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The first sign that something was wrong was the fact that Erik simply hit the buzzer to admit Nadir into his rented townhome without first blasting him through the intercom with his traditional hearty greeting of “Come back when you have a warrant, asshole!”
It was for this reason that Nadir turned the doorknob very gingerly before actually pulling the heavy wooden outer door to open inch by inch. Could it be that he had the wrong address? Or was the place simply rigged to blow up the second a federal agent was dumb enough to step inside? Although Agent Khan and his former informant had more or less established a sort of mutually queasy friendship over the years, it was hard to shed the last vestiges of paranoia when you’d spent your entire career preparing for the worst . . . and when you knew some of the worst things that this particular informant could do, besides.
Erik claimed to have rented the second floor of this building for the duration of a sketchily described sabbatical project. His omission of the details was not unprecedented. Past a certain extent, Dr. Erik Leroux seemed unwilling or unable to shed some habits of his chaotic earlier lives, including making only the vaguest of explanatory statements until he had acquired either cash in hand, a one-way ticket out of town, or a bargain generous enough to make the angels weep.
That third amendment to his modus operandi was the result of Erik’s first experiences with an FBI interrogation room. Well, they were supposed to call them “interviews” now, and “interview rooms,” but nobody sensible has ever been fooled by that kind of pretty language.
And the junior agent Nadir Khan never should have been in that room in the first place – and so he wasn’t. Not in the first place.
Sure, so he was the analyst who’d actually traced the clues back to the supreme eccentric who’d been making all those plausibly deniable forgeries in his decrepit basement apartment. Sure, so he had managed to connect said eccentric to the Italian mob in New Jersey, and from there back into the art market. But as junior as he was, and as Nadir Khan as he was, there was no way he was going to score the opportunity to actually interrogate the guy in person.
Unless everyone else ahead of him failed . . .
So in a fucked-up kind of way, Nadir had benefited from the fact that the more senior and bigoted echelons of his department had flung their favorite protégés at the stony cliff of his suspect only to see them all break on the rocks; and in a fucked-up kind of way, Nadir had gotten his big break by the simple fact that Erik was deeply unwell enough so as to destroy anyone who approached him in a way he did not find pleasant, regardless of the danger he was in.
And he’d seemed to find very few things pleasant.
Nadir stepped into the building’s foyer and shut the outer door behind him silently. He ascended the stairs with caution, listening for sounds of life from above.
It was unusual that no music echoed down the staircase to welcome him, and the silence only became more unnerving with every step he took upwards. After his ostensible rehabilitation, Erik had barely ceased pounding out his arcane melodies on any instrument he could get his hands on, whether or not company was present. Although it was lucky for society that his manic energies were now absorbed by relatively legal pastimes, Erik’s apparent distraction with musical devices was sometimes just another method of keeping his visitors off-balance – in much same way as he had deliberately freaked out the first round of FBI agents sent into his interrogation room once Nadir had finally collected enough evidence to secure a search warrant for his apartment and take him in for questioning.
This skeletal and scathing younger version of Erik had quickly dismissed his own strip-mall quality attorney, and was extremely talkative when questioned; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he chose to communicate only in tailored insults and circular talk that left every interrogator equal parts confused, upset, and mortally offended.
The other problem was his bad tendency to suddenly rip off his half-mask whenever he wanted to make an FBI agent jump back in horror. Either way, he wasn’t actually admitting to anything except being a jackass, despite the evidence that he had committed many, many works of art forgery.
No, the suspect sat on his cushionless metal chair as though it were a throne, resolutely haughty and impervious to all the threats the agents leveled at him. In defiance of the cold, he wore only a black t-shirt and faded black jeans over a pair of battered Doc Martens. It was already winter, but Agent Klein had deliberately turned down the thermostat, to no apparent effect on Erik – only the assembly of FBI agents seemed to be suffering from the pervasive chill. This stunt was an uncharacteristic act of petty sadism on Klein’s part, but nobody could blame her at this point.
Nobody except maybe Nadir. Just a little bit.
