“Did you see what he’s charging for the straights?”
“Are the straights okay?”
As they prattled, Crystal shot a look across the gallery, and Hiromi’s eyes followed.
A man was making his way through the front doors. Tall and lanky, he wore a tweed blazer, like a lecturer at Helshire trying to look tenured. His trousers were hemmed high, flashing argyle socks with every step. He glided at an even pace, in a straight line, as if carried by something unhurried and unstoppable beneath the floor—the rest of the shark, and he was the fin.
In his wake came two younger men, also in tweed. They scanned the room with the vigilance of bodyguards, but they were too slight of build, and kept turning to him for reassurance. Acolytes.
Hiromi saw me looking.
“My biggest fan.” Her fingertips brushed my hand as she pulled away. “Stay in touch, knife-thrower.”
She and her friends edged toward the entrance, in the densest part of the crowd, keeping clear of the man—Garrett’s target.
Dr. Lyon and his escorts walked directly to the little plinth holding thestraight flushes—the apex hand of poker. The small crowd gathered there parted for him, revealing Xenakis holding court, explaining his work.
The artist stilled as the man approached. Lyon took up space, the world bending to him the way it did for Sebastian. But he pulled the oxygen from the room, made it smaller, where Sebastian opened everything up.
As Lyon took hold of Xenakis’s shoulders, I saw him looking past the artist to the gallery entrance, where Hiromi and her friends were slipping out. A flash of anger, then amusement, then his attention returned to Xenakis.
Dr. Lyon didn’t look like a shrink, or a man who owned three Kandinskys. He reminded me of the Wolvaardt matriarch in charge of culling their youngsters.
Garrett came up beside me. “That seemed to go well. Did you two make plans?”
“We were interrupted,” I said, tingling again where Hiromi had touched me.
“There’s time. A chance encounter, perhaps. Arabella can arrange that—she tracks Hiromi’s phone.”
I didn’t look at the man. “That’s him, isn’t it? He’s why Hiromi left.”
“I can’t blame her. Something odd’s going on in there, behind the eyes, and I say that as a Morton. That’s why we’re sending our prodigy.”
An echo went through me—Sebastian’s last words in the rain.
“But for now, why don’t you slip away?” Garrett said. “It might be better if Dr. Lyon doesn’t know you work for me.”
“He scares you too?”
Garrett didn’t answer. His eyes were still on the target, his face animated with a shopkeeper’s eager, nervous smile.
“He doesn’t scare me,” I said.
“That’s why we brought you in, Jessica. I suspect the good doctor also never cried as a child.”
25
The next day, I started on the gallery’s tax returns.
It was slow work. Garrett hated mess in the real world—blood and gristle, people shitting themselves as they expired—but his account books were an abattoir.
“We’re a family of accountants,” I told him on my third day at it. “How areyouin charge of this? You don’t even keep receipts!”
“Mere paperwork.” He waved a hand at the files spread across the dining table. “Any fool can hide things from the IRS.”
“I thought hiding money was the point of this gallery.”
Garrett gave a disappointed sigh, like when Sebastian and I had turned in badly peeled eggs, all those years ago. “What do we bury in our basement? Gold?”
