“Dimbulbs generally do. Hank Stratton’s got a bank robber blowing himself up in his next, with a dynamite belt gone wrong. I’m trying for the effect of blood, bones, entrails, and fire all going up in one big splat.”
“You’re right. It’s horseshit.”
Scarpetti’s mouth fell open. Then the good teeth met in a grin.
“Damn! I knew I liked you the minute you hit the deck. You can’t fake real. This is a shortcut, and it stinks. I was sure when I read your stuff you were an artist.”
“I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. But for weeks now everyone’s been telling me to fake it and no one will know the difference. I would. Could you hang a picture you knew something was wrong with on your own wall and live with it?”
Scarpetti met this with no expression at all; a talent Jacob envied. It would have saved him a bundle at poker.
“Are you a drinking man?” the artist said. “Just say you are, even if you throw it in a potted plant. I’ve been saving a bottle of grappa that drunken prick Hemingway gave me when I told him to take his war novel and shove it up his ass: for my wedding, I thought. Only the bitch ran off with a guy that sells pink flamingos.”
“I’m a drinking man,” Jacob said. “And I don’t see a plant in the joint.”