The Dorotheum Job

Free sample — the opening of Chapter 1, The Man Who Cleans Paintings. The complete book (175 pages, 24 chapters) comes as DRM-free PDF + EPUB with purchase.

Chapter 1: The Man Who Cleans Paintings

The swab came away the colour of weak tea, which meant the varnish was giving up nicely and the dealer would still complain about the price.

Jakob Reiner rolled the cotton off the tip of the bamboo skewer, dropped it into the beaker with the others — a small graveyard of amber-stained buds — and wound a fresh one. Under the magnifier lamp the landscape was a grid of numbered fields he had marked in his head: sky first, always sky first, where the glaze was thinnest and the painter had cared least. Some Danube nowhere, poplars, a ferryman doing his eternal underpaid work at the bottom right. Biedermeier by the yard. The signature said Höger, and perhaps it even was.

He touched the new swab to the solvent, blotted it to almost dry — the mixture was gentle, but gentle was a word for people who had never watched a cloud dissolve — and began the next field with the small circular motion his first teacher had called polishing the saint’s forehead. Twenty years of it and the motion lived somewhere below thought now, in the tendons. What lived above thought was the reading. The way the canvas weave telegraphed through thin paint in the sky and vanished under the impasto of the trees. The way the crack pattern ran in the tight net of a painting kept too long over somebody’s stove. The way the retouches from some earlier butcher fluoresced in his memory even with the UV lamp switched off, because he had mapped them on the first evening and a map, once made, did not leave him.

That was the whole of his gift, if it was one. Paper, chalk, paint, varnish — they could not lie to him. Only people could.

The studio held the smells of the trade in their proper layers: solvent sharp at the top, then beeswax, then the cold-cellar smell of the old shop itself, a former upholsterer’s on a courtyard off the Ottakringer Straße, where the light came in from the north through two tall dirty windows and cost him less than any light in this city had a right to. On the racks along the wall lay the rest of his week: a foxed engraving of the Karlskirche belonging to a pensioner in Hernals, two watercolours with tidelines, a devotional print somebody’s grandmother had glued — glued, with office paste — to hardboard. Work that paid in the low hundreds. Work nobody would ever ask him to certify, testify about, or stand behind, which was the point of sending it to him.

The dealer, Prohaska, had put it plainly enough in the autumn, standing in this room in his loden coat, not taking it off, the way a man doesn’t take his coat off in a place he might have to deny visiting. You do museum work at flea-market prices, Reiner. That’s not an insult, it’s the market. Be glad the market still has a shelf for you.

Jakob lifted the swab, checked it against the white tile. Weak tea. Good. Nothing green, nothing that said the paint was coming with the dirt. He allowed the painting the small professional courtesy of his full attention, ferryman and all, and worked the sky until his shoulders told him it was past two and he had not eaten.

He was rinsing the beakers when the buzzer went.

Couriers came to the courtyard maybe twice a month, usually with solvents from the supplier in Liesing, and the man in the doorway had the right jacket and the right electronic clipboard, so Jakob’s hands were already out for a parcel of tins before he saw there were no tins. A padded envelope, A4, heavier than paper had any business being. No sender field. The label carried his name and address in a laser-printed font and a shipping number that would, he was later quite sure, lead to a cash payment at a counter and a false name.

“Reiner?”

“Yes.”

The clipboard wanted a signature. He gave it the scrawl that was legally his and the courier was gone across the courtyard before the door swung shut, taking the diesel smell of the street with him.

Jakob put the envelope on the packing table, not the work table — a habit; nothing foreign went near an open treatment — and stood looking at it while the kettle he’d meant to put on stayed cold in his hand. Then he set the kettle down, took the shears, and opened the envelope along the short side, the way he opened everything, so that whatever was inside came out undamaged.

What came out was his own ruin, collated.

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