Shut Your Eyes Tight

The little glass.

Christ!

He strode back up the stairs, two at time, back into the sitting room, over to the cavernous leather armchair from which Jykynstyl had greeted him upon his arrival, the chair from which the apparently infirm man had had such difficulty rising that he needed two free hands on the arms to support himself. And having no convenient table on which to lay his little glass of absinthe…

Gurney reached into the base of the thick tropical plant. And there it was-shielded from casual sight by the high rim of the pot and the dark, drooping leaves. He carefully wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

The question facing him, back in his car a minute later, was what to do with it.

Chapter 45

A curious dog

The fact that the Nineteenth Precinct station house was just a few blocks away on East Sixty-seventh Street focused Gurney on a mental list of the contacts he had there. He knew at least half a dozen detectives in the Nineteenth, maybe two of them well enough to approach for an awkward favor. And getting a set of prints lifted from the pilfered cordial glass and run against the FBI database-a process that would demand some wiggling around the need for a case number-was definitely awkward. He wasn’t about to explain his interest in knowing more about his luncheon host, but he wasn’t about to invent a lie that could later blow up in his face.

He decided he’d have to find another way to go about it. He placed the little glass carefully in the console compartment, put his cell phone on the seat beside him, started the car, and headed for the George Washington Bridge.

The first call he made along the way was to Sonya Reynolds.

“Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing all afternoon?” She sounded angry, anxious, and completely ignorant of the day’s events, which he found reassuring.

“Great questions. I don’t know the answer to either one.”

“What happened? What are you talking about?”

“How much do you know about Jay Jykynstyl?”

“What’s this about? What the hell happened?”

“I’m not sure. Nothing good.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How much do you know about Jykynstyl?”

“I know what’s reported in the art media. Big buyer, very selective. Huge financial influence on the market. Likes to be anonymous. Doesn’t allow his photograph to be taken. Likes there to be a lot of confusion about his personal life, even where he lives. Even whether he’s straight or gay. The more confusion, the more he likes it. Kind of obsessed with his privacy.”

“So you’d never met him, never even seen a photo of him, before he dropped into your gallery one day and said he wanted to buy my stuff?”

“What are you getting at?”

“How do you know that the man you spoke to is Jay Jykynstyl? Because he said so?”

“No. Exactly the opposite.”

“He said he wasn’t Jay Jykynstyl?”

“He said his name was Jay. Just Jay.”

“So how…?”

“I kept asking him, told him it would be very difficult to do business with him without knowing his full name, that it was ridiculous for me not to know who I was dealing with when so much money would be involved.”

“And he said… what?”

“He said Javits. His name was Jay Javits.”

“Like Jacob Javits? The guy who used to be a senator?”

“Right, but he said it sort of odd like, like the name just occurred to him and he felt he had to say something because I was making a big issue out of it. Dave, tell me why the fuck we’re talking about this. I want to know right now what happened today.”

“What happened is… it became plain that this whole deal is bullshit. I believe I was drugged and that lunch was some kind of setup that had nothing to do with my artwork.”

“That’s insane.”

“Getting back to the man’s identity-he told you his name was Jay Javits and you concluded from that that his name was Jay Jykynstyl?”

“Not like that, no. Don’t be silly. During the course of our conversation, we were talking about how pretty the lake was, and he mentioned he could see it from his room, so I asked him where he was staying, and he told me at a very beautiful inn, like he didn’t want me to know the name. So later I called the Huntington, the most exclusive inn on the lake, and I asked if they had a Jay Javits registered there. At first the guy sounded confused, and then he asked me if maybe I had the name wrong. And I said sure, I’m getting older and my hearing is bad and sometimes I get names wrong. I tried to sound pathetic.”

“And you think you succeeded?”

“I must have. He said, ‘Could the person you want be named Jykynstyl?’ ”

“I asked him to spell the name, and he did, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy fucking Christ, is it really possible?’ So I asked him to describe this Jykynstyl guest, and he did, and it was obviously the same guy who had come to the gallery. So, you see, he didn’t want me to know who he was, but I found out.”

Gurney was silent. He thought a far more likely possibility was that Sonya had been smoothly manipulated into believing that the man was Jykynstyl-in a way that would leave her with no doubts about her conclusion. The subtlety and expertise of the con job was almost more disturbing than the con itself.

“You still there, David?”

“I need to make some more calls, and then I’ll get back to you.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“I have no idea what happened-other than the fact that I was lied to, drugged, driven around the city in a blackout, and threatened. Why and by whom I have no idea. I’m doing my best to find out. And I will find out.” The optimism in those last five words bore little relationship to the anger, fear, and confusion he felt. He promised again to get back to her.

His next call was to Madeleine. He made it without thinking about what he was going to say or checking the time. It wasn’t until she picked up with a sleepy sound in her voice that he glanced at the dashboard clock and saw that it was 10:04 P.M.

“I was wondering when you’d finally call,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Pretty much. Sorry I didn’t call sooner. Things were a little nuts this afternoon.”

“What do you mean, ‘pretty much’?”

“Huh? Oh, I mean I’m okay, just in the middle of a little mystery.”

“How little?”

“Hard to say. But it seems that the Jykynstyl thing is some kind of con. I’ve been sort of running around tonight trying to get a handle on it.”

“What happened?” She was totally alert now, speaking in the perfectly calm voice that both masked and exposed her concern.

He was aware that he had a choice. He could relate everything he knew and feared, regardless of the effect on her. Or he could present a less complete, less disturbing version. In what he would later see as a self-deluding bit of fancy dancing, he chose the latter as a first step and told himself he would present the whole story as soon as he understood it better himself.

“I started feeling funny at lunch, and later, in the car, I was having trouble remembering the conversation we’d