Chapter 9 Rory
Chapter Nine
RORY
The days acquire a rhythm, and I hate that I can feel myself settling into it.
I wake. I dress in the clothes he bought me---the black jeans, the white shirt, always the same, because variety is a privilege and prisoners wear uniforms. Yuri escorts me to the studio.
The north light is waiting. The brief is on the worktable, held open by a smooth river stone that appeared one morning without explanation, as if the building itself is trying to be thoughtful.
The brief is a Modigliani. Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, 1919.
Oil on canvas. Elongated neck, almond eyes, that particular blue-green background that Modigliani used in the last year of his life, when the tuberculosis was eating his lungs and the absinthe was eating everything else.
The painting was sold at auction in 2015 for forty-two million dollars.
The version currently sitting in the Consortium's pipeline is a forgery made by Pavel---the Russian kid who disappeared, the one the forger circles whisper about when they want to remind each other what happens to instruments that stop being useful---and in six weeks a spectral scanner is going to light it up like a Christmas tree.
My job is to build a replacement that is chemically indistinguishable from a painting made in 1919.
The process is alchemy. Kazimir was right about that, and I hate him for being right the way I hate him for everything---with a precision that keeps me sharp.
I start with the canvas. Raw linen, soaked in rabbit-skin glue prepared from granules dissolved in warm water---applied at exactly the right consistency, following a recipe documented in three separate conservation studies.
Then the ground: lead white mixed with chalk and linseed oil, two thin coats, left to cure over days because period-accurate grounds develop a specific hardness the scanner will measure.
Then the pigments. I grind them by hand on a marble slab, because machine-ground pigments have a uniform particle distribution that didn't exist before 1940.
Hand-ground lapis gives you irregular particles that scatter light with a warmth the scanner reads as authentic.
My shoulders ache. My fingers are raw. The studio fills with mineral dust of materials that were old when Modigliani was young.
I love it. I love every excruciating, painstaking second of it, and the love is a betrayal so thorough that I can feel it rewriting me from the inside.
Because I am doing the best work of my life inside a cage, and the man who locked the door is the only person who has ever given me the tools to do it.
* * *
He comes every day.
The door opens. The room tilts. I don't need to look up to know he's entered, because the space folds toward him the way a painted canvas reorients under a new light source---every shadow finds a different resting place, every surface tips toward the new centre of gravity.
He stands. He watches. He says nothing for long stretches, and the silence is a pressure that wraps around my shoulders like wet cloth.
When he does speak, it is to critique, and the critiques are surgical.
The ground layer is too smooth. Modigliani's supplier used a coarser chalk.
Your hand is too steady on the elongation of the neck. He painted drunk.
Add a quarter-degree of drift.
The blue-green is too saturated. He was dying. The palette contracted.
Each correction is accurate. Each one makes the work better. I absorb them the way I absorb the mineral dust---involuntarily, through the skin---and I implement them, and the forgery improves, and I say nothing because thanking him is a capitulation I am not willing to make.
He never touches me. Not since the hand-washing.
He maintains a distance of precisely three feet---close enough that I can feel the heat of him, the displacement of air when he shifts his weight, the way his presence fills a room the way a ground of ivory black fills every corner of a composition. But he does not touch.
And I start to notice the absence. The bruise on my wrist has healed.
The memory of his fingers on my chin has not. His thumb on my pulse at the club. The soap-slick grip of the hand-washing, each finger cleaned while warm water turned pink between us.
He touched me to control me. To demonstrate ownership. And now he's stopped, and I keep catching myself doing something I refuse to examine: my fingers drifting to my jaw, pressing the spot where his thumb rested, checking for a mark that isn't there. Finding nothing. Pressing harder.
So I do something stupid.
* * *
The portrait of Kazimir takes shape on a scrap of linen pinned to the small easel.
I paint it at night, after Yuri escorts me back from the terrace hour and the studio door locks behind me. Except the studio door doesn't lock---I discovered this on the third night, when I tested the handle out of habit and it opened. A glitch in Yuri's routine, or a deliberate gap.
With Kazimir, I can never be sure.
