by M. J. Rose
“What do you want to see?” he asked.
The agents followed Canton into his library, where he grudgingly offered them seats at a round mahogany table.
“I assume you want to stay in business?” Lucian asked without preamble.
“Is there a reason I wouldn’t be able to stay in business?” Canton asked with a false bravado as see-through as cellophane.
Shabaz must have already been in touch with him.
“That all depends on you and your willingness to cooperate,” Richmond said. “We know you were involved in selling two paintings to Darius Shabaz. He’s given us the bills of sale and all the documentation on their provenance that you gave him. Everything was in order.”
Canton looked slightly relieved, then confused, and Lucian imagined he was wondering why they were here if the paperwork was in order.
“Everything, until we got to the last owner of each painting. At that point the owners had bogus names. Who did you purchase those paintings from? What are their real names? Did they come to you to fence the paintings, or did you put out the word that you were looking for works from those artists?”
“Those were the names the sellers gave me. I had no idea they weren’t their real names. How can I be responsible for people lying to me? The paintings were authentic, and that’s all that mattered.”
“Bullshit,” Lucian spat out. “You knew exactly what you were doing. Who did you buy the Matisse and the Van Gogh from? Real names. Now.” He banged his fist down on the table. Lucian was tired and jetlagged, his head hurt and he was absolutely certain this man was lying through his teeth. Canton not only knew he’d bought stolen artwork, but had probably orchestrated the thefts.
“My lawyer said you have a search warrant but that doesn’t mean I have to answer your questions. I was just trying to help out.”
Lucian stood up. Richmond followed, and together they started pulling out file cabinet drawers and piling stacks of paperwork on the table.
“What are you doing?” Canton screamed.
“We’re taking your records and getting out of here since you’ve stopped cooperating.”
Canton’s hand shook as he reached for the glass of soda already on the table and spilled some of it bringing it up to his lips. He took a long gulp and then asked, “What do you want?”
“The men you worked with,” Lucian said. “Who stole the paintings for you? Were you looking for those specific paintings? Did you put the word out? What the hell happened, Canton?” He knew he was bullying the dealer, but he didn’t care anymore.
Canton was hyperventilating, and his skin had turned even redder. Richmond glanced over at Lucian and raised his eyebrows as if to question the man’s reaction—was it a performance or for real?
“I need…” Canton whispered and then stopped. “I need…” Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out an amber pill bottle, thumbed the cap off, shook out a pill and, with trembling fingers, managed to get it into his mouth.
“You all right, Mr. Canton?” Richmond asked.
“It’s my heart.”
Lucian had been able to read the label. The dealer wasn’t in cardiac distress; the pills were anti-anxiety medication. “Then we’ll just take what we need and leave you to rest,” Lucian said as he started dumping the files into garbage bags he and Richmond had brought with them.
Yesterday afternoon the agents had visited Andrew Moreno’s art gallery in Chelsea, and the paperwork they’d confiscated from his office was enough to keep them busy for days. With this load added to it, Lucian figured he’d be working nights and weekends for a while. He’d need to call Emeline from the car and tell her he might not make it to the Met’s reception tonight. They’d talked twice earlier today, and both times her voice had been tight and twisted with fear. The longer the threats continued, the more distraught she became. Lucian knew from cases he’d worked on how incessant worry and fear frayed your nerves. At a certain point you stopped being able to push the anxiety aside. No one survived attacks like the one Emeline was enduring without scars. She’d told him that she’d gone back to work that morning, and so far had gotten two calls, both in the same mechanical voice: Tell anyone what I look like and I’ll kill you before they find me. You and your father, too.
“And he repeated it,” Emeline had said, her voice tight with the effort of holding back tears. “Three times. Just like in the e-mails.”
Lucian reassured her that Broderick and his men were getting close to making an arrest but it was a lie. They hadn’t made any progress. This guy had to be smart to go this long without once slipping up. Did that mean he was smart enough to elude them and get to Emeline? Lucian prayed not. One accident was all they needed. If he just stayed on the phone a few seconds too long or walked by the gallery and lingered an extra second peering in the windows.
“This drawer’s empty,” Richmond said to Lucian as he dropped another five files into a black plastic garbage back and nodded to another file cabinet. “I’ll grab that, you get the rest of the stuff.”
The color in Canton’s face intensified as he watched Lucian move to the desk and pick up the laptop computer. With a tortured “NO” the dealer leaped forward with teeth bared and bit Lucian’s hand.
Richmond jumped Canton, wrestled him to the ground and had him cuffed in less than thirty seconds. Lucian, excruciating pain radiating up his arm, read him his rights then listed the offenses he was going to charge him with.
“I’ll drop the last three and you’ll have a chance at spending at least some of the rest of your life outside a prison, but I want the name of the man or the men you worked with to get the Van Gogh and the Matisse.”
Twenty minutes later, as Richmond drove away, with the dealer handcuffed and whimpering in the backseat, Lucian kept looking down at his hand as if it had betrayed him by being so close to the dealer’s mouth.
