CHAPTER 4 #2
I pick up the leather memo cover. The brass pencil is in my hair.
I reach to the back of my skull and slide it out and the chestnut weight of my hair drops to my shoulders.
I put the pencil in the right pocket of my wool trousers.
The sentence he has said about it is true, which means he has had a parabolic of me for longer than four minutes.
I do not yet have time to think about that.
The USB-C is already against my left ribs.
I put the strap of the leather case over my shoulder. I tuck the memo cover under my left arm. I walk to the door.
He has, in fact, occupied the threshold. He steps aside at the last second. The cold off him is not the cold of someone who has stepped in from the rain. It is the cold of cathedral granite at the end of February. I do not let it on my face.
The bullpen is silent when I cross it. Pippa is standing at her desk with a stack of print-outs in her hand — the 1948 manifests, the ECPE pulls, exactly what I asked for, walked-not-emailed. Her eyes get wide.
I stop at the corner of her desk. Julian stops a half-pace behind me. I do not look at him.
"Pip."
"Yes, boss."
"Whatever happens after I leave this room — and something is happening — do not pull any more nineteen-forty-eight data without Adrienne Roux's hand on the keyboard with you. Not Atticus's. Not Hawkes's. Not anyone. Adrienne. Promise me."
"Adrienne. I promise."
"Keep the prints in your bag, not on the floor."
She bends; she scoops; she clutches them to her sweater. Mismatched socks. One brown, one cobalt. She is twenty-six years old.
"Quinn — "
"I will see you, Pip."
I do not know whether that is true. I say it because I owe her the sentence.
I walk past her desk. Julian is a half-pace behind. The bullpen door swings shut, and the corridor of floor twenty-eight closes around us, and we move down it together to the southwest wall where the brushed-steel elevator is.
He says, low, to my ear:
"Walk out beside me as if I have been waiting for you, which I have. If you scream the doorman will not hear you. He has been mine since 1981. Walk."
I walk.
He sets his palm flat against the biometric panel; he leans his forehead a quarter-inch toward the small black eye of the retina reader. The door slides open without a sound. Henrik is inside the elevator, black tactical suit, a dark wool overcoat folded over one arm. He nods at me.
"Ma'am."
"Henrik."
I step in. Julian steps in. The doors close behind us.
The elevator rises without a sound. The floor display ticks in pale blue: 28, 29, 30.
We stop at 35. The doors open onto a teak-panelled corridor I do not yet know the name of.
Adrienne Roux steps in. Black pearls at her throat.
Her face for me is professional and almost-amused, which is how she looks when something has gone badly and she is not yet going to say so.
"Tiens, Ms. Quinn. We will get you settled."
"Adrienne."
"There is dry clothing in the guest suite. The hem of your trousers — pardon — is rain. We will manage it. Henrik."
"Ma'am," Henrik says.
The doors close. The elevator rises. There is no 13 in the display; the building skips it. The display reads 45.
Just before it opens, I look down through the glass back of the cab.
The rain is heavier again. The granite plaza is wet to a sheen, and the doormen of two adjacent towers are out under their black parasols, holding the curbside for cabs that are not coming, and below me the rain-streaked granite face of the Vance Tower runs slick at the street level, and the elevator doors close on the rain-streaked granite tower at street level at sixteen-hundred sharp.
The doors open on the foyer of the penthouse.
---
Black granite floor. White marble walls. A single walnut bench. The biometric panel by the elevator with no call button on this side either.
Adrienne steps out first. Henrik gestures me forward with the smallest motion of his fingertips — the hand that is not on the overcoat. I step out.
Julian's knuckle finds the inside of my left wrist as I pass him.
It is not a grip. It is not a tug. It is the brush of one bent finger against the chemical-burn scar at the inside of my left wrist, the dime-sized old place from a sulfuric-acid flask that cracked when I was twenty-three — a place even my mother did not touch deliberately, because I did not let her.
He cannot know I do not let people touch it there.
He touches it anyway, once, while taking my leather case from my left hand and shouldering it over his own shoulder.
He does not look at me.
The knuckle moves away.
The temperature where it was registers, for a half-second, as a small private weather.
I do not let my face show.
He says: "Adrienne will give you the rules."
"Thank you," I say.
He turns and is gone into the corridor on the right with my laptop on his shoulder. The black granite of the foyer floor receives his footfall without the sound a footfall is supposed to make.
Adrienne takes me on a fifteen-minute walk.
The Great Room with its monumental gas fireplace in the southeast corner; the worn Tabriz rug; the two oxblood leather sofas facing the harbor.
The kitchen with the Lacanche range and the brass pot rack and the Carrara island.
The dining room behind a mahogany pocket door.
The library — and here she pauses for one beat, a beat she does not pause anywhere else — three walls of mahogany shelving, the green-shaded lamp over the writing desk, the 1740s reading chair under it.
The greenhouse stair rising in the northwest corner. She names the rooms I will not enter: the master bedroom; the master bath; the closet; the room belonging to Dr. Marchetti.
She shows me the kitchen pantry, a square panel on the back wall.
"Henrik installed this in 2019. A retractable steel ladder for emergency descent. It is not for use."
Henrik, behind us, says: "Ma'am."
She does not show me the wall behind the brushed-steel column in the kitchen.