Chapter Text
--
Thursday, January 12, 15:45 GMT
"I can't believe none of those idiots got the plate," Dupree says. "I mean, what am I supposed to do, run around London stabbing everybody who drives a red Ford Fiesta?"
Gil spares a moment to be glad nobody got the plate.
"It wasn't even on the cameras! What's the point of living in a goddamn surveillance state if you can't use it to find a guy you need to stab?"
"What? How did you get footage? The police havn't gotten footage yet."
"I asked," Dupree says, blinking. Gil hopes she meant she asked the clerk in the convenience store; the prospect of Dupree with unfettered access to public cameras is a terrifying one. "How long until we can see him? I need to yell at him for being too stupid to dive out of the way."
"He'll be out of surgery in an hour and a half." Gil crosses his arms. The peculiar combination of mortal terror and boredom is wearing on his nerves. "Can you sit still for an hour and a half or should we go wait in the pub?"
"They put pubs in hospitals now? Jeez, if they have that kind of money why does the NHS - Relax, kiddo, I was joking. Take a deep breath. You're going to sprain something."
There's a dent in the metal arm of the chair opposite, and Gil focuses on it and takes deep breaths as he slowly loosens his grip on the metal arms of the chair he's sitting in. Dupree telling him to calm down is a bad sign.
The clock flickers. 3:46.
"Anyway," Dupree goes on, "Klaus is going to be just fine. He's practically indestructable. Did you know he still has a piece of bullet in his shoulder from that time he pissed off the Rumbaba chieftain? It must mess up the x-rays something fierce."
"I knew that," Gil allows. "I didn't know you knew that. Since when do you and Father talk about anything but work?"
"Huh? Ages and ages. He got real weird when you were at university." That's almost as long as Dupree has been working for them. Maybe Klaus is feeling his age. A pang of anxiety that he's being a neglectful son joins the mortal terror and boredom in Gil's head, probably because it spotted the nice grooves already worn in his brain by the thought of having to go to tomorrow's auction alone and either spend thousands of pounds on a second-rate piece they'll have to sell for over-the-sofa, or pass up a brilliant, revolutionary artwork that could have been theirs for a song. "You know what I hate about hospitals?" Dupree goes on. "The way they smell. You'd think it would be blood, but it's all these weird caustic cleaning chemicals. And plastic and despair. Don't you hate that?"
"Despair doesn't smell."
"You have no romance in your soul. Despair totally smells." Dupree pokes Gil in the shoulder. "So does fear. Relax. It'll take a lot more than a Ford Fiesta to take out your dad. They'd have to break out the polonium."
"I don't think he's annoyed the Russian government lately." Has he? That thought should dump a fresh wave of terror through Gil's limbic system, but apparently he's out of adrenaline; it just makes him twitch once.
"Right. Who has he annoyed?"
"You think this was a hit?"
From somewhere under the pile of outdated magazines they put in here just in case anyone has the concentration to read while their friends and relatives are being operated on, Dupree whips out of a pad of paper. "You don't? Gimme." She snatches the good pen out of Gil's shirt pocket. "Let's work this backwards. We work out who might be mad enough at Klaus to make him dead, and then I go work out which ones could get a red Ford Fiesta and kill them."
With a sinking feeling of the sort that working with Dupree has made entirely too common, Gil notices the notepad is actually a doctor's prescription pad. "How far back? Because I really only know the last eight years worth. Since I started keeping accounts for the gallery. I know he got some powerful people in San Theodoros very angry before I was born, but I think most of them died in the Emerald Revolution and I don't actually have names for the ones who are still alive."
"That's okay, I can make Klaus talk later. Just tell me the gallery enemies. Head start." She clicks the pen open and grins like a shark.
Gil pinches the bridge of his nose; he can feel a headache forming. It's the smell, it has to be the smell; it reminds him of being a little kid again. How to do this? Reverse-chronologically, maybe. "Julius Strinbeck," he starts. "We said his Van Boucle was a nineteenth-century fake, he said he would sue, we said this wasn't America, he said we'd be sorry. But he drives a Mercedes."
