The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Mel understood. “Kasson. You wouldn’t have come otherwise.” She sounded deflated in this last statement.

  “He was in my apartment.” Paire corrected herself. “In Rosewood’s apartment. I can’t go back there. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “I’m going to run you a bath,” Melinda said, moving into the adjoining bathroom.

  “You don’t need to.”

  Melinda turned on a thundering rush of water. “Too late. It’s already running.” She led Paire into the bathroom and left her alone, returning a minute later with a stack of clothes. “We’re not exactly the same size, but close enough that T-shirts and exercise pants will fit.”

  Paire stood in the center of the sizeable room and folded her arms over herself protectively.

  Mel said, “I’ll give you some privacy,” and excused herself, shutting the door behind her.

  Paire threw the flimsy deadbolt to lock it. She hesitated taking off her clothes. She knew the bath would make her feel better, and that she needed to get rid of these clothes, but she still felt vulnerable, even in this gated compound.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, Melinda was sautéing mushrooms and onions in the kitchen. “Food will help too.”

  “Sorry I came here. I panicked.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  Paire said, “I don’t have to stay, but I wanted to warn you.”

  Mel smiled, but Paire could see she had frightened her. “About what?”

  “You know the painting is missing.”

  “Good riddance,” Melinda said.

  “Abel Kasson is looking for that painting. He’s going to come here.”

  “Did you tell him I had it?”

  “No. But do you?”

  “Paire, the painting was in police custody. How would I get it?”

  “I don’t know. But he thought I had it. It stands to reason that he’ll approach you.”

  Melinda’s face squinted as a thought landed, and a new dread washed over her. She left Paire for a moment to rush to her kitchen counter, where she thumbed through a stack of mail, leafing through several envelopes. “Where is it?” she asked herself. When she couldn’t find whatever she was looking for, Melinda went to a pregnant bag of trash and tore open the plastic.

  Paire watched as her host rifled through garbage, finding a postcard that had been smeared by grease. Back at the dining table, Mel dealt the card so they could both see it. “Honestly, I thought this was from the Fern. It arrived yesterday.”

  The card was embossed, the print a tight script usually found on wedding invitations:

  You are cordially invited to a private reception.

  Qi Jianyu Retrospective.

  Independence Day.

  Paire felt sick when she read the location. “I know that address.”

  Melinda looked just as unsettled. “And that means he knows my address.”

  • • •

  July fourth fell the next day. Just before eight in the evening, Paire and Melinda stepped out of a taxi at the foot of Kasson’s Park Avenue apartment building. The city’s fireworks would start soon. Paire wondered if they could hear them this far uptown. Right now it was just horns and a faraway siren.

  The evening was warmer than any in Abenaki. The older woman wore a form-fitting black dress, and the younger wore a newly purchased white gown. Bare shoulders for both. They gave their names to a stocky Mediterranean doorman, a new face for Paire, and he showed them to the elevators. The front ones, intended for the residents.

  They rode in silence, and Paire shuddered as the doors opened to the fifteenth floor.

  Kasson’s front door stood ajar.

  Unnerved by the lack of party chatter, Paire held the elevator doors. “We don’t have to go in. We can take the elevator back down. No one will know we were here.”

  “I have to,” Melinda said.

  “If he’s in there, he might attack us,” Paire said. She had left Kasson unconscious on the floor on Pierrepont Street. Now they were at his flat, and he had to be in there.

  Paire had expected a crowd, and hoped they would be lost in that crowd, or that there would at least be other guests at the reception so that Kasson wouldn’t erupt as soon as he saw them. Given the absence of sound, she expected that he was in there alone, patiently waiting for something to pluck a strand in the web.

  “Stay with me,” Melinda said.

  Familiar with the layout from her earlier trespass, Paire led them into the flat, down the long Persian runner in the corridor.

  Melinda pointed to the Rosewood laugher on the wall. “Is that—”

  “Yep, that’s his.”

