Читать книгу Dead Sleep - Greg Iles - Страница 7

Two hours before the Cathay Pacific jet landed in New York, I surfaced from my drug-induced dive, stumbled to the rest room and back, and asked the flight attendant for a hot towel. Then I called Ron Epstein and got Christopher Wingate’s number. It took an hour of steady calling to get the art dealer on the phone. I had worried that I might have to mention the Sleeping Women to get Wingate’s attention, but Epstein’s hunch proved correct: Wingate was intrigued enough by my modest celebrity to see me at his gallery after hours without explanation. I couldn’t tell much about him from his voice, which had an affected accent I couldn’t place. He did mention my book-in-progress, so my guess is that he hopes I’m looking for a dealer to sell my photographs to the fine art market.

Meeting Wingate alone is a risk, but my work has always involved calculations of risk. Photographing wars is like commercial fishing off Alaska: you know going out that you might not come back. But on an Alaskan boat, it’s you against the ocean and the weather. In a war zone there are people trying to kill you. Going to see Christopher Wingate could be like that. I have to assume he’s heard about the scene at the museum by now. He won’t have my name, but he will know that the woman who caused the disturbance in Hong Kong looked exactly like one of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that one of the Sleeping Women looks like the photographer Jordan Glass? He knows my reputation, but it’s unlikely that he’s seen a photo of me. I haven’t lived in New York for twelve years, and my work wasn’t nearly so well known then. The real danger depends on how involved Wingate is with the painter of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that the subjects in the paintings are real? That they’re missing and probably dead? If so, then he’s willing to turn a blind eye to murder in order to earn a fortune in commissions. How dangerous does that make him? I won’t know until I talk to him. But one thing is certain: If I go on to Washington now and meet the FBI, they’ll never let me close to him. Every piece of information I get will be secondhand, just like it was after Jane disappeared.

After I clear customs at JFK, I roll my bags to the American Airlines gate, collect my e-ticket to Washington, and check my bags on that flight. Then I walk out of the airport and hire a cab. I don’t like letting my cameras go to Washington without me, but later tonight, when I tell Daniel Baxter I got sick and missed my plane, he’ll be more likely to believe me.

Before going to Lower Manhattan, I have the cabbie take me to a pawnshop on 98th Street. There, for $50, I buy a can of fortified Mace to carry in my pocket. I’d prefer a gun, but I don’t want to risk it. The NYPD takes weapons violations very seriously.

When the cab pulls up to Wingate’s Fifteenth Street gallery in the failing light of dusk, I find a simple three-story brownstone like a thousand others in the city, with a bar on one side and a video rental store on the other. The tony atmosphere of the Chelsea art district stays in another part of Chelsea, I guess.

After paying the cabbie to wait, I get out and study the doorway from the curb. There’s a buzzer by the front door, which looks normal enough but probably hides all sorts of security devices. I slip on sunglasses as I approach, in case there’s a videocam.

There is. I push the buzzer and wait.

“Who are you?” asks the stateless voice I recognize from my earlier call.

“Jordan Glass.”

“Just a moment.”

The buzzer burps, the lock disengages, and I pull the door open. The ground floor of the gallery is half illuminated by fluorescent light from the second floor, spilling down an iron staircase. With my sunglasses, it’s hard to see, but the decor seems spare for a trendy New York art gallery. The floor is bleached hardwood, the walls white. The paintings look modern for the most part, or what my idea of modern is, anyway. A lot of stark color arranged in asymmetrical patterns, but it means little to me. I’ve been called an artist—often during attacks by purist photojournalists—but that doesn’t qualify me as a judge of art. I’m not even sure I know it when I see it.

“Do you like that Lucian Freud?” asks the voice I heard on the speaker outside.

There’s a man standing on the landing, where the iron staircase turns back on itself. Fixed squarely in a shaft of light, he looks as though he simply materialized there. He is wiry and balding, but he compensates for the baldness with a shadow of trimmed black stubble. In his black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket, he looks like the midlevel mafia thugs I saw in Moscow a few years back: slightly underfed but fiercely predatory, particularly around the eyes and mouth.

“Not really,” I confess, with a quick look at the painting hanging nearest me. “Should I?”

