Call Down the Hawk Page 18

  Around them people moved like erratic clockwork. Jordan had spent so much time in this room copying Street in Venice that all the paintings in it felt like old friends. Eventually, she said, “When I first went looking for Sargent in a museum, I didn’t know which wing to look for his stuff in. Born in America, American wing? Lived in England, British wing? You’d think belonging in both worlds would make it easier to find the chap, but really, it was just as when he was alive. Belonging in more than one world means that you end up belonging in none of them.”

  Who was she? Jordan. Hennessy. Jordan Hennessy. Both and neither.

  This was a little more of her than she’d expected to give away before she came here today, but he’d given her the Tyrian purple. It seemed fair that she at least give him a little truth in return.

  Declan didn’t shift his gaze from the Sargent. He said thoughtfully, “When Sargent was in Venice, he used to stay at the Palazzo Barbaro … Supposed to be a very beautiful place. He was related to the owners. Cousins, I think. Do you know this already? Don’t let me bore you if you do.”

  “Go on.”

  “They hosted almost continuous art salons with the greatest expatriate Americans of the time. Wharton, James, Whistler, dazzles to think of them under the same roof. But the guy who owned the place, Daniel Sargent Curtis, he wasn’t an artist. He was just a family man. He’d been a judge back in Boston. For decades, he lived a very dull, very forgettable life there, until one day, he punched another judge in the face. Wham! Imagine that other judge. Knocked off his feet by a man people barely remembered.”

  Declan paused as if he was thinking, but Jordan could tell that he was also pausing for the oratorial effect, allowing her to digest the words he’d just given her before he offered her more; this was a man who had been fed stories at some point and remembered how it was done.

  Then he concluded: “Once he got out of jail, he moved his entire family to Venice, bought the Palazzo Barbaro, and literally did nothing but live and breathe art for the rest of his life.”

  He cut his eyes over to her. He was a good storyteller. It was obvious he liked the sound and play of words released into the air.

  She sensed he’d given her as much as she’d given him. She wanted to ask him when he was going to punch a judge, but a question like that was basically begging intimacy, and she’d already gotten in too deep for a disposable date. “Art and violence. Is that story true?”

  “I’m not as uninformed as you think.”

  “I don’t think you’re uninformed,” Jordan said. “I think you’re all safe and sorted. Why don’t you dress the rest of you like your feet?”

  “Why do you only paint what other people have already painted?”

  Touché, touché.

  Jordan’s phone buzzed. It was Hennessy. Deed’s done Trinity will come get you.

  “I …” she said, but she didn’t know how to finish it.

  He smoothly anticipated the cue. “I have to go to class anyway.”

  It was impossible to imagine him in class. In class for what. Probably business school. Whatever the most boring option was. She was beginning to understand his game; it was the same game as hers, played in the exact opposite way.

  Declan’s fingers found his jacket lapel and assessed it for blemish. A firm pinch reestablished the sharp edge. “Do you want to see me again?”

  They regarded each other. It was now impossible to not see the lines of the Dark Lady in his face: his nose, his mouth, her nose, her mouth, those shared blue eyes.

  As one-sixth of a person—one-sixth of a person who was currently robbing this guy—Jordan knew now what the real answer was.

  But she answered as she would’ve if her life was her own.

  “Yes,” Jordan said.

  Farooq-Lane’s morning began with dead ends but finished with fresh leads.

  It began quite typically. When she’d told Parsifal they needed to go out and drive until they found some clues, he’d disappeared into the hotel room bathroom and turned on the water. He’d stayed in there so long that Farooq-Lane had finished her coffee and then given in to her curiosity. Guiltily, quietly, she had typed his name into a search engine to find out what had happened to his family. Killed them all, Parsifal had said, and she’d guessed at the generalities. She, like every other Moderator, had been given the same crash course in Visionaries: Visionaries saw the future in dreamlike spurts. Visionaries’ visions always had either a Zed or an unschooled Visionary in them. Undirected Visionaries were deadly when they had their episodes, so approach them with as much care as a Zed. Possibly more: They would kill you whether or not they wanted to if you were around when they had a vision. A new Visionary should be advised that the visions didn’t have to be deadly to other people if the Visionaries turned them inward, they’d been told. They’ll know what this means. Don’t tell them it will kill them instead. They’ll figure it out eventually.

