A young woman bounded out of the driver’s seat of the Porsche. “My apologies, Dr. Gabriella,”
she said, placing a set of keys in Gabriella’s hand before walking quickly away.
“Get in,” Gabriella said, dropping into the driver’s seat.
Verlaine followed orders, squeezing into the tiny car and slamming the door. The dash was glossy
burled maple, the steering wheel leather. He arranged himself in the cramped passenger seat and
shifted the duffel bag so he could reach the seat belt, but found that there wasn’t one to fasten. “Nice
car,” he said.
Gabriella gave him a cutting look and started the engine. “It is the 356, the first Porsche made. Mrs.
Rockefeller bought a number of them for the society. It’s amazing—all these years later we’re still
surviving off her crumbs.”
“Pretty luxurious crumbs,” Verlaine said, running his hand over the caramel-brown leather seat. “I
wouldn’t have suspected Abigail to like sports cars.”
“There are many things about her one wouldn’t have suspected,” Gabriella said, and pulled into
traffic, spun around in a U-turn, then headed north alongside Central Park.
Gabriella parked on a quiet, tree-lined street in the mid-Eighties. Sandwiched between two similar
buildings, the brownstone to which she led him appeared to have been squeezed vertical by sheer
force. Gabriella unlocked the front door and waved Verlaine through the entrance, her movements so
sure that he hadn’t a moment to get his bearings before Gabriella slammed the door and turned the
lock. It took him a moment to register that they’d made it out of the cold.
Gabriella leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. In the granular darkness of
the foyer, he could see her exhaustion. Her hands shook as she brushed a strand of hair from her eyes
and placed a hand upon her heart. “Really,” she said softly, “I am getting too old for this.”
“Forgive me for asking,” Verlaine said, his curiosity getting the better of him, “but how old would
that be?”
“Old enough to raise suspicion,” she said.
“Suspicion?”
“About my humanity,” Gabriella said, narrowing her eyes—startling sea-green eyes lined heavily
in gray shadow. “Some people in the organization believe that I am one of ‘them.’ Really, I should
retire. I’ve dealt with such suspicions all my life.”
Verlaine looked her up and down, from black boots to red lips. He wanted to ask her to explain
herself, to explain what had happened the previous evening, to tell him why she’d been sent to his
apartment to watch him.
“Come, we haven’t time for my complaints,” Gabriella said, turning on her heel and walking up a
set of narrow wooden steps. “We’ll go upstairs.”
Verlaine followed as Gabriella climbed a creaky stairway. At the top of the steps, she opened a
door and led Verlaine into a darkened room. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a long, narrow room filled
with overstuffed armchairs, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Tiffany lamps perched upon end tables like
precarious, brightly plumed birds. A series of oil paintings in heavy gilded frames—it was too dark
to make out their subjects—hung upon one wall. An unevenly canted roof peaked at the center of the
room, its plaster stained yellow with water damage.
Gabriella gestured for Verlaine to sit as she drew back the curtains of a series of tall narrow
windows, filling the room with light. He walked to a set of straight-backed Neo-Gothic chairs near
the window, set the duffel bag lightly at his side, and sank into the rock-hard seat. The chair’s legs
creaked under his weight.
“Let me be clear, Mr. Verlaine,” Gabriella said, taking a seat in the matching chair at his side.
“You are lucky to be alive.”
“Who were they?” Verlaine said. “What did they want?”
“Equally fortuitous,” Gabriella continued, nonplussed by Verlaine’s questions and growing
agitation, “is the fact that you eluded them completely unharmed.” Glancing at his raw wound, the
scab of which had begun to congeal, she said, “Or nearly unharmed. You are lucky. You have escaped
with something that they want.”
“You must have been there for hours. How else would you have known they were watching me?
How did you know they would break in?”
“I am no psychic,” Gabriella said. “Wait long enough and soon the devils come.”
“Evangeline called you?” Verlaine asked, but Gabriella said nothing. Clearly she was not about to
divulge any of her secrets to the likes of him. “I suppose you know what they were planning to do