  Paire didn’t try to tiptoe tonight, and the wood creaked. She suspected someone down the hall listened. In her purse, she checked for her spring baton and rolled it between her fingers.

  They came out into the living room. The outside dark, the interior lights turned the windows into mirrors. The French doors opened onto the balcony, and a few candles had been lit at the base of the railing balustrades. A fire crackled, the loudest sound in the apartment.

  The room was almost empty but for a single man who sat in one of the wing chairs. It was not Abel Kasson.

  “Hello, Melinda,” he said.

  He was a long, frail man in eyeglasses, with a wispy gray moustache. He wore a robe and slippers, as if he had expected to be alone tonight. His fingers crooked over the armrests like leafless twigs, the thumb of one hand absently tapping on the upholstery. He said to Paire, “I know you. You were here the other day. What’s your name?” His voice was hoarse but demanding.

  “Paire.”

  “Right,” he said. “Another artist?”

  “Trying to be,” Paire said.

  He said to Melinda, “She wasn’t invited.”

  “And yet I’m here,” Paire said.

  The man looked away toward the fire, a small orange flicker dancing off two glowing pine logs. Following his gaze, Paire now saw the portrait. The Empress Xiao Zhe Yi sat just beside the hearth, leaning up against the wall, right next to a brass stand that held black-tipped tongs and a poker.

  Paire recognized this man’s face, but not from the peering eyeball she’d seen in the doorjamb opening. Studying his profile and sallow cheek, Paire saw the resemblance between this face and the bronze bust she’d seen in the lobby of the MAAC. The one that commemorated its founder, Gabriel Kasson.

  “This is a party. You should sit down,” he said.

  Paire backed down the hallway, searching for a trace of Abel Kasson, then returned to Melinda’s side when she found no sign of him. She clutched the baton in her purse, but had no cause to draw it. She touched Melinda’s shoulder and gestured for her to sit down. They lowered themselves slowly onto the sofa, as far away from Gabriel as possible. As they sank into the cushions, a breeze from the open doors made the fire dance.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you,” Gabriel said to Melinda. “You’ve grown up well. Your father wasn’t a handsome man. You lucked out and got your mother’s genes.”

  “What is this?” Paire asked.

  “Are you her translator?” Gabriel shot at Paire, then said to Melinda, “I tried to track your father down, but I never got to him. Sometimes I wondered if he’d actually moved back to China or if it was all a ruse. I could never find an address for him.” He sounded accusatory.

  Mel finally spoke. “It’s a moot issue. He died two years ago.”

  “That I did prove for myself. I tracked down a copy of the death certificate. Those can be faked, so I even found the man who signed it. I trust that he is dead. Wherever he ended up, he’s not there anymore.”

  “So there you have it,” she said.

  “You ever visit your father in Beijing?”

  Melinda stared hatefully at the old man. “Never made it.”

  “But you stayed in touch.”

  “He was my father.”

  “More so than your mother. I know you two had a falling
out. She found out you liked girls.”

  Paire stood up. “That’s it. We’re leaving.”

  Gabriel turned his attention to Paire. “We’re not even talking about your father, Ms. Novis. Don’t worry, I know all about him, too.”

  Paire shivered when she heard her birth name.

  “Do you still keep in touch with your father now that you’ve moved all the way down to New York City?”

  No sense in denying anything. Paire said, “Only as much as I can stand it. So, not much.”

  “No shared vacations with him coming up, now that he’s free again? No vision-expanding trip to Mont Saint-Michel? No long hike on the Appalachian Trail?”

  Paire was growing irritated. “He wouldn’t survive in the sunlight.”

  “Institutionalized for too long. Probably needs to keep himself to confined spaces.” It must have been a Kasson family trait to poke at people’s soft parts.

  A man’s voice boomed behind them all. “What the hell is this?”

  Paire pulled out the baton and whipped her wrist so it stretched to its full length. When she turned, she saw Abel Kasson standing where the hallway opened into the living room. He had two purple rings under his eyes and a white bandage across his nose where the doctors had reset his bridge. He looked as shocked as they were. When he saw the spring baton he flinched.

