Call Down the Hawk
Page 6
Slam. Adam smashed another, and another.
Ronan stabbed a crab with his makeshift lance. It pierced right through the barcode.
“Gotcha, you hungry bastards,” Ronan told them.
Another crab landed on his arm; he smashed it against the wall and impaled it just as quick. Another flipped onto its back; he stabbed it through the barcode. Stomp, stomp, flick. More slime. Slam. Slam. Adam was killing the ones by the bed. It had a certain gruesome satisfaction.
There was a knocking on the door.
It was unclear how long it had been going on. Only now with all the crabs dead was it quiet enough to hear.
Adam looked at Ronan, horrified.
“The bed,” Ronan hissed. “Put them under the covers for now.”
The knocking continued.
“Just a second!” Adam said.
The two of them furiously scraped a mound of gloppy crab corpses under the comforter. Ronan shoved the hoverboard beneath the bed, where it pressed up tightly against the mattress, desperate for flight.
Adam went to the door. Out of breath, he opened it a crack. “Yeah?”
“Adam Parrish,” Fletcher’s plummy voice said. “What the hell is going on? They’re gonna call the proctor.”
“Fletcher, look, I …” Adam said.
Fletcher pushed open the door.
He stood with his glorious breadth in the door, his hair oiled, books under one arm.
The room was a compelling contemporary painting, a textural experiment of disembodied crab legs, bright liquid guts, and a little bit of Adam’s and Ronan’s blood. It was beginning to stink of exhaust.
Fletcher’s eyes roved over all this. His eyes landed on Ronan’s makeshift lance.
“My flag,” Fletcher said.
Adam shut the door hurriedly behind him.
“The walls,” Fletcher said.
The crab guts were peeling the paint off them and the hoverboard had left several large dents in the plaster.
“The beds,” Fletcher said.
The sheets were torn and ruined.
“The window,” Fletcher said.
One of the panes had somehow gotten broken.
“A motorcycle,” Fletcher said.
It occurred to Ronan that the latter was the most likely to kill him right now, if Adam didn’t, so he turned it off. It took him a second to figure it out because it didn’t have a key, but eventually he found a toggle switch labeled YES/NO.
There was nothing overtly supernatural about the picture without seeing the crabs beneath the covers or the hoverboard beneath the bed.
There was only several thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a Harvard dorm, Ronan’s choking guilt, and a proctor on the way.
Adam said, very simply, “Help me.”
Even though Breck Myrtle was technically the number one on this whole thing, he had Jeff Pick break the window to get into the house. That made Pick the guy who started it. Silly, but it made Myrtle feel better about being involved.
Burglary was not Myrtle’s usual modus operandi. His siblings were into that sort of crime, the breaking and entering, the writing of bad checks, the taking of handbags out of unlocked Nissan Sentras. Their mother had taught them all this sort of low-impact criminality. Not taught-taught, not like flash cards. In a lead-by-example way. She was a Walmart greeter now and had urged her prodigy to go legit, but Myrtle had decided to rise above this. He sold art out of a shop in Takoma Park and also on eBay. The online component worked the best, as people trusted him more when they couldn’t see his face. All of the Myrtles had long faces with tiny eyes, and even when at their most benevolent, they had the look of something that might creep out of the dark to eat your body after you died. But that didn’t matter when he was selling art online; it wasn’t about him, it was about the work. Most of it was real, some of it was fake. He didn’t feel bad about the fake stuff; it was barely criminal. People only believed in fake art because they wanted to, so really he was just giving them what they wanted.
He was not a burglar.
But he was making an exception this time for Hennessy. She was already a criminal. Stealing from criminals was like multiplying negative numbers. It turned out positive in the end.
