A Nearly Perfect Copy (39 page)

“Did you just call me a peach?” he called after her down the hall. “The PC term is ‘apricot-challenged.’ ”

The cab ride took forever. The driver went across the park and then up Riverside, but the street was blocked off for some reason and he had to go around all the way to Columbus and then back over. Elm tried to call Colette—she had brought Klinman to Elm’s attention, maybe she knew something about this—but there was no answer. Elm was buzzed into the building without speaking to anyone, and rode the piss-smelling elevator up to Indira’s apartment, willing it to go faster, even as she wanted to postpone what she knew would be a confrontation.

It took the old woman several minutes to answer the door, during which time Elm’s bladder filled. She found that with this pregnancy, her urges to urinate were more frequent and more urgent. When the door opened, Elm said, “I need to use your bathroom.”

“Go right ahead,” Indira said.

Elm peed and washed her hands. When she came out of the bathroom, Indira was sitting in her armchair smoking a joint.

Elm said, “Can you please not smoke that? I’m expecting.”

“That’s good,” Indira said, letting out another fragrant breath. “It’s nice that now even older women can conceive.”

Elm flushed. You have no idea, she wanted to say, what science has wrought in this body. “I read the article.”

“I thought you would,” Indira said. “And now you want to know what I know. What I knew.”

“Right.”

“Sit,” Indira said.

“I’d rather stand.”

Indira shrugged, indifferent. There was a long silence.

“Well?” Elm asked.

“Well what? Ask. I will answer.”

“Do you know Augustus Klinman?”

“That is complicated. Yes, I have met the man. He spoke a few years ago at a symposium about stolen art that has found a home in the United States. No, I have never dealt with him professionally.”

“Then why did the paper say that you’re a person of interest?”

“Maybe he dropped my name to exonerate himself. How should I know? Maybe he believes I’m an authority? Because I’m an artist?” Indira stared off dreamily out the window, her eyes cloudy with cataracts. It must have been a habit; she couldn’t possibly see anything. Maybe the light was refreshing. Something in Elm softened. Indira was just a little old lady. Even if she had committed a crime, she could hardly be held responsible at her age. Elm sat in the armchair across from her.

“What about the drawings I sold for you?” Elm said. “Those were authentic, right?”

“How should I know?” Indira asked with exaggerated innocence. “You’re supposed to be the expert.”

Elm stiffened. She sat up straight. She saw that she had been played and was breathless, as though the baby had suddenly begun pressing on her lungs. “You knew they were fake?”

“I don’t know what I have or had lying around here. My memory isn’t what it was.”

Elm felt her rage expand. She stood up, clenching her fists. She wanted to hit an octogenarian genius ceramicist, and she didn’t feel bad about it. She wanted to slap Indira’s wrinkled smile, stub the joint out into her neck. “How dare you?” she sputtered.

Indira said nothing.

“This jeopardizes my career. Not to mention … if anyone suspects I knew, I could go to jail. You play this ‘little old lady’ routine, but you’re smart and you’re wily and you don’t care who gets hurt.”

Indira continued to stare out the window.

Elm said, “I’m turning you in. I’m leaving here right now and going to the police, or the FBI or whoever. Someone at Tinsley’s will know whom to contact. I can’t believe I trusted you. I told you about Ronan, for chrissakes.” At the mention of his name, Elm began to cry, angry sobs of frustration.

Indira waited until Elm calmed down, passing her a box of tissues. “The police are not an option,” Indira said, finally. “And you know that. You know that because you too have done what I did.”

“I never knowingly—”

“Stop,” Indira said. “I don’t say this to criticize, only to make clear to you what happens when the truth comes out. During the war, my parents, it is not so surprising, they were taken to the camps and because they were old they were killed. My brother was put to work digging graves. He was strong; he survived the war, long enough to send a letter to our home, which I received years later. But he never made it back home. Did he die? Was he killed? Did he kill himself? It is not known. My sister-in-law I saw for the last time in a propaganda film. She was pregnant, not before the war, but during, which means that the father was most likely not my brother. In the film she is drawing at an arts-and-crafts table. The camera pans quickly, but you can see on the paper her drawing of a house. Only, it’s not just a house, it’s a
Shin
, the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The filmmakers wouldn’t have known; that’s how it slipped through, this symbol of resistance. Her name was on a manifest of the gassed. I don’t know if she ever gave birth. My cousins, my twin aunts, uncles, all taken. How do we get back what was taken from us? Some things are irreplaceable. Others are not. You, of all people, know the difference. I can see from your body that you do.”

Elm felt a knot of worry. Could she know about Ronan? Impossible.

“Your friend Klinman has sent you drawings that I’m told wouldn’t fool an old blind woman. You, in turn, have given them to a dealer, who has placed them prominently in the city. She will not be happy to discover that these are fakes.”

Elm sat; her legs weren’t strong enough to support her. A prickling rose up her neck, an eerie feeling of slowly being electrocuted.

How could she not have seen this coming? It was too good to be true, the drawings arriving just as she needed them. Too good to be true always meant its opposite: not true, not good.

She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t decide what to say. She wanted to smack the joint from the woman’s mouth, and the violence of the urge scared her; it seemed so unlike her, so unlike who she used to be. Instead, she grabbed the antimacassar on the arm of the chair and squeezed it.

