At the base of the stairs leading to the entrance of the house, three men in black T-shirts held silver trays with lemonades, and champagne. Nikki, who had just explained—“it’s short for Nikita, which means ‘winner,’ and my mother likes winning”—took one of each then walked up the stairs, the dogs at her side, and onto an enormous porch lined with antique rattan chairs and wooden chinoiserie drop-leaf tables. She drank the champagne in one sip then set the glass on a table and told me she thought we could start with a tour, then meet “the family,” and then eat. She was mindful of the fact that I would have to leave in a few hours. As I followed her, a football team’s worth of children appeared seemingly from nowhere, raced past me, and started to play tag on the lawn. As we moved through an enormous hallway anchored by palm trees (a tree indoors!), I saw, among other things, a woman nursing a newborn, teenage boys playing chess, three older women in swimsuits reading on chaises longues, and a few other, much older men I assumed, by their uniforms, to be staff. They carried platters of food through a door at the far end of the room, which led to another outside space. Through the door I could glimpse a pergola.
Pergola. Chinoiserie. Chaises longues. These were not words I was familiar with then, but looking back now I can see the house so clearly. And now I have the language to describe it, not only the furniture and the people but the emotions. Looking back, I see it clearly. The house to me at the time seemed filled with family and love and excess. The children at play.
We entered a wide white kitchen where Nikki picked a deviled egg from a tray and popped it into her mouth. She kissed the cook, who wore matching white terry wristbands and a U.S. Open hoodie with the sleeves cut off. It was freezing. I noticed enormous brass buckets filled with wine bottles, which, it occurred to me, could bring the whole house down if they were to ice over and explode.
After the kitchen came a library, then another parlor, and finally a back porch off of which I could see another, separate structure, one I hadn’t noticed from the air. It appeared to be an architectural folly, circular and made entirely of white stone. It felt completely out of place next to the house, which, while large, had a casual, almost Caribbean feel.
“This is my stepfather’s museum,” she told me. “A museum of one. One artwork, one visitor, one patron.” As we approached, I noticed a small electronic keypad by the door.
Barely caring that I was watching, Nikki entered the code and the door, like an elevator, slid soundlessly open. “I know,” she said, “it’s silly, but my mother is obsessed with security, it comes from having been kidnapped as a child.” I let that land without pressing; Raja had told me that part of my role was not to be curious. Inside, eleven enormous canvases hung from ceiling wires, each placed inches from the round walls, giving the impression of a kind of three-dimensional experience. You could walk behind the canvases, or in front of them, between them. I had never seen art displayed that way, and as I got closer, I noticed wires running from the base of each canvas down to the floor, too, preventing the paintings from moving. The wires were so thin you could only see them if you stood inches away. Otherwise they were invisible, and the canvases seemed to float in thin air, each at the exact same height, spaced precisely apart from the walls and from one another. The structure, then, had been designed and built specifically for them. Stepping into the center of the space you were completely surrounded by the art and, as I started to look more carefully, I understood that this was a kind of series, all done by the same artist, and that the series told a story.
A story of slaughter.
Nikki explained that her stepfather was contemplating selling the paintings because he had, in recent years, gone partially blind and the idea of this art he so loved but could no longer see clearly had started to depress him. She told me the paintings had been commissioned, that her stepfather had asked the artist, “Tell me the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey in emotions,” that what I was looking at was the first half of the project. That the artist had died before he could complete it, “which is a pity, as what you see here is so much about death. You get the war, but not the peace, which might be a perfect metaphor, if you know Edouard,” she said.
Nikki walked to the far side of the space, which, if I had to guess, was around two thousand square feet. As she moved, tiny floor lights linked to noise, or perhaps to heat levels, illuminated to further focus the eye on each canvas.
“Helen, Paris, Menelaus, Hector, Patroclus, Priam,” she said, like a child counting dimes for a candy purchase. “At first Edouard thought of commissioning a series of artists and asking each one to consider a different chapter in the story, which is of course very episodic, but then we worried that everyone would compete for the bloodiest bits. Every artist loves a battle. So I convinced him to let one artist do the whole thing. Edouard flew to Rome and took his favorite painter to dinner and, well, Edouard is very good at persuading people to do things for him. It took him six months to say yes, and then we all went to see them in his studio before commissioning an architect to dream up the perfect space to hold them all. During that time, we moved here, and my stepfather decided this would be the place to house the paintings. It was his idea to have them live in the round, he felt it was…democratic. And that it would make you feel immersed in the experience of the story. Come, look.”