The McLean mansion they had just broken into sprawled at just under twenty thousand square feet, about the same size as the sculpted lot it sat on. If you don’t live in a twenty-thousand-square-foot house, it’s a hard size to wrap your head around. It is about the size of one hundred parking spots, or just under half the size of an NFL-regulation football field, or twice the size of the average American strip mall built between 1980 and today. The mansion had eight bedrooms and ten bathrooms and one ballroom and a pool and a fountain with mermaid statues in it and a movie room and a library full of books with only white spines and a kitchen with two ovens in it. The front room was the size of most New York apartments and was completely empty apart from a chandelier large enough to gain sentience and two sweeping staircases up to the second floor, just in case you wanted to go up one and come down another. Things that you didn’t expect to be coated in gold were coated in gold. Floors were made from marble that had once been someplace famous or covered in wood from trees that were now endangered.
It was hard to say how long Hennessy had been squatting there. Properties like these, owned by Saudi investors or princelings or something, they could sit empty for years.
They—Myrtle, Pick, and another Jeff, Jeff Robinson—had come in via the glass-walled poolroom. Pick, who seemed well versed in the art of breaking and entering, had brought a large, lightly adhesive window decal advertising specials on chainsaws. He’d affixed this to one of the large panes of glass and then punched it. The sound had been remarkable mostly in its unremarkableness—just a dull, sandy sound, nothing that warned of home invasion.
“See,” Pick whispered as he peeled off the decal with its new shattered-glass crust, “I told you, no alarms. Hennessy don’t want the police here.”
They took stock in something that seemed to be an enormous and grand living room. A wall of French doors overlooked a stone patio where a bronze woman shot an arrow straight into the sky. The room was decorated with a delicate tufted couch and two chairs pointed at the carved fireplace, a priceless Persian rug, several abstract paintings, a ten-foot-tall potted schefflera, and a brilliant yellow Lexus supercar parked askance as if it had driven in from the patio to enjoy a fire. A paper plate with a congealed half-slice of pizza sat on the car’s hood; a cigarette was extinguished in the extra cheese. These final three objects provided the bulk of the room’s odor of exhaust, smoke, and marinara sauce.
Despite all this excess, the real focal point was a perfect copy of Sargent’s masterpiece Madame X that leaned on a substantial easel. The white-and-black marble floor beneath it was a universe of paint constellations and comet streaks. It was a showstopper. The woman in the portrait was nearly as tall as Myrtle and stood gracefully, one hand gathering the bulk of her black satin dress. Her hair was deep red, her skin so pale it was nearly blue. A signature was painted in the bottom right corner: JOHN S. SARGENT 1884.
The painting was absolutely perfect except for the puckered bullet holes over the delicate eyebrow and flushed ear.
“What a head case,” Pick said.
Myrtle had heard of Hennessy before the party at TJ Sharma’s. Hennessy was supposed to be the best forger on the East Coast. Too expensive for run-of-the-mill copies, but, as evidenced by the perfect copy of Madame X, the person you wanted if you were going to try to sell a fake high-end work to a gullible and moneyed overseas buyer outfitting their new mansion. And there she—she, that would teach him to make assumptions—was at that Sharma party. Small world. Guess word of when Feinman was going to leave her coffin to walk among the mortals got around. He was surprised Feinman turned down Hennessy’s request to get into the Fairy Market; Hennessy was clearly more than qualified for the job. He’d gotten an invite, after all, and what was he but a dealer?
When life handed out lemons, it just made good sense for someone to make lemonade.
“Let’s spread out,” Myrtle said in a low voice. “Look for the high-ticket things.”
“Electronics?” Pick asked.
This was what came from hanging out with criminals. “If that’s what you want to do. Meet back at the pool.”
Robinson peered inside the Lexus. He asked, “And if Hennessy shows up?”
“A car left this morning,” Myrtle said. “Hennessy was in it.”
Pick produced a plastic jar of zip ties from the same bag that had produced the adhesive decal. “And if there’s anybody else, just tie ’em up.”
Myrtle was again impressed with his criminal credentials. “Right. Right. Nobody’s calling the cops, so just keep ’em quiet.”
They spread out.