“Should doesn’t come into it. Though it would have a better chance of impressing you if you took off those sunglasses.”

“I wouldn’t like it any better. I’m not here to see this.”

“What are you here to see?”

“You, if you’re Christopher Wingate.”

He beckons me forward with his hand, then turns and starts back up the stairs. I follow.

“You always wear sunglasses in the evening?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Something wrong with that?”

“It’s just so Julia Roberts.”

“That’ll be the one thing we have in common, then.”

Wingate chuckles. He’s barefoot, and his pale dirty heels seem to float up the steps. He passes the second floor, which houses sculpture, and continues up to the third. This is clearly where he lives. It has a Danish feel, all spare lines and Scandinavian wood, and it smells of fresh coffee. Standing in the middle of the room is a large, unsealed wooden crate with packing material spilling out of its open end. There’s a claw hammer lying atop the crate, a scattering of nails around it. Wingate brushes a proprietary hand against the wood as he passes the crate, which comes to his shoulder.

“What’s in the box?”

“A painting. Please, sit down.”

I gesture at the crate. “You work up here? This looks like your apartment.”

“It’s a special painting. It may be the last time I see it in person. I want to enjoy it while I can. Would you like an espresso? Cappuccino? I was about to have one.”

“Cappuccino.”

“Good.” He walks to a blue enameled machine on a counter behind him and starts to fill a small mug. While his back is to me, I move to the open crate. There’s a heavy gold frame inside. Peeking between the box and the frame, I can’t see much, but it’s enough: the upper torso and head of a nude woman, her eyes open and fixed in a strangely peaceful stare. Wingate is dispensing the cup as I back away.

“So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asks the wall.

“I’ve heard good things about you. They say you’re a very selective seller.”

“I don’t sell to fools.” He sprays out some steamed milk with a flourish. “Unless they know they’re fools. That’s different. If someone comes to me and says, ‘My friend, I know nothing about art, but I wish to begin collecting. Would you advise me?’ This person I will help.” Another hissing jet of steamed milk. “But these pretentious WASP millionaires make me puke. They took art criticism at Yale, or their wife majored in Renaissance masters at Vassar. They know so much, what do they need me for? For cachet, yes? So fuck them. My cachet is not for sale.”

“Not to them, anyway.”

He turns with a grin and offers me a steaming cup. “I love your accent. You’re from South Carolina?”

“Not even close,” I reply, stepping forward to take the mug.

“But the South. Where?”

“The Magnolia State.”

He looks perplexed. “Louisiana?”

“That’s the Sportsman’s Paradise. I’m from the home of William Faulkner and Elvis Presley.”

“Georgia?”

I’m definitely in New York. “Mississippi, Mr. Wingate.”

“Learn something every day, right? Call me Christopher, okay?”

“Okay.” After Ron Epstein’s characterization of Wingate, I half expected the man to make some crack about Mississippi being the home of the lynching. “Call me Jordan.”

“I’m a huge fan of your work,” he says with apparent sincerity. “You have a pitiless eye.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Of course. You don’t shy away from horror. Or absurdity. But there’s compassion there, too. That’s why people connect with your work. I think there would be quite a demand, if you were inclined to market it as fine art. Not much photography really qualifies, but yours … no doubt about it.”

“You’re not living up to your advance billing. I heard you were a son of a bitch.”

He grins again and sips his cappuccino. The pure blackness of his eyes is startling. “I am, to most people. But with artists I like, I’m a shameless flatterer.”

I want to ask him about the painting in the crate, but something tells me to wait. “It’s been said that a photograph can be journalism or art, but not both.”

“Such crap. The gifted always break the rules. Look at Martin Parr’s book. He turned photojournalism upside down with The Last Resort. Look at Nachtwey’s stuff. That’s art, no question. You’re every bit as good. Better in some ways.”

Now I know he’s bullshitting me. James Nachtwey is the pre-eminent war photographer at Magnum; he’s won the Capa five times. “Such as?”

“Commercial ways.” A glint of mischief in the black eyes. “You’re a star, Jordan.”

“Am I?”

“People look at your photos—stark, terrible, unflinching—and they think, ‘A woman was standing here looking at this, recording it. With a woman’s sensitivity. A woman has stood this, so I must stand this.’ It floors them. And it changes their perspective. That’s what art does.”