"Well, somebody's going to be sorry. Maybe he farmed it out." Dupree scribbles the name down. "What about what's-his-name with the animatronic monkeys and the Salvador Dali?"
--
Thursday, January 12, 23:10
Outside are streetlights and traffic noise, but the inside of Rudolf Selnikov's house is dark and quiet behind its protective layer of hedges and brick wall. That suits Agatha just fine. She starts to hum as she works, feeling for the terminal screws.
Selnikov trusts his security system. He went for the cheap safe. It's practically insulting
There's the phone jack; she ignores it. And there are the controls for the Ultra-safe bolt solenoid, which really doesn't live up to its name. Well, the solenoid itself may work quite well; Agatha's never needed to break one. It's so much easier to slip two pieces of wire with spade-terminal ends into place, loosen the screws not quite enough to break contact, slip in her spade ends, and tighten them again. Stubby screwdrivers, the crook's best friend. Difficult part done, she feels for the little plastic connector on the end of the battery, and yanks it loose. Now for the easy: one more wire, ends encased in ferrules, just touched to the two screws labeled 'BOLT' so obviously she can make it out by moonlight.
Deep in the wall, something goes thunk.
"I'm in," she whispers.
"Goot," comes the buzz through her earpiece. "I jest saw a cop car."
There's no point asking Maxim to drop the accent, although Agatha is about ninety percent certain it's affected. She pulls on the bit of decorative moulding, and Selnikov's bookcase rolls neatly away from the wall, bringing the vault door with it. A soft white glow suffuses the closet-sized space beyond, glimmering off the edges of the pile of canvases stacked against its back wall.
There's just no helping some people.
Agatha unzips her portfolio case, humming again. What she pulls out certainly looks like not-Rembrandt-but-we-don't-know-who's The Cambist, the same thoughtful look on the same bearded face examining the same gold coin. She leans it against the frame while she goes through Selnikov's - stack. Really, nobody who treats paintings like this should have them, and she briefly contemplates the merits of hoisting he entire contents of his vault before getting ahold of herself. No. Subtlety. Awful though it feels to leave even an imitation Cambist she did in acrylics last weekend shut up like this, it would feel much worse to get caught.
There he is. She lifts the real Cambist out - maybe it's her imagination, but he looks like he wants to punch someone in this version. Bad lighting, maybe, or the stress of living with Selnikov.
A buzzing in her ear again. "Iz it dere? Not trying to rush you, but de cop car -"
"It's here. I just made the switch."
"Gud."
"Four minutes."
Maxim, wisely, shuts up. Agatha slips the painting into her bag, nudges the bookshelf back into place, and begins undoing her adjustments to the alarm controls. They really don't look that much like a thermostat.
Seventy-three seconds later, the plastic cover snaps back on. Agatha picks up her bag and heads downstairs. There will be a blip on the security system motion sensor logs, but nobody checks those.
The rest is simple. Reset the alarm, out the patio doors, up the oak tree, balance on top the wall while she waits for Maxim to pull up with his van. Which is taking longer than it should. "Hey," she whispers. "Where are you?"
"Circling de block! I vas spooked!"
"Well, circle fast, I'm on the wall."
There's a burst of engine noise through her headphones, and Maxim says, "I stop for five seconds."
She'd yell at him, but there isn't time. The van rounds the corner, and Agatha drops onto the roof, throws herself flat, and grabs the luggage rack. With any luck she'll look like luggage from the street. "Go," she hisses, and Maxim guns it.
"You okay up dere?" he asks as he rounds the next corner at conspicuous speed. She should have brought Jorgi.
"I'm clinging to the roof of a van with a priceless painting on my back and you're speeding! Slow the fuck down before I fall off!"
He doesn't answer, but the van settles back to a respectable twenty-five. Agatha tightens her grip and breathes in slowly. Next job, she thinks, she's doing in broad daylight in a television repair van.
--
Friday, January 13, 14:23
There's a certain smell to auction houses, somewhere between paint and perfume, that puts Violetta on edge. Mostly it's the perfume. She keeps wrinkling her nose in that way Tarvek claims makes her look like a rabbit, because Tarvek is an ass. Also, her feet hurt. Next time she wants to look taller she's bringing a stepstool.
