“Now,” says Angie. “What exactly is going on?”
I lean in. “All I’ve been able to discover is that Isaak has been on Interpol’s list for decades, and they must have finally found some evidence that linked him to a particular crime.”
“Forgery?” Miriam asks archly, because she’s the only one who knows the truth. She was burned once by a glorious forgery he’d painted of a Morisot, but it was only because she had a degree in fine arts before she started flight school that she figured it out. It wasn’t that the painting lacked authenticity, but she spotted an error in the story of how the painting was found. “Or theft?”
“Theft. They found a Pissarro in his apartment.”
Isaak’s gift was for producing paintings that were exactly what an artist might have painted, and he made a brilliant living out of painting “lost masterpieces,” such as the Morisot.
I rub my temple. Will the penalties for actual theft be higher than for the forgeries? He was—perhaps still is—one of the best forgers who ever lived. His downfall is that he was in love with original art, as well, and in a handful of cases, he couldn’t let the originals go. Because nearly everything he copied or sold on the black market was art previously stolen by the Nazis, he felt it justified his choices.
And perhaps, in a way, it did. His mother, like mine, spent the war at the mercy of the Nazis—mine in France, his in Poland—and worse.
“Was he living in Rome?”
“Florence.”
“The city of art,” Fran sighs. “Of course that’s where he’d be.”
I exchange a glance with Miriam. Fran suffered a painful, long-term crush on Isaak, something she tried and failed to hide.
“Have you heard from him?” Angie asks.
“Not in years.”
“I always thought you’d end up with him,” she says, taking a sip of her wine.
“So did I,” Dani says and touches her throat. “When the two of you walked into a room together, you could feel the fire thirty feet away.”
I smile, touch her arm. “To be young again.”
“That’s not youth,” Miriam scoffs. “That was chemistry.”
I’m unexpectedly filled with the sense of him, all around me, his voice rumbling into my ear, his hands and smile, the smell of him—tobacco and spice and man. It was chemistry, certainly.
But I think, too, of our long walks on a beach or in a market, talking and talking, about ideas and books we’d read and history and time and everything. I’d never known anyone in my life who thought so much the same as I did. “It was more than chemistry,” I say quietly.
“It was a long time ago,” Angie says. “The point is, What are we going to do now?”
I can’t help looking over my shoulder, but there’s almost no one else in the restaurant. “I haven’t had time to do any research, but I’m probably going to need a really good lawyer.” I direct this to Dani, whose husband will know exactly whom I should call.
She nods.
“I’m not really sure what’s going to happen, but if I have to leave New York, I called Willow to stay at the apartment.”
“That’s good,” Miriam says. She butters a slice of bread meditatively. “We all should . . .” She pauses, chooses her words carefully. “Find new homes for old pets.”
“What do you mean?” Fran asks plaintively.
“Never mind, dear,” Dani says, patting her hand. “I’ll tell you later.”
Miriam means that everyone needs to get rid of the paintings on their walls. Some of which they might believe are the real McCoy.
It’s complicated. “None of you need worry,” I say, and it’s true. All they’ve done is buy copies of supposed masterworks. I’m the one who trafficked in stolen art. And more. “You don’t. For reasons I’d rather not get into.”
Miriam knows the truth, that none of the paintings they own are originals. Shame burns in my cheeks—what seemed harmless back then now seems a really wretched betrayal, and I know they’ll feel the same way.
At least for a little while. Surely they’ll forgive me when they realize they won’t be sent to jail.
The other three look at me with varying degrees of skepticism. I raise a hand, meant to be calming. “I’ve got this. I promise.”
“Okay, now can we talk about something else?” Fran says.
“Oh,” I say, “how about this? Sam waltzed in today and just announced that she wants to sell the apartment.”
They’re all properly aghast, and we spend an hour on children and grandchildren and nieces and dogs, as we always do.
