“This place is so quiet.” She looked around, down at the silk Persian rug, then up. “My god. This is beautiful.”
I had removed the ceiling last year and replaced the inadequate two-by-four rafters with antique oak four-by-sixes I had rescued from an old Ponce de Leon mansion and carved myself. A fan turned lazily overhead. “Thank you. Can I get you something? Iced tea? Beer?”
I got us both a beer. She was still standing in the dining room, craning upwards.
I handed her the beer. “The height makes it very practical in hot weather.”
She nodded absently, then recalled her manners. “I’m sorry. It’s just…” She took a sip of the beer, then looked at the bottle. “What is this?”
“Lindeboom. It’s a Dutch lager. Would you like to sit?”
She surprised me by ignoring the couches and folding herself down onto the rug, the way I would if I were alone. “Was she really your client?”
“Her name is Beatriz. The Spanish consulate hired me to protect her while she was in Atlanta for a four-day visit. She needed a babysitter more than a bodyguard, but she was useful as cover. I went to Honeycutt’s party as her utterly anonymous escort.”
“You’re six feet tall and were wearing a dress no bigger than a napkin. How were you anonymous?”
“By acting exactly the way each individual I encountered expected me to act, and by lying.”
She looked at me curiously, at my boots and cut-offs stained with glue and varnish. “Don’t you ever get…lost, pretending to be so many people?”
I shrugged. “It’s just like being an actor.”
“No. No, it’s not. Actors follow other people’s scripts. You follow your own.”
Verbal chi sao. “Call it improvisation, then.”
A beat of silence. “Do you know many actors?”
“None. Some performers.”
“Like Cutter?”
“There’s no one like Cutter.”
She grinned. “You said that before.” Then she stretched and seemed to relax. “And your…Beatriz has gone back to wherever she came from?”
“For a month or so. She met a harmless law intern called Peter at the party and is probably somewhere over the Atlantic even as we speak, dreaming of having his babies. So what was it you were so hot to tell me Saturday night that you drove out here at midnight?”
“The Friedrich provenance is impeccable. There’s a fifteen-year gap not long after it was created, but I talked to a man who is considered to be the foremost Friedrich scholar—you wouldn’t believe my long-distance phone bills—who examined the painting thirty years ago and would stake his reputation on its genuineness. Apart from that, the provenance was perfect. And I found out from a dealer that there was a rumour last year that Honeycutt was trafficking in fake art. Something to do with an Anglo-Saxon armring. After a lot of discreet calls, I’ve discovered there are now two armrings in private collections—one in Argentina, one in Italy—that look exactly the same. I got the owners to fax me pictures late Saturday. So it was Honeycutt, the bastard.”
She took a long, fierce swallow of her beer. Her throat moved once, twice, three times.
“When I thought about those phone calls I made, assuring him there was nothing to worry about, not really, that we were having just a little teeny problem, I got furious. He knew all the time. The asshole knew all the time! But what I want to know is, how does he expect to get away with it? Does he think we’re all fools, that we’ll lie down and take it?”
Her beer was gone. I held out my hand for the empty. She followed me into the kitchen and looked around at the cherry cabinetry, the white counters, pine floor.
“This is nice, too.”
I popped the top off another Lindeboom and handed it to her, reached into the fridge for mine.
“So, anyway, I called him. I told him—”
I paused, hand still in the fridge. “When did you call him?”
“This morning. I told his machine—”
“What time this morning?”
“What does it matter? I said…You look very odd.”
My hand was getting cold inside the fridge. I took it out, closed the door. “Tell me exactly what time you called.”
“Before breakfast. About eight.”
…left very early this morning for a six-day trip…What did that mean? Five? “Tell me what you said in your message. Exactly.”
“Oh, I was careful. I told him that I didn’t want his business anymore, and that I was sure he knew why, that I hoped he would avoid unpleasantness and never try to contact me again or use my name in a business context. I’m sure he got the message.”
“Nothing else?”
“I told you, I was careful. I said nothing actionable.”
I ignored that. “You called his home number?”
“Yes.”
“Was it fuzzy, like a tape, or clear, like digital voice mail?”
“A tape, I think. What’s wrong?”
“Honeycutt is the one who ordered Lusk’s death.” She blinked and held her beer with two hands. “He ordered yours, too. You were supposed to go up along with the painting.” She started twisting the bottle. “Honeycutt left for the Seychelles this morning. With any luck, he left before you called and hasn’t heard the message.”
“Honeycutt was…Honeycutt tried to kill me?”
“Yes. I want you to call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”
Her blink rate went up, and her skin colour greyed to pearl.
“Julia, it’s very important that you call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to change.”
As I stripped and changed, I heard her voice rise and fall and finally harden as she jousted with the airlines. When I emerged, her colour was back.
“The most likely flight was through Lisbon. It left at eight-fifty. He would have had to check in two hours before departure.” She looked at my charcoal silks and black Kenneth Cole shoes. “I don’t understand.”
“When I break into Honeycutt’s house, I don’t intend to be seen. If I am, I don’t want to be remembered. The best way to be invisible, unmemorable, is to blend in.”
“Do my clothes pass muster?”
“You’re staying here.”
“No. He tried to kill me. I have to do something about that. It’s me he’ll be after if he gets that tape.” She flushed, as though suddenly self-conscious. “I know it’ll be dangerous, but I’m a grown-up. I know what I’m getting into. I can handle myself.”
She stood there with her hair in a chubby braid, makeup so perfect you could hardly tell she wore it, smelling faintly of European beer. What did someone like Julia Lyons-Bennet know about danger? She knew martial arts as an art and self-defence as theory. Hers was a world of board rooms and galleries, auction houses and banks. She had lived her whole life in civilized enclaves and believed the universe to be an essentially civilized place. Danger to her was just another game that her smarts and good looks and privilege would see her through safely, but danger is not a game. Danger is a casually violent Viking. It doesn’t care about motivation or intention or explanations. When it sits opposite and offers you the cup and dice, you either walk away or play full throttle. Danger, with its well-used axe and huge ham hands, is out to take you for all you’re worth. Luck can work for or against you, but danger loads the dice, it cheats, and when it does you have to pin its hand to the boards with a knife, no hesitation. She wasn’t ruthless enough, she didn’t understand enough.
“He tried to kill me,” she said again.
She was a grown-up. She wanted this. “Come, then. But don’t get in my way. Meanwhile, in my office, through there, there’s a pine cabinet. Key is in the kitchen, hanging below the clock. In the cabinet there’s a satchel. Bring it, please.”