“What do you think?” said Tischler. “These locks are newer, look like…twenty years ago and nothing special.”
He got down on a knee. “Two Yales, one Schlage, here comes Poppa!”
The drill did its job. Tischler reached for the handle but Milo got there first, turned hard, and stepped into darkness.
Reed and I filed past Tischler.
He muttered, “Someone’s in a hurry,” and brought up the rear.
—
Milo’s Maglite located the light switch. One flick and everything turned bright.
We’d entered ten square feet of windowless space with walls covered by intricately patterned green, white, and red tiles. The floors were white subway tiles feeding to an ornate steel staircase.
Flight and a half, the steps granite, the railing adorned by vines and flowers and newel posts shaped like snarling lion’s heads.
A curious, yeasty smell.
Milo held us back and began climbing.
Twenty footfalls later: “Clear.”
—
At the top of the stairs was brick-walled loft space, sixty or seventy feet long and half as wide, backed by a partition on the north end that failed to reach the ceiling and gapped six feet on either side.
Towering ceiling, at least thirty feet, stripped to raw boards, the ducts naked. Double-stacked windows had provided the illusion of a three-story.
Lighting, harsh, ashy, pervasive, suffused with dust, came from four tracks that paralleled the ceiling’s center beam. The floors were wide-plank pine, pitted and scarred and burnished by decades of foot traffic.
The yeast stronger, here.
Paper.
Half the loft was filled with ten-foot stacks of posters grouped by the hundred or so, piles of mailing tubes bound together by metal strips, and heaps of flat brown cardboard, the makings of shipping cartons.
The top poster, a low-res copy ofIrises.A label on the back was printed in Chinese characters. One bit of translation:
Van Goe
A second stack featured a soup can.
Warhol
Tischler said, “Their spelling improved. So what, these were junk art dealers?”
Reed said, “Something like that.”
“Hate that, ruining art. I paint. Used to make a living at it in Chile. Commercial. You respect art, you don’t tacky it up.”
Milo said, “Hold that thought.” He walked through the opening on the left side of the partition.
NoClearcall for what seemed like a long time.
Guillermo Tischler said, “You okay?”
Milo reappeared. “You can go now, my friend. Thanks.”
