The Unhurried Hand

Nadia Vess was sitting in the client chair, unhurried, with a brush in her lap and turpentine on her hands, and she did not look like a killer. That was the thing Emma would tell people afterward, the thing no one believed: she looked like a colleague at the end of a long shared job. "You went to the archive," Nadia said. "I hoped you would. Grandfather keeps talking about listening, and I wanted to see what you'd hear." Emma kept the lightbox between them, which is to say she kept the only weapon in the room, a lightbox, between them. "You put the portrait in here." "I finished the ground last night." Nadia's voice was pleasant and even, an assistant's voice. "The face is the hard part. It always is. Faces are where people decide what a painting is, and I've been trying to decide what you are. Grandfather thinks you're the heir. But an heir signs the schedule, and the schedule is my family's whole apology for existing, and I've watched it eat three men I loved, so you can see my problem, Emma. I don't want an heir. I want it to be over." Outside, far off, a siren. The morning of the plate. Ostrowski's partner was en route to the museum with a warrant signed by a judge who did not call things food poisoning. Emma kept her voice level and kept it moving, the way you keep a swab moving. "So Lucia wasn't the schedule." "Lucia was mine." Nadia said it without weight, the way you report a cleaning. "She was going to sell fourteen paintings to a consortium. Did you think of what happens to eleven bodies in private hands? Because I did. Every night of my life. The bones go into private collections, the log goes into a fire, and the Arnet becomes a story about a drowned painter, and the Marchettis live forever. That is her schedule. My schedule is one where the truth gets told with everything still in it. Bones, log, paintings, name. A confession needs the body, Emma, or it's just a story." She stood, unhurried. She was twenty-six and her hands were the steadiest Emma had ever seen, and she understood, all at once, every painting in the Marchetti's history, because a hand that steady with a brush would be that steady with anything. "I've been building the case against my family since I was nineteen. Eleven paintings x-rayed, eleven sites mapped, and a fourth hand in a log that will convict us. I killed a woman to stop fourteen paintings from leaving, and I will go to prison for it, and the museum will convict itself, and you're the only conservator in the world who'd have found the fourth hand before the trial. That's the face I couldn't paint. Whether you'd help me finish it honestly." "You murdered her," Emma said. "You put a dead woman in a pose and corrected it." "I put her in the only room she'd have agreed to haunt," Nadia said, and for the first time her voice moved. "She modeled for that painting's restoration three times. She loved it more than any of us." The door opened behind her. Ostrowski was in it, gray-faced and upright, and two uniforms behind him, and Nadia Vess set her brush on the lightbox like a woman ending a shift, and held out her wrists. "One condition," she said, to no one and everyone, to Emma. "Restore the woman in gray. Whatever you find under the last varnish, you clean it and say it. And when they x-ray the east wall — tell them my grandfather built the frames. I don't want the schedule to be all that's left of us."