TRACEY POLNITZ. MICHAEL HARTWELL. PETER MORGAN-Vilk.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be carrying a list of anyone’s aliases around with me, much less Lucien Moriarty’s. I would have memorized them and disposed of the evidence. But I had the corresponding passport numbers to contend with as well, which I hadn’t yet stuffed into my brain.
That description, if clumsy, was accurate. It was as though I were packing Styrofoam into a too-small box whenever I tried to commit long strings of numbers to memory. Words had always been manageable. Proper nouns especially, places and people and their vehicles, any identifying detritus of a life lived out in the world. Numbers I managed if I could manipulate them. Equations, fine. Number theory, fine. But memorizing pi to the twentieth digit was an exercise I found both useless and impossible.
“The two aren’t always conjoined,” Professor Demarchelier had said. I was eleven, and lonely. That was my main realization for the year: that I did in fact want to be around other people, and that there were no other people to be had, and so I had to disguise what was turning out to be a very inconvenient failing. Demarchelier believed I had many failings. In that, we disagreed. I liked myself quite well.
That morning, in fact, was one of the last times that I remember liking myself. I was daydreaming about the tumbling practice I had that afternoon. My instructor had promised that today, I would learn to walk across a rafter in a darkened room.
In heels.
I was not thinking about numbers.
Demarchelier snapped his bony fingers in my face. “Charlotte. Just because you’re terrible at something doesn’t make it useless. The only common denominator in everything you attempt—”
“Is yourself,” I repeated. Perhaps my tumbling instructor would also blindfold me, if I asked.
“Indeed.” He frowned at me across the table. “Take some responsibility.”
Perhaps she would even remove the net. If I were polite enough.
Demarchelier tapped the list of national insurance numbers. It stretched down the page. “You have five minutes to learn these. Go.”
Normally I would have needed twenty. On a tumbling day, I needed twenty-five. That day I was distracted enough that when time was called, I didn’t have a single one of the numbers memorized.
“You realize that, if I let you loose into the real world with the skills you have now, you’d be dead.” It conveyed something about my relationship with my tutor that making this statement gave him obvious pleasure. I knew because his eyes were crinkling at the corners, as though he’d just told a joke.
“Because I couldn’t memorize a list of numbers, I would die,” I said. “May I please be excused.” I dropped the question marks on purpose.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
That afternoon, I made it across the rafter blindfolded in twenty-two seconds. The next week, at Demarchelier’s suggestion, I was put on Adderall to fix my “attention problem.”
After that things progressed rather quickly.
On the Acela train to New York, I memorized the list of Moriarty’s forged passport numbers, then shredded the sheet into slivers. I was in the real world and, as I was coming to realize, I had no desire to be dead.
I SPENT THE AFTERNOON IN A RESTAURANT IN CHELSEA, drinking sparkling water at the bar. Across the room, in a beautifully upholstered booth, my quarry was having the sort of marathon business lunch that made me glad that, for whatever kind of person I was, I was at least not a twentysomething banker.
The olives I’d ordered were seventeen dollars. There were twelve of them. I was trying to make the wretched things last.
When will you get there, the text said on my phone. Can’t plan my day around you.
Soon, I replied, and tucked my phone away. With a casual expression, the bartender removed both my drink and my olives. “Unless you’re still working?”
I was, but not in the way she thought. “I’ll have—”
My quarry stood, a bit unsteadily. A result, perhaps, of the two gin martinis I’d watched the bartender make him.
“The check,” I said, and even given time to have it printed, presented, and paid, I still beat my quarry to the front door.
Following him was child’s play. It was insulting. He wasn’t even very drunk; perhaps he was just very stupid. Or unaware. When I first met Watson, I was fairly sure that, if I tried, I could unhook and remove his belt from his pants without him noticing. I informed him of that, once, and it seemed to shock him. He fussed with his belt for a full hour after that.
My mark walked south for so many blocks that I wondered why on earth he hadn’t gotten a cab. Certainly his calfskin gloves suggested that he had the money. It was frigid, the kind of winter in New York that I remembered from a trip I’d once taken to see my uncle. Leander had hosted me in his pied-à-terre when my parents hadn’t wanted me back after a stint at rehab—if memory serves, at Paragon Girls San Marcos. My uncle had taken me to the very nicest restaurants in Chelsea and then insisted that I ate the food he ordered for me, and it all went well enough until I met a girl in a bathroom at 9 p.m. on a Thursday who asked me if I “partied” before pulling a baggie out of her bra, which of course led to three months at Paragon Girls San Marcos’s sister location, This Generation Now! Petaluma.
It was what I was doing now, thinking This Generation Now!, This Generation Now! to the beat of my footsteps as we wandered down Seventh Avenue. At the end of every block, like a tic, he pulled out his phone to check the time, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his overcoat. We went like that, long trudging blocks in the melting snow, our progress punctuated only by Don’t Walk signs and the recurring image of Saturn on his phone’s lock screen. Finally he turned off onto a smart little street in SoHo that I was surprised, calfskin gloves and all, he could afford.
He was going home. He was meeting someone. I could tell from his walk, and from his blithe unconcern for his surroundings, and because I am who I was raised to be.
Still. Something was not right. I had a scratching at the back of my eyes that meant I had seen something I should have noticed, but didn’t.
As we approached a patisserie, he began to dig in his pockets for his keys. I lingered, pretending to look at the brioche in the shop window. The door beside me opened, and he disappeared into it; before it shut, I had my hand on the handle.
There was an art to this. I counted ten seconds, long enough that passersby wouldn’t mark me as a loiterer but long enough that he’d be well up the stairs, and then I slipped inside behind him. I made sure my footfalls rang, rummaged in my bag for coins. Girl sounds. That particular nonthreatening rustle that puts men at ease.
