Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (5 page)

Ali said she met Luke when he saw her by the side of the George Washington Parkway one night, leaning against her car with the hood up. A cool, pretty twentysomething with glossy jet-black hair wearing a strapless jade-colored cocktail dress and stiletto heels, waiting for a chivalrous knight to come along and help a damsel in distress. He jump-started her car, found out she was unemployed during the day, and offered her a job.

Ali and I were in the office after hours one evening, drinking white wine and waiting for Luke to get back from a photo shoot for a client’s annual report, when she told me that story.

I had retreated to one of the black leather Barcelona chairs in the reception area, where I sat cross-legged in my usual work uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and Keds. Ali was perched on her desk, dressed in a vintage black-and-white hound’s-tooth suit, peep-toe heels, one leg crossed over the other, her lustrous black hair marceled like some retro movie star.

She looked at me from under heavily mascaraed eyelashes and said in a husky voice, “So what about you? Where are you from? You know, we could be sisters we look so much alike. Or, at least, cousins.”

She was right. The first time I saw her had been like looking in a mirror at my twenty-year-old self, except that Ali was curvaceous and girly, whereas I was reed slim, a grown-up tomboy.

“My father—my biological father—was from Spain. My mom met him and fell madly in love when she was an exchange student in college. She dropped out when they got married, but it didn’t last. He played football for Real Madrid, so he was always traveling. After the divorce we went back to the States,” I said, “and when I was fourteen we moved to Virginia when she married my stepfather.”

“¿Hablas español?”
Ali asked.

I nodded. “But I learned it in school. What about you?”

“Anglo dad, mom’s from Peru,” she said. “Luke told me you used to live in London. He said you just moved back here.”

“I did.”

“And?”

I didn’t know how much Luke had said, but she would find out sooner or later. So I gave her a sanitized version of Nick’s disappearance and my decision to move home and put my life in order.

Ali drank some wine and swept a wave of hair off her face, as though she were vamping for some invisible admirer. “You still think he’s alive, don’t you? Your husband.”

For one crazy moment, I thought about giving her the whole complicated answer. Instead I said, “The odds are that he’s not.”

“That’s not what I asked.” She made a fist and pumped it against her chest. “You can feel it here. You’re a woman. You
know.
”

She slid off the desk and walked into Luke’s office for the wine bottle in his refrigerator. A moment later I heard her singing, “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”

My God, her
voice.
It was a voice to give you shivers, make you think about smoke-filled nightclubs at closing time and sad saxophones and a table for one. I shut my eyes and listened as the words about Lana Turner’s smile and races and high-tone places soared into the perfect acoustics of the room and echoed off the rafters.

I thought about Nick, who only just cared for me . . . didn’t he? Where was he now and what was he doing? Ali came back into the room and I avoided her eyes as she filled my glass to the rim. We sat together in the brooding silence and drank as it slowly grew dark outside.

Later I wondered if she had deliberately chosen that song.

*

On Tuesday evening, Luke and Ali pulled up in his Jeep in front of the Mall entrance to the National Gallery of Art for the meeting with Seth MacDonald, the museum’s director, just as I arrived on a mint green Vespa, my new purchase from a GW student who was ready to move up to a motorcycle. Ali grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. Luke looked astonished.

“Doesn’t that thing run on a hamster wheel?” he asked.

“Two.” I chained the front tire through an empty bike stand across from the gallery entrance. “Okay, I’m parked. What about you?”

He made a face and drove off to find a spot while I waited for them at the top of the steps. By early September, summer is a distant memory in London, but in D.C. the temperatures still languished in the high eighties and the air felt as humid and sultry as if it were the dog days of August. The one difference is the light: In the few weeks since I’d been home, it had shifted from a hard, pure glare to the softer, golden slant that signaled autumn.

A security guard let us in the gallery and said the director was finishing up some paperwork in the Founders’ Room, which was just off the main lobby. Dark paneling, an enormous chandelier, oil paintings of the museum’s benefactors lining the walls, the Founders’ Room was furnished like an upscale gentlemen’s club. An overstuffed sofa and club chairs were grouped around a large marble fireplace flanked by multitiered candelabra, and an antique clock that had stopped working sat on the mantel. All that was missing was the sherry and a butler to serve it.