The floor was one large slab of limestone. Nikki moved to a small wooden chair—the single piece of furniture in the space—to wait while I looked carefully at each canvas. I asked if I could take notes and she said no but that if, after my time today, I decided to work with the family, to help with the sale, I could come back and take as many notes as I liked. And then it was clear that I was not there to see if I wanted the job. I was there for the family to decide if they wanted to hire me. Even though Raja had assured me, “There is only one candidate for the position,” I suddenly felt like I was the art under inspection. That the table had turned.
“I know why he wanted you,” she said. “Do you?”
“I am good at my job,” I said, and she laughed out loud.
That was Nikki’s curse and her blessing, a confidence that slipped easily into condescension.
“I am sure you’re very good. You’re very pretty, too.”
And just like that, something shifted. Was Nikki reminding me I wasn’t there for deviled eggs, I was there to provide a service, to play my part. What did Nikki know? She walked closer to me. She was so close I could smell the champagne on her breath.
“I don’t bite,” she said, baring her teeth.
She urged me to take all the time I needed—“We’ll eat in an hour”—and as she closed the door behind her I wondered if there was any way she could lock me inside.
My phone had come back to life. A single text popped up, from Marcus: I love you. And I wrote back, I love you, too. I closed the phone and spent a few more minutes admiring the paintings. What I loved was the use of color and white space. How could anyone put a price on something like this? The images were abstract, and not necessarily identifiable. Some looked like enormous flowers mid-bloom and others almost like grids of reds and purples and golds. Only one painting had a clearly identifiable human figure in it, a woman. She wore a crown of brightly colored jewels, which, on closer inspection, might have been a crown of thorns. Each canvas contained letters or phrases around the edges, but they were too abstract to read. They were written in many languages.
“Everyone will welcome you,” Raja had promised, when he came by the hotel before we left. Marcus was calm, tired, and hadn’t touched his French toast. He lay on the bed in his slippers while Raja paced the Persian carpet and ran through the questions one last time with me, actors running lines.
Where did you study?
Florence.
Be specific.
The international school.
And your focus was….
Use of color in the Renaissance.
Like what colors.
Azurite. Ultramarine. Indigo.
What else.
Verdigris. Malachite.
What was the role of color.
To create the illusion of dimension.
To fool the eye.
No, not exactly.
What then.
To enhance the experience.
Of the viewer.
Yes.
Do you have a favorite artist?
So many. Too many.
Oh, but if you have to choose.
Titian. Twombly.
And where were you born?
England.
Be specific.
Outside Oxford.
Be specific.
Burford.
Where are your parents?
Dead.
How did they die?
A car crash.
Was it an accident?
I don’t know. I think so.
Do you miss them.
Yes, of course.
Did you love them.
Yes.
What did they teach you.
Manners.
What else.
To keep an open heart.
Try again.
To learn more about the world.
Good, yes. And how did you meet Marcus?
At the V&A, an opening.
Which opening.
Decorative Arts of the Napoleonic Era.
How old are you?
Twenty-five.
Twenty-five but an old soul, right?
Yes.
You’ve been told you’re an old soul many times.
Yes.
Are you on social media?
No.
Why not?
I’m an old soul.
Why else.
I like privacy.
Who are your clients.
I don’t think I can tell you that.
Will you sign an NDA?
Of course.
And how did you meet Raja?
How did you meet Raja?
How did you meet Raja?
I was told that if this last question came up, not to answer, that the absence of an answer was the right answer, that discussing Raja was the one thing that would always be off limits wherever I went. It was that morning in the hotel in Paris that I finally woke up and understood that Raja was exactly what you, by this point, have likely deduced. Yes, Raja may have been a skilled diplomat, and decorated soldier, he may also have been the son of a great man. He may have possessed an ability to love, and he may truly have loved Marcus, at least. But Raja was also a ghost, a cipher, the lie you need to save yourself. A designated traitor in certain markets and a calculated killer in others, the human analogue to another missile strike. Raja would claim, if pressed, to be allied to no one, only ever to “the mission.” This wasn’t true, though. In the end everyone is allied. As you cook supper or walk your children to school, as you navigate the ordinary emotional rules of life, Raja knew ordinary life was as much a fiction as any “cover” story. Ordinary life for Raja was a set of chess pieces without names, of longitudes and latitudes, of “enemies” whose histories of poor choices Raja was committed to setting right. Buddhists live in the moment. Raja lived in game theory.
