BLOODSTONE
NICO
Mateo pulled up right at nine, cutting the engine before he'd even fully stopped, and unfolded himself out of the driver's seat like a man who had spent years perfecting the exact amount of energy required to look effortless doing it.
“Morning, sunshine,” he said, already circling around to my side of the car before I'd gotten both feet on the sidewalk.
“Morning.”
He reached for my bag before I could stop him, which was how I learned he could sling a full duffel over one shoulder without breaking stride, the strap barely denting the fabric of his jacket.
“Before we go anywhere,” I said, “there's an antiques show at the armory on Lex. I've been going since before I had money to buy anything, and I don't know when I'll get another free morning like this one. I want to stop there first.”
I'd half expected to have to argue for it, some negotiation about schedules or routes, given that I was currently being driven around the city at nine in the morning by a man twice my size who worked for someone I had signed a contract with less than twelve hours earlier.
Instead, Mateo just nodded, easy, like I'd asked him for directions to the nearest subway stop.
“Yeah, course.” He opened the trunk, set the bag inside with more care than the bag strictly needed, and shut it.
“Boss figured you'd want a stop like that before we headed uptown.
He's not a soft guy, but he plans for what people are gonna need before they even think to ask for it.
That's basically his whole deal, honestly. Unsettling, if you think about it too hard, which I try not to.”
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I let myself want it, quietly, for a second, and then put the want away and looked out the window instead as he pulled off the curb.
Mateo found a spot two blocks south of the armory, and we walked the rest of the way in the cold, our breath showing in front of us the whole four blocks.
“You ever been to one of these?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence.
“An antiques show? Nah, man. I don't really do old stuff. My apartment's got, like, one plant and a TV. That's the whole vibe.”
“That's not a vibe, that's a hostage situation.”
He laughed, loud enough that a woman ahead of us glanced back. “Fair. Fair enough.”
The building had gone up in the late nineteenth century to house a regiment that no longer existed, and twice a year somebody rented the drill hall to the antiques trade and pretended the brick walls and the iron rafters overhead weren't turning every conversation in the room into overlapping noise before it traveled three tables in either direction.
The acoustics were criminal. Eight hundred dealers, three hundred collectors, and a whole mix of restorers, appraisers, scammers, hopefuls, and widows carrying their husbands' watches in their coat pockets, the long folding tables running in rows under the high steel beams, every surface crowded with objects waiting for somebody to finally notice them.
I loved every bit of it.
I always came to these with a list. Eighteenth century brass hardware, anything Federal period with original glass, mourning jewelry if the price was sane, and one specific bolt of Belgian linen a dealer in the Bronx kept promising he could source and then mysteriously couldn't, year after year.
I had a tape measure in my coat pocket, a jeweler's loupe in my breast pocket, and a folded twenty for the coffee cart by the south doors that didn't take cards, a fact I had learned the hard way three years running.
“I'm gonna go grab coffee,” Mateo said, already scanning the room like a man calculating the shortest possible route through a crowd. “You want anything, or should I surprise you.”
“You don't know how I take my coffee.”
“I know things,” he said, and gave me a grin that told me absolutely nothing useful, and peeled off toward the cart without waiting for me to argue.
I drifted toward the first row of tables with my hands in my pockets, already scanning, half my brain still stuck on whatever that grin had meant.
“Miss me?” He was back at my shoulder before I'd made it past the second table, two paper cups in hand, one already held out toward me.
“You were gone for ninety seconds.”
“Felt longer for me. I get lonely.”
I took the cup, cautious, and the first sip told me it was the right temperature, the right size, and, impossibly, the right amount of sugar, which was none at all. I hadn't told him how I took my coffee. I hadn't told anyone in this building how I took my coffee.
I narrowed my eyes at him over the lid. He widened his right back at me, the picture of innocence.
“Lucky guess,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
“Educated guess.”
“Educated by who, Mateo.”
He didn't quite manage not to smile. “I plead the fifth.”
“So Draco told you.”
“I plead the fifth harder.”
“You're not coming onto the floor with me,” I said instead. “You'll scare the dealers.”
“I look like a guy who collects bayonets.”
“You look like a guy who uses them.”
“In this room, that's a selling point.”
