Relentless

Vivian made search strings out of some Waxx-isms, favorite and unique expressions that were repeated in his reviews—and she was led to an art critic named Russell Bertrand, who was published regularly in the foremost art journal in the country.
    Russell Bertrand excoriated some painters and sculptors as viciouslyas Waxx went after some writers. Not only were Waxx-isms embedded in Bertrand’s reviews, but his prose also proved to be burdened by Waxx’s signature syntax.
    When Vivian sought Bertrand’s biography, she found that it was more spare than Waxx’s bio, without even a home location to be found on Google Earth. Another black hole. Or the same one.
    Next, Vivian searched Bertrand’s review archives, looking for artists he savaged with particular enthusiasm, one of whom was Henry Casas in Smokeville, California.
    Henry and Bella were encouraged by the headway we had made in our investigation, but I warned them to keep their expectations realistic. We were a long way from having any evidence that Waxx—alias Russell Bertrand—had committed crimes.
    My hope that Henry might be able to describe his kidnapper was not fulfilled. He had been sedated through most of the period when he had been in captivity.
    Speaking through his computer, he said one thing that rattled me:
“Not just one of them. During two months, I heard eight … ten voices. Maybe more.”
    If his perceptions during captivity were not so drug-addled that they should be dismissed, then we had gone from a lone psycho to a pair of them—and now to an entire
organization
, which defied belief.
    “One thing more,”
Henry said.
“Mother, show him.”
    “Are you sure we should?” his mother asked.
    Henry nodded vigorously.
    “Come see,” she said, and led me across the room to a pair of tall cabinets. From one of these, she withdrew a painting and held it for my consideration.
    This work was not exquisite, as were those in the library. It lacked the clarity and the powerful, singular use of extreme light that exemplified the other pieces. The technique was far short of masterful, theimages were not complex, and objects were not of the proper proportions. Yet you could see the same mind at work, the same creative sensibility.
    I turned to Henry to ask how he had done this, and I saw that with his right foot, he held a brush, which now he manipulated with considerable finesse.
    His determination and indomitable spirit were admirable, but that made no less tragic the fact that he remained a first-rate talent reduced to methods of execution that could never properly express the visions in his mind.
    “He knows it can’t approach the quality of what he did before,” his mother said. “He has to use my eyes, my description of what he achieves with each brushstroke before he lays down the next one. But what he hopes, what I hope, is eventually he’ll create more primitive expressions of his vision that will, in their own way, be wonderful. And if it never happens, it’s worth the struggle. Every image he paints—it’s spitting in the faces of those bastards. But no one must know. We don’t want them coming back. If Henry finds a way to do work of a certain caliber—it’ll be his legacy, shown after his death.”
    Her dedication to her son was no less impressive than Henry’s dedication to exploring his talent under these worst imaginable conditions.
    Putting away the painting and removing another from the same cabinet, Bella said, “His kidnappers and the people who worked on Henry when he was conscious—they were careful to keep their faces concealed. Only one went unmasked. Henry has struggled to produce that face, time and again, but I don’t think it’s of any value to you. It’s not just the fact that he now lacks sufficient technique for portraiture. Clearly, the drugs on which they kept him affected his perceptions.”
    When she turned the painting toward me, I saw a countenance not well-rendered and not identical to what I had seen, but nonetheless I recognized the deformed individual in the Maserati.

Zazu, Who’s Who,
Here Dog, There Dog,
Doom, Zoom, Boom

   As long as I can remember, novelists and filmmakers and cult leaders have been depicting and predicting the end of the world by fire or ice, by asteroid or magnetic-pole shift, and they have always found a large audience for their visions.
    In the hearts of modern men and women, there is an inescapable awareness that something is wrong with this slice of