by Jamie Mason
Owen had a blister of fury rising in him at all times, chafed raw by each dull stupidity and sparkling inanity in the world that he couldn’t avoid. He didn’t hurt people when he couldn’t get away with it, but he did catalog how it felt in these moments that he really wanted to. He used it for fuel in the times that he could. A few people paid for all the rest of them.
The girl in the video was being dragged by her ankle. In the mood he was in, Owen vaguely approved.
Then the tug on his attention from the edge of the screen.
Oh, you bitch.
Not Ann. No. She’d gone from useless to his new favorite person in two crashing heartbeats.
The painting. Marcelline. You fucking bitch.
“Do you want me to play it again?”
Owen smiled and nodded at—Oh, what the hell—at Charlie. She blushed and reloaded the video.
People rarely tried to get one over on Owen. He knew the recipe for the cooperation he collected. It didn’t take anything away from his success for him to know what it was made of. And it was made largely of money and intimidation. Only the really clever ones realized they probably had nothing to fear from him. Probably.
Marcelline Gossard had been one of the clever ones. From the very first time he’d walked into the art gallery, she always looked him in the face and never once did that measuring-tape thing with her eyes or flinch when he stepped into her sight line. Owen had made a career out of being a walking omen, eclipsing too much light out of everyone’s peripheral vision wherever he went. He enjoyed watching people do the math of what it might mean to find him suddenly there.
But nothing changed in Marcelline’s poise or tone when her attention shifted from him to the regal old woman on the gallery floor who probably wasn’t going to buy anything, to the FedEx driver, to the little boy who couldn’t take the DO NOT TOUCH sign to heart. Owen was no different to her, and it was the most different thing that had befallen him.
The Anningers had sent Owen to the gallery, and by the transitive property to Marcelline, for artwork: four times for themselves, once for a wedding present, and once for a secretive deal with him on loan to a group that Owen was pretty sure was Russian Mafia. He fancied that he and Marcelline had bonded over knowing looks during that transaction.
She was capable in a much warmer way than Owen was, but distanced, a little guarded. There was a barricade of professionalism, but when she smiled from behind the bars, she made you wonder if the fence was there for her protection or for yours.
Before he was scary, before he was cold, before he was brutal, Owen Haig was efficient. Everything about Marcelline appealed to him: from the sleek, short-sheared curve of the crown of her head to the way her ankles didn’t wobble in the four-inch heels as she strode across the polished floor. And Owen had felt damned near noble that everything in between the top of her head and those ankles, he’d counted as equal. All of it.
She was beautiful, but her posture, her voice, her confidence, her expertise, the fast math she could do with no calculator, the astonishing speed of her typing, it all rolled over him like cool velvet across his skin, across his thoughts. She soothed him, instantly and effortlessly.
They’d worked together the half dozen times, then nothing for months. He’d only been a little disappointed when her number rang in on his phone and she only wanted to talk business. No matter. She was still calling him. Work and solitude were mostly all he had, so business was his road to everything that wasn’t.
“Mr. Haig. You told me to let you know if I came across anything interesting that the Anningers might like.”
“I did. The gallery has something good?”
“No. They don’t have it. Not yet, anyway. I have it. Want to talk?”
Did he ever.
The tribe his employers came from was a rare phenomenon in the world. That was a good thing. Too many of that kind and we’d all be back in caves in short order, eating our enemies and making carved keepsakes of their bones.
Some families could never own enough houses or boats. They bought and sold companies, real estate developments, shopping malls, office buildings, ore mines, small dictatorships.
Fleets of private cars and airplanes moved them around. But when it came to the things they could hold in their hands, the ornaments of their fingers and necks and cabinets and walls, they liked a little history with their sparkle. Sometimes the word history was a euphemism for notoriety.
The Anninger magpie was half-vulture.
There was silver in a sideboard that had been stolen in a coup, the aristocrats of that country hanged and burned while their homes were looted. Mrs. Anninger had a brooch, two rings, and a necklace that had been Nazi plunder. There were gun collections that should, by all rights, have been haunted by their accomplishments, and the oldest Anninger son had two goddamned shrunken heads in the library of his favorite house. Artwork that could be traced back through theft and raid was practically commonplace.
But Mr. Anninger Sr. and his only daughter shared a taste for the truly infamous, with displays and stashes of contraband and ghoulish souvenirs that made Owen hate them. It also made him work the hardest for those two in particular. It was a pet project of his. He was curious to see how far they would go. How much money would they burn to warm their boredom? How many dim thugs would they stack into the dangerous spaces, ordering their hirelings to climb over one another to reach the forbidden fruit for their dessert—the only thing left for them to want after their endless feast of too much of everything else.
The painting that Marcelline had acquired was one of a haul from the largest heist of personal property in history. It, along with its gallerymates, hadn’t been seen in more than twenty-five years. But that much legend would only get it to Mrs. Anninger–level unsavory.
The selling point, the sticky bit of trivia relayed to Owen from Marcelline’s perfect mouth—How did she not get lipstick on her wineglass?—was that this piece had more story than the others, and a story that not many people knew, possibly because it might have been bullshit. But rumor was good enough to turn up the want in a certain kind of person. In an Anninger kind of person.
