While he worked, he was aware of her. She was moving around in the kitchen area, moving things, opening cupboards and closing them. After a while he smelled coffee, and she appeared with a big tray that had two cups and a thermos pot, and several kinds of tea cakes. She set it on a table nearby.
She looked over his shoulder. “Good. Very, very good. Leave it now and have some coffee.” She pointed at the table. “You don’t strike me as the tea-cake type, but they won’t hurt you.” She poured him a cup of coffee and went to the couch to take up the pad. She used the gum eraser and pencil and worked on the drawing.
He said, “This isn’t what I expected.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “You could have gone to a police composite artist if you had wanted something simple. You went to a lot of trouble to find a real portrait painter.”
“I mean the way you go about it.”
“This isn’t the way it’s done, but this isn’t a normal portrait,” she said. She looked up and noticed he was surveying the huge loft. “You like my studio?”
“Artists all seem to be nesters. I’ve seen a few studios that are better than anything the owner ever made to sell.” He frowned. “That’s not you.”
She chuckled. “It’s a sick indulgence—something you do when you need to work but can’t do anything right. Maybe if I add a skylight, the shadows over here will be gone. Maybe if I move the wall over here in a little bit, I’ll have a small corner that glows just right. Then everything will work.” She spun the sketch again. Now the lines that he had made had been refined, and had become the new boundaries of the face.
He stared at it. “That’s closer.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at the picture, then propped up the pad so it faced him. “Let’s have some of those cakes while you get used to him. I want more lines as soon as you see something that’s wrong, remember something you forgot.” She sat at the table with him. “How did you get to chasing a killer around? Is it personal?”
He shook his head. “Nothing as honest and dignified as that. It’s something I fell into a while back.”
“How?” she asked.
“Process of elimination,” he said. He picked up the pad and began working on it again. “I started out wanting to be a great man, but then I noticed that every time there was a great man, somebody would lay the crosshairs on his forehead. Then I figured I’d be a saintly man. But it meant I would have to deny myself all the things my mama wouldn’t have approved of, and end up getting burned at a stake or something. Then I thought I’d settle for being a good man. But no matter how hard I applied myself to it, I couldn’t detect that I was getting any better than anybody else. In those days you had to go into the service, so I did. After a couple of years I got out and had nothing to do. I got a job at a detective agency, then started my own. I solved a couple of cases, and got a reputation. At that point, either I could keep making very good money doing that, or I could go start all over again at something I wasn’t even good at. So I kept on.” He handed the drawing back to Cara Lee Satterfield. “How about you? How did you get to be a famous portrait artist?”
She went to work with eraser and pencil again. “It’s a lot like your story.” She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, then down again at the pad. “Except that mine is true. I came up from Virginia twenty years ago. I needed to draw, and I needed money. I live in a century when representational art is something that’s only in style among people who wear cheese hats to football games and watch pro wrestling on TV. So I did odd jobs—quickie sketches at amusement parks, greeting cards, witness sketches for the police.”
He looked around him at the loft, then back at her. “Something else happened to both of you.”
“Both?”
“You and this building.”
She grinned as she worked. “I bought this place because I couldn’t afford SoHo, which was where artists were living then. This was a hellhole, a place where transients and addicts hung out. There had been four or five fires. I got it cheap. I made it secure so nobody could get in, fixed it up a little, and went to work. Over the years, the rent in SoHo got too expensive for artists, and most of them moved in around me anyway. In the meantime, I discovered that no matter how rich and sophisticated you are, you don’t want your portrait to be abstract. You want realism, with ten years lopped off.” She showed him the portrait.
“That’s close,” he said. “Really close. I don’t know what I could do to it.”
“Then let’s talk ethnic stereotypes.”
“Stereotypes?”
She said, “Nice people don’t. But all we’re talking about here is looks. You look the way the genes your grandparents brought from the old country tell you to look. The question is, Which old country?”
He shrugged. “His skin is pale. I thought about that when I saw him. His hair is dark brown, almost black. His eyes . . . I wasn’t close enough to tell the color, exactly. They looked light, not dark. Blue or gray. The old country is somewhere in Europe on both sides. But it could be anywhere from Ireland to Russia. You see him, you think ‘white guy,’ but you don’t think about a country.”
“If he were out in the sun, would he get freckles?”
“Maybe. He doesn’t have any right now.”
She did some more sketching. “Tell me about how he seems. You talked to him, watched him. What’s his personality?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Guess.”
“I think he’s got the skills he needs for getting along. If he’s supposed to smile, he smiles. If he’s supposed to look like he’s sad, he can do that. He doesn’t feel any of it.”
Prescott looked into her eyes. “You understand? He knows what people are supposed to feel and what their faces look like while they’re feeling it. He’s spent a lot of time practicing—probably in front of a mirror when he was young, and since then by watching people’s reactions—but it’s all the same. It’s like a man doing birdcalls: if he practices enough, he can hit the same notes, maybe not exactly, but close enough to fool a lot of birds. But he’s not a bird. He doesn’t know what the bird feels when it sings, or what it means. He just knows that when he does it, birds will come close enough so he can kill them.”
She looked up from the pad. “He doesn’t feel anything?”
“That’s not exactly right. He feels hunger, cold, heat, pain, a little fear—too little of that—and there’s a big reservoir of resentment or jealousy or something. I haven’t quite isolated that to the point where I can put a name to it. He thinks that other people have things that he deserves. He’s smarter, stronger, more disciplined. He works harder than they do—has been working harder than they do since he was a child—to improve himself. That’s the only sign of fear I’ve seen so far. Something made him afraid when he was young, I think, and that was how he got started on making himself dangerous . . . ‘potent’ is probably the word.”
“Is he?” she asked. “He has power?”
Prescott looked at her in surprise, as though he had been in a reverie and heard a discordant note. He nodded. “Yeah. Of a sort. We live in a beautiful, warm, cozy society. We don’t always know it, but we do.” Prescott paused. “He doesn’t.”
“How is that?”
“We have wars, crime, and so on—but only a few of us, and only some of the time. It isn’t a daily experience. For most of human history, it wasn’t that way. People had to walk around with a different attitude: heavily armed, watchful, ready to react instantly and violently. What he’s done is turn himself into a man from another time and place: training himself physically and mentally, learning the practices of old warrior societies, developing attitudes and skills of men in cultures that had some practical use for that kind of thing, that rewarded it with high status. He’s succeeded. He’s a killer, just as they were.”