Overhead, the speaker crackled. “Claire Montrose. Claire Montrose. Please proceed to a white courtesy phone.”
Damn. It must be Dante, checking to see if she was still waiting for him. If she didn’t get to a phone soon, then he might take a taxi back to her house, figuring she hadn’t hung around. Or call home and scare Charlie, who would wonder what had happened to her.
The page was repeated. This was it. Her chance to connect with Dante was going down for the count. Claire began madly pumping the paper towel handle, spinning the roll around, until she had about six feet of rough brown Kraft paper. She wound it around her hips, clamped her arms to the side, and then took tiny mincing steps into the concourse hall. There, standing with his back to her was Dante, holding his cell phone and looking around expectantly. Claire felt like she was walking in a cone of silence. Was it her imagination, or had all activity within twenty feet of her suddenly come to a halt? Dante turned his head, then did a double take, and said something to the person on the other end of the line before snapping his phone closed. He was already slipping out of his sport jacket while he walked up to her.
“Well, don’t ever let them say you don’t know how to make an entrance.”
He wrapped the jacket around her waist, and tied the arms over her hip. She let the paper fall to the floor. One thigh was still bare, but at least the essentials were covered. A few Japanese tourists began to laugh and clap, as if they were all part of some elaborate American mating ritual they had been lucky enough to catch sight of. Dante tilted his roll-aboard on its side and knelt down in front of it, then offered Claire a pair of Nike running shorts. She considered stepping into the restroom to put them on, but figured it was a little too late to be modest. She stepped into the shorts instead, then handed Dante back his jacket.
#
“I could get used to this,” Dante said, looking at the blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds. His window was rolled down because Claire’s 1988 Mazda 323 econobox didn’t have air-conditioning.
“This is the time of year we Oregonians try not to let anyone know about,” Claire said. “September and October. Hot days with plenty of sun, but the nights are cool so it’s easy to sleep. And then right around Halloween it starts to rain and you forget that there ever was a sun. Where the sun used to be, there’s just a paler spot in the cloud cover.”
She spoke lightly, not sure how she really felt. If Dante got this job and moved out here, it would be a big step. It would mean leaving his entire world behind – friends, family, and an excellent job – for her. Sure, the position at the Oregon Art Museum was a good one, probably one of the best, but could anything be better than working at the Met if you were a curator specializing in Old Masters?
Claire and Dante had only talked around the edges about what would happen if he was offered this job. Would he definitely take it? And if he did, what would happen then? Would they marry, move in together or live separately? The only successful married couple Claire knew was her sister Susie and J.B., and they weren’t even technically married. And how could she leave Charlie alone?
But even though she could think of a million reasons to be wary, every time she looked at Dante, with his dark eyes, brown curly hair and the single gold hoop that made him look like a pirate, she found herself forgetting her reasons. She glanced over at him now, and he gave her a smile. One of his front teeth had been broken and then mended with a flash of white.
“If you came here, wouldn’t you miss the Met?” Suddenly, Claire felt apologetic about her city. She could have added, “The theatre, the restaurants, the music, the bookstores, the museums….” but didn’t.
“Of course. But at the Met I will always be one of several dozen curators. Even when you just narrow it down to those who specialize in Old Master’s there are still eleven of us. If I took this job at the Oregon Art Museum, it would give me a chance to be head curator. The only way I’ll get a position like that at the Met would be if someone died.”
“Or retired.” Claire added.
“Hah. These are the kind of people who love their jobs and are quite capable of working into their mid-eighties.” Dante pushed down the sun visor as they crossed the Marquam Bridge and drove into the setting sun. “And I’m intrigued by the collection. Old Master drawings are quite rare, and here you have seven of them.”
Claire had been wavering, but for now she decided not to tell Dante about meeting the owner of these particular Old Masters. “So why are Old Master drawings rare?”
“Because they were never meant to be the end product. They were usually done before the artist turned to the true medium – paintings, carvings, sometimes even sculptures.”
“So they’re like preliminary sketches?”
“Exactly. It’s rare for a drawing to survive, because an artist would be much less likely to keep what was simply a draft. And paper is inherently more fragile than a canvas. And God knows, that’s fragile enough.” Dante was gesturing now, flicking one hand to show how ephemeral art was. “We put a price on them, but really, they are priceless. They are like roadmaps to a great artist’s creative process. It’s the nexus between an initial idea and its finished state. These men didn’t leave behind diaries, and of course there weren’t any newspaper articles or videotapes made about them. So often, the only thing we know about them is that they left behind these marvelous works of art.”
“Like Vermeer,” Claire said softly, then realized Dante couldn’t hear her over the rush of wind from the open windows. She repeated her remark with a little more volume, thinking of the painting that had originally brought them together. Then she said, “But these sketches weren’t even meant to be the final product. Isn’t it odd to lavish a huge amount of time, attention and money on something the artist dashed off in a couple of hours?” She merged onto I-5, then put her signal on and moved over to the right lane. Despite the posted speed limit of fifty miles an hour, people were blowing past her as she did sixty, which was about the top end for the Mazda. The speedometer dial went up to 110, which she had always figured was some Japanese idea of a joke, unless perhaps they had thought it was kilometers.