Every room was full of paintings. Hard to tell if they were Hennessys or originals. Some of them he recognized—Mondrian, Waterhouse, Ruysch, Hockney, Sandys, Stanhope. Forgeries? High-end prints? Originals? In a house like this, they could be.
He began to take everything he saw, making multiple trips to stack the frames by the door.
Myrtle discovered Hennessy’s workspace in one of the wings. The light was turned on, though it was empty. The ceiling was high and crowned with another massive chandelier. A headboard and footboard leaned against the wall behind rolls of canvas, empty gilt frames, and canvas stretchers. Government paperwork, checkbooks, passports, and envelopes covered a rollback desk. A computer sat on the floor beside it, the keyboard pulled far enough into the room to be in danger of being stepped on. Everywhere else was paint, pencils, paper, books, paintings, drawings. He saw Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Abbott Thayer’s The Sisters, William Orpen’s To the Unknown British Soldier in France—but they were surely for Hennessy’s own satisfaction, being too well-known to ever be passed off as originals.
A striking portrait took center stage. The subject was a lovely golden-haired woman in a man’s jacket; she peered warily at the viewer. He wasn’t ordinarily into figurative art, but it made him feel things in his parts. Which parts he hadn’t worked out yet. Multi-part feelings.
“The trick is to buy as many shitty old paintings as you can find, then you work over the top of them. You’re fucked if they x-ray, of course, but to the casual eye, the unprofessional beauty, all the punter sees is the beat-up old panel, and they’re right there with you. Give the people what they want, that’s all it’s about.”
Myrtle slowly turned.
Hennessy stood in the doorway to the room.
She had changed since she’d left in the car. Her kinky hair was now pulled up in a ragged black topknot. She wore tinted glasses, a rabbit fur coat, a lace bralette white against her dark skin, and leather leggings that exposed a fish-scale tattoo on her lower calf. More pastel tattoos covered her knuckles, which were also smeared with paint. He still couldn’t tell how old she was. She could be twenty-five. She could be seventeen.
“The most successful forgeries change as little as possible,” Hennessy said, lighting a cigarette. She had a face that looked like it was smiling even if she wasn’t smiling. “You follow the rules ninety-nine percent of the time, people won’t notice the one percent you don’t. A thousand little lies, pal, that’s the way to do it, not a big lie. A new Van Gogh? No one believes. But they’ll buy a mislaid Henry Tonks. A new Monet water lily? Fat chance. But a minor Philip Guston? Money for dinner. Piece of advice? No one’s gonna buy that Degas you’re holding.”
Myrtle had not prepared himself for this scene. He searched for a reply inside himself and found only anger. It was the way she was unafraid. It was the way she hadn’t screamed. It made him furious. His mother had always warned him he was an angry person and maybe it was true, because he felt his rage multiplying. Tripling, quadrupling, abillioning.
He put down the Degas and took out a knife. “You little bitch. You don’t just talk to me like that.”
Hennessy tapped ash onto the floor. “You don’t just creep into people’s houses like some mission impossible motherfucker, either, and yet here we are.”
A scream came from elsewhere in the mansion. It was hard to tell what age or gender of person had produced it. It did not appear to concern Hennessy.
Myrtle threw himself at her. He was not bad with a knife, and his nuclear rage lent him superpowers. Hennessy ducked out of the way as his shoes lost traction on the loose rug. As he slid onto his ass, anger ignited to white-hot hatred. He hadn’t hurt anyone in several years, but now he could only imagine how it would feel to crush his fingernails through her skin.
There was another scream. Unknown victim, unknown crime scene.
He scrambled to his feet to lunge for her again as she stood there smoking next to a half-finished nude.
“Hold it,” said a voice behind him. Something cold and blunt tickled the skin beneath his ear. “Unless you want to be licking up the mess of your brains.”
He held it.
“Why don’t you hand that knife to Hennessy?”
He handed it to Hennessy, who dropped it into an open jug of paint.
