A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,112

whoever. Someone at Tinsley’s will know whom to contact. I can’t believe I trusted you. I told you about Ronan, for chrissakes.” At the mention of his name, Elm began to cry, angry sobs of frustration.

Indira waited until Elm calmed down, passing her a box of tissues. “The police are not an option,” Indira said, finally. “And you know that. You know that because you too have done what I did.”

“I never knowingly—”

“Stop,” Indira said. “I don’t say this to criticize, only to make clear to you what happens when the truth comes out. During the war, my parents, it is not so surprising, they were taken to the camps and because they were old they were killed. My brother was put to work digging graves. He was strong; he survived the war, long enough to send a letter to our home, which I received years later. But he never made it back home. Did he die? Was he killed? Did he kill himself? It is not known. My sister-in-law I saw for the last time in a propaganda film. She was pregnant, not before the war, but during, which means that the father was most likely not my brother. In the film she is drawing at an arts-and-crafts table. The camera pans quickly, but you can see on the paper her drawing of a house. Only, it’s not just a house, it’s a Shin, the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The filmmakers wouldn’t have known; that’s how it slipped through, this symbol of resistance. Her name was on a manifest of the gassed. I don’t know if she ever gave birth. My cousins, my twin aunts, uncles, all taken. How do we get back what was taken from us? Some things are irreplaceable. Others are not. You, of all people, know the difference. I can see from your body that you do.”

Elm felt a knot of worry. Could she know about Ronan? Impossible.

“Your friend Klinman has sent you drawings that I’m told wouldn’t fool an old blind woman. You, in turn, have given them to a dealer, who has placed them prominently in the city. She will not be happy to discover that these are fakes.”

Elm sat; her legs weren’t strong enough to support her. A prickling rose up her neck, an eerie feeling of slowly being electrocuted.

How could she not have seen this coming? It was too good to be true, the drawings arriving just as she needed them. Too good to be true always meant its opposite: not true, not good.

She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t decide what to say. She wanted to smack the joint from the woman’s mouth, and the violence of the urge scared her; it seemed so unlike her, so unlike who she used to be. Instead, she grabbed the antimacassar on the arm of the chair and squeezed it.

“Were you? Did you … think of this?”

“No, dear.” Indira chuckled. “At this stage, my mind gets fuzzy if I think more than two steps ahead. I make tea and by the time I’ve gotten the milk out I forget what I wanted. It’s a blessing, honestly. The future is always the present.”

“But who involved me?” Elm asked. “Who got me into this?”

Indira took another long puff on her joint, looking like nothing so much as the caterpillar from Moira’s Alice in Wonderland DVD. “You did.”

During the cab ride home from Indira’s, Elm rubbed her belly and tried not to cry. She made it to the elevator in her building before putting her head to the mirrored wall to sob, her breath made shorter by Ronan’s constriction of her lungs. What the fuck had she done?

It was still early, and Wania hadn’t yet picked up Moira from school. She had ballet this afternoon and wouldn’t get home until after six. Colin wouldn’t be back until seven or eight. That gave Elm three hours to get herself together.

She lay on her bed. There must be a way she could salvage this. What if she said nothing, stayed on at Tinsley’s? The auction house was sure to come under scrutiny during an investigation. Auction houses always claimed that any illegal behavior was simply one bad seed, acting alone. At best, the house would receive bad press, a hit they could not afford in this climate. Elm would be thrown under the bus.

She would resign. Admit herself duped and clear out her desk. Ian would probably never speak to her again, but he’d be