The fair was held in the McCormick Place convention center just off Lake Shore Drive; Jonas and Nikki had to pay thirty-five bucks each just to get in. A number of galleries from all over the Midwest, and four or five from New York, had paid for and staked out square footage inside. Little pamphlets on draped card tables held one-page biographies of the artists, like trading cards for mental illness; Jonas picked up as many of them as he could find. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the farther a particular artist’s own mind had pushed him toward society’s border, the more you could charge for his work. It was somehow revolting and thrilling at the same time. A few dead outsiders had become stars, like Henry Darger or Martin Ramirez. Maybe this was no different, Jonas thought, from the way the art establishment had processed, say, Van Gogh. But everyone moving through the building’s vast warren of temporary drywall seemed so loathsome to him that it was hard to judge. He was surprised how old they were, ten or twenty years older than him at least, if you discounted the occasional baby in a stroller-smug bohemian speculators, praising everything noisily in overcompensation for the fact that they were no match for the magnificent strangeness of what hung right in front of their eyes.

He and Nikki caught a break when they stopped at Larry Masters’s booth and found that Masters himself had gone to lunch; they left the framed Strauss sketch with an indifferent gallery assistant and hurried away. Nikki had a list on an index card of particular artists Agnew wanted her to look for; he wanted to know what their work was selling for and also, more problematically, camera-phone shots of the work itself, but there were security guards here and there and Nikki, who was afraid of cops even of the rental variety, could sneak a shot only occasionally. She took copious notes, though, and collected all the pamphlets and price lists. It wasn’t really a two-person job, so Jonas just walked around following whatever caught his eye. He squeezed through a pack of reverent yuppies for a look at those great iconic deer in the work of Martin Ramirez, who had lived on the streets of LA apparently incapable of so much as a conversation and whose asylum warders at first tried to stop him from drawing on the grounds that it was unhealthy. That stuff was going for tens of thousands now. There were diagrams of nonexistent machines, maps of nonexistent places, ferociously detailed charts filled with dates and numbers in an order that you were never, ever going to divine. There was a grown man named Morton Bartlett who had spent decades photographing his own doll collection. Jonas was just about to start looking for Nikki again when he saw a group of charcoal portraits, if you could call them portraits, of people screaming. Were they screaming, though? Their mouths were open. Maybe they were just trying to speak. Their eyes were always neutral, and their necks were thin and cylindrical, like plant stalks almost. Sometimes there was a background, slight variations on what Jonas ultimately decided was a gas station, or at least looked like one; there were also some simply drawn dogs, and boxlike forms that may have been televisions, though, if so, they were never turned on. But it was the faces, the upturned open mouths, that were most ambiguous and obsessive.

The number written on a sticker beside the portraits was 12; Jonas checked the gallery pamphlet and saw prices listed but no biography of the artist, who was named Joseph Novak. When he asked the stout, short-haired woman at the card table if she could tell him anything more, she sized him up and smiled with a touch too much patience, probably, he realized, because his youth and appearance didn’t suggest that he was in a position to buy anything.

“Joseph is new to us,” said the woman; she didn’t introduce herself, but she seemed to Jonas like the gallery owner, in which case her name was Margo. “He-well, I don’t want to get into specifics, but he was in an institution for several years, in the wake of a crime he admitted to committing as a minor; like a lot of artists he really only began drawing when his freedom was taken away, but he has kept up the pace since his release.”

“So he’s still working on this series?” Jonas asked.

Margo considered how to answer. “Presumably,” she said. “I mean, ‘series’ is a word you could use. I’ve only met Joseph one time myself. These drawings came to me via a brother of his in Kenosha who had a suspicion they might be worth something. Joseph himself is-well, communication is difficult, let’s say that.”

Jonas stared at the drawings for a while longer. They had a broken, smudged line, like if you extracted the lead from a pencil and just tried to hold it in your hand. They were figurative and thus a little less grotesquely original than some of the other stuff there; still, the longer he stared at the faces, the more excitement he felt, like what he was seeing was something that had never even been looked at before. He tried to forget what little Margo had just told him about the artist himself, but that was difficult to do. A while later Nikki was walking past and spotted him. He asked her right away if the name Joseph Novak was on Agnew’s list and felt a small thrill when the answer was no. “How about you?” he said. “See anything interesting?”

“Kind of,” Nikki said. She beckoned him around the corner with one finger, to the exhibition stall right behind Margo’s. There was a good crowd there. On the wall hung an array of large, photorealistic oil portraits of an iconic-looking family, most often standing in front of what was probably their own house, staring right back at the viewer, happy and stiff-in fact, it was almost as if the paintings were portraits not of the people themselves but of photographs of them. It was easy to spot the dealer, who wore a tweed jacket and a name tag and kept touching everyone who spoke to him on the shoulder. And after a moment Jonas realized that the proud-looking family standing with their backs to the artwork, accepting the occasional congratulations-a father, a mother, and a boy who looked like he was maybe in eighth grade, wearing a DePaul University sweatshirt-was the same family represented in the paintings.

“No,” Nikki said, taking his hand. “Over there.” Jonas looked to the right of the exhibition stall, where there was a little recessed area beneath a fire-door sign, and saw a man who looked just about his age, wearing a crewneck sweater with a name tag on it and jeans and unlaced snow boots, sitting lotus-style on the floor; beside him was a worn stack of khaki-colored loose-leaf notebooks that said DePaul University on them. He had his head down and his eyes closed, and his index fingers stuck inside his ears, and his lips pressed together, as he rocked very slightly but rhythmically forward and back. “Who is that?” Jonas asked, though he saw the family resemblance right away.

April was still sound asleep when Cynthia left the house to meet with their lawyers at Debevoise. From Debevoise she went straight downtown to Marietta ’s office; Adam couldn’t get away to meet her there but they had him on speaker. It was chastening how long these meetings took-how much more there was to take into account than she’d even realized. She’d never seen Marietta so businesslike. By the time Cynthia got back home it was nearly three, and Dawn, her assistant, met her at the front door to let her know that April was still not up. God bless Dawn: even though she and April had barely met, she’d done what Edina, the housekeeper, was too scared to do and opened up April’s bedroom door every twenty minutes or so just to make sure she was still breathing, because she knew that was going to be Cynthia’s first question whether Cynthia actually asked it or not.