All the Greys on Greene Street

by Laura Tucker

  The Wake Up Artist was sitting on the far side of the fire escape, like the statue of the Buddha that Linda has in her foyer, quiet in a dark blue suit that blended into the nighttime behind the bars. Only he wasn’t a he, like I’d thought, but a she, with a necklace of green wooden beads wrapped three times around her wrist.

  I wished I was wearing my other shoe.

  “You spend a lot of time on fire escapes,” she said. Her voice was gravelly and low.

  “Usually people don’t look up,” I said.

  She nodded. “That’s been my experience, too.”

  Inside, the music changed. We could hear people laughing. “Were you the only kid in there?” she asked, jutting her chin at the window.

  I nodded. “I came with my friend Apollo, but I got hot.”

  “Yeah, I know Apollo,” she said. Everybody knows Apollo. That’s why you have to use mind-control techniques so he doesn’t stop off at Pearl Paint before dinner.

  “How come you’re out here?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer the question. Instead, she asked me one: “Did you see the dog in there?”

  I shrugged. “I petted her, but she didn’t seem like she was looking for company.”

  “Do you know what she’s doing?”

  I didn’t, but I was curious. That dog had seemed like she was up to something.

  “Watch,” the Wake Up Artist said.

  The two of us kneeled forward and watched through the window as the big dog moved around the outside of the room, stopping every once in a while to touch the back of someone’s knee like she’d done with mine. She bumped up against a guy wearing a baby blue pirate shirt.

  I sat back again. “I don’t get it.”

  Still watching the dog, the Wake Up Artist said, “She’s herding them. She’ll have the whole party in one corner by midnight.”

  Now that she’d said it, a lot of people did seem to be concentrated in one corner of the loft. The guy in the pirate shirt had moved over, so that he had his back up against another grown-up playing dress-up, a woman in a princess’s tattered violet gown.

  The Wake Up Artist leaned back against the painted iron. “She does it at every one of these parties. And nobody ever notices.”

  “She didn’t herd us,” I said.

  “No,” the Wake Up Artist said. “She didn’t.”

  The people inside looked like they were onstage. I got lost watching them until the Wake Up Artist got up, rising easily from her cross-legged position, and I imagined Linda’s Buddha unfolding himself to stand.

  “You about ready?”

  I scrambled to my feet.

  The Wake Up Artist pushed the window up and ducked under. I caught it and crouched on the sill to put my sneaker back on before jumping down.

  It was cooler and less chaotic inside. Still, I was glad when the Wake Up Artist went first, clearing a path through the crowd. She waved at a lot of people, but she didn’t stop to talk. I was glad about that, too.

  I saw the guy in the pirate shirt and the woman with the yellow fist. I saw the German shepherd, quietly nosing her way through the partygoers, pushing them toward the far corner without anyone realizing. Finally, I caught sight of Apollo on a low couch along one wall. There was a woman with red lips and short black hair and a short black dress sitting on his lap. She wasn’t the art critic or the sound artist or the mime, or anyone else I’d seen before.

  I raised one hand in his direction and kept moving, like I’d seen the Wake Up Artist do. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him gesture me over, then try to shift the woman so he could get up, but I was moving quickly, my eyes focused on the back of the Wake Up Artist’s suit.

  Thanks to the dog, the crowd was thinner closer to the door. I twisted between two guys, sweaty in white tank tops. Then I was out the door and into the stairwell, where there was no light.

  HOW I THINK

  A huge moon illuminated the empty streets.

  The Wake Up Artist walked easily next to me, her untied boots silent on the uneven Belgian blocks. She stuck to the center of the street without me saying anything about the rats.

  Panic shot through me periodically, like I was remembering that I’d left something important behind at the party—my notebook, maybe, or the keys around my neck. But the only thing I’d left behind was Apollo, and my chance to tell him everything that was happening. I twisted to look back at the dark building where the party had been, not sure I could trust myself to tell him tomorrow.

  “He saw us leave together,” the Wake Up Artist said, explaining why he hadn’t followed me out. Which was something, I guess.

  She didn’t say anything else, so I didn’t, either.

  Some of the buildings we passed were bombed out, broken windows gaping black or boarded up with graffitied plywood. Piles of tires loomed outside a single-story garage; roll-down grates protected electrical supply stores and hat factories and metalworking shops. Drifts of garbage swirled at our feet, but the Wake Up Artist ambled down the dark street like she was walking down a country lane, taking in the sights. I snuck a look at her, hunting for some sign of the electric energy that made her paste-ups so exciting. But her face was placid, her body relaxed, paint-flecked hands soft and open.

  “My mom’s an artist,” I said, for no reason except that the little faucets weighed heavy in my pocket. “She has a show coming up in the fall.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Not so good.” The truth slipped out; it came easily with a stranger. “She’s having a hard time getting up right now. Out of bed, I mean.”

  The Wake Up Artist didn’t say anything, and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me.

  After a few minutes, we came up on my block, and the empty lot where I’d seen her for the first time. I wondered if it would upset her to see her poster tattered and grey, but she smiled a little when she looked into the dark, rubble-filled lot.

