by Sarah Atwell
A show of my own? That was heady stuff. “I’d be honored. Although it would be a challenge to pull together enough pieces in that time. Let me think about it?”
“Of course, my dear. I wouldn’t want to rush you.” A waiter appeared with a discreet folder. Ian signed something and the waiter spirited it away. “Well, this little excursion to Tucson has been unexpectedly fruitful.”
“What brought you here? Certainly not just to see me.”
“You underestimate yourself. But in truth, I came initially to spend some time with Peter and see for myself what his plans were for the collection. He spoke of the house with such enthusiasm! You know, I offered him the assistance of my gallery staff for planning his display, but he seemed to have his own ideas. What can you tell me about this local person he hired?”
“Madelyn Sheffield.” I managed to suppress a grimace. “I understand they have known each other for a long time.”
“Ah. Well, all that is for naught now, sad to say. Have you heard how the official investigation is progressing?”
I had, of course, but I wasn’t at liberty to tell anyone. “I really can’t say.” That was true, at least.
“I thought perhaps, since you are closer to events here . . . Well, no mind. I’m sure the local police will do their best. And you said the FBI is involved as well?”
“So I understand.” Of course I understood it, since the agent in question had been sitting at my table just last night. Maybe I had already said too much. “Tell me, have you had occasion to work with the FBI art theft group before?”
Ian looked momentarily perturbed. “Certainly I am aware of their activities, as all reputable members of my profession should be. But I have had no personal interaction with them, I’m happy to say. I hope they’re up to the task.” He glanced quickly at his watch. “Heaven’s, we’ve had such a delightful lunch that I completely lost track of time. I have another appointment. But may I say what a pleasure it has been to meet you and to share your work? I do hope we will be able to collaborate in the near future.” He stood up, and a flunky appeared from nowhere to pull out my chair, leaving me no choice but to stand.
“I would enjoy that.”
“Grand. I’ll be in touch, then. May I see you out?”
He guided me out of the restaurant, and we made our farewells in the lobby. I emerged into the bright sunlight and blinked, feeling as though I had just stepped from the other side of the looking glass. What had just gone on?
I retrieved my car from the parking garage and drove back to the shop slowly. Why did I feel conflicted? Peter had told me that he had admired my work, and I had been flattered. Now Ian Gemberling was telling me that Peter had talked me up to him, a renowned gallery owner. Did that ring true? Had Peter really wanted to do me a good turn?
Or was Ian really interested in what I knew about the investigation?
Was I being paranoid, looking this gift horse in the mouth? Ian could do significant things for my artistic career. Was that what I wanted? Was I really happy with my little shop and studio, turning out modest pieces for a small audience? Was I capable of more?
I thought again of Maddy. Poor Maddy, with her piddling talent for little pretty things. Was I really better than she was? I thought so; Peter had thought so. But how much better, and how far would that take me?
Stop it, Em! I didn’t have to make a decision today. I could sleep on it. I could talk to other people about it. I could look at what I had produced over the last ten years with a critical eye, and decide if I thought my talent would carry me forward or if I had already reached my personal pinnacle. Or maybe Ian would never get in touch with me again, and I would be spared making any decision at all.
It wasn’t until I pulled into my parking space behind the shop that I realized that Ian had said he had come to Tucson to see Peter—but Peter had been dead since last week. Why was Ian still here? Certainly not just to see me. Did I buy his explanation that he was eager to help track down the art? Nat hadn’t mentioned any approach from him.
What was Ian Gemberling doing here?
Chapter 19
I was still trying to decide what I really thought about Ian’s offer when I got back to the shop. Allison looked up eagerly when I walked in. “So, tell me all about it.”
“Nice lunch. Nice place. He may want to give me a show at his gallery.”
Allison’s face lit up. “Oh, Em, that’s grand!” Then, noticing my lack of enthusiasm, she faltered. “Isn’t it?”
I laughed. “I’m sorry—don’t I look properly excited? I am—I think. But I wonder if I’m really up to it. It would mean a lot of work for me in the next few months, time and effort I wouldn’t be giving to the shop.”
“Think of the publicity, though.”
“There is that. I don’t know—maybe I’m just in shock. I mean, this came out of the blue, and I haven’t had time to digest it.”
“Your work will win him over. I’m so happy for you, Em. You should be thrilled!”
“I guess. Give me a little time to get used to it. Did I miss anything here?”
Allison shook her head. “A few sales. Oh, I had time to go over your supply inventory, and I think you’re running low on a few things.”
“Thanks. You’re probably right. Let me change clothes and stash my portfolio, and I’ll get on it. Be right back!”
I went upstairs, greeted Fred and Gloria, who raised their heads to acknowledge my existence and went back to sleep, then slipped back into my working jeans and T-shirt. I felt like Cinderella coming back from the ball. It had been fun to meet an important gallery owner for a posh lunch, but it all seemed a little unreal. Right now I needed to get some grunt work done, to keep the day-to-day business going—while I contemplated dreams of glory in the Los Angeles art scene.