  Twenty-two Killed in Germany; Teen Survivor Under Investigation

  In the bathroom, Parsifal let out a little yelp, and then there was a crash.

  “Parsifal? You all right in there?” Farooq-Lane slapped her laptop closed.

  When he emerged, fully dressed, he nonetheless looked naked and unlike himself. His broken glasses were cradled in the bony cage of his hand.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m nearly out of toothpaste,” he replied.

  Later, as he sat rigidly in the waiting area of a same-day eyeglasses shop in a mall, squinting into nothing, he asked her, “What kind of places have many teapots?”

  Farooq-Lane looked up from the home and garden magazine she’d been reading. She used to really enjoy those sorts of magazines when she lived in a home and had a garden. “Kitchen stores. Collectors. Novelty shops. What kind of teapots?”

  “Colorful.” He frowned. He didn’t look real, sitting straight up among the banks of frames in the shop. He looked like a very convincing mannequin waiting to model the latest styles. “Ugly.”

  “Is this about a Zed?”

  “Try these on, sweetie.” The optometric technician had returned with Parsifal’s glasses. He endured her hooking them onto his ears. Everything about his body language silently raged against the contact of her fingers against the side of his head. “How are those for you? You like them?”

  Farooq-Lane could tell from Parsifal’s face that he did not, he very much did not, but he shot a quick glance at Farooq-Lane and said, “Thank you very much.”

  Parsifal Bauer had just been polite to another human being because of her.

  Miracles never ceased.

  “Let’s just give them a little fine-tune,” the technician said. “You like them now, just wait till we adjust how they sit!”

  Parsifal’s mouth worked. He had come to the end of his politeness. He cut his eyes over to Farooq-Lane again.

  Farooq-Lane rescued him. “Actually, we’re in a hurry. We have to meet someone.”

  He stood up with immediate relief.

  Outside, at the car, as she pulled open the door, she said, “That was very polite of you. We can get them fixed after we find the Zed.”

  His voice was brusque and impatient as he slid into the passenger seat. He said, “I don’t know if there will be time.”

  Then they scoured the city for teapots. They went from junk shop to junk shop, and then from kitchen supply store to kitchen supply store, and then from craft shop to craft shop. None of them were right, but the ways they were wrong kept jogging Parsifal’s memory, giving him more and more clues to follow. It was Springfield. It was near an interstate. It was a neighborhood, not a shopping center.

  It was the split-level house they were parked in front of.

  It was an unassuming neighborhood, ramblers and split-levels with patchy but mowed lawns and no trees. MARY’S ODDS ’N’ ENDS, COME ON IN said a hand-painted sign by the driveway, with a little smiling flower painted beside it. It did not seem like the kind of place many people did com
e on in.

  “No BMW,” Farooq-Lane said.

  “Different person,” Parsifal replied.

  “Was it dangerous? What you saw? Should we just go on in?”

  Parsifal was already unbuckling his seat belt.

  At the door, she was about to knock, but he pointed to another sign: JUST COME IN! with an illustration of a smiling coffee cup. Inside, they found a dim, low-ceilinged living room set up as a dowdy little craft shop, unassuming and appealing in its complete lack of ambition. Lumpy, bright teapots in rainbow colors lined the mantel with handwritten price tags. Lumpy, tall mugs gathered on shelves made from old crates. Unevenly knitted blankets in the same psychedelic colors as the pottery were draped over the back of a wicker sofa. The rug was eye-bleedingly bright and hand woven, and also had a price tag. Everything looked unusual, but not in a Zed sense. This was just some old lady’s hobby, she thought.

  Parsifal let out a small little sigh. He didn’t say anything along with it, but nonetheless she felt she could interpret the meaning of it quite well. It was the sound of satisfaction, or rather, of release. Of a job done.