She sneaks a glance around for Agatha, who at five foot eleven should be easy to spot, and finds her in front of a painting of some chinless aristocrat that Violetta probably should recognize from the auction catalogue, chatting to her green-haired classmate who Violetta shouldn't feel horribly jealous of because she and Agatha even admitting to knowing each other at an art auction viewing would just be unbearably stupid.
But there's no harm in sidling a little closer to get a look at the painting, and if she overhears then talking, no harm in that either.
"It's always hard to tell, when a master had a studio," Agatha is saying. She must be explaining the attribution system; she's pointing at the catalogue. "People argue about the quality of brushwork and the exact hallmarks of someone's style - but there's no scientific proof. It got especially confusing with Rembrandt, because he did self-portraits, but he also had his students copy the self-portraits for practice."
"So when it says Studio Of, that means it was probably a student."
"Exactly."
The classmate - Zeetha, her name was Zeetha - is frowning, arms crossed. "And when they say Attributed To?"
"That means they're weaseling to drive the price up. Attributions in catalogues are statements of opinion, not fact." Violetta can hear the air-quotes as Agatha puts on her best snooty accent. She may look the part of a Collector right now, in a green silk gown and tailored jacket, but Agatha has always thought art should be appreciated, not appraised. It's enough to make Violetta feel guilty. Agatha goes on, "Which isn't to say most dealers don't try. Some of them get downright snippy."
There's a tall man in desperate need of a comb off to one side, staring at Agatha and Zeetha. He has a glass and is letting it dangle; if there were any drink left it would be dribbling all over the floor. Twit. She sidles over to look at the rather dull portrait of some lady in a lace cap he's ignoring. Close up it has so much craquelure it looks like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and the lady's expression looks like grim resignation. Violetta twitches her lips in sympathy.
Next to it is the picture she came to bid up: a red chalk sketch of a woman playing the viol da gamba, smiling in satisfaction at her own artistry. The woman looks oddly like Grandmother. She nudges the twit, who is still staring at - Zeetha. Specifically Zeetha. What's so interesting about Zeetha? She's not the only person in town with green hair. "Hey," Violetta says. "What do you think of this one? I lost my catalogue."
He jerks in surprise. "Huh? Lot Thirty-seven? Very expressive, should go for twice the estimate, if Fabritus ever touched the paper I'll eat my hat." Hah. "What's she doing here?"
Violetta follows his gaze as if she has no idea where he was looking. "With the green hair? Who's that?"
"Zeetha Reina!" Messy Hair looks shocked. "Best striker in San Theodoros? Star of the national team for six years? Retired last summer and dropped off the face of the earth? You don't follow football, do you?"
She does not, and neither could she pick out San Theodoros on a map, and Violetta is about to say so when the object of his attention starts striding toward them, with a sudden bright grin.
Time to make her getaway. She's put in an appearance at the viewing, her appearance at the auction should go completely unremarked, and if worst comes to worst and Violetta wins the thing, Tarvek has promised to eat the buyer's premium and buy her dinner at Le Poisson Candi to compensate her for the trouble. But most people are idiots, and if the catalogue says Fabritus the idea that it was done last August in her cousin's flat in a haze of claret won't even cross their minds.
--
One of the more mystifying events of Gil's youth had happened when he was almost sixteen, and he and his father were - not fighting, exactly, but alternating stilted conversations and awkward silences with avoiding each other completely. Gil been lurking in his room doing absent-minded arthropod sketches. His father knocked, and announced, "Pack for a week. Our plane leaves in three hours." Not until they were at the airport did Klaus admit they were going to Faro, and not until they were landing in Portugal did he clarify that they were there to watch the Algarve Cup.
Gil, whose fondness for football and specifically for the San Theodorian women's team was one of the things they were carefully not fighting about, had been too surprised to get a sentence out.
But there they were; Gil whooped and cheered and Klaus sat in stoic silence through four games, during which the San Theodorian team scored five goals and landed in seventh place. Three of those goals were Zeetha Reina's. Even from the distance of up in the stands it struck Gil how intense she looked, like the ball was a theorem she was trying to disprove.