  Gabriel seemed amused. “She’s brought a weapon! This is wonderful.”

  Abel Kasson saw the painting against the wall, and shouted at his father, “You had it?”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve had to keep something secret for your own good.”

  It would have taken someone of considerable influence to remove a piece of evidence from a police locker.

  Gabriel said, “Let’s all sit down. I can see everyone is itchy. But we’ll get it all settled.”

  Abel stepped the long way around the two women and settled in the wing chair opposite his father. They flanked the two women at the center of the wide sofa. Paire and Abel traded looks.

  “I don’t want these people in my house,” said Abel.

  “I don’t want to be here either,” said Melinda.

  “I wanted to be left alone,” said Gabriel. “But you started it.”

  “Is that right?” Melinda said.

  He waved at the empress. “You could have waited until I was dead to trot this out.”

  “I waited until my father was dead. I thought that was long enough.”

  Gabriel reached out and scratched the surface of the painting, scraping the tempera lightly with a fingernail. “At some point you should really go to Beijing. It’s important to see where you’re from. Your father ever talk about it? What it was like?”

  “Sure he did,” she said noncommittally.

  “You can taste the soot over there. And that’s coming from someone who grew up in New York. I remember back when there were more fireplaces in Manhattan. You could smell the ash in the air. But nothing compared to Beijing. I could feel my lungs crystallize when I was there. And I was only there off and on for a few years. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for your father to have grown up there. The pollution that festered in his body. It’s no surprise that I found him where I found him.” Gabriel seemed to detect something interesting when he looked at Melinda. “Surely your father told you how we met.”

  The corner of Melinda’s mouth twitched. Gabriel explained, “It was during the 1972 trip with Nixon. While the President was doing his thing with the Chairman, I was on duty with the First Lady. The trip was such a public spectacle, we had to run ourselves ragged with all the visits. Visits to schools. Villages. Hospitals. I met your father in a hospital bed. I thought he was delirious, because he had this goofy smile on his face, and he hummed to himself. Notably, the tune he was humming was a Beatles song. ‘Help!’ The melody was discernable, even though your father was no singer. The Beatles were outlawed in China, as was most Western music. Luckily, no one on the staff recognized the song. I barely recognized it. I’m no Beatles fan, but even I knew that one. And to find a local in Beijing humming a rock and roll song…that was notable. It meant he had some kind of connection to the West, and clearly a fondness for it. That immediately piqued my interest.” He adjusted his glasses and crossed his legs.

  “Still, your father was a sick man in rags. He stank like he was moldering. I’d heard a lot about cholera outbreaks, and I was paranoid that the First Lady, not to mention myself, had been put in danger of contracting a communicable disease. I had words with the hospital staff. The doctors kept denying that it was cholera, but I had it in my head that it must be, and in my butchered version of Mandarin, I strongly urged them—let’s be honest, threatened them—to move us out of the room. Your father was stowed in this hangar of a room crammed with beds, coughing like a miner with black lung. Whatever was going on, I was convinced it was contagious.

