He had stood in front of the mirror for hours, the longest period he had could remember going without the nervous twitches without being high. The script was Italian and after deciphering a few names and phrases, he realized what it was.
The twelfth canto of Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jake knew the story, of course. When he had been a child, it had been his favorite book in his father’s library. A massive leather-bound tome illustrated by Gustave Doré. He had never made any sort of conscious decision about the best parts, but staring at himself in the mirror, watching the ink that snaked over his frame, he knew that he had made the choice. And when he thought about it, the twelfth canto was the inevitable passage. The violent condemned to hell. The story of the Men of Blood. Like the ones he now hunted.
Like the one he now hunted.
After all this time. And just like finding himself back home, it all reeked of that fucking word destiny. Because some things were meant to happen. Some places were supposed to be revisited. And with that he realized that he hadn’t yet gone upstairs.
Of course the upper floor was as bad as the downstairs, worse because the rising heat had no place to go and it had baked the smell of dust and dirt and despair into the walls. The floor up here was bare, the hardwood stripping dented and the varnish beaten through to now dirty raw wood. Along with more utility knives, a few miserable blobs of canvases were stacked up here, too, leaning against the wall. He stopped and picked one up, trying to figure out what had happened to his father’s thinking. Were these exercises? How long had he been painting these things? How long had he been sick? Why had no one noticed?
He wondered what his father had been thinking while he had been painting these lifeless chips of noncolor. Jake had stopped caring about his old man years ago, but he had never stopped respecting his mind. Of all the shitty things you could say about Jacob Coleridge—and there were enough to fill a football stadium one filthy vowel at a time—you could not say was that he was talentless. Not like the rest of the hacks who had cashed in on being in the right place at the right time, back when showing up had been half the battle. When you added this hardwired brilliance to the equation the whole process of slapping paint to canvas had become something special to behold.
While the rest of them were measuring their progress with a backward-sliding pencil mark on the door jamb of self-parody, Jacob Coleridge had been reinventing the way people looked at the world. Looked at canvas and crusted pigment. Looked at themselves. He went deep into the arteries of the beast, until he was at its paint-pumping heart, and his work had been the most original and passionate to come out of the East Coast for a long time. Jacob Coleridge had not been a slouch, not even when it had been in style.
So what the fuck had happened to him in the past what—two?—five?—ten? years?
Jake turned one of the asymmetrical canvases clockwise, then counter-clockwise. His father had never believed in modern art, not as a rubric. And he certainly had never believed in the narcissistic self-indulgent crap that his son was now staring at. So what had happened here? Jake leaned the canvas against the wall and walked on down the hall.
His old bedroom and his mother’s old office were both locked. The master bedroom had a pocket door that slid into the wall. It was cocked about four inches and Jake wrapped his fingers around the edge and tried to pull it open. It barely budged, as if it was mired in wet sand. He peeked through the crack, into the room, and saw that the door was barricaded—there was no other word for it. From the tight view he saw a chest of drawers, an old iron architect’s table, and a giant gilded blackamoor pushed up against the panel. How the hell had his father gotten out of the room after doing that? And what had been going through his head when he had piled the furniture up?
Peeking through the gap, he saw more utility knives laid out on all the surfaces, always one within reach. The room smelled worse than the hospital did, and in the dark it was infinitely more gloomy, if that was at all possible. He’d open it tomorrow—or the next day—it really didn’t matter.
After the tour of the upstairs, Jake headed down to the water. He walked barefoot, his tattooed arms almost the same worn blue as his FBI T-shirt with the cracked yellow letters. He held on to the empty cup; he was never able to litter, to leave any of himself behind. In his job, he had seen it get too many people in trouble. Kay always said that after Jake visited a place, it was as if he had never been there at all. He thought of it as simply another occupational hazard.
The cold sand was in direct contrast to the warm wind but he barely noticed. His mind’s eye flicked between the 3-D model of the Farmers’ bedroom and his father’s accident. Coming here to deal with his father and walking into that house up the highway last night were not coincidences. This was bad no matter how he tried to look at it.
Jake walked up the beach, the cool sand squeezing up through his toes like gritty cake icing, the sensation stirring up vestigial memories. The beach had changed in the last quarter-century. A lot, in fact. Like the town itself, the point used to be a community of two distinct groups: the locals and the summer people. The smaller, more modest homes belonged to the locals and the bigger, newer places belonged to the summer people. Gentrification had swallowed all the available real estate in sweeping gulps, and the locals had been pushed farther and farther from the shoreline until the beach was a well-kept line of resort houses devoid of personality and Montauk risked becoming just another eyesore of the wealthy. Desecrated land with preened lawns and three-car garages that owners called car houses.
By the time Jacob Coleridge had moved to Montauk he had already made a name for himself. Pollock was dead, Warhol was a firm presence, and there was a huge gaping hole in the progression of American painting. Opposed to Pollock’s color overload or Warhol’s trite packaging, Jacob Coleridge laid down a grim vision in sweeping lines of crusted pigment that critics began to notice. Collectors quickly followed.
Like most artists, Coleridge began as a classicist and was, by the age of eleven, a skilled draftsman. He quickly outgrew the need for people to see meaning in his work and began each painting with a technically breathtaking illustration that he would deftly, and some would say criminally, cover with successive layers of pigment until only a small detail of the original photorealist work was left. Unlike the mass of American painters who wanted their work worshipped, Jacob Coleridge covered up the parts he figured people would want to see. The critics lauded him as the only non-narcissist in American painting. Many collectors had their works X-rayed so they could see what they were missing. Eventually he started painting with lead pigment, grinding it with linseed oil so that an X-ray machine would have a hard time getting through. And the more he told them to go fuck themselves, the more they paid for his work.
Jake edged along the surf line, absentmindedly kicking at the thick line of weeds and flotsam that snarled the shore, his inner detective looking for…what? Sea shells? Pirate treasure? Answers? A spotted sandpiper trailed behind him, picking up early-morning insects that his curiosity dislodged.