Brent regards me for a moment, but he doesn’t seem to focus. “Excuse me, Marie,” he mutters, and charges off, past the truck, out the loading dock.
“Excuse you, Brando,” I mutter. I hope to God that Don takes my place at Bootleg. I am not in the mood to third-wheel with a caveman tonight. If I started driving right now, I could be in San Francisco by dark. Or Vegas. Or Baja. Or Death Valley. Wouldn’t there be a maudlin irony in that? Wouldn’t it be pleasing to see the starkness and bloom of a spring desert? Except that I actually hate driving by myself. I wonder if my brother John would fly out and man the wheel while I stare into the passing miles.
“What did you want with Brent?” Evie is back at my elbow, her voice barely audible above the rumble of the truck driving away.
“Oh, we’re supposed to go to some show tonight. With Yegina and Hiro and Yegina’s little brother.” I register the look on her face. “Want to come? It’s at Bootleg.”
“Bootleg,” she repeats, like it’s a foreign name. “No, thank you.”
“Good choice.”
She squints at me.
“The food’s so bad,” I tell her. Why I am having such a hard time communicating? Maybe because my insides are melting into the saddest lake in the world.
Evie shakes her head. “Would you care to see what I found?” she says.
“Sure.” I follow her into her office, noting that she manages to blowdry the back of her hair with the same meticulous care as the front. Blond strands curve toward her neck, touching the raised tendons. She sets her clipboard down carefully, releases three forms, and sticks them in a binder.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go with the Rothkos,” I say. “But Amsterdam sounds like more fun.”
She makes a small noise of assent.
There’s a movement behind me: Brent storming back to his office with some papers in his hand, slamming the door. Evie watches him rigidly. The table saw shrieks from the carpentry room.
“What’s in the air down here today?” I say.
Evie opens her binder again, fingers the forms to count them. One, two, three. Then she shuts it a second time. There’s a deliberateness to the gesture that reminds me of my days as a grocery cashier, when I watched overwhelmed mothers excavate their carts with slow, exact movements, ignoring the shrieks of their children.
How cold I sound. “I’m sorry. Everyone down here must be so freaked out about Kim Lord. Where do you guys think she is?”
Evie picks up a yellow legal pad, holds it loosely, as if testing its weight. “Most people think Shaw did something. But I believe you,” she says, then hands the legal pad to me. “Here is the provenance on every work I could find.”
I see the names of Kim’s artworks first, about fifty of them from her first two shows, all oil paintings, varying dimensions. All but a few are titled by the names of women: the prostitutes Candi, Tonya, and CiCi, and the film stars Barbara, Rita, Jane. Mentally I add the Still Lives list: Nicole, Elizabeth, Roseann.
And then I notice the collectors, not one of them with American or Anglo names except Janis Rocque, who owns one painting from Kim’s first show, and Nelson de Wilde, who owns three. The rest sound Japanese or Russian: Akira Naoki … Sanjugo Ishibashi … Vladimir Daniloff … Tanaka Ikuta …
I read the names twice, hoping to find a Steve or a Curtain.
“Notice anything?”
I feel Evie’s eyes on me and look up. She’s resurrected her usual cool expression again, but there’s a hint of pride in it.
“Who are they?” I say.
“I don’t know.” Evie sounds triumphant. “They’re not recognized collectors. An artist like Kim Lord, you’d figure she’d be in the collection of a Peter Benedek or Eli Broad, but she’s not.”
“So she has a big international following,” I say. “And no collectors in the United States but Nelson and Janis?”
Evie hesitates.
“Or you think these names are fake,” I say.
“I think they’re fake,” she says. “I think someone or, maybe, a few people are using aliases to buy up everything she’s ever made.”
The statement hangs in the air. Evie and I are standing together in a small, dingy underground room, but it feels suddenly like we’ve risen high above the earth. Maybe I didn’t fully believe my own theory either. Maybe I never thought I’d find actual proof, but this seems like a kind of proof, especially after Evie shows me the buyers who are publicly recorded for purchasing work from Kim Lord’s first show, The Flesh, the one that sold out at auction. It’s not the same as the list on the yellow pad, not by a long shot. The only one I recognize is Janis Rocque, but Evie says that all the other collectors must have resold the work privately later on.
“And this isn’t normal?” I ask.
“Not at all! You look at the provenance of a Chris Ofili or a Mike Kelley, and there might be an avid collector or two, but it’s pretty spread out over a dozen people and institutions.” She taps Nelson de Wilde’s name and says that the gallerist would have to be in collusion with the one mega-collector, or such a monopoly on one artist’s work would never be possible.
“But wouldn’t Kim Lord know?”
“Not necessarily. If the work got resold through someone other than Nelson,” she says.
“I can’t believe we’d be the first to figure it out,” I say.
Evie raises an eyebrow. “Maybe we’re not.” She tells me about a collector who is suing a Harlem gallery because it did not offer him first dibs on buying a painting by Julie Mehretu, despite the fact that he supported the same gallery with a $75,000 loan in return for the chance to snap up hot artists. “He got so steamed about it, he went to court.”
I’m not seeing the connection. “So?”
“So what if Janis Rocque wants another Kim Lord and she can’t get one? Why else would she hire that sleazy guy to snoop around?”
He’s not that sleazy, I think. But what Evie says makes sense. Janis Rocque invites her private investigator to the Gala to find the person who is hoarding the Lords. Then Kim doesn’t show up and J. Ro keeps him on, suspecting something darker. Janis Rocque has been way ahead of me since the beginning; she worried someone was trying to manipulate Kim Lord’s work in the marketplace. I am struck again with the uneasy pleasure of having my convictions confirmed.
“God, how did you find all this so fast?” I ask her. “You’re amazing at your work. I’m so grateful.”
Evie smirks, as if she feels sorry for me for finally noticing. She points to the yellow pad in my hands. “What are you going to do? Could this help Shaw?”
The hurt floods me again. “I hope so,” I say, averting my eyes.
Outside there’s a loud, rolling sound as the loading-dock door comes down. The light behind me darkens. Evie is saying something about Thursday. Visiting J. Ro’s sculpture garden on Thursday.
“I’ll be there,” I manage to say, and wave my thanks, although Thursday feels as far away as the Atlantic Ocean to me. I can feel Evie’s eyes on my back as I cross the cavern to the elevator. Fritz the security guard enters my field of vision, his tinted glasses still darkened from the recent flood of light. He’s waving something thin and brown.
“For you,” he says cheerfully. “UPS came by. Save you a trip to the mailroom.”
I grab it, thank him, and keep walking.
Once, in Thailand, I was sure I was pregnant. My period was late, and I didn’t know where to buy a test. As I sweltered in front of my chalky classroom blackboard, rode on the long bench of the covered taxi, strolled the fly-infested market where pig heads rested on ice, I felt myself expanding, becoming more than me. I wrote a letter to Greg, who was teaching two provinces away from me, but I did not send it. If I sent the letter, it could be true. If I waited, it was merely a secret, a threat. Also, a wish.
The blood came the week before I visited Greg at his house. As we lay on hammocks under his covered front patio, I told him about my scare. He sounded relieved. His relief made me angry.