Chapter Text
i.
I had Myriam meet me at my doorstep the following morning.
She didn’t bother with a greeting beyond a curt nod before brushing past me into the flat, dripping from the sudden drizzle outside. She set her bag on the arm of the sofa, the same way she always did when she meant to stay longer than a cigarette’s worth of conversation, and looked around with a grimace.
“You could clean,” she said. Her eyes roved over the collection of bottles by the window, the heap of laundry slouched against the wall. “If you had five minutes.”
“Was clean yesterday,” I said, locking the door behind her and drifting to the kitchen. “You are the one bringing in the weather. Very hard to keep tidy in such conditions.”
“Your girlfriends don’t mind?”
“They don’t come here to examine the floors. Coffee, tea?”
“No. Sit down.” She slid her coat from her shoulders and draped it over the back of the couch, then unfastened her gloves one finger at a time. “We need to talk.”
The way she said it suggested that she’d already been through this conversation in her head twice before arriving, rehearsing her lines. I dropped into the nearest armchair and leaned back, rubbing my hands together. “Well?”
She sank against the arm of the sofa, one ankle crossed neatly over the other. “Sascha confirms the Miami story,” she said at last. “It’s sitting with a crew out of Coral Gables—really the Grove side canals—who are, how shall we put it… unaccustomed to holding something this volatile. They’ve had it in play for months in their cocaine deals. Private marina, small planes. In and out.”
This was worse than I’d hoped and better than I’d feared. “And how does he know this?”
“He knows one of their intermediaries. Someone who has been working with these people.”
“Okay. So. How do we get it back? Are they willing to sell?”
Myriam shook her head. “Actually, they believe they’re buying from you.”
“From me.”
“Yes. Arms.” She reached into her bag and withdrew a folded sheet of paper, flattened it on the coffee table. A name I didn’t recognize, some numbers, the list of items. Rifles, optics, ammunition. “Sascha has positioned you as the supplier. You fly in. They hand you half the payment up front, you give them half of what they’re looking for. To cover the rest, they give you the painting as collateral while they arrange the second transfer.”
I looked at her, waiting for the catch. “And then?”
“You leave before the second transfer.”
“Just take it?”
“That’s the idea.”
I blinked, bewildered. I’d expected insulation—two or three layers between me and the taking. Some intermediary to muddy the water and catch the shrapnel if things soured.
She saw it in my face. “If there were someone we could trust to pull this off, I’d send them. But we don’t have time, and we don’t have anyone else who won’t fold under pressure.”
“You are saying,” I started, “you are saying I am supposed to walk into Miami with half a shipment, take their money, take their painting, then—"
“Run,” she replied. “Which is not exactly ideal, but appears to be our only option.”
“And do I need to worry about them following?”
“They might try.” She reached down, smoothed the paper flat, tapped her fingernail once against the list of rifles. “But by the time they realize the painting has disappeared, you too will have disappeared.”
I rubbed my forehead, then met her gaze evenly. “And what is it they want with this?” I asked, nodding at the paper.
“They have friends in the islands who are getting tired of using last decade’s equipment. They have the money and drugs to pay for it, or so Sascha says.”
The rest of the visit we spent on the bones of the operation. Inventory from old military stock in Serbia and Bulgaria; optics out of Slovenia; ammunition split so volume and weight wouldn’t sing out on a scan. Everything disassembled and re-boxed into dull shapes, billed innocuously to a paper company in Nassau that existed only on letterhead. Two days in the Bahamas for someone I trusted to crack the crates and fit everything back together, then a short hop to Florida by fishing trawler, the manifest a work of fiction so ordinary it would bore the eye. And if Miami customs were anything like the other ports I’d known, they would wave it through without so much as a lifted eyebrow, provided the paperwork looked convincing enough.
Not difficult work. But expensive.
“Horst will front a portion,” she added. “He wants twenty-five percent of your cash take on Part One, plus reimbursement on freight, if you make him whole inside sixty days. Rare, coming from someone who is fussy about who he does business with.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Aha. Ulrika hasn’t bled him dry?”
“She’s between patrons. For the moment, his money is his own, and he wants to feel useful.”
