Bronca edges forward cautiously. But when she steps forward and swipes at the air with her hand, her hand passes through empty air. Any opening that was there has sealed itself. Exhaling, Bronca straightens and turns to the Artistes—only to find Veneza just beyond the pile of men, staring at her with wide, shocked eyes.
Bronca considers her protégé, putting her hands on her hips. “You okay?” she asks. The look on her face means that Veneza must have witnessed at least some of that whole confrontation. She’s going to have questions.
“Well, I mean, just the sight of something awful and incomprehensible isn’t going to send me off frothing at the mouth,” Veneza says. It’s nonchalant, but there is a shaken note to her voice nonetheless. “I’m from Jersey.”
Bronca coughs a laugh. “Thought I told you to run if you saw weird shit.”
“I saw these asshats.” Veneza lip-points at the Alt Artistes; that’s a Lenape thing she’s picked up from Bronca. One of the Artistes sprawls facedown, and Bronca can’t see him breathing, so she really hopes he isn’t dead. The other two are almost spooning; Fifteen, who’s still conscious (but fetal, and groaning with his hands pressed over his face), is the little spoon. It would be cute if they weren’t racist sexist homophobic dipshits. “So I came to make sure you were okay. And then I see—” She falters a little. Her gaze flicks to the wall behind Bronca. Where the da-dump lurked.
“Yeah, that would’ve been the time to leave.”
“Couldn’t think.” Veneza shakes her head and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment. Bronca tenses, but Veneza makes no move to tear her eyes out. The lexicon warns that that can happen. “Fuck, I’m gonna have nightmares for days. So that’s what’s after you? For real, I mean? Just, like, working through esses resíduos de pele? That White bitch?”
Bronca tries, she really tries, to be a role model sometimes. Occasionally. Okay, not often. “We shouldn’t use ‘bitch’ to refer to women in the pejorative—”
“I’m using it to refer to a nonhuman nonwoman. So is this whole scheme like, an extradimensional shakedown or some kind of fuckshit like that, is that what I’m seeing?” Veneza’s voice has gone more than shaky; it is seismic. She’s trembling, too, and now her hands are rubbing tears from her closed eyes. Bronca sighs and goes over to her. “Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now, because… I can’t…”
Bronca just holds her. It’s what they both need, for a while.
Then they hear feet on the stairwell, and one of the keyholders pushes open the door. It’s Yelimma, the glass sculptor with the abusive ex-husband. She’s carrying an aluminum baseball bat. Two other keyholders, both homeless twentysomethings, hunch behind her, peering out at Bronca. Yelimma takes in the sprawled Artistes and Veneza’s visible distress. Her nostrils flare. Bronca shakes her head quickly, though she’s not quite sure what Yelimma is signaling that she intends to do, or what she’s telling Yelimma not to do. She hopes it’s Do Not Use Bat, or at least Not For Now.
“Call the police,” she tells Yelimma. “I’m gonna go pull the videos from our security cameras for them.”
“Make a copy,” Veneza snaps. She’s better now, though her eyes are red and she’s still a bit twitchy. “What’s wrong with you? Make a copy and a backup copy and a hidden backup copy. NYPD gets the originals and you’ll never see them again.”
“I don’t have time for all that,” Bronca begins, and of course as soon as she says this, Veneza makes a disgusted noise and heads toward the reception desk.
“You call the police, then,” she tells Bronca. “I’ll make sure they don’t fuck up the video evidence. Yelimma, hit the Artistes if they give you lip.” Then she’s off.
Yelimma comes over, a wry look on her face. “You okay?”
Bronca, who has closed her eyes for a moment to disengage with the waiting, ready, martial spirit of her borough, lets out a long slow breath, and then nods. “Yeah.” Surprisingly, under the circumstances. But she is.
It takes the police a fucking hour to show up. It’s still the South Bronx. By then one of the Artistes—Doc—has come to, although he seems more confused and high than anything else. He sits shivering against the wall while Yelimma watches him with a taut attention born of experience. He keeps saying that he’s cold, and asking how he got there. Bronca supposes that whatever the Woman in White did to him could have affected his memory, but she also knows that the Woman in White could not have used Doc and company unless there was something sympathetic, synchronistic, within all of them. So even though Manbun might actually be comatose or catatonic instead of just unconscious, Bronca can’t muster much in the way of pity for him. She just hopes he doesn’t die in her gallery.
When the cops do finally show up, they try to talk Bronca into not pressing charges. The Artistes are nice white boys from well-connected families, it turns out, caught breaking and entering by a bunch of hippie brown women; of course the cops don’t want the smoke they’re going to get from these families’ lawyers or the press. Veneza gives them a thumb drive featuring footage of all three men crowbarring the Center’s shuttered exhibit door—the only door in the place that isn’t on the alarm system because a sensor got damaged a while back, which they knew somehow. The footage shows them sneaking in, one carrying a visible can of lighter fluid. Veneza’s also added time-stamped photos that she took of Murrow Hall, and the piled-up, marker-vandalized paintings. Bronca makes sure the cops note the smell of lighter fluid, still very detectable on the absorbent photo paper. One of the cops makes noises about how it could interfere with the investigation if Bronca shows the video footage anywhere, “like online or to the news.” Bronca smiles and says, “You and the DA handle things the way they need to be handled and we won’t have to.”
So finally they take the Artistes away in zip-cuffs, or in Manbun’s case, on an ambulance stretcher.
By this point, it’s dawn. The keyholders are all up, doing what they can to help put the Center back together. At Bronca’s request, they put up the Unknown self-portrait again, despite the damage. Takes more than a marker to destroy something that amazing. Veneza runs out for donuts and coffee, and as word spreads on social media about the break-in, other artists and patrons from around the borough start showing up. They bring brooms and tools. One guy whose uncle runs an ironworks shop shows up with the business’s truck, carrying several beautifully worked iron gates. He measures and mumbles but is eventually able to fit one that can replace the busted exhibit door shutter. It will be better than anything the Center’s budget could afford. He’s installing it for free.
When Bronca finally takes a moment to sit down in her cluttered office with the door closed, she puts her hands over her face and cries for a minute.
Then someone knocks, and she knows it’s either an emergency or one of the many strangers in the place right now, because the Center staff knows better than to bother Bronca while the office door is shut. Scrubbing the back of a fist over her eyes, she grabs a tissue for her nose and calls, muffled, “What.”