The Empress File

of carefully trimmed hedge. “Come on in,” he said, and I followed him through the heat up the sidewalk. He opened the front door with a key and turned on the air-conditioning as we stepped through. The walls were eggshell white, and the floors were blond hardwood. Art prints dotted the walls. I didn’t know the artists’ names, but all were competent, and some were excellent. The strongestcolor came from handmade rag rugs spotted through the rooms.
    A back bedroom had been converted to a study, with racks of books along the walls. Most of them, judged from their size and color, were histories and political texts. An IBM clone sat on a desk, with a modem and a mouse. Past the bedroom we dropped down a set of stairs into the basement.
    “This is my workroom, you know, like a studio,” he said as he pulled the strings on a half dozen overhead light bulbs. “I don’t bring many people down here.”
    “You can’t work in public,” I said. “You get shitty art from committees.”
    A kiln sat behind the stairs, next to a furnace and water heater. To one side was a workbench made of four-by-four timbers, with a rack of wood and stoneworking tools above it. Welding tanks, along with a torch and mask, were stacked next to the bench. The whole area smelled of hot metal and glass and the pleasantly sharp odor of ceramic glazes.
    At the far end of the room a long table was covered with masks. Some were stone; some were baked clay; some were wood. One was glass, apparently made out of melted Coke bottles. You could still see some of the molded-in words. A couple of the objects were in an almost naturalstate, cut out of dead trees, truncated boles and knots forming lips and eyes.…
    “Not too good, huh?”
    That was patently false modesty. It was better than good; it was exceptional. A pea green ceramic head was fixed on a copper stand made out of some kind of electrical strut. The head might have been Othello’s death mask.
    “Why this stuff?” I asked, picking up the Othello. “How’d you get started?”
    “I saw an exhibit of African masks back in Chicago, in the bad old days. The politicians were afraid the niggers were planning to burn down the city, and they were all running around looking for something to cool us out. Since we were Afro-Americans at the time, they figured we’d get pissed if they handed out sliced watermelon. So they wheeled out the African art exhibit.”
    I looked sideways at him. “Always a skeptic in the crowd.”
    He shrugged. “Wasn’t no big secret why they did it,” he said. Then he grinned. “Funny thing is, with me it worked.”
    “I get fifteen hundred to two thousand for my good pieces,” I said to him.
    “Oh, yeah?” he said uncertainly.
    “I’ll give you a choice of anything I’ve got on hand, trade you for this mask.” I tapped the pea green mask. “I’ve got a couple of things that’d look great in your living room.”
    “Bullshit,” he said.
    “You don’t want to?”
    “What are you going to do with it? The mask?”
    It was my turn to shrug. “Put it on a bookshelf. Look at it. Think about it.”
    He looked at me for a minute and finally nodded. “Deal,” he said.
    “I’ll get you in touch with a guy in Chicago. A dealer. He’s got taste. He ought to come down and look at this.”
    “So you think it’s all right?”
    “My friend, if you can’t sell this stuff, I’ll personally drive you out to Graceland and kiss your bare ass on Elvis’s front lawn.”
    I WRAPPED the mask in newspaper and made the airport with half an hour to spare. John dropped me off and left without a backward glance. While I waited for the plane, I got the tarot deck out of my carry-on bag. The Empress came up in the first spread. Future influences. I put the deck away.
    The plane was late, and then I fell asleep on the trip back. A stewardess had to roust me out of my seat in St. Paul. I caught a taxi, growled at the cabdriver, and rode in silence along the riverside road back home. The apartment echoed with emptiness; Chaminade had erased every sign of her short occupation. I made myself busy withunpacking and transferred the notes from the portable computer to my work machine. John’s mask went on a shelf in the living room, next to a museum-quality drawing by Egon Schiele. Looking at the mask made me think about buying a kiln, but I wouldn’t be any good at it.
    Feeling alone, tired, and a little sad, I peeled off my clothes and climbed into bed. After a