CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER
FOR MONTHS AFTERWARD NASH ACCOMPANIED Masuyo to Kowloon Park twice a week. And each time she had him buy her ice cream. She also went to the bathroom during each trip and then left the container on the same bench, as always. It was as though she was defying him to question her actions.
However, Nash held his tongue and just watched.
On the third time this happened, he was able to walk slowly enough behind her to see a young, slim man dressed in a dark suit rush up from somewhere and take the container off the bench.
On the fourth time, Nash managed to surreptitiously snap a picture of him with his phone.
When he got back to his apartment he looked at the image. The man resembled a million other youths in Hong Kong.
Nash enlarged the photo as much as possible to examine the ice cream container. When he got it to its highest magnification, he thought he could see an edge of a piece of paper sticking up from the napkin that had been wound around the outside of the container.
Okay, she goes into the restroom with the container, writes her message, hides it behind the napkin, and leaves it on the bench for this guy to retrieve.
The only problem was, whom did Masuyo know to send messages to? She’d been in prison in another country for years. It made no sense at all unless it was someone from her past who now resided in Hong Kong.
* * *
A few days later Nash got a message from Steers. She wanted to meet. He had seen very little of her recently.
He took out his gun, checked that a round was in the chamber, and rode up to her penthouse, accompanied by a member of her protection team. The man looked at Nash like he was a piece of bird shit that had fallen on the floor of the elevator.
When the doors opened, the man said, “Get off, now.”
“Getting off now,” Nash shot back. He looked at the man as the doors closed.
The look on the man’s face was clear. He wanted to kill Nash.
That’s okay, the feeling’s mutual. And after I kill your boss, I’ll do you next.
He turned back around to find one of Steers’s female attendants standing there. Then he realized he was not on the penthouse floor.
“This way, Mr. Hope,” she said, her gaze downcast.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“This way, please.”
He followed her down a hall, and she stopped at a large, intricately carved wooden door.
The attendant knocked, and Nash could hear Steers say to come in. The attendant opened the door, bowed, motioned Nash through, and closed the door after him.
Nash looked around and felt like he was in a top-tier museum, with walls so tall he knew two floors of the building had been combined to created the extra height.
The windows were all covered with shades to prevent sunlight coming in.
The artwork hanging on the walls ranged from Renaissance to Baroque periods to more abstract Jackson Pollock–style themes.
Nash knew this because his wife, Judith, had minored in art history in college.
In helping her to study for exams he had learned a fair bit about that world.
Steers was standing near the far wall. She was dressed, as always, in black. Her hair hung straight down. She was not looking at Nash, but at a massive painting hanging in front of her.
“You asked to see me?” said Nash stiffly.
After finding Maggie’s belongings in the box, Nash was finding it hard to stay civil in front of the woman.
He eyed a small statuette on a pedestal that he could use to bludgeon her.
That might be better than his noisy gun, actually.
It would give him and Thura time to make a run for it. He edged closer to it.
She turned to him and his look must have made her curious because she said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“My mother is treating you well?”
“No complaints.”
“She can be. . .difficult.”
“It’s all good,” he replied in a tight voice.
She cocked her head, clearly still perplexed by his brusque manner.
Not wanting her to focus on this he looked around and said, “I feel like I’m at the Met or the Louvre.”
“Have you been to those places?”
“Guarding clients, yes,” he lied, but he had gone to those places as a tourist.
“Do you enjoy art?”
“I know what I like.” While he recognized many of the paintings on the wall he didn’t want to say so, because Steers might know that his wife knew about art, and she might eventually make the connection despite his vastly altered physical appearance.
He pointed at a foreboding painting of a group of men in seventeenth-century garb gathered around a table.
“Most people would know that’s a Rembrandt.
And next to it, I think, is a Warhol,” he added, indicating a silkscreened print depicting stacked Brillo boxes.
He stopped and looked at one painting consisting of colorful loops and polka dots. “But I don’t know that artist.”
“Yayoi Kusama. She is Japanese. She’s now very old, but still at work, I believe.”
He studied her, putting aside for the moment his plan to kill the woman. “Hiroko told me about your artwork, and that you have a studio here. I saw the drawings you did of her. They were really good.”
Steers looked embarrassed by his praise. “It allows me time. . .away from other things.”
Also in her expression he saw, for the first time, an infinite.
. .sadness was the word he was looking for.
It was actually quite startling to him because the woman always seemed to be in steadfast control of her emotions.
He glanced once more at the statuette. Yet now Nash reasoned that it would be unfair to Thura for Nash to kill Steers and then force Thura to flee with him as well, with the most likely result that both men would be killed by Steers’s guards.
Damn.
Nash refocused and then gazed at the painting she was standing in front of.
It was quite large in scope, a full fifteen-by-fifteen feet, he estimated.
It was literally bursting with shapes, images, colors, an amalgamation of concentrated power and fluid whimsy, but somehow still compellingly disciplined in its composition and execution.
