Chapter 14
Break Point
An endless mahogany bar, bookcases, and wainscoting fringed the vast drawing room.
Dominating one wall was a huge pencil-and-watercolor portrait of the great Lebanese writer, calligraphed lines of poetry rendered in flowing black: YOUR PAIN IS THE brEAKING OF THE SHELL THAT ENCLOSES YOUR UNDERSTANDING.
Devine stood waiting behind the bar wearing a wrinkleless linen suit, comb marks in his fresh-showered hair, an exemplar of composure. His pallor was fine, his face snake-oil smooth. He didn’t look beat-up in the least. He might’ve just strolled in from a week at the spa.
Evan watched him. Closely.
Devine perched his hands on the bar. “May I offer you something?”
Beside the Kauffman Luxury Vintage, Evan’s favorite liquid on the planet, a fluted bottle of Chopin Family Reserve stood proudly on the rise of shelves.
The extra-rare young-potato vodka had been rested for two years in half-century-old Polish oak barrels.
Touch of earth, touch of sweetness, and a lingering, warm finish as smooth as a sleight of hand.
Evan pointed. “Neat. Chilled.”
From the neighboring barstool, Joey gave him a nervous look. Aside from the three of them, the drawing room was empty.
Evan said, “She’ll have an Aperol spritz.”
Joey’s eyebrows conveyed dismay but she kept her mouth shut. Two cold-air diffusers spun the scent of desert rose through the room. Rawlings caught Evan’s eye, gave a tiny nod, and withdrew.
Devine poured two fingers of Chopin into a chilled snifter. Then he fixed Joey’s drink in a balloon glass, showcasing the vibrant orange. Equal parts prosecco and Aperol, splash of soda water, large clear ice cubes.
“Aren’t you having anything?” Evan asked.
“I am,” Devine said, “the picture of temperance.” He reached beneath the bar, came up with a gleaming black humidor.
The lid lifted, emitting a breath of leather, leaf, and spice.
Withdrawing two Romeo y Julietas, he walked a long, long way to the bar’s service entrance at the end, exited, and huffed down into one of two facing leather armchairs.
Between them sat a low bar cart with a lace metal fringe, laden with smoking accoutrements.
Evan joined him, removing his label, moistening the tip, and opting for a wedge cut. He lit his cigar with a stick of cedar lining from a box which he ignited with a struck match.
Over at the bar, Joey watched breathlessly. She sipped her drink, her face contorting in a microexpression of disgust from the bitterness, and set it carefully back down.
Devine lit up from a triple-jet torch, drew in a puff, and leaned back, crossing his legs to expose a sockless ankle and the sleek tan sole of a size 7 saffiano-leather loafer. “Well?”
“I need to go look into something,” Evan said.
“The damsel in distress?”
“Yes.”
“The girl the girl saw.”
“Yes. But I can’t leave you here unsupervised.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. Or you wouldn’t have called me.”
Devine sipped at his cigar and settled back once more, thin arm dangling at his side, smoke wisping from the down-tilted cherry.
“Forgetting your Sun Tzu already? ‘Pretend arrogance and encourage inferiority.’” The red-and-gold label glinted.
“I’ve granted momentary control to you here at the estate.
” The faintest wobble modulated his voice, the first indication of internal pressure since his reemergence.
“What is it precisely that you are asking for?”
“Why did you call me, Devine?”
Luke sucked the cigar, popped his lips, shot a ring through a ring. “To settle me down. I’m settled. So.” A regal tip of his head. “I thank you.”
Evan pictured a young woman borne like a coffin off a midnight subway car, engulfed by a pride of predators. His patience was threadbare.
But he couldn’t rush. Couldn’t risk the damage an unhinged Luke Devine would wreak.
Resetting, he shuffled through dossiers, case files, and profiles in his mind, extracting personality traits, pressure points, angles of leverage.
He revisited a sheikh with a propensity for trafficked girls whom he’d sunk beneath the aqua waters of Palm Jumeirah.
A Texas heir to an oil fortune whom he’d considered putting a Nowhere Man round into.
A beak from Eton with a proclivity for faglets whom he’d dispatched outside Goodhart House.
“The part of you that’s blind is running you right now,” Evan told him. “And it’s gonna run you straight onto infantry pikes. From here? Your options get worse. The fallout gets worse.”
The snifter had already warmed against Evan’s palm, the subtle aroma dissipated. He swirled the vodka in the wide bowl, gave a sip. Off the broad rim, the Chopin bum-rushed his palate like a ’roided-up forward pack of ruggers.
Devine wore a faint non-smile, a forked vein prominent in his forehead. Pressure building within. “Last chance to grab the deal of deals. Quite the sales pitch.”
“Why did you call me, Devine?”
A shit-eating beam. “Can’t I just want to see an old friend?”
“Do you even know what a friend is?”
“Sure I do. Someone who can keep up. Someone who can thrust and parry. Someone who knows…” The rarest hitch, a hint of emotion lurking deep beneath the surface, a poignant memory flung up.
“Knows what?” Evan pressed.
“Knows precisely what your favorite drink is.” His eyes, wistful from some remembered kindness. “And how to serve it.”
“That’s all cute,” Evan said. “But you’re compromised like this. You’re gonna step on your own dick and start a coup in Africa or release intel on the VP.”
“I told you about the VP?”
“Yes,” Evan said.
“Hmm. Well, circumspection can be overrated.”
“If only there were a memorable adage about valor and discretion.”
Devine bobbed forward, tapped the ash from his cigar. “I won’t start any fires that don’t need to burn.”
“There is a young woman out there at risk and the longer I have to deal with you, the more danger she may be in.”
“If she’s not already dead,” Devine said, and Evan resisted the urge to lean forward and snap the slender stalk of his neck.
