Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
She wasn't expecting anyone. She stood a moment with her hand not yet on the intercom, running through the short list of people who might buzz her at this hour, and came up with no one.
She pressed the entry button before she'd fully thought it through — a delivery she'd forgotten ordering, she assumed, or a neighbor who'd left a fob upstairs — and a few minutes later she opened the apartment door onto a man standing in the hallway in a well-cut grey suit with no tie, and he was holding nothing at all.
No clipboard. No package under his arm. No phone in his hand, not even switched off.
None of the things a man standing at a stranger's door has some ordinary reason to be holding.
His hands were simply at his sides, easy, empty, and the emptiness of them was the first thing that put her on her guard.
He was forty-something, pleasant-looking, unhurried in the way of a man who has never once in his life had to run for anything. He had the build of someone who'd been a serious athlete a while ago and had kept most of it out of habit rather than vanity.
"Dr. Vargas. I'm sorry to come to your home like this.
" He said the apology as though the saying of it had already settled the question of whether he ought to have come at all.
"My name is Hartmann. I represent a company called Orpheus Minerals.
You won't have heard of us, and honestly we prefer it that way — it's rather the point of us.
Might I have five minutes of your evening?
I'm perfectly happy to stand right here in the hall, if that's what you'd prefer.
I'm conscious of how this must look to you, and I'd rather not make it look worse. "
"Then you can probably imagine," Elena said, keeping her hand on the edge of the door, "exactly why I'm not going to invite you in."
"That's entirely fair. I'd think less of you if you did.
" He smiled, an easy, practiced thing, and made no move at all toward the threshold.
"I'll be quick, then, and I'll be plain with you, because I think you're a person who prefers plain.
A remarkable object has surfaced recently in Tabasco.
Obsidian. Inscribed. Quite large — larger, I'm told, than it has any right to be.
You've seen photographs of it. They were sent to you the day before yesterday, in the evening, by a Dr. Logan Shepard. "
She kept her hand on the edge of the door and said nothing at all, and let the nothing do its work.
"Orpheus holds survey concessions across a good deal of that region," he went on, unbothered by her silence, as though he had planned for it.
"And when something of real potential significance comes up out of ground that we're working, we very much prefer to see it handled by serious people, with serious resources behind them.
Rather than lost. Rather than damaged by an amateur with a chisel and good intentions.
Rather than sold off the back of a truck to a private collector in some country with generous laws and no scruples.
You understand the shape of the problem, I think, better than most. We'd like to retain you to authenticate the object and to advise us on it. "
"How do you know what was sent to my phone?" she said.
"I know that you're the right person for the work.
" It was not an answer, and he let her see clearly that it wasn't one, and that he'd chosen not to make it one.
"I know your reputation, Dr. Vargas. The real one — not the unfortunate business with the codex, which I've read about and set aside, as any serious person would.
Anyone can be deceived by a sufficiently good forgery.
It's no reflection whatsoever on the eye, and your eye, by every account I've taken the trouble to trust, is the best eye alive for this particular material.
Which is precisely what a find of this magnitude deserves.
We're prepared to be very generous with you.
We're prepared to be extremely discreet.
And I'd gently point out that discretion is a thing that benefits everyone currently standing in this hallway. "
"Whose land did it come out of?" she said.
"That's still being established." Not a flicker crossed his face.
"Title in that part of Tabasco is genuinely complicated, and I don't say that to be evasive.
There are communal holdings, old colonial surveys that never quite agreed with each other, overlapping claims going back generations.
Sorting precisely that kind of thing out happens to be one of the things we're rather good at. "
"So you don't actually know where it was found," Elena said, "and yet you're already entirely certain that it's yours."
"I know it came out of ground we hold an interest in.
The rest is paperwork, Dr. Vargas, and paperwork resolves itself in time.
It always does." He smiled again, and this time there was something in it like a teacher conceding a small clever point to a student he'd expected less from.
"And you're doing precisely the thing your reputation promised me you'd do.
Asking the question that sits underneath the question I've actually asked.