“Yes, well. Tell him I will give him a medal, when it is done. Something shiny for the wall next to the family crest, if he hasn’t sold it already.”
She didn’t laugh. “How quickly will you be able to procure your half of the deal?”
“Eh, three weeks if I put in a rush order. If all goes as we are hoping.”
“Gyuri will go with you?”
“Of course. Who else?” I asked. “He can go first, meet the shipment from Rotterdam. Keep an eye out in Freeport while they re-box it. Make sure the Bahamian side does not get entrepreneurial ideas.”
“You’ll need him in Miami,” she said.
“Yes, but if something goes wrong at the Bahamas stage, what is the point of my showing up to shake hands in Florida? No, better to have him there first, then fly him in. I like to know the baby is breathing before I cut the cord, you understand?”
She gave me a dry, measuring look. “You’ll spend a few days in Florida at most,” she said. “From there, Curaçao. Cash hotels. Enough tourists that no one will pick you out of a crowd while you lie low.”
“Beach holiday,” I said cheerfully. A reward for good behavior. Though of course it would not be a holiday at all, and there would be no beach. I had experienced enough of these supposed safe harbors to know what they really looked like. I would sit in a hotel room with the curtains drawn, drinking rum from a plastic cup and waiting for Myriam to tell me it was safe to move again.
“Easy enough,” she said. “You’ll be in Antwerp again by month’s end.”
“Half now, half later.”
“And in between, you walk away.”
I cast my eyes to the floor. In my head, I was already tracing the route like a finger over an atlas—Rotterdam to Freeport, Freeport to Miami. Who to trust when it came to sourcing weapons. Who still owed me favors.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, The Goldfinch. Packed like a slab of meat in a shipping crate, anonymous under stenciled codes and customs stickers. How many hands had touched it by now? Who had leaned over the frame just as I had and seen it without understanding what they were looking at, how important it was? How much of the world’s strangeness and waste and beauty was bound up in that small rectangle of wood?
I glanced at Myriam, who was buttoning her coat. Always, she had the air of someone one step ahead, even when she wasn’t. “You’ll call with the details when they are ready for me,” I said.
She nodded once. “Sooner, if I hear anything that changes the schedule.”
“We will pull this off, do you think?”
“Horst said these men are unconventional, but wanted me to assure you that Sascha’s word is good.”
I saw her to the door. It wasn’t a bad plan. Risky, yes, but so were all the plans worth anything. You didn’t come into possession of a thing like this by way of courtesy or by paying the sticker price.
The difficulty, always, was not in the taking. It was in everything that came after.
ii.
The clock on the wall clicked over to the next hour. I ground out my cigarette, got up, and began to make my calls.
Belgrade. Sofia. Ljubljana. One number after another, men I’d known for years, their voices breaking in static bursts over international lines. I spoke to each one, asking after old stock, “collectibles” as we sometimes called them in my line of work. Pieces that had been sitting in sealed crates since before most of the men handling them were born.
A few said yes outright; a few said they’d check. I took notes, jotting down small names and numbers on a wrinkled napkin. What I was building, even on paper, had a certain pleasing symmetry: calibers balanced against weight, optics offset by volume. I didn’t want to send anything too conspicuous together, nothing that would sound the alarms if customs decided to tap a crate with the back of a crowbar.
By the time I’d hung up for the last time, the light outside had turned sallow, diffused and dulled through the rain. I sat back, rubbing the heel of my hand against my eye. Gyuri would have to be told tonight. He was good at keeping his face blank, but I knew he liked these jobs, liked the travel and the ports and the feeling of importance that came with shepherding contraband from one end of the world to the other.
The next week passed in a blur of movement that never seemed, in the moment, like movement at all. The connections in Belgrade had what they promised—Serbian M70s in original grease, the wood stocks still wrapped in wax paper like pastries. The ammunition trickled in from two different directions, each batch clean and dry and packed in tins with Cyrillic warnings that, I hoped, no one at the Miami port would bother to translate. There had been a hangup with the Slovenian glass, as customs in Koper held it for inspection, which in that part of the world could mean anything from a bored official angling for a bribe to a clerk in a back office using the shipment to rest his feet.
