Chapter 24
We opened the gallery doors at six.
First through was a gaggle of art students. They came straight to my bar, dressed in all black, in bright colors, in chunky shoes, in skinny ties, in thrift-store clothes. My blue hair felt suddenly unremarkable; my lack of tattoos, unforgivable.
I mixed them New Blacks: whiskey, Averna, absinthe. The students drank too quickly, making faces at the spritz of wormwood.
The crowd built, and I listened, absorbing the rhythms of art world chatter. The line for the bar was a stream of small talk and introductions. It was like being onstage at No Drama, except my scene partners were finally real.
“Knife-thrower,” came a familiar voice.
I looked up from refilling the ice and felt the flutter again. “Hiromi.”
She was in a shirtdress of brilliant green silk, the one she’d cinched with a gold belt at her last opening. This time she wore it unbuttoned as a coat, over black trousers and a shell top, revealing a band of midriff.
No rough edges. No uncertainties.
“You look lovely,” I said, wanting to touch her.
She was frowning. “You look different.”
“The hair.”
“The everything.” Hiromi leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Right. You’re in disguise.”
I nodded. “Jessica Anderson. Pleased to meet you. Can I make you anything?”
“I don’t drink. But I promised my friends something fancy.” Her voice dropped again. “Because I’m a personal friend of the bartender.”
In a cluster behind her were three women and a man, all familiar from her socials.
The man, Danny, was telling a story that had the others laughing.
Crystal, with the pink hair, was Hiromi’s best friend, and knew Ayana and Miyeon from their MFA program in Chicago.
All four were “emerging artists”—older, more refined versions of the students, with less jewelry and better haircuts.
I dropped sugar cubes into four tumblers, dashed them with bitters, added shots of absinthe.
“Garrett told me you’d be here.” Hiromi drew a small paper bag from her pocket. “I brought you a present.”
I popped open a bottle of good champagne, topped the drinks off, then took the bag from her. It opened with a sugary, citric bouquet—bitter lemon drops.
It had been five years since Peter’s last trip to the store.
“Are those the ones?” Hiromi asked.
I nodded, entranced by the little orbs of dandelion yellow. That summer flooded back: the smell of ashes drifting in the wind, the chapel reduced to a black skeleton and a few stone columns, a single precarious spire.
I hadn’t tasted lemon drops since, saving my allowance for amaro and bitters.
“I love old-fashioned candies,” Hiromi said. “All candies, really.”
“You should see our local candy store. Abba-Zabas, Mary Janes, Slo Pokes.”
“I have to visit sometime.”
“Thank you,” I finally remembered to say. “I’ve missed these.”
“Glad they’re the right ones.”
We stood there for a cumbersome moment, then Hiromi picked up two of the glasses and turned toward her friends.
Suddenly, Arabella was beside me.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said softly. “I’ll manage.”
I picked up the other two drinks.
Breaking into the circle was easy—I was bearing alcohol, and Hiromi made space for me. She introduced her friends, who looked younger than in their curated socials.
Danny sipped his drink. “Fancy, as promised. What’s it called?”
“A Death in the Afternoon,” I said.
He laughed. “Sounds like one of Hiromi’s sculptures. Or an Agatha Christie novel.”
“Silly boy,” Hiromi said. “It’s Ernest Hemingway.”
“He wrote mysteries?”
“It’s about bullfighting,” Crystal said. “The matador did it.”
“So the bull dies in the afternoon?” Danny asked, staring at his drink.
“Yes, the bull is doomed.” Miyeon toasted. “Because some writers can’t resist an obvious metaphor.”
“It’s not a metaphor,” I said. “It’s about killing bulls.”
They all looked at me.
I tried again. “The book is nonfiction.”
“Which can still use metaphors,” Crystal said carefully.
Another pause. I’d said something that went against the ethos of the group.
I tried again: “Just kidding. Bullfighting is always a metaphor. Like, ‘The matador’s true weapon isn’t the sword, but the cape that hides it.’ ”
Miyeon frowned. “Hemingway?”
“It’s something my grandma says.”
Another awkward moment, then Hiromi blurted out a laugh. “Jessica has the best family! Was your grandma that woman in the red dress?”
“Oxblood,” I said.
“The perfect color!” Danny exclaimed. “For a bullfight, I mean.”
“Yes, we got it.” Crystal turned to me. “Where did you two meet again?”
“That’s our secret,” Hiromi said, putting a protective arm around me.
The conversation flew on from there, faster than anything in Uncle Wolfie’s class, more specific, more elliptical.
The five of them had helped install each other’s shows, had worked as assistants together, had shared apartments and internships and tubes of paint.
They teased each other mercilessly, finished each other’s jokes.
I tried to ease my way in, to prove myself as witty and cynical as they were. But it was like when legacy kids talked shop around other students at Helshire, darting and obtuse. And here, I was the ordinary.
I wondered how Sebastian would have charmed them.
When I was quiet for a stretch, Hiromi took my hand. She didn’t want me to drift away. I grinned at her and finally put a lemon drop in my mouth.
Zest and honey, citric acid, the bitter edge of rind. The tiny sphere’s equator, splay from the mold, sharp against my tongue. Another memory—Peter had painted a tree that hot summer to look like Uncle Max. Arrows, knives, and axes had chipped away that face.
When I opened my eyes again, Hiromi was smiling at me.
“Should we maybe…look at the art?”
Everyone agreed. We split into pairs, Hiromi with me.
“What do you think?” she asked.