He had me there.
It was a good morning, and the worst of it was that Mateo was funny. He had a comment for every aisle.
The first table had a row of Victorian dolls, twelve of them shoulder to shoulder on a strip of black velvet, their porcelain heads tipped back at the same angle, their painted eyes fixed on the rafters above them, unblinking. Mateo slowed and leaned in toward me.
“Those are going to kill someone tonight. You can tell.”
“They're dolls.”
“They've decided, boss.”
He looked pleased with himself. Smug bastard, I thought, and smiled.
The next table had Edwardian silver flatware laid out on green felt, polished to within an inch of its life. Mateo took one step toward it, sneezed hard enough to make the dealer look up from his newspaper, and backed off two paces, wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.
“You okay?”
“Allergies.”
“To silverware?”
“To dust, man. Old dust specifically. It's worse than the new stuff, I don't make the rules.”
“That's the cleanest table in the building.”
“Old dust doesn't care how clean the table looks. It's already in the air. It's been in the air since eighteen ninety.”
“That isn't a thing.”
“It's a thing. Ask a doctor.”
He smiled and didn't come any closer to the silver after that, and I noted it without saying anything.
The table after that held a glass case of cavalry sabers, mostly Civil War. Mateo stopped at one of them, a heavy curved blade with the grip worn black where a hand had smoothed it over years.
“That one's got a body count,” he said.
“How can you tell?”
“Patina.”
He said it like it was obvious, like everyone could read a blade's history off its handle the way he apparently could, and I decided not to ask if he was joking, because I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer.
He drifted half a step behind me and to my left, and I noticed he had put himself exactly where a left-handed man would have to come through him to reach me. I was not left-handed.
He was a menace with the older dealers. He carried a woman's box of Murano glass without being asked and got her opinion on her son's new wife in return.
He charmed Mr. Park into a hard candy and a phone number.
Carmen, a woman I had known for six years and who had never once smiled at me, handed him a tin of homemade polvorones and patted his cheek the way she used to pat mine, back when I was still young enough to get away with it.
“Are you kidding me?” I said, when we were two aisles away.
“What?”
“Carmen does not give people cookies. Carmen does not give people eye contact.”
“Carmen's lovely.”
“Carmen has called me, on three separate occasions, an ungrateful fucking child.”
“Have you been ungrateful?”
“I bought her entire estate inventory a couple of years ago.”
“Were you nice about it?”
“I was professional.”
“There you go.” He bit into a cookie. “It's the smile and the listening, man. You're great at a lot of things. Warmth is not one of your top five.”
I opened my mouth to argue and closed it, because he was right.
I had spent an hour and a half watching him work the room, and what I'd learned was that the charm was real, and the charm was also doing a job I hadn't asked it to do.
He hadn't let anyone within two feet of my back all morning.
I respected it and resented it, and both were true.
“How long have you worked for him?” The question came out before I had decided to ask it.
“Long enough to know he pays well and the job's worth it, even on the nights it isn't.”
“Is he always like that?”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Ordering people around like he's from a different century.”
“You mean why is he evil.”
“I wasn't going to say evil.”
“You were absolutely going to say evil. It was written all over your face before you opened your mouth.”
“He's evil, Mateo.”
Mateo laughed loud enough that the dealer at the pocket watch table looked up.
“Don't tell him I laughed at that.”
“I'll tell him to his face.”
“Tell him in front of me. I want to be in the room for that one.” He took another cookie and chewed on it slowly, and I watched him actually think about how much to give me, which was new, since he hadn't paused before answering anything else all morning.
The smile thinned a little. “He's old money.
Old, old money. He's been giving orders since before either of us was a thought, and he's not used to any version of the world that doesn't bend when he leans on it.”
“Charming.”
“He's not nice. Don't make that mistake. But he's not random, either. If he hurts somebody, there's a reason behind it, even if it's not a reason you or I would sign off on. He doesn't break things for fun. He breaks them because they were in his way.”
“That is not the comfort you think it is.”
“I know, boss.”
“What's he trying to do?”
Mateo held the look a beat longer than the question had earned, then shrugged, easy again, the pause already gone. “Above my pay grade. I drive. I carry. I look pretty in pictures.”
“You're a coward.”