The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Two days before, Mayer had consented to an art authenticator after a long and flush-faced shout-bout with Kasson. The banker insisted that the Fern Gallery was intentionally exhibiting a counterfeit work of art to draw more foot traffic. The morning after their installation had gone up, Paire observed the argument with a thrill, even a lick of defiance when Kasson shot her a look at the desk.

  Word got out about the test, and a crowd began to gather at the gallery. Who had alerted them was anyone’s guess. Both Mayer and Kasson denied calling any attention to the spectacle.

  The expert headed up Friederichs & Strauss, a firm in New York that specialized in fine art forensics. The white lab coat was Kasson’s suggestion— Friederichs muttered something about how she usually worked in jeans. Early on, she had complained about the people milling around. Mayer finally set up a perimeter of orange traffic cones so that looky-loos wouldn’t get close enough to interfere with the testing. Kasson alone crossed the line, looming over the woman’s shoulder periodically in case he spotted the clues that would reveal the hoax.

  Paire was going to chalk all of it up to student traffic, but older patrons turned up too. Reporters showed up, primarily writers for trade press. Since most of the nation’s fine art press kept their editorial headquarters within fifteen minutes of the Fern, their writers wandered over to see if the hubbub was worth reporting. Kasson began pacing on the outside of the crowd, an electron to their nucleus.

  Mayer didn’t look happy to have reporters ask him questions, but he faked congeniality better than Kasson. Currently, he was talking to a writer from Perspective, the biggest art journal in the United States. She wore stilt heels and horn-rimmed glasses. Hunched slightly at her shoulders, she had the posture of a sunflower stalk and spoke with the vocal timbre of a four-year-old. “Does it concern you that you might have a forgery in your gallery?” she asked Mayer.

  Some of the spectators sidled up to hear from the director.

  Possibly spurred on by Kasson’s glare, Mayer threw on a folksy charm. “We’re resolving an important question. Qi is a forgotten but important voice in twentieth-century art. This portrait right here could be the only known work in existence. If it’s real, everyone should know about this. If it’s not real, it’s just as important that we don’t give anyone false hope.”

  If Paire hadn’t known otherwise, she might think the idea for testing had sprung out of Mayer’s head.

  “So, do you know much about what she’s doing?”

  They studied Friederichs over at the drafting table. The scientist looked up from her eyepiece for a moment, appeared irritated, and then refocused on her work.

  “I’m not a forgery expert, but so far she’s used microfluorescence, where you beam X-rays to reveal the spectrum of most of the elements in the pigments. She’ll see if the author used multiple layers. Forgers can sometimes build up multiple layers of paint to reproduce the exact style of the original. In this case, where there is no original that we know of that a forger would work off, we’ll at least know if there’s anything underneath.”

  “Do people still use black lights for this kind of thing?”

  “They can, but nonfluorescent paints can be used to nullify the test.”

  Before they opened that day, Mayer had vented to Paire about how bad the gallery would look if everything went tits up. The testing put the Fern’s reputation at stake. But to the casual observer, Mayer seemed to relish the attention.

  “Are the X-rays dangerous for us to be around?” the reporter asked.

  “Not at this level.”

  “What is she looking for? What’s the tell-tale?”

  “Ultimately, we want to verify that the artist is, in fact, Qi. To do that, we want to conduct a number of tests to make sure this conforms to his typical style. In this case, the artist used a traditional egg-based tempera—pretty much egg yolk and vinegar—the same thing Michelangelo used. The pigment testing is primarily done to make sure he used that.”

  “Will she be able to date the painting?”

  “The dating and pigment analysis isn’t as important as you think. In theory, you could possibly test for mitochondrial DNA traces from the chickens that laid the eggs, and check to see whether those chickens came from China or the United States. But that wouldn’t help us.”

  The reporter adjusted a handheld recorder closer to Mayer’s chin. “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not entirely certain whether Qi was in China or the United States when he painted this. In this case, provenance—documentation of who owned this painting and when—is just as important as the pigment analysis.”

  “So what does the provenance tell you?”

  “That it was shipped from a gallery in Beijing to the United States. They claim to have had it, but not shown it, since 1981. According to the documentation, it passed through customs when Qi Jianyu passed away two years ago.”

  “So, isn’t it time to look for Chinese chickens?”

  This made Mayer laugh. “You’d think, but there’s the chance that the documentation itself was faked, which would call the provenance into question.” He frowned after he said this, possibly regretting having introduced the notion. “So she’ll look at things like how the painting is dressed. You consider the frame, and the surface the artist used. In this case, we already know that the wood matched the kind of wood Qi would have used—Chinese red birch.”

  Paire noticed that Mayer’s talking to the reporter disturbed Kasson, who paced in his corner like a fresh fighter waiting for the bell.

  “So that’s not a canvas?”

  “You can’t use canvas with tempera. The surface bends and the paint cracks. There’s already a little crazing on the painting, which you wouldn’t normally see on a piece this young.” Mayer’s voice was drying out from all the talking. “Sometimes you get forgers that try to reproduce this effect, even sticking a painting in the oven, but if this one was faked, they weren’t trying to create the impression of antiquity. I’d imagine it was stuck in poor storage conditions.”

