“You're impossible,” she told me.
Oh yeah. That was the stuff. Feed me, Felicia. “Sorry. I have a lot on my mind.”
Her face softened. “Yeah. Sorry. There I go, making it all about me again.”
I gave her a little smile. “If that bothered me, we'd have parted ways a long time ago.”
She smiled back, a small, rueful thing before sitting up and stretching. “So,” she said, “want to tell me what you're thinking about?”
I figured I might as well tell her the truth. “Malcolm. And the vase.”
“Ah,” she said. “Right. The embezzler and the broken vase.”
Her words sent a stab of pain through me, unexpected and unwelcome. I shoved it away, hurt and irritated. I'd always supported her, always, even when she was being really stupid, and that was often. But whatever. It wasn't my job to convince her of anything. “Yes. That.”
She rubbed a hand over her mouth, not looking at me. “Yeah,” she said, “I've been thinking about that, too.”
“While you slept?”
“Yes, actually. Specifically the vase. It was broken at the auction, right?”
Yup. That was how this whole thing had started. Just a moment of inattention and boom, you're running from the FBI on a luxury yacht in the Adriatic Sea. I'd been worried about my life getting boring. I was never, ever going to worry about that again. “That's right.”#p#分页标题#e#
“In that case, why did he tell you that you could have a broken vase?”
I put my hands over my eyes. “I don't know,” I said. “Malcolm is a troubled guy. He has issues. Maybe he thought it was symbolic.” Was that part of his masterpiece? Leaving me a broken vase? Our relationship come full circle?
Ugh. I love performance art, but when it gets hard to tell the difference between art and life I sometimes wish people would be just a little less obtuse. I once spent a full five minutes at the end of a long, fully packed art show staring at an empty stone bench and wondering if it was an exhibition piece or just a nice bench to sit on. Can I sit on this bench? I had wondered. Is it art? Can I sit on it if it's art? I wasn't even drunk. I felt the same way now. Leave me a broken vase? Is it art? Or are you just a dumb motherfucker who I miss so much I could scream?
“You have to go get the vase,” Felicia said, breaking me out of my maudlin thoughts. “He wanted you to have it.”
“Fine,” I said. The pressure of the descending plane was starting to weigh heavily on my head and I worked my jaw to pop my ears. “I don't know where it is though.”
“Start with his house. He couldn't have had everything cleared out.”
“Sure he could have.”
“Fine. But we'll start with his house anyway.”
“Oh, you're coming now?”
She grinned at me. “Hell no. I'm just the brains of this outfit.”
“Okay brainiac, tell me how I get into his house. I don't have a key.”
“Don't worry about that,” she said. “I have lawyers, and so does he.”
I shook my head at her, but I couldn't help but smile. “Look at you. You stopped keeping it real as soon as humanly possible.”
She made a face at me as the plane touched down. “Would keeping it real involve breaking and entering and getting arrested and never saving the grand paramour of your tumultuous affair?”
I wasn't even sure she'd used all the words in that sentence correctly, but, after a moment of sorting through it, I nodded. “Probably,” I said as the plane finally slowed to a stop.
“Then we'll use the lawyers,” she said, and at the front of the plane the pilot hopped out of the cockpit and opened the door and the wild, blustery wind of a New York March gusted inside the plane, wrapping us up in chill and cold, and underneath it the hint of spring.
I was home, but when I'd left, it had been with Malcolm. Now I was returning without him, and I suddenly realized that I had no idea when I would see him again, touch him again, talk to him again.
The hitch and ache in my chest returned with a vengeance and something must have showed in my face because Felicia asked me if I was all right.
I had no words for her. It hurt too much to think.
So I stopped.
Chapter Fifteen
Felicia promised to get the key, and I thanked her. I didn't really know if I wanted the key, or the vase, or any of this drama, but I agreed to spend the intervening time at her house.
So I buried myself in one of the guest beds at her mansion and slept like the dead. Occasionally Felicia or Anton would pop their heads in to see how I was doing or drop off take-out, telling me to keep my strength up. Even Arthur showed up once, seeming genuinely concerned for my well-being up until the moment he told me he needed me to get back on the job because he was swamped like a Long Island beach community.