by Ruthie Knox
It had to.
Chapter 2
“Ooh. It’s space pirates!”
The most interesting woman he’d met in years pointed through the glass top of the pinball game. “Look, there’s the spaceship, and there’s the captain and his first officer in a gun battle.”
Her skinny body folded over the tight belt of her trench coat. Her fedora sat at the crown of her head, affixed at a rakish angle over a coil of upswept hair. She wore silk stockings with tall heels, but this costume—which would have been conservative on a London businesswoman waiting for the train—looked like a dare. As though she wore it to announce to the world that with this woman, they ought to expect the unexpected.
It was something of a miracle that he’d accepted her invitation to join her in the first place. Allie Fredericks was the sort of person Winston usually made space around when their paths crossed—the sort he’d expect to encounter headlining an off-Broadway production of the type his daughter, Bea, sent him to see, or being profiled in one of the Humans of New York stories she liked to send him. How the other half lives, she’d tag the articles when she shared them. Or, A little humanity to brighten your day.
What she meant was these were people with big lives and big stories.
Bea wasn’t wrong: it had been a very long time since Winston let himself be drawn to a woman with a story. Decades.
Until Allie had grabbed hold of his lapels and pulled him on top of her, he’d forgotten how exciting they could be. How marvelous it had been, in the beginning, with Bea’s mother, Rosemary.
“Pirates are so cool.” Allie glanced up from the pinball glass, smiling. “Yar.”
He smiled back, because she seemed to require it. “This will work, then?”
“I think so.” She slumped against the wall in the shadows and poked out a finger to depress the paddle button. “Do you think they can see me?”
Winston stood in the player’s position before the pinball table. He had a clear view of the whole of the room they’d just come from: the bar stretching twenty feet in front of him, and past it the table where they’d been sitting and his own reflection in the mirrored wall. Even if the couple glanced behind them in the mirror, they wouldn’t be able to see Allie reflected there. She was obscured by the shadows.
“No. You’re well-concealed.”
“What are they doing now?”
The woman, still standing, had resumed her conversation. Her body blocked her companion’s from Winston’s view.
“Talking. She’s turned away.”
“Good.”
She crossed her arms, her gaze on her shoes. The red polished tips of her stocking-covered toenails peeked through the holes at the toes. She was a small woman. Interesting to look at, but not beautiful.
Painfully, hopelessly his type.
“I liked that show,” she said.
“What show?”
“The space pirates. Firefly. Did you see it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You should. It’s got all the good stuff—cowboys and justice and space prostitution and lots of bad decisions.” She captured a loose strand of hair at her neck and twirled it around her finger. “There was a movie, too. Serenity.”
“I’ll make the effort, then.”
“You should.”
“I will.”
He probably would, too. Since arriving in New York, he’d spent far too many nights in front of the television eating takeout. He’d discovered a lot of interesting movies and programs this way. It was his tendency to speak of them in conversation with Beatrice that had convinced her he needed to get out more.
He had no objection to the idea. It was simply that outside of work hours, he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing, or where, or with whom.
Four years ago he’d made sense: Winston Chamberlain, heir to a baronetcy and head of the Chamberlain financial empire, married fourteen years to Rosemary, father to adolescent Beatrice, owner of a handsome country estate and a luxury flat in the city.
A brother, a son, a reasonable and responsible man who had everything under control.
There were days he’d hated his life. Nights he’d laid awake wondering if he’d fucked the whole thing up irreparably. But he’d done nothing about it—had chosen, instead, to sink deeper into his role.
Winston hadn’t understood that pain could live quietly in a room inside someone, locked down and fed by routines, by rigidity, by tight control. He didn’t understand until it got out, and he behaved like an animal, attacking the brother he loved.
It had been the last straw with his wife. They’d limped along a few more years, but finally she’d sued him for divorce.
Rosemary had declared it his turn to parent and left him with a seventeen-year-old daughter who adamantly insisted she would attend New York University and nowhere else. He’d had to sell the house. His mother had told him bluntly he was no use at the office since the divorce, so he might as well follow Bea to Manhattan, where he could sort things out at a firm they’d recently acquired and learn how to be a proper father to his daughter.
One thing had led to the next, and on to the next, and it wasn’t that Winston wanted to go back. But his brother had fallen in love, left the bank, and become a painter. Last he’d heard, Rosemary was headed to the Himalayas on a climbing expedition. His daughter—who just a few brief years ago had been wearing a school uniform and performing in equestrian exhibitions—had transformed herself into a student, a barista, and a budding filmmaker.
All of them happy. All of them full of passionate pronouncements about how they’d finally figured out how to live their lives.
All he’d figured out was how to work Netflix.
Allie’s gaze flicked from his face to the mirror to the pinball table, then back to him again. Slumped against the wall as she was, it was hard to believe she was the same woman who’d yanked him close and put her mouth near his just moments ago. Her bravado had abandoned her.
It was his curse to want to see it restored.
