by Susan Daitch
An officer tried to compare the time of my 911 call against the time I was seen leaving Claiborne’s on the security footage, but there was no security footage. The cameras had been disabled.
“How about that?” Garfield turned to me as if I personally had pulled that particular set of plugs.
“I swear there was a body lying in front of the painting, under a heap of clothing.” I spread my hand over an area about three feet above the floor, as if patting a levitated corpse. Demetrius Pitt was leaning his butt against the suction table.
“You might not want to do that,” I said, jerking my head toward the table. “If the On switch is flipped accidentally, you’re going to get your ass sucked.”
I should have been more respectful, I know. Also, those tables cost upward of fifteen thousand dollars, but this wasn’t the time to go into details about the equipment associated with my profession, which Detective Pitt gave the distinct impression he thought was on the bogus side.
Garfield’s face was changing by the second. He looked like a man reviewing improbabilities, facts as they appeared, and facts that were listing into the territory of maybe not. Had I been gone long enough for someone to steal a painting and get rid of a body? Exits, freight elevators, alarms—who had keys and codes was all calculated and assessed.
“Let those other ding-dongs in. Those snappy ties must be starting to droop in the rain. Take their prints.”
I couldn’t imagine either the director or the curator pressing their thumbs into ink pads for a lowly police officer. Not because they were guilty but because in their circles this just wasn’t done. To interact with common police, even out of sheer necessity, even to clear oneself, was somehow not the thing. They would, of course, press digits into the ink pads, but not without making it clear that they were holding their noses with their free hands. This was the least of my worries.
“So, Ms. Da Silva,” Garfield said, turning back to me and stating the obvious. “There’s no body here.”
“I can see that. It must have been moved.”
“You’re sure he didn’t get up and walk out all by himself?”
“Isn’t that why you’re dusting for footprints?” I should have been more polite, less sarcastic. A piece of Spanish history and a body were missing. The doubt and blame in the room were like drying clay, slowly coming to the same hard conclusion.
“Let’s hope we find some medieval boot prints,” Garfield said, pointing at the man who had confiscated the toxic pigments.
“Sixteenth century. Not exactly medieval,” I said.
“Whatever you say. My advice to you is not to buy in bulk.” Garfield looked straight at me.
“What do you mean, ‘don’t buy in bulk’? Are you arresting me?”
“Sometimes a small piece of random information unlocks a whole container ship’s worth of evidence. Maybe a whole yard of container ships. A cashier in a fireworks emporium/warehouse in Chicago notes that a man in a Red Sox jacket pays cash for a large order of their highly explosive products, which he personally helps the man load into a Ford Escort with Indiana plates. He calls it in, about his suspicions, the right information goes to the right person, and it turns out that, yes, there was an incendiary event in the works. I’m looking for my guy in a Red Sox jacket in a White Sox state, and, Ms. Da Silva, I think it’s someone familiar with the layout here, able to cause delays and disable cameras. So when I look at you, I see a jacket with pockets in all the right places.”
Chapter 3
I was suspicious of the expression: I’d like a word. It was never one word. Ashby was never a man of one word but many words. My preference for working nights instead of days was frowned on but tolerated. Recently, my boss found a bottle of vodka rolling near a Courbet that was assessed at millions. Still, I made all my deadlines, and no one found fault with the conservations I completed.
“Stella, I’d like a word.”
It was only a few hours after the body wasn’t found. The police were still in the building figuring out how the alarm system had been disabled, a system so high-tech that Claiborne’s had dismissed after-hours security guards (which facilitated Ashby’s antics) and diminished a daytime human presence. Ashby and Fieldston had been allowed in the building. Fieldston was in seclusion, speaking only to the FBI’s art-theft unit, which since its sole undercover agent had retired barely existed anymore.
“You left the door to your studio open.” Ashby was almost pleased with himself.
“I’ve already told the police that I did.”
“But it was locked when you returned.”
“I assumed it had swung shut behind me.”
