Free An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin

entered a hall, unsure which way to go. She looked left, toward the street, to a sunny, blindingly white front room, then right, to a hall that extended back to another half-open door, which she guessed was her destination. She walked down the hall, passing a few offices housing an art library, open books on desks, transparencies leaning on light boxes. She got close enough to the end of thehall to see, through a door cracked open not more than a few inches, a sliver of a painting on an easel, an old master type, of a woman singing in a parlor.
    “Not there, behind you,” Talley said. She turned and saw Talley silhouetted against the window, waving his arm for her to come the other way. “That way, evil and darkness; this way, goodness and light,” said Talley, then added, “We’re all in here.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Talley. I’m Lacey Yeager, just in case—”
    “Oh, I know,” he said. “Thank you for coming. This is Patrice Claire…” Lacey saw the open-collared European whom she had met briefly at Sotheby’s a little over three years ago.
    “We’ve met,” she said, recalling a memory that had set firm in her by a feeling of premonition.
    “Ah, you remembered,” said Claire.
    “Ah,
you
remembered,” said Lacey.
    Lacey sat; they all sat. “Have you ever been to Russia?” Talley asked her.
    “It’s on my to-do list,” she said.
    “Well, move it up a few notches. Did Cherry explain about the Rockwell Kent situation?”
    “Yes, she—”
    “So the Russians have these pictures that they really don’t care about, but America does care about. Mr. Claire has some pictures that the Russians really do care about, and we don’t care about at all.”
    Patrice Claire picked up the story. “I collected about twenty nineteenth-century Russian landscape painters through the years. All these Russian pictures are painted tight, very photographic, very realistic, the respected standard for the period. Russian artists never got into Impressionism until it was practically over—”
    “Neither did the Americans,” Talley interjected.
    “Yes, neither did the Americans. A hundred years later they turn outto be unimportant, pretty pictures, but they are still amazing. Amazing light, amazing detail.”
    “Patrice contacted me with the thought of an exchange, a sort of prisoner exchange,” Talley explained, “and I contacted Sotheby’s for added clout. The art world wants an opening in Russia, and this could be a civil way to begin. We need an assistant for the trip, someone with an American look and nature, preferably from Sotheby’s, and Cherry recommended you. Do you think you might have an interest?”
    Not wondering, or caring, whether she was picked as a sexual possibility on a lengthy trip for gentlemen, Lacey said yes.
    “We would leave in a week for a three-day trip to St. Petersburg. Many of the pictures are at the Hermitage, stowed away. My Russian pictures are being sent there now. Russia’s a bit chaotic these days, so it might be easier to make a deal now than in five years.”
    The conversation loosened; anecdotes were told about travel, foreign ways, differences between Europeans and Americans, and everyone relaxed. Barton Talley fussed with a letter opener, finally laying it precisely square on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and said, “One night in Paris, I was faced with the choice of flying to the South of France to meet Picasso, or staying in Paris and fucking Hedy Lamarr. I chose to fuck Hedy Lamarr.
    “That I would call a mistake.”
    “I’ll try not to make the same one,” said Lacey.

18.
    WITH LACEY ACTING as passport holder and ticket captain, the three of them landed at the St. Petersburg airport, which had a lonely, neglected quality. Weeds grew in the centers of the runways. Broken-down Aeroflot jets seemed to be parked randomly, but upon closer look, Lacey realized they were not broken down at all and there were rattled passengers disembarking from them.
    After a