Varnish

The thing nobody tells you about working nights in a museum is how loud the paintings get once the people leave.Luca Bellandi has walked the dark galleries of the Aldridge Museum for eight years. Thirty-nine, ex-Army, six foot three and built like the freight elevator, with warm olive skin, thick black hair swept back and a short, full black beard, he is the man who checks the badges, arms the doors and walks the late staff to their cars. He is very good at not looking at things he can't have.Two of those things are married to each other.Celeste Adebayo runs the Long Gallery and everyone in it. Long black braids, gold hoops, wine-red lips and a gold satin gown poured over the kind of curves that make board members forget their own names. Margot Lindgren is the quiet one, the conservator with the sharp platinum bob who spent fourteen months bent over a five-hundred-year-old Venus, lifting away a century of yellow varnish one tiny swab at a time. Tonight she is wearing black velvet cut in a plunging V, and nobody was ready for it.The gala is over. The last donor has gone. And when Luca finds the doors left open and the two women barefoot on a velvet bench under the moonlit skylight, sharing a bottle of champagne with a goddess, they make him an offer, very calmly, and give him every chance to say no.He has a list of rules for the building. They have a list of their own. Nothing within ten feet of a painting. Nobody gets left out. Anyone can say stop.And the cameras in the Long Gallery don't go live until Monday.