  The reporter stared at the monitor, and Paire recognized the expression, the way her eyes lazily fell on the folds of fabric in the LCD monitor. The empress had the power to enchant the weak-willed, even on a television screen. “I’m confused. How will you know it’s authentic?”

  “I’d imagine the doctor is looking for stylistic idiosyncrasies. The quirks that would be unique to Qi. We know he was left-handed, so she’ll be making sure the brush strokes came from a left-handed artist. She’ll look at the composition and make sure it’s consistent with his other work. That sort of thing.”

  “Didn’t you say there weren’t any other works from Qi?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  The writer slid her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “Then how do you know what his idiosyncrasies are?”

  From the drafting table, Dr. Friederichs called out, “I’m not looking for any of that. I found what I’m looking for.”

  Everyone who wasn’t already looking turned toward the examination table. The crowd at the front of the line inched past the traffic cones for a closer look. Her hand sheathed in a latex glove, Friederichs tugged lightly at something, then moved the macrolens over the area until it came up on the LCD. “A hair.”

  On the screen, the dark thread looked like a wet reed that had washed ashore. Half of it was embedded in the paint, trapped in the pigment. Almost as if it were growing out of the birch board, the hair looped in the air and sank back into the paint, somewhere around the empress’s big toe.

  Kasson chimed in from across the room, suddenly interested. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Refreshingly, Friederichs was as unimpressed by Kasson as she was by everyone else, despite the fact that he’d hired her. “Good old-fashioned DNA testing.”

  “What are you going to test it against?”

  No one had an answer. Not Friederichs, and not Mayer. Members of the crowd glanced at each other, and then looked to
the scientist for a suggestion.

  A woman stepped out of the crowd. “You can use me,” she said. Breakfast at Tiffany’s sunglasses. Scarf tied under her chin. Loose wool coat that hid her figure.

  • • •

  The crowd instinctively stepped away from the woman as she revealed her face and hair. The woman Paire had followed out to the street at Rosewood’s opening reception.

  A deep breath ballooned in Paire’s chest, and she expectantly held on to it. In the daylight the woman’s face seemed more remarkable. Three full dimensions of the face on the birch plank. Paire crept behind the scientist so she could compare the empress with the real woman. Her skin was a few shades darker, her features more sharply defined on a body more athletically trained than the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi. She was older than Paire by at least a decade, but bartenders might still have asked for her driver’s license. Her glossy black hair was longer than in the painting, but only by a few inches. In the perfect oval of her face, Paire noted a few lines around the eyes, not necessarily wrinkles, from where the baby fat of her youth had evaporated.

  The woman noticed Paire looking at her. She lingered for a moment, her eyes running down the contours of Paire’s figure, and gave an almost imperceptible smile.

  Mayer must have helped stage this, because he showed no surprise when the woman revealed herself. He stared over at Kasson, who seemed ready to pop from displeasure. “This is our benefactor.”

  The woman stared at Kasson. “Melinda Qi. I’m his daughter.”

  Paire had expected English laced with a hint of Chinese accent, but Melinda spoke with a crisp American cadence.

  Kasson looked as if he’d caught someone trying to pick his pocket. He cut across the room to stand an intimate distance from the woman. Others stepped back, but Melinda stood her ground and looked him up and down, warning him with her eyes.

  Kasson could not feign his usual off-putting congeniality. He stared at her threateningly, his head angled down so his eyes bored into her. He extended a hand and said his name.

  Melinda looked at his hand but kept hers folded at her waist. He frowned when he was denied, and spoke. “You sound like you grew up in the States.”

  “Good ear,” she said without humor. Paire liked her.

  “How old would you have been when he painted this?”

  “I would have been four,” she said.

  “Older than I thought.” He smirked. “So you’d have no memory of this.”

  “Memory is all I have of my father,” she said.

  “Memory’s a powerful thing,” he said. “It can play tricks on you. Make you believe things that aren’t real.”

  “Take my blood and see what’s real,” she said.

  Kasson made a grand gesture toward the portrait. “The woman in the painting is you. We can all see that.”

  She replied, “It doesn’t surprise me that a man like yourself would have difficulty distinguishing between Asian women. But the truth is, the woman in the painting more closely resembles my mother, and I closely resemble her. That is how she would have looked in 1980.”

  “She was in the States with you, correct?”

  “Sharp as a tack.”

  “How would he produce this from across the Pacific?”

  “Memory’s a powerful thing,” she said.

  He shook his head, exasperated. “How are you so sure someone isn’t playing a cruel trick on you?”

  “Because I know what cruel tricks look like.”

  Once his intellect caught up to his rage, Kasson stepped a pace backward. He adjusted his cufflinks. His face had turned a blistering pink, but he said nothing more. Kasson cut through the crowd to the front door, his typically percussive footfalls now soft as slippers.

