Charles Effingham, the white-maned chairman of Sotheby's, had been in the business forty years and could predict the success or failure of a given sale by the presence or absence of a certain smell in the auction room. This smell needed to be ferreted out behind the aromas that always pertained in gatherings of the wealthy-the round spiced scents of expensive perfumes, the creamy leather musk of the finest shoes and handbags. The odor Effingham sought out was rather less refined. It was a lusty, avid smell; nervous and glandular, it was a grown-up, toned-down version of the soupy stink of prep school dances. It was a smell that happened when people wanted something badly and were willing to be as stupid as necessary to get it.
In the minutes before the opening of bidding at the Solstice Show, the chairman worked the room. He greeted, he joked, he sniffed; he didn't smell much lust.
"I think I'll sit in the back," he said to Campbell Epstein, the head of Paintings. Epstein got the message; it made his stomach burn and caused the scallop-pattern furrows in his forehead to etch themselves a trifle deeper.
And yet the turnout wasn't bad at all. Perhaps a hundred fifty people were treading the huge Bokhara carpet in the auction room, chatting softly under the Venetian crystal chandeliers. The heavy critics, the important dealers, the big collectors were there in force. Claire Steiger was there, hiding her hangover and her despair. She talked with Avi Klein and several other of her clients, clients to whom she had refused to sell Augie Silvers back when the price was skyrocketing; she felt them gloating now, she smiled but her face hurt. She made a point of keeping far away from Peter Brandenburg, whose calamitous article had already been read by nearly everyone and was the subject of half a dozen conversations in that room. Dressed in perfect linen, distant and impregnable, he stood by himself and made notes in his well-thumbed copy of the auction catalogue.
Among the debonair crowd were a few people who were less so. One of these was Ray Yates. Bearded, wearing sunglasses and an ill-fitting jacket over a palm-tree shirt, he skulked in a corner and avoided the insulting glances of the security guards. He'd been running for his life for almost two weeks now; the habit of furtiveness did in fact make him look decidedly suspicious. And lonely, desperately lonely. So much so that when, just at ten o'clock, Clay Phipps, looking frazzled but not inelegant in a pale yellow suit, swept into the room, Yates almost threw himself against his chest.
The new arrival barely had time to drop a mention of his Learjet ride before the auctioneer pounded the gavel and people were asked to take seats.
The auction began, and it went badly from the start.
Works by Larry Rivers and Jim Dine sold for disappointing prices after languid bidding; a Helen Frankenthaler was practically stolen. Campbell Epstein, sitting near the auctioneer at a table manned by unbusy spotters, looked slightly jaundiced. A Jasper Johns was carried for display through a door at the auctioneer's left; no one ante'd up the work's lofty minimum, and the spurned canvas was ignominiously carted back to storage.
After twenty minutes a young assistant approached Charles Effingham and whispered in his ear. The head of Paintings, his yellow tie dancing against his throbbing Adam's apple, watched the chairman rise and leave, and wondered if the sly old boy had arranged to be called away from the debacle.
The sale dragged on; people started looking out the windows. "The next lots," droned the auctioneer, "numbers C-forty-seven through C-seventy-four, are by the contemporary American Augie Silver."
There was a stirring at the mention of the name, but it was perverse. Heads turned toward Peter Brandenburg; heads turned toward Claire Steiger. As during a streak of lousy weather, people perked up not in hopes of improvement but with a morbid curiosity as to how bad things could get.
"What am I bid," the auctioneer continued, "for lot C-forty-seven, an early work, a lovely seascape, eighteen by twenty-four inches? The medium is oils, the estimated value is twenty thousand dollars."
"Three dollars," someone said. "Same as an issue of Manhattan magazine."
An edgy titter went through the room; the auctioneer squelched it with the gavel. "Serious bids only, please. Do I hear an opening of five thousand dollars for the Augie Silver seascape?"
Silence spread like a fissure in the earth. Ray Yates and Clay Phipps, sitting side by side, looked between their feet and saw their hopes of a windfall slipping down into some black and bottomless chasm.
Finally a plump hand went up. It belonged to Avi Klein. He had a wry look on his face, as if it were intrinsically droll to buy something, anything, for a mere five thousand dollars. No one topped his paltry bid.
The next two works, whose estimates had been thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars, were sold for seven and nine respectively, to another longtime customer of Claire Steiger's, another high roller turned bargain hunter.
