4. Kimberly Finds a Fake.
To read the story so far, visit the Table of Contents.
The Penthouse Suite
Kimberly Grace sat on the window ledge, facing the interior of the expansive room.
The wind gusted in from the open window but her short-cropped blonde hair remained plastered in place. She stretched her legs out from beneath her high-waisted black skirt. Her white blouse, tucked into her belt, billowed out.
Behind her, the city lights twinkled. People said the Palmer’s top floor was the best view in town.
But Kimberly ignored all of that. Her focus was trained on the painting that leaned against the opposite wall of the suite.
Without taking her eyes from the canvas, she dipped to her side and reached down into her purse. She grabbed her lighter and soft pack of Marlboro menthols, plucked one out, and let the pack fall to the hardwood floor. She bent forward and shifted so that she could rest her elbows on her knees, then lit the cigarette, inhaled, and let the smoke escape from her lips without any concern for where it wafted, indoors or out.
This was the Palmer’s penthouse after all, where the same rules governing the peons below didn’t apply.
Over the years, Kimberly had been in enough of these penthouses to know the smoke alarm probably was not even connected to the main network. It was more likely to be hooked into a more private system that would send someone up to discreetly examine a situation before triggering any alarm bells. Hotel managements knew better than to mess with the partying whims of their big shot clientele.
Plus, she’d made it clear to the front desk that she expected “complete privacy” when she was here. No one was going to be coming up without seeing literal flames dancing in the long wall of windows.
Kimberly took one last drag and reached back to stub out the butt amongst several others in the silver ashtray resting on the ledge. She stood up and crossed the room, staring intently at a small section of the painting that had caught her intrigue.
It was a seven-foot-tall canvas set in a baroque frame that bore the title Midnight Cabaret. It depicted a tall lighthouse on a lonesome island, its lamp frozen in mid-spin, glaring harshly into the viewer’s line of sight. This gleam partially obscured a pressing concern: a giant dark wave three or four times the height of the lighthouse that approached in the distance.
This was where Kimberly now focused her eyes.
“Whatcha think, hun?” a gruff voice shouted from the penthouse’s next room.
It took everything in Kimberly’s willpower to not shout back at him to shut the fuck up.
The voice belonged to Harold Doyle, also known about town as The General. An oil magnate in his late 50s, Doyle had paid $25 million for the painting, in addition to the sum he’d earmarked for Kimberly to verify if it was, in fact, a legitimate Gertie.
But to make that determination, as she had told The General twice before, she needed absolute silence in the suite.
“One more warning,” Kimberly said. “Then you have to leave. This is the rule.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” The General said playfully. “I’m sorry hun.”
Kimberly closed her eyes to recenter her focus.
She conjured in her mind the image of a lion. First only an outline, she then began to fill in its complexity, its details. Tail, eyes, color and thickness of its mane and coat, those giant white teeth. When a satisfactory lion had been summoned, she reopened her eyes to again examine the dark wave threatening the lighthouse.
Most untrained consumers of art, of which The General was surely one, believe that painting forgeries are caught in the small details. The discovery of a type of brush fiber that hadn’t yet been invented, or paint that was layered onto a canvas years after the artist died. But that type of analysis was for the nerds with their costly machines. By that point, someone like Kimberly had already sown enough skepticism that that kind of investment was warranted.
It usually never got to that point, though. Kimberly would deliver an appraisal of dubiousness, the auction house would settle quietly, and everyone would get to keep their reps—one sin you couldn’t come back from in today’s art market was being duped into passing off a fraud as a Gertie.
Kimberly had read bits and pieces of the artist’s story over the years.
Gertrude Wagner, born in 1890 to the servant class of Pasadena. She forewent school to take an apprenticeship at the architectural firm of Greene and Greene. Her past grew blurry around 1908, when she left the firm amidst rumors that necessitated hush money. With the new cash infusion, Gertrude went out to see the world and simply never stopped. She lived from hotel to hotel, an ever-expanding collection of boxes and supplies in tow.
One story went that she rented an entire train car for her trip from Berlin to Munich. The only proof of this was an old sulphide print of her broadly smiling out the window of the express, her blonde hair blowing in the breeze, her thin white-gloved hand waving to the photographer. The train’s movement had blurred the photo, but somehow, her face remained in focus.
She died in 1954 in Saint Petersburg, and it was only then that the crates were all opened and her paintings were discovered. A limited portfolio and a compelling story drove up her work’s valuation in the art collector industry. A new market was born.
But Kimberly didn’t care much about that right now.
