Lying Eyes

by Robert Winter

  Kennedy took a seat. “How long have you known Trevor Mackenzie?”

  “Six months,” Randy answered. “Almost exactly.”

  “And how did you meet?”

  “He was an attendant on an international flight I took. We started chatting and ended up friends.”

  “By friends, you mean lovers?” Kennedy asked.

  Randy knew that was coming. Obviously, the FBI had his house under surveillance for some reason. If they were after Trevor, then they probably knew how many nights he’d spent with Randy. He sighed. “Yes. We’re lovers.”

  Dannels adjusted the stack of pages before her slightly, then picked up the top page. She studied the words for a moment, then said, “Mr. Mackenzie sent a text just twenty minutes before we arrested him. You’re to accompany Senator Gibson to Oman tomorrow until Wednesday.”

  Randy opened his mouth to ask how she knew, but suddenly, he didn’t have to. Grace Gibson might not be an obvious subject for espionage, but that was beside the point. When someone in her position went abroad or met world leaders domestically, it generated intelligence that could be fit together with other puzzle pieces and, collectively, reveal too much.

  “Oh no,” he said, and his head sagged. Disaster gaped before him.

  He was aware of Kennedy lifting another page from the stack. “Last month you accompanied the senator to Moscow.” Kennedy set that one aside, and picked up another. “Two weeks earlier, it was an unscheduled trip to Miami.”

  “Trevor is a spy?” Randy asked, but he could hear the resignation in his own voice. He would swear after that he never saw it coming, yet the moment he was confronted with the facts, he accepted it as absolute truth.

  “Yes, Agent Vaughan. He’s been reporting on the movements of Senator Gibson based upon your own travel.”

  All of the questions from Trevor about where he was going, when he’d be back, had seemed so innocent. Those little flirtatious comments about planning his own schedule so he could meet Randy in whatever city he was visiting—they took on a mocking tone in memory.

  Six months. Trevor had been playing him for six months.

  Randy was interviewed for hours, and recounted every detail he could recall from the moment Trevor began flirting with him on the flight from Rome back to Washington. Shame threatened to choke him. When the questions seemed to be over, Randy couldn’t help himself. His throat was dry, but he croaked out, “How did you identify him? I mean, what drew your attention to Trevor?”

  Kennedy shared a look with Dannels before responding. “His wife gave us his name, among others, as part of a deal.”

  Randy slumped lower in his chair. “His wife?”

  Dannels looked sympathetic. “Yes. According to her, they’ve worked essentially the same routine numerous times over the last four years.”

  Trevor was married.

  And Randy never sensed a thing.

  He was placed on administrative leave pending further investigation into his involvement with Trevor. The FBI and then the Secret Service’s Internal Affairs division ultimately cleared him of complicity, but the damage was done. Randy had carelessly allowed a foreign government to monitor the movements of the Senate majority leader.

  After the catastrophe, his superiors couldn’t leave him in charge of a security detail. His team had never even known he was gay, and to find out that way eroded the trust they needed to work together efficiently. Randy’s career was done.

  • • •

  Randy opened his eyes again and sighed. He was aware that Trevor had been sentenced to twenty years for espionage, but they’d never spoken again after the day of the FBI raid. Randy never got the chance to ask his questions. Was any of it real? How did Trevor know who he was, and how did he move so effortlessly past Randy’s usually sharp defenses?

  Was Trevor even gay, or had he hated every moment he spent in Randy’s bed?

  A glance at the clock surprised him. “Get your ass in gear, Vaughan,” he grunted, then surged to his feet. He dragged his towel across his hairy chest again but he was dry so he tossed it aside and got dressed.

  Randy had eaten his sandwich and driven halfway to DC before he acknowledged why those painful memories had surfaced again after so long. Trevor had a wife. Jack had a fiancée. Was any of it real, or was Jack just playing him to get at the painting, the way Trevor played him to get Grace Gibson’s travel schedule?