“Shall I get us drinks, then?”
“Yeah. A rum and Coke? And maybe see what intel you can gather.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Winston ordered from a young bartender with a bushy beard and razor-trimmed hair. Casually, he extracted a credit card from his pocket and set it on the countertop, waiting a few beats before he glanced at the couple Allie was so interested in.
The woman was doing most of the talking, her voice loud enough to hear over the music, her hands waving. She wore blue jeans and a patterned top, her body rounded and softened with middle age, her hair a cloud of frizzy light brown curls. She looked like any woman he might pass on the street, but when she smiled, he noticed her eyes—bright, clear blue, full of light.
Her voice rose, the story reaching its conclusion, and the man laughed.
Winston froze.
When she climbed back onto her barstool, she opened up a clear line of sight between Winston and her companion, and that cinched it.
Christ. The woman was here with Justice.
The bartender set the drinks in front of him. “Do you want to pay for these now or start a tab?”
Winston cleared his throat. “I’ll start a tab.” He’d only intended to nip into the bar for a drink while the storm eased up, but seeing Justice changed everything. It seemed likely he’d be sticking around awhile.
He sipped the whiskey the waiter had brought him, thinking.
It was no great surprise, in fact, to find the artist here. Justice had been the one to introduce him to this Greenwich Village bar when he first arrived in New York, insisting Winston meet him here for a drink because he refused to set foot in the financial district.
Justice demanded special treatment, and he usually got it. He was by no means the wealthiest client whose portfolio Winston had managed, but he was one of the oddest: a public installation artist with an international profile who hid his identity behind
a pseudonym and cloaked his life in mystery.
His real name was a closely guarded secret.
In the art world, Justice was known for being unknown and unknowable—a hermit, a recluse, a cipher.
The cynical, Winston among them, pointed out how well this mystery had worked to Justice’s advantage, inflating his art-world reputation and the prices collectors were willing to pay for the bits and pieces of his work that survived after his installations were dismantled.
That was, in fact, where Winston’s firm came in. Whatever else he was, Justice was a very wealthy man, and however unconventionally he had acquired his money, he’d selected one of the oldest, most stolid and conservative firms in Manhattan to manage it.
Winston had spent his adulthood refining the role of stolid and conservative financial manager to perfection.
The question wasn’t what Justice was doing here—it was, rather, what Allie wanted from him.
The woman at the bar wrapped her hand around Justice’s wrist. The sculptor leaned down to whisper in her ear.
Winston turned away.
Was Allie a reporter? Journalists had been trying for years to dig up details about Justice—his real name, his residence, the mundane details of his life. When Winston took him on as a client, he’d been briefed to be extraordinarily careful about protecting the artist’s privacy.
Had Allie somehow learned of his connection to Justice? She’d sought his attention the moment he walked in, and he’d been seen here with Justice in the past. Maybe she’d been here on one of those occasions, watching. Perhaps she’d targeted him when he walked into the bar.
She’s using you.
But his arrival at Pulvermacher’s had been unplanned, the result of Beatrice canceling their meeting at the last minute and the storm diverting him indoors to have a cocktail and call for his car. What kind of mad girl would hatch a scheme that involved fake-snogging Justice’s portfolio manager to worm her way closer to him?
A spy in a James Bond film would. A woman in costume.
Winston swirled whiskey in his glass and mulled it over.
Perhaps she was bad news after all. Her sort of woman usually was, in one way or another.
But there could well be another explanation for her bizarre behavior, and he could think of only one way to find out.
He would simply have to ask her.
He lifted his hand to signal the bartender. He had a hunch this mess would require something stronger than a single round of drinks.
—
Allie widened her eyes at the bottle of Jameson’s Green Label he sat on the pinball table. “Whoa, big spender.”
“I like whiskey,” he said, unable to generate a more convincing explanation.
“I can see that.” She received her drink with a smile. “Anything happening out there?”
“Not really. The bar is filling up a bit.”
“But you saw them. They’re still here.”
“Yes. They’ve ordered another round, so I think you’re safe for a while.”
“That’s good to know. Thanks.”
She lifted her glass to drink. “We should have a toast,” he said. “To mark the occasion.”
“What are we marking?”
“Adventure.” He raised his own glass. “You never know what it will bring you.”
“To adventure. And to happy endings.”
He felt like rubbish as he touched his glass to hers. Him, toasting adventure. Absurd.
But it seemed just as absurd to imagine this deflated, worried woman as a predator—a story-hungry journalist, a crazed art fan, someone in possession of a passionate and harmful agenda.
He couldn’t see it.
“What sort of happy ending are you hoping for?” he asked.
“In general, you mean, or…?”
“In the specific, I think. What are we to hope will become of this spy mission of yours?”
She shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“I’d rather imagined so.”
“You’re English.”
“Hmm?”
“I just figured it out for sure. I thought you might be Australian.”
“Good lord.”
“So where are you from exactly?”
