“I know, that’s why I decided to let you come in.” He gestured to the satchel. “What have we got here?”
“You’ll never believe it,” Margo said, hoisting it onto the desk. “I went to the museum, and these paintings just followed me home!”
“It’s because you’ve got a kind face.” Vojak lifted out the canvases, fitting a jeweler’s loupe into his eye so he could examine their brushstrokes.
Margo stayed silent until he’d gone through each of the pieces in turn, and then asked, “So, what do you think? Can you find new living arrangements for a couple of Fragonards, a Watteau, and two … third-guy-whose-name-I-can’t-pronounce?”
“Possibly. Probably.” Vojak peered up at her with a smile. “We’ll have to see.”
Margo tolerated this gamesmanship with admirable self-control. News reports had been cagy, but enough information had been released to ascertain what had been taken from LAMFA; Vojak, one of the most prolific and connected fences in the LA area, had probably been feeling out potential buyers for days, anticipating this haul—maybe he’d even initiated a preliminary auction.
Trafficking stolen art wasn’t like moving black market electronics, or even cars; the paintings would be expensive, and the buyer would never be able to display them or brag about the acquisition. Only a handful of collectors were wealthy enough and fixated enough to want that kind of bad deal—and Vojak was the man most likely to find them.
The fact was, though, that Margo knew very little about her fence that wasn’t available on the surface. He ran his operation out of the back of a dummy travel agency; he had facial scarring and walked with a cane; and he was quite the snappy dresser. Vojak, a word that meant “soldier” in a few Slavic languages, was almost certainly not his real name, and five different sources had given her five different accounts of his background.
“By the way,” the man said, moving the paintings to a stand-up rack behind the desk, “I’ve got a couple of buyers interested in the items your team ‘liberated’ from the Chinese consulate last month. I’ve been offered fifty for the Scythian doodads, thirty for the coin collection, and six hundred for those diamonds.”
Margo almost fell off the desk. “S-six hundred thousand?”
“Guessed it on the first try!” Vojak spread his hands. “Get the little lady a prize.”
“I…” She searched for words. “They were so teeny, though!”
“Size can be deceiving. You should go after jewelry more often, you know. It’s lighter, easier to sell, and stones can be recut and reset like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I can’t believe that you, of all people, don’t know how much diamonds are worth.”
“I…” Margo’s voice stalled out again. Another cliché she’d lived up to without realizing it was “rich kid who doesn’t appreciate the value of things.” The jewelry she owned had either been gifted to her or purchased through a private buyer on a parent’s account. She’d never paid much attention to prices.
“You know, if you’d snagged a couple of hard drives or blank passports while you were in that embassy, we could be talking about numbers in the seven figures,” the fence pointed out smoothly, but Margo was shaking her head before he even finished.
“No thanks. You know my disclaimer: I’m a thief, not a spy.” She drew a hard line at government secrets and identity papers; the implications were too broad, and too serious. Depriving the French government of a Boucher was one thing, but enabling a national security breach was another. “I’ll think about the jewelry thing, though. In the meantime, say yes to the doodads and diamonds, but hold out on the coins. They’re worth more than thirty grand, and with six-hundred coming in, we can afford to wait and see if the offer goes up.”
“You’re the boss,” Vojak said, as Margo took the satchel and headed for the door.
“Don’t forget it!” she sang back. Then, halfway into the vestibule between the two locking doors, she turned around again. “And, Vojak? No more thirteenth dukes.”
9
On the long drive back from Van Nuys to Malibu, traffic jamming the freeways as east-siders fled west and west-siders crawled east, Margo called Axel from the car. They’d barely spoken since the break-in, and the distance between them was starting to throb like a toothache. When he answered the phone, she began talking immediately.
“I’m going to be putting some money in your account. And, Axel? It’s a lot of money.”
When she relayed the numbers, the boy actually gasped out loud. “Shut the front door—are you serious?”
“That was my reaction, too!” Margo squealed. “I mean, apparently we need to be looking for bags of diamonds way more often.”
