THE SUMMER AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH MY TUMBLING teacher and the Adderall and Professor Demarchelier, my family took our yearly retreat to Lucerne.
We spent a fair amount of time in Switzerland in those years. Milo was attending boarding school there, at a place that, even at twelve, I knew our family could hardly afford. The winter instruction took place at a ski lodge in Austria, in Innsbruck (hence the name of the place, the Innsbruck School), and during the spring and fall, Milo took his classes with the sons of prime ministers and kings in Lucerne.
“I don’t want to go back,” he’d said at the end of spring break, in a rare moment of dissent. My brother took his orders from our father unflinchingly, as though our family unit were a military operation. “I know enough already to start my own business. That’s all we’ve—I’ve—ever wanted to do, anyway. Plenty of people finish school at eighteen.”
We were at the dinner table. It was the only guaranteed time during the day for the four of us to be together. Consequently, it was my own personal hell. I pushed my plate away, watching my father closely.
He tilted his head to the side. “Why do you think that you attend your school?” I studied his hands on the table. They were still.
Milo considered the question, chewing. He never seemed to feel the reflexive dread I did when our father considered us like that, like prey. “For the connections?”
“Not for the skiing?” I asked under my breath. In those days, I had less control over myself.
Luckily, my father didn’t hear. My mother reached out one viselike hand under the table and captured my knee. She wanted me to shut my mouth. This was because she loved me.
“The connections,” my father said. “A bit baldly stated, but yes, good. Now, as you noted, you are eighteen. How useful is it for you to know the Belgian prime minister?”
“For me to know the prime minister?” Milo said, slowly. “But I go to school with the prime minister’s son.”
“And?” my father asked. On the table, he curled and uncurled his hands. This was a warning. If one lay flat on the table, it meant a punishment was forthcoming, and whether it would be directed at Milo or me was a coin toss.
In the silence, our housekeeper came around and refilled our water glasses. The sound was soothing, and—and I couldn’t focus. I kept staring at my father’s hands, thinking, I will not throw up. It would make too much noise. My father would hear and there would be consequences, perhaps he would comfort me or perhaps he would be mad, I never did know and there was no way I could control it then so I would control it now, my panic, and I would not throw up.
I was twelve. I wanted to make him proud. I swallowed.
Milo was watching our father’s hands as well. “It isn’t important for me to know the Belgian prime minister. Except that I could introduce you to him. Through his son.”
My father’s fingers were curling around his fork. They were spearing a piece of meat and bringing it to his lips.
“Then you understand why you’ll stay at Innsbruck,” my father said, and “Charlotte, eat your veal,” and that was that, and I did not throw up. Not that night.
Our trip to Lucerne coincided with Milo’s return to school. We took a guesthouse outside the town, small and “sweetly Scandinavian” and full of tatty, comfortable furniture. We would be there for his orientation week.
It was not economical for both of us to attend boarding school, my father had told me, and unlike me, Milo had already learned everything that Alistair Holmes had to teach him. He needed an advanced education. But I was taken along on these trips because I still had my uses. I knew how to listen. I knew how to remember, and how to report back the important parts to my father in digest. I was left to play with the children, to glean what I could about their parents.
That year, the year I was twelve, the children I played with weren’t precisely children. I spent the first week thrown together with the table-tennis prodigy Quentin Wilde. He was fifteen. His family had gotten him access to the school’s facility before classes had even started so that he would not miss a single day of his training regimen.
Quentin needed an audience, apparently, and I was to be said audience. I was told to watch him play. I was told to be suitably impressed. His mother was an American energy secretary of some sort and his father stayed at home to care for their children. I wasn’t sure what care he was providing, as Quentin and his siblings all attended boarding school, but it didn’t seem to extend to his son’s physical well-being. It was hard to focus on the table tennis, as I hated it, and as Quentin’s hair was, as his name suggested, wild. I couldn’t help thinking how badly it needed to be cut.
(Late the night before, so late that it was nearly morning, my parents had had an argument, and I’d been awake to hear it.
