He had shed off the heavy cast and ditched the crutches the week before but still had to wear a walking boot on his right foot where the army man had shot him. The boot was better than the crutches but moving around was still an ordeal. The canvas was 48 by 60 inches of warm colors, swirling around in a vortex that gave the illusion of drawing the viewer into a portal towards a dark and fiery nether region straight out of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Reds and oranges and yellows danced in the spiral, but the reds dominated the composition. When Shirokov was six paces away he felt the lighting was just right. He stood with a ceramic palette and a wet brush in hand and spoke to the lawyer. “What do you sink?” Avi Solomon was sitting off to the side of the studio, going through a ream of papers from the real estate agent’s office. The A-list attorney was an expert in many things but art was not one of them.
