The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) (2 page)

By any definition, it was a plum assignment, and for Alix it was a confirmation that things were truly going her way. Finally.

And then this.

When she got back to her workroom with her own coffee, she found a young man fussily arranging coffee fixings, notebooks, and pens on the small conference table in the center of the room.

“Is there going to be a meeting, Richard?” she asked. Richard Ariano was the secretary of Lillian Brethwaite, the museum’s director.

“Yes, the curators. This will probably take all morning.”

“Ah.”

This was the first time she’d been booted out of her workspace, but hardly a surprise. When she’d first arrived, she’d been given the regular workroom to use, but it was a windowless, cheerless place, and she’d asked if there might be something a little less depressing, and with natural light. Clark Calder, the senior curator, had suggested the conference room—roomy, airy, and blessed with a wide, wonderful view over the city and eastward across the Coachella Valley desert to the picturesque, dun-colored Little San Bernardinos—and she’d jumped at the offer, although it had come with the understanding that staff meetings would take priority.

“This
is
the conference room, you know,” Richard said unnecessarily. An oily, prissy young man, he had the proprietary attitude toward his boss and her domain that is not so rarely found among personal secretaries. He had resented Alix from the start, and seemed to think that she had more access to the director and took more liberties with the museum in general than were her due.

“I know that, Richard. I didn’t ask for it, you know. Clark suggested it.”

“Clark,” he said. Obviously not one of his favorites, either.

Well, this business with the reviews had pretty much killed any possibility of meaningful concentration for the next hour or so anyway; the truth was that she appreciated having an excuse to get away from work for a while. “It’s all yours,” she said, and with her coffee she went out to one of the museum’s four broad terraces—one of the two open to the public, not that it made any difference at the moment, since the Brethwaite was temporarily closed while it was undergoing a major renovation of its public galleries.

She had come out onto this terrace before when she needed to unwind a little, and she could tell almost before she sat on one of the comfortable benches that it was going to do the job this time as well. It was the view that did it, northward rather than eastward, so that it took in the astonishing “wind farm” on the city’s outskirts: almost seven hundred immense, chalk-white wind turbines—windmills—each an incredible forty stories high, arranged in row after parallel row, their giant blades turning slowly, slowly in the soft breeze. It was impossible to look at without thinking of Don Quixote. For Alix they were hypnotic; they would put her to sleep if she’d let them. She could feel her anger over those hateful reviews melting away and she sighed gratefully.

It didn’t melt away the hurt, however, or the pain she felt on her father’s behalf. Because this campaign wasn’t meant to get at her, but at Geoff; that was obvious. Geoffrey London had been an accomplished and successful forger in his time—even now he claimed to be unrepentant, but that was another story—and there were a lot of people who still had good reason to wish him ill. Geoffrey had left a lot of humiliated “experts” and embittered collectors in his wake, and she was being attacked now because they knew it would hurt him. They were right, too, and it wounded her to see the guilt it caused him to be the reason for these attacks on her, hide it though he tried.

The possibility that she herself was the object of the attacks, and not Geoff, had naturally occurred to her when the whole thing started, but she soon dismissed that as unlikely.

Who’d want to hurt me?

I
t h
ad taken a mere four months for the new senior curator of the Palm Springs L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum of Art to inspire the level of hatred from his staff that would have taken most people years to generate. They disliked him because he was newer than they were and younger than they were, because they thought his aims for the museum were crass and commercial, his personal ambitions ruthless, his speech gratuitously jargony, his manner jarringly hip and mocking, and—especially—because of the trust that Lillian Brethwaite, the museum’s longtime director and the chair of its board of trustees, had come to have in his judgment and counsel, and who knew what else.

Thirty-seven-year-old Clark Calder was aware of all this and was bothered not a bit. He disliked the four staff members as heartily as they disliked him, but with one obvious and happy difference: There was only one driver’s seat, and he was strapped securely into it. As such, he took pleasure in dismantling the elitist attitudes and practices that had gotten the Brethwaite into its current financial mess, and the more these fusty old dinosaurs rumbled, and quibbled, and resisted being dragged into the twenty-first century (straight from the nineteenth), the more fun it was.

“What we’re talking about here,” he said, leaning over the conference table, “what it has to be all about from now on, is one thing first and foremost: the maximization of monetized eyeballs.”

He paused to let this sink in, waiting to see which of his subordinate curators would rise to the bait this time. As he’d hoped, it was the venerable and oh-so-dignified curator of Paintings, who was unable to repress a wince. If ever a man had a name that fit him to a T, it was the patrician and elegant Prentice Faversham Vandervere. Of all the old fogeys, Prentice was the oldest and fogeyist, trailing half a century of accolades as a famous Harvard professor and an all-knowing pundit on the nature and functions of the art museum and art itself. As such, his very presence weighed on Clark, cramped his style, even stirred feelings of insecurity, something not many other people could do to him. With Clark, the best defense against this or anything else was a robust offense. As a result, the starchy old prof was his most frequent foil.

