12. Tasha #2
"Unless it's the same K and a different first initial entirely.
We don't know that R.K. isn't K, the K, our K, just written a different way at a different point in his life.
" I said it and heard how thin it sounded even as the words left my mouth.
Konstantin's hand was Konstantin's hand.
We had two samples of it not ten pages apart, careful and slow both times, a man's handwriting doesn't change its whole personality between one entry and the next in the same ledger.
"You don't believe that."
"No," I admitted. "I don't."
We sat with it a moment, the ledger open between us, the two sets of initials sitting there in ink that had gone brown with age, unbothered by either of our theories.
I felt the same small, electric charge I always felt when a piece of paper told me something true that nobody had meant for me to find, except this time it came with an undertow I didn't love, a cold thread running under the excitement.
My grandfather's notebook said Confirmed with K.
It never said who else might have been standing in the room when that confirmation happened, or whose hand might have reached for the same page afterward to leave a mark of his own.
"Somebody else knew," I said slowly. "Somebody else was involved in moving these two paintings specifically, and whoever it was didn't sign their whole name, careful in exactly the way my grandfather always was."
"Which means somebody besides Konstantin wanted a record he could recognize later, without leaving enough for a stranger to trace.
" Grisha had gone quieter, that particular stillness he got when he was turning something over and liking the shape of it less by the second.
"That's not how you write something down if you trust the man across the table from you completely. "
"Or it's exactly how you write something down when you're covering for each other." I looked at him. "We don't know which."
"No," he said. "We don't."
Neither of us had an answer for the rest of the afternoon, though we kept working, both of us quieter than we'd been, the banter thinning out into something more careful, like the two extra letters had reached across a hundred years and put a hand flat on the table between us.
I copied R.K. into my own notes twice, checking the loops both times against the two ledger pages, and both times it came back the same.
Somewhere out there, whoever those initials belonged to had stood close enough to Konstantin Sorokin, or to my grandfather, or to both, to leave a private mark next to a private confirmation, and then had apparently vanished from every other page in the house.
I found Basso, or he found me, the next afternoon in the east gallery, and I only recognized the cologne a half second before I recognized the man attached to it.
I'd gone down alone to recheck a condition note on the Rurikov landscape, the same river piece with the mark hidden in its underbrush, standing close enough to the canvas that my breath could have fogged the glass if it had glass, which it didn't, just old varnish and a frame that had probably seen three centuries between them.
The gallery was quiet at that hour, most of the staff occupied elsewhere, and I liked it that way, liked having the paintings to myself without a docent's patter or a donor's questions running underneath my own thoughts.
"There she is." The voice arrived before I'd fully registered footsteps, smooth and pleased with itself, and I turned to find a man in a suit the color of wet slate closing the last few feet between us at a pace that read as friendly and somehow wasn't. "You must be the famous consultant. Tasha, is it? Tasha Volkov."
"That's me." I didn't offer my hand, and he took it anyway, both of his closing around mine a beat longer than the handshake required, warm and dry and entirely too confident.
Up close the cologne hit harder than I expected, something citrus and expensive that filled the space between us before he'd finished letting go of my hand, and he'd closed that space down further than a stranger usually did, close enough that I had to resist the urge to step back and lose ground to a painting I didn't want to lose ground on.
"Anton Basso." He said his own name like it should mean something to me, and honestly, it did, vaguely, from a donor list I'd skimmed my first few days on the job and half a comment Grisha had made once about a man worth watching, though he hadn't said much more than that.
"I've heard wonderful things. Sasha tells me you've been working miracles with this collection. Miracles, Tasha. His word, not mine."
"I've mostly been doing paperwork," I said. "Miracles would take less coffee."
He laughed, too loud for the room the way I imagined he laughed at most things, and let his gaze drift past me to the canvas at my back, and I watched something in his face shift the way a man's face shifts when a conversation he'd started for one reason quietly becomes about something else.
He tilted his head at the painting, the same angle a person uses to check a signature rather than admire a view, and I remembered, too late to be useful, that Grisha wasn't anywhere near this wing today.
"Beautiful piece," Basso said, not looking at me anymore. "I've had my eye on it since the first time Grigori walked me through this gallery. Rurikov, isn't it? The light on that water is something else."
"It's one of the collection's stronger pieces," I said, careful, cataloguer's voice, the one I used on people I hadn't decided about yet. "Not officially part of the gala lineup, but it's drawn a lot of attention."
"I imagine it has." He stepped a half pace closer to the canvas, and by extension a half pace closer to me, near enough that the cologne turned from a scent into something I had to breathe through instead of around.
He didn't look away from the painting when he spoke again, which somehow made the question land harder than if he'd looked me straight in the eye. "Is it for sale?"
I felt the question land somewhere just under my ribs, quick and cold, out of proportion to three plain words. "Everything has a price," I said lightly, because that was the easy answer, the one that kept a donor smiling and a conversation moving and gave nothing real away.
He turned to look at me then, and something in his smile sharpened at the edges, pleased, like I'd confirmed a thing he'd already decided was true.
"Not everything's for sale," I added, a beat later, and made sure my voice came out flatter than the first line had, no lightness left in it at all.
He held my gaze a moment longer than the exchange called for, still smiling, still standing too close, and behind him the river in the painting kept bending gray-green through its trees, holding its small hidden mark exactly where it had always been, patient and quiet and apparently worth a great deal more to this man than a landscape had any business being worth.
I had spent the night before telling my own reflection to be careful, half joking, about falling for the wrong kind of danger.
Standing there with his cologne thick in my throat and his eyes still moving between me and the canvas like he was weighing which one to press harder, I understood that the danger I'd been joking about in a badly lit mirror had just stopped being a shape I could name in the abstract.
It had a face now, and it was smiling at me.