A collective gasp went up. The building itself seemed to hold its breath. Melinda righted herself and hopped down the ladder, her neon Nikes striking every other rung. At the bottom she presented the open box of X-Acto blades to an assistant and then scolded her workers in Vietnamese for doubting her.
“Now, get to work. I don’t pay you to worry.”
Nodding respectfully, they hurried back to their workstations. They were all half terrified of her and half in love with her.
For good reason.
Dusting her hands, she noticed Evan threading his way through the tables toward her and grinned.
“And here I thought you’d forgotten all about me,” she said, reaching up to take his face in her hands.
“Impossible.”
On tiptoes, she kissed both of his cheeks, cheating to catch the edge of his lips. “What do you need, darling? Another driver’s license? Death certificate? Fresh passport for that getaway you’re gonna take me on to Turks and Caicos?”
“I need your brain,” he said.
She crossed her arms. An Olympos double-action airbrush dangled from her hip. She’d padded the futuristic grip with pink tape to ensure that no one borrowed it. As the only woman in the building, she color-coded all her tools.
“My brain? I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.”
“Flattered. It’s a magnificent brain.”
She noticed one of her conservators sponging roughly at a Polish poster of Rebecca and smacked his shoulder. “Careful! She’s been through a lot, that poor girl. Show her some care. Handle her gently, like a lover.” Taking Evan by the arm, she snapped back to English: “I feel sorry for Mihn’s wife. In bed she must feel like hamburger meat.”
She walked as she talked, casting an eagle eye across the workstations.
“I’m trying to find a man,” he said.
“Me, too.” A sideways glance. “Okay, okay. Let’s find your man. It’ll bring some excitement to my life.”
“I doubt your life lacks excitement.”
“Let me cook you dinner sometime, and you can find out.”
“Deal. But for now—”
“But for now, a man.”
“Yes. I believe he’s left the country. He’s off the radar, and he’s been careful to cover all the usual bases. I was in his house briefly. It was filled with luxury items, some rare. I’m hoping I can track him through unusual purchases he’s made.”
“Why that approach?”
“Because,” Evan said, “that’s how he tracked me.”
“No, no, no!” She paused by a giant plywood worktable, lifting the padded earphone free of a painter’s head to shout in his ear. “Use Bestine to remove the tape adhesive residue.”
She let the headphone snap back to the man’s skull and kept on. “So you’d like to track down which purchase?”
“He had an original Monet.”
“How could you tell it wasn’t a fake?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“If I made it, you wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“I’m assuming you didn’t make it.”
She gave a demure tilt of her chin. Proceed.
“It was of water lilies—”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s always water lilies with him. How many water lilies can a guy paint?”
“He didn’t just do water lilies.”
“Right. Haystacks. Lotsa haystacks.” She sighed. “Give me a Metropolis poster from the thirties any day. Have you seen the Boris Karloff Frankenstein? It just went at auction for—”
“Can you track a Monet like that?”
“Evan, the guy painted hundreds of them. Plus the forgeries—only Starry Night’s been knocked off more. Even if you knew it was real, how could you tell which water-lily painting it was? They all look like … well, like water lilies.”
From his jacket Evan pulled the printouts of the crime-scene pictures and fanned through them. But no dining-room shot of the Monet had magically appeared since he’d last perused the stack.
She read his face. “I’m sorry. Was there anything else you saw in the house that you could track?”
“Lexan.”
“What?”
“Bullet-resistant polycarbonate resin acquired on the black market.”
She screwed up her face. “Good luck there.”
He shuffled the printouts. Files on a Pakistani rug. Punctured IV bags draining onto the basement floor. The barn interior, two Mercedes Geländewagens and a wrestling mat.
He stopped. Stared at the last photo. Not what was in it but what was missing.
Melinda’s tiny hand gripped his elbow. “What?”
“A vintage Rolls.”
Evan had seen Dex drive away with it when he’d taken Despi. But it had never reappeared. René needed his toys. As his operation at the chalet drew to a close, he’d have wanted to get the car clear of the location, ready to meet him at his next stop. What had he said at the dinner table? You could take silk sheets and caviar and inject them directly into my veins. His obsession with luxury might be the thing that exposed him.
“What model was it?” Melinda asked.
“A Phantom.”
“That,” she said, “might prove useful.”
Evan stared at the photo taken outside the barn. The edge of the picture captured the bank of shoveled snow that rimmed the vehicle path. It was indented with dozens of notches made by the G-Wagons when they’d backed up for their three-point turns. Evan focused on a particular imprint in the icy rise. Another bumper mark, much lower, studded with the rectangular outline of a license-plate frame. But he knew there had been no license plate on the Rolls. As he squinted at the shape, Melinda leaned over him, her breath smelling of Juicy Fruit.
“What?” she asked.
“The license-plate indentation in the snow here. I don’t remember it having—”
“We’ll look at that in a minute,” she said. “Right now tell me—the Phantom. Was it a I, II, III, IV?”
“How can you tell?”
“I can’t. But come.” She steered him between two wet tables, the mist from a retrofitted insecticide sprayer moistening their cheeks. “Quan? Quan?”
