Page 80 of Graceless

"Who knows why. Rich people's reasons. Paid in full, sent a van, and that panel never surfaced again — no sale, no auction, no wall. I've had a lifetime and every catalog printed, and I have looked, Cat. It went into the private dark and it stayed there. Emilio wrote his correct letters to the estate for years and got correct nothings back, and it ate at him quiet till the day he died." He put his hat down on the bench like he'd caught himself holding it. "I printed photographs, that week. Off the books, my one incorrect act in that man's shop. They're in my office right now, in a green folder, under things you'd have to know me to find."

The basement was very quiet.

"You never told me that. Fifty-some years, Sal."

"What do you say? 'I saw something once and then it was gone'? That's not a story, that's an itch." He nodded at the panel. "Except now you got one, and yours nobody pulled. So finish it right. Slow. Documented. And Caterina—" the full name, which from Sal comes out maybe twice a decade — "when the last letter's up, you come to Mulberry Street and we put your prints next to Emilio's. Because I only saw his letters for a week, and it was a long time ago. But I'm telling you, standing here—" he looked at the six letters standing out of the gold, and something moved under the old face — "I think I've seen some of these before."

He stayed for coffee, which meant he stayed for the interrogation, because I made the coffee and left the two of them at my kitchen table while I washed the pot, and listened.

"So," said Sal. "You're the fella."

"I am the fella."

"She says you're in security."

"I watch things," Raq said. "Buildings. Cargo. People, when they need it."

"Yeah? Long hours?"

"All of them."

Sal drank his coffee and looked at him over the rim, and I have seen that look take the varnish off dealers, appraisers, and one bishop.

"You know what she is?" Sal said. "In the trade. You got any idea?"

"Tell me."

"Best hands I ever trained. Best hands I ever saw, and I saw everybody worth seeing." He set the cup down. "A person with hands like that, you don't let anything happen to them. The hands or the person. You follow me?"

"I follow you," Raq said, "the whole way."

Something passed between them then, old man to old thing, and whatever it was, it settled Sal into his chair like a verdict. He spent the next twenty minutes explaining that the Verrazzano was built wrong — the roadway, the approach ramps, the tolls, the whole philosophy of it — and Raq agreed with him on every point with what sounded like genuine conviction, and by the time Sal stood to go he had invited him fishing.

At the door he squeezed my wrist with his old strong hand and gave me the look from the day I finished my first cradle repair alone.

"Somebody hid that with love," he said. "You can tell by the care. Remember that while you're undoing it."

That night I wiped a counter that was clean. I picked up my phone and put it down twice.

"Say it," Raq said, from the chair.

"Fifty-odd years ago, Sal's teacher found one. An angel painted over, letters buried under the leaf, same technique, same care — and the owner took it back mid-treatment and it never surfaced again." I sat down on the arm of his chair. "That's two, Raq. Mine and Emilio's. Two panels, same buried hand, half a century apart. What if there are more? What if somebody spent — I don't even know how long — hiding things in paintings all over the world, and nobody has ever put two of them side by side?"

He was quiet for a moment, and his thumb moved over my knee, slow.

"Then somebody grieved for a very long time," he said, "and had no one to tell."

I looked at him.

"That's a strange thing to say."

"It is a strange thing to do." His eyes were on the dark window. "You heard what Sal heard in the work. Love. You do not hide a thing that carefully out of fear, Caterina. Fear is fast. Fear burns things. That—" he tipped his head toward the basement door, toward the muslin, toward the name — "was slow. Whoever did that wanted it kept, and wanted it hidden, both, forever. There is a kind of person who needs both at once."

"What kind?"

"The kind who is not permitted to mourn."

He said it plainly, without any weight at all, which was how I knew. You don't describe a country that flatly unless you've lived in it.