“I don’t know that artist, either,” he said.
She turned once more to look at it. “Julie Mehretu. She’s Ethiopian. I first saw her work at an exhibit in Australia. I was so moved by the collection and watching the video of her life, what inspired her, the meanings behind what she does, that I bought this piece when it became available.”
As Nash studied the work he said, “It’s. . .hypnotic.”
“Yes, I find it so. Quite powerful and moving despite its seeming subtleties.”
Curious, he drew closer. “What impressed you the most about her work?”
In a wistful tone Steers said, “She. . .paints in the abstract, as do many other accomplished artists, but she does so with great clarity, if that makes sense. Mixed mediums, hand drawings, silk screening, air brushing, so much complexity, so many layers to what she has created. She said that her work was meant to defy description, or pigeonholing or labeling. But what she was really talking about, I think, was not so much her work, as. . .people, the individual that is embodied in all artwork because it is the individual that creates and also inspires the art. She seems repelled by the universal habit of reducing us to bodies, or skin, or faith, or wealth, or occupation, or where we live, or our language. She refuses to accept that as an identity for others because I believe she thinks individuality transcends such triviality. She draws inspiration from Chinese ink paintings as well as literature, Japanese manga, music, so many subjects that she brings to bear to create. . .this.” She motioned to the painting as Nash moved closer to her.
Despite his guilt over probably condemning Thura to death if he killed Steers, Nash’s hand moved a few inches closer to the statuette.
“What do you see in it, Mr. Hope?”
He glanced at her and thought that she had put his daughter in a little box in a crummy room of this building. Just grab the statuette and kill her, Nash. Do it now. But he had never had such an internal fight as he was having right now.
“I see. . .possibilities.”
“What sort of possibilities?”
“I agree that people wrongly label others all the time. They do so based on what we look like, as you just said.” He ran his hand over himself. “For instance, what do you see when you look at me?”
She slowly turned to face him.
He smiled. “Muscles, tats, bald head, gun. Easy to label, right?”
Surprisingly, she shook her head. “No, Mr. Hope, not so easy. As you correctly pointed out before, I see you as an enigma. I still do. But I am figuring some things out.”
“Like what?” He wasn’t asking to be polite; he wanted to know, for many reasons, most of all his survival.
“You are logical, calm, secure in your abilities, not quick to judgment. But above all else, I believe you are one thing. And it is perhaps an incongruous element in contrast to your physical appearance, which was Mehretu’s whole point.”
“Really, what’s that?”
She reached out and touched his arm before quickly pulling it back.
“I’ve seen how you interact with other people: Thura, Hirokosan, my various attendants, even my mother. You are kind, Mr. Hope. No, you are more than that. You are empathetic. Which is the best of all human attributes, because it leads to all the other goodness of which human beings are capable.”
She looked away, and Nash thought he saw a blush creeping to her cheeks.
“I suppose you find such lofty words starkly hypocritical coming from someone like me,” she said.
“Someone like you?”
She looked up at him and her expression grew defiant. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“Hiroko-san thinks that you are misjudged.”
A sad smile now spread over Steers’s features. “Hiroko-san is biased in my favor. She believes I can do no wrong. That I am perfect.” Her smile faded. “But no one is perfect, least of all me. I am as far from perfect as it is possible to be, in fact.”
Nash was growing more and more confused by her words. Where had the global criminal who killed with ease gone to? He forgot about murdering the woman.
“What do you see when you look at me, Mr. Hope?” she said abruptly.
He didn’t answer right away. Not because he feared his answer would upset her. But because he wanted to figure out what he actually thought.
“I might have answered your question differently before our meeting today, Ms. Steers. But I see someone who would have. . .preferred a different life than the one she has. And perhaps that is the ‘possibility’ that I spoke of before.”
Steers held his gaze for a long moment before she glanced back at the Mehretu piece. He thought he glimpsed a tear sliding down her cheek. She made no move to brush it away.
“Am I wrong?” he asked.
“On the contrary, your perspicacity does you justice. But why would your answer have been different before today?”
He looked around. “Because I had not seen this room yet and your interest in art. It. . .provides a facet I had not known of you before. Like Mehretu’s work, people have many different layers and they do not always easily blend together.
And sometimes it might seem that more than one person resides in a single body. ”
And don’t I know that? added Nash to himself.
She now looked at him for a long time and he really could not read her expression.
He thought, Did I go too far? Did I say something I shouldn’t have?
“I wish to go to dinner tonight, Mr. Hope. You will accompany me.”
“And not your usual protection detail?”
“You are coming as my guest. Be ready to leave at nine. Thank you.”
She turned and left the room, leaving Nash alone with priceless paintings and his own terribly conflicted thoughts. He glanced at the statuette, his mind now on the box in the basement that held some of his daughter’s belongings.
You’re a coward, Nash. With all your muscles and fighting skills, and desire to avenge your daughter. Just a fucking coward.