by M. J. Rose
“What if James Ryan, an art appraiser who works for Sotheby’s, had a reason to visit a reincarnationist?”
“No. Two little letters. N-O. That simple enough for you? I don’t want you in there as Lucian Glass or as James Ryan or as my aunt Edith. You understand?”
“I understand why Lucian Glass can’t go in, but what’s wrong with Ryan going?”
Doug shook his head.
“You afraid of a little revenge energy?”
“You’re not capable of being objective about this. I don’t blame you. No one would be.”
“Objectivity is overrated. Passion is much more productive.”
Across the street, Malachai cut the deck once more, removing the top card from the bottom half. Then, smiling at Richmond, he revealed what it was. Based on Richmond’s reaction, it must have been the card he’d chosen.
Lucian was about to continue to argue his case for going into the foundation undercover when Malachai’s mellifluous voice filled the room.
“Do you believe in reincarnation, Agent Richmond?”
“Nope, I was raised a Catholic.”
“I ask everyone. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“Do you believe?” Richmond asked.
“I do believe, with all of my being. I believe that we return over and over to experience all the different facets of human behavior, learn from them and become complete in the process.”
“And you’re searching for a way to prove that, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’d probably do anything to prove it, wouldn’t you?”
Malachai’s sarcastic laugh filled the room. “Now, you don’t expect me to fall for that, do you?”
“I wasn’t trying to trap you. I wasn’t even asking. I was just realizing it. You would do anything to prove it. I know that now in a way I didn’t before. Good night, Dr. Samuels.”
Even though Lucian wished he were the one across the street instead of holed up here doing surveillance, he admired his partner’s aplomb. “He did great,” he said to Comley as Richmond turned, walked down the steps and headed east, away from the Phoenix Foundation.
“When there’s a will…” Comley said, using Richmond’s own signature line. The agent repeated it so often he never bothered with “there’s a way” anymore.
Lucian kept the binoculars trained on the man who was still standing on the stone steps of the brownstone, watching Richmond walk away, the laughter on his face metamorphosing into…worry? Or was it determination?
Chapter
EIGHT
Before he left for his morning run, Vartan Reza stopped in his daughter’s room and kissed the still-sleeping six-year-old on the forehead. She was a miniature of his wife. Both had strawberry-blond hair, high foreheads and finely arched brows. It was lucky that Gala was such a perfect reproduction of her mother. Better to have inherited her delicate looks instead of his swarthy skin and heavy features. Since 2001, the geopolitical situation had worsened, and he didn’t want his little one to suffer for her heritage.
Out in the hall, he rang for the elevator and stretched while he waited for it to arrive. When the doors opened Reza stepped into the perfectly polished wood-paneled cage and said good morning to the elevator man. Living in a luxury Park Avenue building was proof of Reza’s achievement, the visible reward of relentless effort. Early in his career he’d started taking on the tough cases that no one else had wanted, knowing they’d deliver the highest visibility if he won them. To date, he’d lost only two, but he feared he might be facing his third loss with Hypnos. The sculpture wasn’t going home unless he could figure out a new approach. Discovering that the bill of sale was forged had made him suspect every other piece of evidence the Iranian government had given him, and despite Hicham Nassir’s insistence that they were all legitimate, Reza was in the process of testing every document now.
Reaching the lobby, Reza thanked the operator and strode off across the black marble tiled floor. No, he wasn’t going to spoil his morning run by thinking about this now—he had Central Park to look forward to.
Reza stepped out onto the still, dark street into a steady rain. Not even a downpour would make him skip his run. He was too addicted to the high. Leaning on the streetlamp, he finished his stretches and then set off, jogging west across Park Avenue, to Madison, then to Fifth Avenue; then he turned north and ran the five blocks to the park’s Ninetieth Street entrance.
The path was empty, as it often was this time of day. That was one of the reasons Reza ran before six—he liked the solitude. No one needed him here; no one interrupted him. Nothing bothered him.
Before he knew it he’d passed the 102 Street Transverse on his left, and the Lasker Pool and Rink on his right. The rain wasn’t affecting his pace at all. Two miles farther in, he reached the north end of the park and took West Drive. After about 3.75 miles he came to the Seventy-Second Street Transverse and, running in place, peered through the downpour to see if the road was clear.
Going over seventy miles an hour, the vehicle hit the lawyer and flipped his body eight feet up into the air. His eyes were open when the paramedics found him; one of them thought the dead man looked as if he were staring up into the overcast sky, trying to ask a last question.
A husband and wife who’d also been out jogging had witnessed the accident, but the rain was too heavy and they were too far away to identify the make of the car or even be sure what color it was. Dark was all they could offer. Black? Navy? Deep green? They just didn’t know for sure. Neither of them remembered any numbers or letters from the license plate.
The driver slowed down as soon as he exited the park on Eighty-Fourth and Fifth and drove carefully east to Lexington and south to Seventy-Eighth Street, where he parked in front of a fire hydrant, left the keys in the ignition and walked into the Starbucks on the corner, where he ordered an espresso.
