Private Viewing (City Hearts #1)

Chapter 1

Wet Paint

The crate weighed more than Charlie did, and it wanted him to know it.

He got it up the last inch onto the dolly, felt the whole stack shudder, and did the small private prayer of every guy who'd ever moved art for cash: please don't be a Rothko, please don't be a Rothko.

Reggie had said it was "a Reinhardt or something.

" Reggie said a lot of things. Reggie had also said the job was two hours, and here they were at hour four, Charlie's shirt glued to his back and turpentine still under his nails from his own morning that no amount of gallery air was going to lift out.

Not that this place had air. This place had, like, curated oxygen.

He'd been in a lot of Chelsea galleries by now — you couldn't handle art for a living in this city without learning the block by its loading docks — but Marchand made the others look like they weren't trying.

Everything white. Not builder white. The other kind, the kind that cost money to keep looking like nothing.

The concrete floor was polished to a shine you could do your hair in, and the light came down from little black fixtures on tracks, each one angled with a precision that made Charlie's chest itch, because he knew — he knew — somebody had stood there with a ladder and moved each one a quarter inch until it was right.

He respected that, honestly. He also wanted to knock one of them askew just to see what happened.

"Where's this one going?" he called.

"Wall's fine." A woman in a gray sweater and glasses that probably cost more than his rent didn't look up from her tablet.

Naomi, the other guy had called her. She had the specific calm of a person who had watched a thousand sweaty men carry things through her space and trusted exactly none of them.

"By the desk. Do not lean it. Stand it."

"Standing it," Charlie said. "Full respect for gravity, always."

She glanced up then, just for a second, like she was recalculating him.

He gave her the grin that had gotten him out of two speeding tickets and into one gallery show that fell through, and she went back to her tablet unmoved.

Fair. He set the crate down slow, both hands, felt it kiss the wall without so much as a tap.

See? Professional.

His own painting was leaning by the front door where he'd stashed it, wrapped in brown paper and a truly heroic amount of tape, because after this he had a thing — a maybe-thing, a probably-nothing, a guy who knew a guy who ran a group show in Bushwick and had said, over text, bring it by, no promises.

Charlie had promised himself he wouldn't get his hopes up and had immediately gotten his hopes up.

The paint was barely dry. He'd finished it at 6 a.m. He'd wrapped it at 6:40 and the whole way over on the train he'd smelled linseed under the paper like it was following him.

He was thinking about that painting, and about whether the blue in the corner had gone too green, and about the fact that he hadn't eaten since a bodega bacon-egg-and-cheese at dawn — he was thinking about all of it and none of the crate still on the dolly, which was the entire problem, when the front door opened and the man walked in.

Charlie clocked him the way he clocked everything, in color first. Black.

Not aggressive black, not I'm-a-genius black — just a soft dark sweater and dark trousers and a coat over one arm, all of it that same quiet no-color that told you nothing and everything.

Dark hair going a little gray at the sides.

A face that was doing you the courtesy of not smiling until it decided you were worth it.

He was carrying a small white paper bag, folded neat at the top, and a takeaway cup, and the smell hit Charlie a half-second later — actual coffee, dark and bitter and good, and under it, butter.

Warm butter. Something with layers. It cut clean through all that expensive nothing-air, and Charlie's stomach made an ugly sound, and the man's eyes came to him.

"You're new," the man said. French. Not a lot of it, just a curl on the edges of the words, enough to make you're new sound like a diagnosis.

"Filling in," Charlie said. "The regular guy threw his back out. Deadlifting, allegedly. I have doubts."

The man set the bag down on the corner of the desk. Naomi said something to him in a low voice, and he answered without looking away from Charlie, and that was the moment Charlie should have been paying attention to the dolly.

Because here is what happened, in the order it happened:

The dolly, off-balance since he'd set the last crate down, chose that second to roll.

Not far. Six inches. But six inches was enough for the top crate to lean, and the lean was enough for Charlie's whole body to go from tired to no in the space of a heartbeat, and he lunged — he got both hands on the crate, saved it, saved the maybe-Reinhardt, felt the good clean animal satisfaction of a catch —

— and his hip caught his own painting where it leaned by the door.

