Black Heart (12 page)

He digs up a couple of blankets that used to be at the old house. They smell like home, a somewhat dusty stale odor that’s not entirely pleasant but that I inhale greedily. It reminds me of being a kid, of being safe, of sleeping late on Sundays and watching cartoons in my pajamas.

I forget where I am and try to straighten out my legs. My feet kick against the armrest, and I remember that I’m not a kid anymore.

I’m too tall to be comfortable, but I curl on the couch and manage to doze off eventually.

I wake up to the sounds of Barron making coffee. He pushes a box of cereal at me. He’s terrible in the morning. It takes him three cups of coffee before he can reliably put together a whole sentence.

I take a shower. When I come out, he’s wearing a dark
gray pin-striped suit with a white T-shirt under it. His wavy hair is gelled back, and he’s got a new gold watch on his wrist. I wonder if that was in the FBI warehouse too. Either way, he looks like he made an impressive effort for a Sunday afternoon.

“What are you all dressed up for?”

Barron grins. “Clothes make the man. You want to borrow something clean?”

“I’ll muck through,” I tell him, pulling on my T-shirt from yesterday. “You look like a mobster, you know.”

“That’s another thing I’m good at that most trainees aren’t,” he says, getting out a comb and running it through his hair one last time. “No one would ever guess that I’m a federal agent.”

By the time we’re ready to leave, it’s early afternoon. We get into Barron’s ridiculous Ferrari and head upstate, toward Paterson.

“So how’s Lila?” Barron asks once we’re on the highway. “You still hung up on her?”

I give him a look. “Considering you locked her in a cage for several years, I guess she’s okay. Comparatively speaking.”

He shrugs, glancing in my direction with a sly look. “My choices were limited. Anton wanted her dead. And you surprised the hell out of us by transforming her into a living thing. After we got over the shock, it was a relief—although she made a terrible pet cat.”

“She was
your girlfriend
,” I say. “How could you have agreed to kill her?”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “We were never that serious about each other.”

I slam my hand down on the dashboard. “Are you crazy?”

He grins. “You’re the one who changed her into a cat. And you were
in love
with her.”

I look out the window. The highway is flanked by towering soundproofing walls, vines snaking through the gaps. “Maybe you made me forget almost everything, but I know I wanted to save her back then. And I almost did.”

His gloved hand touches my shoulder unexpectedly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really did start messing with your memories because Mom said it would be better for you not to know what you were. Then, when we got the idea to go into the killing business, I guess I thought that so long as you didn’t remember, nothing we made you do counted.”

I have no idea what to say in return. I settle for not saying anything at all. Instead I lean my cheek against the cool glass of the window. I look at the stretch of asphalt highway snaking in front of us, and I wonder what it would be like to leave all of this behind. No Feds. No brother. No Lila. No Mom. No mob. With just a little magic I could change my face. I could walk out of my life entirely.

Just a few fake documents and I’d be in Paris. Or Prague. Or Bangkok.

There I wouldn’t have to try to be good. There I could lie and cheat and steal. I wouldn’t really be me so it wouldn’t really count.

Change my identity. Change my name. Let Barron take care of Mom.

Next year Sam and Daneca are going to be away at college. Lila will be doing whatever bootleg business her father tells her to do. And where will I be? Killing people for Yulikova. Everything’s arranged, all for the best, and as bleak as a desert road.

Barron knocks on the side of my head. “Hey, anyone in there? You’ve been quiet for, like, fifteen minutes. You don’t have to tell me that you forgive me or anything like that—but you could say
something
. ‘Good talk.’ ‘Shut up.’ Whatever.”

I rub my face. “You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.”

He swallows. “Okay . . .”

I take a deep breath. “But if you want forgiveness, fine. You’ve got it. I’m not mad. Not anymore. Not at you.”

“Yeah,
right
. You’re pissed off at someone,” he says. “Any idiot can see that.”

“I’m just angry,” I say. “Eventually it will burn off of me or something. It has to.”

“You know, this might be your cue to say that you’re sorry about forcing me to go into this whole federal agent training program—”

“You never had it so good,” I say.

