Tina, who was off to pick up Stephanie. After they’d been gone a half hour, Milo’s phone rang. It was his father, Yevgeny Primakov. “Misha! Do you know what Monday is?”
Milo had no idea.
“Public Service Day. Every June 23 the United Nations celebrates the value and virtue of public service to the community. It’ll be a festive day.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Spare me your cynicism, my boy. The true joy of Public Service Day is that I’ll get a rare chance to see your ravishing wife and breathtaking daughter. Perhaps even my infuriating son.”
Milo resisted a smile, though it was difficult. “Okay, I’ll let them know. We’ll have dinner.”
“Not your food. We’ll go out. My treat.”
“Of course it’s your treat, Yevgeny.”
“Listen, Misha, I have an appointment with a foreign minister. I just wanted to make sure you would be there.”
“I try not to travel these days.”
“Not even to London?”
His father seldom wasted a call for purely familial reasons. “You heard?”
“About the Sebastian Hall that wasn’t you? Of course I did. And I made sure you were in good health in Brooklyn before forgetting about it.”
“It wasn’t me, but it was a friend. Can you find out anything?”
Yevgeny hummed a moment, considering this. “Which friend?”
“Alan Drummond.”
“I see.”
“It’s important we find out the details.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me. His wife, Penelope. Tina.”
Another hum. “No one else?”
“A few other people.”
Silence, but Milo didn’t feel up to explaining Dennis Chaudhury. Background voices on his father’s side were speaking French. “Okay, Misha. I’ll bring what I can on Monday.”
“Thanks, Yevgeny.”
Milo ran an online search for miniature cameras, hoping to stumble across the make of the one he’d gotten from Alan’s office. While it looked similar to many, it matched none.
He heard Stephanie stomping up the stairs, and went to open the door for her. He was surprised to find his daughter’s upper eyelids completely black. His first thought was that she’d been beaten. His knees went weak. She was smiling wildly. “What do you think, daddy?”
“I think you look like someone’s punching bag.”
Her smile vanished. “Well… it’s pretty,” she said as she walked past him, ignoring his attempt at a kiss.
Behind her, Tina came slowly up the stairs. “Did you see?” she asked.
“Makeup?”
“Magic fucking Marker,” Tina grumbled.
Milo grinned. “Sarah, too?”
Up on their floor now, Tina leaned against the banister and raised an eyebrow. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Sarah thought Stephanie needed to bring out her eyes a little more.”
“What did her mother say?”
“She said, I think it looks cute. And laughed. Stef’s not staying there ever again.”
While Tina made more coffee, he found Stephanie in her room, examining herself proudly in the mirror. When Milo hovered in her doorway for too long, she said, “You really think I look like a punching bag?”
“Now that I’ve had a moment, no. It’s kind of interesting.”
“In a good way?”
Milo stared at her, as if thinking this through. His daughter’s disheveled hair, her pudgy nose, her big ears, her habit of double-blinking when she wanted a serious answer, her pursed, thin lips-all of this was absurdly beautiful to him. It was a face, like his wife’s, that he would never be able to see objectively. “Good, sure, but maybe it was a bad idea to use a marker.”
“It’ll wash off.”
“I don’t think so.”
She turned from the mirror to frown at him; she looked nothing like a six-year-old. “It’s water based. That means it’ll wash off.”
“Good,” he said. “Why don’t you wash it off so that when we go out for lunch people won’t think we’re abusing you?”
She didn’t laugh.
He wandered back to the kitchen and found Tina sulking in the corner with her cup. “So you didn’t find anything at Alan’s?”
“Not much. The computer was blank, but there was a camera.”
“A camera?”
“It’s been there less than a month.”
He showed Tina the device, and as she turned it in her hand she said, “You’re sure someone else didn’t put this there?”
“It was out of the way, but it wasn’t hidden. If someone else put it there, it wasn’t a secret from him.”
She handed it back. “So he put it there in case someone came to search his office?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t make much sense. Anyone searching his place would run across it as easily as I did.”
“He should’ve used a nanny-cam. They put them in clocks now, so babysitters have no idea.”
“Do they?”
“How can you not know about these things?” she asked.
“What about Penelope?”
Tina came out to the living room; he followed. “She’s messed up. The last time they talked, she was kicking him out of the house. She needs to know what’s going on.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to London?”
“I don’t need to. Yevgeny will be in town on Monday, and he’s bringing information.”
“Little Miss will be happy. She likes him. I do, too.”
“Don’t bring all this up to him. I’ll take care of it.”
“Why can’t I ask him?”
“Because he’s not supposed to know what he knows, and you’ll put him in a position of having to lie to you. There’s no reason for that.”
“I bet I could get him to talk.”
“I bet you could, too, but don’t.”
They both looked up as Stephanie walked in, her face red and wet from washing, but the black coins of her eyelids hadn’t lightened at all. “Sarah lied to me,” she told them. “This isn’t water based at all!”
It was over pizza at La Bruschetta that Milo noticed Chaudhury on the opposite side of Seventh Avenue, under the awning for Rite Aid, staring through the window at him.
“Sorry, ladies,” Milo said, patting his lips with a napkin. “There’s someone I need to talk to. Be right back.”
As he rose, Stephanie craned her neck to peer out the window. “The dark guy?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s got eyes like mine.”
It was overcast but still warm out on the street when Milo waited for the traffic to ebb and jogged across to join Chaudhury, who first said, “You haven’t been beating up on that kid of yours, have you?”
“She said your eyes look like hers.”
