“YOUR FATHER HAS STRANGE FRIENDS.”
She decapitated Arthur with her eyes and then turned her attention to the real work in progress. Styela: their bodies like little lumps of alien excrement. Since her first encounter with them, they had grown no more appealing to her aesthetically. In a practical sense, however, they had become indispensable. At first, she had considered other, more expensive species: the dogfish, or the red octopus, or Ricketts’s beloved flatworms. But all these creatures had seemed too rare in a relative sense, too labor-and time-intensive, too vulnerable to unwanted scrutiny. The Styela, by contrast, were plentiful and unremarkable and something the lab was extremely eager to divest: so much so that it was only now, as the tenth order had been placed, that someone was thinking to question it. And that someone was Arthur.
“Not his friends,” she snapped. “His associates.”
“Either way, I don’t understand why they need so many of these things.”
“No one expects you to understand anything.”
“Settle down, children,” Steinbeck drawled in a broad Great Plains accent. “Else you’ll get the whip.”
Ricketts laughed and then leaned close to her.
“It’s wonderful, you know,” he confided. “I never could have flushed out so many buyers on my own.”
She fought back a smile and grabbed a bottle of fixative from the shelf above the sinks. Ever since the orders had started rolling in—orders she had placed in another name using the proceeds from her portraiture—it had been like this: his affection more brilliant than usual and aimed more often than not in her direction. Today it was especially obvious. In a subversion of the lab’s usual hierarchy, she—not Steinbeck—had been chosen to stand next to him at the countertop while Steinbeck and Wormy packed and labeled the boxes that Arthur lugged broodingly from the garage to the curb. The message, therefore, was clear. Money wasn’t everything, but it was something. And now, just as Steinbeck had predicted, allegiances were shifting on account of it.
So there was satisfaction: a surplus of it that rivaled the Styela themselves. But there was another feeling, too—a less jubilant one—that resided several layers lower. As she measured out the chemicals and slew each little tunicate in turn, she probed this feeling and stirred it up a bit so that its contents could swirl and separate and make themselves known. She had struggled and she had prevailed. She had proceeded exactly as Anders would have. Why, then, did it feel less than perfectly earned? Why did she suspect there was a better and more admirable way: one that her intellect was too dull or her character too weak to fully discern?
“Well,” Ricketts announced, “that appears to be the last of them. Arthur, you wait for the shippers. Wormy, you update the accounts. John, you tidy up.”
Steinbeck huffed through his nose and slapped a paste-damp shipping label onto a box. At some point, they would figure out the truth. They would realize that her father’s Styela-hungry colleagues were nonexistent and that the money was actually hers. By that point, however, it would all be settled, she reassured herself as she buried the bad feelings even deeper. She would be a fixture inside the lab. She would be essential to Ricketts’s ambitions, a prize within his heart, and the elaborateness of her ruse would be fodder for the best sorts of stories, the best sorts of songs.
“And Margot. Please come with me.”
In the passenger seat of the Buick, she continued to congratulate herself.
From the very first portrait, she knew Tino had been right. There was a gold mine here, and she was just the one to mine it, which is not to say she had proceeded without caution or forethought. Her drawings, in their unaltered state, would not have appealed; they were too ragged, too raw. So she had blurred the rough edges on purpose, she had improved on nature’s design instead of representing it faithfully: a compromise she expected to sicken her. But it didn’t. It was an opportunity, she reasoned, not a surrender. She was giving something to the masses, and they were giving it back. Her inaugural client, for instance—a new mother with a baby less than two weeks old—was so overcome by the exceptional portrait of her subexceptional child that she wept with pleasure and offered Margot three times the agreed-upon fee. An old, mute crone, thrilled with a depiction of her face that made her appear several decades younger, gave Margot a gilt pocket watch that, according to a flurry of unofficial sign language, had been in her family for over a century. Margot thanked her in a Sicilian subdialect, just as Tino had taught her, and then placed the watch into her satchel alongside the penknife. Later that afternoon, she had Tino take both items to the pawnshop on Munras.
“You’re sure about the knife?” he asked, noting the inscription.