Spiral A Novel

1 It was Barb who found Grossman, Barb who called Nick in the middle of the night, so stirred up by the turn events had taken that she forgot about the time difference between London and New York. The middle of an English summer. The 3 a.m. dark of a West London basement. Everything changing because of a phone call. Later on, Nick saw it as the moment in which his life came apart. "Does she even realize?" said Linda when Nick was back under the covers. "She was drunk. You know how she gets." Linda turned away from him with a disgusted grunt--yeah, she knew. Barbara Segal was one of two "rich old birds" she would have liked to rip out of his Rolodex, women he had gotten to know intimately in the six years he had been writing the biography of Francis Spira. Not that Barb was that rich, certainly not by New York standards. Her Upper West Side apartment was worth $800,000 tops, but forty years in the art world (she had started out writing for Artforum back in the sixties) and her closeness to the New York School's celebrity psychos, freaks and visionaries had left her holding a half-dozen blotched and spattered rectangles that were now worth serious money. And then there were the Spiras: six of them in all, all portraits of her from the late sixties, two of them gifts from the artist himself. "So what the hell did she want?" said Linda. Nick stared up at the darkness, getting little aftershocks of cognition, Barbara's news blooming in his head. "She said she saw Jacob Grossman," he whispered. "In the street." After Georges Pompidou had awarded Spira the Legion d'Honneur in 1971, the artist had gone out and found an Algerian trucker in Pigalle, taken him back to his room at the Crillon. He had shown up at the opening of the Grand Palais retrospective with a split lip that was only partly concealed by cosmetics. This was Spira's love life: roiling, libidinous, percussive, abandoned. But for all the wildness, he'd had only two significant others: Tony Reardon, the East End criminal who died the month Frank got his French medal, and Jacob Nathaniel Grossman. Nick got out of the bed and stood there for a moment looking down at his feet. He was willowy but square-shouldered, and had the knotty hands and feet of his English mother. "She said she saw him in the street." Linda's head was an area of deeper darkness in the surrounding gloom. With the punky short haircut he'd given her, she looked like a boy. "So she's hallucinating," she said. "It's not surprising with all the booze she puts away." Nick pushed a hand back through his own butchered hair. For the past few months they had been hacking at each other as part of an ongoing economy drive, and her latest effort was particularly brutal. "She saw him in the street, just a chance thing, and she followed him." "But how could she even be sure who it was? I mean, after all this time it must be--" "She said . . ." Barb's voice came to him, flattened with the booze, slightly mushy on the consonants. I followed him, Nick. This old bum. It's crazy, I know. But I couldn't just walk away. We must have walked around for hours. "She just knew," said Nick, trembling now, knowing that this was tremendous news, disastrous news. "She knew who it was." He said it then, said that maybe he should go over to Manhattan. Linda bumped the bedside lamp, grabbing for the light switch. The room jumped into low-rent detail: a Dralon-covered armchair spotted with cigarette burns, a lethal disconnected storage heater. Papers and books stacked like dirty dishes around the walls. Linda reached for her cigarettes, then remembered that she didn't smoke anymore. "Nick, we don't havHumphreys, Gary James is the author of 'Spiral A Novel', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400031924 and ISBN 1400031923.