This is absurd and you know it, my mother had said. Even through the wall I could tell she was seething. I was good at listening through walls. I’d been trained, after all. You realize that it costs nearly my entire yearly salary to send Milo here. You don’t apply for aid—
Which would make our financial situation publicly known. Which would defeat the purpose of all of this. A slammed drawer, the same sound that had woken me. Another soft, hollow thud. Be rational, Emma.
I am being rational, she said, lower. Being a woman with a contrary opinion does not render me hysterical. The very least you could do would be to pretend, at least to your children, that they’re something more than stepping-stones for your career. That you love them.
For God’s sake, I believe in being honest with them—they know I love them—
Do you, now? Take some responsibility, Al! You’ve lied so much that you’re beginning to believe yourself. You were sacked from the ministry! You were caught selling information! It’s like you’re beginning to think that you’re the wronged party, and now you’re putting our children through the—the gauntlet of your expectations so that you can use them like some ladder to climb back to the top—
You’re mixing your metaphors, my father said coldly. His tone meant, You’re drunk, and perhaps she was. I didn’t know if that negated her argument.
You should want better for them. I do. I’ll take them and leave, I will—I’ll take Lottie, at least—don’t you see she’s skin and bones? Don’t you care?
I had never supposed my mother liked me this much. I allowed myself to feel pleasure for a few moments before my critical brain resurfaced. My father had taught me: People have motives, Lottie. People aren’t blindly altruistic. Even if all they’re getting is the thrill of self-righteousness, they’re seeking some reward.
But if my mother said he was wrong about my education, perhaps the things he’d told me during lessons were wrong as well. Still, I’d never heard her contradict him in person. Not ever. And now she was saying that he, too, had motives, and they were even less altruistic than most people’s, though I was also old enough to know that perhaps she was just emptying her arsenal at him as an offensive. (Arsenal. That was the football team my father had been discussing yesterday. I played with the idea for a moment. Arsenal, games, arsenals, losing—)
It wasn’t clear who was telling the truth, if anyone was at all.
You’re coddling her, my father was saying. She shows so little promise anyway. The Jameson diamonds? That was a sad accident, and you know it. You’d take her and in the name of her protection, you’ll spoil whatever potential she actually has. I won’t allow it.
Your expectations—
This time, the sound was glass, and shattering, and loud enough to wake my brother in the twin bed next to mine. Go to bed, Emma, my father said, and this time he said it, You’re drunk, and Milo reached out to touch my shoulder before he shut his eyes again.)
It’s important to know that I had this in mind.
Quentin needed a haircut. I knew how to cut mine; I did quite a nice job at it. I offered to cut his, and he accepted, and back at our empty guesthouse, taking my shears out from my kit, I stood in the bathroom alone. I knew I was a few steps away from breaking.
But I could fix it. Myself. I had a method: I let myself feel it, my crackling, sleepless brain, the boredom of watching some idiot boy hit a ball for hours and hours, the unfairness of spending my days in late July, in Switzerland, in a stuffy gymnasium when I could be reading the encyclopedia or blowing things up in the backyard, and the sad fact that even if my mother wanted me as a bargaining chip it was preferable to not being wanted at all, and then I scooped up those feelings the way I’d been taught and buried them in the ground below my feet.
For the first time, my method didn’t work.
I tried again. I stood there for some time, shivering with the force of it, and it rose up from my stomach this time, a clutching, sad sort of panic, and my thoughts moved faster. I felt it. Felt everything. I knew I wanted to erase myself from the top down, like a drawing, and that still I wanted someone to touch my edges and tell me that they loved me despite them. I tried again. I failed. I was crying, and marveling at the idea of myself crying (crying!), when Quentin found me.
Unexpectedly, he pulled me into a hug.
“Home stuff?” he asked when he let me go. I nodded. “Fuck them.”
There wasn’t much to say to that, so I didn’t.
His eyes roved over the bathroom counter, over my cosmetics kit. With one snakelike hand, he pulled out the bottle of Adderall. “You a fan?”
I considered. “Not particularly.”
“You’re a weird kid,” he said, and emptied a few of my pills into his palm. “Listen. I’ll trade you. We’re having a party later—me and Basil and Thom. You’re a little young, maybe, but if you want you can come along. Want a sampler?” He dug a bottle out of his backpack and shook out two little white pills. “Here,” he said, giving one to me, “cheers,” and tossed his back.