  He needed to get through the evening, and then shut the door on Jack Fraser.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Randy didn’t look up when the door to Mata Hari opened at six-thirty. He didn’t have to. It was as if Jack resonated someplace inside him. He kept his head down as he finished restocking Grey Goose vodka while Jack crossed the room and came to a halt at the bar.

  “Hello, Randy,” he heard, and then finally glanced up.

  Jack was dressed in a black polo shirt under a gray wool blazer. His intense eyes burned with excitement and a touch of nervousness as he gazed at Randy, and his hands resting on the counter trembled slightly. Randy tried hard to think of him as Fraser but it just didn’t work. He steeled himself to indifference and nodded. “Jack.” He said nothing more but completed his task. Jack had every right to be anxious, and Randy was okay with letting that build.

  After a minute or so of silence, Jack cleared his throat. “You said we’d need to leave to make it by seven, I believe?”

  Randy beckoned Malcolm over. “Mal, I’m going to be gone for an hour or so. You keep an eye on the place.”

  Malcolm glanced back and forth between Jack and Randy, and curiosity burned on his face. He knew better than to ask, so he just said, “Sure, Randy. It’ll probably be quiet.”

  Randy gestured for Jack to wait as he retrieved and his truck keys and a thick jacket from his office. He shrugged into its sleeves as he returned to the bar, then jerked his head to indicate Jack should follow him out to the parking lot.

  “I’ll drive,” Randy said. “Traffic sucks but this way I can come right back when we’re done.” Jack had an amused expression on his face as he climbed up into the truck and settled in the passenger seat. “What?”

  Jack smirked. “This truck. It’s so American.”

  Randy grunted as he started the engine. Before he could pull out of the lot, Jack rested a hand on his arm.

  “Are we going to discuss it?”

  Randy expected that, and he had his answer ready. “There’s nothing we need to talk about. It was a pleasant night, and we both got off. That’s it.” He pulled onto the street a little fast, hoping to forestall any further conversation.

  It didn’t work. “You know, I didn’t intentionally keep Sophie from you. It just never occurred to me that you’d care.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Jack snorted. “Of course. That’s why you left the way you did.”

  Randy shot him an angry glance. “I left because we were done.”

  “Then may I explain about Sophie?”

  “Look, Jack. There’s really no point. You were just visiting town, you’ll be gone tomorrow, and you don’t owe me an explanation.”

  “Ah.”

  Randy hated the way Jack said that. Ah. Like he knew something about Randy. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Tell me how you started researching the painting.”

  Jack was quiet for a minute, and Randy watched him out of the corner of his eye. A struggle was going on in Jack’s face and Randy expected him to refuse. Abruptly, Jack sat up straighter and ran his hands through his hair.

  “All right. I told you I was reading through François Brousseau’s correspondence. This started about two, no, two and a half years ago now, in preparation for a major exhibit the museum had planned. We intended to showcase Jean-Pierre’s time in Oise and specifically in the town of Fontaine-Chaalis by juxtaposing his works with his own descriptions of the creative process. I was assigned to find the most illuminating excerpts from his letters to François and match them to works we had in our possessio
n at the Kensington or that we could negotiate to borrow from other museums.

  “Well, it was during that project I noticed the gap in Brousseau’s oeuvre. Jean-Pierre wrote to François on the fifth of July 1878 that he had undertaken the painting of an abbey in Chaalis, as I said last night. I recall he wrote that he worked ‘beside a group of boulders that looked as if they had bubbled up from the mantle of the Earth, where travelers left the ashes of their fire.’ He said ‘in the distance was a desolate ruin on a hill and fields of flowers ranged down the valley.’ In a later letter, he said he wanted to ‘capture the sunrise as it spread across the field like a spill of honey.’ He was quite explicit that he had completed the work just the day before, but he was disappointed in it. In fact, he wrote it was ‘not at all what I’d hoped to accomplish.’