Two days of calls, three different middlemen, and it was freed. Repacked and on its way west with the rest.
And all the while, money changing hands, paperwork changing hands, the names on the documents rotating so that nothing matched up for more than a day. I spoke to Gyuri twice as often as usual, sending him out to stand in cold warehouses, to check that what had been promised was what had been paid for. When I was notified that the shipment was ready for its leg to Freeport, he accompanied me to Rotterdam for a final inspection.
We stood together, watching the containers being sealed. Pieter, a Dutchman I’d worked with before, explained—hands in the pockets of his waxed jacket—how the manifest listed “agricultural processing equipment,” the same description that would ride every leg, Rotterdam to Freeport to Miami. “Better,” he said, “because everyone has a picture of a car part in his head. No one knows what a seed-cleaner looks like.”
They were loaded that same night and departed the following morning, and nine days later, Gyuri was in Freeport to greet them. I remained in Antwerp. On paper, it was the safer position; in practice, it felt like treading water in some deep, black place where the shore was invisible in all directions. My days were broken by Gyuri’s calls, always abrupt, arriving at odd intervals and accompanied by a background of gulls and machinery, the hollow wind moving over the docks. Sometimes he rang just to say all was well, other times to ask whether someone should be paid in full or reminded of his obligations in a more direct fashion.
“Handle it as you see fit,” I told him each time, because he knew how I liked such matters handled and because the fewer instructions I gave, the fewer I could later be accused of having given. When he finally called to say they were ready to move on to Miami, the tickets were promptly booked.
The airport, again. At security, I let them dig through my carry-on without protest. I killed time at the gate, watched the departure board tick over in green letters. Boarding was called. Business class, window side, always. The plane began to taxi, and a flight attendant passed, murmuring something in Dutch. Her eyes slid briefly over me before moving to the next row.
From here, it was all timing. Too early and they’d get suspicious. Too late, and the painting might walk again, handed off until it disappeared for good. Myriam had drummed it into me over the years: control the calendar, control the deal.
The flight attendant reappeared, leaning in with a tray. “Still water, sir? Champagne?”
“Water,” I said. Too early for anything else, though I knew I’d change my mind somewhere over Bermuda.
Outside, the ocean rolled away in hammered silver, and the sky ahead was very bright.
iii.
Theo had told me about Florida years before.
He had never been there himself, had scarcely been out of New York before moving to Vegas, but knew enough to regale me with stories picked up from newspapers, television, stray remarks from Xandra. The kind of place where by nine a.m., you were already damp, shirt sticking to your back like wallpaper paste. Hurricanes that picked up roofs and threw them into the next county. Sinkholes that gulped down cars in broad daylight. And, of course, Disney World. Somewhere I had always wanted to go as a kid, and would have visited on this trip if it weren’t for the fact that I was arriving under an assumed name to rob the people I was ostensibly there to do business with.
When we landed, I found Gyuri waiting for me in the pickup zone with a rented car, the windows smoked just enough to make the interior look faintly illicit.
“Freeport went smoothly?” I asked him as I got in.
“Everything is in place. The crates cleared,” Gyuri said, pulling into traffic. “No missing pieces. I counted myself, twice. Bahamians sniffed around, thought about getting clever—then they see me, and they decide to go home to their wives in one piece.”
Myriam had arranged for us to stay at a hotel on Collins Avenue. Glacial white lobby, A/C cold enough to raise gooseflesh on my arms. Tourists with sunburnt shoulders drifting in from the beach, faces pink as boiled shrimp. Upstairs, the room was the sort of antiseptic luxury Myriam had always preferred. Pale walls and wood, the ocean visible in a neat blue rectangle beyond the sliding glass doors. What I would have given to have lived in Miami during the days of cocaine palaces and floating discos, when the money was so good no one bothered to count it.
The meeting was set. Tomorrow at noon, a marina behind a villa technically in Coral Gables, though Gyuri, having scouted it already, said it looked more like the ragged edge of Coconut Grove.