“I’m interested in anything the Old Masters created. And in some cases, the end result has gone missing, and the preliminary sketch is all we have left to guide us. These people were geniuses.”
“And we don’t have geniuses in our day?” Dante was so passionate about his work it was sometimes fun just to say something that would tap deeper into that passion.
“Is someone five hundred years from now going to spend hours ruminating on a Jeffrey Koonz sketch for a larger than life size gold-leafed Michael Jackson? I don’t think so.” He saw the expression on Claire’s face. “All right, I’m being facetious. But I don’t care for modern art the way I do for things that have stood the test of time.”
“Well, at least you know no one’s going to be staging a pillow fight on one of your paintings.” Claire told him about the article she had seen in the New York Times.
Dante laughed. “It sounds like they gave that installation what it deserved. I was at the Museum of Modern Art last year. There was one display everyone was really talking about. They were standing around it three deep. It was a battered metal cart with some rubber gloves and cleaning products and a garbage can on it. Some people were saying it was such a clever comment on our society and its obsession with cleanliness and the way we dispose of anything worn or old.”
“And?” Claire said, knowing there was a punch line.
“And then the janitor came and pushed it away.” Dante rolled his shoulders, then stretched his arms as much as the cramped quarters of the car would allow. “With these works by Old Masters, it’s more than just being the creation of a genius. Part of it, too, is the scarcity. Time takes its toll. Things get worn down, burned up, thrown away, looted, flood damaged. Touched up by some painter one hundred years down the road when the owner hires him to make the subject’s dress match the new drapes. A painting or drawing tha
t is several centuries old is a rare thing, and it’s only getting rarer. Many, many things that intrinsically have no value in themselves are worth millions because they are only a few of them. There are people who are willing to pay any amount to own a Mickey Mantle baseball card, which is just a little square of cardboard with a picture on it. Looking at it doesn’t make someone’s life any better. It doesn’t give them a lift, like a painting can. It doesn’t have any deeper meaning. It’s just a piece of paper.”
“Just like Beanie Babies,” Claire said as she signaled for the Multnomah exit. “They got all these people to buy into something because they only made so many of each one and then stopped.”
“Right.” Dante nodded. “When it’s a little lump of polyester plush filled with plastic beads. And people were willing to pay thousands of dollars for one of the rare ones. At least an Old Master has some intrinsic beauty.”
Chapter 26
It was nearly nine o’clock at night when Amit Patel looked up from the computer at the young man walking up to the counter of the Bridge City Motel. His hair was military short, his shoulders squared off like a soldier’s, but to Amit’s eyes he looked barely enough to shave.
“Can I help you, sir?”
The young man half-turned to look behind him, as if he thought Amit might be talking to someone else.
“Do you have a lost and found? I think I may have left an umbrella here a few weeks ago.”
Amit didn’t remember the young man, but that didn’t mean anything. Every night, a couple of dozen people stayed in one of the 12 shabby rooms, strung like chipped beads on a frayed string, in the old motel on Barbur Boulevard. Only a fraction of the people who stayed at Bridge City actually came into the office. Despite the postings in each room that declared there should be no more than two people in a bed, or four people in a room, Amit had found it was better never to inquire too closely as to how many occupants he had or how they passed their time.
“What color was the umbrella, sir?”
“Black.
In Amit’s experience, men in this country did not carry umbrellas, especially young men, but a customer was a customer, and at least this one was sober and neatly dressed. Amit thought of the cardboard box in the back room filled with a jumble of children’s toys, pilled sweaters, romance paperbacks, items of women’s clothing that had been meant more for show than for coverage. And two or three umbrellas, he was fairly certain.
“Just a minute, sir, and I’ll check.”
Amit turned the key in the cash drawer and slipped it unobtrusively into his pocket. If someone else came in, a buzzer would sound. He opened the unlocked room behind him. The narrow space was filled with shelves of clean sheets and towels, bins full of tiny shampoo bottles and bars of soap, stacks of toilet paper rolls. With a sigh, Amit leaned over the big cardboard box in the corner.
The first clue Amit had that the young man had vaulted the counter was the small grunt the man made as he landed. The second clue was a fist hitting the side of his neck. Pain bloomed in Amit’s throat, choking off his air. He went down to his knees, then toppled over sideways, spilling the box. Opening his eyes, he found himself nose to nose with a purple Care Bear, faded to gray. There was a buzzing sound, but Amit wasn’t sure if it was in or outside his own head.
A kick to the small of his back made his eyes widen. Amit turned his head and saw three pairs of feet. One boot-shod foot was drawing back to kick him.
“Terrorist!” one shouted as the kick jarred his spine. “We’re going to clean up this town!”
Another voice, this one pitched a little higher. “Hey, Mohammed, where’s Bin Laden?” Another kick, this one landing just below his rib cage. Pain knifed through him as the man’s toe connected with some organ hidden inside his belly.
