He added, "I'll see you in… how's thirty minutes?"
"Thirty?!" Magda aggressively plumped the pillow in her lap.
Her boss let the silence hang.
"Okay, Walter." She silently cursed him. It wasn't the first time he'd used dead air to get her to do something she didn't want to. "See you in thirty."
Grumbling to herself, Magda shuffled to the kitchenette. "We finalized that exhibit weeks ago. What does he expect? I mean, he can't just give me forty-eight hours to make something museum-ready."
She stood and stewed for a moment, then banged the phone into its cradle. Anger seeped into her voice as she continued, "Is there mold, discoloration, varnish, dirt, peeling? Are the paintings on canvas or board? And he'd better just need them cleaned, not restored." Her eyes widened at that prospect. Even the slightest bit of inpainting could take days.
It used to be that she worked hard because of her ambition. She'd once been hungry to claim a life as grand as her parents'. But she had vowed that her glory would be gained from hard work alone. Not because of her last name, or her trust fund.
If only she'd gone with Peter the weekend he died. Maybe she could've prevented the accident, saved him somehow. But she'd worked instead, and it was her work she clung to now, to stave off the despair. Filling her days with rote activity was the one thing that managed to push her brother back into the recesses of her mind.
Taking a few breaths to gather herself, Magda stood straight, flipped her long red hair over her shoulders, and smoothed her hands along her simple cotton dress. She crammed all that hurt back down deep, and applied her work-self as she would the shellac on one of her paintings. She slipped on some sandals and was halfway out the door when the ghost of a smile touched her face. She strode back into the kitchen and then was on her way out again, a loaf of bread tucked firmly at her elbow.
* * *
The immense sign mocked her. Even though Magda's taxi was still a couple of blocks from the Met, she could see the advertisement fluttering high above the museum's entrance. Finding Arcadia: Pastoral Paintings of the Seventeenth Century.
"You can stop here." She grabbed a crumpled ten out of her purse and thrust it at the cabbie. "I'll walk the rest." Clutching her toolbox and the now mashed bread, she marched down Fifth Avenue, her irritation with Walter dissolving as she began to anticipate what treasures might be waiting at the museum to suck her in for the weekend. Her wealthy childhood had afforded her the luxury of studying fine art, but she'd bristled at the cliche. Magda had resolved to be more than the little rich girl who knew her way around pricey antiques, and made sure she gave no one the excuse to think her any less than a rigorous academic.
When she was first hired as assistant curator of European Art, a few of her coworkers had looked down their noses at the girl who'd been chosen for her last name. What museum in their right mind would turn down a member of one of Manhattan's more philanthropic society families? And so Magdalen Deacon had made it her mission to be the best of the best when it came to identifying, cleaning, and restoring old paintings.
She entered a side door to avoid the typical throng of Saturday morning tourists. The heat of the Manhattan summer was claustrophobic enough; given a choice, Magda would avoid a crowded, enclosed space every time. Savoring the sweet blast of air- conditioning, she flicked on a single light switch and walked down a flight of stairs to an antiseptic hallway. Door after door of restoration offices lined a hall that, during the week, had the feel of a busy hive, its workers buzzing around independently and with intense focus. Empty, though, it was like a tunnel; the tiles that glared white during work hours now shimmering gray under the single row of buzzing fluorescent tubes.
She'd been amazed the first time she visited the employees -only area. Dozens of rooms lined the bowels of the museum. A number of them housed mismatched sculptures like a millionaire's garage sale, while others felt like bank vaults, with temperature-controlled facilities housing drawer after drawer of prints and drawings. Her favorite, though, was the painting storage, where hundreds of priceless works hung on panels that she could flip through, much like browsing posters in the museum shop. •"Thanks, kid."
Walter's voice startled Magda and she smiled at herself. She always had a tendency to get a bit fanciful whenever she was among so much art. The empty rooms and dim lights only intensified it.
"No problem," she said, realizing that it was true. Now that she was there, it really wasn't a problem. Magda was actually quite curious about the paintings that would drive Walter to call her for such a fast and loose cleanup job for a ready-to-go exhibit.
"They're in here." He rattled through the dozens of keys hanging from his belt. It was yet another surprise for a curator. Generally a tweedy set, they weren't inclined to janitorial-grade key chains. "They arrived by courier late last night, anonymous bequeathal. All Scottish pieces, which is unusual."
Walter fumbled along the wall for the light, continuing, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn what their provenance is, they're a perfect fit for the exhibit. We've got Flemish paintings coming out of our ears, but we're short on Britain. I even see some Scottish Highlands here, which is unheard of for this time period."
The lights flickered on and Magda drew in her breath. The table was cluttered with dozens of miniature landscapes, each bearing some romantic vista on a small scale: seascapes under bright blue- saturated skies, idyllic farmlands dotted with sheep, storm-clouded castles, purple heather-tangled moors, and emerald green rain -drenched glens.
"Don't have a cardiac, kid. I don't want you to clean the lot
of them. There are just two that I have to have. The rest is gravy.
"Besides," he added, picking up one of the small paintings, "they look like they were restored not too long ago." He held the piece horizontally up to his eyes, shifting it under the light, scanning the surface for imperfections. "You should get these under the UV, see what's what. Otherwise, they should tidy right up with a superficial cleaning."
But Magda wasn't listening. Nor had it been the number of paintings that had made her gasp. It was the portrait that held her attention, looming so incongruously alive among the pool of formal landscapes. Leaning askew against the rear wall was a life -sized painting of a man, pictured from the waist up, against a background of dense, impermeable black. Only the man's face was illuminated with color, and his features seemed to emerge from the darkness. White paint slashed dramatically across his left breast, as if he'd been lit from below, a candle's flicker cutting through the shadows, turning his suit of armor into a dull gray.
He was handsome, but not too perfect. His features were fine, except for his nose, which was just a fraction too large and gave his face a strong, masculine appearance. Brown hair hung in loose waves to his shoulders, making him appear somewhat more disheveled than these sorts of portraits usually depicted, as if the painter had just caught his subject in mid action. His black eyes stared, and they were painted with such vitality the man seemed about to break into a wicked grin, charisma pinning him to the surface of the canvas like a magnet.
"You hungry or something?"
Magda jumped, and looked at Walter as if seeing him for the first time. "Huh?"
"You really are an absent minded professor, kid." He nodded toward the loaf of bread crushed under her arm. "You on an all-carb kick or something?"
"This?" Magda looked down and seemed to come back to earth. "Oh, yeah, we're so short on time, I thought I'd bring out one of my favorite cheats."
"You're on a diet?"