Chapter 7 Rory
Chapter Seven
RORY
Yuri walks me through the penthouse the way a zookeeper walks a new animal to its enclosure---briskly, without eye contact, radiating the disinterest of a man who has been instructed not to damage the merchandise.
The corridor is long. Polished concrete floors, recessed lighting, walls the colour of ash.
We pass the staircase I climbed last night---the floating treads, the absent railing---and continue past the study, past a door I haven't seen before, past the kitchen where the bourbon glass still sits on the counter like a prop in a play that hasn't ended.
Kazimir is gone. He left the gallery after the phone, after the water swallowed the last thread connecting me to Killian, and he walked out without looking back. The door locked. Yuri came. The transfer was seamless, mechanical, a choreography rehearsed before I arrived.
The room Yuri stops at is at the end of the corridor. He opens the door with a keycard---different from the gallery card; this one is matte grey---and steps aside.
I walk in.
The room is beautiful. I hate it immediately.
It is large. High ceiling. A bed that could sleep three people, dressed in white linen so crisp it has never been touched by a body that sweated or bled or woke screaming.
The walls are pale grey. The floor is the same heated concrete.
There is a wardrobe, a desk, a chair. A window faces south---the first real window I've seen in this building---and through it, Kensington stretches in a grey wash of rooftops and bare trees.
The window does not open. The latch has been removed. I press my palms against the glass---double glazed, laminated. Even if I broke it, the drop is five storeys.
The wardrobe holds clothes in my size. Black jeans, white shirts, a grey cashmere jumper softer than anything I've owned. No shoes. My trainers are still on my feet, rain-stained, crusted with roof gravel. The absence is deliberate. You don't run in socks.
The desk holds a single book: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. The spine is uncracked. It was placed here for me. A message dressed as a gift.
The bathroom mirror is polished steel, not glass. Smart. You can't break steel into a blade.
On the way to the room, I clocked a door at the far end of the corridor---heavy, dark wood, different from the others.
It had a keypad instead of a card reader, the digits worn smooth at the edges.
Four of the ten buttons had a faint shine to them where oils from a thumb had polished the plastic: 1, 4, 7, 9.
A four-digit code drawn from four numbers.
That's only twenty-four possible combinations. I filed it away and kept walking.
The cameras in the room are harder to find than the gallery's.
I spend ten minutes running my fingers along the ceiling moulding, the light fixtures, the edges of the window frame.
I find the first one in the smoke detector---a pinhole lens behind the sensor grille, angled to cover the bed and the door.
The second is in the desk lamp, embedded in the base, aimed at the chair.
Two that I can see. Which means there are at least two more that I can't.
I sit on the bed. The mattress yields beneath me---soft, expensive, a surface designed for rest. My body wants to collapse.
My brain won't let it. I am sitting in a room that has been furnished for my comfort and engineered for my containment, and every object in it---the soft linen, the cashmere, the Van Gogh letters---is a sentence in a language that says: I own you, and I want you to enjoy it.
Yuri appears in the doorway. He has not left. He points down the corridor.
I follow him, because the alternative is sitting in the cage and staring at the walls, and I refuse to be the kind of animal that sits.
* * *
The studio is on the other side of the upper floor, behind the door I didn't recognise.
Yuri opens it with his keycard. He steps aside. I walk through.
The sound I make is involuntary. A small, strangled noise that lives somewhere between a gasp and a curse, and I will deny making it until I die.
The room is flooded with north light.
A wall of glass faces north-northwest, floor to ceiling, and the London sky pours through it in a wash of cool, diffused grey.
North light. The light painters have chased since the Renaissance because it is even, shadowless, constant.
I have spent my entire life in spaces that approximated it---squats, borrowed rooms, a storage unit in Hackney with a skylight the pigeons treated like a lavatory.
This is the real thing. A studio built around the light the way a cathedral is built around the altar.
The space is enormous. Twenty feet by thirty, at least. The floors are raw concrete---not polished, not heated, left rough and porous for the specific purpose of absorbing paint splatter without complaint.
