The Juror Page 4

  “Like?”

  “People you wouldn’t have heard of.”

  “But if they’re such big collectors—”

  Inez frowns. She looks down at the yellow notebook on her desk.

  “Sat Yuske? Heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Yoshida Yasei?”

  Annie shakes her head.

  Says Inez, “Well, OK, how about the ever-popular Mor Shoichi?”

  “I’m getting the drift,” says Annie. “My stuff’s going to Japan?”

  Inez shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. These are just names he mentioned.”

  “You didn’t find out where my—”

  “I asked him, he gave me vague. You know? Like, ’Well, I have to do some exploring. Find the right home.’ That sort of runaround—”

  “And that was OK?” Annie asks. “That was good enough for you?”

  “Well, that and a check for twenty-four thousand dollars—of which twelve is yours. Yes. That was plenty.”

  Inez grins. Annie tries to grin back, but the worry is still on her brow.

  Says Inez, “Look, kid, maybe you’re not getting this. You’ve just sold three of your boxes to a power. You ought to be squealing like a pig. You ought to be creaming your jeans.”

  “I’m, I’m ecstatic,” says Annie. “It’s just, I want to know where my pieces are going. I don’t understand who this guy is. Is he a collector? A dealer? Is he, what is he? What does he do for a living?”

  Inez shrugs. “I understand he manages a commodities fund. He has an office on Maiden Lane—but I gather he’s not a slave to it. I know he does this. Collecting. That’s all I know. Oh, and he takes trips sometimes. He saw my prayer wheel up on the wall there and he talked to me about Nepal and I mean, Annie, when this man talks…”

  “What?”

  “Well, you forget your questions. You wind up just… watching him.” Inez laughs. “You’ll see. You’ll meet him. He told me he wants to work with you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Beats me. He said it. Just do me a favor, OK? You’ll be dealing with him directly, that’s OK. But don’t screw me.”

  Annie is astonished. “Inez, I love you.”

  “Oh, that’s so touching I don’t know what the fuck to say. But maybe when you’re on your way to your opening at the Louvre, maybe eternal devotion will slip your mind—”

  “Inez.”

  “Everything through me.”

  “Yes. Inez.”

  “Or I mean I will run you over. I will flatten you.”

  She makes a face. She pushes her lips out, which pulls taut her slabby cheeks. She rises up in her seat and puts her fists on the desk and leans forward, and Annie is put in mind of the prow of a John Deere tractor. Flattening is conceivable.

  Then Inez laughs and hands her the check for twelve thousand dollars.

  And Annie’s unmoored. Afloat. She talks with Inez for a few more minutes, but she hardly knows what she’s saying. She’s got twelve thousand in her purse. She’s got more money coming. She’s got a career. She’s kissing Inez goodbye and then Lainie, and she finds herself in the elevator and then the lobby, and amid swirls of fresh air she steps out onto the street. Sunlight jumps up off the sidewalks. She’s got twelve thousand dollars in her purse and her head is stuffed with cotton, the utter incomparable bliss of success—

  “Annie Laird?”

  She turns.

  It’s the man with the gothic cheekbones.

  He says, “I passed you a while ago—”

  “I remember.”

  “But by the time I decided it was you, I was all the way to Broome Street. And then I had to stop at Paula Cooper. But as soon as I could, I ran back here.”

  He also has brown irises flecked with yellow. He also has a charming lopsided smile.

  He says, “I’m glad I caught you.”

  She regards him quizzically. He tells her, “I’m Zach Lyde.”

  My patron?

  This babe is my patron?

  He says, “I bought a few of your things.”

  “Yeah,” she mumbles. “I have a, um, a check in my purse.”

  She feels like the youngest, simplest sister in a fairy tale. At the happy windup, with her pockets full of gold.

  He says, “I know I didn’t pay what they’re worth, not nearly, I know that. But then I didn’t set the price. I might like to buy others, though, and I’m prepared to offer much more—”

  Annie asks him, “How do you know me? We haven’t met, have we?”

