Under the VARNISH

Chapter 6: What Marcus Didn’t Say

Okafor left two things behind when she finally walked out: a warning, and a business card with a private line scrawled on the back in blue pen, the kind of number that wasn’t printed on the card because it wasn’t supposed to exist yet.

“Don’t do anything about the Sabine Cole offer before you call me,” she’d said, already halfway out the door, not bothering to look back to see if Elena nodded. She hadn’t needed to. Some instructions you gave to people you trusted to follow them. Others you gave to people you were testing.

Elena sat with the card a long time after the door shut, turning it over in her hands the way she turned a brush over a canvas, looking for the place where the surface told her something different from what she’d been told to expect. Nothing about the card told her anything. It was just cardstock and a phone number. The only thing lying to her tonight was going to be a person, and she was tired, suddenly, of being the one who had to do all the reading.

She made tea she didn’t drink and sat by the window with the studio lamp off, watching the street below settle into its evening rhythm — a couple arguing quietly outside the shuttered print shop, a delivery cyclist taking the corner too fast, ordinary lives moving past her window with no idea that four floors up a woman was trying to decide whether to trust a man whose whole existence, according to a detective with a badge, didn’t officially predate his nineteenth birthday.

She called him at nine.

“Four months,” she said, without saying hello first. “Okafor said Julian usually takes eighteen. Why is he speeding up now?”

There was a pause on the line, the kind of pause Elena had started cataloguing the same way she catalogued brushwork — not suspicious in itself, but worth remembering, worth comparing to the next one. “There’s a buyer,” Marcus said finally. “Someone Julian’s circled for years. Old money. Doesn’t buy through galleries, doesn’t leave a paper trail, which means once a deal closes with him, there’s no unwinding it afterward. Julian’s wanted access to that buyer since before I stopped working with him.”

“And you think he’s finally close.”

“I think he’s afraid of losing the window. That’s not the same as being close. That’s worse. A man who thinks he’s running out of time makes mistakes a patient man wouldn’t — but he also stops caring who gets hurt clearing the path.”

Elena pressed the phone tighter to her ear, watching the cyclist’s taillight disappear around the corner below. “If he’s cashing out everything at once, Marcus, that’s not one painting he needs authenticated. That’s an entire collection. That’s why he needs a name like mine attached to it — someone clean

enough that nobody thinks to check twice.”

Marcus didn’t answer right away, and in the gap she found herself doing the thing she’d promised herself she’d stop doing: listening for the tell, the hitch, the wrong note in his silence the way she listened for the wrong crackle in a two-hundred-year-old varnish. She didn’t find one. That frightened her more than finding one would have — because it meant either he was telling her the truth, finally, all the way down, or he’d simply gotten good enough that she couldn’t tell the difference between the two anymore. And she understood, sitting alone in the dark with the phone warm against her cheek, that this question — not the paintings, not Julian, not even Okafor — was the one the rest of this was actually going to hinge on.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said. “I can hear the shape of it even when I can’t hear the words.”

“There’s a lot I’m not telling you,” Marcus said quietly. “Most of it because I don’t know if it’s mine to tell yet. Julian and I haven’t spoken in three years, Elena. Not since the night I told him I was done. If he’s speeding up now, it might not just be about the buyer. It might be about me. About us. He doesn’t forgive people who leave the family business. He collects them.”

“Collects them how?”

“The same way he collects paintings,” Marcus said. “Patiently. And only when he’s sure they can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what he’s made them believe.”

Elena looked at the two landscapes still sitting side by side against her studio wall — one restored for a man who might or might not be lying to her, one stolen from a collector who trusted her enough to hand it over two years ago — and found she could no longer say, looking at either canvas, which one unsettled her more: the paintings themselves, or the man standing closest to both of them.

She picked Okafor’s card back up, and this time, she didn’t put it down.