Just Fall (21 page)

Agathe cuts him off.

“Lucien, listen to me.”

There is a ragged hitch in her voice, she sounds hysterical, but he instantly hears the seriousness in her tone, the urgency.

“Yes? I’m listening.”

“I was at the park with the baby and Gabrielle and Thomas.”

Gabrielle is Agathe’s sister; Thomas is Gabrielle’s six-year-old son.

“Someone took Thomas, Lucien! Thomas is missing! We only had him out of our sights for a minute!”

“Where are you?”

“Still at the park. We—”

“I’ll be right there.”

Lucien clicks the phone off. A deep, agonizing pain stabs through his brain; it feels like it will split his skull right open. His palms sweat; his cell slips from his grasp and clatters to the pavement. The screen cracks. As he bends to pick up the phone the faces of the missing boys swim before his vision. Olivier Cassiel. Pierre Deveraux. Jacob Abellard. Sebastien Durio. Please, God, not Thomas too. Please.

“You can’t not care about cake!” Ellie glared at Rob as if he was well and truly insane. She looked so truly affronted and disbelieving that he burst out laughing.

“I’m not much of a sweets guy.”

“But this is wedding cake! Our wedding cake.” She gave him that smile, the one that was so brimming with love and faith in their partnership, it sucked him in a little deeper every time.

“So what’s involved exactly?”

“Um, we go to a bakery and eat cake? Decide what we like?”

Gravely, Rob said, “It sounds complicated.”

She shot him a look; saw the small secret smile tucked in the corner of his mouth.

“So I can make the appointment for next week? Thursday after work, maybe? Or would you rather do it on the weekend?”

“Thursday’s fine.” He kissed her lightly on the lips, pulling her to a stop in front of François Boucher’s painting
A Lady on Her Day Bed.
He leaned in close to the painting, to better study the subject’s face. Then glanced at the placard that accompanied it.

“The artist’s wife. She’s saucy. I can tell. Just like you.”

Next to them, a security guard cleared his throat.

“Keep your distance from the painting, please, sir.” In a musical Jamaican lilt.

They were in the Frick, Ellie’s favorite museum in New York. She had brought Rob here for the first time on their fourth date. They had been so shivered through with desire, so drawn to touch each other, so distracted and elated, they had raced through the museum and straight back to bed. Today they moved more languorously, still magnetically attracted, but their passion was now dipped like a wick in layers of wax, a candle in the making—a warm, thick coating on an incendiary core.

Ellie had explained her love of the Frick to Rob the first time she had taken him there. It was like walking through the looking glass into a part of New York life that was in the shockingly near past given how much the world had altered. What would the mighty coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick think of the tourists meandering through his former home with their iPhones and tablets, sweatpants and sneakers? It was also that the collection and the building itself were so personal to its founder. Only paintings Frick found “pleasant” (no nudity or war), the enormous dining room he designed to host lively dinner parties at least twice a week, its gilt-edged cream walls vivid with graceful paintings of women of noble birth, the wood-paneled library filled with leather-bound first editions and dark-hued paintings of men of note—all of it made Ellie feel like she was spying through an inverted telescope, stalking the home’s long-dead family.

There were certainly museums with better collections, with art and objects more to Ellie’s taste, she had explained, but she always preferred the Frick. She was thrilled when Rob seemed to appreciate it too. What Rob hadn’t told her was that he had been to the Frick as a child; that his mother’s family was distantly related to Henry Clay himself; that being back there unleashed a torrent of memories about his lost life that left him feeling deeply unsettled.

They made their way through the round golden music room, its rows of empty chairs fruitlessly waiting for patrons eager to be dazzled by virtuosity. Rob felt itchy and anxious. He fell into what he knew had become a default coping mechanism—the adoption of a persona not his own. He strode to the front of the room and faced the rows of chairs. He took three deep bows, one to audience right, one to audience left, and one to center, an impresario acknowledging his audience. A pair of teenaged Chinese tourists peeked in just as he swept his arms in a flourish, conducting an invisible orchestra, and they scurried past, giggling. Ellie laughed, and Rob linked his arm in hers. They strolled on.

No visit was complete without a stop at the small gift shop. Nothing elaborate, but there were gift cards and books, stationery and posters, umbrellas and mugs, silk scarves and caps, totes and journals. Ellie browsed, admiring a selection of chinoiserie-inspired gift items. Rob flipped through a stack of framed posters, then moved on to the books.

There on the shelves, in a section of books about the gilded age, was a reproduction of the New York Social Register of 1910, the bible of everyone important in American society at the time. He flipped through. There were the Fricks: Henry; his wife, Adelaide; and their daughter, Helen. And then there he was: Charles Buckingham Scott, Rob’s maternal ancestor, the cousin of Frick’s his mother had been so proud to name each time she brought Rob here as a child. He remembered the feel of his small, hot hand intertwined in her cool, elegant fingers, the pleasure she took in showing him the art and objets of the collection, the frozen hot chocolate she bought him at Serendipity afterward as a reward for his good behavior. Money, privilege, access, society—they were all supposed to serve as a protective barrier from the harsher realities of life. They hadn’t shielded his mother, though. They had corrupted her. Her investment in appearances had led her to cover her external bruises with makeup and long sleeves. And her internal damage had led to her betrayal of her only child.