Raja was a spy.
A spy in full, entirely incapable by the time he met me of ever looking back at the boy he once was. Raja, like Marcus, like all the ones who last in his line of work, had fully inhabited his cover, and it suited him. The line between who he pretended to be and who he really was had, by the time I met him, almost entirely evaporated. Once, Raja had been a dreamer, a romantic, a boy looking for an exit from his life, for meaning. Raja had been a good son and an observant child, well-mannered to a fault thanks to a mother he was deeply keen to please. The son of an arrogant father, prone to casual abuse as a result of his own shame, Raja longed for a way out, longed to be the operational shot caller in an important game. Raja, once, had been a lot like me.
“We want one thing above all,” he said, repeating himself, as if talking to a child, which in a way I still was. “We want to know if the father, Edouard, is in the house, where exactly he stays in the house, and where he goes if he ever leaves, who he sees, who he does not see. We want to know everything you can learn about him.” And there it was, the end of the story that started with “And that’s not all” that day at the monastery near Dubrovnik. The end of the story was not an epiphany or a glass slipper that fit. It was a two-letter word—“we”—indicating Marcus was involved in all of this, too. “We” was more than Raja, though, far more than Marcus. “We” was weapons grade, nation state, fully funded. “We” was a network operating at a level I didn’t even know existed, nor could have imagined it. “We” was the small set of people who ran the secret world from their glass-walled conference rooms in Arlington, Tel Aviv, and Vauxhall. “We” was in the very serious business of doing the jobs no one else wanted to do, and of finding the right assets on the ground to assist in any mission, Berlin to Bangkok to Bagram to Beirut and in between. And while most new intelligence recruits never sign a formal contract, I had. And while most new recruits don’t recite a vow, I had. My vow was simple, a rite of passage in any ordinary life: in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Any asset can leave her handler, but I wasn’t any asset. I wasn’t recruited by a case officer. I was recruited by my husband.
“All she has to do is enjoy herself, listen, have a nice lunch,” Marcus said, his eyes closed, as if in penitence. As if that were the whole truth.
And that was when they started to argue. Marcus was worried about me and worried about Raja forcing me too far, but looking at them, it was clear who was running things. At one point, Marcus looked at me and said, “You don’t have to do anything at all,” which, if I had been older, if I had seen more—if I had read more, maybe—if I wasn’t as naïve and inexperienced I would have understood the classic line that always comes from the good cop in the good cop-bad cop scenes. The good cop is there as a foil, and to make the mark feel safe. The mark, me. What the good cop-bad cop scene does is give the mark confidence that she will be cared for, that at least someone is on her side. The good cop-bad cop scene is designed to elicit confession, or inspire choice. In my case, the latter was the goal. They needed to know I would do what they wanted. They needed to know I would be good at it. And they needed to trust me. By the time I had boarded the helicopter, I was completely clear on what I was doing, and why, and for whom. I felt a level of pride, even of cool, as if I had been given the lead in the school play. Farce, romance, comedy, tragedy, problem play. I didn’t know the genre yet. Intelligence assets, like actors, are often shown only those scenes in which they will appear. What I told myself was that I was doing this for my husband. What I told myself, and believed, was that no one would get hurt.
Lunch was a long table set for forty, give or take a few, under the pergola. I was seated next to Nikki’s mother, Dasha, with a boy of about ten on my other side who told me his name was Aleksandr—“with a k,” but that he went by his middle name, Felix—“with an x.” He barely stopped talking as plates were laid down the line of the table, meats and cheeses and small pots of butter and jam, freshly sliced mango and melon and multicolored carrots “from the little garden.” Felix said that he liked English football and did I know any footballers? I broke the news that, sadly, no, I did not, but that my husband might know a few, and should I ask him? The boy wanted to know which teams I liked so I lied and guessed, saying Arsenal was “all right,” which resulted in him giving me a brief history of the various clubs and their rivalries, like a historian expounding effortlessly on War of the Roses arcana. Down the table I could hear French, English, Spanish, and what sounded vaguely like Arabic, all being spoken interchangeably, a Tower of Babel on the beach.
