“Yes, yes, yes, yes”… still breathing hard… “Could do nothing about it… You ask me something so funny… you know?”
“Well, where are those paintings now, the ones you did with your eyes closed?”
Igor smiled and started to say something—but then the smile vanished. Drunk as he was, he seemed to realize that he had gotten himself into treacherous territory.
“Ohhhh, I don’t know.” He gave a shrug to show it was of no importance. “Maybe I threw them away, maybe I lost them… I only amuse myself with them… I give them away—but who is want them?… I put them in someplace I do not remember… I lose them”—he shrugged once more—“I don’t know where they are.”
John Smith said, “Let’s say you gave them away. Who would you give them to?”
Igor responded not with a smile but with a canny look and all but closed one eye. “Who would want them?—even if those… ‘artists’… themselves painted them? I will not want them if they give them away across the street.”
“The Miami Museum of Art certainly seemed happy to get the real things. They valued them at seventy million dollars.”
Igor said, “Here they like the fads, I was telling you. That is their… that is their—I cannot tell them what they like. De gustibus non est disputandum.” Another shrug… “You do what you can, but there is not much you can do with some people…”
Nestor saw John Smith take a deep breath, and somehow he could tell he had worked up the courage to ask the big one. He had bitten the bullet.
“You know,” said John Smith, taking another deep breath, “there are people who say you actually did do those paintings in the museum.”
A sharp intake of breath—and no words. Igor just stared at John Smith. He shut one eye nearly all the way, as before, but now there was no mirth in his expression.
“Who says that!?” Uh-oh. Nestor could tell that one last redoubt of sound judgment in Igor’s vodaprikized mind had come alive in the eleventh hour. “I want to know who!—what persons!”
“I don’t know,” said John Smith. “It’s one of those things you just uh… uh that’s in the air. You know how it is.”
“Yes, I know how it is,” said Igor. “It’s a lie! That is how it is, a lie!” Then, as if realizing he was protesting too much, he forced out a huhhh that was supposed to make it lighter. “That is the most silly thing I have ever heard. You know the word provenance? Museums, they have a whole system. Nobody could get away with something like that. That is the more craziest idea! Why is anyone want to even try something like that?”
“I could think of a reason,” said John Smith. “If somebody paid him enough money.”
Igor just stared at John Smith. Not a trace of mirth or even irony in his face, not even a proto-wink. He couldn’t have looked more stone-cold serious. “I give you advice,” he said finally. “You don’t even mention such a thing to Mr. Korolyov. You don’t even tell anybody who ever see Mr. Korolyov. You understand?”
“Why do you mention Sergei Korolyov?” said John Smith.
“He is the one who gave the paintings to the museum. There was a big celebration for him.”
“Oh… Do you know Korolyov?”
“NO!” said Igor. He froze as if someone had just put a knifepoint against his neck. “I don’t even know what he looks like. But everybody knows about him, every Russian. You don’t play around with him the way you play around with me.”
“I’m not playing around—”
“Good! You don’t even let him know you think about these things, these gossips!”
Have a seat. Have a seat, my ass! What was that supposed to mean? The Chief never had to have a seat before he could go into Dio’s office. It was always him walking down the hall past all those dismal little used-to-be Pan Am seaplane offices with his shoulders back and his chest out. He wanted to make sure even the City Hall lifers got a good look at Chief Booker’s black mightiness… and if the door was open, there would always be some white or Cuban lifer standing just inside an open door who would sing out with an ingratiating, worshipful “Hi, Chief!” and His Mightiness would turn toward him and say, “Hey, Big Guy.”
But just now when he came down the hall, there were no lifers singing out “Hi, Chief” or anything else. They couldn’t have contained their worshipfulness