“What was that you asked?” Rob’s voice was suddenly not his own. Rob finger-combed his hair into Henry Clay Frick’s neat side part, as he drew Ellie’s attention. “You want to hear about the assassination attempt? Well, certainly, if you have the stomach for it.”

Rob planted his feet wide apart and put his hands on his hips. “It was July 23, 1892. Inspired by his lover and lifelong friend Emma Goldman, the anarchist Alexander Berkman busted into my office, murder on his mind. I sprang to my feet, immediately sensing danger, as he pulled a revolver and shot at me! The bullet hit my left earlobe…” Rob stroked his left earlobe as if caressing Frick’s scar from this event, before continuing, “…penetrated my neck, and lodged in my back, tumbling me to the floor.”

Rob reeled, imitating taking the bullet in his neck.

By now the handful of other museum shop browsers and its two employees were all paying attention, even those who were pretending they weren’t.

“The bastard shot at me again while I was down! Blood everywhere! But then my esteemed colleague John Leishman—surely you’ve met him? He’s now the president of Carnegie Steel?”

Ellie played along. “Yes, of course, I am acquainted with the gentleman.”

“Leishman grabbed his arm and prevented a third shot, which surely would have proven lethal! I struggled to my feet and Leishman and I charged at Berkman! The three of us crashed to the ground, a tangle of limbs and fury. This was when Berkman pulled the sharpened steel file he had secreted about his person. He stabbed me four times in the leg, before we managed to subdue him.”

“My goodness,” Ellie murmured with admiration, as Rob struck the noble pose of the martyred survivor.

“I was back to work within a week.” Rob-as-Frick shrugged. “But do you know the shocker? Berkman tried to kill me in retaliation for those dirty low-down strikers killed by the Pinkertons I had hired to disperse picketing at our Homestead Steel Works.” He gave a snort of a laugh. “They were keeping men who wanted to go to work from honest labor! Un-American! Stopping the march of progress! It had to be done. But ironic, isn’t it? The bad publicity from Berkman’s murderous attempt collapsed the strike. Twenty-five hundred men lost their jobs. And we were able to pay those who remained half their wage.”

By now everyone was openly rapt. Even those who had known of this chapter of the industrialist’s life were captivated by Rob’s impersonation. And perhaps a little disturbed by the pleasure Rob-as-Frick took in the collapse of the strike.

Only later, when they were long out of the museum and sipping cappuccinos, did Rob reveal that during his performance he had pocketed two boxes of note cards, a tin pencil case, and a pack of playing cards. Stealing the souvenirs had felt like a delicious fuck-you to his mother, her lineage, the whole notion of the society from which he had been ejected.

“I’ll send a check to cover the cost and then some. But did you see? How I got everyone to look at one thing so they never looked at another? The perfect distraction. If anyone asked them later, all they would remember would be the performance.”

“Shoplifting? Really? Any other dark secrets you’re hiding, darling?”

Rob felt perversely pleased by Ellie’s shocked amusement, even as he promised he was otherwise an open book.

And then he told her lies. That his father had died of cancer when he was three and a half, that his mother had never remarried. That she struggled valiantly to provide for him but died in a car crash right after he turned twenty-one; that he didn’t like to talk about these things because what was there to say, really? He had no other family. Until now. Now he had her.

And that, at least, was the truth.

The square-jawed man with the salt-and-pepper hair stares out the window of the plane as it descends toward Hewanorra International Airport in St. Lucia. The Pitons, two extraordinary pyramids of rock emerging from the sea, are every bit as impressive as the tourist photos had promised. As the plane touches down with one bump and then another, some passengers squeal, the scared/excited release of safely alighting from the sky with just a touch of peril.

Everything goes smoothly. He clears customs, picks up his rental car, and plugs the address of the post office into the GPS. The skies are azure, the sun scorching. He opens the windows, letting the salty breeze and tropical scents stream through the car as he drives.

He finds the post office branch with no problem. Slips inside and locates the box number, 143. Uses the key he received in the mail and unlocks the box. There is an envelope inside. The man slips it into his pocket, nods cordially at the post office clerk, and steps back outside.

He gets into the rental car and, just to be safe, pulls away from the post office and drives to a beach down the road. He parks. He walks out onto the beach, turning the envelope over in his hands. He sees a small wrecked sailboat a few hundred feet down the beach and walks to it. He needs to read this letter, he wants to, but he knows it will also require action, thought, strategy. He is tired from traveling, not fully ready. A few people circle the overturned boat, a curious fixture on the beautiful beach. The man peers into the wreckage: leopard skin–patterned sheets on a waterlogged queen-size mattress, a turntable, vinyl records (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Jethro Tull; Yes; the Grateful Dead), plastic plates and cheap cutlery. An incense burner, charred with use. The faint scent of patchouli. Some old hippie’s boat gone to hell.

The man sighs, takes a seat on the sand, and slits the envelope open. The letter inside is handwritten, the penmanship spidery, shaky, hurried.

Dear M,

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. But Rob has told me that in this situation you are our only friend. He also asked that I tell you how sorry he is that we have had to call on that friendship. He had hoped you would be able to live on in peace. But if you have received this letter it means you have traveled to St. Lucia. And you know that we are in mortal danger.