Now that Allison had reminded me, I realized that I was in fact running short of raw materials, and I had to do something about it. I didn’t use standard shippers like the post office or UPS for several reasons. Cost was a big one: The supplies I ordered came in lots that weighed more than a hundred pounds. When I had started up my business a decade ago, every penny had mattered, and when one of my suppliers had suggested using his trucker, Tim Bernowski, I had jumped at the chance. That vendor had gone out of business, but Tim and I had struck up a friendship and we had worked out our own arrangement. Plus he’d always been willing to help me muscle the heavy barrels or bags of cullet into my storage area, which I’d appreciated. Unfortunately he was gone now, and I needed to find a new trucker. And while I might have a little more money to spend than I had when I started out, I had gotten spoiled working with an independent hauler, and I wasn’t sure how to find a new one. Something I had to think about.
I spent some time putting together a list of what supplies I needed, then went back to the shop to spell Allison, and the rest of the day passed quickly. As we were closing up, a thought hit me. “Allison, do you have any plans for the evening?”
She looked up from the receipts she was sorting. “I’ve some reading I should do, but it’s not urgent. Did you need something?”
“Do you want to get in some furnace time?”
“That would be grand! If it’s no trouble.”
“None at all. Come on through to the studio when you’ve closed out.” I loved to teach glassblowing, and Allison was an apt pupil. Not everyone got it—they were afraid of the heat and the urgency of working the glass, or they were just klutzes and couldn’t coordinate their movements. Allison was competent and efficient, and she even took criticism well and learned from it. I couldn’t ask for more.
Besides which, we really hadn’t had much time alone to talk lately, and I admitted—to myself, at least—a sisterly curiosity about how her relationship with Cam was going. Not that I wanted to pry, but . . . I wanted to pry. I felt responsible for them.
When she appeared, I said, “Okay, grab a pipe and we’ll try a small gather.” Allison knew by now just what I meant, and extracted a hot
blowpipe from the pipe warmer and approached the furnace. I slid open the door so she could get at the glowing crucible inside. With an assured motion she collected a blob of glass on the end and pivoted gracefully to take a seat at the bench, keeping the pipe with its load of glass in constant motion.
“Good,” I said. “Now, what’s it going to be?”
“Let’s keep it simple. I still mess up as many as I get right. A tumbler?”
“Fine. Using color?”
“Please. The cobalt blue frit?”
I went to the shelf to retrieve the right frit can and laid it on the marver. “Good to go.” I watched as Allison manipulated the gather, shaping it, giving it a quick puff of air then watching critically for a moment, then shaping again. The glass cooled, and she returned it to the glory hole to reheat.
“You know, I think you’ve got the basic technique down now.”
She nodded, her eyes on the piece. “I hope so. I wish I had more time to work with the glass, but between working in the shop and my classes, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”
“How do you like being in school?”
“I feel like a child in a candy shop—there’s so much I want to learn, although it’s not easy, after so long. I spend so much time doing the reading and the rest of the work.” She swung back to the bench with her glass, turning and watching. “Another gather?” She looked at me, and I nodded. “You know, the advisers there keep telling me I should choose a major or some such nonsense. They want me to have a plan.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. “Do you want to go for a degree?” I asked carefully.
“I’ve no clue. This is all so new to me. Do I have to decide this very moment?” She went back to the glory hole. “Shall I add the frit now?”
I nodded. She heated the glass briefly, then rolled it in the crushed colored glass, then took it back to the glory hole to fuse the frit to the surface. This part was always kind of fun—you never quite knew what the end result would look like, certainly not while the glass was glowing red. She resumed shaping the piece at the bench.
“Don’t let them pressure you. There’s no hurry.” I paused, then took the plunge. “Have you talked to Cam about this?”
I thought she smiled, although I couldn’t see more than the side of her face. “He thinks whatever I do is wonderful, but he frets at the distance between us. Em, I don’t mean to shilly-shally, but I’m not ready to make up my mind about him either. Is that a problem for you?”
“Hey, I’m not the person to be telling anybody else how to run their lives. My track record isn’t exactly brilliant.”
“You and Matt?” This time I know she smiled. “You’ll work it out.”
She was more confident about that than I was.
Her next question surprised me. “Em, can I ask . . . how do you know when you’re good at something?”
I gave the question the consideration it deserved. Allison had been dominated by her late jerk of a husband for so long that she barely had any ego to speak of, and I wanted to encourage her. “I think that if you love what you’re doing, you’re likely to do it well. Are you talking about glassmaking or other things?”
“I was thinking about taking an art history class, but I wondered . . . who is it that gets to decide that a work of art is good?”
Sometimes I’d wondered that myself. I’d taken the required art history classes when I went back to school for my degree in glasswork, but sometimes it did seem as though the professors kept trotting out the same old favorites, giving short shrift to new artists or movements—or female artists, for that matter. “Society, I guess. I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but the pieces that people love, they preserve. And those artists are encouraged. It used to be that artists—like Michelangelo or da Vinci—would find a patron. That way they knew they’d have steady work, even if they didn’t get to choose their subjects. Economic reality, you know.” I glanced at her piece. “You need help with the transfer?”
