She told herself to choose something and was surprised by her choice: Marion’s paintings. Then again, it made sense that she would choose an assessment, and a nonpaying one, when she expected to be interrupted.
The paintings were more subtle than she would have guessed from her short interactions with their young maker, but she was not surprised — given the girl’s youth — by their noticeably different styles.
One was a good but imperfect attempt at photorealism: a meticulous painting of a pawnshop on a sunny day. The painting was devoid of human forms, but people were suggested through their absence, particularly by objects in the shop’s windows, and so the sense was that the pawnshop was closed rather than abandoned, though of course the objects in the window had been at least temporarily abandoned as possessions. The overall effect was eerie, but this effect was controlled by discipline in the lines, restraint in the palette. The water damage to the painting was extreme, particularly in the lower right quadrant, where the paint swelled in blisters. Paint loss also looked significant in the far-right lower corner.
The second painting was somewhat larger, more technically accomplished, and less damaged. Though the wistful but energetic sweeps of sky and sea hinted at an unprocessed Turner influence, the painting as a whole did not strike Johanna as derivative. The shadow across the water cast by a large box of a building made the work ominous. There was abrasion in places, but Johanna thought that a basic cleaning might be enough to save the painting, at least for Marion’s purposes, which she assumed were both personal and modest even if her ultimate aspirations reached higher.
Johanna lowered the blackout shades and began by photographing the works in three different light configurations. This was mostly to have a record, though sometimes she found she could see things in photographs that she couldn’t see when paintings were staring her in the face.
She let the natural light back into her studio and set to work on simple cleaning. It took a while, but eventually she lost herself in the labor, where she was unconscious of the stream of time. She jumped at the sound of the door bells but composed herself — a quick reflex. When she turned, she was confident that she knew whose face she would see.
What she was unprepared for was how that face made her feel. She told herself to remember that he was a means to an end, that what she wanted from him was a simple piece of information. Well, a piece of information that was far from simple, but still only a fact. A name, perhaps with a location. Simple for him if not for her.
She considered taking the unique step of inviting him upstairs — she could make coffee or tea, see if the little dog again warmed to him or not. But the painting was in her flat. Even though she had wrapped it again in thick butcher paper, she would worry about it calling attention to itself like some telltale heart, the decades-old paint undrying and soaking through the brown paper, the deep red becoming the color of blood as the paper absorbed it. She didn’t have enough information to predict which bad thing might happen to her if Elizam knew she had the painting, if he found it. The revelation might mean jail for her or her death or, worst of all, the return of the painting to the person Ladislav had stolen it from before she had stolen it from Ladislav.
There was also a small practical reason for not taking Elizam upstairs. She’d learned soon after her arrival in this country that if you want to get an American to talk, alcohol is better than coffee. She suggested a drink.
He walked her to Molly’s. “Your new client works here.”
Marion was not behind the bar but rather a young woman with a girlish top only partially covering what appeared to be a full-body tattoo, or perhaps a series of tattoos that ran into each other, having run out of space. The bartender wore pin bangs and had made a bright coral heart of her small mouth. The effect was a strange mix of the tough and the vulnerable. Marion, despite the absence of visible tattoos, had not managed to make visible any vulnerability beyond her lack of height. Johanna suspected that this meant she was more rather than less vulnerable than the young woman now opening a beer for Elizam and squeezing lemon into her club soda.
“A cultivated anachronism,” Elizam said, and Johanna smiled, understanding that he was talking about the bartender and agreeing.
Eli
There were more likely candidates on the list Felicia Pontalba had emailed him. Usually he would start with a local fence or two or meet with a collector of questionable reputation. Though Felicia had said he was likely not involved, the man called Fontenot stuck in Eli’s mind because he’d once been the American ambassador to Belgium. It was probably just the sort of weird coincidence that was nothing but a weird coincidence, but the name caught, and Eli had emailed Ted to ask him to set up an appointment. Calls from Ted opened doors that were otherwise shut for people like Eli.
Waiting for Ted’s answer gave Eli the excuse he needed to move Johanna to the top of his talk-to list. It was a hunch, he told himself, and not something else, and his was a line of work in which hunches were necessary and to be trusted. Yet he had no idea how to go about getting information from Johanna, now occupying the next bar stool at Molly’s. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made that Ted had not just hired him but had gone out of his way to do so. He did indeed have what Ted called a skill set, but it came in handy for only small slices of the job.
Johanna let him off the hook by starting. When she asked him to describe the painting he was looking for, Eli told her the old joke about the long-winded man who told you where he’d bought his watch when you asked him for the time of day. It was a warning, as he started his tale, because in that moment he decided to tell her everything. He told himself it was a strategy.
He wasn’t a detective, he told her, not really. He was a painter, a thief, a guy with a new job. “I’ve been in prison,” he said. “Quite recently, in fact.”
She sipped her drink but didn’t look away. She tucked and retucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear, and it looked so smooth that Eli imagined it felt like satin sheets between her fingers. “Is this going to be one of those exchanges where you tell me a secret about yourself, and then I’m supposed to tell you one of my secrets?”
“Not at all,” he said. “For one thing, what I just told you isn’t a secret. I don’t really care who knows, not that anyone would necessarily even understand what it meant. Not many people know what it is to waste the biggest chunk of your adult life on a cause that’s already obsolete.”
“That’s what you did? Were you some kind of Robin Hood?” She paused, then posed a question that sounded less rote: “Was it worth it?”
He ignored the last question. Even though it sounded like the one she wanted an answer to, it wasn’t a question he wanted to hear the answer to. “Except for me it was more like give back to the poor. Return what was taken. The funny thing is that the thing I got caught for was stealing a painting that I myself painted, that bears my signature.”
“They put you in jail for stealing your own painting?”
“It didn’t belong to me legally, you see. That’s what I got caught doing. I got sent to prison because they knew there was more and because some of my, let’s call them compatriots, were into some more serious stuff, which they also knew about.” He drew from the beer. “Anyway, idealism isn’t the whole story. I threw away more than a decade for more than a cause. I also kept someone else out of jail, and that was worth it even if I never talk to her now. But it’s not really a question of worth, anyway. Like I said, the cause is obsolete — to me and to most people.”