Still Lives(43)

I also envy Dee because everyone loves Dee. With her biceps, her smooth British accent, and her boyish look, she epitomizes white cool, like the guys on punk album covers from the seventies. She navigates both the office and the crew world with equal ease. When Brent learned of the onset of Dee’s diabetes last year, he bargained for her to get fulltime status and health insurance so she could stay on at the Rocque.

“Because you’re so talented,” I told her.

She snorted. “Because I keep my mouth shut.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Ha-ha. I told you. I keep my mouth shut.”

An addiction? An affair? I thought booze or drugs. Yegina thought affair, maybe the woman on the crew who quit.

Why was Dee missing last Wednesday and Thursday? Sickness seems like a feeble excuse. And she seems fine today.

There’s a grinding sound as her saw sticks, and I see something stir in a chamber at the far end of the carpentry tables. Brent’s office. It’s the only office down here with a door, and while the crew was hanging the exhibition, he’d offered it to Kim Lord as her changing room so that she could doff her disguises for jeans and a T-shirt. She must not have changed on Wednesday, because she was wearing her trench coat and wig when I saw her hurrying toward Pershing Square. She must have been waylaid almost immediately after she arrived at the Rocque. A phone call on her cell? An encounter here? Perhaps she saw her stalker outside the museum?

Through the open crack, I spot Brent, frowning over a pile of papers. I wonder how long he’ll stay at the Rocque, if he’ll leave on his own or be ousted for his hostility, maybe even for harassment. He doesn’t belong among us almost-somethings and has-beens anyway. Brent’s heyday on Broadway—the 1990s—brought the world Rent, Chicago, Angels in America, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He specialized in epic urban decay, Gotham crossed with Rome. His office has the air of a shrine, hung with black-and-white pictures of industrial sites—steel girders, half-finished roofs, crumbling bridge pilings. Track lights cast a moonglow over the man himself, now scribbling furiously, his dark head bent. He looks like a child caught in a feverish make-believe. When he glances up, directly at me, I swear I am completely invisible to him. His expression is still inward, transfixed.

Dee switches off the saw and yanks the board free.

“Need something else?” Dee asks, holding up the board. I catch sight of the clock above her head. It’s 9:31. Almost time for the press conference.

I tell her no, and hurry away.

Out in the loading dock, the massive door to the permanent collection is up, revealing the museum’s hidden trove, packed with leaning frames, canvases mounted on rollers, and plastic-covered sculptures crouching on shelves and standing free. It looks half like a labyrinth and half like a really expensive rummage sale. I spot our chief curator inside talking to someone obscured by a tall, bubble-wrapped Giacometti. Would Lynne know anything about the cloth behind the figure in “Disappearances”?

As I hesitate beyond the threshold, hidden from view, I hear Lynne say, in a voice raspy with emotion, “I want you to understand something: I didn’t want this exhibition any more than Janis did. Sure, Kim was Nelson de Wilde’s shiny penny back in the early nineties, but I thought she was highly overrated. Until I saw these paintings. And then—”

The saw from the carpentry room drowns out Lynne’s next words, giving my confusion a chance to register. Janis Rocque didn’t want Kim Lord on the exhibition schedule either? Then who did? Bas, obviously. A director can throw his weight around to make a show happen. But why this one?

I creep closer to the collection, keeping concealed behind a shrouded sculpture the size of a horse. A male voice is saying, “… In search of the miraculous. I’ll have to look it up.” The voice sounds familiar, the way it softens and lengthens the I, but I can’t place it. An artist, probably. Lynne hates being interrupted when she’s with artists—it’s like bursting in on a high mass for a nun—so I’m turning to retreat when from behind the bubble-wrapped Giacometti steps J. Ro’s private investigator. He’s in jeans and a hoodie today, making him look younger. He doesn’t say anything, just chews his lip a little, as if he is equally startled to see me.

“I was just walking by,” I say.

“Who’s that?” says Lynne, appearing behind him. She glances at me without interest, but I’m surprised by the change in her appearance. Her hair and suit are black and sleek as ever, but her collar bunches; she looks damp and unwell.

“Do you know Detective Hendricks?” Lynne asks, and then turns to him again. “Someone made a documentary about Ader in the nineties, but it glosses over some things. You really need to read the catalog.”

I regard them blankly, trying to slow my speeding pulse. I don’t like the way this Hendricks person has been watching me since the night of the Gala. He’s studying me now, so I study him back, but it’s as if he has one of those nictitating eyelids that hawks have—an almost imperceptible veil slides over his blue eyes, and I can’t see past it.

They’ve both fallen silent.

“Ader?” I say.

“Bas Jan Ader,” Lynne tells me impatiently, and then I remember: Dutch conceptual artist, used to film himself falling off things. In his last project, he set sail from Cape Cod, intending to cross the Atlantic. His empty boat washed ashore a year later.