The Empress of Tempera Read online

  Though she was only a few paces away, the sun glared off the window so she couldn’t see inside the gallery. Rosewood and crew might have been inside right now, staring out at them. A reverse exhibit. This close, she could smell a mothball scent, and a subtle body stink. She wondered how long he’d been out here, marveling at this window. She considered that whoever he was, crazy or not, he might be unsafe to approach. Yet she approached anyway. Years of being picked on gave her empathy for strangers. She wanted to provide the comfort no one had offered her when she was dirty little scrap Katie Novis.

  A pair of eyeglasses lay at his feet. Presumably, he’d dropped them. They were old and broken like the rest of him. One of the lenses had chipped. Paire stooped and scooped up his glasses, then offered them back to him. “Here you go.” The sound of her voice startled him, and he lethargically turned his head. She gave him one of her practiced smiles and repeated, “Here you go.”

  A hand with dirt-etched nails took the glasses. She wondered how much he could see without them. If whatever was behind the glass might have been a blur to him now, just recognizable by colors and contours.

  A deep whisper came out. “Thank you.” He seemed as fragile as spun sugar as he pocketed the glasses, and his hands disappeared into his pockets. Understanding from the way his focus floated in the air around her that the man couldn’t see clearly, Paire inspected him more closely. A dirty man in a nice suit. She could tell the cut and fabric were expensive, even if the garment itself had aged. His eyes trailed back to the window, and his nostrils flared as he exhaled a moist, tragic gust.

  Then he moved quick. His hands came out of his pockets, and he pounded his chest once, the way men pound their ribs to dislodge phlegm. He wheezed. After his hand dropped to his side, Paire saw the stain on his shirt. Blossoming red. Something fell from his hand. Paire only registered it when the object rattled on the sidewalk. A long, elegant silver letter opener. Minute letters monogrammed the handle, most of it slicked red.

  The man wheezed in tubercular coughs, but he turned back to the window, again bracing himself against the glass. His hand smeared blood on the pane. He stared at his reflection as his chest flowered a gush of deep, rich blood. A thick river spread down his shirt, over his sterling buckle and through the trousers. He’d scored an artery.

  Paire calcified, as rigidly rooted as the man had been, as if some magnet beneath the sidewalk pinned them both to their spots. The man held himself up for only a few seconds, then collapsed. She screamed.

  When he dropped, she knelt beside him and pressed on his chest. Rather than giving him chest compressions, she placed fingers at the entrance wound, trying to dam up the dike. Blood flowed through her fingers. When she applied pressure, some of it sprayed on her dress. For a few moments, the man stayed with her, his eyes open long enough for him to shoot her a look that questioned her audacity. Distantly, Paire heard someone scream, from a block away or perhaps through a window.

  He expired under her hands in moments. When his eyes fogged in death, she looked up and away. Her hands were shaking, and the man’s gore ran up her forearms. She looked at the window, where his bloody handprint had smeared the glass. Behind it, Paire finally saw what hung in the window. Neither HERO nor TRUTH HURTS. It was Her.

  The Empress. Painted on a canvas almost as tall as Paire, the woman was nearly life-sized. Maybe a few years older than she, dressed in a single garment, a red ornamental kimono with lilies climbing up the front in a sinuous pattern. She was seated on a chair, her legs spread beneath the silk. The wardrobe hinted that this was an ancient woman, long dead, but she’d been rendered by a modern painter. Her expression was self-aware, defiant. Modern. And her ethnicity wasn’t clear. The woman might have been Japanese, maybe Chinese, doubtfully Korean, but her eyes were wider than Asian, with deep brown irises and black moon pupils, so large they almost obscured the whites. Subtle brushstrokes had given her smooth skin a hint of lifelike blush. Her bare hands and feet suggested a light body like Paire’s, with long fingers and seductive arches.

  She heard the approach of footfalls and clamor of voices, but her mind was a soup and she heard it all through liquid. Unaware of her actions, Paire rose in a waking sleep and pressed her own red hand on the glass, matching the old man’s right handprint with her left. Even with the limp man by her feet, she couldn’t look away.

