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"You mean like an Identi-Kit?"
"No, this is different," he said. "Much more flexible than the Identi-Kit. You can make minute adjustments to the shape of the mouth, elongate the head, set the eyes deeper, anything you could do with pencil and paper." He explained how the software worked and what it would do. "But it's not drawing," he said. "It's not art."
He laughed, and I asked him what was fu
"Just hearing myself use the word," he said. "I would always correct Elaine when she called it art, what I do. I'm begi
"Elaine told me. I didn't know you'd started working with her."
"Two sessions so far, and it's the most exhausting thing I ever did in my life. She doesn't remember what any of the people look like."
"Then how can you possibly draw them?"
"Oh, the memory's in there. It's a question of reaching in and dragging it out. We started with her father. What did he look like? Well, that doesn't get us anywhere, because she hasn't got an answer. The best she can do is he's tall. Okay, what kind of man is he? He's very gentle, she says. Okay, so I start drawing. He's got a deep voice, she remembers. I draw some more. Sometimes he would lose his temper. Okay, now I'm drawing a tall gentle man with a deep voice who gets angry. Late at night he would sit at the kitchen table adding columns of numbers. Okay, great, let's draw that. And we keep on, and now and then we have to stop because she's crying, or she can't look at the paper anymore, or she's just wiped out. Believe me, time we're done, we're both wiped out."
"And you wound up with a human face?"
"I wound up with a human face," he said, "but whose face? Does it look like the man who went to the gas chamber? No way to know. It brought back memories, I know that much, and she's got a picture that means something to her, so what's the difference? Is it as good as a photograph? Well, maybe it's better. Is it art?" He shrugged. "I have to say I think so."
"And this?"
"This prick?" He leaned forward, blew some eraser dust from the surface of the sketch. "This doesn't have to be art. Just so it looks like him."
I went to a copy shop, ran two dozen copies of the sketch. It seemed to me it was a good likeness. I gave the original to Elaine but told her not to hang it anywhere for the time being. I left a copy with TJ, who raised an eyebrow and a
Over the next few days, I got around to most of the men who'd been at the meeting at Gruliow's house, as well as a few who hadn't been able to make it. No one echoed TJ's sentiment, but neither did anyone recognize Shorter as a long-lost cousin.
"He's a pretty ordinary-looking guy," Bob Berk told me. "Not a face that would jump out at you in a crowd."
Several of them said he looked vaguely familiar. Lewis Hildebrand told me he might have seen Shorter before, that it was impossible to say. "The visual onslaught in this city is overpowering," he said. "Walk a few blocks through midtown Manhattan and more people will pass through your field of vision than the average small-town resident will see all year. Walk through Grand Central Station at rush hour and you'll see thousands of people without really seeing any of them. How much of it do we screen out? How much registers, consciously or otherwise?"
In his living room on Commerce Street, Hard-Way Ray Gruliow squinted at the sketch and shook his head. "He looks familiar," he said. "But in a very vague way."
"That's what I keep hearing."
"What a crazy thing, huh? Here's somebody who hates us all enough to devote his entire life to killing us. Because he's not a guy who got pissed off one morning and took a gun to the Post Office. This is his life's work."
"That's right."
"And we look at him," he said, "and all we can say is he looks vaguely familiar. Who could he be? How could he know us?"
"Where could you remember him from?"
"I don't know. The only time we were all together was once a year at di
"And maybe you stiffed him on the tip."
"No, we wouldn't do a thing like that. We're a generous bunch."
Local 100 of the Restaurant and Hotel Workers of America maintains offices on Eighth Avenue, just two blocks from Restaurant Row. I talked to a man there named Gus Bra
"I have no idea."
"Plenty," he said. "Take my word for it. You go out for a meal and what you get is an audition."
"The turnover's not as high in the old-fashioned steak houses, is it?"
"No, you're right about that, but how many of them have we got left? You got Gallagher's, you got the Old Homestead, you got Keens, you got Peter Luger, you got Smith and Whatsisface, Wollensky, you got-"
I said, "Waiters tend to stay with the same general type of restaurant, don't they?"
"I just told you, they don't even stay with the business."
"But the old-fashioned type of waiter. If a man was working at Cu
"Unless he had a longing to scoop Rocky Road at a Baskin-Robbins. But yeah, you tend to stay with what you know."
"So if you wanted to find somebody who used to work at Cu
"I suppose."
"But I myself would hardly know how to begin," I said. "And I'd have to spend a couple of days ru
"Hey," he said. "I got a job to do, you know what I mean?"
"I know."
"I can't sit around making phone calls, bugging people, asking who worked where twenty, thirty years back."
"You'd be saving me time," I said, "and time is money. I wasn't looking to get the information for free."
"Oh," he said. "Well, that puts a different light on it, doesn't it?"
The following day I called Gruliow and told him I'd found not one but two gentlemen who'd spent their lives bringing steak di
"He'd have been there for our first di
"He didn't recognize the sketch, though. Neither did the other fellow, who's actually quite a bit older, although he was only at Cu
"What's that?"
"They said he looked familiar."
"Oh, Jesus," Gruliow said, "You know what our friend's got? He's got a universally familiar face. Nobody can place it, but everybody thinks he must have seen it somewhere before. You know, Matt, that was just an offhand remark of mine about his having worked at Cu