  “I became curious to see this painting, but as I studied the official catalogues, I realized no such work had been described or photographed. In François’s personal records of his brother’s paintings, however, there was a notation for a work, number 260, that he listed as Lever de soleil à l’abbaye de Chaalis. That is, Sunrise at the Abbey of Chaalis. Even the title intrigued me, but I could discover no further information about that particular piece except that it had been sold in 1901.”

  Jack had shifted in his seat to face Randy. “Although records showed the sale, there were no indications of the purchaser’s identity. I would have given up the hunt as a mere curiosity, except for the oddest thought.” Jack stopped talking, and Randy darted his eyes from traffic to glance over.

  He took the bait. “And what was that?”

  Jack smiled. “It occurred to me that, sooner or later, someone might have looked at a disappointing old canvas of a ruin on a hill and fields of flowers in a valley, and thought to himself, hmm, that looks suspiciously like a Brousseau. So I wondered, what would you do if you had found such a work, perhaps in the drawing room of a deceased relative as you were settling an estate?”

  “You’d find an expert and have it examined, I suppose.”

  “Precisely,” Jack said with satisfaction. “And there really aren’t many experts in Jean-Pierre Brousseau’s work qualified to tell one if a work were original. So I compiled a short list of possible resources. The Kensington museum where I was employed, of course. A few other notable museums with significant collections of Brousseaus or other post-impressionists. And the big auction houses.”

  Randy nodded slowly. “Clever. An auction house—I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

  Jack looked pleased. “It took some time, but I had a, um, connection with the biggest house of all, Valcoates, and she was able to pull some strings to get me access to their records. I was armed only with a few details—the approximate date of original sale, the bare description in Jean-Pierre’s letters to François—but after months of searching I came across a record of a Norwegian gentleman who had asked whether a painting in his possession mightn’t be a work by Brousseau. The description was sufficiently similar that I grew confident I had found what I was seeking. And what do you think?” Randy realized he was leaning slightly toward Jack, drawn in by his excitement. “The noted auction house told the Norwegian collector that his painting was not a Brousseau.”

  “Oh.” Randy sagged back into his own seat, unreasonably disappointed.

  “No, that was fascinating to me, do you see?” Randy shook his head. “Well, I could tell from the report in the Valcoates archives that they had never made the connection to the letters Jean-Pierre wrote to François. The examination was conducted in the early 1970s, well before certain tests that have been developed in the ensuing decades. The auction house report described the sources consulted, and its conclusion stemmed principally from the fact that the work was unsigned and that the style was different to Jean-Pierre’s works both before his time in Fontaine-Chaalis and after. But that was precisely the point. I knew from the letters that this was a transitional work. Jean-Pierre painted the abbey and the fields when he was developing his new style. You understand?”

  “I do,” Randy said with a nod. “They were looking for a fully-realized work of genius by a master, and failed to recognize the fledgling steps he had to take and perhaps abandon in order to develop that genius.”

  Jack smiled happily. “Precisely. Of course you grasp it.” Randy tried to ignore the pride in Jack’s tone, or the warmth it spread through his chest.

  “So,” Jack continued. “I had the letters from Jean-Pierre and an appraisal given to a disappointed collector. I set out to track the owner down, only to learn that he had died at a quite respectable age and left his estate to grandchildren in England. It wasn’t easy, but eventually I located one of the heirs, living in Whitechapel. She disclosed that most of her grandfather’s art collection had been sold to pay estate taxes. She particularly remembered a canvas that they found in an attic, and how her grandfather had told them many times in disgust that the painting was rubbish, which was why he stored it away up there. She was able to find for me the name of the gallery, and of course that was my next stop.”

  Randy could imagine Jack taking up the scent of a mystery, and his own heart beat faster at the idea of the hunt. He saw Jack poring over reports in a mahogany-lined library as he looked for clues. Flipping frantically through catalogues to see where the trail might lead. Randy almost had to slam on the brakes as a car in front of him decided at the last second not to run a yellow light. Whitechapel, Jack had said. “Wait a minute. You contacted the gallery owner to ask about the painting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this Bernard Gates, in Whitechapel? What did you tell him?”