  “It doesn’t bother you, that they get dirty and ripped up?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing lasts forever.”

  I couldn’t stop. “But nobody even saw it, just me and some guys who work in a button factory.”

  She smiled again. “Those guys count. So do you.” A dog barked twice in the distance. “Every time I see you, you’ve got that notebook open. Do you show those drawings around?”

  I made a face. “Sort of.” It was hard to explain. It made Mr. G so happy when I gave him a new drawing that I would have brought them even if he hadn’t traded me for candy. But I didn’t sketch to show off. I didn’t care about compliments; I knew when the drawings were good, and I knew when they were bad. And if they were bad, I only wanted to hear from people like Mrs. Ejiofor and Lady Day and my dad, who would have ideas about how to fix them.

  “So how come you do it?”

  Nobody had ever asked me that. My fingers itched thinking about the question, as if having a Blackwing in my hands would help me answer it. Drawing was what I did, what I’d always done.

  “It’s how I think,” I said finally.

  The Wake Up Artist nodded at that.

  “Your posters—they felt like messages,” I said, wanting something from her, even though I couldn’t say what it was. “Like you were talking right to me. But maybe I just wasn’t understanding what you meant.”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Sometimes the stuff we make is just for us. And sometimes we give it away, so that other people can see what they need to.”

  We had arrived at my door. I pulled my key out from under my sweatshirt and put it into the lock.

  She didn’t wait around to see that I got in, so she was already past when I heard her say, “Most people need to wake up. But some people are already feeling too much. That can be tough.”

  I watched her go. Halfway down the block, she waved back at me without turning around.

&
nbsp; JUST A KID

  I let out an audible sigh of relief as I stepped into our front vestibule. A wave of exhaustion broke over me. They call New York the city that never sleeps, but I was tired.

  Dreading the long climb, I looked up to the top of the steep, crooked stairs—and in one moment, all of my tiredness dropped away. There was an enormous man waiting on the landing outside the studio.

  I could have turned back fast to the tricky front door; my brain was already rehearsing how I’d lift and jiggle the knob. Except that the big man didn’t seem to be coming for me.

  He did inch forward a tentative step or two, one hand raised unmistakably: Harmless! And when his face caught the light of the dangling bulb, I could see that he was at least as scared of me as I was of him.

  More, probably. I’m nowhere near as fast as Alex, but I could have outrun this guy by breaking into a brisk walk.

  There was another thing, too: I was pretty sure that this was Antonin Grandjean, the forgery expert. I’m not an authority on serial killers or anything, but I’m 95 percent positive they don’t go around dropping off business cards with their phone numbers on them before a murder spree.

  The big man shuffled forward to the very edge of the dingy landing. Clearly, what he wanted now was to leave, if he could figure out some way to do it without passing me. I almost smiled; Joyce would have said that I had him treed.

  “I’m sorry! So sorry!” His voice echoed off the painted tin walls. “I didn’t expect . . .”

  A kid, is what he meant. I recognized his accent immediately: This was the same guy who’d been calling Apollo.

  I was going to have to watch what I said. I had no idea whether my dad had done the right thing or the wrong thing, but even if it was the wrong thing, he was still my dad.

  Luckily, there’s no underestimating a grown-up’s ability to underestimate a kid.

  “Are you alone? Where are your parents? It’s very late, you know, and this neighborhood is . . .” He trailed off again.

  Like it was any of his business. He liked scolding better than apologizing, I guess.

  My own voice came out much braver than I was feeling and sounded very New York after his. “What do you want?”

  “The restoration company: They’re not answering their phone. Do you know the people who work there?”

  I shrugged. “Not really. They’re kind of weird.”

  His mouth twisted in disappointment like a baby’s.

  I moved to go upstairs, ending the conversation, but he stepped forward quickly, desperate. “There’s no chance you know anything about this?” He reached into his rumpled coat for a piece of white paper in a clear plastic folder and held it out in my direction.

  I climbed three steps to see—and then a couple more, not so I could see better, but so I could be sure.

  The drawing Antonin Grandjean was holding was one of the hundreds of sketches I’d made of the Head.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked, buying time, although I knew with 100 percent certainty where he had gotten it. I could almost taste the Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew.

  “I bought it,” the man said, and I did smile then, turning my face into the shadows so he couldn’t see; Mr. G had always told me he was going to be responsible for my first sale. “The man at the store wouldn’t tell me where he’d gotten it. But the subject is a painted carving stolen from a church near my grandmother’s house in France.” He added something in French I didn’t catch: a name.

  Stolen.

  Antonin Grandjean wasn’t here about a forgery. He was here about a theft.

  Even though my heart had started to pound again, I kept my face bland, neutral—just a polite kid who knows better than to be rude to a grown-up, no matter how much he drones on.

  “A place I spent summers, as a boy. You see?” He pulled an old photograph with white scalloped edges from the breast pocket of his suit jacket: an awkward boy in a neckerchief in a dark church, smiling big in front of the Head.

  “I’m a forgery expert, based in Brussels, here in SoHo for work. I stopped into this newsstand one morning—for a Coke, of all things—and there she was! Tacked up to a cigarette display. After forty years, like a dream,” he trailed off again, either lost in his memories or believing my disinterested face, which was nothing more than camouflage for the dominos falling fast and furious in my brain.

