CHAPTER 5 #3
Not at my eyes. At a place an inch lower and an inch to the side of my eyes — the corner of my jaw on the left side, the place where a fawn-colored freckle sits between the line of the jaw and the line of the ear.
I know the freckle is there. I know the freckle has been there for twenty-nine years.
I know nobody has ever taken the trouble to look at that millimeter of skin in a public room with my fork halfway to my mouth.
The look is the temperature drop. The same one from the boardroom Tuesday at fourteen hundred.
The same one from the Greybar yesterday — no, the day before yesterday — at fourteen-thirty.
I do not let my face register. I lower the fork.
I lift it again. I put the fish in my mouth and I chew and I taste capers and butter and salt and I do not look at him.
He stops looking at me before Adrienne notices.
I finish the fish.
Adrienne lifts her glass. "Mr. Vance," she says, "the schedule will hold."
"The schedule will hold," Julian agrees.
I drink water, not wine. I will keep my hematocrit clear of any complications until I have been told what hematocrit means in this house.
Dinner ends at twenty-thirty. I thank Adrienne. I nod at Henrik. I say good night to Julian. He says, "Good night, Ms. Quinn," and the Ms. Quinn is exactly correct in front of his CFO and his security chief and the staff who clear the plates, and I am grateful for the rigor.
I walk back to the guest suite alone.
The shades in the master bedroom across the hall came down at seventeen hundred against the early winter dusk; I had heard the hum then too, a longer one for the heavier curtain that closes the larger windows.
The shades in my guest suite are not yet down — the guest-room glass is allowed normal residential dusk, a courtesy I understand only as I notice the difference.
From the writing desk by the small window I watch the harbor go from gray to black.
I watch the lights of a freighter cross the channel mouth. I watch the foghorn sound at the quarter hour but I cannot hear it through the glass; it is a vibration in the bones of the building and not a sound.
It is nineteen-thirty. The penthouse is quiet enough that I can hear the brass radiator under the library window two rooms away begin its tin-tin-tin against the cold.
The library is across the foyer. The library has Julian in it.
I have known this since dinner ended; he turned left at the dining room threshold instead of right, which puts him at the writing desk under the green-shaded lamp with the twelve leather-bound ledgers he has not yet shown me.
I want to know what he is reading.
I let the thought sit on the desk in front of me like a paperweight.
I do not pick it up. I do not put it away.
I look at it. I think: that is a complicating thought, Quinn, and you are going to file it and not look at it again tonight.
I file it. I open the leather memo cover.
I take out the brass pencil. I write in my own shorthand, on a clean page: NDA executed.
Clause 4(b) — mortal regulators — confirmed deliberate language; not error; query reserved for tomorrow.
Engagement extension executed; Vance signed.
Saber on outer-office wall — 1689 Spanish naval, Toledo cup-hilt, re-temper, carried not decorative.
Portrait inner office — Sargent oil, 1530s gown, freckled young woman, his — query reserved for tomorrow.
Coffee preparation pre-stocked — they have been watching me longer than four days.
I underline the last sentence. I do not let it scare me on the page. I will let it scare me later.
I close the memo cover.
I undress one button at a time, fold the wool trousers across the back of the chair, the silk blouse onto the writing desk.
I rinse my mouth in the small bath. I get under the duvet of the guest-suite four-poster.
The mattress, under the small of my back, has the USB-C stick where I left it.
I leave it. The bedside lamp is on. The pencil cap is in my hand. On. Off. On. Off.
Outside the small window the harbor is full dark.
Across the hall, on the other side of the cold partition, a man who is five hundred and nine years old is sitting at a writing desk under a green-shaded library lamp. He is writing in volume nine of a set of twelve leather-bound ledgers. He has not been audited in five centuries. I am the auditor.
I have signed the NDA that does not bind me against mortal regulators, and I have signed the engagement extension that keeps my license clean, and I have heard the master-bedroom blackout shades descend at 04:51 against an astronomical sunrise that responds to a sky he cannot survive in, and he has looked at the freckle at the corner of my jaw across a Pomerol and a piece of cod with the patience of a man who has been deciding when to move for longer than my country has existed.
I do not say vampire aloud.
I turn the cap of the brass pencil one more time. On. Off.
I think: in the morning.
I think: in the morning.
I turn out the bedside lamp at twenty-two hundred. I sleep. The penthouse hums around me. Somewhere across the hall, the man who has not been audited in five centuries reads at his library desk.