The auction house on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had been built for a different century and had never quite forgiven the present one for arriving. The ceilings were too high for the lighting, the lighting was too modern for the mouldings, and somewhere behind the saleroom a heating system laboured against the October cold with the patience of something that had been told to try its best. Evren took his seat in the fourth row, which was close enough to read the room and far enough back to leave it.He had come for a drawing. He had come, more precisely, because the drawing had been listed with a provenance that did not survive a second reading, and because the collector selling it had spent thirty years building a reputation on the belief that no one ever read anything twice. Evren read everything twice. It was not a talent. It was a habit he had formed at an age when most people were still being taught to share, and it had cost him friends and made him money in roughly equal meas

The first thing Evren did on Friday morning was not open his email. He had learned that the order in which a man did things could tell him more about himself than any amount of thinking, and he had woken with the clear intention of finding out who had recommended him to Onyx, and the clear knowledge that he did not want to start with the obvious route.The obvious route was Lazarus. Lazarus had told the story at dinner, Lazarus had a colleague in Geneva, Lazarus had been retained by the same estate that had retained his predecessor. All of that was true and all of it was the surface. Evren had spent enough years reading men across desks to know that the man who tells you the most is rarely the man who knows the most.So he did what he did when he wanted to find something out without being seen to look for it. He went to a gallery.The Galerie Perrin opened at ten. It was a narrow space on the Rue de Turenne, run by a woman named Héloïse Perrin who had inherited it from her father and

Orrin sent the file at nine the following morning, and Evren read it standing up in his kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand for the second day in a row. It was eleven pages, which was not much for a man who had been alive for sixty-three years, and the thinness of it was the first thing Evren noticed. Aurelius had been careful. Careful men left paper trails, but they left them in a shape that looked like nothing, and Orrin had spent the night pulling at threads in public records and had come back with a document that told Evren almost nothing and told him, by telling him nothing, a great deal.Aurelius had been born in Salzburg and had studied law in Vienna and had worked for a bank in Zurich for eight years before he founded his investment group in his early thirties. The group had offices in four cities and no public clients and a website that had not been updated since 2019. He had been married once and divorced once. He had no children. He had given no interviews s