6. Maxim
MAXIM
Ihad spent three days inside the Ricci money, and the money did not want to be understood.
On paper it was clean. A thing that clean is its own kind of dirty.
Nobody launders real money through banks anymore, not the kind that would earn him a cell with a view.
He launders it through things that have no honest price: a vineyard, a racehorse, a building no one will ever rent.
Best of all a painting, because a painting is worth exactly what two liars agree it is worth, and the Riccis had agreed with a great many liars.
The pattern never changed. A canvas was bought quietly for forty thousand.
The same canvas was sold eight months later, through a different gallery and a different name, for one and a half million.
The gap was not profit. The gap was a wash, dirty money walking in one door and strolling out the other in a clean coat, with a receipt and a provenance and a tax form to swear it had always been respectable.
All of that I understood by the first night.
It was the next discovery that kept me at the desk past any sensible hour, the one that refused to fit.
The numbers did not close. After every wash and every inflated sale, the totals still came up short, month after month, by sums too large to be theft and too steady to be error.
Somewhere in the Ricci machine, money was being scrubbed that had never existed at all.
You can't wash a number that was never there, and yet someone was trying, patiently, for years.
I had not gone down to see her once since it began. I told myself the money needed me more than she did, which was true, and which was also the kind of true a man uses to keep from looking at a different one. I didn't examine which. I rarely do, when the avoiding is working.
Arkady said it more plainly, which is why I keep him. “It's a hole,” he said, tapping the screen with a pen he never writes with. “Not a leak. A leak you can trace. This is a hole, the same size every month, and money keeps falling into it and never lands anywhere.”
“A skimmer,” Timur said.
“No skimmer is this neat.” Arkady didn't look up. “A skimmer gets greedy in a good month, sloppy in a bad one. This never moves. It isn't a man stealing from the books. It's a number someone put there to cover a thing that is already gone.”
“Covering what?” I asked.
He spread his hands. “That's your half of the work. I count the money. You decide whose throat it's living in.”
By then I had a list of galleries, pulled from two years of Ricci paper: Halsey, Voss, a place on Fifty-seventh that changed its name every time the lease did. I had walked the list a hundred times and learned nothing, because a name on a shell company tells you who signed, not who decided.
What I didn't have was a face. Then I remembered that I did. A woman three floors down had stood in those galleries for years and kept every face that passed through them. I had a green tie and a Windsor knot. I had a man who counted to himself before he left a room. I had her.
There was a worse answer, and Arkady was too careful to put it in the air, so I put it there for him.
“If the hole is on the Ricci side, it's a gift, and we let them sink.
If it's on ours,” I let the rest stand in the quiet, “then someone in this house has been washing Ricci paintings through Sorokin walls, and I have been signing his paychecks.”
I thought of the painting in the long hall, the one a sedated girl had called a fake in four seconds.
For three years it had hung across from a heating vent while every man who worked for me walked past and saw a masterpiece.
I had sent a photograph of it to someone in the city who knows, and he called back inside the hour, embarrassed on my behalf.
It was a copy, and a good one, a gift from a Ricci ally given a place of honor, admired by everyone who passed it and understood by none of them.
A forgery had decorated my own wall for years, and I had walked past it a thousand times and called it beautiful.
That was the crack the rest poured through.
I had been reading the money as a wash, clean cash hidden inside honest sales.
The fake in the hall said something worse.
If the paintings themselves were lies, then the value was a lie, and a lie has no floor.
You can sell a forgery to yourself through ten galleries and call it ten million dollars, and the ten million was never anywhere.
It was paint and nerve. That was the hole: not money stolen, but money invented, then spent, then owed to people who do not forgive being owed.
The Pakhan had called twice. The first time I told him I was close. The second time I told him the truth, which is a thing I ration even with him.
“It isn't a war,” I said. “Not the kind you win by killing the right man. The Riccis aren't fighting us for territory. They're drowning, and they've grabbed our ankle on the way down.”
“Then cut the hand off.”
“I don't know yet whose hand it is.” On his end the line went quiet, the silence of a man weighing whether patience is wisdom or weakness. “Give me a little longer,” I said. “She's worth more than the war is.”