  “Inez showed me your picture. In the catalog.”

  “Oh.”

  “It does not do you justice.”

  She forgets to say thank you. She simply nods and lowers her eyes. Awkward silence. On the sidewalk, next to his soft Italian loafers, there’s one of those senseless “running beans” that some street-artist keeps stenciling all over SoHo. Annie squints at it. How can any of this make sense? Twelve thousand dollars. A patron who’s a work of art himself. Her boxes flying all over the world—

  Which reminds her.

  “Japan?” she asks him. She lifts her eyes again and asks, “Are you really sending my pieces—”

  “Likely.”

  “So will I ever see them again?”

  “Oh, of course.” That skewed, reassuring smile. “Would you like to talk about it? Would you have time for lunch?”

  “Now?”

  He keeps looking at her. She checks her watch. “It’s eleven-thirty,” she says. “I have to be upstate by two. I have jury duty.”

  He groans sympathetically. Then grins. “I wouldn’t want to make you late for that.”

  “But just a bite of something? Why not? Sure.”

  So he takes her for some simple Pacific fare at a hidden vine-trellised courtyard off Sullivan Street. They sit under an ornamental maple with crimson leaves. The waiter seems to know Zach Lyde well. Is there anything that can be done, he asks, about his poor ailing phalaenopsis at home?

  Zach looks concerned. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “The leaves getting kind of yellow?” says the waiter. “At the edges?”

  “Sounds like you’re drowning it,” says Zach Lyde. “I suggest you relax. Neglect it a little, let it alone, leave it to its own devices, watch what happens.”

  The waiter nods solemnly and slips away.

  Then it’s just the two of them in that courtyard. The breeze doesn’t get down here but the sunlight does. It blazes on the bricks behind him.

  She tastes the ahi poki on crostini with chili pepper aioli. It’s probably magnificent but how can she give it her full attention? Zach Lyde is telling her:

  “OK. You want to know where your art’s going. Inez must have told you about my Japanese friends. They’re businessmen—of a sort. I often buy for them. Nine times out of ten, they like what I buy.”

  Annie asks, “They buy—what, for their homes? Their offices, what?”

  “Sometimes they buy for their warehouses. Or sometimes, sometimes I simply send them pictures and they leave the art here.”

  This baffles her. “They don’t even see it?”

  “I want you to understand. You should clearly understand the nature of this sport. These men are not what you’d call art lovers. They have good eyes, they’re canny, they’re shrewd. But they’re businessmen. Do you know Japan at all?”

  “No.”

  “Contemporary art is a form of specie there now. Because its value is not fixed, because its value is so inconstant, so attractively pliant, it’s become a form of currency.”

  “I don’t, I’m, I’m lost.”

  “Then let me make a sketch for you.”

  He brings his face a little closer to hers.

  He says, “Suppose a Mr. Kawamoto becomes indebted to a Mr. Okita. Kawamoto is a wealthy industrialist, Okita is a businessman of another kind. A yakuza. What we might call a gangster. But by no means a thug. Not a violent churl. No. He’s a graceful man, he’s cultiv
ated, he’s esteemed in his community. Now how can Kawamoto discharge his debt to this man? Not with cash of course—that would draw the attention of the authorities in Tokyo. So instead he gives Okita a work of art. Perhaps a small simple sculpture by a young New York artist. Not valued too dearly. Maybe half a million yen. Five thousand dollars. But who cares about price tags? It’s the thoughtfulness of the gift that touches Okita so deeply. And as luck would have it, the value of the piece blossoms over the next year.

  “One day a vice president from Kawamoto’s company calls on Okita, and offers him twenty million yen for the sculpture. This is a lot of scratch, Lord knows, but the company can write it off as a business expense. Okita, of course, is loath to part with his sentimental treasure, but he reluctantly accepts the offer. The debt is paid—with the help of the Japanese taxpayer. Everyone’s happy. Not least the artist, who now has a record of a six-figure international sale. You like the curried lumpia?”

