Chapter 19
Nineteen
Mark
My footsteps echo on the wooden floor in a quiet corner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum as I wait for Tristan to pick up the phone.
I’m doing my best to look casual, like any other besuited asshole who thinks a museum is just another place to do business, but I’m not feeling casual at all.
I’m feeling like I want to drive to the airport and fly to Montreal and handcuff Tristan’s wrist to mine.
“Hello?” comes Tristan’s voice, and it’s tired, so fucking tired, and I just want to hug him. I want to bring him home and feed him and then make him lie down in bed and sleep until he can’t sleep anymore.
“Tristan, it’s me. Hugo just called. I’m so sorry that I didn’t call you earlier. I didn’t know what had happened, and if I’d known, I would have?—”
A short breath from Tristan, like a huff. “You would have what, Mr. Trevena? Come up here? Brought me back to Lyonesse as soon as the police were done questioning me?”
It doesn’t bother me to be called Mr. Trevena rather than Mark —I enjoy Tristan’s little formalities—but it does bother me in that tone of voice.
A reminder of the distance between us. The distance I made between us.
“I don’t know what I would have done,” I admit. “But at the very least I would have checked on you faster. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Hugo said you weren’t, but I know how proud you are.”
“Oh, I’m proud? Remember when you tore your stitches open after Drobny’s attack because you were too proud to ask for help moving things around? It’s not right to throw stones, sir.”
I remember tearing my stitches open. Vividly. Although it wasn’t for pride.
“Please, Tristan. At least assuage my fears. I promise Hugo isn’t going to think less of you for a sprained ankle or a fractured rib.”
A pause. “I’m not hurt.”
I rub at my forehead as I pace in the empty room. The relief is honey-thick and sweet. “Good. Good. And Isabella, she’s okay? Hugo said her attacker got as far as tying her up.”
“He wasn’t in there long, we think,” Tristan answers wearily.
“Maybe ten minutes at the most. I think almost everyone at Armorica is loyal to a fault, but there was a new doorman… Jovian was able to get to him, pay him enough to make the fake session and then create a distraction outside. Of course, the concierge and Isabella’s guard thought they were making the club safer by running out to check.
Jovian slipped in during the chaos and attacked Isabella while she cleaned up after her last client. ”
I don’t reply right away, and Tristan snorts.
“You’re very loud with the things you don’t say.”
“That’s not true.”
“But you think Hugo and Kayden are too trusting.”
“It’s an ailment common to trustworthy people that they assume everyone else is trustworthy too. Maybe you can help them peel those assumptions out of their procedures going forward.”
“Maybe. I can’t be accused of assuming the people around me are trustworthy these days,” says Tristan, and I hate the way he sounds right now. Cynical and alone.
My fault. I did that to him.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask.
“I’m unhappy with how okay I am, but yes, I’m okay. I don’t—” He swallows. “It was easier than it was at Lyonesse. And I don’t think it should be. I don’t know.”
He’s too tender for this. It’s a stupid and foolish world that will take a prom king and send him to war. A hard and inflexible father who will drive his dragon-novel-reading son to R-Day at West Point and probably not even use the full ninety seconds to say goodbye.
In any fair and sensible universe, someone like Tristan would have become an artist or a teacher or a farmer. He would never have needed a taxonomy for killing—fair, unfair, in self-defense, in the defense of someone else. He would have never met me.
In that universe right now, he would be singing to baby lambs and a passel of kids and probably to the hills and trees around him, because if anyone would be happy singing to some trees, it would be Tristan Thomas. If anyone was ever born to the plowshare and not to the sword…
But it never mattered. There is nothing fair or sensible about our universe, and he spent four years being crushed into the shape of a fighter and the next eight in the mud and smoke of war.
“You don’t need me to tell you that you couldn’t have done anything differently, but let me also say this: goodness is not a stable currency.
It’s exchanged on an open market with many others.
It’s negotiated, it’s bartered, it’s sold.
And if you have to sell a little bit of your goodness to make sure that an innocent woman keeps her eye or that a fellow soldier doesn’t assassinate an elected leader and her children, then I think it’s better to be on the market than to hoard your goodness like a talent buried in the earth. ”
Tristan doesn’t reply.
