Chapter 12 #2
Nobody asked him to do that. Nobody was paying him. He would lose, and quickly, and he knew it, and some part of him had weighed that on the way out the door and come out here regardless.
The species does this. I have never gotten used to it.
He waited for me to answer. I didn't. The waiting went on long enough that it started to cost him, and he shifted his weight, and I watched a man reach the end of his courage with nowhere good to put himself.
"Your bathroom window doesn't close," I said. "The sash is painted up. Two-inch gap over the alley, fire escape under it."
He blinked. "That's been like that since my mother—"
"Razor blade. Score the paint at the seam, both sides, then work the sash. Twenty minutes."
He looked at me a moment longer. Then he took the out.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, all right." And he went inside with his mail.
The gate told me nothing I hadn't read at one in the morning.
I stood there anyway, in the afternoon, with nothing to do and my hand near the metal, and something turned over in me that I did not like.
For two weeks I have carried the shape of this: I noticed her.
I answered her. I stayed. Everything reaching for her reaches through a door I opened, and there is a version of this where I close it by leaving, and I have taken that version out and turned it over every night since my brother put it in my hands.
Standing at her gate, I held it up against the panel.
It did not cover.
Nothing I did put that scene in this basement.
That panel was bought and moved and paid for and kept dark before her grandmother was born, and it arrived in the same week I happened to be standing on a corner on Fifth Avenue when a woman I had never seen threw her whole self open over four lanes of traffic.
You brought the painting. I follow the painting. I said that to her through four inches of chain, and I have been assuming ever since that it was the lie.
I have been alive a long time. I know what a coincidence is. I know how many of them a thing can survive before it stops being one.
I did not take the thought any further than that. I did not want to.
Across the avenue, on the elevated platform, my brother was standing among the Saturday crowd, not taking the train.
Gray coat — the one he wears when he wants to be seen by no one but me. Hands behind his back. Watching her house. I didn't cross to him. He didn't come down. We looked at each other across the traffic, and then he did something I have never once seen him do.
He took out a small black notebook. Wrote in it. Put it away.
Camael does not take notes. Camael is what notes are taken into.
Then a train came in, and the crowd broke and re-formed around it, and when it pulled out he was gone.
I stood at the fence a while longer.
Three nights ago on that parapet, when he let a thing pass without answering it, I knew exactly what the silence was. The silence of a man choosing not to write something down.
He wasn't choosing anymore.
And he made sure I was looking when he stopped.
"I want to see the provenance file," I said.
She was at the loupe, easing tissue over a wept eye. "The chain of custody? Why?"
"I want to know where it's been."
"You said that already. Two weeks ago. Different words, same nothing." She didn't look up. "Envelope on the shelf. Don't bend anything. And if you find a page that explains why a first-rate hand painted an angel on his knees and then somebody buried him under a nicer one, flag it for me."
I read for two hours at the end of the workbench.
She was eleven feet away, and last night there had been no distance at all, and whatever had opened at four in the morning had not closed — she kept arriving in my chest uninvited.
Warmth. Attention. Once, without warning, a wave of heat that had nothing to do with the room.
She never looked up. I read the same paragraph four times.
Then I stopped reading it for a different reason.
"This panel's been sold four times in the last century," I said. "Every time, it went to a warehouse. Not a wall."
"Collectors do that. Tax reasons, mostly. Boring reasons."
"Insured. Appraised. Climate-controlled. Never once exhibited. Never unwrapped." I set the folder down. "Nobody spends that kind of money to look at a thing in the dark."
Now she looked up. "So what were they doing?"
"Keeping it moving. So no single name was ever holding it when somebody finally came asking."
I have watched institutions work. Not read about it — watched it, in the century it happened, and then again in the next one.
They do not act quickly and they do not act cleanly.
They wait. They buy the thing and put it in a room and pay the storage fee for eighty years, and the men who signed the first invoice are bones before the men who sign the last one, and the thing stays dark the whole time because that was the assignment, and the assignment outlived everyone assigned to it.
I know that shape. I have seen it done to books.