I looked up at the cascading columns of black and red.
The show was called Poker Genome Project.
All around us, printed on huge expanses of backlit vellum, was every possible combination of five playing cards—organized into poker hands of ascending order.
Each card was a quarter-inch high, just legible enough to see the probabilities unfold.
The higher-ranked hands—straights, flushes, full houses—each took up a single canvas.
The lowly pairs filled an entire wall, the worthless hands another.
“I like the math of it,” I said.
“But what’s behind the math?” Hiromi stared closer at the fours of a kind. “Why do you like it?”
I imagined Grandmother Elizabeth leading young Mortons through the gallery. We were taught poker even before pain resistance. Calculation under pressure, concealed emotions. “It’s my family in a nutshell.”
Hiromi laughed at this. “All in red and black? Or because this is how the gods see poker? Everything at once, no stakes.”
I nodded. The house always wins, because it doesn’t play.
That afternoon, with locks of my hair wrapped in tiny squares of tinfoil, I’d checked Xenakis’s calculations: 52!/47!/5! = 2,598,960 possible poker hands. Bianca would have laughed at me for bothering, but true power was knowing the odds.
“To me, this is bloodless,” Hiromi said. “People get killed over poker games. I miss the drama.”
“Like your robots. They break shit.”
“You looked me up.” She was pleased. “Actually, my first robot piece was supposed to be funny—an assembly line where things go wrong. Like Lucille Ball.”
“I don’t know her work,” I said.
Hiromi laughed. “It turned out more tragic than funny. Robots with cheap cameras, not much range of motion. Like dinosaurs trying to work factory jobs.”
“That sounds dangerous,” I said. There were stories of a Morton going undercover on an assembly line, back in the 1920s. He’d wound up killing not only his target but half a dozen other bosses too. “I’d love to see your studio sometime.”
“Jessica.” Her eyes met mine. “How old are you?”
I was moving too fast. “Twenty-five.”
“You seem younger.”
“Homeschooled,” I said. “The MFA is a lie.”
“It’s more than that. Maybe this costume you’re wearing.” She reached out and tapped the crow skull on its beak. “This is the only part that’s you.”
“Yes,” I said, wishing her hand had lingered. “My art.”
“You can show it to me sometime.” She turned back to the patterns of playing cards. But I wanted all of her attention.
“My cousin Peter made a robot, right before he died.”
She turned back to me, eyes alight. “What kind?”
“An arson machine.”
“Artist/arsonist.”
I recalled Sebastian’s words, about Peter turning our traditions gaudy and savage. Halcyon Hall had been his masterpiece.
“Peter liked staring into kilns,” I said. “Fire was his friend.”
“You have to love your materials.”
For a moment, I considered telling Hiromi a secret—about potato chips, the chapel, and a fire—but someone called her name. It was Crystal, parting the crowd, pulling Miyeon along, Danny and Ayana just behind. They swept around us, talking about Poker Genome Project.
“It’s all probabilities.”
“Did you see what he’s charging for the straights?”
“Are the straights okay?”
As they prattled, Crystal shot a look across the gallery, and Hiromi’s eyes followed.
A man was making his way through the front doors.
Tall and lanky, he wore a tweed blazer, like a lecturer at Helshire trying to look tenured.
His trousers were hemmed high, flashing argyle socks with every step.
He glided at an even pace, in a straight line, as if carried by something unhurried and unstoppable beneath the floor—the rest of the shark, and he was the fin.
In his wake came two younger men, also in tweed. They scanned the room with the vigilance of bodyguards, but they were too slight of build, and kept turning to him for reassurance. Acolytes.
Hiromi saw me looking.
“My biggest fan.” Her fingertips brushed my hand as she pulled away. “Stay in touch, knife-thrower.”
She and her friends edged toward the entrance, in the densest part of the crowd, keeping clear of the man—Garrett’s target.
Dr. Lyon and his escorts walked directly to the little plinth holding the straight flushes—the apex hand of poker. The small crowd gathered there parted for him, revealing Xenakis holding court, explaining his work.
The artist stilled as the man approached. Lyon took up space, the world bending to him the way it did for Sebastian. But he pulled the oxygen from the room, made it smaller, where Sebastian opened everything up.
As Lyon took hold of Xenakis’s shoulders, I saw him looking past the artist to the gallery entrance, where Hiromi and her friends were slipping out. A flash of anger, then amusement, then his attention returned to Xenakis.
Dr. Lyon didn’t look like a shrink, or a man who owned three Kandinskys. He reminded me of the Wolvaardt matriarch in charge of culling their youngsters.
Garrett came up beside me. “That seemed to go well. Did you two make plans?”
“We were interrupted,” I said, tingling again where Hiromi had touched me.
“There’s time. A chance encounter, perhaps. Arabella can arrange that—she tracks Hiromi’s phone.”
I didn’t look at the man. “That’s him, isn’t it? He’s why Hiromi left.”
“I can’t blame her. Something odd’s going on in there, behind the eyes, and I say that as a Morton. That’s why we’re sending our prodigy.”
An echo went through me—Sebastian’s last words in the rain.
“But for now, why don’t you slip away?” Garrett said. “It might be better if Dr. Lyon doesn’t know you work for me.”
“He scares you too?”
Garrett didn’t answer. His eyes were still on the target, his face animated with a shopkeeper’s eager, nervous smile.
“He doesn’t scare me,” I said.
“That’s why we brought you in, Jessica. I suspect the good doctor also never cried as a child.”