I’ve heard all this before, and while largely true, it bugs me. It smacks of Not bad, for a girl.

“And then there’s you,” Wingate goes on. “Look at you. Hardly any makeup, and still beautiful at—what?—forty?”

“Forty.”

“You’re marketable. If you’ll suffer through a few interviews and an opening, I can make you a star. An icon for women.”

“You said I’m already a star.”

He barely skips a beat. “In your field, sure. But what’s that? I’m talking pop culture. Look at Eve Arnold. You know who she is. But if I walk downstairs and ask a hundred people on the street, not one will know. Dickey Chappelle wanted to be a household name. That was her dream. She schlepped all over the world, from Iwo Jima to Saigon, but she never became what she most wanted to be—a star.”

“I haven’t schlepped all over the world to become a star, whatever that means.”

A feral gleam in the eyes betrays a new level of interest. “No, I believe that. So, why? Why do you traipse from pillar to post, cataloguing atrocities that would shock Goya?”

“You haven’t earned the answer to that question.”

He claps his hands together. “But I already know it! It’s your father, isn’t it? Dear old daddy. Jonathan Glass, the legend of Vietnam. The shooter’s shooter.”

“Maybe you are a son of a bitch after all.”

The smile widens. “I can’t help it, as the scorpion said to the frog. It’s my nature.”

Some of the biggest bastards I ever met were charismatic, and Wingate is no exception. My gaze settles on the crate between us.

“And the way he died,” Wingate exults, “shooting a Pulitzer-winning roll of film. That’s mythic. Then his daughter follows in his footsteps? It’s a legitimate phenomenon, no hype required. We could do a double show. Talk about free publicity. Who controls the rights to your father’s images?”

“I don’t believe my father died in Cambodia,” I say in a flat voice.

Wingate looks as though I just told him I don’t believe Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. “You don’t?”

“No.”

“Okay … so … that’s even better. We could—”

“And I’m not interested in exploiting his work for money.”

He shakes his head, his hands imploring. “You’re looking at it all wrong—”

“What painting is so wonderful that you have to keep it this close to you?” I interrupt, pointing at the packing crate with my free hand.

Momentarily off-balance, he answers without thinking. “It’s a painting by an anonymous artist. His work fascinates me.”

“You like looking at pictures of dead women?”

Wingate freezes, his eyes locked onto mine.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

He gives a philosophical shrug. “I’m not here to answer your questions. But I’ll answer that one. No one knows if the subjects are dead or not.”

“Do you know the identity of the artist?”

Wingate sips his cappuccino, then sets his mug on the counter behind him. I slip my hand into my pocket to feel the cold, reassuring metal of the Mace can.

“Are you asking as a journalist?” he asks. “Or as a collector?”

“All I can afford to collect is experiences and passport stamps. I figured you could tell that with one look at my shoes.”

He shrugs again. Shrugs are a major part of this guy’s vocabulary. “One never knows who has money these days.”

“I want to meet the artist.”

“Impossible.”

“May I see the painting?”

He purses his lips. “I don’t see why not, since you already have.” He walks around to the open side of the crate, braces his feet against the bottom, and reaches in for the frame. “Could you give me a hand?”

I hesitate, thinking about the claw hammer, but he doesn’t look like he wants to bludgeon me to death. Having been in situations where people wanted to do just that, I trust my instincts more than some people might.

“Hold the other side while I pull,” he says.

I set my cappuccino on the floor, then take hold of the other side of the crate while he slides out a padded metal frame that holds the gilt frame inside it.

“There,” he says. “You can see it now.”

I’m torn between wanting to step around the crate and wanting to stay right where I am. But I have to look. I might recognize one of the victims who was taken before Jane.

The instant I see the woman’s face, I know she’s a stranger to me. But I could easily have known her. She looks like ten thousand women in New Orleans, a mixture of French blood with some fraction of African, resulting in a degree of natural beauty rarely seen elsewhere in America. But this woman is not in her natural state. Her skin should be café au lait; here it’s the color of bone china. And her eyes are fully open and fixed. Of course, the eyes in any painting are fixed; it’s the talent of the artist that brings life to them. But in these eyes there is no life. Not even a hint of it.