Sitting uncomfortably at one of the small wooden tables, sipping the bitter coffee, Farid Taghinia watched as a slight, dark-haired man carrying a briefcase got into the charcoal-gray Mercedes, turned the key in the ignition and drove off.
Only then did Taghinia allow himself to relax, proud of how well the operation had gone. The driver would leave the car, per his instructions, in a garage near Lake Placid, where it would be cleaned and painted and the plates would be changed.
Taghinia was absolutely sure no one would ever discover that it had been used as a murder weapon—so sure that he hadn’t noticed that even though it was late May and seventy-two degrees out, Ali Samimi had been wearing leather gloves when he got into the car.
Chapter
NINE
The square, silver-framed glasses squeezed the bridge of his nose, and the mustache and wig of short-cropped hair—both prematurely gray, since he’d told the therapist he was just thirty-five years old—itched. It had been six weeks since Lucian had worn his James Ryan disguise, but usually he slipped into it with more ease than he had on this Monday morning. He lifted Ryan’s black briefcase with gold-embossed initials—JR, mostly rubbed away—onto the table in front of the couch.
“I’d never seen any of these women—or the one man—before I started drawing them,” Lucian said as he pulled out a sheaf of drawings and arranged five sketches on the parquet floor, and then watched Dr. Iris Bellmer inspect his work.
She had an aqualine nose, prominent cheekbones and fox-brown, chin-length hair that kept falling forward as she looked down no matter how often she pushed it back behind her ears. A silver disc hanging from a black cord slipped out from under her white blouse and swung in the air, catching the overhead light and winking at him.
“I didn’t know you were an artist,” she said without looking up.
When he’d called, he’d identified himself as an art appraiser for Sotheby’s and explained that he was suffering symptoms no traditional doctors could diagnose.
“A hobby.”
She glanced up at him again. There were tiny lines crossing her forehead, and
her hazel eyes were as intent and direct as her question. “You said you’ve never seen these women, yet you’re terribly upset that you’re not capturing them exactly. You’re describing an impossible challenge. Do you see that?”
He didn’t answer right away. Everything about being here was suddenly surreal. Standing the way he was, with his back to the windows, he had the peculiar sensation that he was both here and across the street in the studio apartment where he, Richmond and Comley had spent so much time spying on this very building. Where one of them was right now, watching and listening.
Over the past few days Lucian had relentlessly pursued Comley to allow him to pose as a patient and infiltrate the Phoenix Foundation. Ultimately, he’d won because there just weren’t any other agents available and they couldn’t afford to wait—there were secrets hidden in this building that could only be discovered from the inside. As a patient, Lucian’s access would be limited, but it might be enough for him to plant listening devices in the areas directional mikes couldn’t reach. Would that help? They had to try. Too many people connected to this place had died. If Malachai Samuels had orchestrated the robbery at the Memorist Society in Vienna last month and stolen the list of Memory Tools, he certainly wasn’t going to stop there. He’d do whatever was necessary—legal or illegal—to find and acquire the tools. Hadn’t he proved that already, evidence or no?
“James, how can you know something is missing from the drawings if you’ve never seen these women before?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth, but James Ryan speaking Lucian Glass’s frustrating truth was as perplexing as being inside this building, on this side of the door he’d watched for so long.
Dr. Bellmer returned to studying his sketches as if she’d find better answers in the crosshatched and shaded lines than she was getting from him.
To justify seeking out a past-life regression therapist, Lucian’s alter ego, James Ryan, had needed a problem. For expediency’s sake, Lucian had chosen his own. Although he didn’t believe in reincarnation, he could imagine someone wondering if there was a past-life connection to these drawings. But this was the first time Lucian had borrowed any part of his real self for James, and it was uncomfortable blurring the line of demarcation. Too bad. He’d have to get used to it. He’d appropriated his own dreams to get an appointment, and it had worked. And as difficult as it was to be here baring part of his soul, it was also exhilarating to be one of the shadows he used to watch moving behind these windows. Having stepped over the threshold, he was now deep inside the magic kingdom.
Like the entranceway and hallway, Bellmer’s office was perfectly restored. Ornate molding capped high ceilings and framed the autumnal-colored, foliage-inspired Art Nouveau wallpaper. A jewel-toned stained-glass chandelier cast soft light on the drawings on the floor. But it was the doctor’s extensive collections of snow globes, various crystal rock formations and carved dragons and the scent of burnt orange that gave the room its eccentric personality and hinted at some of the complexities of the woman who was still inspecting his drawings.
“On the phone you said your dreams wake you up, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the dream that inspired this drawing.” She pointed to a sketch. Like the others, it was done in pencil, carefully and realistically rendered, and showed a woman caught in a precise moment of fear and terror.
“I don’t remember the dreams.”
“Can you tell me how you feel when you wake up?”
“I usually have a terrible headache.”