It was actually very frustrating for him to watch Erik fling away his only chance to avoid lifelong consequences for his actions. Arguably, Erik’s sole redeeming feature – besides his obvious genius, of course, which he appeared to delight in wasting – was the fact that he seemed to hate absolutely everyone on an equal basis, without special prejudice against any race, creed, or gender demographic. It was more than Nadir could say about a lot of his own colleagues. He was no stranger to hearing the lively conversation in the FBI bullpen hush as he walked through it to his desk, then resume once he was out of close earshot. It was like that at Quantico, too – and to think Nadir had almost naïvely expected a slightly warmer reception at his hometown branch office! He was a professional, of course; he could put the feelings in a box and save them for after hours. He just wished he didn’t have to.
Hence his sense of resignation, and total lack of surprise, at being relegated to a side room for most of the day and forced to watch the successive failures of every more politically favored agent that Assistant Director Jenkins sent in like one lemming after another.
Watching through the grainy monitor in a room full of similarly morose law enforcement officers, it infuriated Nadir to see the interrogators jump every single time Erik pulled the mask trick, even though absolutely everyone had been warned about his facial deformity by this point, and even seen photos and footage of it besides. Nadir saw a photo of it every day, lately, and was pretty used to it at this point. And how hard could it be to stop reinforcing this guy’s infantile behavior, he’d wondered. Did nobody else read his file? Authority figures rankled Leroux like coarse-grit sandpaper on his ghostly skin. And surely not all of those old group homes had simply burned themselves down . . .
It was hard to reconcile the caustic personality slouching behind the brushed aluminum table with the peerless beauty of the forgeries he’d produced. Nadir would have liked nothing better than for Erik’s artworks to have simply been sold as replica collector’s items, rather than laundered as “originals” through the Mob. There was no good reason someone this talented had to use their powers for crime.
Because he wasn’t sent in until everyone else was sick of Leroux to the point of considering the whole venture hopeless, Nadir had most of the day to guess what insults Erik would lob at him if given the chance. Under the laser-focused eyes of academia’s fallen angel, the agent’s brand-name but secondhand suit and his cheap haircut would be easy targets. (Nadir liked nicely made things, and fashionable things; but while you could find good quality clothing in a consignment store, it was remarkably difficult to pass off a cheap haircut as anything other than itself.) And of course, the later they waited to send in Nadir – assuming they even afforded him the chance to talk to the suspect, he thought, trying to remind himself not to get his hopes up at all – the more obvious it would be that the team was running out of ways to crack this particular nut.
It happened around 4:30 PM: A.D. Jenkins finally gave the call to chuck Nadir into the lion’s den. They were out of other meat to throw at the beast, after all. Everyone else waiting around the monitor cast vaguely amused glances at one another. Surely the junior Agent Khan would be chewed up and spat out even more quickly than the rest of them.
Nadir was used to keeping his chin up. But luckily, he was excited enough to actually get to talk to the lunatic that he’d been studying that he didn’t even have to pretend to be in good spirits as he entered the interrogation room and introduced himself.
“Who’d you piss off, charity case? Besides your barber?” Erik asked laconically from behind his artful slouch. His voice was low and musical, but more than a little smug. And why not? He’d already gone through a dozen FBI agents like a hot knife through butter. Under the harsh fluorescent lighting, his skin looked like sallow crepe paper. And at this close distance, you could see the serrations where Erik had sawn his plastic mask in two.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know where to start,” Nadir said mildly, placing his folder down on the brushed aluminum table and taking a seat opposite Erik. These chairs really were uncomfortable. How did a guy with zero visible muscle mass manage to look so poised in his?
Erik’s half-masked head tilted. He regarded Nadir with the bright piercing gaze of a raptor. There was a moment of silence – perhaps Erik’s only such moment all day – as the suspect evaluated a junior agent who didn’t look anything like any of the other FBI personnel who had come and gone from that frigid room so far. “You must be the nerd who tracked me down,” he finally said.
“Pot, meet kettle,” said Nadir. “Nobody who’s collected that many fields of study gets to call me a nerd.”
“Everybody else in your department is a total waste of oxygen,” said Erik. “I’ve done nothing wrong, of course, but none of them would even know where to start looking, much less be able to find me. Tell me, do you often have to rescue them from drowning in the office water fountain?”
