Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
I shift in my seat for the twelfth time since I sat down, eyes dancing from the cafe’s patrons, to gaggles of pedestrians, to the busy street we’re stationed by. I hate feeling like I’m a sitting duck. And I especially don’t like being in the dark when I’m in the field.
“Would you cease your relentless fidgeting?” Graham hisses from behind his newspaper.
Rolling my eyes, I drape one leg over the other and continue scanning my surroundings. I’m still not convinced that some armed men in a van won’t come to a screeching halt and drag one or both of us inside. The thought sounds tempting at first.
But unfortunately, if I want to keep my job, Graham needs to stay alive and under my custody.
I turn back to him. He’s been working through a stack of newspapers ever since we arrived at this cafe.
You miss a lot when you’re in federal prison, he said.
When I balked at the idea of kicking back at a very public table on the outdoor patio, he oh-so-gently whispered: learn to relax, Agent, or you’ll die with that look on your face.
Then there’s a niggling idea that, if he wanted to leave, wouldn’t he already be gone? Graham had every opportunity to flee this morning or last night—not that I’ll be making that mistake again—and he could’ve at least tried to slip through the cracks at either train station yesterday.
But I know it’s coming. The longer he waits to make his move, the further on edge I’m pushed.
“You’re staring,” he says without a single twitch behind his newspaper.
My arms cross. “Just trying to figure out when we’ll actually start working.”
Graham folds the top half of the paper down, sending a raised eyebrow over the top. He’s wearing a pair of sunglasses that are so tinted I can’t see his eyes. “This is work, Poppy. The Louvre wasn’t robbed in a day.”
“Do you want everyone to hear us?” I reply through gritted teeth.
He motions lazily and reclines back in his seat, gaze trained on the paper.
“You think any of them are listening? The tourists in the corner look about ready to collapse, the couple to our left just got engaged, and that young fellow with the wire-framed glasses and a copy of The Sun Also Rises is too focused on the waitress to notice anything else.”
My face scrunches for a split second. I can’t possibly be feeling impressed by a thief right now.
“You’re not the only one with observational skills,” Graham says, as if he’s read my mind. “And besides, I’ve been doing this longer than you.”
I’m not sure if he means Sloane or Poppy, but I reply with, “I started at fourteen,” before I can think.
His jaw ticks. Slowly, as if not to spook me, he sets his newspaper on the table, lowers his sunglasses to the bridge of his nose, and leans forward. “Fourteen?”
The intensity in his narrowed eyes makes me want to squirm. I hadn’t meant to let it slip. My brain reels for a route to backtrack.
My name is Poppy Ashcroft. My name is Poppy Ashcroft.
“It was the first time I ever lifted a wallet,” I lie, so casually that I almost believe it myself. “Some loser at the gas station I’d always hang around. Nothing special, but it got the taste in my mouth.”
A successful diversion. It must be.
Graham’s expression doesn’t change while I speak. Then, it relaxes to impassivity, reaching for the last sip of his cappuccino. “Cute,” he replies, “I suppose one could say that I first began at seven years old, then.”
I can’t help the curious tilt of my head. I mean, because Poppy would be curious.
“It was a Dutch Baroque painting of two women and one man playing their instruments. He refused to let us touch it, or even mention it, and he had a custom, climate-controlled box built to keep it safe. He wouldn’t even allow us in the room.”
“It was a Vermeer, wasn’t it?” I say.
“My, my,” he replies. “I wasn’t aware you were an art history buff.”
Unbidden warmth flushes from shoulder to shoulder at the recognition.
The prep for this op was particularly extensive and I didn’t even get to everything.
“I’m good at my job,” I say. His description clicking together in my head, I sit up and lean across the table with a scowl.
“Wait, a Vermeer painting of a concert?”
He makes no response, but the amused twinkle is all I need.
“Oh, my—” A dry laugh blows through my lips that sounds a lot like a sigh. “—your father was a criminal, too. Why am I not surprised?”
Graham glances away, fiddling with his watch. “Something of the sort.”
“Where is it?” I hiss. “It’s been lost for almost forty years?—”
“I don’t have it,” he cuts me off, “and even if I did, you would be the very last person I’d tell.”
Deflated, I sink back into my chair and cross my arms. Solving a decades-old art heist isn’t what I’m here to do.