“And you’re furious.”
She’d said it as a statement, not a question. “How do you know that?” he asked.
“Just listening to you, watching your face, paying attention to your reactions. Nothing weird, no black magic or tarot cards, don’t worry.”
“That’s reassuring. I think.”
“Do you know why the drawings frighten you?”
“I don’t think they do.” How the hell did she know that?
“What makes you want to draw the women?”
“It’s not that I want to draw them…it feels like they need me to draw them. To commit them to paper. As if that act will alleviate their suffering.”
“Their suffering? Are you sure?”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to your suffering?”
He didn’t answer.
“Dreams can be tricky,” she said. “Are you a religious man?”
“Not at all.”
“Did you have any religious training? Even if you turned your back on it?”
“None. My father was Protestant and my mother is Jewish, but neither of them practiced.” He was telling her about himself again, but he needed to give her answers and in all the years he’d posed as the appraiser, he’d never invented this part of Ryan’s backstory.
“Do you believe in life after death?”
He answered almost before she finished asking. “No. Do you?”
In traditional therapy he knew it would be unusual for a therapist to answer, but this was anything but traditional.
“I don’t believe in the Christian view of heaven or hell, but I do believe in the soul living on after our bodies die. You must, too, a little, or you wouldn’t have sought me out.”
“I’ve tried everything else.”
“The last resort.” She laughed. “I’m used to that. But back to you. Have you lost many people you were close to, James?”
“I never thought much about reincarnation before.” If she noticed he’d ignored her question, she didn’t show it.
“Are you in some kind of personal hell? Professional hell?”
“Other than what’s going on with these drawings? No.”
“Are you married? Living with anyone?”
He shook his head. “Not married. I lived with a woman for the past few years, but we broke up a few months ago, and I’m okay with it. No one I care about is ill or in any kind of trouble.”
“Do you get any relief from the intensity of your feelings or the headaches once a drawing is done?”
“Yes, the headaches are usually gone.”
“For how long?”
“Two hours. Sometimes longer.”
“Do you take meds for the pain?”
“Yes.”
“Do they offer relief?”
“Usually, at least for a few hours.”
“This is a very obvious question, but have you looked into the possibility that you’re having a reaction to your pain meds?”
“I wish. But no, we checked that out already.”
As she wrote in her notebook, Lucian studied her. She reminded him of the women pre-Raphaelite painters favored, and he understood why painters like Rossetti and Burne-Jones had been attracted to this type of woman. She could carry bigger themes, grander emotions.
Dr. Bellmer looked up and, self-conscious that he’d been caught staring, Lucian pointed to the framed drawing on the wall right behind her. “That looks like an authentic William Blake. Is it yours?”
“No, it belongs to the foundation. One of the directors, Dr. Malachai Samuels, is an avid collector.”
“I recognize his name.”
She nodded. “He gets his fair share of press.”
“Does he only collect Blake?”
“No. He collects all kinds of things, from playing cards to antique pistols.” She capped her pen. “James, I’d like to talk to you about hypnosis. It can be a shortcut to the kinds of unconscious memories that are very often at the root of our problems. Have you had any experience with hypnosis?”
“Yes, with pain management self-hypnosis.”
“Where did you learn it?”
Again, the truth was easier and harmless.
“Here in the city—at the NYU pain center.”
“For your headaches?”
“No. It was a while ago.”
“When?”
“I was hurt when I was a kid.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
He could remember every moment of that evening twenty years ago and relive it without making any effort. “I don’t remember much. I was in an accident, lost six pints of blood and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”
“You’re talking about dying pretty casually. It’s an extremely traumatic experience to go through. I’m so sorry you had to experience that.”
“It was a long time ago…it feels like it happened to someone else.”
“An event like that could change the trajectory of your life.”
“I don’t think it did in my case,” he lied.
“How long did it take for them to revive you?”
“Approximately ninety seconds.”
“Did you remember anything about that minute and a half?”
Her voice was like smoke, curling around him, tempting him to let go, give in. He was sorry now that he’d come. He’d never discussed this with anyone. Lucian lifted his hands as if he were throwing the question up in the air and getting rid of it.
He shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve heard it all before.”
“Even if I have, it’s fine if I hear it again.” She smiled. “It could help explain some of what you are going through now.”
“I was aware of a warm light that seemed to be illuminating a path…” He felt himself slipping into the memory and fought back. “In art school,” he said evenly and without emotion, “you learn that white light is made up of other colors—red, green and blue—I could see all the different colors streaking by as if the light was fracturing. There was a sound, like a beating heart…it’s all such a cliché, isn’t it?”
“Go on.”
“Everyone says they want to stay in the light. Well, I didn’t. It was the last place I wanted to go.”
“Because?”
“It was punishment.” Where the hell had that come from? Punishment?
Dr. Bellmer nodded. “Thank you.”
He shrugged.
“Have you discussed this with a doctor before?”
“No.”
“A friend? Family member? Girlfriend?”