“The handwriting on the wall might be a forgery.”
Reza Masoud
I studied the painting of Madame Auguste Manet that lay on the kitchen table in front of me. Anna stood back, holding the now-empty portfolio.
“Come and tell me what you see here,” I said, indicating the painted canvas. I wasn’t accusing her and deliberately kept my tone of voice mild.
She stood beside me, and I pretended not to notice how close she was. Then my gaze returned to the painting.
It was beautiful. Not the subject, because no matter how well-painted Madame Auguste was, she would never be a lovely woman, but the art itself. Manet had caught the tension around her mouth, the fine hairs of a dark mustache on her upper lip, and the disapproving lift of her right brow. She was slender and looked small, even slouchy, in her chair, and the fat sausage rolls of her hair didn’t look like they’d have been in fashion even then. And yet, the black satin of her mourning gown gleamed against the black wall, and the gold of her rings shone with only slightly less fire than the light in her eyes.
“The brush strokes are long and loose, and her skin tone has the flat light of a photograph,” she said. “My mother calls this style early modernism. Everything about it seems impossible.” The last words left her in a whisper.
“What does?” I watched her eyes as she looked up into mine. There were flecks of gold in the irises that seemed to glitter in the light.
She shook her head.
“What’s impossible?” I persisted.
She exhaled. “It’s impossible that this painting could look so much like a Manet. I mean, obviously it’s in his style, but Madame Auguste was bought in 1920 and has been hanging in the Gardner collection since then.”
“Not so impossible, really, if you consider digital photography,” I said thoughtfully. “Theoretically, someone could paint this from a photograph.”
She looked sharply at me. “So, it must be a copy.”
“You tell me,” I said simply.
“I can’t. I don’t know.” She blew out a frustrated breath and then picked up her wine glass. She stepped back from me and took a sip.
“What do you know?” I asked casually.
“I found it,” she finally said, studying the red wine in her glass. It seemed to pain her to say the words, and then they tumbled out as if she had no control over them. “It was hidden behind another painting on the same stretcher.”
There it was … and yet wasn’t. She seemed unable to hide the truth from me, and yet it wasn’t the whole truth. It was too much to ignore, and not enough to condemn, and every word she uttered stabbed me with the certainty that this was somehow a part of the theft at the Gray mansion. I studied her for a long time. “What else do you know about it?”
This time she met my eyes directly. “The edges of it were left behind on the stretcher – about half an inch, I’d guess. It was stuck to the back of the other painting.”
My heart sank and lifted at the same time. There’d been another set of edges behind the painting that had been stolen from Gray, but this was just one more piece of circumstantial – not damning – evidence that she was giving me. Giving freely rather than having it wrestled or tricked from her. And despite my warring thoughts, all I could see were eyes the color of the sky on a stormy day, with flecks of light that shone through dark gray clouds. I wished I could see into her brain, to know her thoughts, to understand her, but I couldn’t seem to find my way past her eyes.
“I find hidden paintings pretty intriguing, don’t you?” I finally said.
“As it happens, I do.” She breathed deeply, as if she’d been holding her breath before that moment.
“I’m inclined to see if the Manet is back in public view tomorrow and perhaps study the two paintings side by side,” I said, still in the casual tone of voice I’d adopted to cover all the questions I wasn’t asking.
“We could go tonight.”
“No,” I said sharply, “we can’t.”
She smiled slowly as she took another sip of wine. “You’re no fun.”
My gaze narrowed. “You were joking?”
Her smile got bigger. “Maybe.” She shrugged. “Probably.”
She finished her glass of wine and stepped around me to tuck the painting back inside its portfolio. Then she slung her messenger bag back across her chest and turned to face me.
“Thank you for the tacos and the wine. I’m going to go find a place to sleep now, and I’ll meet you back at the Gardner when it opens. Cool?”
Apparently, she could read faces, because I hadn’t realized I’d been so transparent until she nodded as I walked her to the door.
“Good choice. Not trusting me to show up would have been a bad move, and definitely would have pushed all my ‘you’re not the boss of me’ buttons. Also, you’re still pissed because you feel like I lied to you, and I get that. So, have another glass of wine. I’m going to stop off at the taco truck for more carne asada, because I haven’t hit my taco limit yet. Come to think of it, I don’t think there is a taco limit – at least not an enforceable one.”
I smiled at that, but it was a fleeting thing. I didn’t trust her, and that bothered me. The part of me that wanted to invite her to stay was silenced by the part that wondered if it was because I was attracted to her or because I didn’t trust her not to run. Neither was acceptable under the circumstances, and she seemed to know it.
“Anyway,” she said brightly, “have a good night, Darius. Dream about things that make you smile.”
When I closed the door behind her, I had no idea what those things could be.
