6. Tasha
TASHA
The gallery workroom held a hush I'd stopped trying to describe to people outside this line of work.
It wasn't silence exactly, since silence was empty, and this was full, dense with things that cost more than my apartment, humming under its own weight the way a held breath hums. I'd worked in a dozen rooms like it over the years, but the Sorokin collection had a way of making the hush feel personal, like the paintings were waiting to see what I'd find.
I had my cotton gloves on, the good pair, thin enough that I could still feel the grain of old canvas through them, and a legal pad going soft at the edges from how many times I'd flipped it open and shut.
I'd catalogued fifteen pieces. Twenty-five to go before the gala, a little over a month left, and no room to get precious about my process.
I liked precious. Precious kept things from getting broken.
But precious took time, and time was the one material I couldn't invoice for more of.
I was on a seventeenth-century portrait, a woman in a dark green dress with her hand resting on a table like she owned it, which she probably had, in whatever room she'd been painted in three hundred years ago.
The craquelure across her bodice ran in a pattern I liked, fine and even, nothing that screamed later restoration or a bad relining job.
I leaned in close enough that my breath fogged, just slightly, on the varnish.
"You'd tell me if you were stolen, right?" I said. "Because I'd rather know now than find out at the gala with three hundred people watching me sweat."
The portrait, obviously, said nothing. I hadn't expected her to. I straightened up and made a note about the craquelure pattern and was reaching for my phone to snap a reference photo when I registered, a half second too late, that I was not alone in the room.
Sasha stood just inside the doorway. He had a way of entering a space that didn't announce itself, no creak of the floor, no shift in the light, just suddenly there, like he'd been assembled out of the shadows near the door frame.
He wore a dark sweater and an expression that gave away exactly as much as he wanted it to, which was not much.
"Am I interrupting?" he said.
"Only a one-sided conversation," I said. "I lose those a lot."
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the idea of one passing through on its way somewhere else.
He walked further into the room, hands loose at his sides, and looked at the portrait over my shoulder without touching anything, which I appreciated more than I could say out loud without sounding like I was grading him.
"How is it going," he said, though it wasn't really a question, more a formality he was performing on his way to something else.
"Fifteen down. I've got the portrait, a pair of landscapes, three still lifes with actual paperwork behind them, which is basically Christmas around here." I gestured at the legal pad. "I'll have a full progress report by end of week if you want it in writing."
"I trust your process." He said it simply, like a fact rather than a compliment, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd dressed it up. "That's not why I'm here."
I waited. Sasha didn't rush toward things. I'd learned that much in the few days I'd been coming in and out of this house, past Grisha at the gate, past Pavel at whatever door needed watching that day. Sasha arrived at a point the way water finds a drain, slow and then suddenly there.
"Grisha will be in and out of this wing more, over the next few weeks," he said.
"Cameras, the east wall, general presence.
I want you to know that whatever he asks of you, in terms of access or timing or where you are in the house, it's not him being difficult.
It's him doing his job. And his job is this family's whole life, has been for twenty years.
" He paused, weighing the words before he let them out. "I don't explain that to people twice."
"Understood," I said, and meant it, though a small stubborn part of me wanted to point out that nobody had accused Grisha of being difficult.
Then again, maybe that was exactly the kind of thing Sasha preempted before it became a problem.
He was head of security and head of the house both, and everybody got vetted eventually, even the woman cataloguing his paintings.
"Good," he said, and that seemed to be the whole visit. He glanced once more at the portrait, an unreadable half second, and said, "My grandmother had a dress like that. Not this one. Similar green." Then he was moving toward the door again, unhurried, already elsewhere in his head.
"Sasha," I said, before I could think better of it.
He stopped, turned half back.
"The hunting scene, and the river landscape," I said. "I flagged them my first day here, provenance gap. Any chance there's paperwork somewhere I haven't seen? Old insurance files, a storage log, anything?"
Something crossed his face, there and gone so fast I couldn't have sworn to it in a deposition. "If there's anything, Grisha would know before I would," he said. "He's been here longer than the paintings have."
Then he was gone, and the room exhaled around me, or maybe I did.
I glanced toward the door, where Pavel had set himself up in his usual chair with a tablet balanced on one knee, scrolling through what I assumed was camera footage, his face lit faintly blue from the screen.
He hadn't looked up once during the whole exchange, which either meant he hadn't been listening, or that he'd heard every word and had better manners than to show it.
"He doesn't talk much," I said, nodding toward the hallway where Sasha had disappeared, though we both knew I meant Grisha.
Pavel didn't look up. "He talks plenty." A beat passed, his thumb still moving over the screen. "You just have to earn it."
"Is there a test? Because I feel like I'd study for that."
"No test." Pavel finally glanced up, something dry and amused in his face. "Just time. And not asking him about it, which you're already failing."