Seth MacDonald looked up from signing papers at a Queen Anne desk in front of the room’s only window. I’d seen photos of him and read enough not to expect a white-haired soft-spoken art historian. Ten years ago he’d been a controversial choice as the youngest director in the gallery’s history at age twenty-nine. Within a few months he’d quashed his critics by persuading the Vatican to loan the museum never-before-seen-in-public paintings from the pope’s private chapel and charming two high-tech billionaires with significant collections into making a permanent bequest in their wills. Since then, he had become best known for his populist talent for staging crowd-pleasing events that brought in hundreds of thousands of visitors who’d never set foot in the National Gallery because they’d believed art was too highbrow or mystical.

The international premiere of the lost Romanov treasures with its two previously undiscovered imperial eggs and the drama, romance, and intrigue surrounding their provenance was right up MacDonald’s alley: a blockbuster exhibition that had already distributed free advance tickets in the tens of thousands. The backstory only added to the fairy tale: a Russian oligarch’s desire to please his beautiful young American girlfriend who was devoted to her mother, an art history professor who was the exhibit’s designer.

MacDonald came around from behind the desk to shake our hands. Though he wore a conservative charcoal suit, his tie was either something that Picasso painted during his Cubist period or the creation of a child gone wild with crayons, and I thought I saw rainbow peace signs on his dark socks.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to go over a few details for tomorrow. Mr. Vasiliev has some rather precise and unusual requirements. This needs to go like clockwork.”

“You won’t even know we’re here, Dr. MacDonald,” Luke said with smooth assurance. “We know how to stay out of the way.”

MacDonald seemed relieved. “Excellent. Please call me Seth. And, if you’re interested, when we’re done I can give you a quick tour of the exhibit. You’ll be the first visitors. It’s quite a feather in our cap that Mr. Vasiliev chose the National Gallery to host the world premiere of the lost imperial eggs.”

His face grew animated when he mentioned the Fabergé eggs, but feather or no feather, the exhibit had clearly come with strings attached, maybe even a whole ball of string. I’d read about Arkady Vasiliev’s path to oligarch superstardom in the British newspapers. And Nick had filled me in on details that didn’t make it into the press. Twentysome years ago, Vasiliev had lived in a tiny two-room apartment in Moscow and stood in daily queues for such basic items as toilet paper and butter, which had been hard to come by in the old Communist-run Soviet Union. Now, after picking off Russia’s state-owned oil production company for a pittance during the gangster capitalism Yeltsin years, Vasiliev had privatized it and watched the value soar into the billions. Then he acquired the Lifestyle, which included owning a fleet of boats, a pride of houses, and a gaggle of jets.

Luke glanced at Ali and me and we nodded. “We’d love to see it,” he said.

We followed Seth into the marble-columned rotunda with its statue of a winged Mercury poised on top of a tiered fountain. The fragrance of hundreds of red rosebushes surrounding the fountain scented the air, and the place was eerily silent except for the rushing sound of cascading water. Fading daylight flickered from the high-domed Rotunda skylight and the skylights that ran the length of the museum’s two mirror-image wings. This wasn’t the first time I’d been in a museum or cathedral or temple after hours and had it virtually to myself. It always gave me goose bumps and the breathless feeling of molecules swirling differently, the place coming to life as though paintings had eyes that followed you and statues flexed stiff muscles like they did in kids’ movies. Once the noisy, boisterous tourists with their guidebooks and cameras and bored children had departed, the space filled up with the weighty stillness of centuries of greatness that I found intoxicating.

“Come.” Seth cut into my thoughts. “Let’s walk and we can go over everything one more time.”

He ticked off items on his fingers. Two hundred guests. More roses specially flown in from California and alabaster urns lining both sculpture halls filled with long-plumed feathers dyed scarlet and gold to evoke the mythical Firebird. Twenty-four-karat gold-flecked Cristal champagne in Waterford flutes. Vasiliev’s personal French chef arriving by private jet from London.