I listen to their voices with a sense of bittersweet longing, a ghost of the hungers that are waiting for me. If I have to flee, I will miss them desperately.
Please, I offer up to whatever gods might be listening. Let me stay.
Chapter Nine
Sam
Jared Maloney’s assistant sent me the time and location of our dinner meeting. I’m not familiar with the place, and it’s a hidden spot with just a name on the door, nothing to indicate what it is. Inside, it smells of leather and grilling steak with an undernote of bourbon. As if that weren’t enough branding, the chairs are heavy and gigantic, and the colors are all muted browns and greens, like an old-school steak house. It is, not ironically, a steak house. Meat, meat, meat. As the host shows me through the room, I pass knots of men in deep conversation, all of it presumably very important.
I only see two other women in the room as I’m seated in the oversize chair, which is not oversize for me because I’m tall enough to handle the space. My sister would look like a tiny doll, Alice lost among the giants. Jared has not yet arrived, and I order a sparkling water with lime in a highball glass, trying to compose myself.
He saunters into the room, stopping here and there to shake hands, clap a fellow on the shoulder, making a show of how important he is. I wish I’d been late to miss it, but he was probably waiting in the wings somewhere for me to arrive, so he would have made this show no matter when I got here.
Or maybe that’s cynical.
I don’t stand when he comes to the table. “Sorry, love,” he says, as if he’s British. “Traffic.” He bends in to kiss my cheek, and I endure it. He slides into his chair. “Thanks for meeting me.”
I nod.
The rest is up to him. All of it.
“So how are you, Sam?”
“Fine,” I say. “You?”
“Good. We’ve had our best year ever, thanks to Mirror Land.”
“It’s a great game,” I say without rancor, and I mean it. “Hannah Canter’s work, wasn’t it?”
“Her brainchild, for sure.” His blue eyes sharpen. “Bet you wished you’d grabbed her when you had the chance.”
I shrug. “She’s an excellent game designer, but our styles would have clashed.” She’s a genius programmer, but she has a mild demeanor I would have run right over and, as often happens with the milder-mannered women, a taste for extreme violence, which is not part of my games. I sip my soda, carefully, as if it’s strong, set it back down.
“Ah, the woman conundrum. Two women is one too many, am I right?”
“Not at all,” I return, hiding my exasperation. “Hannah and I just see games differently.”
He shrugs, leaning back to allow the waiter to place a brown drink in front of him. “Fair enough.”
A silence falls between us, and I struggle to come up with a new thread, but he beats me to it, leaning forward on one arm to say, “I’m sorry about Purple.”
The game that flopped six months ago. I thought we’d managed to bring out something completely fresh and original, and instead it just fell flat. Players found it slow. “Win some, lose some.”
“But you haven’t had a win in a long time, have you?”
Damn. I’m not even going to get a meal out of this, am I? “Why don’t you just get down to business, Jared?”
“Let’s slow down, have a drink, a good dinner.”
I rub a spot ove
r my eye that’s starting to ache. I’d rather not prolong the misery, and I’ve never understood why you need a whole dinner to talk about business anyway. Again, I miss Asher, his smooth manners and calm ways. He was the one who managed the social side of things.
But I’m the only one who can save Boudicca now, and I take a breath, channel my aunt Gloria, who could make friends with a snake.
Ha, snake, I think, smiling to myself—and an image flashes over my mind of a pink snake in a business suit. For a moment, I let it float there as I stare sightlessly at the menu in my hands.
I flash on the steely way she looked at me before she left, her laser beam eyes looking right through me, as always. I hear myself spit out, It’s not yours! A coil of shame winds up my throat.
Then I’m back, here, with Jared. “I’d love to split an appetizer, if you’re up for it.”
“Sure. Nothing too carb heavy, if you don’t mind.”
I read the entries, and it’s an actual old-school steak house, with olives and stuffed celery and marinated herring in the offering. “So vintage!”