  “And what about the sculpture?” says Annie. “What do they do with the sculpture? Throw it out?”

  “Why should they do that? It’s worth two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “But not really.”

  “But it is. Really. It’s important that you understand this. What I send over there is the best art in the world. The most daring, the most moving, the most original. By artists who have everything going for them except an inkling of how to create a career. That’s the part I handle. The right review in Artforum, in Flash Art, the right humble little cottage in the Hamptons, the right niche in the Basel Artfair and Dokumenta. And as for the churning in Japan? That merely solidifies natural values. But anyway this is, well, this is my job. Leave this to me. Your job is to stay in your studio and make your boxes.”

  Sparks flash from Annie’s eyes. “My job? Oh great, it’s nice to know I’m still involved. Hey, listen to me, Mr. Lyde—”

  “Call me Zach.”

  “Listen—”

  “And may I call you Annie?”

  “You can call me whatever the hell you want. But I don’t want to have anything to do with these, these—”

  “Sleazy patrons? Does the notion of that offend you? ‘Sorry, Duke,’ says Raphael, ‘but you’re corrupt and sleazy and you boil your enemies in oil, so I don’t want your help—I’ll just slip quietly into obscurity—’”

  “What I’m saying—”

  He stops her. “Annie, what do you think I get out of this? Money? I don’t make money on this. I don’t need to. What I do for a living, I do well.”

  The waiter appears. Glides soundlessly onto the terrace, but Zach Lyde raises his hand slightly, and without taking his eyes off Annie he says, “David, not now? Please?”

  The waiter retreats.

  Zach Lyde leans in even closer to her. “I do this so an artist like you can go into your studio and make your boxes and not worry about whether or not your kid gets fed. OK? So your thoughts can be as chaotic as you need them to be. And your life won’t have to suffer. So all those idiots in the art world, those gnats, they won’t bother you. So you can work.”

  Abruptly he looks away from her. Blows out a breath of air. Shakes his head. “But look, it’s your career. Keep your boxes. Keep your check too, consider it a grant… my compliments. I wish you luck.”

  He turns, looks for the waiter.

  “Mr. Lyde?” she says quietly.

  “Zach.”

  “Zach. You know, you know you are very persuasive.” She tries to smile. “It’s just that this is… this is. Oh God. Sudden. It’ll take some getting used to, I guess. That’s all. That’s all I meant. I guess.” She looks down at her smoked-salmon summer rolls. She laughs. “Did I tell you how delicious this was? Though I, I’m not sure I can eat any more.”

  “That’s OK. Anyway, you have to go. You have that jury duty, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Right. Forgot. Real life.” She shakes her head. “I wish I didn’t have to go, though. I feel like, there’s really a lot we could talk about, I mean I’m sorry, I wish I didn’t—”

  “Be other opportunities.”

  “Yes.”

  “For example dinner.”

  “What?”

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight, Annie?”

  OLIVER coasts on his bike. With his chin in the air he looks straight up into the great sugar maples along Church Street, the shuddering leaf-caverns, until his mother, riding behind him, cries sharply, “Oliver!” Then he drops his eyes, and in truth the bike had been sort of straying off to one side of the street….

  Side by side they coast down toward the lake. To the corner with the old stone library, where Church Street meets Old Willow Avenue.

  Oliver slows not with the hand brake but by wobbling the wheels.

  They wait for a few cars to go by on Old Willow. Then they cross the road and bounce over hummocky yellow grass to the bike trail that runs alongside the lake.

  He calls back to his mom, “So will I get a new bike?”

  “Oliver,” she says.

  “No, I mean a new Mongoose, Mom, why not?”

  “I’m serious. Shut up.”

  “Who’s listening to us, Momba?”

  “I don’t care. You do not say one word.”

  They pass the bronze statue of Hannah Stoneleigh, the Revolutionary War heroine of Pharaoh, clinging to her bronze horse and shouting a bronze shout.