There are two easels. One is a heavy-duty H-frame, oak, adjustable, the kind that holds canvases up to six feet.
The other is smaller, a tabletop model for studies and sketches.
And the supplies.
I walk to the shelving unit against the east wall and my hands start shaking.
Pigments. Jars of raw pigment, hand-ground, labelled in the calligraphy of a specialist supplier in Florence I've fantasised about since I was sixteen.
Lapis lazuli. Genuine vermillion. Lead white---real lead white, banned in the 1970s because it poisons you, and the only white capable of replicating the luminosity of a pre-twentieth-century canvas.
Oils. Cold-pressed linseed. Walnut. Poppy.
Stand oil aged in glass for the oxidation profile that defeats a spectral scanner.
Brushes---Kolinsky sable, hog bristle, every size, stored in cotton rolls the way a surgeon stores scalpels.
Canvases of raw linen, pre-industrial weave, stretched on bars aged to eliminate the chemical signature of modern adhesives.
I pick up a jar of lapis lazuli. The pigment is the blue of a bruise at its deepest---dark, rich, mined from a rock that has been ground by hand into a powder finer than flour. It costs more per gram than cocaine. I have never held this much of it in my life.
My throat closes.
This is every studio I have ever dreamed of.
Every supply list I scrawled on the backs of takeaway menus in the Shoreditch squat.
Every material I substituted or improvised or stole because the real version was beyond my reach.
And the worst part---the part that makes my stomach turn even as my fingers tighten around the jar---is how badly I want it.
How my hands are already itching to open the lids, to feel the weight of real pigment on a palette knife, to lay genuine lead white onto linen and watch it glow the way the cheap titanium substitute never could.
He built this for me. Before the gala. Before the break-in. He commissioned the Monaco job, watched me pass the test, and built the cage around the thing he knew I couldn't resist. And he was right. That's the poison in it. He was right about what would buy me.
I set the lapis lazuli down. I press my hands flat on the worktable and breathe until the tremor stops, and I hate myself for the fact that the tremor isn't fear. It's hunger.
On the large easel, a canvas is already stretched and primed. Five feet by three. Beside it, propped against the frame, is a card. Same cream stock. Same angular handwriting.
Show me.
* * *
I paint.
I don't plan it. I don't sketch it. I don't stand in front of the canvas with my chin in my hand like some art-school pretender waiting for the muse to descend from whatever cloud she lives on.
I pick up a brush---a flat, two-inch hog bristle---and I load it with cadmium red straight from the tube and I attack.
The first stroke is a wound. Red, wet, dragged across the white ground with enough force to feel the canvas give beneath the bristles. The sound is a whisper that becomes a hiss. The colour hits the linen and spreads.
I don't think. Thinking is the enemy of this. Thinking is what kills a forgery---the hesitation, the calculation, the careful placement of a stroke in a position that is correct but dead. I am not forging anything right now. I am emptying.
The red becomes crimson becomes alizarin becomes a burnt sienna that I mix on the palette with my thumb because the brush is too slow.
My hands are in the paint. My forearms are in the paint.
I am working the surface the way a boxer works a heavy bag---rhythm, impact, the satisfying shock of contact.
I think about the gallery. The locked door. The spotlight on the Rothko. His hand on my chin and the words he spoke close enough to taste. You are an instrument.
I throw a streak of black across the red. Ivory black, thick enough to ridge. I load a smaller brush and build texture---layering, scraping, pulling wet paint through wet paint until the surface develops its own topography.
I think about Killian. The phone drowning at the bottom of a glass. He'll try to contact me. The burner will ring and ring in dead water and eventually he'll stop calling and start looking and find nothing, because the man who owns this building doesn't exist.
I paint faster. Yellows now. Naples yellow, warm and sick, mixed with the red to create a heat that radiates from the centre of the canvas.
The composition is emerging without my permission---a vortex, a centripetal pull, everything spiralling toward a dark centre that swallows the colour the way a drain swallows light.
The centre is grey. Mercury grey. The grey of eyes that read you the way a surgeon reads an X-ray.