She’d seen enough of Gertie’s work by then that she knew she’d only ever used a specific combination of bristle and hair from a Kolinsky sable, a weasel from Siberia. These fibers had a certain absorbency that allowed for a specific type of paint application. While any expert forger could access this type of brush, Kimberly was alert to a particular shibboleth: the rhythm to her strokes. Gertie had a staccato flinch as she painted, as if she wasn’t sure which direction she’d end up in, always second-guessing herself.
This is why Kimberly was focused on the wave.
It was violet with a spray of white moonlight delicately caressing each liquid flutter, giving it an extra depth that—
“Anything?”
That damn voice again.
“Okay, you have been warned,” she said, softly and calm. “Please leave.”
“You said I had one more warning,” said The General.
Kimberly remained silent, waiting him out. Soon enough she heard the springs in his chair rebound as he lifted his hefty frame. In the next moment came a soft muttering and a loud huff. She continued to wait. She’d handled these types often enough to know that they all needed an excuse to convince themselves they were making the decision. When they finally found it, they went on their way.
“I have calls to make anyway,” The General said to no one in particular. “Closing a big deal tonight.”
He waited for a response, and with none forthcoming, Kimberly heard fat footfalls. The door in the other room opened and slammed shut.
She waited until she heard the penthouse elevator ding in the foyer, and then the sound of its slow descent, before she closed her eyes to re-imagine the lion. When it was to her satisfaction, she opened her eyes and examined the waves again.
Dark violet in the moonlight. White foam at the crest like the mouth of a rabid dog. There was anger in this painting. Violence. Something Kimberly hadn’t seen from Gertie before. It was enough to give her a moment of hesitation. Until—yes, she now saw—there was Gertie after all.
She leaned close enough to the canvas to feel it against the fine hairs on the tip of her nose. There were those squiggles of Gertie’s hesitation that she’d been looking for.
She leaned back and relaxed her shoulders.
While it was always fun to break it to some rich swine that they’d been had, it was always difficult to know how they’d react.
One pig in Baltimore had thrown a chair against the wall next to her head, and a wooden shard had nicked her neck and drawn blood. They gave her a quarter-million extra for the trouble, as if she had any choice but to take it and keep her mouth shut. When a person gets to that kind of wealth, their idea of another human becomes warped. Or maybe that’s how they attained that wealth in the first place. It’s an unknowable puzzle. Chicken and Faberge egg.
Informing the rich that their investment had passed the test was always preferable.
Kimberly tore her eyes away from the painting, turned around, and walked back across the hardwood floor to the window. She picked up her soft pack of Marlboros, retrieved another menthol, and sat back down. The General would want to know immediately that his purchase was the real deal, but she still needed to get herself back to seeing the world as it was again. To blink out the microscopic specificity that she’d been living in.
“Unwind on the company dime,” she said, and lit the cigarette.
She let a puff billow as she relaxed her eyes. As the cloud dissipated, she noticed something else in the painting. Something within the wave itself.
Shadows.
She took another drag, stubbed it dead in the ashtray, and crossed the room again.
How could she have missed this?
The shadows were within the sheet of water, lit from behind by the moonlight, their features intricately chiseled. Sea creatures of some sort, that’s all she could guess. No coherent shape, simply blobs with tentacles or arms. Seeming to emerge through the wave.
She blinked.
Yes, in fact, the scaled skin of one of these creatures was coming through the wave, lit by unobstructed moonlight.
She blinked again, and now could make out the creature’s head, a bulbous monstrosity with eyes like waxed buttons.
She blinked, and its mouth was now open, exposing rows of jagged teeth within.
Kimberly began to step backwards, forcing open her eyes so as not to miss one second of whatever mental break she must have been experiencing. She reached behind and felt the ledge, her stare keeping the monster frozen in the wave. She plucked the half cigarette she’d stubbed, twisted off the burnt top with a thumbnail, and stuck it in her mouth to light it.
Smoke got in her eyes, so she blinked, then blinked again, and again. Each blink was accompanied by a sopping wet slapping sound on the wooden floor, echoing through the open space. It came from somewhere in front of her.
Kimberly forced her eyes open, though they reddened in the smoke. The lighthouse had disappeared. So had the wave. The canvas was now all aqua and green, tiled by thin lines. She realized she was looking at scales.
A reflection appeared on the floor in front of her. Two wide, wet circles. One in front of the other, like giant steps stalking toward her. They expanded outward at a steady rate, leaking, as if water was somehow pouring into them.
She blinked again and heard another sopping sound. There it was—another wet print on the floor, closer to her.
Then—the soothing sound of a wave crashing. Calming, tranquil. Leaving her without a worry in the world. For a moment she felt weightless, as if floating in the sea.
She took another inhale, blinked again. Another sloshing slap and another puddle, only feet away from her seat.
She smiled and laughed and pulled a drag from her cigarette.
Maybe this wasn’t a real Gertie after all.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
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