“Look, I am telling you,” Gyuri was saying. He had freshened up in the bathroom and had come out wearing his usual uniform for these sorts of occasions—pressed shirt, dark trousers, jacket that could pass for anything from security detail to junior diplomat. “Whole thing is… strange. This is supposed to be rich neighborhood, yes? Very clean, very private. Tennis courts and Jacuzzis and the like.”
“Okay, and?” I said, leaning back on the bed, kicking my shoes off one by one.
“And there are chickens,” he said, throwing out his hands. “Walking all over the place, like it is a farmyard. What the hell is that? You think, okay, maybe they have some eccentric hobby. But no. This is, eh—how you say—bad sign. Because people who do not care about looking respectable, they also do not care about doing business in respectable way. And these ones—” He tipped his head toward me, eyebrows up. “These ones have that crazy look.”
“You met them?”
“No, no, I did not meet them. I see them from a distance. They were laughing, loud, in the middle of the day, throwing feed, shooting at the roosters. Gangster types. You and I know this is not how you do it.”
It didn’t inspire confidence. In fact, it raised some questions about just how legitimate these people were, and how prepared we were to handle that kind of volatility up close. In my experience, the best operations were conducted quickly and quietly. These people weren’t afraid to make a spectacle of themselves, which was the sort of thinking that was usually the overture to something ugly.
A thought that was affirmed when Myriam called, not five minutes after Gyuri had gone down to smoke by the valet stand, and told me, in the flat way she had when she was working to keep her temper, that a spectacle had already been made.
“One of them was almost arrested two months ago for firing an automatic weapon into a swimming pool,” she explained. “Which Sascha conveniently failed to mention. Broad daylight, neighbors called it in. No one hurt, but—well. This is the caliber of people we are dealing with.”
“I see,” I said, tipping my head back against the headboard. “Concerning, but you know me. I do not mind a little drama. This isn’t my first circus.”
“Well.” A pause; I could hear her draw breath through her nose. “I’m worried it might be your last if we stay with them. We should walk away now.”
“What?” I jolted upright. “No.”
“There’s more,” she said. “Horst said there is no direct swap tomorrow. They want to get acquainted first. An introduction before they move anything.”
“Why?”
“Supposedly, this is how they do things. They claim it’s about making sure you’re the right kind of people, even with Sascha’s recommendation.”
“So they fire rifles into swimming pools at noon, but suddenly care about good manners.”
“They are inconsistent. You can’t predict what they might do.”
I sputtered, aghast. “I have done business with worse people. You think I am walking away after we put this much into it? The time, the money? We can’t leave!”
“It isn’t too late to cut our losses.”
“We have not lost anything yet. And besides, what happens if we go now? They will suspect something is happening and hide it deeper. And then—then we are starting from nothing.”
“You’re gambling with your neck.”
So be it. I had gambled with it before, and for far worse odds. I could picture her standing in her flat, looking at the wall or the floor, her face drawn tight with the vexed patience she adopted whenever she thought I was about to do something ruinous. I had seen that expression many times before. On her, on Astrid, on Theo.
“I have a terrible feeling about this,” she finally said. “But if you insist, no guns. Not showing, at least. If things go bad, they will go bad very fast, and you do not want them deciding to make the first move because they think you are about to make yours.”
That evening, I stood on the balcony with the curtains pulled closed behind me, looking down at the world below. The air had a peculiar coastal dampness, a clinging salt-sweetness that, even from high above, seemed to bead on the skin and crawl beneath the collar. Beneath me, the glow of shopfronts ran in a wavering line down the street, signs buzzing. Now and then, a sprinkler hissed across the hotel lawn and the droplets caught the light, an apparition of mist suspended for a second in the air before it broke apart and blew away.
When I heard Gyuri snuffling in his sleep in the adjoining room, I moved to sit on the edge of my bed, the television on low. The news was in Spanish, the words running together in a soothing hum. “…un tiroteo en Hialeah… la policía investiga… no hay víctimas, pero…”
For my part, I felt good. Myriam had her doubts, always, but her worries didn’t alter the fact that the plan, as it stood, was viable. The bird was there, as far as we knew. And by that time tomorrow, if nothing went sideways, I would have it back: the finch, after all these years, in my hands once more.
iv.