I wish I could see his face, but I’m calling from a cheap phone I bought outside a Metro station right now, and even a call to Canada has it practically spitting sparks in my hand.
And then the man I’m waiting for strolls into the room anyway.
“I need to go,” I tell Tristan, and the regret is a pinch in my throat. “I—I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Thank you,” he says woodenly. “Send my regards to Mrs. Trevena.”
A click before I can say anything else. Like I love you.
Like I made a mistake . Although there’s not much point to a lie like that. Do I feel guilty separating him and Isolde? Do I hate every minute he’s so far away from me? Yes and yes again, but would I do anything differently?
Of course not.
I put the phone in my coat pocket and walk over to my father-in-law, who’s standing in front of a three-piece wooden etching of Joan of Arc.
He’s wearing a three-piece suit, as he usually does, with a long wool coat and scarf, but despite his clothes being as crisp and unwrinkled as a shop mannequin’s on Savile Row, there’s an undeniable jitteriness to him.
“Mr. Trevena,” he says quickly and then looks behind us, as if to check that we’re alone.
I nod. “Mr. Laurence.”
“Thank you for meeting me,” he says. His eyes are darting around, lingering on the empty doorways into the room. “I know you’re busy, but it couldn’t wait.”
He’d said as much on the phone this morning when he’d told me that he’d booked a flight to London for the express purpose of discreetly laying over in DC. “Oh?”
“It’s not—it’s not ordinary business,” he explains. His face—always a severe one—is carved with lines when he turns back to me. “I think I’m being followed. And I think Cashel has something to do with it.”
This does arouse my interest, but I don’t give an outward show of it.
I have been extremely careful to keep my father-in-law ignorant of my motivations and the depth of my knowledge, especially as pertains to Isolde and Cashel.
And while Geoffrey Laurence has the distinction of being the person I hate the most whom I don’t also plan on killing, I think learning that your child murders people at the behest of an evil churchman should come from a father-daughter chat and not from a morally dubious son-in-law.
I’m old-fashioned like that, I guess.
“When Isolde’s mother died, the entirety of the Cashel family’s wealth and property were rolled into the family trust, with Isolde as the trust’s sole beneficiary,” Laurence continues.
“Mortimer had renounced all claim to the family’s money years ago when he took his vows, but he assumed the role of trustee.
I obviously insisted on becoming a co-trustee after Inis’s death, since I wanted to make sure things were done right.
I mean, what would Mortimer know about stewarding a trust?
He took his vow of poverty so seriously that Inis had to shove new socks in his bag whenever he’d visit. ”
That sounds like Cashel. His singular fusion of austerity and power. If his piscatory ring were made out of spent bullets rather than gold, he’d find it just as beautiful.
“He’s never shown a lick of interest in the trust, so I—well, I haven’t personally checked on it much in the last few years,” Laurence says, a ruddiness coming into his pale cheeks.
“It was delegated to someone below me. I glanced over the annual reports, made sure things were heading in the right direction, and moved on.”
“And now you’ve found something.”
He twists his hands together once. “Money has been siphoned off, little by little. Very carefully done, the way a banker would do it.”
“The way the person to whom you delegated the management of the trust did it?”
A jerky nod, and the flush in his cheeks is growing darker and splotchier now. “I’m not proud of this, Trevena. That it happened at my bank at all could be catastrophic, but that it happened to my own family is a…a violation.”
“How much money?” I ask. “Can you see where it went?”
“Millions over the last seven years. Less than ten, more than eight. The amounts were deducted as transaction fees or management fees and then promptly slid right out of Laurence Bank into a shell company. Which went into another shell company. And so on and so on until they eventually got to Armenia or Tajikistan or the Caymans and melted away. There were only two that our investigators were able to trace to their final destinations. One payment went to the tuition department at Stanford. The other went to a woman named Regina Springer.” He digs in his pocket and hands me a folded piece of paper.
I tuck it away in my own pocket to look at later.
“So you’d like me to look into it,” I say, not really asking, because I already know.
This was the nature of our agreement four years ago.
His daughter as surety for our continued services to each other.
“But why do you think that Cashel has something to do with it?”