“But you didn’t know that,” he says. “I could be miserable right now, and it would be all your fault. And then you’d feel bad. Then you’d be sorry.”

“Then I might. Now I’m not,” I say. “Oh, and—good talk.”

Really, it
was
a pretty good talk. About the best I could
expect from my sociopathic amnesiac jerk of an older brother.

We park on the street. Paterson is an odd collection of old buildings and bright awnings with neon signs advertising cheap cell phones, tarot card readings, and beauty salons.

I get out and feed a few quarters into the meter.

Barron’s phone chirps. He takes it from his pocket and looks at the screen.

I raise my eyebrows, but he just shakes his head, like it’s nothing important. His gloved fingers tap the keys. He looks up. “Lead on, Cassel.”

I head toward the address of Central Fine Jewelry. It looks like all the other stores on the street—dirty and poorly lit. The front window is filled with a variety of hoop earrings and long chains. A sign in one corner reads
WE’LL PAY CASH FOR YOUR GOLD TODAY
. There’s nothing special about it, nothing that makes the place stand out as the location of a master forger.

Barron pushes open the door. A bell rings as we walk in, and a man behind the counter looks up. He’s short and balding, with huge horn-rimmed glasses and a jeweler’s loupe on a long chain around his neck. He’s dressed tidily in a black button-up shirt. Fat rings sparkle over his gloves on each of his fingers.

“Are you Bob?” I say, walking up to the counter.

“Who’s asking?” he says.

“I’m Cassel Sharpe,” I tell him. “This is my brother Barron. You knew our father. I don’t know if you remember him, but—”

He breaks into a huge grin. “Look at you! All grown up. I saw pictures of the three of you Sharpe boys in your daddy’s wallet, God rest his soul.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Getting into the business? Whatever it is you need, Bob can make it.”

I glance around the shop. A woman and her daughter are looking at a case of crosses. They don’t seem to be paying attention to us, but we are probably the kind of people you try a little harder not to notice.

I lower my voice. “We want to talk to you about a custom piece you already made—for our mother. Can we go somewhere in the back?”

“Sure, sure. Come into my office.”

We follow him past a curtain made from a blanket stapled to the top of a plastic door frame. The office is a mess, with a computer in the center of a sagging wooden rolltop desk, the surface covered completely in papers. One of the drawers is open, and inside are watch parts and tiny glassine bags with stones in them.

I pick up an envelope. The name on it is Robert Peck. Bob.

“We want to know about the Resurrection Diamond,” Barron says.

“Whoa.” Bob holds up his hands. “I don’t know how you heard anything about that, but—”

“We saw the fake you made,” I say. “Now we want to know about the real thing. We need to know what happened to it. Did you sell it?”

Barron walks intimidatingly close to Bob. “You know, I work memories. Maybe I could help you recall something.”

“Look,” Bob says, his voice quavering slightly, rising a little too high. “I don’t know what’s made the two of you take this unfriendly tone with me. I was a good friend to your father. And I never told nobody that I’d copied the Resurrection Diamond—that I knew who’d stolen it. How many people would do that, huh, when there was so much money on the line? If you think I know where your father kept it or if he sold it, I don’t. We were close, but not close like that. All I did was make the fakes.”

“Wait. I thought you made the stone for my
mother
,” I say. “And what do you mean,
fakes
? How many?”

“Two. That’s what your dad asked for. And there was no way I switched anything. He didn’t let me keep the original diamond for longer than it took to take the measurements and some photographs. He was no fool, you know. You think he’d let something that valuable out of his sight?”

I exchange a look with Barron. Dad was a lot of things, but he wasn’t lazy about a con.

“So what happened?” I ask.

Bob takes a few steps away from us and opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a bottle of bourbon. He screws off the cap and takes a long pull.

Then he shakes his head, like he’s trying to shake off the burn in his throat.

“Nothing,” he says finally. “Your father came in here with that damn stone. Said he needed the two copies.”

I frown. “Why two?”

“How the hell should I know? One fake I set on the gold tie pin where the original had been. The other I put in a
ring. But the original, the real one? I kept that loose, just the way your father wanted it.”