A man in the far corner raised an arm hesitantly. Melinda beelined for him. He stood at attention as they approached. Covering his vast table, sandwiched between Mylar sheets, were sales brochures for vintage automobiles.
“You deal in car brochures?” Evan said.
“You’d be surprised,” Melinda said. “This Bugatti one here? It’s worth nearly three hundred grand.” She looked at Quan. “You need to help him identify a type of Rolls-Royce Phantom.”
She started to translate between the men, but Evan stepped in with badly accented Vietnamese. “It had big fenders that swooped up over the front wheels. Swept-back pillars so the windshield was on a tilt. And it had those things over the rear tires—”
“Fender skirts? With rivets?”
“Yes.”
“The Brits, they call them ‘spats.’ Close-coupled body style?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Was the passenger compartment somewhat short? Did it look … zoomy?”
“Yes.”
“Like this?” Quan tapped the Mylar covering an old Rolls brochure.
“Not exactly.”
Quan bent over, rummaging beneath his stool, and came up with a coffee-table book. Flipping through the pages. “This?”
“No.”
“This?”
“Too big.”
“This?”
“Yes!”
“It’s a Phantom III.” He smiled, showing crooked teeth. “Goldfinger’s car!”
“How many were made?”
Quan consulted the book. “Seven hundred twenty-seven chassis. Less with the body you describe.”
“That’s a lotta haystacks,” Evan said to Melinda.
Already she’d clamped his hand in hers, yanking him along hard enough to p
ut a sting in his shoulder. Before he could thank Quan, he’d been whisked down a back hall and into a dark-walled photography room with blacked-out windows. The most private space in the building, it was generally reserved for illicit document work. Melinda stopped by a desk, snapped her fingers impatiently.
It took a moment for him to catch her meaning, and then he handed her the printout of the photo taken outside the barn. She slid it beneath an AmScope binocular microscope, the enlarged image coming up on the connected computer. Twisting her long hair in a knot, she flipped it over her shoulder and leaned to the wide eyepiece mounted on a boom arm. She studied the license-plate indentation in the snow. Evan did the same on the mirroring monitor.
“It looks like two stacked curves,” he said.
“Those aren’t curves. They’re B’s. A big one perched on top of a smaller one.”
“I don’t get it.”
She snapped off the specialty bulbs illuminating the grainy picture and rotated to another computer, typing carefully on the keyboard so as to preserve her perfect nails.
The search engine swiftly brought up a logo: Bonhams & Butterfields.
Evan said, “You’re amazing.”
“You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.” A search field led to a database for collectors, which led to—
“Five Phantom IIIs have been sold at Bonhams since it consolidated with Butterfields in 2002,” she said. “Three were bought by an Abu Dhabi sheikh. One by that Ukrainian tennis player whose name I always screw up.”
“And the fifth?”
She pointed. The screen read, “Anonymous buyer.”
“There’s your boy,” she said.
“Does he have to register with them to put in a bid? Can you track him?”
“Auction houses are extremely discreet when buyers desire privacy. So no, I can’t track the buyer. However…” Her cheeks dimpled. She looked pleased with herself, a cat ready to be petted. “I can track the car.”
For the first time, Evan allowed excitement into his voice. “The car.”
“The chassis number, to be precise. It has to be registered when moved between countries. There are duties to be paid, taxes, all sorts of annoying bureaucratic paperwork.”
“I can take it from here.”
“Let me. We traffic in fine things. It’s what we do.”
“How do I repay you?”
She leaned to swing her rope of hair off her elegant neck and tapped her cheek.
He kissed it.
“I’ll be in touch by day’s end. Check your e-mail.” She rose, smoothed the wrinkles from her yoga pants, and dismissed him with a wave. “Now, go on. Some of us have work to do.”
68
Object Permanence
Evan hesitated outside the door of 12B. He and Mia had an understanding that he was to keep his distance from her and Peter. Mia didn’t know precisely what sorts of jobs Evan did. But she’d learned enough to know that he wasn’t safe to be around.
He reached for the doorbell, but his finger stopped shy of the mark.
What if she got angry?
What if she told him to leave?
What if Ted was there, whipping up an organic meal, expounding on the virtues of CrossFit?
Evan glared at his finger, wavering in midair. Given everything he’d endured in his life, how absurd that pushing a doorbell made him nervous.
He rang.
After a long pause, he heard footsteps. “Damn it. Hang on. Hang on.” The door flung wide. She wore a bathrobe, soaked through, her wet hair dripping around her shoulders. One hand gripped a pink razor. “Oh,” she said, cinching her bathrobe tighter. “I thought you were the pizza guy.” She looked at her razor, then hid it behind her back. “Um. Awkward.”
“Sorry to bother you. I know I’m not supposed to…”
“It’s okay. It’s good to see you. I mean, if I weren’t in the middle of a shower and didn’t have a Gillette Venus razor hidden behind my back.”
“It’s still there?”
She checked behind her. “Yup. Evidently I was hoping you hadn’t developed object permanence yet.”