  Chapter 9

  The break-in happened a day after the coverage ran online in Perspective. The burglary had been low-tech. Someone hurled a stone through the front window. Nothing was taken, not even Rosewood’s HERO.

  The Fern’s alarm system immediately triggered a call to the police, as well as to Mayer. By the time Mayer made it to the gallery, two patrol cars were splashing twirling blue and red lights across the block’s brick façades. The burglar had long gone.

  When Paire came to work the following morning she saw that a cantaloupe-sized hole had been smashed in the window, with a network of cracks spidering out from the center. The hole let in a draft of early morning spring chill. Pedestrians would now have an eye-level peephole that looked onto the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi. The cracking textured the rest of the pane, obscuring the Rosewood that hung right behind it. Her face framed by the snaggy edges of the hole, Paire marveled at the trail of glass pebbles on the floor inside.

  “Who even finds something this size in New York?” Mayer said in the retelling. He showed Paire a stone roughly the size of a guinea pig. “It’s not like these are just lying around on the street.” Paire wondered herself.

  The stone had smashed through the front window at a merciful angle and velocity, so it didn’t damage any of the artwork. It had landed in the middle of the floor, steps away from the desk. The police had marked the spot with an X of black electrician’s tape.

  “The alarm must have scared him off,” Mayer guessed. Paire had once heard the alarm by accident, because when she set it one night without Mayer’s supervision, she forgot the code, and the siren clanged through the gallery loud enough to set her ears ringing. “That’s the volume they use to get dictators out of churches.”

  Mayer had been there all evening, and he was dressed casually—at least, casually for Mayer Wolff, in a loose cotton shirt with jeans and biker boots. He hadn’t groomed his beard, and while it was close-cropped, the hair seemed more brambly than usual. Deprived of shower and sleep, Mayer looked tired, and to Paire, older.

  Lucia was there too, dressed in a white polo shirt and shorts, so her long, tanned legs goosebumped from the cold. She’d pulled her hair into a brioche at the crown of her skull and wore Mayer’s coat over her shoulders. Lucia sat next to him at the desk, leaning her head on his shoulder, her arm tucked through his. Paire had never seen them touch like this in public.

  Similarly sleep-deprived, Lucia lifted her head when Paire opened the door. She groggily disentangled her arm from Mayer’s. When she rose from her chair, she slid her arm across Mayer’s back as she walked away, until he clasped her hand and kissed it softly.

  “Paire’s smart enough to know what’s going on, and I’m too tired to pretend.” Mayer stood and held Lucia’s face in her hands. He pressed his lips gently against hers, resting his forehead on hers afterward. Lucia’s eyelids batted and she brushed his cheek with her hand. Paire couldn’t help but note the ring on Lucia’s finger when she touched Paire’s shoulder on her way out. “He’s the good one in all this,” she said.

  Paire felt like one of two nurses changing shifts.

  She pretended that she had seen nothing out of the ordinary, and sat down next to her boss. They both looked through the hole toward brownstone steps across the street. “Do they have him on camera?”

  He gestured around the room. “Do you see any cameras, Paire?” The way Mayer said her name had changed since they’d met, from skepticism (is that really your name—Paire?), to the tone of a pedagogue addressing a student, to this one, that of one peer addressing another. And as a peer, he could be curt with her without worrying about hurting her feelings.

  Paire hadn’t thought about the Fern’s security system beyond the alarm keypad. “I thought it might be built into the walls somewhere, like a nanny cam.”

  “We’ve just got the rock to go on.”

  “Nothing was taken?”

  “Nothing was touched, as far as we can tell. None of the paintings are even crooked.” He rubbed his eyes and sipped a gigantic iced coffee.

  “Is there a chance that it’s just vandalism?”

  He seemed incensed that she would even ask him this, as if the question implied that the collection in the gallery might not be worth stea
ling. “It would be a strange coincidence that the story ran online yesterday, and this happens. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how many people would have read it. It’s for art wonks. Also, I’m hard-pressed to believe that an art wonk would be fool enough to think they can smash-and-grab an art gallery.”

  “Are you sure they wanted the Qi?” Paire said this to try and be fair to the vast Rosewood collection that covered most of the walls, but the moment it left her lips she knew it was an asinine question.

  The way Mayer looked at her confirmed it. He lamented, “Now that people know it’s real, it’s become a commodity. The last Qi. That has value. And people will want anything that has value.”

  Two workers with beards and big stomachs entered the gallery. The patches on their gray uniforms read Moby Glass Repair. Several weeks ago, Paire wouldn’t have given them a second look, but after the night at Wall Street station, she scoured over their uniforms to see if they looked too new, with creases in the fabric or wear that came from a hastily rubbed stain. One of the men couldn’t stop staring at the red cheongsam on the rear wall. This relieved Paire, because the way he stared indicated that he’d never seen the painting. A thief wouldn’t ogle the empress in front of the gallery owner.

  Mayer snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose to jostle him out of his trance.

  “You might want to think about sturdier glass,” said the lead man.

  Within a few minutes they signed forms and began removing the broken pane. Mayer took HERO off its mount and leaned it against the rear wall, just under the empress.