expression. In the corridor, I asked again, “Do you know anything about the former owner?”
“Suspicious death.”
“Who? The owner?” I stopped at the registrar’s door, but P.P. kept on going, heading for the elevator that would take him out of our basement offices, leaving without a receipt and with my questions unanswered.
I cursed him. But only for a moment. I understood.
If you live your life for beautiful objects, they become like lovers. To have one taken from you is not pleasant.
I wondered where I might find Tyler, but decided I couldn’t spend my time searching for him. Tyler would be back in the conservation lab soon enough, and I had a hundred things to do.
I stuck my head into the registrar’s office. “Breeze, we need to get a receipt to P.P. for an eleventh-century Khmer head.” Breeze was responsible for keeping track of all objects in the museum. Any piece brought in, whether it belonged to the museum or not, needed to be noted in the records, and if someone left an artwork for examination or for sale, they needed a receipt.
“Okay. Come in and I’ll write it up. I’ll let you get it to him.”
“I’ll be back to pick it up.”
“You’re really pushing out the boat today,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t bend over in that skirt if I were you.”
“You didn’t say that two weeks ago when I wore it.”
“You must have washed it since then. And dried it.”
“You’re right. Too short?”
“Way. The last thing you need is to exaggerate those curves. At work, anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s cute—don’t get me wrong—and it does match the purple streak in your hair.”
I laughed as I pushed the strand behind my ear. “Thanks.”
2
“So tell me about this head that I’ve found lying on the middle of my work table,” Tyler said, the edge in his voice clear even over the phone.
“I’ll be right there.” I hung up, rose from my desk and the pile of oversized papers that covered its surface, pulled my skirt down to a presentable length, and hurried toward the conservation lab. Tyler hated anyone on the staff to deposit art in his lab without consulting him first. Still, he wasn’t as finicky as conservators can sometimes be—a trait necessary for their painstaking, exacting work—but his lab could be likened to a dragon’s lair, with him the presiding dragon.
TYLER stood with his hands on his hips. Big hands, so big that your eye was drawn to them. He looked like an early Dvaravati sculpture, one of those slender Thai figures with oversized hands. Hard to imagine those hands repairing a fine ceramic piece, in-painting a scarred sculpture, dexterously reconstructing a shattered, delicate Meissen teacup. Harder still to believe he made fine jewelry on the weekends, delicately spun confections, one of which I wore around my neck. He’d made it for me the previous year for my birthday. I felt like a klutz in his presence, as if all thumbs, which I wasn’t, except in comparison.
He softened as he looked at the necklace, which I’d unconsciously touched as I walked into the lab. He looked me up and down. “That’s some skirt,” he said.
“I’m getting that from various sources.” I looked pointedly at his jeans.
Tyler wore a lab coat over a flannel shirt and the scruffiest jeans imaginable, the knees sagging and stained. How he felt that he could criticize my wardrobe was a question I wouldn’t mind asking, but it didn’t seem like the right moment. Arthur Philen had been trying unsuccessfully to alter Tyler’s wardrobe, sending out a series of memos that had begun as a general suggestion regarding a dress code and had become narrower and more pointedly directed at Tyler with each new missive. In response, Tyler had taken to wearing his gardening clothes to work.
We both laughed, and as I came to stand next to him, he gave my shoulders a quick squeeze. “I couldn’t find you. I asked everyone, but no one knew where you were.” A slight exaggeration.
He sighed and braced his meaty hands on the table. “Arthur dragged me upstairs this morning. He’d decided that one of the sculptures in your gallery was leaning, and he wanted me to fix it.”
I tried to think which of my sculptures that might have been. I’d walked through the gallery first thing that morning, checking each piece as I did every morning, part of my job as curator. “Was it leaning?”
“Of course not. So tell me about this.” Tyler pulled on gloves and picked up the head. It looked miniature in his hands. Neither of us spoke, we just admired, for no matter how he turned it, it was gorgeous. I told him what I knew.
“So you’re wanting me to authenticate it?”
“Yes, basically.”
“Well, stone is tricky. You know that. There are some obvious things that I can do. I can compare the stone to the Cambodian sculptures that we have and to those in the museum in San Francisco. Will P.P. allow me to chip a little from the lowest part of the neck?” He turned the head over.
“Yes. I asked him.”
“Better get it in writing.”
“Okay.”
“With that chip and that chipped area, I’ll be able to see the depth and irregularity of the surface. If it’s completely uniform, that would be odd. It would suggest that a chemical has been applied to the surface to make it look discolored, worn, old. But if it does appear that something has been applied, it isn’t so easy to see what that application might be.”
“In Southeast Asia they use fruits, resins sometimes. Rub it in and voila, you’ve got an altered surface.”
“Yeah. We saw that on that bronze you brought in last year.”
“Right.” I’d doubted that bronze from the moment I’d seen it, but asked Tyler to look at it anyway. Every fake was a lesson.
“Bronze is radically different from stone.” He held the head near to his face, pulling down the magnifying visor he always wore, an extension of his body. “I’ll look closely at the cuts, the edges. Try to see the wear, which I’m not seeing at the moment. Or not much.” He lifted his head and turned the visor up again.
I said, “I couldn’t either, though I was looking with my bare eye. Could be a fake. It’s from Southeast Asia, and our starting premise is that anything could be a fake. The modern sculptors are really good.” I slipped on gloves.
“Yes, they’re good, and they’re prolific. Sure is gorgeous.” He raised the sculpture in front of him. “I’d like to meet her in a dark alley.”
“Right.” I didn’t want to think about Tyler’s sexual longings. I reached for the sculpture. “When do you think that you might be able to get to this?”
“When do you need it?”