Receding into the bar, Joey continued to read the room perfectly, listening attentively but not invasively.
She smoothed her poplin blouse, crossed her legs high, showing a modest stripe of stockinged ankle.
With her elbow on the bar and her crisply elegant bearing, she looked capable of headlining an M&A deal for a Wall Street white-shoe firm.
A flash of proudness caught Evan by surprise.
Devine scraped his tongue along his front teeth.
“When I’m in this state, I don’t miss a thing.
” He flourished his black box, a nice bit of theater.
“Who’d you like to talk to in order to assuage your fears?
Prime minister of Germany? President of the Hague’s ICC?
Newly implanted director of the NIH? I’d offer up the president”—a wicked smirk—“but she and I aren’t on the best of terms lately. ”
Evan held his cigar forked between index and middle fingers, angled upward. He’d taken two puffs and would not require a whole lot more.
Devine’s lips twitched. “On occasion I imbibe and let my mind gallop and blow out pressure valves to keep the mental machinery clear.” A fissure emerged in his eye, bleeding through the sclera.
Evan watched it expand in real time. And yet Devine’s mask remained perfectly intact, his serpent’s tongue eloquent as ever.
“But when it comes to what matters? When I decide to be focused? I am perfectly—perfectly—in control.”
There it was. The break point.
Evan took his last pull on the cigar, let the smoke sheet from the side of his mouth. “In control?”
Devine’s pupils jittered and he started to reply but Evan bulldozed over him.
“Your nonverbal tells are all over the place, you’re smoking your cigar like a rube—label on, lit with butane, angled downward, tapping the ash like a chain-smoker—and you misquoted Sun Tzu.
You’ve given up two unforced errors”—he allowed the briefest pause so he could watch Devine compute, that mighty brain rewinding and catching the duo of reveals: that he had dirt on the vice president and that he’d installed the new puppet head of the NIH—“you showed me the sole of your foot—try that in a Middle East negotiation—you served me vodka in a snifter—barbaric—and you poured the lady an Aperol spritz without an orange-slice garnish, like some barback on a Caribbean booze cruise.” Evan’s voice was low, steady, mechanical, unremitting.
“You are acting like a slob. Ostentatious, flashy, showing off, misstep after misstep. Manic enough to think you can solve the world.”
Evan watched Devine’s face change, the muscles loosening of their own volition, those peaked cheeks going slack as the realization roosted inside him. He’d hit Devine hard, stunned him into submissiveness, but his state was fragile and new and would shatter into something else if tapped too hard.
“Why did you call me, Devine?”
The slightest tremor surfaced, wobbling a postage-stamp-size patch of skin beneath Devine’s right eye. His lips parted. Nothing came out but a dry rasp of air.
“Why did you call me?”
Devine was on the verge of going either way, steel emerging in the set of his mouth as he regrouped, that big brain tornado-churning, but he hadn’t put his mask back together, not fully, not yet. He wet his lips. Hesitated.
“Say it, motherfucker.”
Joey’s words came low and hard and her voice had not a tremor of anything but precisely the right amount of street.
Devine’s head snapped over to her and for an instant, Evan couldn’t believe she’d spoken either. She remained poised on her stool, elbow resting on the polished mahogany, legs crossed, giving up not an inch.
Devine looked at his cigar as if it had just appeared in his hand, tilting downward so the burn crept up the interior, scorching the leaf.
He came back to Evan, his demeanor off-kilter.
He looked punch-stunned, shuddered like a boxer off a hard cross.
He dropped the cigar into the ashtray, his gaze creeping past Evan’s ridiculous snifter to meet his eyes, and for the first time Evan had seen, he was laid open, vulnerable as a child.
“I…” His voice failed. He cleared his throat, began again. “I need your help.”
Evan extended his arm, palm out. “Cede.”
Devine looked from Evan’s hand to the black box at his side. He picked it up, considered it. And then held it across the low bar cart, smoke from the crushed cigar winding around his wrist.
Evan reached to take it but there was a tug, Devine’s hand still holding on.
Evan waited.
Devine swallowed once, hard, and relinquished it. “I cede.”
Evan held his attention on him, spoke sideways to Joey. “Please pour him two fingers of a low, deep bourbon.”
With a single swift motion, Joey vaulted over the bar.
She dolloped two fingers of Blanton’s Black Label, the Japanese export, into a crosshatch rocks glass.
Leaping back over, she strolled across to them and proffered the glass to Devine on a slight tilt.
He looked up at her. She looked down. He took it. Contemplated the spirit within.
“I’ve been swimming in too many different information silos,” he confessed quietly.
“Western European conservatives. Geoengineers and crypto-anarchists. Pan-African socialists. Evangelical intellectuals. Hellenic philosophers. Talmudic scholars.” He fluttered his fingers, as if airing out his thoughts.
“And they clash like the gods of old. Fighting it out inside me. So many mythoi, so many systems of meaning. They don’t commune with one another.
Most of them don’t even try. I go through door after door. And come back speaking in tongues.”
“So you drink gallons of booze and pop pills.”
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”
“A proverb of Hell.”
Devine’s pupils dilated nearly imperceptibly as he took in Evan more fully, a pellet of trust conferred for the shared reference.
He gazed down into his glass, his face looking suddenly unkempt.
Fair eyebrows ruffled, popped blood vessels in his cheeks, ghostly bruises beneath his eyes.
The glass of bourbon Joey had poured was still untouched, a good sign that he was indeed coming down.
“How can I know what’s enough if I don’t know what’s too much?” Devine asked. “In order to feed it?”
It, Evan thought. His mind.
He said, “Let’s get you out of your brain and into your body.”
Devine’s lips pressed together, amused. “But I can’t defend myself there.”
“That is,” Evan said, “precisely the point.”