He called Cohan again. The sculpture was still available. “Let’s talk turkey,” Mayer said. “I’ve got money now.”

The price was still too high. Nevertheless, a maquette was delivered, and the two-way courting began. The curators stood around the three-metre-high model. They considered, perhaps, its evocation of the logs that floated down the Ottawa River, the beauty of nature rendered in so much stainless steel, the reflections of fireworks in its mirrored surface. Twenty-five hands went up. Mayer called Cohan: “We’re serious, but we need help on the price.”

The curators presented the maquette to the gallery’s board of trustees, which must approve any seven-figure acquisition. Unanimous. More calls to Cohan. Paine came to Ottawa and walked with Mayer across the grass. The artist picked out a spot, like planting a flag. Landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander, designer of the gallery’s gardens, came to give an esteemed second opinion; she moved the proposed site forty feet deeper into the park. Everybody agreed that now it was perfect. Finally, the National Capital Commission, which manages the grass outside the gallery, saw the maquette. Its board and advisory committee joined the more than forty people who had told Mayer to knock himself out. He called Cohan one last time: the price had moved much closer to the right side of a million. Sold.

Mayer was ecstatic when he hung up the phone. “Yes!” he thought. “What a wonderful thing for Ottawa!” The ncc was equally buoyant. They released a rendering of Paine’s work to the press. The Ottawa Citizen put it on the front page. Russia didn’t get this one. Ottawa was on the map.

“Except Ottawa didn’t like it,” Mayer says.

“God’s toothpick,” they called it. “Voice of Twits,” wrote the Citizen’s Ken Gray, nyuk nyuk. A really expensive lightning rod, others railed. Gray suggested that the rod be grounded by Mayer’s chair.

“It sucks,” Mayer says. “It sucks really bad. What breaks my heart is, most people get pissed off when they see art they don’t understand immediately. It becomes ‘You’re joking,’ or ‘This is bullshit,’ or ‘My tax dollars are being wasted.’ But if you just took five minutes, you might be able to get something out of this. You might just be able to make a connection. But it takes a moment. What fun is a crossword puzzle when all the letters have already been filled in?”

He made the same arguments on radio shows and in letters to the editor, but the fight was already lost. For one of the few times in his long and varied career, Mayer was told, publicly and repeatedly and viciously, that his instinct was wrong. And now here he is, only a few weeks removed from this battering, looking at another drawing, contemplating the writing of another big cheque.

He sends an email to his chief curator, David Franklin, who should be arriving at the fair later today. Franklin knows his stuff, his Italian Renaissance stuff especially. Franklin will help him decide.

“Can you reserve this for me?” Mayer asks the dealer.

The dealer smiles: but of course.

And then the lights go out.

t must be a heist! When the darkness hits, a noise rises up from the crowd, a kind of howl; then there are a few seconds of nervous laughter; and then, as the seconds turn into minutes, the place falls mostly into silence, breathless — This isn’t funny anymore — except for the high-pitched squeal of an alarm. Fat old women press their hands against their strings of pearls before they faint; noblemen grab for their wallets; dealers stand at the entrances to their displays, their arms outstretched, hoping they will feel the undoubtedly dashing and well-bred Scandinavian thieves brush past. Somewhere, an insurer stands in a pitch-black corner, wishing he’d taken out a policy on his shorts.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mayer says.

He’s lying. A month earlier, with the outcry over One Hundred Foot Line just starting to ebb, he gave a television interview to cbc about the diversity of the artists whose work hangs on the gallery’s walls. (“An ambush,” he calls it.) He believes it’s important that he appear normal and ordinary on TV, that he speak plainly, not in what he calls “Martian talk”; he believes that art should be accessible, and that he should be, too. He also doesn’t give a crap who painted what, so long as it’s good. And so he said, on-camera, without giving it (or Agnes Martin) much thought, “We’re only interested in excellence, so we put what we find in the Canadian art scene that is excellent, and we’re blind to colour or ethnic background or even whether you were born in Canada. We don’t care.”

Just before he left for Europe, a letter began to circulate in response, suggesting that, among other terrible things, Marc Mayer is a racist: “There is a difference between being blind and just shutting your eyes,” it reads. More than 250 artists have signed it so far.

Mayer has been wobbled by his twin controversies — first criticized for the art that he’s buying, and next for the art that he’s not — but watching him now, standing alone in the darkness, it seems the blows have almost counteracted each other. One or the other might have knocked him off his feet; together, they’ve combined to steady him, or at least his resolve and his course. He’s become more mad than hurt, and his is a steam-driven engine.

He mentions that the semi-famous semi-novelist Michael Turner wrote a blog entry suggesting he take anger management therapy. (Turner also wants Mayer to issue “an apology for being a goof.”)

“Well, because I don’t have a French accent when I speak English, people forget I’m a Latin,” Mayer says. “We’re not angry; we’re just hyper.” (A native of Sudbury, Ontario, he is ridiculously bilingual, not to mention a graduate of McGill University, a Sex Pistols fan, and openly gay.) “How dare he say that, right? Now I really am angry. I’m being told all the time to calm down. If I was a wasp, you could say that to me. But I’m a Latin. You can’t say that to me. We don’t calm down. That’s how we live to be a hundred.”

So he won’t be going for therapy?

“Look, this is a scary job, because there are thousands of artists banging on the door to get into the National Gallery, to put their art into the National Gallery, and I’m the nasty, snarling, slobbering dog at the door,” he says. “And I’m meaner now than I have been at any other museum I’ve worked at. I have to be. The stuff people come up with to get through that door is scary. I’ve been called a massive twerp, a twit, a dilettante, and now it’s a racist. I can’t stand the idea of someone not liking me — I really can’t — but there are a lot of controversies around the gallery, and there always will be, because we’ll never do it right for everyone. I’m not sure we’re ever going to do it right for the majority. I don’t know that it’s possible.”

Mayer tells a story. Last year, shortly after he took the job, he came to this fair for the first time. He had just replaced Pierre Théberge, who, if the capital’s whispering classes are to be believed, had held on too long, suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s and demanding the staff tend to his terriers in addition to the art. David Franklin had been caught in the middle of the mess, and Mayer wanted to get to know him, to salve him, make a fresh start. Retail therapy seemed like a good idea. Mayer invited Franklin to Maastricht, where they found an old painting they both liked: Monsieur de Buissy, by the French painter Joseph-Siffred Duplessis. It was from 1780. It was hanging high on a wall, and Franklin and Mayer stood on a ladder and stared at it. Their hearts started to thump.

Mayer especially liked it, for many reasons: it was a stunning example of portraiture, a near-perfect depiction of its subject; it was in excellent condition; it helped assuage Mayer’s feeling that French artists were under-represented in the gallery’s collection — and last, it featured a bankrupt, embattled nobleman in the wake of the French Revolution, who had decided it would be a good idea to hire the finest (most expensive) painter in France to render him in oil, while he wore a red velvet suit, no less, dyed with thousands of crushed Brazilian beetles called cochineals (also expensive), at a time when the French favoured blue, and the red of the British military was unseen at the court of Versailles, except on the king’s heel, where it demonstrated his contempt for the island across the water. And thus Monsieur de Buissy had giant brass balls — about rebels and creditors and kings, he did not give a merde — and in his cochineal suit and all that it said, Mayer had found the red he was looking for. He hung it across the room from a dying General Wolfe.

The lights come back on. There has been no heist, just an interruption in service. Current has been restored. The building is electric again.