Nadir suppressed a smile. “I’ve seen your work and I admire it, Mr. Leroux, but you have to admit that the contents of your apartment are pretty suspicious.”
The suspect rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re just going to threaten me, too? I’d expected better from you.” This was the nicest thing he’d said all day. He was probably winding up for a lethal strike later on, Nadir reasoned.
“No. If threats motivated you, you wouldn’t be on . . .” Nadir checked his battered wristwatch. “Hour . . . nine and a half of wasting everyone’s time, including your own.”
The inside of Nadir’s mouth tasted like stale black coffee, but Erik had steadfastly refused every offer of food and drink all day, citing the government’s historical propensity for testing strange substances on civilians under duress. At one point he’d launched into an impassioned monologue on the MK-Ultra program, which lasted almost eleven whole minutes until Agent Shea gave up and left the room in disgust. And when the pretty Agent Klein sat opposite him, he’d waxed poetic about the symbolism of Persephone and her Hadean pomegranate seeds before ranting in what they had to assume was Ancient Greek until she, too, retreated in defeat. Nobody in the observation room knew any Greek except for Shea’s faint muscle memory recollection of Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, which did not make an appearance in Erik’s sermon.
Either way, Erik Leroux was clearly powered more by some primal force of spite than by food.
However, it was of great interest to Nadir that Erik had not attempted to shock Klein with the nearly inhuman side of his face that he kept hidden under his white plastic half-mask. Khan mentally filed away this data point for future use.
Erik shrugged carelessly. “I had my secretary clear my schedule for the day.”
“Why’d you fire your lawyer?”
“He thought I was guilty.”
“Wouldn’t you rather negotiate some kind of plea bargain instead of setting your entire life on fire?” Probably a poor choice of words when talking to a suspected serial arsonist; too late now.
A disquieting smirk developed. “But why? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m just a poor artist whose music no one wants to buy.”
“I’m not threatening you,” said Nadir. “I consider your expertise in art crimes to constitute a job interview.”
“That’s a new one,” drawled the suspect. “Good thing I haven’t committed any art crimes.”
Nadir tried to suppress the urgency in his voice, but the truth was that he wasn’t a terribly experienced negotiator yet, and his preexisting feelings about the quality of said art crimes were unprofessional at best. “The thing about racketeering cases is that they tend to sweep up everyone even tangentially involved in an organization. We need you to keep that in mind when we talk.”
“You just said you weren’t threatening me.”
“You have terrible taste in friends,” continued Nadir.
“Erik doesn’t have friends.”
Gee, I wonder why. “You have terrible taste in associates, then.”
Erik offered him an elegant shrug. “I sell my art to people who know that it is my art. A client is a client.”
“You know exactly who and what they are,” insisted Nadir. “And you know that they resell your art as ‘originals.’”
Erik opened his eyes comically wide in a pantomime of shock. “What?! Surely not!”
“You have it backwards,” Nadir continued. “At this point, you’re the one who has to prove that you didn’t know what they were doing with your work. Not the other way around. Your only plausible way out of this is to provide something more valuable to the state than yourself.”
Erik frowned. A silence opened up between them. “Look, lawman, I’ve been here all day, and you’re beginning to annoy me,” he finally said.
“Are you done for the day?”
“I am. Charge me with something, or I’m leaving.” Bluffing with an empty hand.
“We’ll be in touch,” said Nadir. He stood up, not having even opened his folder of incriminating evidence, and left. This was just Round One, after all.
“What the fuck,” said Shea when Nadir reentered the little observation room. He and all the other agents were staring at Nadir with naked hostility.
“What? It’s 5 PM and you heard him, he’s not giving us anything today.”
“Not that,” said Shea, impatient. “You didn’t even flinch. How’d you do it?”
“What are you talking about?” Nadir finally glanced back over at the monitor.
Erik was staring up directly into the camera, unblinking, his horrifying half-face fully uncovered – a pitiless landscape of bone and scar tissue and vivid veins, set with accusatory eyes. The grainy pixels on the CRT trembled in unease.
At what point had he taken off the mask?
Even today, Nadir couldn’t remember.
