Page 73 of Graceless

Then she turned around and told Gina to get her elbows off the table, and that was that.

She didn’t say a word about it. All afternoon. Nina, who has an opinion about everything I’ve ever done.

At the door, with the leftovers bagged in a shopping bag heavy enough to count as strength training — because you don’t leave that house without provisions, it’s not on the menu of possible events — she kissed my cheek and held it one extra beat.

“Okay,” she said. To me. Quiet, under the hallway noise, while Anthony told Raq things about the Mets that Raq received like reports from a distant front.

“Okay what?”

“Okay,” said Nina, and that was the whole conversation. I’ve never once needed her to translate, and I didn’t need it then.

We walked the six blocks home in the last of the light, the leftovers pulling my arm off until he took the bag without asking and carried it like it weighed nothing, because it did. He was quiet the first two blocks. Not his regular quiet — the working kind.

“Okay,” I said. “Give it to me. Whole family, first exposure. Findings.”

“Gina moved her seat.”

Of everything at that table — the interrogation, Anthony’s Mets briefing, Nina’s gravy, the phone catch — that was the thing he’d kept.

“She did,” I said. “That’s the whole ballgame with that kid.”

“I know what it was.” He shifted the bag to his other hand and put himself between me and the curb without appearing to do it. “I have sat at tables where kings moved their seats for reasons. Nobody ever moved one toward me.” He looked down at me. “Your people feed first and decide while you eat. It is a better system than most I have watched run empires.”

“It’s just Sunday dinner, Raq.”

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

Monday morning I was in the halo.

Routine work — lifting the later gilding off the original, scalpel and loupe, a millimeter an hour, the radio on low. The top layer came away in a fleck no bigger than a lentil, and under it the original gold caught the light, and there was a line in it.

I stopped.

Damage, I thought. A scratch that got gilded over. It happens; paintings live hard lives. I moved the loupe.

It wasn’t a scratch. The line had a beginning and an end. It had corners. It turned, clean, confident, cut with a blade by somebody who knew exactly where the blade was going — and then it went under the edge of the gilding I hadn’t lifted yet, like a road going under snow.

I sat back. I turned the radio off. I don’t know why; I needed the room to be quiet for what I was thinking.

Then I took the next section down, a millimeter at a time, with my breath doing something I don’t supervise anymore, and the line came up out of the gold and turned again, and joined another line, and by the time the light died Monday evening I was looking at a letter.

A letter. Cut into the original gold of the halo — and then buried under a second gilding. My cameras never saw it; gold under gold gives the imaging nothing. Only the scalpel finds this. Only by hand.

Four hundred years, and the first person to see it was me, on a Monday, with the radio off. This is the reason anybody goes into this work at all. I sat in my basement grinning like a lunatic at a fleck of gold the size of a lentil.

Raq was out on the stoop, reading the rooflines the way other men read a paper. I came up the basement stairs two at a time with the loupe still around my neck, leaned out the front door, and pulled him inside by the hand, grinning like a lunatic, talking the whole way down.

“Look. No — here, in the raking light. Look.” I put him in front of it and I couldn’t stand still. “Somebody cut writing into the halo. Into the original gold — and then somebody gilded over it. Hid it. It’s been under there the whole time, Raq. Four hundred years. My cameras can’t even see it — gold under gold gives the imaging nothing. You can only find this by hand. And it came up under my scalpel this afternoon.”

I was talking with both arms.

“Hebrew, I think. I know the letterforms enough to recognize them, not enough to read them. And there’s more — see the line going under the edge there? There’s a whole row of it still buried.” I couldn’t stand still. “Do you understand what this is? Hidden writing under a period regilding. Undocumented. Untouched. People build entire careers on one find like this.”

He didn’t say anything.

He went still — the deep still — and the congratulations I had somehow been expecting did not arrive, and the temperature of my good news started dropping while I stood there holding it.

“Don’t hurry,” he said.