The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - AZZOPARDO - (part 2)

Chapter 5, part 2

The epistarch woman took us to the security office, down the hall and around a corner. A militiaman was sitting there with a bank of monitors reading a yellow novel, which he all but dropped into a waste bin as we entered.

“Security files for last night, eighteen o’clock to twenty o’clock,” Miss Azzopardo told him, perhaps not noticing the discarded novel.

He obliged and soon had a monitor gridded with different rooms. There was Miss Azzopardo, moving here and there with her tablet, unlocking cases, adjusting items, locking the cases again, and taking notes. The militiaman sped up her movements so that she looked like a bird fluttering from room to room, her chiton twirling around her legs and her shawl fluttering after. I watched for ten minutes, never taking my eyes off the screen, while real-life Miss Azzopardo’s impatience grew.

She was almost always within sight and vanished through a little door only once—

“Where does that go?”

“That goes to the women’s facilities,” she said coldly. And within seconds, the quick little simulacrum of Miss Azzopardo emerged again.

—and through another archway once.

“And there?”

“There’s a sip-font. Even the abused need a drink, Miss Fenek.”

The little Azzopardo-figure was back at once.

I had to admit, she was in the State Gallery the entire period the murder had taken place and when Barsina and I had discovered the body.

“Are you satisfied? Will the ensign-captain be satisfied?” she said sarcastically.

“I am,” I said. “You said we could see the exhibit?”

“Of course,” she said, gesturing at the militiaman, who returned the little video squares to live feeds as she led us out and downstairs by a side flight of pink marble and granite.

There was a wooden and cloth screen, naval blue, with white-painted letters that read “Arts of Great Antiquity.”

“Mist’ Fortunato’s ill luck is your great fortune,” she said. “Few other people have ever seen such a gathering of antiquities in one place in our history. You’ll see it before the opening.”

She shifted the screen to one side.

I don’t have any taste in art. The picture of the Station in the waiting room looked nice, but I guess it’s only a couple of centuries old or something. What was in the room looked a lot like what’s usually hanging up. Except she was happy to talk about it and point it all out. It was behind locked glass and lucex panels. Paintings, statues, gold, little printed cards next to them—it looked boring or odd at first blush. I managed a polite expression.

Perhaps I didn’t look enthusiastic enough. Her smile curdled slightly.

“This is all rare, irreplaceable, beautiful. In these cases, the work comes from Epsilon Indi. In these cases, all the art comes from around Sol, mainly from Earth. In this last case, the artifacts are all from Mars.”

If I had hair on the back of my neck, it would have prickled when she said this. Not only was it old, but it also came from so far away that I knew I couldn’t even begin to understand how far it had traveled. I didn’t even know anything about these worlds; they were just names, places from before the start of history. Maybe it was impressive after all.

The Mars stuff left me cold. It looked like a display of industrial products or knick-knacks. Among other things, it included a small bust of a jowly, tousle-haired old man (its card said it was reputed to be the founder of the colony, name of such and such,) a set of tall fluted cups of gilded rose glass, and a painting of a desert that could have been anywhere on Iphigenia that hadn’t been terraformed. The Epsilon Indi works were paintings in a style I didn’t care for, mostly on sheets of thin paper and silk, and looked especially aged. The Earth art—it was crazily varied in a way that made it seem that it came from a dozen planets, not one. There were statues of various styles and materials, from wood to stone, and paintings that ran the course from stumpy agrios types eating and drinking to bizarre and indescribable dreamscapes to a large canvas of nothing but squares and rectangles of blue, yellow, black, red, and white, all lined up together, which I honestly found very soothing.

“This one is the finest,” the epistarch said to me.

It wasn’t a big painting, taller than broad but not by much, with a dark background, tidied away by itself in a case. It had a thick gilded wooden frame with a soothing repetitive pattern that attracted my eye, but the picture was even more striking … a girl looked at you, lips parted, eyes alive, intense, her skin almost glowing from within. She wore some sort of chiton or robe. A headscarf covered her hair in blue, gold, and white. A pearl hung from her ear. The painting appeared of great age, with a tracery of cracks in the surface.

“It’s called Meisje met de parel,” the Sub-Director said, or some words like that. It wasn’t normal talk.

I was fascinated. The girl looked either about to smile or to turn away. Which would it be? I’d never know. She was caught in time …

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s written in graphite on the back. The Director thought parel meant pearl. Meisje might have been her name.”

I nodded. Parel, perlo, sure, maybe. And there was that large one by her ear.

“How old is it?” I asked, suddenly feeling small and awestruck again, by things bigger and better than me.

“Very,” was her laconic answer. “It was contributed by a private collector, Miss Herme Scyros.”

Scyros. I’d encountered her briefly before and came away unscathed. She was a wealthy labor-broker who bought the contracts of desperate citizens: another trafficker in misery I’d made it my life’s mission to avoid.

I looked at the card. Meisje, painted in about such a century, early Atlantic era, artist unknown, exact date unknown. Something stirred a memory, but Miss Azzopardo was talking about the conservation efforts, and as I nodded, I watched Barsina looking quite hard indeed at the portrait, busily copying it down in her notebook. She was doing a better job than I ever would have. I guess the Barsinas have artistic talent.

To make sure Miss Azzopardo told me all the truth, I also checked the women’s facilities, which had no window a woman could have reached and slipped out of, and the alcove with the sip-font. All was as she had said.

Then, the interview was over.

“I trust I will not have to speak with you again,” Sub-Director Azzopardo said.

“Likely not,” I said with a curtsey. “Thank you for your time.”

I looked over my shoulder once as we walked away through the pillared galleries. She still stood there, watching us go.

( … This way to Chapter 5, part 1 … ) ( … This way to Chapter 5, part 3 … )