“I’ll let others deal with your carelessness and its consequences. That’s not what concerns me at the moment. Stella, events you have witnessed…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence with words but rolled his eyes like Mae West inviting a man to join her upstairs. Except that Ashby certainly wasn’t inviting me anywhere. I knew what he was alluding to. I didn’t want to finish his sentence for him, either.
“You know I left early last night,” he reminded me.
“Did you?”
“Let’s not joke.”
Whenever Ashby referenced the concept of joking, I knew that he was also referencing his experiments in random passion. Then he removed a checkbook from an inner pocket of his blazer, wrote a check, turned it over, and slid it across the desk. I flipped it over. It was a very large number.
“Stella.” He screwed and unscrewed the cap on his gold Montblanc pen, a gift from a satisfied bidder. “You do excellent work, but I’m sorry to say—and this will surely come as no surprise—you must pack up your things immediately, and a policeman will escort you off the premises. In addition to the personal check I just wrote, I’ll try to arrange a generous severance package with Fieldston. It won’t be easy, but I’ll see what I can do.” No longer Mid-Atlantic, his accent had shifted to central London. You would never know that he was born in Far Rockaway, a place he would return to only in his dreams, and Ashby’s dreams weren’t a territory you would ever want to visit. He would never say anything as vulgar as “Ya fired.”
“You can’t force me out. I had nothing to do with the disappearance of Las Meninas.”
“I can, and you’re out. Not only are you out but you’re not going to say a word about things you’ve seen here, or someone is going to be restoring you, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
“There was a body.”
“Yes, dressed in period clothes.” Ashby still smelled of cigarettes, though he didn’t smoke. The skepticism in his voice was as thick as that smell.
“You don’t believe me?”
“Then why couldn’t the police find it? There isn’t an unclaimed molecule of blood in the whole house. Not a hair, not an enzyme. The painting is gone, and Fieldston is pulling every string he possesses to keep the story from the front page of the papers so its theft doesn’t start another Spanish-American war. Your negligence created this situation. Claiborne’s prides itself on discretion and the service we provide to both seller and buyer. You’ve destroyed that trust. The director and I both feel that you should be terminated, effective immediately.”
“I didn’t throw my own shoes down the stairs just for the fun of it.”
“Those shoes…” Even in an emergency, even if the building was on fire, if Ashby felt distaste for something he couldn’t hide it.
“Only a few people know the security codes to my studio: you, me, the director—”
“Exactly.” Ashby wouldn’t let me finish my sentence. “Oh, and if you do feel like talking to the police about evening events in my office let me remind you of the botched Giacometti drawing. If that were to become public knowledge, you’d never work again. You’d have to go back to the junkyard in Babylon.”
“Providence.”
“Wherever. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”
The Giacometti drawing had arrived at Claiborne’s in a state not far removed from
that of a crumpled ball. It was a disaster. The drawing of the artist’s brother Diego was not only crumpled and stained but had been scribbled on a page torn from a book on psychoanalysis. So there was the faded printing ink to consider, but also the drawing had been done in ballpoint pen, which is very difficult to work with, as the chemical composition of the viscous ballpoint isn’t designed for longevity but for its own self-destruction. This kind of problem in a work, due to ephemeral materials used or to the way it’s been stored, is called inherent vice, and I was reluctant to work on the drawing not only because saving it might have been a lost cause (I worked on a lot of inherent-vice cases) but because its provenance was murky. After the artist’s death in 1966, the executor of his estate, a French foreign minister, was accused of privately selling major Giacometti works via the famous auctioneer Jacques Tajan. Both were convicted. It was a long time ago, but still, I couldn’t be sure that ownership of the work was honest. Maybe it was. I just didn’t know. Ashby and Fieldston informed me that it was not my job to question the origins of the objects I worked on. A Giacometti sculpture had recently sold for $104 million. Known for his long, thin sculptures of men and women, I called him the Thin Man. Ashby wasn’t amused. I was finally strong-armed into doing the job. I didn’t get to pick and choose. But then there was an accident with the suction table. The machine tore the paper, already so creased and buckled. It was my fault. I’d made a mistake with the setting. The owner sued Claiborne’s. Everyone’s insurance covered the loss, but Fieldston wanted to fire me. It was only due to Ashby’s appeal on my behalf that I kept my job. I owed him, but I wondered if he had done this not because he liked me—I don’t think he ever did—but because I’d already seen too much. Underneath the Ashby who hadn’t taken the subway since the Son of Sam murders was a guy who was the first one in his family to go to college, and it was the buried Ashby that I thought could sometimes, in some unpredictable way, be my guardian angel at Claiborne’s. But not anymore. Not in the way I hoped.
