“So you want me to squeal on my bosses,” Theo deadpanned.
“Precisely.” His expression was perfectly, beautifully serious.
“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so? The tyrannical regime of the Schechterites must be ousted.”
Adler spluttered into his drink, but it wasn’t a full laugh. She grinned at him. “Although we’ll need to talk about something else too,” she added. “So I won’t have to lie when the higher-ups ask me what we were discussing.”
Adler gave that due consideration. “What sort of topic? Politics? Entertainment? Controversy?”
“No controversy. Too controversial. How about the weather?”
“What can you say about the weather in Chicago? ‘Day 56: Still freezing. Distinct bouquet of dead fish.’ Baseball?”
“I thought we said no controversy. When the Sox won the pennant, Interactives wouldn’t talk to Taxidermy for over a week. News? The economy?” She caught his grimace. “Oh, right. That’s probably like mentioning Macbeth to an actor, right? Do I have to turn around three times to break the jinx?”
“I’ll forgive you if you promise not to mention it again.” Adler gestured as if he were warding off the Evil Eye, getting a laugh from Theo. “Family, perhaps? You must have stories.”
“If you want to be bored to death,” Theo said. “The Speers are nothing to write home about. Except my grandma Dora was a Goldwyn Girl back in the day, and doesn’t that embarrass the hell out of my mom. How about the Adlers? It must have been strange, growing up with this huge family legacy.”
“Not particularly.” He drummed his fingers on the table, mulling over his words. “It feels normal, really. All families have expectations, don’t they? It’s rather…” Theo waited expectantly for the next words, but he stopped and offered her a crooked smile instead. “You know, I don’t have a way to end that sentence without putting my foot in my mouth. What about your family?”
“It’s nice to know I’m not the only one with chronic foot-and-mouth disease,” Theo said. “I’m the eldest of three—there’s me, Edith, and Godfrey.”
Adler looked amused. “Your parents like old-fashioned names, don’t they?”
“Sort of.” Theo crossed her legs at the ankle and made herself comfortable in the booth. “Grandma Edie, Grandma Dora, and Great-Uncle Godfrey pooled their savings to buy Mom and Dad a house back when they were newlyweds, and my parents promised to name kids after them in memoriam. Mom used to tell me that if she’d had a choice, I would’ve been Jennifer Amanda. How about you? Got a sister?”
“No, it was just me and my brother.”
“And where’s he now?”
“He got religion,” Adler said.
Theo leaned back, wondering if she’d touched on something sensitive, and he shook his head. “No, not in a bad way. He was my closest friend when I was little, but he never wanted to be involved in”—he waved a hand vaguely, encompassing not so much the restaurant as the world—“this. He passed away a few years ago.”
Theo winced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
“Don’t be. He had a good life.” Adler took a sip of his drink. “He was a good man, if a little bit too, eh, concerned for my soul. Besides, I’m the one who brought it up.” He grimaced. “My mistake.”
“I’ll say.” She leaned forward. “See, you’ve got me curious. You don’t like talking about family, so you mentioned it? I’m pretty sure Freud would have something to say about that.”
“Oh God, not Freud,” he said, shaking his head. “Help?”
He ran a hand through his hair, looking awkward enough that she was willing to help him. It was hard to be nervous about talking to him when he’d walked into a conversational trap he himself had set.
“All right, I think we’ve done enough talking to satisfy my bosses,” she said, taking a few olives from the appetizer plate. “How about we forget Freud and talk about something that won’t embarrass either of us?”
“Yes. Please.” Adler took a sip of beer and settled back in his chair a little. “Tell me more about that mural you were working on. Most of the exhibits have murals framed on canvas, don’t they? But you were painting it directly onto the wall.”