He watched it go. That was the worst part.

There's a kind of slow you only get when something's already too late to stop, and Charlie got the full version: the wrapped canvas tipping off the wall, hitting the polished concrete flat on one corner, the tape giving with a sound like a zipper, the brown paper tearing back, and the painting sliding — sliding, face-down, three feet across that mirror floor, leaving a smear behind it like a snail from hell.

Wet paint. Still wet, in the corner, the too-green blue.

It came to rest against a pair of very clean, very dark shoes.

Silence. Real silence, the curated kind.

"Oh," Charlie said. "Oh, no. No no no."

He was on his knees before he'd decided to be, reaching, and then not reaching, because you don't grab a wet painting, that's how you turn one disaster into two, and there was a blue-green streak up the side of the man's left shoe, a good four inches of it, catching the track light like it was proud of itself.

"I'll pay for those," Charlie heard himself say. "I don't — okay, I can't pay for those, look at them, but I'll — I know a guy, I'll figure it out, I'm so sorry—"

He looked up.

The man wasn't looking at his shoe. He wasn't looking at Charlie. He was looking at the painting.

It had flipped as it slid, ended up half face-up, the torn paper peeled back off most of it, and it lay there on the floor of Marchand Gallery in a way Charlie would have paid actual money to prevent — his painting, his 6 a.m. painting, the one with the blue that had gone too green, faceup on the concrete under those perfect little lights.

And the man had gone completely still.

Charlie knew still. He'd grown up around people who went still — his abuela in front of a novena, his mother over a bill she was pretending not to read.

This was a different still. This was the still of someone who'd been walking through his own life on autopilot and had just walked into a wall.

The man's face, which had been so busy not committing to anything, had stopped performing entirely, and for one second — one — it was just open.

Naked, almost. Like Charlie had caught him coming out of the shower.

Then it was gone, folded back up, and the man crouched. Slowly. In those trousers, on that filthy smear, which — okay, that told Charlie something too, that he'd crouch.

"Don't touch it," Charlie said, panicked. "It's wet, you'll—"

"I know it's wet." Quiet. Not looking up.

"I can see that it's wet." He had his hands clasped between his knees, elbows on his thighs, and he was looking at the painting the way Charlie looked at other people's paintings maybe twice a year, if he was lucky, if the show was good.

Reading it. Actually reading it. His eyes moved across it in a line and stopped, in the corner, on the blue.

"That green in the blue," the man said. It wasn't a question. "You did that on purpose."

Charlie's whole body did something stupid and warm. He ignored it.

"I mean, I—" He stopped. Started over, because no promises had trained the hope out of him and here it was crawling back. "Yeah. I did. Everyone tells me it reads wrong. Reads dirty."

"It reads like water that has a bottom," the man said. "Water you would not put your hand in." He tilted his head. "It's not pretty. You didn't try to make it pretty."

"No," Charlie said. His voice came out weird.

The man stood. Charlie stood with him, too fast, and they were close now, closer than the gallery's curated oxygen probably allowed, and the coffee-and-butter smell was all mixed up with the turpentine coming off Charlie's own hands, and somewhere behind them Naomi said, gently, like she was defusing something, "Laurent. "

Laurent. Charlie filed it. He was bad at names and good at faces and this was going to be an exception.

"Whose is it," Laurent said. To Naomi, not to Charlie. Like Charlie was a piece of the furniture that had happened to be standing next to it. "Is it something of ours? Did it come in with the Halvorsen shipment?"

"It didn't come in with anything," Naomi said. "It came in with him." A pause. "The mover."

Laurent looked at Charlie. Really looked, this time — took him in from the sweat-stuck shirt to the ruined knees of his jeans to the paint, everywhere, always the paint.

And Charlie watched the man do the math and get an answer he didn't like, because that's what everyone did, every gatekeeper, every guy who knew a guy: they looked at Charlie in his work clothes with his loud face and his bodega breakfast and they decided what he was before he'd opened his mouth about it.

"You carry other people's paintings," Laurent said slowly, "and you also carry this one. Around. To your job."

"Had a thing after," Charlie said. "Was gonna show it to somebody. Now I'm gonna show it to a mop."

"Who's the artist?"