“No, I’d never seen him before. He apparently just wandered in from the street.”
“But the exhibit doesn’t open to the public until tomorrow night,” Carys pointed out.
“That’s what I told him.” Jordana took a sip of her wine. “He didn’t seem bothered that we weren’t officially open yet.”
“Weird,” Carys said, twisting some pasta onto her fork. “What did he want?”
Jordana shrugged. “I suppose he wanted to look at the art. That’s what he said, anyway. We talked for a while about Italian sculptors and compared some of the pieces in the collection, then he left.”
Carys eyed her over the rim of her wineglass. “Like I said, weird.”
“He was … nice,” Jordana said, taking a bite of her scampi as she thought about the man and the short time she spent with him in the exhibit.
He was a stranger, a peculiar one at that, and yet she’d felt almost instantly at ease around him. Despite his oddness and his uninvited presence in the museum, she had felt comfortable with him; safe, in some indefinable way. And she would have enjoyed talking with him a bit longer, had he not left the museum without explanation as soon as she turned her back.
Vanished, more like it.
Maybe Carys was right, there was something weird about the man.
Jordana’s musing was interrupted when her friend’s comm unit pulsed on the edge of the table with an incoming call.
“It’s Aric.” There was a note of bitterness in Carys’s voice as she spoke her brother’s name. Her fingers hovered over the device for less than a second before she drew her hand back onto her lap with a shallow sigh. The comm unit buzzed again, but Carys remained still, her mouth pressed into a flat line.
Jordana studied her across the small table. “You can’t shut him out forever, Car.” The Chase siblings hadn’t spoken since their heated confrontation over Rune the other night, and Jordana knew it was killing Carys to have a wall standing between her and her twin.>He didn’t acknowledge the offer or her request for him to go. Slowly, fluidly, he strolled from one art display to another.
“A Canova,” he said, walking over to the clear case containing a marble bust of Beatrice from the famous, epic poetry of Dante Alighieri. “An impressive piece.”
Jordana followed the man to the sculpture, taking in his modest attire more closely now. None of his clothes looked newer than a decade old, and they fit him like they’d been broken in on someone else and cast off years later. His brown leather loafers were scuffed and scarred, faded and timeworn like the rest of what he wore.
“Canova is considered one of the greatest neoclassical sculptors,” Jordana said, unable to resist sharing her knowledge of the collection. “He was probably the most famous artist of his day, but I don’t find many people who know his work on sight. Particularly the lesser-known pieces like this one.”
“More’s the pity.” Her uninvited visitor’s mouth curved in a faint smile. “Canova’s work is exquisite, no question. There is a calmness to his sculpture, from the smoothness of his subject’s skin, to the fluid form of each curve and the flawless stroke of every line.”
Listening to him speak so eloquently and so well informed, Jordana suddenly felt awkward for insisting he’d have to pay to view the art that belonged by rights to the world. In spite of her earlier misgivings about him, she found herself intrigued.
He went on, still studying the sculpture. “The perfection of Canova’s work—the pure idealism of it—invites the eye to linger, to study and admire.” The man glanced to Jordana. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Jordana shrugged. “Honestly, I find it too perfect. His art is too … I don’t know. Too controlled, I suppose.” She gestured to a neighboring marble piece, one of the collection’s most important acquisitions. “Take this Bernini bust, on the other hand. Look at the energy of his work. It’s unsettling, unrefined. Aggressive.”
The sculpture they looked at was Anima Dannata, depicting a condemned soul staring into the abyss of hell. Jordana drew closer to the display. “Bernini shows you every crag in his subject’s face, every livid vein and hair standing on end. You can actually see the torment in the man’s face—you can feel it. You can almost hear the scream of horror from the man’s open mouth. Bernini shows you everything. He dares you to experience it.”
The stranger nodded. “You take your art very seriously.”
“I love it,” Jordana admitted. “It means everything to me.”
Something flickered in his unusual green eyes. “We share that in common, then. I am a lover of art myself. And today, a newfound appreciation for Bernini. Your favorite piece, I take it?”
“Oh,” Jordana said, shaking her head. “No, there’s another sculpture that I like even more. But it’s not as important as either of these.”
“Will you show me?”
For a moment, Jordana forgot all about the fact that the exhibit was currently off-limits to anyone but museum staff. She led him to another of the pieces housed inside a Plexiglas display.
“Cornacchini’s Sleeping Endymion,” he said, a smile on his lips. Jordana noticed he hadn’t needed to read the placard. “You know this one too?”
“It’s been in the museum’s collection for many years, I believe.”
“Yes, it has.” He must be a longtime patron of the museum, to be so familiar not only with art in general but with this particular piece as well. “Endymion came to us by anonymous donation a couple decades ago. It was in another exhibit most of that time, but when I began planning this collection, I had to have it.” She gazed at the reclining human shepherd, sleeping under Selene’s crescent moon. “There’s not another piece in the entire museum that I love more than this one.”