“Uh-oh,” Clark said, “looks as if I offended the delicate sensibilities of Professor Vandervere yet again, am I right, professor?”

“I said nothing, Clark.” Aloof, reserved, above it all. Arrogant old fart. It was rumored that he was thinking of retiring. He’d had plenty of experience at that, already having retired from Harvard and from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That would be a big day, a freeing day, in Clark’s life, although he’d probably miss sparring with the old coot a little. Or not.

“No,” he said pleasantly, “but I spotted a telltale quiver in the right third of your left upper eyelid—a dead giveaway. Do you have a problem with the concept, professor?” He smiled. He had a great smile—a killer smile, one of his girlfriends had called it—and he knew it. Open, friendly, boyish, inviting, it was one of his best features, and he used it unmercifully.

Vandervere smiled back, politely and noncommittally, hoping now to let the moment pass. This meeting, like all of them, was Clark’s show, and Vandervere had largely given up debating him to no useful end. He might win the debate, but he had yet to win the war or even a single battle. Clark was too slick with words, too quick to jab, too intent on winning.

And now the senior curator continued to wait, eyebrows raised inquisitively.

Vandervere emitted an almost inaudible sigh and took up the gauntlet. “It’s not a problem, really, Clark. It’s only that your turns of phrase sometimes take a while for an old traditionalist like myself to accustom himself to. I think you’ll agree that ‘the maximization of monetized eyeballs’ is not an expression that one expects from the mouth of a curator—a senior curator—at a reputable museum of art.”

Vandervere’s elegant and carefully crafted language, delivered as always courteously and non-combatively, and as smoothly as if it were being read aloud, was enough to give most people pause—especially people less than half his age.

Not Clark Calder. “But I’m a senior curator, and this is a reputable museum,” he said innocently, “and it just came from my mouth. Ergo: there must be something wrong with your argument.”

“I intended no argument. You asked me a question, and I answered.”

But Clark wasn’t about to let it go. “So it’s my choice of terms, Prentice? Is eyeball monetization not part of the museum administration curriculum at Hah-vahd? No? But then, I suppose that monetary considerations aren’t exactly high priority at Hah-vahd, are they?” He continued to smile. The climate in the room, icy to begin with, chilled further.

It was Madge Temple, the comfortably plump, forty-something curator of Costumes and Furnishings, who put an end to it. “Enough already, Clark. I think we can all agree you’ve made your point:
You
didn’t have to go to Harvard to get where you are, blah blah blah. Congratulations. So how about getting to the point of the meeting now? Or was that it?”

Madge reminded Clark of one of those Happy Buddha statuettes: plump-cheeked, with knowing, amused eyes peeking out from under half-closed lids, and a serene smile that indicated how endlessly entertaining she found the foibles of those around her. That in itself would have been only moderately hard to take, but unfortunately, like Buddha himself, she was prone to voicing her observations and dispensing her guidance for the benefit of others. If she was aware that her jokey, side-of-the-mouth comments might offend others, which they frequently did, she gave no sign of knowing. By now, Clark had come to the conclusion that she really didn’t know.

“Certainly,” Clark said agreeably, not as much irritated by her latest remarks as one might think. He was indeed proud of not having gone to Harvard, proud that his only college degrees were a BA in entrepreneurial studies from Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, and an almost-MFA in art history from Montana State at Bozeman. And especially proud that he’d been born without a silver spoon in his mouth, or any spoon at all, and yet here he was with this collection of fancy-school PhDs taking orders from him. He had come from nothing—an absentee father, a motel-maid mother—had paid his own way here, and had done it on his own, with dedication, perseverance, and innate smarts. Why wouldn’t he be proud of himself? The good looks and that killer smile hadn’t hurt either; he had to admit that.

“Now then,” he said, “you all know that Integrated Marketing Systems has been studying our operation for some time. They have now analyzed the data from the movement-sensor time recorders that were in place most of the last two months, and have turned in their report, and yesterday evening the board unanimously accepted their recommendations and directed that they be implemented. The
point
of this meeting is to inform you of them.” He cleared his throat and shuffled through the few papers in front of him.

“This is not going to be good,” said Madge to no one in particular. “He looks too happy about it.”

On another day that definitely would have gotten under Clark’s skin, but on this particular morning it slid off him like sizzling droplets from a Teflon pan. “The most substantive change thus far will occur—
has
occurred—in Photography,” he said. “The IMS study makes it amply clear that the photographic wing provides our least effective client interface functionalities, in that—”

Client interface functionalities
, Vandervere mouthed silently, his face a mask of pain.

“—in that our clients spend almost no time there, and most of them—
most,
you understand, not
some
—simply pass it by without a glance. So . . . as of this morning, the photographic wing is no more. The contents will be going into storage over the next few days, for future deaccession consideration.”

