grandparents brought from the old country tell you to look. The question is, Which old country?”
He shrugged. “His skin is pale. I thought about that when I saw him. His hair is dark brown, almost black. His eyes . . . I wasn’t close enough to tell the color, exactly. They looked light, not dark. Blue or gray. The old country is somewhere in Europe on both sides. But it could be anywhere from Ireland to Russia. You see him, you think ‘white guy,’ but you don’t think about a country.”
“If he were out in the sun, would he get freckles?”
“Maybe. He doesn’t have any right now.”
She did some more sketching. “Tell me about how he seems. You talked to him, watched him. What’s his personality?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Guess.”
“I think he’s got the skills he needs for getting along. If he’s supposed to smile, he smiles. If he’s supposed to look like he’s sad, he can do that. He doesn’t feel any of it.”
Prescott looked into her eyes. “You understand? He knows what people are supposed to feel and what their faces look like while they’re feeling it. He’s spent a lot of time practicing—probably in front of a mirror when he was young, and since then by watching people’s reactions—but it’s all the same. It’s like a man doing birdcalls: if he practices enough, he can hit the same notes, maybe not exactly, but close enough to fool a lot of birds. But he’s not a bird. He doesn’t know what the bird feels when it sings, or what it means. He just knows that when he does it, birds will come close enough so he can kill them.”
She looked up from the pad. “He doesn’t feel anything?”
“That’s not exactly right. He feels hunger, cold, heat, pain, a little fear—too little of that—and there’s a big reservoir of resentment or jealousy or something. I haven’t quite isolated that to the point where I can put a name to it. He thinks that other people have things that he deserves. He’s smarter, stronger, more disciplined. He works harder than they do—has been working harder than they do since he was a child—to improve himself. That’s the only sign of fear I’ve seen so far. Something made him afraid when he was young, I think, and that was how he got started on making himself dangerous . . . ‘potent’ is probably the word.”
“Is he?” she asked. “He has power?”
Prescott looked at her in surprise, as though he had been in a reverie and heard a discordant note. He nodded. “Yeah. Of a sort. We live in a beautiful, warm, cozy society. We don’t always know it, but we do.” Prescott paused. “He doesn’t.”
“How is that?”
“We have wars, crime, and so on—but only a few of us, and only some of the time. It isn’t a daily experience. For most of human history, it wasn’t that way. People had to walk around with a different attitude: heavily armed, watchful, ready to react instantly and violently. What he’s done is turn himself into a man from another time and place: training himself physically and mentally, learning the practices of old warrior societies, developing attitudes and skills of men in cultures that had some practical use for that kind of thing, that rewarded it with high status. He’s succeeded. He’s a killer, just as they were.”
“What about the fear? You said he didn’t have much.”
“Not enough,” said Prescott. “There are theories about that, but they’re just theories.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I need to hear everything that comes to mind when you look at him.”
“Once in a while the psychiatrists do tests on a certain kind of people—ones who jump out of airplanes a lot, or go for speed records, or whatever. Supposedly a lot of them have a deficiency in a chemical called monoamine oxidase. It’s a chemical that regulates other chemicals, and it’s released when you’re scared. When monoamine oxidase is released, it gives you more dopamine and norepinephrine, so you feel a rush. I think that could be what’s going on with him. He needs that rush, like an addict. But both intentionally and unintentionally, he’s been making himself resistant to fear. He needs more and more objective danger to trigger it.” He sighed. “But all of that stuff is invisible. It doesn’t have much to do with a picture.”
She handed the drawing to him, a refutation of what he was saying. There was the young, clean-cut man he had seen in the crisp security-guard uniform.
It seemed to Prescott that the last time he had seen the drawing it had been extremely good. The term for it was a “likeness.” But now something else had happened. The face was alive. In the skull that had simply been an accurate outline, then a three-dimensional shape, there were thoughts. He tried to analyze this impression, and realized it had to be the eyes. They were watchful in exactly the right way. The mouth was almost smiling, but the eyes were doing something different that made the smile just an extremely convincing lie. In the eyes was cunning opportunism; inside the pleasant young face a different person was waiting, with cold patience, for his chance.
“It’s him,” he said. “It’s the one.” He tried to say it more accurately: “It’s that man, and it’s nobody else.” That was what she had done. An hour ago, it had been a picture of the man. In subtle degrees, she had made it more like him, but absolutely not like other men who resembled him. She had eliminated them.
“Good,” she said, without surprise. She stood up and took the drawing away from him, then walked toward the other end of the room, where her workbenches and easels stood and everything was paint-spattered.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“It’s time to paint,” she said in a distracted voice, without removing her eyes from the drawing. “I’m a painter.”
“You already have him,” said Prescott, getting to his feet.
She kept walking. “Go sit down. Have more coffee, take a nap or something. This will take some time.”
“But why are you doing it?”
“I told you. I’m a painter. I’m not sort of a painter. I don’t quit just because some ignorant character comes in and tells me it’s good enough for him. It has to be good enough for me.”
Prescott sat and drank coffee. He paced the loft, looked out the windows at the night streets below, now surprisingly empty for New York. After a time, he lay on the couch and dozed, then woke. Each time he looked toward the other end of the loft, he could see her still standing, working intently, paying no attention to anything but the sketch and the canvas. It was daylight before she looked in his direction, then beckoned.
He walked to the easel and looked. The killer looked back at him. It was no longer just a representation. Somehow, contained in the painted version, there were all of the things that Prescott believed about this man and had told Cara Lee Satterfield. The painting was more like him than any blown-up color photograph could be. “When can I have it?”
“You don’t want this,” she said. “You want eight-by-ten photographs of it. I’ll take them now.”
The photographs took time. Big floodlights on stands had to be moved around, then white reflective screens arranged and rearranged until she was satisfied. She set up a camera on a tripod, took shot after shot, moved the lights and screens, then took more. At last, he heard the camera’s automatic rewinder humming. She popped the camera’s back open, took out the film, then looked at her workbench, tore the printed address off an old envelope full of slides, and handed him the address and the film. “That’s the place to get them developed.” She looked around, seeming to notice the daylight for the first time. “What time is it?”
“Nearly noon.”
“Good. They’re open.”
“You’re going to want to go to sleep, so maybe we’d better settle your fee before I go.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a checkbook.
She held up her hand. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“I keep this account’s balance pretty high,” he said.
She shook her head. “That’s just money. This is magic. It’s a collaboration, an experience. I figured out my price.”
“What is it?”
“You can’t pay off until you’ve finished chasing this guy,” she said. “About how long will it take?”
He looked at her uneasily. “You know, I don’t want to be dramatic, but the finish could be that I stop chasing because he kills me.”
“I’ve seen you, and now I’ve seen him,” she said. “I’ll take that chance. Give me a call when it’s done, and you can pay off.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Sure,” she said. “There are two things. You’ll fly back here to sit for me. I want to paint you.”