He dragged his mind back to the present. All of that had been a long time ago, and things were very different now. Haven risen in the ranks, Nadir was dressed to the nines, and here he was making a semi-social call to a reformed person in a very nice sublet townhome. Erik had finally finished his suspended doctorate and built an excellent career for himself over the decades; but somehow he remained pathologically unable to stay away from trouble. And as friendly as they had become, Nadir was still obligated to follow up whenever Erik popped up in the vicinity of suspicious artifacts . . . which seemed to happen too often to be entirely coincidental.
There was always an excuse, an explanation, and another seed of doubt.
One other thing had not changed: a room in which Erik was being silent was far more dangerous than a room in which Erik was making noise.
Nadir removed his winter gloves and carefully placed them in his jacket pocket. He tugged his shirt cuffs down over his wrists in the way that subconsciously soothed him. He then reached out to turn the doorknob as quietly as possible, opening the door just an inch at first. All he could hear was a frantic scratching noise, as though a giant rat were nesting within.
The door swung open. At the kitchen table, Erik started as though electrocuted by Nadir’s entrance, dropping his pen. The table was buried under irregular heaps and piles of papers. Most of it looked like musical notation, but it was hard to tell from a distance. He seemed to be composing with all the lights off. The half-mask lay forgotten on a chair, and his hat was upside down on the floor. These days he used a fine porcelain half-mask that mimicked the natural angles of the un-wrecked side of his face, a far cry from the era when he would simply hack a plastic Halloween mask in two with a bread knife and call it a day. While the black hat normally added a little extra camouflage in the form of shadow, not even that could have hidden the lunacy that burned in Erik’s eyes at the moment.
“What’s the matter with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” exclaimed Nadir.
“Seen? Heard,” Erik hissed, still hunched over the table, one clawlike hand grasping for his fallen pen. “ ‘Out flew the web and floated wide.’ ”
“What?” Bewildered, Nadir stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “Are you all right?”
“ ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side. The curse is come upon me!’ . . .”
“Tennyson? Something is wrong.”
“Why are you here?” Erik demanded, turning away to resume his frantic scribbles. There were ink splotches on his hands. The inherent messiness of his writing style was probably just one of many reasons why he habitually dressed all in black.
“We were going to have dinner tonight, remember,” Nadir reminded him. “You were going to tell me your extremely convincing reasons for arriving in town at the same time as a lot of music-related artifacts went missing from City Hall.”
Erik looked back up to squint at him. “Really?”
“Seriously, what’s going on?” he demanded. Could Erik truly have forgotten why they both found themselves here instead of their beloved New York City?
Erik dropped his pen again and looked around his rented space as though he’d never seen it before. It was pretty sparse; he had only been living here for about a semester, and clearly hadn’t had much opportunity to accumulate the type of bizarre clutter that normally made him feel at home. “I forgot. Something happened. I forgot.”
Although he’d technically been invited inside, Agent Khan still somehow felt that he was intruding on something exceptionally weird and personal. But suspects don’t get to set the terms of engagement, he reminded himself. Missing artifacts notwithstanding, this was probably just going to be yet another one of those nights where Nadir had to take the initiative and order delivery because Erik had decided that the concept of food was boring again. He sighed and pulled out his sleek minimalist smartphone, that great invention which let him summon a double order of dumplings and fried rice at a whim.
No, you couldn’t do much better than takeout when your friend/suspect was going through some kind of emotional crisis, but the thought of Chinese food was also prompted by Nadir’s ongoing recollection of making Erik’s acquaintance in the first place. Chinese food was just one of many details from a well-worn memory that bubbled up pretty much every time he had to try and re-establish the blurry boundaries between their professional and personal lives:
The night Erik broke in for the very first time.
That evening after the first failed interview, Nadir met his cousin Jake for Chinese food and a brief rant about the state of the world. Finally, full of noodles and a vague hope that tomorrow would somehow manage to look a little better than today, he dragged himself back home and up the worn carpet stairs to his little studio apartment. The ghost of old cigarette smoke lingered in the hallways of his building. Nadir also suspected that one of his downstairs neighbors was involved in one of those operations that smuggled cartons of Canadian cigarettes across the border, but he didn’t have the energy to follow up on it just yet. And in addition to ruining the lines of his suit, his giant brick of a cellular phone was out of juice. No matter, the charging station sat on his kitchen table right next to the tape deck and all those Xeroxes.