Chapter
SIXTY
Iris Bellmer was bewildered and overcome with remorse. She’d let Malachai hypnotize her with his soft, smooth voice, using her own damn snow globe. Sitting at her desk, trying to make sense of what she’d done and calculate its ramifications, she stared out the window at the tree that filtered the view of the street. The wind was blowing, and one branch kept tapping on the glass almost as if agreeing that what she’d done was unforgivable.
Closing her eyes, she practiced deep breathing for five minutes, inhaling to the count of five, holding the breath to the count of five, then following the same pattern of exhaling, holding and then starting all over again until finally she felt calmer.
When Iris opened her eyes again she knew what she had to do: stop Malachai Samuels from doing anything illegal with the information she’d given him and let James Ryan know that she’d released information about his past-life memories without his approval.
She called her patient first. Ryan’s phone rang three times before his voice mail picked up. Iris had prepared what she was going to say, but to him, not a machine. She just identified herself and asked him to call her at his earliest convenience.
What she had to do next would be more difficult. How could she convince Malachai of anything? What could she say to him that would stop him from interfering with their patients’ lives?
Opening her door, she took a step out into the hallway, surprised to see Malachai and Beryl standing close together talking at the far end. Should she confront him with Beryl there, or wait? Before Iris had a chance to decide, Malachai turned and walked in the opposite direction as Beryl started toward Iris. Should she go after Malachai? He was almost at the staircase that led to lower-level library.
“Are you all right?” Beryl asked.
If Malachai heard his aunt, he didn’t turn around. How many more steps till she could be sure he wouldn’t be able to hear her?
“Iris?”
“Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
Iris heard a door shut in the distance—the door to the library. She nodded. “Yes.” It cam
e out in a whisper.
Chapter
SIXTY-ONE
As he walked up the museum’s grand marble staircase, the pull of the palace reached out to Lucian, but it wasn’t a night for sentiment. Passing through the medieval galleries, heading for the American Wing, he was blind to the artwork for the first time that he could remember. Tonight he was going to solve more than one mystery, and as much as it might cause him personal pain, there’d be relief to finally get to the truth. Hard, cold knowledge was the only thing he could trust. The past few weeks had all been a game, and he’d been played. He clenched his teeth against the thought of that and his unremitting headache.
Golden light flooded the Charles Engelhard Court, a glassed-in garden on the park that was home to large-scale sculptures, leaded-glass windows and architectural elements from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were already at least a hundred guests milling about the three-story atrium, but the space was far from crowded. Lucian recognized and nodded to members of the board of directors. Top-tier museum patrons were there, as well as descendants of the families who had bequeathed the paintings to the Met.
In the center of the room an area was cordoned off by a twelve-foot opaque screen. Behind it, Lucian found Marie Grimshaw repositioning five empty easels. When she saw him she forced a smile. He had the sudden urge to tell her he was sorry—but for what? Everything had turned out the way she and Tyler Weil wanted it to—the paintings rescued, Hypnos safe.
“Congratulations, Agent Glass. In a career dedicated to protecting art, to keeping the treasures of the centuries safe, tonight should be a major celebration for you. Thank you.”
She was right. He should be reveling in what he and Matt had accomplished, but the surprise he’d suffered earlier this afternoon when Oliver Canton finally gave him the name of his accomplices had ruined that. One name meant nothing. The other meant far too much.
Afterward, Matt had tried to convince Lucian to have a drink with him. To talk about what had happened. Lucian had refused and sat in his office on the computer ostensibly working but just staring at the screen trying to figure out how to deal with the information and its ramifications. He’d been made a fool of. He’d wanted to believe something so badly he’d risked his credibility, his job and his fucking sanity.
He’d forced himself here, not for the celebration, but for the confrontation. He’d even dressed for the magnitude of the event, wearing black slacks, not jeans, a jacket made in Italy and suede loafers that replaced his everyday boots. The only item that was the same was the Glock in his shoulder holster.
There were two bars set up at opposite ends of the gallery. The one with the smaller crowd backed up to a Frank Lloyd Wright living room that had been transplanted to the Met in 1982. Since Lucian was officially off duty, he ordered vodka on the rocks and, while the bartender made it, he stared out the windows into the park’s lush green backdrop. A familiar sense of loneliness overtook him as he remembered someone who was gone, whom he’d almost been able to reach out and touch. Emeline had raised the specter of Solange’s ghost, put flesh on her bones and blood in her veins. It was a mean trick. She should have stayed a memory. Even if he’d mythologized her, as a myth she’d done him no harm.
He could smell her, as if she were right there. It was the curious mixture it seemed he’d been smelling all his adult life, either in reality or in his imagination—that particular mingling of lilies of the valley with turpentine and linseed oil. Solange’s scent.
But it was Emeline approaching, leaning on her father’s arm. More sickly looking than ever, Jacobs was probably leaning on her but disguising it well. The man’s navy suit hung on his frame, his illness all the more obvious for the excess fabric.
Lucian’s hand gripped his glass as he fought the urge to throw it in the man’s face, battled with the overwhelming desire to beat him to a bloody pulp right here, right now. And Emeline? He had to force himself not to turn away.
