Orphan X

25 Business of a Certain Type

It was full dark by the time Evan reached Northridge, the moon a bullet hole through the black dome of the sky. Maneuvering a grid of streets on the flat floor of the Valley, he arrived at the industrial park just off Parthenia. The layout had a movie-studio vibe, blocky buildings scattered like sound stages.

The Taurus’s tires crackled across the asphalt between businesses, all of them shuttered for the night. Except one.

A single point of light glowed above the entrance to the last building in the complex. It was a Victorian streetlamp, rising like a prop from a bed of begonias. In place of a light, the streetlamp held a backlit sign that in turn featured a streetlamp illustration, beneath which was written “CraftFirst Poster Restoration” in old-timey letters. The Magritte-meta conceit was an appropriate one, as the brick façade housed a business behind a business.

He parked and rang a buzzer on a call box. A moment later the door clicked open and he entered, passing through a brief foyer with periwinkle walls exhibiting Italian noir posters from the forties. Another door, another buzzer, and then he was through into the vast workspace.

Industrial shelving units lined the perimeter, crammed with all order of supplies. Jars of paints, rubber-cement thinner, fine-tipped brushes with tape-padded handles, palette knives, and X-Acto blades. Rolls of army duck canvas, Mylar, and fine-texture poster backing. Jumbles of corner brackets and frame stretcher bars. The space resembled a factory floor, with various conservators bent over giant square plywood worktables, restoring vintage posters and prints. The rolling tables, positioned haphazardly wherever elbow room was afforded, rose only to the workers’ thighs, allowing them ready access to their tasks.

Most of the painters were plugged into iPods, big clamp headphones hugging their skulls. Every last one wore eyeglasses; this kind of work strained the vision. A shiny-haired man adjusted a crinkled British three-sheet of The Day of the Jackal between blotter sheets and slipped it into a nineteenth-century cast-iron screw press. Next to him at a wet table, a worker sprayed an olive German M poster with a retrofitted insecticide atomizer while his partner sponged at a stained spot gently with Orvus soap, a pure, fragrance-free surfactant used for livestock and posters. It made water wetter, the better to penetrate paper fibers. The two men quickly whisked the poster onto a suction table, which roared to life, a vacuum wicking the moisture from below before it could spread out.

“Evan! Over here! You have to see this.”

Melinda Truong, a lithe woman with a curtain of black hair reaching her lower back, popped up from a cluster of men around a workstation and waved him across the floor. As he wove his way to her, a mounted TV blared the ten-o’clock news. Evan glanced up to see if it was carrying the story of the motel shooting, but it was a feature about some assemblyman gone missing.

The ring of workers parted deferentially as he approached. Melinda took his face in both of her hands and kissed him on either cheek close to the edge of his lips. She wore a fitted sweater, yoga pants, and bright orange sneakers of elaborate design. Tucked behind her ear was a 000 paintbrush — the finest make — with its handle wrapped in pink tape. At her waist, slung in an actual holster, was an Olympos double-action airbrush, which looked like a 1970s take on a ray gun. Its grip was also padded with pink tape. The only woman in the operation, she color-coded her tools to keep her men from borrowing them.

She tugged his hand, turning him toward the table around which the little group had gathered. “This poor girl was stripped from a cinema display case in Paris. She lay in a dank warehouse for years after the war, then was shoved into a trunk until last June. She came to us in intensive care.”

He stared down at the object of her affection, a Ginger Rogers insert from Lady in the Dark, sandwiched between Mylar sheets. It had multiple tears, pinholes, and fold wear. “She looks tattered,” he said.

“You should’ve seen her before we got our hands on her. She had to be demounted, washed, the tape adhesive residue removed with Bestine. We’re patching her with vintage paper now. She’ll be worth six figures when we’re done — her owner’ll be thrilled. Of course, we’re only billing him at one twenty-five an hour.” The long lashes of one eye dipped in a graceful wink. “Not like for our special services.”

She seemed to notice the workers around her for the first time. “Well?” she said sharply in her native tongue. “What are you waiting for? Back to work!”

As they scurried into motion, Evan nodded at a poster of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man pinned on the neighboring table. “How about that one?”

“This guy?” She grinned, showing perfect rows of pearl-white teeth. “He’s good-looking, right? Been damaged and restored a few times, like most good men.” She freed a corner of the poster, showed off the back side. “Got all these collector stamps to establish provenance. But.”

She barked another order across the room, and a moment later the lights in the building went out with a series of clanks. A black-light wand clicked on in her hand, the greens and whites of the poster suddenly luminescent. “Fake, see? The glow gives it away. They made an ink-jet printout, glued it onto vintage backing, and intentionally distressed it.” The lights came back on, and she whisked the poster off the table, Frankenstein disappearing into the wide drawer of a flat file cabinet. She smirked. “I know a good forgery when I see one.”

Slipping her arm through Evan’s, she led him down a back hall that smelled pleasantly of petroleum. “The poster trade, Evan, is the Wild West.”

“Seems to be.”

They entered a dark-walled photography room, its windows blacked out to prevent reflections during shooting. A fine excuse to have an impenetrable back room in which to conduct business of a certain type.

“It’s been what — six months?” she said. “You came because you miss me?”

“Of course. But not just that.”

“You need another license? Social Security card? Travel visa?”

“Haven’t had a chance to burn the ones I’ve got.”

Her lips made a sly shift to one side. “You brought me a lead on a German Metropolis three-sheet?”

Melinda’s — and every poster trader’s — holy grail, the poster went for upwards of a million dollars. There were three in the world that anyone knew about.

“Alas, no.” Evan withdrew Katrin’s passport from his pocket and held it out.

Melinda regarded it a moment, then took it and thumbed to Katrin’s photo. A playful tilt of her head. “Should I be jealous?”

Setting the passport down on the workbench, she opened and closed several letterblock drawers housing customs stamps. “Do you want her to have been to India?” She removed one of the larger stamps. “Or how about the Galápagos? This is the elaborate one they give you at Baltra.” She thwacked the stamp onto a piece of scrap paper, took a moment to admire her handiwork.

“No. I don’t need it embellished. I need to know if it’s real.”

Her thin eyebrows lifted, but even then not a wrinkle appeared in her flawless skin. She crossed to an AmScope binocular microscope hooked into a computer for image capture. All business now, she flipped her long hair over one shoulder and bent to the wide eyepiece mounted on a boom arm. She studied the passport cover, its seams, and multiple pages under different specialized lights.

Then she took her time on the computer, sorting through the captured images. Back to the passport itself, now with a loupe, examining the photo page square inch by square inch.

“It’s real,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She straightened up, deleting the images from the computer, then clearing the cache. “It is very hard to fake a passport, Evan. The paper is impossible to replicate.”

“Even from etched and engraved metal plates?”

She shook her head. “No way.”

“How about if it was silk-screened from a high-detail Photoshop print?”

“Even I couldn’t achieve this clarity in the pixelation.”

That answered that, then.

Melinda blew out a breath. “Look, maybe someone could re-create the embossment tool for the security images, but these holograms? No way. This is a flawless specimen.” She held his gaze a moment longer, perhaps sensing that he needed more convincing. “Not a fake. Not a good fake. Not a great fake.” She offered the passport back with an artful flick of her wrist. “It’s her.”