What exactly happened? In the night’s dead time, around 3:20 A.M., a dark-windowed Chevrolet Suburban with no plates drew up outside the Twenty-Fourth Street gallery. The driver must have visited the gallery previously and used what the NYPD’s public statement described as “very sophisticated skimming equipment” to clone the ID cards and discover the PINs. The steel doors rolled up and the titanium gates opened and then plastic jerrycans filled with gasoline were uncorked, thrown into the gallery, and set alight, perhaps by the same sort of blowtorch used to create the sculptures on display. The SUV left as the fire billowed outward, and a similar procedure was followed on Twenty-First Street. There was one witness, an unreliable wino, who described the Suburban’s driver as a man in a black hoodie and dark goggles. “He looked like the Fly,” the witness said. “Yeah. Come to think of it I remember he totally had hairy Fly arms sticking out the ends of his sleeves.” As this testimony plunged deeper into science fiction, the witness was thanked and allowed to leave. No other witnesses emerged. The investigation’s best hope was to identify the car, but it was not immediately found. And by the time the fires were extinguished the sculptures were irreparably ruined.
INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. BEDROOM.
Sitting up in bed, still wearing his black hoodie and goggles, PETYA, with the sheets pulled up under his chin. He is sobbing uncontrollably. He pulls off the goggles and throws them across the room. Bottles of liquor open on bedside table.
INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.
Still weeping, almost screaming with grief, PETYA has started to smash up his new home. He throws a lamp across the room, it hits a wall and shatters. He picks up a chair and throws it after the lamp. Then he squats down on the floor with his head in his hands.
INTERIOR. DAY. PETYA’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.
Mix through to the next morning, PETYA in the same position.
The DOORBELL rings. Repeatedly. He does not move.
Cut.
EXTERIOR. DAY. OUTSIDE THE “MONDRIAN BUILDING.”
NERO GOLDEN is ringing the doorbell. Cut into CLOSE-UP of his face as he speaks directly into the camera. Under the VO we can hear the ding-dong of the bell as he continues to ring it.
NERO
Of course I understand at once that it is him. They show the drawing on television and when I see it I know. This is not the Fly. This is Petronius. Also the car. He has taken the plates off but it is my car. I myself gave him the key when he moved into the apartment. He is a good driver, a safe driver. What father would expect such a thing from his son? We keep it in the parking garage under 100 Bleecker, the NYU high-rise, we sublet the space from a journalism professor living on the twentieth floor. I know the car, I know my son, I know the woman. Naturally. That is the woman that his brother took from him. This is revenge. A terrible thing, but after all he is a man.
Cut.
INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA’S APARTMENT.
The apartment is in disarray, but PETYA has allowed MURRAY LETT to enter. He, PETYA, is still hunched over, squatting on the floor, at rear of shot. LETT is down with him, his arms on PETYA’s shoulders. PETYA is talking nonstop. We don’t hear his monologue.
RENÉ (V/O)
He bought the blowtorch online. That was easy. After taking the plates off the Suburban he drove to a convenience store in Queens and picked up the plastic gas jerrycans. Then he drove to a different, drive-through C-store in Nassau County and filled those gas cans up. As for breaking through the security systems at the galleries, he just said it was really easy. Maybe he hadn’t expected the wave of guilt that hit him immediately after the attacks. He very nearly drowned in it. The meltdown was very severe. He became anxious, hysterical, depressed, drunk. The therapist wanted him put on suicide watch. His father hired round-the-clock nursing staff to sit with him.
Cut to PETYA, talking furiously, but we still hear only RENÉ’S narration. At times PETYA is speaking in lip sync with RENÉ.
RENÉ
His rage attack was aimed mostly at himself, full of guilt and shame. However, he also talked a lot about how much he hated his brother. His feelings for Apu had curdled into lumps of hatred so thick that they could only be dissolved by his brother’s lifeblood, he said, and maybe even that would not be enough, maybe he would subsequently also need at frequent intervals to shit on Apu’s rancid grave. In the crime pages of the cheap newspapers, he read about men who had kept women prisoner for years and he said, maybe I could do that, I could shackle and gag him and keep him in the basement near the boiler and hot water cylinder and torture him whenever I wanted. In those days after the arson attack Petya was drinking very heavily. He was also completely out of his mind.
Cut.
EXTERIOR. DAY. NERO’S STUDY. THE GOLDEN HOUSE.
NERO GOLDEN with a thunderous expression stands with his back to the window and his two DRAGON LADIES await his instructions.
NERO
I want the best criminal defense lawyer in America. Get him today and get him here.
The door opens and VASILISA GOLDEN stands there, her hands on her womb. NERO turns to her, angry at the interruption, but the look on her face silences him.
VASILISA
It’s time.
Cut.
Spring, the last of the ice gone from the Hudson, and happy sails breaking out across the weekend water. Drought in California, Oscars for Birdman, but no superheroes available in Gotham. The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president, along with the rest of the Suicide Squad. There was still more than a year and a half of the current president’s term to run but I was missing him already and nostalgic for the present, for these his good old days, the legalization of gay marriage, a new ferry service to Cuba, and the Yankees winning seven games in a row. Unable to watch the green-haired cackler make his improbable declaration, I turned to the crime pages and read about killings. A gunman shot a doctor in El Paso and then killed himself. A man shot his neighbors, a Muslim family in North Carolina, because of a parking dispute. A couple in Detroit, Michigan, pleaded guilty to torturing their son in their cellar. (Technically not a killing, this one, but a good story, so it counted.) In Tyrone, Missouri, a gunman killed seven people and then made himself his eighth victim. Also in Missouri, a certain Jeffery L. Williams shot two policemen in front of the Ferguson city police headquarters. A police officer named Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina. In the absence of the Batman, Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders offered themselves up as the alternatives to the Suicide Squad. In a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas—“Eats! Drinks! Scenic Views!”—nine people died in a biker war and eighteen others went to the hospital. There were floods and tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas, seventeen dead, forty missing. And it was only May.
“Dostoevsky got all his plots by reading the crime pages of the newspapers,” Suchitra mused. “STUDENT MURDERS LANDLADY. Whatever the Russian for that is. And bingo! Crime and Punishment.”
We were having breakfast—home-brewed macchiato coffee and the cronuts we had waited in line to buy on Spring Street at 5:30 A.M.—sitting at the table in the glass-window corner that looked south toward the harbor and west across the river. It occurred to me that I was happy, that I had found the person who could bring me joy, or she had allowed me to find her. Which also probably meant that I could never tell her the truth about the baby; which in turn meant that Vasilisa Golden had a hold over me which I could never break. It’s true that by revealing her secret Vasilisa would undo her own strategy as well as destroying my best chance of a good life. But maybe she was so sure of herself that it didn’t matter. She had overcome the drama of her dalliance with Masha the fitness trainer, had she not. And Nero was older every day and more and more anxious not to live and die alone….I pushed such thoughts away, understanding that I was succumbing to paranoia. Vasilisa would not tell. And meanwhile, eating my cronut and looking at the movie reviews in the Sunday Times, I was content, happy to let Suchitra think aloud, as she liked to do during these rare moments of calm in her nonstop schedule. From these Sunday brainstorms—just letting her mind freewheel, free-associate from thing to thing, she often came up with projects she wanted to pursue.