She's looking at him now the same way, and Gil swallows and tries not to gibber. "Hello?"
Zeetha bursts into a grin. "Hello! Have we met?"
"No, but I saw you in a tournament once. Uh. Sorry for staring." The blonde woman she was talking to has sidled over, grinning. Gil is glad all this is happening at low enough volume to vanish in the murmur of conversation.
"You're Zeetha Reina, right?"
"I am! Who are you?"
"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. Like the Wulfenbach Gallery," he adds, as if she cares. "My father owns it."
"Reeeeally." Impossibly, her grin sharpens.
Her friend puts in, "I'm Agatha. We're just here to look at the pretty pictures. You buying?"
"Well, I hope so, there's a Valpolicella sketch that matches two we picked up last year, and a preparatory study for one of Poussin's allegories, and now that I've had a good look I think that Unknown Portrait is actually Blu - I'm sorry, this is probably very boring."
"No, no, we're here to learn." Agatha brandishes her catalogue. "Go on, show off a bit. Impress your crush."
Gil feels his face go an interesting shade of red. "She is not my - I don't - I just wondered what happened to you! Everyone wondered!"
Zeetha shrugs. "I decided astronomics was more interesting than football."
"We can give you the whole rant later," Agatha informs him, her grin matching Zeetha's. "We tag-team. Tell you what, why don't you show us around and then we'll all go to tea?"
--
Friday, January 13, 16:22
Agatha spears another forkful of cake and hides her smile behind her napkin. She's seen enough people go glassy-eyed at Zeetha's sales pitch, but Gil, miraculously enough, is following along. He answered her bit about San Theodoros's greatest natural resource being its nearness to the equator, which Zeetha usually has to demonstrate by spinning a bowl on her fingers, with a bright "Of course!" that cut five minutes off the rant. Now he's wistfully asking Zeetha how soon they plan to break ground on the spaceport.
"Could be a decade," Zeetha tells him. "We don't even have a site picked out, and, well, there's politics. Mother will probably have to pay a lot of bribes. I should explain, my mother is -"
"Minister of the Interior. I know."
"And how do you know so much about me, Mister Wulfenbach?" Zeetha raises an eyebrow.
"Uh. I read your Wikipedia page." Gil blushes. "I was actually born in San Theodoros, is the thing. I've never been there since I was a baby, but ..."
Zeetha raises both eyebrows. "There has to be a story there."
"Not much of one." He shrugs. "I had some kind of chronic disease, so my father moved us to London so it could get treated. Spent a lot of time in hospital. All better now. I guess he didn't want to go back." Gil is absently spinning his fork between his fingers as he talks, a blatantly obvious nervous habit. Luckily there's no cake left on it. "My life's not really that interesting. I work a lot, I paint a little."
Agatha breaks in, "You must really love art, though. You knew so much about the sketches."
His face lights up again with the delight of an expert about to expound on his area of expertise. It's a look Agatha knows well, including from the mirror.
--
Friday, January 13, 23:36
"You have it all figured out," Gil tells Zoing, and taps the aquarium glass with his empty pint glass. Zoing waggles his antennae.
Another pint glass slides into his line of sight, gripped by a teal-fingernailed hand. Gil tries to take it with a mumble of thanks. The hand mysteriously fails to let go. "Hyu's in a bad way if hyu's telling your troubles to de lobster."
"Can't I be worried about Father?"
"Of cawze. But hyu is not the only one in de world. Not even in diz room." Gkika settles onto the next stool with all the inevitability of a lava flow. "Hyu papa iz a friend ov mine since before hyu vas born. Mebbe since before hyu lobster friend vaz born. Hard to tell vit lobsters."
Gil half-shrugs. He's read that most supermarket lobsters are between five and seven years old, so Zoing is probably younger than Gil is, but he could just have been a runt. "Father is going to be fine," he tells Gkika. "I know that. He's just ..."
"Gettink old?"
"Not as immortal as he thinks he is?" Gil grimaces.