This painting was arguably one of the more minor works stolen from the museum. It wasn’t the most missed or the most sought. But it had been the only one seen, or at least reported to have been seen, in the trophy room of a famous, and famously murdered, music producer. There had been whispers of bragging. There were always whispers of bragging. That was the game. That was the entire point. The long story of the painting was better than the quality of the artwork itself.
Per Marcelline, it was theirs, off the books, and the price was negotiable.
Yeah. If there was a chance of blood on it, Mr. Anninger would want it. Or his daughter.
When the sale had gone completely wrong, and the scrubbed-up tweaker had walked up and opened fire on them all, Owen, to his shame, had looked first to Marcelline. He didn’t care about the money. He didn’t care about the painting. He didn’t care about the Anningers. Disappointment was such a rare, bitter treat for them, he often wondered if they actually loved it best of all. No, he cared only to see if Marcelline had known, to see if she had set him up.
He still didn’t know, even now.
When he’d picked her out of the shadows and the movement in the chaos of that night, she’d been curling toward the pavement, hands clawing at her neck, blood already raining down in a narrow torrent as she folded.
The man who’d come with her was already there at her side. At the start she’d introduced him to everyone as Jonathan, and he’d been the one who brought the painting to the meeting. Now this Jonathan knelt next to her. He leaned in and pulled her hand away from her throat, looking, checking, but no. He took her other hand, too, holding them both away from her thrashing instinct to push against the pour of her blood. He just let it flow. Jonathan rose up, prying her fingers from around his wrist. And he ran. When Owen got to her, Marcelline was fading unconscious, no story to te
ll.
Owen had let him run, and he also ignored the Anningers’ hired help, some guy and some girl who looked like a guy, neither of whom he’d met before—one clearly dead, one rolling around grunting, looking all but done for. He’d lifted Marcelline, his biceps pressed hard into the wound, her blood invisible as it warmed, then quickly cooled, into his black suit jacket.
He had access to essentially every resource of the Anningers. They never asked him to account for anything. He’d made the call with Marcelline dying against his arm to dispatch two warm and upright retainers to retrieve the two cold, dead ones from the lot.
At his place, a quiet doctor and a couple of see-nothing-say-nothing nurses were easy enough to get. They went to work on her. He’d stopped a nurse hurrying past him in the hallway. She’d held a metal bowl grim at the bottom with blood and bits of bone.
Is she alive?
She is for now. She’s hanging in there.
She needs to make it. Do you understand me?
I’m sure she wants to come back to you as much as you want it. I know you’re worried. But love is medicine, Mr. Haig. I believe it. Hold on to that. Have faith.
You’re not getting it—
Ow. You’re hurting my arm.
She needs to wake up long enough to talk.
We’re doing our best, Mr. Haig.
Then let’s hope that’s good enough. Now, take that shit back into the room. I’ll bring you some bags. I will personally take care of whatever needs to be disposed of. We’re clear?
Absolutely.
And Marcelline survived long enough to shine him on, get strong, and steal his fucking car.
She’d vanished with a thoroughness that could only have been professionally mediated. Or else she’d died before she could slip up. He would have found her if she’d made a mistake.
He got the car back, eventually, but it never felt the same.
Owen couldn’t remember the last time any of the Anningers had specifically brought up the lost money or this particular void in their art collection, but he also couldn’t remember the last time a Do you think you can handle this? sneer wasn’t attached to everything they asked of him.
Now, after years of looking and nothing but dead ends to show for it, the painting was on the wall in that video of a little girl kicking some shithead in the face. Charlie had played it for him three times.
Over the intervening four years, he’d read everything he could find about the painting. He had seen it over and over in articles, and, of course, once briefly in real life. The one in the video could have been a print, but why bother? Who would? It was nothing special to look at, by a guy no one had ever heard of, a half curiosity that it was even taken in the first place.
But it was the first clue he’d had to Marcelline in years—through an accident, by the pestering of a ditzy woman who was all too happy to be out of whatever hidey-hole she called home.
The last place you looked wasn’t ever the end of anything. Found was always a beginning, whether it was your car keys or a lost art treasure. Find it and you start the thing you’d been kept from.
When they landed, Owen convinced Charlie to have a drink with him. It turned into two and a half glassfuls as she chirped and giggled and flattered him until he had to fuck her against the wall of a private room nestled away in the labyrinth of the VIP lounge. She seemed unhurtable, though he tried a little, driving up and into her with a force that knocked her head against the doorframe.
She was flustered and glowing when he was done, chewing the corner off a nervous smile as he zipped up. She was unfathomable, delighted again, with her unmentioned wedding ring and her pristine luggage and her newly mussed hair. He saw the approving up-and-down glance she gave to her reflection in the long mirror on the wall.
Owen meant to walk away without a word, one last dig to make it sting, but she was between him and the door. Of course she was.
Before he could stop her, she took his face in her hands and kissed him, sweetly, her elemental thrill tingling against his lips. He stood, stunned stupid. She pulled out of the kiss first and smiled into his face.