Morning arrived tepid and colorless.
I woke to the dull boom of waves breaking on the sand and, through the slit in the curtains, saw the tops of the palms shivering faintly against a washed-out sky. Across the road, a woman in a wide straw hat was hurrying under the café awning, one hand to the brim to keep it from lifting in the wind. Down on the service lane by the porte-cochère, a delivery truck idled—beep of reverse, hydraulic hiss—while the hotel valets leaned in the shade and scrolled their phones.
Gyuri was already awake, already dressed. He stood by the window with his jacket already on, hair combed to a severe side part. On the desk beside him, a paper cup of coffee and a grease-spotted paper bag sat beside a folded newspaper, its masthead creased where he’d held it under his arm.
Hot today, he said in Ukrainian, without so much as looking over his shoulder. Even for here.
We were on the road before the traffic had a chance to clot. Collins Avenue unspooled in a long strip before us, the sea flashing turquoise through the gaps. Somewhere around Alton, the streets began to widen, palms rising out of clipped lawns, and after three more circuitous turns, we had arrived at the fusty wealth that Gyuri had described. Through the gated wall of one property, a rectangle of a tennis court. At another, a gardener hosing down the lawn.
And then, as promised, the chickens, darting this way and that in erratic lines on the grass.
Gyuri slowed as we drew up before the location but remained at a safe distance. The villa itself was larger than I’d pictured, two stories, white stucco, tile roof faded to a soft brick red. From where we idled, I could see a clean slice of the pool, and beyond it the masts of the boats in the marina, fine white pins scratching up from the water.
A man, bare-chested and sun-browned, crossed the yard, then stooped to pick up a stone and lobbed it at one of the hens pecking nearby. The bird shot sideways, flapping madly; the man spat, grinned to himself, and continued on his way.
“Already I do not like this,” Gyuri said, cutting the engine. His eyes stayed on the man in the yard, who had disappeared toward the dock. “Too many of them around. No pattern. You see? One on the balcony. Three more behind the pool fence. Not like a crew, more like… hangers-on. Not good.”
I didn’t like the distribution either. I wasn’t sure which of these people were ornamental and which were meant to be watching the place, though in my experience, the difference was not as great as one might think. I also had no clear sense of who our contact was, only that I had been given a name and a brief description from Myriam by way of Sascha, and that he had flown in from wherever just to assist us with this deal. Terry White. Canadian. How he had fallen in with Cuban-American traffickers was anyone’s guess.
I checked my watch. Two minutes to noon. I reached for the door handle, then stopped, glancing across the console.
“Ready?” I asked.
Gyuri’s eyes flicked toward me, a quick flash of white before he looked back to the gates. “Always,” he said, and reached under his jacket. The black polymer grip of a pistol appeared briefly before he slid it back into the holster beneath his arm. “And you?”
I pressed a palm to my ribs where the weight rode flat under my jacket. Small, discreet, sourced locally, and chosen for the fact that it would not print against the fabric. “I am not walking in here with my hands in my pockets, believe me,” I said.
Gyuri tapped his hand on the steering wheel. “Then let’s not keep them waiting,” he said, and started up the drive.
v.
We went in at a measured pace, suited men strolling into a matinee. A kid with a towel over his shoulder, no older than twelve, watched us from the balcony, then hollered at someone in the yard in Spanish, announcing our arrival.
“Eight,” Gyuri murmured, without moving his lips.
I’d counted fewer. But once he said it, I saw the rest: two by the sliding doors, one in the shade under the tree with a phone; one at the dock coiling a rope very slowly, looking at nothing. The shirtless man had reappeared with a T-shirt on and a gun on his hip. He yawned, scratched, lifted his chin at us. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“We have an appointment,” I said. “Terry invited us.”
The man looked briefly perplexed, his brows drawing tight, then his face unlocked. He chuckled. “This way,” he said, jerking his chin toward the back.
We were led along the pool, the water scuffed up at one end where a pair of women were kicking idly with their heels, and under a strip of shade that had been hammered together out of PVC and canvas. The man who’d fetched us cut ahead and crooked two fingers toward a set of sliding doors.