“Margo, babe, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I am always on the lookout for a bag of diamonds.”
They giggled together, and she felt a rush of warm relief. She and Axel didn’t fight often, and when they did, it made her feel like a piece of herself was missing. Afraid to let the moment escape, she asked, “How’s your mom?”
“Okay.” He sounded cautious, afraid of invoking a jinx. “Today’s a better day. She spent some time on the deck, and she’s sleeping now.”
“That’s good.” She nodded to herself. “If you need anything—”
“I need a favor,” he said, almost at the same time.
“Name it.” She crossed her fingers, hoping against manual labor.
“You have to go to a party with me.” His voice was small. “It’s tomorrow night, at Astrology on Cahuenga.”
“Astrology?” Even though he couldn’t see her, Margo grimaced. “That place is the literal worst, Axel. Everything is sticky, the people are gross … it’s where all the teenage floozies hang out!”
“Listen, you owe me,” he began argumentatively, but then stopped short. “Did you say ‘floozies’?”
“I’ll owe you anything else, okay? I’ll take you drag shopping. I’ll buy you a pair of Louboutins, if they make them in your size.” She thought for a second. “I’ll commission a pair of Louboutins in your size! Just please don’t make me go?”
“I can’t…” he trailed off uncomfortably, and mumbled, “I won’t get in without you.”
“Because you’re underage? Please. Astrology has lower standards than that. You don’t need a hot chick to talk your way past the bouncers.”
Mumbling even quieter, his tone miserable, Axel revealed, “Ryan’s hosting a thing there. And … I’m not exactly invited.”
“Oh.” Ryan Labay, the son of an actress and a record executive, was one of the more popular guys at Somerville Prep—their tiny private school near Zuma Beach. He listened to the best music, threw the best parties, and had the best abs in the senior class. Once upon a time, he had also been one of Axel’s best friends.
But then came Basil’s infamous arrest, which made the Moreau name a social disease that no Malibu resident wanted to catch—and the Labays had been among the crooked financier’s many victims. Axel still kept hoping he could live down his father’s reputation, still get back a little bit of what had been taken from him, and Margo didn’t know how to tell him it was pointless.
“There’s a list, so just call him and tell him you want to come, and that you’re bringing a plus one.” Axel rushed on, “Or maybe you don’t even have to bother! If you just showed up, it’s not like they wouldn’t let you in.”
“Okay, Axel,” Margo said, trying not to sound as depressed as she felt. “I’ll get you into Ryan’s party.”
Hanging up, she hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake for both of them.
* * *
When Margo got home, the salty breeze from the ocean cooling the canyon, she found two cars parked in the forecourt—a beat-up sedan and an even more beat-up SUV—only one of which she recognized. Letting herself in through the garage, the bright, lemony scent of cleaning spray greeted her immediately, and she called out, “Irina?”
“Margo?” The voice came from the kitchen, where she encountered a
stout woman with a suspicious frown and hair that was magenta from a bold henna rinse. “What are you doing home? It is school day, no?”
“I had … stuff to do?” Margo anticipated a lecture, but the stern-faced woman merely tossed up her hands and muttered in Russian. Narrowing her eyes, the girl remarked, “You know, I’m getting a little tired of people cursing me out in languages I don’t speak today.”
“You think this is curse? This is nichto. My grandmother would give you curse, God rest her horrible soul.” The woman snatched up a rag and started wiping down the countertop so ferociously, Margo half expected the black stone to turn white.
“Irina, is everything okay?”
The Mannings’ housekeeper sighed, her motions slowing. “Your father is not feeling well. I think … I think he gets worse.” Shortly, she added, “We exchanged ideas.”
“I can imagine how that went. Did he fire you?”
“He tried. I tell him no.” Irina shrugged dismissively. “And don’t change the subject. What do you mean, ‘stuff to do’? You had school to do!”
