The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [38]
“His interlocutors say he does not. They claim to sell them as he paints them, numbered in exactly the order in which they are produced. And they claim not to know exactly what Patrick’s vision is, or what he’s ultimately trying to accomplish. That could be a lie, of course, but in any case, it would have been almost impossible to paint the entire thing at once.”
“Why?”
“Because as more of the tiles are released, we’re starting to get an idea of the size of this thing. It would have to be gigantic.”
“How gigantic?”
“Bigger than Times Square in New York. Bigger than Grant Park in Chicago.” He lifted his arms up. “Bigger than the Colossus Hotel. At this rate, he’ll never finish it in his lifetime. He’ll never finish it in three lifetimes.”
“Maybe he’s doing it in sections?”
“No, he’s doing a tile here and a tile way over there. As far as we can tell, he’s painted only fourteen adjacent pairs and five triples.”
“You could do this on a computer.”
“Maybe. Maybe everything about Burning Patrick is a lie.”
“In which case?”
“In which case, obviously, my tiles would be worth considerably less than I paid for them.”
“Well, how else could he do it?”
“Some of us want to believe that Patrick possesses a genius we don’t understand.” He added, “Your father had that kind of intelligence.”
She turned up one corner of her mouth. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’d like you to prove it one way or the other.”
“How?”
“I want you to follow him. I want you to eavesdrop on his conversations and on the conversations of his managers. Whatever it takes. I want to know how he’s doing it.”
“You mean go to Chicago?”
“You can stay on my estate very close to downtown. It’s gated and guarded and comfortable. You will have access to my home, my kitchen, my staff for as long as you need. Months if necessary. In return for your time and effort, I will pay you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Nada studied him for a tell, for any sign of disingenuousness. “You want to pay me a quarter million to find out your art isn’t worth as much as you paid for it?”
“I’m hoping you’ll discover the opposite. Of course, if you discover that Burning Patrick is not the genius I believe him to be, I have a nondisclosure agreement prepared, and the penalty for violating it would be severe.”
“Until you can unload your tiles at present market value.”
Jameson stopped short of laughing. “I believe Burning Patrick is a singular genius—a visionary, perhaps divinely inspired. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be spending a fortune on his art. But I spent a working lifetime dealing in hard currency—euros and drams and dollars and yen. Faith is not good enough for me. I need to know. I need confirmation. Years from now I don’t want it revealed that Burning Patrick has been perpetrating an elaborate hoax and watch a significant investment shrink to nothing.”
Finally, a motive she understood.
She turned toward the room and found the douchebag. He was talking to one of his friends, hand on his left hip, weight on his left leg, leaning toward the door. She couldn’t see his lips.
Jameson said, “So, Canada, I’m very interested to know what you say to my …”
Nada knew the word he was going to use even before he said it: proposition.
13
WAYNE WAS RUNNING, bouncing, spinning all over the casino. Cowboy Hat’s girlfriend turned out to be his sixteen-year-old stepniece. Dealing with that mess and with the counting crew at the same time took the attention of the entire staff. Meanwhile, he separated the card counters and sweated each of them in different conference rooms and took their photos and typed a report. He e-mailed their mug shots to his counterparts at other casinos. Their features would be programmed into facial-recognition software and, Wayne promised, if the Colossus security cameras ever caught their cheating mugs, an alarm would ring in the bug in his ear and their next parting wouldn’t be so cordial.
The official policy