Dasha said nothing and ate in silence. Children eat quickly so, as the younger ones finished, they left to return to their lawn games, at which point Dasha turned to me. She looked very young, but I would guess, given Nikki, that she was in her late forties. Dasha led with “elegance, and cultivated curiosity,” in Raja’s words. He warned me that Dasha was suspicious of everyone, having lived a life in the “shadows,” but said that my age would defuse the bomb of her concern. “In her eyes,” he had said, “you’re like a child, and as she was a child bride herself, she might even feel empathy, or whatever she can access closest to that.” She wore the simplest white shirt over a swimsuit, no jewelry, no makeup. This family, on this day, appeared happy and engaged, immaculately inclined away from perfection even though everything they did was, in my view, perfect. Millions of dollars of art housed less than a quarter of a mile away, attack dogs asleep lazily on the lawn. I worked hard not to acknowledge any exoticism in it all, pretending as if this was how I spent every day, pretending I was one of them, or might have been. As if perhaps I still could be.
“Where are you from,” Dasha asked, pulling grapes casually from the enormous purple bunches that lay in a line down the center of the table. Two garden roses in tiny glass vases set by each place reminded me of my garden, our garden, of Marcus and the prayer bench. That garden felt very far away now. When would I be back? And would we even return to London? That day on the boat the one thing Marcus had been clear on was, “We are going to spend some time around Paris,” and I didn’t question him. He’d told me he wanted to see some doctors working on an experimental treatment for his illness which he described as “neuromuscular, degenerative,” and not treatable, and when he didn’t say more than that I didn’t press. He told me that he also had a “bad heart,” with an irregular beat, that he might have a stroke any day if he forgot to take his medicine. “I’m an old man,” he’d said, as if it were his fault.
“I’m from England,” I told Dasha. “Near Oxford.”
“Where near Oxford, I know it well.”
“Burford.”
“Ah, lovely, near the water.”
“Yes.”
“And were your parents professors?”
“No, they were”—at which point Nikki sat down on my other side, taking Felix’s seat. She had brought her plate of meats and cheese with her, intent on joining the conversation.
“How do you know Raja,” Nikki said, it was less a question than an indictment. “A far more interesting question than if your parents taught university.”
My parents hadn’t gone to university.
“I met him through my husband,” I said.
“He’s a recent acquisition of Nikki’s,” Dasha said.
“It’s true.”
“Raja is no one’s acquisition, I can assure you.”
“That’s not fair,” said Nikki.
“My grandfather was blind at the end of his life, too,” I said, trying to pivot. “A silver lining was he learned to love music. By the time he died he knew as much about Tchaikovsky as your son was just telling me about Turkish football.”
I nodded to the boy on the lawn, who I knew was not her son but her stepson.
“My husband loves Tchaikovsky,” Dasha said, which I also already knew.
“I like Swan Lake,” I said.
“Edouard loves Swan Lake.”
And then she said, “My husband will never sell those paintings, even if he goes completely blind, but my husband loves meeting young, beautiful women, so we have welcomed the distraction of your visit today, a distraction I believe was”—and she glanced at Nikki—“your friend Raja’s true intent.”
And then one of the staff was by her side, explaining with some urgency that she was needed. I asked Nikki if everything was all right, she assured me it was, and asked if I had time for a swim before I left. As we walked away from the table, I could hear someone say, “If America dies, she will die by suicide,” and then, “You know who said that? Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln.”
Nikki led me to a guest bedroom, where a blue swimsuit, in my size, lay on the bed, the price tag still attached, alongside a towel, swim cap, and goggles. On the floor was a new pair of sandals, also my size. I changed and looked at myself in the mirror and remembered Marcus as he licked the icing from my finger, the Komodo dragon robe, and “Happily ever after.” I felt, in that moment, complete confidence that this was all completely normal, meant to be, by design. Life leads, you follow, is what I told myself. On a desk, I noticed a lacquered box of light blue stationery. Rather than a name or address, a quote was printed in tiny, elegant block letters across each sheet:
IN THE HOTEL OF DECISIONS, THE GUESTS SLEEP WELL
Turning it over I could see the same phrase was written, in French, on the other side:
DANS L’HÔTEL DES DÉCISIONS, LES CLIENTS DORMENT BIEN
As I walked into the hall, I noticed Dasha emerge from a few doors down then close the door carefully behind her. She walked away from me toward the stairs, never looking back, but I could feel she’d noticed me, and I wondered if I had already overstayed my welcome.
