LITMIR.BIZ

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time, I wondered if Arthur really liked art. He wouldn’t be the first art historian who didn’t. I couldn’t think of anyone else in the museum who thought less about art. Even the guards were always up on current exhibitions and grilled me on what museums I’d visited when I traveled. Our staff parties were permeated with art, with art history charades, more obscure with each passing year, as details of paintings—not just complete paintings—made their way into our charade lexicon.

      P.P. glared at him and shifted his body, causing Arthur, in his ever-tightening progress around the room, to run into the worktable. “Didn’t know.”

      “Of course he didn’t know,” I said. “We don’t know. Arthur, please, we need to do some research. If it does turn out to be the original head, P.P. will happily return it to the Cambodian government.” I looked meaningfully at P.P. His mouth was set in a harsh line, but he nodded agreement.

      “Return it? Without being asked?” Arthur began marching again, gesticulating as he did. “Return it like that famous lintel that was returned to Thailand, or those sculptures to Cambodia a few years ago?”

      Arthur’s parts made one view him as a two-dimensional fabrication—a mechanical toy with jerky movements and exaggerated physiognomy. Aquiline nose, a slab of a face, limbs extended like Laurel in that old Laurel and Hardy movie when he was stretched on a rack. Right now the gears in the head of that mechanical toy were moving so fast I feared it would suddenly begin to do a full three-sixty spin.

      The grinding of gears in Arthur’s head always aligned with his desire to get attention, to get noticed. Arthur sought affirmation as a way to negotiate himself into Caleb New’s position as the museum’s director. Everything he did, every word he spoke, was an attempt to move him in that direction.

      “We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Arthur.” I may be small and young, but I can be forceful. I can also be impulsive, as evidenced by my initial certainty that this was the genuine head. But Arthur was gone, popping out as quickly as he’d popped in, leaving P.P. and me looking at each other, holding the proverbial bag, or in this case, the head. “Uh-oh,” I said.

      P.P. scowled and said, accurately and succinctly, “Idiot.” Then he resumed caressing the head. I had to keep reminding myself that the head belonged to him and it wasn’t my place to chastise him for not wearing gloves. Somehow, having the head here in the conservation lab, in the midst of microscope, beakers and brushes, lacquers and paints, all the paraphernalia of the science of restoration and conservation, made his stroking seem all the more incorrect.

      “Fake would be good,” P.P. said.

      For a second I didn’t understand. “Because you could keep it?”

      He nodded, running his finger around and around the whorl of that perfect ear.

      “I thought you said it was expensive.”

      He shrugged.

      There was something he wasn’t telling me. I pulled the gloves back on and took the head from him. It took some strength, not just because the head was heavy, but because P.P. was firmly attached. I turned it upside down as I wrestled it away and looked at the break, but there wasn’t anything unusual about it. It was irregular, rough, one side of the neck extending further than the other. Not cut with a modern saw, or so it seemed. Which was weird, as hadn’t the head been cut from the sculpture?

      I looked up and out the high windows that lighted the conservation lab, trying to recall what I knew about the theft. The alarm system malfunctioning, the only guard asleep in his office, the head detached at an old break. Ah, yes, that would explain the uneven surface. I looked back at the neck, where one would expect to find some of the adhesive that had attached the head to the body at the old break. I couldn’t see any, but I would have Tyler check for it, as it was an important clue to whether the piece really was the original.

      Then I looked closely at the stone. It appeared to be the good, fine-grained sandstone typical of Cambodian sculptures. It wasn’t concrete or resin mixed with crushed stone and poured into a mold, the way some fakes are created today.

      “I’ll put it on Tyler’s priority list if you don’t mind leaving it here for a while,” I said. “He really needs to check it under the microscope. Secondly, do you mind if he chips a tiny piece away from the lower section of the neck? So that he can see how deep the skin of patination is and if it’s irregular, as one would expect from an old piece. You know, since the discoloration wouldn’t be uniform over the surface.”

      P.P. didn’t speak, and I realized that he’d mentally answered my first question and wasn’t going to bother to answer my second, impatient, as he always was, with the obvious.

      “Sorry, P.P. Let’s go to the registrar’s office and get you a receipt for the piece.”

      “Oh, well,” he said as we headed for the door.

      “What do you know about the people who sold the head? The person who bought it originally?”

      He didn’t answer.

      “P.P., don’t get secretive on me now.”

      “Never should have shown you,” he sulked, holding the door open for me.

      “Well, that may be. If you want to own a stolen head.” He was beginning to irritate me. The greed, the acquisitiveness that I saw as his least attractive characteristic was showing itself in his foul 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

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