“You are spending a great deal of yourself on a girl who knows nothing,” he said. “See that it is the work you are spending it on.” He hung up before I could lie to him about that.
To separate the real paintings from the false, to read the provenance lies, to walk the whole rotten gallery of it and say this one is honest and this one is not, I needed an eye. Not an accountant's eye. Arkady can prove a number is wrong. He can't tell me a brushstroke is.
I had known exactly one person in my life who could do that.
I do not think about Katya. It's the single discipline I have never had to practice, because the not-thinking built itself, the way scar tissue does, thick and dumb and protective. But the money had walked me to the edge of her, and I stood there longer than I should have.
Our mother died when I was twelve and my sister was six, and there was no one else, so I became the wall between Katya and the world our father lived in.
I was good at it. I was good at it for seventeen years.
She grew up bright and impossible and unafraid, because I had built a world in which fear never reached her, and somewhere in the middle of it she fell in love with paintings.
“You only love them because they hold still,” she told me once, in a museum I had taken her to because it was warm and free and far from the men our father knew.
“Everything in your life holds still, or you make it hold still. A painting was already doing it before you walked in.” She was nineteen, insufferable, and right.
She became what she loved: an appraiser, the one galleries called when they needed to know whether a thing was real.
She was twenty-three when a man put two bullets in her and dressed it up as a robbery, and I was across the city being useful to our father, and I had built her wall so high and so strong that it never once occurred to me to stand on the side of it where she actually lived.
For eight years I told myself the Riccis did it, because the belief gave me something to push against, and a man like me needs something to push against the way other men need God.
I never had the proof. I only had the timing.
She died two days after a job that brushed their name.
And now I was sitting inside the Ricci money with both hands, and the money ran on paintings, and the paintings ran on appraisers, and I understood, in the body, before the mind would agree to it, that I had finally walked into the room my sister died in.
I just didn't yet know who else had been standing in it.
Timur knocked once and came in without waiting, which he only does when he has decided I have been alone too long. “You've been in here since the lights came on.” He set a glass of water by my hand, not vodka, which was its own kind of message. “Whatever it is, it'll keep until you've slept.”
“It won't,” I said.
He looked at the screen, then at me, and something shifted in his face, because Timur has stood beside me for eleven years and he can read the two or three things I can't keep off it. “Maxim,” he said, carefully. “Is this still about the money?”
“Go home, Timur.”
He went. He's the only man I would never have to ask twice, and the only one I would let see that there had been something worth asking twice about.
I closed her away again. I have had eight years of practice. The grief has a door, the door has a lock, and I own the only key. I turned it and walked back into the cold clean room where the work lives, because the work is the one thing that has never once let me down.
And the work was holding a small, ugly joke for me.
I needed an eye that could tell a true Old Master from an expensive lie.
I had spent a fortune and a war looking for a way into the Ricci machine.
And the whole time, three floors down, behind a door only I could open, I had a Ricci who could read a forgery while half-conscious, who had grown up inside the very rooms where these paintings hung, who had watched all of it without ever being told it was evidence.
I had taken her for leverage. I had kept her because she was an instrument.
I had not, until that hour, understood that she might be the only way into the one machine I had never been able to crack.
I sat with that, because it was a clean, useful thought, and clean useful thoughts are where I live.
I didn't let myself sit with the one underneath it, the one that had been waiting since the corridor: that I wanted a reason to go back down those stairs, that the work had just handed me one, and that I was grateful to it in a way that had nothing to do with the work.
I didn't call for her. I didn't send Yasha to bring her up. This wanted my own eyes.
I went into the files Arkady had built and found the painting that sat at the center of the hole, the one sold and resold the most times for the most impossible money, a small Venetian scene, a lagoon under a pale sky, that had passed through four galleries and three names in two years.
I printed it, one photograph of one painting, and set it face up on the desk.
Then I started down toward her room, not to ask her what she knew.
People lie when you ask them what they know, and they are good at it, and she would be better than most. I went to watch her face.
There is a half-second between seeing a thing and deciding what to do about it, a window before the mask comes down, and inside that window a person tells you the truth whether they mean to or not.
I only needed her half-second. I have built my whole life on other people's half-seconds.
I put the photograph in my pocket and went down to see what her face would do before she could decide to lie.