Authors: M.J. Rose
At noon Emeline called. Lucian recognized her number and let the machine answer. She called again at two. He didn’t pick up that call, either. At five he sat down and played the messages back.
“Lucian? The police just left,” she said. “They said you called off the detail. I tried to reach Captain Broderick, but he’s not in. Does this mean you found the man who’s been threatening me?”
She sounded excited.
Good little actress,
he thought.
On the second call, concern colored her voice. “Lucian, are you all right? Last night was so terrible. All I can think about is what would have happened if you hadn’t been there. I know you’re busy…but when you get a break, call me, okay?”
There was always coffee in the agency’s kitchenette, but this late in the day it was bitter and thick. Lucian didn’t care. He poured it into a foam cup and headed back into his office. He read a few e-mails and took a sip of the disgusting brew without tasting it. At 5:20 p.m. he shut down his computer and left. He was exhausted.
Lucian sat in his car, unsure where to go. He couldn’t get Emeline’s voice out of his head. She’d lied to him about every
thing, and he’d believed her. Worse, he’d believed
in
her. And because of her, he’d delegated his responsibility for bringing a job to a close for the first time in his career.
The traffic was heavy, and it took Lucian almost forty minutes to reach Madison Avenue and Eighty-Third Street. He pulled into an illegal spot and then sat there staring at the storefront. He’d avoided this place for the past twenty years. Even during the past few weeks, he’d dropped Emeline off here once but had never gone inside. The framing store was the only ghost left.
She was happy to see him and so relieved the police had caught her stalker.
“We didn’t catch him,” Lucian told her.
“Then why did you call Broderick and tell him I didn’t need protection anymore?” She was frowning and clearly confused.
“Yesterday we arrested an art dealer for trafficking in stolen goods. With very little provocation he told us the names of the men he’d worked with—one who procured a Van Gogh for him, another who’d gotten him a Matisse. A landscape.
View of St. Tropez.
That man was Andre Jacobs.”
Lucian stopped, waiting, hoping Emeline would protest, that she’d argue and offer up an explanation, or lash out, indignant, insulted by his accusation. Or insist she had no idea what he was talking about. But she didn’t do any of those things. Emeline remained completely silent. As good an admission of guilt as any.
“Your father may be old and he may be sick, but that doesn’t preclude him from being the devil. And if he’s the devil, what does that make you?” Lucian waited for her to respond, and was infuriated all the more for her silence. “What did you think? That if you pretended you were Solange reincarnated I’d be so blinded and confused that Andre would be safe?” Lucian
laughed bitterly. “Well, congratulations. You did an excellent job. What did you use? Solange’s journals? Letters? How did you find out about the carving on the tree? Where’d she write about that? The cherry on top was how hard you fought against the idea yourself. That was priceless. All that protesting about how you wanted me to see you for who you were, about how hard it was for you to live with Andre’s and Martha’s desperation.”
There were clues to what she was thinking in her pale, pale face and in her sad eyes, but he didn’t trust himself to read them.
“Tell me how you knew about the tree, Emeline.”
“It was in her journal.”
“And that she’d asked me to paint her?”
She nodded.
“Did he ask you to set me up like this?”
“You don’t understand. It was the tragedy of his life,” she said, throwing the words out at him as if he should be able to understand this. “An accident that shouldn’t have happened. He never thought the theft would result in murder. It was supposed to be a simple robbery.”
“He was a greedy bastard, responsible for his own daughter’s death.”
“Don’t you think he knows that?” she shouted.
Lucian walked over to the door. He put his hand out, about to leave. “Your father’s going to be arrested tomorrow morning.” He stood there for a moment longer looking across the room at her, at the storefront, at the whole sorry scene, one last time. “Tell Andre if he turns himself in before we come for him, the courts will be more lenient. At his age, in such poor health, with a good lawyer, he should be able to work out a house arrest agreement.”
Lucian opened the door. On the other side was a man just about to ring the bell. Well dressed, he was wearing a light
brown suit and carrying a rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper. He had his head down, but something about him looked familiar. Lucian didn’t care who he was. He wanted to get out and get away. He left the door open for the customer and walked to his car.