Several seconds pass. I quietly fixate on the glossy, chocolate sheen in my mug, positive we’ll spend the rest of the day in tense silence.
Graham clears his throat, lips curling into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I had no idea why, but he loved it more than any of us. One day, Manon accidentally smudged the glass with some blackberry jam and she didn’t realize until he saw it. He’d thought she tried to open the blasted thing.”
Guess I’m not getting the silent treatment, I think. Not sure how I feel about the way he keeps surprising me. I rip my stare away from my drink and toward his face, too curious to feign apathy.
“When I arrived home from school, I attempted to throw myself in the middle, but it was too late. He’d beaten Manon until she could barely walk.”
The air thickens to molasses. I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I could throw myself into the Seine. An unsolved art heist seems trivial compared to what he was trying to tell me.
“How old was she?”
“Thirteen. We were sent to separate boarding schools not long after.”
I try to swallow but my throat feels like sandpaper.
I was lucky enough not to have experienced anything of the sort before Raffaele found me.
Working alongside a crew of other orphans, though, you get used to stories that keep you up at night.
When I was younger, I always thought kids with families and money had it all.
I resented people like Graham. Ancestral homes, top-tier schooling, and no clue how good they had it.
It’s true that he could be lying to manipulate me. But when our eyes lock across the table, a shudder crawls down my spine. He’s not Graham Baudelaire, an internationally notorious thief—he’s a lonely seven-year-old boy.
“My father left for a business trip the next week,” Graham continues, voice low. “I smashed the glass with a brick and hid that painting under my bed.” He pulls his features back into the flippant smirk I’ve become accustomed to. “Far from my finest work, but I’ve come a long way since.”
I don’t press any further.
Instead, I reach for the ice-cold chocolat chaud that’s remained untouched since the waitress brought it. Not because I don’t desperately want to know what happened next. But because I do, and I detest that I do, and endearing him any more to myself will lead to certain disaster.
“How do you do it?” Graham asks, derailing my train of thought.
I send him an arched brow over the rim of my mug. “What?”
“Remember everything you do,” he replies. “You know who Vermeer was, and you even recalled the exact painting I spoke of, down to its… colorful history.”
My fingernails bite into my palms beneath the table. Now is not the time to prod him for the whereabouts again. “Like I said, it’s my job,” I explain, voice tight.
His features darken with frustration before they’re wiped clean again. “But how?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Call it professional curiosity.” It’s his turn to lean forward, his fingers clasping together in apparent anticipation.
I sigh and pinch my eyebrow. I already know he’s not going to let this one go. And it’s not exactly a trade secret, either. Intelligence communities across the globe use similar tactics.
“It’s a combination of techniques called mnemonic devices,” I reply, feeling more professor than spy.
“The strategy behind most of them, really, is utilizing our imagination to create emotionally charged imagery in our minds, rather than simply attempting to consume and memorize large amounts of information.”
He hums. “Image association.”
“Yes—there are others, too, like attaching new information to previously learned information, which I always imagine as a—” My voice catches, and my pulse accelerates, but I compress it all back down and focus on the facts. “A honeycomb.”
“A honeycomb?” Graham echoes.
I swallow thickly. “New information that can be associated with the old gets stored in a fresh hexagon beside it.”
“Huh.” He tilts his head. “And it all comes together as the hive.”
Instead of answering, I give a rigid nod and pretend to be distracted by a gaggle of passing tourists. In and out, Sloane, I think, drawing a shaking breath. You can’t keep falling apart.
If, a week ago, you’d asked me what I thought robbing the Louvre would be like, the very last thing I would’ve guessed—and I mean, subterranean—would be strolling up and down the marble corridors of the Galeries Lafayette Champs-Elysées.
“That is insane,” I snapped at Graham the moment he brought it up. “I’m not going shopping with you.”
He replied, “I’d be more than happy to go alone.”
That’s how I ended up sitting on a deep navy velvet couch, watching him be fitted for countless new suits, nursing a martini the attendant had presented on a silver tray beneath a glass dome filled with woodsmoke.
I gave up keeping an eye on our surroundings when I realized Graham managed to have them lock down the entire atelier solely for his visit.
Or maybe that was typical for him—wouldn’t want to be near the unwashed masses.
The tailor has been hunched over at his feet for nearly an hour as they worked on several sets of pants.
Distantly, I wonder how much he’s being paid for the back-straining labor.