"Fair," I said, and went back to my portrait, properly chastened by a man who hadn't even looked up to do it.
I worked for another hour without much conversation, which suited me fine, because the portrait needed careful handling and my brain needed quiet to do the kind of pattern matching that made me good at this job in the first place.
I measured, I photographed, I ran my gloved fingertip along the edge of the stretcher bars to check for warping.
I made notes about brushwork, about a repair along the lower left corner that had been done competently but not by anyone documenting their work for posterity.
Somewhere in there I caught myself murmuring to the portrait again, something about how her painter clearly liked her more than the commission required, and I only realized I'd said it out loud when Pavel made a small sound that might have been a laugh disguised as a cough.
"You talk to it a lot," he said, not unkind, just an observation, filed away the way he probably filed everything, quietly and for later.
"Occupational hazard." I set down my loupe and rubbed at the bridge of my nose.
"My grandfather used to take me into museum storage when I was a kid.
Basements mostly, big cold rooms full of things nobody was looking at.
I was maybe seven the first time. I got scared of how quiet it was, all those faces just sitting there in the dark, so I started talking to them instead.
Told them about my day. Asked them questions.
My grandfather never told me to stop, so I never did.
" I shrugged, embarrassed in the low-grade way that came from admitting something true and a little strange to someone who hadn't asked for the whole story.
"Now it's just what I do when I'm nervous.
Keeps my hands from shaking when I'm holding something worth more than my building. "
Pavel considered that with the same unhurried attention he seemed to give everything. "Better than talking to yourself," he said.
"I contain multitudes. Sometimes that includes a three-hundred-year-old Dutchwoman."
"She talk back?"
"Not yet. I live in hope."
Something close to a real smile crossed his face, quick and gone, and he went back to his tablet.
I turned back to my legal pad and was in the middle of transcribing a measurement when my phone buzzed against the worktable, loud enough in the hush of the room that I startled a little and had to steady the loupe before it rolled.
Sergei. He was my junior researcher, six years younger than me and roughly forty percent more competent with archival databases than I would ever be, currently three thousand miles away in whatever apartment he worked out of, living a life I mostly knew through the shorthand of text messages and the occasional shared screen call.
Frankie and I had hired him eighteen months ago to help chase down provenance trails we didn't have the hours to run ourselves, and he'd turned out to be quietly, almost eerily good at it.
Hey, when you get a sec, could you send high res shots of a couple pieces for the insurance file? The river landscape and the hunting scene with the dogs specifically. Whoever's compiling the file flagged them as missing current images.
I looked up at the two paintings in question, hanging where they always hung, the river landscape with its quiet greens and the hidden mark I hadn't told anyone about, the hunting scene with its pack of hounds frozen mid-stride around a stag that had been running from them for three hundred years.
Both of them were already sitting in my notes under the same flagged heading, provenance gap, both dead-ending in the same decade.
Sure, give me a few minutes, I typed back, and set my phone down, and went and got the good camera out of my case because insurance documentation deserved better than a phone photo, whatever the excuse for asking.
It took me twenty minutes to get the light right, angle the tripod so I wasn't catching glare off the varnish, shoot each piece straight on and then at a slight angle to show texture.
Pavel watched with mild interest from his chair, not enough to comment, just enough that I felt the faint prickle of being observed while I worked, which I was getting used to in this house.
I sent the files off in a batch, four images of the river landscape, three of the hunting scene, with a note that said hope this helps, let me know if you need detail shots of anything specific.
Sergei's reply came fast, faster than usual, a thumbs up and a thanks, this is great.
I was about to set the phone down again when something made me scroll back instead, thumb dragging up through our message thread, past today, past the last few days, looking for nothing in particular except maybe the small satisfaction of watching a conversation build.
And there it was. A couple of days ago, he'd asked if I had any updated condition reports for the two landscape pieces near the east gallery wall, the question phrased casually and folded into a longer list of other requests.
Before that, the very first day I walked this gallery, he'd come at it from a different angle entirely, asking whether the museum comparables I'd sent included anything on the river scene specifically, since he wanted to double check a stylistic attribution.
And now today, he wanted insurance documentation, high resolution, those same two pieces named outright.
Three times in three days. Three different reasons. Same two paintings, every time.
The thought sat there a second, my thumb still hovering over the screen, the workroom's expensive hush settling back in now that I'd stopped moving long enough to notice it.
It was probably nothing. Insurance files were tedious, and condition reports got requested twice because somebody on our end lost track of what had already been sent, and stylistic attributions took multiple passes because Sergei was thorough almost to a fault, that was half of why we'd hired him.
There were a dozen boring explanations and I could think of all of them without trying very hard.
I put the phone face down on the worktable, picked my loupe back up, and turned my attention back to the portrait in the green dress, who watched me with the same patient, unbothered expression she'd worn for three centuries, giving nothing away.