He took off his Philip Johnson glasses and pointed to the door with their frames. I was finished at Claiborne’s. Giacometti, who said that he would save a cat from a burning building before he saved a painting, would have looked at the auction house from across the street just once, then, hands shoved into his pockets, headed to Dondy’s to sit and draw ambulance drivers and firemen under signed photos of Tony Bennett and baseball players.
I left Ashby’s check on the desk.
Back in my studio, I found a few plastic bags and packed the tools of my trade that belonged to me: high-powered microscope, brushes, magnifying loupe, some magazines, and other bits and pieces. I carried them through the lobby of Claiborne’s as if they were expensive luggage. Early-morning clients, turned away by the police, stared at the woman in broken shoes and smelling of turpentine as if I were a bag lady, which I could shortly become if I didn’t find another job fast.
Chapter 4
Near my apartment in Brooklyn there’s an empty lot sometimes used as an unofficial flea market that pops up even in the middle of the week. By the time I got home, there was only one vendor left. Salsa music still played from an ancient boom box, but he was packing up. In the corners of the lot, left against a chain-link fence, were piles of the stuff so damaged and forlorn that they were ignored even by scavengers pushing shopping carts. Toy light sabers, circa 2002 (batteries not included), VHS tapes, knockoffs of knockoffs, like Beats by Dr. Drew or pleather Chanel bags with messed-up insignia: the Cs didn’t intersect.
My apartment is on the ground floor of a brownstone owned by a retired New York City schoolteacher who spends most of the year in Miami. That the rooms are dark during the day in the winter months and not all that light during the rest of the year doesn’t help my sleep disorder, but there’s a garden in the back, and the rent is low. From the kitchen to my bedroom there are all kinds of sleep aids scattered around, from chamomile tea to stronger, prescription stuff, but at that moment it was easy to collapse. Yet I couldn’t. I poured myself a glass of white wine and made a grilled cheese sandwich with ground mustard and smoked paprika.
My answering machine was blinking. I still have one, because it has voices on it that I like to hear from time to time. There was a message from my father, just checking to see if I was okay. I knew I should call but somehow couldn’t.
I had loved my dad’s scrap-metal yard. You never knew what you would find there, and I loved it when my father trained me to use the crane. Operating the crane, feeling the treads crawl up a hill of scrap metal, then down the other side, was like riding a roller coaster, flattening cars, lengths of rebar, dishwashers, carburetors wrested from long-dead engines. Chunks of scrap could then be hoisted, weighed, and sold. One of my friends used to describe crushing a rose made of icing against the roof of her mouth, then feeling the sugar tickle her palette and an intense glucose stimulant enter her bloodstream and nerve cells. Crushing discarded RVs, pieces of aluminum siding, air-conditioning units as if they were no more than cake decorations was, for a teenage girl, like being on top of the world. Driving the crane, I felt that whatever apocalyptic event hit Rhode Island, I could survive. As long as there was gasoline, I would ride over the ruins, pulling people out of the wreckage, even rescuing pet dogs with the jaws of the family Link-Belt.
One Saturday afternoon, I was driving the crane in a far part of the yard. I had earphones on, and I was listening to my dad’s old Clash tracks that he’d given me, singing “I’m lost in the supermarket” at the top of my lungs. A sort of braying sound, like a wounded animal, pierced Joe Strummer’s voice in my ears. Then there was an abrupt silence.
I stopped the crane and hopped down. It was the kind of sharp autumn day when you felt that Canada was much closer than Long Island, and it was getting dark early. I couldn’t see anything unusual in the mounds of scrap metal and rust, so I climbed back into the crane and turned on the headlights. Stepping out of the cab again, this time I saw, as I looked down, something distinctly nonmetal. Under the treads, blood was pooling.