Amit realized two things. The first was that these men thought he was a Muslim. And the second was that if he didn’t get back on his feet, he was a dead man.
Next to the Care Bear was a black umbrella, the one he had planned to show to the young man. Amit curled his fingers around it and rolled to his hands and knees. Another kick made him skid forward, but still he managed to stand and get his shoulder blades against the back wall.
There were three of them, he saw now. All of them young, fit, shaven-headed. The one with dark stubble barely flecking his scalp jabbed at Amit, but Amit ducked left. He pressed the button on the umbrella, and it popped open, the flimsy black fabric providing him with a second’s surprise.
“Vimla!” he shouted. Or tried to. All that came out was a croak. One of the men batted the umbrella away from him. Amit found he was too weak even to hold on to it.
But Vimla heard him, even if he no longer had a voice. Nineteen years together in a strange country, 19 years of working side-by-side 80 hours a week, 19 years of trying to bring up their children in one country by the principles of another.
The door buzzed as Vimla came into the office. Amit heard her suck in her breath. Then he saw her startled face. She opened her mouth and began to scream. The three men froze, their attention split. One turned and ran toward her, and it was only then that Amit saw the gun in his hand. Vimla must have seen it, too, because she stopped screaming and began saying frantically, “Let me open the cash drawer, sirs. Please let me open the cash drawer for you.”
A second had gone to the counter and was yanking on the locked drawer. “Come on, bitch, open it up!” Then his attention was caught by the switchboard display, the one that showed each room’s telephone activity.
“What is this!” he yelled, slamming down his fist. “Someone’s calling 911! We gotta book it!”
The third just stared at Amit for a moment, before turning and running. The last thing Amit thought, just before his legs folded underneath him, was how green the young man’s eyes had been.
Chapter 27
OQUAP
Claire got up from the breakfast table and picked up her own and Dante’s plates, bare except for a slight sheen. Charlie had made German pancakes, waving away all offers of help as she mixed up the batter and then poured it into the well-seasoned cast-iron frying pans. Fresh from the oven, the puffed-up pancakes had been topped with melted butter, powdered sugar, and juice squeezed from wedges of lemon. The three of them had eaten until every bite was gone.
“Here, let me help,” Dante said, starting to get up.
Claire handed him the Oregonian and the New York Times and pushed him in the direction of the living room instead. “Sit. Read the newspaper. Relax while you still can.”
In just two hours, the director of the Oregon Art Museum would be giving Dante a personal tour of all the exhibits, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at what was in storage or undergoing restoration in the museum’s workrooms. The final stop of the morning would be the collection of drawings and paintings donated by Allen Lisac and destined for the new wing.
The afternoon would be taken up with meeting the various board members for a series of interviews. Dante had told her that each would bring his or her own personal and professional biases to the meeting. Some would want to know Dante’s take on how to improve the museum’s financial future. Others would want to discuss how to make the museum more appealing to people who didn’t traditionally go to museums. And some would be interested in how his connections in the art world might lead to blockbuster exhibitions.
Claire went back to the kitchen and began to dry and put away the dishes Charlie was washing.
“Tom’s coming over at seven, right? Do you want us to stay around and meet him, or would you rather it be more private?”
Tom had invited Charlie out to dinner, but she had insisted he come over to the house, that it would be her pleasure to cook for him. He had compromised by offering to bring dessert. Claire was dying to see what he looked like, but she wanted to respect Charlie’s privacy.
“Perhaps it would be better if we were this first time alone. Not so overwhelming.” Charlie’s pink sponge paused in mid-swipe. “Claire-le,” – the G
erman diminutive was one of very few traces of Charlie’s past – “Claire-le, could you perhaps help me pick out something to wear for tonight?”
“Of course I can.” Claire couldn’t think of another time when she had heard Charlie ask for help of any kind. She hoped her friend wasn’t getting her hopes up too much. Tom must be well over 80 by now, and from what Claire had seen, time did not treat men as kindly as women. She imagined a fat, bald man using a walker or even one of those motorized scooters, maybe with a green canister of oxygen tucked between his legs.
Dante called to her from the living room. “Hey, isn’t this in your neighborhood?” When she came out, he pointed at an article in the Oregonian, and Claire read over his shoulder.
Hotel Owner Attacked in Southwest Portland: Police Fear Hate Crime Spree
A motel owner and his wife may have been victims of a hate crime, according to police. This is the third seemingly racially motivated attack in Southwest Portland in the past two weeks. After forcing their way into a storage room, attackers kicked and struck Amit Patel, 48, owner of the Bridge City Motel, and called him “terrorist” and “Mohammed,” evidently taking him for a Muslim.
Tuesday’s attack on Patel, a native of India who is in fact a Hindu, appears to be the most serious of a spate of hate crimes motivated by anti-Arab sentiment in Oregon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Police departments across the state recorded 29 such crimes between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of 2001, the last year for which complete crime statistics are available.
The attack on Patel also appears to be linked to a series of attacks that have left a Hispanic man with neurological and facial injuries, and a white homeless man with several broken bones. Victims have said their attackers appeared to be skinheads.