  Chapter 2

  A thin, handsome man in a neat suit pulled her off the sidewalk. She’d seen him before when she nosed into the gallery. He always wore inventive fabrics, all snugly tailored. His salt-and-pepper hair corkscrewed wildly, and he manicured his beard. They had said hello in passing. She sensed that he was the manager or owner of the gallery, but they’d never spoken. When Rosewood bickered on the phone about the exhibit, she suspected it was with this man.

  When he found Paire on the sidewalk, he introduced himself as Mayer Wolff. Paire was still shaking. She tried not to touch herself, because her hands and clothes were soaked in blood, and her hands didn’t know where to go, so they trembled in the air. Ambulance sirens cut through the air blocks away, on their way but not there yet. Mayer threw his pinstripe jacket over Paire’s shoulders and led her inside.

  Mayer recognized her too. “Do I know you?”

  Paire shook her head so they wouldn’t have to make conversation.

  She hadn’t been confronted by violence like this since, well, since Maine, and she rolled her shoulders forward, the habit she’d acquired as a bullied tween in shitty little Abenaki. As Mayer Wolff led her into the gallery, she felt exposed. At this moment, Paire Anjou forgot she had just changed her name.

  With her senses overloaded, Paire noticed movement around her without really absorbing it. The sign for the Fern Gallery, a green sprig, passed above her. The empress was the only painting that directly faced the window, mounted on a stand-alone wall with a six-foot alley between the art and the glass. As they passed by it she looked at the portrait bashfully, almost afraid it would catch her staring. She was in shock from what had just occurred outside but couldn’t help her visceral reaction to the image. Possibly because she was in shock, she sought the opportunity to distract herself from seeing all that blood. Paire felt a turbulent rush in her stomach when her eyes found the portrait. The hands and feet, so elegant. The figure, so effortlessly poised.

  Paire stared at the painting as long as she could as she walked past it, trying to see what had mesmerized the old man. The artist had used a bright palette and that red was bold as a fishing lure. Paire admired the craftsmanship, the technique behind the boldness, the control in the brush strokes. The woman’s face was smooth, with a cold angelic paleness that seemed to have never seen the sun. Her robe was intricately detailed with minute strokes, adding an etched quality and including a few strands of gold thread at the bottom of the kimono where the hem was about to fray. It wasn’t just that it was beautiful—and God, it was—it was that this was the sort of painting Paire would want to create had she the technique and the talent for capturing human expression.

  Only after they passed the portrait did she take in the rest of the gallery. The two-story cathedral hall was floored with pine planks and walled with white plaster. Drenched in sunlight, the space had housed a sizeable assortment of postwar contemporary art during her last visit. She hadn’t walked past the gallery in months, but all those works were gone. Technically, the gallery was closed while they installed Rosewood’s show. Some works had already been mounted, and some leaned against the walls waiting to be hung. She recognized the large blocks of primary colors without studying individual pieces. At the back of the room, wooden shipping crates were stacked on a pallet.

  A large man stood by the back wall, watching her with unblinking eyes. He was bulky, shaped like a pineapple, a marbled mix of fat and muscle. She wondered how many of them had been watching the front window when the man stabbed himself in the heart, and why it took them so long to react.

  Paire was too curious to avoid looking over her should
er to see the small crowd outside the window, who had wandered down from Seventh Avenue once they heard her scream. The gallery window offered a view of the dead hump on the sidewalk and the two bloody handprints on the glass. The blood was so bright, so stark against Manhattan’s landscape of gray. The same red stippled her clothes.

  Mayer sat her at a black swivel chair by a glass-top desk, clear except for a mega-monitor, keyboard, and a stack of papers with edges tight as a wrapped deck of playing cards.

  Trace scents of paint hung in the air. She’d gotten used to these odors in her classrooms at school, and although it was fainter, older here, she could still identify the smells of dried oils.

