Intaglio: The Snake and the Coins Read online

  INTAGLIO: THE SNAKE AND THE COINS

  by Danika Stone

  Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer:

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights.

  *NOTE: The characters, situations and artists portrayed in Intaglio are all fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any commentary on artists, writers, or public figures, living or dead, is purely fictional and has no basis in fact.

  ©www.danikastone.com

  Published by Dancing Dog Productions / www.danikastone.com

  This book is dedicated to my two favourite DLs in the world.

  : : : : : : : : : :

  To D: for inspiring and assisting in the creation of this novel.

  To Deena: for being a ‘super golden’ friend, and the best sort of editor.

  : : : : : : : : : :

  You are BOTH the reason this happened.

  “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”

  ~ Vincent Van Gogh

  Table of Contents:

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Donatello

  Chapter 2: The Opening

  Chapter 3: The After Party

  Chapter 4: Black and White Photographs

  Chapter 5: In the Flow

  Chapter 6: Midterms

  Chapter 7: Roughing Out

  Chapter 8: Other Side of the Fence

  Chapter 9: In the Dark

  Chapter 10: The Snake and the Coins

  Chapter 11: The Crown and Sceptre

  Chapter 12: Connections

  Chapter 13: Coming to Blows

  Chapter 14: After the Storm

  Chapter 15: Fields of Gold

  Chapter 16: Unexpected Arrivals

  Chapter 17: Into the Darkness

  Chapter 18: Incentive

  Chapter 19: Last Night

  Chapter 20: First Impressions

  Chapter 21: The Lion’s Den

  Chapter 22: Safety Valve

  Chapter 23: Storm on the Horizon

  Chapter 24: Flashbacks

  Chapter 25: Declarations

  Chapter 26: Safe Harbour

  Chapter 27: Breakthrough

  Chapter 28: A Message for Albert

  Chapter 29: Theories

  Chapter 30: Breakdown

  Chapter 31: Back to the Yards

  Chapter 32: At the Station

  Chapter 33: The Next Banksy

  Chapter 34: Corporate Corruption

  Chapter 35: The Half-life of Flow

  Chapter 36: At the Gate

  Chapter 37: Echoes

  Chapter 38: New Year’s Eve

  Chapter 39: The Return of Winter

  Chapter 40: On the Step

  Chapter 41: The Fire Escape

  Chapter 42: The Morning After

  Chapter 43: Bright Light of Morning

  Chapter 1: Donatello

  Ava was only taking the art history class because she needed to complete three foundation courses before graduation. She hated listening to the droning speakers who’d never lifted a brush in their lives. Hated sitting in the dim amphitheatre and trying to keep up with someone else’s opinion of “good” art. It bothered her… the dull repetitiveness and bland indifference that had nothing to do with the elements which made her love art the way she did: the aching glory – ugliness or beauty or rage – given voice in the dark.

  No, for Ava, art was about the wash of colour on canvas tossed up in drunken fits of anger, dark and brooding words, and the power they inferred. Those gloriously lurid smears of graffiti on train cars near the apartment where she’d grown up… ‘Freeze the cans before you sneak out and you can blend them like a Renaissance fresco.’ These illegal canvases had been Ava’s first forays into artwork.

  But not today.

  No, today she sat, her foot kicked up in front of her, arms crossed, listening to some falsely cultured academic tell her why this particular sculpture of a teenage David caused such scandal. She blew a shaggy lock of blonde hair out of her eyes, breath hissing in frustration. The claims were, according to Professor Wilkins, the artist had cast this figure from life. At that, Ava snorted with laughter, breaking the silence of the room. (The effeminate sculpture of the boy in the straw hat did nothing to impress her.) The professor glared at her, then continued talking, and the class moved on.

  An hour later, she was walking away from the class when another student jogged up beside her. He was tall and dark-haired, with the muscled body of a welter-weight boxer. Most striking were his eyes: the pale grey irises, almost silver, ringed with navy. She remembered him from her art history class. ‘Shit disturber,’ was the term that came to her mind. He was always arguing, giving Wilkins questions he couldn’t answer. ‘But how is the Renaissance patron system any less repressive than the current government-supported art centers?’ Ava liked that about him, though the rest of him worried her for some reason. He was intense, for one, writing his notes in a tight, narrow script. (Ava never wrote anything at all, ignoring the prof and blustering her way through the exams.) He was a sculptor for another, and she didn’t quite “get” the methodical need to work through a piece of stone.

  She was all about the present. Paint and blood and lust. The now.

  “I agree with you about Donatello,” he said without preamble. Again the word popped to mind: ‘intense’.

  “Yeah?” Ava answered without slowing her steps. She ran a hand through messy hair, eyeing him suspiciously. “How’s that?”

  “It’s overdone,” he muttered, “too finished… pretty almost. Can’t fucking stand it.”

  Laughter – loud and unexpected – bubbled from her chest.

  “And how do you really feel about it?”

  He laughed with her, and then stopped walking, and for some reason she did too, an echo of his movement. They were the only people stopped in the busy hallway, the rest of the world moving on around them. For a second, there was an awkward silence.