“I’ve got it down pat. I do struggle with stranger anxiety, though.”
“Okay.” She bit her lower lip. “I’m all out of witty repartee and getting shivery. Can we move this along?”
“I just wanted to apologize to Peter. For the lobby last week when I was … short with him.”
“He’s in his room. He snuck his Halloween candy in there, so enter at your own risk. I’ll be drying myself off and pretending not to eavesdrop through the heating vent.”
“Deal.”
She vanished up the hall, and he walked over to Peter’s door. It had been a long time since he’d been down here. The Batman stickers remained, as well as the skull-and-crossbones KEEP OUT! sign, but the Kobe Bryant poster had been replaced with one of Steph Curry.
The door was slightly ajar, and Evan knuckled it open. Peter started, diving to cover up the sea of dumped-out candy. He craned to look over his shoulder. “Evan Smoak?” Rolling out of his emergency belly flop, he pulled a Snickers Mini from a fold in his pajama top and started shoveling candy back into the pillowcase frantically. “Don’t tell Mom.” His mouth was full, the words distorted.
“I wouldn’t be shocked if she knows already.”
Chocolate smudged his cheek. His lips were raspberry blue. He chewed and swallowed. “Why do you think she knows?”
“Because your mom knows everything.”
“Why don’t you visit anymore?”
Evan resisted the urge to scratch at the remnants of the scabs on his neck. “Like we talked about, your mom and I thought it’d be better if—”
“I still think it’s dumb.”
“I understand that. Look, I just wanted to—”
Hopped up on candy bars, Peter leapt to his feet, ran to his desk, and began frenetically coloring in a Star Wars drawing. “Did you know butterflies taste with their feet?”
“I did not.”
“What do you want to wear in your coffin?”
“A wetsuit.”
“Do frogs have penises?”
“Not the ones I’ve met. Listen—Peter? Look at me. I wanted to say that I’m sorry.”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “For what?”
“For how I was in the lobby. You’re right. I acted mean.”
“Oh. I forgot about that already. That was like years ago.” He set down his crayon, now worn to a nub, and looked at Evan. “Friends don’t make a big deal over stuff like that,” he said.
Evan had to clear his throat before he could respond. “Okay,” he said.
“I hope you can come back sometime.”
“Me, too.”
Peter turned back to his coloring book, and Evan slipped out into the hall.
He was feeling better every day. Just this morning he’d teased the sutures out of his shoulder with stitch scissors and needle-nose tweezers. He’d regained decent mobility with his right arm, though he had to be cautious about how far and how fast he pushed it. Oddly, his calf was bothering him more today, the nerve line like a twisting strand of barbed wire.
He stopped in the living room to take in the place. Drying laundry covered the couch. Jazz played softly down the hall somewhere, early Miles Davis. The air smelled of vanilla candles and hot chocolate and dish detergent. The kitchen trash can overflowed.
A real home in all its messy glory.
The Post-it stuck to the wall by the kitchen pass-through was more faded than when he’d seen it last. Written in Mia’s scrawl: “Treat yourself as if you were someone who you are responsible for helping.” She posted these life lessons, lifted from a favorite book, around the condo for Peter to read.
This one in particular had always given Evan pause. When he’d been trapped in that chalet, he’d been his own client for the first time, the one in need of rescuing. He wondered if he deserved the same happiness that he wished for the people he helped.
&nbs
p; Mia surprised him. “How’d you do with the Duke of Sugarbuzz?”
“He was … inquisitive.”
“Did he ask you if frogs have penises?”
“He did.”
Mia toweled her hair some more. “Do frogs have penises?”
“I don’t believe they do.”
Watching her laugh, he felt something tug at him.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
She bit her lower lip. Studied him. And yet she hadn’t asked him to sit.
“I’d better go,” he said. “Before you bust out that Gillette Venus razor again.”
“We wouldn’t want that.”
He started out.
He was at the door when she said, “I can’t help but think that in some other life…”
He turned.
She looked at her nails, over his shoulder, everywhere but at him. “Where I’m not a DA and you’re not a … whatever you are.”
He nodded.
“But it’s not safe for Peter,” she said. “I could never put him at risk.”
“No,” Evan said. “Never.”
“I wish it were different,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Good-bye, Evan Smoak.”
“Good-bye, Mia Hall.”
69
No Extradition
Before turning in for the night, Evan entered the Vault and logged in to [email protected].
A single e-mail waited for him from Melinda Truong.
“A Rolls-Royce Phantom III 1936 sports limousine with a Hooper body, Saoutchik chrome trim, and a chassis number of 9AZ161 passed through the Port of Rijeka on Friday, October 28. You’re welcome. You can repay me by taking me to dinner. Or to Turks and Caicos. xoxo mt”
Evan cracked his knuckles, studied the screen.
Rijeka.
In Croatia.
One of the countries that has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
Evan reached for the IRS printouts, covered with his notes. On the backs of the pages, he’d scrawled all the addresses he’d turned up while trying to chart the sprawling map of René’s financials.
The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Page 30