ELARA
The ministry scans arrived at 7 AM on a Wednesday, while I was standing at the kitchen counter eating yogurt directly from the container with a dessert spoon because all the regular spoons were in the dishwasher and running it for three spoons seemed wasteful.
I'd been at the Whitmore Collection for six days. Professor Pemberton was coming to New York next Tuesday. The board meeting was Thursday. The Cycladic figure provenance chain had been sitting at the edge of my attention like an unresolved chord for two weeks, and now the Italian Ministry of Culture's archive department had high-resolution scans of the original 1978 police photographs, each one named with a numbering system that suggested the archivist had a deep personal investment in organizational order.
I rinsed the spoo
