Page 79 of Graceless

I have stood longer watches than that over empty water, waiting for nothing.

This watch has her in it. I will not miss an hour.

CHAPTER 21

CATE

Sal came on Saturday, with a box of pignoli and no warning, which is his version of a formal announcement.

"So," he said, on the stoop, hat on his head. "You gonna let me in, or you want I should assess the stonework?"

Raq was already in the hall behind me — he'd read the double-park before Sal's knuckles hit the door — and Sal looked up at him, all six-and-a-half feet of him filling my hallway, and did not blink.

"You're a big one," Sal said.

"Yes."

"You gonna take the box, or you want I should get a hernia on top of the parking ticket?"

Raq took the box.

"Sal Ferraro." He put out his hand.

"Raq."

"That short for something?"

"Yes."

Sal waited. Raq didn't elaborate. Something in Sal's face registered the not-elaborating — professional respect for clean work — and he took off his hat and handed me that too.

"I like him better than the accountant already," Sal said to me. "Where's the work?"

He took the basement stairs slow, one hand on the rail, with Raq a silent step behind him the whole way down, positioned — I saw it, Sal didn't — to catch an old man's fall before it started. He insulted the state of my swab jars. He approved the raking-light setup with a grunt that took him forty years to earn the right to.

Then he stood in front of the covered panel and put his hands behind his back.

"Show me," he said.

I lifted the muslin.

Six letters stood up out of the gold. The seventh was half clear, a millimeter a pass, my slowest work all week. Sal leaned in, hands behind his back, and went quiet a long time.

"Talk to me," I said.

"Quiet. I'm reading." And he read the halo edge to edge like a man reading a diagnosis.

"Madonn'," he said. Quietly. "So that's what it looks like when you find one."

My swab stopped over the jar. "When I find one?"

"Sit down." He took the work stool like he owned it, because in every way that counts, he does. "Nineteen sixty-nine. I'm twenty-four, I'm nobody, I'm apprenticed to Emilio Guarini — you know the name. Best hand I ever saw or will see. We get a panel in from an estate up in Westchester. A chapel piece, small, older than anything we touched, varnish like a shut door. A Deposition. Angels in attendance." His hand moved on his knee. "And one of the angels had overpaint on him. Centuries old. Invisible from a pew. Emilio found it, because Emilio was the kind that finds. And underneath, the angel wasn't attending."

"What do you mean, wasn't attending."

"He was on the ground." Sal looked at the halo, and the look was half a century long. "Kneeling. Collapsed. Wrong for the scene — wrong for every scene ever painted, there's no iconography where an angel goes down like that. And in the gold over his head, under a skin of later leaf, Emilio found letters. Cut clean. Covered clean. He'd uncovered three of them when the estate took the piece back."

"Took it back why?"