“All we need to know is if he is there,” Raja had said.
“And if he plans to stay,” added Marcus.
I walked to that door. As I came close, I could hear music inside. As I leaned in, I recognized it. Swan Lake. Marcus had taken me to see it in London, on one of our first dates.
Carefully, I turned the doorknob, which clicked, and the door opened. And, making up what might pass for an excuse in the event I was caught, I walked into the room and almost into yet one more Belgian Malinois. He looked up at me and gave a low growl. I stood completely still while the music played. That night after the ballet, when Marcus and I made love, he had taken his time, more than before. I remember it feeling like he was trying to make up with me, even though we hadn’t argued.
The bed was unmade. Books were piled on the coverlet, as well as a laptop, four mobile phones, and a breakfast tray with the remains of lunch. The little garden roses in their vase, the grapes, a small dish with chocolates. I could see a door on the far side of the room and walked toward it. The dog didn’t move, as if he trusted me, as if maybe he was there to protect me. There was a sofa piled with papers at the other end of the room, and as I walked past, I could see documents in many languages. Glancing into the bathroom, I noticed the sink was dripping, as if someone had only minutes before finished washing their hands, or shaving. Men’s cotton pajamas lay in a heap on the floor. As I turned to go I saw an enormous map hung on the far wall, framed in Lucite. As I got closer, I could see the map was printed on silk, that it was what I would later learn is called an “escape and evasion” map, used to plot routes into, or out of, hostile territory in wartime.
The map showed the far eastern border of Turkey, into Western Iran, and was dotted with tiny red lines and markings in what looked like Morse code, dots and dashes. The map appeared to have been torn, and so only this part of it remained recognizable, though the paint was bright, as if it had been recently restored. It was its own work of art. Was this Edouard’s room, Edouard the blind man? Edouard, the ghost. Edouard, the husband and father, stepfather; Edouard, allegedly the architect of crimes, the center of a horror story no one had told me yet. Edouard, the one to watch. Edouard, the man I was sent here today to find.
When I had asked Marcus who Edouard was and why Raja was interested in him, Marcus said, “He’s the king of kings,” then said not to ask more, not yet. He did add, “If he is there, which I very much doubt, and if you do meet him, he may want to spend time alone with you. And if that happens, don’t be afraid.”
I remembered Nikki’s comment about the paintings, about having the war but not the peace. I took a step closer to the bed. I wanted to see what the books were, and just as it struck me as odd that a blind man would cover his bed in books, I heard a noise from downstairs, the dog barked, and I rushed into the hall, closing the door behind me quickly. I thought I had heard something, or someone, inside the room, but I was at risk of being late. Even then I could safely conclude that Nikki wasn’t one to abide lateness.
She was waiting on the beach, which was half sand and half rock, and as soon as she saw me, she ran into the ocean and dove under the first large wave. I joined her and we swam silently out for what felt like a long time. The water was warmer than I had expected.
“I like you very much,” she said. “You must come again.”
We treaded water and looked at the shore for a minute. And then she dove back down, and I could see her swimming fast back to the beach, as if she were racing. A small cabana had been set up, inside of which, on a chair, were my clothes and my bag. “The helicopter is here,” Nikki said as I emerged from the ocean. Of course it was. The entire day, including my exit, had been choreographed far in advance of my arrival.
And as we approached the landing pad, Nikki kissed me three times, left cheek then right then left again. My hair was still wet as we lifted into the sky, which was the clearest blue. I looked back over my shoulder, away from the house and even farther from the small round museum. I could see a clearing in the trees and, inside the clearing, I could barely make out a lap pool, its dark water well camouflaged by black walls. I could see someone was swimming laps, naked, wearing only swim goggles. It was a man. At the edge of the pool, another man sat silently smoking, dressed in a suit, as if keeping watch. The swimmer reached the edge of pool, the end of his lap, and, just as we were rising up away and out of view, I thought I could see him raise his head and follow the line of our flight.
“On y va?” said the pilot. “Home?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Take me home.”