Emeline and her father had reached the bar. Her scent was so pervasive. She’d never used Solange’s perfume before. Why tonight? To continue the farce?
As she smiled at him, a faint blush rose in her cheeks. She was wearing cream-colored, wide-legged silk pants with a narrow, fitted blouse of the same fabric. On her feet were flat ballet slippers in the same shade of cream with gold strings tied in a bow. Her hair was sleeked back and pulled into a chignon, almost as if she was showing off her scar. In her ears were round diamonds that caught the light and reflected back the sunset’s glow.
Reaching up, she brushed Lucian’s cheek with a kiss that would appear innocuous to anyone watching—including her father—but wasn’t, and then whispered that signature line Solange had always used on greeting. “I very much missed you.”
Lucian couldn’t help noticing the swell of her small breasts. Despite everything he knew and all the emotions roiling in him, he was still overwhelmed by an urgent need to touch her skin—to make sure it was warm, not cold—to reassure himself that she was real, that she was still here, that she was not about to evaporate into the past. His heart hadn’t caught up to his head yet.
Coming here had been a mistake. He suddenly knew how the men he had put in prison felt. This wasn’t the place to pose the questions he needed to ask or to hear the answers he was almost afraid to learn. He needed to get out.
“Good evening, Lucian,” Jacobs said formally.
“Good evening, Mr. Jacobs, Emeline,” Lucian responded. His own voice sounded forced. He wasn’t managing this very well. “Would you like drinks?”
Emeline told the bartender she’d take champagne and Jacobs asked for gin. “No rocks,” he muttered, and Lucian noticed Emeline stiffen.
He knew, because she had told him, that Jacobs’s daily promises to stop drinking never lasted long past each evening’s cocktail hour, despite the fact that the liquor was killing him.
Around them, as more and more people poured into the luminous stone-and-glass gallery, the sounds of tinkling crystal and excited voices rose and hovered in the air along with the mixed scents of flowers, burning candles and perfumes. Satins and silks shimmered in the twinkling light from the votives scattered around the room on the cocktail tables. Diamonds hanging from earlobes, necks and fingers glinted; sequined jackets and beaded handbags shone.
The festivity was an affront to what he knew about the two people standing beside him. Lucian wanted to climb up on a bar and scream at them all to be quiet, to honor the memory of a dead girl and take revenge on the man who was responsible for her death.
The bartender delivered the Jacobses’ drinks just as the string quartet stopped playing and the museum’s director, Tyler Weil, stepped onto a platform to the right of the screened-off area.
Weil scanned the audience, found who he was looking for and motioned for Marie Grimshaw to join him. Then, picking up the microphone, he welcomed everyone.
Beside Lucian, Emeline took his arm and pressed close to him. She smiled up at him, and he was struck by her enigmatic expression. She looked as if she was trying to be happy but at the same time was struggling with where she was, with who she was, with trying to assimilate it all. The stress was no doubt real but its source was not what she’d led him to believe. Before tonight he would have been empathetic about her dilemma. Now he knew it was a lie.
Chapter
SIXTY-TWO
The lights in his office were off except for a table lamp, and so Beryl’s face was in shadow, but Malachai could read her expression from the way she was gripping her cane—not for support but like a weapon.
“How dare you laugh at me?” Her voice strained with rage.
“But what you’re saying is surely a joke, isn’t it? What can you think I’m planning? Betraying our patients? Relax, Beryl, please. I’d never do anything to risk the reputation of the foundation.”
“You wouldn’t? But you have. I can’t allow you to do it again. I can’t take a chance you’ll put us back in the news and harm us further. I’ve
called our lawyers, Malachai. As of an hour ago your name has been removed from the deed of the building, I’ve stopped your salary and you are no longer co-director of the institute. You’re on a temporary leave of absence.”
He stood up quickly, his hands clenched at his sides, a muscle twitching in his neck. “You can’t do that.”
“I most certainly can. I’m the chairman of the board, and I have the unanimous support of the other board members.”
“I’m a member of that board.”
“You’ve been outvoted.”
“Whatever it is, you owe it to me to listen to what—”
“Here’s what I’m offering you,” she said, not waiting for him to explain. “If you stay away from Veronica Keyes and James Ryan and make no attempt to use therapy or hypnosis to delve into their psyches to find out more about this sculpture you’re obsessed with, then six months from now you can come back to work and start receiving your salary again. Six months after that, your name can go back on the lease. And six months after that, if everything is still status quo, you can resume your duties as co-director. I’m serious, Malachai. I’ve put up with more than I can stand—and I can’t stand that well anymore.”
“You bitch.” He said it low and deep, and the single word rushed out of his mouth so quickly and came at her so hard she flinched as if it were a physical blow.
“I want you to understand something else. If anything happens to me, or to Iris Bellmer, the directors have instructions to tell the police you are the prime suspect. You’re ill, Malachai. You’re obsessed to the point that it’s threatening your own mental health. My last stipulation is for you to see a therapist. Not a past-life therapist, but a psychiatrist. You need help, even if you can’t see it. You are a world-renowned reincarnationist and have everything a man could want in terms of prestige and money. It should be enough, but it’s not, and—”