I hesitated.
“It makes all that shit you’re feeling go away,” he said, and I swallowed it down so quickly that he started laughing.
When I returned to the guesthouse at midnight, my father asked me where I’d been. He trusted me to provide details. I provided them: Quentin and I had eaten pizza in the gymnasium together while he talked about his girlfriend, Tasha. I’d always liked the name Tasha. It was the first time I’d successfully lied to my father.
In actuality, once I arrived at the “party,” I was ignored. Basil and Thom had drunk a bottle of tequila between them, then spent the night retching in the restroom. After I cut Quentin’s hair, Quentin had practiced table tennis for hours with a laserlike focus I hadn’t seen on him before. As for me, I wandered down to the school swimming pool and read my encyclopedia Q–R with my feet in the water. It was de rigueur, except for the part where I’d swapped my bottle of pills for Quentin’s.
His I actually liked.
TWO YEARS LATER I TOLD MILO, IN A FIT OF HONESTY, THE real events of the night. The handwritten apology I received from Quentin was done in such a shaky hand that I could only assume that Milo had been holding a knife to his neck.
This was love. This is what love looked like.
AT 4 A.M., I PUT THE KETTLE ON. I RAN THE NECESSARY information back through my favorite American business database (subscriber-only) and took down the results, then filtered them, then filtered them again. I spent some time looking at Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood on Google Maps. Then, at four thirty, I phoned the Yard.
There was a certain pleasure in calling Scotland Yard and asking to speak to the detective inspector on duty. I was an official source. I was listed in the records as such. That knowledge was pleasurable too, though I didn’t put too much stock in such institutions.
“Stevie,” DI Green said today. “Good to hear from you.”
“Hello,” I said. Stevie was my code name, as in Nicks. It was why Green was saved in my phone as “Steve.” The detective inspector had a fondness for seventies folk rock and a certain cheesy sense of humor. “I’m settled in.”
“Excellent. You have a report to make?”
I suppose I had a soft spot for Lea Green.
I’d known her for some time. She was the detective from the famous Jameson incident, the one where, if the papers were to be believed, I’d drawn a crayon map to lead the police to the stolen emeralds. I often wished I could go back and take a pair of scissors to that day, like I was removing scenes from a play. So what if the play was my life.
Really the worst-case scenario I could imagine, had I never gotten involved with the Jameson case, would be that my father had overlooked me entirely. That I turned out to be an ordinary girl, studying for my A levels somewhere in London, on hard burn to get into Oxbridge for chemistry. Instead, I’d been a child with a famous detective’s last name, hiding behind a sofa while her father talked case notes with New Scotland Yard. All because his famous last name had given him such delusions of grandeur that he styled himself a tiny crime-solving king.
Green had been studying detective fiction at Cambridge before joining the force. Hence, her coming to my father. (I often thought she and Watson would get on quite well. He always liked formidable women.) I’d been informing for her ever since, though the operation she and I were running right now was only half legal, at best. She trusted me. Whether or not that was wise was her own business.
“I confirmed the Peter Morgan-Vilk identity,” I told her. “If you have any sway with customs, I’d pull that passport. Morgan-Vilk won’t miss it, but Lucien Moriarty will.”
“Good.” She was typing. “Your uncle came up with this information, then?”
For months I’d been telling her I was shadowing Leander as he’d been investigating Lucien Moriarty. I hadn’t been speaking with DI Green every day; I had reached out sparingly, at odd hours, to provide her with intel I had “gleaned” from my uncle’s “case notes.”
“We’ve split up,” I told her. “It was my birthday present. I’m striking off on my own.”
“Right,” she said. “Congratulations, girl. What will you do now?”
“Look into certain insinuations Morgan-Vilk made about Lucien’s political career,” I said. “I have some thoughts about Michael Hartwell’s daughter—”
“Stevie.” Green huffed a laugh. “The answer is, ‘I’m going to Disneyland.’”
“What?”
“Nothing—look, I’ll pull the Polnitz and Hartwell passports too.”
