Portraits of a Man

That afternoon.

A fresh canvas, a fresh face.

Sofia looks nervous as she holds the brush in her hand, pondering the palette of colors before her. With the rays of sunlight striking her face, shining through the translucent fabric of her light white dress and gold beams sparkling off the gold of her hair, she almost looks like a fae queen lost in the Najbreit garden.

To speak and make my presence known somehow feels intrusive, and so I stand off to the side, watching her in silence, admiring her figure and beauty. Yet, she somehow senses my presence, and she turns to look at me, a quiet smile crossing her face.

“I was wondering when you might show up,” she says, her voice breathy. “I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do on my own.”

“Don’t know where to start?” I ask, glancing at the blank canvas.

“I’ve never painted before,” she says. “I was hoping you could show me.”

“You’ve never painted before,” I repeat, grasping her hand with the paintbrush, gently correcting her grip. “And yet, you seemed sure that you wanted art lessons from me.”

“There were other reasons,” she says, glancing off at the neatly trimmed bushes on the side. “Things relating to… the conversation we had in Palo Alto.”

“Time together, time alone,” I say quietly. “To talk about serious things.”

She dips her head a fraction, and then looks back up into my eyes. “But I’d like to learn a thing or too about art, too.”

“I wager we can do both,” I smile. “But it’s best if we could have these conversations elsewhere. I don’t know if I trust…”

She shushes me a deft finger to her lips, indicating that she’s fully on board with me. Father may have hidden microphones anywhere, and even what we’ve talked about today might have been a step too far. There’s a pause as we look at each other, trying to communicate those thoughts that we should not put into words.

“Painting technique,” I say, clearing my throat, conscious of my hand still wrapped around her’s.

“Painting technique,” she agrees.

“Let’s start with the various kinds of brushstrokes,” I say. “An angry jab and a delicately placed dab of paint might both leave a mark on the canvas, but their final effect…” I demonstrate with our mutually held paintbrush. “… could not be more different.”

“It is only through practice and a discerning eye that you’ll be able to tell what technique to apply in particular circumstances,” I carry on. “One exercise that I found most constructive in my training was to paint the same scene twice, each with the intent to express a different feeling. You pass the exercise if an outside observer is able to tell what those two different feelings are, without either of them having been told to them before.”

“That sounds like a good challenge,” she says. “Should I get started?”

“Whoa,” I laugh, putting a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure you’re ready to dive right in? I was just floating the idea as something to try, once you’ve mastered the fundamentals…”

“I’d like to try,” she says firmly.

“We can call this a diagnostic test,” I say. “A way to judge your capabilities, before any training.”

“Great!” she laughs, and then she holds up the paint palette, beginning to mix a variety of colors.

She takes a moment to glance at me, her eyes furrowed in a cute manner, and then she turns back to the canvas, beginning to paint an ovular outline.

“I’d… actually prefer if you weren’t watching me paint,” she says.

“How am I supposed to teach you then?” I ask, slightly amused by her comment.

“Just this time,” she says. “I’d like it to be a surprise.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll come back here in two hours and find you. How does that sound?”

She nods, hardly glancing at me, fully focused on whatever is going in that head of hers. I chuckle to myself and amble away, wondering what she might have planned.

Down in the Bunker, Vidocq looks up in faint surprise as I enter into the main conference room.

“Having fun?” I ask, nodding at the big pair of tits on full display on the projector.

“Doing work,” he glares at me. “Not my fault that Erin decided to send Ricardo a whole bunch of nudes.”

“And that requires examining those pictures in great detail, huh?” I chuckle.

“There’s something suspicious!” he says, sounding offended that I would accuse him of perving on my half-sister.

I’m well aware of the hypocrisy of that, having actually fucked her.

“What’s that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes as I look at that pair of tits. “They look quite regular to me. Well, not regular… perhaps impressive would be the better word… but suspicious? That’s ridiculous.”

“There’s a handful of pixels that don’t look right,” Vidocq says, squinting at the screen. “Random pixels whose color don’t fit in with their surroundings. They’re hard to see unless you’re looking out for them, but that screams suspicious to me.”

As it was meant to. Looks like they’re finally picking up on the deeper message that might be encoded in the photographs. But it’s one thing to notice that there’s a message there, and quite another to decode it.

“Show me,” I say, taking a seat by the table.

“Shouldn’t you be attending to your… other art lesson?” Vidocq asks.

I shouldn’t be surprised that he knows. Word gets around fast in this household, and I guess Salome must have already told the big-shots of what transpired this morning.

“Sofia's working on a few paintings, she wanted some space,” I say. “So I figured I’d come here to check in on how things are going.”

“You got a letter,” Vidocq says, choosing to ignore what I just said.

He hands it to me. It’s clear that the seal has been broken, its contents read already.

“You’re intercepting my letters,” I say flatly, opening it up and unfolding the paper contained within.

“You already knew that,” Vidocq shrugs.

Congratulations, I read. You have been selected as a deputy campaign manager of Senator Najbreit’s re-election campaign. Please report to the campaign headquarters on August 1st, 2020…

“How did this happen?” Vidocq asks me, narrowing his eyes.

“You already know that,” I say, echoing his words.

“I do,” he concedes with a sigh. “But my question is why?”

I give him a mysterious smile.

“When do I get help on the case that I’ve been working on?” I ask.

Vidocq stares at me blankly for a second, before it seems to click for him.

“The pedophiles,” he says.

“The pedophiles,” I agree. “I bet you they aren’t sitting on your ass while we dawdle on… Erin’s tits.”

I wave at Genevieve’s tits on the screen, knowing that it would be much too suspicious if I could identify them as such.

“Not Erin’s,” Vidocq mutters, shooting me an annoyed look. “And come back tomorrow evening. We’ll have something prepared for you then.”

“Care to elaborate?” I ask. “I thought I was calling the shots on this project.”

“No,” Vidocq says. “Orders from above. Now, let’s make sure you continue to do your part, and let’s take a closer look at this pictures again.”

He zooms in on the image of Genevieve’s tits, and begins walking me through the oddities that he and his team had picked up on over the last few days.

I step back into the garden, head filled with the asinine theories that Vidocq and his team have concocted about the nudes. At least I got to stare at some hot bodies for the better part of two hours. Sofia, spying me coming down the garden path, gives me a cheery wave.

“What have you come up with?” I ask her, smiling back at her.

“See for yourself,” she says, and I step around the artist’s easel to view the two paintings she’s completed there.

She looks shy about what she’s done, and I brace myself to give some nice and affirming comments, when I actually get a look at what she’s done.

I’m floored. They’re portraits of me in the suit I wore to the first family dinner, and they’re… really fucking good. Good enough that it’s immediately clear that she’s had training, good enough that I know that I’ve got nothing to teach her. Good enough that, if I tried to teach her, she’d see through my ruse in no time at all.

“Can you guess the feeling that they’re meant to convey?” she asks me, a smile twinkling in her eye.

I look at the first, the sharp lines of my face, the dramatic lighting, the rise in my collar, the cocky half-smile.

“Suave,” I say, and I see from the delight on her face that I’m on the money.

“I had ‘Charming’ in mind, but that’s the same thing,” she says. “And for the other?”

The tricky thing about this second portrait is that it, in many ways, is similar to the first. But there’s a difference here, a subtle thing—a smoulder in my eyes, the interest in my lips, a smokier tone, all of which leads me to think…

“Seductive.”

“And it worked,” she whispers into my ear, squeezing my arm.

I stare at the two portraits, captivated by those images. Is this how people see me through the lens of the AMA?