“Were you? Did you … think of this?”

“No, dear.” Indira chuckled. “At this stage, my mind gets fuzzy if I think more than two steps ahead. I make tea and by the time I’ve gotten the milk out I forget what I wanted. It’s a blessing, honestly. The future is always the present.”

“But who involved me?” Elm asked. “Who got me into this?”

Indira took another long puff on her joint, looking like nothing so much as the caterpillar from Moira’s
Alice in Wonderland
DVD. “You did.”

During the cab ride home from Indira’s, Elm rubbed her belly and tried not to cry. She made it to the elevator in her building before putting her head to the mirrored wall to sob, her breath made shorter by Ronan’s constriction of her lungs. What the fuck had she done?

It was still early, and Wania hadn’t yet picked up Moira from school. She had ballet this afternoon and wouldn’t get home until after six. Colin wouldn’t be back until seven or eight. That gave Elm three hours to get herself together.

She lay on her bed. There must be a way she could salvage this. What if she said nothing, stayed on at Tinsley’s? The auction house was sure to come under scrutiny during an investigation. Auction houses always claimed that any illegal behavior was simply one bad seed, acting alone. At best, the house would receive bad press, a hit they could not afford in this climate. Elm would be thrown under the bus.

She would resign. Admit herself duped and clear out her desk. Ian would probably never speak to her again, but he’d be all right. He’d ingratiate himself to her successor the same way he charmed everyone else.

And that successor would probably be Colette. Why hadn’t she seen it? Colette had brought her to Klinman. She was probably part of the whole thing. Hell, maybe she even orchestrated it. And she was seemingly blameless—nothing linked Colette to Klinman to Tinsley’s. The only link there was Elm.

What had made Elm think she was capable of this kind of scheming? Elm couldn’t even play tic-tac-toe, and she had fashioned herself a role as a duplicitous con artist. Someone should have stopped her. If she had confided in anyone. Why hadn’t she told her husband? She didn’t trust him anymore, she realized. Their grieving had taken different
directions, made them peer at each other through new eyes as the other took a course that the partner disapproved of. She had forgiven him for losing their son as much as she’d forgiven herself, but she still wondered: What if he had grabbed Ronan when the wave hit? What if he had reacted faster, had more presence of mind? It was different from blame, it was disappointment, and she knew he could sense it.

She would just have to tell him about Indira. But then she would have to tell him about Relay. And then about Ronan. Was there a way to leave that out? The secret was a cluster of tin cans strapped to a fender, banging and clanging wherever she went. Not telling had become a full-time job. The literature from the clinic should have warned her about this. Colin would never forgive her if she told him. He would leave her, whether for the deceit or the cloning or both. She knew him well enough to know this about him.

What if they proved she knew the drawings were fake? Would she go to jail? She was fucked. Fucked fucked fucked. But at least she had Ronan, and in a few months he’d be with her again, and she could be in jail or in hell, for all she cared, as long as she got to hold him in her arms again.

“Ian,” Elm called as he was leaving the break room, a mug in his hands.

“Hello, dahling,” he said. “Exciting plans for Presidents’ Day?”

“I have to talk to you,” she said. Her voice cracked, even as she tried to keep her face neutral.

Ian paled. “Are you okay? Is the baby …?”

“No, it’s fine. It’s about work,” she said. She felt a flood of relief. No one was hurt. No one was sick. Her baby was fine. The rest was all inconvenience. “Let’s go to the Cockroach.”

“Okay …” Ian dragged the word out. “Can you give me a preview?”

Elm shook her head. “Meet you there in five minutes. No, ten. I have to pee, for a change.”

The Cockroach was their name for The Coach House diner around the corner. It was disgusting, but it had the advantage of good acoustics and the fact that no one from Tinsley’s would be caught dead there.

She found him in “their” booth, pushing his spoon around a bowl of oatmeal with raisins.

“This is gross,” he said.

“I’ll eat it.” He pushed it across the table to her. She took a bite. It was gross, but food was fuel to her now; she was simply refilling the gas tank.

“I’m dying here,” Ian said. He tried to cross his leg under the table but was too tall. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.”

“Okay,” Elm said. “Promise you won’t be angry.”

“I don’t promise beforehand,” Ian said. “I’ve been hurt too many times.”

“Then promise to
try
not to be angry.”

“Okay, fine, get on with it.”

“I, uh, think that Indira Schmidt gave us forged pieces.”

“What? That’s impossible. We had them authenticated.”

Elm shrugged.

Ian said, “But it’s not your fault. Fakes get put through all the time.”

“But ethically, they shouldn’t.”

“Ethically,” he echoed. They sat in silence for a moment. “What else?” Ian asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what else is there for you to tell me?”

“That’s it.” Elm held her palms open to show that there was nothing up her sleeve.

“Uh-uh.” Ian shook his head. “I don’t believe you. You don’t look empty.”

“I don’t look what? Look, Ian, I already told you that I think I may be in trouble, possibly even with the police, and definitely with my job, at a time when my husband’s about to lose his and I’m pregnant.”

Ian drummed his fingers on the table, impatient. His other hand played with a package of Sweet’N Low.

“What about Relay? I mean—” Ian leaned across the table closer to her. For the first time since she’d known him, Ian seemed angry, even menacing. “What about the drawings you sold through Relay?”

“What?” Elm said.