THE ART OF DECEPTION

The Man Who Recommended Me

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 had spent twenty years quietly making it more important than it looked. Evren had bought three things from her over the years and had sold one back, and the one he had sold back had been the only transaction between them that either of them had ever discussed twice.

Héloïse was in the back room when he arrived, and she came out with her glasses pushed up into her hair and a look of mild suspicion that did not soften when she saw who it was.

"You're not here to buy," she said.

"I'm here to ask a question."

"Those cost more." She went back to her desk and did not offer him a chair, so he stood. "Ask."

"Who else has been asking about the Marchetti provenance?"

Héloïse looked at him for a moment. "That is a question I would expect from the police."

"The police would ask it in writing."

"The police would ask it badly." She took her glasses down and began to clean them on the corner of her sleeve. "Two people. One was a man from a research firm, very polite, very thorough, left a card I did not keep. The other was a woman who came in person and did not leave a card at all and asked questions that were better than yours."

"What did she look like?"

"Dark hair. Italian, I think, though her French was better than mine. She knew the collection. Not the paintings. The collection." Héloïse put her glasses back on. "She asked about the same seven years you asked about. I told her what I told you, which was that the reframing in Rome was done by a workshop that closed in 1989 and that the records went with it."

"And what did she say to that?"

"She said the workshop did not close in 1989. It closed in 1991, and the records went somewhere else." Héloïse's expression did not change, but her hands stopped moving. "I checked afterwards. She was right."

---

Evren walked from the gallery to the Rue de Miromesnil without stopping. The morning was cold and bright and the pavements were full of people who had somewhere to be, and he moved through them with the particular efficiency of a man whose thoughts had arranged themselves into an order and who did not intend to lose that order to the noise of the street.

Soraya. The woman in the gallery had been Soraya, and Soraya had asked the same questions he had asked and had known more than he had known when she asked them, and she had not mentioned any of this at the auction house on Tuesday, when she had sat three rows ahead of him and had not turned around. That was not an accident. That was a woman who had decided, for reasons of her own, to let him discover her interest rather than declare it.

He was thinking about this when he reached his office and found a message waiting for him that had been delivered by hand and left with the concierge, and the message was from Anouk, and it said only: I hear you went to dinner. I'd like to know what was served.

He called her from the office. She answered on the second ring and did not say hello.

"That's a strange way to ask for a meeting," he said.

"It got you to call." There was the sound of a keyboard being used with more force than was strictly necessary. "What was served at Onyx's table?"

"Not a menu question."

"I know it's not a menu question. If it were a menu question I would have asked a chef." The typing stopped. "I've been working on something for six months. Last week a man I had never met sent me a document that he said I should read and then not use. I've read it. I haven't used it. I want to know whether the dinner you went to has anything to do with the document I'm not using."

"What's in the document?"

"Not on the phone." A pause. "There's a café on the Rue de l'Université that closes at three and doesn't mind people who sit for an hour. I'll be there at one."

She hung up before he could answer.

---

Anouk was already at the table when he arrived, with a cup of coffee that had gone cold and a notebook open in front of her and a pen she was not using. She was thirty years old in the way that journalists age, which is to say she looked twenty-eight and had the eyes of someone who had stopped being surprised by people a long time ago.

She did not get up. She did not offer her hand. She looked at him the way she looked at everything, which was with the steady assumption that it was lying to her and had not yet been caught.

"You went to dinner," she said. "Who else was there?"

"Theron. Lazarus. Zaire. Four people I didn't know and Onyx."

"Lazarus." She wrote the name down and underlined it twice. "Lazarus told a story at dinner. About Geneva."

Evren said nothing.

"He told the same story to me," Anouk said, "in a café not unlike this one, six weeks ago, and he told it as though he were telling it for the first time, and he told it to you the same way at a dinner table with seven other people listening." She looked up. "Why would a lawyer tell a story about a dead client to a journalist and then tell it again to a room full of strangers?"

"Because he was told to."

"Or because he wanted to see which of us would do something with it." Anouk set down her pen. "I haven't done anything with it. I've been careful. I've been so careful that my editor has started asking why I'm not filing, and I've been lying to her, and I don't like lying to her." She leaned forward. "Tell me what you know that I don't."

Evren considered her. There were three things he could do with this conversation and two of them were useful and one of them was honest, and he was still deciding which to choose when she said, "And don't give me the version you gave Theron on the corner last night. I've already spoken to him."

---

He told her some of it. Not all of it. He told her about the auction house and the provenance that did not hold and the seven years that should not have existed, and he told her about the accounts Orrin had sent him and the initials that had changed four times in thirty-one years, and he did not tell her about Soraya, because Soraya was the one piece of the board that he had not yet placed and he did not want to place it in someone else's hands before he understood it himself.

Anouk listened without writing, which was the first thing she had done all afternoon that surprised him. When he finished she sat back and looked at him for a long moment.

"You're leaving something out," she said.

"Yes."

"What?"

"Something I haven't finished looking at."

"Then finish looking at it and tell me when you have." She picked up her pen. "I'll tell you what I have. There's a lawyer in Geneva named Lazarus. He has an office he doesn't use and a house he does. He represented a man who died in a hotel room and he advised the family to let the matter rest, and the family took his advice, and the matter rested." She wrote a single word on the page and turned the notebook around so he could read it. "Then a second man died in Rome. Different circumstances. Different generation. Same estate. And the lawyer who advised the family the first time was not Lazarus. It was the man Lazarus replaced."

"Who was he?"

"His name was in the document I'm not using." Anouk closed the notebook. "His name was also in the accounts Orrin sent you. I'd like to see those accounts."

"I'll send them."

"You won't. You'll send me the parts Orrin sent you, which are the parts he decided were safe." She stood and put on her coat. "I'll take them anyway. But I want you to understand something." She buttoned the coat and looked at him. "I've been working on this for six months. I've been careful and I've been quiet and I've been lied to by two people I trusted. If you're the third, I will find out, and I will write about it, and you will not enjoy the article."

"I believe you."

"Good." She walked to the door and stopped. "One more thing. Whoever sent me the document knew where to send it. My home address, not the office. They knew my name and they knew I would read it and they knew I would not use it." She looked back at him. "That's not a source. That's someone who wants me to know something without being able to prove they told me. And I would very much like to know who that is."

---

Evren walked back to his office slowly. He was thinking about the document and about the seven years and about the initials that had changed four times, and he was thinking about Soraya, who had been in the Galerie Perrin before him and had known more than she had said, and he was thinking about the fact that she had been at the auction house on Tuesday and had not told him, and that she had not told him for the same reason he had not told Anouk about her.

He was still thinking about it when he reached the Rue de Miromesnil and found a second message waiting for him at the concierge's desk. This one was not from Anouk. It was a single sheet of paper in an envelope with no name on it, and the paper had one sentence typed on it, and the sentence was: You are asking the right questions in the wrong order.

There was no signature. There was no way to tell who had left it. And the sentence was true, which was the part that stayed with him as he climbed the stairs to his office and sat down at his desk and looked out at the grey afternoon light coming through the window.

The right questions. The wrong order.

He took out a sheet of paper of his own and began, for the first time, to write down everything he knew in the order in which it had happened rather than the order in which it had mattered. It took him two hours. When he finished he read it through once and saw what he had not seen before, which was that every single thread he had been pulling on began in the same year, and the year was not recent, and the year was not the year of the Geneva death, and the year was the year he was born.