People from a halfway house down the street told me Jeannette Bender had a habit of wandering off, of becoming disoriented, and had been on a suicide watch. In the last week of her life, she’d been walking into traffic. My family and friends, the police, said it wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t have seen the warren she’d created for herself out of a short stack of toaster ovens, fridge doors, and dented shelving units. She left behind two small children, who lived with her sister. Her sister pressed charges against me for reckless endangerment and negligent homicide, and against my father for letting a sixteen-year-old drive a crane without a driver’s license. Jeannette Bender weighed two hundred pounds. How could I not have known she was there? Her sister said all of this to news cameras while holding a three-year-old in her arms. How could a responsible driver not know there was someone in the junk? How could anyone say that Jeannette planned to be run over? The yard wasn’t adequately fenced, was easily accessed from a field on its northern boundary. She sued the yard as well, and my father, always so optimistic and capable, the original Mr. Spoonful of Sugar, became severely depressed.
I can still see blood on a cluster of hubcaps, curved silver plates magnifying the horror on their convex surfaces.
The idea of home, a room of one’s own, enough heat and light, no longer seemed possible to me. It was the same house and family, but I was no longer part of the world of middle-class neighborhood families I’d known all my life. I had experienced what it was like to kill someone, to see crushed body parts, and know it was my foot on the gas that had taken that life. A kid next door wanted the gruesome details. Some people were overly nice, didn’t want me to feel bad. When a woman said, “Well, Bender was crazy as a fox,” I screamed at her. I counted the days before I left for Chicago.
I had loved the junkyard, but I couldn’t go back. The inquest determined that it wasn’t my fault, and the lawsuits were dropped. It was claimed that Bender was a mental patient, but I’ve always doubt
ed that somehow. Everyone has their demons, everyone is entitled to their depression and to visits from the black fog. Chicago and studying chemistry, then art conservation, was as far away as I could get. I still think, If only I’d seen evidence of her lair in a rusted tower of car parts. I run the film over and over in my head, and sleep becomes impossible.
Unpacking my bags was bittersweet. Where would I go next? Back to Chicago? I had no idea, but with close to zero savings I had to start looking immediately. I unpacked my borescope (for detecting mold and insect detritus), brushes, solvents for removing tape residue, daylight-simulation bulbs for revealing the true color of a canvas or other objects. At the bottom of the bag was a slip of paper from Kronstadt’s Paint and Pigment on Eldridge Street. I knew old Oscar Kronstadt, who claimed that as a teenager he had sold paint to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock before the latter switched to house paint for his splatter pictures. (A conservator’s nightmare, by the way.) Kronstadt still had an old-fashioned cash register, and wrote out receipts by hand. But this receipt wasn’t mine. It was dated two days earlier. I had a job then, and I would have been at work. That was the day Las Meninas arrived from Madrid. I was overseeing the initial unpacking. I was often a customer of Kronstadt’s, but there was no way I’d been in his shop that day.
Sleep hit briefly. When I woke, it was a few minutes past ten. There was a text on my phone from my pal Marnie Sleeter to meet her at Jacky’s Fifth Amendment. I’d known Marnie since college, though she dropped out when the loans got too steep, and she was getting work designing lighting for bands. She had studied computer science, like millions of others, and she was good at it, but, at the same time, the idea of spending hours at a desk, staring at a screen, frustrated her no end. She constantly had to get up and walk around. It was like putting a brain with the patience to write complex code into the body of a long-distance runner. She couldn’t sit still. Marnie was sort of a music groupie, but she had a love-hate relationship with that, too. In designing light shows, she worked with lasers, LED screens, had been dangled from the sky with a spotlight following musicians around stages in Prague, Sydney, Stockholm. Even when the process became more computer-automated, someone still had to design the shows. She called what she did “the architecture of light.” She’d work without stopping for maybe six months, then go into total retreat. This was one of her recluse periods, but she was still up for meeting me in a bar. Our last binge had been during the week between our thirtieth birthdays, and the next birthday hadn’t yet come around.