Revenge on the Rye by Alice Castle

Author:Alice Castle [Castle, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crooked Cat Books
Published: 2018-12-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Magenta wasn’t normally prone to nerves, but rocking up to Andy Kuragin’s gallery that morning at what felt like the crack of dawn, she was a lot less confident than she looked. It was in a nicer part of town than Benson’s, though, which was a good start. Whitechapel might be achingly trendy, but the cobbles there had played havoc with her heels and she was instinctively more at ease in the wide and reassuringly expensive streets of Mayfair. No bearded hipsters here, selling ironic breakfast cereal. They simply couldn’t afford the rents. She wasn’t sure how Kuragin could – and she certainly didn’t want to find out. Like Benson, he rarely sold a canvas, but when he did, it was for big bucks.

She looked around quickly as she pressed the discreet buzzer. There was a sharp click as the heavy front door released and she pushed it with both hands before stepping elegantly into the vestibule. Maybe Kuragin was expecting a ram raid? She knew they’d happened in Mayfair before – determined thieves would drive their cars through the plate glass windows of jewellers and galleries and make off with whatever they could grab. Or maybe Kuragin was just worried about the Russian Mafia.

With a slight shiver, Magenta looked around her. The vestibule was kitted out with everything you’d expect. A pristine floor, buffed to a shine that made it seem very unlikely that anyone had ever walked over it before. A discreet bank of lifts at the end of the corridor that hinted at more floors just off-stage, as swanky as this one. And right in front of her, a marble console table that would have looked at home in any stately pile, bearing an enormous vase full of aggressively twisted driftwood, interleaved with the comically cheery heads of orange gerberas. Above the arrangement, stage-lit, was a long horizontal canvas.

If she wasn’t mistaken, it was an early Slope – an interwoven riot of separate strands of aerosol paint. She leaned forward until the tip of her nose was as close as she could get to the signature. It was the famous poodle, but not quite the stylised cottage loaf two-balls-of-scribble-with-a-nose-and-ears that had become so familiar and distinctive. This looked like a cruder, clumsier version. And, although it seemed to be defecating a globe, in the trademark Slope style, the drawing was more tentative than other versions she’d seen. That could just mean it was a really, really early work and thus had tremendous scarcity value. Graffiti juvenilia, after all, was often buried under layers of municipal paint as soon as it was completed, and that was the best-case scenario. Mostly, it was scrubbed off by earnest council workers or reluctant community service teams, reduced to rubble when walls or buildings came down, or bleached, crushed, and whitewashed, if it was on railway land.

Magenta was just wondering if she could get even closer still without climbing into the artwork, when there was a discreet cough at her elbow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.