“Sleeping Woman Number Twenty,” says Wingate. “Do you like it better than the paintings downstairs?”

Only now do I see the rest of the painting. The artist has posed his subject against a wall, knees drawn up to her chest as though she’s sitting. But she is not sitting. She is merely leaning there, her head lolling on her marbled shoulder, while around her swirls a storm of color. Brightly printed curtains, a blue carpet, a shaft of light from an unseen window. Even the wall she leans on is the product of thousands of tiny strokes of different colors. Only the woman is presented with startling realism. She could have been cut from a Rembrandt and set in this whirlwind of color.

“I don’t like it. But I feel … I feel whoever painted it is very talented.”

“Enormously.” Genuine excitement lights Wingate’s black eyes. “He’s capturing something that no one else working today is even close to. All the arrogant kids that come in here, trying to be edgy, painting with blood and making sculpture with gun parts … they’re a fucking joke. This is the edge. You’re looking over it right now.”

“Is he an important artist?”

“We won’t know that for fifty years.”

“What do you call this style?”

Wingate sighs thoughtfully. “Hard to say. He’s not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is dead. Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?”

“The what?”

“Nabis. It means ‘prophets.’ Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard?”

“What I know about art wouldn’t fill a postcard.”

“Don’t blame yourself. That’s the American educational system. They simply don’t teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university.”

“I didn’t go to college.”

“How refreshing. And why would you? American institutions worship technology. Technology and money.”

“Are you American?”

A bemused smile. “What do you think?”

“I can’t tell. Where are you from?”

“I usually lie when someone asks that question. I don’t want to insult your intelligence, so we’ll skip the biography.”

“Hiding a dark secret?”

“A little mystery keeps me interesting. Collectors like to buy from interesting dealers. People think I’m a big bad wolf. They think I have mob connections, criminal clients all over.”

“Do you?”

“I’m a businessman. But doing business in New York, that kind of reputation doesn’t hurt.”

“Do you have prints of other Sleeping Women I can see?”

“There are no prints. I guarantee that to the purchaser.”

“What about photographs? You must have photos.”

He shakes his head. “No photos. No copies of any kind.”

“Why?”

“Rarity is the rarest commodity.”

“How long have you had this one?”

Wingate looks down at the canvas, then at me from the corner of his eye. “Not long.”

“How long will you have it?”

“It ships tomorrow. I have a standing bid from Takagi on anything by this artist. 1.5 million. But I have other plans for this one.”

He takes hold of the metal frame and motions for me to brace the crate while he pushes the painting back inside. To keep him talking, I help.

“For a series of about eight paintings,” Wingate says, “he could have been one of the Nabis. But he changed again. The women became more and more real, their bodies less alive, their surroundings more so. Now he paints like one of the old masters. His technique is unbelievable.”

“Do you really not know if they’re alive or dead?”

“Give me a break,” he grunts, straining to apply adequate force without damaging the frame. “They’re models. If some horny Japanese wants to think they’re dead and pay millions for them, that’s great. I’m not complaining.”

“Do you really believe that?”

He doesn’t look at me. “What I believe doesn’t matter. What matters is what I know for sure, which is nothing.”

If Wingate doesn’t know the women are real, he’s about to find out. As he straightens up and wipes his brow, I turn squarely to him and take off my sunglasses.

“What do you think now?”

His facial muscles hardly move, but he’s freaked, all right. There’s a lot more white showing in his eyes now. “I think maybe you’re running some kind of scam on me.”

“Why?”

“Because I sold a picture of you. You’re one of them. One of the Sleeping Women.”

He must not have heard about what happened in Hong Kong. Could the curator there have been afraid to risk losing his exhibit?

“No,” I say softly. “That was my sister.”

“But the face … it was the same.”

“We’re twins. Identical twins.”

He shakes his head in amazement.

“You understand now?”

“I think you know more than I do about all this. Is your sister okay?”

I can’t tell if he’s sincere or not. “I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say no. She disappeared thirteen months ago. When did you sell the painting of her?”

“Maybe a year ago.”

“To a Japanese industrialist?”

“Sure. Takagi. He outbid everybody.”