Wordlessly, Margo reached into her purse and drew out an envelope that bulged with paper currency, and placed it on the counter before Irina. The woman’s dark, intelligent eyes darted quickly around the room, and then she swiped the money up and stuffed it into a pocket of her apron. Softly the girl said, “That’s forty-eight thousand, and I’ve got more coming.”
“Spasibo,” the housekeeper murmured, looking nervous. She gave the girl a little smile, and then resumed cleaning.
Years ago, in another life, Irina Zhukova had been a nurse in a suburb of Moscow, married to a writer and activist who was critical of the current regime. When the woman had treated patients of a chemical explosion the government was attempting to cover up, she smuggled copies of the charts to her husband, who subsequently published them. Two weeks later, he was dead—killed in a staged home invasion—and Irina, fearing for her own life, fled the country. Her name smeared by planted stories back home, she’d been forced to abandon her medical career and seek whatever employment she could find; but that didn’t mean she’d given up helping the sick and the desperate.
“Is the clinic doing well?” Margo asked softly.
“We do okay.” Irina bobbed her head, patting the new lump in her apron. “This will help. Always we need more medicine, more supplies, more everything.”
A year and a half earlier, when a romantic evening with her first serious boyfriend had ended in a broken condom and a lot of panic, Margo turned to Irina for help. Freshly sixteen, she didn’t dare tell her perpetually disappointed father—and, already a public figure, the girl was terrified of being photographed buying a home pregnancy test.
The housekeeper hadn’t even blinked. Bundling Margo into her aging sedan, she’d whisked the girl all the way from Malibu to one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, where, in the belly of a gutted tax preparation office, an unlicensed health center had sprung up. The small front room was packed with weary and frightened patients, mostly women, and the sudden revelation of the place took Margo’s breath away; shut out by the system and with nowhere else to turn, some people waited for days to get an appointment.
It had been humbling. With access to more money than she’d ever need, Margo was stealing out of sheer boredom, while hundreds of people depended on one illicit field hospital for basic care. That afternoon, skipping to the front of the line to receive a brief exam and some emergency contraceptives, she brooded over a sudden wellspring of guilt.
From that day forward, Margo contributed her entire cut from every heist to the health center—money that couldn’t be declared to an organization that couldn’t exist—helping the women who ran it to pay for everything from bandages to bribes. Unable to donate any portion of her considerable allowance, thanks to Harland’s scrupulous management of her expenses, it never felt like enough.
“Irina, whose car is that in the courtyard?” Margo asked after a moment. The dented SUV had been driving her nuts, because she couldn’t profile the owner. The auto was a newer model, and not a cheap one, but it looked like it had been rolled down a ravine a few times. While on fire.
“Your father has visitor,” the housekeeper answered unhelpfully. “A gentleman.”
“Who? What gentleman?”
“You’re so curious, go upstairs! See for yourself.” The woman scowled, but with a glimmer of something in her eye Margo couldn’t quite identify. “I am told that my job is to mind my own business! So here I am, minding business.”
Attacking the stovetop with the rag, Irina muttered more Russian profanities under her breath, and Margo followed her curiosity upstairs. There, she found the gentleman visitor slouched in a decorative chair outside her father’s bedroom door, thumbs flying over the screen of a smartphone. Dressed in a black polo shirt and pressed khakis, she was surprised to find that he was young—maybe only a few years older than she was.
Margo cleared her throat and the guy looked up, his face breaking into an unexpected grin that showed startlingly perfect teeth. He had close-cropped dark hair, a cleft chin, and warm brown eyes. Before she could speak, he headed her off. “Well, if it isn’t Margo Manning.”
“Do I know you?” she inquired coolly, because it was always best to be cool around gorgeous boys.
“Ouch!” The guy made an exaggerated show of flinching, hands over his heart. “It’s been a while, but I thought for sure you’d remember. Do you forget all the guys you’ve seen naked?”
Margo’s eyebrow arched so high it almost scratched the ceiling. “Excuse me?”
