Once I scrape my heart off the roof of my mouth, I whisper, “What? Why?”
I get a you dummy look. “This is his work. Do you want to see him?”
Not now. I’ll have to face him eventually. I can’t explain why to Gianna, not yet, but I can appeal to her greed. “You give me to him, he gets the commissions, not you. I don’t want that.”
Gianna makes a gack sound and glares at me. She glances to the door, then to me, then back to the door. Do the right thing, girl, I keep thinking, hoping it’ll get through. You want me to owe you. Just do it before he comes in…
Gianna clamps on my elbow and yanks. “Come!” she growls. She thumbs in the combination, hauls open the door, and drags me into the storeroom.
Quick impressions: a workbench and framing table to my right, framed art storage to my left, concrete slab, strip lights, small, frosted, wire-reinforced clerestories, everything very clean. Gianna leads me to a door on the other side of the workbench, flings it open and shoves me inside. “Say nothing,” she stage-whispers. “Stay here. I come back when he is gone.”
“Gianna—”
“Say nothing! Quiet!”
Her face was half-peeved in the viewing room, but that’s turning to fear now. Her eyes are bigger than ever. She shuts the door. Her footsteps end with the click of the viewing-room door closing.
When my eyes adjust, the under-door stripe of filtered daylight looks like neon. The people across the street can hear my heart thumping. I try to slow my breathing. I’ve almost got it down when I do something stupid—I put my work phone into flashlight mode.
I’m in a closet, facing the door. There’s a telephone punch block and a stack of boxes to my right. Meter-wide rolls of unbleached muslin, kraft paper, shrink wrap and bubble wrap hang from pipe racks behind me. The whole place is maybe eight by four, unfinished drywall all around. It’s smaller than my hobbit hole at PEN. Too. Damn. Small.
Dark is better. The walls can’t close in if I can’t see them. The problem is, I can still see them in my head, and it’s like the trash compactor in Star Wars. I swear I can hear them grinding closer. There’s no room to pace—the way I burn off my nervous energy—and I run into something every time I move. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to think of calming things. Beer, kittens, beaches, art, Allyson. Shit no, not Allyson. Chloe. Yeah. I imagine her hugging my arm, whispering, “It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay.” She’s so great. Why isn’t she straight?
The lights buzz on outside. Gianna?
Footsteps. Solid, heavy, not the click-click of Gianna’s pumps. Belknap. Coming closer.
All my effort getting calm is down the toilet. My heart claws up my throat again.
The footsteps slide to a stop. A drawer rumbles open, things clink, then it closes. The footsteps get really loud. If Belknap needs bubble wrap, I’m fucked.
His steps echo off all the concrete and cinder block.
They’re fading. He’s going away.
I lock my knees to keep my legs from making like overcooked spaghetti. I sag against the wall, brace my hands on my thighs, and concentrate on one deep breath after another.
The footsteps stop.
The lights are on, so he’s still out there. Now that I can almost breathe again, I wonder what he’s doing. Getting a painting? Why not have Gianna fetch it? That’s what she’s for.
I need to see this. I manage to scrunch up on my side without bashing into anything, then press my ear against the slab, close one eye and squint through the inch-or-so gap under the door.
Belknap’s lower legs stand facing a white metal-mesh panel that he’s pulled from the rack at the far end of the room. The legs shuffle side-to-side. Then his hand leans something against the end of the next panel: a medium-sized canvas… wrapped in muslin. When he rattles his panel back into the rack, I see the bottom edge of another canvas covered with taupe fabric.
They’re hung wrapped? I’ve seen that only once before, in a really sketchy joint in London. This place is cleaner than my Starbucks.
Maybe he doesn’t want anybody to see the art. Aha.
Belknap hefts the canvas, then crosses to the rank of black portfolio cases leaning against the opposite wall. The painting slides into the second one he tries. Then he strides toward the door in the far wall, sidesteps through, clacks off the lights, and pulls the door closed.