Inside, a ceiling fan clacked. A television bickered in the next room, then dropped to a murmur. Our guide paused, knocked on the jamb with the backs of his knuckles, and tilted his head.
“Terry,” he called out, and laughed again. “Friends are here.”
Another man quickly materialized. Thirty, perhaps; thick through the chest in the way of someone who had lifted weights without ever learning form, the bulk lopsided, prison-yard style. His hair was buzzed close, scalp showing pink beneath, and his face had the heavy, flattened quality that suggested more than one fight with concrete.
“So,” he said, in a voice that strained at being friendly. The accent was hard to place—vaguely Americanized, but under it a Slavic gruffness that gave him away. Czech, I thought, though he’d taken pains to smooth it over. “You made it.”
This was Sascha’s contact? This man was no more Terry White than I was, but I wasn’t alarmed. Anyone in our line of work who didn’t use a fake name was already dead, or soon to be.
“Canada must have changed a great deal since I last visited,” I said lightly, shaking his hand.
He didn’t acknowledge this. “Let’s drink,” he said, and then Gyuri and I, along with “Terry” and several of his Miami Cuban confidants, were seated. One of the men poured generously, slopping liquor into cups until it ran over the rims. Another knocked back his share, then stood and positioned himself by the door, arms crossed.
It certainly wasn’t what I had been expecting. The meeting devolved in less than an hour. Toasts for no reason, jokes without punch lines that everyone still laughed at, a great deal of slapping each other on the back and calling each other family. One of them proposed a toast to Miami women, which set off a round of hooting and pounding the resin tabletop. Another, unable to think of anything else, immediately raised his glass to Miami men, which provoked another bout of shrieking laughter, so loud that one of the women by the pool outside turned and frowned through the sliding glass.
Gyuri caught my eye once, briefly. His mouth didn’t move, but I knew the look: children. I was itching to tell Myriam about it all later, that she had misread them. Inconsistent, yes, but stupidly trusting, and seemingly amused by me. I had a feeling that if we kept on, they’d gift me a rooster and invite me to join their ranks.
When we tired of the drinking, out came the cocaine. Along with the cash—two hundred thousand in tens and twenties, rubber-banded, half of which would come with us and, from that, Horst’s twenty-five percent and reimbursement—it had been agreed they’d offer a sample of their product, more a sweetener than a necessity. A brick thumped on the resin; tape crossed in yellow; corner shaved. A pocket knife fussed. They offered me the blade.
I leaned in and tapped the edge of the blade against the crook of my thumb, rubbing the granules between my fingers before touching them to my tongue. Bitter, numbing, cleaner than any powder I’d ever had in my life. Once I gave the nod, the whole table erupted into a frenzy of enthusiasm, the men rolling bills and tipping the brick to carve out crooked lines, tearing at it like wild dogs at a carcass.
The apparent ringleader of the group, a tanned, burly man who had otherwise been silent for most of the conversation, made a ceremony of pulling a cigar, cutting it poorly, and sucking at it. “So tomorrow,” he said, waving the cigar and leaving a black fleck of ash on the white resin table. “We’ll meet at the same time. How do you want to do this?”
The handoff. “Neutral dock is fine,” I wheezed, cocaine fizzing in my sinuses. I hadn’t planned on indulging as much as I had, not with this carnival of halfwits, but it would have been impolite to seem squeamish. When in Rome.
“Has he seen it?” the man said, turning to one of the others. He was high as a kite, I could tell, teeth scraping as he spoke. “Bring it out! Show it to him, our little parlor trick. He’ll see it soon enough, anyway.”
The kid from the balcony, someone’s nephew or younger brother, rose from where he’d been lingering nearby and vanished at a run. A moment later, he reappeared with something squared against his chest, wrapped in cloth.
“Eh, careful, coño,” one of the men snapped, snatching it from him. The boy scowled and rubbed his palms against his shorts, then retreated.
