I had chosen a restaurant downtown to meet with the agent — agents? I wasn’t sure— figuring that some place local where people might know me would be safer. They couldn’t very well disappear me if they knew people were paying attention, could they?
I was early. They were late.
My nerves were not steadied by the wait. The place was unnervingly full of the clatter of silverware, of tables being bussed, of the quiet conversations of people who were not waiting to meet with a federal agent. Or agents.
It was obvious who they were when they came in the door. They were not wearing sunglasses, but it was clear they were agents of some kind. It was the way they carried themselves, the way that, though you couldn’t see, you understood there were firearms beneath those jackets.
They approached.
“Mr. Lyles,” the taller one with a folder suggested. I nodded. “May we sit?” I nodded.
“My name is Andrew Smith,” he said as they slit into their chairs, “and this is my partner, Craig Bishop.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You obviously know who I am.” I was on edge, which is the only explanation for what I said next.
“Agent… Smith? Really? Agent Smith?”
He grimaced. It was not the first time he’d heard this. Agent Bishop was stone-faced.
“We would have preferred to meet with you in our office,” he said.
“I understand, and I’m sure you understand why I preferred a public space. Thank you for meeting me here.”
“To be frank,” Smith said, “there was so little in your file that we couldn’t make a definitive risk assessment to convince… our superiors… to let us bring you in.”
I chose silence.
It did not seem to bother Agent Smith, or if it did he didn’t allow himself to show it. He pulled a photo out of a folder and shoved it across the table to me.
“Do you know this man?”
It was Al Petelin. I was shocked.
“What on earth?” I began, but Smith cut me off.
“Do you know him?”
“Yes, it’s Al Petelin, but why…”
“It is our understanding that you wired $500 to him.”
“Yes.”
“In dollars.”
“At his request, yes.”
“To Gazprom Bank in Moscow.”
“Again, at his request.”
“Did you know of Gazprom’s role in international money laundering in support of sometimes violent political operatives?”
“I kept up with the news, absolutely, but I need you to explain what this has to do with my purchase of one of Aleksandr Vitalevich Petelin’s drawings?”
Smith hesitated, seeming to regard my answer as some kind of alibi.
“You paid $500 to an unknown man in…”
“…in Astrakhan, Russia…”
“… in Astrakhan, Russia, yes, for a drawing?”
“It’s what art collectors do, Agent Smith.”
“Buy drawings from an unknown man in Russia.”
“His Improvisation I, hanging in my bedroom next to the Picasso.”
There was another pause.
“Did you know Petelin before purchasing this drawing?”
“Nope. Came across his drawing in an online exhibit in London. Al had submitted the drawing, it was accepted, I saw it, and I jumped through all the hoops necessary to purchase it from him, up to and including wiring him payment in U.S. dollars to a notorious money-laundering bank. Is this whole thing based on your stumbling across my transaction five years later, Agent Smith?”
“Have you heard from him since your purchase of this drawing?”
“Not really. I interviewed him via email for my blog, which you’re welcome to go read, but after that I’ve had no reason to keep in touch. He has not reached out to me. What is this about?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
“Yeah, I just did: He had a drawing in an online exhibit in Britain, I saw it, I tracked him down, he sold it to me. I’m not sure how this turned into something you needed to pay attention to.”
Smith made eye contact briefly with Agent Bishop before answering. “He’s vanished.”
I was stunned. I had not kept in touch with Al, true, but it never occurred to me that anything had happened to him.
“It just seemed to us, Mr. Lyles,” said Agent Bishop, “that $500 was a lot of money for a drawing by someone that no one’s ever heard of, especially one who lives in communist Russia.”
“Not everyone has the means to escape their crappy country, do they, Agent Bishop? Some have to stay and risk being disappeared by the state, don’t they?”
There was a moment while both agents decided not to respond.
“And as for the drawing’s cost, it was a fair price to pay for a piece that speaks to me every time I look up at that wall in my bedroom. That’s how I collect art, anyway, not for the investment but for how each piece speaks to me. That goes for the Picasso, the Hamann, and yes, the Petelin. I’m sorry your inexperience in these matters has led you astray.”
The two men looked at each other, deciding on their next move. Agent Smith took the lead.
“Sorry to have taken up your time, Mr. Lyles. We will keep this file open in case of further developments. If you hear from Petelin…”
“I’m pretty sure you will already know if he does without my having to go to the trouble of getting in touch.”
Smith acknowledged as much with a slight nod. He and Agent Bishop rose and left the restaurant.
What the hell? Why had Petelin seemingly vanished? How had he vanished? I didn’t want to think it was possible.
But I realized immediately that there were a lot of ways Aleksander Petelin could have vanished. Though in his early twenties, he had had cancer; perhaps it had returned. Had he been devoured by the Russian war machine in Ukraine? Or had he been driven underground for his iconoclastic beliefs? Had he taken down his website out of caution? Had he fled his home and was now living abroad in hiding? I simply didn’t know.
And I had no way of finding out.