  She followed his gaze. He was looking into the kitchen; a sliver of countertop was visible through the living room doorway. Just that sliver was enough to reveal a dream. She knew it was a dream because it broke her brain a little bit. The thing was not even really a dream object, it was just a collection of wild colors sitting on the counter. There were no logical words to describe it. It was not a thing that was wildly colored. It was just the concept of the colors themselves, balled up together on the counter. The colors themselves matched the crafts the Zed had made by ordinary, handcrafted means. They were all obviously a product of the same mind.

  Farooq-Lane took a step closer. Beyond the dreamthing were sugar and flour canisters and other ordinary kitchen objects. The dream sat among them, a proud little art piece.

  A dreamt art piece.

  Both Parsifal and Farooq-Lane jumped as the sliding door from the backyard opened.

  “You came on in!” said the newcomer happily.

  She was very old. She was a soft, plump lady who’d dyed her white hair pink, and she was wearing very colorful lipstick, too. Her clothing matched the colors of the teapots and the thing on the counter. Farooq-Lane caught a glimpse of something in her mouth but wasn’t sur—

  She asked, “Did you make all this?”

  “Everything in this house,” the old lady said. She reached for a bright canister on a bright end table. Farooq-Lane flinched as she removed the lid, but she only tipped the contents toward them in an offer.

  “Don’t worry, they aren’t dog biscuits,” she said, and laughed merrily at herself. As she did, Farooq-Lane saw what she had glimpsed before. The woman had a false tooth, a molar way in the back. It was the same swirling collection of rainbows that the thing on the counter was. A dreamt false tooth.

  She felt a surge of adrenaline. There was no thought immediately attached to it. Just that bubbling rush of warmth through her limbs. They’d found a Zed.

  This was a person who took things from their dreams.

  They’d done it.

  The Zed shook the canister at Parsifal. “They’re biscotti I made yesterday.”

  To Farooq-Lane’s shock, Parsifal accepted one, so she was required to as well.

  “Have you seen anything you like?” the Zed asked as Parsifal took an experimental bite of the biscotti.

  Farooq-Lane hadn’t, but she used some of her buyers’ fund from the Fairy Market to buy the rug. She didn’t know why she bought something. She panicked, she supposed. She had to do something. She picked the rug. She had half a thought the teapots would be breakable, although she didn’t know why that mattered since she didn’t intend on keeping whatever she bought.

  “Another?” the Zed asked. Parsifal accepted another biscotti, making it officially the most Farooq-Lane had seen him eat in one sitting since they’d met. He didn’t say thank you, but the Zed smiled at him as sweetly as if he had, and said, “Better take one for the road.”

  Back at the car, Parsifal ate the third cookie and watched Farooq-Lane wrestle the rug into the backseat.

  Then the two of them sat there in the quiet car.

  “She’s very old,” Parsifal said.

  “I know.”

  “She’s not going to end the world,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Parsifal watched her taking out her phone. “Then what are you doing?”

  “I have to tell them we found one, Parsifal.”

  He looked at her sharply. “They’ll kill her!”

  “I’ll tell them she’s no threat,” Farooq-Lane said. “But I have to report her.”

  “They’ll kill her!”

  He was starting to get agitated. He squeezed his knobby hands into fists and stretched them out again on top of his knobby knees, and rocked a little as he looked back at the house. She wasn’t feeling great herself; adrenaline never felt good as it washed back out to sea.

  She said, “Parsifal, they already think I might be on the Zeds’ side because of my brother. I know they’re testing me, and I’m failing. I’ll tell them she’s just an old lady. They’re not going to kill an old lady.” He curled a hand on the door handle and gripped it hard enough to turn his knuckles white as exposed bone, not as if he were going to get out, but as if he were keeping himself from floating away. She said, “You’re being fishy yourself, you know. Why don’t you want a Zed reported? They wouldn’t like that, either.”

  She called Lock.

  She and Parsifal didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

  This was, she told herself, the business of the end of the world.