The man who had barked at him made an elaborate ceremony of the unwrapping. He palmed the corners first, ostentatious, glancing around to make sure all eyes were on him. A hot tide of chemical sweetness pulsed up in my head from the cocaine—ears ringing, teeth tight. I sat back and let my face be stupid with intoxication until the bird emerged, and everything else dropped away.
Nine years buckled and unbuckled at once. The room dissolved into that one small panel. Though I could hardly remember his face, I imagined Theo as he had been the day he’d taken it, a terrified child wandering the galleries, painting jammed under his arm, hair full of plaster dust. And then all the years collapsed forward: me, us, Vegas, him leaving, me alone, bad drugs, strange men, again and again and again—and the only constant in all of it, the fragile bird lying before me.
“Ta-da,” one of the men said, turning it over to show the verso. “Nice, right? And it sits pretty on a shelf when we aren’t using it. Good conversation piece.”
I forced my expression back into its usual mask. The trick, always, was to look interested without appearing besotted, and I could feel I was failing. Gyuri’s fractional shift beside me confirmed that he’d seen my pupils jump. Finally, after all this time, there it was. And not a scratch on it that I could see, either—though who knew what indignities it had suffered.
My eyes flicked to the door. The old reflex in me rose, the Houdini itch, the street-corner grab. My palms prickled. A panicked animal in me howled: take it, now. Stand, hook it under the arm, drop the first man who moves, run to the car. It was possible. Not the plan, but I could end it here.
The painting lay within reach, no farther than my arm. My hand drifted to my jacket, pressing flat against the grip inside. Now, now, now.
Then, suddenly, the door blew inward. A splinter flew and pinged off the fan. For a cartoon second, no one moved. Then a man in a black vest flooded the doorway, white block letters across his chest, mouth open and roaring. The second and third came like a tide behind him. The room telescoped to a pinpoint. Hands—up—now—down—on the ground—don’t—move.
The first gunshot went off by accident, I think. One of the roosters outside screamed and flapped against the screen. The coke brick skittered in a cloud of dust, the table jumped, cups toppled. Someone yelled “federal” and someone else, suicidal, reached for his waistband. Two more shots, hot, flat, like doors slamming in a hallway. The men who had been posing by the sliding glass fled in a clatter of flip-flops, knocking over a lamp. The boy—towel, balcony—ducked beneath the table, terrified.
Gyuri’s hand clamped my shoulder and dragged me hard sideways, the two of us ducking for cover behind a couch. Another bullet cleared leather, two shots, close, concussive. Someone moaned in pain.
I saw it, then: the panel, sliding off the table to the tiles. I lunged, hand outstretched, but Gyuri yanked me back so hard my teeth clicked. Terry, who’d been crouching near the radio, dove and snatched it up. We locked eyes—sudden, searing—before he bolted, scattering with the others who hadn’t been scythed down already; the painting hugged to his ribs, gone in a streak out the back door.
“Fuck!” I hissed, thrashing. “Stop him!”
“Tcha, hold on—do you want to die here?” he spat in my ear, iron-grip still at my shoulder. “We’ll get it from him later!”
And yes, of course. Coke-fogged as I was, I knew it: Sascha’s man, middleman, friend-of-a-friend. A couple of calls, and we’d have everything straightened out, the deal back on the table after the dust settled. If the right men weren't cuffed, if the wrong ones didn't die.
“Move,” Gyuri said, shoving me low, and together we crabbed toward the back door, still ajar where Terry had fled. Outside, I was hauled to my feet and yanked into motion, toward the thickest hedges along the property line. We ducked past a patio heater and slipped behind a bank of ferns, sirens wailing up the road. Behind us, the static of radios, squawked commands, someone yelling in Spanish—“¡Al suelo! ¡Policía!”—and the crackling pop of a taser or stun gun. My lungs screamed. My scalp felt cinched to my skull.
We peeled out so fast the tires screamed, fishtailed once, caught. “They really had it,” I said, fumbling for my seatbelt. “They had it. Can you believe? It was there, right in front of us! Who would wave something like that around to people they had just met? Like it was a souvenir mug or some shit? Idriss was telling the truth. Amateurs.”
“Mn,” grunted Gyuri, jaw clenched so tight I thought I heard his molars crack.