“There’ll be lighted ice sculptures of the two lost Fabergé imperial eggs,” Seth said. “Red for the Firebird, blue for the Constellation egg.”

“How come no fireworks on the Mall or changing the color of the lights on the Capitol dome?” Luke asked when he had finished.

Seth’s laugh was rueful. “You jest. The Park Service nixed the fireworks. I don’t think changing the Capitol lighting occurred to anyone, thank God. And the National Symphony is on tour. Mr. Vasiliev is making a significant financial donation to the gallery, so anything he wanted he got as long as we could accommodate it.”

Based on what I knew about Vasiliev, so far this sounded pretty tame.

“What else did he ask for?” I said.

“I have a small suite—an office and a conference room—that I use occasionally when I need a place to work where I won’t be disturbed,” Seth said. “You won’t find it on any gallery map because it’s located in a corridor that’s accessible only through a somewhat hidden door in the cloakroom. Mr. Vasiliev wants the suite available for his private use, just in case.”

Ali looked puzzled. “Just in case what?”

Luke and I exchanged glances and Seth gave her a heavy-lidded look.

“Just in case he wants it for whatever he wants. And he requires absolute privacy,” Seth said. “He also requested a fully stocked bar, all top-drawer liquors and wines, and silver bowls filled with Beluga caviar to be placed there.”

Ali seemed like she might be trying to imagine whatever-he-wants, but Luke said, “Seth, your PR guy, Moses Rattigan, told us we could use your office to store our equipment. We might need to get back there for fresh batteries or whatever. Is that going to be a problem?”

Seth looked concerned. “I hope not. The room Mr. Vasiliev really wants is the conference room. We can close the connecting door between that room and my office, if necessary. There’s also a lock on the door to an office supply closet where you can keep your things. I’ll arrange for you to borrow the key for the evening.”

“We’d like to see that closet and the setup,” Luke said. “We need to make absolutely sure our gear is safe.”

“You can have a look at it as soon as we’re done here,” he said. “Come, next I want you to see the stage for Dr. Gordon’s talk. We had to make some changes after she did her walk-through.”

Seth led us through the West Sculpture Hall, its elegant bronzes burnished by the diffused light of spotlights suspended from the skylight fretwork. This was the wing of old master paintings: Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French, Italian—and the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the western hemisphere, a fifteenth-century Florentine bride named Ginevra de’ Benci. I trailed behind the others, stopping to glance into each gallery.

Seth doubled back and found me, the patient, polite expression of someone used to herding wayward visitors written on his face.

“Sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist. It’s been years since I’ve been here. It’s such a fabulous museum.”

“Enjoy having it to yourself now because you won’t be able to look into these galleries tomorrow,” he said, smiling. “There’ll be screens up everywhere. We can’t have someone accidentally splashing a glass of wine on Jacques-Louis David’s
Napoleon,
you understand. The only spaces that will be open during the reception will be the Rotunda, the East and West Sculpture Galleries, and the two garden courts. The
Empire of the Firebird
exhibit is in a gallery by itself off the East Garden Court, where we often showcase temporary exhibits.”

Luke joined us and caught the end of Seth’s comments. “What about the lower level?”

“It will be closed. All guests will enter the gallery through the Mall entrance as you did this evening,” Seth said. We walked into the West Garden Court, where rows of folding chairs were set up in front of a small stage.

“I wanted you to see where we relocated the podium,” he went on. “Katya Gordon’s request. I’ll begin by making a few remarks, thanking Mr. Vasiliev for his generosity, and then introduce Katya. She’ll give a brief talk about the collection, the history of Fabergé and the Romanovs, and anything else she wants to talk about. All guests will receive a ticket when they arrive specifying the time when they can view the exhibit. If all goes according to plan, the reception ought to end around nine thirty.”

He led us back through the Rotunda into the East Sculpture Hall. Here the galleries were filled with eighteenth-and nineteenth-century paintings, American, British, Spanish, and a magnificent gallery of the Impressionists; the sculptures were white marble.

“Last but not least of our host’s requirements concerns you three,” Seth said. “No photographs of the exhibit. Mr. Vasiliev controls all official photos and he owns all rights. I presume that’s been made clear to you?”