This had the intended effect. They were stunned. One of the five curatorial divisions gone, poof, just like that? “We’re closing down Photographs because it didn’t get enough . . . enough
eyeballs
?” Vandervere said with a disbelief that matched the expressions on the faces of the others.

“No, not because it didn’t get enough eyeballs; because it didn’t get enough eyeball
time
, and lack of eyeball time is an indicator of a client-perceived shortfall in our ecosystem. If we hope to put the Brethwaite on a sounder financial footing—and by that I mean increased memberships, increased donations, increased attendance, increased admission income—such shortfalls need to be perceptually recontextualized.”

“Perceptually recontextualized.” The curator of Decorative Arts, aka Madge’s husband Drew Temple, emitted a harsh, clipped laugh. “Forgive the expression, Clark, but that is such a total load of bullshit, even for you. With all due respect, of course.”

Clark’s smile broadened. He thought exactly the same thing. He enjoyed throwing in the marketing gobbledygook because it never failed to upset them, but he didn’t know what the hell most of it meant either. He got most of it from a “jargon generator” on the Web: three columns of buzzwords—verbs, adjectives, and nouns—that you could combine any way you liked to produce mind-boggling business-oriented neologisms:
disintermediated cross-platform functionalities
,
integrated Web-enabled algorithms
,
orchestrated user-centric paradigms
. He’d started doing it as a joke in the early days, when they were all still friends, more or less, but to his amazement they’d never gotten it. The silly terms just rankled and confused them. So naturally, he’d kept it up.

Madge must have thought that Drew had overdone it, because she stepped in now. “I think that what Drew was trying to say, Clark—”

“What Drew was trying to say is precisely what Drew said,” Drew snapped at her. “I don’t see that interpretation is required.”

Madge cheerfully pulled an imaginary dagger from her chest. “Pardon me for living.”

What an unlikely couple they were, Clark thought. Madge was straight out of a family sitcom: fat and sassy; unable to keep her mouth shut and damn the consequences. Drew couldn’t have been more different. A waspish, discontented man, other than his boringly predictable grousing over any and everything, he kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. Clark had distrusted him from the start.

“Clark, I’d like to say something here,” Vandervere said in that equable, aren’t-I-reasonable tone that never failed to make the senior curator grind his teeth. “I understand the need to cut back, but consider for a moment: our Photography department is a one-of-a-kind historic resource: the finest photographic record in existence of early irrigation in the Coachella Valley and the initial construction phases of the Coachella Canal.”

Clark, who wore reading glasses down low on his nose during meetings, peered drolly over them. “And your point is?”

This time Vandervere declined the bait and shifted the subject. “And what will happen to Werner?”

“Yes, and where is old Wernerschnitzel, anyway?” Madge added.

“Werner won’t be with us today,” Clark replied. “Obviously, with no need for a Photography department, there’s no need for a curator of Photography. I spoke with him earlier this morning and offered him the management of the gift shop, a new position. Oh, did I mention that the days of blue-haired lady volunteers are as of now a thing of the past? Whether Werner accepts it or not, I saw no reason for him to continue to attend the curatorial staff meetings.”

This sent new shock waves around the table.
Manager of the gift shop?
Werner Mayehoff? Werner, who had been there longer than any of them, the only curator who’d been around since Day One in 1996, an old friend of L. Morgan Brethwaite’s himself? If it could happen to Werner, then how safe were any of them?

“And what about the rest of the departments?”

This from the one person who hadn’t been heard from until now. The curator of Prints and Drawings, Alfie Wellington, wasn’t much of a contributor at staff meetings or anywhere else. Since neither museums nor the art in them excited his interest very much any longer, he was often unengaged, to put it charitably. The next oldest of the remaining curators (after Prentice), a rotund sixty-year-old with a chubby-cheeked face that was made to be merry but rarely had been in recent years, he had come to the museum as a relatively young man in 1998, in what he must have imagined to be a step toward a bigger, better future at some bigger, better museum. Yet here he was, more than fifteen years later, at the same museum, in the same position, with nowhere to go.

It wasn’t entirely his fault. As with the other curators, there hadn’t been much for him to do to distinguish himself. There had been no blockbuster exhibitions to set up, no major acquisitions with which to scoop competing institutions, not really much of anything, as far as Clark could see, that wouldn’t have been the province of curatorial assistants or interns at any other decent museum.

The four of them were all in the same boat in that regard, and they reacted true to their own natures: Madge with her barbed and supposedly funny throwaway lines, Drew with tightly repressed resentment, Prentice with “civilized” equanimity. And Alfie? Alfie had turned to booze. He wasn’t what most people would call a drunk, not the kind who goes around staggering and slurring his speech, or snoring through meetings, but he was never without enough alcohol in his system to soften life in general with a calming, distancing fuzz. Even now, at 9:15 in the morning, the smell of bourbon on his breath had the others giving him plenty of room.