“Are they good fakes?” Barron asks.

Bob shakes his head again. “Not the one on the pin. Phil came in here, wanting it fast, you know? Within the day. But the second one, he gave me some more time. That was a fine piece of work. Now, are you two going to tell me what this is about?”

I glance at Barron. A muscle in his jaw is jumping, but I can’t tell if he believes Bob or not. I’m trying to think, to play this thing through. So maybe Mom gives Dad the stone and says she needs a fake really fast, before Zacharov notices that the piece is gone. Dad goes straight to Bob, but he asks for
two
stones, because he already knows that he’s going to steal the diamond for himself—maybe out of spite, since he discovered that Mom was screwing around with Zacharov? Anyway, Dad brings her one of the fakes, and she slips it back to Zacharov before he notices that it’s gone. Then Dad tells her he has a present for her—a ring with the Resurrection Diamond set in it, which is actually the second fake. If that’s what happened, the original could be anywhere. Dad could have sold it years ago.

But why put the diamond in a ring that Mom can’t wear outside the house without drawing attention? That, I’m not sure about. Maybe he was so pissed off that he liked seeing it on her hand and knowing he’d gotten one over on her.

“What would something like that be worth on the black market?” I ask.

“The real thing?” Bob asks. “Depends if you really believe it’ll keep you from getting killed. As a stone with historical value, sure, it’s something, but the kind of people who buy rocks like that don’t want something they can’t show off. But if you believe—Well, what’s the price on invulnerability?”

Barron gets a glint in his eye that tells me he’s considering the question seriously rather than rhetorically, pricing the thing out in dollars and cents. “Millions,” he says finally.

Bob pokes Barron’s chest with his gloved finger. “Next time, before you come in here acting heavy, you get your story straight. I’m a businessman. I don’t cheat the families, I don’t cheat other workers, and I don’t cheat my friends, no matter what your mother told you. Now, before you go, you better be buying something nice. Something expensive—you get me? Otherwise I’m going to tell a couple of my friends how rude you boys were to Bob.”

We go out to the counter. Bob pulls out a couple of pieces that are in the right price range for our transgression. Barron picks out a diamond heart set in white gold for nearly a grand. I manage to seem convincingly broke—something that isn’t hard, since it’s true—and am allowed to buy a much cheaper ruby pendant.

“Girls like presents,” Bob tells us as he lets us out of the store, adjusting his glasses. “You want to be a charming guy like me, you got to shower your girl with gifts. Give my best to your mother, boys. She looks good on the news. That woman always knew how to take care of herself!”

He winks, and I’m ready to slug him, but Barron grabs my arm. “Come on. I don’t want to have to buy the matching earrings.”

We march back to the car. Our first mission together, and it was pretty much a bust. I rest my head against the frame while Barron takes out the keys.

“Well, that was . . . interesting,” he says, unlocking the doors with a click. “For a dead end.”

I get in, sliding into the passenger seat with a groan. “How the hell are we going to find this thing? The stone’s gone. There’s just no way.”

He nods. “Maybe we should try to think if there’s something else we can give Zacharov?”

“There’s me,” I say. “I could—”

The car starts, and he pulls away from the curb, veering into traffic like he’s daring the other cars to a game of chicken. “Nah. You’re already mortgaged to the hilt. But hey, maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. Mom has a nice apartment to stay in and an older gentleman to keep her company. Three square meals. Patton can’t get to her. What exactly are we trying to save her from? Given what we know about her history with Zacharov, she might even be getting—”

I hold up a hand to ward off whatever he’s about to say next. “LALALA. I can’t hear you.”

He laughs. “I’m just figuring that
maybe
she
might
be better off unsaved—safer, happier—which is excellent, because, as you said, our chances of finding that stone are pretty much zero.”

I tip my head back against the seat, looking up at the Ferrari’s tinted sunroof. “Just drop me at Wallingford.”

He pulls out his phone and texts while he drives, making him nearly pull into another lane by accident. A moment later his phone buzzes and he glances at the screen. “Yeah, okay. That’s perfect, then.”