The guy shot up from the chair with a panicked expression. “Oh shit, sorry—that really didn’t come out the way it sounded in my head! You were, like, five years old at the time.” Margo crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes, and the boy’s face turned hot pink. “I’m just digging this hole deeper, aren’t I?”
“When you reach six feet, I’ll start piling in the dirt.”
“We used to know each other,” he blurted. “I’m Dallas. Dallas Yang?”
It took Margo a beat to recover, the name Dallas Yang hurtling out of the past and towing a surprisingly long train of memories. They were hazy, from around the time her parents had divorced—a page of history she’d put effort into forgetting—but they were good ones. Deciding to make him work just a little harder, though, she shook her head resolutely. “No. I’m sorry, but I remember Dallas Yang. He’s a scrawny, seven-year-old showoff who can’t shut up about Harry Potter. You’re nothing like him.”
“Double ouch.” Dallas rubbed the back of his head with a sheepish look, and Margo couldn’t help noticing just how rigorously his biceps and shoulders tested the integrity of his polo shirt. “Is that really the impression I left? I thought I had way more game than that.”
“All guys overestimate their game.”
“Hey, you’d be surprised how often my Harry Potter trivia works.” He gave her a rakish, lopsided smile that had her thinking, No, I probably wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Until she’d passed the bar herself, Dallas’s mother, Liliana Perez, had worked as a paralegal for Winchester Martin—Harland’s longtime personal attorney. Practically family, Win was a frequent guest at the mansion; and, as Liliana had become practically family to him, she and her husband and their scrawny, showoff son had been around often as well.
Margo had been fascinated by Dallas when she was a kid. Two years older, he was brash and outgoing, seemingly fearless. She remembered a stick-wielding, gap-toothed whirlwind careening around their expansive lawns, screaming at the top of his lungs. And now? Now he was at least six foot two, with broad shoulders, a lantern jaw, and a pouty bottom lip with a slight cleft in it, like a ripe plum, begging to be tasted—
“Earth to Margo—everything okay?” Dallas was looking at her funny. “Your eyes kinda glazed over for a minute.”
“Sorry, yeah, I’m good,” she said, trying to shake off the sudden warm feeling in her stomach.
“What brings you to Malibu after, like, a decade?”
“We moved out to Pasadena a while back, to be closer to mom’s office. I’m here because I’m actually interning for Win now, and”—he gestured to a briefcase resting against the wall—“I have some stuff for your dad to sign. Only, your terrifying Russian guard dog downstairs told me that if I woke him up, she’d bury me in cement. And I’m not sure it was a figure of speech.”
“I thought Win was scaling back his practice?” Having recently turned seventy, the Mannings’ attorney was gearing up for retirement—if Harland would allow it.
“He is. He did.” Dallas shrugged. “No more assistant, no more paralegal—just me, answering phones, filing stuff, and getting paperwork signed. He kind of took me on as a favor to Mom.”
“Just, like, as a job? Or are you going to be a lawyer?”
“The second one. I’m at UCLA, following in Mom’s footsteps!” He gave her that smile again, and she was proud of herself for not feeling woozy. “I was actually in Switzerland for the summer, doing a program on international law. My parents are a little pissed at me, though, because I spent more time jumping out of airplanes than sitting in class.”
“Jumping out of—sorry, you’re going to have to back up.”
His expression became utterly serious. “Switzerland is basically the extreme sports capital of Europe. Skydiving, snowkiting, hang gliding … it’s amazing!”
“I don’t know what ‘snowkiting’ is, but it sounds pretty extreme,” Margo offered. “So. Dallas Yang is going to be a lawyer. I remember you wanting to be an explorer or a robot.”
“Turns out robot jobs are easy to find, but the pay sucks.” He stretched his arms out, the fabric of his shirt riding up enough to show a couple inches of bare skin, and Margo clenched her teeth together to keep her tongue from scrolling out. “I’d ask what you’ve been up to lately, but you’re famous enough these days that I guess I don’t have to.”
Death Prefers Blondes Page 8