  “Cole Thomas,” he said abruptly, offering his open palm. He had strong hands – sculptor’s hands – the knuckles scuffed, skin dry like the stone he worked.

  She smirked, wondering what this intense young man who shared her dislike of Donatello would think of illegally spray-painting train cars by night. Part of her wanted to test her theory.

  “I’m Ava Brooks...” she answered.

  : : : : : : : : : :

  She didn’t talk to him for the next few days. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to – Ava was curious about this sculptor with the body of a Renaissance statue – but the next day she made a rude comment about the blatantly male physiques of Michelangelo’s women and the grey-haired prof called her on it. Wilkins told her to stay behind. After all the students were gone, he lectured her on attitude and classical interpretations, shaking his fleshy fingers in her face and wheezing. Ava scowled, her mind offering different answers to the same questions. Hoop jumping and misogyny. It angered her that she had to be in this class. But she’d been warned by the Registrar’s Office already, the three foundation courses were a requirement, and no amount of complaining would change it.

  So she bit her tongue and stewed, letting Wilkins’ rage blow itself out like a Spring storm.

  The hallway was empty when she walked out twenty minutes later, a
nd that irritated her… and then she was annoyed at herself for wondering about the young man’s absence. She took the back stairs out to the fire exit to the alley, smirking as she passed a series of tags newly spray-painted along the cement walls. ‘You’re a fucking anarchist, Morag...’ she thought, recognizing the handiwork. She straightened her backpack, kicking open the metal door, heading out into the Autumn wind. Eyes watering, she pulled her hands up inside her sleeves, tucking her chin down against the cold.

  Ava skipped class Friday, because that’s what she did. Friday night she went out to a hole-in-the-wall nightclub and listened to some friends jam until the wee hours of the morning. The buses were no longer running when the session finally broke up and she was drunk, effectively trapping her downtown. With no money for a cab, and too tired to walk home, her foul mood was abruptly back. Shivering, she headed over to the studio space she rented with Marcus and Suzanne and a few other starving artists.

  The studio wasn’t meant for overnight use, and the super set the thermostat low. Ava curled into a small ball on the couch, pulling her paint jacket overtop her leather one and a drop-cloth onto her legs before letting exhaustion pull her into restless slumber. In the last, half-conscious moment between sleep and wakefulness she flashed first to the sculptor’s oddly-coloured eyes, remembering his last name: Thomas. It seemed like she should recognize it for some reason.

  Then she was suddenly gone – vision awash with colours and shapes of endless beauty. Mind able to materialize all the things she wanted to paint, but was never adequately able to express in the world of conscious thought.

  She dreamed...

  : : : : : : : : : :

  Saturday morning, Ava awoke buzzing with inspiration that had her skipping breakfast. She had been painting for an hour before she heard the first scrape of the key in the lock downstairs. It was Marcus – the long strands of his sandy blond hair hidden under his knit cap – coming up the back stairs, stinking of pot. ‘God, it’s ten in the morning,’ Ava thought in chagrin, but she forgave him as soon as he reached the top of the stairs. He brought day-old muffins from the bakery down the street and paper cups full of strong coffee which the two of them shared. They stared at the wet shapes smeared onto the canvas, blue, green and gold swirling together like the first hint of Spring. There was the beginning of a shape – a rippling swirl of blue – arcing upward across the canvas. A scattering of yellow splotches along one side.

  “Wow, Ava… this is just amazing.”

  He said it with the same reverence he did when talking about Che Guevara or Camilo Torres. Hearing the compliment, Ava felt a blush rise up her neck. She bumped his shoulder, slopping coffee over the edge of her cup and scalding her fingers.

  “Thanks, Chim,” she muttered, embarrassed by the praise. “It’s nothing, really… just a dream I had last night.”

  Marcus Baldwin – nicknamed “Chimney” in high school for his drug use, shortened to “Chim” in the intervening years – was a painter too. Ava had known him since ninth grade, when they’d become inseparable. He was almost a brother to her, more than a best friend. His images were multilayered and meticulously rendered over weeks and months, full of icons from the revolutionary past. Ava felt her own abstract images were trivial in comparison. She shifted from foot to foot as Chim stepped closer to the canvas, his eyes following the lines like an art dealer, measuring value.

  “No really,” Marcus said, voice awed. “You’ve gotta show this one. It’s awesome, Ava… just… breathtaking.”

  After he left, she painted for hours, losing track of time. Suzanne, Chim’s latest girlfriend, popped by, nodding as she watched Ava work. Eventually she pressed a sandwich and bottle of water into Ava’s hands, then wandered back to her own studio space. There was an art opening at the main gallery downtown later that night, and though she was still in the middle of painting – the strokes coming almost faster than she could relay them – Ava decided to break flow to attend. She walked back to the pub in the frosty, late-afternoon air, picking up her rusting truck from the lot and heading back to her apartment.

