now, a script to recite. When he got to Bill’s office, the Sharps weren’t there but Richard already was. Yale hadn’t heard him come in. Had he been asleep? He felt like maybe he had. Richard wore all black, except for the yellow sweater he’d knotted around his shoulders, and he moved like a cat around the room, crouching low to adjust the lights he’d brought. He had the Foujita green-dress watercolor laid out on Bill’s table.
“The man of the hour!” he said, and blew a kiss at Yale before turning back to his lights.
Yale managed to say, “Thanks for doing this.” He tried to remember if he’d seen Richard since the night of the memorial. Yes, several times. At the fundraiser, for instance. Still, Richard seemed to have walked straight out of Yale’s nightmares. The man had done nothing wrong. He’d thrown a great party. He’d made a beautiful slide show.
Richard didn’t talk as he worked, didn’t require Yale’s conversation, and soon the Sharps were in the doorway, grinning like parents about to meet their adopted child.
Bill made introductions—Esmé, Allen, Richard Campo, Allen, Esmé—and shut the door behind them all. He said, “Truly, this is the most extraordinary find of my career, and I can say right now that I’ll retire happy. We could get this up next fall, is what I’m hoping. Well, maybe that’s a bit optimistic. But a spectacular show.”
Bill showed them the Foujita, still on the table.
“That’s her,” Yale said. “That’s Nora.”
“She’s lovely!” Esmé leaned over the paper, entranced.
Bill opened the cover of the giant portfolio he’d moved the smaller pieces to, and Esmé held her husband’s arm. Richard looked, too, from behind. Yale said to him, quietly, “It’s Nico and Fiona’s great-aunt.” The portfolio was open to one of the blue-crayon Modiglianis, not that it looked much like anyone at all.
Richard laughed, delighted. “Spectacular genes in that family.”
Maybe he could ask Richard, after all, for a bed tonight. A different bed. Would that be so terrible?
Allen said, “I don’t want to wake up and find I’ve invested in restoring some frauds.”
“Well,” Yale said, “we could hold off till authentication comes through.” His voice was made of tin. “But we have strong corroboration for provenance, and we’d love to get restoration started to prevent further damage.”
A painting was a thing to which you could prevent further damage. You could restore it, protect it, hang it on a wall.
Bill looked at Yale expectantly. There was something else he was supposed to say, but he was blank. Bill cleared his throat and said, “One option is, we could wait for the first authentication to come through. Let’s say the Pascin people verify his work, for instance.” He flipped to the nude Pascin sketch. “Wouldn’t that reassure us about the rest as well?”
Allen bobbled his head side to side. Noncommittal.
Bill said, “Well, go get Roman! Go get the copies!”
And so Yale did, and as Richard continued working at Bill’s desk, the rest of them gathered around the chair where Roman deposited the stack of papers. Yale half listened as Roman read them a letter Nora had written home about Soutine and his wretched table manners.
Bill, meanwhile, had come up behind Richard, who was putting white gloves back on, ready to pull one of Ranko Novak’s cows out of the portfolio.
Bill whispered: “Not those.”
It wasn’t as if there were some Ranko Novak expert out there to mail the photos to.
Bill said, “The artist was not overburdened with skill.”
The cow sketches weren’t bad, but the three were nearly identical, and there was something too neat and too simple about them, like images from a “how to draw animals” book for kids. Still, Yale didn’t fully understand Bill’s contempt. Well, no one ever got to be a gallery director through egalitarianism.
Richard shrugged, turned carefully to the first Metzinger sketch.
Allen looked agitated, scratched behind his ear. He said, “Look, what I’m thinking of, I’m thinking of those fake heads they found in the river.” The summer before last, someone had dredged a canal in Italy hoping to find the carved heads Modigliani had allegedly thrown there in his youth after a harsh critique from friends. They found three heads and rushed to display them, but a few weeks later some university students came forward to say they had carved the pieces themselves and tossed them into the river as a prank.
Bill took the letter Roman had been reading from, put it back on the stack, kept his hand there. “It’s true everyone’s