“Jordan,” Hennessy said, “it took you forever to get here.”
The voice attached to the gun replied, “Accident on 495.”
The newcomer stepped into his view. The first thing he saw was the gun, now pointing at his face, a Walther with the word D!PLOMACY sharpie-d on the barrel. The second thing he saw was the person holding it.
She was a twin; she had to be. She looked just like Hennessy—same hair, same face, same nose ring, same tattoos. She moved like her, too, kinetic, confident, taking up room where there was no room to be had, all muscle and power and teeth-flashing challenge.
He also hated her.
“Now who’s the little bitch?” Hennessy asked him, in that same lazy, mild way.
He called her an offensive word that started with a C and was not crunk.
“Don’t be a stereotype,” Hennessy said. She extinguished her cigarette on his bald spot, and when he was done yelling, the twin with the gun said, “We’re going to take a little walk to the door, and then I never want to see you again.”
Together, the three of them walked down the long hallway, past the collection of paintings he’d been gathering, and then to the door with the broken glass.
Pick stood by it, shivering and holding himself. Blood covered one half of his face, although it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Robinson crouched with an assortment of teeth, presumably his own, cupped in his palm.
Three other girls stood in the gray morning shadows. The light was poor, but to Myrtle, it seemed that they, too, looked very similar to Hennessy. At the very least they all stood like her, like they would fuck you or fuck you up.
The one called Jordan went through Myrtle’s pockets and got his wallet.
“My mind’s like a sieve,” she said. The bright friendliness of her voice as she snapped a cell photo of his ID was one of the more threatening things he’d ever heard. “Wouldn’t want to forget. Oh, hey now.”
She’d taken his Fairy Market invite out of his wallet.
“It’s got my name on it,” he said.
Hennessy laughed, as if that was the least important detail.
“You’ll be sorry,” he said as Jordan handed it off to one of the other girls and vanished it away.
“I don’t think I will be, friend,” replied Jordan.
Hennessy smiled widely at Myrtle, her mouth wide enough to swallow the planet. “Thanks for the dance.”
Ronan walked for hours.
At first he walked nowhere, just one foot in front of the other, eyes on boots, boots on leaves, leaves from foreign trees that didn’t know him and didn’t care to. He changed courses only when a walkway turned, when a building loomed, when
the wall of Harvard Yard forbiddingly turned him back. Eventually, he found himself walking a labyrinth in an isolated courtyard outside the Divinity School. Some labyrinths had walls of stone or shrubbery; this one was just a brain-like pattern inlaid in the courtyard stones. One could step off the path from outermost circle to innermost at any time. The only thing that kept one in this maze was one’s own feet.
He walked the labyrinth in to its center, and then he walked it back out, and then he walked it in, and then he walked it back out. He didn’t think, because if he did, he’d think about how somewhere, Adam was explaining himself to his proctor and God knew who else.
He just walked.
He just walked.
He just walked.
If he’d had a car, he would have gotten in it and driven. Where? Anywhere. As fast as possible.
You see how the game gets harder the more pebbles are thrown. The tighter the spiral twists.
Declan called at some point. “I told you to text in the morning. The rules of this were very simple.”
Ronan tested his voice, found it wanting, and then tried it again. It worked this time, even though he did not think it sounded particularly like his own. It said to Declan, “I ruined his dorm.”
There was silence, and then Declan said, “I’m going to call Adam.”
Ronan kept walking the labyrinth. Somewhere someone was playing a single poignant French horn very, very well. It was far more audible than the murmured sounds of the day’s traffic.
He sat in the center of the labyrinth. Put his head down on his legs. Folded his hands over the back of his neck. This was how Adam found him some time later. He sat down behind Ronan so that they were back to back in the center of the maze.
“Declan took the crabs,” Adam said.
Ronan didn’t say anything.
“He told me to blame everything on you,” Adam said.
Ronan didn’t say anything.
“I told them …” Adam hesitated. “I told them you got drunk. I’m sorry, I—”