Quiet. I hoist myself off the floor and shake out my legs. I’ve been trying to be here since Saturday—the storage room, not the closet—and this is my best shot at checking it out without adult supervision. But there’s nowhere to hide out there.
If Belknap comes back, it’s over.
If I don’t go now, I may never get another chance.
Carson would say, “Fuck yeah, let’s roll.” That’s how we ended up in that warehouse last night. Maybe Carson’s not the best role model.
My phone shows two bars. I turn off the ringtone and bring up StolenArt.net, the project that’s burning off my 2500 hours of community service. At the same time, I listen for an opening door or footsteps. After a couple quiet minutes, I say to hell with it and ease open the door. Compared to the closet, it’s noontime-in-the-desert bright in the storeroom. I blink fast until I can see without squinting.
The room’s maybe twenty-five feet long by fifteen wide. The wall to my left (shared with the viewing room) has a jumble of stuff: black Gaylord storage boxes on metal shelves, tan-cardboard Airfloat shipping boxes, the portfolio cases, flyer-sized cartons, yadda yadda. The right wall’s what I’m interested in. It has two eight-foot-wide Montel ModulArt rack systems—white, square-tube framework cages holding eight vertical, sliding metal-mesh panels each. A great way to store a lot of pieces in a small area, but it’s not cheap.
As I prowl to the far end on the balls of my feet, I scope out the sliding panels. The first five hold unwrapped pieces, probably the gallery’s own stock. The sixth through fourteenth panels are empty (an expensive lot of spare capacity). Everything’s in muslin on the last two. Why? If it’s not the gallery’s, then who owns it, and why’s it here?
I carefully pull out the very last panel, the one Belknap lightened by one canvas. The hanging pieces clatter against the wire mesh way more than I like. I listen a moment for a reaction from outside. Nothing. Deep breath.
The wrapping on the mid-sized canvas at my knee level is pretty simple—down the back, up and over from the bottom, then a flap draped over the top. I pull the lower half down and find nymphs and satyrs grab-assing in a forest clearing. There’s an “AB” monogram in the lower right corner. I bring up “advanced search” on StolenArt, punch in “AB” in the “signature” field, and get Arnold Bocklin. A search on Bocklin’s name turns up nothing; the piece is legit as far as StolenArt’s databases are concerned. I shoot a picture just in case.
Rewrap, rinse, repeat. I work my way through both sides of the panel. Every creak, squeak or pop I hear sends my heart screaming around my chest. When some guy-footsteps tromp by the door, I freeze in mid-reach, like putting down my arms will set off alarms.
Nothing I check raises any red flags. It’s all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work, but it’s all over the place: religious subjects, still lifes, landscapes, portraits, every school and style from the period. This looks like buying for investment, not love.
Guy-footsteps clump down the hallway again and I make like one of those living-statue dudes. This time, the steps stop with a door slamming shut.
Did Belknap just leave?
If so, now I have to worry about Gianna coming in. She’ll probably wait a few minutes—I would—so I have time for maybe two more searches. I unwrap the next piece, a harbor scene with derelict sailing ships and an overcast sky, hit “search” for Eugene Boudin, and—
“What do you do?” Gianna shrieks behind me. “That is not for you!”
I almost jump through the canvas. Gianna bears down on me with a mix of horror and anger on her face. Even her footsteps’ echoes are mad. Shit. I didn’t hear her come in. And I’ve totally blown it. “Gianna, wait a minute—”
“I tell you to stay there!” She throws a finger toward the closet. “I tell you to wait! You risk yourself! You risk my work! That—” she aims the finger at me “—belongs to a client!”
My brain races to figure out that story I owe her… but then it stops. Something on my phone’s screen catches my eye. I put up a hand, palm out, and throw all the steel I can into my voice. “Gianna, stop.”
She almost leaves skid marks on the slab.
“He may own it, but it doesn’t belong to him.” I step forward and hold up my phone so she can see the screen and the FBI National Stolen Art File page for what the Bureau calls Harbor Scene. “It’s stolen.”