“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.”
9
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?
It was easy enough to follow her home and case the joint. He’d have no problem getting good price for her forgeries at the market she couldn’t get into.
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?”