  The painter was a street artist who had made it big. He inspired her, the way he could twist the obscene elements of anger and disenfranchisement into beauty. She smirked as she thought of how art world aficionados were fawning over some street punk who’d spent six months in jail for spray-painting the front facade of the main courthouse with anti-war propaganda. Kip Chambers: a millionaire artist whose grinning face had graced the cover of hundreds of magazines.

  Someone, more importantly, who had made it to the top in the game she wanted to play.

  Ava paused in front of the mirror in the bathroom as she got ready. Like her paintings, the image that greeted her was full of potential but left her frustrated by its lack. She glowered. Her hair hung limply around her shoulders, unruly locks in her eyes. She tried to train it into submission with a comb and flat iron. Failing, she forced it off her forehead with a short burst of hairspray, opting for a narrow line of curving black eyeliner on her top lid and smoky grey shadow.

  Leaning back, she smirked. Done this way, her eyes seemed wider and bluer than usual. A smear of tinted gloss accentuated lips she had always thought of as obscenely full. Makeup complete, she put on a silky black top and dark jeans, wiggling to loosen the close-cut denim. Her faded leather jacket topped it off. Ava liked the edge of dangerousness to her beauty. Seeing the effect, elfin androgyny traded for powerful sexuality, she smiled at herself in the mirror.

  She had every intention of being noticed tonight.

  Chapter 2: The Opening

  Cole walked to the gallery with a crumpled fifty in his pocket. He had the collar of his black wool coat turned up against the wind, his nose tucked into his grey scarf. He could have taken his motorcycle, but that would have meant leaving his bike downtown overnight. Given the poor rep of the city’s inner core after nightfall, he’d rather not. Besides, it looked like it might snow. He'd decided to take a taxi back, allowing himself to drink if he wanted. He’d been out of sorts lately… or not ‘lately’ per se, but ever since speaking to her. The young woman from his Art Foundations class: Ava Brooks.

  He wanted to talk to her again.

  Cole had noticed her the first day of class – along with every other male (and several women) in the room – though she seemed to have discovered he existed only three days ago. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and a curvaceous frame wrapped in paint-flecked jeans and a requisite artist’s leather jacket. He’d remembered her name – Ava Brooks – from the very first time he’d heard it called out by Wilkins.

  The time she’d wearily answered: “here in body if not spirit.”

  At first, Cole thought she was one of the irritating grade-seekers whose interest in art was limited to regurgitating the “right answers.” Those students who wanted a cushy job at an art gallery or promoting the government-sponsored art system. Not really artists themselves. He’d assumed as much because she sat dead-centre in the classroom while he sat at the back. But as day after day passed by and she never took notes, he’d come to realize the reason for this.

  Sitting perfectly centred meant that she was directly beneath the projector’s blinding beam of light. The prof at the front couldn’t see her there without staring directly into it. Even with that position, she couldn’t seem to help herself from heckling Wilkins. Ava Brooks liked pushing people’s buttons and Cole wanted to know why she’d never gone after him yet. He certainly argued enough with Wilkins to be a target.

  He’d waited for her after class the day she’d questioned Wilkins about Donatello’s David. It had intrigued him that she had voiced exactly his reaction from moments earlier, especially given that she was a painter, not a sculptor. He’d talked to her in the hallway, noticing her wary eyes. There’d been a reckless bravery to her that had astounded him. She’d joked with him, grinning up at him with such unabashed joy he’d had to fight the sudden urge to touch her face. Instead, he’d done the right thing �
�� the smart thing – and introduced himself (though he’d already known her name), offering his hand instead.

  When their palms had touched, he’d felt a hard punch of energy pulse up to his shoulder. It was the same feeling he got when his muse was hot and he put chisel to stone, ready to release the form within. It was that first snap of connection as he slammed the mallet down and the chisel reverberated against his hand as if all that potential was transferring up and out in a moment. Released. She had let go first, tucking her hand inside her sleeve before walking away.

  “See you around,” she’d called over her shoulder to him.

  He’d watched until she disappeared, unable to explain why a handshake had rooted him to the spot.

  Cole knew that Ava Brooks didn’t use her university-assigned studio space like he did, so he had no excuse to go talk to her when everyone was working on their mid-term pieces for the upcoming student show. He’d heard that she shared rooms in a cooperative space downtown. So he had waited for the next day's class, his nervous energy willed into the growing dent he was making in a large block of sandstone. He had worked until midnight, his arms aching and heavy by the time he’d crawled onto his bike, kicking hard to start it for home.

  That night, he had dreamed of her.

  She had been a few minutes late to class the next day. He’d taken a seat near the middle this time, but for whatever reason – likely Wilkins’ comments about tardiness – she’d sat several rows behind him. He’d heard the repetitive tap of her foot against the back of a chair; annoyance given root in action. Near the end of class she’d made a snarling comment about the male physiques of Michelangelo’s females and Cole had added it to his tally of things he liked about Ava Brooks.

  Wilkins hadn’t shared Cole’s opinion. He’d called her out and made her stay behind. Cole had waited at the front entrance to the building, hoping to see her again. The cold air had seeped into his limbs until he was numb. She’d never come out.