Nadir unlocked his door and stepped over the threshold. Some instinct caused him to pause and cock his head to listen, the back of his neck tingling.
He was being paranoid. There was no rustle of movement inside his pitch-black studio apartment. In fact, even the street outside seemed to be holding its breath in expectation, the normally ever-present sirens and traffic momentarily suspended as if in amber.
He was being paranoid. And yet one tall shadow in the silent kitchenette seemed even darker than the rest . . .
Nadir heard his front door click shut behind him, shutting out the dim flickering halogen light that had stretched in from further down the hall. Bracing himself for nothing, he reached over and flicked the light switch on the wall beside him.
Erik Leroux stood there on the kitchenette linoleum with his back to Nadir, examining the photocopied documents left strewn across the table and taped up onto the wall. These included copies of his forgeries, of course, but besides that – Erik’s own music. Handwritten scores and bootlegged tapes; tangential postmodern artifacts that were meant to help Nadir access the inner workings of his subject’s Daedalian brain as he scoured the tri-state area for his crafty trail.
“Do you know, I think you might be my first fan,” the suspect said conversationally, not even turning to look over his shoulder at him. His fingers were threaded together loosely behind his back as though he were any casual tourist wandering through a museum gallery on a Sunday afternoon.
Nadir’s dress shoes were rooted to the floor. He needed to get past Erik, to the phone in the kitchenette where he could dial 911 and his supervisor after that. Internal Affairs would rake him over the coals in the morning despite the fact that none of this was technically his fault. Nadir would be removed from the case, of course.
“You can’t be here,” he said without any conscious effort, mechanically rejecting the impossible situation.
Erik finally turned to look at him. “I’m impressed that you found some recordings of my original work. I can’t even sell it as hold music.”
“Probably because it doesn’t sound anything like hold music,” Nadir said reflexively. The music had a lot to say, ranging from ecstasy to loathing, but as such it would also shock a casual listener into hanging up the phone rather than staying on the line for the next available associate. But never mind that; how had Leroux gotten into his apartment? And how could he get him back out again? The younger man was clearly insane.
“Thank you!” Erik picked up a Xerox of one of his older forgeries. “This one’s not my best. But I’m sure you noticed that.”
The front door hadn’t felt any different when Nadir opened it, but perhaps Erik had picked the lock deftly enough not to cause damage. Nadir glanced over to the windows. The dingy shades were pulled all the way down. He was pretty sure he’d left them up when he left in the morning, for the benefit of his potted fern.
“I came in through the fire escape,” Erik offered as he followed the direction of Nadir’s gaze. “Your window is unharmed, but it is very insecure as far as windows go. -- I really thought they paid FBI agents better than this, by the way.”
They did, but Nadir had recently endured a nasty breakup with a gorgeous but temperamental painter named Raquel, who’d kept their nicer one-bedroom apartment in the split – and the cat, which was what actually hurt far worse than the rest of it. This studio was all he could find on such short notice. It wasn’t anybody else’s business, though, and he felt his anger rising as the reality of the current situation resolved into sharper focus.
He’d been trying his level best to set things up so that Erik could plead his way out of prosecution while helping take down the Mob, and this ingrate rewarded him by breaking into his apartment and insulting him! He’d wanted to help set a talented stranger back on the straight and narrow . . .
“Why exactly did you think that this was a good idea?” Nadir asked himself as much as Erik.
He had to get the suspect away from the kitchenette, where the telephone hung on the wall next to the bathroom door. Fundamentally, nothing else mattered; there was far more at stake than his latent vain desire to achieve some détente between the two of them.
“You might be incredibly boring, but you’re still my best chance at survival,” Erik insisted, dropping the copy of his forgery back onto the table. “The rest of your colleagues are much stupider. You’re the only one who kind of knows what he’s doing.”
“See, this right here is why you don’t have friends.”
“Don’t insult me by implying there’s only one reason,” Erik sneered.
