CHAPTER 9 #2
I know it is in the pocket because I always put it there before bed and I went to bed Sunday night and never came back, and the men with the scar at the upper lip do not steal keys, only photographs and pencils.
The peacoat hangs the way a peacoat hangs when the body that wore it is in a building two miles away and the body is not coming back tonight.
The phone in my hand rings.
"Eliza."
"Cora."
"Eliza, what the entire fuck."
"I know."
"There is a man named Vasquez sitting in the kitchen of this apartment and a woman named Rye who says she is going to make me eggs and there is a Sig Sauer on the table beside the salt grinder.
The salt grinder, Eliza. They have the salt out.
They are making eggs. I am sitting on a couch that I think is from West Elm.
I have been kidnapped by people with a kitchen pepper grinder. "
"They have not kidnapped you. They are sitting with you. They will not be in the apartment with you all night. By morning you will have one woman in the next-door apartment, with a key, and you will be able to lock your door. You can lock your door right now. They will respect it."
"Eliza."
"I know."
"Eliza, I want you to listen to me with your forensic ears.
I do not want to call my mother and I do not want to call my firm and I do not want to call the police, because Vasquez told me, courteously, that the police would not be a great idea right now, and because that is the kind of thing that men with handguns say to women who have been kidnapped, but I will be straight with you and tell you I believed him.
So I am going to ask you one question and you are going to answer it. Are you in trouble."
"Yes."
"Bad trouble."
"Yes."
"Like, the SEC kind."
"No."
"Like, the worse kind."
"Yes."
She takes a long breath out. I can hear her doing the thing she does, the open-mouth slow exhale, the same one I have heard her do on the stoop of her grandmother's house in Pittsburgh after a funeral and in the corridor outside Marcus Hale's office before a deposition and once in a bathroom stall at a firm holiday party after a partner had said something that should have cost him his job and would not.
"Eliza," she says. "If I stay in this apartment, am I safe."
"Yes."
"If I do not stay in this apartment, am I safe."
"No."
"All right. All right. All right. Eliza."
"I love you, Cora."
"I love you back. I am furious with you. I love you back. Eliza."
"I will tell you everything when I can. I owe you that. I cannot tell you now. I am going to ask you a thing and I am going to ask it the way I ask the partners. Will you trust me."
"Eliza Quinn, I have trusted you since you were a sophomore who came back from your mother's funeral and wrote out a forensic ledger of the hospital chart on yellow legal in my dorm room for three weeks.
I am not going to stop trusting you tonight because someone has put a pepper grinder on a Vasquez table.
Yes. I trust you. Stay where you are. Do not come for me.
I will sit on this West Elm couch until somebody tells me I can sit somewhere else.
I am going to make Vasquez tell me his real name by sunrise. "
"His real name is Vasquez."
"Eliza."
"Cora. Stay where they put you. Please. I am serious."
"Okay. Okay. Okay. Eliza. Okay."
She hangs up.
Henrik holds out his hand, palm up, for the cordless.
I give it to him. He sets it back in the cradle.
He holds out his hand again, the same palm-up gesture, for the burner.
I take the burner out of the pocket of my trousers, where I have been holding it like a brass pencil.
I lay it in his palm. He pulls the SIM out with one short jerk, snaps the plastic case in half across the corner of the steel desk, and drops both halves into a small tactical-grade burn-bin under the monitor bank.
There is a soft hiss as the bin's thermal element converts the plastic to a smell of polymer and heat.
"Ma'am," he says. "Mr. Vance is in the library."
I go.
Julian is at the writing desk. Volume Eight is closed under his right hand the way it was yesterday morning.
His right boot is on the worn spot of the Tabriz.
The lamp on the desk is the green-shaded library lamp and it throws his pale-fair face in two halves, the right half lit, the left half in the warm dark of the room.
He looks up when I come through the door.
"Quinn."
"Vance. " I do not sit. "She is in a safe apartment. She knows nothing yet. She trusts me. I owe her the truth one day. Not yet."
"Not yet. Agreed."
"Henrik destroyed the burner."
"Yes."
"My door is open at Hawthorne. The lamp is broken.
The cushion is pulled. The brass pencil is gone.
The peacoat is on the hook the way it would be on the hook if someone had pushed past it.