“You saw. I could have touched it.”
“That was a trap.”
He cut the wheel hard at the intersection, nearly swiping a mailbox, and I was thrown sideways against the door. “No, no, we were just unlucky,” I said. My shirt was wet, and I touched it, my high convincing me I’d somehow been shot. “How was that a trap? They didn’t even know who we really were, we were careful—”
“Someone knew something,” he said. “You should tell Myriam.”
“Not yet.”
“Okay, but you know what she will say about this.”
I could hear it already: I told you so. “Give me twenty minutes, just twenty,” I said hoarsely. “I need to think, fuck.”
He didn’t push. He never did, when I sounded like that.
vi.
It was over an hour before I had the nerve to call Myriam.
Gyuri had gone out. I sat hunched on the hotel bed, sweat drying in sticky patches down my back, hair still wet at the temples. The TV was tuned to a local station, one relaying the events we had narrowly sidestepped. Four men had been arrested during the commotion, in connection with both the painting and the cocaine scheme, though it had been a botched raid. While combing the upstairs, one of the agents had shot and killed a housekeeper. She’d had no involvement whatsoever and had only come in to fold towels.
I muted the volume and dialed.
“Boris,” she answered crisply.
“Yes, hello, everything is fine,” I said quickly, nervously. “I am guessing you already know what happened, if you have been watching Miami news. The whole thing went to shit. But! I am okay, Gyuri is okay. We made it out before—before anything. But it was close. It was very close.”
Silence. She said nothing at all.
“You are upset,” I said, fidgeting. “You were right. Bad idea, worst idea. Never should have entertained it, the whole fucking thing, but—"
“You have to leave today,” she said. “Curaçao, like we planned.”
“What are you saying? We still have to move our product.” The guns and ammunition were ready to be offloaded at any moment, sitting in a shipping container, not far.
“Don’t go near it. We’re compromised. There is no salvaging this.”
“They brought it out for us, the painting,” I told her, a poor attempt at reassuring her that this wasn’t all for naught. “Sascha’s courier took it. But this is no problem for us, right? Better that it is safe in his hands than in DEA evidence locker. Ring Horst. Have him arrange a new meeting.”
“We spoke an hour ago. Horst hasn’t heard from Sascha in three days. He believes he’s fled the country.”
I sat up at this. “I’m not understanding,” I said, though I had a sinking feeling that told me I was. I stared at the television, at the image of the house, crime scene tape strung about like party streamers.
“It turns out Sascha and this intermediary are closer than we originally thought,” Myriam delivered grimly. “We believe they planned this from the beginning. I’m sorry.”
Blood thundered at my temples. I stood, turned from the bed, paced to the desk and leaned on it with both hands. She was still talking, but her voice had fuzzed out to nothing. Gone, gone, gone again.
“I’m getting you out of there tonight. No delays,” she said. “Out of Fort Lauderdale. Gyuri will fly separate from you.”
“I am not going without it.”
“You don’t have a choice for now.”
I slammed a palm down on the desk. “Do you know—” I broke off, trembling. “I need to get it back.”
“And we will do our best. Horst is not happy about this, believe me. He was burned on this deal, too,” she said. She smoothed her voice as if addressing a child who didn’t know any better. “We will fix this, but not before you get out of there. There will be eyes all over for who knows how long, and you do not want to be standing in the blast radius when they start asking questions.”
I agreed. I sat on the edge of the bed a long time after the call ended. Phone down, hands between my knees. My pulse throbbed in my neck. Somewhere across the street, a car alarm went off and was quickly silenced. I could feel the vibration of it in the soles of my feet.
What now. The whole thing had been a farce from the start. I should’ve been furious, should have hurled the lamp across the wall, called Myriam back and told her exactly where she could put her ideas. I could have refused to leave outright and gone after it myself, I thought, the way I might have done when I was younger. But the odds of me coming back empty-handed were high, as were the odds of not coming back at all. Practicalities marched past my temper: the DEA, the FBI, the men I’d met who’d assume it was my fault their friends had been carted off to prison.
Gyuri returned. We packed our things. Tomorrow, we would start again.