The vacuum roared to life in the hall outside the door, its shadow passing back and forth across the half inch of light that intruded between the door bottom and the carpet pile. He stepped back gingerly against the wall, feeling his way. He heard a door opening directly across the hall. A few seconds later, the roar of the vacuum diminished, suggesting that it and its operator had entered the opposite room.
Gurney’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, which the crack of light shining under the door was diluting just enough for him to make out a few large shapes: the footboard of a king-size bed, the curving wings of a Queen Anne chair, a dark armoire against a lighter wall.
He decided to take a chance. He felt along the wall behind him for the light switch and found a dimmer knob. He turned it until it was approximately in the middle of its range, then depressed it to its “on” position and immediately back to its “off” position. He was betting that the cleaners were sufficiently busy that the resulting half-second flash of muted light beneath the door would go unnoticed.
What he saw in the brief moment of illumination was a spacious bedroom with the furnishings whose outlines he’d discerned in the semidarkness, plus two smaller chairs, a low chest of drawers with an elaborate mirror above it, and a pair of nightstands with ornate lamps. There was nothing unexpected or strange-except for his reaction. In the instant it was visible, the scene ignited in him the experience of déjà vu. He was sure he had seen before everything exactly as it appeared in that flash of light.
The visceral sense of familiarity was followed a few seconds later by a chilling question: Had he been in this bedroom earlier that day? The chill grew into a kind of nausea. He must have been here, in this room. Why else would he have such an intense feeling about it, about the bed, the position of the chairs, the scalloped crest of the armoire?
More important, how far might the disinhibiting power of alcohol and Rohypnol take one? How much of what one believed, how much of one’s true value system, how much of what was precious to one-how much of all that could be swept away by that chemical mixture? Never in his whole life had he felt so vulnerable, such a stranger to himself-so unsure of who he was or of what he might be capable of doing-as he did at that moment.
Then, gradually, the vertiginous feeling of helplessness and incomprehension was replaced by alternating currents of fear and rage. Uncharacteristically, he embraced the rage. The steel of the rage. The strength and willfulness of the rage.
He opened the door and stepped out into the light.
The drone of the vacuum was coming from a room farther down the corridor. Gurney walked rapidly the other way, back to the big staircase. His recollection of the brevity of his noontime elevator ride told him that the sitting room and dining room were almost certainly on the second floor. Hoping that something in those rooms might provide a thread of memory he could follow, he descended the stairs.
An archway led from the landing to the rest of the second floor. Passing through it, Gurney found himself in the Victorian parlor where he’d met Jykynstyl. As elsewhere in the house, all the lights had been turned on by the cleaners, with a similarly bleak effect. Even the giant potted plants had lost their luxuriance. He walked through the sitting area into the dining room. Dishes, glasses, silverware had all been removed. So had the Holbein portrait. Or Holbein fake.
Gurney realized he knew nothing for certain about his lunch visit that day. The safest assumption would be that every element of it was phony. Especially the extravagant purchase offer for his mug-shot portraits. The idea that all of that was bogus, that there never was any money on the table, never any admiration for his insights or talents, brought with it a surprising shock to his ego-followed by chagrin at how much the offer and the accompanying flattery had meant to him.
He recalled a therapist once telling him that the only way one can judge the strength of one’s attachment to something is by the level of pain caused by its removal. It seemed clear now that the potential rewards of the Jykynstyl fantasy had been as important to him as… as believing that they weren’t important at all. Which made him feel like an idiot doubled.
He looked around the dining room. His ecstatic vision of a sailboat on Puget Sound returned with the sourness of regurgitated wine. He studied the freshly polished surface of the table. Not a hint of a smudge or fingerprint anywhere. He went back into the sitting room. There was a faint, complex smell in the air of which he’d been dimly aware as he’d passed through the room minutes before. Now he tried to isolate its elements. Alcohol, stale smoke, ashes in the fireplace, leather, moist plant soil, furniture polish, old wood. Nothing surprising. Nothing out of place.
He sighed with a sense of frustration and failure, the pointless risk of having entered the house. The place radiated a hostile emptiness-no feeling that anyone actually lived there. Jykynstyl had admitted as much with his vague description of a traveling lifestyle, and God only knew where the “daughters” spent their time.
The vacuum sound on the floor above grew louder. Gurney took a last look around the room, then headed for the staircase. He was halfway down to the first floor when a vivid recollection brought him to a full stop.
The smell of alcohol.
The little glass.
Christ!
He strode back up the stairs, two at time, back into the sitting room, over to the cavernous leather armchair from which Jykynstyl had greeted him upon his arrival, the chair from which the apparently infirm man had had such difficulty rising that he needed two free hands on the arms to support himself. And having no convenient table on which to lay his little glass of absinthe…
Gurney reached into the base of the thick tropical plant. And there it was-shielded from casual sight by the high rim of the pot and the dark, drooping leaves. He carefully wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
The question facing him, back in his car a minute later, was what to do with it.
Chapter 45
The fact that the Nineteenth Precinct station house was just a few blocks away on East Sixty-seventh Street focused Gurney on a mental list of the contacts he had there. He knew at least half a dozen detectives in the Nineteenth, maybe two of them well enough to approach for an awkward favor. And getting a set of prints lifted from the pilfered cordial glass and run against the FBI database-a process that would demand some wiggling around the need for a case number-was definitely awkward. He wasn’t about to explain his interest in knowing more about his luncheon host, but he wasn’t about to invent a lie that could later blow up in his face.
He decided he’d have to find another way to go about it. He placed the little glass carefully in the console compartment, put his cell phone on the seat beside him, started the car, and headed for the George Washington Bridge.
The first call he made along the way was to Sonya Reynolds.
“Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing all afternoon?” She sounded angry, anxious, and completely ignorant of the day’s events, which he found reassuring.
“Great questions. I don’t know the answer to either one.”
“What happened? What are you talking about?”
“How much do you know about Jay Jykynstyl?”
“What’s this about? What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure. Nothing good.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How much do you know about Jykynstyl?”
“I know what’s reported in the art media. Big buyer, very selective. Huge financial influence on the market. Likes to be anonymous. Doesn’t allow his photograph to be taken. Likes there to be a lot of confusion about his personal life, even where he lives. Even whether he’s straight or gay. The more confusion, the more he likes it. Kind of obsessed with his privacy.”