It's exactly why we would so much rather have you inside this thing than outside of it and asking those questions somewhere we can't hear you. "
"And if I'm simply not interested?"
"Then you're not interested, and I've spent five agreeable minutes of a Tuesday evening on your doorstep, and we engage somebody else in the morning.
" He spread his empty hands, the very picture of a reasonable man.
"I'd only say to you — as a colleague, mind, and genuinely not as a threat, because it truly isn't one — that an object of this kind draws attention very quickly.
And attention is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous to the object itself.
It's dangerous, sometimes, to the people who happen to be standing nearest it when it arrives.
What we can offer, more than money, is that we can keep that attention orderly. "
"You're going to have to do considerably better than the weather," Elena said.
"The alternative to us is not us behaving badly, Dr. Vargas — please understand that, because I think you may be picturing the wrong thing.
The alternative to us is the kind of disorder that no single person controls and that everyone involved lives to regret.
" He paused, and let the pause do something.
"We already have someone down there, in fact, keeping things in good order.
A Ms. Volkov. It's what she's good at, keeping order.
And I'd only observe that it would be a great deal better for your Dr. Shepard if the orderly version of events were the one that reached him first."
The name went through her like a swallow of cold water going down the wrong way. She kept her face entirely still, which took more than it usually did. "Is that a threat about Logan?"
"It's a weather report," Hartmann said. He produced a card from an inside pocket, unhurried, and held it out to her across the gap, and when she made no move to take it he simply crouched, smoothly, without any theatre about it, and stood the card upright against the doorframe at her feet, and rose again.
"Think it over tonight. Talk to Dr. Shepard, by all means.
Talk to your sister, even, if you'd like a second opinion.
Rosa, isn't it — the journalist? She's been calling around about our concessions for a week or two now, as it happens.
Asking a good many of the same questions you're asking, only from the other end of the table.
" He straightened his cuff, and brushed something invisible from his knee.
"It would be a great deal simpler for all three of you, I think, if you found yourselves on the same side of this thing. Inside the tent, as the saying goes."
"I think you should go now," Elena said.
"I'm already gone." He inclined his head, courteous to the last. "Good evening, Dr. Vargas. And thank you for the five minutes. You were more generous with them than you had to be."
She shut the door and threw the bolt and stood with her back flat against it and her heart going harder than the situation seemed, on its face, to warrant.
Through the wood she heard him cross the hall to the elevator without hurrying, unhurried the whole way, and then the soft chime of its arrival, and the doors sliding shut on him.
And then there was the ordinary nothing of her own hallway on the other side of the door, which did not feel remotely ordinary anymore and, she suspected, was not going to feel ordinary again for some time.
The laptop was still open on the desk across the room. Logan's voice came thin and far away out of the little speaker.
"Elena. Who was that? Elena. Talk to me, come on."
She crossed the room and picked the laptop up and held it.
"His name is Hartmann," she said. "He's from a company called Orpheus Minerals.
" She watched his face change on the screen, watched the ease drain straight out of it.
"He knew about the photographs, Logan. He knew that you were the one who sent them to me. He knew the exact day you sent them."
"That's not possible. Elena, that is not possible, nobody?—"
"He named you. He said your name out loud, in my hallway.
And he named Rosa." She looked down at the card standing against the doorframe, stark white against the dark floorboards.
ORPHEUS MINERALS, and a name, and a phone number, and nothing else on it at all.
"And he named someone who's down there with you right now.
Volkov. He said it would be better for you if she found you first."
Logan didn't answer right away. The fan turned behind him, and turned, and the silence stretched out across two thousand miles of it.
"Get the slab somewhere they don't know about," she said. "Tonight, if you can possibly manage it. I'm coming down."
"You spent the entire afternoon telling me you weren't. You had a whole speech."
"I know exactly what I told you." She bent and picked the card up off the floor, and as her fingers closed on it the phone in her other hand started to ring. The screen said Rosa. "I'll call you back, Logan. It's Rosa."
She answered it, and she said, before her sister could get so much as a word out, "Rosa. The mining company you wouldn't name for me on Monday. Tell me it isn't called Orpheus."