“Well, it’s about practicality, really,” she said. Adler still hadn’t touched the appetizers—another detail for her mental portrait. He hadn’t eaten much at the party, either. Maybe it was a question of comfort and personal boundaries. “When it’s a traveling exhibit, like King Tut’s treasures, the large graphics that go with it will be printed on fabric and displayed stretched on a frame. It’s a cheap way to fill up your wall space. But while Treasures of the Middle Kingdom is going to go on the road later, it’s something we put together ourselves, not a loan. It needs to make an impression.”
She shrugged. “When you print a painting on fabric, especially when you’re blowing up a smaller image to, say, ten feet by twenty, it loses a lot of vibrancy and detail. Printed versions can go on the road, but for this…for this, it has to be perfect. It will be perfect.”
“And what happens to perfection when the exhibit closes? Will it be painted over?”
“Probably. Or scraped off.” His brow furrowed at that, and she shrugged again. “It depends on whether they reuse the dividing walls they built. If not, the whole thing might go into storage, but if they need the walls for another exhibit it’ll probably get scraped.”
There was an odd look in Adler’s eyes that she couldn’t decipher, and she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. It wasn’t as if the mural were somehow unique or special; it was a copy of a picture made for the exhibit. Maybe he was objecting to the waste?
He didn’t say anything, though, and for a moment she struggled to fill the gap in the conversation. “I know it sounds strange, but it’s really not,” she said as lightly as she could. “We’re used to it. Every painted-on mural goes on a temporary wall anyway. To paint an actual wall, we need special dispensation from the museum’s board of directors.”
The corner of Adler’s mouth twitched. “Is the bureaucracy really that bad?”
“It’s not the bureaucracy—it’s the building. It’s not such a big problem in the newer wings, but the main body of the museum was built out of a hall from the World’s Fair in 1893. It’s considered a historic site, and the Heritage Association gets really picky about whatever we do. Last month someone taped a cat poster over our dumbwaiter door, and the whole department got angry letters.”
“Why does the art department have a dumbwaiter?”
“Our loft used to be part of the offices for the big cheeses of the Fair, and they had big dumbwaiter shafts built in so people could send up hot dinners while they were working late. Ours still works too,” she added. “The tray’s gone, but the pulley and rope are pretty strong. If someone needed to hide something in a hurry and didn’t mind breaking it, they’d drop it down the dumbwaiter shaft and get in through the ground-floor panel to clean up the mess later. Apparently, it was a really popular way to get rid of illegal booze back in the twenties.”
Adler laughed for real this time. For a moment his posture loosened, and the taut strain went out of the lines of his form; with shoulders relaxed, he looked younger than before. His eyes had a warmth the rest of his colors didn’t—halfway between tawny and auburn, with a glint of reflected light in them that bypassed her mental Pantone charts and went straight to whiskey. Old whiskey, the good stuff that could make your head swim if you weren’t careful with it.
Oh, damn, this was a dangerous line of thinking. Clearly Aki had been right about her needing to get out more.
It had been a while since she’d been to lunch with a man who wasn’t Aki. Her last relationship had ended by mutual consent when both of them realized that they were sticking together purely out of boredom and inertia—not the stuff dreams are made of. Throwing herself into her work had been one way to stave off loneliness and avoid getting herself into another mess. But if she was reacting like this because
a donor was good-looking and friendly, then she had good reason to pull herself back. This was how flaky artists, not professionals, acted.
If she wasn’t professional, she wasn’t anything.
She was answering one of his questions about the department’s reconstructions of tomb paintings when a flash of color caught her eye. It was gold—no, too brown—bronze, real prehistoric bronze, not a color typically found in Loop bars. She turned her head as she tried to catch the source of it.
It was one of the TVs. It was showing a news broadcast, the voices of the anchors almost drowned out by the noise in the dining room. Inset behind the two reporters was a picture of an ancient bronze shield, looking vaguely familiar and out of place next to the coifed pair.
“—taken a shocking turn,” one of the reporters was saying. “Sources within the university’s administrative branch have informed us that far from being the simple act of vandalism originally believed, the events of last night were a deliberate attack on one of the city’s oldest institutions.”
