Call Down the Hawk Page 3

  Hers: a souped-up old Challenger Hennessy had stolen a few hours before.

  He’d challenged her to a grudge match at a gas station. Winner took the other’s car. Jordan wasn’t ordinarily a fool, but she was just enough like Hennessy to get sucked into such a game.

  The short version of the story was that Jordan now drove a Supra everywhere. She’d driven TJ for a little while, too, but Jordan didn’t date anyone for long. They were still friends, though. Or at least as close as people could be when one of them was pretending to be someone else.

  “The key to proper forgery,” Jordan told the partygoers, “is to remember you can’t copy it, the signature. The curves and the flourishes will look stilted, everything will end in hard stops instead of trailing off prettily. Okay, I hear you say, so I’ll trace it. No way. Trace it, the lines’ll wobble their way from bed to pub and back. Any amateur who looks close can tell if a signature’s been traced. But, Hennessy, I hear you say, what else is there? You have to internalize the organic structure of it, don’t you? You have to get the architecture in your hand, you have to have the system of shapes memorized. Intuition, not logic.”

  As she spoke, she rapidly drew signatures and random letter combinations over and over. She barely looked at her work as she did, her eyes entirely on the partygoers’ handwriting. “You have to become that person for a little bit.”

  Jordan had homed in on just one of the handwriting samples. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, signed with the unusual name Breck Myrtle. It was an angular signature, which was easier than a fluid one, and he had a few really good specific tics in his handwriting that would make the trick satisfying for onlookers.

  Flipping the paper over to hide her scratchings, she confidently wrote one last set of words on the blank expanse: I deed over all my possessions on this day in November to the most fabulous Hennessy. Then she signed it flawlessly: Breck Myrtle.

  Jordan pushed the paper to the partygoers for their assessment.

  There were delighted noises. Laughs. A few sounds of mock dismay.

  Breck Myrtle, the partygoer in question, had a complicated reaction to this. “How did you … ?”

  “She’s got you, Breck,” said one of the other women. “That’s perfect.”

  “Isn’t she scary?” asked TJ.

  None of them had seen the scariest bits of her—not by a long shot. If Breck Myrtle kept talking, Jordan could’ve learned to predict his way of using language, too, and she could use that knowledge to compose personal letters and emails and texts instead of having to hide in formal contractual language. Forgery was a skill transferrable to many media, even if she generally used them more in her personal than business life.

  “You’re so young for crime,” laughed one of the other women.

  “She’s just coming into her powers,” TJ said.

  But Jordan had been pretty well into her powers for a while. Both she and the real Hennessy were art forgers. The other girls in their house dabbled in it, but they were more properly copyists. Jordan found there was a tendency to misunderstand—to conflate—art forgers with copyists. The art world had plenty of artists who could replicate famous paintings down to every last fold in a sleeve. Copies, Hennessy would say contemptuously, are not art. A true forgery was a new painting made in the style of the original artist. To copy an existing Matisse was nothing: All one needed was a grid system and a good understanding of color and technique. To forge a new Matisse, one must not only paint like Matisse, but one must also think like Matisse. That, Hennessy would say, is art.

  And Jordan would agree.

  A doorbell ring cut through the nineties music.

  Jordan’s heart flopped with anticipation.

  “Bernie!” TJ said. “You don’t have to ring the bell like a stranger! Come in, straggler!”

  Jordan was still friendly with TJ, but she wouldn’t have partied with his more boring friends without an ulterior motive. And here the motive was: a woman in a smart, purple pantsuit and tinted round glasses. Bernadette Feinman. With her silver hair gripped tight in a glinting pearl claw, Feinman looked like the only adult in the room. She looked not only like an adult but also like an adult ready to make a coat out of one hundred and one Dalmatians. Unknown to probably everyone else in the room, Feinman was also one of the gatekeepers for the DC Fairy Market, a rotating, global, underground black market that traded in all sorts of prestigious illegal goods and services. Emphasis on prestigious.

  Not just any old criminal could display wares at the Market. You had to be a high-class criminal.

  Jordan wanted in. She needed in.

  Bernadette Feinman would decide.

  Feinman stepped deeper into the house. She had a creaky, particular way of walking, like a mantis, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and melodic. “I would say I didn’t mean to be late, but I think we should be honest with each other.”

  TJ pressed a drink into her hand, looking like a little boy cautiously making sure a respected grandmother had everything she needed. Everyone else got beer, Jordan noted, but Feinman got a stem glass with a leggy white wine for one hand and a clove cigarette for the other.

  “This is Bernie, guys. She’s my Yoda, my mentor, so let’s drink to our elders!” TJ said. He kissed her cheek. The partygoers drank to their elders, and then they turned on the PS2.

  Feinman leaned over the table to look at the signatures. She raised her gaze to Jordan. “So you’re Hennessy. Surely this isn’t all you’ve got.”