  He asked, “Did you know him?”

  Paire shook her head. “I thought he might work here.” Her voice was scratchy from screaming.

  “Were you just walking by?” Mayer asked.

  Paire didn’t know how to answer that. She wanted to leave as soon as possible. Flight had served her well in response to adversity. There was no sign of Rosewood. Where was he, she wondered. She needed him. Her hands were shaking, and she needed him. But Paire sensed that if she admitted to coming here to see Derek Rosewood, it would only complicate matters and keep her trapped here longer.

  “Didn’t you see me?” she asked.

  “I was in the back,” Mayer said, looking Paire in the eyes.

  She thought he was probably a kind man.

  The large man against the wall said, “I saw everything.” Paire detected no such warmth from him, a pink-faced older man with thin lips and bullet-hole eyes. Tall and bullishly bloated. His navy suit looked expensive, tailored in the utilitarian cut found on finance professionals. Possibly Brooks Brothers, probably custom. He tugged at his cufflinks and smoothed out the front of his suit jacket. His slick gray hair whitened at the temples, and a strong, square jaw was clearly delineated beneath the chin fat. His hands were thick, walnut-cracking vises, and under his suit she detected the muscles that had formed decades ago.

  Sirens whined outside as an ambulance lurched to a halt on the other side of the window. Two EMTs jumped out and hauled a wheeled gurney out of the back.

  At the far wall, where the large man leaned and eyed Paire, a door opened to a rear office. Through the crack, Paire glimpsed shelves of pine crates.

  A woman walked out from the back and approached Mayer at the desk. She was young, within a year or two of Paire’s age. Petite too. She’d tied her hair in a French twist and wore a form-fitting, leg-revealing suit. She spoke to Mayer, sharp and angry—“I don’t work here anymore”—and placed a magnetic security card and a few keys on the glass-top desk.

  As she strutted out, Mayer made no effort to stop her. He and Paire watched her slip out the front door.

  “Is that going to cause a problem for you?” Paire asked.

  He shrugged. “Not a problem worth fixing. She’s only been here two months, and was miserable the whole time. You can’t please everyone.”

  Outside, the EMTs raised the gurney from ground to waist height. They’d tucked a white cloth tightly around the man’s body, obscuring the head. Among the crowd of onlookers, a male college student videoed the scene on his phone.

  She stared at her ankles. Blood freckled her dress and legs. When she rubbed a drop on her skin, it smudged. Paire shivered, and Mayer adjusted his jacket on her shoulders.

  Another woman came through the rear office door, this time a blonde in a fitted black dress. She had the same trim, polished look and tied-back hair as the woman who had just quit, but she was more mature—Mayer’s age.

  Paire was worried that this woman would resign as well, but when she approached she gently smiled at Paire, revealing a mouth full of braces. The woman handed her a glass of water and introduced herself. “Lucia de Moraeas.”

  Paire didn’t take the glass at first, showing a palm coated in blood, but when Lucia nudged her, she accepted the water.

  Mayer asked Lucia, “Could you take her to the bathroom?”

  Paire said, “I don’t need to go.”

  He said to Lucia, “She’s in shock. Take her in the back.”

  Lucia beckoned and Paire followed her to the back office. Her head still spun, and the room came in and out of focus, the noise outside fading in and out of clarity. She followed the grain of the floorboards, then raised her eyes to the woman’s snug black dress and the effortless sway of her hips. When Paire walked with confidence she bounded on her toes, but her hips never moved like this.

  They passed through the back office, a tight room the width of the gallery. Plywood and pine catacomb slabs held the Fern’s remaining inventory. Paire supposed some of the postwar exhibit might have been boxed up back here. On the other side, a small desk and clip lamp stood by a heavy steel door, which presumably led out to the back alley.

  “I think we have clothes,” said Lucia.

  Through another door, they continued to a small bright bathroom and stood at a porcelain sink. Lucia twisted the faucet and checked the warmth of the water before pulling Paire’s hands into the stream. A diamond the size of a hazelnut sat on the woman’s ring finger. Absently, Paire tapped the jewel with a finger.