Theo’s stomach clenched. Adler cocked his head curiously, and she realized that she’d trailed off in the middle of a sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The news—”
His gaze followed hers to the TV, and his jaw tightened. The screen was showing the front of a familiar stone archway.
It wasn’t her museum, but she knew it anyway: the Oriental Institute of Chicago, known for its collection of artifacts related to the ancient Near East. It was an odd place, quiet and dim, its galleries filled with out-of-the-way corners where a girl could get comfortable with a sketch pad. The news crawl below the image was talking about crime statistics, and the reporter made that face they made when serious stories didn’t involve murder or anything else exciting.
“—detected the alarm shortly after three o’clock,” she said, “by which point the collection had already been emptied. Shards of stone were found on the floor of the gallery, but we don’t know at this time whether the stolen items have in fact been destroyed—”
Theo took a deep breath. “Not another one,” she whispered. The waiter refilled her water glass, but she didn’t touch it.
The camera was panning across what she recognized as the Hall of Syria. It was a wreck: cases smashed, statues toppled, a rare early Christian manuscript slashed to pieces. The reporters talked on, discussing distraction tactics and whether the Collector—if this was indeed his work—harbored some kind of hatred for museums. “Someone goes to this much effort to make a mess, I’m thinking there’s got to be serious issues there,” one of them observed to the other, who nodded.
The screen cut to a commercial, and Theo finally turned away. A dull ache was throbbing in the back of her neck, and she massaged the muscle with the heel of her palm. It helped to have something to do with her hands.
“Jesus,” she murmured. The images seemed to be burned into her brain. The Collector had wrecked items he couldn’t steal before, but this… She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, making starbursts erupt in her vision.
“So…” Adler’s voice was quiet. “The Collector?”
“The Collector,” she managed to say. “Or someone like him—her? Them?”
“I’d heard stories,” he said, toying with his fork. His eyes were fixed on her, though, and that tension was back in his shoulders and stark lines. “It’s unavoidable in certain circles these days. A cat burglar who attacks collections of Eastern artifacts and destroys what he can’t take. Though the Columbian’s board of directors has seemed eager to reassure its donors that everything’s secure.”
“We’ve been fine so far,” she said. “We have a good security team. But I—I don’t think anyone’s gonna be too happy. Someone’ll hear about this”—she jerked her head toward the TV—“and it’ll be on the grapevine in minutes. They’ll be double-checking everything, setting up new checkpoints.” She shook her head. “It’s gonna be a mess.”
For a moment, there was silence between them. Adler’s hands were flat on the table as he leaned forward slightly, the pressure leaving paler patches under his skin, and a few lines appeared in his face as his jaw tightened. Theo took a quick swallow of ice water and tried to get her nerves under control.
It didn’t work. The Columbian had done a lot of business with the Oriental Institute, co-sponsoring shows and making trades of certain artifacts. The thought of THS203 sprawled half-out of a cracked case, its bandages ripped, made her throat close.
“I should go,” she said. “I’m sorry, I probably should. The museum takes this kind of thing very seriously.”
The words sounded canned, but they must have made some kind of sense because Adler nodded. “All right,” he said. “I hope this won’t cause trouble for your department.”
“I wish I could promise it won’t.”
She tried to ask for the check, but Adler insisted on taking care of it. He seemed concerned about her reaction to the news and asked a few times if she was feeling well. Her hands trembled as she and Seth drove back toward the museum.
Work on the mural had stopped. Five team members were gathered around Jake Stiegler, who was streaming footage from a local news site through his phone. Aki glanced up as Theo slipped in next to him. “How was your date?” he whispered.
“Fine, and it wasn’t a date. I came back as soon as I heard.” She nodded to the phone. “How’d you guys hear?”
