through it. He raised both hands like a politician at a rally to ask for order. The buzz thinned to a hiss of flattered surprise-to be addressed by the chairman of Sotheby's was a rare event-then it gradually subsided. Effingham pushed aside the auctioneer's microphone. With his leonine growl of a voice and his precise clipped consonants he didn't need it.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he began, 'those of you who deal with us regularly are aware of Sotheby's deep regard for tradition. But we believe, as well, in being responsive to extraordinary circumstances. And in light of what I must say is the exceptional interest occasioned by these Augie Silver paintings, I would like now to do something most unusual: I would like to offer for sale a work not listed in the catalogue-a work, indeed, of which I myself was not aware until a few short moments ago. The work is unframed and off its stretcher. It in no way conforms to our general standards of presentation, yet I am confident you will agree it is in every way a remarkable picture. The house has placed on it a reserve price of one million dollars.'
The chairman nodded toward the open door. Two assistants came through lugging chairs, which they placed some six feet apart near the lectern. Two more employees followed, carrying between them a large furled canvas. They stepped up onto the chairs, signaled with their eyes, and let the picture unfold. The heavy scroll dropped open with a muffled snap.
A huge parrot in biting green looked out red-eyed and all-seeing from a prodigious wanton jungle. The edges of the canvas were singed and frayed, here and there the foliage and plumage were smudged with soot and dulled with ash; yet, like the flaws and cracks of ancient statues, these imperfections somehow increased the work's unsettling power, bore witness to the ravages and dangers of existence and asserted the reckless and undaunted determination to endure.
No one had ever seen a picture quite like this, and there was a kind of nervousness, shame almost, in the rumbling inchoate murmur that greeted it. The painting somehow showed too much, cut too deep, was at once absurd and wise, sacred and wildly uncouth. People wanted to tear their eyes away and could not; the parrot's seared and searing gaze locked on like a strangling hand and would not let go. The murmur mounted, took on something of the character of keening. Then a voice, calm and certain, cut through it.
'It's a fake.'
All eyes turned toward the speaker, who appeared just the slightest bit surprised that he had spoken. With the room's attention pulled away, no one at first noticed the two people who now slipped through the door.
'Why a fake, Peter?' said Augie Silver. His scorched red skin made his dark blue eyes look purple, he was wearing big clothes borrowed from Clay Phipps and they added pathos to his haggard frailty. 'A fake because the real one was destroyed in a fire early this morning?'
'Fire?' said Brandenburg. 'I know nothing about a fire.'
'Yes you do,' said Nina Silver. Her face was taut and scarlet, her legs were blistered beneath the man's shirt she was wearing as a dress. She looked up at the parrot's red and flashing eyes; Brandenburg's gaze ineluctably followed hers. 'Who set it, Peter?' she went on. 'Did you hire someone?'
The room was silent, it was as if the air had changed its character and would no longer carry sound. Time too became something other than itself, it congealed like stanched blood and ceased to flow. Eyes flicked back and forth from Brandenburg to Augie, from Nina to the painting. And in that long suspended moment a sick certainty was growing like a cancer in Claire Steiger. Secretly she glanced to her left and to her right; there were strangers there. There were strangers everywhere, and she was sitting here without her husband. Her hand rose slowly to her mouth as if to hold her insides in. She spoke softly and she looked in no particular direction. 'Kip,' she said. 'It was Kip, wasn't it?'
Peter Brandenburg stood up slowly. His eyes were riveted straight ahead, still locked in a futile stare-down with the painted parrot. He didn't raise his voice.
'He said everything was taken care of. He said everything was just as it should be.'
The security guards moved unhurriedly toward the critic, and the critic made no move to elude them. But he didn't like to be touched, he pulled his elbows back and made it clear he would go without resisting.
The auctioneer pounded the gavel and pounded some more, but it was a long time before order was restored.
47
'It was Nina who figured it out,' said Augie Silver.
They were sitting at Clay Phipps's-their home while their own house was being rebuilt. It was a steamy evening at the beginning of July, the air smelled of closed, defeated flowers, and the ceiling fans turned lazily, heavily, seemed at every moment to be winding down. Joe Mulvane, his blue shirt splotched with sweat, leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. Claire Steiger sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her; her dandelion hair was round, her face was round, her curled body was relaxed in comfy circles. She was vacationing at the Flagler House, recovering from many disappointments, and yet she seemed serene. Clay Phipps had had his living room painted; gone were the lewd, accusing rectangles where Augie's pictures had been hung; gone with them seemed to be Phipps's penchant for self-blame, the nagging self-disenchantment that led him to do things that were blameworthy.
'Really it was Reuben who figured it out,' Nina said. 'The way he seemed to know it would come down to that painting.'
Augie nodded. There was wonder in his face like the wonder of seeing the full moon lift red and mottled from the Florida Straits. 'Yes, that was remarkable,' he said. 'But the real breakthrough-that was yours.'
Joe Mulvane leaned forward a notch farther. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'but I guess the detective's always the last to know: What was the breakthrough?'
Nina paused, savored the moment. She'd gotten younger in the last couple of weeks. Her skin had healed, her husband and her life were safe; she'd been swimming every day and she was full of joy. 'You know how it is,' she said, 'when you lock yourself into a certain way of looking at a problem? The way, after a while, you're stuck with that approach, whether it gets you anywhere or not? Well, we'd been assuming all along that whoever wanted to hurt Augie was trying to drive the prices up, so they could sell. Then, the night of the fire, the timing of Brandenburg's article, it suddenly dawned on me that the plan was to drive the prices down, so they could buy.'
' Then sell,' put in Clay Phipps.
'At a vast profit,' Augie added. 'And very soon, so Kip could meet his July first obligations. The choreography had to be quite precise. When Kip set the fire, he timed it so the auction would happen before the news of my death had reached New York. Peter buys low, then I'm dead, and boom, prices go crazy. They turn the pictures over almost immediately.'
Mulvane considered. 'But at the beginning, with the poison tart-'
'At that point,' Augie said, 'things were simpler. Kip was working alone then. His plan A was to kill me far enough ahead of the auction so he'd make his money on the pictures Claire had.'
The dealer shook her head in self-reproach. 'I encouraged him. I'm the one who planted the idea that, handled right, the auction could bring in enough-'
Augie reached over and patted her knee. 'Claire, Claire, you're my agent, don't ever blame yourself for jacking up my price… But anyway, when the tart killed Fred instead of me, Kip started getting worried that he was running out of time, that he needed a different strategy. That's when he persuaded Brandenburg to come aboard.'
Claire Steiger frowned. 'Another thing I did,' she said. 'Threw the two of them together.'
The others let that pass.
'The turquoise ragtop,' Nina said. 'Kip drove it, but it was rented with Brandenburg's I.D. Brandenburg didn't own paintings, we had no reason to put him on the list of names to check.'
'And the picture on the license?' Mulvane said.
'When someone looks as rich as Kip, clerks don't check things very closely,' said Claire Steiger. 'Besides, there's a more than passing resemblance between them-that same kind of constipated preppy handsomeness. Probably that was part of the attraction.'
