CHAPTER 5 #2
The teak panelling of the executive hallway is older than I am and so are the brass sconces, and the air in this corridor is cooler than the foyer by a degree. Julian's outer office is a small antechamber with a leather settee and a single object on the wall above it: a saber, mounted hilt left.
I stop.
Seventeenth-century. Spanish. Naval. The cup-hilt is a Toledo-school cup with the chiseling I have seen exactly once in a museum in Madrid, when I was twenty-three and traveling for a paper on insurance fraud in the Spanish colonial period.
The blade is straight and long, silvered along the false edge — a re-temper, not original — and the grip wrap is dark with old sweat where a thumb has rested above the cross. This is not a wall decoration.
This is a sword that has been carried. The pommel carries the dent of a strike absorbed.
I look at the way the cup catches the brass-sconce light and I think: Toledo blade, 1689 by the cup geometry, naval by the false-edge bevel, and the man who owns this office has at some point cleaned it himself. I file it.
The inner office is corner space, two walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, the harbor on one side and the city on the other, gray Atlantic light striped with cloud.
A teak desk that has the weight and the patina of a 19th-century P the hair is loose at the shoulders, an older daughter rather than a wife; the face is grave, freckled across the bridge of the nose, fair-skinned with an alabaster undertone.
The brushwork is the wrong century for the gown.
The brushwork is loose at the cuff and tight at the throat in a way I have seen exactly twice in my life and both times in rooms with a Sargent oil signed lower right.
Sargent died in 1925. Whoever commissioned this had Sargent paint a 16th-century subject.
From memory. From a description. From — I do not finish the sentence; I have not yet been given the page.
I think: his mother, maybe his grandmother, and then I think: no.
Not his mother. The face is wrong-aged for that. A sister, then. File it.
Julian is at the desk. He has not moved while I looked.
"Sit," he says.
I do not sit. I stand at the front of the desk. I have prepared a speech. I will deliver it standing.
"You can lock the door, Mr. Vance," I say. "You cannot lock the spreadsheet. If I'm not at my desk by Thursday Reginald Hawkes will request the file as a courtesy and at that point the variance is on his screen. So either you kill me tonight or you start talking."
He is still for a count of three. Then he says it, in the old-world cadence I have only heard him use in clipped corporate sentences before now:
"I am not going to kill you. I am going to keep you alive. We will talk in the morning."
The brass radiator under the window clicks once.
I sit. I had not meant to. I sit because the alternative is to stand and shake.
"Why," I say. One word. I name units when I am frightened; I shorten sentences when I have lost my margin.
"Because someone has been forging my signature for seventy-six years," he says, "and I need a forensic surgeon. I also need to know what your hematocrit looks like the first time you have a serious shock. We will talk in the morning, Ms. Quinn."
The word hematocrit lands on the teak between us.
It is a clinical word. It is a blood word.
It is, at this distance, the closest he has come to telling me what is in the wall on the other side of my guest-suite plaster at 04:51 in the morning.
I do not ask. I have asked enough today.
I will let him give me the rest of the page in his own hand.
"In the morning," I say.
"In the morning," he says.
I stand. He stands when I stand — a fractional courtesy, the kind of motion you notice in a man who has spent five hundred years deciding when to move. I walk to the door. At the door I stop. I turn.
"The portrait," I say. "Sargent?"
His pale gray pupils do that tightening thing again.
"Yes," he says.
"In the morning?"
"In the morning," he says. "Also."
I leave.
I do not look at the saber on the way out. I have already filed it.
Dinner is at nineteen hundred in the dining room.
The harbor outside the windows is already night-black at this season; the bronze fountain in Foundry Square is an unlit lump.
The Eames pedestal table is set for four.
Henrik takes the chair by the door. Adrienne takes the chair opposite.
Julian takes the head. I take the chair opposite Henrik, which puts me on Julian's right and three feet of Eames pedestal between my elbow and his.
The wine is a Pomerol. Small. Restrained.
Not the Domaine de Chevalier I have seen behind the climate-controlled glass in the kitchen wine wall, which is somebody else's bottle for somebody else's evening.
The food is a roast root vegetable and a piece of fish — Atlantic cod, butter-poached, capered.
I eat the vegetables first. Adrienne discusses the Q4 closing schedule for Vance Holdings in the diction of a woman who is performing normalcy for the benefit of the new audience at the table.
Henrik says, once, "Pass the salt, please, ma'am," to me, with the courtesy of a man whose entire interior life I will never see.
The fish comes. I lift the fork. I look up.
Julian is looking at me.