  The Head was the piece of art missing from the studio.

  The Head, which had been stolen.

  That explained the terrible gash at the base of her. It explained why Apollo hadn’t wanted anything to do with the job, even though she was old and beautiful, the kind of piece he’d always wanted to work on. It explained why she had ended up so far downtown, instead of at one of the white-glove restoration places across from the museums uptown. Whoever was in charge at the Dortmunder Collection must have thought Apollo and my dad would help them get away with it.

  Another domino tipped.

  The Head, which had been stolen. From France.

  I heard Joyce Walker in Richard’s courtyard: Never one to pass up a grand gesture, your dad. The last of the heroes.

  And I heard my dad’s voice, just like he was sitting on the edge of my bed the night he left: I’ve got to take the lady home.

  He hadn’t been talking about Vouley Voo at all.

  He’d been talking about the Head.

  The man cleared his throat politely, as if he knew he was interrupting. “It’s a very good likeness, actually,” he said, looking down again at the sketch dreamily. “She is how I got interested in art in the first place.” I hadn’t quite captured the Head’s elusive expression, but I’d gotten pretty close on this one; I tended to give Mr. G the good stuff.

  “The people at the big art supply store seemed to think these restorers were working on her. But I have been phoning all week, and the man there is very difficult; I do not think he is telling me the truth, and now he does not pick up the phone at all. I leave tomorrow, you see. So after my business for the day was done, I came in person. I thought if I could catch him, if I could explain how important she is to me . . .” He trailed off. “Nothing, though, and I have been here for hours.”

  Apollo had left with me, to get pizza before the party.

  The forgery expert’s eyes, watery and droopy like a basset hound’s, slipped down to my ratty sneakers and faded jeans, the beat-up backpack where I kept my homework and art supplies. He gave it one last try anyway. “You’re sure, then, that you haven’t heard anything about a wooden carving?”

  “I’m really sorry I can’t help you, mister,” I said, letting his hope bounce right off my blank, perfectly pleasant, know-nothing kid face.

  His round face crashed in disappointment. I knew the feeling; he’d run out of leads.

  Brain still racing, I shifted on the creaky stair. “I should probably get home now, so my mom and dad don’t worry.” Even though I was just acting, hearing myself say “mom and dad” gave me a mini zap I didn’t like.

  “Of course. No, of course. I just thought perhaps . . .” The fat man shook his head to clear it, embarrassed by his own wish, and started off down the wide stairs toward me on his tiny feet. He held out a business card to me as we passed awkwardly on the stairs, and I made a show of looking at it before tucking it into my notebook, like the words printed on it weren’t already burned into my brain.

  Of course I’d call him if I heard anything. Of course I would.

  I turned around at the landing to watch him go. He was standing in the dim light at the bottom of the stairs by the taped-up A.I.R. sign, looking mostly like a comfortable sofa and staring down at the old brown photo with the white edges and at the drawing—my drawing—in his fist.

  He was in love with the Head, too.

  I felt bad for him. Not so bad that I didn’t take my shot when I saw it, though.

&nbs
p; “’Scuse me? Sir?” He turned around, surprised to find me still there. “I’m actually doing a project on France, for school.” He smiled up at me, and I could see him younger, thinner, the boy in the photograph. It had been a happy place for him, back then.

  “What did you say was the name of that town?”

  AND THEY DANCED BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

  I practically floated the rest of the way up the stairs. The fat man’s cold trail meant mine had heated up again.

  The Head had been stolen from a tiny church in Écalles-Sainte-Catherine, a tiny medieval town in central France. The fat man had even spelled it for me, told me where to put the accent. She’d been a gift to the church from a famous sculptor who’d fallen in love with a shepherdess in the town. Most people thought the shepherdess had been the sculptor’s model for the Head.

  I was willing to bet a case of Blackwings that the Head was back there now, in Écalles-Sainte-Catherine, with my dad.

  My dad, who wasn’t a forger after all.

  Of course, it did seem like he’d stolen the Head. But if you stole something so you could return it to the people it had been stolen from in the first place, was that really stealing?

  I thought triumphantly about the look I’d see on Alex’s face when I told him.

  The last of the heroes.

  I threw myself on my bed, the lamp on my desk casting shadows onto Apollo’s color study. Though it was late on a school night, my brain raced with plans. All I had to do was find him. There probably weren’t a lot of hotels in a town the size of Écalles-Sainte-Catherine. I could call every one of them; Richard could help me with the French. And once I found him, my dad would know what to do about my mom.

  The night had caught up to me, and I struggled to keep my eyes open. I wanted to get up, put on some pajamas; Alex would totally sleep in his clothes if Linda let him, but I didn’t like the idea of all that street dirt in my bed. Plus, I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I lay there for a long time, dreaming of squeezing the center of a full tube of toothpaste, laying a thick line of gel onto my red toothbrush, a neat curl on top like in the commercials. Then I’d wake up again with my parched, gummy pizza mouth, wishing the dream had been real.