Nadir’s patience was reaching, well, a nadir. “It’s safer this way, isn’t it, if you intentionally sabotage all your relationships before they can hurt you?”
“Don’t patronize me, you’re not in Behavioral Sciences.”
“Look, I have to report this interaction or you’ll blow the whole case. You have one chance to just get out of my apartment before I call the cops.”
Erik spread his hands in a poor imitation of bafflement. “I thought you liked my work. Why else would you decorate with it?”
“I do!” shouted Nadir. “I do,” he repeated, quieter. “It’s not my fault you’re such a narcissist that you can’t tell you’re not even the main target!”
“I’m – I’m not the main-?!” And for the first time, there was a note of genuine outrage in Erik’s voice. He planted his hands on his skinny hips. Anger flared up in his bright eyes.
“Your ego will be the death of you,” said Nadir, resigned. But, finally, it was also a way in.
He hadn’t counted on Erik being quite so damaged as to defy the normal sequence of events in a RICO case: You cornered a lower-level suspect with incontrovertible evidence of their own crimes, then used it to get them to flip on everyone higher up the food chain of organized crime. However, Erik simply wasn’t psychologically capable of accepting that he’d been cornered in the first place. Or that he wasn’t the biggest possible fish the team could be after.
Unfortunately, this might also mean he was too radioactively crazy to handle in the normal way.
Nadir realized that he was pressing the heels of his hands to his temples, developing the mother of all headaches. Erik glided noiselessly across the studio floor and made himself comfortable on Nadir’s thin futon in the meantime, swigging contemplatively from a flask which seemed to materialize from the ether.
“I came here because I don’t want to do this anymore,” Erik said, quiet.
“What, break into people’s houses?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, there is nothing in this shoebox worth stealing. It might actually be the most depressing studio in the entire Bronx. No, I came here because I want out. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Erik waved over towards the kitchenette and the photocopies of his work. “I want to be a normal m- I want to be a normal musician. I want to go back and finish my Ph.D. I hate these people and I don’t want to work with them anymore, but I can’t get out on my own. I need your help.”
“That is what we’ve been trying to do all day.” Nadir would have shouted this, too, but he was suddenly out of energy. “How do you not get that?!” he hissed from between clenched teeth.
“How was I supposed to know?” he asked, perplexed. It was infuriating.
“Have you never watched literally any police procedurals?”
“No, why would I do that?” Erik sounded genuinely mystified. He tilted his flask towards Nadir where he still stood flat-footed by the door.
“I don’t drink.”
“Probably for the best. – I think that if I believed in a god, I’d have to believe in all of them, and that sounds like a lot of work.”
He huffed out a laugh despite himself. Not for the first time, Nadir found himself wishing in vain that he had met the younger man under different and better circumstances, ones in which they could have actually been friends instead of natural adversaries. They might have met in college instead, perhaps, with Nadir studying art history and Erik studying . . . pretty much everything short of basic human etiquette, apparently, ever the intolerable prodigy.
He should be calling 911 and his supervisor. Instead he was removing his shoes and jacket in a surreal facsimile of his normal nightly routine, and then he was lifting a cold aluminum can of ginger ale out of his fridge, sticking that stupid dead cellular phone into its port on the table, and gravitating back towards the man-shaped pile of felonies that lounged on his own hospital-cornered futon.
Nadir currently owned exactly one chair, which he had found on the curb on trash day after Raquel kicked him out. He dragged it away from the kitchen table to sit opposite the futon. Apart from one tiny hairline wrinkle by his one visible eyebrow, Erik looked utterly unconcerned with their state of affairs, as languid on the bed as a pre-Raphaelite painting. That was probably how he’d wandered into the clutches of the Mob in the first place; distracted, one eye on the heavens and one eye on his wallet. Nadir sipped his ginger ale slowly.
“If I am not the main character in your sordid little play, lawman,” Erik finally said, examining the water stains on the studio’s popcorn ceiling, “we are in even bigger trouble than I thought.”
