The next day I was in Professor Sanborne’s office with fourteen photos of what I hoped was the best work I had done thus far. I doubt I’d ever felt more vulnerable and exposed in my life.
“No wonder you knew so much about the Realists,” she said after she looked at them. “Your work reminds me of Edward Hopper. In his early days.”
“I suppose you mean back when he was finger-painting in kindergarten?”
She laughed, and I decided it was gentle humor, kind humor, rather than the savage variety some professors strive to perfect.
“Not that early,” she said. “As you know, I’m sure, Hopper is legendary for his ability to capture reality. But his early works are so impersonal. That’s where you are now. In my opinion, anyway. Over time, Hopper’s paintings began to take on emotions — loneliness, despair, gloom. Nighthawks is probably his best work — my favorite — and he didn’t paint that till he was sixty.”
“I hope it doesn’t take me that long,” I said, “to do something half as good.”
“It won’t,” she said. “Not if you study at the right school.”
“Like where?” I asked. “Any suggestion you have would be so helpful. Honest.”
“Like here,” she said.
I shook my head a couple of times. “I don’t think I have the talent to be accepted at Parsons.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Loser buys the winner…I don’t know — dinner at Peter Luger. I love Luger’s.”
Six months later, Professor Katherine Sanborne and I were having the porterhouse medium rare at Peter Luger in Brooklyn.
I paid for dinner.
We started seeing each other regularly after our celebratory dinner, and six months after that, I was in her Group Critique class at Parsons. We did a pretty good job of keeping our relationship a secret from the other students, I thought.
The best part of Group Critique was being able to be near her three times a week. The worst part was enduring the critiques by my so-called peers.
The morning before I found the diamonds, my latest painting was being thoroughly trashed by Leonard Karns. Karns was short, round, pretentious, and bitterly, unnecessarily nasty. He waddled over to my canvas and explained to the rest of the group why it sucked and, by proxy, why I sucked.
“So it’s a bunch of nobodies in line at an unemployment office,” he said. “But do we really care about any of them? I could take the same picture with my cell phone camera. It’s like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht said, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’”
“And you don’t think Mr. Bannon has shaped this piece?” Katherine said.
“No,” Karns said. “But I think he should take a hammer to it.”
If he was hoping for a laugh from the rest of the class, he didn’t get it. Most of my fellow students sat in silence and winced. It was the last day of the semester, and by now Karns had managed to systematically piss off every one of them with his condescending elitist bullshit.
He would have pontificated longer, but Katherine cut him off. When class ended, she gave us back our term papers. The assignment had been to write a five-thousand-word critique of public art in New York City. It counted as a third of our grade, so I’d spent a lot of time on it. I’d hoped for an A.
But I didn’t get it. There was a yellow sticky on the front page. It said, C+. Matthew, see me after class.
I sat in a depressed funk while everyone else filed out of the room. Katherine Sanborne finally came around her desk and walked toward me.
“C-plus?” I said. “I thought the paper was a little better than that.”
“If you’re willing to put in the time, I can give you a chance to improve your grade,” she said.
“What do I have to do? I’m not afraid of hard work.”
And then Katherine’s mischievous gray eyes lit up, and she clicked the lock on the classroom door.
“Take off your pants,” she said.
I’d been had.
She stepped out of her skirt. Very graceful. Nice to watch. “If those pants don’t come off in five seconds, Mr. Bannon, I’m going to have to give you an incomplete,” she said. “By the way, that paper of yours was damn good, but I’ve come to expect even more from you.”
The classroom had a chaise longue that was used for the figure-painting courses, and within seconds Katherine pulled me to it and began caressing, kissing, exploring. Then I was inside her. This was some kind of teacher-student counseling session.
Finally, Katherine put her lips to my ear, taunting me with kisses and little flicks of her tongue.
“Matthew,” she whispered.
“What?”
“A-plus-plus.”
Chapter 4
OKAY, LET ME get back to my story about the unexpected treasure trove that I found in locker #925. It was a night I’ll never forget, of course. And for the other people in Grand Central Terminal, it was probably their worst nightmare.
I wasn’t in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I’ve lived here long enough to understand the citywide paranoia. It could happen again.
New York is, was, and always will be Ground Zero. Code orange is as lax as we get here. I’ve seen tanks parked on Wall Street, bomb-sniffing dogs in public buildings, and convoys of cop cars barreling into neighborhoods as part of the NYPD’s daily anti-terrorism drills.
So, when the post — rush hour lull at Grand Central is shattered by gunshots and followed by two loud explosions, only one thing comes to mind.
Terrorist attack.
In an instant, the collective paranoia was justified. Mass panic ensued.
The screams echoed off the walls of the marble cavern. The first thing I saw was that nobody ducked for cover. Everybody ran — with visions of the crumbling towers replaying in their heads, I’m sure.
And then I couldn’t see a thing. Red smoke filled the building.
I’ve spent a lot of time in war zones, but this was not my responsibility. I wasn’t a first responder.
I ran like the rest of them.
And then I saw it in the smoky haze.
A trail of blood.
Instinctively I followed it. And then I saw him.
He was a big bear of a man, slumped against a bank of lockers in a pool of his own blood — from a gaping wound in his neck.
In all the madness, nobody was paying any attention to him. I knelt at his side.
My knee hit something hard. A gun.
“Get doctor. Stop blood.” He gurgled out the words in a thick Russian accent.
But there was no time for a doctor. No time for anything.
Before I could say a word, his eyes rolled back in his head and he exhaled a strained breath. He was dead.
His dark blue suit and the floor around him glistened with blood. It coated the door of the bottom locker closest to him. As I looked up, I saw a wide swath of red where he had leaned against the upper locker and slid to the ground.
Locker #925 was covered in bloody handprints.
And it was open.
Wide open.
Chapter 5
I COULD THINK of only one reason that a reasonably sane man who was hemorrhaging blood would open a train station locker instead of wildly seeking help. Whatever was inside that locker had to be too valuable to leave behind.
I looked down at the dead Russian. Was it worth it, Comrade?