As soon as he stepped into the loft, he was impressed. One wall embraced a huge mirror, ten feet by ten feet. The other walls, stripped down to bare brick, were covered with paintings. The dozen or so canvases were large and, he thought, very well executed. Each was divided precisely down the middle by a thick, straight black line. On one side of the line there was a head-to-foot image of a stylized nude male or female figure striking a pose. On the other side, this same figure was precisely mirrored.
Ruth gestured them to a sitting area near the front windows. After they sat, she studied Ray's drawing of Gelsey "No"-she shook her head-"I've never seen this person."
"Who are the other artists who work with mirrors?" Ray asked.
"I only work with one mirror." She pointed to the large one on the wall.
"I pose my models in front, then paint what I see. A double image, straight and reversed-that's my trademark. No self-respecting artist would copy another's signature style."
"Ray didn't mean copy," Janek said. "We're interested in artists who use mirrors in all sorts of ways."
Ruth nodded. "I've seen them used as surrounds. And there're a couple of people who make mirror sculptures. Jim Dargesh in L.A. bends mirrors.
There's a guy in Boston, Edelman or Adelman, who creates abstract surfaces by arranging small round mirrors in series." She thought a moment. "I remember seeing a show of large-scale mirrored geometric forms sometime last year. It was at the Martinelli Gallery on Greene Street. There's also a star photographer, Leslie Kron, who shoots still lifes against backgrounds of angled mirrors. There're probably a lot more people I could think of." She stared at Janek. "Is this important?"
He felt she knew something. "It is," he said. "We'll appreciate any help."
"You say her first name's Gelsey?" Janek nodded. "Suppose I helped you find her. Would she be arrested or anything?"
"Nothing like that," Ray assured her. "We think she's in danger. We're looking for her so we can warn her protect her if she'll let us." Ruth continued to stare. Janek thought: She's wondering whether she can trust us. Finally she nodded. "I'm going to make a call."
She strode to her work space at the far end of the loft, Picked up a wall phone and stabbed out a number. Janek glanced at Ray. Ray touched his mustache and smiled back. Then they both sat silent, straining to overhear the conversation.
When Ruth Hibbs came back, she squinted at Janek. "I called a friend, Jodie Graves. I think she knows the person you're looking for. The woman signs her work ',' but that isn't her first name."
"What's her first name?" Ray asked.
"Elizabeth. Most people call her Gelsey, but some call her Beth. She shows at Erica Hawkins on Broadway near Spring." Ruth Hibbs shook her head. "Funny-I've heard of her, but I never knew she worked with mirrors till Jodie mentioned a picture the other day… Later that night, when he and Ray finally reached Erica Hawkins, and the woman reluctantly opened up her gallery so that they could meet, Janek received a major insight into Elizabeth Gelsey's mind.
Ms. Hawkins had shown them the portrait, titled "Leering Man," which hung in her office opposite her desk. The moment Janek saw it he was astonished. The work, he felt, cast a powerful spell, and the longer he looked at it, the more deeply he felt himself drawn in.
The image was not beautiful, nor was it intended to be. Rather, it was a dark vision, a portrait of a leering and perhaps threatening male embellished with all sorts of artifacts-coins, bits of paper money, shards of mirror glass, little springs and wheels-enmeshed in thick paint and arranged into a kind of encompassing halo around the subject's head.
At the bottom of the canvas was a very small naked female figure, lying with arms outstretched, exposed, vulnerable, as if at the mercy of the leering man whose face loomed so large above. This female's eyes, engaging the viewer, were wide open, displaying a mixture of pleasure, confusion and pain. The eyes were also very familiar; Janek recognized Gelsey's eyes as depicted in the two police artists' sketches.
But just as extraordinary, Janek thought, were the eyes of the Leering Man above-enlarged, black, meeting Janek's with an unremitting gaze.
Gelsey had depicted the eyes of a person who was smirking while, at the same time, apparently suffering great distress.
After staring at the faces, becoming lost in Gelsey's vision, Janek decided it was her ability to convey different feelings simultaneously that accounted for the painting's extraordinary power. He was moved by her empathy and understanding of human failings-the anger that masks anguish, the sensual pain that lurks in a smile, the knowledge of one's own malice that erodes one's joy even as one tries to take pleasure in the bitter suffering of another.
The Meeting Janek emerged from the Holland Tunnel, then headed west across the Jersey swamps. The rising sun chased him, burnishing the grasses of the Meadowlands shades of rust.
There were numerous ways to drive to Newark. He chose the Pulaski Skyway. It was narrow, noisy, dangerous, but he liked the way it was constructed. It reminded him of his boyhood, building bridges out of parts scavenged from other kids' discarded Erector sets. Anyway, he wanted the trip to take a while, to feel like a journey, He hadn't slept well, his dreams haunted by Gelsey's Leering Man. At dawn he'd called Aaron, asked to borrow his Chevrolet.