“We.” One of the oldest tricks in the book: Identify and isolate the greenest junior agent on your case, get him on your side by appealing to his emotions, feed him plausible lies, and corrupt the investigation before he knows what’s happened. Erik must have noticed the obvious fact that Agent Khan was something of an outsider in his own organization, and therefore vulnerable to manipulation. Certain types of criminals delighted in building a hall of mirrors around their persecutors, turning the whole world into a funhouse, distorting your perception of reality, until you couldn’t tell which way was up.
But wouldn’t it be nice to believe otherwise?
Little carbonated bubbles popped on Nadir’s tongue as he contemplated all the various lenses through which he might dissect tonight’s conversation once it was over.
Erik cast his bright gaze back over to Nadir. “I want out, all right, but I couldn’t talk back there because up until a certain point I was pretty confident the Roses could get me out of your bureaucratic hellscape in one piece.”
“What changed?” It was impossible for Nadir to resist his curiosity even as he suspected Erik of exploiting it.
“If you’re actually going after them, themselves, I am expendable to them.”
“Not if you work with us.”
Erik emitted an eerie dark laugh, his gaunt expression now more troubled than any of the hateful faces he’d pulled in the interrogation room. “Not really, no. Because your Agent Shea is also on their payroll.”
And with that, the final wall of their fated hall of mirrors slotted into place with a heavy thud. Nadir was doomed to work both ends towards the center that whole year – doomed to trust everybody and nobody until the final showdown where he almost shot A.D. Jenkins and exposed Shea as the turncoat that he was.
It was entirely too exciting a year, and it was ultimately responsible for his growing dependency on antacid tablets.
He got through it by telling himself that it would all be over soon, very soon, and that afterwards there would be no more terrible surprises.
The terrible surprise caught his eye as soon as he drew nearer to the table. “What the hell is this,” Nadir blurted.
“Music,” Erik said dismissively.
“No. This.” Nadir picked up the sketch tentatively between thumb and forefinger as though it might burst into flames at the touch. It had sat slightly to the side of the piles of musical notation, staring up at him as though they were equally surprised to happen upon each other here.
“Nothing! Don’t touch that!”
“What the fuck,” he said involuntarily as he looked at it more closely. “Is this – do you know her?”
The drawing was technically beautiful. The girl looked out from the page with such vivid realism that she seemed ready to blink and breathe at any moment. A halo of curls framed her face as she turned from behind a counter to regard the viewer in shock, almost in awe, her mouth dropping open. She wore an apron over a plain button-down shirt.
And she was terrified.
“Put that down,” Erik hissed.
“Is this – is she a student?”
“Probably – I don’t know! I can’t find any information at all! – Not like that, don’t look at me like that,” he hastened. “I’m not that kind of professor, and she isn’t even my student. But I’d rather ‘retire early’ than go after any undergraduate,” Erik added. “You know I hate teachers like that . . . I could never live with myself . . .”
Dear God. An undergraduate. The piece of paper shook slightly in Nadir’s hand. Had Erik finally cracked up for good? Perhaps it was only a matter of time . . .
“It’s unrelated to my work here,” Erik continued, as though his research was somehow the primary question at hand. “It’s not as though I could make her sing my compositions, either . . . could I? . . . no. No. I just need her to meet the right people and advance her career. That’s all.”
“ ‘Advance her career,’ ” Nadir repeated, dubious. He gently placed the incriminating sketch back down next to the leaning piles of musical scores.
“It’s an extraordinary voice,” Erik said, petulant. “The quality of interpretation . . . so I don’t know why she hasn’t called me yet!”
“Called you?” That familiar old tension headache reared up again. Nadir’s dentist had told him in no uncertain terms to wear a mouth guard that would stop him from grinding his teeth in his sleep. Sure, that would have been a good fix, except he hadn’t admitted to the doctor that he was pretty sure that he only committed this particular sin when he was awake. His profession just seemed to lead to a lot of involuntary jaw-clenching . . . or at least his acquaintances did.
“Sure, I left her my card.” Erik shrugged. “It couldn’t have been more clear.”
His head pounded. “Please tell me that you told her why you wanted her to call you.”
“It couldn’t have been more clear!” he insisted.
“That’s a ‘no,’ ” Nadir said flatly. “Erik, are you aware that just giving strange young women your business card with no explanation implies that you are coming on to them?” Why the fuck do I have to explain this to a grown man?
