door sliding shut. The van pulled away, leaving a drably uniformed man and woman in the semidarkness at the door of the brownstone. The man opened it with a key affixed to a ring at his belt. They entered the building, and moments later a light came on in the foyer. Shortly after that a light came on in another ground-floor window. That was followed at approximately two-minute intervals by the appearance of lights in windows on each of the building’s four stories.
Gurney decided to bluff his way in. He looked like a cop, sounded like a cop, and his membership card in an association of retired detectives could be mistaken for active credentials.
When he came to the front door, he found it still open. He walked into the vestibule and listened. There were no footsteps, no voices. He tried the door that led from the vestibule into the rest of the house. It, too, was unlocked. He opened it and listened again. He heard nothing except the muted whine of a vacuum from one of the upper floors. He stepped inside and closed the door gently behind him.
The cleaning people had turned on all the lights, giving the large, foyerlike room a colder, barer look than he remembered. The brightness had diminished the richness of the mahogany staircase that was the room’s main feature. The wood-paneled walls had been cheapened as well, as though the unflattering light had stripped off their antique patina.
In the far wall, there were two doors. One of them, he recalled, was the door to the little elevator into which he’d been escorted by Jykynstyl’s daughter-if in fact that’s who she was, which he now doubted. The door next to it was ajar, and the room beyond it was as brightly illuminated as the large foyer in which he stood.
It appeared to be what real-estate ads refer to as a “media” room. It was visually dominated by a flat-panel video screen with half a dozen armchairs arranged at various angles to it. There was a wet bar in the rear corner, and against an adjoining wall there was a sideboard with an array of wine and cocktail glasses and a stack of glass plates appropriate for elegant desserts or lines of coke. He checked the drawers of the sideboard and found them empty. The wet bar’s cabinets and small refrigerator were locked. He left the room as quietly as he’d entered it and headed for the staircase.
The Persian runner cushioned his rapid steps as he climbed the risers two at a time to the second floor, then to the third. The vacuum sound was louder here, and he imagined that at any moment the cleaning team might descend from the floor above, so reconnaissance time was limited. An archway led into a corridor with five doors. He assumed that the one at the far end would be for the elevator and the other four would open into bedrooms. He went to the nearest door and turned the knob as soundlessly as he could. As he did so, he heard the muffled thump of the elevator stopping farther down the hall, followed by the smooth whoosh of its sliding door.
He stepped quickly into an unlit room he assumed was a bedroom and eased the door shut behind him, hoping that whoever had emerged from the elevator, presumably one of the cleaning people, had been looking in another direction.
It dawned on him that he was in a bit of a situation: unable to conceal himself because the room was too dark for him to locate an appropriate spot and unable to turn on a light for fear it would give him away. And if he were caught hiding pathetically behind a bedroom door, he could hardly bluff his way out at that point by flashing a set of retired-detective credentials. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? What was it he hoped to discover? Jykynstyl’s wallet with a clue to another identity? Conspiratorial e-mail? The photographs referred to in the text message? Something incriminating enough to Jykynstyl to neutralize any threat? Those possibilities were the stuff of implausible caper movies. So why had he put himself in this ridiculous position, lurking in the dark like an idiot burglar?
The vacuum roared to life in the hall outside the door, its shadow passing back and forth across the half inch of light that intruded between the door bottom and the carpet pile. He stepped back gingerly against the wall, feeling his way. He heard a door opening directly across the hall. A few seconds later, the roar of the vacuum diminished, suggesting that it and its operator had entered the opposite room.
Gurney’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, which the crack of light shining under the door was diluting just enough for him to make out a few large shapes: the footboard of a king-size bed, the curving wings of a Queen Anne chair, a dark armoire against a lighter wall.
He decided to take a chance. He felt along the wall behind him for the light switch and found a dimmer knob. He turned it until it was approximately in the middle of its range, then depressed it to its “on” position and immediately back to its “off” position. He was betting that the cleaners were sufficiently busy that the resulting half-second flash of muted light beneath the door would go unnoticed.
What he saw in the brief moment of illumination was a spacious bedroom with the furnishings whose outlines he’d discerned in the semidarkness, plus two smaller chairs, a low chest of drawers with an elaborate mirror above it, and a pair of nightstands with ornate lamps. There was nothing unexpected or strange-except for his reaction. In the instant it was visible, the scene ignited in him the experience of deja vu. He was sure he had seen before everything exactly as it appeared in that flash of light.
The visceral sense of familiarity was followed a few seconds later by a chilling question: Had he been in this bedroom earlier that day? The chill grew into a kind of nausea.
More important, how far might the disinhibiting power of alcohol and Rohypnol take one? How much of what one believed, how much of one’s true value system, how much of what was precious to one-how much of all that could be swept away by that chemical mixture? Never in his whole life had he felt so vulnerable, such a stranger to himself-so unsure of who he was or of what he might be capable of doing-as he did at that moment.
Then, gradually, the vertiginous feeling of helplessness and incomprehension was replaced by alternating currents of fear and rage. Uncharacteristically, he embraced the rage. The steel of the rage. The strength and willfulness of the rage.
He opened the door and stepped out into the light.
The drone of the vacuum was coming from a room farther down the corridor. Gurney walked rapidly the other way, back to the big staircase. His recollection of the brevity of his noontime elevator ride told him that the sitting room and dining room were almost certainly on the second floor. Hoping that something in those rooms might provide a thread of memory he could follow, he descended the stairs.
An archway led from the landing to the rest of the second floor. Passing through it, Gurney found himself in the Victorian parlor where he’d met Jykynstyl. As elsewhere in the house, all the lights had been turned on by the cleaners, with a similarly bleak effect. Even the giant potted plants had lost their luxuriance. He walked through the sitting area into the dining room. Dishes, glasses, silverware had all been removed. So had the Holbein portrait. Or Holbein fake.
Gurney realized he knew nothing for certain about his lunch visit that day. The safest assumption would be that every element of it was phony. Especially the extravagant purchase offer for his mug-shot portraits. The idea that all of that was bogus, that there never was any money on the table, never any admiration for his insights or talents, brought with it a surprising shock to his ego-followed by chagrin at how much the offer and the accompanying flattery had meant to him.
He recalled a therapist once telling him that the only way one can judge the strength of one’s attachment to something is by the level of pain caused by its removal. It seemed clear now that the potential rewards of the Jykynstyl fantasy had been as important to him as… as believing that they weren’t important at all. Which made him feel like an idiot doubled.
He looked around the dining room. His ecstatic vision of a sailboat on Puget Sound returned with the sourness of regurgitated wine. He studied the freshly polished surface of the table. Not a hint of a smudge or fingerprint anywhere. He went back into the sitting room. There was a faint, complex smell in the air of which he’d been dimly aware as he’d passed through the room minutes before. Now he tried to isolate its elements. Alcohol, stale smoke, ashes in the fireplace, leather, moist plant soil, furniture polish, old wood. Nothing surprising. Nothing out of place.
He sighed with a sense of frustration and failure, the pointless risk of having entered the house. The place radiated a hostile emptiness-no feeling that anyone actually lived there. Jykynstyl had admitted as much with his vague description of a traveling lifestyle, and God only knew where the “daughters” spent their time.
The vacuum sound on the floor above grew louder. Gurney took a last look around the room, then headed for the staircase. He was halfway down to the first floor when a vivid recollection brought him to a full stop.
The smell of alcohol.