She sighed, a short, happy sound, and patted his charcoal lapels. Charlie was finally out of noise. She took up the handle on her roller bag and walked away.
The clip of her heels faded into the next surge of airport crowd and Owen was finally alone. Confused, but just slightly infected by her excitement, if not exactly kindly so, he flexed his wrists to settle his shirt cuffs and headed toward the parking deck, to find the car he used to love.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
Nothing could have stretched an already desperate run of hours into an impossible grind like trying to get Miss June through her day. It should have been good—a cheerful, lucid granny and pretty weather. But Emma wanted to be anywhere else.
She tucked June into her recliner with her two blankets, three pillows, and tea, diluted just right. Emma switched on the television to a roundtable gossip show.
She wanted to be alone, to think. To rewatch the video. To decide what to do about it.
“Emma!”
She pulled back from her deep drift. “Yes?”
“You worried me, honey. You’re a million miles away. I called you. It’s like you didn’t hear me. I thought I’d died and was the last to know it.” June’s blue eyes sparkled in humor that disguised the slight tinge of the actual fear of confusion.
“I’m sorry! You called me?” Emma looked down at the phone in her hands.
“Called your name, for goodness’ sake.”
• • •
Marcelline Gossard had been answering to the name Emma O’Connor for nearly four years. She’d left her real name behind, shedding it unknowingly at first, in Owen Haig’s apartment. He’d made a magic trick of Marcelline Gossard. Her coworkers had seen her leave for the day. A few people, all now dead or fled, had seen her at the secret meeting to sell the Flinck.
Then poof. She vanished. First, from her own train of thought.
The first time she woke up in his spare room, not that she recognized it as such, it was like clawing up through miles of crumbling darkness that dragged against every gain she made toward thinking. She’d swim up, pulling and fighting to hold on to an idea or even a question. She’d get as far as the wall of pain, then slip back to sleep before she could make sense of anything. She slid so deep that she hadn’t been dreaming. She couldn’t swear that she’d even been breathing except that she was still alive to wonder about it. She was just gone, unplugged, then plugged back in for rebooting. Over and over.
She was there for nine days, with the first two only accounted for by working backward on a calendar. Then nearly three days of the molasses swimming.
When she saw Owen for the first time, she thought she might finally be dreaming. Or possibly dead. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. Marcelline searched her catalog of impressions of him and realized that she could never have pictured him in anything but a dark suit, buttoning and unbuttoning the jacket when he sat down or stood up—smooth, graceful, as automatic as a machine.
A rippling soft crewneck on Owen Haig was all wrong. He had his costume like a paint job, as if he hung himself up in it every night and shrugged free of the hanger each morning, already set for business when he hit the floor. She could imagine him shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie, but that was about it. She slid her jaw sideways for a bolt of pain to test reality, just to be sure.
It was real.
And he was real.
He was there in the room with her and he didn’t always wear suits, and he had, apparently, given her a lot more thought over the time they’d known each other than she’d ever given him. She tried to make his having saved her life stay up top of the growing list of things that were on her mind.
Everything came back into focus. Gains were made by the hour and the day. The pain became understandable, and thereby bearable. She rediscovered her voice and a way to talk through
a mouth that didn’t move right. She found that she could now remember, from one sleep to the next, where she was and what this was all about. But she wasn’t inclined to show her progress. Owen was kind, almost sappy, when she was weak and aching, but he sharpened as she did. He had a lot of questions about what had happened. She had a lot of questions about what was happening.
Her phone was gone. The clothes she’d been wearing, too. She didn’t have any shoes. He took the medicines out of the room after dosing her, but left her bottles of water to drink.
She had doctors and nurses to tend the damage to her face and neck, but Owen wouldn’t let her have a mirror. She burrowed into the bed, deliciously piled in softness and warmth, when the painkillers kicked in. The curtains kept out the light, so she could rest and heal. But it took hours, not days, to realize that the room was actually a well-appointed cell.
She’d asked for her phone, any phone, every time a nurse or doctor or the timid housekeeper came into the room. And every time, they’d avert their eyes and say that she’d need to talk to Mr. Haig about that.
When she did, Owen, in a tone with no inflection, had asked her if she’d be willing to call her partner. He obviously expected her to say no. He didn’t mind showing that the question was a prod. He watched her for a squirm. Her heart revved in her chest.
“He’s not my partner, Owen. I swear. I only met him a few days ago. He wouldn’t talk on the phone at all. I don’t even have a number for him.”
“Hmmmm. That’s a shame. But okay. There’s no reason for you to have the phone, then. But you can have the battery.”
He slid the silver-and-black square onto the bedside table.
Even the cell signal of Marcelline Gossard was gone. No one would find her that way.
Over the first days, the situation sketched in. Jonathan had taken the painting and the money in the interrupted sale. That was only known “in-house,” as Owen put it. The two people who came with Owen were dead. That was also being kept private. Marcelline Gossard had been officially reported missing by her family. Owen said her picture had made the news, but the nurse had gone pale and shut her down when she’d tried to plead with her to get a message out.