The Collector
Page 71

He had some coffee, poured two bowls. Then remembering she’d fussed the night before—and it seemed he was now in competition with Luke—put together a tray.
He found a notepad, a pencil, and wrote his version of a note before hauling everything up to the third-floor terrace.
Lila rushed in as she’d rushed out—but this time carrying Earl Grey. “This dog’s a riot! He wanted to take on a Lhasa apso—to fight or have sex, I’m not sure. After that adventure we’re both starved, so . . . and I’m talking to myself,” she realized.
Frowning, she picked up the notepaper on the counter. And the frown turned to a brilliant smile.
He’d sketched them sitting at the table on the terrace, clinking coffee cups. He’d even added Earl Grey standing on his hind legs, front paws waving.
“That’s a keeper,” she murmured while her heart mimicked the sketch of the dog. “Who knew he could be adorable? Well, EG, it appears we’re to breakfast on the terrace. I’ll just get your kibble.”
He stood at the high wall, looking west, but turned when she came out balancing the little dog and two small bowls.
“What a great idea.” She set Earl Grey down in some shade, with his bowl of kibble, filled his tiny water bowl with the hose. “And look how pretty—you and your artist’s eye.”
He’d arranged the blue cereal bowls, another of strawberries, glasses of juice, a ribbed white pot of coffee with its matching cream and sugar bowl and blue-and-white-striped napkins. And added a spear of yellow snapdragon—one he’d obviously stolen from the garden pot—in a bud vase.
“It’s no turnover, but . . .”
She walked to him, rose on her toes to kiss him. “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but they’re not bad.”
She tugged him to the table, sat. “I especially loved the sketch. Next time I’ll remember to brush my hair before I take the dog out.”
“I like it messy.”
“Men do go for the mongrel look. Milk?”
He eyed the contents of his bowl dubiously. “What happens to this stuff when you add milk?”
“Magic,” she promised, and poured for both of them. “God, it’s a gorgeous day. The rain washed everything, including the humidity, away. What are you doing with your morning?”
“I thought about doing more research, but it feels like a waste of time. Might as well wait to see what Kerinov has to tell us. Maybe I’ll work up here for a while, do some sketching. Bird’s-eye of New York. And I have some calls to make.
“It’s not bad,” he repeated as he spooned up the cereal. “It looks bad, but if you don’t look, it’s okay.”
“I’m going to try to work. And when this guy gets here, I guess we’ll see. Shouldn’t we consider they—whoever they are—might already have this other egg? The Nécessaire?”
“Possible.” He hadn’t thought of that. “But not from Oliver, and he had the documents. I spent a lot of time going through his paperwork. If they have it, they still want the one I have. But considering Oliver, I think he counted on cashing in big time on the one, using some of that to finance finding the other for an even bigger payoff. Big and bigger, that was Oliver’s MO.”
“Okay, so we go on that assumption. It’s probably not still in Russia. It just seems like it wouldn’t still be lost if it had stayed in Russia. It was probably smuggled out, or sold off the books, something. The odds of it being with the same person your brother dealt with are pretty slim. Just hard to believe one person had two, and he’d have asked, right—arranged to buy both? Big and bigger?”
She nibbled on a strawberry. “So that potentially eliminates Russia and one person in New York. Progress.”
“We wait for Kerinov.”
“We wait. I hate waiting.” She propped her chin in her hand. “I wish I read Russian.”
“So do I.”
“I can read French—a little. Very little. I only took French in high school because I imagined I’d move to Paris and live in a clever little flat.”
He could see her there, he realized. He could see her anywhere. “What were you going to do in Paris?”
“Learn how to wear scarves a million ways, buy the perfect baguette and write a brilliant and tragic novel. I changed my mind when I realized I really just wanted to visit Paris, and why would I want to write a brilliant and tragic novel when I don’t want to read one?”
“How old were you when you realized all this?”
“My second year in college, when a dried-up, narrow-minded snob of an English lit professor made us read brilliant and tragic novel after brilliant and tragic novel. Actually I didn’t see what was so brilliant about some of them. The kicker was selling a short story to Amazing Stories—a kind of precursor, as it turned out to be the series I’m writing now. I was insanely excited about it.”
“You’d’ve been what, nineteen or twenty?” He’d make a point of finding it, reading it—gaining some insight into who she’d been. “It’s something to be insanely excited about.”
“Exactly. Even my father got a kick out of it.”
“Even?”
“I shouldn’t say it like that.” She shrugged it off, scooped up more cereal. “To his way of thinking, writing fiction’s a fine hobby. But he assumed I’d knuckle down, be a college professor. Anyway, word got back to this college professor, who announced it to the class—and said it was poorly written popular dreck, and anyone who read or wrote popular dreck was wasting their time in her class, and in college altogether.”
“Well, that’s a bitch, and a jealous one.”
“A bitch, no question, but she believed it. Anything written in the last hundred years was dreck to her. In any case, I took what she said to heart. Walked out of her class, walked out of college. Much to my parents’ consternation. So . . .”
She started to shrug again, but he laid a hand over hers. “You showed them all.”
“I don’t know about that. How did you—”
“No, don’t ask me how I spent my college years. What did you do when you walked out?”
“I took some courses in popular fiction and started blogging. Since my father started making noises about how the army would give me direction and discipline, I waited tables so I didn’t have to feel guilty for taking his money when I absolutely wasn’t going to take his advice. He’s proud of me now. He keeps thinking I’ll write something brilliant, if not tragic, but he’s good with what I do. Mostly.”