The Color Of Night Read Free Page B

cluttered with recently consulted volumes, slips of paper protruding from their pages. All of these rooms were generous spaces with sitting areas and comfortable furnishings, and each of them communicated with the others through a short arched passageway with a wrought-iron gate the height of the passageway placed midway. The gates were covered on one side with plate glass to muffle sound for privacy when the gates were closed. A fourth room was for storage, where rows of thin, vertical shelving for paintings and drawings lined the walls. This was also a work area for packaging artwork to be shipped and for receiving.
    Every morning at nine-thirty Meret let herself into the front entry of the house and went straight through to the peristyle. This morning, like many others, Strand saw her enter the colonnade with an armload of documents and walk around to her office door, where she let herself in. While she was settling in, he stepped out into the courtyard and crossed to the other side to the kitchen. He prepared two cups of coffee and took them back around the colonnade to Meret’s door. She was already standing there, holding it open for him.
    “Perfect,” she said, taking her cup at the door. “There are a few things you ought to deal with straightaway,” she began. Meret was organized, and there were limits to the amount of time she would allow a loose end to remain loose. Strand increasingly took advantage of this, letting unessential details go unattended, knowing that if they were even potentially important, Meret would catch them and bring them to his attention.
    “Such as…”
    “Such as these,” she said, snatching a pink Post-it off her desk and waving it at him. She kept “to do” things on the bright adhesive squares, and sometimes the whole left side of her desk blushed with ranks of reminders.
    Strand settled into an armchair beside the sofa where Meret presided during their morning conversations. She sat down, her legs and feet together, and stuck the pink note on the hem of her skirt, which left more than half her leg exposed. Meret was not a petite young woman, but she knew instinctively how to dress to her best advantage. The stylish short skirts and revealing blouses that she favored were worn with a sexy intelligence that told you immediately that she knew what she was doing. Degas or Maillol would have asked her to take off her clothes in a minute. She would have done it, relishing the adventure and the humor of it, though she would have charged them by the quarter hour and wanted her payment in cash. On top of that, she would have had a highly educated opinion of the artist’s efforts.
    “Leaman Stannish,” she began, holding her cup and saucer like a duchess. “The matter of his Gérome studies.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I thought we’d agreed they were too weak.”
    “That’s what I remembered.”
    “Then you have to let him know we’re passing.”
    “I’ve been putting that off…”
    Meret looked at him with her best “that’s the point of this conversation” expression.
    “… but he’s got those fine, those very fine, Carpeaux drawings, the sculpture studies…”
    “And you don’t want to piss him off,” she said.
    “Right.”
    “What he’s saying is, You want my Carpeaux? Take my Gérome first.”
    “That’s right.”
    “You shouldn’t play that game.”
    Strand sipped his coffee. “I know. Write him and tell him we can’t do it.”
    Meret stiffened. “
You’ve
got to write him, Harry. Stannish is a pain in the ass, but you can’t afford to alienate the guy. He knows he’s being unfair, and he’s also very much aware of your reputation as an ethical dealer. He’d much rather operate under that cloak of respectability than work in the market without it. He’ll come around.”
    Strand nodded. “I’ll let him know.” He had already decided what to do, but it was good to hear Meret’s opinions coinciding with his. It had gotten to the point