“Right?” He grins. “I love it. I grew up in Kansas, and you can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. This was the height of fancy for our town.”
I raise my head, and I can see through to the kid he must have been—bespectacled, like Asher, a misfit with his brain, not great with girls, his bedroom papered with posters of Billie Thorne. At least Asher was born in New York, a world where misfits come in a variety of forms. “Did you always know you’d come to the city?”
“Yeah, way back. I didn’t really know it would be games, but life takes you all kinds of places, right?” He pauses. “Would you be up to giving the steak tartare a try?”
“Why not? And some olives, please.”
We order the appetizers and entrees, and when the waiter departs, I feel myself struggling to make small talk, then remember his favorite subject. “My mother would have loved the food in this place.”
He brightens as if a spotlight shines from his eyes. “What would she have ordered?”
“I don’t know that much, really, but the redder the meat, the better.” A memory surfaces of the three of us, my mom and Willow and me, along with Gloria, somewhere in Manhattan. Willow and I drank Shirley Temples, while the adults drank gin and tonics. “She loved steak Diane.”
He leans closer. “What else?”
I think back, back, back. I spent so much time angry with her that it’s hard to remember things like that. “Milkshakes. Peaches. Doughnuts.” I think of us at a bakery on the Lower East Side somewhere, gritty back then, and a white bag full of fresh doughnuts, glazed and chocolate frosted, and even apple fritters. I smile. “She really loved doughnuts.”
“Yeah? That’s cool.” He shifts his napkin on his lap, and I can feel the energy it takes for him to rein in his curiosity. “How’d you like the party?”
For a few more minutes, we make small talk. The waiter brings the appetizers, and I suddenly realize steak tartar is going to be right in the middle of my texture revulsions. Hummus, oatmeal, all those mushy but slightly grainy things. I’ll pretend to eat it. Pretending has carried me a long way.
What would Asher do? I think of his genial expression, his calm way, but it doesn’t help ease the nervous anticipation tangling in my gut. “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, Jared?”
“All right.” He is remarkably quiet as an eater, and I relax a little bit. “I’ve been watching Boudicca for a couple of years, and I don’t mean to be a bastard, but it’s clearly in trouble. You’ve struggled since before Asher left, but it’s been more obvious since the breach.”
I choose an olive from the plate. “Common knowledge.”
“What happened to you two? I expected you to be married by now, with a couple of cute kids wearing glasses.”
“The relationship was always platonic.” At least until it wasn’t.
He cocks his head. “Was it, though?”
“We’ve been friends since third grade,” I say. “I was practically engaged to someone else for over a year.”
“Sorry.” He studies me for a long minute. “I got it wrong, I guess.”
Irritation buzzes along my neck, spreads around my forehead. “What do you want, Jared?” I know I’m desperate, but he doesn’t. Bravado has carried the day more than once, and I hope it will again. “I am not going to let you absorb Boudicca, and you must know that, so what do you propose?”
“Fair enough.” He dabs his napkin over his fingers. “I’d like to be a silent partner. Bring in some cash, get the company over the hump. You’d maintain control, but I would get a voice on the creative side.”
I want to reject it instantly—even the thought of him messing with my ideas makes me feel homicidal, and our tastes are not at all the same. But I don’t have that luxury any longer. “How much of a silent partner? And how much of a voice?”
His shoulders are still entirely relaxed when he says, “I want fifty percent and final veto on any major project.”
I roll my eyes. “You know I won’t take that.”
“I knew you’d say that,” he says, pointing a finger at me. “But have you thought about why? What would you really be losing?”
“My company!”
“But you wouldn’t. It’s still yours. You still develop the games you want to write, but the cash will mean you can bring more people in to get the coding done.”
“Why the veto?”
“You’ve made some errors in judgment,” he says unflinchingly. “Purple should never have gone to market the way it was. It needed more time and more depth.”
