September, 2015
Amsterdam, Holland
Zari
Zari met John Drake the next morning for coffee at a small café overlooking a canal. Through the plate glass window, she saw cyclists wheeling across a bridge. Sunlight glinted off houseboats docked along the canal. Some were freshly painted architectural gems, while others looked as if they only stayed afloat due to a combination of glue, tar, and luck.
Across the table from her, John stirred his latte. He was dressed in black jeans and a button-down black shirt, a nod to his standard work uniform. His footwear was scaled down as well—the fancy brogues he’d sported during his presentation had been swapped out for high-topped Doc Martens.
Not for the first time, she wondered what his personal life was like. He never mentioned a partner, and she had absolutely no sense of his sexual orientation. The first time she’d seen him in a suit she had assumed he was gay, but that was because most of the straight American men she knew were incapable of putting together a sophisticated outfit. Things were different in Europe, she had soon learned.
His short-cropped black hair did nothing to soften the rough features of his face, and his skin was darker than it had been when she had met him a year ago, hunched over potions and gadgets in his workshop. That was because he’d spent most of his weekends over the summer surfing, it turned out. John surfed regularly in the frigid Atlantic off the west coast of England, and most of his travel revolved around the search for the perfect wave.
“Why aren’t you staying at the conference hotel?” John asked.
“I’m staying with—a friend.” Zari realized she didn’t know what to call Wil. Long-distance lover? Boyfriend? Partner? She would have to pick a moniker and stick with it. “So how was your summer of surfing?”
“I got to know the Cornish coast quite well,” he said. “I’m looking forward to branching out a bit. I’ll be heading to France in the spring.”
“Where?” Zari gave her own latte a stir.
“St. Jean de Luz. It’s only an hour or so from where you’ll be.”
“Have you surfed there before?”
“A few times. There’s a great community of surfers in the area. It has a strong Basque culture and a more relaxed outlook than you find in other parts of France.” He put down his spoon and glanced at her. “So what did Dotie have to say to you at the reception? I saw you two chatting.”
“I don’t think chatting is the right description for that encounter. He talked about my hair and spent a little too much time examining my...outfit. Things devolved from there.”
John shook his head. “Dotie does have a bit of a reputation, I’m afraid.”
“So I’ve heard. I got prickly because he laughed at my inexperience. The thing is, he’s right—I am inexperienced. I don’t have dozens of well-connected colleagues on my side. I don’t have an arsenal of experts backing my theory that Mira painted those portraits. What’s the value of experts anyway, when technology and science keep proving them wrong?”
John took a sip of his latte. “Technology and science have taken the experts down a peg or two, but they still carry a lot of weight. Get a few of them on your side and Mira will rise from obscurity. Right now, she’s a lovely idea based on a few scraps of evidence. You need to prove she’s a maker of history. Try birth and death notices, church records. You’d be surprised how far back some of these things go. A lot of them are digitized these days.”
“I know, and Laurence has offered to smooth the way with all of that.”
Laurence Ceravet, who owned the portrait of the merchant family, was a curator at the art museum of the university in Pau, where Zari would be spending the next several months.
“Bureaucracy can be mind-numbing in France,” John said.
“She’s cutting through all that red tape for me. We’ve already got appointments lined up in Bayonne at the municipal archives to see the records on Arnaud de Luz, thanks to her. Whatever we dig up, I’ve committed to presenting it all at a conference on Renaissance-era portraiture in Bordeaux next spring. Can I count on you to share your findings from the Fontbroke portrait analysis for my paper?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you all the documents as soon as I get back to Oxford.”
Zari stared into her latte. Suddenly the thought of drinking it made her nauseous. Or maybe it was just the anxiety gnawing at her belly. “I wish I had your knowledge,” she said wistfully, looking up again. “I worry that I’ll find evidence that I can’t even see because I don’t know what to look for. Have you ever considered writing a blueprint for solving art mysteries?”
John smiled. “Tell you what. I’ll make time for dinner in my busy surfing schedule when I come to St. Jean de Luz if you can tear yourself away from your research. You can share your findings and pick my brain. Wait—you surf, don’t you? Why not join me in the water as well?”
She cradled her cup in her hands. “I’m warning you, my surfing skills are pretty rusty.”
“Do you mind wearing a wetsuit?”
“Not as much as I mind hypothermia.”
He laughed. There was a warmth in his eyes that Zari hadn’t seen before, and his smile was broad and unguarded. John’s cool reserve rarely slipped away, but this smile? It was evidence. He liked her.
And she desperately needed an ally like him in the art world.