It was a tenement building in the old style, with a hollow under the first-floor landing where the lodgers had left their bicycles. A faded Christmas wreath was tacked up above the line of mailboxes. I could have looked to confirm his apartment number, but I didn’t need to. He was on the third floor. I could tell from the sound his keys made in the lock.
Tracey Polnitz, I said to myself. Michael Hartwell. Peter—
“Peter Morgan-Vilk.” The voice curled down the stairs. “It’s been a long time.”
The feeling.
The feeling I’d had on the street that I hadn’t had time to catalog and identify.
I couldn’t pull up the street outside in my head, freeze it, turn it from every angle, examine for discrepancies, then file it back away. I didn’t have an eidetic memory. I wasn’t an unprecedented genius.
I was still smart enough to know that James Watson’s car had been parked at that curb, and that I was only realizing it now.
“How much did you sell your name for, Pete?” my uncle Leander was asking, but by then, I’d already hidden myself behind the bicycles and the mopeds and the empty recycling bins below the first-floor landing and far out of sight.
“Leander Holmes,” Peter Morgan-Vilk said, every young, moneyed syllable dripping with scorn. If he was drunk, I couldn’t hear it in his voice. “Is that your way of saying hello? It’s been a long time. Who’s your friend?”
“My colleague, James.”
“A pleasure.” Jamie’s father, speaking.
“The Watson.” Peter sounded bored. “Of course. How can I help you?”
“We’re looking for your father,” James said. “Thought you’d know where we could find him.”
“Listen, if this is about Lucien, I—”
“Lucien? Moriarty?” Leander laughed. “No. This is about your father owing me money.”
Peter whistled. It echoed in the stairwell. “Didn’t realize Dad was still doing that shit.”
“He needs to keep less expensive mistresses.”
“I’m aware. Look, I’m not in touch with him. Last I heard, after his political campaign fell apart and Mum left, he took off to Majorca with his heiress to live off her wealth. Broke my kid sister’s heart. That was three years ago.” A pause. “Are you sure this isn’t about Lucien? Because my dad still blames him for it. All of it.”
“Makes sense.” That was James—warm, inviting tone, drawing Peter in.
“They had a contract, right? Was he consulting on his campaign, or managing, or—”
“Consulting. When Lucien bailed on him, it was at the worst possible time. Hard to make a mistress disappear when your fixer disappears the week before that.” Peter coughed delicately. “Anything else? Or can I go shower before I get back to the office?”
“One more thing,” James said, still friendly. “How much is Lucien giving your dad to rent out his son’s identity?”
So.
Leander was tracking down Lucien too. He knew at least as much as I did. It could be a matter of days before I was found, by him, and before everything would be ruined. I attempted a steadying breath through my nose and nearly gagged on the garbage smell.
Before Peter could answer, the buzzer inside his apartment rang.
“Of all the—” Peter swore. “Hold on.” A pause, and the door unlocked, and swung open.
A teenage boy walked in.
Jamie Watson pulled off his knit cap, ruffling the snow out of his hair. His hair was longer. Different. His coat was different. His shoes were the same, but the treads were further worn down, and there was a dusting of snow on his right trouser knee that wasn’t there on his left, and a scar on the back of his right hand that was too precise to be from rugby. (Glass? A razor? It had a straight edge.) But he was playing rugby, and his team was still losing, and he was up late the night before, studying, and then I couldn’t stop. I was greedy with it, the looking. He hadn’t finished his lunch, he had that peaky look that meant that he’d be grumpy until someone made him eat a protein bar. He had grown a full inch and put on seven and a half pounds. No. Seven. No, he . . . he had a girlfriend, one he’d had for a long time, now, at least several months, and she’d knit him the brown-and-white scarf he was wearing. The fringe was ragged. No one in his family crocheted. No one else would give such a haphazardly done gift that the recipient would then in fact choose to wear. As I watched, the tail of the scarf brushed against the floor.
Watson.
It had been a solid year since I’d seen him last.
Once I had learned his habits. Had them catalogued. Had known him down to the ground. The boy standing in front of me was a stranger, a house rebuilt exactly but from parts that were strange to me.
“Dad?” he called. “Are you ready?”
“Coming down,” James said. Footsteps on stairs.
I had missed the end of their interrogation.
Watson looked down at the floor. His eyes traveled over the mailbox, the dingy wreath, the bicycles, the bins—all the evidence that Peter Morgan-Vilk was a man who would pay the money to rent a bad apartment in an expensive part of town. It would be easy to theorize, from there, that he himself had negotiated the loan of his identity to Lucien for a substantial payout, that his father had nothing to do with it. If Lucien’s fake IDs were confiscated, this then would be his backup: entry into America without any repercussions, for three months at a time, as a man who actually existed.
And Peter taking money from the man whose misbehavior brought down the father he despised? That was a fair motive on its own.
I had arrived here with those theories, but I had, as I’d said before, learned my lesson. I was done beginning at conclusions; this time I would begin at the beginning, and I had planned to interrogate Peter myself. And still, despite this planning, I had missed obtaining the information I needed, and barely, and all because the only friend I’d ever had was standing so close I could see the crease in the corner of his mouth.
Perhaps I made some sort of sound. A whisper of disappointment.
Watson’s gaze sharpened; he was staring at the bins in front of me. Slowly, he took a step forward. Another.
I couldn’t breathe. I wouldn’t have been able to, even if I dared.
“Come on.” James thundered down the last of the stairs, Leander at his heels. “We’ll get dinner, get you home.” Watson looked again up the landing, at Peter Morgan-Vilk’s shut door. Then he shrugged, and followed James and Leander out.
I stayed in that stairwell a very long time.