"Sure," Aaron said. "But don't you want me to drive you?"
"No, thanks."
"What about backup?" "Won't need backup on this one," Janek said.
When Gelsey woke up, later than usual, she found, strangely, that she no longer felt the fear. And yet, as far as she knew, nothing had changed:
Dr. Z was dead, both the police and Diana were after her and she was still a prisoner of the mirrors.
But something was different. And if, she reasoned, the difference did not lie in the objective facts of her situation, then it must lie within, in her feelings.
Yes, that was it. Because she felt good. She felt almost… ebullient.
She got out of bed, yawned, stretched, then strode into the work space of the loft. Surrounded at once by all her drawings and studies, she was suddenly struck by the notion that with her latest painting in the series, the one she had turned over to Erica, she had finally finished with Leering Man and was ready to take on something new. She didn't know yet what her new subject would be, only that she would discover it when she set to work.
A new beginning, she thought. Perhaps today is the day.
The sun, higher now, was lifting mist off the swamps. Janek, raising his eyes from the road, watched an American Airlines jet, most likely a red-eye from the Coast, fall softly toward Newark Airport. Plumes of smoke, burn-offs from the petroleum-tank farms, marked the windless sky like hieroglyphics. Or perhaps, he thought, like letters written in mirror-reverse.
He knew where he was going. He had gone there with his father many times, His last visit had taken place thirty years before, but he hadn't forgotten the sounds, smells, revelry, crowds. Unshelled peanuts in a paper bag. Cotton candy wound around a cone. Shooting gallery with Kewpie doll prizes. Merry-go-rounds, Dodgem, roller coaster, Ferris wheel.
There were dark attractions, too-the tunnel of love, with its gloomy, watery aroma of cheap perfume and teenage sex; and the fun house (the "crazy house," his father had called it), with its cackling automatons, freaks, slanted moving floors, sudden startling blasts of wind and maze of distorting mirrors. had told "Her folks were carny people," Erica Hawkins h him. "She lives out by a deserted amusement park near Newark."
Janek remembered the place well, and also his father's friend out there, an old organ grinder named Walter Mele", with sad eyes and a drooping, yellowing mustache. His father had kept the old man's hurdy-gurdy going for years.
"Wait will never be able to buy a new one," he'd said.
His father had never charged Meles for repairs; in return, every summer the old man had sent him a pair of one-day passes. And so, each August, on a very hot Sunday afternoon, Janek and his father would go to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and board a bus for Richmond Park. Once there they would ride the rides and say hello to Wait. Janek had always dreaded that part of it-not the saying hello, but the shaking of the hand. Not Walter Meles's hand, either; it was the hand of Walt's old monkey, Suzy, tethered to the hurdy-gurdy, that he would dread.
"Now say hello to Suzy," Walt would intone. The monkey would cackle, stick out its paw and Janek would have to touch it. When one time he complained, his father told him there were things in this world you have to do whether you liked to or not. "Suzy is all that old guy has," his father explained. But still, any fun Janek might anticipate on their annual foray was sabotaged by his knowledge that i he would have to shake the animal's scabrous little paw.
Gelsey had always held to a superstition: that her pencils, crayons and brushes knew what they wanted to depict, and that if she could only get into sync with them, they would take her hand and show her what to draw.
Now she stood before a large sheet of paper tacked onto a sheet of plywood nailed to her studio wall, waiting for her hand to move. The ceiling fan cut at the morning light utions that. streamed in through the skylight, its rapid revol inspiring notions of circles, balls, spheres, globes.
Yes, a head A portrait.
She swirled the black crayon through the air and then touched it lightly to the paper. And then slowly she followed it as it seemed to find a groove. And then it was as the crayon had a will of its own, scribing with such authority that her hand seemed barely more than a support.
Still thinking of his father, Janek stopped the car before the entrance to Richmond Park. The wrought-iron gate, rusted now, was closed and hooped with padlocked chains. Richmond had been shut down ten years ago, closed by the state after its roller coaster crashed. The crash had been a major tragedy-seven children killed, forty-six seriously injured.
Richmond had never reopened, yet no one had bothered to tear it down.
And so it stood, rotting slowly, almost, Janek thought, magnificent in its decay, surrounded by an automobile junkyard, a warehouse especially constructed for storage of industrial wastes and a single street of decrepit blue-collar homes.
A pack of wild dogs, it was rumored, roamed its grounds. A dismembered human female body had been discovered there a couple of summers before.
The killing, Janek recalled, had not taken place at the park; the body parts had just been dumped there. But that was enough to create an aura of menace and fear. Now Richmond was the sort of place one kid might dare another to enter on Halloween.
Thinking sadly of his father, Janek drove on.