“One more round,” she said, going back to the glory hole for another gather of clear glass. The next few minutes were devoted to the choreography of transferring her piece to a different rod, so that she could open it up and make it a vessel. Some people managed to do it solo—I’d done it plenty of times myself—but for a novice it was easier to have help, which I was happy to provide. But it took concentration, which hampered conversation
“And who gets to decide that art is art?” Allison continued, when she had a moment. “I mean, is what you do art? Or something else?”
“Got me. Oh, that’s not to say there isn’t a hierarchy among glassblowers, with the immortal Chihuly at the top, along with a couple of others currently—Lino Tagliapietra, William Morris—and at the bottom end, those poor people who haul minifurnaces around to Renaissance fairs and make cute little things. I’m somewhere in the middle, and that’s fine with me.”
In making a tumbler, it’s necessary to swing the glass back and forth like a giant pendulum, which elongates it into a drinking vessel. Allison knew this, had done it before, but this time something got away from her and the poor thing crumpled into itself, beyond salvage. Allison looked sadly disappointed.
“Hey, don’t sweat it,” I reassured her. “Even I mess up now and then. Regularly, in fact. That’s why this isn’t some kind of assembly line—there’s that element of risk. Makes it fun, no?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged as she slid the poor deformed creature into the annealer. Even though it would never be a glass, it still had to cool gradually before we could discard it. Unfortunately there was no salvaging a piece that combined glass types such as clear and frit, and it would end up a murky mess.
“Look, you’ve come a long way in a short time. Don’t beat yourself up because you can’t do everything perfectly. Some things just don’t work out, and it’s not your fault.”
“Like relationships?” She eyed me slyly as she cleaned up her equipment.
“Maybe. You do the best you can, but there are no guarantees.”
“But once it’s broken, you can’t fix it. It’s gone.”
“Unlike relationships,” I said firmly. “At least there you get more than one chance. Like Matt and me.”
I had just made it upstairs when the phone rang. “Hey there, you rat,” I said when I picked it up.
“Em, your cell’s off.” It was Cam.
“I was in the studio. You sure took off in a hurry yesterday. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I really did need to get back here, and this is the first chance I’ve had to call all day.”
“Your departure didn’t have anything to do with avoiding Nat and Matt?”
He chuckled. “The thought had crossed my mind, but I’m sure you handled them brilliantly. Did you get any flak from them?”
I leaned against the counter and sighed. “About what you’d expect. Matt was upset that you got the computer and that Nat shared it with you. He was also annoyed that I knew anything at all about it. We all sat down and made nice, and now they’re best friends. But I’m sure you’ll be hearing from them again. So are you just calling to make sure that they didn’t eat me alive? Oh, and we found Andrew Foster. Actually, I found him, which didn’t make Matt any too happy.”
“But, how . . . ? No, I’ll wait for that explanation. How’s he look as a suspect?”
“I’m not really sure. He spun me a good story about going off into the desert to clear his head, and he was roaring drunk when I ran into him, but he claims that he and Peter had mended their fences. Matt isn’t quite convinced, so he’s keeping him in Tucson for the moment.”
“Huh. I guess we can’t cross him off the list, then. But the reason I called—Em, I found something else interesting in Peter’s computer files, but I haven’t had time to really get into it. But I wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“Really? What?”
“As far as I can tell, he was working on a new algor
ithm for identification of artworks.”
“Algorithm has too many syllables. What does this mean?”
“I don’t know much about tracking missing art—that’s Nat’s domain—but I think he was developing a program to record art in unique detail. So if it gets stolen, there’d be a definitive and widely accessible record.”
“Wait a minute—doesn’t this already exist? Didn’t Nat tell us about that?”
“Sure, but not at this level of specificity. Nat was talking about the existing tracking and identification programs, but many of those rely on written description, which is subject to interpretation. Peter was working on a visual scanning system that would be much more accurate.”
“Interesting. Was this before he shut down PrismCo?”
“No, I think this was after, something to keep his hand in. And as far as I can tell he was working pro bono. He could afford it.”
“Does Nat know about this program?”
“I can’t say. She didn’t mention it. Maybe she figured I didn’t need to know, but it’s also possible that Peter hadn’t shared it with anyone yet. I told you he was a perfectionist, and I’m sure he wanted to get all the bugs out first.”
I turned over the implications in my head. “Nat told us that art theft is big business in this country—we’re talking millions if not billions, and most of the stuff is never recovered. If Peter, who was actually a player, was coming up with a better way to track art, then the thieves might see him as a threat—but then, they didn’t take his computer, did they?” I shook my head, trying to work out the implications. “Does that mean there were algorithms or whatever for his own pieces?”
Cam chuckled. “Yes, he did record his own collection. Sort of a beta test now, huh?”
“If the pieces ever resurface at all,” I said glumly. “Nat says a lot of them disappear forever.” I had a sudden brain-storm. “Cam, while you’re snooping, could you dig a little deeper into Ian Gemberling?”
“Who?”
“That dealer who sold the glass to Peter originally. He should be in Peter’s files somewhere. Remember I asked you about him a while ago? Your first search came up clean, but I don’t follow the gallery scene much. Anyway, he stopped by the shop, and I had lunch with him today. He said Peter raved about me, and he might want to give me a show.”