“There were other bidders for that particular painting?”

“Sure. Always. But I’m not about to give you their names.”

“Look, I want you to understand something. I don’t give a damn about the police or the law. All I care about is my sister. Anything you know that can help me find her, I’ll pay for.”

“I don’t know anything. Your sister’s been gone a year, and you think she’s still alive?”

“No. I think she’s dead. I think all the women in these paintings are dead. And so do you. But I can’t move on with my life until I know. I’ve got to find out what happened to my sister. I owe her that.”

Wingate looks at the crate. “Hey, I can sympathize. But I can’t help you, okay? I really don’t know anything.”

“How is that possible? You’re the exclusive dealer for this artist.”

“Sure. But I’ve never met the guy.”

“But you know he’s a man?”

“I’m not positive, to tell you the truth. I’ve never seen him. Everything goes through the mail. Notes left in the gallery, money in train station lockers, like that.”

“I don’t see a woman painting these pictures. Do you?”

Wingate cocks one eyebrow. “I’ve met some pretty strange women in this town. I could tell you some stories, man. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.”

“You get the paintings through the mail?”

“Sometimes. Other times they’re left downstairs, in the gallery. It’s like spy novels—what do they call that? A blind drop?”

“What legitimate reason could there be for that kind of arrangement?”

“Well, I thought it might be the Helga syndrome.”

“The what?”

“The Helga syndrome. You know Andrew Wyeth, surely?”

“Of course.”

“While everyone thought all he could do was rural American realism, Wyeth was secretly painting this woman from a neighboring farm. In the nude. Helga. Wyeth kept the paintings secret, and they were only revealed years later. The first Sleeping Woman I got was simply left here. It wasn’t one of the early ones. It was from his Nabi period. As soon as I saw it, I recognized the talent. I thought it might be by an established artist, one who didn’t want it known that he was experimenting in that way. Not until it was successful, at least.”

“How do you pay him? You can’t leave millions in train station lockers. Do you wire the money to a bank account somewhere?”

A languid expression comes over Wingate’s features. “Look, I sympathize with you. But I don’t see how this part of my business is your business, okay? If what you say is true, the police will be asking me all this soon enough. Maybe you’d better talk to them. And I better talk to my lawyer.”

“Forget I asked that, okay? I’m not trying to hurt you. All I care about is my sister. All these women disappeared from New Orleans. Not one has been found, alive or dead. Now suddenly I discover these paintings in Hong Kong. Everyone assumes the women are dead. But what if they’re not? I have to find the man who painted these pictures.”

He shrugs. “Like I said, we’ll just have to wait for the police to sort it out.”

A buzz of alarm begins in the back of my brain. Christopher Wingate does not look like a man who would welcome the attention of police. Yet he is stalling me by claiming he wants to wait until they become involved. It’s time to get out of here.

“Who knows about all this?” he asks suddenly. “Who else have you told?”

I’m wishing my hand was in my pocket, wrapped around the Mace can, but he’s watching me closely, and the hammer is within his reach. “A few people.”

“Such as?”

“The FBI.”

Wingate bites his bottom lip like a man weighing options. Then a half-smile appears. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

He picks up the claw hammer, and I jump back. He laughs at my skittishness, then grabs a handful of nails, puts a few in his mouth, and begins hammering the side panel back onto the crate, like a man taking maximum precautions to protect his treasure.

“Every cloud has a silver lining, right?” The nails between his lips make him answer out of one side of his mouth. “The FBI starts investigating these paintings in a murder case, they become worldwide news. Like the guy in Spain who murdered women and posed them like Salvador Dali paintings. That means money, lady.”

“You are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“It’s not illegal, is it? Yes, I’m going to make a lot more money on this painting than I thought. Maybe double the bid.”

“What’s your commission?” I ask, stepping out of range of the hammer and sliding my hand into my pocket.

“That’s my business.”

“What’s a standard commission?”

“Fifty percent.”

“So this one painting could land you a million dollars.”

“You’re quick at math. You should work for me.”

The crate is nearly sealed. When he’s finished, he’ll tell me to leave, then get on the phone and start promoting his newly appreciated asset.

“Why are you selling these paintings in Asia rather than America? Were you trying to delay the connection to the missing women?”

