At the courtyard's far end she saw what looked like a builder's yard, a big, open building with a sheet-metal roof, partial walls and wooden shelves piled with lumber and metal bar stock. On the right side of the courtyard stood a single-story structure with several doors that might lead into apartments.
As she entered the courtyard heat washed over her from the right. She looked to see a man standing by the wall, turning the crank on a sort of metal meshwork drum half-filled with green chili pods, rotating them above a set of blue propane-burner flames. That was the source of the marvelous smell.
If the sounds coming out the open door were any indication, the main action was in the building next to the gallery on her left, a two-story structure that had apparently started life as a warehouse. Though the gallery's front door stood open, she wandered past to enter the warehouse.
Inside was a blare of noise. Loud, cheerful conversation competed with riotous ska brass and the piercing whine of a cutoff saw biting metal. A sort of greeter's booth stood right beside the door to her right, covered with pamphlets about the exhibitors and Chiaroscuro itself. In a room behind it Annja saw a curious apparatus like an outsized hood for a kitchen stove above a large square table at which men and women in goggles sat doing dangerous-looking things to metal.
"Hi, I'm Randy," shouted the guy standing by the table. "Welcome to Chiaroscuro Guerrilla Arts Collective."
"I'm Annja," she replied, likewise shouting to make herself heard. "I thought it was the Guerrilla Art Compound."
"That's the place. The collective is us. Can I help you make yourself at home?"
He looked like a Kiowa – tall, burly, well bellied, with olive skin and a ponytail of heavy, glossy black hair.
She gestured past him at the big copper hood arrangement. "What's that thing?"
"Negative-air-pressure hood," he said. "Draws up nasty fumes and all kinds of other stuff we don't want getting loose. We do a lot of metalwork here. I draw and paint, myself." He handed her a business card, printed with a pen-and-ink drawing of some kind of Goth goblin girl with pointed ears and a definite attitude.
She laughed. She liked him. She liked the place, and the energy of the people. "This is very good. Do you have some work on display here?"
He nodded at the door behind her that led into the display room she had first seen from outside. "In there. But look all over the place. We have a lot of talent here."
He gestured deeper into the building. Past the partition at the other side of the metal shop lay a much bigger room. The music came from there, as did most of the other party noise. Though the band was hidden from view, Annja saw paintings and drawings hung on the walls.
"Thanks," she said. "I will. Where would I find Byron Mondragón's work?"
"Through that door right behind you, then through another door on the right. It's great stuff. He's a great guy, a good friend of mine. Although I hate him."
His big smile belied the latter. Annja could not refrain from asking, "Why?"
"He's too damned young to be so good!"
"Is he here? I'd like to meet him."
"So would everybody else. But because you're you, I'll see what I can do," he said with a wink.
Although Annja felt drawn into the back room and Mondragón's Holy Child paintings as if by a magnet, she resisted. Exercising her willpower was all to the good, she told herself. And if that's just token rebellion against my destiny, she thought defiantly, then good for me. I didn't ask for the sword. I just wanted to do archaeology.
Telling herself to simmer down, she took in the art on display. She looked at paintings, drawings, small sculptures of wire or stone. She was surprised by how good most of it was. Randy's artwork mostly followed the lines of his business card, pen-and-ink cheesecake. But it was cheesecake with an edge. The scantily clad females, some with pointed ears and little wings whom she presumed were punk fairies, displayed not just sexiness but a definite insouciance. As if they'd as soon kick your ass as look at you – and could. It wasn't exactly to Annja's taste. But it definitely made her smile.
She moved on. She had visited many of the great art museums in Europe and New York City. While she didn't doubt the cognoscenti would want to subject her to her famous predecessor's fate for daring to believe so, she thought to see much of the same inspiration here in this desert backwater. If that wasn't an oxymoron. She'd never claim to be an expert of fine art. But she was endlessly fascinated with the human drive to express vision with skill – whether in the caves of Lascaux, the studios of Renaissance Florence or here.
I don't know if it's art, she thought, amused at herself, but I like what it stands for.
She found herself staring intently at a huge photograph on the back wall. It was very strange. It looked for all the world like a winter snowscape, with snow dusted or clumped on bare tree limbs, drifted on the ground around dry grass bunches. Except it wasn't white. It was orange – and glowing.
It was, in fact, fire. Embers, actually, although if she looked closely she could see little blue ghost wisps of flame dancing above the brighter concentrations. It gave her goose bumps.
"I know the feeling," a voice said from behind her right shoulder. "It kind of creeps me out, too. Makes me think of a winter wonderland in Hell."
She jumped, turned. A young man stood there. He was just taller than her, wispy, with almost blue-pale skin that made the blackness of his eyes and wavy, slightly wild hair especially intense. He was dressed in black pants and white shirt, as if he'd just shucked suit coat and tie.
But for an obvious but indefinable Latino cast to his features, he might have stepped from a Beardsley drawing. Annja thought he was beautiful.
"I'm sorry," he said, smiling. "I didn't mean to startle you. I'm Byron Mondragón. My friend Randy said you were looking for me."
"Yes," she said, returning his smile with interest. "I'm so pleased to meet you. I'm Annja Creed."
"It's my pleasure, Ms. Creed," he said. "Have you seen my work?"
"I haven't yet had the pleasure."
He gestured toward the next room. "Would you like to?"
It was what she had come for, of course. She preceded him through the door. The ska band had finished their set and were filing past the door to the main room in their Goodwill sports coats and little hats, carrying their instrument cases.
The Alibipiece had characterized Mondragón as something of a child prodigy. He was certainly kicking up a sensation. Annja was dubious herself. The pieces pictured in the article struck her as tacky, just a step up from black-velvet paintings. She felt trepidation. She'd liked the young sensation on sight, with his pleasant, ever so slightly diffident manner. He was a far cry from the social-lion artists she was familiar with from the East Coast.
There were a half dozen of his paintings displayed, propped in a darkened corner of the room with a tracked spotlight overhead focused on each. Her first look at them in person was a disappointment. They're amateurish, she thought, and wondered if he might be no more than a beneficiary of the global attention drawn to the Santo Niño flap. Did he just win the lottery on this?
She glanced at him sidelong. He hung back. Though he maintained calm well enough, she could tell he was on tenterhooks. She opened her mouth to lie...