Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be carrying a list of anyone’s aliases around with me, much less Lucien Moriarty’s. I would have memorized them and disposed of the evidence. But I had the corresponding passport numbers to contend with as well, which I hadn’t yet stuffed into my brain.
That description, if clumsy, was accurate. It was as though I were packing Styrofoam into a too-small box whenever I tried to commit long strings of numbers to memory. Words had always been manageable. Proper nouns especially, places and people and their vehicles, any identifying detritus of a life lived out in the world. Numbers I managed if I could manipulate them. Equations, fine. Number theory, fine. But memorizing pi to the twentieth digit was an exercise I found both useless and impossible.
“The two aren’t always conjoined,” Professor Demarchelier had said. I was eleven, and lonely. That was my main realization for the year: that I did in fact want to be around other people, and that there were no other people to be had, and so I had to disguise what was turning out to be a very inconvenient failing. Demarchelier believed I had many failings. In that, we disagreed. I liked myself quite well.
That morning, in fact, was one of the last times that I remember liking myself. I was daydreaming about the tumbling practice I had that afternoon. My instructor had promised that today, I would learn to walk across a rafter in a darkened room.
In heels.
I was not thinking about numbers.
Demarchelier snapped his bony fingers in my face. “Charlotte. Just because you’re terrible at something doesn’t make it useless. The only common denominator in everything you attempt—”
“Is yourself,” I repeated. Perhaps my tumbling instructor would also blindfold me, if I asked.
“Indeed.” He frowned at me across the table. “Take some responsibility.”
Perhaps she would even remove the net. If I were polite enough.
Demarchelier tapped the list of national insurance numbers. It stretched down the page. “You have five minutes to learn these. Go.”
Normally I would have needed twenty. On a tumbling day, I needed twenty-five. That day I was distracted enough that when time was called, I didn’t have a single one of the numbers memorized.
“You realize that, if I let you loose into the real world with the skills you have now, you’d be dead.” It conveyed something about my relationship with my tutor that making this statement gave him obvious pleasure. I knew because his eyes were crinkling at the corners, as though he’d just told a joke.
“Because I couldn’t memorize a list of numbers, I would die,” I said. “May I please be excused.” I dropped the question marks on purpose.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
That afternoon, I made it across the rafter blindfolded in twenty-two seconds. The next week, at Demarchelier’s suggestion, I was put on Adderall to fix my “attention problem.”
After that things progressed rather quickly.
On the Acela train to New York, I memorized the list of Moriarty’s forged passport numbers, then shredded the sheet into slivers. I was in the real world and, as I was coming to realize, I had no desire to be dead.
I SPENT THE AFTERNOON IN A RESTAURANT IN CHELSEA, drinking sparkling water at the bar. Across the room, in a beautifully upholstered booth, my quarry was having the sort of marathon business lunch that made me glad that, for whatever kind of person I was, I was at least not a twentysomething banker.
The olives I’d ordered were seventeen dollars. There were twelve of them. I was trying to make the wretched things last.
When will you get there, the text said on my phone. Can’t plan my day around you.
Soon, I replied, and tucked my phone away. With a casual expression, the bartender removed both my drink and my olives. “Unless you’re still working?”
I was, but not in the way she thought. “I’ll have—”
My quarry stood, a bit unsteadily. A result, perhaps, of the two gin martinis I’d watched the bartender make him.
“The check,” I said, and even given time to have it printed, presented, and paid, I still beat my quarry to the front door.
Following him was child’s play. It was insulting. He wasn’t even very drunk; perhaps he was just very stupid. Or unaware. When I first met Watson, I was fairly sure that, if I tried, I could unhook and remove his belt from his pants without him noticing. I informed him of that, once, and it seemed to shock him. He fussed with his belt for a full hour after that.
My mark walked south for so many blocks that I wondered why on earth he hadn’t gotten a cab. Certainly his calfskin gloves suggested that he had the money. It was frigid, the kind of winter in New York that I remembered from a trip I’d once taken to see my uncle. Leander had hosted me in his pied-à-terre when my parents hadn’t wanted me back after a stint at rehab—if memory serves, at Paragon Girls San Marcos. My uncle had taken me to the very nicest restaurants in Chelsea and then insisted that I ate the food he ordered for me, and it all went well enough until I met a girl in a bathroom at 9 p.m. on a Thursday who asked me if I “partied” before pulling a baggie out of her bra, which of course led to three months at Paragon Girls San Marcos’s sister location, This Generation Now! Petaluma.
It was what I was doing now, thinking This Generation Now!, This Generation Now! to the beat of my footsteps as we wandered down Seventh Avenue. At the end of every block, like a tic, he pulled out his phone to check the time, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his overcoat. We went like that, long trudging blocks in the melting snow, our progress punctuated only by Don’t Walk signs and the recurring image of Saturn on his phone’s lock screen. Finally he turned off onto a smart little street in SoHo that I was surprised, calfskin gloves and all, he could afford.
He was going home. He was meeting someone. I could tell from his walk, and from his blithe unconcern for his surroundings, and because I am who I was raised to be.
Still. Something was not right. I had a scratching at the back of my eyes that meant I had seen something I should have noticed, but didn’t.
As we approached a patisserie, he began to dig in his pockets for his keys. I lingered, pretending to look at the brioche in the shop window. The door beside me opened, and he disappeared into it; before it shut, I had my hand on the handle.
There was an art to this. I counted ten seconds, long enough that passersby wouldn’t mark me as a loiterer but long enough that he’d be well up the stairs, and then I slipped inside behind him. I made sure my footfalls rang, rummaged in my bag for coins. Girl sounds. That particular nonthreatening rustle that puts men at ease.
It was a tenement building in the old style, with a hollow under the first-floor landing where the lodgers had left their bicycles. A faded Christmas wreath was tacked up above the line of mailboxes. I could have looked to confirm his apartment number, but I didn’t need to. He was on the third floor. I could tell from the sound his keys made in the lock.
Tracey Polnitz, I said to myself. Michael Hartwell. Peter—
“Peter Morgan-Vilk.” The voice curled down the stairs. “It’s been a long time.”
The feeling.
The feeling I’d had on the street that I hadn’t had time to catalog and identify.
I couldn’t pull up the street outside in my head, freeze it, turn it from every angle, examine for discrepancies, then file it back away. I didn’t have an eidetic memory. I wasn’t an unprecedented genius.
I was still smart enough to know that James Watson’s car had been parked at that curb, and that I was only realizing it now.
“How much did you sell your name for, Pete?” my uncle Leander was asking, but by then, I’d already hidden myself behind the bicycles and the mopeds and the empty recycling bins below the first-floor landing and far out of sight.
“Leander Holmes,” Peter Morgan-Vilk said, every young, moneyed syllable dripping with scorn. If he was drunk, I couldn’t hear it in his voice. “Is that your way of saying hello? It’s been a long time. Who’s your friend?”
“My colleague, James.”
“A pleasure.” Jamie’s father, speaking.