  Lucia remarked, “Don’t place too much stock in these. It’s just a mineral.” In the mirror, Lucia tapped her braces. “But he did pay for these.” She pointed to towels hanging on the opposite wall. “Use as many as you need. We’ll buy new ones.” Lucia said she would try to find some spare clothes, guessing Paire’s dress size accurately before leaving her alone with the light hiss of tap water.

  Paire threw the deadbolt and stripped down to her underwear while she rubbed the liquid soap into suds. The blood on her skin smeared, then slowly thinned, rouging her before coming clean. It wasn’t going to come off all in one cleaning. In fact, she might need several soaks and showers to get all of it off, maybe more before she felt clean again. She sat on the toilet, lid closed, and tried to mop off as much as she could, monitoring the fading shades of crimson on her body and the deepening stains on the white terrycloth.

  She heard more sirens, slightly muffled back here. Another car pulled up outside and the noise ended with an abrupt tweet. Footfalls on the pine floors sounded all the way back to the bathroom. She guessed several people had come into the gallery, mostly men, judging by the weight of their heels. One man had an exceptionally loud voice, and seemed to be arguing with Mayer. He sounded like the large man who had been leaning against the back wall. Back at the sink she turned up the water and tuned out the voices so they sounded like party murmurs.

  The restroom had been intended for exclusive use by the staff. The décor resembled a bathroom in an upscale residence—literature by the toilet and a shelving unit with candles and plants. Trinkets littered the counter space around the sink, almost giving the impression of a voodoo altar. Paire casually inventoried the knickknacks—spare lipsticks, eyeliners, brushes, a comb, tweezers, dice, pens, and notably, a leopard-print clutch purse that contained two condoms. Ribbed, glow-in-the-dark. She imagined they might look like glow sticks when in use.

  Paire listened to the murmurs outside, what sounded like Mayer recounting the last hour’s happenings to whoever had just entered. Staring at herself in the mirror, she felt more like Katie Novis than Paire Anjou, once the clothes were off and the makeup was wiped clean. Her fingers crept into the leopard-print clutch and she withdrew a condom between her first two fingers, holding it like a cigarette. She tucked it into her own purse, inside her own wallet, where it snuggled against the New York State ID with her old Maine name on it. The condom was worth less than a dollar, and she chose to steal it because out of everything, she thought they would miss it the least.

  Once the condom was in her purse, though, she immediately felt queasy that she’d done it. It was a tiny action, intended to placate herself by doing something that seemed a familiar behavior, but she still knew it was wrong. A moment later she opened her purse to replace the condom, but the door rattled.

  Lucia
called, “You okay in there?”

  Paire panicked and placed the purse by her feet. She unlocked the door and opened it a crack. Lucia’s hand, sporting that giant diamond, reached in with a hanger of clothes and a pair of shoes. Paire pulled them on in a hurry—a navy A-line dress and black pumps with a shorter heel than she would normally wear. She smelled the freshness of the dress, and felt the way her feet bent the leather, and she knew the clothes were new. Lucia and Mayer had bought these for her, likely from a shop nearby. Not cheap, not in this neighborhood.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, Lucia told her she looked great, and with a spare towel, wiped a little more of the moisture out of her hair. Paire thanked her by wrapping her arms around the older woman.

  When they returned to the gallery, Mayer was locked in conversation with two uniformed NYPD officers, one of whom scripted notes while he listened. Two young men, one of Asian and the other of African descent. Both had bulky shoulders and hair trimmed a quarter inch from bald. They reminded Paire of guys she might meet at a club.

  Lucia tried to hand a scrap of paper, which Paire identified as a sales receipt, to Mayer, probably for the clothes she was wearing. Before Mayer could take it, the large man appeared from behind and snatched it out of Lucia’s hand. He towered a head and a half above Paire.

  The police turned their attention to her. The officer without the notebook asked, “You found him?”