Page 67 of Icarus

“Ready?”

Helios turned off the lights and there they were again, in the dark like the first time they’d met. Helios turned on his flashlight and set it on its side on the windowsill so that it pointed to the painting, like Icarus’s headlight must have that night.

Icarus waited until he could feel Helios come up beside him.

“It’s harder than doing a traditional reproduction,” he started. “This canvas is from a painting a bit larger than this one, and it had to be cut down to size. But it’s from the same region and same year that this was painted.”

He dragged his fingertip along the edge of the canvas. “We stripped it down to the bottom, took off all the paint with turpentine and mineral spirits, then we washed it very gently and re-stretched it to frame.”

“It took twenty days for my father to paint this. He’s so quick, much quicker than I am. He uses many pictures taken with different light sources, brightness, and shade to figure out the true colors. It’s easier with pieces that have a bit of fame because there’s so many pictures taken of them.”

He glanced at Helios, but Helios kept his eyes on the piece before them.

“After he’s finished painting it like new, he checks my own photographs to assess the damages. All paintings have them. This one had sun damage, dust damage, general lacquer aging, crayon damage of course . . .”

“I was four,” Helios murmured.

“It was a Malachite Crayola Gem Tone crayon. The color was released in 1994, but was permanently retired,” Icarus said with a smirk. “He made me scour eBay until it turned up.”

Helios finally turned to him. “That’s insane.”

Icarus shrugged. “To a thief, the work is worth it.” He touched the crayon smear. “My dad replicated your drawings though. It would have been fun to be able to say I did, but I didn’t.”

“I would have believed you,” Helios said, “if you’d lied.”

Icarus hmmed.

“After he was done painting this, he shaded over it in a transparent gold and then covered that with a clear lacquer. A tinted lacquer would test positive for modern interaction if the painting was appraised. The only thing I did help with was adding the cracks. We put each one in with razor blades and X-Acto knives. That took four days.”

“Then he dried the painting in a vacuum environment and dusted it with one layer of fuller’s earth. I was supposed to add a second layer on location, but . . . well.”

Icarus shrugged.

Helios touched the painting along the edge where Icarus’s fingers had been. Tracing his path like a man in a desert.

“One of the others from this collection sold for one hundred million dollars,” Icarus finished. “A Haystack by Monet.”

“It sounds . . . harder to make a forgery than to make the original,” Helios said, letting his arm fall to his side.

Icarus shrugged. “I guess. It’s like two artworks in one. But it’s not . . . worth anything. You could probably argue that it isn’t even art.”

“It’s still beautiful.”

Icarus shrugged. “It’s a job. My job, sometimes.”

Helios’s eyes were hard and dark when he faced him. “That doesn’t mean it’s worthless.”

Stream

Helios’s weight beside him in this bed felt like a stone pulling the mattress down.

If Helios was Celestina, he might have wrapped himself around Icarus, twined their arms and legs together, let Icarus shake until he drowned.

But he was not. There was space between them, careful and deliberate. And Helios’s eyes were closed. He was being terribly polite.

“Helios,” Icarus whispered.

“Hmm?”