“Document Preservation heard it first. They passed it to Anthropology, who passed it to Egyptology, who passed it to us.” Aki shook his head. “The board probably knows by now. Ten bucks says the exhibit gets postponed while they reevaluate everything.”
Theo grimaced. Postponed was one step from canceled. If the board thought the museum’s security was in danger of being compromised, they would be willing to lose the revenue of a big exhibit if it meant protecting the rest of the collection. Six months of work down the drain.
She watched the newscast as long as she could stand it, but that wasn’t long. The images of smashed cases and destroyed relics did something strange to her stomach. “I’ll be back in a few,” she murmured to Aki. “I need to go check on something.”
“Saying hi to your friends?” Aki whispered back.
“No comment.”
* * *
She wasn’t in the labs so often these days, but she’d spent plenty of time on sketches there a few months back, and she still had fond memories of the place. Her boys were right where she’d last seen them, arranged on shelves in a climate-controlled cabinet, staring calmly back at her.
“Hey there, guys,” Theo murmured as she patted the glass. The three dozen statuettes looked back and didn’t answer. Like always.
They came in various shapes and sizes, all obviously handmade by someone without much technical skill. Skill, though, wasn’t what made the experts so excited. The sheer number and variety of the shabtis, especially in an early Middle Kingdom burial, were unheard of. The thirty-six in front of her were barely a fraction of the cache.
Aki knew she had a fondness for the little guys, but he didn’t share it. Geez, no wonder, he’d said when he found out. Men who don’t talk back. She’d rolled her eyes at him and left it at that.
It was almost impossible to explain that the shabtis did talk. Sort of.
Seven were the classic mummiform shabtis, hands crossed over their chests, their bodies bound into stiff, upright shapes and scored with shallow lines to indicate the shapes of the bandaging. Formulaic spells were etched into their bodies, calling on the gods to favor their owner. The next four were unusual specimens: unpainted clay figurines in the shape of overseers, more spells chiseled into their bodies. The rest were soldiers in various poses of drawing a bow, tying a sandal, kneeling to pray, or fastening a cloak. Every single one had the lines of crude hieroglyphics etched into its back or its chest—the thing marking them as part of the same cache.
The academics had several theories about how the shabtis had been made and why and by whom. Models of worke
rs were common grave goods in the early Middle Kingdom, but almost none had been made of this type of clay, and they never featured the unique prayers that were carved into these specimens. Dr. Van Allen himself had been seen to raise an eyebrow over the subject.
But to Theo, veteran of art school and project deadlines, they looked like end-of-the-semester work. The sculptor had been making a few of this, a few of that, and then throwing in a couple of yet another type and hoping numbers would make up for the fact that he appeared to have been drunk when he was writing the hieroglyphs. Three of the little guys had gaping holes in their chests, with dimpled marks in the remaining clay where a wad of organic matter must have been stuffed to pad them out.
Working fast and working sloppily, then, but determined to make as many as possible. In the afterlife, these shabtis would come alive and serve their master. It literally was a matter of life and death.
But being sloppy wasn’t their fault, was it? They didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and they certainly hadn’t given anyone trouble. Smiling, she patted the glass again, bonding with that ancient sculptor.
“Been there and done that, brother,” she said softly. She bet he’d be happy to know how long his work had lasted.
She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked into the eyes of the closest shabti. He was in soldier form, holding a bow and arrow. Half of his face had sloughed off years ago, leaving a single eye with a dot of Pacific-blue paint in it. Given the other members of the collection, she guessed the soldier had been made early on, when the sculptor thought he had more time to spend on the details.
The face was crudely modeled, with a stub of a nose and no mouth at all, but something about the tilt of the one eye and the low, relaxed shoulders spoke to Theo. The model looked…amused, almost. In a calm way. He wasn’t exactly having a ball, but he was in a good place and taking things as they came.
With a few details, an anonymous man four thousand years ago had made something that could evoke emotion in her. It might not have made it to the realm of the gods, but the shabti still had life.
Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1) Page 5