He laughs again. “It just happened that way. A Frenchman from the Cayman Islands bought the first five, but I found out he’d spent most of his life in Vietnam. Then a Japanese collector stepped in. A Malaysian. Also a Chinese. There’s something in these images that appeals to the Eastern sensibility.”

“And it’s not very subtle, is it? Dead naked white women?”

Wingate turns to me long enough to wrinkle his lips. “That’s crude, and it’s an oversimplification.

“Where is the painting in the crate going?”

“An auction house in Tokyo.”

“Why go to that trouble, Christopher? Why not auction them here in New York? At Sotheby’s or wherever?”

Pure smugness now. “It’s like Brian Epstein with the Beatles. You’re number one in England, but at some point you have to take them to America. Maybe the time has come.”

Wingate’s arrogance finally triggers something deep within me, a well of outrage I try to keep capped, but which sometimes explodes despite my best efforts or interests.

“I was lying about the FBI,” I say in a cold voice. “I haven’t told them about the paintings yet. I wanted to talk to you first. But since you’re being such a prick, and you haven’t told me anything helpful, I am going to tell them. Do you know what will happen then? This canvas you’re drooling over will become evidence in a serial murder case, and it’ll be confiscated. And you won’t make jackshit off it, because it won’t be sellable. Not for a very long time, Christopher. It’s like assets being stuck in probate, only worse.”

Wingate straightens up with the hammer and turns to face me. He still has a couple of nails in his mouth; I’d like to shove them down his throat.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

“I want a name. I want to know who paints these pictures.”

He hefts the hammer and drops its head into the palm of his other hand with a slap. “If you haven’t told the FBI yet, you’re not in a very good position to make that kind of demand.”

“One phone call.”

Now he smiles. “A phone call requires access to a phone. Do you think you can get to that one?”

He points the hammer at a cordless phone on the counter behind him. I could probably Mace him and get to it, but that’s not really the point. The point is that he’s willing to hurt me—maybe to kill me—to protect his little art monopoly. Which means he probably knows a lot more than he’s saying about the origin of the Sleeping Women.

“Well?” he says, almost playfully.

I back toward the iron staircase, finding the spray nozzle with my finger as I go.

“Where are you going, Jordan?” He takes three quick steps toward me, the hammer held waist high. As he does, a new scenario hits me with chilling force. What if the painter isn’t the killer at all? What if Wingate masterminded the whole thing to earn millions in commissions? What if he kills the women and merely commissions the paintings from some starving artist? His dark eyes flash as he moves forward, and the violence in them unnerves me.

In one movement I whip out the Mace can and blast his face from six feet, the powerful stream filling his eyes, nose, and mouth with enough chemical irritant to set his mucous membranes on fire. He screams like a child, drops the hammer, and starts clawing his eyes. I almost want to steer him to the sink, so pitiful are his cries, but I’m not that crazy. As I whirl toward the stairs, my heart beating wildly, a giant hand swats me back into the room and a fusillade of distant cannon hammers my eardrums.

When I open my eyes, I see gray smoke and a screaming man. Wingate is shrieking so loudly that I can’t think. You don’t hear men scream like that except in war zones, when they’re lying on the ground holding their guts or genitals in a bowl some medic gave them. Now Wingate is running around the room like a blind rat in a sinking ship; he might just go out a window. I scrabble to my knees and crawl toward the staircase, but the smoke only gets thicker. The lower floors of the gallery are on fire.

“Is there a fire escape?” I shout, but he doesn’t hear me. He’s still trying to claw his eyes out.

To my left I see a faint blue glow, a streetlight. That means a window. I crawl quickly to it and raise my head above the sill, hoping for a fire escape. I find a thirty-foot drop instead. Crabbing back toward the stairs, I stop halfway and wait for Wingate to rush by. A couple of seconds later he does, and I tackle him.

“SHUT UP!” I shout. “IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!”

“My eyes!” he wails. “I’m blind!”

“YOU’RE NOT BLIND! I MACED YOU! STAY HERE!”

Standing erect in the thickening smoke, I rush to the sink and fill a coffee decanter with water. Then I stagger back to him and flush out his eyes. He screams some more, but the water seems to do him some good.