  Jordan flashed a huge grin at her. Her world-eating grin, full of confidence and goodwill. No sign of nerves or how important this was to her.

  TJ frowned a little. “What, Bernie?”

  “Hennessy’s interviewing for a spot at the agency.” Feinman lied so swiftly that Jordan wondered if she’d had the lie prepared before she got there.

  “Doing biz at my party?” TJ said. “You’re supposed to pay the daily rate for my living room conference room if it’s for business purposes.”

  Feinman handed him her still-full glass. “Go find me some more wine, Tej.”

  TJ went away, silent and obedient as a child.

  Clacking silver-painted nails on Breck’s forged signature, Feinman cut through the bullshit. “I trust I’ll be looking at more than party tricks.”

  “These are candy bars at the cashier,” Jordan said. “Don’t mistake them for an entrée.”

  Feinman’s teeth were a little line of pearls hidden behind tight lips. “Fetch me the meal, then.”

  “Back in a tick.”

  Jordan’s grin vanished the moment she wound out into the cold November. For a moment she steadied herself by looking at the Supra on the curb she’d won it from, at the way the suburban houses behind it were lit by washes of porch and garage lights, the way the cars slept quietly in the half-light beneath skeletal fall trees. She thought about how she’d paint this neighborhood, where she’d place the focal point, what she would emphasize, what she would push back into obscurity. She thought of how she’d make it art.

  Then she pulled six paintings from the car and rejoined the party.

  Inside, she laid her goods on the dining room table for Feinman to examine them, wine glass held in mantis grip. They were copies. Demonstrations of power. A Mary Cassatt, a Hockney, a Waterhouse, a Whistler, and a Mona Lisa with Jordan’s tattoos, because Jordan liked a joke as well as anyone.

  If the partygoers had been amused before, now they were properly impressed. Even forged Breck Myrtle had returned to look closely.

  “You’re scary,” TJ said. “You can really look like anyone, can’t you?”

  Feinman leaned close to study the important parts: the edges of canvases and boards, marks on backs, textures, brushwork, pigments used, accuracy of the supports. She wasn’t going to find a fault.

  “What does your own art look like?” Feinman asked.

  Jordan didn’t know. She spent all her time painting other people’s. “A lady never tells.”


  “I think it must be pretty spectacular.” Feinman and her clove cigarette moved close to the parody Mona Lisa. The paint was aged and cracked and looked precisely like a museum find, but the anachronistic tattoos proved its etymology. “Although these games have their pleasures.”

  Jordan held her breath.

  She needed this. They needed this.

  TJ said, “So is she getting the job?”

  Feinman turned her mantis body toward Jordan and peered with the same intense gaze she’d previously used on the copies, her eyes unblinking behind her tinted glasses. She was, Jordan thought, someone who was used to her word being god—her word being god both to someone like TJ and to someone like Jordan. It seemed to Jordan that if you could hold dominion over both those worlds—both day and night—you had quite a lot of power indeed.

  “Sometimes,” Feinman said, “you have to turn someone down because they’re too qualified. You don’t want to hold them back from who they’re meant to be.”

  It took Jordan a beat to realize that she was being told no.

  “Oh, but—”

  “I’m doing you a favor,” Feinman said. She cast a last look at the Mona Lisa. “You might not know it yet, but you’re meant for originals, Hennessy.”

  If only any part of that sentence had ever been true.

  Adam Parrish.

  This was how it had begun: Ronan had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III’s bright orange ’73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn’t hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.

  This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldn’t manage in a single year’s use—secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.

  “Who’s that?” Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn’t answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.

  Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:

  Please.

  And now Ronan had followed Adam to Harvard. After Declan dropped him off at the gate (“Don’t do anything stupid. Text me in the morning.”), he just stood inside the Yard’s iron perimeter, regarding the fine, handsome buildings and the fine, handsome trees. Everything was russet: brick dorms and brick paths, November leaves and November grass, autumnal scarves round students’ throats as they idled past. The campus felt unfamiliar, transformed by the seasons. Funny how quickly a handful of weeks could render something unrecognizable.

  Six thousand seven hundred undergraduate students. Legacy students: twenty-nine percent. Receiving financial aid: sixty percent. Average financial award: forty thousand. Yearly tuition: sixty-seven thousand dollars. Median annual salary of Harvard grad after ten years: seventy thousand. Acceptance rate: four-point-seven percent.

  Ronan knew all the Harvard statistics. After Adam had been accepted, he’d spent evening after evening at the Barns pulling apart every detail and fact he could find about the school. Ronan had spent weeks with two Adams: one certain he had earned his place at an Ivy and one certain the school would soon discover how worthless he truly was. Ronan endured it with as much grace as he could manage. Who else did Adam have to crow to, after all? His mother was a disconnected wraith and if his father had gotten his way, Adam might have been dead before he’d graduated high school. So Ronan absorbed the data and the anxiety and the anticipation and tried not to think about how he and Adam were stepping onto differing paths. He tried not to think about all the shining, educated, straightforward faces in the brochures that Adam Parrish might fall in love with instead of him. Sometimes Ronan thought about what might have happened if he’d finished high school and gone off to college this fall, too. But that was as impossible as imagining an Adam who had dropped out of high school and stayed in Henrietta. They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.

  Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge?

  Maybe. Maybe.

  It took Ronan several moments of digging through his phone to find the name of Adam’s dorm—Thayer—and then several more to find a campus map. He could have texted Adam to tell him he was there, but he liked the idea of the soft surprise of it, of Adam knowing he was coming today but not knowing when. Ronan was well versed in comings and goings, in the tidal rhythm of a lover washing out to sea and returning under favorable winds. This was his father, after all, leaving the Barns with a trunk full of dreams and returning some months later with a trunk full of money and gifts. This was his mother, after all, sending him off and then welcoming him home. Ronan remembered the reunions well. The way Aurora’s smile got unwrapped along with the rest of the parcels in Niall’s trunk, the way Niall’s was dusted off from a high shelf where Aurora kept it.

  Over the past few days, Ronan had played his reunion with Adam over in his head many times, trying to imagine what shape it would take. Stunned quiet before an embrace on the stairs outside Adam’s dorm? Slowly growing grins before a kiss in a hallway? Ronan, said this imaginary Adam as his dorm room door fell open.

  But it wasn’t any of those.

  It was Ronan finally figuring out how to point himself toward Thayer, Ronan stalking through the students and tourists, Ronan hearing, surprised, “Ronan?”

  It was him, turning, and realizing they’d passed each other on the walkway.

  He’d walked right by Adam.

  Even looking at him now, properly, the two of them an arm’s length away as others were forced to make a berth around them, he realized why he had. Adam looked like himself but also not. His gaunt face had not changed in the weeks since Ronan had last seen him—he was still that boy with the bicycle. His dusty hair was still as Ronan recalled, charmingly and unevenly cropped short as if by self-piloted scissors in a bathroom mirror.

  All the car grease and sweat and grit Ronan remembered was gone, though.

  Adam was impeccably dressed: collared shirt, sleeves rolled just so, vintage tweed vest, perfect brown slacks cuffed above stylish shoes. He held himself in that precise, reticent way he always had, but it looked even more remote and proper now. He looked as if he belonged here in Cambridge.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” they both said at the same time.

  Ronan thought this was a ridiculous sentiment. He was unchanged. Completely unchanged. He couldn’t change if he wanted to.

  “I walked right by you,” Adam said, with wonder.

  He even sounded different. There was no trace at all of his subtle Virginia accent. He’d endlessly practiced erasing it in high school but never pulled it off. Now it was completely hidden. A stranger’s voice.

  Ronan felt a little unsteady. There had been no room for this experience in his daydreams.

  Adam glanced at his watch, and Ronan saw then that it was his watch, the elegant timepiece Ronan had dreamt him for Christmas, the watch that told the correct time for wherever Ronan was in the world. The ground steadied a little beneath him.

  Adam said, “I thought
you wouldn’t be here for hours. I thought you—I should’ve known how you drive. I thought …”

  He was staring at Ronan in an unfamiliar way, and after a moment, Ronan realized that Adam was staring at him in exactly the same way Ronan was staring at Adam.

  “This is fucking weird,” Ronan said, and Adam laughed in a haggard, relieved way. They hugged, hard.

  This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.”

  Home.

  Ronan felt even steadier. It was going to be all right. He was with Adam, and Adam still loved him, and this was going to work.

  They stepped back from each other. Adam said, “Do you want to meet my friends?”

  Friends were serious business for Ronan Lynch. He was slow to acquire them, slower to lose them. The list was small, both because secrets made relationships complicated and because friends, for Ronan, were time-consuming. They got all of him. You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left. So there was burnished Gansey, who might not have saved Ronan’s life in high school, but at the very least kept it mostly out of Ronan’s reach so that he could not take it down and break it. There was pocket-sized Blue Sargent, the psychic’s daughter, with her ferocious sense of right and wrong; they’d learned each other so slowly, peeling back layers and only truly figuring each other out just in time for high school to end. There was Adam, and there were Ronan’s brothers. That was it. Ronan could have had more casual friends, but he didn’t see the point.

  “Repo! You’re supposed to say Repo.”

  “What?” Ronan was playing a card game. It was a confusing card game, with a lot of rules, an elaborate setup, and an unclear time frame for completing gameplay. He was fairly certain it had been developed by students at Harvard. He was fairly certain, in fact, that it had been developed by the students at Harvard he currently sat with: Fletcher, Eliot, Gillian, and Benjy. Adam sat beside him, hearing ear closest (he was deaf in one).