Page 9 of Graceless

"Depends," I said, which is Brooklyn for yes.

What came out of that van came out in a crate. A good crate — I know crates the way Nina knows split ends — museum-grade, cornered in foam, climate strip on the side still green. They walked it down my steps like it was a patient, and while the younger one angled it through Nonna's door frame the older one handed me a tablet and an envelope with my name on it in fountain pen — real fountain pen, wet-ink, the kind of handwriting nuns used to beat into people — and had me sign four times, and never once looked around at the basement the way people look around at the basement.

Then they were gone, and I was alone in my studio with a crate the size of a door, and I called Sal, because my hands had started shaking and I wanted to know why before they got worse.

He picked up on the first ring. He'd been waiting by the phone. Sal Ferraro, who taught me gilding with his hands over mine when I was nineteen, who does not wait by phones.

"It came," he said. Not a question.

"Sal, what came? There's a crate in my studio that costs more than my house."

"The client. From yesterday. He liked the Lombard — no. Listen. He didn't like it. He examined it." Sal's voice had a note I'd heard maybe twice in fifteen years, and both times were about paintings. "Forty minutes, Cat. With a loupe. Not one word. Then he asks me who did the cradle repair on the back, because the grain matching was — his word — respectful." A breath. "I said my girl did it. He said: the one from the basement on Bay 50th?"

The shaking reached my elbows. "Sal. How does a man like that know where my basement is?"

"Because you're getting a reputation, that's how, that's the whole point, that's what a reputation is—" but there was a hitch in it, a half-second where the old man's voice checked its mirrors. He'd heard it too. He talked over it, the way we both talk over things. "It's a church piece, Cat. Private chapel, deconsecrated, whole collection's being liquidated, and this panel — he could send it to the Met's people. He could send it to the guys on 57th with the climate rooms and the interns. He's sending it to you. Full documentation in the envelope. His people already handled the insurance."

I looked at the envelope. My name, in that handwriting.

"How much is it insured for?"

He told me.

I sat down. On the floor. Of my studio. The Lombard angel had been worth more than me; this was worth more than the block.

"Condition report by Friday, no rush on the cleaning, he says. Oh — and there's a rider on the policy, number that big. Someone from the insurance company's gonna come assess the premises. Locks, alarm situation, whatever they do. Let them in, don't give them attitude." I barely heard it; I was doing the math. "And Cat. Cat. Are you hearing me? This is the one. You do this clean and quiet, and you never cold-call for work again in your life. This is the one that gets you all the rest of them." And then, softer, because he is my second father and he can't help it: "Don't blow it."

"I never blow the work, Sal."

"I know," he said. "It's the only thing you never do."

We hung up on that, because that's how Sal says I love you.

It took me two hours to open the crate, because I did it right — seals photographed, strapping logged, orientation arrows, the whole museum liturgy — and then the foam came away and I stopped being a professional for a second and was just a person alone in a basement with a very old thing.

An Annunciation. Chapel-sized, the angel arriving on the left, the dove, the lily, the gold ground gone deep amber under varnish the color of tea. Beautiful, and filthy, and mine till Friday's condition report. I swung the work lamp low and started walking the surface the way Sal taught me — slow, corner to corner, letting it tell me what it had been through.

It had been through something.

Under the grime, low on the angel's robe, there was a patch that didn't belong. You wouldn't see it from a pew. You'd barely see it with a loupe. But varnish ages like skin, and this patch was younger than the rest — not sixteenth-century younger. Not even Victorian-improver younger. Decades. Somebody had gone into this painting recently, quietly, matched the tone, and left no record — and there is no honest reason on God's green earth to do invisible work on a chapel panel and then hide that you did it.

Restoration you document. Concealment you don't.

The hair on my right arm stood up — that arm, the same stupid stretch of skin — and I was leaning in with the lamp in one hand and my loupe in the other when two things happened at once.

The first was that I felt watched. Not heard-a-noise watched. Watched like sun through glass, warm and directional, coming from the window at the top of my wall, the one that looks out at ankle-height on the whole indifferent street.

I looked up.

Across the street, in the doorway of the Espositos' bricked-up laundromat, a man was standing in the dark. Big. Still. Donnie's guy — half the night, across from the alley — and I couldn't see his face and I didn't need to, because my arm already knew, the way it had known for two days, and my heart did something complicated that was not entirely, or even mostly, fear.

The second thing was the doorbell.

Nobody rings that bell. Joey has keys. Nina texts. Donnie yells through the wall like we're in a tenement musical. The bell hasn't rung since the funeral casseroles stopped coming — and it rang now, at ten o'clock at night, two long pushes, while the man across the street stood in a dead laundromat's doorway watching my window and a five-hundred-year-old painting with a fresh scar in it sat on my easel breathing tea-colored fumes at me.

I put down the loupe. I picked up Nonna's rolling pin, which is not a plan, but it's a tradition.

And I went to answer the door.