“I’m going to look into their provenance anyway. I imagine Moriarty didn’t choose them out of a hat. He’s been careful to avoid assuming identities of the deceased, for whatever reason—except for this Polnitz identity. But the others I don’t understand.”
“Leave me to figure it out. I need you to go to Greenpoint today.”
“Greenpoint,” I said. It had been in my plan, and still I disliked being ordered there.
“You could hide a little of your disdain for me, you know. Might take you further.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, and instead said, “I saw Watson yesterday. He didn’t see me.”
DI Green exhaled. If she didn’t know the full extent of my and Watson’s history, she did see firsthand how everything went to shit. “How are you feeling about it?”
It was a simple question. Why did it always make me want to bite the person asking it? “I didn’t sleep well. Is something in particular happening in Greenpoint today?”
“There’s a shipment due for Connecticut from the gallery. It leaves at close.”
Whatever mawkish emotion I was feeling was gone, erased as though with a damp cloth. “Where? Where in Connecticut?”
“Stevie—”
“Where?” I loathed asking questions to which I already knew the answer.
“You aren’t to be on the truck. You aren’t to be anywhere near the truck, do you understand? No. Lorries. You’re on intel only. I don’t want you to be seen by them. I don’t want you to be—”
“Saying something five different ways doesn’t make it more effective—”
“—or any of your Lara Croft bullshit, I mean it, Stevie—”
“Fine,” I said.
A pause. “I should go,” she said with a huff. I could hear someone—her supervisor?—in the background. “You didn’t send me that photo last night.”
Of my pills. I’d fallen asleep. “Sorry.”
“Doesn’t cut it. Send it now.” Green put the phone down.
I supposed I was going to Greenpoint, then. The ease with which I had taken her advice surprised me. Certainly, the DI had given me a good reason, but in the past, that hadn’t had been enough.
I knew, at this point, that I should have a handler. The briefest of glances at my last operation would tell you that.
If you’d said anything at all, Watson had said to me that day on the lawn. Anything. I could have changed your mind! But you maneuvered me here just to—
This is love, I’d told him. This is what love looks like, and then I’d left him to the wolves.
Yes, I needed a handler. If DI Green wasn’t the exact right fit, she was a beginning.
I took my stash out of my coat lining. I photographed it. I made another cup of tea, put on my Rose-from-Brighton kit, topped it off with flat-black, cat-eye sunglasses, and went off to buy myself some Kevlar.
The man in the body armor shop was incredulous. “What—”
“It’s for my Fashion Institute admissions portfolio,” I said impatiently. “I’m putting together work that’s a commentary on personal security. It has a lot of tulle.”
“Tool?”
“Tulle. T-u-l-l-e. Like a tutu? Attached to a vest.” I shrugged my bag from one shoulder to the other. “Here are my measurements. I’m going to model it myself.” When he continued staring at me, I stomped my foot. “Honestly. How hard is this to understand?”
Thankfully the shop was empty; I was having to make a scene. At least I was providing this clerk with exactly the sort of girl he expected to be buying his wares, and so he’d forget me soon enough. Had I arrived as myself and quietly made my purchase, I would be the sort of oddity he would remember.
“It’s your money.” Shrugging, he turned to pull the least expensive model from the wall.
“No. I want the Byzantium Express Level 3X-A. With the moisture wicking if you have it.”
“You’ve done your research,” he said, obnoxiously surprised.
I blinked at him. “With the wicking,” I repeated.
“Wicking?”
“It’s a high-stress interview.”
The man hesitated. “That one’s seven hundred dollars, kid.”
Which would bring me down to two hundred total. Still—“I like the color,” I told him. “It goes with the skirt. Can you wrap it for me, please?”
On an empty subway platform, I did up the vest over my chemise and under my oversized blouse. I tucked my blond hair into the bag and, with quick fingers, undid the curls I’d made this morning to stick the wig’s pins into. I was myself again. Other than the ringlets.
As the train came, I found myself checking the fastenings on my vest. Was I nervous? Perhaps I was. This wasn’t an errand I’d been looking forward to. It had been number four on the list, after all.
But then, I had to see Hadrian Moriarty at some point. No better time than now.