  Says Oliver, “How about a PowerBook?”

  “What?”

  “A PowerBook. It’s a computer with a built-in Trac-ball.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Will I get one?”

  “No. And if you breathe a word of this to anyone—you hear me?—you’ll get a Trac-ball built in to your little throat.”

  “Momba.”

  “What?”

  “That wasn’t funny.”

  “Wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “It was kind of stupid.”

  “Good.”

  “Ha ha ha!” he mocks. “A Trac-ball built in to my little throat! Ho! Ha ha!”

  He rises up and pushes down on the pedals. The lake breeze whips up around him. “Ha ha ha!” he shouts as he speeds away from her. Think of Momba famous. We’ll buy the Dills’ house up on Horsepound Ridge, and Mom’s friend Juliet can come over to use the pool.

  He calls back, “Move it, Mom!”

  Soon they’re cruising together up Seminary Lane. They pass Shawn Cardi, who gives them a nod and a quick cool fartlike honk from his bike’s electronic horn. Makes Oliver feel a little sheepish to be seen hanging around with his mother. However Shawn Cardi has his own problems. He’s a buzzbrain, for one thing. And his mother is the funeral director in town. So Oliver returns his nod sort of curtly and leans way back on his bike like he’s riding a Harley, and he thinks pretty soon it will be a Harley he’s riding. I mean we could buy a lot of land, right? And I wouldn’t need a driver’s license on my own property, would I?

  Theoretically, he thinks, I could be riding a Harley tomorrow.

  And once I get good at it, by say sometime next week, I can start letting Juliet ride behind me.

  Home stretch now. Past the snippety lawn of Mr. and Mrs. Zoeller and their lawn troll (all three of whom Oliver despises). Then their own wild yard. He banks to the right, arcing into the driveway just ahead of Mom. Rides around to the back, by the Indian bean tree, and jumps off. He walks the bike to the back stoop, and he’s about to reach up to open the screen door when he sees the skull.

  “Holy shit,” he says. “What is that?”

  Stupid question, though—it’s plain what it is. It’s a human skull, hanging in front of the screen door.

  Mom comes up behind him. She gasps.

  A tag, like a laboratory ID tag, hangs from the skull. It reads OLIVER LAIRD.

  Then Oliver feels something drilling against his temple and into his ear and slashing down his neck, and he wheels. Another burst of water hits him between the eyes. His assassin is up in the Indian bean tree. Juliet.
>
  “You’re dead.”

  She’s peering around the trunk, with a Super Soaker submachine gun held against her shoulder. Green-eyed, red-haired Juliet, Mom’s best friend. Squinting down the sights.

  “Down, you’re dead.”

  “Not fair!” Oliver cries.

  “Fair? Death is not fair.”

  “I’m not armed!” He opens his mouth to raise further objection but she blasts it.

  “It’s time to die, Oliver.”

  He shrugs, and lets his bike fall, and drops to his knees, and slowly pitches forward. Winds up in a sort of kowtow. Looking up at her sideways. She jumps out of the tree. She’s 6’2”. She has sort of a boyish body but with a few soft confusing female turns. When she’s gossiping with Oliver’s mom, or when she’s horsing around with Oliver, she slouches a little, she relaxes. But he’s seen her flirting with men at a restaurant and once at a barbecue, and once in a parking lot with another resident at her hospital, and on those occasions she rose up to her full height and even leaned back a little, and swayed slightly as she talked, swayed like a snake, and Oliver wishes she would stand this way around him once in a while.

  From his dead-man’s kowtow he asks her, “Whose skull is that?”

  Juliet gives his mother a hug, but she keeps her rifle pointed at Oliver. “Yours, loser. Can’t read your own name?” Then she asks Oliver’s Mom: “So what’s this earthshaking news?”

  Says Oliver, “Hey, is it real? Where’d you get it?” He jumps up and unhooks it from the screen.