Coming out on the roof, I was greeted with the ever-present line of cars on the 110 bending around the hills of Dodger Stadium and descending into downtown Los Angeles. The cars were close enough that I could make eye contact with their drivers. Behind me screeched a high-pitched, slightly-accented voice engaged in a heated discussion.
“You can’t just create in a vacuum,” said the slender man in expensive jeans and loafers. He wore a tailored white shirt that set off his tortoise shell, bold-framed glasses. “A building must not only be cognizant of its surroundings but it must take its cues from them. What I’ve done is create a sense of space that is true to the cultural and social fabric of this community. It is harmonious with the people who reside here and that is the great accomplishment.”
The old man let him have his speech but no more than that.
“You have two choices,” Valenti said calmly, “Your very noble ideals or this commission.” He left the frustrated architect and walked over towards me by the stairwell. He thanked me for coming and then suggested we go across the street to talk. I had no choice but to follow him like a lackey trailing his master.
We made the short walk over to Chung King Road. This was the chop-suey and fortune cookie part of Chinatown where everything was lit by paper lanterns and where foo dogs outnumbered people two-to-one. We settled in at the empty bar at Hop Louie. It smelled of sweet-and-sour and ammonia. A surly bartender stared at me with an arched eyebrow. Feeling the need to be culturally enlightened, I ordered a Tsingtao with the correct pronunciation. Valenti ordered a ginger ale.
“I never touch alcohol before five,” he told me as I took my first sip of beer. I was certain that, had I ordered a ginger ale, he would have told me that he never trusted a man who didn’t drink before five.
Valenti unfurled the architectural plans on the bar and studied them in silence. It felt like a put-on, like he was waiting to be asked about them. I gave him no such satisfaction and let him pretend to pore over the drawings until even he grew tired of the charade.
“It’s going to be my legacy,” he said flatly.
Why his legacy would reside on a random lot in Chinatown was unclear. He had no cultural connection to this part of the city or the people who lived here. If anything, he was constantly at odds with them. His developments were almost exclusively in the white neighborhoods of Los Angeles or in the pure-white neighborhoods of Orange County.
“What is it?” I asked.
Valenti took a few seconds for dramatic effect.
“The seminal museum of contemporary American art,” he answered with a smug look of satisfaction, not so much at the accomplishment of having your own museum but at the fact that I was interested in hearing about it. “You know I have the largest collection in the world?”
I told him I didn’t. He took my answer as an invitation to tell me about it in excruciating detail. His tone shifted to feigned boredom as if he was annoyed that he had to explain it to me. He rattled off names — Diebenkorn, Ruscha, Baledessari — two-thirds of whom I had never heard of, and prattled on about this movement and that school and only a graduate art history student could tell you if he knew what he was talking about. Each acquisition followed the same formula — an important piece purchased directly from the influential artist when they were unknown or out of favor or flat broke. He knew exactly what he paid and he knew exactly what it was worth today. His lips glistened as he categorized pieces as “10x” or “100x” or even “1000x,” which referred to the level of price appreciation they had garnered since he purchased them. Not once did he talk about a specific piece in any great detail outside of its monetary value.
Valenti then removed a pen from his jacket pocket and crudely started scribbling on the impeccably rendered drawings. In a few strokes, he added a fourth floor and in big bold letters the words, “VALENTI ART CENTER.”
“Subtle,” I said.
Valenti looked at me askance but then smiled. “It has to be taller,” he told me, “so when all those prigs from Pasadena come into town for the opera, the first thing they see is my name.”
The random building at the far end of Chinatown wasn’t so random anymore. It was a lousy spot to put a seminal museum of contemporary American art but it was the ideal spot to remind everyone how rich you are that you are able to put a seminal museum of contemporary American art wherever the hell you want to.
As a first-generation multi-billionaire, Valenti had the money to elevate him into the stratosphere of the elite but he lacked the currency of credibility among that set. Some years ago he realized fine art was his ticket in and set off on a buying spree unsurpassed by even the city’s preeminent museums.
“Well, like you said,” I smiled and motioned for another beer, “it’s all about the art.”
This time he laughed.
“I am worth ten billion dollars but that means nothing to you. Or, it means a lot but you don’t want to let me know it.”
“The latter,” I told him truthfully.
“That’s why I trust you. That’s why I need you to help me find my granddaughter.” I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly and looked at the surly bartender as if expecting him to repeat it for me. “She has been missing for four days,” Valenti confirmed but offered up no further details. He carefully folded up the drawings.
“Have you called the police?”
He ignored my question.
“One hundred thousand dollars if you can find her,” he said and stood up from the bar stool. “Please give me your answer this evening.”
He left me with the bill.
***
I decided to walk back to the office despite it being the first truly hot day of the summer. In this stretch of the city there seemed to be a natural aversion to trees and the sun broiled the concrete landscape into a seemingly harder surface. I skirted the south side of Hill to hide in the narrow slit of shadow cast by the buildings on my left.
On the walk I replayed in my head the events of the last hour with Valenti. We spent the entire time talking about his artwork and the incredible capital gains he had made off their canvases and only at the very end did he get to the real reason for the meeting. He spoke of his missing granddaughter with none of the passion he reserved for the retelling of his art conquests. She was an afterthought, a loose end that needed to be tied. And I hated him at that moment. Not because of his coldness towards a missing human being but because I didn’t decline his offer on the spot. Because I sat there and listened to his every word, and when he deemed it time to dangle an offer of money, I put out my hat.
The walk back to the office was an emotional contrast. With distance from the bar came the courage to tell Valenti where he could shove his hundred thousand dollar offer. By the time I reached First Street, I had nobly climbed up on my high horse and within a few blocks further I had the perfect zinger to tell him off. The great one-liners always come much later than when you need them.
But with time, the wonderfully pragmatic mind took over. As I began the long ascent up Bunker Hill, an internal pitch session made a very convincing, very one-sided case for taking Valenti up on his offer. Post-divorce, I was cash-strapped and sweltering in a fixer-upper in Eagle Rock with no air conditioning. A hundred thousand dollar cash infusion would solve many of my earthly problems.
Plus, I was bored.
I thought of Bob Gershon and the retirement party and the words he said. We shared a similar view of our roles, and although I was not quite at the point of total despair that he had reached, I was definitely hurtling towards a similar conclusion. I could envision myself in that board room in twenty years giving the same speech. And it scared me.