Erik’s mouth hung open in shock. “No! That’s insane!”
It came as no small mercy that the sheer horror on Erik’s face implied that he had not consciously attempted to proposition the scared girl whom he had brought to near-life in graphite on scrap paper. However, intent alone wasn’t enough to rewind the clock on whatever the hell he had done to terrify her so badly. Had she seen him maskless? What had actually happened, and where?
“What exactly do you want out of this interaction with her,” he asked with caution, dreading the answer.
Erik snorted. “What I want is immaterial. I have a favorite restaurant in Prague – irrelevant. I need to update my will – irrelevant. And my office in the Archives is absolutely unlivable – irr- . . . well, that’s . . . that actually is relevant.”
“Please tell me that these facts are not related.”
“ ‘These facts are not related,’ ” Erik recited almost in singsong, rolling his eyes, scrabbling to gather his toppling heaps of paper together. It was wholly unconvincing.
“Tell me one more thing,” Nadir had asked that evening as they left the courthouse for the last time, descending the stairs and preparing to enter their divergent new realities headlong. One by one, the panels had shattered inside their hall of mirrors until only one way forwards to the truth remained, and after that their paths must split off from one another. His department’s bullpen was justifiably terrified of Agent Khan now that he’d rooted out a mole in the Bureau and helped take down a major Mob family after a year’s worth of chaos, his legacy now golden and his path to promotion finally smooth, the fact that he’d nearly shot Jenkins notwithstanding; but despite all of this, somehow what Nadir felt most during that long moment on the cold stone steps was a curious sadness at his certainty that he would never see this modern cryptid calling himself Erik Leroux ever again.
Erik shed his black suit jacket in distaste, slinging it over one skinny arm. He wasn’t used to formal clothing yet. “What, six hours on the stand wasn’t enough for you? You love the sound of my voice that much? I’m honored.”
Nadir looked upwards through the jagged canyon of buildings around Foley Square. The sun had fallen long ago, but as usual, clouds and light pollution hid the stars. All he could see above them was the sterile blinking of wing lights on an airplane that sailed away from JFK. “Your last foster placement.” He tugged at his cuffs unconsciously.
“No. Come on, don’t talk about stupid things now of all times, lawman. I’m probably never going to see you again. If I’m lucky.”
“The fire.”
“It was the Fourth of July.”
“And?”
Erik shrugged and looked away as if embarrassed. Sometimes, particularly when you could only see the unmarred side of his face, he looked more like a rangy overgrown adolescent than a young man, much less a criminal turned Mob informant who’d lucked into a new chance at life.
“Fire works,” he said.
That nearly alien youth was still in there somewhere underneath the cultured façade, and that’s what frightened Nadir. His tendency towards unpredictable acts of shocking naïveté, coupled with a violent streak and frequently mischanneled genius, made Erik a man worth watching indefinitely. And he’d always known, on some level, that women were a mortal weakness which both of them shared. But one of these two men was far better socialized than the other . . . or at least he tried . . .
And why had he ever thought that he could be rid of this pernicious man for good?
Nadir retrieved his delivery order from the stoop and headed back upstairs in some trepidation that he’d somehow see an even stranger scene once he reentered Erik’s apartment with their food.
Instead, Erik had actually spent the last few minutes of Nadir’s absence tidying up his piles of sketches and music, clearing off the table and relocating his papers to a desk in the next room. He’d also donned his half-mask, a gesture which discomfited Nadir. Surely they were past such things, the two of them – but then again, he remembered the terror on the face of the girl Erik had drawn. Something had happened, whether Erik wanted to admit it or not. Something that made the suspect feel self-conscious.
“It’s a new beginning,” Erik declared as Nadir shut the door behind himself. He stood by the table with authority, his spine straight and proud. “I have the chance to do something good.”
“Something good,” he echoed, dubious.
“Something good,” said Erik decisively.
Whatever he had planned could only turn out to be deranged at best, impossible at worst.
But wouldn’t it be nice to believe otherwise?
In the meantime, there was takeout and a crate of stolen artifacts to discuss. Perhaps the weirder recesses of his suspect’s psyche could wait.
For now.