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front end of the gallery. He consulted me on important decisions, but otherwise he had total control. He could have stolen anything he wanted, sold pieces for half off, and I would not have noticed. The lone apostle has a full-time job.
     
     
    AND THE PROPHET HIMSELF?
    To tell you the truth—and here begins my confession—I stopped looking for him. Before very long I thought that I might be better off never meeting the man.
    I conducted the interviews excerpted at the beginning of this chapter, as well as a handful of others with people who claimed to have noticed Victor roaming the halls of Muller Courts. All their stories turned out to be fragmentary, anecdotal, and self-contradictory. One of the security guards told me that Victor had been a drug dealer. Others suggested janitor, cook, writer, and bodyguard.
    A physical description proved slippery as well. He was tall; he was short; he was average. He was gaunt; he had a big belly; a scar on his face, a scar on his neck, no scars at all. A moustache. A beard. A moustache and a beard. That everyone remembered him differently made sense; he had never been in one person’s presence long enough to leave a distinct impression.
    He tended to stare at the ground rather than look you in the eye. On that people agreed.
    With Tony’s help I learned that Cracke had been a tenant since 1966, and that his apartment was heavily rent-controlled, the monthlies low even for the slummiest part of Queens. Until the time of his disappearance, in September 2003, he had never missed a payment.
    There were no other Crackes in the phone book.
    Father Lucian Buccarelli, of Our Lady of Hope, had never heard of Victor. He recommended that I talk to his colleague, Father Simcock, who had been around the parish a lot longer.
    Father Allan Simcock didn’t know any Victor Cracke. He wondered if I had the right church. I told him I could be wrong. He made a list of all the neighborhood churches—a list far longer than I expected—and, wherever possible, gave me the names of people to talk to.
    I did not follow up on them.
    I am not a detective. And I owed Victor nothing. He could have been dead; he could have been alive. It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was his art, and that I had, in spades.
     
     
    PEOPLE DON’T APPRECIATE the creativity of dealing art. In the contemporary market, it is the dealer—not the artist—who does most of the work. Without us there would be no Modernism, no Minimalism, no movements at all. All the contemporary legends would be painting houses or teaching adult education classes. Museum collections would grind to a halt after the Renaissance; sculptors would still be carving pagan gods; video would be the province of pornography; graffiti a petty crime rather than the premise behind a multimillion-dollar industry. Art, in short, would cease to thrive. And this is because—in a post-Church, post-patronage era—dealers refine and pipeline the fuel that drives art’s engine, that has always driven it and always will: money.
    These days especially, there is simply too much material out there for any normal person to be able to distinguish between good and bad. That’s the dealer’s job. We are creators, too—only we create markets, and our medium is the artists themselves. Markets, in turn, create movements, and movements create tastes, culture, the canon of acceptability—in short, what we think of as Art itself. A piece of art becomes a piece of art—and an artist becomes an artist—when I make you take out your checkbook.
    Victor Cracke, then, was my definition of a perfect artist: he created and then he disappeared. I couldn’t have imagined a greater gift. My very own tabula rasa.
     
     
    SOME OF YOU MIGHT DEEM my actions ethically squishy. Before you judge me, consider this: plenty of times art has been dragged into public without its creator’s knowledge—even against his will. Great art demands an audience, and to deny that is