“More,” he coughs.

“No time. We have to get out. Where’s the fire escape?”

“Bed … bedroom.”

“Where is it?”

“Ba—Back wall … door.”

“Get up!”

He doesn’t move until I yank his arm hard enough to tear a ligament. Then he rolls over and starts crawling beside me. As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire’s voice. I’ve heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There’s a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it.

I go through the bedroom door first. The smoke here is not as bad. There’s only one window. As I crawl toward it, Wingate grabs my ankle.

“Wait!” he rasps. “The painting!”

“Screw the painting!”

“I can’t leave it! My sprinklers aren’t working!”

The pressure of his hand on my ankle is gone. When I turn back, I see no sign of him. The fool is willing to die for money. I’ve seen people die for worse reasons, but not many. I stand in the door and try to see through the smoke, but it’s useless.

“Forget the goddamn painting!” I shout into the gray wall.

“Help me!” he calls back. “I can’t move the crate alone!”

“Leave it!”

No reply. After a few seconds, I hear something whacking the crate. Probably the hammer. Then a creaking sound like tearing wood.

“It’s stuck!” he yells. Then a series of racking coughs cuts through the roar of the advancing fire. “I need a knife! I can cut the canvas loose!”

I don’t much care if Wingate wants to commit suicide, but it suddenly strikes me that the painting in that frame is worth more than money. Women’s lives may depend on it. Dropping to my knees, I take a deep breath and crawl toward the coughing.

My head soon bumps something soft. It’s Wingate, gagging as he tries to draw oxygen from the smoke. The flames have reached the top of the stairs, and in their orange glow I see the painting, half out of the crate but stuck against the side panel Wingate only partially removed. Unzipping my fanny pack, I take out my Canon, pop off three shots, then zip it back up and grab Wingate’s shoulder.

“YOU’RE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DON’T MOVE!”

His face is gray, his eyes nearly swollen shut. I grab his legs and try to drag him to the bedroom, but the exertion makes me dizzy, and for an instant my eyes go black. I’m near to fainting, and fainting here would mean death. Dropping his feet, I rush to the window, flip the catch, and shove it upward.

The outside air hits my face like a bucketful of cold water, filling my lungs with rich oxygen and clearing my head. I have a momentary fantasy of going back for Wingate, but survival instinct overrides that impulse. Below me is the iron framework of a fire escape. It’s the classic New York model; one floor down, a latched ladder awaits only my weight to send it to the pavement below. But when I crawl down to the platform and pull the latch, the ladder stays where it is. A wave of smoke billows from the window behind me. I pull down on a rung with all my strength, but nothing moves.

I lived in New York long enough to know how to work one of these things, and this one isn’t functioning. It’s fifteen feet to the cracked cement of the alley below, my best target a space between some garbage cans and a steam grate. A distant siren echoes up the chasm, but I don’t think the fire department will start their rescue work in this alley. I’ve got to get down, and there’s only one way to do it.

Crawling over the railing, I lower myself until I’m hanging by my hands from the edge of the platform. I’m five feet eight, which shortens the drop to about ten feet. No great shakes for a paratrooper, but I don’t happen to be one. I did drop from a helicopter once in North Carolina, photographing an Army training mission. It felt like fifty feet, though it was supposedly twelve.

What the hell. A broken ankle is nothing compared with Wingate’s fate. I open my hands and drop through the dark. My heels strike a glancing blow on the pavement and fly out from under me, leaving my right buttock and wrist to absorb the main force of the impact. I yell in pain, but the exhilaration of escape is a powerful anesthetic. Rolling to my left, I get to my feet and look back up at the platform. The window I crawled through moments ago is spouting fire.

Jesus.

My next instinct is to look down the alley, and what I see there sends a cold ripple along my flesh. There’s a man standing at the far end, watching me. I see him only in silhouette, because all the light is behind him. He looks big, though. Big enough to really mess me up. As I stare, he moves toward me, first uncertainly, then with a determined gait. He does not look like a fireman. My hand goes to my pocket, but the Mace is not there. I lost it upstairs. All I have is a camera, which is less than useless in this situation. I whirl and run toward the other end of the alley, toward the banshee wail of sirens.