I work by the red light of the head torch that nobody confiscated, because the catalogue of things Kazimir controls is vast but imperfect, and the gaps are where I live.
I paint him the way I see him. The way my synesthesia processes the data of his existence into something visual and true.
Mercury eyes, cold and reflective. Cheekbones that throw shadows in hard planes.
The silver at the temples rendered in zinc white and raw umber, the jaw in a hard line of Payne's grey.
It is a study in control---the face of a man who has spent decades removing every trace of spontaneity from his surface.
But I paint the crack.
In the corner of his mouth---the left corner, the side that twitched when
I said something about Hockney at the gala, the side that almost smiled when I called his art philosophy dangerous---I let the grey soften. A fraction of warmth. A hint of colour in an otherwise monochromatic face.
The ghost of a smile he didn't give himself permission to have.
I leave the grey of the rest of his face untouched. Cold. Controlled. That single warm corner of the mouth is the only colour in the composition. The eye goes straight to it.
I leave it on the small easel. Propped up. Facing the door. A gift wrapped in an insult.
He finds it during his morning visit. I am grinding pigments at the worktable, pretending not to watch. He walks in. He stops. The silence has a colour. Burnt umber. Heavy with compounds that are volatile if exposed to heat.
He walks to the small easel. He stands in front of the portrait for a long time. His hands are in his pockets. His face is turned away from me, so I cannot read it, which means he has deliberately angled himself to deny me the reaction I am desperate for.
When he speaks, his voice is level. Measured. Utterly controlled.
"The likeness is accurate. The technique is confident. You've captured the bone structure with a precision that suggests you've been studying my face with more attention than you would prefer to admit."
My hands stop on the muller.
He turns from the portrait. His expression is not anger. It is not offence. It is the cool, appraising interest of a collector who has received an unexpected acquisition and is determining its value.
"The mouth is wrong, of course," he says. "But you knew that when you painted it."
He leaves. He does not take the portrait. He does not ask me to remove it. He leaves it there, facing the room, and I am left standing at the worktable with mineral dust on my fingers and the maddening, corrosive knowledge that I aimed a weapon at him and he absorbed it.
\Later that morning, while he is gone, I find myself in the back room---
the one with the pigment jars and the reference library. A cabinet I've never opened, tucked behind the shelving. Inside: conservation files.
Old ones. Leather-bound, the spines cracked from handling.
The first one is dated 1998. Inside, photographs of a restoration in progress. Oil on canvas, sixteenth century, a Caravaggio. The handwriting in the margins is steady, assured, better than mine. Different signature at the bottom---initials only. P.M.
There's a sketch tucked into the back, half-finished. The same hand.
Charcoal. Remarkable.
I move to the worktable and find it: initials scratched into the wooden surface near the sink. P.M. The letters are deep, deliberate. Angry, maybe.
Or desperate. The kind of thing you carve into something when you need to leave a mark that says you were here.
The filing cabinet is closed before Yuri finds me standing in front of it.
Before I have time to process what I've found: proof of a predecessor.
Someone who had this studio, this light, this man's attention. Someone who understood paint the way I understand it. Someone who is gone.
* * *
\The note appears on my desk that evening.
Same cream stock. Same angular handwriting. Dinner. Eight o'clock. Dress appropriately.
I stare at it. Dress appropriately. The man who took my phone and locked me in a glass room and washed my hands like I was five years old wants me to put on nice clothes and eat dinner with him.
I open the wardrobe. The clothes are the same---black, white, grey, the palette of a life with the colour removed. But at the back, behind the cashmere, I find something new. A shirt. Dark green silk, so fine the fabric pools in my hand like liquid. No tag. No label. Cut to my measurements.
He chose green. The colour of my eyes.
I put it on. I leave it untucked. I roll the sleeves to my elbows.
I do not wear the trousers that are clearly meant to go with it---I wear the black jeans, the ones with pigment ground into the knees.
I do not wear shoes. He still hasn't given me any, which means he either forgot or he enjoys the reminder that I can't run.
Bare feet on heated concrete. A silk shirt worth more than my monthly rent. Paint in my hair because I didn't wash it.