  “I was in the middle of asking why the area wasn’t quarantined when I felt something slip into my hand. A folded sheet of paper—someone from behind me slipped a note into my palm. Then a voice whispered in my ear—with a thick accent, but in English—“Just a snakebite, boss.” Those were the first words I ever heard from your father. And it was a snakebite—he had the bandages around his ankle to prove it. A pit viper got him in the heel.” Gabriel shifted in his seat and grabbed the poker. For a man his age—eighty-six years old, Paire had calculated when she looked up his biography—he seemed nimble enough with the brass rod. The fire didn’t need tending, but he prodded the logs anyway. “I probably wouldn’t have come back to see him, but the note he’d slipped me wasn’t a note. I expected it to be some plea to help him defect. You get your share of those when you’re doing that kind of work.” For moments he seemed lost in memory, and murmured, “Not a note at all. Instead, he’d given me the most exquisite pencil sketch of the First Lady. He’d composed a quick drawing from across the room when we’d first entered. Moreover, he had given Pat Nixon wings, because he made her an angel. It sounds hokey, but the sketch was sublime. I hadn’t seen art like this in China. I’d never expected to, but now that I had, it made me miss the art world back in New York. Especially back then, the art in China—at least, to me—was a composite of competing grays. You didn’t see this kind of creative expression. You didn’t have the arts like it existed in the West. If you were lucky enough to be an artist, you painted on behalf of the State, and the work you created was intended to honor the State and the People. To draw the wife of the President of the United States, and to make her an angel—playing with religious iconography, not to mention glorifying a political figure from another country—you just didn’t do that in China. Then, to slip that drawing into the ambassador’s hand while the hospital staff was watching. This man had a kind of daring that I’d never seen. I needed to go back and speak to him. So when we were done with the First Lady’s events, I found a way back to the hospital, and after some protest, I paid off enough people for them to let me visit. Qi Jianyu. He insisted that I refer to him as Qi.”

  At this point, Gabriel pulled the poker out of the fire and examined the tip as it faded from red to black, a wisp of smoke trailing off the tip. Paire was afraid he would jab the birch board and sear the portrait. Abel stared expectantly at his father. He seemed to know the story, but was afraid to interrupt.

  “We got to know each other over the next year. The President might have gone home, but I was still there.” He turned to look at Mel. “Your father was a teacher at the university, and did his own work on the side with extra materials he pilfered from the school. Qi invited me to a village in the middle of nowhere, to some dilapidated hut that looked like it should have been condemned. He staged an exhibit for me in the middle of the countryside, hidden from everyone. Certainly illegal. It was gorgeous. Your father was begging for a chance at real freedom, and I gave it to him.

  “You have no idea the lengths I went to for that man. I set him up with a home, a car, a good income that he could rely on every year.
More than he’d ever make in China, I’ll tell you that. I pulled strings to get him over here. That was no picnic. I transferred out of the embassy when Nixon ducked out of office in 1974, and it wasn’t easy to figure out how to move one Chinese artist to the United States with all that transition. But still I did it. I convinced the most famous architect of the day, I. M. Pei, to design a building for me, and ponied up the money to pay for it all. All for your father, Melinda. You know how he repaid me? In sloth. As soon as he had a whiff of success, he wanted more of it. He wanted more money. More everything. He said he couldn’t understand the contract that he had signed. But was it my responsibility to explain an arrangement that was clearly mapped out on paper? When he got to New York, the only thing he had to do was paint. And he refused to do it. After the millions spent on opening a cherry museum in the heart of Manhattan, he refused to do the job that I hired him to do. He felt like his freedom was compromised, even though I’d given him more freedom than he’d ever known.”

  Melinda kept her head down. Paire couldn’t tell if she was disgusted by Gabriel Kasson’s account of her father, or if some of this rang true.

  “I opened the museum with the inventory we were able to bring over from China. This was a lot, don’t get me wrong. But I’d expected him to create new work for this museum, and I only got a few slapdash pieces he threw together to fulfill his contract. I got crap. We opened with crap. And not enough of it, at that. I had to bring in more artists just to fill in the empty spaces on the walls. Your father seemed to feel he was entitled to be a billionaire just by stepping foot onto American soil. It doesn’t work like that.”

  At this point Melinda finally asked, “What did you do with the work?”

  “Once he moved back to China, it became clear that the museum wouldn’t be able to showcase his new work. There was no new work to showcase. We had to make use of the space somehow, so we made room for new artists. I didn’t know as much about art as I should have. Especially for someone who founded a museum. I had the passion for it, and the means, but I hired someone who knew how to curate. That’s how I found Nico Franconi.” For the first time, his gaze landed on Paire. “I’m sorry you had to watch him die. I guess guilt got the better of him.”