Lucian put his key in the ignition. He was angry—mostly with himself—for getting so emotional. It had been a mistake to even come here. But at least it was done. He looked at the clock on the dashboard—it read 6:26 p.m. He’d been there for less than twenty minutes. It had felt like years. Twenty years, to be exact. He stared at the storefront.
The gold lettering on the black glass read JACOBS FRAMING—EST. 1933. The plate glass window showcased a half-dozen elaborate gilt frames. During the day you could see in though the front door, but the shade was pulled down now. The hours were painted on the glass in more gold lettering. MONDAY TO SATURDAY, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. CLOSED SUNDAY.
He could see the words from where he sat. The store closed at five o’clock. So why had there been a customer waiting outside when Lucian left?
But it wasn’t a customer. Lucian knew who it was. He’d met the man twice. Put his hand on his arm. Consoled him.
Leaping out of the car, Lucian raced up to the storefront. The door wasn’t locked. No one was in the front room. Brown wrapping paper and a length of string littered the floor. Voices and the scents of glue and sawdust wafted out from the back.
Lucian pulled his Glock out of its holster.
The hallway was dark. At the far end the light shone, casting the two people in a warm yellow glow. Emeline was standing at a large wooden table, laying frame corners on the edges of a painting, trying out different combinations. The customer stood beside her, looking over her shoulder.
Everything seemed completely ordinary—they were picking out a frame—except the new customer was holding a gun in his right hand. Emeline couldn’t see it. But Lucian could.
“Drop it.” Lucian assumed a shooting stance, his gun trained on the intruder’s chest. A perfect bull’s-eye shot.
Charlie Danzinger grabbed Emeline around the waist, jerked her in front of him and shoved the barrel of his gun into her temple. He did it so quickly and smoothly, almost as if he’d expected an intruder—almost as if he welcomed one. The hand holding the weapon shook slightly, but Danzinger didn’t look scared. The Met’s top restorer looked deranged. And that bothered Lucian more than anything else. A cogent argument didn’t work with someone who was lost to logic.
“Why don’t you let her go, and you and I can work this out.”
Danzinger, who’d killed in this very room so long ago, and looked ready to kill again, shook his head. “Can’t.” His tongue flicked out, fast like a lizard’s, and he licked his lips.
Lucian tasted bile. “Why can’t you?”
“She’s a witness.”
“To what?”
“To what happened. To everything that happened. She saw it, she knows.”
“What does she know?”
“I worked for Andre Jacobs. He was like a father to me. I was all alone in the city. Trying to get started. He said nothing would happen. He was like a father to me. But she was here. She was here…” His voice wavered and Lucian wondered if he was going to cry. “I’ve never meant to hurt anyone. Never. Never told anyone. But if she knows…” He nodded to Emeline. “If she knows and if she tells…I’ll go to jail. And I can’t go to jail. Can’t be away from my work. I do important work. I restore things.”
Emeline was as still as if she were painted there—not real at all.
Danzinger licked his lips again.
“You don’t really believe all that stuff about reincarnation, do you?” Lucian asked him. “It’s just some hocus-pocus the papers printed because they needed to sell copies. There’s no such thing as reincarnation. She has no idea who you are. She lied about being reincarnated to get sympathy. She doesn’t know anything.”
“I can’t go to jail. I can’t be away from my work.”
“Charlie, she doesn’t know anything. Tell him, Emeline. Tell him how you lied about being reincarnated.”
The gold, L-shaped frame corner flashed as Emeline swung it around and up and into the man’s face. Its sharp edge sank into his right eye. Danzinger let go of her as he put his hand up to the source of the excruciating pain.
The restorer’s scream was endless, a long note of pure, unending anguish, and it echoed in Lucian’s ears as he jumped him, grabbed Danzinger’s gun out of his hand and threw him down on the ground. Cuffing him, Lucian kept him there on the floor with his knee shoved into Danzinger’s back, watching the man’s blood pool on the wooden floor as his wound bled out.