“Most recently, London. But I’ve lived here in New York for the better part of a year.”
“I’ve never been to London.”
“You should go. There’s nowhere else on earth like it for architecture, theater, for sheer history.”
He heard how he sounded, pompous as a butler in a tourism advert, and hated it—not least because he meant every word.
He loved London.
He missed London.
“I can imagine.” Brow furrowed, she reached behind her head with both hands, tugged, and her hat tipped onto the top of the pinball machine. She turned it upside down. “I mean, I can’t imagine, really, which is why I imagine it’s worth going. Because I’ve only seen London in movies and TV and books”—as she spoke, she plucked bobby pins from her hair and dropped them into her hat—“but I know enough to know it’s nothing like Wisconsin, where I’m from, and so I can’t imagine it. I could barely imagine New York.”
Her hair was a light brown. She uncoiled it, separating strands stuck to themselves by their own curling texture. There was a halo of fuzzing ringlets around her head, backlit by the pinball machine.
“This is your first visit?”
“Yeah, I just flew in this morning from Manitowoc. Well, from Milwaukee—then to Chicago, then to Newark, and then over on the train. Which is funny, since I ended up here.” She gestured at the walls around them.
“Funny how?”
“Because it’s a Wisconsin bar.” She pronounced the name of her home state with a nasal aah sound in the middle of it. “And I’m from Wisconsin? Like if you came here from London just so you could drink at a bar where everybody was British and there were Union Jacks and pictures of the queen and pots of tea everywhere.”
“That’s a fair description of the Imperial Club, actually.”
“Do you go there?”
“All the time.”
She smiled—a genuine smile, bright and amused. Her clear blue eyes came alive. “Sorry.”
“It’s quite all right. But tell me…” He put a palm down on the glass surface of the pinball machine and leaned closer. “…what brings you all the way from Wisconsin to New York City for the first time, to this bar, in the rain?”
What makes a woman fly hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles, don a disguise, hail a stranger, grab him by the lapels, and lick his teeth?
What’s got you scared? What’s made you sad?
What’s your story, and can I get in on it?
That was what he was asking her. He knew it even as he shifted his body close—closer than was strictly polite, close enough to smell the fruity scent of her hair, to see her pupils widen.
Tell me your story.
He needed to know. Not for Justice’s sake, but for his own. Because he’d lived in New York nine months and he still felt like a stranger.
Because his daughter didn’t have time for him, didn’t listen to him, certainly didn’t need him.
Because he was bored, and tired of his own boredom. But here was a puzzle.
Here was a woman who was big enough to keep him interested, a woman who might draw him along, draw him in. And because he liked her, and he hated to see her this way—anxious and sad and trying to hide it.
Winston already suspected that Allie Fredericks was no threat to his client. It wasn’t that he was a better spy than she was, but that any stranger could, for instance, name Rosemary as Bea’s mother, even in a crowd of other patrician blondes.
Allie hadn’t come for the artist. She’d come for the woman Justice was with.
“Who is she?”
He knew already. He just wanted to know that she’d tell him.
When she did, she set their story in motion.
“My mom.”
<
br /> Chapter 3
“You know what this is like?”
Winston plugged another quarter into the pinball machine. He was truly terrible at pinball, and his skills had not improved as they worked their way through half a bottle of whiskey.
“It’s like my friend Elvira always says, that it’s easier to be authentic with the mailman. Well, she doesn’t say it, this other woman says it, but Elvira is the one who says it to me.”
Winston rolled up his shirtsleeves to the elbow. She couldn’t remember when he’d taken off his jacket. At some point in their conversation he’d draped it over the back of the chair he pulled over from the closest table to serve as a resting place for the whiskey bottle and his cell phone, which buzzed intermittently but didn’t seem to have his attention.
She had his attention.
It felt good. She knew it didn’t mean anything—a chance meeting in a bar, a good-looking stranger keeping her company. It was the kind of thing that happened in New York, where everyone was a stranger. Even her introverted sister, May, had managed to meet a guy in a bar the first night she’d gone out on her own.
It was nice, though.
Back home in Manitowoc there weren’t a lot of unattached men floating around, available for conversation. There wasn’t anybody who didn’t already know her whole story—no shopkeeper who didn’t want to reminisce about the time she’d gotten arrested for cow-tipping, no single guy her age who hadn’t at least heard about her leaving Matt at the altar and formed some private opinion of her character.
People took sides in a breakup. Matt was popular, friendly, well-liked. She’d believed when she was with him that she was, too, and it wasn’t that she’d become some kind of pariah. But it seemed like the people she’d known in high school who had a problem with her—the girls who thought she was too strange, too different, too much—had learned to accept her as she was. Allie had been proud, even, before the breakup, of how rich and diverse her social life was. She’d felt like she could go anywhere in town and run into a friend.
Now, when she walked into a restaurant to grab a sandwich, it was fifty-fifty that one of her former “friends” would avert her eyes and pretend not to see her.