Had Charles Effingham still been seated in the auction room, his keen nose would have by now detected a smell of something funky, something feral. It was not the reek of acquisition, however, but the meaner stink of scandal, the nasty excitement of being witness to a disaster, seeing the undoing of a career in art. A fourth Augie Silver was gaveled at less than a quarter of its estimate; a fifth picture did no better. Moment by moment, bid by grudging bid, Augie was being pulled down from the ranks of painters who mattered, was being flayed, shrunk, expunged from fashion, chipped away at like a toppled monument.
Claire Steiger mustered her composure but could not keep her lower lip from quivering.
Then an unexpected thing occurred. As the auction moved on to the later, larger, presumably more significant Augie Silvers, Peter Brandenburg began to bid. With a gesture so refined as to be nearly invisible, he raised his neat hand inside his immaculate linen sleeve. A spotter zeroed in on his impassive face; after that, nothing more ardent than a slightly lifted eyebrow was required to confirm his willingness to top. Almost before his fellow bidders realized it, he'd bought Jimmy Gibbs's painting for sixteen thousand dollars and one of Ray Yates's for twenty-two.
A quick-fermenting exhilaration mingled with confusion filtered through the room. It was not unheard of for a critic to buy pictures, but it was rare. Critics had power, not money, and while Sotheby's lived on prestige it did not accept prestige as payment. Then too there was the ethics of the thing; it had been, after all, Brandenburg's article that had cast such a pall on the proceedings. But now that the famous critic was bidding, people thought back on what they'd read, and reconsidered. What had he really said that was so terrible, so damaging? He'd said that Augie Silver, an artist who was always growing, changing, was embarked upon a new phase of his work, a phase that promised to be extremely bold, ambitious, risky, and productive. Clearly, Brandenburg was gambling that this new phase would carry the artist to the next level of fame and reputation, the level at which everything the painter had ever touched would be assured of holding value.
While other bidders were reasoning this out, Peter Brandenburg bought Ray Yates's other canvas for twenty-eight thousand dollars, and two of Clay Phipps's pictures, one for thirty-seven thousand, the other for forty-four. The prices were still well below pre-auction estimates, but the gap was narrowing, the numbers were becoming respectable.
And now the bidding livened. The paintings that were left were the prizes: the artist's personal favorites that he'd given to his closest friends, the canvases of special merit that Claire Steiger had been stockpiling. Avi Klein jumped back into the fray; other top-tier collectors joined him. Brandenburg copped two more pictures, but they cost him-the six-figure plateau loomed very close.
It was reached in a phone bid from Japan, and once that magic divider had been crossed, the floodgates opened and it became a different kind of auction. Gone was any thought of bargain seeking; archaic was any notion of buying pictures for less than estimated price. Bidding went from thousand-dollar increments, to five, to ten, to twenty-five. Buyers sweated in their gorgeous suits; the profitable stink of art lust wafted forth. Spotters danced out of their chairs, the auctioneer cranked up the volume, put some syncopated jazz into his patter. A canvas went to Brandenburg for a hundred and twenty-five; the next was bought by Klein for one fifty; the following picture was scarfed up by the absent Japanese for an even two hundred thousand. Around this time Peter Brandenburg dropped out, and the big boys took it as a token of their prowess that they'd subdued him. By some mysterious buoyancy, the price fluttered higher till it transcended the niggardly custom of being reckoned in thousands and entered the quarter-million range. People leaned forward in their chairs, fanned themselves with catalogues, and barely breathed as the bidding on the final Silver canvas climbed ever upward and ended at last at the lofty level of three seventy-five.
When it was all over, the auctioneer pounded his gavel and pounded some more, but the buzz in the room only mounted, a kind of rarefied bedlam had set in, it was a frenzied letting go poised tipsily between catharsis and exhaustion. Everyone, it seemed, was winded, wilted, fidgety-everyone but Peter Brandenburg, whose linen suit was crisp, whose forehead was unlined and dry. He'd bought fourteen paintings in all and spent just slightly over a million dollars that no one knew he had. He'd led the bidding for so long that no one really noticed that all but his last two purchases were bargains. He'd jump-started the auction, then he'd gotten out. He was very pleased. A whole new scale of value had been established for Augie Silvers, and Brandenburg and his partner now had the biggest holdings. The imminent leap in prices would allow them to live very comfortably indeed.
The auctioneer continued to call for quiet; the audience continued to ignore him. Then quite suddenly the door to the left of the auction lectern opened and Charles Effingham, his white hair resplendent, stepped spryly 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.