It was nine-thirty by the time the police finished taking statements, collecting evidence and closing out the murder scene. After they left, Lucian locked the front door, found a bottle of Scotch and some coffee mugs and poured drinks.
“I don’t want it,” Emeline said when he put one down on the desk in front of her.
“Drink it anyway.” He crossed the room and leaned against the door, as far away from her as he could get. He didn’t want to smell her damned perfume or see her pulse beating in her neck.
Like a child, she took the mug in both hands and sipped obediently. His own first gulp went down like barbed wire, but the next wasn’t as rough and the one after that was almost smooth.
“Thank you,” Emeline said. “You saved my life.”
“This time I knew what to do.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You mean you didn’t know what to do to save Solange?”
“No. I didn’t.” Lucian drank more of the Scotch.
“How did you know to come back inside?” Emeline asked.
“I saw Danzinger as I walked out. He was there by the door waiting. Just another customer. No reason to pay attention to him. I went back to my car, and then it hit me that if he had been just another customer, why was he waiting outside like that? Why would it matter if there was someone else inside? And it was too late. The store was closed. It was a hunch. Not nearly as clever as you reading old journals to figure things out.”
The gibe stung, and she blinked twice. She started to say something, then stopped. Finally, “Lucian, please, I want to at least explain something about that, about Andre and why—”
“I know. He’s all the family you have. You love him. I get it. Let’s not rehash this.”
“But you just saved my life.” Her voice cracked.
“That’s my job. To save things.”
“Things?”
“Just don’t ask me to forgive you for what you did. What’s so damn ironic about all this is…” Now he was shouting, yelling at her, or at himself, he wasn’t sure. “You made me see Solange again. Really see her. And I finally understood how I’d idealized her. Turned her into an impossible, perfect memory. The terrible irony is that I’d stopped wanting her. Do you understand? It was you I wanted—it was you. You! Isn’t that something?”
She bent her head and lowered her face into her hands. Her blond hair fell forward like a curtain, making the distance between them even greater.
Lucian ached to get out of there finally and for good, but he couldn’t leave while she was like that. The seconds went by. Her weeping was silent, but her back shuddered with each new sob.
“You did it for him? For a man who…” He couldn’t finish. He wanted to say something to hurt her, but he didn’t. He felt sorry for her, for her misguided effort. Lucian put his hand up to his temple to massage the pain. The gesture had become a habit.
But despite all the confusion, sadness and exhaustion, he didn’t have any pain. He hadn’t since yesterday evening. He just hadn’t realized it until now. It had disappeared at some point during the ambush, and in the ensuing hours it hadn’t returned.
No nightmares had woken him up that morning, either. No ghostlike women had haunted his dreams.
Finally, Emeline lowered her hands. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red and bloodshot. Her hair was disheveled. The familiar and very real scar above her eyebrow stood out in relief. In the framed mirror opposite the desk, she saw her own reflection and reacted, wiping away the tears, trying to smooth down her hair, and then attempted a laugh that sounded like a sob.
“Promise,” she said, “you won’t paint me like this…”
Her whisper reached out and grabbed hold of him. Words that no one but he had ever heard, words that could not have been written down in a diary or a journal or in a letter or repeated to anyone because they had been said only seconds before the woman who’d whispered them had died.
He didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. Tried to absorb what had just occurred. Attempted to reason it out. Reason all of it out. It was too much for now. Okay then. He just needed to reason part of it out.
If…if there is reincarnation,
he thought,
it’s about forward motion. It has to be, or else we would all be forever stuck in the past.
“Please promise,” she repeated, “you won’t paint me like this.”
They were Solange’s last words coming from Emeline, but she was waiting for an answer, something Solange hadn’t been able do.
He was looking at her across the room and the distance between them did not seem as great as it had only seconds before. Lucian took a step closer. Both of them had been damaged, like the Matisse, like the sculpture of the god of sleep, but they were survivors, too, maybe more special for what had happened to them, as if what they had gone through had imbued them with something magical. And then the gap was closed.