  “Very little, of course. You must see. If I’m right, this discovery will make my professional reputation. I couldn’t risk having my work stolen, but once it became known what I was looking for—”

  “Anyone would be able to recreate the trail.” Randy’s mind was whirling. He remembered the letter coming out of the blue from Gates a few months back, offering to repurchase the painting from him. “How long ago did you contact the gallery?”

  Jack thought about it. “Probably three or four months back. But realize. It would be feasible to retrace my guesswork yet it would be very difficult to assemble the paper trail that I did. I have the original bill of sale from François Brousseau, the appraisal from the auction house, a handwritten letter from the Norwegian collector to his son describing his disgust with the painting and therefore his decision to not display it any longer, the correspondence from the heirs authorizing the sale by the auction house…”

  “Provenance.” Randy nodded. “You can demonstrate the provenance of the work.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said proudly. “You know that provenance is key to any sale to a reputable collector or display in a museum. I’m reasonably confident that no one could recreate the records I have assembled.”

  “There seems to be a major flaw in your thesis, though.” Randy took a quick glance at Jack. “An auction house says the painting’s not an authentic Brousseau. Even with letters from Jean-Pierre to François that describes it, how do you overcome that?”

  Jack’s face shuttered closed. “I, uh, I have some thoughts on that. First things first, hmm?” he said in a clipped tone. “Let’s see if the painting you own is the correct one.”

  Randy was shocked at the abrupt change. Then he began to get annoyed. For most of the drive, he’d been sucked in by Jack’s openness. He’d shared a thrill of discovery that reminded him of the trip to the Metropolitan in New York with Uncle Kevin and Luc, when the world had begun to open before his curious eyes. But Jack had only woven an illusion. He told Randy just enough to get his cooperation, then shut him out again. He still didn’t trust Randy, not fully.

  Fine. Randy didn’t entirely trust Jack either.

  They finished the drive in awkward silence. When Randy pulled into the parking garage below Thomas’s condo building and said, “We’re here,” Jack twitched with his growing excitement. They rode the elevator
from the garage to the ground floor without exchanging a further word but Jack’s eyes shone and he kept wiping his palms against his trousers.

  “Randy Vaughan for Zachary and Thomas,” he told the concierge. She buzzed upstairs, got approval, then told Randy to go ahead to the penthouse.

  Zachary was waiting for them at the open door to the condo. “Hey, Randy. C’mon in,” he called as they approached. His hair was damp, so Randy guessed he’d gone for a swim in the building’s pool when he got home from work. He had been a swimmer in college and still kept it up.

  Zachary was not quite as tall as Randy, but he had a steadiness that hadn’t been there when he first walked through the door of Mata Hari six months earlier. The things he’d been through since had destroyed much of his naïveté, but not his essential spirit. Randy admired that, and he was happy Thomas had been able to pull his head out of his ass long enough to see that Zachary was perfect for him.

  “Hiya, kid. Zachary Hall, this is Jack Fraser,” he said with a gesture. Jack shook hands with Zachary, who then ushered them into the living room.

  The condo was stark and furnished in a minimalist style Randy knew dated to a time when Thomas was rebuilding his life and couldn’t be bothered to think about comfort. That was one of the reasons Randy had persuaded Thomas to hang some of his art collection there a few years earlier, to add life to what would otherwise have felt like a stark white cell.

  Already, though, he could see Zachary was softening the hard edges Thomas had lived with for a long time. Books filled a lot of the shelves, throws had appeared on the backs of chairs, and the space was more lived-in than when Thomas had been alone. “This is the big weekend, huh?” Randy asked.

  Zachary glowed. “Yes, and I can’t wait.” To Jack, he explained, “I’m moving in here with my partner this weekend.”

  “How do your parents feel about it?” Randy wanted to know.

  Zachary held out his hand and wiggled it back and forth. “Pretty mixed, I’d say. They’ve been trying hard to accept the gay thing, and they liked Thomas when they met him. But their son shacking up with another man? That’s a tough one for them.”