He’s not wrong. I was anxious to get it out, to get some better cash flow going, and overlooked some red flags. It was humiliating and frustrating. I knew better, and now I’m paying the price. My headache beats a tempo over my left eye, but I don’t say anything.
“I’ll send a formal offer via email,” he adds, “but I’m guessing you will need quite a substantial sum to carry you into a new era.” He names a number that is far above what I would have expected.
It’s daunting. It’s depressing.
It is possible he is quite correct.
And yet. How can I give up the one thing that belongs completely to me? Give up without a fight? “That’s a very generous offer, Jared, but I just—”
“Take some time,” he says. “Think it over. Talk to Asher and see what he advises.”
As if I could just pick up the phone and call him, no big deal. “I’ll think about it,” I say, but something in me howls in protest.
There has to be another answer.
Chapter Ten
Gloria
After lunch with my friends, I stop by my local church to bring some day-old bread I picked up for the soup kitchen and meet with a friend I have there who can maybe help me get a passport in a new name. I walk home, aching with the possibility that I might really have to flee my life here. I might lose this very walk, which I take nearly every day. My chest is filled with anxiety, my mind with a swirl of thoughts, regrets, hope, despair.
Something is going on with Sam, and Willow is like a pillow without its stuffing. They need me right now, and if I have to leave, who will they lean on? Will their always-volatile relationship burn up, leaving them with no one at all in their corners?
When I arrive home, Willow has gone out. She’s left a note: Don’t wait up. :-) Out with friends.
Worry loops around my chest, raises my blood pressure enough that I can feel it pulsing in my throat. I take a breath, let it go. It won’t do to make myself sick.
I shed my slacks and blouse and trade them for a pair of ancient silk pajamas. The fabric is cool and soft against my skin, making me remember pleasures I’ve not had much of in recent years, maybe won’t again. I only loved one man, Isaak, and it took me nearly a decade to get over him. Men are a lot of trouble, honestly, and unlike many of my friends, I find no need to have one in my house, th
ough I miss having one in my bed now and then. For quite some time, I had a lovely arrangement with a film critic in 3-C, but he died a couple of years ago, and I haven’t bothered to replace him. A young couple with an air of lifelong entitlement moved into his apartment.
Never mind.
Until I get new papers, there’s little I can do to move the process along. In my uneasiness, I head for the greenhouse and keep my hands busy with the work of tucking geranium slips into potting mix so they’ll be ready for spring.
My mind is free to wander where it will. Rain patters down on the glass roof, an appealing music, healing, along with the notes of soil and greenery in my nose. My thoughts wander to Sam and her tense, faintly hostile bid to sell the apartment. My elder niece has never walked easily in the world—she’s prickly and easily offended and yet so very deeply vulnerable to hurt. I worry about her, far more than Willow, who has always walked an easier path. Sam didn’t look good today—pale and tired—and I wonder if there’s a problem with the business. Snapping lower leaves from the stalk of a clipping, I make a mental note to google it.
Once the clipping is tidily tucked into its little pot, I brush my hands off and pick up my phone. The light is excellent, pale and soft, tinged with green, and I focus on the ruffled edge of the leaf, the blue tone of the glass behind it. A good shot for a gardening-day story. It calms me.
I know Willow is bewildered that I’m not bustling around to get ready for a trip, and I haven’t even come up with a story to tell her. It’s just that I needed her to be here, in case. In case I am arrested. In case everything truly does fall apart.
I open my Instagram account to post the photo. A tiny bump tells me there’s a private message on Instagram, from a name I don’t recognize, which is not at all uncommon. Mostly, they’re new followers who just want to connect a little bit. I answer all of them if I possibly can, honoring the whole purpose of communication. I touch the name and it opens.
Ma bichette, do not worry.
As if I’ve been doused in icy water, my limbs freeze. Ma bichette was Isaak’s endearment for me. The wildness of emotion that’s been running under my every moment now swells and overflows, filling my eyes with tears of . . . what? Longing? Loss? Remembrance?
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