Gkika grins, and shoves the pint at Gil. She's got a glass of her own in the other hand - as is traditional for Gkika, it's a soft amber that probably means whiskey-and-soda, but garnished with cherries on a stick. At least it's not one of Theo's. "He did shtupid stuff all de time ven he vaz young. Iz amazing none uv it killed him yet."
"He doesn't know how to give up." Gil takes a gulp of ale. "Tries to do everything himself."
"He - Hwat iz it de kids say? He haz no chill."
"Has no sense of proportion."
"Vunce he treatened de Commandant uv de Kurvi-Tasch Guards vit a handgun for interrupting a meetink."
"He actually did get a mafioso arrested on fraud charges for insulting me. Well, you remember that, he came here and grumbled about it. For hours."
"Ho yez. Und dat mess vit de Piranesi prints. Klaus tinks no vun elze knows how to run ennyting."
Gil's head hits the bar with a thump. "He's going to try to get right back to work as soon as the painkillers wear off," he moans. "He'll complain about everything and insist on meeting clients in person and probably get in a fistfight with the Sotheby's appraiser."
"Tch," says Gkika, and then, "No he von't. I hev un idea."
"Idea?"
"Sure. Inztead uv takink him home, you bring him here." She raises her glass. "I look after him, und keep him busy redesigning our menus or summting like dat, he iz completely out of hyu hair." She pats Gil on the shoulder. "Eezy-peasy."
Gil blinks at the aquarium. "I don't know if he'd agree to that."
"Who says hyu asks him? Jest turn up here. Hy iz happy to see him, iz he going to run off before he haz a drink? Hy ken be persuazive. Und hyu hez a gallery to run."
And Gkika has a pub to run, but she also has twelve employees. Gil looks around. At this hour Mamma's is still busy, in the understated way of a place that caters to people who don't want trouble. The tourist crowd have mostly gone to bed. A waitress in an epauletted jacket is handing off a basket of chips to two sweatshirted stragglers. Another is giving a just-abandoned rustic wooden table a desultory polish. The effect is almost homey, by candlelight. Enough noise and bustle to give his father something to complain about even from the upstairs flat, not enough to actually slow his recovery. Gil offers, "Deal. Thank you so much."
"Iz my pleasure." Gkika offers her glass, and Gil hastily clinks it in a toast. "Hy can nag him abot dat Rembrandt print he promised me."
"If he finds one, let me check it," Gil offers. "There are some very good fakes floating around. There was a sketch at the auction I'm sure wasn't actually a Fabritus, but someone thought it was and bought it for seventeen thousand pounds. Telephone bid. I hope they're just wrong and not going to get a nasty surprise when they open the package. But it was good enough to fool the appraisers. Maybe it was a Hebborn, there are still a lot of them out there -" He's babbling again. Nerves. Gil takes a deep breath and says, "We'll keep looking for you."
"Iz no rush. Vaz Klaus's idea." Gkika pats his shoulder again. "Iz hyu staying late? Dere's a game downstairs."
He really should go home and sleep. But the flat is big and empty without his father there, and he'd probably be up all night worrying anyway, and if he's going to be up all night he might as well be up all night in Gkika's basement, listening to a bunch of Syldavian significant-pause-businessmen argue over the rules of whatever card game one of them has invented this month, because poker is too psychological and cribbage is too inexplicable, and thinking about other people's problems. Maybe he'll even make a sale. It won't be the first time Gil's gotten business out of Game Night.
--
Sunday, January 15th, 02:20
The click of the opening door is very loud.
Agatha instinctively stops breathing. This is the trouble with doing a job on thirty hours notice: no time for reconnaissance.
There's a series of beeps - someone turning off the security system, hopefully someone too tired to notice it was already off, or who's cursing themselves for carelessness. Agatha takes advantage of the noise of footsteps to walk backwards three strides and press herself against the wall, behind the swing of the door. She hurriedly reaches over to flick off the lightswitch. Who turns up to work at an art dealership at two in the morning? Will they stick to the office where all the computers are and leave her be, or come in to admire their stash?
