Outcasts

Chapter 5 - Legend?

They rode up in an open freight elevator, Sykes wearing his dark glasses that he'd retrieved from the street, didn't want his black and bloodshot eyes freaking out a potential client. Patches of light passed over their faces as the lift rattled and swayed upward, past sprawling, empty, echoing spaces that once had people and machines in them that made something that probably seemed like it would be in demand forever. Or wouldn't be made cheaper overseas. Finally, the elevator jounced to a stop.

Janna led the way as they stepped off onto a concrete floor, dim light filtering through tall, sooty windows that ran the length of one side of the building. Sykes followed her past hulks of rusting machinery, toward the sound of raw-rock music.

She rounded a partition and led Sykes into Mavro's domain, a vast open space of creative mayhem. The walls were covered with murals in his energized style – a blend of grunge graphics and tribal art, in vibrant splashes of contrasting colors.

Pieces of junk – bicycle parts, kitchen appliances – were fashioned into freestanding sculptures.

Skateboards were propped on a cluttered workbench, embellished with Mavro's designs.

Mavro himself was at one end of the bench, replacing the broken wheel on his board.

Janna walked over with Sykes, reached to the paint-smeared radio and turned down the music.

"Mavro, this is Sykes," she said.

The two shook hands.

"Sorry for the confusion," Sykes said, thinking that this kid couldn't be more than eighteen, twenty at most – brown hair twisted into a topknot, sparse whiskers on a face that looked like it didn't smile much, underweight in the starving-artist tradition...

Mavro gave a dismissive shrug. "No problem."

"Mind if I look around?"

"Help yourself."

Sykes stepped around some tangled bedding on a mattress on the floor and went over to one of the big wall paintings – a panorama of naked human bodies with heads of beasts, the creatures frolicking and, in some cases, doing obscene things to one another.

Sykes looked over at Mavro. "Is this enamel?"

"Industrial strength, same as the skateboards."

"You do canvases?"

"Plywood, mostly." Mavro indicated a painting in what Sykes was beginning to think of as his tribal-grunge style, the piece leaning against a beat-up refrigerator. "I had more downstairs, but a pipe broke and trashed them."

Sykes checked out the plywood painting, the colors, the man/beast figures, nodded and said, "This could sell."

"So buy it."

"How much?"

Mavro shrugged. "Make me an offer."

Sykes turned to him and smiled. "That's just what I'm here for."

~~~~~~

The five-story townhouse on the Upper East Side had a wrought-iron fence across the front that was painted black, as were the secure gate and the electrified window trim and the imposing steel front door. Victor Sykes was in the den upstairs, trying to make a case for his new discovery.

"He can turn them out like that," Sykes said, snapping his fingers in front of the fireplace in the high-ceilinged, book-lined room. "And they're good. But that's not the point."