  It was probably, Hennessy thought, not actually the end of the world.

  She had mixed feelings about this.

  “People like your mother were born to die young,” Hennessy’s father had told her once, before it had become obvious that his daughter was people like her mother. “I knew that before I married her. Her kind burn fast and hard. Exciting. Dangerous. Gorgeous. Always take the inside line. Push it until they break it. I knew it. Everyone told me that.” He hadn’t actually told this to Hennessy. He’d told Jordan, who he thought was Hennessy, but Hennessy had been hiding under the dining room table, so she’d heard it. It wasn’t a gaspworthy reveal anyway. This was dinner table conversation, old war stories.

  “I married her nonetheless,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t take it back, but she was like a Pontiac. Some cars you only need to drive once.”

  Hennessy’s father was Bill Dower and he was a race-car driver and kit-car fabricator. Everything he said came out as a race-car metaphor. Before one met Bill Dower, it seemed impossible for everything to eventually tie back into racing, but after one met him, it was hard to forget.

  Hennessy’s mother was J. H. Hennessy, known as Jay to her friends, though it was understood that was not what the J stood for, only how the J sounded. Hennessy never knew what her real first name was. Art writers never knew, either, despite their best efforts, and theorized that she might not have truly had a J name at all. Maybe, they said, the initials were a sort of pseudonym, an invented identity. Maybe, others said, she had never really existed at all. Maybe, they posed, she was a co-op of artists all creating art under the name J. H. Hennessy and that was why she could not be effectively researched posthumously. Perhaps the woman who appeared at events had been hired to be the face of J. H. Hennessy and she was the Banksy of the gallery world.

  Oh, she was real all right.

  Anyone who had to live with her could never think otherwise.

  Hennessy’s phone rang. She watched it skip and patter across the concrete stair until it fell to the next, where it lay on its face and hummed morosely. She left it there.

  It was afternoon-ish. A crime had recently been committed in a young man’s town house in Alexandria; not too long ago, several women had finished breaking a window, stealing a painting, and repairing a broken window. Now Hen
nessy and The Dark Lady sat on the stairs of the National Harbor, alone except for some young professionals and the sun, both jogging through on their way somewhere else. In front of her she could see Seward Johnson’s The Awakening, a seventy-foot sculpture of a man emerging from the sand. Possibly emerging. Possibly sinking. If one didn’t know the piece’s title, it was just as likely the clawing hands and desperate face were being sucked back down into the earth.

  She was stalling.

  Hennessy wiped her nose with the back of her hand and then studied the darkness smeared on her knuckles with detached observation. Recently, she had seen what was considered the blackest paint in the world. Singularity Black, it was called. They’d coated a dress with it. It was so black that whatever it coated ceased to have any details beyond being black; there were no deeper shadows, no subtle highlights. It became an outline of a dress, all complexity erased. Singularity Black wasn’t properly a pigment, it was some kind of nanoshit, tiny bits and bobs that ate ninety-some percent of the light around them. NASA used it to paint astronauts so aliens couldn’t see them or something. Hennessy had looked into getting some of it for Jordan for their birthday before she’d found out it had to be applied fifty coats thick, cured at six hundred degrees, and then could still be wiped off with a finger. Only NASA could put up with that shit.

  But it had been impressively black.

  Not as dark, however, as the liquid coming out of Hennessy, because it wasn’t truly black. It was less than black. It was not anything. It was nothing. It only seemed black from far away, and when one got close, one could see its supernatural origins.

  Was it a side effect of being a dreamer, or a side effect of being Hennessy? There wasn’t anyone alive for her to ask.

  J. H. Hennessy had been a dreamer. She didn’t talk about it with Hennessy except in metaphorical terms, but Hennessy knew what she was. Her mother would fall asleep drunk on the stairs or under the piano, and it didn’t take too much observation to discover that she tended to wake with more paints and bottles around her than she’d fallen asleep with. Or maybe it did, because Hennessy was sure that her father had never figured out that Jay could dream things into being.