I poured myself another glass of wine and sat down at the table where the painting of Madame Auguste Manet had been. I could still catch hints of Anna’s scent in the air. It was disturbing, disconcerting, and utterly distracting – just like her. My concentration had been shot since I spotted her in the museum courtyard, and I couldn’t seem to focus on more than one thing in any given moment: the tone of her voice, the riot of curls and the way the light shone in her eyes. I was in danger of becoming a poet’s nightmare of bad verse and trite metaphors, and through it all I was still so angry.
Angry at having been lied to, angry that she was a thief, and angry that I was so fucking attracted to a liar and a thief.
My cell phone rang, and I was surprised to see the Cipher office number onscreen.
“Masoud,” I said as I answered.
“Darius, it’s Shane. You’re on a speaker with Jorge, and we’re down in his Swordfish lair at Cipher.”
“It’s almost midnight. You should be home with your man and that ridiculous beast who vaguely resembles a dog,” I said, happy for the distraction from the noise in my head.
“I know, right?” Jorge said with a grin evident in his voice. “But he’s not really my man, and this task-master won’t let me leave until she tells you what I’ve been digging up.”
The sound of a playful punch carried through the speaker phone. “Hey!” Jorge complained.
“Shut it, genius,” Shane said impatiently, and then apparently to me she added, “We’ve been digging for information on your twins.”
My twins. No, they weren’t mine, she was. Except she wasn’t. She was a suspect in the burglary of a home protected by one of my security systems. That was all.
I realized Jorge was talking, and I had to focus on his words to hear them. “…hard to find the public record connection between Anna and Colette Collins. It was tough to even link them together as sisters, much less as twins. They were born in a little coastal town in Massachusetts that still has all their birth records on microfiche, and they haven’t lived in the same city for a decade.”
“Were you able to use the tracking device I slipped in her bag?” Shane asked.
“I waited until she was on the move again before we called,” added Jorge.
I settled back in my chair. Shane had been a private investigator before she came to work for Cipher, and Jorge was her genius neighbor whom I’d met when he was just eighteen. They worked together with a shorthand that was similar to how Shane worked with Gabriel, and I realized I was a little jealous of their easy relationship.
“Darius?” Shane asked.
“Sorry. She was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to investigate the thirty-year-old heist.”
“What? She said she was going out of town for a bounty,” Shane said.
“Apparently the guy had some information on the Gardner heist that he wanted to trade for his freedom. She turned him in to Boston P.D., then went to the museum to learn more. I found her there, and when the museum closed, we came back here.”
The apartment was one that Cipher Security kept available for its agents who traveled to Boston for work. Dan O’Malley was from Boston, and Cipher still had several clients in the city. The fact that the apartment was a block from the museum was a happy accident for my purposes.
I traced the etching in my wine glass. “There may be some connection between the painting stolen from the Gray mansion and one hanging in the Gardner Museum.”
“What kind of connection? That painting wasn’t of any particular value that we know of, was it?” I could hear Jorge’s computer keys clattering in the background as Shane spoke.
“I don’t have proof of anything substantial, and my suspicion is purely a gut level thing, but the vehemence of Sterling Gray’s refusal to call in the police feels like there may be something else to the story of the painting, its provenance, or what it may have been hiding.”
“And you developed this theory after your evening with the sister of your thief?”
“Actually, I’m afraid the sister is the thief, but I can’t prove it.” Suddenly, I remembered a bit of conversation from earlier. “Jorge, can you dig into the twins’ family? Apparently their mother went to MassArt, which is right around the corner from the Gardner.”
“All roads lead to Boston, huh?” Shane said.
“Something like that,” I answered.
“I’ll get you whatever I can find on the family,” Jorge said over the clatter of his computer keyboard.
“I asked Quinn to have Alex look into the client, Markham Gray. Maybe you could do that too?” I said.
Shane answered. “Apparently the senior Gray is heading to Boston from Europe as we speak. Quinn’s trying to set up a meeting for you, and Dan may go there to help facilitate.”
“That would be good. I appreciate Quinn and Dan taking my request seriously.”
Shane snorted. “We all know what happens when we start investigating the clients, don’t we?”
I smirked, remembering the case that brought her into Cipher. She’d been investigating one of our clients for infidelity, and it turned out he was guilty of much more than just cheating on his wife. “Quinn has governments on his client list now. It’s in his best interests to cut out any criminal element that might be hiding in the shadows,” I said.
“There are no shadows deep enough to hide from me,” Jorge said in the background. He already sounded distracted by whatever he was searching up on his computer.
“Let me know if you need any other help, Darius,” Shane said quietly. “Gabriel and I just finished a case, so we have some time.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” I didn’t usually work with a partner because in my specialty, it was just me, the electricians, and the engineers. Investigation was something new to me. “Shane?”
“Hmm?”
“What did you think of Anna when you met her?”
Something in the question or maybe my tone must have inspired the smile I heard in Shane’s answering voice. “I liked her. She’s smart and funny and weird enough to be friends with Sparky. He wanted us to meet because he thought we’d have a lot in common.”
“Was he right?” I asked, thinking about the strength, grace, athleticism, and fierce intelligence of my colleague.
“Yeah, I think he was.”