The right shoulder lower than the left. The lining of the left lapel folded back wrong. The key in the inside pocket."
"Yes."
"You told me yesterday you would not lie to me. Tonight is the night."
"Tonight I will see you fed."
"Tonight you will see me fed. From a steel cup. Donor blood. No live feeding. You will sit on the chair against the cold tile. You will not approach. You will not hand me anything. You will leave when you cannot watch any more. Helene will be in the room. The brass surgical lamp will be on."
"All right."
"All right. " He looks at me for one long beat. He says, low, "Quinn. I am sorry about the peacoat."
I do not know how to answer that. I do not try.
I leave the library at oh-five-hundred and I walk the corridor back to the guest suite and I close the door behind me and then, after a beat, I open it again to six inches.
The corridor light returns to the cream wall above the four-poster of the guest bed for what I am beginning to understand is the last time.
Helene at oh-nine-hundred is exactly Helene at oh-nine-hundred.
The clinic on floor forty-two is warm and quiet and smells faintly of clean linen and the eucalyptus bath salts she keeps in a small glass jar by the sink.
She wears nurse's whites under a cream cardigan.
The cobalt enamel pin is at her right collar, a small round of cobalt-glass with a gold rim, and the raked light off the brass surgical lamp catches the gold rim once a minute and throws a small bright disc onto the cardigan sleeve.
She takes my blood pressure (one-eighteen over seventy-two; she nods); my pulse (sixty-eight; she nods); my temperature with a thin glass thermometer she draws from a steel beaker on her tray (ninety-seven point nine — signorina, you are a little cold from the morning, she says, and wraps a fleece blanket around my shoulders and tucks it at my throat with the same maternal economy she would have used in 1924 at a Naples maternity ward, and I feel ridiculous and warmed).
She draws three vials of blood from the vein at the inside of my left elbow with an eighteen-gauge needle.
She labels each vial in a small precise hand: Quinn E.
with the date in dd/mm/yyyy. She runs the hematocrit on a small spinner at her elbow.
The dial goes around for ten minutes. She reads it. She writes on the chart.
"Forty-one percent," she says. "Bene. High-normal.
Hemoglobin thirteen-eight. Iron storage excellent.
Signorina, you are a healthy young woman.
If Mr. Vance feeds from you in the future, your hematocrit will drop by three percent at most. I will not allow a second feeding within seven days if it drops more. Capito?"
"Capito," I say.
She smiles. "You speak no Italian."
"None. I am parsing by context. I have heard capito twice."
"You are quick, signorina."
"I am an auditor."
"Yes. " She caps my arm with a small white cotton pad and a strip of paper tape. "An auditor with a hematocrit of forty-one and a Tabriz that has been read by the right person. Bene."
I do not ask her what she means by the second half of that sentence.
I let her tuck the fleece blanket around my shoulders.
She gives me hot tea in a small white cup.
I drink it. She sits opposite me on a stool and watches me drink it and does not speak.
When I am finished she takes the cup. She says: "Tonight, twenty-one hundred.
You will sit on that chair. " She points to a wooden ladder-back chair against the cold tile wall, six feet from the surgical leather chair where, I now understand, Julian will be.
"You will not move from the chair. If you must move, you will move out of the room. You will not approach Mr. Vance during a feeding. Capito."
"Capito."
"Brava."
I go up to the penthouse. The day moves the way the day moves when one is waiting for nine in the evening.
I sit in my converted vault study, which is not yet a study because the Bloomberg terminal does not arrive until Wednesday morning per the proposal Adrienne pushed across the kitchen island yesterday, but which is a vault with two empty bookshelves and a steel safe whose combination I do not yet know.
I write notes on a yellow legal pad with a borrowed Mont Blanc rollerball.
I write headers: Cora. Hartwell. Peacoat.
Pencil. Konstantin. Under Peacoat I write: right shoulder pulled lower than the left; left lapel folded back wrong; brass key in inside pocket.
I do not yet know why I am writing it. I have a forensic intuition that the peacoat will matter — the way one of my partners' clients had a small mole on his earlobe that mattered in a deposition six months later because the mole was the thing the witness remembered.
Coats remember. Coats remember the bodies that wore them. Coats remember the bodies that pushed past them. I underline brass key.