A tense fifty seconds later, the door creaks open. The light flicks on, and Gilgamesh Wulfenbach slams the door behind him. He's tense, shoulders almost vibrating; there's a clipboard clutched in his left hand. He walks over to - the giant scanner. Huh. The clipboard goes on the bed. He punches buttons like he's trying to poke holes in them. The scanner starts to make a nervous whir as its bridge rolls over the clipboard, and Gil sighs heavily and turns around.
By considerable effort of will, Agatha doesn't scream.
Gil doesn't scream either, although it would be reasonable to. He makes a little adorable noise like a deflating balloon, and then, amazingly, he raises his hands. "Please don't shoot," he says.
Agatha feels compelled to point out, "I don't have a gun."
"Oh. Right." Gil blinks a few times. "Sorry. I'm pretty tired. Is this a robbery?"
"It's not even a burglary," Agatha tells him. What would the point be in lying? He knows her name, he knows she's at university with Zeetha. "I just wanted to get a good look at that Unknown Portrait you picked up at the auction Friday."
She wasn't at the auction, but Gil's apparently too tired to wonder who her informant was. He blinks a few times. "The Bludtharst? Oh. I can show you, it's not a secret. Why?"
That's a little trickier. Agatha turns it over in her head looking for the least revealing answer, but there really isn't one is there?
Unless -
Unless she brings him in on it. The new plan is spread across her mind like a sudden crashing power chord. She can work out the details as she goes, the important thing right now is to be as confident and convincing as possible. Luckily Agatha's good at that.
"I think you're right, it's a Bludtharst," she opens. "Did you get a look at the back of the sheet, though?"
"Of course I did. Very preliminary landscape sketch with a castle that would probably fall down if anyone tried to build it. That's why I think it's Bludtharst, he was better at capprici than portraits."
"Like he was working out a composition, right?" Agatha smiles encouragingly. "There was a hullabaloo a few decades back. Rumours about a lost Bludtharst painting believed destroyed in the nineteenth century -"
"- that vanished into a private collection." Agatha can see as the same conclusion she came to spreads across Gil's face. "The Castle at Heliotropolis. You think it really existed? His diary only said he was contemplating it -"
"But you just bought the preparatory sketch."
"It could be. The subject fits. We can't tell for sure."
Agatha leans forwards and smirks. Really, he was caught as soon as he stopped to chat instead of calling 999. "How much do you think you could sell Bludtharst's Castle at Heliotropolis for, if it fell into your hands?"
She goes over to the file drawers while he thinks it over. The auction buys are still sitting on top, wrapped in brown paper. Agatha starts to unfold it as Gil says, "To the right buyer - five hundred thousand? Privately, not at auction, things get weird at auctions. Why, do you have a lead on it?"
"Better. I know it doesn't exist."
"Then it can't be sold."
"Let me rephrase that." Agatha holds up the sketch. It's an architecturally improbable castle, and it looms over a spread-out sequence of roofs and streets and distant hills in that charmingly ominous way Bludtharst was so brilliant at; the sketch may be hasty and loose but the layout is perfect. "It doesn't exist yet, but I could change that. I know a man."
"A man who owns a time machine? It's a lost work -"
"A man," Agatha informs him, "whose name isn't Fabritus either." Gil's hands are clenched, but the look on his face is more of fascination than concern. The scanner has finished its grinding work; he doesn't seem to have noticed. "And who can work from this sketch, if I get a good picture of it. Does that thing do photocopies?"
"I can send the output straight to the office printer." Gil snatches up the clipboard and clutches it to his chest like he's trying to hide something. "What happens if I say no? If I don't want to risk the gallery's reputation like that?"
"Then I take the copy away and we never have to see each other again." It's brilliant how he's talking himself into it. The idea of going to the authorities has slipped completely away. Agatha gently sets the sketch landscape-up on the scanner bed, with the reverence due a three-century-old artwork, and gestures at Gil to start punching buttons.
He does, looking almost hypnotized. A true connoisseur. She knew it.
The scanner makes a grinding noise.
"It wouldn't be that much of a risk," Gil eventually says to himself, still clutching the clipboard. "It would only get forensic tests if they turned around and sent it to auction right away, at one of the major houses. But what if they did?"
"Ah," Agatha says. "That's where I come in." This is her favorite part of the plan.
--